New Realities, May 16, 2026

New Realities with Alan Steinfeld Experiencers, Disclosure, and the Consciousness Behind UFO Contact Guests, Meredith Spearman, Holly Ann Wood and Richard Monck Introducing the UAP Experiencer Discussion In this episode of New Realities, Alan Steinfeld presents a UAPedia-sponsored discussion from the latest UAP Con, focused on UFO contact, anomalous experiences, consciousness, and the experiencer community. The panel features Meredith Spearman, Holly Ann Wood, and Richard Monk, each bringing a personal and research-based perspective to the topic. Alan frames the conversation around the challenge of integrating extraordinary experiences into a culture that often rejects or ridicules them, especially when those experiences do not fit ordinary scientific, social, or psychological frameworks. Meredith Spearman on Silence, Initiation, and Witnessing Meredith Spearman shares her childhood contact experience, beginning around age eight, and describes how the encounter dissolved the boundary between observer and observed. She explains that the phenomenon seemed to meet her rather than simply appear before her, creating a mutual and deeply transformative experience. Meredith says the experience ran through family lines, along with a learned silence around it, and that she carried it privately for decades before writing and speaking publicly. She frames contact not as hallucination, but as a form of initiation that can dissolve old identity, force a revision of reality, expand relational awareness, and permanently change a person’s understanding of existence. Containers for Extraordinary Experience A major part of Meredith’s presentation focuses on the need for social and cultural “containers” to help people integrate experiences that disrupt ordinary reality. She compares modern experiencers to ancient initiates, shamans, mystics, and those who crossed thresholds in traditions such as Eleusis, where ritual, elders, preparation, and community helped turn crisis into transformation. Without such support, she argues, the same experience can leave a person isolated or broken. She also compares experiencer testimony to pain in medicine, saying that even when the cause cannot be proven externally, the lived experience still deserves recognition, compassion, and care. Holly Ann Wood on Contact, Consciousness, and Safe Spaces Holly Ann Wood, known as “That UAP Girl,” shares her own childhood encounter with three orange orbs near the ancient white horse carved into the chalk hills of Wiltshire. She explains that the experience did not feel random or distant, but present, aware, and interactive. Holly emphasizes that UAP encounters are not only scientific questions, but human ones, affecting people psychologically, emotionally, spiritually, and sometimes physically. She argues that experiencers need safe spaces where they can speak without stigma, process what happened, and realize they are not alone, which led her to create Project Nano as a place to discover, discuss, and disclose these experiences. Richard Monk on High Strangeness and Personal Transformation Richard Monk discusses three unusual experiences from his life that he once saw as separate, but later began to understand as connected through the lens of high strangeness. As a child in 1980, he saw a classic saucer-shaped craft near a cloud while a nearby girl did not see it, raising questions about perception, manifestation, and the relationship between witness and phenomenon. He also describes having an imaginary friend named Nicholas as a child and later learning that imaginary companions sometimes appear in the histories of people who report UAP encounters. Finally, he shares a near-death-like experience involving a profound, loving nothingness that later helped him explore consciousness, the pleroma, and the possibility that these events form part of a deeper personal curriculum. Disclosure, Empathy, and a New Reality The panel discussion turns to how experiencers can help society move toward disclosure. Alan, Meredith, Holly, and Richard discuss whether humanity is going through a collective initiation, whether personal disclosure may matter as much as official disclosure, and how the public can learn to acknowledge experiences without needing to fully explain them first. Meredith emphasizes that the empathy question can be answered before the ontological question: even if we cannot prove exactly what happened, we can still recognize that someone experienced something meaningful. The episode closes with UAPedia’s presentation of its mission as a trusted UAP knowledge hub, bringing together research, testimony, documents, claims, cases, and experiencer perspectives into a more coherent public resource.