Alan Steinfeld

Alan Steinfeld occupies an unusual niche in American UFO culture: not a whistleblower, an abductee researcher, or a debunker, but a broadcaster — a man who has spent over three decades putting a microphone in front of nearly everyone else in the field. As host and producer of the long-running television and web series New Realities, and as the longest-serving emcee of Contact in the Desert, the world's largest UFO/UAP conference, Steinfeld has functioned less as a primary source of disclosure claims than as a connective institution — the person who has interviewed, introduced, and often outlived the careers of dozens of the field's most prominent researchers, contactees, and skeptics.

Early life and personal encounters

Steinfeld describes his own relationship to the UFO phenomenon as beginning in childhood, with what he has characterized in interviews and promotional materials as encounters involving unexplained beings appearing at his bedroom window. He has also spoken of a more severe, adult experience: an abduction-like event he places in 1987, the memory of which he says did not fully surface until he underwent hypnotic regression therapy in 2019. This narrative arc — a suppressed early memory recovered decades later through hypnosis — follows a pattern common to the post-Budd Hopkins/John Mack abduction-research tradition, and it comes with the same evidentiary caveats that apply to that entire genre: hypnotically refreshed memory is regarded by mainstream psychology as unreliable and prone to confabulation, and no external corroboration for the 1987 event has been publicly documented. Steinfeld presents the story as personal testimony and a motivating force behind his life's work rather than as a case he asks audiences to verify forensically. In interviews he has described the regression session itself as disorienting — recovering, in his telling, sensations and fragmentary images rather than a fully coherent narrative — and has been candid that he cannot independently prove the event occurred as recalled. That candor sets him apart from contactees who present hypnotically retrieved material as settled fact; Steinfeld more often frames his own experience as a case study in how the mind processes anomalous encounters, using it to explain his motivation for spending a career interviewing others with similar stories rather than as evidence he asks the public to accept at face value.

His professional training sits at a considerable remove from ufology in the conventional sense. He holds a Master's degree in Oriental Medicine from the International Institute of Chinese Medicine in Santa Fe and is a licensed acupuncturist, credentials reflected in his authorship of Careers in Alternative Medicine (Rosen Publishing), now in its third edition. That background in complementary and alternative health medicine — alongside later training in remote viewing under Russell Targ, the physicist who co-founded the Stanford Research Institute's classified remote-viewing program — placed Steinfeld from the outset within a broader consciousness-studies milieu rather than the more narrowly evidentiary wing of UFO research. He has since taught workshops on what he calls "nonlocal awareness," treating the UFO question as continuous with parapsychology, meditation, and the wider New Age exploration of altered states.

New Realities: three decades on the air

Steinfeld founded New Realities in the mid-1990s, initially broadcasting on Manhattan public-access cable through MNN, at a time when public-access television was one of the only outlets willing to give sustained airtime to fringe science and paranormal claims. The show has since migrated to YouTube, podcast platforms, and outlets such as BBS Radio TV, and Steinfeld and his supporters claim a cumulative audience in the tens of millions across its run. Over more than 2,000 episodes, New Realities has interviewed a remarkably broad cross-section of consciousness researchers, scientists, and UFO figures, including psychiatrist John Mack, abduction researcher Budd Hopkins, historian Richard Dolan, investigative journalist Linda Moulton Howe, Communion author Whitley Strieber, and consciousness figures such as Deepak Chopra, Ram Dass, and Egyptologist John Anthony West. The show's format — long-form, unhurried conversation rather than debate or investigative confrontation — has made it a durable archive of firsthand testimony from a generation of researchers, several of whom (Mack, Hopkins) are now deceased, giving some of Steinfeld's interviews retrospective value as some of the last extended recordings of their subjects' views.

That same format is also the basis of the most common criticism of Steinfeld's work: New Realities rarely subjects its guests to adversarial or skeptical questioning, functioning instead as a sympathetic platform that takes contactee, abduction, and consciousness claims largely at face value. Steinfeld has framed this choice as a deliberate editorial stance — his stated interest is in documenting believers' and researchers' own accounts on their own terms, leaving critical evaluation to audiences and other venues.

Contact in the Desert

Since Contact in the Desert was founded in 2014 in the California desert, Steinfeld has served as its emcee and a recurring panel host, a role he has held continuously longer than any other figure associated with the event, which markets itself as the world's largest UFO and UAP conference. He is not the conference's founder — that credit belongs to its organizing production company — but his role as its longtime on-stage host has made him one of the most visible faces of the event, introducing speakers who have ranged from mainstream disclosure-era figures like Luis Elizondo to independent researchers, contactees, and, in recent years, military and government witnesses drawn by the post-2017 surge in UAP attention. He has also personally hosted sessions on remote viewing and the psychology of contact, drawing on his SRI-lineage training under Targ. Steinfeld has said that his years backstage and on-panel at Contact in the Desert gave him direct access to many of the researchers, witnesses, and theorists later collected in his 2021 book.

Making Contact and its reception

In May 2021, St. Martin's Essentials published Making Contact: Preparing for the New Realities of Extraterrestrial Existence, a 352-page volume Steinfeld curated and framed rather than authored outright — it is structured as an anthology of essays and contributions from a range of researchers and thinkers, including former British Ministry of Defence UFO desk officer Nick Pope, the late John Mack, and Whitley Strieber, bound together by Steinfeld's introductions and editorial throughlines. The book reached the top of Amazon's relevant bestseller category on release and went on to win the 2023 Conscious Life Book Awards, two years after its initial publication; it has since been translated into Spanish as En Contacto. It carries endorsements from Coast to Coast AM host George Noory, Deepak Chopra, visionary artist Alex Grey, physicist Erwin Laszlo, and French-American ufologist Jacques Vallée — an unusually credentialed set of endorsers for a book aimed at a popular audience.

Critical reception has been mixed in the way typical of multi-author anthologies. Space journalist Leonard David, reviewing the book, called it "a bit of a mind-bending compendium" that ranges from simple accounts of objects moving through the sky to dense speculation about hybridization and multiverse theory, and noted that the instability of the subject matter itself — the still-unsettled status of UAP discourse generally — makes the book difficult to evaluate as a coherent whole. That assessment is broadly representative: reviewers have praised the range of voices Steinfeld assembled while noting that quality and rigor vary considerably from essay to essay, a function of the editorial choice to platform believers and skeptics alike without imposing a single evidentiary standard across contributions.

Public engagement with skeptics

Unlike many contactee-adjacent media figures, Steinfeld has been willing to engage directly with organized skepticism. He was interviewed at length by Michael Shermer, founding publisher of Skeptic magazine, on The Michael Shermer Show, a conversation in which Steinfeld discussed how believers and skeptics differ in their approach to UFO evidence — an exchange notable for its relatively even-handed tone rather than confrontation. He is also a frequent guest on Coast to Coast AM, the largest late-night radio program devoted to paranormal and fringe-science topics in the United States, which has served as a major amplifier for both New Realities and Making Contact.

Reception and criticism

Steinfeld's standing within the wider UFO research community is genuinely bifurcated. Among contactee, experiencer, and consciousness-studies audiences, he is regarded as an elder statesman: a rare figure who has maintained a consistent, sympathetic media presence across three decades in which most competing outlets — public-access cable, print newsletters, early internet forums — have come and gone. Guests and audiences alike credit him with preserving long-form testimony from researchers who left no comparable archive elsewhere, and his longevity at Contact in the Desert has made him, in effect, institutional memory for an event whose speaker roster turns over considerably from year to year.

Among more evidence-focused researchers and science journalists, the assessment is cooler. The recurring critique, echoed in Leonard David's review of Making Contact and implicit in the format of New Realities itself, is that Steinfeld's interviewing style rarely challenges claims, blending well-documented figures like Nick Pope with speculative or unverifiable material under a single sympathetic frame. This is less an accusation of dishonesty than a description of editorial choice: Steinfeld has never presented himself as an investigator adjudicating competing claims, and he does not claim the fact-finding role of a Richard Dolan or the clinical rigor once claimed by Mack. His own engagement with skeptics such as Michael Shermer suggests an awareness of this critique, and a willingness — unusual in his corner of the field — to let it be aired directly to his own audience rather than avoided.

Institutional roles and legacy

Beyond broadcasting, Steinfeld holds a cluster of affiliations characteristic of the American consciousness-studies and alternative-spirituality world: he sits on the board of Friends of the Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS), the parapsychology-adjacent research institute founded by Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell; serves as Vice President of The Association of Psychotherapy and Spirituality; represents The Academy for Future Science before the United Nations; and appears as listed faculty with The Shift Network, an online platform for spiritual and personal-development courses. None of these positions carry independent scientific authority, but together they situate Steinfeld as a genuine institutional insider within the loose network of organizations that has, since the 1970s, provided infrastructure for UFO contact claims to circulate alongside parapsychology and alternative medicine.

Steinfeld's significance to UFO history is best understood as archival and infrastructural rather than evidentiary. He has not claimed to possess classified documents, produced physical evidence, or served as a firsthand military or government witness. His importance instead lies in the sheer duration and breadth of his role as an interviewer and convener: few living figures have spent as long, or spoken to as many of the field's central personalities, as Steinfeld has across three decades of New Realities and a decade at the microphone of Contact in the Desert. As the field's original generation of researchers — Hopkins, Mack, and others — has passed away, Steinfeld's back catalog of interviews has taken on unintended value as a primary-source record of how those figures described their own work in their own words, even as his editorial approach of largely uncritical platforming remains the central point of criticism directed at his work.