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Posted: 22-05-2012 21:43 Post subject: Glowing man...what was this?

This story was related to me by a close friend...it was the late 1980s and she was about ten yers old. She had returned with her parents from a shopping trip and it was just on twilight in the wintertime...the parents told my friend to stay by the open boot of the car whilst they began taking things into the house.

I'm not sure why they did that...presumably because they didn't want the shopping or the car to be stolen though what a ten year old could do about it I don't know!

Confused

Anyway....she began, as kids do, to wander a bit...she walked a little way up the street (this was a suburban area...smallish road)...then something made her turn back and look over her shoulder and she saw a "glowing man....bending over the open boot as though examining the contents"

She screamed and was very distressed and he/it ran away in the opposite direction....he was she said, male with no discernable features and rounded off limbs....he glowed in the same way as the moon does. He ran very powerfully off up the road and her parents came out of the house to see what the matter was.

She has never forgotten this and has a little fear that he might come back...what was it?

Posted: 22-05-2012 22:19 Post subject:

Whoa.
Repo Man?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Repo_Man_%28film%29

Edit: Yep, Wikipedia broke the HTML rules again.

Edit: Fixed. P_M

Posted: 22-05-2012 23:09 Post subject:

Ready brek.

Posted: 26-05-2012 10:00 Post subject:

Posted: 26-05-2012 16:50 Post subject:

Seriously, though, this is a pretty good story. What would make a person glow at twilight? Phosphorous? A fluoresecent tabard? The way the light caught him as he stood rummaging through the shopping? There's nothing to indicate he came from outer space, after all - no UFO seen, for example.

Posted: 26-05-2012 19:07 Post subject:

Bloody hell the Invaders, I used to love that.

Posted: 27-05-2012 09:51 Post subject:

William of Ockham would, I'm sure, suggest the following explanation:

The witness was some distance from the car, and the weather was cold.

A local man - perhaps curious, perhaps light-fingered - approaches the open boot of the unattended car. The witness looks back and sees the man silhouetted against a street light, perhaps using a torch to examine the car, wreathed in the steam of his own breath which is glowing in the backlight.

Add a ten-year-old's imagination to the mix and: Hey presto! Glowing alien!

maximus otter

Posted: 27-05-2012 10:46 Post subject:

Posted: 27-05-2012 11:18 Post subject:

If I was going for an everday explanation then I'd say an opportunist rummager in a hi-vis jacket. (Okay, not the best thing to be wearing when you're on the rob - but if he was an opportunist maybe he was just on his way back from work, saw the open boot and thought, feck it - I'll just have a bit of a nose.)

Those hi-vis jackets are very bright indeed when hit by headlights - and the brightness of the reflective strips at the end of the sleeves, compared to the darkness of the hands poking out of them, might suggest that there were no hands at all. And of course, it was dark, so you wouldn't necessarily see discernable features.

Anyway, what I like about this scenario is that it allows for an equal and opposite story being told on another Fortean type website - where the proposed moody geezer, now obviously reformed, is telling the one about how when walking home from work one night he'd spotted an open boot, thought, feck it - I'll just have a bit of a nose, and then, just as he was picking up a frozen chicken, had the living daylights scared out of him by this unearthly screaming.

I tell you man, I was off and up the road like a bloody olympic sprinter. Still gives me the horrors...and I've never been able to touch chicken since.

Posted: 27-05-2012 11:18 Post subject:

A brief Google Images search reveals this, which gives an impression of the effect I've tried to describe:

http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_ll0qi0sEnR1qhez5wo1_500.png

maximus otter

Posted: 28-05-2012 17:47 Post subject:

So he was lit from behind rather than glowing?

In 1979 or 1980 a class mate of mine who was definitively not into anything paranormal, came to school one morning and kept telling this story over and over that she had seen a tall blonde man [dressed in a long black coat and who was quite tall], walking towards her and she couldn't look away because his face was glowing. At the same time she didn't want to stare too much as he gave her the heebie jeebies. She described the glow as being similar to the faces of ladies in old films, when they are highlighted, only his face was glowing even more than that.

There were no street lamps as it was in a place in Hanover [Germany], which was called then "Passerelle", a miles long underground shopping street and at the place she saw this man, it opened up but was always a dinghy place.

I thought I'd throw this in, in case the man you saw was glowing and maybe there is a connection [highly unlikely but hey] Wink

Posted: 28-05-2012 18:12 Post subject:

Horses sweat, gentlemen perspire, and ladies glow. And so do weirdo humanoids.

Posted: 27-05-2013 13:50 Post subject:

Long time since I've been back but thanks for the replies! I don't think the explanations quite fit as he apparently glowed all over...not just his edges....But I accept that ten year olds could embellish...

Posted: 27-05-2013 14:24 Post subject:

It might be helpful to specify the car. At least here in the USA, it was once common to have a small light bulb in the trunk / boot lid that illuminated the enclosure whenever the lid was open. Unless you happened to open the trunk at night, you might never know it was there. In twilight conditions with such illumination, someone peering into a trunk / boot might appear to be mysteriously aglow.

Posted: 27-05-2013 18:48 Post subject:

One thing to bear in mind is that high visibility jackets were much more rare in the 1980s than they are now. These days they're ubiquitous but before the late 1990s and early 2000s very few people wore them; they weren't of the same luminosity and rarely had reflective tape on them either.