Contact in the Desert

AFTER THE GOLD RUSH

Neil Young, 1970

The words ontological shock are the only ones I can take from their usual contexts and place before the sight that greeted me when I landed in Palm Springs and beheld the desert for the first time. After some long moments committing the sight to permanent memory storage, I grabbed my bag, got in a cab, and made my way to my final destination: Contact in the Desert. My first UFO conference.

The roots of American UFO culture stretch across the Southwest and into California’s aerospace industry, emerging alongside the development of rockets, radar, nuclear technology, intelligence operations, and experimental flight. It is inexorably tied to the government programs, projects, and tests whose histories—known, hidden, or standing somewhere between the two— continue to shape the myth, the mystery, and, for a few days in Palm Springs, the reality surrounding the phenomenon.

Founded in 2014, Contact in the Desert has grown into one of the largest gatherings devoted to UFOs, unexplained phenomena, consciousness studies, ancient mysteries, and speculative science. Its speakers include physicists, military personnel, intelligence officials, religious thinkers, filmmakers, experiencers, and authors.

Nearby stands Giant Rock, site of the Giant Rock Interplanetary Spacecraft Conventions, where thousands of believers, skeptics, researchers, and contactees gathered during the 1950s and 1960s. Long before podcasts, livestreams, and YouTube channels, Giant Rock was one of the centers of American UFO culture. What has changed since those conversations began is considerable, but even more so, the synchronous nature of the similarities remains endlessly fascinating to me as a great admirer of the patterns woven by time.

The subject of disclosure—the promise hanging like a piñata we can’t see but hit with enough accuracy to know it’s still above—that government might finally reveal what they know—was once again being debated in real time, though I’ll bet that I’m not alone in the expectation of candy falling all over the floor.

LOVE WALKS IN

Van Halen, 1986

I’ve seen enough and heard enough to imagine that the best conversations happen outside the lecture halls. They happen when people can talk about everything except the topic and, somehow, everything inside the topic at the same time.

So I go down to the bar.

Words like retrieval drift through the room. Acronyms bounce between tables. I hear familiar voices belonging to people I don’t know. Supporters of extraterrestrial visitation sit beside advocates of interdimensional theories. Those waiting for a glimpse share tables with experiencers. Mystics mingle with nuts-and-bolts materialists. I drink a cocktail and attempt to first be present in, and then enjoy, the moment.

A SPACEMAN CAME TRAVELING

Chris de Burgh, 1975

The panels serve as sermons to those who read the book at home. Something closer to communion, and sometimes with its author on stage.

I look up at Whitley Strieber, author of the book largely responsible for mass cultural interest in the abductee experience, but also the writer who inspired me to put pen to paper. Around him, the conference continues its endless exchange of testimony, theory, and revelation.

A filmmaker speaks. A researcher speaks. An experiencer speaks.

Chris Bledsoe, a crowd favorite, emerged publicly after a series of experiences he describes as encounters with anomalous intelligences and luminous aerial phenomena. His story attracted attention not only from UFO researchers but also from individuals connected to government, intelligence, and scientific institutions. Over time, his account evolved into something larger than a conventional contact narrative. It became a story about prophecy, consciousness, religion, and the possibility that whatever humanity encounters in the skies may be inseparable from the oldest questions it asks about God.

This is not the first time that we, as a country, have lived through a reckoning—a collective, furtive gaze at our shadow, with our necks turned upward to watch the sky.

In 1951, Jesus walked out of a spaceship to sounds only Bernard Herrmann could create and was shot upon arrival. In “The Day the Earth Stood Still”, Michael Rennie’s Klaatu takes the name “Carpenter” to become the kind of stranger who is allowed to look, who is allowed to visit, and to remain. Someone from somewhere else, as all are before the agreement of belonging.

Across ufology, popular culture, and even parts of the national security apparatus, conversations once framed strictly in terms of extraterrestrial visitors increasingly drift toward questions of consciousness, spirituality, and metaphysics.

This shift materializes in real time on my second day of the conference during a panel discussion when Chris Bledsoe announces that a peer-reviewed paper by MIT researchers will emerge within the next few years that will confirm the universe was created by a non-material God, according to his source.

People clap.

This is a community capable of applauding material science, spirituality, government whistleblowers, ancient mysteries, consciousness studies, and extraterrestrial hypotheses all within the same afternoon.

There is more clapping than I ever thought possible.

But sitting among thousands of people who have devoted years, and sometimes entire lifetimes, to questions that once provoked the American laugh track instead of hands coming together in support—or, if not support, respectful acknowledgment—I find the force between my hands doubled, and I hear a new world.

I Hear a New World — Joe Meek & The Blue Men, 1960