I was around 4 my dad played E.T. for the first time. I was born in 1984, had two brothers, and lived in Michigan. This memory might be the single most important memory for my inquiry into ET contact, which is now called NHI contact for non-human intelligence. Similarly, the language of flying saucers became UFOs and is now called UAP for unidentified anomalous (or aerial) phenomenon. This memory is simple: my family watched ET until I became afraid and we did something else.
ET was directed by Steven Spielberg in 1982, after Close Encounters of the Third Kind in 1977. His newest movie, Disclosure Day, is set to release in mid-2026. I am turning 42, my son turned 4 in February. Like me, he has wavy blonde hair, he talks incessantly at home but will quietly observe out in public. Like me, he sometimes speaks in tongues through a sort of glossolalia or echolalia. Like me, he enjoys watching stories at twice normal speed to learn about the world and sometimes gets scared of what he sees.
When I was 4, I couldn’t tell the difference between the media and reality. They blended together and the emotion was the reality, but I had no words for it and it overwhelmed me. We could imagine that a trauma happened back then, which caused me to be obsessed with alien encounters and also afraid of them. When Jurassic Park came out in 1993, I remember being afraid that Velociraptors hid underneath the stairs to my bed room. I knew that it was impossible because dinosaurs did not live in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, but it didn’t do anything about my feelings. As a young child, I did not distinguish between rational possibility and fantasy.
Back in the 1980s, the words were alien abduction and UFOs. I learned to tie my red converse all-stars, I liked Ernie more than Bert (unlike my twin brother), and I suppose everyone was deep in the Cold War, but I had no idea. The memory I have might be a complete fabrication, which is actually normal for memories. We had traveled downstate to the Lower Pennisula, where the trolls live, named so because they lived beneath the Mackinaw Bridge connecting Michigan’s two peninsulas.
I remember a white and black carpet, surrounded by a formation of couches. I remember looking out the windows to the green forest and yards outside. Michigan is truly a beautiful state, which our seasonal pilgrimages south to visit friends and family gave me ample opportunity to observe. I don’t remember whose house it was. There’s a feeling of more people than my family, if I had to guess, we were visiting one of my dad’s two best friends who I called uncle.
Here now, in 2026, I am watching my son watch TV on my phone, getting scared or asking questions about how things work. I see myself in him and think about the giant TVs in the center of the TV room almost like an altar in a temple. My life right now is focused on my three children and providing for them, which I tried to do through my writing and dreamwork/hypnosis sessions about ET/NHI contact. I did hundreds of sessions, wrote 4 books, and skated by like I used to do as an artist. We need more than what a starving artist can provide, so I’m diving deep so that I can cure myself of this ET obsession or at least make my work generate income as might a job.
I am obsessed with ET contact narratives, perhaps as imagined by Speilberg. I can’t help but research them and write on them. For better or worse, I will scour the internet or libraries for stories of the paranormal, I will reflect on them, and I will consider a world in which all these stories are true. My routine in 9th grade, before I was home-schooled, was to eat my white bread and cheese sandwich as fast as possible, then methodically explore the library and to read what I was interested in. I would frequently visit the philosophy, religion, and paranormal sections. I wrote a website on Geocities about aliens and the paranormal.
I now understand how and why my obsession could have occurred, even though I never remembered alien abduction events. First, Michigan was a fertile ground for fantastic stories. When night fell, it was easy to feel the spirits of the natives and the various groups of immigrants because you could find arrow heads next to a depilated barn near dark woodlands, all set within a square grid emanating from Detroit and the advent of the assembly line. My mom told stories of UFOs, my aunt of seeing aliens, my dad once saw a demon, my uncle lived on a road with a warning about the Dogman, and so on. Further, there were the fundamentalist churches with their stories of aliens and demons, which we attended, but occasionally I’d go to a Pentecostal or non-demonimational event that seemed to produce miracles, prophecies, speaking in tongues, and other demonstrations of the spirit.
The second reason why my alien obsession occurred involved my dreams. I had powerful, vivid, strange, and lucid dreams that sometimes seemed to tell the future or feel as if I was in other real places. I have since identified similar dreams within literature on sleep paralysis, lucid dreaming, shamanism, and out of body experiences, as well as alien abduction research. My life story is shaped by the connection of dreaming and alien abduction because I felt connected to the narratives and the research spoke to me in ways that no other media did until perhaps The Waking Life in 2001, which artfully depicted the experience of lucid dreaming.
If you have not experienced such dreams, it may seemed unbelievable to you that you could have encounters with entities that feel ultra real who communicate messages about the future that come true, enact miraculous healings, and other supernatural feats. It may seem equally unbelievable that such beings could kidnap your body, leave marks upon it or objects within it, and bring you back without you knowing, only to leave behind cryptic memories. If you have not experienced such things, simply know that some people do and they do not seem to be insane, in the same way that believing in Christian angels and demons does not make you mentally ill. The phase between sleeping and waking often involves powerful experiences, which scientists call hypnagogic hallucinations.
These liminal experiences is associated with lucid dreaming, sleep paralysis, and encounters with supernatural beings. It is hard to estimate, but I would guess 5% of people spontaneously have recurrent experiences like this for at least some long period in their lives. About 15% of people have experiences sleep paralysis once or twice in their lives. Dreams, as well as reporting behavior, respond to personal and collective biases, therefore the prevalence of these experiences may widely vary. Similarly, Susan Clancy estimated that around 5% of people expressed schizotypal traits, which she claimed were a primary factor in why people believe in alien encounters. Schizotypy involves in the inability to tell the difference between fantasy and reality. Dream-reality confusion is the technical term for the inability to tell the difference between a dream and reality, which 10-25% of people may have experienced. Interestingly, false memory researchers leverage human tendency for dream-reality confusion by suggesting that a reported dream may actually have occurred.
As a 4 year old kid, I couldn’t tell the difference between the movie and the reality like when I saw ET for the first time. I remember being excited to watch the movie. I remember the first scene in the forest with the lights. I remember feeling more and more scared. I remember the feeling that the movie was stopped and something else happened. I don’t remember much more than that. Maybe those details are a fabrication. Maybe it happened when I was 5 and we were at home. Maybe it was my brother that got scared.
It doesn’t matter what happened then, what matters is what is happening now. I find myself anticipating Spielberg’s Disclosure Day as a sort of day of revelation. Just like the aliens or demons who are easy to disbelieve in the day and fear in the night, so too is it easy to see Spielberg’s work as fantasy in the day, but a truth that may explain the fear in the night. In 2026, when I am 41 years old and 3 sons, I find myself imagining our society after the release of Disclosure Day with a feeling that reminds me of imagining the rapture in our Baptist church.
The feeling reminds me of nostalgia and hope, mixed with alternating relief and terror at the inevitability of time. I’m sure I had the feeling in 1999, in the anticipation of the millennium. I was 15 years old. Even though my time as an evangelical Christian was just a few years, it still has an impact on me that I can not quantify. I am remembering back to the turn of the century, with all our fears about Y2k that imagined the technological world end due to computer bug. I remember reading The Diamond Sutra at midnight as a magic ritual, which is a mystical Buddhist text that I selected for the powerful turn of the millennium. My eldest son is 15 years old now.
When I was 15, I remember having nightmares, dreams within dreams, entity encounter dreams, and a variety of dreams. I remember jerking off in bed, then praying to Jesus for my forgiveness because self-pleasure was close enough to a sin and was possible sign a demon could be targeting me. I also remember having a meeting with my pastor to discuss his education in church history because a number of claims he made were directly contradicted by the books I was reading in the library. My intellect clearly was not constrained by dogma, but my subconscious was.
I don’t have any clear memories of alien abduction. When I tell the stories, they will feel just like dreams to you. For me, they are life changing events. They are testimony and anecdotes that require interpretation, not clear statements of historic fact. I remember going to the library and reading alien abduction books. I remember going on the internet and building a Geocities website about it. I remember scanning my body for any unexplained scars or marks, which I could not find. I remember scanning the sky with my mother for UFOs. I remember going to bed terrified of the idea that aliens stand outside of time and could move through walls and take me and do things to my body and then put me back and change my memory.
Clearly, something was so impactful that I read as much as possible. I had considered gifts of the spirit like they had in the more Charismatic traditions, spiritual warfare, or alien abduction. But the alien abduction narratives fit the best, although I had no memories of the classic grey aliens. I had one dream once with a reptilian who eat me alive. The dream was made of a special light that some lucid dreamers would recognize and for me signifies a powerful, shamanic, noetic, or otherwise meaningful dream. Dreams have different feelings and they sometimes align themselves to future events, series of synchronous events, or even animal encounters. I have had so many of these dreams, along with the corresponding events in the day, that I now honor dreams that involve animals who later show up in my life as messages from my deepest self. For example, I once made a decision to move because I dreamed of a porcupine, then saw it in waking the next day.
The fact that dreams predict the future seems magical and has been used as a source of authority in many religions and cults. I have had too many precognitive dreams to ignore the fact that they happen. Many other people testify to the experience. However, it is not like some people imagine, where you could willfully see the winning lottery numbers. It is more remembering your own experience of the future, particularly the inner experience of emotions and subconscious thought. Some precognitive dreams feel powerful like the animal dreams, but some feel completely mundane and you wouldn’t discover it unless you kept journals of your day and night experiences.
Similarly, people often give authority to media that predicts the future or reveals hidden knowledge. In the UFO community, the term soft disclosure refers to the dissemination of secret UFO knowledge through media to prepare the population for world view shock caused by evidence of aliens. In this way, Spielberg’s alien movies are often understood to be as authoritative or canonical as you can get for soft disclosure. The blending of fantasy and reality seems to transfer authority from one domain to another in unconscious ways, such that I might believe fantastic elements of the story because some elements correspond to reality. The most powerful example of this, in my life, comes from Close Encounters, in which Spielberg modeled the French UFO investigator Lacombe after famed UFOlogist Jacques Vallee.
The blending of fantasy and reality can create realities based upon fantasies. There is a paradox here that involves time travel, causal loops, prophecies, and many other phenomenon that are easily to be skeptical of in the day, but not so easy when you’re heart is pounding because you “woke up” in the dead of night. The paradox explains the shifting guise of the others, the airships in the 1800s, the flying saucers of the 1940s, the grey alien abductors of the 80s, and the sentient drone-orbs of the 2020s.
If you believe in the power of trauma to hide from our memories and define our lives, then you might interpret my memory of watching ET as the source cause of my ET obsession, which certainly makes a sort of narrative sense. The story goes like this: I’m 4 years old, we’re in a new place with people I rarely see but are important, we watch a movie everyone is excited for, it is too scary for me but I’m integrating social awareness for the first time so that I force myself to watch more than I am comfortable, and I become overwhelmed by terror, unable to distinguish fantasy from reality. The movie is cut short and I do not discover the friendship or resolution to the movie.
If the trauma therapists are to be believed, then that moment split me in two and causes a sort of amnesia. One part of me, who is forever four years old, is frozen in that moment of trauma. It is remembered through the body and feelings, trying to communicate its needs to a world that could not accommodate them. It is now part of the Shadow, as Jungians would call the self that is repressed to fit in. If I could fully recover that memory so that I could process the trauma of the event, then my body would not need to hold onto it and that part of my soul could come back with all of its energy and vitality. If I could have just the right experience in therapy, then my obsession with aliens might be resolved.
This view is a clean story, one that is believable, and is the basis for many interactions between experiencers and therapist or therapist-like figures such as hypnotists or UFO investigators. It is satisfying in how it can explain why I am looking at a UFO disclosure media, particularly this upcoming Spielberg film, as a revelation that is tied to my religious beliefs. I spend recent years thinking that something like this happened to me at a slightly more complex level surrounding the work of a network centered on Robert Bigelow, who was the contractor that ran the US government’s UFO study reported on by the New York Times in 2017.
Since 2020, I have primarily focused my professional activities on hypnosis and dreamwork for experiencers of ET/NHI contact. I did hundreds of sessions and wrote four books. I sought for the reason why I was obsessed with these narratives and how to transmute my terror. I developed a hypothesis called the shamanic dreaming hypothesis of missing time, which explored the idea that unremembered REM dreams are a primary precedent for missing time and that shamanic dreaming may be a precedent for ET/NHI hypnosis. Most researchers observe the encounters are dreamlike, but can’t account for their real aspects. The shamanic dreaming hypothesis solves the problem by shifting the expectation that dreams are unreal.
However, reality and dreaming are more complex than I imagined. I had imagined that my symptom of anxiety about dreams, encounters, and paranormal experiences could be explained by being a victim of either alien abduction itself or alien abduction narratives. From 2020 to around 2025, some part of me sought for a trauma that could explain why I was a victim of whatever it was that caused my anxiety about aliens and dreams, trouble integrating into society, the supernatural events of my precognitive or lucid dreams, and the supernatural stories I grew up with in Michigan.
I found out what literally caused fear of alien abduction, which as a booklet published by Robert Bigelow in 1992. Why was I afraid of aliens from around 1995-2023? Because Robert Bigelow aggressively promoted the alien abduction hypothesis in ways that defined our cultural understanding of abduction. I explored this idea through an essay The Alien Abduction Believer Syndrome that was written as a literary parody of the UFO Abduction Syndrome defined in the Unusual Personal Experiences booklet, which is the definitive introduction of alien abduction to the mental health profession. My essay’s abstract summarizes its argument:
A new interpretation of the UFO Abduction Syndrome, defined in the 1992 Unusual Personal Experiences booklet, in the context of subsequent research, suggests that there is a syndrome associated with belief in alien abduction that may manifest in false memories, paranoid thoughts, fear, anxiety, and PTSD. This report defines the Alien Abduction Believer Syndrome (AABS) and identifies its cause in two epistemological fallacies: the myth of repressed memory and the monophasic bias. AABS appears to affect two populations: abductees, now termed experiencers, and those who integrate abductee testimony into their worldviews. It is estimated there are tens of thousands of abduction reports. 60% of the population believes in the myth of repressed memory and nearly 80% believe the government may cover-up signs of alien visitation. While the original abduction researchers advocated for the disempowering reality of abduction trauma, this report argues for empowering reality that abduction events are both dreamlike and real, thereby advocating that the experiencer is capable of mediating their ET/NHI encounter phenomena for their benefit. Additional resources and research for further inquiry is indicated. This document is crafted as a literary satire on Unusual Personal Experiences and should not be considered a clinical argument.
I would not be obsessed with alien abduction if Robert Bigelow had not introduced UAS to over 100k mental health workers through the booklet publication and series of national conferences. His study and its publication appeared to legitimize the research of Budd Hopkins, David Jacobs, and John E. Mack, relying on Mack’s prestigious credentials as a Psychiatry professor in Harvard and as a Pulitzer prize winning author. The fact that Bigelow wrote letters of introduction for his conferences on Harvard letterhead somehow swiped from Mack, complete with a forged signature, seems immensely relevant. However, I only discovered this fact when Will Bueche, the archivist for the John E. Mack Institute, sent me a PDF copy of Mack’s apology letter to Harvard.
The fundamental reasons why alien abduction narratives like from Mack or Hopkins are compelling, while scientific skepticism like from McNally or Clancy is not, is because science has not explained the very lived experience of alien abduction in a compelling way. There is a well-documented phenomenon between waking and sleeping that involves hyper-real encounters with supernatural beings, intense feelings, and bodily experiences interpreted as out of body experience (OBE). Scientists call these experiences hypnagogic hallucinations and immediately point out the similarity of abduction and sleep paralysis reports, such as in Blackmore’s response to Unusual Personal Experiences.
I’m tracking literary history that unfolded during a time I was still afraid of dinosaurs and petrified by fears of space aliens. I’m tracking dream or fantasy reality confusion, which is perhaps what made my fear watching ET when I was four so traumatic that I became obsessed with alien abduction narratives and are compelled to reflect on them so that I can be a more whole parent to my own four year old boy. A four year old boy who will sit straight up in his sleep, wail and gnash his teeth, and say things that demonstrate he is clearly experiencing a powerful dream. I wonder what my boy will write about when he is 40 and reflecting back on the things I taught him about dreaming.
If you have never experienced such a dream or encounter, it may be easy to think that dream-reality confusion is crazy and you might not be able to imagine how someone could become convinced that their nocturnal encounter with space aliens, which resolved into a memoryless slumber and incomplete impressions, may be literally real. It is inexplicable to the unexperienced that some people believe space alien visitation is more plausible than hypnagogic hallucination. But if you have lived through it, you would have experienced something that feels more real than waking, that may have left unexplained marks on your body and surroundings, that clearly overwhelmed your continuity of self, and perhaps happened within hours of trusted people in your life physically seeing unexplained lights that appear to intelligently move. Skeptical scientists say that it is just hypnagogic hallucination and do not speak to the lived experience or the unexplained evidence like the marks or shared witnessing of UAP events.
Credulous researchers, following the example of John E. Mack, suggest that the experiences are real and therefore not dreams. The credulous reduction to reality is equally as damaging to the complex reality of the phenomenon. Fantasy or dream, by way of confusion with reality, can influence the reality of our shared world. Trauma-informed worldviews would have me believe that my confusion of ET the movie with reality fractured my psyche and caused behavior as if my fears were real, which is why I have an irrational fear of my dreams and imagery of aliens. These fears, according to the abduction researchers, are primary symptoms of the UFO Abduction Syndrome.
There is no one true theory, history, or narrative that can express the complexity of life, especially dreams and reality itself. While I felt immense satisfaction tracing the literary causes of my fears about abduction, assumptions about hypnosis, and passion for dreams, they did not explain why I experienced such things over and above other members of my generation. After all my session work, research, and writing, I came to yet another hypothesis about my alien fascination. As a result of my vocational crisis, my finances became limited and stressful, which precipitated a series of migraine headaches.
Like many memories from childhood, I needed a contemporary event to trigger the memory. The migraines began with a migraine aura, which is a sort of visual hallucination that is hard to describe but easy to recognize in literature and graphics. The migraines developed differently than my childhood ones, which were violently painful in my eyes and head. The migraines had feelings that reminded me of hypnagogia and other altered states. I discovered that I could shift the course of the migraines by eating certain foods, which indicated either a psycho-somatic cause or a metabolic cause. As a kid, I was diagnosed with hypoglycemia and trained to eat a granola bar when I felt the symptoms. If the migraine took hold, I would often experience immense pain, sensitivity to light and movement, and vomiting. I would lie in a dark room and try to sleep until the next morning.
If my recent migraines felt like I imagined LSD flashbacks to feel like, with experiences directly comparable to hypnagogia, then perhaps my childhood migraines presented similar experiences. In this view, I can see that my childhood involved the regular trauma of migraine headaches during which I flowed in and out of sleep for up to 18 hours. This hypothesis explains why I might be attracted to the equally nightmarish and transcendent aspects of alien abduction, from its body horror and its paranormality. It seems likely that I had dreams about alien abduction in this state, where I may have skipped across the surface of dreaming stilled by the transcendent pain of the migraine. Some part of me likely will be forever confuses as to whether to pain caused the dream or the dream caused the pain, none of which I clearly remember because of those hours dozing in dimmed rooms.
My migraines were frequent, as well as my consumption of science fiction, particularly Spielberg movies and day time TV about alien mysteries. It is very plausible that I had multiple migraines within a months in which I watched a Spielberg alien movie and saw a day time TV appearance of a Bigelow-backed abduction researcher, like Mack on Oprah in 1994. However, this doesn’t explain why I am fascinated with these encounters, while both brothers had migraines but are not as touched by this subject as me.
At 41, I’m still trying to find an explanation for experiences I had when I was a child. However, I now have to balance my hypothesizing with being a father to my three kids, one of which has whatever genetic thing might be associated with the type of dreaming confused with alien abduction. I must now become clear about dreams and reality because my vocation is to make some of my dreams a reality. If I am to be a whole man, providing for my children, I must follow my spiritual vocation, which involves this inquiry about aliens and dreams.
Let me be clear with you now: there is a common, yet unacknowledged, real phenomenon of entity encounters that occurs in dream-like states that transcend the boundary of sleep and fantasy. These encounters really do seem to involve reports of intelligent light. There are precedents in every culture and every time period. There are good historic reasons why we don’t know about them, which is primarily because of the rise of materialism after the dark ages, compounded with the relative newness of psychology as a science. This is essentially the Earth Lights hypothesis put forward by Devereux, which suggests that alien encounters may consistent in a physically real encounter with something like ball lighting, which in turn produces a trance similar to hypnagogic hallucination. This explains why the encounters seem dreamlike and why there are shared witness accounts of similar lights.
These encounters are not just dreams, hallucinations, or fantasies, but they involve dreams or fantasies caused by a real and anomalous source outside of the dreamer. Abduction researchers often discuss screen memories, which are strange memories of impossible encounters with things like big owls or odd clowns that stand in for aliens either because the true memories are too traumatic or the aliens performed mind control. In my Earth Lights inspired hypothesis, every encounter with a humanoid is a screen memory for the physical encounter with a ball of light. Therefore, we are dealing with a special type of dream that may be a type of real communication with real entities.
However, the difference between the actual reality of this phenomenon and its fantastic representation, in fiction like Spielberg movies or non-fiction in reporting following Bigelow-supported research (all of post-2017 UFOlogy), is significant. It is a similar difference between imagined psi or telepathic phenomena and its statistical proof. There does appear to be evidence for dream telepathy and precognition, but the evidence is complex to interpret and produces non-obvious but statistically significant results. For instance, people may predict the results of a random number generator slightly more effectively than chance but not enough to see the results without a calculator. In this way, I am pointing to a phenomenon that is clearly dreamlike, but also may have some very real effect or cause in this world outside of the dreamer.
The trailer for Spielberg’s upcoming Disclosure Day movie includes fantastic representations of the phenomenon I am discussing. The trailer cycles through themes common in UFOlogy. I’ve explored many of these ideas and sought to find a basis in literature. For example, science fiction and abduction implies that body marks are evidence for encounters. My research is more about who raise those claims about body marks as evidence first, rather than if that evidence is valid or what it implies about our world.
For example, I know that alien abduction research in the US mirrored alien crop circle research in the UK. In the beginning of the Disclosure Day trailer, we see a crop circle lay down around a protagonist during a day time scene. I know that initial claims and cases of abduction and crop circles involved balls of light and were presumed to occur during the night, followed by interference by intelligence community associated sources. In the case of alien abduction, the ball of light UAP was assumed to carry intelligences that interfered with the abductee’s body and mind. In the case of alien crop circles, the ball of light UAP was assumed to create the formations can cause the paranormal effects observed in the circle.
I do not doubt that the ball of light encounters occur in both the abduction and the crop circle experience, but I doubt the common causality. My inquiry suggests that humans create that human agency is directly involved. Some crop-circle makers have come forward with their techniques and experiences, suggesting that most crop circles are human made and that some circle makers and visitors experience paranormal effects in the circles like ball of light UAP visitations. This hypothesis was powerfully expressed in the trailer for the documentary The Circle Makers.
In the same way, we could see that the special dream type of the abductee, which might happen at a prevalence rate similar to recurrent sleep paralysis or spontaneous lucid dreams, as a material cause of the ball of light encounter. Just as the human crop circle, held as a sort of ritual mandala practice of the makers, could have psychically attracted the real ball of light UAPs, which in turn appear to serve as vehicles for the menagerie of spirit beings one might encounter in folklore around the world, so too, the hypnagogic experience of the dreamer maybe also create the psycho-spiritual container for the attraction of such entities.
My hypothesis is not fully baked, I am just exploring it right now. However, I have found a precedent in literature that makes such a hypothesis seem plausible to me. It appears that Neoplatonic Theurgy, which is the erased basis for much of the ritual-magical flavor of Catholic rituals, described interaction with such intelligent light as the process of photogogia. I have discussed this precedent in my writing on body marks as evidence for supernatural encounters. It very well could be the case that the underlying phenomenon behind alien crop circles and alien abductions may be a very human capacity that appears magical, but was understood by esoteric traditions persecuted by empires.
The Disclosure Day trailer shows a shadowy government organization tracking experiencers, perhaps like Bigelow through his mirrored copy of the MUFON database or his NIDS work. It shows examples of glossolalia, or speaking in tongues, which some people call light language. It also shows ET/NHI control of animals, which is called animal embodiment in shamanistic literature and is a common theme in shamanic traditions. The trailer presents a world in which many of the real phenomenon that I have experienced myself, but are dreamlike or spiritually based, as expressions of an alien reality. Speculation about the trailer suggests that it will deal with genetic themes of hybridization.
I am concerned about Disclosure Day and related science fiction, even though I will enjoy watching it and look forward to it as a revelation of new knowledge, a soft disclosure of the truth. However, I am concerned because it may alienate the very aspects of humanity we need now to navigate these challenging times. If the special type of dreams associated with shamanism and alien abduction respond to cultural programming, then stories about aliens and victimization may actually program the experiences. In other words, the experiences may make themselves more non-human because we call them non-human and they may feel anomalous because we call them anomalous.
I don’t think my children will be afraid of alien abduction. There aren’t the same type of encounters as there were in the 1980s and 90s. Either the aliens have changed how they behave or else humanity has changed. While it is impossible to provide quantitative proof that these narratives have truly shifted, since how we report alien encounters have dramatically shifted with the rise of the internet, it is possible gauge the shift by observing how people talk about them. What changed between Close Encounters in the 1981 and Disclosure Day in 2026?
Something truly has changed since the 1990s that is apparent in the legacy of John E. Mack, the most famous abduction researcher, the former Air Force medical officer (that’s important if you know about the Yankee Blue program), and Pulitzer-prize winning Harvard psychiatrist. Mack participated in the production and promotion of Speilberg’s lesser known mini-series Taken, for the Sci-Fi channel in 2002. Interestingly, the Sci Fi channel repeated Bigelow’s Unusual Events Survey for the promotion of Taken, which served the basis for promoting Hopkins, Jacobs, and Mack’s work to the mainstream.
Mack died in 2004 as a victim of a drunk driving event in England. Alien abduction research, as declared by the Skeptical Inquirer, imploded in 2011 because of an expose written by Carol Rainey, a former partner of Budd Hopkins. She documented damning statements by Hopkins and Jacobs that call into question their research integrity. While Mack was not named, his research integrity may also be questioned since he was trained by Hopkins in hypnosis, not as part of his medical training.
In 2017, another former partner of Hopkins, Leslie Kean, along with the biographer of John E. Mack, Ralph Blumenthal, published the famous New York Times article about Robert Bigelow’s UFO study with the government. In 2023, Kean and Blumenthal published article that defined contemporary UAP Disclosure narratives that introduced David Grusch as a respected intelligence official turned UAP whistleblower. In 2026, Spielberg will release Disclosure Day, once again capturing or defining our collective imagination.
I was deathly afraid of alien abduction in the 1990s because of the prevalence of alien abduction narratives in our media and science fiction. It is now clear to me that those narratives were study, crafted, and cultivated by a small group of people involving billionaires like Robert Bigelow, Hans-Adam Liechtenstein, and Laurance Rockefeller. In 2026, we know more about networks of billionaires than we did back in the 1990s and can ask other questions, which is beyond the scope of this reflection.
In 2026, John E. Mack’s legacy is represented collectively through the UAP Disclosure movement defined by Kean and Blumenthal’s reporting and institutionally through the John E. Mack Institute (JEMI). The Institute is a non-profit that Mack founded to manage independent project related to social change like his nuclear age psychology work. It is best known for his work with alien abductees, which he conducted through programs like Program for Extraordinary Experience Research (PEER). Its scope of activities is unclear to me, but its website offers online community groups, articles by the Mack community about experiencer topics, and links to buy his books.
JEMI’s executive director, Karin Austin, has discussed archival projects with Rice University’s Archive of the Impossible. The archive is directed by Jeffery Kripal and includes material from Whitely Strieber and Jaques Vallee, in addition to JEMI’s material. Austin has described work to digitize and analyze Mack’s experiencer research using LLMs, which is still labor intensive because they are taking steps to ensure the privacy of Mack’s patients and subjects.
Karen also discussed, on recent podcasts, her experience as one of Mack’s subjects and as an alien abductee. Her language is quite unlike the language used on the 1990s day time TV shows or night time science fictions that clearly declared the physical and historic reality of abduction. She uses highly abstract language that feels constructed by post-modern philosophers, not mental health works who helped victims of interstellar kidnapping and violation. She speaks in a way that feels constrained by the dogma and legacy of alien abduction research. She speaks in a way not to offend donors who may have been patients of Mack, convinced that their sexual sleep paralysis nightmares were evidence of alien encounters or the dawning of some new transpersonal shamanistic utopia. She speaks of narratives that appeared real and have cultural significance.
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