The UFO Optimist
For someone eager to commune with off-world entities, Dr. Leo Sprinkle remained on Earth for quite a long time. The PhD psychologist was 91 years-old when he passed away in November 2021, leaving behind a body of work dedicated to understanding the purpose behind encounters with UFOs and their occupants.
According to his assessment, UFO experiences (UFOEs) weren’t a negative event. He believed that repeated contact with intergalactic entities was part of a universal educational program—“a gradual, but persistent, conditioning of human awareness for a new age of science and spirituality.” Instead of calling them aliens, Sprinkle preferred to use non-threatening monikers, like “Star People” or “UFOLK,”—a way of humanizing the beings he saw as our cosmic mentors and spiritual partners. (In an interview with Weekly World News, Sprinkle described the creatures as “benevolent.”)
A young man in the 1950s, Leo Sprinkle’s perspective was likely tinged by the onslaught of ‘contactee’ literature depicting extraterrestrial visitors as charitable space-brothers. This auspicious interpretation became a guiding light and he resisted subsequent trends that had researchers accusing ‘the visitors’ of nefarious intent. Sprinkle never wavered on this idealistic understanding of humanity’s place within the larger “cosmic citizenry.”
He liked to point to J. Allen Hynek’s assertion that UFOs possessed both a physical and a psychical aspect. Sprinkle was of the opinion that the key to unlocking UFOEs lies within the “subconscious observations of the UFO sighting.” Instead of scouring our external reality for clues to solve the enigma, he argued that much of the evidence “is perceived to be ‘internal’ to the UFOEr.”
He stressed the importance of “personal interpretations” when evaluating UFOEs, advocating for a subjective analysis of the imagery involved: “Consider the possible significance of the location of and possible symbolism of the building or facility.” With Jungian flair, Dr. Sprinkle provided some examples: “If the UFOE occurs inside a car, or a small room, then the location might represent an ‘egg’ or ‘foetus’, ready for birth.” If the encounter took place at night, he suggested that “the UFOEr may be ‘in the dark’ not yet conscious of the possible significance of the scenario.”
Dr. Sprinkle appeared multiple times in the classic tabloid of record, Weekly World News. A year before Leo Sprinkle recovered memories of his own childhood abduction, he sounded uncertain about the exact nature of the phenomenon. He accepted that there were authentic incidents, but his speculation lacked the conviction and zeal that defined his stance in later years:
“My personal and professional bias is to accept tentatively the claims of UFO abductions as ‘real.’ However, I do not know if these ‘abductees’ have experienced physical abduction or whether they have experienced ‘out of body’ events. In either case, the experiences seem real to the abductee.” (UFO Update, 1979).
An early promoter and refiner of hypnotic regression techniques, Dr. Sprinkle also pioneered novel ways of psychologically assessing UFOErs while minimizing the effects of observer bias. He later experimented with unconventional means of subconscious communication through dream interpretation and automatic writing. “Most experts of dream report analysis agree that the best interpreter of a dream is the dreamer. Likewise, the best interpreter of a UFOE is the UFOEr.”
How well he insulated himself from the effects of his research is up for debate—after years of working with experiencers, Dr. Sprinkle underwent a hypnotherapy session of his own. This episode led to the retrieval of previously hidden memories indicating he had “experienced childhood encounters with entities (human-like) on board alien space craft.”
Leo Sprinkle’s ufology passport was thoroughly stamped. While not a household name like Friedman or Mack, Sprinkle was present at some of the field’s defining moments. As an advisor to APRO in the 1960s, he investigated the death of “Lady” (aka “Snippy”), the first famous casualty of the animal mutilation craze. He contributed to the Air Force’s UFO study as a psychological consultant to the Condon Committee (and overtly refuted its anti-UFO conclusions); hypnotically regressed Myrna Hansen (whose story went on to cauterize Paul Bennewitz’s belief in alien bases underground Dulce, NM); and as an investigator for NICAP, was one of the first to interview the notorious ‘abductee,’ Travis Walton.
Dr. Sprinkle also testified in front of Congress as part of the 1968 Symposium on UFOs, using his opening remarks to tell the political assembly that he accepted as fact that “the earth is being surveyed by spacecraft which are controlled by representatives of an alien civilization or civilizations.” Dr. Sprinkle was a strong advocate of public discussion and transparency on the UFO topic and urged lawmakers to establish a multi-disciplinary group that could provide “continuous, formal investigation of the physical, biological, psycho-social, and spiritual implications of UFO phenomena.” With the formation of a new outfit to investigate UFO reports announced this year, his fifty-year-old request may finally have found a receptive audience in the current session of Congress.
Speculating on Disclosure’s prospects back in 2013, Sprinkle noted that many smaller nations had already ponied-up their UFO data, “but the ‘Big Three’ (China, Russia, and the U.S.A.) have yet to do so. Soon?” Betraying an ever-present sense of optimism, his hopefulness was buttressed by an absolute faith in his beliefs: “The status of UFO evidence is a deluge, not a delusion.”
Leo Sprinkle had a fair share of critics, at times dodging friendly fire from ufologists like Jacques Valle, who called his brand of hypnoanalysis a “highly questionable method.”
Yet Sprinkle had always conceded that the practice was imperfect, granting that there were “limitations to the effectiveness of hypnotic time regression.”
The academic mainstream was obligatorily dismissive of Dr. Sprinkle’s conclusions about abduction experiences. While ‘professional’ psychologists don’t immediately dismiss the accounts as hoaxes, they also don’t consider the reports literally accurate. Conventional theories for why people believe they’ve had encounters with unknown entities range from a “desire to escape from ordinary self-awareness” to, less convincingly, a manifestation of an individual’s latent craving for “Extraterrestrial Sadomasochism.” There is also widespread disdain for the “porous technique” of hypnotic regression—psychologists believe it serves only to implant false or distorted memories.
While he held tightly to his ideology, Leo Sprinkle didn’t proselytize. He even left room for error, emphatically stating that he “could be wrong!!” about the entire thing. The sentiment is classic Sprinkle, hedging his comments in an effort to avoid alienating someone else’s point of view. This welcoming attitude was evident during his annual ‘Rocky Mountain Conference on UFO Investigation’—hosted on the University of Wyoming campus where he worked as an associate professor of psychology. Capturing the hospitable atmosphere of the gathering, one attendee told the local Colorado Springs Gazette Telegraph that “a lot of conferences are dogmatic, hardcore … this is so much warmer, there is so much love.” This opinion was echoed by one of Sprinkle’s doctoral students, Dr. David Cain. The undergrad went on to become a successful ‘person-centered psychologist,’ and he credited Leo’s humanistic style for helping him “understand the therapeutic impact of humor.”
Few ufologists are memorialized in verse, but Sprinkle earned that distinction in a poem titled “Leo Sprinkle’s Body,” by Bobbie Brown. Featured in the Spring 1994 edition of The Antioch Review, Brown’s poem reads as a personal narrative from the perspective of one of his grandchildren:
And Leo, was he scared when he saw
the abduction coming? Did he ask to take pictures?
And when the memories returned—alien, rare—
singed by hypnotic shimmer, Leo, did you say to yourself
Look, I am ten, drifting through bedroom walls,
flying a spaceship? You must have believed yourself
crazy. Who, recalling such scenes, would not?
The late psychologist acknowledged the reality of encounters with interstellar intelligences, and upheld the idea that our destiny was among the stars. By his estimation, humans were “Cosmic Citizens,” instead of “Planetary Persons;” “adductees,” over “abductees;” “knowers,” not “believers”—and he devoted his career to exploring the personal implications of UFO experiences within this framework.
Whether these interactions prove to be hostile or benign, Leo Sprinkle saw them as opportunities for personal reflection and universal transcendence.
