Richard “Rik” Bonenfant was born in Lewiston, Maine in 1944. He graduated from neighboring Sabattus High School in 1962 and shortly thereafter enlisted in the U.S. Army. While In the Service he was assigned to a number of different units which ended with Military Intelligence, where he served as a linguist and translator. Upon being discharged, he attended the University of Maine at Orono graduating three years later in 1969 with a baccalaureate degree in Anthropology. His graduate career then proceeded to the State University of New York at Albany, where in 1972 he earned a masters degree in Physical Anthropology. Following graduate school he secured a position as research associate with Albany Medical College, where he conducted studies of birth defects in newborn children, first at Albany Medical Center Hospital and later with the New York State Birth Defects Institute. He then transferred to the New York Sate Department of Health in Albany, where he served as a medical research scientist for a 27 year period. It was during that later period that he completed his doctoral work with a Ph.D. in cognitive psychology.  He concluded this phase of his research career with the N.Y.S. Division of Environment Epidemiology.

Following his retirement, Dr. Bonenfant secured a position with the Department of Psychiatry at the Malcolm-Randall VA Hospital in Gainesville, Florida. During a 5 year association with that Department he pursued research on Near-Death Experiences relating to the durations of aftereffects associated with these experiences. While at the VA he lectured on the subject of NDEs and published a number of professional articles on that topic. In 2007 he retired from his post at the VA.  A few years later he was nominated to serve on the Board of Trustees of two regional hospitals along the Gulf Coast of Florida; Bayfront Spring Hill and Bayfront Brooksville. Finally, in 2017 he took his third and final retirement at the age of 73.

In the academic realm, Dr. Bonenfant has also served as an adjunct professor at Siena College in Loudonville, NY and City College in Gainesville, FL. He presently resides in Savannah, Georgia where he has authored a number of science fiction novels and numerous articles relating to near-death experiences, mysterious animal mutilations, the alien abduction phenomena and a host of other subjects that lie on the fringe of scientific understanding.