My mother was born October 19, 1936 in Germany. She died recently on her 88th birthday last fall.
She lived through World War II as a child in Germany and she could be difficult to deal with which it was easy to chalk up to her misfortune of having been a child in a war zone and having lived in Nazi Germany.
Except I grew up in the German-American-military subculture unique to Columbus, Georgia and I knew other German women who were similar in age to my mother. My mother seemed unusually difficult in some ways even for a German woman of that era in spite of being an uncommonly kind, generous person, far more decent and diplomatic than average.
My mother definitely had baggage and she was from a previous era and her beliefs were sometimes "primitive" beliefs even though she was unusually smart and she read a lot.
She believed in astrology and she believed in psychic phenomenon and she was always trying to convince people that if she dreamed something was going to happen, it would happen. Her goal with that last seemed to be to convince people she wasn't crazy, this really happened, her dreams really did come true, but the impact it had was to make her look crazy because her predictions seemed to never come true.
I have written about some of this elsewhere without saying it was my mother in specific because my mother was still alive at the time. But she's dead now and the dead have no right to privacy.
I grew up around someone who was kind of like the Trelawney character in the Harry Potter series. Like Trelawney, they were TERRIBLE at actually trying to predict the future but sometimes blurted things that were true that they shouldn't have had any way to know...So I haven't run around trying to prove to people that I am psychic because I have seen that go bad places for someone else who likely IS, in fact, psychically sensitive and yet all efforts to prove it seem to just make them LOOK crazy even though their goal is try to prove to people "I am NOT crazy. I really do have dreams about future events!!! Honest!!!"
So she routinely talked about her dreams and one theme of her dreams was that she dreamed of aliens and talked about them looking like movie aliens with grey skin and no lips and she talked like this was in some way something real that she was surprised fiction got right.
It was odd that she had such dreams because she wasn't into sci-fi. She read medical literature and the News and cookbooks, not science fiction full of aliens.
In her teens, she worked the fields and got paid in kind, with part of the harvest. She was one of twelve kids and this helped feed the family.
A relative once suggested that if she had disappeared for a few hours from the fields, it would be hard in that era for anyone to notice and there might be zero record of it in any way, not even a memory of her own of her boss noticing she had been gone or something.
This same relative made a reasonable argument that UFOs (in other words aliens) and Bigfoot and similar stories probably have some basis in fact because there are so many such stories but you can't trust any particular story because you can't verify it and they could be lying and we know for certain some cases are hoaxes.
Ultimately, I concluded that my mother's issues with being unusually difficult in some ways and her constant dreams of aliens would reasonably fit with having been abducted by aliens and then they did something to block her memory of the incident which had unintended side effects, thus her being "difficult."
I spent a lot of time in therapy because I was molested as a child and I've had college classes in psychology and read up on how people handle trauma, suppressed memories etc. I have no professional credentials and if you aren't familiar with that sort of literature, I'm sure this hypothesis sounds whackadoodle.
But this is the source of my belief as alluded to once on a public forum that we probably really are being visited by aliens because I believe I was likely raised by a permanently mentally scarred survivor of alien abduction who was impaired in some ways due to having had her memory of the incident blocked.
To be clear, this is not a claim she ever made. It's a family hypothesis concerning patterns of behavior and what might reasonably explain them.