The expo illustrates what researchers have called “conspirituality” — a term coined in 2011 to describe the documented merger of alternative spiritual communities with conspiracy-oriented thinking — and the growing role of online influencers in extending that convergence to audiences once outside New Age’s traditional reach.
More than 5,000 spiritual seekers gathered at the LAX Hilton Hotel in Los Angeles from Feb. 20–23 for the 24th annual Conscious Life Expo, where the event’s founding focus on astrology, health and sustainability has given way, organizers and observers say, to a dominant strand of alien encounters, channeled extraterrestrial messages and conspiratorial narratives about global power structures.
The expo, which launched in 2002 and has previously featured former presidential candidate Marianne Williamson, psychedelic pioneer Ram Dass and “Plandemic” filmmaker Mikki Willis, now centers many of its most-attended sessions on speakers who describe themselves as “starseeds” — a term referring to incarnate galactic souls — or who say they channel messages from beings in higher dimensions.
“I think it’s evolved to much more of a religion about aliens,” said Michael Satva, 43, the co-producer of the expo and the son of co-founder Robert Quicksilver.
A shift in focus
Debbie Solaris, a military veteran who describes herself as a galactic historian, told a packed room about an out-of-body experience she said occurred in 2012. “This ship was huge. It was like a city-sized ship. And there was hundreds of beings on board,” said Solaris, one of six panelists sharing alien-encounter accounts. She said one alien group had “larger heads, larger eyes” with “very big auras, lots of colors.”
“I knew at that point that my life changed,” Solaris said. “My life was never going to be the same.”
The expo was co-founded by Quicksilver, who was raised in an ultra-orthodox Jewish community in Brooklyn before pursuing Theravada Buddhism and later operating a chain of spiritual gift shops. He launched the Conscious Life Expo in 2002 after its predecessor, the Whole Life Expo, shut down following the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Quicksilver described the event as a place where “freedom and creativity and brainstorming and visionary ideals” converge.
Satva said Baby Boomers who shaped the original movement largely do not recognize its current form. “They have no idea how it’s evolved over time, because they, you know, they came up with their version of it, and then they never really went beyond that,” Satva said.
The influencer effect
Attendees and researchers attributed much of the shift to social media influencers who began posting publicly about alien contact around 2020. Elizabeth April, 33, a self-described starseed with 371,000 YouTube subscribers, was a featured speaker at the expo. She said the pandemic marked a turning point for her public profile on the subject.
“I really kept it low-key, the alien thing, super low-key, until, honestly, 2020,” April told the Associated Press ahead of the event. “2020 is when I was like, yep, like, I’m talking to them. And I also feel like I am one, you know, and I’m here to awaken others who are like me. And that video blew up on my channel.”
April said she attributes the movement’s growth to a broader awakening that began during the pandemic. “I think 2020 really woke a lot of people up to their own abilities, to their own leadership, to their own powers,” she said.
Gina Aguero, 33, of San Antonio, said she attended the expo because of influencer Althea Lucrezia Avanzo, who says she channels what she calls “light language” — a vibrational form of communication she expresses through sounds and hand gestures — from higher-dimensional extraterrestrial beings. “Finding her really helped me heal my inner belief systems at the time that were making me really sick,” Aguero said.
Stacey Shell, an entrepreneur who said she has attended the expo for five years, said this year she noticed “groupies” following influencer-speakers. “I’m seeing people that are doing keynotes and panels who are bigger influencers,” she said.
Conspiracy content and its limits
The expo’s growth has coincided with an increase in conspiratorial programming, which organizers said they try to contain without fully excluding.
Satva described a “dark, twisted side” of certain expo conspiracies that organizers “try to just not engage in.” To accommodate what he called the edgier content while signaling its separate status, the expo designated a section of its basement level “The Rabbit Hole.”
On the expo’s first Friday evening, a speaker named Sacha Stone — described by critics cited by the AP as a promoter of vaccine disinformation and anti-establishment conspiracy narratives — delivered a 90-minute lecture in that section. Stone, who describes himself as a human rights advocate, has been featured on former Trump adviser Michael Flynn’s ReAwaken America Tour, according to the AP. His lecture at the expo made unverified assertions including claims about satanic ritual activity among global power centers, anti-gravitational technology and the debunked pizzagate conspiracy theory.
“The planetary reset is now imminent, courtesy of the revelation, by God’s grace, of the ritual Satanism, the pedophilia, the trafficking, the cannibalism going on in the basement of our power centers,” Stone declared to his audience, according to the AP.
Noelle Cook, author of “The Conspiracists: Women, Extremism, and the Lure of Belonging,” said Stone represents a pattern she examined in research on women at the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot who had embraced New Age beliefs. Cook said the audiences she studied were not primarily drawn to extremism. “Most of the women I was studying were not actually seeking extremism. They were seeking a purpose, identity and some coherence in their life,” she said.
“The danger comes when you’re not discerning,” Cook added.
Researchers: pandemic accelerated convergence
Matthew Hannah, a conspiracy movement expert and author of a forthcoming book about QAnon, said the pandemic intensified existing anti-institutional currents within New Age communities. “A lot of people in that kind of alternative health, alternative spirituality community really got turned off by what they saw as government overreach, and this really quickly coded as the deep state, which is working with Big Pharma to force vaccines on us,” Hannah said.
The convergence of alternative spirituality with conspiratorial thinking was named “conspirituality” by researcher Charlotte Ward and sociologist David Voas in 2011. At the expo, panelists in several sessions described cosmic narratives with structural similarities to End Times religious frameworks: a coming period of chaos, possible solar events, and a collective shift into a new dimension of existence.
UFO investigator Linda Moulton Howe told a final-day panel, titled “Something Is Coming!,” that “between 2025 and 2030 there will be an event involving the sun, and it may destroy parts of the surfaces of the whole earth.” Robert Edward Grant, a self-styled polymath and entrepreneur, told attendees to expect a “profound shift” in 2029 and said “2030 will be our year No. 1.”
How organizers see it
Quicksilver and Satva said they maintain a commitment to what they describe as anti-censorship while steering the event toward positive values. They said they have asked some speakers not to return but declined to name them. Satva said he expects that speakers who bring what he called “dark energy” will ultimately lose followers.
The expo’s closing event, a play written by Quicksilver titled “Judgement Day,” featured longtime expo speakers in alien masks whose extraterrestrial characters decided that humans were worth saving, in part because of their “sacred bond with the planet, its living creatures and each other.”
Satva attributed the expo’s turn toward what he called “larger, more cinematic stories” to a broad cultural moment reshaped by technology. “With AI, nobody knows what’s real anymore,” he said. “So, if you don’t know what’s real, might as well enjoy and believe in something much more fun and exciting.”