CE-5

The label now names more than a category of sighting. It covers a field protocol built on group meditation and signaling, a network of local practice groups, a 2020 documentary, and a smartphone app, and it serves as the flagship term for the wider practice of human-initiated contact.²

The Hynek close encounter scale

Hynek's original classification

The scale that CE-5 attaches itself to comes from The UFO Experience: A Scientific Inquiry, the 1972 book in which J. Allen Hynek sorted UFO reports into six categories. Three covered observations at a distance: nocturnal lights, daylight discs, and radar-visual cases. The other three were close encounters, which Hynek restricted to events within roughly 150 meters, about 500 feet, to limit misidentification.^1,3 A close encounter of the first kind is a visual sighting at that range with some detail visible. The second kind adds a reported physical effect, such as interference with vehicles or electronics, scorched vegetation, or frightened animals. The third kind involves an animated entity, including humanoid figures, observed in or near the object.^1,3

Hynek came to the subject from inside official investigation. The United States Air Force recruited him as an astronomical consultant in 1948, and he served Project Blue Book from 1952 until the project closed in 1969. He began as a doubter, later writing: "I had scarcely heard of UFOs in 1948 and, like every other scientist I knew, assumed that they were nonsense." He founded the Center for UFO Studies in 1973. His third category supplied the title of Steven Spielberg's 1977 film Close Encounters of the Third Kind, for which Hynek was paid $1,000 for the title, $1,000 for story rights, and $1,500 for three days of technical consulting, along with a brief on-screen cameo.³

Later extensions of the scale

Hynek's own scale ended at the third kind. He died in 1986, and the higher categories were added by others. His colleague Jacques Vallée extended the system by two steps in his 1990 book Confrontations: A Scientist's Search for Alien Contact, defining a close encounter of the fourth kind as an event in which a human is abducted and a close encounter of the fifth kind as one in which the witness receives a physical effect from the encounter, typically injury or healing.¹ Greer then redefined the fifth kind as human-initiated contact, in which individuals or groups use specific protocols to attempt communication with extraterrestrial beings, and Greer's sense is the one in general circulation today.¹ The categories beyond Hynek's original three are applied unevenly in the research literature, and writers continue to debate how well the later additions fit the framework Hynek designed.¹

The CE-5 protocol

Greer founded CSETI in 1990 and organized its field practice as the CE-5 Initiative.² In an April 1995 presentation in Denver he gave the definition that CSETI materials still use: "A Close Encounter of the Fifth Kind is when humans deliberately take the initiative to interact with or communicate with, no matter how simply, with these life forms and their spacecraft."⁴ The protocol combines a trained mental practice with physical signaling, carried out by small working groups in the field, typically at night.⁴

Coherent thought sequencing

The protocol's core is a meditative practice CSETI calls coherent thought sequencing. Participants first settle into what Greer describes as a non-linear state of mind, and the 1995 transcript states that "the Coherent Thought Sequencing actually begins once that state of non-linear mind is accessed." The practice treats directed group thought as a signal that a non-human intelligence can perceive and answer.⁴

Light and sound signaling

The mental work is paired with physical beacons. Groups shine powerful lamps at the sky, on CSETI's stated reasoning that high-powered lights "may attract the ET craft if they are in the general vicinity." Tones that CSETI attributes to earlier UFO events are played into the air and broadcast by radio "to serve as a sort of beacon."⁴

Working groups and expeditions

CSETI organized practitioners into local working groups based in specific areas, plus a traveling unit Greer called the Rapid Mobilization Investigative Team, described in the 1995 transcript as "a type of rapid deployment team."⁴ Joseph Burkes, a retired internal medicine physician, organized a Los Angeles contact team in 1992 and served as a CSETI working group coordinator for over five years. His accounts place meditation and mental connection at the center of the fieldwork.⁵

Historical development

Greer founded CSETI in 1990 while working as an emergency physician. He holds a 1982 biology degree from Appalachian State University and an M.D. from the James H. Quillen College of Medicine, and he retired from emergency medicine in 1998.² He had earlier taught Transcendental Meditation, and his team reported its first successful contact event in 1991.⁶ In 1993 he founded the Disclosure Project, which moved much of his public activity toward campaigning for the public release of government UFO records.² Through the 1990s and 2000s the CE-5 practice spread mainly through CSETI presentations, trainings, and local working groups.^4,5

The 2020 documentary

Close Encounters of the Fifth Kind: Contact Has Begun, directed by Michael Mazzola and narrated by actor Jeremy Piven, was released to streaming on April 7, 2020 through distributor 1091 Media, with a running time of 80 minutes.⁷ The film features Greer alongside Daniel Sheehan, Jan Harzan, and Russell Targ.² Its reception split along familiar lines, with a 20 percent score from the five critic reviews counted on Rotten Tomatoes against a 78 percent audience score.⁷ The film carried the protocol to a mass streaming audience, and its release came in the same week as the CE5 Contact app.^7,8,9

The CE5 Contact app

The CE5 Contact app, published by Sirius Technology Advanced Research and sold through Greer's Sirius Disclosure store, was first released in the spring of 2020. The store dates the original release to April 5, 2020, two days before the documentary's streaming premiere.^8,9 The app promises "instructions and tools to assist you in making peaceful contact with extraterrestrial civilizations as well as locating others in your area who are interested in making contact," and its features include training materials developed by Greer, a step-by-step CE5 process, guided meditations, an equipment list, and networking functions for finding other practitioners.⁹ Priced at $9.99, the Android version alone has logged more than 120,000 downloads.⁸

Writing in Religion Dispatches in January 2024, religious studies scholar Joseph Laycock of Texas State University described CE5 as "a growing movement of people attempting to contact aliens using meditation" and examined how contact groups form and grow, drawing on sociological frameworks developed for the study of new spiritual movements.⁶

CE-5, Human-Initiated Contact, and HICE

CE-5 is the oldest and most visible member of a family of overlapping terms. Human-initiated contact is the plain descriptive phrase for the practice, used when writers want the concept without the Hynek numbering. HICE, expanded as Human Initiated Contact Events and in some practitioner material as Human Initiated Contact Experiences, was adopted by Joseph Burkes after his years inside CSETI. Burkes states his preference directly: "I prefer using the term HICE (Human Initiated Contact Events) for human empowered contact efforts." His stated reason is that the CE-5 label was chosen to fit contact work into the classification lineage of Hynek and Vallée, and that the fit is poor because, in his judgment, the intelligences rather than the researchers control the circumstances of an encounter.⁵ The three terms describe the same field practice from different commitments, with CE-5 tied to Greer's organization and branding, human-initiated contact serving as the neutral umbrella, and HICE marking a practitioner current that has stepped away from the scientific-classification framing.

Leading interpretations

These interpretations are not mutually exclusive.

Documentation and research record

CSETI's public materials cite a large evidence base for the wider UFO phenomenon, including over 3,000 reports of sightings by pilots and over 4,000 cases the group describes as landing traces.² The CE-5 record itself is built from a different kind of documentation. The typical products of a contact session are participant testimony, session logs, and night footage of small, distant lights, a body of material that captures the experience directly but rarely permits instrument-grade identification of what appeared in the sky.¹⁰

Disciplined identification is part of serious contact fieldwork, because the modern night sky is crowded. Reviewers of CE-5 reports note that satellite trackers can resolve unfamiliar moving points into cataloged spacecraft, that Starlink passes can appear "insanely bright and clear to the naked eye," and that slow-moving dots often reveal themselves as aircraft as they approach.¹⁰ Experienced observers treat these checks as routine practice, since ruling out satellites, aircraft, and astronomical objects is what allows any remaining event to stand as genuinely unexplained.

The most widely discussed piece of CE-5 footage comes from a January 27, 2015 event at Vero Beach on Florida's east coast, showing lights offshore. Greer stated that "there were NO boats or ships seen anywhere in the area of the objects" and that "these are not flares." In July 2020, Washington Examiner writer Tom Rogan matched the sighting to flight tracking data showing a Beech 76 Duchess, registration N110SU, crossing the area at 85 miles per hour at 9:11 p.m., and argued that a crew at that speed could feasibly have deployed parachute flares.¹¹ The two readings of the footage remain in the public record side by side, and the case illustrates the value of pairing night observations with flight tracking data.

The documentation of the practice itself has accumulated in layers over more than three decades, from CSETI's trainings, expedition reports, and local working groups in the 1990s through the film, the app, and the practitioner networks that now carry the protocol worldwide.²

No CE-5 event has yet been documented under controlled conditions with independent instrumentation, and practitioners and researchers alike have noted that gap. What exists is a substantial body of sustained testimony, contested night footage, and a living practice that many adherents describe in contemplative as well as evidential terms. The record establishes that participants at CE-5 events consistently report striking experiences. Whether those experiences involve a source beyond the cataloged sky is the question serious contact research is now working to answer.

The record and open questions

Documented: Hynek's 1972 classification ended at the third kind, and he died in 1986 without authoring any higher category. Vallée added a fourth and fifth category in 1990, and Greer's CSETI, founded in 1990, redefined the fifth kind as human-initiated contact. The 2020 documentary and the CE5 Contact app are documented releases with a documented reception, including a sharply divided critic and audience response to the film and more than 120,000 Android downloads for the app. For the most publicized piece of CE-5 footage, one journalist's flight-data analysis proposed a conventional candidate source, a reading Greer disputes.

Reported: Practitioners report lights, craft, sensed presences, and experienced communication during protocol sessions, describe these events as responsive to group intention, and frame the practice as a repeatable contemplative discipline rather than a one-time sighting. Working group organizers such as Joseph Burkes report five years and more of sustained fieldwork built on these experiences.

Open questions: Which lights logged at CE-5 events belong to the cataloged population of satellites, aircraft, flares, and astronomical objects, and which fall outside it, is a question careful groups work through case by case. No controlled, independently instrumented study of the protocol has yet been published, which leaves the tie between directed human intention and anomalous aerial events a live question the field is equipped to take up.

Frequently asked questions

What is a close encounter of the fifth kind?

A close encounter of the fifth kind, or CE-5, is a contact event in which humans deliberately initiate communication, most commonly through the protocol of group meditation, light signaling, and tone broadcasting developed by Steven Greer's CSETI in the early 1990s. The term extends J. Allen Hynek's close encounter scale, which originally ended at the third kind.

Did J. Allen Hynek create the CE-5 category?

No. Hynek's 1972 scale defined only the first three kinds of close encounter, and he died in 1986 before the higher categories appeared. Jacques Vallée added a fourth and a fifth category in 1990 with different meanings, and Steven Greer redefined the fifth kind as human-initiated contact. Attributing CE-5 to Hynek is a common error.

What is the CE-5 protocol?

The CSETI protocol combines coherent thought sequencing, a guided meditative practice in which participants direct thought toward inviting contact, with physical signaling using high-powered lights and recorded tones played into the sky and broadcast by radio. Groups typically work at night at remote sites and log any lights or perceived responses.

What results do CE-5 practitioners report?

Practitioners report frequent sightings of lights and craft, sensed presences, and experiences of communication during protocol sessions. Careful groups check candidate lights against satellite, aircraft, and astronomical data, since the modern night sky is crowded with conventional objects. No controlled study with independent instrumentation has yet been published, so the question of what the protocol produces remains open.

What is the CE5 Contact app?

CE5 Contact is a $9.99 smartphone app published in 2020 by Sirius Technology Advanced Research and sold through Greer's Sirius Disclosure store. It offers step-by-step protocol instructions, guided meditations, an equipment list, and tools for finding other practitioners nearby. The Android version alone has recorded more than 120,000 downloads.

What is the difference between CE-5 and HICE?

They describe the same practice from different vantage points. CE-5 ties human-initiated contact to the Hynek classification lineage and to Greer's organization. HICE, for Human Initiated Contact Events, was adopted by former CSETI working group coordinator Joseph Burkes, who argues that the scientific classification framing fits the phenomenon poorly. Human-initiated contact is the neutral umbrella phrase covering both.

Sources and further reading

1. Wikipedia. "Close encounter." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Close_encounter
2. Wikipedia. "Steven M. Greer." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_M._Greer
3. History.com. "Meet J. Allen Hynek, the Astronomer Who First Classified UFO 'Close Encounters'." https://www.history.com/articles/j-allen-hynek-ufos-project-blue-book
4. Greer, Steven M. "The CE-5 Initiative." CSETI presentation transcript, Denver, April 8, 1995, as recorded by Shari Adamiak. https://drstevengreer.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/CE-5-Initiative-Transcript.pdf
5. Burkes, Joseph. "Human Initiated Contact Events (HICE) and the Consciousness Connection." Contact Underground, February 10, 2022. https://contactunderground.org/2022/02/10/human-initiated-contact-events-hice-and-the-consciousness-connection/
6. Laycock, Joseph. "Amid Anticipation of Government Disclosure, 'We Are Not Alone' Follows Those Who Claim Alien Contact Through Meditation." Religion Dispatches, January 25, 2024. https://religiondispatches.org/with-increase-in-government-inquiry-we-are-not-alone-follows-those-who-claim-alien-contact-through-meditation/
7. Rotten Tomatoes. "Close Encounters of the Fifth Kind: Contact Has Begun." https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/close_encounters_of_the_fifth_kind_contact_has_begun
8. AppBrain. "CE5 Contact." https://www.appbrain.com/app/ce5-contact/com.star.ce5contact
9. Sirius Disclosure. "CE5 Contact: the app to help you initiate peaceful ET contact." https://shop.siriusdisclosure.com/pages/ce5-contact-app
10. Metabunk. "Needs Debunking: CE-5, humans initiating UFO sightings." https://www.metabunk.org/threads/needs-debunking-ce-5-humans-initiating-ufo-sightings.11262/
11. Rogan, Tom. "Did Steven Greer fake a UFO with flares?" Washington Examiner, July 31, 2020. https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/2330755/did-steven-greer-fake-a-ufo-with-flares/