UFO Religions

Christopher Partridge

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9781135251598
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religious Fundamentalism & Cults

The spectre of the UFO, as popularized by shows such as The X-Files, has brought an astonishing slant to the face of modern religious practice. But what motivates the fantastical and sometimes sinister beliefs of UFO worshippers? UFO Religions critically examines some of the fascinating issues surrounding UFO worship - abduction narratives, UFO-based interpretations of other religions, the growth of pseudo-sciences purporting to explain UFOs, and the responses of the core scientific community to such claims. Focusing on contemporary global UFO groups including the Raelian Movement, Heaven's Gate, Unarius and the Ansaaru Allah Community, it gives a clear profile of modern UFO controversies and beliefs.

Part I

Introduction

1

Understanding UFO Religions and Abduction Spiritualities

Christopher Partridge

There can be few people in the Western world who are unaware of the contemporary significance of UFOs, extraterrestrials and stories of alien abduction in popular culture. Alien faces with their large, dark, almond-shaped eyes can be seen everywhere; alien-contact films, such as Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1979), ET (1982) and, more recently, Independence Day (1996), Mars Attacks! (1996), Contact (1997), Men in Black (1997) and Signs (2002) are some of the most commercially successful ever produced; numerous television programmes have dealt with the subject matter, The X-Files being one of the most popular television series of all time;¹ in popular music, musicians such as Reg Presley of the Troggs² are committed believers, and bands such as Eat Static make their interest in the area explicit with albums such as The Alien E.P.s, Implant, Abduction and The Science of the Gods; books such as Erich von Däniken’s Chariots of the Gods?³ and Whitley Strieber’s Communion⁴ have appeared on bestseller lists, the former being described as ‘the best-selling book of modern times’.⁵ Further evidence of this popularity can be seen in the numerous UFO organisations and networks, some of which publish journals and host large annual gatherings. As well as significant national organisations such as BUFORA (the British UFO Research Association), there are international organisations, the most famous of these being MUFON (the Mutual UFO Network) and CUFOS (the Centre for UFO Studies), the latter of which was founded by the astronomer J. A. Hynek and publishes the International UFO Reporter and the more scholarly Journal of UFO Studies.

Whilst there are UFO reports and studies which are little more than ridiculous speculation, even fabrication, there are, as I have discovered when attending gatherings of UFO enthusiasts, ‘ufologists’ who go to great lengths to ensure that sightings are verified and that hoax encounters and shoddy researchers are exposed. It is my impression that many in the ufology community are hard working and intelligent people who, as far as they are able, are committed to the highest standards of research. Indeed, I have been genuinely impressed by the detailed (if a little obsessive) scrutiny of government documents, the critical discussions of recent publications on UFOs, the dogged determination to thoroughly investigate reported sightings, and the files apparently compiled over many years.

As for myself, I am, as I think many Westerners are, a little sceptical but nevertheless open-minded about such phenomena. On the one hand, it is difficult not to believe that there is, in the vastness of space and orbiting one of its innumerable suns, a planet on which there exist intelligent beings.⁶ On the other hand, it is difficult to move from that statement of probability to the claim that such beings are so intelligent and technologically advanced that they are able, not only to leave the surface of their planet (as we have done), but to leave their solar system and travel to a tiny blue planet many millions of miles, if not light years, away. Moreover, not only is this difficult to believe, but I am one of the multitudes who have never seen a UFO or encountered an alien, let alone been abducted by one. (That said, for many years my friend has insisted that, in our late teens, together we witnessed a UFO hovering at some distance in front of us. However, as I point out to him, there are other reasons why a couple of hippies walking home from a party at three o’clock in the morning might have had an encounter of the third kind.) Nevertheless, I am always keen to listen to those who claim to have experienced such phenomena and, as might be expected of one who studies religion, I am particularly fascinated when, as is often the case, an encounter leads to the adoption or construction of a spiritual worldview.

This collection of studies, as the title makes plain, is not about the type of painstaking investigative ufology that analyses sightings, claimed encounters and government reports. Rather, the chapters in this volume focus on those within the UFO community whose belief in extraterrestrial contact has led to the construction of implicitly or explicitly religious worldviews, or those whose religious beliefs, whilst not being fundamentally ufological, have been informed by a belief in the existence of UFOs and the intervention of extraterrestrial life.

The Emergence of Contemporary Ufology

When searching for the origins of the contemporary religious interest in UFOs, whilst, as we will see, many UFO theorists and religionists seek to construct what amounts to a sacred history of sightings and contacts stretching back into prehistory,⁷ it is hard to avoid one date which appears more frequently than any other, namely 24 June 1947. This is the date on which Kenneth Arnold, an American businessman from Boise, Idaho, reported a sighting of ten shining discs over the Cascade Mountains while flying his private plane near Mount Rainier in western Washington. According to Arnold, ‘they flew like a saucer would if you skipped it across the water.’ Misquoted, the sighting was reported as Arnold’s encounter with ‘flying saucers’. Whilst there had been previous modern sightings of, for example, ‘balls of fire’ accompanying planes during the Second World War (nicknamed ‘foo fighters’), or cigar-and disc-shaped objects in the sky⁸ (such as the wave of Scandinavian ‘ghost rocket’ sightings in 1946⁹), these tended to be sporadic and vague, having no consistent pattern. Moreover, the research of Robert Bartholomew and George Howard has shown that before 1947 ‘there is not a single recorded episode involving mass sightings of saucer-like objects.’¹⁰ It was Arnold’s ‘flying saucers’ that both began the modern waves of sightings and ushered UFOs into the popular consciousness. Indeed, the interest in Arnold’s story was immediate and massive. Despite frequent dismissals and explanations by scientists and military experts, such was the level of popular interest that, by the beginning of July the same year, the US Air Force felt it necessary to carry out an investigation. ‘A Gallup poll taken on August 19, 1947, revealed that while one out of two Americans had heard of the Marshall Plan, nine out of ten had heard about the saucers.’¹¹ By the end of that year 850 UFO sightings were reported in America alone.

Within just a few weeks of the Arnold sighting, the most famous alleged UFO incident occurred at Roswell, New Mexico. More significant in terms of its cultural impact than in terms of its scientific verifiability, this event, perhaps more than any other UFO event, has spawned a whole body of literature, numerous television documentaries, various movements, a network of conspiracy theories, and many fictional works (e.g. The X-Files, Roswell High and Independence Day). During the night of 2 July (the Independence Day weekend) W W. ‘Mac’ Brazel, a farmer living at Foster Ranch, near Corona, New Mexico, heard an enormous explosion. On investigating, he discovered strange large, pieces of metal strewn over a radius of three-quarters of a mile. No sooner had rumours begun to circulate about the explosion and the subsequent discovery of the strange metallic fragments, than the US Air Force rapidly descended on the area, cleared everything up, and claimed that a new weather balloon had fallen to earth. Although this satisfied much of the curiosity for a short time, rumours nevertheless began to circulate. That said, whilst these events at Roswell exercised the minds of some suspicious individuals, being ideal material for conspiracy theories, it had relatively little impact on the international UFO community until 1980, when two such suspicious investigators, Charles Berlitz and William Moore, published their book, The Roswell Incident.¹² Following the publication of this book during the 1980s, it became the conviction of many that Roswell was perhaps the most significant UFO event of modern times. It was claimed that, not only had the Air Force recovered strange-looking debris, some of it having been inscribed with unfamiliar symbols, but also they had discovered a second, larger crash site, from which were recovered several bodies that did not appear to be human. Furthermore, it was claimed that one of these strange beings was still alive and was able to communicate telepathically with the authorities. The range of conspiracy theories, mythologies and controversies engendered by these speculations was further stimulated early in 1995 with the release of film footage showing, it was claimed, autopsies on an extraterrestrial cadaver.

Roswell is now firmly established as what might be described as a key ufological ‘sacred site’. That is to say, whilst of course many ufologists would not interpret the significance of Roswell religiously, it does tend to inspire the same sort of behaviours as religion. In other words, it inspires implicitly religious attitudes and actions. For example, the ‘pilgrims’ who travelled to Roswell to mark the 50th anniversary of the crash in 1997 were greeted by what looked like an ancient religious site constructed from standing-stone-like obelisks. Jodi Dean relates that these had been erected at the entrance of the long path to the crash site and that, after a walk of several hundred yards, she came to ‘two more obelisks and a commemorative stone’. From this point the visitors could ‘view the rocky cleft where the saucer came to rest’. Inscribed in the stone ‘in a runic font’ (which is itself indicative of religious, particularly New Age–Pagan, significance) are the following revealing words: ‘We don’t know who they were. We don’t know why they came. We only know that they changed our view of the universe. This universal sacred site is dedicated July 1997 to the beings who met their destinies near Roswell, New Mexico, July 1947.’¹³ Indeed, as one would expect in a place of pilgrimage, the local community was not slow to make the most of the entrepreneurial opportunities offered by the growing torrent of pilgrims in 1997: ‘Main Street decorated their windows with full-scale drawings of grays [a type of alien – usually spelled with an ‘e’]. Some had alien dummies and dolls. Others had balloons with large black eyes. You could buy alien piñatas, kites, shoes, aliens in jars, refrigerator aliens, alien puppets, alien Christmas tree ornaments, alien artificial insemination kits. You could buy alien everything … Roswell’s two UFO museums sponsored lectures and book signings by important ufologists.’¹⁴ Even the local Church of Christ ‘featured alternative speakers testifying to the Christian message of abduction’.¹⁵ However, as we will see, the modern sacralisation of the extraterrestrial has been a central feature of UFO folklore from the outset.

Ufoism as Theosophical Religion

Beginning with Emmanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772),¹⁶ one can produce a modern religious history of individuals who claim to have seen UFOs, encountered extraterrestrials and even travelled to other planets and experienced advanced alien civilisations. Certainly, even when such fantastic claims were not made, notions of beings from other planets and their advanced civilisations has entertained the minds of thinking people for centuries. For example, prior to the twentieth century: in Micromégas, Voltaire relates the story of a visit to Earth by inhabitants of Saturn and Sirius, the latter visitors being a mile high; Kant speculated about the possibility of life on other worlds; the philosopher Kurd Lasswitz’s novel Aus Zwei Planeten (1897) explored the implications of Martians travelling to Earth; and of course the genre of science fiction which explores many of these issues has become increasingly popular and valued since the publication of novels, particularly by Jules Verne and H. G. Wells.¹⁷ More recently, whilst the exegesis is unconvincing and generally dismissed by the academic community (not that it is ever seriously considered), there are numerous claims, for example, that the Hindu scriptures contain accounts of UFOs (see particularly Mikael Rothstein’s discussion of Richard Thompson’s/Sadapuda Dasa’s thesis in Chapter 13), or, as we will see, that the Bible relates such material in passages about, for example, the mighty race of Nephilim (Genesis 6:4), the ascension of Elijah ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Contributors
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Part I Introduction
• 1 Understanding UFO Religions and Abduction Spiritualities
• Part II Observing Religions
• 2 Scientific Creationism A study of the Raëlian Church
• 3 When the Archangel Died From Revelation to Routinisation of Charisma in Unarius
• 4 Opening a Channel to the Stars The Origins and Development of the Aetherius Society
• 5 Legitimating Suicide Heaven's Gate and New Age Ideology
• 6 The Urantia Book
• 7 The United Nuwaubian Nation of Moors
• 8 From Extraterrestrials to Ultraterrestrials The Evolution of the Concept of Ashtar
• 9 UFO Faith and Ufological Discourses in Germany
• 10 The Finnish UFO Tradition, 1947–94
• Part III Understanding Narratives
• 11 UFO Religions and Cargo Cults
• 12 Alien Doubts Reading Abduction Narratives Post-Apocalyptically
• 13 UFO Beliefs as Syncretistic Components
• 14 Apocalyptic and Millenarian Aspects of American Ufoism
• 15 Attitudes toward Religion and Science in the UFO Movement in the United States
• 16 Jung on UFOS
• 17 The Psychology of UFO Phenomena
• Bibliography
• Index