Contactees

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?"

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.

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...."

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".

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