by Sheryl Gottschall   © 2023

The UFO phenomenon has a long record in human history and there are no signs that it will disappear any time soon. It is enduring, vast and complex, and probably deeply intertwined with human development, yet filled with great mystery that we are yet to understand.

Questions arise around the nature of close encounters as to whether we are making contact with extraterrestrials, inter-dimensional dwellers, visitors from our future, or exotic life forms that can exist in both physical and nonphysical reality. Even though there are many reports of close encounter experiences reported on a daily basis around the world, they leave us with little fact as to their true nature.

However, what we do have from witness testimonies are reports of how the lives of individuals are changed by these experiences. Their testimony describes the physical, emotional, mental and spiritual effects on the lives of those who report them, indicating that something deeply profound has actually occurred. These changes not only serve to support their reports, but also indicate that close encounters with aliens (for want of a better term) have left their legacy on the development of our human civilization.

Physiological Effects
Changes caused by close encounters vary greatly in magnitude, but they can be grouped into physiological, behavioural, spiritual, psychic, and paranormal. Some of the physiological changes that have been reported to me over the years include the onset of chronic migraines; sensitivity to light, loud noise and strong smells; the emergence of allergies; the onset of autoimmune disorders; sensitivity to environmental toxins; inability to eat the same foods as before; the development of sensitivity to pharmaceuticals. This is just a small sample that I’ve recorded in witnesses, but UFO researchers worldwide report other effects as well. Some of these effects can arise immediately following an event while others can emerge over months.

Behavioural Effects
These type of changes are often quite dramatic and in their negative form can present as self-medication or addictions to cigarettes, alcohol or drugs as coping mechanisms. One witness reported that he smoked heavily so he could shroud himself in smoke as his experiences made him “feel ugly”. Other witnesses have reported they drank alcohol because when they did it “stopped the telepathic communications”.

Posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) can also emerge causing disorganisation, agitated behaviour, anger, flashbacks, avoidance, anxiety, sleep disorders, hyper-vigilance with exaggerated startle responses and panic attacks. One young female experienced such strong anxiety that she could hardly walk up the front steps of my home for an interview, and was doubled over by gripping anxiety with panic setting in with every step. During the 1990s in particular, when abduction reports were prolific, many witnesses also reported that they slept with some type of object or weapon nearby such as a gun, axe, knife or baseball bat in order to feel they could relax enough to get some sleep.

Whether because of their sometimes agitated state, or feelings of losing their grip on reality, some close encounter experiencers (CCE-ers) often become socially withdrawn, suffer from feelings of isolation and at the extreme become reclusive. It could be postulated that in cases of abduction experiences this is due to the struggle in coming to terms with their experiences, however it doesn’t explain why it can also occur in witnesses reporting uplifting experiences.

Some CCE-ers are often highly sensitive people or HSPs, a term coined by Dr Elaine Aron (1). They crave peace and quiet and are intolerant of violence in any form. They seem to develop a reverence for all life and this can manifest in becoming vegetarians or vegans. One CCEer working as a freelance journalist had refused to eat animals of any kind from a very young age and had been a vegetarian all her life. Her father had also experienced close encounters from an early age and was a vegetarian too. Furthermore, it has not gone unnoticed that many of the people who attend UFO Research Queensland meetings and who have had close encounters are also vegetarians.

In addition, CCE-ers score high when it comes to developing ecological concerns and the emergence of social activism. The latter point was one of the findings recognized, and in my opinion grossly underappreciated, by the Roper Report published in 1991, wherein the combined data from three national surveys of nearly 6000 adult Americans showed that “people who report close encounters have a higher percentage registering as political/social actives”. Here they are described as the trend setters rather than the trend followers and are elsewhere referred to as the “influentials”. This is a surprising finding as one would expect people who are more passive to be less likely to raise social concerns, but the reverse seems true leaving another question mark for researchers. (2)

Cultural Creatives
In essence, people who report close encounters, whether they report positive or negative experiences, seem to fall under the umbrella of “cultural creatives” in our
society. This is a growing movement of people who care deeply about the ecology and saving the planet, about relationships, peace, social justice, self-actualization,
spirituality and self expression. (3)

Ultimately, having a close encounter steers people on a different path, changing their perspective and giving birth to a new reality which is much bigger, broader and deeper than what they experienced before. One example of this was a male witness working as an environmental consultant and taking samples of the water in a lagoon at a golf course in the evening. He looked up to observe a very large low, black, triangular-shaped object glide silently over him. Following this sighting he began having many paranormal incidents, including an out of body experience where he was flung out of his body from inside his home to outside in his garden, then flung back again, “like he was a rubber band being snapped”.

Soon after he developed an even more intense interest and concern in environmental problems and came to refer to himself as an eco-warrior. It would seem that his experience potentiated something within him in an unexplainable way. Some have claimed that “aliens” intentionally cause these changes in individuals, which I do not adhere to myself as it seems that people who undergo a wide variety of experiences beyond the range of usual human experience, such as walking in a crop circle or having a near death experience, are transformed in similar ways, favourably pointing to the idea that the ability to experience deep transformation is latent in all human beings.

In fact this process was identified by the late Dr Rhea White who had a near-death experience (NDE) as a young woman and wanted to understand what and why she was experiencing certain after-effects from her experience. She collected many types of experiences, some otherworldly, others more mundane, and found that the after-effects of close encounters, near-death experiences, loss of a loved one, divorce, bankruptcy etc, were very similar when the experience caused a deep transformation that was lasting and permanent. When this took place she referred to these experiences as Exceptional Human Experiences or EHEs. (4)

While profound, this is nothing new. Human beings have been having remarkable experiences since the beginning of time that have caused deep transformations within, changing their life direction and perspective which we recognise in the ecstatic experiences of St Joan of Arc, Moses, Mother Theresa and the children of Fatima to name a few.

Spiritual and Emotional Effects
Many CCE-ers undergo grief in its various stages over the loss of their personal identity following their close encounters. They are no longer who they were prior to their experiences and have to come to terms with this loss. Grief is a universal experience with five stages that were first proposed by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross in 1969. These stages do not necessarily occur in any specific order or in equal intensity and we can move between stages before achieving a sense of peace. When it comes to CCE-ers I’ve mostly observed anger, depression and acceptance, with the addition of isolation and transformation. (5)

It’s during this time of transformation that we can see some witnesses undergo what is referred to as a “dark night of the soul experience”. This is where witnesses, who are either traumatised by their experiences or the ensuing effects of ostracism by family, friends or society in general, can find themselves isolated and bereft. In her book ‘The Dark Face of Heaven’, Dr Janet Colli describes this as a “symbolic death and rebirth process, mobilising the transpersonal, resulting in spiritual awakenings and psychic openings. This deep transformation seems to give space within the psyche to rebuild themselves anew” (6).

It has also been my observation that almost all CCE-ers become spiritually engaged following their experiences, or if already inclined, this intensifies dramatically. Many witnesses begin meditating, practice hands-on-healing, attend spiritual development circles, or develop an interest in indigenous practices. In effect, they go on a spiritual quest to understand themselves more deeply.

Psychic and Paranormal Phenomena
The lives of CCE-ers are often intertwined with spontaneous or heightened psychic experiences and paranormal phenomena. Many report psychic abilities such as precognition, telepathy, remote viewing, glossolalia (sometimes called Star Language), seeing auras, clairvoyance, clairsentience, spontaneous mediumship and automatic writing of glyph-like scripts. They also report out-of-body, near-death and bilocation experiences as well as street light interference (SLI).

Electrical sensitivity can be an issue too and in some cases witnesses have reported that close proximity to computers, televisions, and many white goods such as refrigerators, washing machines and freezers, can cause them to fail or even blow up!

In one interesting case I investigated, a young male witness was having coffee with his friends when the tines of his cake fork curled while he was holding it in his hand. He also showed me his twisted apartment key that “became like butter” in his hand one evening when he tried to insert the key into his front door. Another very common report is of CCE-ers becoming precognitive. Many individuals report knowing they are going to have a vehicular accident in time so they can avoid it.

More often than not CCE-ers report seeing the deceased, in particular their deceased relatives. One report in 2016 involved a young woman who, while accompanied in her car by a friend and young daughter, reported being followed by a light in the sky. It did so for fifteen minutes before slowly descending and eventually coming to ground in bushland on an undeveloped suburban block. While my investigative colleague was scouring the bushland looking for evidence of a Chinese lantern or possible hoax device gone to ground, she told me the story of when she was a young girl and awoke one night to see a pair of large yellow eyes at the end of her bed staring at her through the dark. She ran screaming to her father’s bedroom where he quietly calmed her, but in later years when she reached adulthood, he told her that he had also experienced close encounters through his life.

Then after her father passed away, one day she walked into the living room of her house and was met by the ghost of her deceased father sitting on a chair. She reported that he looked solid, “like flesh and blood, just like us”. Naturally she screamed at the sight, but after she settled herself she told her deceased father not to appear to her again in ordinary reality as she found the experience deeply disturbing even though he was her father. He took her advice and she now reports that he only appears to her in her dreams, but quite regularly.

Ultimately, close encounter experiences put people on a different path which changes their perspective, giving birth to a new world view which is much bigger, broader, deeper and richer than what they held before. While some believe that these other-worldly beings actually cause this to occur intentionally to prod our human development, I believe this to be human projection, and the ability to change and transform from these experiences is latent in all human beings. While there has been a tendency to give credence to this process to exotic others, it seems we are in fact hard-wired to catalyse these changes within ourselves for our very survival. Human beings are always affected in some way by any new experience, and the more removed our experiences are from ordinary reality, the more potential there is for profound changes to be catalysed within us. Which brings me to my closing thoughts.

An Extraterrestrial Legacy
The new field of epigenetics studies the heritable changes in our gene expression, and knowing that close encounter experiences are reported in family lines, I have often wondered how they may have changed each generation in turn. It’s of great interest to note today that reports of alien abductions have decreased dramatically and been replaced by more positive perceptions of close encounters that include the notion that contact experiences are performed by members of the benevolent “star families” of witnesses. There is now a tendency to perceive these experiences as positive, uplifting and beneficial to humankind. Could it be this change in perception is exactly as it appears to be and the phenomenon has evolved yet again? Or is it the opposite swing of the alien abduction pendulum that we’re now seeing, just as we have seen in history when alien abduction reports first made their entry into the UFO arena to intrude upon the benevolent spacebrother notions?

Is it possible that “UFO therapists” have performed their roles so successfully that they have helped witnesses reinterpret their close encounters in a positive light to enable them to integrate their experiences and get on with their life? After all isn’t that what therapy is all about? Or could it be that the prolific “alien abduction” experiences of the 1990s, while including biological sampling of human beings, also included genetic manipulation to make future generations of abductees are more compliant and perceive their experiences more positively? I truly can’t answer these questions and it’s difficult to extrapolate what a race of advanced beings can actually do to us.

It behooves us to remember that scientists are still in the early stages of understanding human DNA, and are yet to unravel how far reaching manipulation of human DNA penetrates beyond our biology. Perhaps we should be thinking more deeply about the lasting imprint of extraterrestrial contact which may be flooding through the human quantum field, changing our mental and emotional behaviour to prepare us for more cosmic contact, galactic citizenship, or something more sinister in a way we are yet to understand! The legacy of extraterrestrial contact will probably be something that requires decades to pass before we fully understand its impact.

References:

1. The Dark Face Of Heaven, Janet Elizabeth Colli PhD, CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2014.

2. The Highly Sensitive Person, Elaine Aron PhD., Broadway Books NY. 1996

3. Unusual Personal Experiences, conducted by the Roper Organisation. Bigelow Holding Corporation 1992.

4. The Cultural Creatives : How 50 Million People Are Changing The World. Paul H. Ray PhD. Harmony Books NY. and Sherry Ruth Anderson PhD. 2000

5. Rhea A. White PhD (hon). https://ehe.org/display/splash.html

6. On Death And Dying, Elizabeth Kubler Ross PhD. Scribner Books, NY. 1969.