Contactee

Contactees are persons who claim to have experienced contact with extraterrestrials. Contactees have typically reported that they were given messages or profound wisdom by extraterrestrial beings. These claimed encounters are often described as ongoing, but some contactees claim to have had as few as a single encounter.

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 have issued newsletters or spoken at UFO conventions.

The contactee movement has seen serious attention from academics and mainstream scholars. Among the earliest was the classic 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 (see sources below). "The contactee movement is a rich treat for anthropologists, sticky with sincere and sincerely deluded individuals. Were the contactees in touch with anything other than their own internal fantasies?"^[1]

Contactee accounts are generally different from those who allege alien abduction, in that while contactees usually describe beneficial experiences involving human-like aliens, abductees rarely describe their experiences positively.

Overview

Astronomer J. Allen Hynek described Contactees as asserting "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.."^[2]

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 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.”^[3]

Contactees usually portrayed "Space Brothers" as more or less identical in appearance and mannerisms to humans. The Brothers 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:^[4]

• Certain humans have had personal and/or mental contact with friendly, completely human-appearing space aliens.
• The contactees have also flown aboard flying saucers, and traveled into space and to other planets.
• The Space Brothers want to help mankind solve its problems, to stop nuclear testing and prevent the otherwise inevitable destruction of the human race.
• This will be accomplished very simply by the brotherhood spreading a message of love and brotherhood across the world.
• Other sinister beings, the Men in Black, use threats and force to continue the cover-up of UFOs and suppress the message of hope.

History of contactees

Early contactees

Though the word contactee was not in common use until the 1950s, the authors of the anthologies noted in "sources" below use the term to describe persons whose claims occurred centuries before the UFO era, attempting to depict them as a part of the same tradition.

Though not linked to flying saucers or odd aerial lights, it is perhaps worth noting that there is a long history of claims of contact with non-earthly intelligences. The founding revelations of many of the world's religions involve contact between the founder and a supernatural source of wisdom, such as a god in human form or an angel. In this context, it might be expected that most of the 1950s contactees would form their own religions, with the contactee as sole spiritual leader, and that is just what happened, almost invariably.

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 known during Swedenborg's era — he did not visit Uranus, Neptune or Pluto.^[5]

Later, Helena Blavatsky would make claims similar to Swedenborg's.

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.^[6]

Another early contactee book, of sorts, was From India To The Planet Mars (1900) by Theodore Flournoy. Flournoy detailed the claims of Helene Smith, who, whilst in a trance, dictated information gleaned from her psychic visits to the planet Mars — including a Martian alphabet and language she could write and speak. Flournoy determined that Smith's claims were spurious, based on fantasy and imagination. Her "Martian" language was simply a garbled version of French.

1900s

Two of the earliest contactees in the modern sense were William Magoon and Guy Ballard (the latter a follower of Madame Blavatsky).

Magoon's book William Magoon: Psychic and Healer was published in 1930. He claimed that, in the early 20th century, he had been unexpectedly and instantaneously transported to Mars. The planet was essentially earth-like, with cities and wilderness. The inhabitants had radio and automobiles. Though they were invisible, Magoon sensed their presences.

Though Magoon was obscure, Ballard would have more impact via the I Am movement he established. In 1935, Ballard claimed that, several years earlier, he and over 100 others witnessed the appearance of 12 Venusians in a cavern beneath Mount Shasta. The Venusians played music for the audience, said Ballard, then showed the crowd a large mirror-like device that displayed images of life on Venus. The Venusians then allegedly reported that the earth would suffer through an era of tension and warfare, followed by worldwide peace and goodwill.

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."^[7]

Christopher Partridge notes, importantly, that the pre-1947 contactees "do not involve UFOs."^[8] Rather, he suggests that an existing tradition of extraterrestrial contact via seances and psychic means promptly incorporated the flying-saucer mythos when it arrived.

Contactees in the UFO era

The 1947 report of Kenneth Arnold sparked widespread interest in flying saucers, and before long, people were claiming to have been in contact with flying saucer inhabitants.

There was a nearly-continuous series of contactees, beginning with George Adamski in 1952. Radio host John Nebel interviewed many contactees on his program during this era. The stereotypical contactee account in these days involved not just conversations with friendly, human-appearing spacemen but visits inside their flying saucers, and rides to large "Mother Ships" in Earth orbit, and even jaunts to the moon, Mars, Venus, Jupiter and Saturn.

By the late 1950s, many contactees were no longer claiming to have been physically visited by aliens; rather, they were more often in psychic contact with the spacemen, who passed their messages on to people in trances. However, alien contact via Ouija board, spirit mediums and channelling was fairly common even in the early 1950s. Eventually, there was a complicated crossover with the later "psychic channeling" movement, which found a degree of renewed popularity beginning in the late 1960s.

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 bear a suspicious resemblance to a type of once commonly available chicken egg incubator, complete with three light bulbs which Adamski said were "landing gear."^[9]

For over two decades, contactee George Van Tassel hosted the annual "Giant Rock Interplanetary Spacecraft Convention" in the Mojave Desert.^[10] Another 1950s contactee, Buck Nelson, held a similar convention in the Ozarks of Missouri up until 1965.

Response to contactee claims

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.^[11][12] Jacques Vallée notes that "No serious investigator has ever been very worried by the claims of the 'contactees.'"^[13]

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.^[14]

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.^[15]

List of contactees

Those who claim to be contactees include:

External links

• Another overview of 1950s contactees
• Another survey of 1950s contactees and their associated religious cults