UFO Religions

Archive for the ‘Alien Abduction’ Category

I just finished Thomas Bullard’s book, The Myth and Mystery of UFOs, by scholar-folklorist Thomas Bullard (University of Kansas Press, 2010). Rather than write my own review, I found the work summarized nicely in this review over at Magonia review of books blog. I’ll just add a few thoughts below on this important work.

Bullard’s book is not light reading. It is an academic work. In my view, as an academic, it’s a wonderful volume. Bullard has detailed chapters, with the expected documentation in mainly academic sources, on all the major motifs of UFO studies: descriptions of alien craft, the aliens themselves, abduction narratives, and alien mission and homeworlds. In each case, Bullard painstakingly details how virtually all the UFO anecdotal evidence can be found in ancient, medieval, and early modern tales across the globe. Importantly, the vast majority of these correlations have nothing to do with other planets, inter-planetary travel, or extraterrestrials. That is, though the correlations are overwhelmingly present, it is only in the contemporary era that narratives about abduction and “otherworldly visitation” conforms to anything we would recognize as high technology. His point in this effort is to raise question of how any of the UFO phenomena could in reality be about visitors from space given the vast arrays of correlations. Good question.

Bullard’s (for the most part) explanation is the psycho-social approach. This is not a view that says a culture produces these episodes or encounters and their descriptions. Rather, it is the encounter with the anomalous that produces the descriptions — and the descriptions are far more likely to not be about genuine aliens from space than other deep-seated thoughts, fear, beliefs, yearnings, etc. The reason the overlaps are so high, reasons Bullard, is that experiences are parsed in such a way that new mythologies are constructed that serve the same fucntion or outlet as older ones.  The garb changes because we are living in a different era, our lives defined by technology and the “final frontier” of space.

Bullard doesn’t take a dogmatic stance on this, though. He simply feels it has high explanatory value, but not complete explanatory power. He leaves room for truly anomalous events that might include genuine extraterrestrial contact, and outlines in some details how such experiences might be winnowed from the those experiences for which the psycho-social explanation can best account.

I would encourage anyone interested in UFOs to read this book, and to keep it as a handy reference for its coverage and source material. In particular, those for whom the UFO subject goes beyond the nuts and bolts (questions of physics and reverse engineering which a priori assume that most UFOs are physical craft of non-human origin) will be well served by Bullard’s focus on how the UFO subject molds and produces religious experience and worldview.

Technorati Tags: abduction, aliens, Bullard, fairies, folklore, magonia, mystery, myth, review, UFOs

I came across this bibliography tonight. As many readers will know, sleep paralysis is a likely explanation behind many (but not all) alien abduction episodes.  Though it’s a good resource, it is out-of-date, as the most recent entry is for 2000.

Technorati Tags: Alien Abduction, bibliography, Sleep Paralysis

I just heard of the passing of Dr. Tom Hawkins yesterday. Those who follow this blog of who have read The Facade have likely not heard of Tom, but he figures in the novel and his work will again constitute part of the plot line of the sequel, now titled The Portent.

Tom spent the better part of two decades ministering to people who were the victims of ritual abuse (the term used for such is actually “survivors”).  This is what (in part) used to be called MPD (Multiple Personality Disorder) but which is now called DID (Dissociative Identity Disorder). His patients included people deliberately traumatized as the result of mind-control experimentation aiming at the deliberate creation of “alters” (yes, it’s real – just look up MK-ULTRA in the Congressional record). More often, though, the abuse was the result of “less weird” traumatization, such as satanic ritual abuse (SRA). Tom was a graduate (PhD) of Dallas Theological Seminary and not a crank. He fit the template of a normal evangelical pastor. He stumbled onto the DID problem while in the pastorate, when it turned out his wife Dianne was a survivor and neither of them knew it (she was “triggered” and certain behaviors and memories resulted). Their story, along with a range of materials on the subject and its treatment, is available through his website and ministry, Restoration in Christ Ministries.

So what’s the connection to The Facade? Well, in the latest version, recall the revelation of the name “Gottlieb” (Sydney Gottlieb). A number of Tom’s survivors spoke of the same types of trauma and, in particular, the messaging, as reported by so-called alien abductees: nephilim babies, hybridization, OBEs, etc. – except no aliens. That isn’t a coincidence.

It turns out that Tom was able to help many survivors become re-integrated or whole as a result of his research in “the cosmic hierarchy” (aka, the divine council). I never figured on it, but my own work in the divine council was of help to him. He focused mainly on the New Testament, while most of my work has been in the Old Testament and ancient Near East. But gods are gods, and they do what they do. And their over-arching agenda is clear in terms of the big picture, if not the immediate details that swirl about us.

Providentially, the only time I have ever presented anything approximating a start-to-finish overview of the divine council worldview covering both testaments was this past October in Lehighton, PA, at the request of Tom and some of his assistants. I’ve never been asked by a church to do so.  I’m so glad I made time for it now. It was all recorded, and can be purchased in support of Tom’s ministry (I don’t sell the disks and earn nothing from them – per my request everything goes to this ministry). The DVDs cannot as yet be ordered online, but you can inquire about and order them via phone.

To review the purpose of this thread, I suggested at the outset that there were four aspects to the Christian fundamentalist view of UFOs and aliens (i.e., that UFOs that are not man-made or other natural phenomena are demonic and alleged alien life forms are demonic). They were:

1. Abductee testimony of the forcible trauma of their experience.

2. The similarity of abductee testimony to early Christian (and otherwise) reports of demonization.

3. The similarity of abductee testimony to the events described in Genesis 6:1-4 (and other ancient Jewish texts).

4. A belief that the events of Genesis 6 (and so, an alien presence) is a specific touchpoint in New Testament teaching about the Second Coming (or, for many, the notion of a rapture — which is not the same as what is broadly thought of as the Second Coming).

In the first installment I focused on number one. Toward getting uninitiated readers up to speed, I produced six pages from the conference proceedings of the alien abduction conference at MIT (1992) detailing what abductees say happens to them, and how that testimony overlaps in multiple ways with testimony from people who were ritually or satanically abused. My point therefore was that, for the Christian fundamentalist this sort of trauma is evil. As such, its roots are satanic or demonic, and the presumed non-human perpetrators are demons, not beings from another planet.

I think it’s fair to say that anyone with a conscience or moral compass focused on human rights would agree that inflicting such harm and trauma on people is evil. One isn’t required to believe in God or supernatural beings to say that much. To this extent, the Christian fundamentalist and the atheist believer that alien abductions are really perpetrated by aliens could agree. Both could conclude what is done to people is evil.  Where they disagree is on who’s doing it. I think it must further be granted that, even if one doesn’t believe in God or the supernatural, it is perfectly reasonable that, given a belief in God and demons, the Christian fundamentalist view of the trauma is coherent and understandable. But someone who believes that abductions are really being performed by aliens would think *that* view is more coherent.

Both sides could, therefore, be willing to agree to disagree on the matter of who’s doing the traumatizing, so long as we call a spade a spade: evil is as evil does.  But the disagreement often does *not* end there. I have personally had people (researchers, abductees) try to convince me or someone else, where I was listening to the conversation, that the aliens who are traumatizing their victims aren’t really evil since “it was for our own good.” As many writers on abductions would point out, this is a common part of the abduction narrative.  Christian fundamentalists don’t buy this explanation or rationale. They consider it incoherent for several reasons.

1. What is done to people can’t be evil and not evil at the same time. If we accept “it’s for our own good” then we really cannot logically also maintain at the same time that it is evil. In other words, this is talking out of both sides of one’s mouth and disingenuous. The person who wants genuine extraterrestrials to be behind this bears the burden of proof to demonstrate that this traumatization of people isn’t evil.

2. If we grant that there are aliens, and that these aliens are vastly superior to us in technological terms, this excuse for their behavior evaporates. For example, would the alien defender really be willing to endorse the idea that causing pain *unnecessarily* to someone else is virtuous or ethical because “it’s for their own good”?  This rationale *might* be a coherent trajectory if there were no alternative. For instance, we could say that a doctor who had to remove the limb of a person pinned under a pile of rubble without anesthesia so as to extract that person and save his/her life before another imminent collapse was acting virtuously. But if that doctor didn’t need to do something so excruciating, we would not look at the decision with favor at all (putting it mildly). If the life (and limb) could have been saved another way, or anesthesia was available and there was time for it to take hold, it’s pretty obvious that the doctor’s decision to amputate without anesthesia would be viewed as cruel and perhaps sadistic –despite the life being saved.  As Jacques Vallee pointed out many years ago with respect to alien abductions, the narrative suffers from a significant technology gap. If intellectually superior beings could develop technology to traverse space (conquer the speed of light) or use wormholes (circumventing the speed of light problem), surely they could come up with a non-traumatic way of extracting sperm and eggs. Surely, if the goal is knowledge of human anatomy, they’d be smart enough (at least as smart as us) to use cadavers or imaging technology. The fact that they don’t suggests to the Christian fundamentalist that these beings are evil, and this kind of evil is best explained in demonic terms.

3. Another layer of this excuse is to compare what aliens are doing to humans with what humans do to animals (lesser life forms) for study. On the surface, the two sides appear analogous.  But are they?  Suppose a dog or cat or polar bear could communicate with the scientist through language or telepathy (or vice versa) so that the scientist could learn how traumatized the subject really was. Would the scientist continue? This brings us back to #2 above. While humans can’t communicate with animals this way, according to abductee testimony, there is plenty of communication back and forth between alien and abductee.  And so (back to #2) why doesn’t this vastly superior race either stop what it’s doing or find a better way to do it — equipped as it is with superior technology and plenty of experience learning from abductees how traumatizing the experience is? Again, the fact that they don’t suggests to the Christian fundamentalist that these beings are evil, and this kind of evil is best explained in demonic terms.

What it comes down to is that the alien can tell the victim how it’s all for their own good but if you put the alien on the witness stand and asked these questions you wouldn’t get a coherent answer. This is one reason (but not the only one) that the Christian fundamentalist presumes that these alleged aliens are evil to the core and demonic.

Technorati Tags: Alien Abduction, aliens, Christianity, demons, UFOs

For those who have not read the post that explains why I’m getting into this and what I mean, read that first.

In that original post, I said there were four trajectories I’d have to track to help people understand the “fundamentalist” view (that this is all about demons). They were:

Basically, there are four reasons for this:

1. Abductee testimony of the forcible trauma of their experience.

2. The similarity of abductee testimony to early Christian (and otherwise) reports of demonization.

3. The similarity of abductee testimony to the events described in Genesis 6:1-4 (and other ancient Jewish texts).

4. A belief that the events of Genesis 6 (and so, an alien presence) is a specific touchpoint in New Testament teaching about the Second Coming (or, for many, the notion of a rapture — which is not the same as what is broadly thought of as the Second Coming).

Let’s start with number 1 – the violent forcible trauma described by abductee testimony. In a nutshell, anyone (human or not) who would do such things as described below would be evil — and what better representatives of evil are there than demons? Not difficult to follow.

There are  a number of books that chronicle the heinous things abductees report. Dr. David Jacobs’ two books, Secret Life and The Threat, are a good place to start. But it’s probably easier to just show you the tables from pages 354-366 of the book Alien Discussion: Proceedings of the Abduction Study Conference at MIT, Cambridge, Ma. Those pages are the reference for the paper by Gwen Dean entitled, “Comparisons of Abduction Accounts with Ritual Maltreatment” (i.e., ritual and satanic abuse). The comparison pages cover six pages. I invite you to read through them, noting not only the violence, but also the numerous overlaps with ritual and satanic ritual abuse testimony.

The point: It would take a lot to dissuade any “fundamentalist” that such things were not evil and satanic. This is Exhibit A why the fundamentalist believes that, if the abductee testimony is true, if the person *did* have a physical experience, those who perpetrated these acts of violence are anything but enlightened beings with which we should seek to commune, and from whom we should seek wisdom. Such abuses of human rights are not only crimes, they are evil.

Technorati Tags: Alien Abduction, ritual abuse, satanic, SRA