Summary

American author who transformed the global cultural framework for understanding non-human contact experiences. His 1987 account 'Communion' - describing his own terrifying encounter with non-human beings on the night of December 26, 1985, at his cabin in upstate New York - became an international bestseller and remains the most widely read first-person account of a contact experience ever published. 'Communion' did not create the abduction phenomenon; it gave millions of experiencers language and cultural permission to acknowledge experiences they had been unable to discuss. He has maintained an ongoing claimed relationship with non-human intelligences across four decades, documenting it through a body of work that includes 'The Key' (1999) and 'A New World' (2019). His Dreamland platform has hosted the UAP research community's most substantive voices, including Jacques Vallee, Diana Pasulka, Joe Semivan, and Hal Puthoff. His archives are held at Rice University's Woodson Research Center.

Roles

• -Author - Communion (1987); The Key (1999); A New World (2019)
• -Founder and host, Dreamland (podcast/radio, 1998-present)
• -Subject of the Harvard abduction studies (Dr. John Mack)

Organizations

Education

• -B.A., University of Texas at Austin (1968)
• -Graduate study, London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art

Early Career

• -Published horror and thriller novels throughout the 1970s and early 1980s - including 'The Wolfen' (1978) and 'The Hunger' (1981), both adapted as major films - establishing a career as a commercially successful author before his contact experiences
• -His pre-'Communion' fiction career provides an unusual baseline: a writer of known craft and public record chose to risk his professional reputation by publishing a non-fiction first-person account of an encounter he described as profoundly real and disturbing
• -Began working with researcher Budd Hopkins in the mid-1980s after his December 1985 experience, connecting him to the then-emerging abduction research community