Woody Harrelson shares his ‘freaky’ alien experience from 1974

Turns out Woody Harrelson was drawing from real-life experience for his Saturday Night Live “Close Encounter” sketch.

Along with recounting an eventful Grateful Dead concert, the Now You See Me star, 63, used his recent visit to The Late Show to tell host Stephen Colbert all about his 1974 encounter with aliens… though it taking quite a bit of prompting to get Harrelson to open up.

While chatting about Harrelson’s appearance on SNL 50, where he joined Kate McKinnon for her latest abduction sketch, Colbert asked the actor if he believes in aliens.

“Yeah. I mean, I’m open-minded,” Harrelson replied. When the late-night host pushed further, asking if the actor had experienced any close encounters himself, Harrelson was incredulous.

“Have I had an alien experience? You’re really asking me if I’ve had an alien experience?” he asked, to the delight of the laughing studio audience.

Colbert defended himself, “I’m not saying ‘Have you been abducted?,'” he began, then joked, “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.”

That admission ended up being key: because despite his initial disbelief, it prompted Harrelson to divulge his secret. “I’ll admit, I have,” he finally answered.

“I wasn’t abducted. Or maybe I was abducted and forgot,” he quipped. 

The Electric State star explained that the incident occurred over 50 years prior, in 1974 when he was a teenager living 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.”

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He continued, “Everybody, we watched it for a while, it took a few minutes and then finally just, whoosh, went somewhere else. Some other world.”

The kicker is that afterward, Harrelson said nobody stuck around to unpack the strange occurrence. 

“Nobody talked about it. Literally, everybody just went inside and said nothing,” he shared. “It was so freaky, even for me, as young as I was.”

So do aliens exist? Harrelson thinks so. “Of course it’s true,” he told Colbert. “Why wouldn’t it be true?”

Memorable as Harrelson’s story may be, it was thankfully far less traumatic than the experiences of McKinnon’s Colleen Rafferty, who has been “vacuumed” up into space in several separate SNL sketches. Meanwhile, her companions — which this time included Harrelson, Pedro Pascal, and Meryl Streep — always manage to have a much more wholesome experience.

“We met these two beautiful glowing aliens who took our hands and said welcome. I’ve never felt so safe,” Harrelson says at one point in the sketch.

“Little different for me,” McKinnon’s Colleen interjects. “I was less cradled by light and more grabbed by a giant rusty claw.”

Watch Harrelson’s full conversation with Colbert above.