Dr. Jon Klimo

Academic Foundation

Dr. Jon Klimo received his Ph.D. in Psychology from Brown University, establishing himself as a rigorous academic voice in the study of consciousness and paranormal phenomena. Over 45+ years, he built a distinguished career as core faculty and full professor in the clinical psychology program at the American School of Professional Psychology (ASPP), Argosy University, and previously taught at Rutgers University for eight years. His academic rigor is reflected in the fact that he has chaired approximately 250 doctoral dissertations throughout his career, roughly 75 of which focused entirely or primarily on parapsychology, consciousness studies, and UFO-related contact phenomena—an unusual concentration of supervision in a mainstream academic institution.

Research Domains

Dr. Klimo's intellectual breadth spans parapsychology, complementary and alternative medicine, consciousness studies, new paradigm science, transpersonal psychology, metaphysics, and ufology. Rather than treating these as fringe domains, he has systematized academic inquiry into them, overseeing doctoral-level research that brings empirical methodology to traditionally marginalized topics. His work tacitly affirms the principle that genuine academic investigation should not exclude phenomena simply because they challenge conventional worldview—a stance that has made him a bridge figure between mainstream academia and UFO disclosure research.

The FREE Foundation and Landmark Contact Research

Dr. Klimo's most significant recent contribution came through his role as Chair of the FREE Experiencer Research Committee. FREE (Foundation for Research into Extraterrestrial and Extraordinary Experiences) is a 501(c)(3) academic research foundation co-founded by Apollo 14 astronaut Dr. Edgar Mitchell, Dr. Rudy Schild (Emeritus Research Astronomer at Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics), Australian researcher Mary Rodwell, and Rey Hernandez. Under Klimo's leadership, FREE has undertaken what is arguably the first comprehensive, long-term academic study of UFO-related contact phenomena—a rigorous departure from earlier anecdotal or clinical case-study approaches.

Between 2011 and 2016, the FREE Experiencer Research Study collected detailed quantitative and qualitative survey responses from over 4,200 individuals across more than 100 countries who report having direct contact with non-human intelligent beings (NHIB). The study's landmark finding—that UFO/ET experiences are reported by experiencers as overwhelmingly positive—contradicted decades of popular culture narratives emphasizing abduction trauma and fear. This counterintuitive result emerged from rigorous statistical analysis and gave credibility to the experiencer community's own accounts.

"Beyond UFOs"

In 2018, Dr. Klimo co-authored Beyond UFOs: The Science of Consciousness & Contact with Non Human Intelligence alongside Dr. Rudy Schild and Dr. Reinerio Hernandez. The book synthesizes findings from the FREE study and contextualizes them within physics, consciousness studies, and phenomenology. Rather than treating contact as anomaly or pathology, the work frames it as a subject worthy of serious scientific attention—positioning the data within existing frameworks of quantum mechanics, non-local consciousness, and interdimensional interaction theory. The book's approach exemplifies Klimo's philosophy: rigorous academic standards applied to phenomena conventionally dismissed by institutional science.

Contribution to Disclosure Conversation

Dr. Klimo's significance to the modern UAP disclosure movement lies not in dramatic revelations but in methodological legitimacy. His decades of academic standing, combined with his leadership of a statistically robust international study on contact experiencers, provide discursive weight to assertions that UFO contact is real, structured, and measurable. By treating over 4,200 testimonies as data rather than anecdote, he has demonstrated that mainstream academic rigor need not reject contact phenomena—a crucial argument in advancing institutional acceptance of disclosure.

In the current disclosure era (2017–present), where government bodies, scientific institutions, and military establishments have begun acknowledging UAP as genuine, figures like Klimo provide the foundational groundwork: peer-reviewed supervision of consciousness research, quantitative analysis of experiencer reports, and theoretical frameworks that integrate contact into existing scientific paradigms rather than positioning it as pure anomaly.