35．Contact in the Desert: An Inside Portrait

In China, I had learned how political power could decide which questions were safe to ask. Contact in the Desert introduced me to a very different world—one where almost anyone could speak about the unknown.

But freedom created a harder question of its own: who gets to decide what is true?

As I moved among researchers, experiencers and alleged insiders, I began to see that every community draws boundaries around belief. The deeper challenge was learning how to remain open to the unknown without surrendering judgement—and how to disagree without turning truth into territory.

In 2021, while the pandemic still shadowed the world, a recommendation led to an unexpected invitation to speak at Contact in the Desert, one of America’s largest gatherings devoted to extraterrestrial contact. It brought together UFO researchers, contact experiencers, and people who saw spiritual awakening as inseparable from the question of humanity’s place in the cosmos.

For me, the invitation carried weight far beyond a place on the programme. The conversations before and around the conference opened a window onto an American UFO world very different from the one I had known in China. It was more open, more pluralistic, and far less centralised. It also carried boundaries and tensions of its own.

Before the conference, I met online several times with Victoria, the event’s organiser, and her friend Stella to shape my presentation. Victoria always appeared on screen exactly on time, seated in a meticulously ordered study. Her narrow face behind rectangular glasses gave her an air of focus and efficiency.

At our first meeting, she began before I had said a word.

“Stella has told me quite a bit about you—your work in China, and what you have experienced in the UFO community,” she said. “I have also heard about your I Met Aliens series. You have a very natural way of speaking. You do not sound rehearsed, and people respond to that. There is a real curiosity here about what is happening in China, because we hear so little from inside that world. I think you could give our audience a perspective they do not usually get.”

She glanced down at her notes, then looked back at me.

“Here is my only concern. China is politically complicated, and I do not want to put you in an uncomfortable position - or close the door on something we might be able to build later. For this first appearance, perhaps we choose a subject that gives you room to speak freely without entering the most sensitive areas. Then we can see where it leads. I would love to explore a collaboration with people in China one day—perhaps through a platform like Starry Sky Radio. Maybe Contact in the Desert could even have a Chinese version in the future.”

Her tone was calm and composed, with a quiet firmness beneath it. It was easy to find oneself moving at her pace. She was weighing far more than a guest’s preferred subject. She was considering what an audience could receive, what a future partnership might risk, and how politically charged the conference could afford to become.

I told her almost immediately where I hoped to take the talk: into the social world of China’s UFO community. I wanted to explore how people who described encounters with extraterrestrials lived under the political pressure of the Chinese Communist Party - how years of caution, repression, and uncertainty had shaped their choices, their temperaments, and the strategies by which they carried on. I also wanted to examine the experiences themselves: their variety, and the ways they could become entangled with personality, psychological state, and the circumstances of a person’s life.

I believed the subject could offer American audiences a meaningful basis for comparison. Faced with the same unknown, people formed by different cultures, political systems, and collective histories might recognise something unexpectedly familiar in one another. They might also reach sharply different conclusions about what they had seen and how they should live with it.

Victoria listened without interrupting; her attention fixed on the screen. When I had finished, she closed her notebook and smiled.

“I really like that,” she said. “It is important, and I think people here would find it fascinating. For a first appearance, though, I would steer us toward something that gives you a little more breathing room. What about ancient astronauts? It is a familiar subject here, it has a broad audience, and you could still say something substantial while keeping the political side at a safer distance.”

Her decision came with brisk clarity. Within minutes, we had settled on a new direction: I would speak about ancient-astronaut theories through the lens of China’s Sanxingdui civilisation.

The arrangement followed a familiar pattern in the UFO world. Invited speakers rarely exercised complete control over the subject or frame of apublic appearance. Organisers and media hosts shaped the agenda through audience expectations, commercial realities, personal relationships, and their own sense of what a public event could carry.

The American UFO community I was beginning to enter gave speakers far more room for public expression than the Chinese UFO community I had known. Their boundaries moved through subtler channels: market appeal, professional caution, personal alliances, and the quiet calculations of public reputation. I remained grateful all the same. The invitation affirmed that my work had travelled beyond China, and it gave me a rare opportunity to appear alongside prominent researchers and experiencers while observing the American UFO community at close range.

***

Before the conference had officially begun, connections among the speakers were already taking shape. People appeared on one another’s media platforms, introduced one another through YouTube, livestreams, and social media, and began building a public sense of momentum around the conference. These exchanges also served another purpose. They allowed people to test one another, exchange trust, and establish their place within the field. Before the stage was even assembled, a network particular to this world had begun to form.

Through interviews, private conversations, and public exchanges, I came to know many of the guests. I also began to see the American UFO community from within. Compared with the UFO world in China, long shaped by political pressure and censorship, it was more open, more pluralistic, and far less centralised.

At the conference and in the conversations surrounding it, people spoke openly about UFOs, secret military projects, extraterrestrial contact, ancient astronauts, consciousness research, and possible links between psychic abilities and anomalous phenomena. What struck me most was the public life of these questions. Subjects still unrecognised by mainstream science, and always vulnerable to ridicule, could nevertheless be discussed, organised around, challenged, and investigated in public.

In China, such a space had seemed almost unimaginable.

The pressure surrounding UFO questions in China came from two directions. Within the community, seniority, face, organisational authority, and the desire for control could easily gather in the hands of a few people. Beyond it, UFOs were often treated as a potential political risk before they had been granted the status of a serious question. Curiosity rarely settled the matter. People first had to consider whether they might attract trouble, acquire a label, or place their work, family, or personal safety at risk.

In the American UFO world, the pressures took a different form. Participants could debate openly, form alliances, challenge one another, and enter the same stage carrying conviction, ambition, and a sense of competition. The wider freedom of expression brought more voices into view. It also made struggles for status, clashes of position, and collisions of temperament far more direct and visible.

In the Western UFO world, the freedom to speak had initially felt close to liberation. As I moved deeper into it, I began to see the discipline that freedom required. An open forum could sustain serious inquiry, yet it could also reward spectacle, unchecked claims, personal mythmaking, and the pursuit of influence under the banner of truth. The issue was never simply whether people could speak. It was whether they could remain accountable for what they said, especially when emotion, ambition, and the desire to be recognised began to shape the story.

A quieter question emerged beneath the arguments: who gets to be believed?

In China, political pressure had taught people caution. It narrowed the space in which they could speak, meet, and pursue difficult questions together. In the United States, the pressures moved through a different terrain. Voices multiplied, allegiances formed, and strong personalities competed for authority. The challenge was to keep inquiry from hardening into faction, vanity, or a struggle for ownership of the unknown. China made people afraid to speak. America asked whether people could remain in the same room once everyone had found a voice.

For Victoria, maintaining a space in which people could remain in relation was its own quiet labour. She worked in a field shaped by reputation, ideology, old loyalties, and personal sensitivities. Some guests arrived with exacting demands; others carried private grievances or competing claims to influence. None of this required the visible force of the state, yet it created its own atmosphere of pressure.

Victoria’s gift lay in the way she moved through that atmosphere. She seemed polished and at ease. In conversation, she showed a subtler authority: a feel for the moment when someone needed space, when conflict needed softening, and when a boundary had to be held without drama.

Her work extended far beyond schedules, speakers, and logistics. She had to preserve a fragile common ground where people with conflicting convictions could remain together long enough for something meaningful to pass between them.

***

Who Gets to Be Believed

An apparently open field does not grant every experience an equal hearing.

One day, I joined several conference guests for a private video call. Faces appeared one by one across the screen. They spoke about their research and recent developments in the American UFO community; I gave a brief account of changes within China’s own circle. At first, the conversation was warm and easy. We shared a familiarity that crossed national borders. Each of us had spent time at the margins of respectable discourse, trying to find language for an unknown that had, in one way or another, entered our lives.

Then I mentioned that I had once invited an American guest to speak in China. In earlier interviews, she had described unusual experiences on Mars.

The atmosphere shifted almost at once.

One person leaned back from the screen. Another pressed his lips together. After a brief silence, one of the guests spoke in a low voice, with a force that made each word distinct.

“She’s a fraud. She never went to Mars.”

The others quickly joined in. Inviting someone like her to China, they said, would mislead local UFO enthusiasts and distort their understanding of extraterrestrial contact and the UFO phenomenon. They urged me to invite them next time, so that people who “really understood the truth” could set the record straight.

I watched the faces on my screen. Their displeasure was visible, though no one abandoned the civility of the call.

“Why are you so sure her experience was false?” I asked.

The answer came without hesitation.

“Anyone who says they served in a secret space programme, or claims to have been to Mars, is part of a smokescreen. They are being used by the very forces they claim to expose. They have been programmed. It is not real. Don’t listen to that nonsense.”

The conversation continued, though its centre of gravity had shifted. We had begun with a question about experience. We were now deciding who could speak credibly, and whose testimony could be refused before it was heard.

A boundary was being drawn before me. Certain accounts of contact were allowed into serious discussion. Alleged service in secret space programmes lay beyond the threshold. Such claims were not to be investigated or set alongside other testimony. No effort was required to distinguish fantasy, trauma, misinterpretation, fabrication, or some fragment of reality still beyond our present language. Once a claim had been classified as impossible, it forfeited any claim to attention.

I could not vouch for the truth of anyone’s story, and extraordinary claims demand rigorous scrutiny. Yet the exchange showed how quickly exclusion can assume the authority of reason. Caution is necessary. So is the capacity to remain open before what has not yet been explained. A claim may fail under examination; it should still be examined before it is banished from the realm of the discussable.

The exchange revealed how quickly exclusion could assume the authority of reason.One word was enough: impossible. The person vanished inside the label. The question closed, and the unknown stood outside the door once more.

As I spent more time with conference guests, the American UFO world came into focus as a decentralised and deeply divided ecology, where several versions of reality existed side by side. Research-based inquiry, personal encounter, official disclosure, and grassroots storytelling each gathered their own communities of trust. Each offered a language for ordering the unknown, a source of belonging, and a measure of inner certainty. Each also carried its own blind spots.

Quiet boundaries followed. They shaped which experiences could enter serious discussion and which voices were left at the edges.

From a distance, such diversity appeared to promise openness. Inside the community, it often produced contests over legitimacy, influence, and followers. “Truth,” contact experience, and messages from higher dimensions could become entangled with reputation, access, and the distribution of resources. The unknown, which had drawn so many people into the field, could gradually become territory to be claimed.

Even around the same UFO question, people gathered into smaller circles shaped by their assumptions about extraterrestrial intelligence, the nature of contact, and the source of reliable knowledge.

Groups such as CCRI grounded their authority in research and data that could be measured, analysed, and compared. Some speakers treated firsthand contact as the central source of knowledge, placing particular weight on the felt reality of consciousness. MUFON, one of the world’s most influential civilian UFO organisations, drew authority from its quasi-institutional structure, investigative systems, and procedures for reporting and certification.Beyond these groups stood a much larger body of UFO enthusiasts. The divisions became most visible in the smallest encounters.

The Researchers’ Disappointment

A different boundary ran through the part of the UFO community that had committed itself to research. People working along this path tended to speak with greater restraint. Method, evidence, and professional training shaped their sense of which questions could bear serious attention.

Over several conversations with researchers in the field, I began to hear the disappointment beneath that discipline.

During one video call, an acquaintance spoke about the changes he had watched unfold in recent years. When the subject turned to the stories attracting the largest audiences, his pace slowed. His brow drew together.

“What people want now is the Hollywood version,” he said. “Someone claims they were on Mars—a super-soldier with a laser rifle, fighting thousands of reptilians. The more outrageous the story, the bigger the audience.”

He paused, as though deciding how much of his frustration to reveal.

“People will spend hours listening to that. Very few want to engage with the work we are actually trying to do. Where does consciousness come from? What might contact experiences reveal about human consciousness? Those are questions you could spend a lifetime studying.”

He did not press the point. He only shook his head. Yet his weariness lingered in the silence that followed: the fatigue of someone who had watched patient inquiry disappear beneath stories designed to astonish.

After a moment, he added, “This is where the field has to go. Every anomalous phenomenon, including contact, brings us back to consciousness.”

Then he turned his attention to me.

“You should put your energy into consciousness research and the contact cases that might genuinely teach us something. Be careful around people who turn their personal stories into science-fiction films.”

He gave no names. The object of his concern was clear enough.

I understood his frustration. For people trying to preserve their standing within universities, laboratories, and research institutions, UFO studies already carried professional risk. They lived with the scepticism of mainstream academia and felt compelled to demonstrate, again and again, their commitment to evidence, method, and disciplined judgement. Dramatic personal narratives could attract audiences, followers, and publicity within days. Research that demanded patience, long attention, and cumulative work often passed almost unnoticed.

When several scholars working seriously in the field spoke of people who claimed involvement in secret space programmes, their tone grew markedly harder. Such accounts, they believed, offered little that could be verified and could not be meaningfully set beside longitudinal data, experimental design, or systematic research. At times, their impatience seemed instinctive, as though allowing these narratives into view might pull the entire field back toward disorder and ridicule.

Their concern had real grounds. The UFO world could easily be overtaken by exaggeration, opportunism, and assertions never tested against anything beyond the speaker’s own conviction. Evidence, method, and standards of inquiry mattered. Yet rigour can become another closed door once it loses the ability to listen.

The unknown rarely enters human life in a form that is complete or easily measured. It may first appear as fragments: a contradictory memory, an encounter that resists language, a feeling that disturbs the order of one’s life. Some of these fragments will prove unreliable. Others may contain traces of something still beyond explanation. When only experiences already legible within an established framework are permitted to count, many possible clues lose their place in the inquiry before the inquiry has truly begun.

The question was never whether every claim should be accepted. It was whether a field devoted to the unexplained could preserve enough humility to listen before reaching a verdict.

Experience, Identity, and the Right to Speak

The same pattern of exclusion appeared among those who treated lived experience and insider knowledge as the deepest source of authority.

Some people who said they had been involved in MILAB—an acronym used in the community for alleged military abduction—or in Secret Space Programme projects, often called SSP, dismissed credentialed researchers as “eggheads.” In their view, academics and professional experts were intelligent people confined to books, institutions, and approved categories of knowledge.

Professional expertise, they believed, dealt in a filtered reality: selected, edited, and made legible to existing standards. Those who had lived through hidden events felt closer to what had been withheld.

Behind the insult lay a wound. Many experiencers felt that their memories had been declared inadmissible before anyone had truly listened. When they spoke of secret programmes, UFO technology, or antigravity, they often met an amused smile or a familiar verdict: insufficient evidence. To them, this carried more than intellectual reserve. It felt like a gate closing before their account could be weighed. Some had come to believe that certain people were denied the right to speak before they opened their mouths.

Their resistance to institutional authority grew from this history of dismissal. They wanted to protect their memories from being reduced to pathology, fantasy, or error by people who had never entered the world they described. Yet protection could harden into sealed conviction. Once every question began to feel like an attack, inquiry gave way to defence. Experience became a fortress, sustained by the affirmations of those already persuaded. Within that enclosure, belief could offer dignity and shelter while leaving little room for correction, humility, or the deeper transformation that truth demands.

Many of these people were not simply seeking attention. Some were trying to defend a reality they felt had already been taken from them. Their vulnerability deserved recognition. Their certainty still required examination.

Insider Status and the Authority of Disclosure

A third form of authority belonged to people who said they had worked in government, the military, or intelligence before entering public life as whistleblowers.

They spoke in the measured register of restricted knowledge. References to “classified” material and secrecy often set the outer boundary of discussion. In their accounts, truth had already been recovered from concealment; access depended on identity, connections, and the standing to be admitted.

This status carried a powerful emotional force. Official language, institutional associations, and fragments of inside information could create the impression that the deepest questions had already been resolved somewhere beyond public view. Once a disclosure acquired the aura of institutional confirmation, further scrutiny could begin to seem almost improper.

Yet the fact of release did not answer basic questions. Who had investigated the material? What had been left out of the record? Had information been selected, edited, or released to serve a particular purpose? What interests might still shape the story?

Disclosure could illuminate. It could also become a stopping point. Once information was received as a final answer, inquiry lost the humility that kept a person receptive to what remained unseen, unresolved, or beyond present understanding.

Over time, I came to see that the deepest divisions in ufology rarely rested on any single claim. They concerned the power to decide what counted as experience, who could define credibility, and who possessed the right to declare a question settled.

Academic training, private memory, and insider status each carried genuine forms of authority. Each could also become a defence against listening and correction. The danger appeared when a way of knowing became a claim to exclusive ownership of truth.

Looking back on those first online meetings with Victoria, I came to understand the quiet force she carried. Her work extended far beyond guest lists, speaking topics, and event logistics. She was holding together a provisional and fragile order: a space where people who disagreed could remain in relation, and where divergent approaches to the unknown could share the same room without immediately reducing one another to error, fraud, or irrelevance.

Perhaps this is the discipline the UFO world most urgently requires. It is also an inner discipline demanded of anyone who stands before the unknown.

Truth rarely arrives whole. It emerges through fragments, contradictions, testimony, doubt, and time. In moments of haste - when people feel compelled to define, align themselves, or establish their superior claim to certainty - the harder task is to preserve a margin of openness: for another person’s experience, for correction, and for what has yet to become intelligible.

Without that discipline, inquiry contracts. The search for truth becomes a struggle over rank, access, and who may claim to stand closest to it.

Victoria’s achievement was modest in appearance and demanding in practice: she preserved a room in which uncertainty could live longer than the need to win.