Contactee
From the UAP Encyclopedia, the open encyclopedia of UFO and UAP history · 📖 Term
Contents 5
| Type | Term |
|---|---|
| Also known as | contactees |
| On the Timeline | 1 event, 1978 |
A contactee is a person who claims to have had contact with extraterrestrials, usually friendly, human-looking beings who pass on messages for humanity. Contactees became a cultural phenomenon in the 1950s, when several of them wrote books, gave lectures and held conventions. Similar claims have continued since. The evidence offered has always been anecdotal.[1]
Characteristics
Astronomer J. Allen Hynek described contact claims as visits by kindly beings who deliver messages of cosmic importance to a few chosen people, often repeatedly.[1] Contactees usually described the aliens as looking and behaving almost exactly like humans. The aliens were said to be troubled by war, crime and nuclear weapons on Earth.[1] Historian Curtis Peebles summarised the usual pattern: - peaceful humanoid aliens contact chosen people, physically or mentally - the contactees ride in spacecraft and visit other planets - the aliens want to help humanity stop nuclear testing and avoid self-destruction, through a message of love and brotherhood - sinister figures such as the Men in Black try to suppress this message[1]
Contactee accounts differ from later alien abduction reports. Contactees generally described their experiences as positive, while abductees usually describe frightening ones.[1]
History
Claims of contact with beings from other planets predate the UFO era. In 1758 the Swedish mystic Emanuel Swedenborg described spirit journeys to inhabited planets, stopping at Saturn, the most distant planet then known. In 1891 Thomas Blott's book The Man From Mars claimed a meeting with a Martian in Kentucky who spoke English.[1] Religious-studies scholar Christopher Partridge noted that these early contact claims did not involve UFOs.[1]
The best-known 1950s contactee was George Adamski, who had earlier founded an occult group called the Royal Order of Tibet. Political scientist Michael Barkun observed that his Venusians' messages sounded much like his own earlier teachings.[1] Some contactees produced photographs to support their claims. Adamski's pictures of a "Venusian scout ship" were noted to resemble a common chicken-egg incubator.[1] George Van Tassel hosted the annual Giant Rock Spacecraft Convention in the Mojave Desert for more than two decades.[1]
Reception
Most UFO researchers dismissed contactees as charlatans or the lunatic fringe, and some avoided the subject for fear of damaging serious study. Jacques Vallée wrote that no serious investigator had been much worried by their claims.[1] Psychologist Susan Clancy attributed such claims to false memories shaped by fantasy-proneness, sleep hallucinations and cultural scripts.[1] Carl Sagan noted that the aliens readily answered vague moral questions but never answered precise mathematical ones.[1] Historian David M. Jacobs observed that contactees' stories grew more elaborate over time, and that older contactees often moved the dates of their first encounters earlier as new claimants appeared.[1]
On the UAP Timeline
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- Project Windfall claim (1978) — John Keel says the CIA ran Project Windfall, an investigation of UAP contactees.
References
- Contactee — Wikipedia · en.wikipedia.org · archived copy
This page was last edited on 31 October 2026. Articles are written in our own words from the sources listed under References; disputed claims are attributed to the people who made them.
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