Chris Bledsoe
Chris Bledsoe is a North Carolina homebuilder and UFO contactee who experienced a close encounter with unidentified aerial phenomena on 8 January 2007 on the banks of the Cape Fear River near Fayetteville, North Carolina. The incident involved Bledsoe, his seventeen-year-old son Chris Bledsoe Jr., and several construction workers, and was followed by the complete and reportedly verified remission of Bledsoe's Crohn's disease. Decades of ongoing contact followed with an angelic luminous entity known as the Lady. His case has been studied by personnel from the CIA, Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), NASA, and the Pentagon.
Background
Bledsoe grew up in North Carolina and trained as a commercial pilot, eventually earning instructor-level certification in aviation meteorology, before redirecting his career to home construction to raise his family near Fort Bragg. At the peak of his business he was constructing approximately 100–120 houses per year, and his wife operated a RE/MAX real-estate office in Fayetteville that closed around $40 million in sales in its final year. The 11 September 2001 attacks sent Fort Bragg onto high alert and dried up military housing demand; by 2005 the sustained financial collapse had exhausted Bledsoe's savings and his Crohn's disease, diagnosed in his mid-twenties, had become debilitating — leaving him in the restroom twenty or more times a day and forcing the sale of the business. A separate near-death experience followed when a psychiatrist treating his depression over-prescribed lithium, causing toxic metal poisoning; Bledsoe regained consciousness in the hospital to find the prescribing physician had overdosed and died, having hospitalised 113 patients.
By late 2006 Bledsoe had recovered enough to accept a construction finishing job at the North Carolina coast for his father. The job wrapped up at the start of January 2007, setting the scene for the 8 January encounter.
2007 Cape Fear River encounter
On the afternoon of 8 January 2007, Bledsoe drove three construction workers — Gene, Donnie, and a third man — and his seventeen-year-old son Chris Jr. to a private stretch of the Cape Fear River known as Carolina's Creek off Marsh Road, roughly three miles from his home, to celebrate the completed job with a fishing trip. The access track ran 100 feet downhill through woods to the riverbank and then a further eighth of a mile to a roughly acre-sized clearing Bledsoe described as a cul-de-sac.
While the others fished at the riverbank, Bledsoe walked alone toward the gate at the top of the hill to watch for wildlife, inwardly in deep depression about his finances and health. Near the crest of the hill he saw two large blood-red, tangerine-orange balls of fire, each roughly 40–50 feet across, hovering just above the treetops about 300 yards away. A third object then appeared directly overhead and shot down to join the others; Bledsoe immediately sensed it had registered his presence.
Bledsoe has no memory of the next approximately four hours. When he reappeared at the fire the workers told him he had been missing all night; he believed only twenty minutes had passed. Chris Jr. had gone to search for his father and was found crouched in undergrowth at the edge of the cul-de-sac, trembling and unable to speak coherently. In a separate account, Chris Jr. described watching two three-to-four-foot-tall, dark, near-translucent figures with large glowing red eyes emerge from the wood line and approach him; he was unable to move for the duration of their presence. The figures fled on all fours into a pile of cut logs when they detected the headlights of the returning truck.
On the drive home, a single orb transformed from red to a glowing white egg- or Tic-Tac-shaped object that descended to about five feet off the road, passed directly over Bledsoe's truck through the open sunroof, and then pivoted north. Multiple orbs tracked the truck for the remainder of the journey. Bledsoe reached his home late that night; the following morning he woke to find his Crohn's symptoms entirely absent — a remission subsequently confirmed by specialists at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, who found no clinical marker for the disease.
Later that same night Bledsoe encountered a small glowing figure — roughly the size of a four-year-old child, with glassy luminous skin and red eyes — at the edge of the forest behind his father's property, prompting his 17-hound kennel to bark in distress. The figure communicated telepathically: "You don't understand. I'm not here to hurt you, we're here to help you," before vanishing.
Subsequent contact: the Lady
In the months and years following the encounter, Bledsoe reported continuing visitation by orbs at his property — sometimes fifty to seventy at once — and by a tall, luminous feminine entity he came to call the Lady, which he identifies with the Holy Spirit, the Virgin Mary, Hathor, and related divine mother figures across world religions. The entity reportedly appears at or around Easter each year; Bledsoe describes three orbs flying in triangular formation as a recurring motif tied to these visits.
In 2012 Bledsoe walked out on Easter Saturday night after five years of community hostility, shouted to the heavens that he would speak no more of the experience — at which point the Lady physically appeared to him. She told him from that point on she would permit him to film and share the phenomena; since 2012 Bledsoe has accumulated what he describes as terabytes of video, photo, and audio data.
The Lady described herself as having carried many names throughout history: Diana, Demeter, Isis, Hathor, Hera, the Virgin Mary. The Lady is identified most closely with Sophia — the Gnostic principle of divine wisdom — and the Holy Spirit as described in Proverbs chapters 8–9, which describes an entity created before the earth itself. Her physical appearance — a glowing woman of thirty-five to forty years, hovering three feet off the ground — conforms to a "typical Virgin Mary apparition type thing."
Under hypnotic regression conducted by a Harvard-trained psychiatrist for the 2008 Discovery Channel documentary, Bledsoe recalled that during his missing four hours on 8 January he was held inside a transparent spherical enclosure, narrated by three shadowy figures, and shown aerial views of North America, the Egyptian pyramids, the Hathor temple, and the Great Sphinx of Giza. The Lady subsequently delivered what Bledsoe described as a prophecy — that when the star Regulus appeared red on the eastern horizon in front of the Sphinx's gaze before sunrise, it would mark a change in humanity's knowledge. At the request of two Air Force generals and a NASA contact, Bledsoe put this message in writing around 2012–2013; astronomers then computed the alignment to occur at Easter 2026. The prophecy's language aligns with the original Greek meaning of "apocalypse" — to reveal that which has been hidden — rather than physical destruction.
Government and institutional interest
In October 2013 a tree on Bledsoe's property ignited and burned from the inside out on ground that had been wet for two days; this event drew the attention of personnel from NASA and the National Reconnaissance Office, and led to Bledsoe's involvement with what he describes as a circle of government and intelligence researchers.
Hal Puthoff, who Bledsoe describes as connected to both the CIA and NASA, repeatedly warned Bledsoe not to allow the orb phenomena too close to him: "He knew the voltage was like 33 million volts in one of these things and if it got near me it would kill me dead." NASA communicated to Bledsoe via Diana Walsh Pasulka that they understood the orbs to be angels, cautioning: "They know that they're angels. They don't mean to harm us, but their energy, if they get excited, can cause harm to a human."
Seventeen to nineteen senior-level DIA service members have visited his home with their families and personally witnessed orb phenomena. At his personal property he has also hosted heads from NASA, the DOD, and CIA, as well as three Washington diplomats. Named associates include Jim Semivan — former CIA director of operations, who wrote the foreword to Bledsoe's book — and Col. John Alexander, who introduced Bledsoe to remote viewing.
In 2014 Bledsoe was flown to Washington, D.C. at the request of a CIA contact to visit a gravely ill child connected to Michael Morell, then Deputy Director of the CIA; the child reportedly recovered the same night after Bledsoe's visit. In 2017 representatives from the Vatican visited its archives at the request of Diana Walsh Pasulka and a NASA researcher to investigate historical parallels to Bledsoe's case; Bledsoe reports that his photograph was subsequently placed in the Vatican Archives alongside documents of Galileo and Copernicus.
The orbs
The orbs that attend him are intelligences connected to consciousness, responsive to thought rather than physical location: "I don't have to go out and speak to get this thing to come — just think about it. It knows our thoughts completely, and in advance of what you're going to think." The phenomena consistently manifest in threes and triangular patterns. Photographs from 2012 onward reportedly show human faces — including what he believes is his deceased son — visible inside the orbs. A Monroe Institute Faraday cage experiment involving Bledsoe reportedly registered anomalous results; he was also given a golden astronaut pin at Kennedy Space Center — signifying off-planet travel — by a senior NASA official.
Public disclosure
In 2008 MUFON and the Discovery Channel produced a documentary on the case; it included testimony from Bledsoe Sr. and at least two of the construction workers who were present on 8 January 2007, as well as the Harvard-trained psychiatrist who conducted the hypnotic regression. Chris Jr. appeared briefly in the documentary but felt his account was not adequately represented, and did not speak publicly about the night again until a 2022 episode of the family podcast Bledsoe Said So hosted by his brother Ryan Bledsoe.
Bledsoe is the author of UFO of God: The Extraordinary True Story of Chris Bledsoe, a New York Times bestseller. He participates in ongoing research at Skinwalker Ranch in collaboration with owner Brandon Fugal.
Danny Jones interview (2023)
In a December 2023 interview with podcast host Danny Jones, Bledsoe and his daughter Emily Bledsoe elaborated on the ongoing nature of the contact phenomenon and its relationship to suffering, describing a pattern in which the orbs appear most intensely at moments of personal crisis or deep emotional pain — a connection Bledsoe regards as demonstrating the entities' responsiveness to human consciousness rather than to physical location. The interview also covered the orbs' acoustic properties, the circumstances of the burning tree incident, the appearance of the Lady alongside what Bledsoe describes as a bull entity, and the precise celestial alignment tied to the Regulus prophecy. The interview's chapter outline — published by Jones in the video description — reflects the breadth of topics covered, including telepathic communication, missing time, studies of Bledsoe's brain conducted by government scientists, and the alien sightings reported at NASA launch sites.