For those prepared to possibly have their minds blown and beliefs challenged, the annual Contact in the Desert conference will delve into the strange and unusual over the course of four days at the Renaissance Esmeralda Resort & Spa in Indian Wells. Just don’t expect tinfoil hats or little green men.
“We consider this event to be an academic scientific conference that looks at things that are unexplained,” attests “Captain” Ron Janix, organizer of the world’s largest conference that’s committed to a rational investigation — not an over-the-top celebration — of UFOs, alien abductions, and other topics exploring the boundaries of human understanding.
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Contact, which began in 2014 in Joshua Tree, has been held in recent years in the Coachella Valley to accommodate the growing number of attendees. (Janix expects more than 2,000 from around the world.) This year’s gathering will include live podcast recordings, film premieres, and talks by the likes of Josh Gates, host of the Discovery Channel series Expedition Unknown, as well as NewsNation’s Ross Coulthart, who has been interviewing government whistleblowers about unidentified aerial phenomena.
Janix is particularly looking forward to a presentation by Diane Hennacy Powell, a psychiatrist who has been studying non-speaking autistic children who appear to exhibit telepathic communication with their mothers or caregivers. “It’s an amazing thing,” Janix says. “We are going to demonstrate that live on stage for 30 minutes, and then [Hennacy Powell] and a couple of experts are going to explain for an hour how they think this is happening.”
