Tom Hanks' son has opened up about his life-changing encounter with God while staying at a wilderness camp for bad behaviour during his teenager years.

Music artist and actor Chet Hanks told the IMPAULSIVE Clips that he was 17 when he was sent away to the camp in a remote part of Utah. 

He recalled being a professing atheist filled with rage and hatred at the time, but all that "just flipped on a dime" when he met God during a day hike while at the camp. 

The unexpected moment came when they reached the top of a mountain and he sat on a cliff edge looking out at the view.

"As I was looking out at that view and I was looking at where I had been from an elevated perspective — because I'd been stuck in this desert for 12 weeks and it just looked ugly and boring, and there's nothing to look at. But now I'm looking at it from an elevated perspective of the top of this mountain," he said. 

"So I'm looking around, and I'm so overcome by emotion. It felt like I was touched by the hand of God. It was at that moment God revealed Himself to me.

"All that anger, and that hate, and that resentment flipped. It inverted to just infinite hope, gratitude, peace, love.

"It just flipped on a dime, like that. And I was so overcome by emotion, I just sat at the edge of that cliff and I wept. I wept for an hour, uncontrollable weeping for like an hour. It did not cease, but tears of joy, tears of everything, feeling every emotion at once, all the pain and all the joy."

It would be another seven years before Chet would finally overcome his drug and alcohol addiction. But now, aged 30, he still believes in God. 

"Any experience I've had on psychedelics doesn't even come close to this," he said. 

"It was at that moment, that was the birth of my spiritual life, that was when I was overcome. I knew, 'OK, no, there is something else out there.

"There is a higher power, there is a higher intelligence because it felt like it just tapped me on the shoulder."