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Contactees are persons who claim to have experienced contact with extraterrestrials. Some claimed ongoing encounters, while others claimed to have had as few as a single encounter. Evidence is anecdotal in all cases.
As a cultural phenomenon, contactees perhaps had their greatest notoriety from the late 1940s to the late 1950s, but individuals continue to make similar claims in the present. Some have shared their messages with small groups of followers, and many contactees have written books, published magazine and newspaper articles, issued newsletters or spoken at UFO conventions.
The contactee movement has seen serious attention from academics and mainstream scholars. Among the earliest was the 1956 study, When Prophecy Fails by Leon Festinger, Henry Riecken, and Stanley Schachter, which analyzed the phenomenon. There have been at least two university-level anthologies of scientific papers regarding the contactee movements.
Contactee accounts are generally different from those who allege alien abduction, in that while contactees usually describe positive experiences involving humanoid aliens, abductees rarely describe their experiences positively.
Astronomer J. Allen Hynek described contactees thus:
The visitation to the earth of generally benign beings whose ostensible purpose is to communicate (generally to a relatively few selected and favored persons) messages of "cosmic importance". These chosen recipients generally have repeated contact experiences, involving additional messages [1]
Contactees became a cultural phenomenon in the 1940s and continued throughout the 1950s and 1960s, often giving lectures and writing books about their experience. The phenomenon still exists today. Skeptics often hold that such "contactees" are deluded or dishonest in their claims. Susan Clancy wrote that such claims are "false memories" concocted out of a "blend of fantasy-proneness, memory distortion, culturally available scripts, sleep hallucinations, and scientific illiteracy". [2]
Contactees usually portrayed aliens as more or less identical in appearance and mannerisms to humans. The aliens are also almost invariably reported as disturbed by the violence, crime, and wars that infest the earth, and by the possession of various earth nations of nuclear and thermonuclear weapons. Curtis Peebles summarizes the common features of many contactee claims: [3]
As early as the 18th century, people like Emanuel Swedenborg were claiming to be in psychic contact with inhabitants of other planets. 1758 saw the publication of Concerning Earths in the Solar System, in which Swedenborg detailed his alleged journeys to the inhabited planets. J. Gordon Melton notes that Swedenborg's planetary tour stops at Saturn, the furthest planet discovered during Swedenborg's era, he did not visit then unknown Uranus, Neptune or Pluto. [4]
In 1891, Thomas Blott's book The Man From Mars was published. The author claimed to have met a Martian in Kentucky. Unusually for an early contactee, Blott reported that the Martian communicated not via telepathy, but in English. [5]
George Adamski, who later became probably the most prominent contactee of the UFO era, was one contactee with an earlier interest in the occult. Adamski founded the Royal Order of Tibet in the 1930s. Writes Michael Barkun, "His [later] messages from the Venusians sounded suspiciously like his own earlier occult teachings." [6]
Christopher Partridge notes, importantly, that the pre-1947 contactees "do not involve UFOs". [7]
In support of their claims, early 1950s contactees often produced photographs of the alleged flying saucers or their occupants. A number of photos of a "Venusian scout ship" by George Adamski and identified by him as a typical extraterrestrial flying saucer were noted to suspiciously bear a remarkable resemblance to a type of once commonly available chicken egg incubator, complete with three light bulbs which Adamski said were "landing gear". [8]
For over two decades, contactee George Van Tassel hosted the annual "Giant Rock Interplanetary Spacecraft Convention" in the Mojave Desert. [9]
Even in ufology—itself subject to at best very limited and sporadic mainstream scientific or academic interest—contactees were generally seen as the lunatic fringe, and serious ufologists subsequently avoided the subject, for fear it would harm their attempts at serious study of the UFO phenomenon. [10] [11] Jacques Vallée notes, "No serious investigator has ever been very worried by the claims of the 'contactees'." [12]
Carl Sagan has expressed skepticism about contactees and alien contact in general, remarking that aliens seem very happy to answer vague questions but when confronted with specific, technical questions they are silent:
Occasionally, by the way, I get a letter from someone who is in "contact" with an extraterrestrial who invites me to "ask anything". And so I have a list of questions. The extraterrestrials are very advanced, remember. So I ask things like, "Please give a short proof of Fermat's Last Theorem." Or the Goldbach Conjecture. And then I have to explain what these are, because extraterrestrials will not call it Fermat's Last Theorem, so I write out the little equation with the exponents. I never get an answer. On the other hand, if I ask something like "Should we humans be good?" I always get an answer. I think something can be deduced from this differential ability to answer questions. Anything vague they are extremely happy to respond to, but anything specific, where there is a chance to find out if they actually know anything, there is only silence. [13]
Some time after the phenomenon had waned, Temple University historian David M. Jacobs noted a few interesting facts: the accounts of the prominent contactees grew ever more elaborate, and as new claimants gained notoriety, they typically backdated their first encounter, claiming it occurred earlier than anyone else's. Jacobs speculates that this was an attempt to gain a degree of "authenticity" to trump other contactees. [14]
Those who claim to be contactees include:
George Adamski was a Polish-American author who became widely known in ufology circles, and to some degree in popular culture, after he displayed numerous photographs in the 1940s and 1950s that he said were of alien spacecraft, claimed to have met with friendly Nordic alien Space Brothers, and claimed to have taken flights with them to the Moon and other planets.
The extraterrestrial hypothesis (ETH) proposes that some unidentified flying objects (UFOs) are best explained as being physical spacecraft occupied by extraterrestrial life or non-human aliens, or non-occupied alien probes from other planets visiting Earth.
In ufology, the psychosocial hypothesis, abbreviated PSH, argues that at least some UFO reports are best explained by psychological or social means. It is often contrasted with the better-known extraterrestrial hypothesis (ETH), and is particularly popular among UFO researchers in the United Kingdom, such as David Clarke, Hilary Evans, the editors of Magonia magazine, and many of the contributors to Fortean Times magazine. It has also been popular in France since the publication in 1977 of a book written by Michel Monnerie, Et si les ovnis n'existaient pas?.
Eduard Albert Meier, commonly nicknamed "Billy", is the founder of a UFO religion called the "Freie Interessengemeinschaft für Grenz- und Geisteswissenschaften und Ufologiestudien" and alleged contactee whose UFO photographs are claimed to show alien spacecraft. Meier claims to be in regular contact with extraterrestrial beings he calls the Plejaren. He also presented other material during the 1970s such as metal samples, sound recordings and film footage. Meier claims to be the seventh reincarnation after six prophets common to Judaism, Christianity, and Islam: Enoch, Elijah, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Immanuel (Jesus), and Muhammad.
Gabriel Green was an American early UFOlogist who claimed contact with extraterrestrials. Green was a write-in United States presidential candidate in 1960 and 1972.
Howard Menger was an American contactee who claimed to have met extraterrestrials throughout the course of his life, meetings which were the subject of books he wrote, such as From Outer Space To You and The High Bridge Incident. Menger, who rose to prominence as a charismatic contactee detailing his chats with friendly Adamski-style Venusian "space brothers" in the late 1950s, was accepted by some UFO believers.
A UFO religion is any religion in which the existence of extraterrestrial (ET) entities operating unidentified flying objects (UFOs) is an element of belief. Typically, adherents of such religions believe the ETs to be interested in the welfare of humanity which either already is, or eventually will become, part of a pre-existing ET civilization. Other religions predate the UFO era of the mid 20th century, but incorporate ETs into a more supernatural worldview in which the UFO occupants are more akin to angels than physical aliens, but this distinction may be blurred within the overall subculture. These religions have their roots in the tropes of early science fiction and weird fiction writings, in ufology, and in the subculture of UFO sightings and alien abduction stories. Historians have considered the Aetherius Society, founded by George King, to be the first UFO religion.
In ufology, Nordic aliens are humanoid extraterrestrials purported to come from the Pleiades who resemble Nordic-Scandinavians. Professed contactees describe them as being six to seven feet tall with long blonde hair, blue eyes, and fair skin. Debunked ufologist George Adamski is credited with being among the first to claim contact with Nordic aliens in the mid 1950s, and scholars note that the mythology of extraterrestrial visitation from beings with features described as "Aryan" often include claims of telepathy, benevolence, and physical beauty.
Truman Bethurum was one of the well known 1950s UFO or alien "contactees"- individuals who claimed to have spoken with people from other inhabited planets and entered or ridden in their spacecraft. Bethurum was born in Gavilin, California, and in the early 1950s worked as a truck driver and a mechanic on a desert road-building crew. He later became a self-proclaimed spiritual advisor. In 1953, Bethurum first published magazine and newspaper accounts of being contacted on eleven separate occasions beginning in July, 1952 by the humanoid crew of a landed space ship near Mormon Mesa in the Mojave Desert of southern Nevada, and repeatedly conversing with its beautiful and voluptuous female captain, Aura Rhanes. The saucer and its crew, who spoke colloquial English, came from the unknown planet Clarion, which was allegedly on the other side of the Sun and thus could not be seen from the Earth. Bethurum's 1954 book, Aboard a Flying Saucer, gave many details of his suffering at the hands of skeptics and a great deal of information about Captain Rhanes, Clarion and its people.
George Hunt Williamson, aka Michael d'Obrenovic and Brother Philip, was an American flying saucer contactee, channel, and metaphysical author who came to prominence in the 1950s.
Wayne Sulo Aho was an American contactee who claimed contact with extraterrestrial beings. He was one of the more obscure members of the 1950s wave of contactees who followed George Adamski.
Samuel Eaton Thompson was an American contactee who claimed to have been in contact with extraterrestrials. Although his claims earned him little publicity during his lifetime, Thompson might have been the first North American contactee. Researcher Jerome Clark describes the account as "surely the most outlandish story in early UFO history [and] also one of the most obscure". The story earned a brief, 11 paragraph, mention in a local newspaper in 1950, and the full story was not publicized until more than three decades afterwards.
Ashtar is the name given to an extraterrestrial being or group of beings that a number of people have channeled. UFO contactee George Van Tassel was likely the first to receive an Ashtar message, in 1952. Since then, many different experiences about Ashtar have appeared in different contexts. The Ashtar movement is studied by academics as a prominent form of UFO religion.
James Willett Moseley was an American observer, author, and commentator on the subject of unidentified flying objects (UFOs). Over his nearly sixty-year career, he exposed UFO hoaxes and engineered hoaxes of his own. He was best known as the publisher of the UFO newsletters Saucer News and its successor Saucer Smear, which became the longest continuously published UFO journal in the world.
History of alien abduction claims describes assertions or claims that people have experienced alien abduction. Such claims came to international prominence in the 1950s and 1960s, but some researchers argue abduction narratives can be traced to decades earlier. Such abduction stories have been studied by investigators who believe that the accounts describe actual, literal interaction with non-human or extraterrestrial entities. Others have investigated alien abduction claims from a more skeptical perspective, arguing they can be best understood as expressions of folklore or various psychological phenomena.
The interdimensional hypothesis is a proposal that unidentified flying object (UFO) sightings are the result of experiencing other "dimensions" that coexist separately alongside our own in contrast with either the extraterrestrial hypothesis that suggests UFO sightings are caused by visitations from outside the Earth or the psychosocial hypothesis that argues UFO sightings are best explained as psychological or social phenomenon.
The Frances Swan story is a 20th-century legend of a Maine housewife who, in 1954, claims to receive messages from extra-terrestrials via automatic writing. Allegedly instructed by the messages to contact the Navy, the housewife reaches out to her next door neighbor, a retired admiral, who arranges for Naval investigators to interview the woman. Using automatic writing, naval investigators summon a UFO.
They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers is a 1956 book by paranormal author Gray Barker. It was the first book to allege that "Men in Black" were covering up the existence of flying saucers.
I was but seven years of age in November of 1953, when I first saw the strange lights above the river near my home in Northeastern Arkansas.