CE3X – Close Encounters of the Intimate Kind (book review)

CE3X – Close Encounters of the Intimate Kind, Claudio Suenaga, Flying Disk Press, Pontefract, 2025, paperback, 366 pages, black and white illustrations, bibliography, no index. (This review first appeared in Fortean Times, FT 476, November 2026.)

CE3X stands for Close Encounters of the Intimate Kind, although there’s little intimacy in most of its accounts of alien abductions in which male abductees have sex with extraterrestrials. Male witnesses describe acting as if they’d lost all will, “aroused” only when a strange oil was applied to their skin or they were gassed, then having unpleasant, nausea-inducing sex with alien females.

CE3X’s strongest section is its thorough investigation of the case of Brazilian farmer Antonio Villas Boas, who one night in 1957 was abducted by short aliens while ploughing a field with his tractor. He was induced to have sex with an alien female. Boas was interviewed by ufologists who tried to keep it under wraps, they went public after details leaked out. Original published accounts, embellished in later sensationalist retellings, described the alien woman as “beautiful”. But Boas himself, and his surviving relatives and childhood friends later tracked down by Suenaga, corrected this – she was an “ugly” dwarf, “simian” and less human in appearance, communicating through “animal grunts.” Suenaga convincingly argues that Boas’s description of the alien craft, entered via a curiously primitive rope ladder, resembles the Sikorsky CH-37 - the world’s biggest helicopter at a time when the CIA was allegely active in psy-ops in that region.

Numerous similar experiences are recounted, involving men in Brazil who only reported seeing strange lights until ufologist-hypnotists involved themselves, “revealing” after regression hypnosis that witnesses had had sexual experiences with aliens.

The CE3X experiences of some of the women contactees – mostly Brazilian – sounded more genuinely intimate. One woman described their alien sex encounter as “producing great pleasure”. Alien males showing up in their bedrooms were more human (but with thinner than usual penises!) – one extraterrestrial wore a Roman-style helmet with little antennae. Most female witnesses said they’d have believed they’d just had a vivid dream if they hadn’t awoken to a “strange perfume” and what they identified as sperm on them. Whatever the reality of these encounters, womankind seems less under threat from alien sex fiends than from obsessive ufologist-hypnotists working with “trusted doctors” who subject them to creepy virginity tests and dismiss their experiences as “repression.”

My heart sank on realising there were another 100 pages of analysis to go, covering … what exactly? Sexual encounters with supernatural entities on the Old Testament, in Greek mythology, in dodgy testimony from European witch trials, in Lord of the Rings, Dracula(the author realises these are fiction, yes?) and so on. If there is a conclusion it’s unclear what it is.

VERDICT: Engaging examination of the Villas Boas case, skip the rest. 3 stars. ***

©️ Matt Salusbury 2026