Alternate Perceptions Magazine, February 2025
I was once a vehement UFO Skeptic. Today I am a UFO Contactee.
by: Preston Dennett

It all began for me on the evening of November 17 in 1986. I turned on the television news and heard about another one of those ridiculous UFO sightings. The newscaster explained that the pilot of a Japanese Commercial Airline claimed to have seen a UFO while flying over Alaska. After the report, the newscasters laughed nervously, joked about the incident, and moved on to the next news item.
I wasn’t aware of it at first, but in that instant my life changed forever. I thought to myself, this pilot is lying. Maybe he was suffering from “highway hypnosis” and hallucinated the object. Perhaps it was just a reflection off the ice-cap. I later learned that the object was larger than his plane and paced it for several miles. It appeared on the jet’s onboard radar, and on ground radar.
Of course, none of these details were revealed on the news report about the incident, which was very short brief and joking. But for some reason, I couldn’t get it out of my mind. I remembered that about eight years earlier, my older brother Mark came running into the house one evening saying he’d seen a UFO. He said it was not much higher than the telephone poles and that he and his two friends chased it down the street. I just shook my head. He couldn’t have seen a UFO, because such things don’t exist! I was a vehement skeptic. I knew that the stars were too far away for ETs to traverse interstellar distances. I assumed that anyone who saw UFOs was uneducated, naïve, a liar, mentally ill or on drugs. I figured UFOs couldn’t be real because whenever they were discussed in the mainstream media, the coverage was derisive, mocking and ridiculing.
But now, hearing about this pilot, Captain Kenju Terauchi, I approached my brother and asked him to tell me again what he thought he saw. To my shock, he described a very close up encounter with a metallic disc with a dome on top, covered with colored lights, hovering silently only a few hundred feet away, at treetop level. He and his two friends followed it in their car for 15 minutes until it suddenly darted away. “If you don’t believe me,” Mark said, “you can ask Phil and Greg (his friends.) They were there with me.”
So I did, and they described the same thing, providing even more details. I was shocked. It was clear they weren’t hoaxing, hallucinating or misperceiving. Could UFOs actually be real? It was an incredible shock. I started asking other people in my family. I found out that my sister-in-law and her two friends observed three glowing objects over Van Nuys Air Force Reserve base, in California. Just a few months later, she reported seeing two gray-type extraterrestrials near her home. At the time, she’d never heard of grays and wasn’t even sure what she was looking at, only that they weren’t human. “Were you scared?” I asked. “Yes,” she said. “It was like being woken up when you’re awake.” I soon found out that my other sister-in-law, Mark’s wife, saw little blue beings in her bedroom as a child. “I considered them my friends,” she said. They came for a period of two weeks, and she never saw them again.
Shaken, I decided to ask some friends. I learned that a close friend (and her friend) saw an egg-shaped object which emitted a low buzzing noise move overhead in Topanga, California. Another friend was with his girlfriend in Topanga Canyon when they saw a triangular formation of lights hovering in place low in the sky. The objects swooped at them, at which point they became disoriented and frightened and fled the area. A third friend described seeing anomalous lights while visiting Maui.
Then, stupid me, I brought the subject of UFOs up at the office where I worked. The lady whose desk was next to mine told me that she and her family saw a darting star-like object while camping in the San Bernardino Mountains of southern California. “Are you sure it wasn’t a helicopter?” I asked. She laughed and said that it would turn at right angles, hover silently in place and zip from horizon to horizon in a matter of seconds. Another lady I worked with explained how she and her friends saw a group of multi-colored objects performing fantastic maneuvers in the night skies over Palm Springs, California. Another lady told me that when she was a kid, she, her best friend and her mother were followed by a metallic disk with colored lights around the perimeter which hovered over their car as they drove home. It was strange, she said, because the drive which normally took five minutes took one hour and fifteen minutes. They were missing over an hour of time.
By this time, I had started to pick up books at the library and bookstores. I found a surprisingly wide variety of books. I quickly devoured them all--looking for the proof I was sure I would find--that UFOs can be explained as hoaxes, hallucinations, or misperceptions. Instead, the books told of stunning encounters involving multiple witnesses, supported by radar returns and landing traces, medical effects (both injuries and healings) animal effects, electromagnetic effects and more. I learned that the phenomena had been studied for decades and that there was an apparent cover-up by the U.S. government which considered the subject Top Secret and of extremely high importance. I continued to ask everyone I knew if they had ever encountered a UFO, and before long, I had an impressive collection of accounts. I was shocked. UFOs were real. There was no doubt about it. Too many people that I loved and trusted had had encounters.
Finding out that UFOs were real was not good news. It hit me like a ton of bricks and caused me to reevaluate my entire worldview. Earth was being invaded by aliens and yet mainstream society seemed to be entirely ignorant of the fact. I began to formally interview witnesses and decided to write an article for the local paper. I was surprised when the editor put the story on the front page of the Topanga “Messenger,” making it the lead story. This brought in more reports. I began to subscribe to UFO magazines and journals and join any UFO groups I could find. I attended local meetings and conventions. I joined MUFON, took their test and became a field investigator. Before long, I found myself actively investigating UFO incidents. I began to appear on radio shows, which led to multiple television appearances. In a few short years, UFOs had effectively taken over my life.
I actively wrote articles for various magazines, journals, and newspapers, and in 1996, after ten years of research and more than 30 articles, I wrote my first book, “UFO Healings.” Following this, I wrote furiously and have since put out more than 30 books and more than 100 articles. Even more exciting, during this time, I started having my own encounters. While it was incredible to read about UFOs, and fascinating to hear from witnesses firsthand, I really wanted to see UFOs myself. I found myself traveling to UFO hotspots, visiting locations where people had recently seen UFOs, camping outside at night in the hopes of seeing some. My persistence paid off. I started to see anomalous lights.
Just before midnight on the evening of July 19, 1992, I was driving to my little condo in Canoga Park, California when I saw what I first thought was a bird swooping down towards my car. Looking up, I immediately dismissed that theory and thought perhaps it was a firecracker, as it was a glowing orb-like object swooping in a curving parabola towards my car. In seconds, it hovered in front of my windshield, about one foot away, hovering over the hood of my car, right in front of my face. Okay, not a firecracker! And it clearly wasn’t a reflection. I had stopped the car and gripping the steering wheel, stared in shock at what was clearly an intelligently controlled object: a small orb just larger than a golf-ball, white-yellow with solid edges. The orb then moved to the left, to the right, to the left and back in front of my face. I sensed a presence, an intelligence. Someone was guiding this object. And then it promptly moved forward, dipped down slightly and darted straight up, disappearing into the distance. And that’s all I remember. In fact, I forgot the entire sighting. I don’t remember driving home. I didn’t think about it. I forget about it completely. It wasn’t until a few months later that I remembered what I had seen. It took me quite some time to realize I had experienced a classic missing time encounter!
That was a big year. I had four other sightings that year. I began doing CE5 work with a small LA-based group. And as the years passed, I continued having encounters. The phenomenon seemed to be circling around me, coming closer and closer. I had an encounter where a UFO called me outside and gave me a telepathic message that they were real, and that the witness I was interviewing at the time was telling me the truth. I began having dreams of being onboard, being shown free-energy devices, the engine room of the craft, seeing little grays and tall whites and more. It took me many years to realize that I myself was a contactee. Further research revealed that my younger sister had several encounters including a missing time event. I had two nephews who had close up UFO sightings and one reported seeing a humanoid in his bedroom. As a researcher, I knew that contact was often generational and tracked certain family lines. It appeared that my family belonged to that group.
UFOs was a subject that had initially repulsed me. Never in a million years could I have predicted that they would become such a large and important part of my life. And yet, now, here I am almost 40 years later, one of an army of researchers out there working hard to investigate this subject, educate people and end the UFO coverup. Here I am, part of an even larger group of UFO contactees, most of whom remain private about their experience. In 2022, I had my first fully conscious onboard experience. I woke up from a sound sleep in my home in Reseda, California to find myself being pulled into a craft. I was put on a table and briefly examined by a tall female who appeared half-human, half gray. She had tightly curled white-blond hair, over-sized almond-shaped eyes, a tiny nose and mouth and white skin. She was slender and wore a seamless white jumpsuit. I tried to get up off the table, but she held me down and kept asking me if I was okay. I assured her that I was, and I got off the table and was amazed to find myself in a 40-foot wide-room with curved walls and ceiling, and a panel of windows around the circumference. There were other grays, some people, and a tall white ET, dressed in a white smock. She was the epitome of elegance, wisdom, and beauty. I walked up to her and she tilted her head, smiled subtly, and asked telepathically, “So, is this what you thought it would be like?” I replied, “No, it’s much better.”
The feeling of benevolence and goodwill was strong as I was given free rein to explore the room. There’s more to this, but I will save it for another time. It was a short experience, about 5 minutes long, but entirely friendly, and not a speck of fear. I would have loved to stay longer. But alas, I soon found myself back in my bed, amazed and in awe.
Today I am gratified and delighted to see that this subject is now being taken more seriously, that the coverup is crumbling under the weight of its own lies, that disclosure is quickening, and that more and more people are becoming interested in this subject. A new era dawns for humanity as we finally come to realize that we are not alone. It’s a good time to be alive! I look forward to the day when our governments are truthful, transparent, and forthcoming (though I’m not sure they will ever do this voluntarily.) And I hope that one day we will have open official contact with all humanity. Thank you for giving me the opportunity to share my story.