“I saw something in the sky, and then an individual on the ground who spoke to me,”  He described the entity — a possible extraterrestrial? — as a “blonde-haired, blue eyed dude” dressed in all white. “I wasn’t on psychedelics or anything,” Humphrey laughed, but the encounter left him shaken.

“I had trouble sleeping after, but I wasn’t harmed,” Humphrey said. “I took it as an experience where the line blurred between reality and spiritual woo-woo stuff.”

Humphrey’s mind-bending night was the kind of thing many would keep private, or to the deepest trenches of UFO Reddit. But last weekend, two thousand fellow seekers gathered at the Renaissance Esmeralda resort to try to make sense of their similar encounters and beliefs.

They had much to discuss. The topic of UFOs has gone from fringe to urgently mainstream in just a few years. The highest reaches of the government, military, media and entertainment have taken serious interest in the phenomenon.

The audience was there — according to a 2021 Pew Research Center poll, two-thirds of Americans believe that extraterrestrial life exists, and more than half believe that military-reported sightings are evidence of alien life.

“There are thousands of fascinating stories for producers here. It’s not just like that Twilight Zone episode ‘To Serve Man’,” Harary said. “We’ve got a guy who is a multimillionaire businessman who said he’s met with the Pleiadians ever since he was 5, and hey, I believe him.”