Tag: aliens

The Boy in a Box and Other Traumatic Memories from TV.

D. Michl LoweLeave a comment

For several years now, I have been slowly writing down every memory I have. I have been trying to make a complete timeline of my life up to the point where I am now. Its not been easy. I find memories continue to float back into my thoughts. Here recently, I have been getting nostalgic about movies, TV shows, and videogames I remember experiencing and trying to find them. Some of them are fun memories, but others were… odd.

Some of those are easier to find than others. For example, Condor Man, a classic Disney movie from 1981 that stared Michael Crawford was always a movie I went back to as a kid.

Condorman Trailer linked below.

Condor Man Trailer

However, there were other experiences that were harder to nail down. My dad picked up a family on the side of the road that were broken down with two little boys my age. They stayed at our house for the night and the two boys brought a NES game with them.

We played for an hour or so before bed and by the morning they were gone. All I remembered when looking back was that you were a ninja who could transform into animals. It took some googling to discover the name of the game was Ninja Crusaders on the original Nintendo Entertainment System.

Link to a review of Ninja Crusaders linked below.

Ninja Crusaders Gameplay

Now to the reason Im writing this article. When I was young, we had one tv in the house. It was down stairs in the basement and it got four channels, 3,8,11, and 13. There’s a possibility that we got more, but those are just what I remember. The movie I remember was apparently shown on PBS in WV during the early 1980s, but from what I have read, PBS was on channel 33 in Charleston during that time. So, in reality, I’m not sure what channel this movie was on, but I remember it clearly. What I rememeber, was a little old woman who receives a mysterious crate in the mail. Upon opening it, there was a little boy inside who wasn’t quite human. I remembered him as being a bit like a robot.

The movie was called Konrad. It was a made for tv movie feom 1985. It stared Huckleberry Fox as Konrad (the strange little boy) and Polly Holiday as Berti (the kind old lady). As a child, I rememember the opening minutes of the film and was deeply disturbed. I recently showed it to my own kids (13 and 16) and they agreed, it was really weird and creepy. Feel free to watch the full movie if you like below, but honestly the first 10 minutes is enough to see what I mean.

Full movie linked below:

Konrad (1985) Full Movie

The 2nd movie that really messed with me as a child was The Adventures of Buckaroo Bonzai Across the Eighth Dimention. What I remember watching was a scene from the very beginibg of the movie. Buckaroo is driving a rocket car reminiscent of the car from Back to the Future. He gets teliported to the Eighth Dimention and when he returns there is a goopy alien ball stuck to the bottom of his car. I dont remember anything else from the movie back then.

Now, that mught be the end of what I rememeber, but that is certainly not the end of that movie. I recently watched the whole thing and it is both absolutely terrible, beyond weird, and not worth your time to actually watch. I would also like to mention that it took me years to discover what this movie even was. Chat GPT had a really hard time helping me discover both this one and the Konrad movie.

This is something that has really bothered me for years, but has been fun discovering these lost memories from my past. Even though these memories don’t hold anything really that special, remembering them from a child’s point of view is interesting. Like seeing a ghost when you were a kid and remembering how scared you were, but thesebare ghosts you can rediscover and reveal them for the smoke and mirrors they really are.

Link to the trailer for Buckaroo Bonzai linked below:

Trailer for Buckaroo Bonzai!

Experiences as a child are like that at times, mythic and large. You remember the path through the woods that seemed to go on forever with the huge cave at the end of it. When you return as an adult, the path is just a little over fifty meters and the “huge cave” is just a small overhanging rock. This is why I like writing down my memories. It preserves the mythic perspective. I wrote a story down once about a snake that lived over our swimming hole when I was a kid.

I always swore this snake was at least twelve feet long and as thick as my arm. I wrote it down as such. Besides, I was like ten years old when I last saw this creature. In speaking to my cousin who was about fourteen at the time, he informed me it was more like six feet. I like my version of the story. The memory of a twelve foot black snake throat protected our swimming hole is a lot more fun to tell. Sitting alone on the carpet in front of our large wood paneled Magnavox CRT.

My memory of a strange robot boy being delivered in a crate and a man finding an alien blob ball under his car is a lot more fun than the movies themselves. That’s how childhood is; bigger than life. Full of new and amazing experiences. Even time spent on front of the TV that only had three or four channels at the time could live on in my memories. I often wonder how many of these kind of memories lie dormant in other people’s memories. They might remember them from time to time, but never share them with anyone else. Welcome to the back room of my mind; it’s a really messed up place, and I love it.

D. Michl Lowe

The Floating Lights

D. Michl LoweLeave a comment

One night, my mom and dad went down across from the Bloss’ house to their grandfather’s house, Don Bloss. This was Tom Bloss’ father, Tom being the girl’s dad. They were buying some property from him to start the process of building a house. They wanted to build a house of their own design. My cousins; Randy, Tammy, Tuesday, and I were hanging out together. This had to have been around Christmas time because Tammy lived in Texas and I was only able to see her around that time of the year. As it happens, there was a blacktop road beside the girl’s house that went up the hill near there and had a circle turnaround at the top. Don had paved this to encourage people to buy lots up there.

As mom and dad were negotiating and signing contracts, my cousins and I decided to walk up to the top of the hill and play tag at the top. It was becoming dusk by the time we got to the top of the hill. It was cloudy. There was a large tree just beyond the pavement, which sat in a small field just before the edge of the forest which continued up the hill. I knew just inside the tree line was a barbwire fence. The land Don had broken up into lots, used to be his family’s farm where they had cows. As we played, I noticed some lights at the top of the hill just inside the tree line. I didn’t think much of it. There were a lot of kids around this area that rode four-wheelers down the trails here inside the barbed wire fence. So, I just assumed it was some kids up there riding four-wheelers.

There was a problem with this theory, however. There was no sound of engines. Randy suddenly stopped running having seen me standing over to the side staring up the hill. “What are those lights?” He asked. “I’m not sure.” I honestly answered. “I thought maybe they were four-wheelers, but I don’t think so, there’s no engine sound.” The girls stopped playing as well and came to stand next to us, hearing the conversation. “Maybe it’s some people riding bikes with lights on the handlebars?” asked Tammy. That could have been the case, but those were not cheap and often broke easily. So, seeing so many (five in fact) on bikes would have been rare at this time. As we debated, the lights began to move down the hill, just inside the tree line, down the trail I knew was there.

“I don’t hear any leaves,” I said. Referring to the fact that the foliage was down and we should have been hearing the crunch of leaves as bikes or even feet were coming down the path, but it was completely silent. No sound at all, save for a slight breeze. These lights were round and appeared to be hanging in the air. They were about the size of basketballs and moved slowly down the path, about as fast as some running at a slow jog.

As the lights came closer to our group, they left the woods and began floating across the small field between the blacktop circle beneath the tree that was there. It was at this point that we realized that nothing was holding up these lights, not a bike, a person, or anything else. The balls of light were gently glowing with a yellow-ish orange light and they were floating about three feet above the ground seemingly on their own. As children, we were terrified and immediately began running down the hill. The lights, followed us, close behind. Looking back, I could see they were matching our pace as we ran, being only about twenty feet behind us. We ran all the way down the hill and then up the driveway to where my parents were meeting in the house just above the end of that road. We stopped long enough to look back down at the end of the road we just come from. The lights were at the end of the road. As we watched, they began swirling around each other and then just winked out, as if someone had blown out their candles.

Of course, we told my parents what had happened, but we weren’t believed. My dad just thought we had gotten scared in the dark and whipped ourselves up into a frenzy. However, I can tell you that when I was around 14 years old, I was watching the Discovery Channel with dad when suddenly on the screen were my floating lights. I jumped up and just about scared the pants off of dad. “That’s the lights we saw when I was a kid!” I yelled. Dad was completely confused and I had to tell him again about the lights. So, what did the Discovery show say about the lights? Aliens? Ghosts? Nope! Apparently, it’s a natural phenomenon called “ball lightning”. It’s where lightning forms into a sphere because of magnetism or something. It often floats several feet off the ground or way up in the air. Now the way it seemed to chase us? I’m not sure about that, but I am convinced that we saw ball lightning that night. I guess when I get to heaven this is yet another thing, I am going to have to ask God about.

D. Michl Lowe