The Transformative Potential of Contact Experiences: A Phenomenological Study

The Study: Overview and Methods

The study involved 15 participants who were interviewed over the course of 2 to 4 hr. All names have been changed to protect the identities of the participants. The gender makeup was eight male, six female, and one who described themselves as gender non-conforming. Participants were recruited with the help of the John Mack Institute, who advertised the study on their mailing list, website and social media. The research was overseen by Molloy University’s IRB and all participants signed written consent forms guaranteeing their confidentiality.

The situatedness within a lifeworld shaped participants’ horizons of meaning-making and interpretation. The majority of the participants were from the United States and discussed their experiences within the context of U.S. cultural narratives surrounding unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP), or UFOs. The two exceptions were Yosef, who lives in the Middle East, and Eric, who lives in Scotland. Jeanette is Native American, specifically with Choctaw heritage. Jeanette’s cultural framework is anchored in an ontology that accepts the existence of advanced NHIs, leading to less ontological shock and more acceptance of what was occurring. Marin, who identified as gender non-conforming, stated that their experience of being told that their gender expression was “impossible” had produced an epistemic and ontological flexibility that made them more open to other anomalous or “impossible” experiences.

There was a wide range in time periods in terms of when participants reported their encounters, with some experiences beginning when they were children all the way back in the 1960s, with the bulk of their abduction-like encounters happening in the 1980s and 1990s. Two experiencers, Linda and James, reported much more recent initial encounters within the past 2 years. Participants were not asked directly about their employment, but many offered it voluntarily throughout the interviews. Rachel and Deidre have built careers as reiki healers, Marin currently works as a librarian, Justin as a musician, Thomas works as a therapist, Parker works as an acupuncturist and energy healer, Jeanette is retired but had a long career working in political campaigns and offices, Derrick hosts his own podcast, Linda works in human resources, Catherine is a director of a non-profit organization, and Andrew works in direct support in human services. Importantly, almost all of the above-mentioned participants said that their contact experiences had affected their current career trajectory, moving toward service or healing professions as part of a transformation in their values and overall sense of self.

While “alien abduction” is one of the types of common anomalous psychedelic experiences identified by Luke (2022), none of the contact experiencers I interviewed were under the influence of psychedelics at the time of their encounters. This suggests that contact experiences persistently span conscious modalities, including psychedelic states, meditative states, dream states, and waking consciousness. It is worth noting that Catherine, Parker, and Jeannette had previously undergone hypnotic regressions to try to better understand their experiences. The other 12 experiencers interviewed had not undergone hypnotic regression in order to remember their experiences. Catherine, Parker, and Jeanette also had contact experiences they were able to recall without the use of hypnosis. Parker and Jeanette reported a mix of waking-stage and regressed recall: Jeannette, for example, recalled experiences from childhood of being on a craft and being encouraged to play with the ostensible hybrid children that she remembered without hypnosis. However, she had a gap of missing time as an adult, which she only recalled as a full abduction experience under a hypnotic regression with Mack. Parker had waking state recall of lights coming in his window and room, and of a sighting of a being in his room, but only recovered memories of being taken on a craft under regression with Mack. While the narratives recovered under hypnosis only constituted a small portion of the overall testimony, it was evident that for Parker and Jeanette in particular, the material recovered under hypnotic regression played a significant role in how they interpreted and made meaning of the contact events. Thus, I approached such testimony from a standpoint of the phenomenological reduction: rather than making a judgment about whether what was retrieved under hypnotic recall was credible or “real,” I acknowledged that for two experiencers in particular, the lived experience of hypnotic regression was integral to their overall experience and interpretation of the contact event and their integration process in the aftermath.

I employed a combination of descriptive, generative, and interpretative phenomenological analysis. Descriptive phenomenology is rooted in the work of Edmund Husserl and developed for psychology by Giorgi (1997), who describes phenomenological reduction as requiring one “(a) bracket past knowledge about a phenomenon, in order to encounter it freshly and describe it precisely as it is intuited (or experienced), and (b) to withhold the existential index, which means to consider what is given precisely as it is given, as presence, or phenomenon” (1997, para 13). Drawing on Husserl’s (1900–1901/2001) injunction to “return to the things themselves,” descriptive phenomenology brackets all prior assumptions and interpretations; the role of the researcher is only to describe what is present in lived experience (p. 168). Focus is shifted away from what something is to how it appears or gives itself. As Giorgi (1997) says, “one refrains from saying that the object is as it presents itself” (para 11). Applied to this study, an example of a phenomenological statement is “the entity presented itself as a physically embodied advanced non-human intelligence” which does not entail making the definitive statement “an embodied advanced non-human intelligence was actually physically there”—although importantly, such a possibility is not by default ruled out or excluded.

I also employed a layer of generative analysis. Generative phenomenology emerged from the criticism from later phenomenologists (and even recognition from Husserl himself in later work) that there could never be an interpretation-free appearance. In generative phenomenology, the goal is not to uncover the world “as it is” absent any interpretation, but to recognize that realities are essentially generated, not discovered. The subject is essentially a co-creator who brings their lens of interpretation to any appearance. The goal becomes to uncover the ongoing structures and meaning of experience; how the subject is situated within a lifeworld, recognizing that all processes of “bracketing” still reflect their embodiment in a social and cultural world. The world is something that is continuously constituted, not something waiting to be uncovered by a reflective neutral subject. Instead, the world is given to various perceivers in their experiences. When we describe the world through generative phenomenology, it is always the world as given to X. Perceptions are not discarded or organized according to how closely they adhere to the supposed “as it is-ness” of the world (Tuckett, 2018). In my generative layer of analysis, I examine how the encounter with the perceived entities reshapes the experiencers’ embodied, ethical, and relational horizons, generating revised or novel structures of subjectivity and intersubjectivity rather than revealing a universal “essence of contact.”

The last layer in my method is an interpretative phenomenological analysis, which has its origins in Heidegger’s (1962/2004) concept of Dasein: a conception of the person as Being-in-the-world alongside things and other people. We are “thrown” into a world of language, culture, and history that we use to make meaning of the world. Interpretative phenomenology thus attends to the sense-making processes through which experiences and transformations are understood and expressed. Eatough and Smith (2017) describe interpretative phenomenological analysis as less interested in universal phenomenological structures than in “the person’s experience of the phenomenon and the sense they make of their experience” (p. 3). The individual’s inner feelings, desires, and hermeneutic frameworks are studied alongside the appearance itself. The three key features of an interpretive phenomenological analysis are experience, idiography, and interpretation. Idiography, or the study of concrete, individual cases, focuses on the unique characteristics of the individual that help frame and interpret the experience. Material is “mine[d] . . . for possible meanings” that allow the phenomena studied to emerge or appear distinctly. A “double hermeneutic” is employed that critically examines the participants’ meaning-making and synthesizes it with the researchers’ own interpretative lens (Eatough & Smith, 2017, p. 13). The researcher makes an intentional effort to enter the participants’ inner world, while also integrating their sense-making into other possible meanings.

I began with a naïve reading of all 15 narratives, approaching each interview with an open stance in order to apprehend the experiential “feel” of the accounts and to bracket, as far as possible, prior theoretical commitments. This descriptive starting point anchored the analysis in how the encounters appeared in lived experience—their sensory, affective, temporal, and relational dimensions—without resolving questions of their source or exact ontological status. I then identified meaning units within each transcript: discrete experiential moments, affective shifts, or interpretations through which participants described both the initial contact event and its subsequent influence on beliefs, values, and worldviews. At this generative level, analysis attended to how contact experience functioned as an event that reorganized the experiencer’s lifeworld, reshaping their embodied and relational horizons. Finally, interpretative phenomenological analysis examined how experiencers themselves made sense of these transformations over time, situating them within personal, cultural, and philosophical meaning frameworks while engaging a double hermeneutic that integrated my own interpretative lens as a researcher.

Over the decades, contact experiencers have been pathologized, mocked, dismissed, and discredited. For example, the recent volume The Reliability of UFO Testimony (Ballester-Olmos & Heiden, 2023) features several chapters arguing that experiencers are mentally ill, have masochistic fantasies, have low self-esteem, or are simply liars. These accusations are not only empirically unjustified but are actively harmful. I thus find it necessary to speak to the reliability and credibility of the individuals I interviewed. John Mack himself took great care to screen for psychopathology before treating individuals who had potential abduction experiences. Three of my experiencers, Catherine, Parker, and Jeanette, had been screened and treated by Mack himself. Additionally, it is worth nothing that even scholars who have begun with the presumption that these experiences cannot possibly be true have not found any higher rates of traditional psychopathology among those who report contact experiences than in the general population (Holden & French, 2002; Parnell & Sprinkle 1990; Rodeghier et al., 1991; Spanos et al., 1993).

All participants were well-spoken, respectful, and spoke coherently and meaningfully about their experiences. I have no reason to believe that any of them were describing anything to me other than what they had perceived. All experiencers were familiar with altered states of consciousness, and three of them reported having experienced sleep paralysis in the past, but emphasized that their close encounters were different from sleep paralysis states. They differentiated whether their experiences happened in a state of normal waking consciousness, in a meditative state, or felt more like a “vivid dream.” No individuals received any compensation or incentives for participating in the study. They knew the study results would be anonymous and were not seeking attention or personal fame. The most consistent characteristic I observed was a genuine desire to share their story and a conviction that what had happened to them was important.

Recruitment through the John Mack Institute intentionally sought individuals already articulating contact experiences, consistent with purposive sampling in phenomenology. Given John Mack’s focus on abduction as a transformative experience, this may have inclined the study toward more transformative accounts, though such purposiveness is in line with phenomenological inquiry. However, the findings may reflect more favorable or transformative outcomes than would be found in the broader contact experiencer population. Additionally, as a primarily interpretative phenomenological study with a relatively small sample size, caution should be exercised in generalizing these findings to all experiencers. However, it is noteworthy that the key themes identified here are consistent with the findings of larger-scale studies, including Ring (1992) and the FREE study (Hernandez et al., 2018), which similarly report transpersonal and transformative effects among individuals reporting contact with advanced NHIs.

Results: The Experiences

I explored the initial encounters through descriptive phenomenological analysis. While there is not a universal “essence” of contact experienceable by all in the study or generalizable as a human experience, there were key phenomenological structures or themes that emerged from experiencer recall of their experience: ontological shock, lack of bodily agency, bodily intrusion, reproduction/hybridization, non-local communication, a felt sense of interconnectedness, missing time, intersubjective validation, and ongoing psychical phenomena in encounter aftermath.

The experiences reported with the entities themselves varied considerably. Catherine, Rachel, Sarah, Parker, and Jeanette reported abduction encounters, in which they had the experience of non-consensual capture, and the perception of being taken into crafts where they then had medical procedures performed on them. Deidre, Andrew, Yosef, Marin, Eric, and Derrick had encounters with more liminal entities that appeared to be capable of physical manifestation but to also appear to exist somewhere in between traditional physical reality and energetic or psychical realms. Some of them also reported signs associated with abduction encounters (missing time, nosebleeds, and strange physical marking on their bodies) but did not report direct memories of being taken into a craft. The last four individuals, Justin, James, Linda, and Thomas, reported communication experiences with an entity that did not involve forcible capture or potential abduction, many of them taking place at least partially in altered states of consciousness and having a distinctly more positive valence. Additionally, all 15 experiencers reported at least one UFO or UAP sighting, sometimes taking the form of glowing orbs of light rather than structured craft.

The abduction experiences followed very closely with the key phenomenological structures identified by Mack (1994). The entities associated with the abduction events appeared to primarily resemble the gray entities with bulbous heads, big black eyes, and small, spindly bodies, as well as taller gray entities who appear to take on a “doctor” role. Two exceptions include Sarah who reports “tall entities with hair all over their bodies” and Catherine who reports a giant biomechanical bug that climbed on top of her bed. The experiences begin with a loss of bodily agency as the individual is removed from the environment, either awakening to find themselves in a foreign environment (often interpreted as a ship) or feeling themselves floated through a wall or closed window to get there. This loss of agency is described most commonly as a sense of paralysis or override of the nervous system, resulting in an inhibition of traditional bodily movement. For example, Parker describes the beginning of his initial memory, prior to exploration of the experience through hypnotic regression: “I feel a presence in the room. I’m immediately hit in the forehead with some kind of light. I feel a kind of paralysis. I feel shaken.” Catherine describes the sense of paralysis as phenomenologically different from sleep paralysis, which she says she has also experienced at various points. “So it feels like electrical currents, like something in the central nervous system is being overridden.” In one of Catherine’s most memorable encounters, she sensed a presence in her bedroom.

Now my body had that paralysis again. So I had that electrical current running through my body. It just kind of runs in waves, kind of up and down, runs in waves. And I couldn’t open my eyes and my arms were pinned down to my side . . . I could feel, all of a sudden, this footstep at the end of the bed.

This inability to move or open her eyes was followed by the presence of a large mechanical bug-like entity climbing on top of her bed, an experience during which she describes herself as wide awake for, when she was eventually able to open her eyes.

Sarah recalls waking up to the sight of two gray beings walking her 6-year-old son down the hallway. Panicking at the thought that they were taking her child, she attempted to get out of bed to stop them. Rather than a feeling of paralysis, Sarah instead felt a pain in her leg, “like a shot and I went out.” Sarah says for the next year and a half, the spot on her thigh had a white circle around it that served as “a visual reminder for me.” The other abductees, Parker, Jeanette, and Rachel report distinct experiences of simply “waking up” or “the next thing I knew” to find themselves in a different environment. This alleged transport violates bodily agency as they experience themselves being relocated against their will.

Additionally, there are themes of bodily intrusion: Abductees recall being subjected to medical procedures, often involving the nose, brain, or genitalia. Most provocatively, individuals report being impregnated and having the pregnancies removed, or in the case of men, having their semen taken or having sexual encounters with entities while on board. Some report being later introduced to their alleged hybrid children. Following the experience, they report finding unexplained scars, scoop marks, puncture wounds, or objects that have been inserted into their bodies, or feeling like energy flows through their bodies differently. These bodily intrusions were reported by all five abductees and some of those with more ambiguous experiences as well. Parker describes waking up after an abduction experience with unexplained marks on his body, “I wake up with marks behind my neck, behind my ear, two puncture marks.” Sarah reports one of the most significant experiences of bodily intrusion upon discovering an ovary is missing:

My left ovary was causing me problems and I had a lot of pain. And I remember waking up one morning and there was just a blue line that looked like a laser. It looked like abruise almost, but it looked like a blue line, and the pain was gone. It did not hurt any more. Not only that, but a few years later the doctor’s like “There’s no record of surgery. Where’s your ovary?” My left ovary was gone. And I’ve never had surgery. All of my children were born by vaginal birth.

Jeanette describes the experience of retrieving a solid object from her nose after her abduction experience after an intense feeling of something inside her nose after an experience. “So I went to the bathroom and I took a tweezer, like I’ve got to get this out or I’m going to go crazy. And I did. I gently pulled it out but it wasn’t a scab. It wasn’t a clot. It was a very tiny piece of rectangular metal that I could not bend.”

Parker recalled perhaps the most explicit memory of involvement with reproduction and hybridization under hypnotic regression with Mack. He remembers being brought into a room and encountering a female gray entity.

And the image [I recall] is us lying on a– it felt more like a block of stone than it felt like a bed– and an awareness that we were being observed by a group of aliens, the elders. It was all being monitored and we were supposed to . . . be sexual. It felt like it was a physical connection designed to imprint our connection for each other.

Catherine also describes a memory of being introduced to her alleged hybrid offspring after finding herself transported to what looked like the upstate New York woods. Finding herself surrounded with “small people walking with even smaller people” she realizes the beings are not human. One of the entities presents a child lacking in affect and communicates that this is her offspring.

Abductees also report the experience of gaps of missing time, only for memories of the events to be triggered and come “pouring back” later, sometimes requiring hypnotic regression for the memories to return. Jeanette, for example, explains an experience of driving outside Boston, when she suddenly found herself outside her vehicle, in a completely different place than where she had been driving with no idea where she was, missing substantial time:

The next thing I remember, I was walking out of a wooded area . . . And I make a U-turn and then off to my right, high up, was billboard, and it said, “Welcome to Salem, New Hampshire.” I thought, “Oh, ho, how the hell did I get here?” And I looked at the clock and about two and a half hours had passed.

When Jeanette explored this experience under regression with Mack, she recalled an experience of an entity beckoning her out of her car, taking her into a traditional flying saucer, having a long needle inserted deep into her nasal cavity, and then “blacking out.” Other themes related to time included extended time (having the subjective experience of more time passing than had passed in physical reality) and condensed time (experiencing less subjective time than had passed in objective reality).

Not all participants reported abduction events, with six participants describing more liminal encounters that seemed to take place partially in physical reality and partially in the psychical or subtle realms. For example, Yosef described an encounter that began in a delightful “dream” of floating outside his body and seeing green beings with large black eyes standing near his body below him. When he awoke, he was bewildered and terrified to see the beings were now present in his physical room.

Importantly, all 11 of the abductees or those who encountered liminal beings that I interviewed for the study reported some form of intersubjective validation in which elements of the encounter were witnessed by someone else. Parker, for example, reports an abduction experience at the same time that two women who knew nothing about his experiences reported seeing a UFO craft outside his home. Sarah reports an abduction as a teenager that included a friend who was staying over at her home. Years later at a class reunion, she asked the friend if she remembered the experience, and the friend confirmed she did. Five years after her strange encounter of being introduced to alleged hybrid children in the woods, Catherine happened upon a drawing in an unpublished book manuscript of the exact scene she had experienced that night, including the grass clearing, the tree line, and the hybrid children being brought to meet their human parents. Another human experiencer—a perfect stranger to Catherine—was apparently also present for that night’s anomalous events and had commissioned the drawing for his book. Derrick reports a waking state encounter when he was traveling across the country with his wife and small child in 2005, when he awoke before daylight to see a small humanoid figure standing at the end of the hotel bed. He recalls first thinking it was just his daughter, until he was baffled to see the entity turn and walk right through the wall. The encounter was witnessed by his wife, bringing it into the realm of intersubjectivity.

Shifting into the generative analysis, one of the most significant reactions that fundamentally restructures experiencers’ conception of subjectivity is the feeling of ontological shock—that they have just encountered something that is incompatible with their understanding of what can and cannot occur in the world. Parker, for example, expresses his disbelief and disgust after recovering the memory of his alleged sexual encounter with the entity:

Like, I can remember going, “Oh my god, I just had sex with an alien. I can’t believe this. And not only that, but was it against my will? Was it coerced? Did I agree to this? Like, how did this happen?” I was devastated. It was just so hard and even in this moment, it’s so hard for me to comprehend it and sit with [the possibility] that it happened and not want to put it into a fantasy or an illusion.

Catherine, too, describes an inability to believe what was happening when describing her encounter in the woods with the hybrids:

My brain just sort of melted down after that. Like I had literally what John calls the ontological shock. It’s just totally traumatic. I have no idea where I am, who these beings are, why I’m with all these other human beings, and I can even feel it now. Like having, in that moment, to swallow what was being presented to me almost made me nauseous. It was almost too much.

Being raised in a traditional western worldview with an understanding that we have no evidence for the existence of advanced NHIs, and that any beings interacting with us would have to obey the known laws of physics, abductees report a true sense of shock and disbelief regarding what is apparently occurring, at the level of disgust and bodily rejection.

Four participants—Justin, James, Linda, and Thomas—presented with experiences that had more positive valence, even though they may have been confused or shocked by them. These experiences took place at least partially in altered states of awareness, such as Justin who experienced encounters with beings in his “third eye space,” followed by a physical sighting of orbs afterwards, or Linda, who encountered a celestial-like woman in a meditative state, and when she opened her eyes she was standing in front of her. These experiences do expand the individual’s ontological boundaries, including their understanding of the capacities of human consciousness. They do not involve the same levels of loss of bodily agency, bodily intrusion, and ontological shock.

No matter the nature of the contact experience reported, all 15 individuals report non-local communication from the entities. Communication is almost always described as mind to mind. Non-local communication is also described by participants as images in the mind, a voice heard inside the head instead of the ears, instant receipt of knowledge they did not have before, or intuitively receiving the entity’s thoughts. Yosef describes a non-local exchange of information that included the phenomenological experience of the boundary between his mind and the entity’s dissolving:

What gave me even more of a feeling of fear was that when he looked at me, I could realize that he was sensing me all over. I know that he knows my feelings . . . and I know his feelings too. I was open to the others in the room because they all connected with their consciousness together. And then in an instant, the fear goes down and we start to communicate . . . it seems that the connection gave me the opportunity to know what I want, everything in their consciousness.

This literal felt sense of interconnectedness is described by other participants as well. James, for example, has an experience that does not involve necessarily feeling at one with the entities, but of oneness with everything.

I was fully consumed by this washing of love. And then my mind felt like it was expanding my consciousness . . . I’m thinking about the grass in my side yard, or my neighbor and the plants. Every time I reach this new thing that I’m expanding into, I realize that it’s also connected in love. So all the flora and fauna, the people, the animals, even the immaterial things like rocks and stuff . . . I feel like I’m one with this whole planet, right? It’s a unitive experience and it’s total love . . . I felt that there was this connection in all things that we’re a part of.

Additionally, experiencers report poltergeist phenomena, profound synchronicities, precognitive experiences, telepathic “downloads” of information, heightening of their senses, synesthesia, increased empathic abilities, a transpersonal sense of self, and more. Deidre, for example, reports that she was used by the police in investigations because her psychic abilities grew so strong. Thirteen out of fifteen reported some kind of transpersonal experience during their encounters, in which they no longer felt their sense of self as limited to being expressed through their physical bodies. Catherine and Yosef both reported explicit out of body experiences in the presence of the gray beings. Derrick describes meditation experiences in which he feels his sense of self merging with a form of collective intelligence. “It feels like I’m actually part of that intelligence in some way. And it feels like some kind of a plurality, it feels like a group of intelligences together that also form a kind of collective intelligence or collective consciousness.” Justin expresses a sense that his consciousness transcends beyond his experience in his current corporeal body, suggesting that there are aspects or dimensions of him having other conscious experiences at the same time he exists in his current embodied form: “So I’m having different experiences through a different avatar in other places. And my awareness is happening to me here, but there’s so many different [things] I’m also experiencing. Like there’s a version of this where I didn’t have this conversation with you today.”

Results: The Worldviews

Moving into the more explicitly generative and interpretive analysis, my interest was not only in describing what appeared, but how these experiences had affected the structures of individual subjectivity in the aftermath, influencing individuals’ hermeneutical frameworks and meaning-making processes. For this section, experiencers were asked if the encounter with the entity in particular had influenced how they thought about certain topics related to spirituality, the afterlife, time, consciousness, relationships, economics, politics, education, criminal justice, and sustainability. Distinct patterns emerged in the answers to these questions, suggesting that changes in the individual’s moral reasoning, conception of self and world, and orientation in the lifeworld are integral to the experience of contact, whether that contact takes the form of abduction or a gentler, more subtle exchange.

Experiencers reported a new way of orienting themselves in relation to their existential possibilities. This included a new metaphysical orientation as well as an ethical one. The specific changes with respect to concrete policies or practices reflected their overall shift in orientation. Specifically, experiencers express a shift to a metaphysical orientation in which time is not linear and consciousness is not limited to the body nor a product of the individual brain. Rather, consciousness is considered a fundamental property of the universe, which can have experiences separated from a brain or body. Additionally, experiencers expressed a fundamental metaphysical conviction that all things are interconnected and that everything that exists is ultimately an expression of the one ultimate source. Ethically, experiencers reported a shift to a post-anthropocentric ethical orientation rooted in a deep sense of interconnectedness with human and non-human life. Their circle of moral considerability expands to include non-human entities, such as animals, plants, the Earth, and the biosphere as members of the moral community. Their relationality with others moves toward interactions that center human respect and agency, true transparency, and unconditional love. These changes fundamentally shift how they live their subjectivity and anchor themselves within a lifeworld.

Discussion

Looking at the phenomenology of the experiences involves understanding the type of conscious experience this is. Within the descriptive phenomenology of the contact events, we see themes of loss of bodily agency, bodily intrusion, time distortions, liminal encounters, intersubjective validation, non-local communication, felt sense of interconnectedness and psychical phenomena, including separation of consciousness from the body. Importantly, aspects of the encounters are not lived as private, subjective experiences, but experienced in the realm of the intersubjectively shared. However, the entities are not always perceived as traditional phenomenologically real objects. However, some participants, like Catherine, Jeanette, and Sarah, are adamant that their encounters took place in normal waking consciousness in the physical world. These encounters inherently blur the boundaries between the physical and non-physical realms, between corporeality and incorporeality. They occupy thresholds and in-between spaces, resisting neat categorization. The intersubjectively witnessed aspects resist them being reduced to an event that happens in the individual’s mind alone, although they do not rise to the level of objective, scientific verification. Phenomenologically, participants do not live these experiences as illness, pathology, or private subjective experiences. They live them rather as profoundly transformative and intersubjective sites of metaphysical and ethical meaning-making. Simultaneously, the most profound aspect of these encounters is reflected in how they restructure the individual’s subjectivity.

At the generative and interpretive level, the ethics and worldview changes reported are anchored in a metaphysical model in which time is not linear, consciousness is not local or dependent on a brain, and all beings are understood as emerging from a monistic source. The ethical orientation and commitments flow from this metaphysical model in conjunction with the collapse of anthropocentrism and human supremacy: many of our existing social systems and institutions are viewed as deficient because they distort the perceived metaphysical oneness that underlies all things. Changes in participants’ ethical commitments reflect the changes in their metaphysical convictions and ethical orientation: a post-anthropocentric way of anchoring themselves within the lifeworld that understands all human and non-human life as an interconnected expression of one source, equally deserving of respect and compassion. Given the reflection of these patterns in Mack’s (1994), Ring’s (1992), and Hernandez et al.’s (2018) work, these changes thus do not appear to be incidental side effects, but integral to the phenomenological structure of contact experiences. The key question remains, why do such transformations occur?

I do not think there is a single answer to this question, but the phenomenological structure of the experience points to several likely contributing factors:

Thus, these transformations should not be reduced to "interesting data points” nor seen as incidental or coincidental side effects of contact. Instead, they are integral to the phenomenological structure of contact, even if the degree to which individuals report these changes is a spectrum rather than a universal essence.

The fundamental phenomenological revisions come both in how experiencers conceptualize their own subjectivity, and how they relate and respond to Otherness. Experiencers emerge from this experience with a multidimensional understanding of their own subjectivity: one in which their conception of self is not limited to the body, the psychological ego, the confines of physical reality, or to the present temporal moment. The body emerges as one expression of conscious life, not the only form that their sense of self can take. Further, the boundaries of their subjectivity become distinctly more fluid and porous—the rigid distinctions they previously made between self and otherness are broken down. This does not just happen at the level of belief, as if individuals simply accept a new set of propositions about the self. Rather, it happens at the level of experience and participation—they experientially feel the boundaries of selfhood and otherness dissolving and becoming more malleable.

The distinction between subject and object—between what consciousness conceives as “me” and “not-me”—are considered foundational phenomenological categories. These are not considered a priori categories that emerge prior to experience, but a posteriori distinctions that emerge through our experience in the lifeworld. Sartre, for example, argues that the conscious subject forms a conception of self only by differentiating itself from what it is not. Consciousness is expressed and experienced in a cultural and social environment of objects and other bodies, and through this immersion forms a sense of the “not-me.” By rooting one’s conciousness in their own experience of the word, the subject forms a sense of self and the boundaries that govern that self (Sartre, 2018). The lived body and internal conscious states constitute the boundaries of the “me,” while the external world of things, animals, other humans, and other minds constitutes the “not-me.”

Contact experiences forcibly destabilize these distinctions. A common phenomenological rupture for experiencers is the experience of consciousness exceeding the individual brain. Collapsing the traditional separation between the mind and the world “out there,” consciousness is considered the defining property of the universe. Experiencers are conceive of a larger field of subjectivity in which consciousness extends through all human and non-human life. This expansion of self is not merely conceptual but experiential and participatory, frequently describing conscious capacities that ostensibly exceed a physicalist framework of causality. Possibilities that consciousness can act directly on matter, or communicate non-locally emerge into their existential field as genuine possibilities. Several experiencers, such as James, Derrick, and Justin, report participating in close encounters of the fifth kind (CE-5s), events in which groups initiate contact with NHIs. The protocols usually involve meditation and visualization of oneself as interconnected with the universe, affirming that the mind/consciousness can communicate instantly across space and time. Individuals take seriously the idea that non-local consciousness makes telepathic communication with non-human entities possible, and they participate in the world differently in light of it.

The recofiguration of subjectivity also happens temporally. Experiencers report a sense of self that transcends linear time and local embodiment. As Justin describes: “This future me that is transcendent in the stars again is happening right now.” One of the defining characteristics of our experience of subjectivity is that consciousness is anchored in a body, in a particular time and place. But through contact encounters, experiencers are introduced to an experience of selfthat transcends these limits. This is often articulated as the higher self, transcendent self, or soul. The key idea is that they experience a dimension of their subjectivity that is atemporal or not bound by the confines of linear time. This aspect of the “self” may be having simultaneous experiences in other time periods, dimensions, realities, or may be conceived as having other conscious experiences in different forms simultaneously with their current corporeal embodiment.

Finally, the breaking down of boundaries culminates when the distinction between self and other beings—human, animal, plant, or Earth itself—blurs and dissolves. Experiencers now consider these categories provisional, helpful for navigating practically in the lifeworld, but not ultimately static. At the most foundational metaphysical level, they describe all of reality as emerging from the same underlying “stuff.” They conceive of consciousness individuating into distinct perspectives, giving rise to the apparent divisions of subject and object, self and world. But in their encounters, individuals tap into what feels metaphysically prior to these distinctions: a shared ground of being from which differentiation then arises.

This dissolving of the barriers between subjectivity and objectivity results in a fundamentally transformed way of meeting Otherness. Contact experiences could be characterized as the ultimate experience of Otherness—apparent advanced NHIs that are not “supposed” to exist and that can defy the laws of physics and subvert and navigate the spaces in between the physical and non-physical, mind and matter, human and non-human, and technological and spiritual. More importantly, their precise identity and ontology remain ambiguous; experiencers do not know who the Other that appears is, how they experience the world, what the encounter with them ultimately means, or how it will change them. They must proceed without certainty, without assurance of what will unfold, without knowledge of who this Other is, or what their intentions are. Allowing themselves to welcome this Other without condition, allowing it to subvert their understanding of their own subjectivity and world, allows them not only to meet the non-human Other, but also to fundamentally reconfigure how they meet Otherness in general.

This process involves surrendering to receptivity that reconstitutes the self, although the self is inevitably changed. This mirrors the phenomenological structures introduced by Marion (2007) in The Erotic Phenomenon, exploring how the encounter with a beloved Other results in a givenness that ultimately dissolves our sense of ego and reconfigures subjectivity. Marion describes the collapse of the boundaries of the self when a lover must advance without assurance of an outcome, without guarantee that they will be loved in return, ultimately responding to a call that cannot be fully understood nor predicted. I posit a “contact-sense” of erotic reduction, in which the encounter is not with a human beloved but with a mysterious ostensibly NHI. However, the transformation has the same phenomenological structure: the subject surrenders to the givenness of the Other by allowing one’s boundaries to dissolve in the Other’s presence. The experience is beyond conceptual mastery; it cannot be known through language or thought, only through direct participation. In contact encounters, as in eros, one often experiences being seen from within or known entirely. This is often experienced very literally as the entities reportedly merge with the experiencers’ consciousness or demonstrate intimate knowledge of their inner lives and futures. The self becomes the recipient rather than initiator of experience. The subject-object polarity is dissolved and enables the revelation. In surrendering to the givenness of the unknown Other, experiencers allow excess and ambiguity to overwhelm their desire to control the terms of the encounter.

These experiences also result in relation toward Otherness that are not limited to the human Other or advanced non-human entities, but to other expressions of non-human life: animals, plants, Earth, and the biosphere. The Other is not viewed transactionally, in terms of what they can receive from them, but with a holistic compassion that recognizes a fundamental oneness across even the most diverse expressions of consciousness and life. Otherness is met with curiosity, ontological openness, and compassion across species and conscious expressions. Indeed, contact experiencers express metaphysical and ethical worldviews that seem to have more in common with the cosmologies of Indigenous American peoples who have expressed ways of knowing and relating anchored in kinship and interconnectedness with plant and animal life, land, and the Earth itself (Topa & Narvaez, 2022; Whyte, 2021).

In his work, Jeffrey J. Kripal (2024) refers to this dissolution of subject and object as “dual-aspect monism,” a metaphysical stance that ultimately denies any final distinction between the mental and the material. In such a configuration, the world is one, but the human is two: human consciousness can experience reality as either physical or mental, yet these are not ultimately separate. It is through consciousness, he argues, that we impose the division between mind and matter, a division that obscures the “deeper unity of everything and everyone” (p. 9). The contact experiencers appear to describe a metaphysics that reflects this dual-aspect monism: the experiences unsettle and subvert this division between mind and matter, self and other. This disruption and subversion instills the ability to see both truths at once: the apparent divisions between subject and object, self and other, and mind and matter that they use to navigate the world; and the deeper interconnectedness that underlies them. This allows experiencers to anchor themselves in a holistic interconnected relationality reflected in their ethical orientation and commitments.

Taken together, this all suggests that academic, clinical, or therapeutic approaches to working with contact experiencers may do harm when they start in a position of pathologization or dismissal instead of curiosity. The phenomenological structure of these events is one that is ontologically shocking, and fundamentally disrupts and restructures subjectivity and the parameters through which experiencers understand and organize a world. Most substantially, they emerge with an understanding of self as constituted by a consciousness that is not limited to the parameters of the body or spatiotemporal reality, and an experiential, participatory sense of metaphysical oneness with all that is. Additionally, experiencers emerge from such experiences with an increased tolerance and ability to meet that which is radically Other with curiosity, openness, and hospitality, rather than interpreting it as fear or threat. They further show an increased ability to take the interests of various non-human Others as equally important to their own. This suggests that contact experiences serve as sites of experiential, philosophical, moral, and spiritual insight that we could distinctly learn from rather than attempt to explain away.