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.

Technological Angels: The Religious Dimension of UFO Belief

Follow and Support Us!