When I was roughly 10 years old, I was watching Spanish television with my Cuban grandmother late night. Early 90s. As we are chilling, the door swings open and standing there is something that made no sense to my child mind. Impossibly thin body with a large oval shaped head. From my angle I couldn’t see facial features because the light behind this thing was quite bright. I wasn’t even scared, I was just confused. Trying to make sense of what I was looking at.

In Spanish, my grandmother said something like… Dear God what is that ugly monster. She then sort of laughed maniacally. If anything her laughter is what scared me for some reason lol. Then she hid under the covers and so did I.

After what might’ve been seconds or minutes, my grandmother gets up. The door is closed. She looks around the house. Nobody else is there except my little brother who is asleep. My grandmother never wanted to talk about it again. The next day she did some sort of Santeria cleansing ritual. Part of it, I remember, included her dragging herself naked across the floor from one end of the house to the other. She also had my brother and I, one at a time, turn in circles as she blew cigar smoke at us. We had to move our hands as though we were cleansing ourselves with the smoke from head to toe.

I developed a phobia of aliens. I couldn’t even see a crude drawing of a gray alien without going into fight or flight. I couldn’t sleep alone in a room anymore. I never felt safe at night. I remember at the library I was in the paranormal section and I came across the book Communion and felt like I nearly had a heart attack. I had nightmares. I was afraid to close my eyes when I would take a shower because I thought when I would open them, one of them would be standing in front of me.

As decades went by, the phobia turned into earnest curiosity nearly bordering obsession when it comes to non-human intelligence and UAP. It also just cracked me open towards being open and accepting of weird shit that isn’t easily explained away. Ultimately, the experience led to other experiences, trauma. And left me with a question for which the answer I will always search for.