My experience in 2019 — finally talking about it after seeing the recent news coverage

I've been a lurker on this forum for about two years and I wasn't going to post this because honestly I didn't want the hassle. But watching the US congressional hearings footage and seeing someone describe physical sensations and missing time that basically matched my experience word for word, I thought - right, okay, I should put this somewhere. So here it is.

It was the 14th of March 2019, a Thursday. I was driving back from a work conference in Edinburgh, heading south on the A9 through the Cairngorms. Around half one in the morning - I remember checking the dashboard clock just before it happened - I noticed an orange light moving parallel to the road about half a mile to my left. Not above, parallel. At road level, roughly. I assumed it was another vehicle on a track but there's no track there. I pulled over to watch it and that's the last clear memory I have until I was parked in a layby about eleven miles further south with the engine off, both my hands on the steering wheel, and my clock showing 3:47am. Roughly two hours and fifteen minutes I cannot account for.

Physical details: my nose was bleeding, which had never happened to me before and hasn't since. My shoes were damp and there was a small amount of mud on the soles despite me having no memory of leaving the car. The passenger seat had a smell I can only describe as electrical - sharp, like the air after lightning. Weather that night was clear and cold, maybe two degrees, no wind. I had no alcohol in my system; I'd had one coffee at the conference reception and that was eight hours prior.

I have never reported this to anyone official. I told my wife that I'd pulled over for a sleep because I was tired, which was partly true in the sense that I was exhausted afterwards. I'm sharing it now because the news coverage has made me realise I've been sitting on this alone for five years and that seems daft. I'm not asking anyone to believe me. I just wanted it written down somewhere.

Thank you for posting this. The A9 through the Cairngorms has an unusual number of reported incidents for its length - I have a document I've been building for the last eighteen months cross-referencing Scottish Highlands reports and there are at least six others with elements that overlap with yours, particularly the timeline (late night, early morning hours, that specific stretch of road), the light at ground level rather than aerial, and the post-experience exhaustion. If you're ever comfortable sharing more detail privately I'd be grateful, no pressure at all.

The nose bleed detail is consistent across a really striking number of independent accounts - going back to the Hills abduction in the sixties right through to much more recent reported experiences. I've always thought it's too specific and too cross-cultural to be a collective confabulation. Either it's pointing at something physiological that happens during whatever the experience actually is, or it's the most widespread piece of unconscious plagiarism in the history of storytelling. I know which one I find more plausible.

I don't want to be dismissive because you've clearly been carrying this and that's not nothing. But the A9 at night in near-freezing conditions is also the kind of drive where microsleeps happen without the driver being aware of them. The missing time could be two and a bit hours of unremembered sleep. The muddy shoes could be from a half-conscious walk you don't remember taking. The electrical smell in enclosed spaces is sometimes associated with migraine aura, which can also cause disorientation and nosebleeds. I'm not saying that's what happened - I genuinely don't know - but I think it's worth considering before drawing conclusions about the nature of the experience.

Five years is a long time to hold onto something like that on your own. For what it's worth I had something happen to me on the North Yorkshire Moors in 2016 - nothing as dramatic but similar enough that I understand the impulse to not say anything because you don't know what you'd even say. The fact that you're putting it down now, even here, even anonymously, seems healthy. You might want to look into hypnotic regression - I know it's controversial and the quality of practitioners varies wildly - but a good one can at least help you process the experience regardless of what you conclude about its nature.

The congressional testimony you're referring to - I assume you mean David Grusch and the others - is what's brought a lot of people out of the woodwork on this forum too. There's something about having official figures describe these experiences in formal testimony that retrospectively validates things that felt too strange to share. I don't think you need their testimony to trust your own experience but I understand why it functions as a kind of permission slip. You're not daft for only talking about it now.

Did you go back to that layby in daylight? Or to the area where you saw the light first? I ask because a few people with similar experiences have found physical markers they didn't notice at the time - unusual ground disturbance, vegetation patterns, that sort of thing. Probably more useful than regression honestly, at least as a starting point. The A9 is a long road but if you have the mileage from your trip that night you could probably narrow it down fairly precisely.

Wrote a long reply and deleted it twice because I wasn't sure how to say this usefully. I had a missing time experience in 1998 near Rendlesham Forest - different context, different details, but that quality of the clock saying something impossible is something I've spent twenty-six years turning over. The best I can tell you is: write everything down, all the details you still have, before more of it fades. The peripheral details are the ones that go first and they're often the most interesting in retrospect. You've made a start by posting this.