Stranger than Fiction

One of the easiest ways to believe something someone tells you, is if it’s easily observable in the real world. For example, if someone tells you something like:

I saw a possum in my backyard last night.

The statement is instantly believable. Possums are something we know are real, and seeing one in your backyard isn’t anything out the ordinary. They’re even nocturnal, letting the time of the occurrence match with its expected behavior. Even when you’re more vague, it’s still easy to believe.

I saw some kind of animal in my backyard last night.

You would still believe them, since many different animals could have been in the backyard that night, they just couldn't identify what it was. Even if we take that statement farther, and make it so it’s not “just” an animal, it’s still a fairly innocuous statement.

I saw some kind of weird animal in my backyard last night.

This statement is still believable, since there are plenty of animals that can easily be considered  “weird,” especially is you only see them for a moment or just one part of them. In the case of something like a possum, if they just saw the large fleshy, bristly tail, or the flash of a mouth full of little sharp teeth-- both of those traits could be considered “weird,” and not let the person easily identity the animal in question. Likely, the speaker said “weird” due to being unsettled by the sighting, than because of any actually strangeness of the animal in question.

Now, the important part of this discussion is what starts to make a statement unbelievable. Starting small, we can have a statement like this:

I saw some kind of weird animal, or something, in my backyard last night.

Simply by adding “or something,” it makes the statement start to seem more like something out of fiction than reality. If it wasn’t an animal, what was it? In a real life scenario, one would still likely believe the person, just thinking the unexpected presence of the animal was unnerving enough to nurture a, likely unintended, paranoid conclusion. This can be expanded into:

I saw something in my backyard last night.

Here, the vague descriptors make it, in some ways, less strange than the inclusion of the possibility of it being a “weird animal.” Here, the lack of detail lets the listener fill the gap with the most likely conclusion. They might ask a follow-up question along the lines of: “Like what, an animal?” However, that believability might change if you were to respond in a way that indicated you didn’t think it was an animal, by saying something like: “I don’t think so.” This would then start to invite doubt about the person’s observation.

But what if we take that to the next level? Something like:

I saw someone in my backyard last night.

At this point, you’d probably lose some people in terms of believability. It’s not that seeing someone in your backyard one night is highly improbable, it’s just that it seems more fitting for a movie than reality, so most would react as such. However, with others you might get genuine concern or worry-- mostly from the fact that the situation in question plays on innate fears of observation from some unseen interloper. The point is, that if you actually saw someone in your backyard one night, it wouldn’t be too difficult to convince someone you did, and deal with it accordingly. However, this is entirely dependent on the fact that it’s, just like the possum before, a scenario that is fairly easy to imagine happening in the real world-- there’s a lot of unsavory characters out there after all.

Now, what if the situation you encounter, is more outside the realm of possibility?  The believability here still ranges depending on the factors of the statement. As we discussed earlier, being vague can actually add believability. In this case, that means that just leaving the statement as “someone/something” makes it obviously more believable than if you said something like:

I saw an alien in my backyard last night.

In this scenario, the first thing you’d likely think is that, obviously, your friend did not see an alien in their backyard last night. They likely saw something they thought was an alien, but was actually something else. Why is a statement like that less believable than the “weird animal, or something” or “someone” examples we used above, even though it’s technically more specific? The key here is the presence of the concept being mostly in fiction, rather than reality. This idea is fairly well known, even being discussed by Mulder in The X-Files (since we're already talking about aliens.) The idea, to put it simply, is that when an idea is sufficiently disseminated through media, especially fiction, it becomes increasingly difficult to believe it’s something that could be real (such as the idea of Area 51 being a secret alien and UFO research site.)

However, even with the idea of an “alien,” there are people who would be willing to believe you, especially people who already believe in something like “aliens” to begin with. This also works if you swap out “alien,” for other notable fiction entities that also have followings of people that believe in them, such as an “angel,” or a “ghost.” If you find the right person, the belief is still able to be achieved. However, that’s not the goal of writing this. The idea I’ve been guiding towards, is the presence, hostile or otherwise, of something that is only present in media in a fictional depiction.

In order to explain this, I’m going to move away from the “something in the backyard” formula. Let’s say someone says to you:

I keep having nightmares where someone is trying to kill me.

Nothing really out of the ordinary here. Plenty of people have nightmares like that.

I keep having nightmares where someone is trying to kill me... they feel so real.

Here, a little more to have to accept, but we’ve all had dreams that “feel” real. However, that’s just a feeling, we accept that it isn’t actually real.

I keep having nightmares where someone is trying to kill me... they feel so real. I think if they do I’ll die in real life.

And now we’ve fully left reasonable possibility. In the scenario where you’re trying to tell someone this, you’re probably not going to have them believe you. Even if they tell you they believe you, they probably still don’t. You could probably say one day “I was just overreacting,” and all they’d probably respond with is “Oh. Well, that’s a relief.” or “Yeah, that’s what I figured.” Again, showing they never really believed you to begin with.

This is almost as far as you can take a statement like this. Almost.

I keep having nightmares where Freddy Krueger is trying to kill me... they feel so real. I think if he does, I’ll die in real life.

This is the end-all, beat-all in terms of unbelievability. Not only would you have to accept that it’s possible to be pursued by some kind of dream entity that kills you in real life-- it’s the one that already exists in the fictional media of A Nightmare on Elm Street. Just a straight-out-the-door impossibility right there. This statement would be nigh impossible to convince anyone of. The same applies to anything with a purely fictional presence.

I saw an alien from Alien in my backyard last night.

I’m being stalked by Michael Myers when I walk home.

Daffy Duck keeps trying to burn my house down.

What I’m trying to get at, is that something being present in fictional media, and only present in fictional media, makes suspension of disbelief impossible. It requires us to change what “fiction” means as a whole. We’d have to consider that maybe there is an entity that has somehow disseminated their appearance and behavior into fictional media. That it has serialized itself in order to make sure it’s impossible to gain sympathy or help in dealing with it. Even if you could prove it, with pictures or video-- we live in an age where anything can be doctored or staged, even further expanding that gulf of unbelievability.

If you were someone dealing with something that you knew no one would believe you about, you’d likely just keep it to yourself. After all, what’s more important; telling the truth, or being believed?
Exactly.
That’s why I don't tell anyone what I saw that night.