My grandmother used to tell us this story. She always said it was about the time they met an alien. It happened many years ago, back in the early 1930s. They lived near a forest — just an ordinary forest. They'd go there to pick mushrooms and berries, hunt game, the usual.
Then, out of nowhere, people started disappearing. Four people vanished in just one month. You might chalk it up to wild animals, but the only wildlife around there were foxes, hares, and wild boar. So naturally, people became afraid to go into the forest. And then, not long after, a man wandered into their village. They saw him come right out of that very forest. My grandmother described him as oddly dressed, carrying strange gadgets, speaking in a peculiar way. He seemed completely lost, like he had no idea where he was. About those gadgets — she said he had a metal bracelet on his wrist, and after they'd given him a good steam in the bathhouse, he pressed some buttons on it, and within five minutes all his scratches were gone. He also kept staring at some little box that had glowing pictures and numbers on it. He kept shoving it in front of the men's faces, showing them strange maps, asking where he was.
So they figured a UFO had landed nearby. They called it in to someone higher up, but nobody believed them and no special services ever showed up. And then the man just vanished. My grandmother said the alien must have sensed something was off and fled.
Anyway, when I was a kid listening to this story wide-eyed, I truly believed he was an alien. But now, years later, I think — come on, no alien would blow his cover like that. And that little box of his sure sounds a lot like a modern smartphone. So now I believe that man somehow ended up in the wrong time. And judging by the fact that we still don't have anything like that bracelet he wore, he wasn't even from our time — he was from even further in the future. And what about the people who disappeared? Maybe they were displaced in time too? By the way, after a while, people gradually started going back into the forest, and there were no more disappearances. So the anomaly was short-lived — it lasted maybe a month or two. If it was a time portal, as I suspect, it may have closed or moved somewhere else. As for that man, they never heard anything about him again. Maybe he found his way back, or maybe he quietly lived out the rest of his life there, in that time.