For years, whistleblowers have publicly alleged that the United States government is withholding what it knows about UFOs (now formally referred to as “unidentified anomalous phenomena” or “UAP”).

Those allegations gained new weight this past May, when the U.S. Department of War began the process of releasing hundreds of declassified documents, images and videos as part of the Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters.

These recent disclosures raise an old question: If the U.S. government is officially acknowledging that UAP have been observed, could claims of contact with the non-human intelligence allegedly operating them also be true? To understand what a claim of actual contact would even mean, it helps to start with the framework that first tried to categorize these encounters.

In 1972, American astronomer J. Allen Hynek proposed a three-part “Close Encounters” framework for classifying UFO experiences that has shaped the field since the late 1940s.

A “Close Encounter of the First Kind” (CE-1) is a visual sighting from less than 150 metres away. A CE-2 involves physiological effects on the surrounding environment. A CE-3 involves observing non-human entities operating the UFO.

Five years after Hynek’s book appeared, Steven Spielberg’s 1977 film Close Encounters of the Third Kind established CE-3 in popular culture.

Communicating with UAP

Later researchers expanded Hynek’s classification. A “Close Encounter of the Fourth Kind” refers to abduction into a UAP. A “Close Encounter of the Fifth Kind” (CE-5) alleges human-initiated communication with the non-human intelligence operating UAP, whether extraterrestrials, time-travellers or so-called interdimensional........

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