100 YEARS OF CONTACT ~ From Occult Encounters, Flying Saucers to Experiencers, Secret Programs and Disclosure (Version 1)
Janet Kira Lessin | Sasha Alex Lessin, Ph.D. | Research: Claudia Lenore | © 2026 Aquarian Media
For more than a century, people have reported encounters with intelligences that seemed to stand outside ordinary human society, and the terminology has shifted with each generation that tried to name them. They were spirits, angels, demons, adepts, Martians, Venusians, space brothers, extraterrestrials, aliens, interdimensionals, ultraterrestrials, non-human intelligences, and most recently NHI. The names kept changing while the encounters kept arriving.
They also began well before Roswell. The modern contact story reaches back beyond the moment the phrase “flying saucer” entered English, beyond the founding of the United States Air Force, beyond the first rockets to leave the atmosphere, and beyond the point at which humanity acquired a technological vocabulary equal to what witnesses said they encountered.
What shifts across this history is the framework, not the contact. An occultist in 1918 called an intelligence an entity; a Swiss child in 1942 would later describe an extraterrestrial teacher; a pilot in 1947 reported an extraordinary craft; and a couple in 1961 described beings who took them aboard one. A military witness spoke of classified programs, a contactee spoke of teachers, an abductee spoke of captors, and a channeler received information with no craft in sight. By the twenty-first century, the language had started to converge on a single term, non-human intelligence, and this is the story of that convergence.
It is also personal. Over these decades, many of the people in this history went from being names in books to becoming part of our lives. We met them, interviewed them, hosted some of them in our home, and shared meals, conferences, arguments, discoveries and friendships with them. Several trusted us with stories they wanted preserved while they still had time to tell them, and their lives form a human chain running through more than a century of contact.
PART ONE
Before the Flying Saucer: Contact at the Edge of Occultism and Science
1918: Aleister Crowley and Lam
One of the strangest precursors to the modern extraterrestrial image emerged decades ahead of Roswell. During the Amalantrah Working of 1918, Aleister Crowley produced the portrait known as Lam, a large-headed, narrow-chinned figure whose appearance strikes anyone familiar with later Grey descriptions as uncannily familiar. Crowley exhibited the drawing in New York the following year.
One point deserves careful attention because it demonstrates the argument this book makes. Crowley himself drew no line between Lam and any extraterrestrial. He worked inside an occult framework of invocations, intelligences, altered states, and communication across dimensions, and he described Lam in those terms. The connection to Greys and to space arrived decades afterward, when the occultist Kenneth Grant took up the portrait in the 1970s and read it through a vocabulary that reached Crowley long after his death.
That sequence matters more than a simple resemblance would. Early contact had no obligation to look like twentieth-century UFO contact, because the witnesses held no UFO vocabulary to describe it with. Experience passes through whatever culture the person receiving it happens to own. Grant supplied a later culture, and the image’s meaning changed, which is exactly the process this history tracks. Crowley stands near the opening of our chronology as a doorway between an older occult tradition and an era in which contact, technology, and space exploration would begin to merge.
Jack Parsons: When Rocket Science Met the Occult
That merger turned almost literal in the life of Jack Parsons, who worked as both an occultist and a pioneer of American rocketry. His research helped establish what would become the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, while his private life moved through the world of Aleister Crowley and the Ordo Templi Orientis. In 1946 Parsons conducted the rituals remembered as the Babalon Working, with the science fiction writer L. Ron Hubbard taking part and recording portions of the work. Parsons believed he was opening a pathway for a new intelligence or force to manifest.
The historical juxtaposition remains remarkable. At almost the exact moment humanity began building rockets capable of reaching beyond Earth, several of the people closest to that technology were attempting communication with nonordinary intelligence. The rocket and the ritual shared a room in history.
L. Ron Hubbard: From Parsons to a Cosmic Religion
Hubbard left Parsons’ circle and created Dianetics and Scientology, and the cosmology that grew around Scientology reached far past ordinary terrestrial history. It came to include beings who existed before their current human lives, immense spans of cosmic time, extraterrestrial civilizations, and traumatic events involving worlds beyond Earth.
Whatever conclusion a reader reaches about Hubbard, his place in this chronology illustrates a recurring pattern: contact narratives become religions. Human history may hold many earlier examples of the same process, in which a powerful encounter occurs, the witness interprets it, followers gather, teachings solidify, rituals develop, and generations later the original encounter has hardened into theology. That pattern returns throughout these hundred years.
PART TWO
War, Rockets and the First Modern Contactees
1942: Billy Meier’s Contact Story Begins
The public tends to associate Eduard “Billy” Meier with the spectacular photographs that emerged from Switzerland during the 1970s, though his own chronology starts much earlier. Meier said his first sustained extraterrestrial contact began in 1942, when he was five years old, with an elderly teacher he called Sfath. He dated the Sfath period from 1942 to 1953, followed by a second period with Asket from 1953 to 1964, and after a long interval the best-known phase opened on 28 January 1975 with Semjase.
That places the beginning of his claimed contact five years before Roswell, so his case spans several distinct eras at once: the Second World War, the birth of the flying saucer phenomenon, the 1950s contactee movement, and the photographic contact cases of the 1970s. Few contact stories span such an extraordinary stretch of time.
William Mills Tompkins: The War Behind the War
William Mills Tompkins belongs to another branch of the 1940s story, the one running through military intelligence and alleged technology transfer. Tompkins described work connected to United States Navy intelligence during the Second World War, including accounts American agents brought back concerning advanced German aerospace projects. His testimony covered the Vril women, Maria Orsic, German interest in extraterrestrial information, and a later American effort to understand and reproduce technologies that had moved far beyond conventional aircraft. He went on to work inside the American aerospace industry and claimed that non-human intelligences shaped portions of the postwar space program.
His history sits at the intersection of several threads this series follows: extraterrestrial contact, intelligence operations, advanced German technology, American aerospace development, and the emergence of a classified space infrastructure. The public space program launched rockets into space, and the testimony of Tompkins and others asks whether a second program went considerably farther.
PART THREE
1947: The Sky Opens
If one year created modern UFO culture, that year was 1947.
24 June 1947: Kenneth Arnold
On 24 June, the civilian pilot Kenneth Arnold reported nine extraordinary objects near Mount Rainier in Washington State, estimated their speed at roughly 1,700 miles per hour, and described their motion as resembling a saucer skipping across water. The newspapers turned that description into a name, and flying saucers swept across America. Reports multiplied, the modern UFO era arrived, and both the National Archives and later historical accounts treat Arnold’s sighting as a foundational event in American UFO history. Arnold hardly stood alone, since the summer of 1947 produced an extraordinary concentration of sightings from pilots, civilians, and military personnel across the country.
Then came Roswell.
July 1947: Roswell
Roswell Army Air Field announced on 8 July that personnel from the 509th Bomb Group had recovered a flying disc from a ranch near Roswell, New Mexico. The announcement survived a matter of hours before the reversal arrived and the disc became a weather balloon.
Roswell then faded from public attention for decades, while the witnesses, the military personnel, the recovered-material testimony, and the later accounts all refused to disappear. For our larger work, the case represents more than a crash. It marks the point at which contact and national security became inseparable, and from that moment two histories unfolded at once. One of them happened in public. The other went behind classification.
PART FOUR
The Contactees
20 November 1952: George Adamski and Orthon
By the early 1950s, the UFO story had moved past objects in the sky, and people began reporting meetings with the occupants. George Adamski became the most famous of the first American generation. On 20 November 1952, near Desert Center, California, Adamski said he met a human-looking being later identified as Orthon and associated with Venus. Other people traveled to the desert with him and watched portions of the encounter from a distance.
The Adamski case established themes that would define the contactee movement for a generation: human-looking extraterrestrials, alarm over nuclear weapons, spiritual development, warnings about humanity’s direction, and the idea that advanced civilizations were watching us through the dangerous adolescence of a technological species. Whether the witnesses called them Venusians, space brothers, Nordics or something else, the humanoid visitor stayed in contact testimony for decades afterward.
The 1950s Contactee Movement
Howard Menger, George Hunt Williamson, Daniel Fry, Orfeo Angelucci and Truman Bethurum described their own encounters and communications with beings from beyond ordinary human civilization. Much of the press mocked the movement, and yet its central message held remarkably steady: humanity had entered the atomic age without matching its technological power to any comparable emotional or spiritual maturity. We had split the atom while remaining unable to live together, and the visitors, the contactees said, were worried. That message outlived the culture that produced it.
PART FIVE
Contact Becomes Abduction
The tone shifted during the 1960s. While the early contactees described meetings they had wanted and welcomed, a second body of testimony described encounters the witnesses had never sought.
1961: Betty and Barney Hill
On the night of 19 to 20 September 1961, Betty and Barney Hill encountered a strange object while driving through New Hampshire. Their later recollections under hypnosis with the Boston psychiatrist Dr. Benjamin Simon included beings, a medical examination, missing time, and a star map, and the case became the model for what the culture would learn to call alien abduction.
That term proved too narrow soon enough. Some people felt terror while others came through profound transformation, some reported reproductive procedures, some developed psychic abilities, and some discovered that their encounters ran back into childhood and across generations of the same family. The person had stopped being a witness to an object and had become part of the phenomenon. The experiencer era had begun.
PART SIX
The 1970s: Physical Contact, Photographs and Missing Time
1975: Billy Meier and Semjase
On 28 January 1975, Meier said his contact with Semjase had resumed, and the photographs, films, metal samples, and extensive contact notes that followed made his case one of the most heavily debated claims in UFO history. His importance to this chronology reaches past the question of whether any single photograph persuades a skeptic, because his case generated a vast documentary archive. He named his contacts, recorded conversations, and described a civilization along with its history and philosophy, and his story drew researchers from around the world. One of those researchers was George Green, and that relationship built a direct bridge from a Swiss contact case into our own lives.
November 1975: Travis Walton
In Arizona, Travis Walton vanished after several coworkers watched him approach a luminous object in the forest. He stayed missing for five days, and the presence of multiple witnesses to the events preceding his disappearance transformed the case.
Walton reinforced something already visible in the Hill material. Contact arrived through more than one door, and some people came back frightened, injured, confused, or changed for the rest of their lives.
PART SEVEN
George Green: From Edwards Air Force Base to Billy Meier
George Green belongs in this history for several reasons, and one of them is that George and his wife Gillian Green became our friends.
George said his own encounter with the reality of UFOs began long before his public work. In an interview with us, he recalled service at Edwards Air Force Base in 1958, where he came within about ten feet of an anomalous craft and saw two dead non-human occupants associated with it. He described work on the X-15 program and said he kept silent after his security debriefings.
Then came 1984. George said he encountered the book UFO… Contact from the Pleiades and recognized at once the similarities between the craft in Billy Meier’s material and what he remembered from Edwards. That recognition redirected the rest of his life. He traveled to meet Billy Meier and became involved as more than a curious visitor, working to bring Meier’s story, photographs, and publications to a broader American audience.
We continue to document the exact financial and publishing history, since George’s involvement appears to have included financial support for the publication of Meier-related material, and that record deserves precision rather than a repetition of folklore.
George’s place in our history turned personal long after those events. Near the end of his life, he had cancer, and he called me. He knew his time was short and he wanted to tell his story one more time, so we interviewed him. I understood that this was more than another radio program, because George was putting his life back on the record while he still could.
Gillian called me when he died. They had gone out to eat together, one of the things they always loved to do, and George died sitting in his chair. Something about that ending feels strangely right. After decades of extraordinary claims, battles, warnings, books, conferences, investigations, and arguments about the fate of humanity, George left this world beside the woman he loved, after something as ordinary and as human as a shared meal.
His final interview survives, which makes his chapter more than historical research. We heard the story from George himself.
PART EIGHT
The 1980s: Contact Becomes a Cosmology
Several contact traditions expanded during the 1980s from individual encounters into elaborate descriptions of the universe.
The Law of One
Between 1981 and 1984, Carla Rueckert, Don Elkins and Jim McCarty produced the sessions known as The Law of One or The Ra Material, describing densities of consciousness, reincarnation, planetary development, service to others, service to self, the Orion group, and a universe in which human spiritual development formed one part of a much larger cosmic process.
The significance of such material rests on something other than whether a reader accepts every transmission as literal. It rests on the fact that the contact phenomenon had widened again. Contact no longer required a landed spacecraft, because communication itself had become the event.
1984: Darryl Anka and Bashar
Darryl Anka began channeling the intelligence known as Bashar in 1984, and across the decades since, the Bashar material has developed an extensive framework covering consciousness, extraterrestrial civilization, hybridization, parallel realities and human transformation. Once again, an individual contact grew into a body of information large enough to generate its own community and worldview.
1987: Whitley Strieber and Communion
If Adamski defined the contactee for the 1950s, Whitley Strieber helped define the experiencer for the late twentieth century. Communion appeared in 1987 and changed the cultural conversation; its cover became iconic: the large, dark eyes, the narrow face, and the penetrating gaze of the being that millions would come to associate with the Greys.
Strieber’s deeper contribution was psychological. He declined to reduce his experiences to a simple invasion story, wrestling instead with terror, transformation, consciousness, memory, the nature of reality, and the possibility that the visitors belonged to a category more complex than that of people from another planet. The phenomenon was growing harder to fit inside one box, and that difficulty was the point.
PART NINE
John Mack and the Experiencer Revolution
By the early 1990s, the number of people reporting contact had grown too large for anyone to dismiss them as a handful of eccentrics. Then a Harvard psychiatrist listened.
Dr. John E. Mack, psychiatrist and Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer of T. E. Lawrence, began interviewing people who reported abduction and contact experiences, and instead of assuming pathology, he took seriously what they said. He found people from varied social, educational and professional backgrounds describing experiences with striking similarities. Many were psychologically healthy, many had sought nothing of the kind, and many came through profound changes in worldview, spirituality and concern for the Earth. Harvard convened a committee to review his work, and he continued.
For experiencers, Mack’s importance is difficult to overstate. He gave people permission to speak without first declaring themselves insane or their experiences imaginary. Sasha and I knew John and moved through the same broader experiencer-and-consciousness community.
The contactee had become the experiencer, and the experiencer was starting to speak.
PART TEN
Janet Kira Lessin: Contact from Childhood to Johnston Atoll
My own place in this history began with contact rather than with a book. Understanding arrived much later.
Some of my earliest encounters happened in childhood, including my experience with the being I came to know as George, a Draco/Reptilian guide whose presence frightened me at first. That relationship changed over time as I learned that appearance, fear and intention are three separate things.
My life kept returning me to the subject. Science fiction opened another doorway, and The Day the Earth Stood Still resonated with its warning that human violence carries consequences past Earth, while Star Trek offered a different possibility, that humanity might survive its adolescence and join a larger community. As a teenager I took part in the campaign to save Star Trek.
Decades later the story turned literal. From 1995 to 1997 I worked as a civilian at Johnston Atoll in the Pacific, where my official duties described very little of what I came to understand was happening beneath and around that installation. My experiences there included direct interaction with non-human intelligences and work I understood as translation or liaison activity.
That period changed everything, because it removed the first question entirely. I had no need to decide whether extraterrestrials existed. The question had become who they are, what they are doing here, and what relationship humanity holds with them. That search converged in time with Sasha’s work and with our study of Zecharia Sitchin.
PART ELEVEN
Stewart Swerdlow: Contact, Montauk and a Personal Connection
Stewart Swerdlow occupies another controversial and important branch of experiencer history, the one running through Montauk, mind-control programs, non-human contact, and the intersection of consciousness with covert operations. For us, Stewart is more than a name in a book. We hosted him in Maui, and later Sasha and I traveled to Michigan to visit him and present at his conference.
That personal connection matters to this series. When people appear only as figures on websites, researchers flatten them into believers, debunked figures, whistleblowers, or contactees. Real people carry more complication than any of those labels hold. You eat with them, you watch how they behave when nobody is recording, you hear the stories that never reach a conference stage, and you compare what they tell you in private against what they say in public. Our history of contact includes those human relationships because we have lived inside part of the community we are documenting.
PART TWELVE
Alex Collier and the Andromedan Contact
Alex Collier described childhood contact with beings he identified as Andromedans, and later presented a sweeping history of extraterrestrial civilizations, conflicts, human origins, and Earth’s place inside a much larger galactic political environment. His work gained influence because he offered a civilization-scale narrative rather than a set of isolated sightings.
For many listeners, the astonishing element lay in how far pieces of that story echoed material from entirely separate contact traditions: reptilian races, humanoid civilizations, galactic federations, intervention in human development, Earth as contested territory, and human consciousness as the central prize. Different witnesses used different names while the same structures kept surfacing.
PART THIRTEEN
Contact, MILABs and Secret Space Program Testimony
Another group of witnesses emerged across the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, and their stories fit awkwardly inside either the classic contactee model or the abduction model, because they described military involvement.
Some experiencers reported being taken by humans in military environments as well as by non-human beings, and researchers began using the term MILAB, short for military abduction. Others described participation in classified space programs, underground facilities or off-world operations. The names associated with this broad field include William Tompkins, Randy Cramer, Corey Goode, Phil Schneider and Andrew Basiago, alongside Bob Lazar, whose claims concern reverse engineering rather than abduction and who therefore sits adjacent to this group rather than inside it.
The claims vary and so does the evidence. Even so, the arrival of this category changed the fundamental question. The issue was no longer only whether extraterrestrials are here. It had become a question of what portions of our own governments, militaries, and private corporations already know, and how long they have known it.
PART FOURTEEN
From UFO to UAP
The public debate stayed trapped for decades inside a false binary, in which UFOs were either extraterrestrial spacecraft or nothing at all. Meanwhile pilots kept seeing them, radar kept tracking them, military personnel kept reporting them, experiencers kept describing encounters, and researchers kept collecting cases.
Then the official language changed and UFO became UAP. The terminology sounded more respectable while the mystery stayed exactly where it was.
The modern public turning point arrived in 2017, when reporting on United States Navy encounters and previously classified videos forced the subject back into mainstream political and scientific conversation. Congressional hearings followed and military witnesses testified. David Grusch testified under oath in July 2023 and alleged the existence of a long-running crash-retrieval and reverse-engineering program involving non-human material. Lawmakers began asking questions that would once have ended political careers, and a subject long mocked entered congressional hearing rooms.
The experiencers had been talking the whole time. Governments were now reaching for some of the same vocabulary.
PART FIFTEEN
Contact Creates Religion, and Religion Preserves Contact
Place Crowley, Parsons, Hubbard, Adamski, Meier, the abductees, the channelers and the modern experiencers on one timeline and another pattern surfaces. Humanity has probably been doing this for far longer than a hundred years.
Ancient people also reported beings who descended from the sky, from whom they received laws, warnings, technology, calendars, agriculture, astronomy, instructions for temples, rules for kings, accounts of human creation, and stories of wars among the gods. Those encounters hardened into sacred history, sacred history hardened into religion, religion hardened into institution, and institution eventually forgot that someone, somewhere, had first claimed an encounter.
This is one reason our Anunnaki research belongs beside the modern contact story. The ancient record and the modern one may each hold a different chapter of a single phenomenon.
PART SIXTEEN
The People Behind the Cases
One goal of 100 Years of Contact is to recover what UFO history keeps losing: the people.
Billy Meier amounts to more than a collection of photographs, George Adamski to more than a desert encounter, John Mack to more than a Harvard credential, and Whitley Strieber to more than the face on the cover of Communion. Stewart Swerdlow amounts to more than Montauk, George Green to more than the man associated with Billy Meier books and Handbook for the New Paradigm, and William Tompkins to more than a secret space program witness.
They had spouses, children, and friends, along with fears, illnesses, arguments, failures, and moments of courage. They grew tired, they aged, and they died. Some of them called their friends near the end because they were afraid that what they knew would vanish along with them. George did, and that is one reason we are writing this series now.
PART SEVENTEEN
The Lessin Connection: We Were There Too
Looking back across these decades, Sasha and I keep noticing how often our own lives crossed the history we are now documenting. We studied with Zecharia Sitchin. We knew Lloyd Pye. We knew George and Gillian Green. We hosted Stewart Swerdlow in Maui and later visited him in Michigan. We moved through conferences and experiencer communities, and we interviewed researchers, contactees, whistleblowers, abductees, psychics, scientists, authors and witnesses.
I carried my own lifetime of contact into those conversations while Sasha brought anthropology, psychology, consciousness research and decades of scholarship. Sometimes we agreed with our guests, and sometimes we disagreed, and either way we listened. A historical record asks for exactly that. It asks for listening rather than for worship or for ridicule.
PART EIGHTEEN
What a Century of Contact Shows
After more than a hundred years, no single theory accounts for every case. Some encounters appear physical, some appear interdimensional, and some occur through consciousness alone. Some involve craft, and some involve beings; some involve military personnel, and some involve reproductive procedures. Some deliver warnings and some offer teachings, some terrify, and some heal, and some begin in childhood and continue across an entire lifetime. A great many witnesses report more than one category at once.
Perhaps the greatest mistake UFO research ever made was the assumption that all contact had to arrive through the same door. Reality may hold many doors.
CONCLUSION
From Contact to Relationship
The twentieth century asked whether we are alone, and the evidence accumulated until that question became inadequate. The deeper questions are harder. Who else is here, and how long have they been here? How many civilizations or forms of intelligence are involved? Which groups cooperate with humanity and which exploit us? What agreements have governments made, and what part does consciousness play? Why do some families report contact across generations, and why do ancient stories resemble modern encounters? Why have so many contactees delivered warnings about nuclear weapons, environmental destruction and human violence? And why, after decades of denial, are governments themselves now speaking in public about non-human intelligence?
Perhaps disclosure was never going to arrive as one president walking to a podium. Perhaps it has been arriving person by person for generations.
Crowley drew Lam. Parsons attempted to open a doorway while helping humanity build rockets. Hubbard turned cosmic history into religion. Billy Meier said Sfath came to him as a child in 1942. Kenneth Arnold watched nine impossible objects cross the sky in 1947. Roswell placed the phenomenon inside the machinery of national security. Adamski said he met Orthon in the desert. Betty and Barney Hill brought missing time and abduction into public consciousness. Travis Walton disappeared for five days. Meier photographed what he said were his contacts’ ships, and George Green followed those photographs to Switzerland. Whitley Strieber gave the experiencer a face, and John Mack gave the experiencer a hearing. William Tompkins described a hidden history of aerospace contact, Stewart Swerdlow described contact inside covert programs, and Alex Collier described civilizations beyond Earth. Thousands of others told their stories with less fame and no less conviction.
Some of us lived long enough to watch the language change around us, from alien to extraterrestrial to UFO to UAP to NHI. Words shift when human understanding shifts, and the phenomenon stays where it is.
For a century we have treated these people as isolated anomalies. They are anything but isolated. Put them in chronological order and a different picture appears, because they form a history, and that history may be the opening chapter of humanity’s recognition that Earth has never been an isolated world.
The age of asking whether contact is possible is coming to an end. The age of understanding the relationship has begun.
Janet Kira Lessin | Sasha Alex Lessin, Ph.D. | Research: Claudia Lenore | © 2026 Aquarian Media
DragonAtTheEndOfTime.com | EnkiSpeaks.com | AquarianMedia.org
This work rests on the testimony of people who spoke when speaking cost them. We name them, we thank them, and we hold their accounts in their own words.
