I thought it was a meteor... but it wasn't

It was late on a winter's night, almost New Year's. I was in bed, my aunt was in her room, and my sister was still up, watching TV. My parents were out at a party and wouldn't be home until very late. I had been awoken by a noise like thunder, which was strange because it was wintertime. I got up and looked out my window to see a slow-moving orange fireball floating past my window. I ran down the hall and through the family room, yelling to my sister to come and look at the meteor coming down in the back yard.

We went to the kitchen window that looked out into the back yard. I opened the curtains and we saw a large black shape settling onto the roof of the back porch. The shape was about ten feet across, a black diamond with large green lights on the points. It emitted a low rumble that shook the house, and the sound felt like it was going through my chest. The glass in the window was rattling.

"What is it?" My sister asked. "I don't know," I said. I wanted to go out on the porch and look underneath it, but I couldn't move. I heard someone in my head saying, Don't go outside, you'll get hurt. I got the idea that it wasn't safe to go underneath this thing, whatever it was.

After a few minutes, the black diamond moved horizontally off of the roof, hovered in the back yard a few seconds, then lifted up and took off over the hill. It seemed to be moving both fast and slow, as if it was warping the space around it. It was blacker than the sky. After it was gone, four jets from the military base chased it, but they couldn't get near it. My sister and I turned from the window and started to walk into the family room--

And suddenly I woke up in bed. It was much later, and my parents were home. I could hear them trying to rouse my sister from her trance in front of the TV. They had shut the TV off, but apparently my sister continued to sit there and stare at the screen. I heard my mother call her name over and over, but she got no response. She put my sister to bed and told my father that she was shaking. My mother had wanted to bring her to the emergency room, but my father said that she had probably just seen a scary movie on TV, and would be alright in the morning.

It was then that I noticed that I was lying in my bed wearing slippers, and I had been tucked in. I had NOT had any slippers on when I had stood at the kitchen window watching the black diamond... and I hadn't been tucked into bed since I was five! My hair had been spread across the pillows, and my arms were crossed mummy-style over my chest. And my bathrobe was tied in a big, sloppy bow-- NOT in the knot I always tied it in! I think these differences were the reasons why I remembered the incident-- too many things were changed.

My sister and I never talked about the incident. I completely forgot about it for five years-- but I had lots of "false memories" of telling other people about it! I discovered this when I told my friend that something had reminded me of the black diamond on my roof, and she said that I had never told her about it.

My sister no longer remembers anything about that night, but a recent conversation with my mother verified that something had happened-- my mother remembered how she had come home to find my sister in a daze in front of the TV, and how she had been shaking when she put her to bed.

I don't remember seeing anything that night besides the black diamond. In fact, as I was standing there looking at it, I had had a feeling of being ripped off because there were no alien faces pressed against any windows on it! But something must have happened that night for all of those changes to have been made. I still wear that bathrobe, which I now call my "UFO bathrobe." Some day I will do a hypnotic regression and find out what happened in the hours before my parents came home.