We, as a society, like to believe we’ve outgrown superstition. That science swept away the illusions, and only the uneducated still see beyond it. We celebrate human progress as we admire advances in neuroscience, space exploration, and artificial intelligence. But what if nothing was swept away? What if it’s all still here, and we’re just trained not to notice?
When someone threatens the dominant status quo, we name it bias (you mismeasured it), error (your perception is distorted), or hallucination (your mind generated it), and it simply disappears. Not because it’s gone, but because it’s been redefined for the system’s comfort.
Who gets to define what counts as “seeing correctly” in the first place? A dark history we fear to confront in the institution of Western mental health care, as certain privileging of philosophies begin to reveal themselves in epistemology and power structures.
What we can agree on is history. It shows us that certain patterns repeat in human experience across time. That raises the question of whether there are aspects of reality or perception we are still failing to fully recognize.
Extraterrestrial encounter experiences sit at the intersection of psychology, culture, and belief. Reports of contact with nonhuman entities have been seen throughout history and in current pop culture. From people like Darryl Anka, who report channeling an extraterrestrial intelligence known as Bashar, to sworn testimonies by government officials reporting covert programs involving nonhuman technology in front of a judge. Despite the wide range of contexts in which these accounts emerge, they share a common feature. They force a confrontation with the limits of accepted knowledge of the status quo and shake the foundation of what we think we know about reality.
Belief Prevalence and Cross Cultural Reports
Survey data suggest that belief in extraterrestrial life is widespread, and a notable minority of individuals report direct encounters or UAP sightings. Yougov found that 56% of Americans believe aliens definitely or probably exist. Along with 47% of Americans believe aliens have definitely or probably visited Earth. This isn’t just the general population. In fact, about 58% of astrobiology experts believe intelligent extraterrestrial life likely exists somewhere in the universe. Some researchers estimate that millions of Americans may have had such experiences, underscoring their relevance for clinical practice. (Statistics from Varieties of Anomalous Experience, p. 256)
Cross cultural reports from the United States to Brazil and Australia have strikingly consistent patterns. These reports describe experiences of capture, physical examination, communication with entities, journeys to other realms, and eventual return. Many also include elements such as receiving spiritual or existential messages, including warnings about environmental crises or themes of interconnectedness.
Individuals who report these encounters frequently undergo what is described as ontological shock. A form of psychological disruption that occurs when deeply held beliefs about the nature of reality are suddenly shattered. These rapid and profound shifts in perception can be destabilizing and may require careful integration through trauma informed processing.
Clinical Presentation and Reported Aftereffects
From a clinical perspective, individuals may present with a range of symptoms:
- Anxiety, irritability, and mood instability
- Intrusive thoughts and recurring nightmares
- Dissociative symptoms such as depersonalization or derealization
- Difficulties with concentration and daily functioning
Physical complaints such as unexplained marks, fatigue, or sensory disturbances are also reported, though their origin remains unclear. At the same time, these experiences may activate profound psychological and spiritual change. Many individuals describe increased empathy, ecological concern, and a deepened sense of meaning or purpose.Limited research in this domain makes it difficult in understanding how to approach these reports.
Controversial Research
Dr. John E. Mack (1929–2004) was a psychiatrist and faculty member at Harvard Medical School whose scholarly work focused on the psychological processes underlying belief formation, identity development, and the subjective construction of experience.
Within academic psychiatry, Mack was primarily concerned with how individuals interpret and integrate atypical or anomalous personal experiences into their cognitive and emotional frameworks. His work emphasized the role of perception, narrative construction, and meaning making in shaping enduring changes in worldview, including shifts in spirituality, values, and interpersonal orientation.
He conducted qualitative, interview based clinical research examining reports of unusual subjective experiences, analyzing their psychological structure, phenomenology, and impact on functioning and belief systems. His approach was grounded in psychodynamic and phenomenological traditions in psychiatry, particularly in relation to how culturally mediated expectations influence interpretation of experience.
Mack’s work became the subject of institutional scrutiny at Harvard regarding what he was studying in 1995. While reports that research methods may have been biased, there is no evidence to substantiate that people even looked at his research prior before asking for an investigation. As time has passed it is increasingly evident that inquiry served as an inquisition directed by skeptics of his work for studying phenomenology that may push the paradigm in modern psychiatry. He was eventually cleared of any wrongdoing and granted the freedom to study as he chose. Harvard Medical School Press Release August 3, 1995
Psychopathology and Diagnostic Limitations
A central issue in clinical assessment is whether reported extraterrestrial encounter experiences should be interpreted as symptoms of mental illness. While some reports may occur in the context of conditions such as schizophrenia or PTSD, empirical findings suggest that experiencers, as a group, do not show elevated rates of psychopathology compared to the general population.
Dr. Mack, through extensive clinical work with experiencers, concluded that no existing diagnostic category adequately accounts for these reports. Although individuals may experience anxiety, distress, or trauma related symptoms following an encounter, these reactions appear to be responses to the experience itself rather than evidence of an underlying disorder producing it.
In Mack’s PEER (Program for Extraordinary Experience Research) survey of abduction experiencers, rates of psychological help seeking were largely comparable to those in the general U.S. population. Depressive symptoms were reported at 17%, schizophrenia at 1%, and bipolar disorder at 1%. However, at 17%, the sample was approximately twice as likely to seek help for anxiety compared to the general population. These findings are consistent with other researchers in the field, who similarly report low incidence of serious psychopathology among individuals describing encounter experiences.
This research can be seen in John Mack’s book Passport to the Cosmos: Human Transformation and Alien Encounters. Although the research was submitted to a scientific journal, they declined to publish it in full. Mack ultimately argued that partial publication wouldn’t do his work justice; therefore, he withdrew the submission and put it in his book. A common feature of controversial research is publication of research in a book.
DSM-5-TR Classification and Conceptual Tension
From a clinical standpoint, these extraterrestrial experiences occupy a controversial yet increasingly acknowledged space. Within the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition, Text Revision, they are classified under “Religious and Spiritual Problems,” a category that resists simple labeling as pathology.
Yet, this raises deeper questions. What happens when a person’s lived experience does not fit within accepted scientific or cultural frameworks? How should such experiences be approached, dismissed, medicalized, or understood on their own terms?
The DSM is not a book of absolute truth. It is a constructed system with a documented history of revision and error. This leads to critical questions: What is the actual evidence standard for a diagnosis? Who benefits from these classifications?
Clinical Systems, Diagnosis, and Institutional Response
From my perspective, as a person who was trained within clinical counseling. Diagnosis often appears more beneficial to insurance structures ensuring payment for services than to clients themselves. Many individuals do not receive the depth or quality of therapy they need for anomalous experiences because research is underfunded. While new diagnoses continue to emerge, there is often a lack of meaningful, culturally relevant treatment for the populations being served. As a result, people disengage from mental health services altogether, fearing mislabeling, unnecessary pathologizing, or a lack of genuine understanding.
When a person reports an anomalous experience,whether extraterrestrial, symbolic, or misinterpreted. The system often responds in one of two ways. Dismissal or medicalization. Both responses can function as forms of control rather than prioritizing the client’s emotional and psychological wellbeing.
This isn’t a radical take. Many therapists today are questioning the DSM and the way therapy is often practiced. While Dr. Mack was considered controversial in his time, his core approach of actually listening to clients and taking their experiences seriously shouldn’t be controversial at all.
Meaning Making and Therapeutic Approach
The real issue is how often people are dismissed or reduced to diagnoses instead of being understood. Too often, the response is a pill shoved in the face and a smirk judgment. Rather than humility and a genuine effort to help someone make sense of their own experiences. If a client’s perspective doesn’t fit the dominant framework, it gets labeled as “wrong” instead of being explored.
At the same time, the goal shouldn’t be to blindly accept every interpretation either. The focus should be on working with the person to find meaning in their experiences while staying grounded in what is most accurate and helpful to the client. Clinicians should avoid overly suggestive techniques such as aggressive hypnotic memory recovery, which may increase distress. Instead, treatment focused on coping strategies, trauma processing, and meaning making should be advised.
Importantly, therapists must also remain open to the possibility of positive transformation. As with other forms of “spiritual emergency,” these experiences may represent opportunities for psychological growth rather than solely pathology.
Spiritual Transformation and Comparative Perspectives
Research by Kenneth Ring suggests that extraterrestrial encounters may function similarly to NDE experiences, serving as catalysts for psycho spiritual transformation. Both appear to promote an enhanced sense of interconnectedness and a new approach to life.
From a comparative perspective, these experiences also parallel shamanic initiatory journeys documented across cultures. Elements such as forced examination, travel to other realms, and return with insight mirror traditional accounts of spiritual transformation. This has led some scholars to interpret encounters as expressions of archetypal processes. Consistent with this view, Carl Jung argued that the psychological significance of such experiences is more clinically relevant than questions about their objective reality.
Jungian Archetypes and Symbolic Interpretation
Extraterrestrial encounter experiences occupy a liminal space between psychopathology, physical reality, spirituality, and culture. Jung believed archetypes aren’t just storytelling tools. They’re psychological patterns that structure how we perceive reality, show up in dreams, and shape identity. Archetypes generate forms. Yet, they are not the forms themselves. For example, the mother archetype is not your literal mother. It’s the psychic pattern of nurturing, protection, dependency, and origin.
Odd enough, many people have confessed to me that they don’t think extraterrestrials look exactly like they appear to them in altered states. They’ve told me that they think these beings are interacting with them in a way that is symbolic, through familiarity and their inner subconscious, to relay knowledge.
For practitioners, the task is not to determine whether such experiences are objectively “real,” but to engage with their subjective reality and psychological impact. Doing so requires a flexible, integrative framework that acknowledges both the distress and the transformative potential inherent in lived experience. Solving the mysteries of the universe is above the pay grade of the psychotherapist.
The role of the psychotherapist is not to resolve metaphysical uncertainty, but to help individuals integrate experience in a way that supports psychological stability and meaning making.
Epistemology, Truth, and Power
Sanity and insanity are not fixed truths. They are shaped by the time we live in and the authorities that define them. What is called “truth” reflects power as much as it reflects reality.
Knowledge systems such as Western science, for all its strengths, are built on human made frameworks of measurement, rooted in earlier philosophical assumptions about what is real within its culture. One of those assumptions is the metaphysical belief that this physical world exists independently and prior to consciousness. This may itself be a construction of the mind, a way of distancing ourselves from a deeper intuitive knowing.
Humans create tools to understand reality, then come to trust those tools as more objective than the very consciousness that created them. When we do this, we are mistaking our methods for truth itself.
If philosophers have taught me anything, it is that you have to be lucky to find the truth.We may not even recognize it when we hold it. This is why humility matters. It is grounded in wisdom and vulnerability, provoking inner reflection toward one’s self and perspective. Skepticism, when directed only outward at others, is a form of naive arrogance. It is more concerned with control and self identity protection for the comfort of closure rather than genuinely seeking value or insight into the unknown.
I will leave you with a quote from the late Dr.Mack:
“I think this kind of debate, which is healthy in a way, is also preventing us from getting on with understanding these powerful experiences that are happening to so many hundreds of thousands of people, if not millions. What does this mean for our culture? A lot of people who have these experiences actually grow as human beings when they face them and really go into them deeply. I don’t know what it means, but it could be maturing for us as a species if we face up to it.”
References
Vickers, P., Gardiner, E., Gillen, C., et al. (2025). Surveys of the scientific community on the existence of extraterrestrial life. Nature Astronomy, 9, 16–18.
John E. Mack Institute. (n.d.). John E. Mack Institute.http://johnemackinstitute.org/
Jung, C. G. (1968). The archetypes and the collective unconscious (2nd ed., R. F. C. Hull, Trans.). Princeton University Press.
Wada, K., & Fellner, K. D. (2025). Decolonizing psychiatric diagnosis: Turning the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders on its head. American Psychologist, 80(8), 1313–1326.
Photographer unknown. Landscape sculpture artwork by Rob Mullholland
