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changed in the early 1950s when—after a few years of deliberately staying behind a curtain of secrecy—they slowly but surely showed themselves.

The Differences Between Contactees and Abductees

Long before the first alien abduction incident was reported, elements of the US government were already secretly monitoring certain figures in the United States who claimed close encounters with extraterrestrials. Agencies were carefully collating files, listening in on phone calls, and intercepting the mail of dozens of people. Those same figures became known as the contactees. It’s important to have an understanding of the contactee phenomenon, as it serves to demonstrate how and why it led government, military, and intelligence personnel to focus on the claims of ET interaction—and then to do precisely the same when the abduction issue took off.

Most of the secret work in the contactee field was carried out in the 1950s. It was undertaken to learn what was allegedly being done to American citizens by our mysterious visitors. At the time, the bulk of the work fell under the auspices of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and at the express order of none other than almost-legendary FBI director J. Edgar Hoover. How do we know this? Simple: thanks to legislation brought about under the Freedom of Information Act, numerous files on the contactees have now been released into the public domain. Real X-Files? You bet. Those files make it abundantly clear that the US government went to extraordinary steps to ensure that the contactees were placed under careful, secret watch—particularly because those contactees were clearly influencing public opinion on matters relative to not just alien visitations but also politics, the economy, and religion.

Before we get to the matter of demonstrating how and why the contactees became such a potential threat to the government, it’s important to first demonstrate the differences between the contactees and the abductees. The abduction experience is almost always a traumatic one: people are