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Woody Harrelson recently revealed he once encountered a UFO, adding another fascinating chapter to his already colorful life story.
During his appearance on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert this week, Harrelson shared details about his extraterrestrial experience. The conversation emerged naturally after Colbert asked about Harrelson’s participation in an alien abduction sketch during the recent SNL50 anniversary celebration.
“I’ll admit I have. Yeah. I mean, I’m open-minded,” Harrelson told Colbert when asked if he’d ever seen a UFO. “I wasn’t abducted. Well, maybe I was abducted and forgot or something.”
The encounter happened while he was living in Ohio in 1974.
“Suddenly, I noticed, everybody’s out in the street and so I went out, and we look up,” he recalled.
What he witnessed that night left a lasting impression on the actor. “It was night time and there were these lights that were just kind of blinking and then it would just shoot all the way across the sky, right? And then there’d be one over there, shoot over here, several. They just kept going across the sky.”
Harrelson and the other witnesses observed the phenomenon for several minutes before the lights disappeared.
“We watched it for a while. It took a few minutes. Finally just went somewhere else. Some other world.”
What struck him most wasn’t just the sighting itself, but how everyone reacted afterward.
“And nobody talked about it,” he continued. “Like literally. Everybody just went inside and said nothing.”
The experience clearly made an impression on young Harrelson.
“It was so freaky, even for me, as young as I was. Of course it’s true. Why wouldn’t it be true?”
From UFOs to Jamming with the Dead
During the same interview, Harrelson shared another memorable story — how he nearly disrupted a Grateful Dead concert by distracting Jerry Garcia with a deep conversation about the expanding universe. The actor then accidentally sat on a live keyboard during the show.
“That was my first experience with them. I jammed with the Dead,” he joked.
Harrelson’s UFO story adds to the growing number of celebrity encounters with unexplained aerial phenomena — a topic that’s gained more serious attention in recent years with the Pentagon’s official acknowledgment of numerous unexplained sightings by military personnel.