The Legend of the Bermuda Triangle - Part Two: Dead Reckoning

In fourteen hundred and ninety-two, Columbus sailed the ocean blue. This is what we’re taught as children, along with numerous myths that I have addressed previously, such as that the Earth was largely believed flat before Columbus’s voyage. We can thank prolific mythmaker Washington Irving for this myth, as well as many others, such as the character of Santa Claus as we have come to imagine him, and the popular notion that Ponce De Leon came to Florida in search of the Fountain of Youth. Well, thanks to Washington Irving, we also find Christopher Columbus all wrapped up with the myth complex of the Bermuda Triangle. It started with Irving’s account of Columbus crossing the Sargasso Sea. Like a horror story, we learn that his ships were becalmed in a strange expanse, with seaweed all around them yet no sight of land. Moreover, his crew witnessed strange sights, a fire in the sky, and an unusual light in the distance. Then, his compass began to behave strangely. In fact, Irving’s depiction was likely relatively accurate in this case. The Sargasso Sea, so named after the Spanish word for seaweed, would long strike fear into sailors. Typically seaweed was seen only when close to land, though it gathers here in the mid-Atlantic because of its circular currents. Seeing the masses of seaweed, sailors typically feared they might run aground, or worse. Stranded for long periods in this sea, sailors began to see things on the flotillas of sea vegetation surrounding them. Creepy crawly creatures that made their home among the branches and gas-filled berries of the pale brown sargassum seaweed lent it the appearance of movement, such that some believed it was alive, grappling their ships, holding them in place. In fact, movement was impeded in the Sargasso because of the so-called horse latitudes, a belt of waters in which wind was rare, with weather so calm that sometimes sailors felt they could not breathe. It was called the horse latitudes because sometimes, which on ships carrying horses were so becalmed that they ran through their drinking water, horses became so mad with thirst that they leapt overboard. As for the talk of a “great flame of fire” seen in the sky, and later of a strange light in the distance, these episodes are easily explained. The crew likely had spotted a meteor falling, and in fact, there is no sense that the sight was unusual or greatly troubled the sailors, who must have seen such things before. As for the light in the distance, this occurred shortly before they finally sighted land, so it was likely a torchlight held by a night fisherman or a native on a nearby island. Of course, UFO enthusiasts latch onto these lights as an indication that Columbus encountered some kind of mysterious flying object during his voyage, and once the legend of the Bermuda Triangle was established, the incident became proof that Columbus had almost been lost to the mysterious forces of the area, which were often linked to flying saucers. In reality, most of the Sargasso Sea is well outside the area designated the Bermuda Triangle, but it does overlap in its westernmost reaches. In fact, there is at least one indication that Columbus had entered the Triangle: his erratic compass readings. Compasses do in fact behave relatively oddly in the Bermuda Triangle. Considering the fact that the most notorious and most mysterious of Bermuda Triangle incidents, the disappearance of Flight 19, is said to have involved the failure of the planes’ compasses, this does indeed seem to connect the experience of Columbus and his crew and the vanishment of Flight 19 to some anomalous phenomenon in the Bermuda Triangle…but when we look further into this, the “anomaly” may not be as mysterious as it seems, and its effect on Columbus and Flight 19 perhaps entirely embellished by those who would make of the Bermuda Triangle a monolithic paranormal mystery when it is really no more than an assemblage of unrelated tragedies.

As we continue to explore the urban legend of the Bermuda Triangle, we must reckon with the inciting incident, so to speak. Strangely, the inciting incident of this drama was not the first disappearance said to have occurred in the Triangle, but rather the one that drew the most attention. The fame and notoriety of the disappearance of Flight 19 and the plane dispatched to rescue them cannot be exaggerated. It was a major, national front-page story that captured the public’s imaginations. Newspapers called them “The Lost Patrol,” though as I described in part one, they were not on patrol. Rather, they were on a navigational training flight, each of the five bombers crewed with three men, and only one, the lead plane, piloted by an experienced aviator: flight instructor Lieutenant Charles Taylor. All four other planes were being flown by student pilots, crewed with student navigators. Initial public interest in the disappearance of the squadron waned after the Navy conducted its month-long investigation of the incident and cited instrument failure and pilot error as the reasons for the loss of the squadron, but as the report would later be amended to conclude that the flight had been lost due to “cause unknown,” the same report would later fuel speculations about a paranormal cause. The seeds of the legend of the Bermuda Triangle first appeared in a 1950 Associated Press piece by E.V.W. Jones titled “Sea’s Puzzles Still Baffle Men in Pushbutton Age,” which paired the story of Flight 19 with the 1948 loss of a British passenger plane, the Star Tiger, near Bermuda, and the 1949 loss of another plan of the same model flown by the same airline, the Star Ariel, on its flight from Bermuda to Chile. As the title suggests, the short article only points out that modern mysteries still exist, and that even in the modern age “men and machines and ships can disappear without a trace.” It was a simple reminder of how vast and untamed the world still was, with no imputation of supernatural phenomena. But within two years, these supposed mysteries were expanded on in the pages of Ray Palmer’s paranormal phenomena magazine, Fate, a magazine credited with popularizing the idea that flying saucers were real and were piloted by extra-terrestrials. By the mid-fifties, the growing laundry list of supposedly mysterious incidents in the area was reprinted and added to in the pages of numerous books that attributed the losses to UFO’s, including 1954’s Flying Saucers on the Attack, 1955’s The Case for the UFO, and Donald Keyhoe’s The Flying Saucer Conspiracy that same year. The name “Bermuda Triangle” would eventually be coined by Vincent Gaddis in his article for men’s magazine Argosy in 1964, which would be reprinted the same year in Flying Saucer Review. From there, the snowball had gathered enough mass and momentum that it could not be stopped, and eventually we would see the legend fully fleshed out in Charles Berlitz’s work in the 1970s.

The Argosy Magazine issue in which the legend took its final form.

No matter what we might say about the way subsequent writers would add onto the legend, drawing tenuous connections and presenting less than mysterious incidents as mysteries in order to manufacture a myth, a fact is that the loss of Flight 19 did seem a genuine mystery. That’s why it captured the attention of the country at the time, why it warranted a Navy investigation that lasted months, and why even five years later it was being written about as a puzzle by journalists. This was not the loss of a single plane. It was a whole squadron, five bombers, and the fact that a rescue plane sent to find them also was promptly lost made it a true enigma at the time. What could have caused all their instruments to fail? Why did they lose radio contact? Why could they not have simply navigated west, making their way back to Florida, simply by following the sun? When they ran out of fuel, the plane should have been able to float for some time, long enough for the crew, who all wore life vests, to get in their emergency, self-inflating rafts. They should have been capable of surviving on their rafts for some time while awaiting rescue, and they were equipped with radio gear with which they could have continued sending SOS signals while in their rafts. If they had all crashed and been unable to launch their rafts, why was no floating wreckage or bodies ever found? Why were no oil slicks observed in the extensive search? And these questions apply as well to the loss of the Martin Mariner, the flying boat sent to search for and rescue the naval airmen. According to numerous accounts of the last radio transmissions of Flight 19, Taylor indicated that they were experiencing an emergency and were off course. When asked for his position, Taylor said he couldn’t be sure, that they were lost. When told to head west, he reportedly exclaimed, “We don’t know which way is west. Everything is wrong…strange…we can’t be sure of any direction. Even the ocean doesn’t look as it should!” What possible explanation could there be for all of this?

In fact, if all of these details were accurate, there are still some feasible explanations. For example, the sea looking strange might be attributed to the fact that methane hydrates are believed by scientists to occasionally release frothy and bubbling gas explosions in the area. Or if the flight had gone off course into the Sargasso Sea, perhaps the rafts of seaweed made the waters look unusual to any pilots who were not familiar with it, which, as we will see, flight leader Charles Taylor may not have been. As for the failure of the flight’s compasses, this may be attributed to the unusual compass readings common in the area, as was observed even by the first European to ply these waters, Christopher Columbus. In fact, there are exactly two places where these odd compass readings are known to occur, in the Bermuda Triangle and in a certain stretch of ocean near Japan called the Devil’s Sea or the Dragon’s Triangle, in which, much like the Bermuda Triangle, many ships and airplanes are said to have mysteriously disappeared. This compass variation is said to be caused by some magnetic anomaly in these areas, which could be linked to reports of St. Elmo’s Fire, or witchfire, being common in the Triangle. This weather phenomenon involves the electric field around objects like ship masts or plane wings ionizing the air and create a glowing plasma field. Perhaps this phenomenon could have caused the confusion of Flight 19 and prevented them from seeing the sun and navigating westward? All of this sounds rather scientific and convincing, but it’s hogwash. The compass variation that Columbus experienced is typical and common knowledge even among hikers. Almost everywhere on earth, compasses don’t point to true north, but rather to magnetic north, which gradually changes, requiring some customary adding or subtracting of degrees. Indeed, Columbus realized right away that his compass needle was being drawn to some other pole, as it was not pointing toward the North Star. The fact is that, in the Bermuda Triangle, compasses are known to point to true north, making navigation easier rather than more difficult. Any tales about magnetic anomalies causing spinning compass needles are nonsense; there is no evidence of any strange magnetic phenomena in the area, and though St. Elmo’s Fire is known to appear on the edges of planes, it does not affect instrumentation or the visibility of the sun. As for the Devil’s Sea near Japan, where it is true that as in the Bermuda Triangle, compasses point to true north rather than magnetic north, this sister mystery to the Bermuda Triangle has also been proven false. A series of New York Times articles from the 1950s are responsible for this legend, as they reported some ships being lost to undersea volcanoes and tidal waves in the area. These losses, which the Japanese did not find mysterious at all, would later be latched onto by American writers as evidence that ships were commonly lost in those seas, when the Japanese do not consider it an especially dangerous area. But after all this, when we delve deeply into the legend of the Bermuda Triangle, we discover that none of these potential explanations are even needed, as the transmissions in which Taylor talks about being unable to see the sun and says the seas look strange, it turns out, never even happened. These words of Taylor’s originate from a 1962 American Legion Magazine article that included fictional dramatizations of Flight 19’s final transmissions. Even though none of these radio messages were real, appearing nowhere in the 400-page Naval investigation report, they have been repeated uncritically as real quotations by writers who promote the Bermuda Triangle mystery.

An early edition of Larry Kusche’s book, whose title, surprisingly, was no exaggeration.

So it went for decades, each writer publishing on the Bermuda Triangle putting their own stink on the mess and not bothering to clean up any of the previous researchers’ garbage. Each new article or book simply recycled what had previously been claimed, listing the incidents others had already compiled without really looking into them or doing much in the way of fact checking. When one of these “researchers” bothered to do some research, it was usually just to find some new incident they could tack onto the lists, rather than actually confirming the mysterious nature of the incidents previously attached to the legend. But then came Larry Kusche in the 1970s. Kusche was a research librarian at Arizona State University. For those who know nothing about library science, this may not seem especially impressive, but if you ever need to track down obscure source material, a reference librarian is who you need, and his background in library science meant he had a strong sense of source quality and credibility and was able to think critically when evaluating what material could be trusted. In the seventies, the topic came to his attention when students wanted to write essays about it and sought out his help in finding credible support material. Kusche took an interest, and while the students who had solicited his help came and went, he continued amassing newpaper and magazine articles and looking further into the Bermuda Triangle. Kusche also just happened to be an experienced commercial pilot, flight instructor, and flight engineer with thousands of flight hours under his belt, making him even more peculiarly suited to cracking the case of Flight 19. Undertaking the project with the intention of writing a book, he wisely moved beyond secondary sources in the news media to examine the actual Navy investigation’s report and the personal records of Lt. Charles Taylor. Over the course of writing his two books on the topic, he conducted almost a hundred interviews, took a ride on an Avenger bomber, and even piloted a solo flight following the same path as Flight 19. What he found was rather surprising. Almost all of the lost ships and flights named by those compiling lists of the Bermuda Triangle’s victims had some rational and mundane explanation—causes as simple and to-be-expected as foul weather, storms that writers failed to mention or even insisted had not occurred—and many happened far outside the area identified as the Bermuda Triangle. As for Flight 19, he discovered that no researcher before him had even bothered to examine the investigative report, which, as he demonstrates convincingly, actually proves that Flight 19 simply got lost, due to flight leader Charles Taylor’s error, and went down in severe weather.

Those who believe nothing can adequately explain the loss of Flight 19 often appeal to the experience and expertise of Lt. Charles Taylor. By all accounts he did have extensive combat piloting experience and was an excellent pilot. But, of course, he was also human, and Kusche recorded indications of his fallibility. For example, he had twice before become lost while piloting and been forced to ditch his planes. The first time was June of 1944. He’d lost his bearings near Trinidad, run out of fuel, and had been unable to launch his raft before his plane sank, triggering the explosion of depth charges below him. He was lucky to have been rescued that day. The next time was January of 1955, earlier the same year as Flight 19’s disappearance. He had lost radio contact and had been unable to find his way to Guam. He put the plane into the water and he and one passenger spent all night in a raft awaiting rescue. This does not indicate that he was a bad pilot, but it does demonstrate a pattern that corresponds with what appears to have occurred on December 5th. There is a story about Charles Taylor having had a premonition about some disaster that would happen on the flight, causing him to ask to be excused and not lead the training flight that day. According to the investigation’s report, he did ask that another instructor take his place, but there is no mention of a premonition. Some writers have suggested that he wanted out of the assignment because he had tied one on the night before and was hung over, or even because he was intoxicated at the time of departure, but there is also no evidence for these speculations. In fact, witnesses said Taylor appeared “normal in all respect.” Just as likely is the possibility that Taylor simply did not feel prepared for the flight. Until recently, he had been based in Miami, flying patrols for a year over the Gulf of Mexico and the Florida Keys. All indications suggest that he had never flown the Bahamas route that he was then being asked to instruct trainees in flying. When Kusche examined the lengthy official report of the Navy’s investigation, it became clearer and clearer that not only had the loss of Flight 19 been Taylor’s fault, but the original report had even concluded as much, finding him “guilty of mental aberration.” Yet those who insist on the mystery of Flight 19 consistently claim that the Navy had been unable to determine the cause. This is because Taylor’s mother would later accuse the Navy of wrongfully blaming him, contending that they had no aircraft or bodies, and thus no evidence. So to mollify her, it seems, Taylor was exonerated, and the Board of Inquiry amended their report to state that the cause of the disappearance was unknown. The fact is, though, that the investigation had ample evidence to come to their conclusion about Taylor, all of it from his radio transmissions.

Lt. Charles Taylor, the leader of Flight 19, who was likely responsible for the loss of the five bombers, as Kusche demonstrates

One of the purposes of the training flight was to teach the student navigators the technique of dead reckoning, by which airmen navigate when over the open ocean without any visible landmarks. Dead reckoning requires a timekeeping device, as the plane’s location is calculated according to heading and speed, by keeping track of elapsed time, accounting for wind. During a pre-flight check, apparently it was noticed that the five Avengers had no clocks on board. It’s hard to imagine that the planes would be cleared for takeoff with no timekeeping devices on board, but radio transmissions, in which Taylor was heard more than once asking the time, suggest that this lead plane was without a clock. Nevertheless, even when Taylor began expressing concerns that the flight was lost, there are indications that they were actually right where they were supposed to be. About an hour and a half into the flight, Taylor started asking what one of the other pilots’ compass read, saying, “I don’t know where we are. We must have got lost after that last turn.” Communicating with someone at Fort Lauderdale and mistakenly using the call sign MT-28 rather than FT-28 (MT being the designation he’d been using the past year while flying out of Miami, and FT being the designation for his flight out of Fort Lauderdale), he said, “Both my compasses are out and I am trying to find Fort Lauderdale, Florida. I am over land, but it’s broken. I’m sure I’m in the Keys, but I don’t know how far down and I don’t know how to get to Fort Lauderdale.” This is the key to the entire debacle. Flight 19 had flown east and by that time would have been directly over some of the smaller Bahama islands, which can look strikingly similar to the Florida Keys. Taylor had been flying over the Keys for a year but likely had not yet flown over the Bahamas. The simple fact that he looked down and thought he was over the Keys seems to have convinced him that he had accidentally been flying southwest rather than east. Therefore, though there was nothing wrong with his compasses, he presumed they were not working because he felt he could not trust them, believing the evidence of his eyes over an instrument known to sometimes fail. Now we are able to understand why he did not immediately head west, and it was not because the sun could not be seen. Believing himself and the whole squadron to be over the Florida Keys, he believed that to head west would take them out over the Gulf of Mexico, where they would run out of fuel. Instead, he appears to have chosen to fly northward, believing this would take them back to Florida, when in fact it took them out into the Atlantic. We know this to be the case, because about four hours into the flight, Port Everglades, who had come into radio contact with the squadron, was finally able to fix their position well north of the Bahamas. But their position was never transmitted to Flight 19 because radio contact was lost. Like the compasses, this communication failure was no great mystery either. Taylor never switched to the emergency broadcasting channel, which would have had a broader reach, preferring to stay on the channel used for training flights in order to keep in contact with the other planes in the squadron. Then it was dark, and despite what promoters of the Bermuda Triangle legend claim about the weather being calm, out over the Atlantic where they ended up, it had grown stormy. As rescue planes would report, the area had high winds and extreme turbulence, and the seas into which the squadron would have been forced to ditch were described as “rough” and “tremendous.”

With knowledge of these transmissions, it becomes very clear why the Naval investigation determined that Taylor had suffered a “mental aberration.” Sadly, he became confused, decided he could not trust his instruments, led his squadron in the wrong direction, directly into stormy weather, and they all tragically ended up in the sea. Whether or not they launched their rafts successfully, it’s clear that they were unable to contend with the roughness of the waves. Another unfortunate factor leading to their certain deaths, if they had managed to ditch their aircrafts and survive for some time that dark and stormy night was the fact that the rescue plane sent to search for them was also lost, and further rescue efforts did not commence until the next morning. So now we must consider the loss of the Martin Mariner, the flying boat sent to rescue them the same evening they were lost. First, it must be noted that the Mariner was only one plane among 200 sent to look for the squadron, along with seventeen ships sent to search their last known location. Nothing happened to any of the other planes and ships out searching for Flight 19. When promoters of the Bermuda Triangle myth tell the story, it sounds like the Mariner flew out immediately and then vanished. A tanker out in the area observed an explosion at 7:50pm, made its way to the site of the flames to search for survivors and found only an oil slick and burning gasoline. Legend promoters typically discount this as unrelated, suggesting that this mystery explosion occurred hours after the Mariner had already vanished, but in truth, the Mariner took off at 7:27pm, only 23 minutes before the explosion was seen. And these flying boats were known to be at risk of such random explosions. They were nick-named “flying gas tanks” because they had a problem with the fumes of their fuel leaking out, such that if any crewman snuck a smoke or if any random spark occurred, they could go up in a fireball. Considering this and the evidence found by the tanker, it’s exceedingly clear what happened to the flying rescue boat in the aftermath of the loss of Flight 19. But despite all this evidence and the unmistakable conclusions of the investigation, legend promoters insist it is impossible to comprehend. They point specifically to the fact that, when the search was eventually called off, a standing order was issued to remain on alert for any signs of the lost squadron, and that this order remains “in effect to this very day!” But the reality of the situation is that whenever a search is called off like this, such a standing order is put into effect. It’s nothing unique or strange at all. It just means the search failed, which unfortunately is not uncommon.

A map produced by the Associated Press to illustrate the flight paths of planes lost in the Triangle.

So, we see the insurmountable mystery of Flight 19, the “sea puzzle” that launched the entire Bermuda Triangle myth, was no unsolvable enigma. In fact, it didn’t even really involve the instrument failure so often cited. It was just a matter of pilot error, inclement weather, slow rescue response, and in the case of the exploding rescue boat, an unsafe aircraft. We’ve seen that all of the many lost ships attributed over the years to the Bermuda Triangle likewise had simple explanations. Can the same be said for all the rest of the lost planes? Let’s look specifically at the Star Tiger and the Star Ariel, the two lost British planes originally cited in the first article to ever suggest that planes had a habit of going missing in the area. As with every other of the more than fifty incidents Kusche investigated, the losses of these two passenger flights were also shown to be explainable even if they remained unexplained. The Star Tiger, for example, seems to have encountered stiffer winds than expected, something typically left out of the sensationalist accounts in favor of claims that weather was always perfect during Bermuda Triangle disappearances, and in the case of the Star Ariel, because contact was lost after the pilots had signed off of one frequency but before establishing contact on the next, search and rescue was not dispatched to find them until the next day. While reports of these two flights’ disappearance emphasizes the fact that investigations came to no certain conclusion, suggesting some inexplicable cause, the truth was that their investigations did not rule out any standard cause with any certainty, and even explicitly stated that causes such as fire, engine failure, and loss of control could not be eliminated. The work of Larry Kusche on this topic is an admirable example of critical analysis and skeptical inquiry.

Skeptics like Kusche get a bad rap. Many people use the word “skeptic” as a pejorative, like it means hater or someone who doubts everything unreasonably. In fact, it refers to a systematic approach that should be taken when investigating most topics, involving suspending one’s judgment, evaluating the reliability of evidence and the credibility of sources, and eventually settling on the most reasonable or logical conclusion…or accepting that no clear conclusion can reasonably be reached. Another pejorative used for skeptics that some have applied to Kusche—a label I too have been given from time to time—is “debunker,” giving the impression that we set out determined to disprove a topic from the start, and implying that we would omit or ignore evidence that runs counter to our preferred conclusions. Kusche has addressed this label before, explaining that when he started his research, he really would have preferred to find something truly mysterious about the Bermuda Triangle, as his book would then have surely been a bestseller and earned him a boatload more money than it did. The problem was that his academic sensibilities and ethical approach to research and argumentation made it impossible to perpetuate and amplify what he realized was a total urban legend. This truly resonates with me. I understand that if I didn’t strive for the truth in my podcast, I could probably find far more listeners among those who yearn for the mysterious and the paranormal to be true. But it’s not just ethics that prevent me from promoting such insupportable claims and misinformation; it’s also, as Larry Kusche has explained, the fact that I believe the real story, the fact that such mysteries have been manufactured as frauds perpetrated on the public imagination, to be even more interesting than the far-fetched ideas of E.T. saucers, time portals, and Atlantean death rays. Maybe others who feel the same will eventually find and listen to the podcast in larger numbers, and legends like the Bermuda Triangle can be relegated to the history of mistaken ideas once and for all.

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Until next time, remember, skeptic is not a bad word, and debunker shouldn’t be either. You can’t successfully debunk something that is true, so using the word “debunker” scornfully just means you resent when the shams you believe are exposed as false.

Further Reading

Kusche, Larry. The Disappearance of Flight 19. Harper & Row, 1980.

Kusche, Larry. The Bermuda Triangle Mystery—Solved! Prometheus Books, 1995.

Raine, David F. Solved!: The greatest sea mystery of all. Pompano Publications, 1997.

The Legend of the Bermuda Triangle - Part One: A Watery Grave

It was 1945, and the war was over. In May, Allied victory in Europe had been achieved, and in September, a month after the US dropped two atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan finally surrendered. Within days of this demonstration of power, existing tensions between the US and the Soviet Union escalated with the two countries each occupying half of Korea, dividing it as their forces had also divided Germany. It was clear that world peace had not exactly been achieved, as the stage was clearly set for the ensuing Cold War. The US Navy, which grew a great deal in strength and importance during operations in the Pacific Theater, would have to remain vigilant and ready for further operations. Two months after the Japanese surrender, on the fifth of December, 1945, a squadron of five Avengers, the torpedo bombers most effectively and commonly used in the war, undertook a routine training exercise intended not just to maintain readiness and capability of their pilots with regard to bombing and train new pilots, but also, somewhat ironically, to hone navigation skills. It was called a “navigation problem,” basically a scenario intended to challenge the pilots, as they flew out of Fort Lauderdale naval air base, navigated to a certain shallow coral reef near the Bahamas called the Chicken Rocks, practiced a low-altitude bombing run, and returned to Florida. It was the 19th of these training exercises, so it was called Flight 19. The name would end up going down in history for all the wrong reasons, as these five Avengers would never be seen again. It’s said that the flight leader had had a premonition of danger before the flight, and that during the flight, they reported the sea looking strange and their instruments failing, radioing in their concerns about being off course and unable to navigate. After losing contact with the squadron, a boat plane was dispatched to find the airmen, who would have made an emergency sea landing and awaited rescue when they ran out of fuel, but they lost contact with the rescue plane as well, and none of the 14 men in the squadron, nor any of the 13 crewmen of the rescue flight were ever found, nor was wreckage of the aircraft ever located. The loss of Flight 19 was attributed to navigational error, in combination with instrument failure, and its rescue flight was believed to have gone down in a catastrophic midair explosion, but within 5 years, it had already begun to strike some as a mystery. A couple of more years, and some publications began to claim there was a pattern of disasters in the area, which they said claimed planes and ships at a higher rate than elsewhere. Within twenty years of the disappearance, the legend had been fleshed out, and the area of sea between Florida, Puerto Rico, and Bermuda had been dubbed The Bermuda Triangle, a patch of ocean stretching from the Caribbean to the Sargasso Sea that its researchers asserted was fraught with mysterious danger, the deadliest waters in the world. It wasn’t long before these ships and aircraft lost at sea were said to have fallen victim to fantastical threats. They had entered time portals, it has been said, or sailed right through rifts into an alternative universe. They were abducted by alien spacecraft, or they had been targeted by the advanced technology of the sunken civilization of Atlantis.

Welcome to the first episode back from my year-end hiatus, as we kick off what I hope will be another great season of the podcast and blog. This topic, the legend of the Bermuda Triangle, will take us on a tour through many of the topics I have covered in the past. In fact, besides the lost first episode, which I’ve taken down because I no longer want the first episode some listen to be a political diatribe (there will be plenty more of that for them later), the very first episode in my main feed is on the Lost Colony of Roanoke, and in fact, strangely, though the Roanoke colonists were not at sea, their disappearance has sometimes been suggested to be connected to the supposed strange disappearances in the Bermuda Triangle. Since I am working right now on revising and rerecording that first episode for rerelease (which I hope will help retain new listeners who might otherwise be turned off by the audio mix), this topic seemed the perfect one to explore as accompaniment as we revisit that first episode. But in fact, I am finding that the topic connects further, to, for example, my episode on the loss of Aaron Burr’s daughter Theodosia at sea, and to my episode on the mystery of the derelict schooner the Carroll A. Deering, both of which happened on the Outer Banks, near the site of the Lost Colony. Unlike the Lost Colony, though, the mystery of the Bermuda Triangle did not develop right away. As I indicated, it only developed years after the loss of Flight 19 in 1945, embellished by writers who had latched onto the notion that something mysterious was happening in the area. These writers came from the UFO world. One of the earliest promoters of the legend was the magazine Fate, published by Ray Palmer, the science-fiction enthusiast who almost single-handedly popularized the idea of flying saucers of extra-terrestrial origin. And in the 1970s, perhaps the most influential book promulgating this legend, which compiled numerous other incidents long predating Flight 19, was written by linguist Charles Berlitz, who before that had written pseudohistorical books on Atlantis and afterward, as listeners of the podcast may remember, popularized the Philadelphia Experiment hoax and the Roswell Incident myth in his books of the same names, co-authored with known CIA disinformation agent Bill Moore—yet another connection to previous topics covered on the podcast. What we find, then, is that a genuinely surprising incident—the 1945 loss of a whole squadron of bombers as well as the rescue plane sent after them—was afterward embellished and used as a jumping-off point by people known for fabricating other lasting urban legends and modern myths.

A squadron of TBM Avengers like those that disappeared on Flight 19.

To start, let’s look at the oldest supposedly mysterious incidents said to have happened in the Bermuda Triangle, most of which have been identified by people like Berlitz and his predecessors who had it in their mind that something anomalous in those seas caused the disappearance of Flight 19. They therefore pored over all the records they could find for that stretch of water, believing that any incident in which a craft or vessel or person was lost in that place must have been evidence of the anomaly’s existence. It is a kind of proof by location that does not hold up under scrutiny and logic, since it is never actual evidence of something paranormal or supernatural, and to prove it anomalous would require comparing the number of similar incidents in every other patch of sea all over the world. Otherwise, it is simply an exercise in confirmation bias. Take, for example, one of the earliest incidents ever claimed to be a mysterious Bermuda Triangle disappearance: the loss at sea of American Founding Father Thomas Lynch, Jr. Lynch had signed the Declaration of Independence, stepping in to replace his ailing father, a South Carolina representative in the Continental Congress. Interestingly, in a very early presaging of the Civil War, within a month of signing the Declaration, Lynch was threatening that South Carolina would secede from any Confederation if their ownership of slaves was made a topic of debate. Yet more evidence to refute the Lost Cause Myth. Thomas Lynch, Jr., then became quite ill himself, and he and his father returned to South Carolina. His father died of a stroke on the way, and as his own illness dragged on, Lynch, Jr., retired at just 27. It seems likely that he suffered from tuberculosis, as his condition only worsened over the next two years, and he ended up planning a voyage to the South of France with his wife, hoping the air there would do him good. Their ship, a brigantine called Polly, set sail on the first leg of their voyage, headed for the Dutch Antilles island of Sint Eustatius in the Caribbean, and was promptly lost at sea. To Bermuda Triangle researchers, it’s a vanished ship known to have been sailing through or at least near their Triangle, so it’s perfect. But all this is evidence of is that those were dangerous waters, for any number of reasons. The simple fact that there may have been a lot of lost voyages in those waters does not prove anything unexplainable occurs there. Bermuda Triangle researchers will sometimes focus more on lost ships or aircraft whose wreckage was never found, suggesting that since there was no evidence of a shipwreck, this is somehow evidence of paranormal vanishment. But this logic should be reversed. There may be no evidence of a shipwreck, but there is also no evidence of aliens or portals or lost technological civilizations, and which is more likely to be the case? Also, the fact that ships lost at sea and planes that have crashed into the sea might leave no evidence behind is not surprising. While it may be common for some to leave floating debris or oil slicks, it is also very common for every sign of such a disaster to sink or be swept away, especially in this area, as we will see. According to Popular Mechanics, less than 1% of the world’s shipwrecks have been explored. With 90-95% of the sea floor unmapped, it’s believed that there may be 60$ billion worth of recoverable artifacts and valuables strewn across the ocean. So it’s clear that lost wreckage is common, all over the world’s oceans, and the absence of wreckage cannot stand as evidence of some kind of supernatural disappearance.

The problem here is that promoters of the Bermuda Triangle legend present any loss at sea that is deemed “unexplained” and therefore technically “mysterious” as bizarre or unearthly. Cue the X-Files theme music. Really though, most of the losses at sea pointed out by these researchers are only considered to have no explanation because we may not know exactly what happened but do have some likely explanations. What these fabulists do is just reject or purposely omit the rational likely explanations and focus only on the uncertainty, which is misleading. For example, Charles Berlitz in Without a Trace lists the USS Pickering, which left Delaware in August of 1800 bound for the West Indies, as the first known ship lost in the Triangle, but he makes no mention of the USS Insurgent, a frigate that left port in August as well and is believed to have been lost in a severe storm that ripped through the West Indies in September. In fact, it’s believed that both ships were sunk by the same storm. And this is the key to many of the oldest Bermuda Triangle disappearances that frequently get ticked off as proof of some unexplainable danger, as that area is commonly struck by tropical storms and hurricanes. The next two lost ships Berlitz lists, the Wasp and the Wildcat, were lost in early autumn 1814 and in October 1824. These are all squarely in the window of the Atlantic hurricane season, as tropical cyclones are known to form mostly between June 1 and November 30th every year. Yet the actual word “hurricane” only appears once in Berlitz’s Without a Trace, and it’s not to explain these lost ships, but rather to explain the sinking of Atlantis, which he suggests may literally lie at the bottom of all the strange disappearances. The topic of Atlantis is a whole other monster that I cannot address with any depth in a series on the Bermuda Triangle, but suffice it to say here that the entire tradition of a lost civilization called Atlantis originated in an allegorical story told by Plato to illustrate metaphorically his ideas about an ideal state. However, some medieval writers came to view it as historical tradition, and 19th-century pseudohistorians later endeavored to prove that it was real, no longer believing it was in the Mediterranean, as was originally suggested, but in the New World, in the Caribbean. But what’s certain is that, when Plato wrote about Atlantis, he knew nothing about the part of the world where Berlitz and others demarcate the Bermuda Triangle.

The USS Pickering, one of many ships whose loss is attributed to the mystery power of the Bermuda Triangle.

What’s pretty ridiculous is that Bermuda Triangle theorists even go beyond the boundaries they themselves have set in their search for juicy cases of ships lost at sea that they can tout to their readers. Some, for example, have even pointed to the lost schooner Patriot, a swift vessel sailing from South Carolina to New York, carrying the daughter of Aaron Burr, Theodosia. Likewise, they will group in the abandoned Carroll A. Deering, which did sail through the Bermuda Triangle on its journey back to the U.S. from Rio, but was seen with men on her decks off the coast of the U.S., having obviously made it through the Triangle intact, and was only later discovered abandoned and run aground off Cape Hatteras. In both of these cases, which you can hear about in far more detail in my episodes “The Loss of Theodosia Burr Alston” and “The Carroll A. Deering, Ghost Ship of Cape Hatteras,” there are further, far more rational and supported explanations other than that some mystery vortex swallowed the ships or their crews and passengers. For example, there is some reason to suspect that, whatever happened to the Patriot, it happened along the Outer Banks of North Carolina, which is also where the Carroll Deering was found, and the waters off the coast of this chain of barrier islands, on which was located the Lost Colony of Roanoke, as it happens, are notoriously treacherous because of the shifting sands on the sea floor constantly changing the depth of the waters. Because of this, it’s called the Graveyard of the Atlantic. Since the late 16th century, there have been more than 350 shipwrecks there. Tellingly, no one attributes those to supernatural causes. But even discounting the very obvious possibility that these ships just wrecked and ran aground in waters known to be treacherous, there is the further idea that they may have been the victims of piracy, which offers yet another rational and believable explanation for the disappearance of ships in the Bermuda Triangle as well. In the Patriot’s time, there were bankers, or wreckers, which lured ships toward the islands with lights and then murdered the crew and stripped the ships of valuables. And during the Carroll A. Deering’s day there was some speculation of pirate activity in the Atlantic, by bootleggers or perhaps Bolsheviks. At the same time that something was befalling the Carroll A. Deering, an oil steamer, the S.S. Hewitt also disappeared off the Carolina coast, and like the Deering, it too seems to have been spotted, and its crew seemed to behave suspiciously. Add to this the fact that another ship, the USS Cyclops, had disappeared on its way from Rio to Baltimore a couple years earlier, and it began to look like ships were being captured off the U.S. coast at the time. In the case of the Cyclops, there were further possibilities, such as that it had been captured by the Germans while the Great War was still being fought, or that its captain and crew, several of whom were of German descent, may have been German sympathizers and purposely delivered the ship to Imperial Germany. But like the Deering, the disappearance of the Hewitt and especially of the Cyclops would be attributed to the mystical powers of the Bermuda Triangle even despite all of these more obvious and credible explanations, like shipwreck, capture, and—a further explanation for more than one disappearance attributed to the Bermuda Triangle—lack of seaworthiness.

In the case of the Deering, when she was encountered before her abandonment, a man on her quarterdeck had signaled a passing ship and said they had lost their anchors in a storm, and when the ship was found, it showed signs of having been out of control, as her emergency lights were burnt out. Certainly if it were out of control, it was no longer seaworthy, though in the strictest sense of the term, seaworthiness refers to the fitness of a vessel prior to undertaking a voyage. In the case of the Cyclops, there is reason to believe that it never should have undertaken its voyage. The captain had reported before leaving Brazil that her starboard engine was not operational due to a cracked cylinder, and the ship had to make an unscheduled stop in Barbados due to being overloaded with the manganese ore she was carrying, which also may have caused the ship to list and even capsize in rough seas. In fact, more than 20 years later, two sister ships of the Cyclops, the Proteus and the Nereus, both were lost in the Triangle while shipping loads of bauxite ore within weeks of each other. Score three for the Triangle it would seem, until you learn that these sister ships, these naval freighters, all had a structural flaw. They were held together with I-beams that ran the length of the vessel, and these beams were known to become corroded due to contact with the kinds of cargo these ships were designed to carry. Thus it is reasonable to conclude that all three of these lost freighters were simply not seaworthy when they undertook their final voyages. Similarly, in 1925 the coal freighter SS Cotopaxi was lost after departing from Havana, but it appears two of her sister ships suffered similar fates. And we know the Cotopaxi sank, rather than pulling some kind of vanishing act, because her crew radioed a distress call, stating that they were taking on water and listing. Still, she was for a long time listed as a victim of the Bermuda Triangle because here wreckage wasn’t recovered. In the 1980s, though, her wreckage was found, and in 2020, they were definitively identified. Yet that won’t stop Bermuda Triangle enthusiasts from still suggesting that it was some mystery force specific to that region that caused her to sink. Likewise, the frigate HMS Atalanta, which was lost in 1880 after leaving port in Bermuda and has frequently been cited as a victim of the Triangle, has been shown to have been unseaworthy by researcher David F. Raines. His exhaustive research demonstrates that the Atalanta was unstable because of its narrow design, as it had been built for speed by a yacht designer. Her sister ship, the HMS Eurydice, sank two years earlier off the Isle of Wight, and the investigation indicated that its instability led to the ship being lost in severe weather. But the Atalanta had even more working against it than just its design. It also seems that it was declared fit to sail again despite having recently taken hull damage in a storm, and on top of that, it was overloaded with an enormous volley gun, essentially dooming the ship before it even departed. Lastly, in 1963, 18 years after the disappearance of Flight 19 and just before the legend of the Bermuda Triangle really began to take off, the SS Marine Sulphur Queen, a tanker carrying molten sulfur, was lost somewhere off the southern Florida coast. While the Coast Guard investigation determined that the vessel was not seaworthy owing to the fact that it had been converted from tanker to a sulfur carrier, concluding that, if not due to capsizing in rough seas, it likely sank because of an explosion or structural failure, it nevertheless is routinely cited as yet another mysterious disappearance in the Bermuda Triangle.

The USS Cyclops, one of numerous ships whose disappearance, though explainable through numerous more rational means, is frequently said to have been the victim of some supernatural forces in the Bermuda Triangle.

Beyond the plain and I think unsurprising facts that ships lost in the Bermuda Triangle most likely just sank in a storm, were captured and absconded with by pirates or perhaps even mutineers, or were simply unseaworthy, there are actually some rational and scientific explanations for vessels being lost in those seas that should really satisfy even the staunchest Bermuda Triangle enthusiast, as they indicate there really is something unusual in that region causing ships to disappear. First, there are the unusual currents of the area. The area identified as the Bermuda Triangle is where the Gulf Stream, the warm waters flow out of the Caribbean and up the coast of North America, meet the circular currents of the Sargasso Sea. At a time when the speed of ships was calculated by tossing a log tied to a knotted rope from the ship’s bow and timing the appearance of each knot, any ships that did not conduct this practice very frequently could find that the surprisingly fast Gulf Stream had carried them significantly off course. They might easily find themselves adrift in the Sargasso Sea, then, which is largely covered in masses of floating sargassum seaweed and, being located on the so-called horse latitudes, without much wind. Often ships found themselves becalmed and trapped there. Additionally, the base of the Bermuda Triangle, the tract of sea between Florida and Puerto Rico, lies above a continental shelf, and at its tip the insular shelf of Bermuda, and in these shallower ocean floors, scientists have shown that methane hydrate fields sometimes erupt, creating a bubbling frothy ocean that can actually affect the buoyancy of ships and theoretically even swallow them whole. Anyone who recently saw the blockbuster film Godzilla Minus One saw this science put into fictional practice in the characters’ efforts to sink the monster. But beyond this relatively recent and technical explanation for ship disappearances in the region, there is also the simple fact that right in the middle of the Triangle, between the continental shelf and Bermuda’s insular shelf, is extremely deep water, especially in the Puerto Rico Trench, which is some 30,000 feet deep. Its depths were only first reached by submersible in 2018 and have yet to be thoroughly explored. It would indeed be unsurprising for the wreckage of many of these lost victims of the Bermuda Triangle to be found down there eventually. These scientific explanations and common sense reasons for why ships may go missing in the Bermuda Triangle should satisfy those who want to believe, as they confirm there are some unique qualities to the area that do indeed make it more treacherous than other waters. But Triangle enthusiasts typically reject such explanations as too prosaic, preferring instead their aliens and Atlanteans. The simple fact, though, is that even with the unique risks in the area, statistically the Bermuda Triangle does not appear to be any more dangerous than other waters. This according to Lloyd’s of London, the oldest and biggest insurer of seagoing vessels in the world, who in a 1975 statement to Fate magazine revealed “that our intelligence service can find no evidence to support the claim that the ‘Bermuda Triangle’ has more losses than elsewhere.”  

As the legend was meticulously created in the following years by writers assembling lists of unexplained but not unexplainable disappearances, they inevitably played fast and loose with facts and ended up amplifying and perpetuating errors. For example, one of the earliest examples of a mysterious disappearance given by Berlitz in Without a Trace is the Rosalie, which he says was found derelict in 1840 with no person aboard, and only a canary. He seems to have taken this from an 1840 London Times article, which actually describes a cat and other birds being left aboard. It turns out that this Times article got it wrong. They seem to have been talking about a ship called the Rossini, which ran aground and was abandoned, but whose crew had been rescued and taken to Cuba. Similarly the creepy tale of the Ellen Austin’s late 19th century encounter with a ghost ship, a tale that has the captain twice putting his own crewmen on the derelict in order to salvage it and twice more finding it abandoned, his own crew somehow vanished, appears to have been a ghost story told and retold among mariners, such that we see among its earliest appearances numerous contradictions, including the year it occurred, what flag the ship flew, and even the discrepancy of what the Ellen Austin was called at the time, its name having been changed, much like the Facebook corporation, to Meta. It was very clearly a campfire tale that Bermuda Triangle myth-makers like Charles Berlitz included in their lists as fact. And not to be fenced in by their imagined watery triangle, they routinely suggested that even people’s disappearances on land might have been part of the same imagined phenomenon. There are the colonists of Roanoke, but also two lighthouse keepers on Great Isaac Cay, a tiny Bahamian island off the southern coast of Florida. The story of the vanished lighthouse keepers of Great Isaac is extraordinarily similar to that of the vanished lighthouse keepers of Eilean Mor, which I explored in detail in my episode, “Three Men Gone.” In that piece, I found one compelling explanation of their disappearance to be a rogue wave that may have struck the island and washed the men away to drown. Such an explanation of the missing Great Isaac lighthouse keepers seems even more plausible, since Eilean Mor rises more than 200 feet above sea level, whereas Great Isaac only rises about fifty feet above the waves. But the real drivers of this legend, the stories that started it all and that remain the most compelling support for promoters of the Bermuda Triangle legend also have to do with the disappearance of those who weren’t on the seas, but rather flying above it, like the lost squadron of Flight 19, that I will be studying in far closer detail in Part Two of The Legend of the Bermuda Triangle.

Until next time, remember, if something remains for the moment unexplained, that does not mean it cannot be explained. Only fabulists sensationalize the unexplained as if it is unexplainable.

Further Reading

Kusche, Larry. The Disappearance of Flight 19. Harper & Row, 1980.

Kusche, Larry. The Bermuda Triangle Mystery—Solved! Prometheus Books, 1995.

Raine, David F. Solved!: The greatest sea mystery of all. Pompano Publications, 1997.

The Historical Jesus and the Myths of Christ Mythicism (Another Historically Blind Xmas)

A couple of times this year, one name has been popping up in my research. The first time was in my episode on the Ark of the Covenant. John M Allegro, I told you then, was an eccentric archaeologist who worked with the team in Jerusalem that brought the Dead Sea Scrolls to the world’s attention, and it was Allegro who translated the Copper Scroll and believed that the treasures it recorded were real and could be found. He was himself a kind of proto-Indiana Jones in that he led expeditions to track down this long lost treasure, which he never managed to discover. Something I didn’t mention at the time, but which serves as noteworthy context for what came next in his career is the fact that he jeopardized his academic standing by making unusual claims about the contents of the Dead Sea Scrolls, asserting that certain fragmentary mentions of a “Teacher of Righteousness” who seemed to be a precursor messiah analogous to Jesus Christ, actually proved that the story of Jesus was just a recycling of this older story, and thus Jesus Christ himself was a myth. Allegro appeared again, briefly, in my recent episode on the Entheogen Theory of Religion, as his notion of Jesus Christ being a myth that represents someone or something else had developed in a remarkable direction by 1970, after he encountered the work of R. Gordon Wasson, the world’s first ethnomycologist and inventor of a grand unifying psychedelic theory of religion and world history. Besides a sect that reworked older traditions about a Teacher of Righteousness, Allegro had come to view early Christians as a fertility cult, devoted to the imagery of penises and sperm, and also to ritual drug use, specifically the eating of the Amanita muscaria mushroom as a sacrament. As a mystery cult, they did not speak openly of their rite or their true beliefs, he claimed in his book, The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross, and instead spoke only in a sort of code, and early Church fathers unwittingly canonized their drug allegory as dogma. Just such a coded meaning surrounded the figure of Jesus Christ, for just as their sacred mushroom was known to spring from the earth without a seed, so too Jesus was said to have been conceived without seed. While Wasson took his mushroom theory of religion much too far, Allegro took it further still, claiming that through his maverick etymology, tracing words back to Sumerian, he could show the Bible was constantly making mushroom references. And as further evidence, he pointed to a 13th-century fresco in a French Church that depicts the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil in a way that looks a lot like a cluster of mushrooms. But of course, as I pointed out before, a 13th-century French work of art could not possibly shed light on early Christian thought or the rites of a Middle Eastern mystery cult in antiquity. None of his academic colleagues found his Sumerian etymology convincing, and his scholarly career fell to shambles. Even R. Gordon Wasson, who we might imagine would latch onto Allegro as an ally, could not credit his outlandish claims, stating that Allegro “has stuck to a naive misinterpretation…only because he thinks this would serve his thesis.” While the claims of John Allegro that Jesus Christ was a myth, not a real person, have never been taken seriously by scholars and are widely viewed as unconvincing, he is not alone in theorizing that Jesus Christ was not a real, historical person. This holiday, I’ve still got more to say about the man who many see as the reason for the season. So gather round the fire as I tell a different kind of nativity story, about the birth of a modern myth, but maybe not the one you suspect I’m going to tell.

In my last holiday special, you could say that I put the Christ back in Christmas, even though I began with a lengthy discussion of the false notion that the abbreviation “Xmas” was a nefarious secular attempt to remove Christ’s name from the holiday. In that episode, I discussed the image of Christ, and how the images we revere today may have differed from the man Jesus. The underlying assumption in that holiday special was that Jesus Christ existed, historically, as a human being, though we may more accurately call this a given than an assumption. The fact is that the consensus among scholars of the New Testament and first century Palestine is that Jesus Christ was a real person. In fact, for most of the Common Era, there simply never was a reason to doubt that Jesus was real; the entire notion of Christ Mythicism is relatively recent. Now, don’t get me wrong. Even during Christ’s time and ever since there have been skeptical views about him. In his own time, he was largely viewed by everyone but his followers as a heretic or a revolutionary rabble rouser. And long have there been alternative views regarding who and what his followers proclaimed him to be, one of the first being that he certainly had not been born of a virgin. One alternative view of Christology, or “Christology,” was that Joseph was his biological father, and that Jesus only became the “Son of God” when the Holy Spirit descended on him at his baptism. Thus God was his adoptive father rather than the inseminator of Mary. Along with these “adoptionist” creeds was a “psilanthropist” view, holding that Jesus was merely a man—a man chosen to bear the revelations of God, perhaps, but a man nonetheless. Another claim, popular among critics of early Christians, was that, while Joseph wasn’t Jesus’s father, he did indeed have a biological father, a Roman soldier named Panthera who illegitimately fathered Christ. One doctrine, Docetism, even argued that Christ was divine but had no physical form and rather walked around as a kind of ghost or projected illusion. What we can see here is that, all of these Christologies uniformly took a view that there really was a figure named Jesus Christ on Earth during the first 30 years or so of the Common Era. Even the doctrine that he wasn’t corporeal still did not attempt to say that he was not actually there, doing and saying things and known to his followers and his persecutors alike. The notion that he wasn’t real would not appear until the 18th century and the Age of Enlightenment.

The Festival of Reason, a celebration of rationality held by the atheistic Cult of Reason in the wake of the French Revolution.

Specifically the Christ myth theory appeared among French thinkers during the French Revolution, a time when religious dogma was being actively stamped out in favor of what was viewed then as Reason—remember that Christian churches were converted to state-run atheist Temples of Reason. During this turmoil, one Constantin Volney was the first to hazard this claim in 1791, suggesting that Christ was a kind of mythological sun god whose name was derived from the Hindu god Krishna. By 1795, the claim was taken up by Charles-François Dupuis, who, as many have done since, suggested that Christ was just another mystery cult solar deity, like Mithra. By the late 18th century, early 19th century, the idea had spread to America, where political theorist and founding father Thomas Paine, in his least popular volume of The Age of Reason, asserted “that so far from his being the Son of God, he did not exist even as a man—that he is merely an imaginary or allegorical character, as Apollo, Hercules, Jupiter, and all the deities of antiquity were. There is no history written at the time Jesus Christ is said to have lived that speaks of the existence of such a person, even as a man.” As we will see, Paine’s objection about records would resonate with later Mythicists. Later in the 19th century, the German Bruno Bauer, claimed Jesus was invented by the writers of the gospels, which as we will see would also become a mainstay argument of Mythicists. At the end of the 19th century, white supremacist William Benjamin Smith also cast doubt on all contemporaneous sources about Christ and further hypothesized that a cult worshipping some Jesus figure had existed prior to Christ’s lifetime. At the dawn of the 20th century, Scotsman John Robertson took up this theory and brought it back to its roots by again arguing Christ was a solar deity worshipped by a Jewish mystery cult, specifically identifying the sacrificed messianic figure worshipped by a certain cult of Joshua as the deity that would become Jesus Christ. In 1909, German philosopher and historian Arthur Drews synthesized these arguments in a successful and controversial book called The Christ Myth. While Drews’s work was embraced by Vladimir Lenin and Christ Mythicism became a foundational tenet of Russian atheism, the theory was almost universally rejected by historians and scholars, for reasons I will discuss throughout the episode. Thus the Christ myth theory disappeared from academic and popular discourse, until 1975 when English scholar George Albert Wells took up the cause throughout the 1980s. By the 1990s, there had arisen a coterie of Christ Mythicists publishing more and more sophisticated arguments. The consensus view of historians and scholars remains that there was indeed a historical Jesus, but if one were to read mythicist works alone, without also reading the works of trained historians and scholars that explain how we know Jesus did exist historically—like the ponderous multi-volume work A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus by John P. Meier or the more accessible work of Bart D. Ehrman, like my principal source for this episode, Did Jesus Exist? The Historical Argument for Jesus of Nazareth—one might think that mythicists have made an ironclad argument against Christ’s existence. In fact, while their books may be more successful with the reading public, the scholarly community rejects their methods as flawed, their arguments as unsound, and their conclusions as false.  

One of the central arguments of those who assert that Jesus Christ never existed as an actual person is that the principal sources for his existence, the gospels, cannot be trusted. They point out that that the original manuscripts of the gospels no longer exist, and that they were not written by the individuals they are named after, who might have had some first- or even second-hand knowledge of the man Jesus, but rather by men writing in a distant land some fifty years after the events narrated, give or take a decade. Since the gospels are full of contradictions and clearly legendary material, and since by their view, the gospel writers themselves were the ones inventing a mythical Christ, or at least were among the earliest promoters of the myth, they cannot be viewed as historical evidence whatsoever, and they look instead for non-Christian sources that mention Jesus within the first century of his lifetime. Such sources are few and far between, which they argue itself is proof Christ didn’t exist, though the fact is, such record keeping was not extensive or detailed in 1st century Palestine, and nevertheless there actually are some contemporaneous mentions of Jesus Christ outside of New Testament works. The most prominent of these are from Flavius Josephus, a former Jewish military commander during the First Roman-Jewish War who defected to Rome and lived the rest of his days writing histories, such as The Jewish War and Antiquities of the Jews. In the latter work, there is a passage called Testimonium Flavianum, in which Josephus seemingly tells about Jesus, a “teacher of people,” who “was the Messiah.” In the passage, he describes Pilate’s condemnation of him, his crucifixion, and his subsequent resurrection. The problem with this passage, however, is that it doesn’t make sense for Josephus, who was not a Christian, to have stated some of these things. Since it is known that Josephus’s works survive today because they were copied and transmitted through the Middle Ages by Christians, there is scholarly consensus then, that this passage is an interpolation, something added by a Christian scribe at some later date. So, Jesus mythicists will say, you can’t trust the Bible, and the only mention of him outside the Bible is also untrustworthy. However, from a more scholarly perspective, this is an overstatement.

A romanticized woodcut engraving of Flavius Josephus

While it is true that the Testimonium Flavianum is mostly viewed as some kind of scribal interpolation, it is untrue to suggest that scholars believe the entirety of the passage was inserted by later Christians. The fact is that most scholars who are experts on the works of Josephus believe that only certain elements were added to a passage that Josephus did write himself, specifically wording that identified Jesus as divine and mentioned his resurrection. Without those interpolations, the Testimonium only describes a teacher who was put to death and who continued to inspire a tribe of followers who call themselves Christians—a historical account much more in keeping with something Josephus would have written. More than this, there is actually a second mention of Jesus in Antiquities of the Jews, a blurb in which Josephus mentions James, whom he identifies as “brother of Jesus, who is called the messiah.” The Messiah, for those who don’t know, was a Jewish eschatological concept, a redeemer or savior figure who would appear at the end of days. The word would later be translated into Greek as Christ. So here we have Josephus specifically referring to Jesus Christ, who in gospel traditions is also said to have a brother named James. Mythicists dismiss this as another scribal interpolation, but scholars disagree, as there is no reason to suspect that Josephus would not have written this. But this is a common tactic of mythicists, as Bart Ehrman consistently points out. When some source is raised as support for the historicity of Christ, they simply dismiss it as probably fake with no evidence that it is. For example, there are no less than three other potential non-Christian sources for the historical existence of Christ that appeared within a century of the years in which it is believed he lived. In 112 CE, Pliny the Younger wrote about a sect who call themselves Christians and “sing hymns to Christ as to a god.” In 115 CE, Suetonius wrote that during the reign of Roman Emperor Claudius, he deported the Jews from Rome due to riots “at the instigation of Chrestus,” which scholars believe was a misspelling of the Latin “Christus,” or Christ. And that same year, Tacitus wrote in his Annals of Imperial Rome about Nero’s persecution of a group “called Christians. The author of this name, Christ,” he explains, “was put to death by the procurator, Pontius Pilate, while Tiberius was emperor; but the dangerous superstition, though suppressed for the moment, broke out again not only in Judea, the origin of this evil, but even in the city.” When mythicists address these other sources, they often say that these too must have been scribal interpolations, even though they add no Christian message to the text, get the name wrong, and even call Christianity evil. So here we see mythicists moving the goalposts, saying they would need some non-Christian source but then refusing to accept such sources when they are given.

It is true, though, that these non-Christian sources cannot alone prove the historical Christ’s existence, as they only go to prove the existence of Christians, or at most that the story of Christ, the gospel traditions, were spreading during the first hundred years after his lifetime. For stronger evidence, we must look earlier, which means examining the books of the New Testament historically. I do not mean taking their accounts as works of history, as their contents cannot be viewed as inerrant fact. But to contend that, just because they have a bias or contain some clearly mythological or legendary elements means that they are of no use to historians is absurd. If we were to throw out all such literature, then that would mean historians would also have to reject many other ancient works of history, such as Herodotus, who commonly blended fact with fantasy and rumor. Instead we must look critically at the texts to discern what they can show us. Mythicists, as with other skeptics, including myself, will first point out the authorship of these works. It was long believed that Matthew and John were written by actual disciples of Christ—Matthew supposedly being a converted tax collector mentioned in the gospel that bears this name, and John long believed to have been the unnamed Beloved Disciple. See my episode on the Authorship of John for more on that. Meanwhile, the other two canonical gospels, Mark and Luke, were believed to have been written by followers of Christ’s followers, Mark supposedly being a companion of the disciple Peter and Luke a follower of the apostle Paul. However, as mythicists will point out, none of this appears to be true, as all evidence points to these works having been written anonymously decades later by educated individuals fluent in Greek, rather than in Aramaic, the language of Jesus and his followers. And more than this, mythicists further deconstruct the gospel traditions by pointing out that almost nothing in John agrees with or repeats anything in the other three so-called Synoptic gospels, so it should be rejected as a work of fiction. And more than this, they point to evidence that both Matthew and Luke appear to use the exact wording of passages in Mark, suggesting that their authors used Mark as a source. According to mythicists, then, this means that there is really only a single source, Mark, which they view as a work of fiction that invented the man Jesus. However, as with other mythicist arguments, they have latched onto one aspect of modern scholarship to make an argument that no New Testament scholars agree with.

Codex Vaticanus, a 4th century Greek Bible which contains one of the earliest extant complete manuscripts of The Gospel According to Mark, itself the earliest of the surviving gospels.

The fact is that mythicists are absolutely right when they point out that we don’t have original documents of the gospels, and that they contain a multitude of discrepancies, and that John presents an almost entirely different story from the Synoptic gospels, and that Matthew and Luke do appear to repeat elements of Mark. But a further fact is that Matthew and Luke also each contain unique and independent elements not copied from Mark, like the Beatitudes and the Lord’s Prayer. Matthew also contains the story of the Magi, which no other gospel contains, and Luke contains the parables of the good Samaritan and the prodigal son, which are unique to that gospel. Does this mean that these are all invented whole cloth? Experts on this topic don’t believe that. The academic consensus is that the writers of the canonical gospels were working from numerous sources. Luke even references these older accounts in chapter 1, stating, “Since many have undertaken to compile a narrative about the events that have been fulfilled among us, just as they were handed on to us by those who from the beginning were eyewitnesses and servants of the word, I, too, decided, as one having a grasp of everything from the start, to write a well-ordered account.” New Testament scholars designate these pre-existing sources using letters. The source of episodes that appear only in Matthew being called M, and those that appear only in Luke being called L, and the source of traditions that appear in both Matthew and Luke but not Mark being designated Q, for quelle, the German word for “source.” Rather than viewing John as a complete aberration that doesn’t match source material at all, The Gospel According to John is also believed by experts to be based on pre-existing sources that simply have not survived. These are called the Signs Source, believed to be the source from which John took accounts of Christ’s miracles, and more than one Discourse Source, from which he took the speeches that he attributes to Jesus. Some scholars even suggest that his account of the passion is derived from some other currently lost work. Beyond these, there are other surviving gospels that simply aren’t canonized, like the Gospel of Peter and the Gospel of Thomas. And beyond even the written sources there is scholarly analysis of the gospels that suggests they all derive ultimately from oral traditions, which would make a lot of sense considering that it’s believed literacy was uncommon in 1st century Palestine. Moreover, the fact that occasional words in the gospels are given in Aramaic and then explicitly translated into Greek supports the notion that written Gospel sources were recording Aramaic oral traditions. So altogether, this provides a picture of the evolution of gospel traditions, coming out of Palestine during the time of Christ in the form of oral tradition, being written out afterward in sources now lost to us, and then preserved in the surviving gospels. Thus, while mythicists try to reduce these sources to a single work, all evidence suggests there were numerous contemporaneous accounts of the living man named Jesus who was called by his followers the Christ.

The fact is, though, that there are numerous other early Christian sources beyond gospel accounts that attest to the existence of Jesus Christ. One source was Papias, an early second century church father who describes, in words that only survive in quotation by later writers, how he pieced together what he knew of Jesus by seeking out and questioning those who had known Christ’s disciples in life. His writing, a five-volume work reportedly called Expositions of the Sayings of the Lord, would amount to a primary source document if it had been transmitted by ancient scribes and survived for us to read today. We further have Ignatius of Antioch’s early second century letter to the Smyrnaeans, which repeats the major incidents of the gospels, and I Clement, a letter written by Roman Christians and addressed to the Christians in Corinth, which makes clear that there was early, widespread knowledge of Jesus’s life, teachings, and death. Throughout the New Testament, beyond the gospels, we see clear knowledge among early Christians of Jesus and his life that mythicists will tell you had just recently been invented. The information litters the Acts of the Apostles, numerous epistles such as I Timothy, the Letter to the Hebrews, and I and II Peter, and I John. Even the Book of Revelations contains passages that reflect clear knowledge of Christ and gospel traditions, all of which are dated to the 1st century. And the biggest stumbling blocks that mythicists must negotiate are the Pauline epistles, the numerous letters written by the Apostle Paul, which make up the majority of the New Testament and according to scholarly consensus actually were written years, even decades before the surviving, canonized gospels. You heard that right. The gospels record events said to have occurred during the life of Christ, but the letters of Paul, a one-time persecutor of Christians who was converted, are the earliest written sources that appear in the New Testament. To deal with this massive blind spot in their argument, they cast doubt on whether the epistles of Paul really show that he had any knowledge of Christ. They argue that, for someone who supposedly was so devoted to faith in Christ, he sure doesn’t talk much about Jesus and his life. The fact is that his letters were to other early Christians who were well aware of the life story of Christ, so there was no need for him to be preaching to the converted, as it were. Regardless, there are clear instances in which Paul references the life and death of Jesus—specifically about his birth, his being a Jew of the Davidic line, his brothers (specifically naming James), his teachings, his prediction of his own death, his crucifixion, and his burial. Some mythicists, as is typical of many of their arguments, attempt to address this fact, which seems devastating to their argument, by again weakly suggesting without a shred of evidence that later Christian scribes just inserted these references to Christ in Paul’s epistles.

A portrait of Paul the Apostle by Rembrandt

As Bart Ehrman explains, one major criterion for determining the historical authenticity of any report in ancient works, besides whether it is independently attested to in numerous sources—which is certainly the case with the historicity of Jesus Christ—is the so-called “criterion of dissimilarity.” Essentially, this has to do with whether the reported fact or incident serves some purpose or accords in some way with an article of faith that the transmitters of the document want to promote. To put it plainly, if some detail concerning Jesus’s life did not help later Christians, or even early Christians, to promulgate their doctrines, why would they make it up or insert it into works that did not include it. Mythicists too use this criterion to argue that each part of Christ’s story serves a purpose in spreading the Christ myth, but as Ehrman points out, this criterion is supposed to be used—can only be used, really—to prove something did happen, not to prove it did not happen. And there are several independently corroborated details of Christ’s life that meet this criterion. One is the existence of Jesus’s family, specifically his brothers. Not only does this information appear in a variety of our sources, it also seems to serve no clear Christian agenda. If it were made up, why? Another is Christ’s crucifixion, which was likewise corroborated in numerous sources, and was actually quite inconvenient for Christians. It must be remembered that Christians were trying to tie their Jesus to the foretold messiah of Jewish tradition, but it had never been part of prophecy that the Messiah would suffer and die so violently. It was said the Messiah would bring about the resurrection, but this wasn’t about the Messiah dying and rising again. Rather, it was about the resurrection of all the dead and the conquering of death altogether. Christians had to bend over backward, finding old bits of scripture that they suggested were actually prophecies about the Messiah being pierced and not having bones broken in order to bolster their case that their man Jesus was the Messiah. Why would they have made up the story of the passion if it made it harder to argue their doctrine? And lastly, the fact that Jesus came from a poor little backwater village in Galilee called Nazareth was also a real problem for early Christians, as it was said the Messiah would be born in Bethlehem. To address this problem, they told a dubious story about his mother traveling to Bethlehem for a census that, according to historians, would not take place for another 6 years. The point is that, though it does indeed seem that this gospel tradition, like others, is not to be trusted, if early Christians were just inventing the story of Jesus Christ, if it were not based on a real, historical person’s life, why would they not just say that he was born in Bethlehem? Well, mythicists have an interesting response to this problem. They claim that no such place as Nazareth even existed, that Jesus being from Nazareth in the gospel traditions resulted from a mistranslation of a word for “branch,” referring to Jesus supposedly being a branch from the line of King David, or that he was a member of a sect called Nazirites, mistakenly called a Nazarene. We can safely dismiss this mythicist argument as well, though, since archaeologists have actually located the small Judean village of Nazareth. Mythicists have done mental gymnastics to refute this archaeological evidence, suggesting that, while it may have existed, it wasn’t inhabited during Jesus’s lifetime, a claim further refuted by archaeologists who have turned up a variety of evidence, from pottery to coins, that prove it was not only a real place, but also inhabited during the time in question.

The last mythicist argument to consider looks farther back, before the Common Era, to pagan traditions of antiquity. What most of the various mythicist arguments have in common is the claim that Jesus Christ was just one more version of a pagan myth or deity, that his myth was a reinvention or evolution of previous myths. I’ve brought up ideas like this before, and to be honest, they cannot be refuted entirely because there is clear reason to believe that elements of pagan belief were incorporated into Christian traditions. However, what mythicists do is take this entirely too far. For example, one strain of Christ Mythicism takes supposed similarities to Mithra and Mithraism and argues that Jesus did not exist any more than Mithra did, that Christianity was just a rebranding of Mithraism. I spoke about this in greater detail in my very first holiday special. Essentially, there is good reason to think that December 25th was chosen as the date for Christmas not because it was the literal date of Jesus’s birth, but because it coincided with the pagan holiday of the birth of the unconquered sun, Sol Invictus, which seems to have been a later development of the Mithraic mystery cult, but the numerous claims about every single element of Christianity being derived from Mithraism lack credibility. He was not born of a virgin; he was born of a rock. He did not have twelve disciples; rather, he was pictured in certain reliefs with figures representing the twelve signs of the zodiac. While it is true that certain early Christian apologists like Justin Martyr and Tertullian drew comparisons between the two religions, suggesting Christian baptism and the eucharistic ceremony were similar to Mithraic ritual meals and ablutions, these parallels are dubious. They were promoted by Christians hoping to convert pagans by suggesting their practices were not so dissimilar, and if there was any connection or crossover between the two, it may very well be that evolving Mithraic customs were actually beginning to incorporate nascent Christian practices. Any absolutist argument about Christianity being a whole-cloth adaptation of Mithraism just doesn’t hold up under scrutiny.

Relief depicting Mithra slaying a Bull (a tauroctony). The image was iconic in Mithraism and has no clear connection to Christianity.

Mythicists do not limit themselves to Mithraism, though. Many draw parallels to a wide variety of mythological deities, specifically what they call pagan dying-rising gods. They take this notion from the writings of comparative mythologist James Frazer, who raised the idea in his important late 19th-century work, The Golden Bough. According to Frazer, there is a motif among world religions and mythologies, a kind of archetype or category into which many deities fit, and it involved dying and rising again. For Frazer, this had to do with fertility cults and their preoccupation with the life cycles of vegetation. Just as ancient sun worship saw the setting and rising of the sun as a kind of death and resurrection, so too fertility cults saw the life cycles of plants that seem to die in the winter and revive in the spring as a cycle of rebirth. Frazer identifies deities like Osiris, Adonis, and Tammuz as just such dying and rising gods, and mythicists would throw Jesus Christ on the pile. In this, however, mythicists are working in an outmoded scholarly tradition. More recent scholarship views Frazer’s claims as flawed, suggesting that most of the deities he identified are more like disappearing gods or just dying gods. For example, Osiris does die, but he doesn’t come back to life, instead becoming the lord of the dead. Likewise, Adonis is simply forced to live some of his life in the realm of the living and some in the realm of the dead because Aphrodite and Persephone fight over him. And like Adonis, since these vegetative deities represent a cycle, there is often a perpetual death and rebirth, which is, of course, not the case for Jesus. As I have already mentioned, for early Christians, it is clear that Christ’s resurrection represented the beginning of the Messianic age, in which all the dead would be resurrected. He was viewed explicitly as a fulfillment of Jewish prophecy, not as some pagan fertility deity. And the simple fact is, though Christians throughout history have refused to acknowledge it, the earliest of Christians did not view Jesus as a god, or The God, at all. He was just the Christ, the Messiah, the anointed king, the son of God in the same way that all Davidic kings were the Sons of God, and whether in a biological sense the offspring of God as well, or just perhaps the adoptive son of God, still not God Himself. In short, there is just no clear evidence to support the notion that this human man, this historical man that came to be the leader of an apocalyptic Judaic sect, was actually, secretly viewed as a fertility deity, let alone that he did not exist and was invented to represent such a deity.

Another rather ironic claim by mythicists is that there was no Jesus because the stories about Jesus’s life are nearly identical to the stories about another sage who lived at the same time, Apollonius of Tyana, whose existence is widely confirmed by scholars. In such a claim, worded as carefully as I’ve just worded it, they are absolutely correct. According to the principal source for the life of Apollonius, a third-century biography by Lucius Flavius Philostratus, Apollonius’s mother was visited by the apparition of the Egyptian god Proteus and bore this god a son, who would himself be divine. And this son, Apollonius, was a precocious young teen, demonstrating his great wisdom at only fourteen, and he grew to become an itinerant mystic philosopher, performing miracles and mustering disciples. He runs afoul of Roman law, and according to some accounts rises into heaven instead of dying. What’s ironic about Christ mythicists suggesting Apollonius was real and Christ wasn’t is first that they would trust the majority of scholars in this case but not in the other. Indeed it is believed that Apollonius of Tyana did exist, as there are sources independent of Philostratus, including a certain 3rd or 4th century inscription, the Adama Inscription, as well as manuscript sources that Philostratus relied on. However, the sources for Apollonius’s existence suffer from the very same issues, or more! Philostratus was writing in the 220s or the 230s, it’s believed, and that’s far later removed from Apollonius’s lifetime than the gospels were from Christ’s. Like the gospel sources, Philostratus’s sources have now been lost, and one of them, a diary written by one of Apollonius’s acolytes, is believed by many scholars to have been a fictional source made up by Philostratus as a kind of literary device. There are numerous letters supposedly written by Apollonius himself, but some or all of these have also been argued to be later pseudepigraphal works. In some ways, evidence for the existence of Apollonius is weaker than that for Jesus. It simply shows a confirmation bias that mythicists would look at these two figures and argue that the gospels must have actually been about Apollonius, someone who is never even said to have visited Judea, rather than reaching the far more sensible conclusion that the similarities were a result of Philostratus, who was writing later, cribbing from the gospel traditions when he mythologized Apollonius. Interestingly, when mythicists draw this comparison, they are following a long tradition of anti-Christian polemicists going all the way back to the late 3rd century, when Porphyry of Tyre, in his work Against the Christians, argued that the Apollonius story showed that the miracles and achievements of Jesus were not unique or special. And in the early 4th century, during Diocletian’s brutal persecution of Christians, Sossianus Hierocles claimed that Apollonius was an even greater miracle worker than Jesus. But even they didn’t hazard the argument that Jesus was not a real person.

A 2nd century Greco-Roman medallion depicting Apollonius of Tyana, further independent evidence of his historical existence.

I think that, as with my refutation of the entheogen theory of religion, some who have come to view this podcast and my thinking as anti-Christian or anti-religion may be surprised by my spirited defense of the historicity of Christ. But anyone who closely follows my work should recognize that my bias, if we can call it a bias, is to lean heavily in favor of critical thought, reliable evidence, and scholarly consensus. I’ve had my pitfalls, made mistakes regarding what sources I rely on, etc., and I try to own up to them, but I always make a strong effort, in what little time I have to research each episode, to present not only the main points of arguments I think are wrong, but also the evidence that refutes them. Even though I am agnostic with atheist sensibilities, I have no qualms about arguing that Jesus Christ existed historically because the evidence supports that conclusion. This does not, however, mean that I believe he did indeed perform all the miracles attributed to him, that he rose from the dead or that he was in any way more than human. That, of course, is another argument altogether, and more a matter of faith than of history or even science. Interestingly, my view of Jesus Christ is essentially the early Christian view of every other god. There is a name for this argument: euhemerism, named after the 4th-century BCE Greek mythographer Euhemerus. Euhemerism is the argument that the gods of mythology were once just normal men and women, and as their stories were told and retold over time, they became exaggerated, made fantastical, until finally they were deified. Ironically, early Christian apologists themselves relied on euhemerism in their efforts to discredit pagan beliefs. Rather than argue that Zeus and Osiris were entirely made up, they simply said that they were more likely to have been normal men, or kings, perhaps, who were later mythologized into something more. All I would suggest, then, is that the same could be said about their man Jesus Christ, who certainly was a living human being, and perhaps the single most influential spiritual teacher in human history, if nothing else.

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Until next time, ask yourself if, a couple thousand years from now, people might not have a hard time finding concrete evidence that you yourself existed.

Further Reading

Crossan, John Dominic. Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography. HarperSanFrancisco, 1994.

Einhorn, Lena. The Jesus Mystery: Astonishing Clues to the True Identities of Jesus and Paul. The Lyons Press, 2007.

Ehrman, Bart D. Did Jesus Exist? The Historical Argument for Jesus of Nazareth. HarperOne, 2012.

Ehrman, Bart D. Jesus: Apocalyptic Prophet of the New Millennium. Oxford University Press, 1999.

Johnson, Luke Timothy. The Real Jesus: The Misguided Quiest fort he Historical Jesus and the Truth of the Traditional Gospels. HarperSanFrancisco, 1996.

Meier, John P. A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus. Volume One: The Roots of the Problem and the Person. Doubleday, 1991.

Meier, John P. A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus. Volume Two: Mentor, Message, and Miracles. Doubleday, 1991.

Sanders, E. P. The Historical Figure of Jesus. Penguin, 1993.

The Mushroom Kingdom: The Entheogen Theory of Religion

Medicine has always had a religious character to it, going far back into the obscuring veils of prehistory. In numerous cultures all over the world, we find medicine men or women, witch doctors, shamans, who are not only folk healers but also spiritual leaders, who are believed to heal through divination and communion with spirits, typically achieved through some sort of trance. The very word medicine, it has been suggested by some, finds cognates in numerous Indo-European languages that indicate its connection to the idea of mediation, of acting as a medium or conduit for divine healing. It is no new idea that such trance states as shamans experience may be accessed through the use of psychoactive substances, or drugs. The word drug, derived from the Dutch drogue, referring to the droge vate, or dry vat of the apothecary, who was known to deal in all kinds of substances, both medicinal and poisonous, has always had a double meaning of a substance used for medication or for intoxication, just as today we may talk about a drug store or a drug dealer. The notion of the religious use of drugs is also certainly nothing new. Many today are aware of the South American shamanic use of ayahuasca, of the Native American use of peyote, or even the Rastafarian use of ganja. However, until the 1960s, it seems many in the Western world were utterly ignorant of this aspect of religious experience. When, through the activities of the CIA in their pursuit of mind control technology, psychoactive substances such as the recently laboratory-synthesized LSD and the psilocybin or “god’s flesh” mushroom first encountered by an American in the 1950s, were brought back to the U.S., a whole new vocabulary had to be developed. The terms “psychotropic” and “psychomimetic” were used, as it was believed these drugs may turn one psychotic, or that they caused a mimicry of psychosis. To the newfound enthusiasts of the trance states these substances induced, they were “psychedelic,” or mind manifesting substances. To others they were “hallucinogens,” or generators of hallucination. But to some of the earlier explorers of these substances, none of these terms seemed appropriate. One man in particular, the man responsible for introducing “magic mushrooms” to the world, would thereafter embark on a hallucinatory odyssey through history, coming to understand the widespread use of psychedelic mushrooms in extremely disparate cultures and time periods, and beginning to suspect their use in Western cultures as well. From the late sixties through the 1980s and today, he would champion a conspiracist view of world history and religions, working together with like minded academics to popularize a new term for such substances, “entheogens,” meaning “revealers of the god within.” By the theory he spearheaded, it was the use of these drugs that inspired all religion. Here we have a compelling alternative theory of religion that has received some significant scholarly support but that also relies on tenuous connections through questionable etymology, and dubious claim of a massive, millennia-long conspiracy of silence.

We cannot explore the entheogen theory of religion without examining the life of one man, Robert Gordon Wasson. Wasson was born before the turn of the 20th century. One thing is clear: Wasson was an intelligent man. He only attended three years of high school before travelling abroad and eventually serving in the American Expeditionary Forces during World War I. On his return, he enrolled in Columbia School of Journalism, and after his graduation, he studied at the London School of Economics for a year before returning to instruct English at Columbia for a year. After that, he began writing for a few newspapers, eventually serving as the financial reporter of the New York Herald-Tribune, a role that he would parlay into a Wall Street career. He went to work for J.P. Morgan and Company, where he would work for almost thirty years, earning a vice-president position after around a decade. During this time, he married the love of his life, a Russian pediatrician named Valentina Pavlovna Guercken, and it was on his honeymoon with her in the Catskills that his interest in mushrooms began. His wife recognized some mushrooms that she knew from her youth in Russia, and this sparked a conversation about differing cultural attitudes toward the “toadstools” that Wasson had always been taught to avoid. From then onward, in their spare time and on the vacations that his lucrative Wall Street career afforded them, they researched fungi together, publishing a book in 1957 called Mushrooms, Russia, and History, and in the process essentially founding the academic field that has come to be known today as ethnomycology. During their research on the importance of mushrooms in Russian culture, Wasson became familiar with the ritualistic use of the psychoactive fly agaric mushroom, Amanita Muscaria, among Siberian shamans. This first suggestion of the importance of psychedelic mushrooms in religious experience was certainly a memorable one, as it involved urine-drinking. In Eastern Siberia, shamans would eat this mushroom, experiencing the full and dangerous effects of the fungus and acting as a kind of filter of its toxins, a true mediator of the experience, as others would then drink the shaman’s urine in order to experience more safely the effects of the mushroom. Reindeer were even known to follow around those who were intoxicated by the mushroom, waiting for them to urinate in the snow so they could eat the snow and become intoxicated themselves, which typically made reindeer easier to capture, and even the meat of a reindeer that had been intoxicated by fly agaric was known to confer some residual intoxication on those who consumed it. This psychedelic mushroom pervaded Siberian cultures. Among the Koryak people it was a delineator of class, as the rich would consume the mushroom, and the poor would wait outside their huts hoping to drink their psychedelic urine. So fascinated were Wasson and his wife with this mushroom that they gradually became more and more interested in psychedelic mushrooms specifically, travelling to Mexico and taking part in shamanic rituals with another kind of mushroom, the “god’s flesh” mushroom, about which Wasson wrote in a very influential LIFE magazine article called “Seeking the Magic Mushroom.” If the name sounds familiar to you, it’s because I mentioned Wasson in my episode on MK Ultra. Unknown to him, his efforts to acquire specimens of these mushrooms, classified today as psilocybin after the psychoactive compounds within them, were actually funded by the CIA as part of their search for a substance useful in mind control. Because of this, Wasson is mostly known as the man who popularized psilocybin mushrooms, and in Western culture, when we think about psychedelic mushrooms, we typically think of this mushroom. But during the course of his lifelong investigations into the topic, Wasson believed he discovered a much greater and seemingly hidden history to the Siberian mushroom, classified Amanita muscaria, whose name relates to flies, as does its more common European name, fly agaric, because to most of the world outside of Siberian shamanic cultures, this admittedly beautiful fungus, with its bright red cap and white spots, was just a poison toadstool known only for its use as a fly trap, as it would attract flies when sprinkled with milk. But Wasson slowly came to believe that fly agaric was more widely and secretly used to induce religious visions and trances than anyone suspected.

The Amanita muscaria, or fly agaric mushroom.

Wasson’s entheogenic theory of religion did not really start to take shape until he began researching a book on the Indo-Iranian use of the mystery drug called soma in the Rigveda. This was a longstanding historical mystery. The Indo-Iranian peoples that migrated to the Indus Valley in the second millennium BCE brought with them a unique pantheon of deities: Indra, another Sky Father and wielder of lightning, and Agni, the god of fire. Some of these Hindu deities, or Devas, are better known today in the West than others: Ganesha, Vishnu, Shiva. But in the ancient Vedic literature from which these legends evolved, one was different: Soma, god of the Moon and of night, and of plants and vegetation. What set this god apart from the others was that it was believed one could become this god by ingesting a particular sacramental offering, some sort of food or drink that when taken conferred a religious ecstasy and, it was believed, immortality. In the most ancient of Hindu scriptures, the Vedas, and especially the Rigveda, which was orally transmitted over millennia before finally written down in the Common Era, many hymns refer to this substance, soma, which appears to have been literally deified. More than a hundred hymns in the Rigveda are dedicated to this god-food. More than forty potential candidates for what this substance might have been were suggested by scholars in the 19th century, and by the 20th, dozens more were proposed, until more than a hundred contenders existed. Was it honey? Was it alcohol? Could it have been cannabis? Might it have been the plant ephedra, used today in such drugs as nasal decongestants? Perhaps it was a certain vine used for religious purposes elsewhere in India today? When R. Gordon Wasson looked into it, unsurprisingly, he came to believe it was a mushroom, and specifically the fly agaric, Amanita muscaria. He and his fellow researcher, an Indologist named Wendy O’Flaherty insist that he did not begin his research with any such presumption, claiming he only began to suspect the mushroom when he learned that one particular line in the Rigveda mentions the urination of soma, which to him recalled the Siberian shamans urinating after ingesting fly agaric, and the subsequent drinking of their urine by others. I personally find it highly suspect that Wasson, who was an amateur mycologist and arguably the world’s first ethnomycologist, had started looking into soma without any presumption that it might have been a mushroom. I think it is pretty safe to bet that he hoped to make a case that it was a mushroom and was looking for evidence that it was some fungoid substance. However, the case he puts forth, and which others have since developed further, remains pretty convincing.

Wasson argued that soma could not have been alcohol, for the Brahmans, the Hindu priesthood caste, had alcohol in the form of beer, and this drink was generally disapproved of because of its fermentation process. He suggests that, judging by the geography of the Indus Valley, adjacent to mountains that may have been temperate enough to foster a birch forest, such as the ones in which the fly agaric typically grew, it was possible the mushroom was present there. More than that, in all the hymns, there is no mention of roots or leaves or seeds or flowers in relation to soma, but there are, according to his partner’s translation, lines that refer to stems and caps, and all descriptions of the color of soma match with the red and white color of the Amanita muscaria. Even some lines about a “single eye,” Wasson claims, refer directly to the sight of a mushroom cap sprouting out of the ground. But his clincher was the single line about the urination of soma. Converts of the Wasson view of soma have sought further confirmation in nearby and related cultures, such as in Tibetan Buddhist rituals that involve the ritual drinking of colored water that may be meant to represent urine-drinking in antiquity, but the key word here is “may.” As the critics of Wasson would point out, his theory of soma is as much speculation as any other. The line about the urination of soma, for example, makes no mention of urine-drinking, suggesting he may be misconstruing its meaning. The translations he relied on can be challenged in numerous regards. His argument that nearby mountains might have had birch forests is unconvincing without evidence that birch or any similar woods that act as host to these mushrooms ever grew there. And the fact that there is no mention of leaves or seeds does not mean with any certainty that it must have been a fungus. Perhaps they simply did not mention those particular aspects of it because they ate it as a paste or drank it in a tea. And though the effects described in the hymns do not sound like an alcohol, they also don’t sound like a psychedelic, as a sensation of greater alertness and clarity is mentioned, making it sound rather more like the stimulant ephedra. Perhaps the strongest candidate remains the Cynanchum acidum, or “creeping soma,” a vine and thus leafless and seedless, which remains in use in religious ritual in South India and is widely regarded by Indians as the soma of the Rigveda.

The ritual drinking of Soma, as referenced in the Vedas.

Despite some academic resistance, though, Robert Gordon Wasson moved merrily along, insisting he had proven beyond doubt the identity of the Vedic soma, and intent on further proving the widespread use of hallucinogens among those not only in the East but also in the West, setting his focus next on the Eleusinian Mystery. In ancient Greece, the agrarian mystery cult of Demeter and Persephone, which it is believed had derived their rituals from the more ancient practices of the Mycenaean civilization, held initiation ceremonies every year in the sanctuary at Eleusis. These ceremonies, which were kept secretive and considered profane if performed outside the sanctuary, involved in a variety of dramatic reenactments of myths, the displaying of certain sacred objects, and commentaries on all of them, including warnings that if one were to divulge the mysteries, the penalty was death. It sounds very much like Masonic ritual in that way, and also like Mormon temple rituals, which were cribbed from Masonry. The Eleusinian Mystery was supposed to climax in a grand vision of the afterlife. This, of course, is what led Wasson to suspect the involvement of psychedelics, or entheogens, and he recruited classics scholar Carl Ruck to help him investigate. At some point in the Mystery ceremony, a potion or philtre was consumed by the participants, called a kykeon, so Wasson and Ruck homed in on that element of the ceremony as the ingestion of a psychoactive substance. Unfortunately for Wasson’s mushroom theory, the kykeon’s ingredients were recorded: water, barley, and mint or pennyroyal. But not all hope was lost for their theory, as they brought on a third collaborator, Dr. Albert Hoffman, the discoverer of LSD, who told them just what they wanted to hear, that a certain fungal parasite, Claviceps paspali, commonly known as ergot fungus, tended to grow on barley and other grains, and alkaloids present in it, long term exposure to which can cause convulsions and gangrenous symptoms called St. Anthony’s Fire, also caused hallucinations. It was in fact ergot from which Hoffman had synthesized lysergic acid.

So it seemed Wasson had found his entheogen theory for the Eleusinian Mystery, which he and Ruck argued was strengthened by the fact that Socrates’ protégé Alcibiades, a known libertine, was once convicted in absentia of having participated in the Mystery rite in a private residence rather than in the sanctuary, giving the impression that the use of this psychedelic was spreading outside the cult of Demeter and Persephone into illicit recreational use. While Wasson might have been disappointed that it wasn’t fly agaric, he seems to have taken comfort in the fact that ergot fungus also, sometimes, developed little tiny caps like miniscule mushrooms. And not to let his beloved mushrooms languish too much, he and Ruck still suggested that, while the potion used in the central, so-called “Greater Mystery” initiation ceremony was infused with ergot, in the preliminary “Lesser Mystery” ceremony, a wild mushroom might have been ingested. Again, as with soma, their theory is by no means proven, but some evidence supporting it did recently turn up outside of Greece.  In northeastern Spain, in what was once a colony of Greater Greece, Mas Castellar de Pontós, a sanctuary built for Greeks unable to sail across the Mediterranean to participate in the Demeter and Persephone Mystery rites at Eleusis, was excavated in the 1990s by an archaeologist, and in one miniature chalice there, not unlike the cups in which the kykeon was served, the chemical signature of ergot alkaloids was detected. Of course, it was also detected in teeth among remains discovered at the site, indicating that ergotism may have been rampant in the region and offering the further possibility that there are other reasons the alkaloids may have been present, but it is at least some archaeological support for the theory, something that Wasson’s soma theory has always lacked. And ergot, it turns out, would take the entheogenic theory of religion a lot further than Wasson’s toadstools.

The Return of Persephone, by Frederic Leighton, a depiction of the myth that formed the basis of the Eleusinian mystery cult.

Already in the late 1980s, before Wasson’s death, he was extending his entheogen theory to encompass all forms of religion, seeing in every culture and every age the presence of his beloved mushrooms or some similar psychoactive agent. While the academic partner he had inspired, Carl Ruck, focused still on ancient Greece, arguing that hints in Greek theatrical writing and philosophy further suggested that the mysterious wine of Dionysus was an entheogen and the mythical Hyperborean fruits from Appollo’s garden were none other than the Siberian fly agaric mushroom, Wasson turned his dilated pupils to another region on the Mediterranean and began to suggest the influence of his mushrooms in ancient Hebrew religion, thus ushering in Judaism and by extension Christianity into the entheogenic fold. He suggested that the biblical story of Adam and Eve eating of the fruits of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil was yet another reference to eating the fly agaric, which grew only at the foot of a certain type of tree in certain climates. The fruits eaten by Adam and Eve made them in some way like God, just as the soma Wasson claimed to be the same mushroom allowed its consumers to partake of the divine. He further suggested that any culture that deified or considered sacred a tree, any Tree of Life myth the world over, must also have been a reference to trees at whose foot grew the sacred mushroom. After Wasson’s passing, there was a long lull in publications on the topic, but eventually Carl Ruck and others, like Daniel Merkur and Brian Muraresku, took up where Wasson left off. Merkur argued in his book The Mystery of Manna that manna, the miraculous bread that God provided the Israelites to sustain them in the wilderness, which according to his interpretation of scriptures was also associated with visions of God, was actually bread with ergot fungus. There are, unsurprisingly, problems with this interpretation as well. Even if we were to accept his explanation that the notion of manna having fallen from heaven was pure myth, which I would certainly be disposed to accept, he suggests that this ergot-tainted bread was purposely given to the Israelites by Moses because the prophet had promised them a vision. This would suggest that Moses just had a huge quantity of this tainted bread on hand and knew it would give them visions. If we were to accept this, then we must also ask why there is no mention of ergot poisoning occurring among the Israelites who ate this tainted bread daily. Merkur goes on to connect manna with showbread, a sacramental bread placed in the Temple of Jerusalem, within the presence of the Ark of the Covenant. He argues that this ergot-tainted bread was taken as a prophetic initiation, inducing visions, and that if any died of ergotism because of taking it, they were considered to have been smitten by God himself, a further explanation for the deaths said to have been caused by the Ark. This is certainly a creative explanation, though it does not seem to accord with the biblical accounts of people who died instantaneously simply from touching the Ark, or the many people said to have been killed simply from looking at it the wrong way. And though it is tempting to suggest the plague of tumors visited upon the Philistines when they stole the Ark was really ergotism, which causes extreme skin conditions, the fact is that the small amount of showbread kept not in the Ark but near it at any given time would not have been enough to affect entire populations of people even if it were what Merkur suggests it was and had been stolen along with the Ark.

Merkur and Ruck and most recently Brian Muraresku have extended the ergot sacrament hypothesis further in the last 20 years or so, arguing what is essentially a psychedelic version of the pagan continuity concept, the idea that pagan traditions did not cease to exist but were rather adopted and changed to suit the needs of early Christians—a concept that is all but proven in many regards, as I have demonstrated time and again, particularly in my holiday special episodes. Their argument is essentially that the psychedelic ritual experience of the Eleusis Mystery was embraced by early Christians in the form of the Eucharist, the ceremony commemorating the Last Supper, in which bread and wine were ritually consumed. As with other examples used in the entheogen theory of religion, the Christian sacrament was said to be the consumption of Christ’s flesh and blood, the ingestion of God himself, which confers some aspect of godliness upon the participants. This can be compared to the Mexican ingestion of “god’s flesh” mushrooms, the Hindu ritual of eating the deified soma, and the notion that when Adam and Eve ate of the Tree’s fruit they became like God. Therefore, whether the bread of the Eucharist were originally an ergot-tainted bread, or whether the wine drunk were some psychedelic brew hearkening back to the powerful wines of Dionysus, they argued that the Eucharist ceremony was, in its earliest and most true character, a hallucinogenic experience. One specific piece of supposed evidence Ruck relied on was the 16th century Isenheim Alterpiece, a German painting of the crucified Christ that depicts his skin as pitted with lesions or sores, which Ruck suggested lends credence to the notion that Christ suffered from ergotism. As usual, though, this logic just doesn’t hold up. First of all, we know why Christ was depicted this way on the alterpiece. It was painted for a monastery that specialized in caring for plague victims and those suffering from ergotism, so the idea was clearly to draw a connection between Christ’s suffering and the suffering of the ill at the monastery. But even if we reject this explanation, the idea that the painting revealed a secret about Christ’s ritual use of ergot would require us to believe that this was a known fact even in the 16th century, that it had been kept as a secret for more than a thousand years, only occasionally hinted at in iconography. As we will see, this is the central problem with the entheogen theory of the origins of religion, that it depends on a massive conspiracy theory.

The Gathering of the Manna by James Tissot

Many other claims about entheogens influencing the foundation of both Judaism and Christianity have been put forth. It has been suggested that, since the acacia tree contains DMT, another entheogen that has been called the God or Spirit Molecule, perhaps Moses inhaled it during the episode of the burning bush. And since cannabis grew commonly in the Middle East, perhaps it was the original incense burned at altars, a theory that appears to be supported by recent archaeological discoveries at shrines in Israel, where traces of cannabis were found. This leads to the further notion that cannabis may long have been infused in the anointing oil so commonly described as being applied in biblical times. The anointing oil used by Moses in Exodus is described as being composed of cinnamon, myrrh, and something called “kaneh-bosm,” which it was understandably thought might be cannabis, though others argue that it was actually calamus, or sweet flag. In the early 2000s, Ruck promoted the research of Chris Bennett and Neil McQueen, pointing to the discovery of traces of cannabis in vessels from Judaea and Egypt as further evidence that holy anointing oil was infused with cannabis, leading to the further suggestion that when Christ anointed the sick and healed them or anointed the possessed to cast out their demons, he was actually applying a cannabis salve, the effects of which are known to ease pain and calm seizures, which might of course have been mistaken for demonic possession. Then there was the further and far more extreme argument of John Allegro that early Christians were really a mushroom cult, and that there really was no Jesus at all, that he was just a personification of their sacred mushroom, the Amanita muscaria, an untenable claim that likewise partook of the vast conspiracy theory on which much of these wider claims about the origin of religion rely. I’ll talk in greater detail about Allegro’s claims in this year’s Xmas special, but we can see this tendency just in the theories of Robert Gordon Wasson, the Mushroom King, who more than any others who might have been inspired by his thinking tried to connect all religions to some ancient precursor religion based on ritual psychedelic use.

By Wasson’s reckoning, wherever coniferous trees grew, the fly agaric might grow, and the prehistoric cult of the mushroom may have begun in Siberia, spread to Europe, the Middle East, and even the Far East from this mysterious northern Mushroom Kingdom then called Hyperborea by some. Likewise, this mushroom cult must have been carried over the land bridge into the Americas, thus explaining its persistence among indigenous cultures. And throughout the millennia it evolved, through syncretism entering into new religions and developing new mythological trappings. As evidence, he strings together numerous disparate images, suggesting that the Indo-Iranian people’s reference to the “single eye” must surely have referred to his beloved mushroom, and therefore all other references to beings with only a single eye, like the cyclops, must also have been coded references to psychedelic mushrooms. Likewise, he draws a tenuous connection between any possible mythological creature that has only a single leg or foot as necessarily being a cryptic reference to the mushroom that grows on a single stalk: the “single-foot” soma, the Greek Monocoli or “One-leg” people, the Steganopodes or “Cover-foot” monsters of medieval legend, the “one-sided man” of Siberian Chukchi lore also known as the “halfling” (a connection to Tolkien that I didn’t expect to find), and the hurakan or “one-leg” mentioned in the Mayan Popol Vuh. He even goes so far as to suggest that Satan might represent the red fly agaric mushroom because the devil is commonly depicted as having a club-foot, and thus has only one good foot, though how this identification of the mushroom with evil would work with an overall theory that the mushroom was sacred in Western religions is not entirely clear. When issues like this come up in Wasson’s writing, he merely suggests that the sacred mushroom has been suppressed by what he calls “mycophobes,” or mushroom haters. He blames mycophobes for the negative reputation mushrooms have developed, for insulting nicknames like “toadstool,” and for the disappearance of their use in modern Western religions. Whenever the point is made that mushrooms and other psychedelics are not in use in the very same religious rituals today, he rationalized that in all but a few of the cultures that supposedly used to consider the ingestion of entheogens sacred, their ritual use was put to an end and they were replaced with other substances. As to why this would happen, it must have been the mycophobes who wanted rid of their hated mushrooms, or perhaps it was because of a shortage—though this last notion really doesn’t make sense when it comes to ergot fungus, which might grow on bread anywhere. And the central role of these entheogens in so many religions was kept secret, only referred to in ambiguous language, because, Wasson argued, talking about the most holy mysteries of religious rituals was a taboo. But let’s consider this a moment. The idea that a taboo prevented the open revelation of the nature of so many different religious rituals, even after those rituals had changed and no longer used their former hallucinogenic sacraments, is a bit hard to believe. If the practice was stamped out as a kind of reform, it would have been written about in polemics and preached against. And if it had been suppressed, when had it been suppressed? If clues were present even in medieval and Renaissance art, then it was either still active relatively recently, or at least known about. So in the end, the entheogenic theory of the origin of religion is essentially a claim of massive cover-up, perhaps the most massive conspiracy theory ever dreamed up, as it must involve almost every culture and people from every era of human history. Such a conspiracy claim simply cannot be credited.

A depiction of the first ritual taking of the Eucharistic elements.

I am not sure how many people of faith listen, how many religious listeners I may still have. While I recognize that several of my episodes in the past may have driven such listeners away, I nevertheless like to think that some remain, listeners whose faith is not shaken by my skeptical polemics. Perhaps some of you who find that your faith does not rely on a literal interpretation of the Bible or who can comfortably reconcile your beliefs with science find that you can enjoy my podcast for what it is: one man’s rational seeking after the truth. For those of you who have faith and still listen, this one’s for you. Although the entheogen theory of religion seems like it might be the kind of view of religion that I would support, as it’s a great topic for atheists and agnostics who may want to make religions look foolish or hypocritical, on further researching the topic, I simply found the scholarship questionable or even downright sloppy, and the overall premise fundamentally flawed. And considering the source, Robert Gordon Wasson, it appears unreliable from the start. He was a tool of the CIA and MK Ultra, but we maybe won’t hold that against him. What’s more relevant is that Wasson was an amateur, a hobbyist. He may have invented the field of ethnomycology, but he didn’t study botany or cultural anthropology. He was a Wall Street guy who got turned on by psychedelics. It’s true, he studied journalism, but he spent far more time with JP Morgan, and it should be noted that he got the job at JP Morgan because he had written an article in 1937 that attempted to exonerate JP Morgan of certain war-profiteering accusations. After the firm hired him, he became a vice president, but it’s not often mentioned he was Vice President, specifically, of Public Relations. His job was rhetoric, spinning the facts to make his preferred view convincing, and that is what he did in his spare time too, arguing that psychedelics had fostered all religion. And certainly he was not neutral in his research, as he sometimes liked to claim. In his dismissal of mycophobes, he identified himself as a mycophile. In his discussion of mushrooms as the forbidden fruit, he portrayed himself and his wife, with whom he began his study of mushrooms, as a kind of Adam and Eve who had tasted of the Tree of Knowledge. In short, he was quite a character, but not very credible. As for those who came after him, Carl Ruck, who certainly was an expert classicist, was again no authority in the more relevant fields of history, religion, ethnology, mycology, chemistry, etc., and certainly was working out of his field of expertise when he began writing about Christian sacraments and Renaissance art. Daniel Merkur is a clinical psychoanalyst, and thus also appears to be a researcher into these religious topics in an amateur capacity. The most recent proponent of the theory, Brian Muraresku, whose book, The Immortality Key, resurrected the claims of Carl Ruck, is a lawyer, but at least his undergraduate degree appears to have been in the Classics, with a linguistic focus on Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit. However, one need only look at who he has associated himself with to begin to question his reliability. History falsifier Graham Hancock wrote the foreword to his book, which should be a massive red flag, and he tends to promote the book on the podcasts of those who amplify misinformation and toxic ideology, like Lex Fridman, Jordan Peterson, and Joe Rogan. Overall, while the corpus of writings developing the entheogenic theory of religion do make convincing individual arguments, such as that the Vedic soma and the kykeon of the Eleusinian Mystery were likely some sort of psychoactive substance or narcotic, the grand unifying theory of religion it puts forth has never convinced the scholarly community and cannot be credited as anything other than a conspiracy claim. And I hope that this conclusion will demonstrate to religious listeners that in this podcast, in my own evaluation of claims about religion, I can be open-minded and am willing to defend religions and religious beliefs at least against attacks that lack merit.

Further Reading

Merkur, Daniel. The Mystery of Manna: The Psychedelic Sacrament of the Bible. Park Street Press, 2000.

Muraresku, Brian C. The Immortality Key: The Secret History of the Religion with No Name. St. Martin's Griffin, 2023.

Ruck, Carl. “Was there a whiff of cannabis about Jesus?” The Times, 12 Jan. 2003. https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/was-there-a-whiff-of-cannabis-about-jesus-b3ncmnl0b8w

Wasson, R. Gordon. Soma: Divine Mushroom of Immortality. Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, Inc., 1968. Internet Archive, https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.449342/mode/2up.

Wasson, R. Gordon, Carl A.P. Ruck, and Albert Hofmann. The Road to Eleusis : Unveiling the Secret of the Mysteries. Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, Inc., 1978. Internet Archive, https://archive.org/details/roadtoeleusisunv0000wass/mode/2up.

Wasson, R. Gordon, et al. Persephone’s Quest: Entheogens and the Origins of Religion. Yale University Press, 1986. Internet Archive, https://archive.org/details/PersephonesQuest/mode/2up.

Technological Angels: The Religious Dimension of UFO Belief

In considering the cover-up claims made by UFO whistleblowers and conspiracy speculators for the last seventy years or so, one central question is why. Why would the US government or other governments feel compelled to keep such a momentous historic milestone from humanity? Dark sider UFOlogists spin their fiction about a Faustian bargain with malevolent EBEs, selling out citizens in exchange for advanced technology, but of the more down-to-earth conspiracists—and conspiracy claims are so varied that there actually are more pragmatic and realistic conspiracist beliefs—they rely on the old saw that the government wants to avoid a general panic like that seen during the Orson Welles War of the Worlds broadcast. In fact, as I discussed in a bonus episode back in 2021 called Extra! Extra! Extra-Terrestrial Hoaxes!, there is convincing evidence that the widespread panic caused by the Welles broadcast was overblown by newspapers in a media hoax to make radio look bad, creating a scandal where one did not really exist. In reality, for a long time, we have seen people’s reactions to the possibility of disclosure, as those in the UFO community call the long-awaited revelation of extra-terrestrial visitation. When Bob Lazar’s false claims went viral, people didn’t riot in the streets, but many descended on the town of Rachel, Nevada, near Area 51, hoping to glimpse a saucer. And when Bob went viral again on Rogan, millions did not riot, but rather expressed a similar interest to “see them aliens,” Thousands traveled to Nevada again, and in the end, they just used it as an opportunity to plan a music festival, which was to be called Alienstock. In 2017, when the Pentagon’s UAP program was exposed in the New York Times, and in 2021, when the Department of Defense released and acknowledged already leaked and viral videos of UAP and when the Office of the Director of National Intelligence released its first annual report on the topic, and now in 2023, when David Grusch went before congress to allege a secret UAP crash retrieval and reverse engineering program, on none of those occasions was there panic among the general populace. And this was not because most were skeptical and disbelieved it. Rather, these events were typically met with ironic detachment and indifference. On social media, many posts were made saying “So aliens are real. I still gotta pay my rent.” This summer, during the UFO whistleblower hearings, NBC News remarked on this, with the headline, “Are aliens real? People online don't seem to care either way. The congressional hearing on UFOs was met with a collective shrug by many Twitter and TikTok users.” And the Washington Post likewise reported, “Congress asks: Are aliens real? Many Americans respond: Meh.” So if it’s no longer a panic or riots the supposed government cover-up fears, what else? Some have suggested that the faith of the religious is being sheltered, fearing that the discovery of other sentient species in the universe would challenge ideas about mankind’s unique role as the Creation of God. Such a revelation would be akin to the Copernican revolution, when the world’s religions were forced to reckon with the fact that the Earth was not the center of the universe but rather, as Carl Sagan put it, “an insignificant planet of a humdrum star lost in a galaxy tucked away in some forgotten corner of a universe in which there are far more galaxies than people.” But ever since the discovery in 1996 of what was at first believed to be fossilized bacteria in a Martian meteorite, a claim that has since been refuted but still served as a milestone in the field of astrobiology, theologians and believers everywhere have already come to terms with the notion of life elsewhere. Western religion and Christianity, which especially relies on the notion of an incarnation of God being sacrificed to redeem mankind, has proven very adaptable to the notion, considering that God may have likewise redeemed numerous other creations through similar incarnations. In 2016, the Center for Theological Inquiry at Princeton invited two dozen theologians to consider the question, and some of these religious scholars predicted that the discovery of alien life would actually strengthen religious traditions rather than weaken or undermine them, as many would turn to their faith for some sense of how to process and contextualize their new place in the universe. And certainly we can already see this sort of reaction among those in government privy to classified UAP information. As I mentioned in part two of my UFO Whistleblowers series, it appears some in the intelligence community have decided that the unidentified aerial phenomena they hear about must be celestial beings, whether demons or angels. And this view has spread among legislators who are learning more about these UAP programs, like Republican representative Eric Burlison of Missouri, who was quoted as saying “In my opinion I think it’s either angels or manmade.” Then there is the notably unbalanced Qanon-supporting representative of Georgia, Marjorie Taylor Greene, who recently said of UAP, “I’m a Christian and I believe the Bible…. And I think we have to question if it’s more of the spiritual realm. Angels, or fallen angels.” This religious dimension of UFO belief is actually nothing new, though, and looking closely at the intersection of UFO mythology and religious thought and the similarities between belief in religion and belief in alien visitation can help us come to a clearer understanding of the psychological and spiritual drives of such beliefs. Taking a skeptical view of both alien visitation and religion leads me to believe the similarities between these two faiths, one ancient and the other more modern, actually serves to discredit both.

At the beginning of my massive documentary-style series on UFO whistleblowers, I mentioned that early in the podcast, I made an episode on UAP of which I’m not especially proud. At the time, in 2018, I didn’t really know what the podcast was. I knew I wanted to do some critical thinking and dig into some esoteric topics, but I had more of a focus on historical mysteries, and I was cross promoting with some paranormal podcasters that were in the same pod collective as I was back then. In the episode, I relied on the illustrated survey Wonders in the Sky: Unexplained Aerial Objects from Antiquity to Modern Times, by Jacques Vallée. At the time, I considered Vallée to be the most academic and reliable of UFO researchers, so I was happy to find this work compiling seeming UFO sightings throughout history by what I then considered to be a credible author. And I still consider Vallée as far more credible than others in his field. For example, he thoroughly debunked the Philadelphia Experiment hoax, and I relied on his work there in my episode on the topic. And although I didn’t mention it in my recent episode on Bill Cooper, Vallée also rather famously interviewed and discredited that conspiracy kingpin. But my opinion of Vallée and the work Wonders in the Sky has since changed. Based on the work of Jason Colavito, I have come to recognize that Vallée and his so-called “Invisible College,” a group of educated scientists who took an interest in UFOs and the paranormal, including J. Allen Hynek of Project Blue Book and physicist Hal Puthoff, who listeners may remember for his research into psychic phenomena and remote viewing, were driven by their obsession with the occult and supernatural and have been instrumental, again and again, in getting the U.S. government interested in funding studies of absolutely bonkers claims, like those at Skinwalker Ranch, where a government research project spent taxpayer money searching for shapeshifting dogmen and space poltergeists. The story of Skinwalker may need to be told elsewhere, but suffice it to say here that Vallée and Puthoff, like the infamous George Knapp, was also on eccentric billionaire Robert Bigelow’s payroll to promote the UFO and paranormal claims of his think tank, the National Institute for Discovery Science. Colavito has also gone point by point through the “prodigies” listed in Vallée’s Wonders in the Sky, demonstrating how he took nearly all of them out of context, relied on poor translations, and presented fake quotes as genuine.  And more recently, researcher Douglas Dean Johnson has made a convincing case that Jacques Vallée is guilty of cherry-picking and omitting inconvenient evidence in order to present stories in such a way that they favor his views. All of this further makes me cringe in embarrassment at that early episode of the podcast, and it may be that I produce a more definitive episode about Vallée and his Invisible College in the future, especially if I can score an interview with Colavito, whom I’d love to have on the podcast. For the sake of this topic, though, I wanted to highlight that much of what Vallée took out of context in his book Wonders in the Sky, the accounts of “prodigies,” or luminous visions in the sky, actually seem to have been references to natural meteorological phenomena, sun dog optical illusions or references to the disk of the sun or the disk of the stars, old astronomical and astrological terms. These prodigies, although explainable with historical context and our modern understanding of the world and our perception of it, were often at the time taken to be some kind of omen or divine sign. What Vallée did was project modern notions of UFOs backward onto these historical accounts of religious visions. That is, by definition, presentism, a kind of cultural bias in historical analysis. Perhaps Vallée can be forgiven this, since he is no historian, but we should instead look at things the other way round. Rather than suggesting that the similarity of UFO beliefs today to ancient religious beliefs and visions somehow proves those ancient beliefs valid and shows that it was UFOs all along, perhaps we should instead consider that belief in extra-terrestrial visitation today is just another example of humanity’s tendency to seek meaning in the skies, and that this should not be considered any more valid than those superstitions in antiquity.

Worship of Aten, the solar disk, a sun worship religion dubiously presented as a flying saucer religion by some.

Certainly in Western religion, the emphasis has been placed on the sky or the heavens as the abode of deities and divine beings, and thus has been designated the focus of believers’ faith. The Hebrew word for heaven, shamayim, is traced back to an Akkadian word for “sky” and another word for “waters,” thus meaning “Sky waters” or “lofty waters.” This derives from an ancient conception of the earth as a flat disk, supported by pillars, and the sky above as a dome, or firmament, that was blue only because of the cosmic ocean of waters beyond. This weird cosmogony was the original flat-earther notion; God had raised this solid dome and supported it on the pillars of the Earth in order to separate the waters below from the waters above, making a pocket of habitable space for mankind. In the dome were installed windows to let in precipitation, and on the underside, God demonstrated His artistry with the lights of the heavens, which served as a kind of bulletin board, as in them could be divined prophetic signs and wonders. Certainly the heavens were the abode of the divine, where angels and God were known to dwell, and whenever these celestial beings came to mankind, or whenever a person went to them, it was referred to as a descent to Earth and an ascent up to heaven. The traditions of Christianity continued this focus on the skies, with Christ locating his “Father who art in Heaven,” with the conception of the Holy Spirit descending from “on high,” and his disciples’ reports that he himself ascended to heaven after his resurrection. Likewise Islam continued this theme with Muhammad’s heavenly ascension, journeying into the skies to observe the stars and speak with angels and the dead. Nor was Western religion unique in this regard. Certainly some pagan and Eastern traditions focused more on our natural surroundings and invested them with the qualities of the divine, but many others venerated sky gods, like Ahura Mazda of Zoroastrianism, Zeus of ancient Greece, Jupiter of Rome, and the Sumerian Anu. The list goes on and on, among ancient Egyptians, the Incans, the Mayans, the Aztecs, the Hindu, and the endless names of Chinese Sky Emperors. From sun worship to wind gods enthroned on clouds, the concept is so widespread across so many disparate faiths and cultures, appearing in so many pantheons, that comparative mythology offers a name for it: the sky father. While proponents of ancient aliens like Erich von Däniken take this as evidence of alien contact in apparently every ancient culture in antiquity, an inversion of their reasoning seems far more logical: this universal tendency to seek supernatural meaning in the skies has in more recent years, with the influence of science and the Enlightenment, evolved to encourage new beliefs about the inhabitants of the heavens that are nevertheless equally religious in nature.

The idea that modern folklore about UFOs and aliens can be likened to religious mythology was not lost on early thinkers on the topic either. French psychologist and UFO researcher Aimé Michel noted the similarity of ideas about aliens to ideas in Greek antiquity about daemons, some of which, so-called eudaemons, were benevolent and others evil, a belief that was later Christianized in notions of angels and demons, the latter even using the same Greek word. And theologian Ted Peters, in the seventies, wrote in “UFOs: The Religious Dimension” that belief in UFOs was nothing more than “scientized religion,” in that believers “do want a celestial savior, but that savior will not be mysterious; instead, he will be fully comprehendible and scientifically explainable according to the laws of nature.” One of the first thinkers to recognize this tendency to place UFOs in the same role as angels and demons or gods and to suggest it was not only an explanation for widespread belief in alien visitation but also an explanation for UFO sightings themselves was Carl Gustav Jung, the Swiss founder of analytical psychology. In his book Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Sky, he asserts that it is hard to consider them “objects” at all, “because they behave not like bodies but like weightless thoughts.” Jung surmised that it was no coincidence that our preoccupation with flying saucers and alien contact began during the Cold War, when the looming threat of nuclear war had already invested the skies with the specter of death from above. In contrast to this existential threat, however, UFOs and the ETs that many began to believe piloted them, came to be viewed in the 1950s and beyond as not only technologically advanced but also morally superior beings come to save us from ourselves. This view of aliens in flying saucers as our saviors caused Jung to suspect that UFOs or our ideas about them were simply conforming to the established archetypes of religion. For those unfamiliar with the term, the quintessential Jungian view of psychology was that human beings inherit universal patterns of thought into which we organize our perceptions, and religion specifically can be understood as conforming to these patterns or archetypes. By Jung’s reckoning, in a world of science and technology, humanity was beginning to replace outmoded notions of sky gods with what he called “technological angels.” To Jung, identifying saucer sightings as a kind of religious experience meant that, while in some cases sights of actual things in the sky might be misconstrued according to this quasi-religious interpretation, in other cases perhaps nothing real was seen at all, or rather, the things “seen” were only figments of ecstatic imaginations. Objects actually caught by radar may likewise, he reasoned, be mundane phenomena invested with the religious mystique of the UFO. But Jung actually took his evaluation of flying saucers as a psychological phenomenon beyond the domain of the mind, thinking that perhaps the imaginations of those who believed they saw saucers were actually creating some physical manifestation of their beliefs, which in turn could be seen by others and observed with radar. “[T]he  projection-creating fantasy,” he wrote, “soars beyond the realm of earthly organizations and powers into the heavens, into interstellar space, where the rulers of human fate, the gods, once had their abode in the planets.” Of course, he would not be the first to entertain this parapsychological notion of a thought-form or tulpa, the notion that human belief could make the unreal real. While this is quite a stretch, scientifically speaking, there was further, more concrete reason for Jung’s identification of UFO belief with religion. Not long after the advent of saucer mania came the rise of UFO contactees in the 1950s, and the formation of outright UFO cults, all of which had their roots in alternative religions.

The 1958 cover of Jung’s exploration of UFOs as psychological phenomena.

The tendency to make UFOs and aliens into sacred figures like deities has been remarked on by modern academics, like religion scholar and historian Catherine Wessinger, who observed that “increasingly in new religions, extraterrestrials and space aliens are the superhuman agents that act in the roles previously filled by God, gods, angels, and devils.” These new religions, or as they’re more commonly labeled, cults, actually began to appear long before the rise of flying saucer mania. In 1758, a Swedish philosopher named Emanuel Swedenborg published a pseudoscientific work whose ponderous title is typically translated as Worlds in Space, but in its entirety is Concerning the Earths in Our Solar System, Which Are Called Planets; and Concerning the Earths in the Starry Heaven; and Concerning Their Inhabitants, and Likewise Concerning the Spirits and Angels There from What Has Been Seen and Heard. Swedenborg was formerly a scientist, writing exclusively on chemistry and mineralogy, who had transitioned into theological treatises and then went full-blown visionary mystic, claiming that, much like Muhammad, he had ascended into the heavens, visiting other planets and detailing the anatomy and cultures of all their inhabitants, including the native beings of the Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. Interestingly, he called them all “spirits,” even though he described their bodies and organs in detail. Swedenborg’s work should be viewed as mere fiction, telling as it is that he only visits the planets of our solar system known by science at the time. His work also conforms to a literary trope, that of the “fantastic voyage,” a popular kind of story, like Gulliver’s Travels, in which a traveler discovers a strange civilization that serves as a kind of satire or parable in order to teach us some lesson about our own world. Swedenborg, however, never admitted to writing fiction, but rather transformed himself into a revelator figure, and though he never founded a religion, he did speak in his works about a “New Church,” and in the years after his death, a cult following did develop in reading groups and among those who studied and interpreted his many weird writings. In 1787, fifteen years after his death, his New Church was eventually organized in England, and this Swedenborgian church would be brought to America by none other than John Chapman, a nurseryman and conservationist who has been immortalized in tall tales as Johnny Appleseed. But besides this Church of New Jerusalem, as it was called, and its several denominations, Swedenborg’s influence can perhaps more widely be seen in his inspiration of another quasi-religious, pseudoscientific movement: spiritualism.

Spiritualists, those who claimed to act as a medium through which contact with the dead and other spirits could be made, first arose in the Burned-Over District of upstate New York, a hotbed of new religions out of which both the Millerites and the Mormons arose. In that milieu, the writings of Emanuel Swedenborg, with his claims of psychic ability and spiritual travel and a “world of spirits,” was combined with the teachings of Franz Mesmer, who claimed that a group of people chained together by holding hands could amplify the paranormal power he called animal magnetism, and these two developed into the practices of séance and mediumship. And interestingly, spiritualists did not only claim to be able to contact the dead. They also claimed to contact extra-terrestrials. Helene Smith, a French medium, claimed in the late 19th century that she, too, like Swedenborg, had spiritually traveled to Mars and encountered Martians. And Sara Weiss, an American medium, claimed the same in the early 20th century. Just as Swedenborg’s account of travel through our solar system has been revealed to be false through his omission of all planets not known at the time that he wrote his works, so too the claims these mediums made of having visited Mars have been disproven because of their reliance on inaccurate notions popular at the time. They both included descriptions of canals on Mars, a notion that actual works of engineering could be seen on the planet’s surface, a false notion that arose because of a poor translation of Italian and that has since been definitively debunked with higher resolution imagery of Mars. This conflict between science and those who claim extra-terrestrial contact tends to be persistent. The claims of contactees and UFO religions blend the occult with materialist scientific ideas, and thus when scientific errors are corrected, they too much amend their doctrines. But this never stopped such claims from proliferating. Many are the supposed alien intelligences contacted through séance and telepathy. The most influential of these were the “Ascended Masters” of Madame Helena Blavatsky, the founder of Theosophy, a 19th century religion that drew its teachings from her writings, many of which were proven to have been plagiarized. Blavatsky’s religion grew directly out of spiritualism, for she started out as a medium. Eventually she claimed to be in contact with and passing on the teachings of these “ascended masters,” who were extra-terrestrial entities dwelling on Venus. Despite the many and thorough debunkings of Madame Blavatsky as a con artist, which is a whole can of worms that I’ll have to open in a future episode, Theosophy had an outsized influence on on many thinkers. In fact the notion of a tulpa, or thought-form, which Carl Jung was playing with in his explanation of UFO sightings, was itself a Theosophical concept. And Blavatsky’s assertions about alien intelligences from Venus being “ascended masters” have cropped up time and time again in the stories of contactees, some of whom also went on to found religions of their own. Guy Ballard, a California mining engineer, began claiming in 1935 that he had met with Blavatsky’s Venusian ascended masters in a cavern inside Mount Shasta, and he went on to found a cult called the “I AM Activity” in which he supposedly passed on the new teachings of Blavatsky’s Venusians to his followers. Following the advent of saucer mania, perhaps the most influential or infamous of supposed contactees, George Adamski, who faked UFO photos and claimed to have been taken on a Swedenborgian voyage across the solar system, was known to have been a Theosophist before making his claims, and his Nordic-looking aliens also just happened to come from Venus. And George Van Tassel, a contactee whom I mentioned in a recent episode, who would start a religion called “The Ministry of Universal Wisdom,” claimed to have been in contact with an “ascended master” from Venus named Ashtar, whose spiritual revelations he compiled and passed on to his believers.

Emanuel Swedenborg, the originator of so-called “astrotheology.”

Many are the UFO religions founded on the spiritualist concept of channeling or telepathically being in contact with extra-terrestrial intelligences or spirits, such as the Mark-Age movement, based on the claims of a supposed contactee whose organization received promotion in the pages of Ray Palmer’s magazine Fate, which did so much to propagate UFO myths, or similar groups whose teachings were always received through channelers, like the Universarium Foundation and the Extra-terrestrial Earth Mission.  Some emergent UFO religions or cults did not seem to have much connection to spiritualism or Theosophy but rather represent a kind of syncretism of Christian theology and UFO mythology. The most prominent example of these is the Human Individual Metamorphosis group, who also called themselves Total Overcomers Anonymous, or UFO People, but who went by another name during the last years of their existence, a name that would become infamous after the group’s mass suicide: Heavens Gate. Other UFO groups, however, tend to mash up all of these influences, spiritualism and Theosophy with Christian elements, like the Aetherius Society and the Summit Lighthouse, whose founders claimed to be in contact with Ascended Masters from Venus and claimed that Jesus had been one such Venusian being. One of these religions was based on the teachings of a supposed venusian called Unarius, a group led by two channelers, Ernest and Ruth Norman, who also claimed to be reincarnations of Jesus Christ and Mary Magdalene. Then there is the more atheistical Raëlian Movement, whose prophet, a Frenchman named Claude Vorlihon who had taken the name Raël, began claiming that he had been contacted by extra-terrestrials called Elohim. Elohim is, of course, a word translated as angels in the Bible, and Raël claimed these aliens had simply been mistaken for angels in antiquity. Throughout history, he claimed, the Elohim had created alien-human hybrids to serve as their prophets, among them included the Buddha, Christ, Muhammad, and, of course, himself. His organization relies on membership fees, and one of their major practices is “sensual meditation,” as adherents are guided toward achieving “cosmic orgasm.” The church’s founder, Raël, also organized an exclusive order of women meant to serve as the sexual consorts of the Elohim, which until their arrival would just sexually gratify him, it seems. So here we find many of the hallmarks of a cult, but not all UFO religions are so easily categorized. One of the most successful UFO religions is Scientology, which is classified also as a secularized religion or a psychotherapeutically oriented religion, or just as a privatized religion or scam, but can certainly also be classified as a UFO religion because of its emphasis of an ancient alien myth regarding the origin of humanity, the “Xenu myth,” which they themselves call a “space opera,” admitting its science-fictional nature.

Even among UFO contactees who never start or join a religion focused on UFOs, though, we still see the clear connection of their UFO beliefs with religious concepts and experiences. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the claims of UFO abductees. Of course, much of the alien abduction phenomenon can be adequately explained based on the issues with hypnotic regression. I spoke a bit in my most recent patron exclusive minisode, which delved a little into the famous claims of Betty and Barney Hill, specifically highlighting some theories about the surfacing of traumatic memories surrounding accidental awareness, or waking up under anesthesia during medical procedures. There is also the general unreliability of hypnotic memory regression, which I will likely discuss more in my next patron exclusive. And a further rational explanation of many other abduction claims is that they conform to the experience of sleep paralysis, which may involve hypnopompic and hypnogogic hallucinations. Interestingly, this phenomenon can also be used to explain other supposedly supernatural phenomena or myths. As I spoke about in my episodes on vampires, it serves as a clear explanation of the accounts of revenants troubling townspeople in their sleep. The phenomenon of sleep paralysis and its attendant hallucination also explains claims of demonic visitation, and has even been called the “incubus phenomenon,” named after demons that supposedly attack one sexually while one is in bed, an incubus being a male version of this demon and a succubus the female version. Taking a Jungian view of these experiences, religious symbolism is most common in dreams, and while religious views of the past might have colored interpretations of the shadow figures of sleep paralysis hallucinations as demons, if our collective unconscious has adopted a newer, space-age conception of sky gods, as Jung suspected, it is reasonable to believe that many modern minds would interpret these hallucinations as extra-terrestrials today rather than as demons. Moreover, we see the sexual aspect of incubus and succubus encounters present also in many of these abduction experiences. Abductees claim to have been not just poked or probed painfully, but to have their genitals examined and to engage in sexual intercourse, claims that have led to the belief that extra-terrestrials seek to inter-breed and create some hybrid offspring. Whether or not the experiencer views their alien abductors as benevolent, neutral, or malicious, they still tend to be led to a kind of religious epiphany by the experience. Many abductees claim their abductors impart some moral lesson for them to pass on to the rest of humanity, an aspect that further helps us categorize these as quintessentially spiritual or religious experiences. Then there are those whose abduction experiences are horrifying, who view their abductors as evil, or we might say demonic, like horror writer Whitley Strieber, whose book on the topic bears the very religious-sounding title Communion. Indeed, he explicitly compares his “visitors” to demons, claiming they wield a “technology of the soul.” Strieber has actually argued against an exclusively materialist interpretation of abductee experiences, emphasizing their religious character. And seemingly unrelated to his abduction experience but further indicating his tendency toward religious experiences or visitations resulting in spiritual epiphany, Strieber later claimed to have been visited by an angelic type of character, a mysterious man who came to his hotel room and helped guide him to a new understanding of God.

“Der Traum der Gräfin Marguerite von Flandern” by Vincenz Georg Kininger, a clear depiction of the incubi phenomenon that may today present as the alien abduction phenomenon.

One last way in which UFO beliefs have been observed syncretizing with religious traditions is simply through the reinterpretation of Western religion through the lens of UFOlogy. This is the very kind of presentism I spoke about in the beginning of the episode, which serves as the bread and butter of ancient astronaut proponents like Erich von Däniken. These revisionists will scour scriptures for anything that might be construed as sounding related to the UFO phenomenon and hold it up as evidence of their UFO beliefs. Thus the descending of God onto Mount Sinai, which if anything just sounds like the description of a thunderstorm, is construed as the landing of an extra-terrestrial vehicle. Likewise the pillar of fire that led Israelites out of Egypt must also have been some ET craft. Perhaps the most commonly cited is Elijah’s ascent into heaven in a chariot of fire, though if we read that closely, this chariot of fire, led by horses of fire, only is said to separate Elijah from his son, and he is actually borne into heaven by a whirlwind, but even a whirlwind is close enough for those who want to find flying saucers in the Bible. They look at the Star of Bethlehem and see a saucer, they look at the heavens opening and God’s Spirit descending on Christ at his baptism and see a saucer, they look at the bright cloud that appears at Christ’s transfiguration and see a saucer, and they look at the cloud that hid Christ from their sight during his Ascension and again see a flying saucer. Whenever an angel appears, whenever the Holy Spirit descends, they speculate that it may have been a UFO or an alien or some kind of beam technology, and this backward thinking, this inverted logic, can be seen also in claims that UFOs are commonly depicted in religious art from the Renaissance. Indeed, there are numerous paintings, such as “The Annunciation with Saint Emidius” by Carlo Crivelli, 1486, in which a beam appears to come out of a circle in the clouds right into the Virgin Mary’s head, and “The Baptism of Christ” by Aert De Gelder in 1710, which depicts the Spirit descending on Jesus like beams of light out of a circle in the sky, and “The Madonna and Child with the Infant Saint John” by Domenico Ghirlandaio, sometimes called Our Lady of the Flying Saucer because of a luminous shape in the sky up at which a shepherd stares in the background. To my embarrassment, I actually used details of this painting, without any analysis, as the artwork of my old episode on UAP in history. The more I research and realize the problems with that early episode, the more I cringe at keeping it up in my feed. So while I quietly remove the episode from my public feed, let’s look at these Rennaisance paintings to see why they most certainly are not depicting flying saucers.

First of all, it is absurd to think that these paintings prove something about events in the Bible. They were painted more than a thousand years after the events they depict. The only thing they can show us is how such religious traditions were being conceived of and portrayed in Rennaisance artistic trends. And we must look back at the scriptures that inspired them to understand these portrayals. The heavens are said to have opened at Christ’s baptism, so the circle overhead through which the spirit of god descends like beams of light is not a disk-like object but rather a circular opening, a window in the firmament, or heavens. As for the circle in the sky beaming something into Mary’s head in Crivelli’s “Annunciation,” we know from the title and subject of the image that this is meant to portray angels communicating to Mary that she will give birth to the Son of God. There are very high-resolution images of this painting online, and if you zoom in, you can clearly see that it’s no flying saucer. Rather, it is two concentric rings of angels in a roiling cloud. You can see their cherubim faces and wings. This unlocks the meaning of all of these paintings, including the strange object hanging in the skies behind Our Lady of the Flying Saucer. These depictions derive from the Renaissance artists’ clearer understanding of how biblically-accurate angels were described. Most I think have by now seen the viral social media memes saying “Here’s what angels really look like,” suggesting typical depictions of angels are all wrong and that the religious don’t even know their Bibles because angels really were just a terrifying mass of wings and eyes. There is some element of truth to this, as specific angels, seraphim and cherubim, are described in Isaiah, Ezekiel, and Revelation as having numerous wings, not just two, and numerous eyes as well as multiple faces. Of course, there are also descriptions of angels and archangels as being humanlike, so as always, don’t get your understanding of history or mythology from a meme. But the clincher here comes from the numerous detailed descriptions of angels in Ezekiel. The prophet’s vision repeatedly talks of cherubim forming into “wheels,” or circling up. Likewise, his vision of God enthroned describes how the throne is borne aloft by these very same angelic wheels. Of course, those who seek some confirmation of UFOs in the Bible take his description of “wheels within wheels” out of context and claim it to be yet another biblical flying saucer, but what Ezekiel is actually describing is the formation of angels into rings that encircle and carry the throne of God. It seems abundantly apparent that this is what Renaissance artists were depicting when they painted divine circles in the sky: either rings of angels or the very throne of God as described in the Bible. To project modern ideas about space aliens onto the intentions of these artists or onto the traditions of ancient religions is really to misrepresent and revise them.

Aert de Gelder’s “Baptism of Christ” (c. 1710)

The modern tendency to project newer ideas about space travel and alien visitation onto old, inherited religious ideas, and the desire to reconcile the two claims into one coherent worldview, may be more deeply entrenched among military officials, the intelligence community, and lawmakers than we might suspect. One of the first signs that this perspective was spreading in those fields came in 1994, when two former Air Force officers self-published a book called Unmasking the Enemy, claiming that because witnesses had described UFOs as vanishing like ghosts, they must actually be demons. That’s right, they jumped right past hallucinations and mass hysteria and any sort of rational explanation having to do with experimental technology like stealth, and they went right to demons! And in 2010, UFO and paranormal researcher Nick Redfern claims to have stumbled onto what appeared to be a secret group within the Department of Defense called the Collins Elite that was dedicated to investigating the possibility that UAP are actually angels and demons. Redfern is known to uncritically repeat some of the most outrageous claims of conspiracy and the supernatural in his work, so I would caution that he’s not exactly a reliable source, but after his book, when wild conspiracy claims about the Collins Elite began to spread online, he tried to correct the record, explaining that the only thing he had discovered, by being put into contact with members of the alleged group through a priest who had been approached by them, was that they started out as a group of Christians who came to this conclusion about UFOs in the 1980s, met and discussed their ideas with others, growing their numbers during the 1990s, and eventually, through the Defense Department contacts of some involved, ended up getting some state funding. According to Redfern, they are not a large or powerful organization, just an assemblage of like-minded people, and their activities are mostly focused on briefing congressmen and senators on their theory that UFOs are demonic. This is absolutely a baseless conspiracy claim from an unreliable and unverifiable source, but based on the fact that we know, from the book Unmasking the Enemy, that this theory was prevalent in the Air Force in the 90s, and we further know from the comments of Lue Elizondo that some shadowy figure in the Pentagon expressed the same theory, and we know that legislators like Marjorie Taylor Greene have started floating this theory themselves, it certainly seems believable. Redfern suggests that the Collins Elite specifically chooses to approach legislators who might be likely to believe their theory, and the notion that some rogue group of religious officials in the Pentagon may be whispering into the ears of already bonkers representatives like Greene that UFOs are probably demons is terrifying.

It seems quite possible that such a group as the Collins Elite, working behind the scenes like lobbyists, may have pushed for the recent congressional hearing in order to make a public spectacle and bring the issue into the limelight—a kind of religious evangelism through government that should be prohibited by the separation of church and state. But still, while such a group, if it exists, may be growing in its influence, and the syncretism of Christianity with UFO beliefs appears to be continuing apace, it is my personal view that there are others within the military and intelligence community who will never subscribe to such a theory since they already know that UAP are not angels or demons or aliens because they know exactly what classified technology is being mistaken for them. My personal pet theory, which I did not arrive at on my own and has been floating around for decades, is that most sightings that are hard to explain with mundane phenomena like birds and balloons and optical illusions, can be explained by radar spoofing technology. Indeed, certain recent UAP described by Navy pilots as orbs with a cube inside have been identified as radar-reflecting balloons. And for any sightings that involve impossible maneuvers or speeds, there is the potential explanation that particle beams may be theoretically projected, from the ground or from an aircraft, creating a glowing plasma ball in the sky that can be seen by the naked eye and by instrumentation, could be made to look like it was performing maneuvers and achieving speeds that no aircraft possibly could, and could be made to disappear at will simply by hitting the off switch. This is, admittedly, only theoretical, which any deeply classified technology would be until it has been revealed that we have had it for years, but it should be noted that we use very similar technology today in the medical field, to project protons for targeted radiation on cancer, in a procedure called proton beam therapy. It may likewise be speculation, but to me it seems a more rational and feasible explanation that does not smack of religion at all.

Further Reading

The Gods Have Landed: New Religions from Other Worlds. Edited by James R. Lewis, State University of New York Press, 1995.

https://journalnews.com.ph/the-collins-elite-what-in-hell-ufos-demons-and-putting-the-picture-straight/

Gallant, James. “Angels of the Singularity.” The Fortnightly Review, 16 Oct. 2022, https://fortnightlyreview.co.uk/2022/10/gallant-angels-singularity/.

Jung, C.G. Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies. Translated by R. F. C. Hull, Internet Archive, https://archive.org/details/carl-jung-flying-saucers-a-modern-myth-of-things-seen-in-the-skies-0_202012/mode/2up.

Partridge, Christopher. “Alien demonology: the Christian roots of the malevolent extraterrestrial in UFO religions and abduction spiritualities.” Religion, vol. 34, no. 3, July 2004, pp. 163-189. ScienceDirect, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0048721X04000570.