Abstract
The "contactee movement" arose in the early 1950s as a direct response to the flying saucer phenomenon. In the context of UFO phenomena, a contactee is an individual who claims to have direct and/or personal contact with alien entities (a close encounter for the third kind, CE-III) on a recurring basis. These people assert that UFO occupants have "contacted" selected human beings in order to convey critical information through them to the entire human race. Over a forty-year period the movement has experienced advances and declines in popularity, but it remains a phenomenon deeply rooted in occult-based religion. This article will explore the contactee experience by briefly tracing its development as an occultic religious movement, inspect the typical contactee scenario, and provide a Christian assessment of this unusual UFO-related phenomenon.