
When Simone was 4 years old. She would take two fingers, run them down the center of her mother’s face, from forehead to chin, and say “Zup.” At first her mother, Rachel, thought it was just one of those strange, cute kid things. Then one day she asked Simone what she was doing. Simone answered matter-of-factly, “I’m unzipping your mask.” When Rachel pointed out that she wasn’t wearing a mask, Simone’s response dumbfounded her: “Sometimes you’re not my mom,” her daughter said. “Sometimes you’re an alien who looks like my mom.”
What could make the most familiar person in the world suddenly seem like a stranger?
A surprising number of children at some point believe their parents are impostors. “Once I started looking for alien parents, they were everywhere,” writes Elna Baker. “I posted on social media and asked if, growing up, anyone else had thought their parents were impostors of some kind. Several people wrote to say ‘yes.’”
When Baker described Simone and the others to Trudy Goodman, a child and family therapist, she said she wasn’t at all surprised by how many examples she’d come across. Of course, some children simply are letting their imaginations run wild. But kids are also drawn to creative explanations as a means of making sense of disruptions or events in their lives — which, she added, is a perfectly normal way for them to explain an uncanny feeling. “They know things, but they don’t know what they know,” she said.
But what are they actually seeing?
Read Baker’s full report on the strange, surprisingly common childhood suspicion: