The Overboard star, 77, recalled going to sleep in a friend’s car after a dance rehearsal in West Covina, Calif., where she heard a “high-pitched sound” that prompted her to look out the window. “I saw these two or three triangular-shaped heads. They were silver in color, slash for a mouth, tiny little nose, no ears,” she said. “They were pointing at me, pointing at me in the car as if they were discussing me, like I was a subject. And they were droning…”

Hawn remembered feeling paralyzed. “I didn’t know if it was real or not real. And finally, I burst out of it. It was like bursting out of a forcefield. And of course, I go back to all the kids and stuff, and I went, ‘Oh, my God. I think I made contact with outer space,’ I mean, something like that.”

Goldie Hawn. MATT BARON/SHUTTERSTOCK

For years, the actress wondered if she dreamed the entire experience until she connected with an astrophysicist at the University of Champaign, Ill. She visited the professor’s virtual reality lab, where she took a tour of the Milky Way. “I went into what I consider the most beautiful place I’ve ever seen. I was happy. I was calm. It felt so beautiful. It was so weird, but I felt kind of at home,” she said. “I got emotional, tear here and there, and I said, ‘I don’t understand it, but I did have an experience once that had to do with maybe being visited by someone.'”

Hawn said that the astrophysicist interviewed her about her experience, which she likened to “regression therapy,” as it unlocked repressed memories. “Suddenly I remembered something. They touched my face. They touched my face, and it felt like the finger of God. It was the most benevolent, loving feeling. This was powerful. It was filled with light.”

Years later, Hawn had a dream that she saw “six lights come up over the mountain,” which she took as a sign that the extraterrestrials had returned. She then visited Avebury, an ancient English monument similar to Stonehenge, where locals had reported seeing crop circles. “We got to the spot, and, by God, I was standing on this hill, looking down over a valley that was dark. That was exactly the spot in my dream, and a crop circle of just a heart,” Hawn recalled. “I’m now freaking out. I have collected hearts my whole life. I built a house of hearts. I have done everything with hearts. And I looked at this, and I thought, ‘I don’t know anything, but if this is a sign, I’ll take it.’

Ultimately, Hawn doesn’t know what to make of the experience, but it doesn’t bother her. “I’ll never know. And I kind of like it that way. I don’t want to know everything,” she said. “We cut ourselves off from a lot of things if we’re continuing to deny something that we have no proof over. There’s a lot of things in this world that we can’t see, but we can’t stop believing.”

She added: “We can never, ever lose our wonder. It’s just no fun. It’s really an important aspect of being an adventurer, where nothing is impossible.”