Free Resources for Experiencers
When I started my journey of trying to make sense of my experiences, I didn’t know ufology or cryptozoology or parapsychology existed and had no idea that other people had similar experiences. I felt alone, confused and terrified. Over the last several years with the help of wonderful teachers, mentors and fellow experiencers I have been able to find ground and context, if not solid answers. In fact, I am skeptical of anyone claiming to have solid answers to the mystery of the phenomenon, as it’s often called. What I have found are ways to think about and interact with these mysterious landscapes and experiences. Ways that have empowered me and brought me into a new relationship with myself, with the Beings, with the Unseen world, and with reality itself. As humanity hesitates on the threshold of an entirely new iteration of itself, many of us of being called to go first. To cross the threshold and undertake this Hero’s Journey, or better yet, Inanna’s Descent. The price of entry to the new world is the ability to hold paradox, to die before we die so that we can truly live and the phenomenon is an initiation into that new world. This is not the only way to look at these sometimes terrifying, sometimes exultant, sometimes absurd experiences, but this context has given me a sense of agency and clarity that has helped me in every aspect of my life. I am happy to offer that context here, and invite you into the journey to see for yourself. It is not for the faint of heart, and it is worth every step.
Framework and Context
“The phenomenon is a koan, an archetype, a paradox, a riddle, a trickster, driving us to renegotiate our relationship with reality.
UFOs are both real and ephemeral. Beings visit us across all levels of our consciousness at will.
Waking life becomes a lucid dream.
The gift of the phenomenon is that it remains sufficiently slippery, eluding consumption and assimilation.
Am I an Experiencer? and other FAQ’s
Former New York Times reporter Ralph Blumenthal references the term experiencer in his 2021 Debrief article and says it is “a word that describes nothing - because their experiences seem so impossible to imagine.” It describes people who have had contact with non-human intelligence and/or UFOs. There is also a broader definition of the term which I prefer and use: An experiencer is anyone who has experienced any and all kinds of anomalous phenonemon. This can include pre-cognition, lucid dreaming, contact with the Dead, altered states of consciousness, out-of-body experiences, high strangeness, visitations, abductions, contact with cryptids… you get it. Anything that doesn’t fit into consensus reality.
When I talk about the phenomenon, then, I’m referring to those unexplained occurrences that lead us to question the nature of reality, and our relationship with it. Essentially, it is the overarching mystery surrounding these experiences and their potential connection to our understanding of reality and consciousness.
Ultimately, these terms and identities can be extremely helpful guides and pointers as we begin to navigate this wild and weird landscape. Like all identities, we may also come to a point in our journeys where we integrate and transcend them in favor of something larger and more expansive, or something seemingly simpler (but is it?) like human; a many-bodied, multidimensional expression of the All, walking around in a body which is maybe the most absurd and anomalous experience we can have.
All of this to say… Are you an experiencer? I don’t know, man. If you’ve made it this far - if you long for contact with the mystery, if you can’t stop listening to UFO podcasts, if you’ve ever had an experience that doesn’t fit into consensus reality - you probably are, even if you’ve never seen a UFO.
The most common words uttered to me by clients are:
“I don’t think I’m an experiencer - not like other people are - but there was this one time… “
From the UFO to Personal & Spiritual Development
When we have experiences that shake our view of reality, we can experience “ontological shock”, a term popularized by Harvard psychiatrist John Mack in his 1994 book Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens. This term described a spiritual disorientation that can occur when someone is confronted with something that challenges a deep belief around the very nature of reality. Many who have had near-death experiences, psychedelic journeys, contact with non-human intelligence, UFO sightings, pre-cognitive dreams, out-of-body experiences or anything that disrupts the perception of reality, also experience ontological shock. This can send us on a journey to find new ground and stability and to make sense of a strange new world where reality is not what we thought it was. That journey aligns with the depths of our very human nature and can include spiritual development, shadow work, parts work, dreamwork, building somatic capacity and working with all aspects of our multidimensional selves.
For some experiencers, the journey becomes both developmental and spiritual.
I often ask the question jokingly - how do we start with the UFO and end up feeling our feelings? It may sound funny, but many experiencers, including me, have found that this is exactly the path that unfolds as we begin to reckon with reality and our place in it. As we engage with the “Other” we unexpectedly find that we deepen into our humanity, including some parts of humanity that we here in the West have left behind. We move from a strictly materialist worldview into a much more expansive and enchanted landscape that includes the emotional body, physical body and other, more subtle bodies. As we take this journey, we can look to spiritual traditions and in some cases teachings from the Beings themselves to guide us.
The UFO and abduction experience
“has something to do with what we call death.”
-Anne Strieber
Consciousness, Death, Time and Dreams
When we begin to engage with our anomalous and extraordinary experiences, we orient towards a sense of long time, the long self, and very nature of consciousness, dreams, death and time. Many people who have experienced one type of anomalous event such as seeing a UFO, also have paranormal experiences, time anomalies, expanding psychic abilities, out-of-body experiences, contact with the Dead, lucid dreams and more. Why is that? What’s going on here? We are simply remembering innate parts of ourselves which we’ve forgotten. The journey becomes an unveiling, a rediscovery, a homecoming to our intrinsic humanity, while at the very same time we are bridging to a new and as of yet unwritten future. All of this becomes Death Practice, Dream Practice, and time and consciousness themselves take on a different meaning.
“The nature of our species is
to be in relationship with these
beings & realms, to the
deeper registers of ourselves
and to the part of
us that already know how
to interact with them all.
We just forgot.”
-Me, from
Earth: a Love Story
Protection Practice and Connection With Your Unseen Team
As we begin to re-enchant the world as animate, alive and teeming with unseen discrete ontological beings, and begin to implement practices to connect with that unseen world, we can experience their presence more and more in ordinary life. Trust is a big part of this. Not every disincarnate being who might be hanging around should be invited in to give guidance. Or invited in at all. It’s extremely important to use discernment and get specific about who we’re calling in and why.
Step 1: Be clear with language that rings true for you. Ask to connect with your Team, your Guides, your Council - those beings who have your highest interest at heart and are here specifically to support your earthly incarnation and evolution. Whatever you choose to call them be specific about who you’re calling in. You don’t need to know their names, who they are as individuals. Maybe you have a sense of them or maybe you don’t. If you don’t, don’t worry about it. Trust that they are there and they love and support you, and the details can arrive over time.
Step 2: Ask them for help, protection, support, feeling safe enough to sleep, connection, or whatever seems most needed in your life. Ask for big and small signs. This step can feel weirdly transactional, but it is actually relational. We are stating desires and needs and as long as they’re aligned and sincere, the guides seem to want to help. And this is a co-creation, and we can practice building healthy relationships here.
Step 3: Say thank you. Leave offerings. Acknowledge their presence. Treat these relationships as if they are important to you and as if, again, you’re dealing with actual beings (which, spoiler, you are). Tend to them like any other relationship that you really care about.
Step 4: Be consistent – show up regularly to tell them you’re serious. (Also, if you’re someone who’s overworked and exhausted, don't make it into another task on your to-do list to stress out about. Just do your best.)
Step 5: Pay attention. Keep an eye out for ways that the guides are interacting with you, bringing you information, support, signs, synchronicities, whatever it is you need. Do this short practice with care and attention twice a day--I recommend while lying in bed just after waking and just before sleep in that liminal, edgespace that seems to support such work.
Reach out to me if you’re not seeing results with this practice! I’m happy to help refine this process.
Common Struggles Reported by Experiencers
The most common ailment that clients bring to me is one that is a part of my own experience. I, like so many other experiencers, have struggled with falling asleep, feeling safe while sleeping, or having such terror at night that sleeping without the lights on or alone has felt impossible. Many experiencers also struggle with how to define reality, where to place their attention and how to integrate their experiences into everyday life. We can have difficulties relating to our loved ones who, even if supportive, can’t fully understand our experiences. Many of us also wrestle with both wanting the experiences to stop and wanting them to continue, highlighting issues around consent, trauma, boundaries and agency.
In much of Western civilization, we are still operating under the split that happened when we entered into the rational materialist age which says that if you can’t see it and measure it, it isn’t real. This disconnected us from our interior landscapes, our dream lives, our deep and mysterious psyches, and our multidimensional, multi-bodied selves. These realms of consciousness are where many phenomenal experiences take place. The Overculture, as I call it, tells us that these realms either don’t exits or aren’t important, leaving us questioning ourselves and our own lived journeys.
The good news is that there is a pathway through the challenges which not only can help us sleep peacefully and integrate our weirdest and wildest experiences, but can also take us on a journey of discovery and empowerment as we come to terms with our phenomenal and anomalous experiences. This is a journey of claiming our agency, finding supportive community and rediscovering our humanity in new and beautiful ways. We claim our sacred interiority without leaving behind rationality. We connect to Unseen teams and resources, as well as begin to decode and trust the mysterious and shadowy inner realms. We safely explore our psychic gifts and positive contact with non-human intelligence, mediumship, etc., while not abandoning our own agency and sovereignty.
“The ufo is nothing more than an assertion of herself by the Goddess into history,
saying to science and paternalistically governed and driven organizations:
You have gone far enough.
We are going to turn the world upside down.”
- Terence McKenna
UFO’s and The Goddess
Inextricably and mysteriously entwined, the Goddess, the Divine Feminine, the Lady, appears alongside UFO’s and the phenomenon again and again. She unexpectedly appeared in my life just as I was being broken open by my experiences with the phenomenon, and completely rearranged and redirected me. She is rising, just like we’ve all heard, but not how we thought. She is coming up through the soles of our feet. She is integrating our physical and emotional bodies through the nervous system that weaves them together. She reminds us that our bodies are the bodies of the Earth, and that we are here for a reason. That we incarnated into these flesh and blood bodies, and that simply being here and present with them is perhaps the most psychedelic experience we can have. What it is like to feel Her, Life Herself, moving through us, coursing through our veins, the feeling of being alive and on a planet during an extraordinary time. She reminds us not to only seek up and out, but to also answer the call to be drawn down and in. She stands for us, her children, and for the animals and trees and plants and all of life here on our precious planet. As humanity longs to join a galactic family, she reminds us that we belong to her. That unless we integrate our utter dismissal and fear of death and suffering, we will just keep repeating the horrors we’ve been exacting on each other and the other species on this planet. Many experiencers have been given visions of catastrophe - what I call Armageddon dreams. We’ve been shown our precious planet being destroyed again and again, and we’ve been called to do something about it. The reintegration of the feminine into our own bodies, our relationships, and into the collective consciousness is a vital piece of the story. We must come when she calls and she’s called.
“... the renegotiation
of trauma is an inherently
mythic-poetic-heroic journey.
It is a journey that belongs
to all of us…”
-Peter Levine
Doorway, Gateway, Portal, Bridge
The Experiencer Group - A private, supportive community for those who have experienced anomalous phenomena including out of body experiences, NDE’s, contact with non human intelligence, sleep paralysis, etc. *Right now this is my very favorite thing.*
Jeffrey J. Kripal - Read all of his books if you’re looking for support and framework to engage with the idea that we’re limited by materialism. The Flip, and How to Think Impossibly are highly recommended.
Aliens & Artists - A podcast dedicated to exploring how contact with non-human entities impacts human creativity and artistry. Stuart is no longer recording new episodes but this remains as a valuable guide for how to think about and engage with the phenomenon.
The UFO Rabbit Hole Podcast - A speculative non-fiction podcast about UFOs—and everything else. Kelly Chase provides brilliant framework for experiencers and skeptics alike.
The Telepathy Tapes - This groundbreaking series challenges everything we think we know about communication and the human mind, inviting viewers to step into a reality where the impossible is not only possible but happening every day. Through emotional stories and undeniable evidence, The Telepathy Tapes offers a fresh perspective on the profound connections that exist beyond words.
Mike Clelland - Known as “the owl guy”, Mike explores the relationship between owls and UFO sightings. He has written several books that contribute powerful contexts that help us figure out how to think about the mystery and reality. He also is the art director for my book Earth: A Love Story, and beyond all of his helpful and brilliant books and podcast and blog, he’s just the nicest guy.
Charlie Morley - Lucid dreaming teacher who helps people wake up in their dreams, transform their shadow and harness the power of sleep for psychological growth. His books Dreaming Through Darkness and Dreams of Awakening are both highly recommended.
Eric Wargo - His books Time Loops and Precognitive Dream and the Long Self can help us build new frameworks to open our ideas around time.
Dopey - Podcast about Drugs, Addiction, and Dumb Shit. What does this have to do with experiencer life? Depends on if you’ve tried to cope with things by using substances. If that’s the case, you might find resonance and relief in this raw, funny, raunchy, emotional podcast. If “war stories” are triggering, keep a weather eye.
This Naked Mind - Annie Grace, check her out if you’re not into AA but want a better relationship with alcohol.
Find a Meeting - Alcoholics Anonymous - find a meeting anywhere nationwide
Lifeline - Suicide prevention