2020 has offered such a dramatic flurry of news stories that one topic in particular seems to keep getting lost in the fray: aliens.

There was the confirmation of the Pentagon’s UFO sightings and its special top-secret UFO task force. The potential alien life on Venus. And of course, the abundance of civilian alien sightings.

Now, some high-profile people are coming forward with stories about their own alien encounters. Miley Cyrus recently came forward with a wild story involving drugs, UFOs, and eye contact with an actual extraterrestrial.

Miley Cyrus’s Extraterrestrial Encounter

“I was driving through San Bernardino with my friend, and I got chased down by some sort of UFO,” the 27-year-old told Cyrus told fashion designer Rick Owens in a recent Interview Magazine profile. The two were on the subject of Area 51 after Owens began discussing his recent birthday, which included a visit to the alleged alien prison. This prompted Cyrus to launch into a story about a recent “experience.”

Cyrus said she was “pretty sure” about what she saw, though qualified that statement by admitting that she had just purchased some THC-infused products from a roadside shop, so it could’ve been that.

“But the best way to describe it is a flying snowplow. It had this big plow in the front of it and was glowing yellow. I did see it flying, and my friend saw it, too. There were a couple of other cars on the road and they also stopped to look, so I think what I saw was real.”

Cyrus’s experience left a profound mark on the singer. “I was shaken for, like, five days. It f*cked me up,” she said. “I couldn’t really look at the sky the same. I thought they might come back.”

During the experience, though, she hadn’t felt any sense of fear—but she did have some direct communion with whatever extraterrestrial or hallucination she encountered. “I didn’t feel threatened at all, actually, but I did see a being sitting in the front of the flying object,” she said.

“It looked at me and we made eye contact, and I think that’s what really shook me, looking into the eyes of something that I couldn’t quite wrap my head around. But you’re so right to say that it’s a form of narcissism to think that we’re the only things that could be in this vast universe,” Cyrus told Owens.

For her part, Cyrus doesn’t seem too consumed by the experience. She spends most of the interview talking about her musical and creative ambitions, and her new album, Plastic Hearts—out November 27th—seems guaranteed to launch her into a new era. Given the nature of her blonde mullet and excellent recent covers of The Cranberries’ “Zombie” and “Heart of Glass,” her star seems to be on the rise. Whether she’ll be having more encounters with creatures literally from the stars remains to be seen.

Miley Cyrus – Live from Whisky a Go Go – Zombie #SOSFESTwww.youtube.com

Miley Cyrus – Heart Of Glass (Live from the iHeart Festival)www.youtube.com

Demi Lovato’s UFO

Demi Lovato, another Disney star with a troubled past and a strong redemption arc, has been involving herself in political activism.

Demi Lovato – Commander In Chiefwww.youtube.com

She’s also had a few alien encounters herself—though hers feel a little more potentially cult-like than Cyrus’s. Lovato recently underwent a breakup from Max Ehrlich, whom she spent the early months of quarantine cozying up to, and it seems that contacting aliens has been her way of processing the fallout.

In a recent Instagram post, she told fans that she spent a few days in Joshua Tree with a “small group of loved ones,” Dr. Steven Greer, and his “CE5 team.”

“Over the past couple months I have dug deep into the science of consciousness and experienced not only peace and serenity like I’ve never known but I also have witnessed the most incredibly profound sightings both in the sky as well as feet away from me,” she wrote.

“This planet is on a very negative path towards destruction but WE can change that together. If we were to get 1% of the population to meditate and make contact, we would force our governments to acknowledge the truth about extraterrestrial life among us and change our destructive habits destroying our planet. This is just some of the evidence from under the stars in the desert sky that can no longer be ignored and must be shared immediately to make contact yourself!”

She goes on to promote Greer’s app, which costs $9.99—a suspicious cost for an app, but apparently one that’s worth it for some moments of connection. “You can download the CE5 app and it will teach you the protocols to connect to life form beyond our planet!!” she said. “(Ps [sic], if it doesn’t happen on the first try – keep trying – it took me several sessions to tap into a deep enough level of meditation to make contact!)”

Lovato’s post may seem out of left field, but Greer and Lovato aren’t the first to find (or think they’ve found) spiritual redemption and answers to planetary ailments in alien contact. In fact, some people believe that God is actually an alien race who will someday descend to present us with enlightenment.

Dr. Stephen Greer seems to be one of them. Greer is an American ufologist, retired traumatologist, and transcendental meditation teacher. He is also the founder of the Center for the Study of Extraterrestrial Intelligence, and his UFO-related work appears to be dedicated to declassifying information about UFOs and initiating CE5s, or “close encounters of the fifth kind.”

Greer is also the creator or several films and books about alien encounters; his April 2020 release, Close Encounters of the Fifth Kind, attempts to share the most dangerous information that the architects of secrecy do not want you to know; how forgotten spiritual knowledge holds the key to humans initiating with highly advanced ET civilizations.”

A History of Celebrity Alien Encounters

Lovato and Cyrus aren’t the first celebrities to share their extraterrestrial experiences. Alicia Keys once said, “Haven’t all of us seen something flying in the sky, and it’s at some random time of night that doesn’t make sense and it’s not the shape of a plane?”

Jaden Smith said, “I talked to President Obama about extraterrestrials. He said he could neither confirm nor deny the existence of aliens, which means they’re real,” he told Wonderland magazine in 2013. “If people think we’re the only people that live in this universe, then something is wrong with them.”

While not many people go as far as to propose that aliens are literally among us, many seem to agree that it’s pretty presumptive to believe we’re alone in the universe. Keanu Reeves, who played an alien in The Day the Earth Stood Still, said, “I think it’s more likely than not [that aliens exist]. The cosmos is a pretty big place.”

Stories of alien encounters and abductions became particularly popular in the 1960s and 70s in America, yet another parallel between our chaotic times and those days of revolution. Maybe there’s something about living in scary times that makes us long for the imposition of an exterior being, someone or something capable of imposing clarity and meaning on our fragile human minds. Or maybe, just maybe, they’re really out there.