This is a true thing that happened to me. And better, it happened to me and a friend together, so there’s a corroborating witness.

Back in high school, me and my friends Chris, whom I call Gene, and Scharf made plans to hang out at Gene’s house after school. Gene and I both had 9th period free, so we met at the beginning of 9th period in the SWAS room. Scharf had said he’d meet us there at the end of 9th period, the last period of the day.

I was in an alternative education program, School Within A School, in high school. It was in a big room with couches instead of desks, no grades, etc., it’s a whole other story. But SWAS met for the first few periods of the day, and after that, the SWAS room, full of couches, was a lounge for the people in the program. Many SWAS students used the SWAS room to keep their stuff in, so between periods, there was always a flurry of activity in there, people stopping in to get their books and things.

So Gene and I met in the SWAS room at the beginning of 9th period, just as everyone was in there getting their stuff for 9th period classes. The room cleared out and Chris and I hung out for the whole period.

And hung out.

And hung out.

The SWAS room didn’t have a working clock in it, owing to the kind of hijinx that might occur in a high school room full of bored, unsupervised suburban mischief-makers all day. So, after a while, Gene and I realized it had been quite a while it felt like it had been a really long period. So Gene and I ducked out into the hall to find a clock to glance at…

…and the school was quiet.

We looked in the other classrooms in the hall.

And they were empty.

All of them.

All their clocks said it was well after 3pm. The school day was over and everybody had gone home. The busses had left already.

There was only one problem. We’d been in the SWAS room the whole time. The end of 9th period bell hadn’t rung yet, and the end of day crush of students hadn’t rolled in to put their books away. The whole end-of-day rush of activity, the noise of students in the halls right outside the door getting knapsacks and jackets out of their lockers to go home, none of it had happened.

We too a late bus to Gene’s house—school had a few after-hours bus runs throughout the afternoons—and when we got there, Scharf was sitting on his front steps. “Hey, where were you guys? I came to the SWAS room after 9th period, and you guys weren’t there, so I assumed you’d left school early, and came here to meet you. I’ve been waiting here a while.”

So, ok. Sitting in the SWAS room, which we’d never left, we’d somehow missed the end of 9th period bell, the rush of students coming into the room at the end of the day, including Scharf who came into the room looking for us, the noise of students right outside in the hall as the hallways filled up with students leaving for the day.

You could imagine somehow, if one person had lost time like this, some sort of reasonable explanation: dozing off for a few minutes (although this doesn’t explain how Scharf came to the room and didn’t see us) or even taking a short walk and absentmindedly forgetting they had. But this was two of us. We’d been in the SWAS room talking the whole time. We were there at the beginning of 9th period, but somehow in there lost a chunk of time during which the school day ended, everybody came into the SWAS room for their end of the day stuff, and nobody saw us.

Gene and I went over our recollections. They matched. Neither recalled a gap or anything that might account for how we apparently disappeared for a while without ever knowing it. Just hanging out, waiting for the 9th period ending bell to ring and the crush of students to show up, feeling like it had been an awfully long time, and venturing out into the hall to discover we’d somehow missed it. And later discovered other people had been there at the end of 9th period and… we weren’t.

Alien abduction? Brief foray to another dimension?

We never figured it out.

And, no, in case it needs be said, we hadn’t been smoking weed.