A Bermudian-based financier is seeking to open a safe space online for conversations on experiences of “non-human intelligences” in the wake of the 2022 US congressional hearings on unidentified flying object sightings with top military officials.

Kelly Barbey said he was also inspired to go public by Colonel Karl Nell, a US aerospace executive and military officer who has repeatedly insisted in public that non-human intelligences have visited Earth.

The US hearings made global headlines, particularly for footage from US Navy pilots purporting to depict UFOs in action.

Mr Barbey said a new climate of openness for people to discuss otherworldly encounters inspired him to go public with podcasts, YouTube videos and a website, www.kellybarbey.com, detailing his experiences and research.

Mr Barbey, who comes from a lifetime in finance and banking, is an investment adviser for the Swiss Fidelity Trust Company. He also advises the Bermuda Hesed Foundation, in addition to sitting on its advisory board for trustee grants.

He and his wife, Dawn, divide their time between their residence in Hamilton Parish and their home in Switzerland.

The couple spoke to The Royal Gazette shortly after attending the Sol Symposium in Italy from October 24 to 27, described as an “unprecedented international gathering on unidentified anomalous phenomena” or UAPs.

Mr Kelly’s website details an experience in 1990 of a “non-human intelligence” that proved “overwhelmingly benevolent”.

He added: “My experience was like the reactions of the Christian mystics, which is why it led me to Christianity.”

He said he had “been silent all these many years or decades after that experience I had”.

“I just didn’t feel the time was right; that was part of it. I don’t like to talk about myself, but there is such a biographical portion that’s so important for me to communicate.”

Mr Barbey said the experiences “are not as fringe as we think we are when we talk about something that’s out of the norm of our usual understanding.”

Mrs Barbey added: “With the people and comments that Kelly has been getting on YouTube and on his website, you see the hunger that’s there for a place to speak openly.”

Mr Barbey said the experience of otherworldly contact could have a profoundly distressing effect that he called “ontological shock”.

“When you encounter this kind of phenomenon, it’s life-changing because we have not been taught about this. We have not integrated.”

However, he added: “This is old. This is covered in scripture.”

Mr Barbey said: “I can’t say it’s just that 1990 experience — it was overwhelming, of course, and life-changing. It happened at the peak of my career as managing director of a Swiss private bank.”

Mr Barbey said he interpreted his experience as a “spiritual journey” that took him to Regent College, a non-denominational Christian College in Vancouver, Canada.

He said his religious research, which included Christian mysticism, opened his mind to the varieties of experience.

“My first reaction was, ‘I am not insane — this has happened to other people’. That was one of the first impulses. It’s not just my 1990 experience. It puts into perspective the bigger picture of our whole lives.”

He added: “That’s why, on the website that I just launched a couple of weeks ago, on my page about me I wrote ‘Who am I?’ These are questions I think we should all be asking ourselves.

“We have a narrow view of who we are because we have had a variety of types of parents that have reflected the image of who they think we are supposed to look like, which is what their parents did to them. We have developed identities that are very this-worldly — but in the end, there’s much more to who we are.”

Mr Barbey said people “do not realise to what extent we have closed ourselves in a box, even in the Christian world. All of these phenomena have been covered through our Judeo-Christian history and scripture and recorded for posterity.”

He said: “There’s a thirst, and not everyone has that thirst. If you have that thirst, you want to understand — what are they? What are they doing here?”

The couple said they hoped Mr Barbey’s site would prompt more people to come forward.

Their attendance at the Sol Symposium enabled them to meet others with experiences beyond the norm, such as the author Whitley Strieber, who also writes on metaphysical topics.

Mrs Barbey said: “There are objects that people are seeing, and now the military has come out saying that these things do things that we cannot do.

“For me, the connection is you have amazing objects doing amazing things. There’s some sort of intelligence behind it.”

She added: “This is what causes the ontological shock. It’s one thing to say that I believe in non-human intelligences. It’s another thing when you see something that is obviously a non-human intelligence, even in a mechanical form.

“It poses the question of, who made it and who is controlling it? For me, that’s where the connection is. There’s something other than human — what is it?”