UFO Religions

Archive for the ‘UFOs as Folklore’ Category

The Magonia Blog posted a review today on an important new book by Jacques Vallee and Chris Aubeck entitled, Wonders in the Sky: Unexplained Aerial Objects from Antiquity to Modern Times, and Their Impact on Human Culture, History and Belief (Tarcher/Penguin, 2010). You can read the review here. Two paragraphs of note:

Of course these accounts are not without interest, and the portions relating to strange lights in the sky may well contain material of interest to astronomers and meteorologists. This is particularly true of the material from the nineteenth century. For example some of the observations of dark objects crossing the sun might be early accounts of near-earth asteroids.

Though the second section entitled ‘Myths, Legends and Chariots of the Gods’ is supposed to be the one in which more mythical or even fictional material is presented, once it moves out of modern hoaxes, the differences between the two sections become rather academic. Again, it seems to invoke the sort of arguments which plagued projects like INTCAT, trying to separate out the ‘genuine’ from ‘spurious’ cases, often on the basis of personal belief and boggle factor. Again if we cannot make easy judgements about events in our own time, how can we possibly make them about events and experiences centuries ago?

I’m reading the book now, and will no doubt have similar sentiments, though I’ll probably be harsher. To this point, while this book will be valuable as a reference source, it is a parade example of over-promising and under-delivering. Stay tuned to find out why.

Technorati Tags: ancient, Ancient Astronauts, signs and wonders, ufos antiquity, Vallee

I blogged on this over at PaleoBabble and thought this audience would enjoy it.

Technorati Tags: alien gods, aliens, Ancient Astronauts, Egypt, fetus, King Tut

I can’t help thinking that this sort of weird — but completely natural — phenomenon is behind at least some of those “UFO sightings” in Greco-Roman or medieval texts.  Most of the language used in those sources invokes astronomical terms, but then there are sightings that, to the ancient writer, were just too different for “normal” astronomical activity.  The ancient and medieval writers wouldn’t have a word for “supernova effect.”

Technorati Tags: greco-roman, medieval, UFO sightings

This is a follow-up to my earlier post in regard to the article on how folklore served as a useful propaganda tool in Nazi Germany. The article was meant to point out that governmental power, totalitarian or otherwise, often makes use of “big picture” ideas – BELIEFS – to serve its own end. History literally teems with examples. Frankly, the idea that religion / belief (coherent to us or not) fuels action, including control of other people, is about as close to a self-evident truth as you’re likely to encounter. An idea like Manifest Destiny in U.S. history is illustrative.

For the Nazis, their religio-mythical base was the Aryan mythology wedded to Germanic folklore. In the hands of Himmler and his ilk, this amounted an amalgam of Blavatsky’s root races mythology and other elements of theosophy, occult bloodline lore, eastern religion, and even ET as a progenitor of the human race. If you’re interested in all this and want to read scholarly material on it, I recommend Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke’s “trilogy” – the first volume of which is his Oxford doctoral dissertation (the ET/UFO connection is in ch. 8 of the third book):

1. The Occult Roots of Nazism: Secret Aryan Cults and Their Influence on Nazi Ideology

2. Hitler’s Priestess: Savitri Devi, the Hindu-Aryan Myth, and Neo-Nazism

3. Black Sun: Aryan Cults, Esoteric Nazism, and the Politics of Identity

For our purposes, I thought this article could serve as a springboard to how the ET mythology of the 20^th century could serve various constituencies. Anyone who follows “exopolitics” knows that it’s already serving political ends. Let’s list a few that area already present, and some that might surface if there is an ET reality someday-or such a reality is contrived for the masses.

1. The radical political left-wingers – I’m thinking here of people like Alfred Webre and Steven Greer. ET is the answer to global warming and alternative energy. If something happened to sway the masses into believing ET contact had been made – or was genuinely on the horizon, people like Greer, who fancy themselves as some sort of avatar or liaison with ET would be in a position to demand real power and influence-effectively attaining that status. ET would be a political tool for all sorts of global change. Don’t believe me? Look at global warming (which I consider a myth in terms of human causation-and hence human solution-and thousands of scientists do as well, but are effectively silenced). Global warming is really about changing the global economy, redistributing the wealth of the West to the end of government ownership of industry (i.e. socialism and then communism), and keeping the Third World from developing. This is an old agenda, dating back to Marx and the Fabian society. If you want scholarship on this, I recommend the two academic works below:

My point here is that the global warming / climate change agenda has already been merged by some with the ET issue. That won’t change, and will gain momentum if ET becomes official (real or not).

2. The military industrial complex – This one’s easy and also already here (and has been for decades). If you’ve read The Façade, you know that one of my takes on the UFO issue is that the idea of alien craft visiting earth has been a useful lie since the events of Roswell. I was in print with this idea before Nick Redfern, but he’s the guy who’s put the most time into it. The alien crash myth was a carrot dangled before the public to cover up a PAPERCLIP screw-up at Roswell. The science fiction climate was just right for it, and it served as an unfalsifiable mythology that helped deflect attention away from the fact that Nazi and other war criminal scientists were on our payroll helping us fight the Cold War. I frankly wonder if mainstream science could ever come forth with an “ET is real” statement without getting the orders for doing so from the military. It’s a bit scary to think that the military really is in the position of “validating” ET for the scientific community (which wouldn’t be good science). What if there was a selfish, rogue element in our military that cared more for its own agenda than constitutional rule? All that would be needed is for the military to admit (even in private) that all that alien visitation and UFO crash stuff was real, but withheld from the public to avoid panic. The military industrial complex could bring about a new phase of the mythology to accelerate the weaponization of space. It really wouldn’t even need to be public. Admissions, advice, and demands could all be made behind the closed doors of Congress or the Oval Office. ET would be the ultimate enemy for the military to protect us from. Always formidable, always out there, always justifying the need for more. Again, all that’s needed is the BELIEF that ET is real. Just speculation for now, obviously. My point is only how the BELIEF could be used.

3. Radical Islam – Yes, you read correctly. Sound bizarre? Well, there isn’t much about radical Islam that’s very coherent, is there? Nevertheless, it is flourishing. This is in part because, as Muslims who have broken away from Islam (radical and otherwise) have told anyone who will listen, that 99% of Muslims know next to nothing about the contents of the Quran. They know only what their radicalizers tell them. Granted, there’s a lot of content in the Quran that fits their logic and agenda, but there’s also material that doesn’t. My point is that there is no intellectual wave of resistance within Islam against the radical fundamentalists in its ranks because most of the radicalized are ignorant. They are also kept in tow by fear. The educated radicals we read about from time to time typically buy it because they are taught to hate the West, as though Muslims could never be the source and solution for their own problems around the globe. Anyway-did you realize that the Quran allows for, and even suggests, that there is ET life?¹ Moreover, the Quran can also read as having Adam created off planet earth by Allah from blood and clay and even a “sperm drop” – who is spoken of in the plural. (Sounds like Sitchin, doesn’t it?).² I’m not suggesting that this is the correct way to read the Quran, only that it COULD be read this way – and I believe it WOULD be read that way in the wake of an ET revelation. It would be easy for radical Islam to claim that the discovery of real ET life and the relationship of humanity to our “space brothers” was anticipated only by the holy Quran, thereby validating its inspired status. I don’t think that would hurt Islam’s growth and power. Outside of the Al-Qaeda type, these ideas are already being popularized in the urban ghetto ³

4. The most scary group for my money is one that, to my knowledge, doesn’t exist yet in any unified, formalized, intentional body. This is the group that I’ll share some thoughts about in my next post.

Again, to be clear – none of this is about what’s real, only what could be believed, and how such beliefs could be used to manipulate. The ET myth could be a powerful tool to various ends.

Technorati Tags: alien gods, aliens, extraterrestrials, folklore, Islam, Nazis, Quran, religion, theosophy, UFOs

I know a number of you have been wondering why I “assigned” the second PDF article, the one on folklore as a political tool of the Nazi regime. I wanted readers to think about how folklore or religion serves many purposes of a totalitarian regime. Indeed, the folklore created and fostered by the Nazis played a critical role in bending the will of the masses to cooperate with the goals and intellectual propaganda of the Nazis. I’ll try and explain the applications of this historical reality to the UFO / ET issue. It’ll take more than one post, too. This will likely be a small series. And, in so doing, I’ll be letting you in on my thinking about that this all means.

Let’s start with how the Nazis used their pseudo-science to build a mythology that would both fire and control the masses, as well as provide a rationale for the Nazi agenda in all its horror.

There were a number of ideological points to Nazi ideology that needed a supporting mythology – a metanarrative, so to speak, that gave it the ideology legitimacy:

• Racism (especially anti-Semitism) and the belief in the superiority of the White, Germanic, Aryan or Nordic races.
• Euthanasia and Eugenics with respect to “Racial Hygiene”
• The rejection of democracy, along with its corollaries, the control of religion, the press, and the academy
• The “leader principle” – faith / belief in the leader (or the inevitability of the master race producing ultimate leaders)
• Social Darwinism
• Collective identity (as opposed to individualism); everything was about the state

Let’s make some brief comments about these guiding ideas:

1. Racism, Eugenics, Racial Hygiene, Collective Identity – The myth in a master race meant not only that the German people could think of themselves as superior, but it created a binding, unified, transcendent identity to those who were included. It fostered collective identity. The folklore associated with the idea said that racial purification was a way to regain a lost, advanced humanity. The intellectual prowess and superiority of the ascended citizenry of this lost quasi-divine race was worth regaining for all the good it could do. The master race was the hope of humanity, and that ends justified many (really, ANY) means used in pursuit of recovering it. It was too important to fail, and inferior races that stood in the way and threatened purification had to be eliminated.

2. Social Darwinism and Rejection of Democracy – Naturally, those of more pure blood, closer to the folkloric / mythological master race were more advanced. This superiority naturally qualified them as the leaders, the enlightened elite who knew better than most, and whose duty it was to keep the unwashed masses in line while their numbers could grow (remember Himmler’s programs to have the SS membership matched with racially proper “breeder” women; cf. the book, Of Pure Blood). Eventually, inferior specimens could either be killed off or their flawed stock would be replaced generationally. But then again, you always needed the inferior around as worker bees. They certainly have no right or ability to rule those far more advanced and enlightened. And so what? It is survival of the fittest. And who could argue? Himmler believed that the original master race, now preserved in the Germanic stock, was fathered by extraterrestrials. That mythology in place, THIS race had a divine right to rule – and that right needed to be regained, asserted, and entrenched (ultimately, in a globalistic sense). Social Darwinism, of course, borrows and depends upon evolutionary biology. And if naturalistic Darwinism is indeed correct, humans are not “endowed by their creator with inalienable rights” – they have no inherent rights. They are animals like everything else – and the only “rightness” to be had is racial (biological) superiority, which also entail intellectual superiority when you’re talking about the high point, the hairless apes we call humans (see the book, From Darwin to Hitler: Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics, and Racism in Germany).

3. The Leader Principle (or, the Master Dynastic Principle) – This amounts simply to faith in the race, and faith in the leaders produced by that race. And since the leaders, the enlightened elite, have as their goal a totalitarian utopia, where the elite truly rule (as is their right by heritage and ability), faith in the leader is entirely consistent with faith in the state – or whatever we want to call the larger collective that holds power.

How does all this apply to ufology? Actually, the better question is, How would an intelligent ET reality – or the perception of an ET reality, regardless of whether it was provable or not – affect humanity in the context of the human (governmental) thirst for power? One thing’s for sure – an ET reality isn’t going to rid humanity of the desire to have power over other humans. I would suggest that an ET reality or mere perception of it would be a very useful folkloric tool.

In the rest of this post, I want to take the above three groupings and see how this could work. But as a precursor, I want to unpack the “perception” phrasing I just used. Personally, I don’t think we need actual scientific proof of ET to have a global paradigm change in this area. I also don’t think we need a literal alien visitation that would be undeniable to the mainstream scientific and political communities of the world. I think all that’s needed for this shift is the suggestion, by mainstream science, politics, and media, that intelligent life had once existed elsewhere. This is easily obtainable. Given the propensity of the masses to believe that what is truth is what the media elite put in front of them (the “official” kinds of news sources), it would take only a NASA panel to interpret data in such a way. If NASA went on Larry King and said, “you know, Larry, we’ve found exactly the kind of microbial life on Mars that we know gave rise to higher life forms on earth, including intelligent life. We’re betting that there were genuine ETs on Mars at one time but that their civilization is long gone” that’s all it would take. The extrapolation would begin. The populace does that now at amazing numbers, despite lacking such “confirmation” as this. So what if this shift happened? Back to the usefulness of the ET myth.

Let’s go on one rabbit-trail for now.

It takes little imagination to realize that if it ever became widespread belief that intelligent ET life was actually for real, the assumed ETs would invariably be linked with human life. That has actually already been put forth in the form of undirected panspermia – the idea that life on earth (and life on other planets) was seeded from space by natural, random forces. You and I have already read this sort of thing in connection with the research being done on Mars. In fact, in the first two years of the newsletter I used to write (2002-2004), I personally collected over 200 articles (mostly popular) promoting the idea of panspermia and ET life (in whatever form) as a key to understanding the evolution of life on earth and/or human evolution. This is nothing new.

If the idea caught on with enough people – say, like global warming, so that it became part of school curricula – the result would be felt a number of ways. There would be a sense that we are all human, as opposed to non-human. People would feel it more acceptable to talk about the ETs that are still out there. Credence would be lent to the idea of ancient earth visitation. Commonalities in the genetics of humans and other life forms on earth would be interpretively sifted through the ET life grid (confusing correlation with causation).

This is all somewhat innocuous. But what of people who’d want to manipulate other people with such information? We already have “Indigo children” and those who suspect that they are the first wave of an advance in human evolution. Maybe their connection with space is stronger than most. Maybe the new information about our space connection was just what was needed to explain the Indigos. Or….even better, maybe it’s because enough people who “had more” of the space material in them intermarried so that certain characteristics are now becoming genetically dominant in succeeding generations. Recent media creations (like the series “Heroes”) suggests this trajectory, and it isn’t alone there. Hey, maybe there’s something to the idea of a superior race, and we’re just starting to see that the “ancient wisdom” has validity.

Now, of course, the genetically superior wouldn’t use that superiority to harm anyone – we’d need to study the new advanced stock so that it could be shared. Yes, we could make inferior people better through genetic engineering! (No matter how you slice it, it’s racial hygiene, but it sounds so…”technological” and clinical this way). Bear in mind at this point that I’m describing the “sane” version of these events. Naturally, the more convinced the masses became of an ET reality, the greater the likelihood that some would claim to be part of an ET lineage. Crazy…but what if that person had abilities no one else did (or an elite few)? Why, we “know” that the alien aspects of our DNA have been awakened all over the globe – maybe this fellow really does have some sort of concentrated form of that stock. Maybe that’s why he’s a super genius – and you know, we ought to listen to super geniuses since they’re rare. He could lead us on a more enlightened path. Our collective hope is to be led by him and be like him. He can show us the way. Or, we could at least find out what makes him tick now that the human genome is mapped, and then we can alter succeeding generations to vault our own evolution. Hmmm … Someone needs to be in charge of that, I’d guess.

Now, I know this sounds nutty – but don’t miss the point – I’m talking about MYTHOLOGY as a political tool. In Nazi Germany the folklore and myths propounded by the Nazi occultists were taught as fact (that actually began in the late 19^th century). Their nonsense was the “established fact” of the academy during that time. Millions bought what we look at today as being pure absurdity. People will believe what they are told – as long as they are sufficiently under-educated or uneducated. Don’t get me started on that one. We have a culture (now) in the West that is bent on pleasuring and entertaining itself above all. I used to laugh when Jay Leno would go out on the street and talk to the average person about what you’d think is basic knowledge for anyone who is ambulatory. I don’t anymore. And the problem isn’t that there are so many people who can’t think critically (which is FAR different than technical aptitude), they don’t care. Apathy reigns alongside the longing to entertaining ourselves to death.

No, it wouldn’t take a whole lot to get huge throngs of people to believe in an idea that would redefine how we think of humanity. We’ll pick up on that in a bit.

Technorati Tags: evolution, extraterrestrials, folklore, Nazis, propaganda, religion