At the Conscious Life Expo, Alien ‘Disclosure’ Is Only a Matter of Time

In a packed ballroom in Los Angeles, astrologer Shima Moore announces that something has just happened in the stars for the first time in at least 6,400 years. Minutes earlier, Saturn and Neptune met at zero degrees in Aries, the first degree of the first zodiac sign. Moore, dressed like a priestess in flowing white robes and a red and gold scarf, describes it as a “cosmic reset.” This rare planetary transit, she indicates as a harpist plucks softly, could herald the next phase of human evolution: open contact with extraterrestrials.

“This next few years is the time for potential ET contact,” she tells me afterwards. “I just sense that’s going to really be happening. I’m tuned into what’s going on astrologically.”

Alongside me, more than 300 attendees — aura readers, quantum life coaches, and “starseeds” who believe they descend from beyond the Milky Way galaxy — are guided by Moore to hold their arms aloft and give thanks to “the guardians of this place.” Several people shake from the sheer force of the collective energy. One breathes so sharply I worry he’s about to be lifted by a light into the sky. 

I’m watching this celestial scene at the Los Angeles Airport Hilton next to Althea Avanzo, a “galactic channeler” with fire-engine red hair that goes down to her waist. She whispers in my ear that we are entering a “time loop portal wormhole.” She later tells me how she was “taken up on the ships” when she was around three months old. “They took genetic information from me to create a hybrid child,” Avanzo says. 

Welcome to the 24th-annual Conscious Life Expo, a four-day conference devoted to “the conscious co-creation of a new world.” That, if the ensuing event teaches me anything, will involve understanding aliens and fine-tuning the administrative logistics of “first contact.” Coincidentally, the day before the conference began, President Donald Trump pledged to finally release the government files on extraterrestrial life. So, I’m here at the largest event of its kind across the U.S. to find out what sort of information might be disclosed, and whether ET really is phoning home.

Certainly, it seems like something is shifting and that we’re at a precipitous moment: UFO talk is no longer confined to the conspiratorial fringes. With hearings on Capitol Hill, former government officials using the phrase “non-human intelligence,” physicists like Bob Lazar testifying about retrieved anti-gravity craft that he was allegedly ordered to reverse manufacture, and Barack Obama making a coy remark about “objects in the skies,” it feels less ridiculous to ask whether the 9,000 people who pass through this conference over the weekend are delusional, or simply early to the party. 

The decades-old movement to force “disclosure” — the release of all the alleged classified evidence documenting alien contact with earth, though it’s also used to describe the movement that believes in alien life — dates back to 1947, when the U.S. military said it had recovered a “flying disk” in Roswell, New Mexico. These days, it is reaching unprecedented heights, and the crowded expo hall strikes me as what an Area 51 hanger might look like if half of Sedona moved in. 

This is what disclosure looks like in 2026 — part revival meeting, part Comic-Con, part political rally. In the lobby, I meet a blonde woman who is pushing her rabbit in a buggy. “His name is Bunny,” she tells me. “He’s disabled.” Beside her, a bearded man shakes a maraca and blows a didgeridoo into the chest of another man, sporting a shiny purple shirt, as he closes his eyes and smiles. For what it’s worth, it does look extremely relaxing.

Mauve curtains separate vendors who hawk $300 group seances, $222 “starseed activations,” $110 tarot card readings, and $69 “mantis psychic channeled readings” from a man wearing a preying mantis outfit and headpiece  who will hold your hands intently for much of the 20-minute session. (Access to the conference is $125 for the weekend and $60-plus for each keynote and panel, unless you buy a “Platinum All Access” ($785) or “Diamond VIP Experience” pass ($1,111.) A Saturday night ayahuasca ceremony is also being offered by a scruffy neoshaman, with other psychedelic plants like San Pedro cacti never far away either. 

“We have been visited for many, many millenia ,and we have to move forwards in our lives as a way to progress our existence as a species,” Keith Seland, a ufologist with a thick chevron moustache, tells me at his booth. He’s selling copies of his books, including the 2020 Humaniverse Guide to First Contact with ET. 

Meanwhile, an 84-year-old man who legally named himself Jesus Christ roams freely in his white dhoti, somehow weaving between the masses who bump into each other with alarming frequency. “We’re all one,” he tells me. 

Along another aisle, Natalie Walter, also known as Naya Cosmic, has a colorful booth where she offers quantum healing upgrades and “light language activations.” That is to say that she can “channel” an alien language which might help others “remember” that they can also speak it. “It started with recurring dreams of these blue beings that I had as a child,” she recalls, wearing a forehead chain with a moonstone resting atop her mythological third eye. “And then five years ago, they came to me in Sedona, where they actually put a blue light right through my crown chakra and all of a sudden I could do the healing with my hands.” (Someone walks past and, eyeing Walter, says to her friend, “She’s Lemurian, I can tell.”)

From afar I spot Dick Russell, a New York Times-bestselling author who penned the 2023 biography The Real RFK Jr.: Trials of a Truth Warrior. His forthcoming book is titled They’re Here!: UFOs, UAPs, and US. “There’s a consensus that ‘first contact’ is not far away,” he tells me later over email. 

In another conference room, Adam Apollo, a self-described planetary steward and “sexual healing” expert is giving a talk on “Galactic Spiritual Tech,” donning exercise mitts and parachute pants. Adam and Apollo are indeed his real names — his hippy parents were astrology enthusiasts — though he keeps his surname private for security reasons.

He provides a compelling tale of an ET encounter which he says took place at Burning Man in 2005. “Even though I was totally sober, when you meet an ET being and they start blasting into your mind with telepathy, you kind of wonder, ‘Was there something in my drink?’” Later, as he relaxed on the playa, he delved into the recesses of his mind, where he met “the whole Galactic Council” and exactly 73 ambassadors of different interplanetary species. He also had time to visit sex temples in Petra, an ancient city in Jordan. “I started to see and remember all of these things,” he tells the crowd, including when a Pleiadian priestess helped save his crew after his starship got stranded during the “Orion wars.”

These far-out experiences convinced him that reality is not only a “holographic matrix field,” he says, slipping into a Gandalf-like British accent he uses for emphasis, but one inhabited by beings from other star systems. “They’re your family.” 

Next up is Stephen Bassett, who in 1996 became the first and only registered UFO lobbyist on K Street, fighting through his advocacy organization Paradigm Research Group to end what he saw as the government-imposed truth embargo. The sci-fi buff and former tennis pro first became convinced that there has been “contact” after reading 1994’s bestseller Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens by John Mack, a Pulitzer Prize-winning Harvard psychiatrist. In 2021, Bassett was vindicated when it emerged that the Pentagon ran a secret UFO program.

“A rumor has been spreading worldwide … that Donald Trump has already planned a speech for disclosure and plans to give it on July 8,” Bassett says, wearing a dark suit in a basement conference room next to a section of the expo known as “The Rabbit Hole.” Stephen Spielberg’s new film Disclosure Day, which features crop circles and aliens speaking through Emily Blunt, is set to come out June 12, and could set up Trump’s coming revelations nicely, Bassett adds. “People love aliens, they really do.” 

Back in the ballroom where the opening ceremony was held, shock-jock panel host Jimmy Church says disclosure is “our fundamental right” and that we deserve “to know who our brothers and sisters are.” The roomful of attendees, including a lady wearing fluffy black Uggs, a guy with a purple lotus dyed into his hair, and an elderly gentleman who is furiously petting his cockapoo, naturally exclaim, “Yes!” and clap. 

At a “Secret Technologies” panel, an all-star cast of experts and conspiracy theorists including Robert Edward Grant (926,000 followers on Instagram) and Billy Carson (1.7 million) explain how suppressed alien objects could transform our understanding of reality. And then the claims get even more wild. “We homo sapiens are the product of genetic manipulation by at least three extraterrestrial civilizations going back at least 14,000 years,” Linda Moulton Howe, a veteran journalist wearing narrow rim glasses who runs the popular Earthflies YouTube channel, tells the ballroom. “If we have worldwide animal mutilations, it might have something to do with sustaining the lives of these beings. And essentially we are being harvested.” She also asks how many of the “non-humans” are in collaboration with China. Another speaker interjects that they could be “arming” Russia, too, in an extraterrestrial colonization tactic likened to “the deadliest Mexican standoff.”

But, never fear, with the correct understanding of how to coexist through diplomacy, we might be able to live in peace with the coming ETs, according to Daniel Sheehan, a dapper lawyer in a cream suit who filed the landmark 1986 federal civil racketeering lawsuit over the Iran-Contra affair before pivoting to UFOs. He is giving a sparsely attended Saturday afternoon talk on what he describes as the “incremental disclosure of information concerning ET civilizations” since 2017, including “at least five species of highly intelligent ETs” and those who are in attendance give him a hero’s welcome. He claims that ETs have been in contact with U.S. officials since at least 1964. 

“We’re going to have to start preparing how to become part of a galactic civilization,” he tells the small crowd. Sheehan wears a wry smile as he holds a copy of December’s National Defense Authorization Act, which compels the Pentagon to be more transparent about any UFO interceptions. “Disclosure is blowing up, as it should be.” 

And so if disclosure is coming, whose interpretation should we give the most credence? The line for the weekend’s crowning event on Sunday begins forming a few hours before the doors open at 8 p.m. Medium Daryl Anker claims to have channeled a multidimensional being known as Bashar for over 40 years, developing a fervent cult following in the process. The room is jam packed with more than 400 people and dozens are left milling around outside, disappointed.

Anker, who looks like a cross between the British occultist Aleister Crowley and Kojak star Telly Savalas, eventually takes the stage wearing a T-shirt which says “2027: The Year Everything Changes.” He sits down, closes his eyes, clears his throat, and twitches. I find myself holding my breath. Many start to film him with their phones. Anker breathes as if he is about to cough up a furball, and then greets the audience to whoops and cheers. “You may find yourself being very surprised at how quickly things will synchronistically begin to appear in your reality,” he says in an accent that sounds like Siri crossbred with a desert prophet. 

One audience member asks how she can best utilize the information about ETs which has already been made available. “Until open contact,” Anker says, “the idea is to follow what we have shared with you, what we call the formula, to prepare yourself, to raise your frequency, to be synchronistically, exactly where you need to be when you need to be there to receive the information and the guidance that you will need to move forward in life after open contact.”

He tells the audience that “hybrid children” are already among us, that the mythological sasquatch is “the natural-evolved species on the planet” and that humans are “quantum jumping all the time.” A lady next to me ums and ahs with appreciation at each imparting of information. It’s her sixth time seeing Anker become Bashar live, she says. 

Then, weirdly, as the talk comes to a close, I attempt to post an Instagram story of Anker, and my brand new iPhone switches itself off. There isn’t much time to dwell on whether something in the room has meddled with my phone’s battery, and we’re shepherded out into the corridor where merch stands have been hastily erected, selling Basher T-shirts, posters and “first contact” crystals. 

Very few people are waiting for a UFO to land on the White House lawn, but disclosure isn’t just about government files either. In a disillusioned country and a world-at-large that feels more atomized and at war with itself than in recent memory, there is a longing to believe that the story of humanity has cosmic authors, and that they might finally reveal themselves. In an era where politics feels surreal and technology behaves like magic, it might not be the unlikeliest scenario. As I step outside into the LAX traffic, I’m oddly comforted that the sky is empty save from a passing airplane, but I can’t help but think there might be more out there.