LOS ANGELES (RNS) — “This ship was huge. It was like a city-sized ship. And there was hundreds of beings on board,” said Debbie Solaris, a military veteran and one of six panelists sharing their alien encounters with a packed room at the LAX Hilton Hotel in Los Angeles on a recent February Friday. “They had larger heads, larger eyes,” she said, describing one alien group. “Very big auras, lots of colors.”

Panelists’ testimonies had the arc of conversion narratives; after her out-of-body experience in 2012, Solaris traded her career in environmentalism for one as a galactic historian.

“I knew at that point that my life changed,” said Solaris, hands folded, eyes upward, her long, dark hair contrasting with her fuchsia blouse. “My life was never going to be the same.”

At the 24^th annual Conscious Life Expo, which convened more than 5,000 New Age spiritual seekers from Feb. 20-23, Solaris’ experience wasn’t fringe. The event, which has previously featured speakers like former presidential candidate Marianne Williamson, psychedelic pioneer Ram Dass and “Plandemic” filmmaker and conspiracy theorist Mikki Willis, originally focused on topics like astrology, health and wellness and sustainability when it launched in 2002. While UFO discussions have long been part of the milieu, as the conference nears its quarter-century mark, some of its most popular speakers claim to be vessels channeling aliens, or to be aliens themselves.

Fueled by social media influencers and a post-pandemic cultural shift, the expo’s content has become more cosmic and, often, more conspiratorial, attracting a diverse audience hungry for meaning outside of institutional religion.

The shift

“I think it’s evolved to much more of a religion about aliens,” said Michael Satva, the 43-year-old, warm-eyed son of Expo co-founder Robert Quicksilver and co-producer for the event.

On the first morning of the expo, Satva wore an understated black hoodie and gripped a glass bottle sloshing with brown liquid — “a cacao mix of some kind from one of the exhibitors,” he explained — as he checked on booths selling life force energy tools and high frequency skincare.

“I’m constantly surprised how little the Boomers know of what’s happening,” Satva said about New Age’s new turn and the generation who birthed the movement during the spiritually experimental and culturally unsettled 1960s and 1970s.

“They have no idea how it’s evolved over time, because they, you know, they came up with their version of it, and then they never really went beyond that,” Satva mused.

For Quicksilver, Satva’s father and an energetic man in his 70s, the expo has always been about bringing together alternative spiritual beliefs and practices (meditation, healing, UFO lore, ancestral myths) into a loosely organized, non-dogmatic community, he told RNS.

Raised in an ultra-orthodox Jewish community in Brooklyn, New York, Quicksilver embarked on a spiritual journey that, in the 1970s, led to Thereaveda Buddhism. After operating a chain of spiritual gift shops, he co-founded the expo in 2002, when the Whole Life Expo — the current expo’s predecessor — shuttered after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

“It’s about planetary transformation,” said Quicksilver, who described the expo as a place where “freedom and creativity and brainstorming and visionary ideals” converge and lead to love-filled unity.

Artifacts of this founding spiritual vision remain visible around the expo. Through the hotel doors, attendees are greeted by loudspeakers playing ethereal sounds and a hotel lobby transformed into a festival stage bedecked with psychedelic paintings. Down the hall are booths offering crystals, palm readings, tinctures and amulets. The air is thick with the smell of essential oils. In one booth, people climb into collapsable infrared saunas that come up to the neck; in another, a man claiming to be the reincarnation of Jesus Christ sells metal and crystal gadgets promising divine healing — his room-size pyramids can cost up to $100,000.   

“There are a lot of quacks here, too,” said Marcy LeBeau, who, at, 70, is retired and living in Long Beach. LeBeau, whose iridescent purple nails would stand out anywhere else, has been attending the expo for decades. Raised Catholic, she now identifies as spiritual and said that, although you must “sift through” conference offerings, she keeps coming back to reach a “higher level of existence” by learning to “expand your consciousness.”

At a nearby booth in the exhibition hall, a psychic wearing flowing robes and a glittery headdress sits next to a giant, inflatable blue mantis. He’s a real estate agent in the D.C. metro area, but here he offers to channel wisdom from alien mantis beings.

The influencer effect

In the last five years, the concept of channeling insights from extraterrestrials has gained traction in some corners of New Age Spirituality, thanks in large part to the influx of online influencers.

“I’m seeing groupies here this year,” said Stacey Shell, an entrepreneur who has been at the expo for five years. “I’m seeing people that are doing keynotes and panels who are bigger influencers.”

Sometimes, it’s those influencers who are broadening the expo audience. Gina Aguero, 33, from San Antonio, Texas, said she came to the expo because of influencer Althea Lucrezia Avanzo, who says she channels light language — a vibrational form of communication she expresses through sounds and hand gestures — from higher-dimensional extraterrestrial beings.

“Finding her really helped me heal my inner belief systems at the time that were making me really sick,” said Aguero, who added that she also channels light language. “This conference is actually really broadening my horizons.”

Avanzo’s content first began to take off around 2020; that’s also when Elizabeth April, a 33-year-old influencer with blonde hair and a bright smile and another featured speaker at the expo, began posting about aliens.

“I really kept it low-key, the alien thing, super low-key, until, honestly, 2020,” April told RNS in a call ahead of the event. “2020 is when I was like, yep, like, I’m talking to them. And I also feel like I am one, you know, and I’m here to awaken others who are like me. And that video blew up on my channel.”

April, like a growing number of other expo attendees and panelists, calls herself a “starseed,” nomenclature for an incarnate galactic soul on earth to aid humanity. She has 371,000 subscribers on You

Tube, and, according to her website, she monthly channels the Galactic Federation of Light, “a group of advanced beings who watch over Earth, radiating unconditional love and support.” Asked about her growing following, April attributed the movement to a broader awakening that began during the COVID pandemic.

“I think 2020 really woke a lot of people up to their own abilities, to their own leadership, to their own powers,” said April.

The conspiracy side

That was the same period when many in the New Age spirituality space noticed a discernible uptick in hardcore conspiracy theories like QAnon, which frames Donald Trump as a savior combating an elite ring of pedophiles. Matthew Hannah, a conspiracy movement expert and author of a forthcoming book about QAnon, said the pandemic exacerbated the anti-institutional sentiment in New Age spirituality. “A lot of people in that kind of alternative health, alternative spirituality community really got turned off by what they saw as government overreach, and this really quickly coded as the deep state, which is working with Big Pharma to force vaccines on us,” he said.

Though QAnon isn’t a staple at the expo, conspiracy often is. Satva acknowledges there’s a “dark, twisted side” that can show up in some of the conspiracies at the expo that “we try to just not engage in.”

“Not that we’re in denial of it, but that our core message is more about bringing solutions and love and light,” he added.

Satva and the other expo organizers say they want to balance a commitment to anti-censorship and a desire to focus on positive values. They’ve named the basement level of the expo “The Rabbit Hole,” a tongue-in-cheek nod to the expo’s edgier content. And while they’ve asked some speakers not to return, they also expect that those who bring “dark energy” with them will ultimately lose followers.

On Friday evening, former rock musician Sacha Stone held a late-night lecture deep in the bowels of “The Rabbit Hole.” A self-described human rights advocate, Stone is better known to critics as a New Age conspiracist who platforms vaccine disinformation and anti-establishment, Illuminati-style conspiracy narratives. In his cutoff shirt, white skinny jeans and bare feet, Stone paced around the platform, gripping the mic and gesticulating as he blasted through his fast-paced 90-minute lecture that touched on anti-gravitational technology, an alien base under Romania, human control of the climate and the pizzagate conspiracy.

“The planetary reset is now imminent, courtesy of the revelation, by God’s grace, of the ritual Satanism, the pedophilia, the trafficking, the cannibalism going on in the basement of our power centers,” he declared to his audience of mostly middle-age women.

Noelle Cook, author of “The Conspiracists: Women, Extremism, and the Lure of Belonging,” said Stone is emblematic of the blend of MAGA enthusiasm, conspiracy and New Age spirituality she unpacks in her book, noting that he was featured in former Trump adviser Michael Flynn’s Christian nationalist ReAwaken America Tour. While he doesn’t use the QAnon label, his belief in a Satanic global elite and industrial-scale child trafficking illustrates how these ideas are repackaged for New Age audiences. 

“The danger comes when you’re not discerning,” said Cook, whose book profiles women at the Jan. 6 insurrection who embraced New Age spirituality. “Most of the women I was studying were not actually seeking extremism. They were seeking a purpose, identity and some coherence in their life.”

“Cinematic stories”

The merging between New Age beliefs and conspiracies — dubbed “conspirituality” by researcher Charlotte Ward and sociologist David Voas in 2011 — is inescapable at the expo: in panels offering secret knowledge; in stories of an elect group on a mission to aid humanity; and in warnings of a coming, global dimensional shift.

While the expo largely avoided political content this year, some speakers described cosmic narratives that echoed End Times religious teachings. At the final panel, titled “Something Is Coming!” panelists described a time of coming chaos, possible solar events and a potential collective shift into a new age. 

“Between 2025 and 2030 there will be an event involving the sun, and it may destroy parts of the surfaces of the whole earth,” said UFO investigator Linda Moulton Howe. Self-styled polymath and entrepreneur Robert Edward Grant added that “2030 will be our year No. 1,” telling panel attendees to expect a “profound shift” in 2029.

During the Q&A, a woman shared fears that her husband would not ascend to the next dimension with her, referencing New Age beliefs about shifting from a limited, 3D state to a better, higher dimension. “I’m excited about it, the 3D to 5D, the consciousness. I’m thrilled I’m going there,” she said. After a pause, she added, “I don’t think my husband is coming with me.”

Despite the panel’s content, the tone was light. Panelists joked about buying toilet paper and suggested preparation should be about personal spiritual alignment, not selling stocks.

That levity was also present at Saturday evening’s “Judgement Day” play, written by Quicksilver. Longtime expo speakers donned alien masks and face paint, their extraterrestrial characters deciding that humans were worth saving despite their faults, in part due to their “sacred bond with the planet, its living creatures and each other.” 

“I think these larger, more cinematic stories help create a new identity and a new framework for society and for the world,” said Satva. “With AI, nobody knows what’s real anymore. So, if you don’t know what’s real, might as well enjoy and believe in something much more fun and exciting.”