UFOMagacon_Hamby

UFO MegaCon in Laughlin, Nevada.

It came alive out of the night, a massive neon flash. It traced over itself, stretching into bizarre, unnatural patterns. It morphed from green, to yellow, then blue. It held its form for a few seconds before evaporating into the darkness of the desert night.

The light didn’t seem to pose any immediate threat, it just emanated from the base of a citadel in the middle of the Mojave. During its cosmic dance, the light somehow knew our language and formed letters out of its trajectory.

“Aquarius,” it said.

“Aquarius.”

The name of the casino blinked twice above its entrance doors and vanished. Among the several dozen people streaming in and out beneath the neon sign, some carried handbags labeled “UFO Megacon” in bold red letters.

Held in the Nevada border town of Laughlin during the last week of March, UFO MegaCon showcased a blend of expertise on both the intergalactic and interdimensional. Guest speakers included a geologist panhandling for pieces of spaceships, a woman selected by celestial lizards to bear their children and a professor who studies the strategies of psychic spies.

Laughlin sits in a pocket of canyons on the southern tip of Nevada. Traveling from Las Vegas to the young city, cars cross a blanket of mesquite blooming in the spring months. In the daytime, jets cross overhead, checkering the sky with their trails. There’s no human contact other than the occasional camper and towns dependent on their one casino and one gas station.

The road turning off I-95 runs into five hotel towers on the Colorado River and the intersection of Arizona, California and Nevada. Don Laughlin founded his refuge for transients and retirees along a trail that places it between Roswell, New Mexico and Homey Airport.  

The first day lasted over twelve hours, hosted seven speakers and ended with a pizza and pasta dinner.

Dr. Bob Brown, who founded the event nearly twenty years ago, acted as MC and introduced each lecturer. Credentials ranged from doctorate holders to “contactees,” or those who said they’d been abducted by extraterrestrials.


 Yet they whose sweep of vision grows not old

Still at the central point of space behold

Another pole-star: for the Truth abides.

-Edith Wharton


 Dozens of heads, mostly balding and gray, filled the ballroom on the casino’s second floor. MAGA hats could be spotted among a few of them. The audience stared up at Simeon Hine, a remote viewing instructor, as he explained how the U.S. and the Soviets used clairvoyant espionage to steal submarine technology from each other during the Cold War. During his slideshow, he mentioned the CIA and an audience member guffawed.

Hine concluded his presentation with a test to see if anyone in the audience enjoyed the “gift.” He invited those with pen and paper to close their eyes and let their minds tap into visions of the future. He told them to draw whatever feelings came to them, whatever sights, sounds and smells.

He went to the next slide to reveal a Buddhist temple, shooting up like a spire. A woman came to the podium to show off her sweeping sketch that could match snuggly with the photo. Some people showed off their doodles to their neighbors. One person drew a peace sign with a happy face inside. Another made what looked like an amoeba.

Alien contact has become increasingly progressive in recent years, according to Rey Hernandez, who helped conduct a survey of 4,200 people across several continents. A larger portion of contactees have consented to their travel and enjoyed their experiences.

“We’re not selling fear,” Hernandez said. “We’re selling facts.”

 Within minutes of taking the stage, Samantha Mowat detailed her selection as the mother to nearly a dozen alien children, as well as two earthlings. Implants and genetic alteration made her a vegetarian who abstains from drugs. She’s on friendly terms with the all extraterrestrials: grays, whites, reptiles and orbs. She described herself as a hugger, the type of personality ideal for interplanetary coupling. After she finished her presentation, she met with convention goers at her booth and dealt tarot cards.

At kiosks surrounding the entrance to the ballroom, attendees could buy maps to spaceship crash sites and pills that improve spirit vibrations. During demonstration for a device called the Vibra Fit, a salesman had a woman sit on a pad that shook her body and apparently melted calories off her.


"I wuv you! I wuv you!" said the little blue man

"I wuv you! I wuv you to bits"

"I wuv you!" He loved me, said the little blue man

And scared me right out of my wits

-Novelty Song from the '50s


Other items for sale included t-shirts celebrating Nikola Tesla as the earliest martyr of corporate conspiracy. Kerry Trent Haggard, a television host from Texas, promoted a book he and co-author Johnny Dale Cochran II wrote about an encounter in the small town of Aurora, Colorado in 1897. In front of his table stood a short, plastic creature with glassy, black eyes - the mascot of Aurora.

A person in a green suit, complete with a cape and helmet, thumbed through a brochure for UFOTV. The streaming service offered hours of content focusing on suppressed science and interdimensional contact. There are no pretenders here, no cosplayers. The only man in a costume wears a sign that asks, “Are you tapelined?”

His sign asks the question, but he refuses to answer it.

Voices all around debated the legitimacy of the speakers. One woman said her husband would never stand sharing her with an alien. In passing, a bearded man made the case for the improbability of a person’s consciousness being abducted from their body.

“It can’t just be mental. It’s in the biology,” he said.

“In the biology.”

Two men wrestled with a black tarp and several twisted feet of plastic piping. Beneath the tarps rested a layer of tin foil the workers carefully stepped around. A woman sat in a chair next to them and watched.

“When they’re done, this tent will be for inspections,” she said.

For weapons?

“No, for alien implants.”

Suzanne Reed, a retiree from Kingman, Arizona, spent her vacation in Laughlin for the convention. Reed, who said she had an encounter with a spirit while on a cruise off Shanghai, accepts the existence of ghosts and aliens while still being a devout Christian. Should any hard evidence of life appear off the rock that God created for man, she said her faith wouldn’t be shaken at all. According to Reed, He’s done much stranger things.

Geologist Frank Kimbler brought samples of his time digging around the Roswell crash site. In a glass case, he keeps several bits of metal no bigger than a thumbnail. They don’t seem like unearthly metal, but they don’t look like pieces of a weather balloon either.

Kimbler, who spent the rest of the week with his family instead of the truth seekers at the convention, said he took up inspecting the Roswell site since becoming a teacher there. While living in Montana, he panhandled for gold in streams; he doesn’t see his hobby in New Mexico as too different from that.

According to Kimbler, he prefers evidence that can be touched and felt.