We began to see that my experience was not only terrible, it was extraordinary and, we assumed, rare. Since running seemed pretty pointless, what should we do? Eventually, we made the decision to try to reconnect with what I had come to think of as “visitors,” assuming that they had not already left.

To be sure, my initial contact had been violent and confused and probably dangerous to both them and me, but the bottom line was that they were highly intelligent and scientifically advanced and clearly not human and—well, I was more curious than afraid.

I decided to try, if I could, to develop a relationship.

This worked. In fact, it still does. They have now been part of my life for over thirty years.

Transformation and its follow-on Breakthrough describe what it was like when a small, ordinary family first became involved in such a relationship.

It is time for everybody to know what these people are like and what it is like to live with them. The reason is that their presence has been growing, elements of the government are beginning to talk about disclosing at least some of what the secret community knows, and it seems more possible every day that they will come into more lives.

If so, how will that play out? Certainly, there will be cultural and political ramifications, but the core of the experience is going to be among ordinary people. Governments and religious groups will try to help, or even control contact. If our experience has any value at all, though, it tells me that our visitors are primarily interested in us as ordinary people, and it is into ordinary lives that they will go.

The front line of contact will be us ordinary folks.

Transformation 2026 tells the story of how Anne and I and our son lived such a life starting back in the late 1980s, and brings that story up to date.

Too few people know our story. While Communion had taken the keepers of the secrets by surprise, they were ready for Transformation and Breakthrough, and the two books were skillfully suppressed, which is why I am republishing them, beginning with Transformation, with much new information.

What is it going to be like if they come into our lives? We are going to experience what is  known as “ontological shock,” which is what happens when an entire worldview fails, turns out to be fundamentally flawed and incomplete, and a new one has to be found. And this goes not just for us, but for them, too. The deeper both sides go into relationship, the more our world views are going to be changed. It must be understood clearly: both sides are going to experience ontological shock.

This is why our governments are so fearful, our intellectuals so hostile to the very idea of visitors, and our military so belligerent—and why our visitors are so obsessively, compulsively secretive.

People always assume that we’re ready. This is not the case. That shock is going to run far deeper than anyone who has not lived with contact can imagine.

It forced me to throw out my understanding of what is really going on in the world. It forced me to face the fact that the beings who are here must be vastly superior to us in knowledge, and possibly also in intellect, but also that they do not understand how to relate to us. The leader of the group who came into contact with my family became, by our standards, extremely transgressive, forcing herself on us and failing in some basic ways, among them failing to understand how to relate to our son. She was always gentle with him, but she would engage with him without our participation. I don’t think she realized how this would affect us, or did not know how to include his parents.

I would never claim that contact will be easy or that even advocate that it isn’t dangerous. It is not easy and I am pretty sure that it can be dangerous. But it is also possible, and, if handled carefully, is life-changing in the most profound ways possible, and, at least in my experience, in the end to the good.

I have added new commentary throughout the book, bringing it up to date in the context of current understanding. The new commentaries are labeled “2026 Update” and appear where appropriate after each story I discuss in the book.

Some of them are major updates, important not only to new readers, but also to those who have read the book before.

The experience we had was enormously challenging at every level. Our reality cracked open and collapsed around our ears. And what did we find? You can still have a cup of coffee, read a book, talk and laugh and dance, love each other and love the world, even while experiencing high strangeness on a daily basis. And you can come to relate to these beings in ways that work. But it is nothing like relating to another human being, not at all. One thing I have learned: this relationship is going to be new from the ground up. Relationship with them is in no way like relationship with other human beings.

I don’t expect our visitors to come into more public contact with us just because one or another government admits that they are here. They aren’t going to do that until they feel ready to absorb the shock, and feel that we can, too.

As I explained in my previous book, The Fourth Mind, because our brain structures and sensing organs are so different from theirs, the gulf between us and them is very great. So where do we start?

We start right here, with one little family grappling with the unknown.

I have tried for years to perfect communication with the visitors. They have tried, too, striving, as I do, to bridge the chasm between us.

Back when we were having these experiences, UFO sightings were relatively rare. Now, on any given day, there are hundreds of reports, and probably thousands of sightings that go unreported. And, as I feel sure, quiet relationships are out there and growing in numbers.

Taking advantage of the Whistleblower Act, government officials have gone before congress and stated frankly that not only are there extensive records of alien craft, there are biological materials in government possession as well, and there have been strong intimations that close encounter experiences, also, are real.

Two retired CIA officers, Jim Semivan and John Ramirez, have admitted publicly that they have had such experiences. Both of them have discussed this on my podcast Dreamland, in fact, as well as in many other venues.

When this book was written, starting in 1987, I had just completed a year-long media tour for Communion, which had revealed that contact with the mysterious presence I had come to call “the visitors” was far more extensive than anyone, including me, had realized, and far more contentious an issue than I had dreamed possible.

Often, I would find myself going on a radio or television program to be treated with incredulity, then, later that night, facing the visitors in mysterious and often very challenging ways.

Even so, looking back to those years, I cannot say that I regret anything. I did my best with an almost impossible situation, and managed to produce an accurate narrative about an experience of a kind that nobody, quite simply, had ever reported in such depth before.

I never saw the visitors through the lens of belief, as demons or angels or gods or aliens, but rather as what they were to me—a living mystery, incredibly interesting, extraordinary to know, more than a little dangerous and more than a little wonderful.

Since then, I have experienced the loss of the cabin where it all happened, only to find that it fell into the hands of a man who loves my work and welcomes me back whenever I want to go. And I do go, and the old secrets whisper again when I walk those night woods.

I lost the cabin but not the right to be there. I lost my dear Anne, but not her love. But I have not lost the visitors, who have become integral to my life. They are fierce, determined and demanding. With them, there is no compromise. I am both their student and their advocate, now. They are dangerous in ways that we can hardly imagine, and wonderful, also, in ways beyond our ability to fully understand.

When, during those years, one of them called me “the luckiest of the lucky,” I scoffed.

I am not scoffing now. Hard though it has been and is, they were right. And it is in that spirit that I embark on this new quest, to bring the whole Communion trilogy into a rich new level of focus, starting with Transformation.

It was toward the end of 1985 that our son began reporting encounters. As we had not discussed Communion with him, we were quite concerned. He would say that “little doctors” had come into his room and shone lights on him, saying that they were looking at his soul. Another witness, Lorie Barnes, said that they had told her that they were “soultechs.”

This gets me to the most fundamental question behind these books, and, in fact, the most fundamental question of our time: who are we, and what are we? We have either lost touch with our meaning, or lost it altogether. No matter which, we are in the dark about ourselves. As was said to close encounter witness Betty Andreasson Luca, “you wander in eternal darkness.”

That darkness is, I think, our inability to contact our own souls, or even, for most of us, even to accept that they exist. Because of this, our reality is very constricted. We either deny our nonphysical selves altogether or involve them in systems of belief that choke off our chance to have a real relationship with them. Either way, it leaves us wandering aimlessly through reality, driven like leaves in the wind.

Our visitors are probably here primarily for reasons of their own. But whether it is intentional on their part or not, their presence is challenging us to wake up and see the world around us as something new, promising with the vistas inward and outward that we are in the process of discovering, that we are on a path worth walking.

It is this path, and this promise, that the Communion series, and all I have written about the visitors, and my life, is about. Walk with me for a little while in this wonderful forest of mind and soul, its pathway glowing from the soft light of the stars above us, and meet our visitors as I and my family did so long ago.