Vince Ynzunza at the 2025 Chehalis Flying Saucer Party

Vince Ynzunza at the 2025 Chehalis Flying Saucer Party

In the 1950s, concepts of alien visitors evolved from menacing Martians to more benevolent human-looking ETs delivering a message of world peace and unity. And the human messengers who were chosen to receive and spread these teachings were known as The Contactees; a disparate crowd of would-be-gurus who hypnotized American popular culture resulting in countless TV and radio appearances, thousands of tell-all books, and eventually splintering into modern New Age and UFO themed cults. The history books tell us that the first Contactee was a man named George Adamski who claimed to have been contacted by visitors from the planet Venus in the California desert in 1952. However, just two years prior, a Centralia man named Samuel Eaton Thompson told a strikingly similar tale – only to be then relegated to the footnotes of UFO history. Did the Contactee movement truly start right here in Lewis County? Did Samuel Eaton Thompson first witness a phenomenon that would soon grip the hearts and minds of America and the world? Researcher Vince Ynzunza will lay out the confounding, and sometimes zany, history of the Contactees and how an idea that changed the world may have started right here in WA state.

Vince Ynzunza grew up in Washington State and has been interested in UFOs and the paranormal since he was a child. He is an independent videographer, researcher, and the producer of the YouTube series Pacific NorthWEIRD which chronicles the bizarre happenings and history of the Northwest. He also co-produces the Chehalis Flying Saucer Party which celebrates Kenneth Arnold’s historic 1947 flight out of the airport in Chehalis, WA that resulted in a UFO sighting that kickstarted the modern UFO craze.

Currently, Vince is working on a number of projects and presentations ranging from documenting a small town feud that erupted between two quarreling Bigfoot hoaxers to studying the UFO/Extraterrestrial pop culture wave of the 1990s. Vince lives in Tacoma with his wife Sabrina.

Host or Publisher Lewis County Historical Musuem