Mike Clelland is an American illustrator and author who built one career on cartoon-filled wilderness instruction books and a second as the UFO field's leading chronicler of owl encounters. His 2015 book The Messengers: Owls, Synchronicity and the UFO Abductee gathers accounts from people who tie owl sightings to contact or abduction experiences, and Vice's Motherboard called him in 2021 "the foremost writer theorizing a connection between owls and alien encounters."

His outdoor work centers on lightweight backcountry travel. He wrote and illustrated Ultralight Backpackin' Tips (2011), Allen & Mike's Avalanche Book (2012) and Ski Tips for Kids for FalconGuides, an imprint of Globe Pequot, and he illustrated instructional books by other authors. Two of those were honored by the National Outdoor Book Awards: Andy Tyson's Glacier Mountaineering in 2005 and NOLS Cookery, edited by Claudia Pearson, in 2018.

His path into the UFO subject began with experiences of his own. He told Motherboard that at 30, living in Maine, he woke to a bright light in his bedroom and saw "five spindly aliens" in his yard, an episode he first took for a dream and that was followed by others. During a 2006 camping trip, he said, owls circled overhead for about an hour, and he began linking the birds to those events. He then asked for owl stories through his website and told Motherboard that at least one new account arrived every day. He calls his own encounters "more elusive, more mysterious" than the abduction label implies.

The Messengers was published under the Richard Dolan Press imprint and later released as an audiobook, followed by Stories from the Messengers (2018) and a self-published paranormal novel, The Unseen (2023). Clelland hosted the Hidden Experience podcast from 2009 to 2014 and revived it on Patreon in 2024, and he says he also hosted a podcast for Whitley Strieber's Unknown Country. He stayed a regular voice in experiencer media in 2026, discussing owls, synchronicity and spiritual transformation with Ryan Sprague on Somewhere in the Skies in September and joining the speaker lineup of the free virtual ANOMACON 2026 conference on September 12.

Clelland does not argue that aliens direct the owls. He told Motherboard he sees the link working "in a much more mystical, overlapping way," and he concedes that his thesis lies "way out beyond the boundaries of the UFO mainstream"; no ornithologist would discuss it with the magazine. More than two decades into the research, his archive of first-person accounts has made the owl a familiar motif in modern contact literature and made him a fixture of experiencer podcasts and conferences.