Goldie Jeanne Hawn, born on November 21, 1945, in Washington, D.C., is an American actress and singer. She rose to fame on NBC's Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In from 1968 to 1970 and won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her first major film role, in Cactus Flower (1969). She was nominated for Best Actress for Private Benjamin (1980), and her comedies include Foul Play, Overboard, Death Becomes Her and The First Wives Club. She returned to film in Snatched (2017) and the Christmas Chronicles films.

Away from the screen, Hawn published the memoir A Lotus Grows in the Mud with Wendy Holden in 2005 and founded the Hawn Foundation in 2003, whose MindUP programme teaches children strategies for well-being. In 2026 she released a children's book, The After-School Kindness Crew. Her place in the UFO record rests entirely on her own account of one experience in her youth, which she described at length in 2023.

Speaking on Apple Fitness+'s audio series Time to Walk, Hawn said that at about 20, while working as a dancer in Southern California, she lay down for a nap in a friend's car during a rehearsal in West Covina. She said she heard a high-pitched sound, looked out of the window and saw two or three beings with triangular heads, "silver in color," with a slash for a mouth, tiny noses and no ears, who pointed at her as if discussing her. She said she was paralysed until she broke free "like bursting out of a forcefield," and that UFO sightings were often in the news at the time.

Hawn said more of the experience surfaced years later, when an astrophysicist at the University of Illinois who told her he had studied such accounts for 25 years questioned her in a session she likened to regression therapy. She then recalled the beings touching her face, which she called the "finger of God" and a benevolent, loving feeling. She has also described a later trip to Avebury in England, where she said a dream of six lights preceded her finding a heart-shaped crop circle; she said she would never know whether it was a sign.

On April 29, 2026, Jimmy Kimmel Live! posted an interview in which Hawn discussed what the show described as a close encounter with aliens in the 1960s. A clip of its host, Jimmy Kimmel, retelling her story had already circulated in November 2023, and the 2026 interview spread quickly across UFO social media, where the researcher Joe Murgia paired it with her Time to Walk account. Hawn is among the most prominent Hollywood performers to describe a close encounter of her own, and her retelling on network television brought a decades-old personal account to a new audience.