I just discovered that while the ServiceNow APIs return all times in UTC, they use the user's default time for all times passed in as a parameter.

So if your account is set up in PDT and you say "give me this item that I just created", it will say "here your item, this was created at 17:00".

But if you say, "cool let me see all items created in the last hour, so anything greater than 16:00", then it will respond "got nothing for ya, chief."