Close Extraterrestrial Encounter Syndrome (CEES) is an Adjustment Disorder Not Otherwise Specified .A reaction to a close extraterrestrial encounter (CEE), remembered or repressed into the unconscious, which substantially alters patterns of daily living or social relationships in a mildly disorienting or unsettling way, and has four or more of the following 20 associated symptoms. These symptoms may include:
Repeated anxiety/unexplained restlessness after an anomalous event, (such as one involving nocturnal lights, viewing a UFO, a sense of a foreign presence in the house, or an unexplained detour from one’s ordinary driving route);
Phobic reaction to phenomena consciously or unconsciously associated with a CEE, (such as an accurate sketch of an extraterrestrial face);
Repeated sleep disturbances or nightmares with UFO/ET themes;
Obsessional “Dreams” or daytime thinking about UFOs, ETs or CEES;
Compulsive behavior (e.g., reading) concerning the UFO topic;
Unexplained moodiness/irritability after an anomalous UFO/encounter incident
Preoccupation with body symptoms/marks associated with a CEE (such as tiny scoop marks, or laser scars which don’t bleed or hurt and which heal very quickly, or inexplicable bruises noted upon wakening consistent with an extraterrestrial hand grip, or episodic ringing in one ear, or other episodic resonance vibrations felt in a particular body site, such as the upper nasal sinus cavity or the occipital lobe region of the brain);
Experiencing an unexplainable, substantial period of “missing time” following an anomalous incident, (such as being paced at night by a “car” with a single powerful headlight, or sitting down after dinner to watch television, immediately noticing an unusual pattern on the screen, and “waking up” at 9:00 the next morning unable to remember having watched TV or going to bed, etc.);
The sudden, unexplained onset of feelings of social non-ordinariness (i.e., that one is out of sync with the world, or that the world no longer seems as it used to);
Cosmic awareness (thinking about the Earth as a living whole, instead of confining one’s perspective to neighborhood or town or country; or thinking about the Earth as just one among many inhabited planets) which enters with unusual frequency into one’s daytime thinking;
Suddenly feeling an affinity for CEE experiencers one reads about or hears interviewed on television, or feeling a strong attraction to extraterrestrials as somehow familiar;
A sense of receiving telepathic messages or repeated gifted intuitions, presumably from an extraterrestrial source;
A sense of one’s mindspace being episodically entered into and shared with an extraterrestrial being;
The onset of or marked increase in, psychic/ESP ability, (such as clairvoyance, telepathy, precognition, or telekinesis);
Onset of attraction for a spiritually or religious practice based on the in-dwelling of the Supreme Source in all nature, and resultant reverence for all lifeforms as related;
Sense of longing for the primary-contact Extraterrestrial one has dealt with during one or more Encounters;
An obsessive sense of having a mission (clear, vague or unconscious) derived from the CEE, and related to the extraterrestrials’ messages;
A sense of strong “pull” to travel to a specific area, either with an intuition of an impending close encounter there, or for an unknown reason, (which turns out to be a CEE);
Having an extraterrestrial perspective to the Earth’s situation, or feeling a genetic heritage partially derived from extraterrestrial sources, or having a sense of having come from off-planet, or having somehow had an extraterrestrial as one parent;
Sense of one’s destiny as off-planet, or feeling a “pull” to go “home” to an extraterrestrial planet one was shown by the ET’s, or to “rejoin fellow” extraterrestrials elsewhere in the galaxy.
Then, there are those experiencers who are suffering from major symptoms of a Complicated Close Extraterrestrial Encounter Syndrome (CEES). Most often this is because they are still dealing with residual emotions from an earlier, severe, human-caused trauma, for which they have not yet completed a successful course of psychotherapy. In such instances, the extraterrestrial visitations cause an abreactive exacerbation of previous, human-caused Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Other preexisting disorders which predispose an experiencer to develop major symptoms after an encounter are: Dissociative Identity Disorder, Borderline Personality Syndrome, severe Histrionic or severe Dependent Personality disorder. For such dually-challenged persons the therapist will need to consider longer-term psychotherapy.
Such therapy will need to deal with both the human-caused traumatic issues and the emotional exacerbation and turmoil resulting from extraterrestrial visitations. Special care will be needed to keep distinct the issues stemming from the human-caused trauma, and those issues stemming from the extraterrestrial contact itself. It cannot be expected that the experiencer who has had previous human trauma will initially be able to keep the two events separate. In fact, in my research experience, such experiencers almost always confuse the feelings coming from their extraterrestrial encounter with the residual feelings from their human trauma.
And this is to be expected. The reason such confounding of close encounter feelings with feelings from human trauma occurs is because the human trauma is invariable extremely intense, catastrophically unexpected, out-of-the-norm, and extremely intimate. The unresolved human traumata most likely to cause flashback emotions after a close encounter are: childhood sexual molestation, childhood or adult rape, or childhood ritual (Satanic) cultic abuse, (usually involving sexual molestation and torture). Such human traumata leave the victim with deep feelings of being intruded upon intimately by an unwanted other person, feelings of being overpowered in a frightening way, feelings of loss of the usual protective boundaries between what is personal and what is socially shared, and feeling of loss of distinction between where self ends and where another person begins (intimate invasion).
Because extraterrestrial encounters often involve the sudden appearance of one or more extraterrestrials without warning in an expected location, such as one’s bedroom at night, their appearance can feel, at first, like an invasion. the extraterrestrials’ use of mental telepathy, and their facility for reading one’s thoughts and the contents of one’s mind, can feel, to the previously traumatized person, like an old, familiar, and unwelcome intrusion into what is in our culture one’s private space. Here we have the clash of two cultures, polar opposite in their assumptions. In human culture, (Western modern industrial culture, anyway) the assumption is that one’s thoughts and living space are private, because individualism is prized. In extraterrestrial cultures researched thus far, it appears that living space and thoughts are inevitably shared, because of the automatic, two-way nature of the mutual telepathic ability of all members of their society. they live in a shared mind-field “commons”.
There are other aspects of some close encounters which may also cause traumatic flashbacks. Sometimes an extraterrestrial will cloak him/herself (yes, they have gender) by imposing on the mind of the experiencer the borrowed appearance of a familiar family figure, so that the experiencer believes (and remembers) that it was Dad, or Uncle Henry, or Grandma that was actually in the bedroom the night they woke up with a presence in the room. If that close encounter also includes a scientific-medical exam, with the experiencer on her back, paralyzed or held in place by force-field ankle or wrist restraints, and if palpation of the pelvic or buttocks areas, or a gynecological procedure is part of the procedures, and the experiencer has only sketchy recall of the encounter, their memory may put the fragments remembered together and come up with the pseudo-memory that Dad, or Uncle Henry, or Grandma pinned them down in their bedroom and molested them. I have discovered at least five instances of such pseudo-incest memories in an 86-case research sample, and Hard psychiatrist John Mack reports more.
Then, there are those minority of cases, perhaps 5%, of persons who are the victims of pseudo-Alien abductions. These are staged by human Military/Intelligence “Special Operations” personnel to extract information or test exotic technology, and may include drugging, narco-hypnotism, psychological and physical abuse, interrogations, threats, rape, or torture, in exotic unfamiliar settings, with bizarre pseudo-”Aliens” (costumed Special Forces) present. The federal Department of Health and Human Services has been collecting reports from these victims.
Differential diagnosis of CEES from schizophrenia is relatively straightforward. Genuine experiencers do not have bizarre, grandiose, somatic, religious, nihilistic or persecutory delusions, (although the clinician must distinguish such report as telepathic communication by ETs from schizophrenia thought-insertion delusions.) Likewise, schizophrenic auditory hallucinations, where “the voices” criticize or command, must be distinguished from audible-seeming ET telepathic communication. And genuine experiencers are not incoherent, nor locked into illogical thinking or loose associations, as schizophrenics so often are. Also, experiencers’ affect is anything but blunt or flat. Nor is their behavior grossly disorganized, as the schizophrenic’s so often is.
Borderline Personality Disorder, as well as Factitious Disorder with Psychological Symptoms, provide differential diagnosis challenges, because many attention-seeking Borderlines and Factitious Disordered are now hopping on the “abductee-victim” bandwagon. Further, they have been exposed to enough media or support-group data to cleverly mimic experiencers. But persons who have had genuine encounters generally lack the marked mood-shifting, stubborn anger, history of intensely unstable relationships, gnawing identity disturbance, impulsivity patterns and chronic acting-out to enliven an empty life, which are the hallmarks of Borderlines.
Likewise, the Factitious-Disordered person’s chaotic array of symptoms and stubborn clinging to “victim” status do differentiate them from the generally well-functioning experiencer, who genuinely wants to understand their experiences and come to feel resolved.
The differentiation of Delusional Disorder, Paranoid Type from CEES is more exacting, because a Delusional could, and sometimes does, have a single-topic delusion of extraterrestrial visitation, and otherwise be functional. However, the characteristically-disproportional, consuming paranoia of the Delusional is quite different than the sometimes-afraid reaction of some experiencers. Delusionals are refractory to reality-based educative counseling, while experiencers are able to master their misgivings and uncertainties about their encounters.
Frontal-Lobe Epilepsy may produce transient organic hallucinations, which can infrequently include “seeing” extraterrestrials. But the emotional liability, impulsiveness, intellectual rigidity or social disconnectedness often also seen in these organic personality syndromes distinguishes them from genuine victims who are usually psychologically indistinguishable from the general population.
