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Origins Of The Starchild Phenomenon

by Sheryl Gottschall ©2018 Revised 2025

The terms Star People, Star Children, Starkids and Starseeds are not new. In fact they have an established history in the UFO field, albeit chequered, dating back to at least the 1970s. Over time the various terms have evolved with each author giving their personal spin on them, culminating today in the mishmash of New Age beliefs, indigenous mythology and western spirituality, creatively entwined into the UFO phenomenon ending in what we have now come to know as the Starchild phenomenon. But where did it all begin?  

Did it begin with Brad Steiger?

After spending many hours combing the extensive library of UFO Research Queensland, the earliest mention I could find of Starpeople was from Brad Steiger in his book ‘Gods of Aquarius’ (1976). Born Eugene E. Olson in 1936, the late Brad Steiger passed away in May of 2018, leaving behind him a treasure trove of over 170 books on extraterrestrials and all things paranormal. At age 11 Brad had a near death experience that changed his Lutheran beliefs, and by 1967 he became a full time writer of the paranormal. (1)

Well known to the UFO community, Brad Steiger introduced the concept of Star People and proposed that humans originated as extraterrestrials, arriving on Earth either through birth, or as a ‘walk-in’ to an existing human body.  As he travelled the country gathering research data and giving lectures about his work, he became aware of a unique community of people who , “claim to have memories of having come to this planet from ‘somewhere else’, or to have experienced interaction with paranormal entities and UFO intelligences since their childhood.” (2)

In the chapter titled, “The Star Maidens and The Worldwide Production of Little Uri Gellers”, Steiger relates that people who resonate to having close encounters or feeling extraterrestrial themselves, argue that, “to have knowledge of the fact that one is essentially ‘star seed’ and a ‘stranger in a strange land’, does not necessitate one’s withdrawing from the culture.  In fact, each of these Star Maidens [as Steiger calls them because they are predominantly female], appear surprisingly normal and are successfully integrated in contemporary society”. (3)

Steiger goes on to give detailed descriptions of this group of humans reporting close encounters  including their physical appearance, their ability to communicate telepathically, looking attractive, being cautious with their diet, functioning  on little sleep, having a sensitivity to electricity, having sharp hearing but with loud noises bothering them, and since earliest childhood report having continuing series of episodes with angels, elves, fairies, masters, teachers, and openly declared UFO intelligences.     

He further writes, “all of them share a feeling, a knowing, an awareness that their ancestors came from another world, another dimension, another level of existence…..some speak of a star ship that came to this planet 20,000 years ago. The vehicle came to Earth to observe, to study, to blend with the evolving Homo sapiens. Their own seed would enrich the developing species and accelerate the time when their Earth cousins would begin to reach for the stars – and their cosmic home.”  (4)

Nancy Tappe

While the UFO community is familiar with the term Starchild and Starseeds, our American counterparts have often exchanged the word for Indigo children, but initially the term wasn’t used to describe comingled ET and human individuals.  The Indigo term arose from sometime in the 1970s and was coined by a woman named Nancy Tappe.  (5) Nancy was a parapsychologist, psychic and self-described synesthete, who spent her youth in Scottish mysticism. She had a condition which would later be identified as synesthesia, a condition of the brain where a sense such as seeing is simultaneously perceived by another sense creating a joined perception.  For example, a synesthete may experience the wind as blue, or experience the heat as salty. According to a study conducted by the University of Granada, scientists now believe synesthesia to be the reason why some people can see auras. (6)

Around 1970, Nancy began ‘seeing’ the colour Indigo around the children being born at that time. She observed that these children had certain personality traits which she later categorised into four groups: humanists, artists, conceptualists and catalysts.  Continuing to look for understanding about what it meant to have synesthesia, Nancy established Colourology, which was the development of her own synesthetic perceptions into a formalised, structured system of information. (7)

From here the Indigo Children phenomenon slowly began to send out tentacles, entwining itself with the UFO phenomenon and Brad Steigers Star people, sharing many of the same traits as Steiger previously described.

Lee Carroll & Jan Tober

The term, Indigo Children, quickly spread around the world with many attempts to reinterpret Nancy’s work which led to its distortion over time. Two of these proponents included Jan Tober and partner Lee Carroll, both who travelled the world espousing the channelled messages of Kryon, an angelic entity, which began in 1989.

Tober and Carroll proposed “an opening in an energy portal”, as told to them through channelling sessions with Kryon, through which these new Indigo children would be born. This is where the idea of the Indigo Children concept begins to move away from its origins born from a physical disorder and establishes itself to be a part of future New Age philosophies. (8)

Dr Richard Boylan

At the same time the term was picked up by psychologist Dr Richard Boylan, while working with people who reported close encounters with extraterrestrials as part of his clinical practice.  He also identified Indigo children but focused on the term Star Kids. He believed these children and young adults were born of both human and Star Visitor origins, meaning that they had some of their ancestry somewhere in our cosmos.  He states on his website that , “The Star Visitor contribution to the child’s makeup may come from:

1) Star Visitor genes spliced into the human parent’s reproductive material (genetic engineering), or

2) From a deliberately chosen ‘missionary’ incarnation of a Star Visitor into a human body to accomplish important work here, bringing useful awareness and competencies, or

3) From a Walk-In situation in which a human somewhere during childhood, or later, begins to die from an accident or serious illness, but the departing human spirit/soul/personality is simultaneously replaced by a Star Visitor spirit/soul/personality which carries on providing the life-force and completes the lifetime, imbueing that human with advanced abilities. These descriptions also apply to those who are Star Seed adults.” (9)

While talk of ‘walk-ins’ seems to be less discussed now than in years past, for a while it was a hot topic, and Australia has its own story of just such a case in The Book of Yul: The Secret Life of A Space Incarnate. In his book Yul claims to be an extraterrestrial who took over the body of a young Australian boy at the boy’s death, so Yul could complete his mission in human form on Earth. Yul lived in Sydney for many years and on a trip to Sydney in 2014 to take part in a UFO investigator training course, I had hoped to visit him personally, but discovered he had died only a couple of years prior. (10)

However, with the help of Dr Richard Boylan, the UFO community were privy to watch walk-ins soon transform into indigo Children and Star Kids, claiming that over time “the biological engineering conducted by extraterrestrials is an effort to upgrade the Human race.”  He also alleged this ‘upgrading’ resulted in enhanced psychic abilities, the ability to harness energy for healing, and the development of telepathic abilities in these individuals.  Then in 2003 he published an online Star Kid/Star Seed Identification article which coincidentally points to the very same qualities of indigo Children, previously identified by synesthete Nancy Tappe.  (11)

Doreen Virtue

Doreen Virtue began her career as an editor of a local newspaper before taking up therapy. She obtained various degrees in Liberal Arts, Psychology and Counselling then began publishing books on psychology and self-help books on topics such as child custody and eating disorders. In 1995 Doreen had an experience where she heard an ‘angels loud, booming voice’ which helped her escape unscathed from an attempted armed carjacking. (12)

Until recently, she dedicated her life to teaching spirituality and writing on spiritually-oriented topics with the majority of her focus on Angels.  Virtue began writing about Star Children in her psychic work and reported that she had seen those who are reincarnated ETs, walk-ins and angels in her psychic practice.

In her book The Crystal Children, Virtue says, “Indigos are often mislabelled with the psychiatric diagnoses of Attention Deficit with Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) or Attention Defecit Disorder (ADD).”  (13) Here Virtue forges the connection between Starchildren and children with ADD and ADHD. In recent years, this concept has become more deeply entrenched in the UFO community by various researchers, but particularly by Australian researcher, Mary Rodwell. Somewhere between her first book, Awakening, and her second book, The New Human, Mary has worked to firmly establish this connection through the use of the terms, ‘Letter People’ and ‘New Human’, linking individuals diagnosed with these disorders to close encounters with extraterrestrials.

Enter Drunvalo Melchizedek

In the early 1990s, others jumped on the same bandwagon including, Drunvalo Melchidezek, who began to talk about children with extraordinary abilities. Some of these cases were published in a book entitled, China’s Super Psychics. (14)

In a much later interview in 2015, Drunvalo discusses what he calls, Children of the New Dream. Here he states, “…. there are 3 different kinds of children emerging in the world today that I have been able to identify:

  • The first are called the Super Psychic Children of China
  • The second are called the Indigo Children
  • The third are called the Children of AIDS

Drunvalo states in the interview, “The first one, the Super Psychics of China, was first discovered in 1984 when a child was found who was psychic beyond belief. Researchers conducted every psychic test you could imagine and he was 100% correct every time. You could turn cards over in another room and that didn’t matter. He could perfectly know what was on the card. So Omni magazine went to China and wrote an article on this discovery. They found one child and then another. When they went in 1984 they assumed it was a hoax so they did experiments like putting 100 kids in a room and taking a book and randomly pulling out a page. They would crumple it up and stick it under their arm. These kids could read every word on the page. They did test after test, and the response was flawless. The phenomena didn’t stop there. These kids are not just in China. They have spread all over the world. I personally have been talking to parents who ask me, “…what do we do… I have a kid who knows everything?” (15)

He goes on to state that Lee Carroll in the US had begun calling these super psychic children the Indigo Children, but Drunvalo thought the two groups were coming from the same source.

Further into the interview he states,” It is the third group that I am most interested in – the Children of AIDS. About 10 or 11 years ago in the US, there was a baby born with AIDS. They tested him at birth and at 6 months, and he tested positive for AIDS. They tested him a year later and he still tested positive. Then they didn’t test him again until he was 6, and what was amazing is that this test showed that he was completely AIDS free! In fact, there was no trace that he ever had AIDS or HIV whatsoever!

The boy was taken to UCLA to see what was going on and those tests showed that he didn’t have normal human DNA..….this boy had 24 codons turned on – 4 more than any other human being. Then they tested this kid to see how strong his immune system was. They took a very lethal dose of AIDS in a petri dish and mixed it with some of his cells and his cells remained completely unaffected. They kept raising the lethalness of the composition and finally went up to 3,000 times more than what was necessary to infect a human being and his cells stayed completely disease free. Then they started testing his blood with other things like cancer and discovered that this kid was immune to everything! Then they found another kid with these codons turned on – then another one then another one – then 10,000, then 100,000, then a million of them and at this point, UCLA, by watching world-wide DNA testing, estimates that 1% of the world has this new DNA. That breaks down to approximately 60 million people who are not human by the old criteria.”

It does seem there may be some degree of accuracy in Drunvalo’s statement, confirmed in part by a BBC News article entitled,  One in 10 children has ‘Aids defence’. (16) In this article health and science writer Jim Gallagher states , “researchers analysed the blood of 170 children from South Africa who had HIV, had never had antiretroviral therapy and yet had not developed Aids.”

Epigenetics – Unlocking The Human Genome

By now you might be wondering what has HIV got to do with extraterrestrials and Starchildren and I don’t blame you, but there is a method to my madness!  For years many esoteric teachers have been predicting the birth of a planetary new root race that will represent a quantum leap in human advancement and thereby quicken our evolution. However thanks to the genomic revolution, researchers now understand that evolution does not require thousands or millions of years to take place, but occurs much faster. Biologists can now actually track the population-level genetic shifts that mark evolution in action. They have come to understand that evolution can happen in one generation and a significant example is how just in the last generation, the effect of a gene that favours cigarette smoking has dwindled in some groups.

Two studies presented at the Biology of Genomes in 2016 have shown that biologists can now view selection in action and how the human genome quickly responds to new conditions in subtle but meaningful ways.  Molly Przeworski, an evolutionary biologist at Columbia University, predicts that we are now in the early days of discovering these gene-by-environment effects. (17)

This draws one to ask if we have to turn to extraterrestrial intervention with the comingling of ET and human DNA to explain changes in human abilities, in particular in those who report close encounters.  I consider the answer to be no. At this early stage of the new science of epigenetics, we are only glimpsing the far horizon of a new understanding about our personal genetic expression and how we can change it. No longer do we have to wait for a lengthy Darwinian evolutionary cycle to kick in to bring about change in the human species, but do so by simply changing our lifestyle to turn off unwanted genetic expressions. We are now realising the effects of environmental impacts on our emotional health, and life experience in the expression of our genetic disposition. One example is that we now know that the children and grandchildren of returned soldiers can develop symptoms of illness directly related to their ancestor’s previous stress.  

Another example is by Dr John Launer who states in a 2016 article, “you may be born with a capacity to be tall and confident, but if you are undernourished and abused as a child, you are likely to turn into a stunted and fearful adult instead”. (18 )

Given the intense environmental changes currently taking place on Earth it’s easy to predict that these will change the human species now and in future generations, even if we don’t know how that presents at this stage. The unknown effects of global pandemics like Ebola/H1N1/HIV/AIDS/Covid 19; the increase in volcanic activity and solar cycles; the decrease of our ancient natural forests; the effects of environmental disasters like the Fukushima Daiichi and Chernobyl nuclear disasters; the radiation effects from mobile phones and similar technologies; the radical effects from immunisations; the entry into our daily lives of far more information than our ancestors could have ever imagined; plus many more factors, will certainly be accumulating into a biological imperative to evolve at a faster rate so the human species will survive. Is it any wonder that we are seeing our youth as very different now from those in generations past?

The evolutionary effect of all these influences combined could be the intensifying of the speed at which we evolve, expressing itself in an unknown percentage of the human race and with the possibility of ‘higher’ faculties and non-physical abilities emerging evermore in each new generation.

In her book the Highly Sensitive Person, Dr Elaine N. Aron states that, “20% of the human species are highly sensitive with the ability to process everything around them much more. When this processing is not fully conscious, it surfaces as intuition. This represents a survival strategy found in a many species, always in a minority of its members”. (19)

There is no doubt that some individuals of the human race are responding to our ever changing environment – physically, emotionally, socially and psychically, at an unprecedented rate, and this could indeed be due to the need for the species to survive . Intertwined with this, some individuals report experiencing strange memories that remind them of their ancestral cosmic origins, stirring within them an unknown yearning to return to their cosmic “home” wherever that might be. There seems to be so many triggers for these responses that it’s hard to clearly and comprehensively understand what exactly is taking place right under our nose.  

Un-conclusion

It now seems that what we are left with are more questions than answers. Could it be that the Starchild phenomenon is exactly what it portrays itself to be, a community of unusual people with stories of ET contact and psychic abilities? Could there be a co-mingled species living among humanity and contributing to our advancement? Are the changes we see in ‘star people’ an effect of our environment under stress, a result of virus effects on the human body and psyche, or genuine ET contact?  What if the phenomenon is even stranger than we think with these cases being suggestive of actual ET walk-ins? After 30 years of personal research I have no doubt that planet Earth is being visited by extraterrestrials and has been throughout Earth’s history.  Nor do I doubt that some of those extraterrestrial life forms are interacting with humanity and probably many other life forms on Earth, but what are we to make of their varied agendas and are they studying life forms for their own interests, and if so what are their specific interests?

Maybe ETs are interested in the current ‘awareness’ explosion taking place in human consciousness and possibly through similar historical times like the Renaissance, studying the evolutionary processes, not just in humans, but in many species living in the petri dish of planet Earth. Perhaps they actually created these changes, as the Starchild proponents suggest, making their presence known to us while comingling their DNA with ours. Or are they merely curious to observe the increase in the evolutionary cycle of the human species that has possibly occurred in many other pre space-travel civilizations, while wondering if we will evolve fast enough to save ourselves from our own mismanagement? Maybe it’s all a precursor, an initiation of sorts as we evolve to become space farers, finally becoming cosmic citizens ourselves.

What we do know is that at this point in our history there are many people undergoing a social, ecological and spiritual awakening. Call them Indigos, Starchildren, Crystal or Rainbow Children, they have certainly been identified by many, some of who have pinned their hopes on them to bring some sanity to what is taking place in the world today. Like it or not, members of the New Age movement have bestowed upon these individuals,  the responsibility to heal our current environmental insanity and the warring, money-making attitude that seems hell bent on sacrificing the welfare of Mother Nature without any forethought to the future. All I can say to that is – good luck!

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Quote of the day

“The scientific world at large is in for a shock when it becomes aware of the astonishing nature of the UFO phenomenon and its bewildering complexity. I make that terse comment well aware that it invites easy ridicule; but intellectual honesty demands that I make clear that my two years’ study convinces me that in the UFO problem lie scientific and technological questions that will challenge the ability of the world’s outstanding scientists to explain – as soon as they start examining the facts. The scientific community has been casually ignoring as nonsense a matter of extraordinary scientific importance.”

Dr James E McDonald statement on UFOs submitted to the House Committee on Science and Astronautics 29 July, 1968.