Autobiography of an Experiencer: A Nuclear Engineer's Account of Childhood Trauma, Adult Autism, Aliens, UFOs, and a Contented Life
About this ebook
With a foreword by Joshua Cutchin, author of Ecology of Souls.
A black triangle the size of several jumbo jets crossed the night sky in silence while he stood and watched. A being stripped to the blood once appeared at his patio door. During a near-death experience, he rose into a light he did not want to leave.
Kevin Cann gave seven years to the Navy's nuclear program and thirty-one more as a systems engineer. He never wanted to believe any of it. He kept seeing anyway, and finally set it all down.
Autobiography of an Experiencer gathers a lifetime of these encounters, each told plainly and left standing. A closing section lays out every honest reason to doubt them, written by the author against himself. One rule holds throughout: debunk the explanation, never the experience.
This is not a book of proof, and it does not ask to be believed. Jacques Vallée investigated one of its events. Jeffrey Kripal of Rice University became Kevin's friend and stood beside him on the stage at Esalen. Cutchin reads the whole book as a study in twoness, the experiencer and the explainer turning out to be the same man.
The story moves through childhood terror, a late diagnosis of autism, addiction, and collapse, and arrives somewhere the hard years never promised: a contented life.
For readers of UFOs, near-death experience, neurodivergence, and the far edges of human consciousness. And for anyone who has suffered and needed to know that a strange and painful life can still come out whole.
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About the author
Kevin Cann is the founder of Platonic Surrealism and the author of more than a dozen books, including the Platonic Surrealism trilogy and the Still Peculiar After a Trillion Years novels.
He served seven years as a Navy nuclear engineer and then thirty-one years as an information technology systems engineer, work from which he is now retired.
He is on staff at the Esalen Institute, where he has taught alongside Jeffrey Kripal of Rice University.
His experiences have been investigated by Jacques Vallée and documented through the Super Experiencer project at the California Institute for Human Science.
He lives with his wife, Mary, and their dog, who, since they have no children, is what makes them a family.
Joshua Cutchin is an author and musician based in Georgia.
He has written eight critically acclaimed books on the paranormal, including A Trojan Feast, The Brimstone Deceit, Thieves in the Night, the two-volume Where the Footprints End (with Timothy Renner), and his two-part work Ecology of Souls: A New Mythology of Death and the Paranormal.
His recent books include Fourth Wall Phantoms (2025) and The Inverted Path (2026), and his first novel, Them Old Ways Never Died, appeared in 2023.
He has discussed his work on Ancient Aliens, Coast to Coast AM, The Why Files, and Mysterious Universe, among many other programs.
In 2025 he joined the California Institute of Integral Studies as adjunct faculty, and he advises the Worldwide Initiative for Super Experiencer Research.
In December 2025 he assisted Kevin Cann and Jeffrey Kripal's workshop The Soul Is a UFO at the Esalen Institute. He also plays tuba in the Atlanta brass band FunkCake.
