UFO Healings

About the Author

Preston Dennett began investigating UFO and paranormal phenomena in 1986, after discovering that family members, friends, and co-workers were reporting dramatic unexplained encounters of their own. Raised in Topanga Canyon in Southern California — a region that would later become a recurring geographic focus of his research — he has since interviewed hundreds of witnesses across California, Arizona, Nevada, and New Mexico.

A field investigator for the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON) and self-described ghost hunter and paranormal researcher, Dennett has authored more than thirty nonfiction books and over one hundred articles on UFO and paranormal subjects, with his writing translated into German, French, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, and Icelandic. His articles have appeared in Fate, Atlantis Rising, the MUFON UFO Journal, Nexus, and numerous other specialist publications.

This book, his first, began as research he undertook in the early 1990s and won the 1996 Karla Turner Ph.D. Award upon publication — a specialist ufology-community honor recognizing significant contributions to abduction-related research. Dennett went on to expand this original line of research decades later into The Healing Power of UFOs: 300 True Accounts of People Healed by Extraterrestrials, roughly tripling his original 1996 case count. He has since appeared on the History Channel and Travel Channel, and continues operating a public UFO-report hotline.

Dennett's own working life before and alongside his UFO research reads as a genuinely eclectic list: carpet cleaner, landscaper, cook, data-entry clerk, bookkeeper, teacher, lecturer, actor, writer, singer, and television consultant, among other roles — a background reflecting a researcher who built his UFO-investigation career gradually and personally, through direct witness contact rather than through an academic or scientific credentialing path. His speculative fiction has also placed in the Writers of the Future Contest, and he received a Telly Award in 2004, indicating creative output extending beyond his nonfiction UFO writing specifically.

Historical Context & Origins

The book was published in 1996 by Wild Flower Press, a small Mill Spring, North Carolina press specializing in UFO and paranormal titles, running 186 pages with a foreword contributed by Dr. John Beresford, MD — a physician's endorsement lending the collection a degree of clinical credibility relatively unusual for a contactee-literature title of this kind.

The book arrived during a period of intense mainstream and academic attention to abduction research specifically, with John Mack's Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens having appeared just two years earlier in 1994 and Budd Hopkins's abduction-research career already well established since the mid-1980s — both figures, along with David Jacobs and Jacques Vallée, are credited with contributing comments and cases directly to this book, situating it within the same core network of researchers actively shaping abduction literature during the mid-1990s.

This site's own citation of the book connects it to the October 1974 Carl Higdon case, which predates this book's 1996 publication by 22 years — meaning Dennett's survey, drawing on cases collected through the early 1990s, arrived as a later systematic attempt to place individually striking claims like Higdon's reported tuberculosis-scar and kidney-stone resolution within a much broader documented pattern, rather than treating each healing report as an isolated curiosity.

The book's mid-1990s publication also followed closely behind a wave of alternative-medicine and mind-body-healing popular literature that had gained significant mainstream traction earlier in the decade, a broader cultural receptiveness to claims of non-conventional physiological healing that likely contributed to the book finding a readership willing to take its specific extraterrestrial-healing framing seriously rather than dismissing it outright.

Core Arguments & Key Concepts

The book's central claim is that reported physiological healing following UFO encounters constitutes a genuine, recurring, and previously under-documented category of contactee experience, spanning conditions from minor ailments to serious and even life-threatening diagnoses including AIDS, cancer, diabetes, polio, muscular dystrophy, and tuberculosis.

Dennett's method combines witness testimony collection with what the book's own framing describes as chronological case analysis, footnotes, and an index — formal scholarly apparatus relatively uncommon in contactee-literature titles of the period, reflecting an attempt to present the material with documentary rigor even while working entirely from unverified personal testimony rather than independently confirmed medical records.

The book's incorporation of direct comments and case contributions from Budd Hopkins, David Jacobs, John Mack, and Jacques Vallée gives it a collaborative, cross-referenced quality distinguishing it from a purely solo-authored case compilation, situating Dennett's specific healing-claims research within the broader body of work these more widely known abduction researchers were producing during the same period.

As with any collection built entirely from witness self-report rather than independently verified medical documentation, the book's core evidentiary limitation is one this site states plainly: none of the more than 100 healing claims it documents, including the specific Higdon case this site cites it for, can be independently confirmed as genuinely medically inexplicable rather than misdiagnosed, naturally resolved, or inaccurately recalled after the fact.

Key Cases & Evidence Discussed

This site's own Carl Higdon / Rawlins Encounter (Case File #215, October 25, 1974), the Medicine Bow National Forest encounter near Rawlins, Wyoming, is the specific case this site cites this book for: Higdon's own account, recovered through Dr. Leo Sprinkle's 1974 hypnosis sessions, included the claimed resolution of pre-existing tuberculosis lung scarring and kidney stones during his examination aboard the reported craft — precisely the category of claim this book's more than 100-case survey was assembled to document and contextualize.

This site's own The Dr. X Encounter (Case File #334, November 1, 1968) represents one of ufology's foundational healing-claim cases, predating this book by nearly three decades: an anonymous French physician reported the rapid, medically unexplained healing of a fresh leg wound and an old war injury following his sighting, documented within days by French researcher Aimé Michel and later carried to wider audiences by Jacques Vallée, who called it one of ufology's most significant "physiological effects" cases — exactly the kind of foundational healing claim Dennett's own broader 1996 survey builds on and systematizes.

Critical Reception & Controversies

The book won the 1996 Karla Turner Ph.D. Award, a recognition specific to the abduction-research community rather than a mainstream literary or scientific honor, reflecting its reception primarily within specialist ufology circles rather than broader critical or medical audiences.

Dr. John Beresford's contributed foreword represents the book's most substantial claim to outside clinical engagement, though this site's research was unable to locate independent peer-reviewed medical assessment of the book's specific case claims beyond that single physician's endorsement.

The book's direct incorporation of commentary from Hopkins, Jacobs, Mack, and Vallée reflects genuine standing within the mid-1990s abduction-research community specifically, though this site notes that community's own broader methodology — reliance on witness testimony and, in many cases, hypnotic regression — carries the same evidentiary limitations this site's own coverage of Robert A. Baker's Hidden Memories discusses in detail elsewhere.

No source located during this article's research directly disputes the good-faith documentation of witness testimony within this book; the appropriate critical stance, consistent with this site's treatment of similar testimony-based UFO literature, is to weigh the book's genuine documentary value as a record of what witnesses reported against the inherent limitation that self-reported, non-medically-verified healing claims cannot themselves establish that any given resolution was genuinely inexplicable by conventional medicine.

A further complicating factor this site's own research surfaces: several of the conditions the book's marketing describes as documented healings, including specific chronic and progressive diagnoses, are conditions medical science already recognizes can occasionally show spontaneous, unexplained improvement or symptom fluctuation through entirely conventional (if imperfectly understood) biological mechanisms, independent of any UFO encounter. That baseline rate of spontaneous medical improvement is not addressed as a comparative control anywhere in the book's own framing, a methodological gap worth noting alongside the book's genuine documentary value.

Influence & Legacy

This exact title is cited in this site's own Carl Higdon / Rawlins Encounter case file's Further Reading section as useful context for placing Higdon's own specific healing claim within its wider evidentiary category, alongside Margery Higdon's own family memoir of the same case.

As the first book-length treatment of its specific subject, this book effectively established UFO healing claims as a distinct, named sub-genre within broader contactee and abduction literature, one Dennett himself returned to and substantially expanded nearly two decades later in The Healing Power of UFOs, roughly tripling his original case count from just over 100 to 300.

Dennett's broader thirty-book bibliography, sustained MUFON field-investigator role, and continued media presence across television and podcast appearances demonstrate this book functioned as a genuine career foundation rather than a standalone early-career curiosity, with the healing-claims research it introduced remaining one of his most consistently revisited specific research threads.

The book's continued relevance nearly three decades after publication is reflected in Dennett's own ongoing podcast and media appearances specifically discussing the healing-claims research, including recent conversations on shows like The Paranormal UFO Consciousness Podcast revisiting the expanded 300-case findings — indicating the subject retains active audience interest well beyond this book's original 1996 print run.

The Book

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