During a recent appearance on The Late Show, Woody Harrelson, the 63-year-old actor, shared his 1974 UFO encounter with host Stephen Colbert, though it took some prompting to get him to open up.
While discussing Harrelson’s SNL appearance, where he joined Kate McKinnon in an alien abduction skit, Colbert asked if he believed in aliens.
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Subscribe to the Newsletter“Yeah. I mean, I’m open-minded,” Harrelson replied. When Colbert pressed further, asking if he’d had a close encounter, Harrelson was surprised. “Have I had an alien experience? You’re really asking me if I’ve had an alien experience?” he quipped, amusing the audience.
Colbert clarified, “I’m not saying ‘Have you been abducted?,'” joking, “But if you have been abducted, now would be a great time to tell me! But have you like seen a UFO? ‘Cause I have, I’ve seen stuff I can’t explain.”
This admission prompted Harrelson to share his story. “I’ll admit, I have,” he said. “I wasn’t abducted. Or maybe I was abducted and forgot,” he added with a laugh.
Harrelson explained the incident occurred in 1974 when he was a teenager in Ohio.
“Suddenly I noticed, like everybody’s out in the street and so I went out, and we look up. 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,” he recalled.
“And then there’d be one over there, shoot over here, and there were several. They just kept going across the sky.” After a few minutes, the lights disappeared. “Whoosh, went somewhere else. Some other world,” he said.
Surprisingly, no one discussed the event afterward. “Nobody talked about it. Literally, everybody just went inside and said nothing,” Harrelson shared. “It was so freaky, even for me, as young as I was.”
When Colbert asked if aliens exist, Harrelson replied, “Of course it’s true. Why wouldn’t it be true?”
Watch Harrelson’s full conversation with Colbert below.
