“The Pleiadians gave me an interesting download the other day."
Steven Spielberg’s Disclosure Day is a blockbuster call for humans to start taking the likelihood of extraterrestrial intelligence more seriously. On June 12, the sci-fi film that imagines how people might react to proof that aliens exist, hits theaters, bringing the UFO debate to the masses—proof that Spielberg believes does, in fact, exist. But many have been taking contact into their own hands for decades, and some may be listening to what these otherworldly beings have to say right now.
In the lead up to the latest theatrical release from the acclaimed director of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, I have been interviewing people experiencing close encounters of the fifth kind: human initiated ET contact through consciousness, the metaphysical tissue connecting all forms of life throughout the universe.
CE-5, as it is known colloquially, is an increasingly popular protocol using meditation to commence peaceful contact with non-human intelligence. The accessible technique has sparked a grassroots disclosure movement (a term, in this context, generally understood as the the governmental or otherwise official confirmation of extraterrestrial contact) steadily gaining steam since pioneer Dr. Stephen Greer founded the Center for the Study of Extraterrestrial Intelligence (CSETI) in 1990.
“The intelligences behind the phenomenon are totally telepathic,” says Dr. Joseph Burkes, a retired internal medicine physician and former volunteer contact worker involved in the early days of CSETI.
Burkes tells me over the phone from his Northern California home that he witnessed Greer summon a 300-foot triangular shaped craft in the sky during a 1993 CE-5 expedition at the base of Mexico’s Popocatépetl volcano.
“It was totally silent. It blocked out the stars. It came within maybe 200 or 300 yards of our position,” he recalls. “It turned on its side so we could see its underside, and there was a red beacon. It signaled in response to our light work: one flash from us, one flash from them; two flashes from us, two flashes from them… Even as it pulled away and went back towards the volcano, it still signaled at us, like adiós.”
Greer continues to push for disclosure through his documentary films and speaking engagements on the UFO circuit, while Burkes shares his experiences through his website, ContactUnderground.org. Burkes says he has seen ships in the sky, heard invisible footsteps in the desert, and even received telepathic downloads during his adventures that lasted through the turn of the century.
“They showed me how they create illusion,” explains the retired emergency room doc. “How they can manifest not only objects in the sky that are holographic-like projections that are not physical, but they can also project thought forms in the course of field work, where one person sees them and the other one doesn’t. Because it’s a consciousness-based interaction; it’s not physical as we know it.”
This is why the contact activist believes the government and other elites insist on keeping the subject highly classified or dismissing it as mere fantasy.
“Once you realize that UFOs are not just about friendly ETs, but are about a whole new paradigm in terms of consciousness being primary, and not mass and energy, the whole physicalist or materialist paradigm of academic Western science is undermined by these visitors,” Burkes tells me. “They can manipulate space-time, and that suggests that space-time is not primary, so [people in power] are against it.”
Sam, a 27-year-old experiencer (someone who believes they’ve experienced paranormal activity) and aspiring EDM producer based in Virginia, tells me he doesn’t even care for any kind of government disclosure, because he believes he’s been in direct contact with an alien entity since September of 2024.
The encounters, he says, began in a dream state after practicing the Monroe Institute’s guided meditation Gateway Tapes for a few months.
“I was starting to have some vivid dreams, and one of them, I remember, it was like the face of a gray alien, and it shifted into something more triangular,” Sam says.“Then in another dream, I remember going to what looked like a museum, and there were these guides taking me through this place. I remember seeing this mural with a Mantis being teaching children something, and audio over a speaker saying, ‘This is real, this is real.’ And then I had a sleep paralysis episode… I was terrified. I honestly thought he was gonna eat me or something.”
Mantis beings are a tall, slender type of entity in alien lore that resemble earthly praying mantis insects. They’re often reported to be wearing colorful robes, described as benevolent and wise, and frequently appear alongside the shorter gray alien beings in reported encounters.
I connected with Sam after he posted a painting of Talkum, the entity he says he’s in touch with, on the Mantis Encounters Reddit page, which was founded by a fellow experiencer.
“Back in 2018 I had a psilocybin mushroom experience where a Mantis being entered my trip and proceeded to show me the earth from space,” the moderator tells me. “This page is a collection of the experiences of other people that I find throughout the internet.”
Reports of Mantis beings in psychedelic trips have become so common, in fact, that one of the world’s leading psychedelic research organizations, the Beckley Foundation, recently promoted an independent survey seeking feedback on encounters with praying mantis entities in altered states of consciousness.
Sam’s experiences with the Mantid he encountered during his sleep paralysis episode ramped up after coming across magic mushroom gummies a few weeks later.
“I decided to take those, and then do a Gateway meditation during the trip,” he says. “I wasn’t expecting much to happen, but I really did get to end up meeting this being. He was very loving and familiar; not childish, but childlike. At the same time, I got the feeling he was very wise.
“He had a sense of humor too, because I remember during that time I felt bad about the fact that I was so scared of him, and he just kind of joked about eating me, which I thought was pretty funny.”
Sam says Talkum communicated telepathically and that the brown being was excited to make contact during the hour-long psychedelic encounter, which was preceded by a series of “really intense vibrations” in his body before breaking through into an out of body experience.
“He said at the time that he wanted to elevate my consciousness,” Sam recalls.
Things got even stranger a few weeks later when he repeated the process.
“[Mantids] were taking my non-physical body into this triangular-looking craft, and they put me on this table,” he explains, noting larger, robed mantis beings watching the operation, as well. “Talkum was there too and he was holding my hand, but they were ripping open my abdomen, taking this sort of brown, gooey ball of sludge and tossing it away,” he says. Sam felt terror, until he realized that the mantids were doing him a favor. “What they were doing was removing this ball — it was my anxiety.”
Many other experiencers are coming out of the woodwork to talk about their encounters openly on social media platforms.
West Coast-based TikToker @NovaSays is three months into sharing her journey channeling Pleiadians — an intergalactic race of Nordic-like beings that she had never heard of before she says they introduced themselves during a meditation that followed a vivid dream.
“I’m not someone who grew up with any sort of psychic ability that I’m aware of, and all of a sudden I’m hearing these voices during meditation,” she explains.
Nova was considering these voices “spirit guides” before they revealed their alien origins when she asked about the dream. “It was so unexpected, I started crying, because no guide had ever explicitly introduced themselves to me like that.”
Now she’s tuning into what she deems clairaudience every night to learn more about this race of beings she considers “soul family,” with whom she believes she’s reincarnated “many, many, many times.”
“I hear a voice. I don’t see as many images,” she explains. “I might see a flash of something, and then as I hear the voice, I am doing automatic typing, and just like in a flow state of typing and allowing it to come through.”
“One of the consistent messages for me is to speak up and share my voice, to share my perspective,” she says. “They actually told me to start my TikTok.”
For Nova and many other experiencers around the world, contact is a spiritual experience. There is a firm belief across the UFO contact community that a wide range of intergalactic races are here to help raise the vibration and frequency of humanity — a species that has allegedly been the victim of a “malevolent ET agenda” to tame, control and manipulate.
“Pleiadians were just talking to me the other night about the domestication of the human, and like the sort of tranquilization and trained docility of being a human,” she says. “Part of this shift is like, God’s not docile, God’s not domesticated; God is wild and free.”
TikTok and YouTube are overflowing with channelers claiming to be in contact with all sorts of entities. Among the most well known is Darryl Anka’s “Bashar,” who has developed a cult following over the course of the 40 years he’s been allegedly speaking through Anka’s body on Earth.
Channeling is also an aspect of ET lore that Spielberg explores in Disclosure Day. Trailers tease Emily Blunt’s character suddenly speaking in extraterrestrial tongue on the air of a news station while delivering a weather report. The plot only thickens from there, but no spoilers here.
Christian Stepien, the chief technology officer and media representative for the National UFO Reporting Center, doesn’t dismiss channeling, but he is skeptical. The subjective contact method is a challenge to verify in his line of work for a non-profit organization that has logged and mapped over 180,000 reports of unidentified aerial phenomena around the world.
“The UFO phenomenon spans a wide range of reality,” he tells me, “from nuts and bolts physical craft, to aspects that certainly involve consciousness and different levels of being.”
“I’m sure there’s certain people who are genuinely contacting or making some conscious connection with some entities that are aliens or otherwise. And I think there are some people who just aren’t and are frauds,” he says. “How you sort them out is a difficult thing to do, but channeling, I believe, is a very real thing.”
Both Nova and Sam say they’re still making sense of this newfound connection with the cosmos, and still struggle to wrap their heads around similar messages they’ve both received:
Physical encounters are coming.
“I’m really skeptical about it,” Sam tells me toward the end of our conversation, “but Talkum has told me that one day we’re going to see each other in person.”
He’s channeled this Mantis being during a regression episode with a trained therapist, and even more recently – the night before we speak, actually — he says he felt Talkum trying to come through while getting high and painting with his partner, who was thoroughly freaked out when she noticed a shift in his eyes.
“It basically feels like I’m taking a back seat,” he says of channeling another being. “When you leave your body, you feel these intense vibrations, but something else is coming inside of you and trying to communicate.”
Nova says she’s received messages suggesting 2027 is going to be a big deal: “Something is going to happen where things are set in motion or set free.” But the channeler is struggling with her own questions about some of the revelations she thinks these non-human entities may have revealed.
“This is where the doubt comes in for me, because it seems like a lot,” she says. “Anyone who talks to them is a sort of emissary or envoy in a way, and is going to help facilitate galactic relations in some way, and help humans connect with ETs on a face-to-face level. So, not only will I be seeing them face to face, others will be seeing this face to face.”
Talkum has told me that one day we’re going to see each other in person.
These conversations with experiencers are all in line with a view Spielberg presents in Disclosure Day, a sci-fi adventure that welcomes extraterrestrial contact instead of characterizing their presence as an invasion. It’s a chase thriller framed as a race to show the world what has long been suppressed by powerful governments and secret agencies.
It’s because of that suppression that Dr. Burkes believes ET intelligences are intentionally bypassing our planet’s terrestrial elites to communicate with the general population instead.
“They’re trying to assist us, but we are incredibly fearful and violent,” he explains. “[Aliens] don’t go to the generals and the politicians, because they’re not going to want to establish some kind of peaceful world order… so they go to the people. And that’s what I saw us as: a people’s disclosure movement, one soul, one heart, one mind at a time. They’re recruiting us.”
Perhaps Sam and Nova are among these recruits.
“The Pleiadians gave me an interesting download the other day,” Nova says. “Disclosure is not a race to the bottom, meaning it’s not a race to reveal all the terrible things. That’s part of it, and disclosure is also partly the reintroduction of us. But the true meaning of disclosure is you finally connecting with your infinite light and your divine self, and living out a physical life in that way. And once you fully connect with that, all this alien stuff will just make sense.”