It’s nearly 7 p.m. on the second Tuesday of the month, and Catherine Chapey is sitting at home in Holtsville, Long Island, making preparations for a social highlight of her week — a virtual meeting with a group of people who claim to have experienced close encounters with extraterrestrial life.
Chapey, a former electrician and an ordained “interspiritual minister,” found herself in the role of den mother to the eclectic and growing gathering after having her own brush with the otherworldly — subsequently reaching out to find out if there were more like her.
Starting with a small, in-person gathering at her local public library, she now has a mailing list of thousands — some beaming in from as far as Japan and New Zealand.
One by one, Chapey’s fellow “Experiencers” pop into the Zoom meeting, billed as a safe space for attendees to recount their abductions, telepathic visions from beyond and other celestial come-to-Jesus moments. What the average observer might find hard to believe, Chapey likes to think of as “spiritually transformative experiences.”
Today’s hot topic — 3I/Atlas, the interstellar object that’s streaking through our atmosphere, igniting speculation that it could be extraterrestrial and propelling the conversation around aliens more into the mainstream than it’s been in decades.
There’s Kevin, 71, a Realtor in Florida and a “lifelong contactee” whose cosmic rendezvous began at 8, he said, when he was visited by two unknown beings while in the bathroom. At 14, the beings introduced him to their council of eight — with whom he works closely to this day. He thinks that 3I/Atlas is a rock that’s “being programmed with consciousness.”
Funda, a medical worker from Colorado, is a self-described “ET-human hybrid” — she willingly opened herself up to extraterrestrial contact in 2017, and was subsequently whisked up to Uranus and probed by two humanoid aliens with gray skin and black eyes, in order that she might become a conduit between the two worlds.
Dialing in from Chicago is IT worker Nick, who’s sure he’s been used as “a guinea pig” by various malevolent entities over a period of years. Attending the meetings has helped him exorcise those demons. He believes that our interstellar interloper could use “reverse biology” to devise cures for Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s.
There’s Terry, too, a retiree from Seattle who’s fairly confident that 3I/Atlas is an alien spacecraft. “I’ve been aboard a couple of spacecraft and maybe 3I/Atlas is one of the ones that I was actually on,” she explained to the room.
Mel, a mental health worker from Canada, knows why Atlas has taken so long to reveal itself. “My sense is that they (3I/Atlas) come closer incrementally because they’re upgrading our consciousness. So they cannot download all at once because people are not ready. Their brains would split.”
One by one, over a period of two hours, the attendees speak their piece, after which they’re affirmed and thanked for sharing. This is group therapy, but of a third kind.
“This isn’t something you talk about with your family,” explained Mary, a participant from New York’s Finger Lakes region, after telling her own story about how, when she mentioned to her oldest friends about someone she knew having had ET contact, their response was, “What type of medication is that person taking?”
Unbeknownst to them, that “someone” she was talking about was herself.
“When you go through something like [this], people drop out of your life,” Chapey explained. “They think you’re crazy, you’ve lost it — people can lose their family, they can lose their kids. [Others] can’t really relate to you anymore because they are living in the 3D world in the world of matter. It’s hard, because you feel like, ‘Oh, wow, you can’t really talk about something that was so profound.’ “
But while the usual chatter in these meetings might fall on deaf ears elsewhere, tonight, the unique tribe of astral plane aspirers is far from alone in their assessments of the latest so-called visitor from beyond.
Atlas’ non-gravitational acceleration, anti-tail (pointing toward the sun instead of away, as is typical), and bizarre path toward Jupiter, Venus and Mars, have led major minds, such as Harvard scientist Avi Loeb, to theorize that this is an alien probe.
This contrasts sharply with NASA’s official position — that 3I/Atlas is a comet as its “characteristics, color, speed and direction are all consistent with what we expect.”
The captivating, ongoing event comes at a time when it’s never been cooler to be an alien contactee. According to a YouGov poll, belief in UFO sightings skyrocketed from 20% in 1996 to a stratospheric 34% in 2022, with 24% of Americans reporting they’d seen a UFO, Newsweek reported.
Chapey credits the recent mainstream coverage of UAPs, like the Department of Defense’s 2020 release of footage depicting the fast-flying “tic tac” objects that were spotted in 2004 during a Navy flight off the California coast — a craze that has crested with the appearance of 3I/Atlas.
Her personal out-of-this-world experiences, she said, have ranged from seeing “feline faces” in a backyard shed to a house call from an inter-dimensional “Sasquatch” that teleported through a portal in a nearby tree to cure a particularly painful headache.
“I had a big awakening in 2008 where [celestial beings] were preparing me for my work in the world,” she told The Post. “I knew the answers to everything at one point. I was in the cosmos. I was being taken places with my guides and they told me I was going to be working with groups and helping people that are going through spiritual awakenings. They were saying many people are going to be waking up to who they truly are.”
In 2019, Chapey made it official — she was ordained following an intensive two-and-a-half year seminary class at the Gathering of Light, a multi-faith worship organization in Melville, NY.
Its philosophy: to “teach that each human being is an individual expression of Divinity in physical form, and as such, we are all One.”
From then on, Chapey made it her mission to “help spiritual experiencers” know they are “not alone” or “crazy.”
“This is what I’m supposed to be doing. So all of the things that I’ve been through in my life were purposeful. It was for a reason,” she said.
Contrary to popular belief, the UFO community is not a monolith — Dennis Anderson, a former member of the Center for UFO Studies, isn’t nearly as keen on the extraterrestrial hype.
He notably investigated the “Arthur Kill Lights” of 2001 — where between five and 16 bright orange “ovals” were spotted flying in a V formation over the waterway between New Jersey and Staten Island.
“They were big and they were only about 1,000 feet up,” the former Wagner Planetarium head told The Post of the phenomenon, which, to this day, he is not sure what it represents.
But the comet? The UFO hunter is certain. “Every picture I’ve seen, it’s [3I/Atlas] got a coma and a tail, which means, you know, it is a comet,” said Anderson. “I don’t believe it’s anything else.”
And, after 63 years on the UAP scene, Anderson has a warning about so-called ”experts” who profess to know about, say, “57 civilizations of people coming from this planet.” “When you read that, the first thing you do is stop reading it and run the opposite direction.”
Chapey easily shrugs off the skeptics — she’s confident that when 3I/Atlas does arrive, it will validate the encounters she and every other ET experiencer has had throughout their lives.
“The fact that there’s this thing in space that could be some kind of a craft doesn’t shock me at all because I’ve seen what they do,” she said. “Within the next couple years, people are going to be very aware that we are not the only ones. And there is absolutely nothing to fear.”
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