Contact: The CE-5 Experience
In the spring of 2020, two major events altered the course of civilization. The first was a global pandemic. And the second was the release of a UFO documentary called Close Encounters of the Fifth Kind.
The first statement is a fact, and the second is wishful thinking. But this wishful thinking reflects the amount of self-importance Contact: The CE-5 Experience carries itself with.
Writer-director Serena Dc’s documentary presents a utopian look at ufology’s CE-5 movement. CE-5 is a practice that teaches people to control their state of consciousness to communicate with aliens. CE-5 is a contentious aspect of ufology (which is already a contentious subject) and Dc’s fawning doc isn’t doing the movement any favours.
Who is Steven Greer?
Dc claims to have had a life-changing CE-5 experience that inspired her to reach out to the “man behind it all,” Dr. Steven Greer.
Greer spent the past few decades fighting on the UFO disclosure movement’s frontlines. But he’s become one of ufology’s most divisive figures in recent years. Today he’s best known for making wild claims and profiting off believers while basking in the media spotlight. He’s like ufology’s Vince McMahon – a mogul and a showman with a ravenous fanbase.
Contact: The CE-5 Experience: What’s it About?
Contact: The CE-5 Experience sees Greer invite Dc and her crew to Oracle Arizona to document a workshop teaching his CE-5 protocols. These gatherings are a huge deal for people who share Greer’s views. For these folks, UFOs aren’t just glowing lights in the night sky; they’re beacons of hope illuminating the path to cosmic enlightenment.
People travel from around the world so Greer can teach them how to make contact with E.T.s, and Dc sits down with these folks as they discuss how CE-5-initiated contact has affected their lives.
Dc’s doc offers little value to anyone watching with a skeptical point of view. It doesn’t just embrace the world of woo; it treats alien contact as a simple fact of life.
What Counts as Evidence?
One gentleman describes running into an extraterrestrial after his CE-5 event in the desert. The man says he invited the being to hang out, and they spent the night playing hide-and-seek and going for walks. But the cherry on top of this syrupy story? The charitable visitor healed the man’s hearing loss.
We can’t prove whether this man hung out with a playful alien. But there should be medical records tracking his hearing issues and their sudden improvement. Dc has no interest in backing up these extraordinary claims with case-specific evidence, which is a recurring theme throughout the doc.
Contact: The CE-5 Experience offers plenty of photographic evidence of alien encounters, but evidence is too generous of a term. Even hardcore UFO believers will struggle to make sense of the luminous globs flashed across the screen. Instead, it’s a parade of clear images of faraway objects in the sky and blurry images of closer objects.
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but the truth shouldn’t be. This film keeps asking viewers to accept hard-to-swallow claims because of the sincerity of the interview subjects. Interviewees speak with certainty about alien agendas, and I have no doubt most of them believe what they’re saying. But believing in something doesn’t make it true.
An interview subject named Ignacio shares a story that sums up what’s wrong with the film when he boldly states, “all my life I knew E.T.s were out there.”
Ok, the man has our attention. But how did he know aliens were out there? Was he visited? Did he read Whitley Strieber’s book Communion? Did one of his parents work at Area 51? The film treats this tale like this guy is the chosen one and just rolls with everything he says.
Ignacio also says he knew everything “he looked at in media wasn’t right.” When he found Greer, he knew he was in the right place. Once again, why? Was he in the right place because Greer told him what he wanted to hear?
Reality rarely aligns with peoples’ expectations. Humanity evolves as people seek knowledge to improve their understanding of the world. Focusing on validating your assumptions isn’t intellectual growth; it’s stagnation.
When someone tells you something you want to hear, that’s all the more reason to question them. There’s no questioning going on in this movie. We’re not hearing the words of people approaching the subject with open minds. The blind faith on display in the film seems more like zealotry.
26 minutes into the film, Dc casually mentions people having “massive telekinetic experiences and going up into crafts.” Shouldn’t she lead the doc with this part of the story?
Also, I can’t help but wonder where one draws the line between a telekinetic experience and a massive telekinetic experience? For myself and everyone I’ve ever met, receiving a telekinetic brainfart would be a massive event because, you know, telekinesis isn’t a normal thing.
Again and again Contact: The CE-5 Experience treats extraordinary paranormal claims like everyday parts of life. It’s littered with new age phrases about raising our vibrations and unity consciousness. This pretentious mumbo-jumbo masks a simple message at the CE-5 movement’s core. Humans are a garbage species who must clean up our acts to get into our galactic savior’s good graces.
Contact: The CE-5 Experience: Is it Worth Seeing?
The film grinds to a halt several times as Greer talks his flock through guided meditations. These segments go on for minutes at a time, and they’re as dull as watching paint dry. They’re too long to work in the flow of the narrative and too short to guide you through an actual meditation – it’s not like these folks would give away this pricey knowledge for free.
I can’t get on board with the information this movie peddles. But that’s not why I’m giving it a negative review. I can see value in a documentary that presents a perspective I don’t agree with. But that’s far from the case here. I can’t endorse this film because it fails on an artistic, thematic, and technical level.
Contact: The CE-5 Experience is a poorly crafted propaganda video posing as an educational documentary. It’s dull and misleading, but what’s most egregious is that it lacks curiosity. Lacking curiosity is a horrible trait for a documentary.
The film refuses to examine and substantiate its many sensational claims. Contact: The CE-5 Experience doesn’t bother asking essential questions because it’s too busy preaching.
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