It had been, as she described it, a “lifetime of weirdness”: she has a semi-verbal, autistic child, and she said she had “an encounter with physical beings in my house” as a result as undertaking The Gateway Tapes, a CIA-produced set of guided meditations intended to access new planes of consciousness. (The tapes exploded in popularity amid a COVID-era surge in wellness habits, as well as with the help of several Rogan episodes on the subject.)

“Think about the stigma here,” the moderator said. “I’m not being conspiratorial at all. There might have been a need in the national security state in the ’50s to tamp down this topic, and as a result, generationally, it’s like a snake eating into a tail that people can’t talk about it.”

Michael Eisman, a talent management and telehealth entrepreneur from Los Angeles, had been overcoming similar fears of late. A friend of his has been volunteering at the Disclosure Foundation, and Eisman was excited to tag along on the trip to DC following a childhood encounter with a “glowing white board over my bed” that still hung over him and his family.

“I’ve had these experiences and I’ve always been nervous to talk about them because I don’t want to sound crazy,” Eisman said. “I don’t think I’m crazy. Otherwise, I’m a pretty sane and rational person. Now that more people are talking about it, I’m interested in being part of that conversation.”

If these attendees represented, as they saw it, a sort of band of misfits, any stigma they have faced has begun to dissipate in recent years. While the UFO files have not yet offered any groundbreaking revelation along the lines of the most headline-grabbing whistleblower claims—that, for instance, the government has concealed its recovery of non-human spacecraft with threats and killings—they have provided true believers with an institutional stamp of approval. (“The U.S. government has offered support and recognition to a new kind of religion: belief in UFOs,” the religion writer Diana Walsh Pasulka recently wrote.) At a meeting with astronomy students at the Vatican last summer, Pope Leo XIV spoke about the “mysterious joy” that comes from studying the universe and the ability conferred by a space telescope “to peer deeply into the atmosphere of exoplanets where life may be developing and study the nebulae where planetary systems themselves are forming.”

“Most religions are all about belief in non-human intelligences,” Yale religious historian Carlos Eire told the audience on Thursday. “So religion, could be argued at least … might actually lessen the shock of full disclosure.”