He purchased his artifacts—allegedly excavated in Mexico—over the past year. “Then I started getting messages to come out to this location where I’m taking you now,” he said. “That’s when I captured these huge orbs of light floating in the sky out here.” That experience imbued him with a mission “to bring people out here, because it’s part of the disclosure. There’s a long history on this planet of ET connection.”

After 15 minutes, we arrived at a secluded clearing overlooking Boynton and Sycamore canyons. The desert wind was cool, carrying the dry, peppery scent of juniper from twisted trees scattered across the scrubland. Their trunks corkscrewed towards the sky. The last traces of twilight had drained from the red rocks. “People see things out here,” said Sterling, who only recently began to offer UFO skywatches in America’s New Age capital, where there is growing demand for the tours. “This is what we do in Sedona: Make contact.”

Sterling set up a digital night-vision monocular and linked it to a seven-inch monitor, then handed us military-grade binoculars worth $3,000 apiece. The phosphorescent lenses cast the sky in glowing green, magnifying the light above us and making the cosmos seem almost within reach. The stars, satellites, and planets, which already shone resplendent, twinkled harder. The crescent moon glowed more serenely still. 

“It feels like an ancestor, like a family member, almost as if we’re just remembering our divine connection,” said Sterling as he urged us to fix on a particular slow-moving flying object. “That flashing one just appeared all of a sudden out of nowhere,” he exclaimed. It didn’t resolve into anything I could confidently call a sighting. And Sterling proceeded to put on a gentle ambient playlist that seemed to harmonize with the crickets singing in overlapping waves as he beamed a green laser toward various apparent orbs, still hoping the night would yield something more. 

I was told that if I stayed in Sedona long enough, I would start to see what Sterling was seeing—and perhaps start making contact with extraterrestrial life myself. “Sedona helps people awaken to their psychic powers,” he said. “The chakras start to spin here.”

The climate crisis has reshaped how people think about the future, from colonizing Mars to a growing number of young people questioning whether to have children. Among its more surprising impacts is how climate anxiety—a desire to look beyond the confines of a struggling planet—and a growing distrust of governmental figures, have contributed to UFO interest and sightings, reaching an all-time high in the United States, higher than their previous peak in the 1950s. 

Nearly 50% of Americans now believe aliens have visited Earth, with just 16% saying they have not. Declassified military footage, landmark congressional hearings, and a directive by Trump to publicly release declassified Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena files have all stoked public imagination. At the same time, the possibility of life beyond Earth has begun to echo broader anxieties about whether humanity needs a Planet B. In the American Southwest, one of the fastest-warming regions in the country, that sense of atmospheric attention feels especially charged, with skies more crowded, weather more volatile, and an increasingly unstable desert.

In Sedona, where rising average temperatures and water scarcity are the new normal, the veil between material reality and the world beyond is thought to be unusually thin. The town has long marketed itself as a place of vortexes, healing, and spiritual awakening. Yet amid the spiking fascination with UFOs and a widespread sense that humanity is entering an uncertain new era, pilgrims of a cosmic kind are increasingly coming not just to look up at the towering red rock formations but for evidence that humanity is not alone in the universe. Each of the four guides I contacted or toured with for this piece said business is booming. 

It’s no coincidence that Sedona, where cicadas hum with an otherworldly, almost extraterrestrial frequency, and where the late doomsday leader “Gabriel of Sedona” drew more than 100 followers in the 1990s with promises that UFOs would save them from the apocalypse, has one of the darkest night skies in all of America. 

The day after our tour with Sterling, I was sitting in a funky café garden listening to a live guitarist, Karl Jones, improvise endlessly over psychedelic blues rock. After his set, I asked whether he had ever seen a UFO. He removed his blue-mirrored wraparound sunglasses, pushed his shoulder-length, greying hair back behind his ears, and launched into an extraordinary tale from 1997 about a giant, glowing orange ball that “took up a huge portion of the sky.” Jones said he was so shaken by the experience that he did not sleep for 39 days. “The energy from it was so intense,” he said. “I think it was the fact that there was something so technologically advanced in the world that I don’t know anything about. I can’t make heads or tails of it, how I was able to sustain that long without sleep.” 

Encounters like that have become part of Sedona’s local folklore. “Most of us in Sedona have seen something,” he said. 

Later that day, I noticed an eye-catching leaflet in my Airbnb showing a flying saucer beaming down on Sedona’s rose-colored bell-shaped butte, Bell Rock. It advertised the services of “master tour guide” Reverend John Polk. “Guaranteed to see UFOs or your money back!” it promised. Since our night with Sterling had not, to our knowledge, produced a sighting, we thought it prudent to meet Polk before booking a tour. He invited us to his address and said to bring beer. “I’m the most popular UFO guy in Sedona, Arizona, which is one of the hottest hot spots in the entire world,” said Polk, who was wearing a red T-shirt with a graphic of a green alien in a saucer. “My bookings keep going up, the amount of money I’m making keeps going up.” 

He showed us 13 military-issue goggles, collectively worth around $40,000. “This was predestined and predetermined before I was even born through soul contracts,” he said of his work. Polk has been taking people UFO skywatching in Sedona for eight years and traces his fascination with extraterrestrial life back to his childhood. “It was really more of an obsession as opposed to a hobby,” he said.  His mother, a government employee, encouraged his claims of seeing spirits, testing him with Zener cards and giving him books on psychic development from the age of 5.

“When you live in Sedona, if you just look up and you have the right energy and right consciousness, you’re going to see stuff,” he said, echoing Sterling. I was going to have to work on raising my consciousness, but I decided not to do it with Polk.

Still, the question he and Sterling kept raising—that the right kind of “energy” could summon something from beyond—was one that psychologist Dr. Renee Lertzman recognized immediately, though she framed it very differently. 

“Are we looking for someone, or something, to come save us?” Lertzman said, as she tried to explain why people may be increasingly drawn to the promise of extraterrestrial life in a time of severe climate instability. “We’re facing what we’ve done to our planet and the environment,” she said, describing a perfect psychological storm as people try to come to terms with the existential threat of climate change and environmental degradation.

Human-generated oblivion can feel “inevitable,” said Lertzman, who has studied the psychology of climate inaction, and she understands why people reach for different strategies to manage that psychology. On podcasts about possible contact with extraterrestrials, she noted, speakers often invoke the hope that “when it comes down to it, beings will step in, there’ll be an intervention, or there’ll be a way to prevent the worst outcomes.” This is a view shared by Sterling. “They would like to help us because we’re on the brink of destroying the planet because of our archaic technologies,” he said. 

For Lertzman, that hope reflects an inability to “reimagine what we’re doing on the planet” as the climate crisis deepens.

Psychologists have long found that stress, uncertainty, and a diminished sense of control can reshape beliefs. Recent research has linked distress and reduced coping with some paranormal beliefs, while other studies suggest that people prone to finding meaningful patterns amid ambiguity are also more likely to endorse supernatural or conspiratorial explanations. In that light, UFO skywatching in Sedona and beyond can be read not simply as escapism, but as a form of meaning-making.

Sedona’s Center for the New Age is hard to miss—it’s bright purple and situated prominently at the southern approach to town. Its east-facing façade bears a mural of ethereal figures circling a glowing Earth beneath a cosmic sky. Two lime-green alien statues stand sentry, greeting visitors like planetary mascots. For our last night in Sedona, we signed up for the center’s UFO tour with the renowned skywatcher Melinda Leslie, whose leaflet promised sightings.

When Leslie arrived, to lead what she said was her 2,153th UFO skywatch tour, she gathered the group beneath a pyramid-like structure outside the center before leading us to a trailhead parking lot near where we had skywatched with Sterling three nights earlier. “We’ve always kind of thought there’s something,” said a fellow skywatcher, a logistics supervisor from Ohio named CJ, who parked next to us. “There’s got to be something going on. I don’t know if it’s aliens, interdimensional beings, [or] is it us from the future coming back to spy on us.” 

The group gathered into a circle of camping chairs, bristling with expectation, as Leslie explained how she reads the night sky and claimed that some tour operators exaggerated ordinary lights, campfires, and distant commercial or military aircraft as UFOs. “We have enough real sightings, we don’t need to do that,” she said. 

Eventually, we were handed military-issue binoculars, and hundreds of stars and satellites again came splendidly into view. There was also a surprisingly high number of aircraft with blinking lights. When Leslie pointed to brightening or fading lights and described them as activity, a quick check of the Sun Seeker app, which tracks the sun’s position below the horizon, suggested that at least some were likely satellites passing into Earth’s shadow. But that distinction did not seem to matter much to her or the group. “They come up, they power up, they start dimming, and all of a sudden they turn back on themselves and kind of really speed forward—like they’re making a check mark,” said Leslie. “And then they’re gone.”

Sedona’s enigmatic appeal does not depend on unexplained lights—or on whether any of the skywatch guides are right. It resides in the longing they carry. Among the red rocks and junipers, every blinking object becomes a possible messenger, every ambiguity an invitation to believe that humanity is part of a larger story. The skywatchers who gather here are looking for evidence of extraterrestrial life, but they are also looking for reassurance, for perspective—perhaps even for rescue. It’s hardly surprising that climate anxiety has made this kind of cosmic hope feel newly compelling.