Contactee

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Contactees are persons who claim to have experienced contact with extraterrestrials. Some claimed ongoing encounters, while others claimed to have had as few as a single encounter. Evidence is anecdotal in all cases.

As a cultural phenomenon, contactees achieved their greatest notoriety during the 1950s, but individuals continue to make similar claims in the present day. Some contactees have shared their messages with small groups of believers and followers, and many have written books, published magazine and newspaper articles, issued newsletters or spoken at UFO conventions.

The contactee movement has received serious attention from academics and mainstream scholars. Among the earliest was the 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 various contactee movements.

The accounts of contactees generally differ from those who allege alien abduction, in that while contactees frequently describe positive experiences involving humanoid aliens, abductees usually describe their encounters as frightening or disturbing.