Thomas Jane is an American actor, director and comic-book writer known for Boogie Nights, The Punisher, The Mist, HBO's Hung and the science fiction series The Expanse. Over the past several years he has also become a visible figure in the UFO community: he lectures at the Contact in the Desert conference, has written a nonfiction book about visiting aliens, appears in a 2026 disclosure documentary and, in September 2026, described for the first time in public what he says was his own encounter.

Jane was born Thomas Elliott III in Baltimore on February 22, 1969, and later took his mother's maiden name because another Screen Actors Guild member already used his birth name. After Boogie Nights in 1997 he starred in Deep Blue Sea, played Mickey Mantle in the HBO film 61*, and took the title role in The Punisher in 2004. Hung (2009 to 2011) earned him three Golden Globe nominations, and from 2015 to 2019 he played detective Josephus Miller in The Expanse. In December 2025 he was cast as Dr. Leonard McCoy for the final season of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds.

Outside acting, Jane co-owns the entertainment company RAW with Steve Niles and Tim Bradstreet; its comics division published his comic series Bad Planet through Image Comics. He made his directing debut with Dark Country in 2009 and launched the production company Renegade Entertainment in late 2019. In May 2025 he said he had recently completed a nonfiction book, A Human's Guide to Visiting Aliens, which mixes science with speculation about extraterrestrials and a critique of human civilization.

Jane has spoken at Contact in the Desert, where his 2024 talk argued that humans can only understand alien visitors through the lens of a Western worldview; he returned in 2026 with a talk sharing his book's title. He is among the interviewees in Ron James's documentary Accidental Truth: Next, released on June 2, 2026, whose trailer bills Jane and Matthew Modine alongside members of Congress, journalists and researchers. In May 2026 he joined the Psicoactivo live show to discuss the Pentagon's latest UFO files release, psionics and proposed alien species.

His most widely discussed appearance came on September 11, 2026, in a nearly three-hour interview on Chris Ramsay's Area52. Ramsay's episode description says Jane had never spoken publicly about a night in 2011 when, alone on his couch at 3 a.m., something came through his ceiling; Jane walked through the experience and drew the beings he says he saw. Jane remains an active screen actor, with his Star Trek role still ahead, while treating UFOs as a sustained second career of lectures, interviews and writing; the 2026 account added a claimed experience of his own to the encounter cases he had spent years collecting.