Reinerio Hernandez, JD, MCP, is currently the Director of the Consciousness and Contact Research Institute (CCRI). He is editor of several anthologies including Beyond UFOs, and the first two volumes of A Greater Reality. He is author of The Mind of God: A Spiritual-Virtual Reality Model of Consciousness & The Contact Modalities.

Here he emphasizes his core argument that there is a unity behind UFO encounters, near-death experiences, out-of-body experiences, entheogenic experiences, mystical experiences, apports, materializations and other events associated with high-strangeness. He refers to these as "contact modalities." Although he admits that he cannot specify the precise workings of that unity, he attributes it to "the mind of God." He maintains that consciousness is fundamental and that what we perceive as the physical world is, in effect, a virtual realty, or a projection from a higher spiritual reality. He suggests that the best metaphor for this projection is to think in terms of Russian nesting dolls.

New Thinking Allowed host, Jeffrey Mishlove, PhD, is author of The Roots of Consciousness, Psi Development Systems, and The PK Man. Between 1986 and 2002 he hosted and co-produced the original Thinking Allowed public television series. He is the recipient of the only doctoral diploma in "parapsychology" ever awarded by an accredited university (University of California, Berkeley, 1980). He is also the Grand Prize winner of the 2021 Bigelow Institute essay competition regarding the best evidence for survival of human consciousness after permanent bodily death. (Recorded on October 23, 2022)