outer space

When I was a child I firmly believed that humans had visited every planet in the solar system except Jupiter. I was so disappointed and disgusted to learn in school that we hadn't even reached the moon yet!

Lark

One night when I was about 7 I woke up around 3 in the morning. I couldn't get back to sleep so I decided to read a Richie Rich comic book, and the main story concerned a bunch of bad guys who stole the moon (of course they didn't; they just turned it invisible, and Richie figured it out). I remembered that there was a full moon that night so I went to look at it out my window, which faced East, and... IT WAS GONE! Not knowing that both the Earth and Moon would be spinning/revolving enough to get over on the other side of the house in the 5 hours since I had last seen it, I went into my parents' room and woke Mom up to let her know that someone had stolen the Moon or turned it invisible. She groggily assured me it hadn't and told me to go to bed.

Fortunately, I was wrong.

TlalocW

I used to believe that if you dug under ground a little bit that you would see space

Jacob

When I was little I used to belive that the earth was it. No space at all.

Anon

When i was little,i thought at night, the moon was actually the other side of the earth, because that was the light side

Max

One of the weirder things I genuinely believed in was a physical border between the world of the imagination and the world of the 'real'. This border was a sharp division (like the equator or something) which sat on the very outmost edge of the universe and represented a border which mankind could never cross.

I used to believe if you could build a spaceship with a warp drive, a person could jump to the border between the two realities and put their hand through the curtain, to the other side. Everything that existed in 'unreality' lay on the other side... with effort you could bring people and objects back through the curtain - (they were unable to cross through on their own free will)- things like the animated Transformers on TV, or the imaginary heroes from books that only existed in your mind.

Later on this would evolve into my working definition of the afterlife for many years.

Mark

I used to think that the moon was just a reflection of Earth. I used to stand at my window at night and wave upwards, thinking that my mirror-image would be waving back down at me.

MrMachine

I used to think that up in outer space the sun was a gigantic baby that never grew up like in Teletubbies.

WeirdButProud

I used to believe that crescent moons were the bits of fingernail I bit off my thumb that had inexplicably floated into the sky, and glowed there to remind me not to bite my nails.

Anon

My brothers told me that the moon would become a crescent because the army was shooting at it. (we were army-brats)

Rebecca

I used to think that all the planets looked like what they were named after. Mars looked like a giant candy bar, Pluto was a cartoon dog, etc. Some were tough, like Saturn, (which I eventually figured out looked like a car). You can imagine what Uranus looked like...

Lara

When I was a child I believed that if I fell off the earth I would end up on the Plante of The Apes.

IslandGirlie

When I was young, I thought that the chirping sound that we always heard outside at night was the sound of the stars twinkling. Only later I found out it was really crickets chirping.

Melissa

I used to believe that the stars were holes in the roof of the world, and the light shining through the holes was the light from heaven.

Subi

I was born in 1967 and my Dad worked on the Saturn V so I remember hearing all about how man landed on the moon. For many years, when people would talk about seeing the "man in the moon" I would look really hard to see his silouette sticking off the side!

albeebe