Contact Meditation

The practice differs from conventional meditation in its stated aim. Mindfulness and concentration traditions treat attention itself as the object of training. Contact meditation treats a quieted mind as a transmitter and receiver, and practitioners judge a session by whether a response arrives.

Main elements of the practice

Core components

Across groups the practice combines three elements. The first is a settling period in which participants quiet mental activity, described in protocol materials as reaching a "silent state of mind."² The second is focused intention, a sustained mental invitation directed at whatever intelligence the group believes may be listening. The third is visualization, in which participants picture locations, routes, or an arriving object in structured detail. Sessions typically run at night in dark-sky locations, last from one to several hours, and close with participants comparing what they saw or felt.

Coherent thought sequencing

The most codified version belongs to the Center for the Study of Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence, or CSETI, whose working groups call the technique coherent thought sequencing. In a lecture delivered in Denver on April 8, 1995, and transcribed by his colleague Shari Adamiak, CSETI founder Steven Greer described a guided sequence in which participants reach a silent mental state and then picture the Milky Way, the solar system, the Earth, and finally the exact research site, in effect transmitting directions inward from the galactic scale.² Greer described the underlying technique as "essentially discovered in 1973." CSETI protocols pair this mental work with high-powered lamps and recorded tones played into the sky, a combination the 1995 lecture reports raised the yield of its field expeditions to nearly 100 percent.² The figure comes from the protocol literature's own field reporting.

Groups and retreats

The practice extends well beyond CSETI. Independent CE-5 groups meet on their own schedules. A representative example is a group in Farmington, New Mexico, founded by the Rev. Sandra MacCready Clark, which began monthly meditation meetings in October 2022. Clark summarized the aim for a regional newspaper in 2023, "Instead of the aliens getting in contact with us, we are trying to get in touch with them."³ Retreat settings exist as well. The best known is the ECETI ranch at Trout Lake, Washington, at the base of Mount Adams, where owner James Gilliland established Enlightened Contact with ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence, an organization he dates to 1986, and has hosted skywatching events since 2003.⁴ A reporter who joined a 2014 visit described an evening meditation circle led by Gilliland followed by hours of group skywatching, with nearly 30 travelers on that trip.⁵

Historical development

The classification that frames the practice comes from astronomer J. Allen Hynek, whose 1972 book The UFO Experience: A Scientific Inquiry introduced the close encounter scale. Hynek's original scheme ran to three kinds, covering close-range sightings, physical effects, and observed entities. The fourth and fifth kinds were added by others after his death in 1986, and the reading of the fifth kind as human-initiated contact is attributed to Steven Greer.¹

Greer, a retired emergency physician, founded CSETI in 1990 and built the CE-5 concept into a field program of trained contact teams.⁶ The April 1995 Denver lecture laid out the working-group method in public form.² The practice reached its widest audience with the April 2020 documentary Close Encounters of the Fifth Kind: Contact Has Begun, directed by Michael Mazzola, which carried the protocols and the testimony of longtime practitioners to a wide streaming audience.⁶

Independent groups continue to form outside CSETI. The Farmington group began meeting in 2022, and filmmaker Serena DC's documentary We Are Not Alone drew coverage in early 2024 for following practitioners who report contact through meditation.^3,7 Religious studies scholar Joseph Laycock, writing about the film and the wider movement, described the hope surrounding contact and disclosure as "a form of millennialism" and studied the groups with the tools religious studies brings to emerging movements.⁷

What practitioners report

Session reports follow a recognizable pattern. The most common events are distant lights, points resembling stars or satellites that practitioners describe as brightening, dimming, flashing, or changing course in apparent response to the group. At the 2014 ECETI gathering, one visitor described a light that brightened and then vanished about a dozen times, while the reporter present sorted her own observations carefully, noting which of the lights she saw might have been meteors, the kind of discipline experienced skywatchers apply on any field night.⁵

A second class of reports is interior. Practitioners describe felt presences in the meditation circle, physical sensations such as energy moving through the body, and mental imagery experienced as telepathic communication.⁵ A member of the Farmington group described a 2017 meditation encounter with a nine-foot being that communicated telepathically about environmental destruction.³ Filmmaker Serena DC described her own first session this way, "We do the meditation, open our eyes, look at each other and start laughing, feeling like we're two idiots in a field, you know? And then it happened."⁷

After sessions, groups compare experiences, and shared events become part of the group's account of itself. Clark described her group's purpose as awareness, "to let people know they are not the only ones out there who have had these things happen to them."³ The record these sessions generate is primarily testimonial. Time-stamped recordings that would let an outside analyst check an event against satellite passes and air traffic remain rare in published accounts, and adding them is the clearest way for groups to strengthen the record their sessions produce.

Research perspectives

No controlled study of contact meditation itself has appeared in the mainstream peer-reviewed literature. What exists is research on adjacent states: sustained meditation, absorption, suggestion, expectation, and the border between waking and sleep. Researchers in these fields offer perspectives on how such conditions shape experience, and those perspectives sit alongside the field record rather than replacing it.

Contemplative research documents that intensive meditation is itself a source of unusual percepts. A 2017 mixed-methods study led by Jared Lindahl interviewed 60 Western Buddhist meditators along with 32 teachers and clinicians and catalogued 59 kinds of meditation-related experience across seven domains. Changes in perception were reported by at least three quarters of the practitioner sample, including a general brightening of the visual field, sometimes accompanied by the appearance of simple lights.⁸ The study drew these reports from practicing meditators, not from clinical patients, and treated them as a documented feature of intensive practice.

Work on absorption examines how training shapes what attention delivers. Stanford anthropologist Tanya Luhrmann spent years studying evangelical congregations that practice conversational prayer, attention turned inward toward an expected divine voice. Congregants scoring high on the Tellegen Absorption Scale were the ones who reported hearing God's voice, feeling divine touch, or seeing angels, and after about a month of regular practice many reported hearing that voice for the first time.⁹ Luhrmann presents this as evidence that attention can be trained toward experience, and the structure she describes, a trained attention state plus a specific expected communicator, closely parallels contact meditation's.

Laboratory work has examined suggestion directly. A 2005 double-blind study by Granqvist and colleagues in Neuroscience Letters tested the claim that weak transcranial magnetic fields produce sensed-presence experiences. The team reported, "We found no evidence for any effects of the magnetic fields," and found instead that personality measures related to suggestibility predicted who felt a presence.¹⁰ In the team's analysis, participants disposed to absorb an expectation were the ones who experienced it.

Sleep research supplies one further perspective on the late-night setting. A review of 35 studies covering more than 36,000 people, led by clinical psychologist Brian Sharpless, found that roughly one fifth of the pooled sample had experienced at least one episode of sleep paralysis, whose classic sleep-transition experiences include the felt presence of an intruder.¹¹ Sleep-border states are at most an overlapping context for some session experiences, not an explanation for the practice as a whole. None of this research examined contact meditation, and none of it rules out the interpretations practitioners hold.

Leading interpretations

These interpretations are not mutually exclusive.

Documentation and research record

The record of contact meditation has been built in layers. Protocol literature and lecture transcripts set out the methods, press accounts describe sessions at independent groups and retreat sites, and session testimony circulates within and between groups. Serious field observers add a further layer of identification discipline, because the night sky supplies its own traffic on any clear night. When SpaceX began launching Starlink satellites in batches of 60 in 2019, observers across the United States filed waves of UFO reports.¹² Careful groups therefore log times and bearings so that a light that brightens and fades can be checked against satellite passes, since satellites catching sunlight produce bright, changing lights for any observer.¹²

The protocol literature reports field success approaching 100 percent.² The 2020 documentary built around the same program carried its account of that field record to a wide audience.⁶ Pairing the reported yield with instrumented session records that outside analysts can examine remains the open documentation task, and it is one the field is well positioned to take up.

Stronger documentation is straightforward to describe. It would involve sessions logged in advance, continuous all-sky camera coverage with time stamps, comparison nights at the same sites, independent checking of recorded events against satellite and flight databases, and publication of quiet nights alongside eventful ones. No published study of contact meditation yet meets this description. Peer-reviewed attention has come from religious studies, which examines the movement's social form, and from psychology, which examines the states the practice draws on, while the practice's own central claim awaits a controlled public test.⁷

The record and open questions

Documented: Contact meditation is the core technique of human-initiated contact practice. CSETI has promoted a codified version, coherent thought sequencing, since the early 1990s, and independent groups and retreat sites, including the ECETI ranch at Trout Lake, run their own versions. Researchers studying meditation, absorption, suggestion, and sleep-border states have documented vivid anomalous experiences in ordinary, healthy people under these conditions.

Reported: Practitioners describe lights that appear to respond to sessions, felt presences, physical sensations, and telepathic impressions, and they describe these events as contact. Protocol materials report field success approaching 100 percent, and group organizers describe the practice as reliably productive.

Open questions: The open question the field is working to answer is whether a session event has ever involved a non-human respondent. No controlled study of the practice has yet been published, no instrumented session record has been made available for independent review, and the rate of similar sky events at the same sites on non-session nights has not been measured. These are the measurements that would let the practice test its own account, and each lies within reach of the groups already doing the work.

Frequently asked questions

What is contact meditation?

Contact meditation is the use of meditation, focused intention, and visualization to invite communication with non-human intelligence. It is the central technique of CE-5 and related human-initiated contact protocols, practiced by organized working groups, independent local groups, and retreat centers.¹

What is coherent thought sequencing?

Coherent thought sequencing is CSETI's name for its guided visualization technique. Participants quiet the mind, then picture the Milky Way, the solar system, the Earth, and finally their exact location, in effect transmitting directions to the site. Steven Greer described the method publicly in a 1995 lecture, where it is paired with signal lamps and recorded tones.²

Does CE-5 contact meditation work?

Practitioners report that it does, and protocol materials report success rates near 100 percent.² No controlled public study has put the practice to a formal test, and no instrumented session record has yet been published for independent review. The practice reliably produces powerful experiences, and whether those experiences involve a non-human respondent remains an open question.

What do people see during contact meditation sessions?

The most common reports are distant lights that brighten, dim, or flash, read by the group as responses.⁵ Interior events are also common, including felt presences, energy sensations, and imagery experienced as telepathic communication.³ The same sky carries satellites and aircraft for all observers, which is why careful groups value time-stamped documentation.¹²

Is there scientific research on contact meditation?

Not on the practice itself. Adjacent research is substantial. Studies of intensive meditators document visual lights and other unusual percepts, fieldwork on absorption shows that trained expectant attention is associated with vivid quasi-sensory experiences, and double-blind work on the sensed presence points to suggestibility as one operative variable. Researchers present these findings as perspectives on the states the practice draws on, not as tests of contact itself.^8,9,10

Where is contact meditation practiced?

CSETI has run trainings and field expeditions since the early 1990s.² Independent CE-5 groups meet in many regions, such as the Farmington, New Mexico group that has held monthly sessions since 2022.³ Retreat sites host seasonal skywatching, most prominently the ECETI ranch at Trout Lake, Washington, which has hosted events since 2003.⁴

Sources and further reading

1. Wikipedia. "Close encounter." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Close_encounter
2. Greer, Steven M. "The CE-5 Initiative." CSETI lecture transcript recorded by Shari Adamiak, April 8, 1995. https://drstevengreer.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/CE-5-Initiative-Transcript.pdf
3. The Durango Herald. "Group pairs meditation, energy to attempt contact with extraterrestrials." March 22, 2023. https://www.durangoherald.com/articles/group-pairs-meditation-energy-to-attempt-contact-with-extraterrestrials/
4. Wikipedia. "Gilliland's Ranch." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilliland%27s_Ranch
5. Nile, Amy. "Enlightened Contact." The Chronicle (Centralia, Washington), 2014. https://www.chronline.com/stories/enlightened-contact,96638
6. Wikipedia. "Steven M. Greer." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_M._Greer
7. 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/
8. Lindahl, Jared R., et al. "The varieties of contemplative experience: A mixed-methods study of meditation-related challenges in Western Buddhists." PLOS ONE, 2017. https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0176239
9. Bower, Bruce. "Visions for All." Science News, March 23, 2012. https://www.sciencenews.org/article/visions-all
10. Granqvist, P., et al. "Sensed presence and mystical experiences are predicted by suggestibility, not by the application of transcranial weak complex magnetic fields." Neuroscience Letters 379(1), 2005. https://portal.research.lu.se/en/publications/sensed-presence-and-mystical-experiences-are-predicted-by-suggest
11. Penn State University. "Psychologists chase down sleep demons." October 17, 2011. https://www.psu.edu/news/research/story/psychologists-chase-down-sleep-demons
12. Gizmodo. "Starlink Satellites Produce Wave of UFO Sightings in the US." December 27, 2019. https://gizmodo.com/starlink-satellites-produce-wave-of-ufo-sightings-in-th-1840678429