READ: Woody Harrelson Recalls a Childhood UFO Encounter That No One Wanted to Talk About

Woody Harrelson, known for his laid-back persona and willingness to entertain the strange, recently shared an eerie childhood UFO experience during an interview on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. The True Detective star, fresh off an alien abduction sketch for SNL50, recounted a bizarre event from his teenage years in Ohio—one that has stayed with him for decades.

Image by David Shankbone via Wikimedia Commons.

Harrelson described how, one evening in 1974, he noticed something unusual happening outside. People had gathered in the street, staring skyward, transfixed. When he joined them, he saw what they were looking at—strange, blinking lights moving in ways that defied explanation.

"It was nighttime and there were these lights that were just kind of blinking and then it would just shoot all the way across the sky. And then there'd be one over there, shoot over here, and there were several," he recalled.

The erratic, darting movements of the lights stunned him. But what disturbed him even more was what happened afterward. Or rather, what didn’t happen.

Despite the crowd that had witnessed the spectacle, no one spoke about it afterward.

"Nobody talked about it," Harrelson said. "Literally, everybody just went inside and said nothing."

For a young Harrelson, this eerie silence was almost as unsettling as the lights themselves. Had the event been too strange to process? Or had something—someone—ensured that it wouldn't be discussed?

Colbert, no stranger to UFO discussions, asked Harrelson if he had ever been abducted. While Harrelson didn’t claim anything that extreme, he admitted he remains open to the possibility of extraterrestrial life.

"Why wouldn’t it be true?" he mused.

With the recent surge in government disclosures about unidentified aerial phenomena (UAPs) and an increasing number of celebrities opening up about their own encounters, Harrelson’s story adds another layer to the growing mystery. Whether it was a mass sighting that people were too unsettled to acknowledge, or something more inexplicable, one thing is certain—Harrelson hasn’t forgotten that night.

What do you think? Did Woody Harrelson and his neighbors witness something otherworldly, or was it just a case of misidentified aerial phenomena? Either way, the fact that no one ever spoke about it afterward remains one of the strangest parts of the story.

Would you talk about it? Or would you, like Harrelson’s neighbors, just go inside and pretend it never happened?