Contactee - Overview

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.."

Contactees became a cultural phenomena in the 1940s and continued throughout the 1950s and 1960s, often giving lectures and writing books about their experience. The phenomona 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.”

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:

• 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.