Human-Initiated Contact

The term covers a spectrum of activity: organized expeditions run by dedicated organizations, independent sky-watching groups, guided-meditation events, and solo practice supported by mobile apps. What unites them is intent. Practitioners treat contact as something that can be invited on a schedule, and they build repeatable procedures around that premise.

How contact protocols work

Core protocol elements

Published protocols differ in detail but share a structure. A group gathers after dark at a site with a wide view of the sky, often on a recurring schedule. Sessions typically open with group meditation intended to quiet and synchronize attention. Participants then direct intention toward contact, a step practitioner guides describe as telepathically sending out invitations or welcoming thoughts, often paired with visualization exercises focused on the desired encounter.² Some groups add light signaling, flashing lamps or lasers into the sky in patterns framed as an invitation for a response.² The session then settles into sustained observation, frequently lasting hours, with participants logging and filming anything that moves, flashes, or brightens.

Light signaling operates inside a hard legal boundary. Pointing a laser at an aircraft is a federal crime in the United States, and the Federal Aviation Administration can impose civil penalties of up to $11,000 per violation, so the signaling step must avoid air traffic entirely.³

What practitioners report

Session accounts describe points of light that appear, brighten, flare, or change course, orbs reported near the group or found afterward in photographs, and occasionally larger structured objects. Members of a New Mexico contact group told The Durango Herald in 2023 that they had seen lights in the sky and cigar-shaped objects, including bright lights in the southwestern Colorado night sky that moved quickly and erratically.⁴ Practitioner guides state that many participants report unidentified flying objects, light orbs, or other phenomena during sessions and interpret these as successful contact.² Alongside the visual events, participants describe interior experiences: felt presence, imagery arriving during meditation, and a sense of two-way communication. Participants understand these events as contact, and the accounts form a substantial and growing body of field testimony, session logs, and handheld low-light video.

Historical development

Deliberate contact is older than its modern vocabulary. The contactee movement, which became a cultural phenomenon after the first wave of modern UFO sightings in the late 1940s and peaked during the 1950s, was built on accounts of friendly, purposeful communication with humanoid beings who delivered messages of cosmic importance to selected individuals.⁵ George Adamski, the first and most prominent UFO contactee of the 1950s, described an encounter on November 20, 1952, near Desert Center, California, in which a scout ship landed close to him and its pilot, a Venusian he called Orthon, sought him out.⁶ His books Flying Saucers Have Landed (1953, with Desmond Leslie) and Inside the Space Ships (1955) fixed the template of the willing human participant in a welcomed meeting.

Adamski's craft photographs have been argued over ever since. Photographic analysts of the period matched the landing struts in his famous image to 100-watt General Electric light bulbs and matched the main body to a widely available 1930s pressurized-gas lantern, an assessment that remains part of the case file.⁶ Whatever the photographs showed, the posture Adamski modeled endured: contact as something a person could go out and seek.

CSETI and the CE-5 protocol

The modern protocol-based practice dates to 1990, when Steven M. Greer, at the time working as an emergency room physician, founded the Center for the Study of Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (CSETI) as a diplomatic and research-based initiative to contact extraterrestrial civilizations.⁷ CSETI defined CE-5, or close encounters of the fifth kind, as human-initiated contact and communication with extraterrestrial life, adding an active category to the passive scale Hynek had introduced.^7,1 The organization fielded teams it called Rapid Mobilisation Investigative Teams to travel to areas of reported UFO activity, and it codified a psychic protocol for initiating contact⁷ whose elements, as practitioner guides describe them, center on intention, meditation, and consciousness.² Greer has described early results. In remarks quoted by The Durango Herald he said: "When I first started doing that in 1990, within two years we had made successful contact with ET craft off the coast of Florida near Pensacola."⁴ The early CSETI record, like most of the contact literature, comes down through the testimony of the participants who were there.

Greer retired from medicine in 1998 to work in ufology full time.⁷ He founded the Disclosure Project in 1993, and in May 2001 he held a press conference at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. featuring 20 retired Air Force, Federal Aviation Administration, and intelligence officers, an event that made him one of the most visible figures in American ufology.⁷ The 2020 documentary Close Encounters of the Fifth Kind: Contact Has Begun, written and directed by Michael Mazzola and released in April 2020, presented the CE-5 protocol to a wide streaming audience.⁷ Practitioners credit Greer with opening contact work to anyone willing to try it.

Spread beyond CSETI: groups, films, and apps

The practice no longer depends on its founding organization. Independent contact groups meet on their own schedules. A representative example is the Sacred Spiral Healing CE-5 Group of Farmington, New Mexico, profiled by The Durango Herald in 2023. Led by Rev. Sandra MacCready Clark, the group holds monthly gatherings at the San Juan College Planetarium that pair meditation and energy work with watching the sky for a response.⁴

Media and software carry the practice further. The documentary We Are Not Alone, from filmmaker Serena DC, follows people who attempt alien contact through meditation and features Greer alongside ufologist Jacques Vallée.⁹ Religious studies scholar Joseph Laycock, reviewing the film for Religion Dispatches in 2024, analyzed CE5 recruitment with standard conversion models from the sociology of religion and noted that many practitioners discovered the practice during the stress of the 2020 lockdowns.⁹ On the software side, the CE5 Contact mobile app, published by Sirius Technology Advanced Research, packages official training materials developed by Greer, guided meditation resources, and a networking feature for finding and messaging other practitioners, and it is designed to work offline at remote sites.¹⁰

Leading interpretations

These interpretations are not mutually exclusive, and more than one can hold across different groups and events.

Documentation and research record

The record of human-initiated contact has been built in layers. The contactee era contributed books, lecture-circuit accounts, and photographs. CSETI added structured expeditions, a written protocol, and decades of session accounts. The present ecosystem adds press profiles of working groups, practitioner training guides, documentary films, app-connected session networks, and a large and growing volume of smartphone and low-light video, so the field record now expands every clear night a group convenes.^2,4,10 Careful groups pair that record with observers' discipline. Before logging a light as anomalous, they rule out satellites, including the bright Starlink trains now common overhead, along with aircraft, meteors, and the artifacts of low-light cameras, which reduce distant point sources to structureless dots.¹¹ Identification work of this kind protects the record, because a case that survives screening carries more evidential weight than one that does not.

Researchers across the field converge on the same next steps for strengthening the record. Pre-registered predictions would commit a group in advance to when and where a response should appear. Matched control sessions, run without any contact protocol, would test whether intending groups record more anomalies than indifferent ones. Multi-sensor records combining calibrated cameras, radar, and satellite catalogs would let any candidate event be checked against known traffic. Instrumented sky monitoring of this kind already exists in adjacent research: Harvard professor Avi Loeb launched the Galileo Project in July 2021 to pursue a systematic search for evidence of extraterrestrial technology, including a network of high-resolution telescopes to image unidentified aerial phenomena, stating, "We want to collect our own data from scratch, basically, that will be open, and the analysis will be transparent the way science is done."¹² A human-initiated contact event documented to that standard would carry the strongest cases from testimony into shared, checkable data, and building that bridge is the field's central research task.

The record and open questions

Documented: Deliberate contact practice has a documented lineage from the 1950s contactee movement through CSETI, founded by Steven Greer in 1990, to a present-day ecosystem of independent groups, documentaries, and mobile apps. The CE-5 category, defined as human-initiated contact, extends the close encounter scale Hynek published in 1972. Laser signaling is legally constrained because pointing a laser at an aircraft is a federal crime. Any multi-hour night watch reliably includes satellites, aircraft, and meteors, which is why disciplined groups identify and set aside ordinary traffic before logging an event.

Reported: Practitioners report lights that appear, flare, or move erratically during sessions, orbs near the group and in photographs, cigar-shaped and structured objects, and interior experiences of presence and communication, which participants describe as contact. Greer describes successful contact events dating to CSETI's earliest fieldwork, including craft off the Florida coast near Pensacola.

Open questions: Whether session events involve a responding non-human intelligence is the live question the field is now organized to answer. Pre-registered, multi-sensor documentation is the field's next step, the kind of record that would let an elicited event stand apart from ordinary night-sky traffic and be studied on its own terms. Building that record is the clearest path forward, and the strength and consistency of the testimony is a standing reason to run the test.

Frequently asked questions

What is human-initiated contact?

Human-initiated contact is the deliberate, protocol-based attempt to open communication with a non-human intelligence, typically through group meditation, focused intention, light signaling, and sustained sky observation. It is distinguished from spontaneous sightings and abduction accounts by who moves first.

What is a close encounter of the fifth kind?

The close encounter scale comes from J. Allen Hynek's 1972 book The UFO Experience, which classified near sightings, physical-effect cases, and entity cases as the first through third kinds. The fifth kind, popularized by Steven Greer, designates events in which individuals or groups use specific protocols to establish communication or interaction, which is why a CE5 is also called a human-initiated close encounter.¹

Does the CE-5 protocol work?

Practitioners report that it does, describing lights, orbs, and sensed communication during sessions, and those accounts form a large and growing body of testimony. Session records also include ordinary satellites, aircraft, and camera effects, which practitioner groups increasingly log and screen out themselves. Multi-sensor field documentation is the clearest way to deepen the record, and the strongest sessions already pair testimony with independent recordings.¹¹

Who is Steven Greer and what is CSETI?

Steven M. Greer is a retired emergency room physician who founded CSETI, the Center for the Study of Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence, in 1990 and later the Disclosure Project, which staged a widely covered National Press Club event in 2001. He is the most publicized advocate of human-initiated contact, and practitioners credit him with making contact practice accessible to anyone willing to try it.⁷

What do people see at CE-5 events?

Reports describe points of light that appear or maneuver, orbs, occasional cigar-shaped or structured objects, and inner experiences of communication. Disciplined observers first rule out satellites, including bright Starlink trains, along with aircraft and low-light camera artifacts, so that the events they log as anomalous can stand on their own.^4,11

Is it legal to signal the sky with a laser?

United States federal law makes pointing a laser at an aircraft a crime, and the FAA can impose civil penalties of up to $11,000 per violation. Contact groups that use lasers must keep them away from any aircraft, which constrains how the signaling step of a protocol can be practiced.³

Sources and further reading

1. Wikipedia. "Close encounter." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Close_encounter
2. CE5 Guide. "Intro to CE5." https://ce5.guide/guide/intro-to-ce5/
3. Federal Aviation Administration. "Laser Incidents." https://www.faa.gov/about/initiatives/lasers/laws
4. 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/
5. Wikipedia. "Contactee." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contactee
6. Wikipedia. "George Adamski." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Adamski
7. Wikipedia. "Steven M. Greer." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_M._Greer
8. Gleiberman, Owen. "Close Encounters of the Fifth Kind: Film Review." Variety, 2020. https://variety.com/2020/film/reviews/close-encounters-of-the-fifth-kind-review-dr-steven-greer-1234574140/
9. 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
10. Apple App Store. "CE5 Contact." Sirius Technology Advanced Research. https://apps.apple.com/us/app/ce5-contact/id1499236474
11. Metabunk. "Needs Debunking: CE-5, humans initiating UFO sightings." Forum thread, 2020. https://www.metabunk.org/threads/needs-debunking-ce-5-humans-initiating-ufo-sightings.11262/
12. The Harvard Crimson. "Harvard Prof. Loeb Launches Galileo Project." August 11, 2021. https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2021/8/11/galileo-project/