Alien demonology: The Christian roots of the malevolent extraterrestrial in UFO religions and abduction spiritualities (original) (raw)

At the Nexus of Science and Religion: UFO Religions

The modern period has witnessed a rise of religious interest in extraterrestrial life and visitations, which although dating back to the 18th century, culminated during the 20th century in the emergence of the ‘UFO religions’. This article highlights the manner in which the founders and members of unidentified flying object (UFO) religions have sought to operate at the nexus of science and religion in the modern world. The article first considers definitional questions and explains the origin of the concept of UFOs, ufology, and UFO religions. The article then traces the history of the development and rise of several of these religions, providing case studies of the major UFO religions and religious movements. Finally, the article considers recent scholarship and research issues involving UFO religions.

Why UFOs are ideal for new religions, and why they fail

This paper examines why UFOs are highly suitable symbols for some creators of new religions. I suggest this is because these creators desire a spiritual system that is also scientifically credible. I then offer some reasons why UFOs fail in that reconciliatory role: first, that UFOs must be as malleable as spirit yet more physically real; and second, that mainstream scientific and religious stigma against UFOs undermines UFO religions' credibility in a wider cultural arena. Of the small but growing number of scholars who study UFO phenomena sociologically, many agree that UFOs have great religious importance and potential. Where some, such as noted religion scholar Steven O'Leary, are concerned with how the self-professed scientific study of UFOs is infiltrated by spiritual concerns, I am more concerned with how religious movements make UFOs and aliens integral parts of their belief systems. Specifically, I will draw on the textual productions of these religious groups and their sociological investigators to consider the utility of UFOs for certain kinds of religious creativity. That same body of texts also, I suggest, offers hints that UFOs can and do fail in the roles they are asked to fulfill. Based on works in the sociology of new religious movements, in the study of UFOs, and on my own research on several UFO movements, I will examine these successes and failures.

Televangelists, Flying Saucers, and Soul Eaters A Contemporary Account of Occult Christianity's Ufology

This article outlines the general history of American Evangelical Christianity's textual response to the UFO phenomenon, framed by the literary genre of the jeremiad and as part of the apocalyptic turn of the twentieth century. Beginning with its early entanglement in the 1940s and moving to the present, it highlights the shifts in the narrative from angelic harbingers to demonic co-conspirators. The article pays particular attention to a new Evangelical approach to the phenomenon through novelization that at once mirrors contemporary politicization and utilizes the literary form to initiate adherents. While "new" in some regards, the extended discussion and examination of Michael Heiser's novel The Façade reveals a continuity with earlier forms of occult literatures birthed in the mid-twentieth century. Ultimately, the metaphysical and mystical nature of UFOs together with the similar qualities of the novel have been and are being appropriated by American Evangelicals in a hyperreal mode to extend their cultural influence.

Gruenschloss, Andreas: "Waiting for the 'Big Beam' — UFO Religions and ‘Ufological’ Themes in New Religious Movements"

• „Waiting for the ‘Big Beam’: UFO Religions and ‘Ufological’ Themes in New Re-ligious Movements“, in: J.Lewis (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of New Religious Movements. Oxford 2004, 419–444., 2004

For the most part, UFO religions were not taken seriously until after the Heavens Gate suicides in early 1997. Since that time, more and more scholarly attention has been given to UFO religions as well as to the religious motifs found in the more general ufological subculture. This article discusses the historical emergence of this strain of spirituality out of modern esotericism, the millenarian aspect of ufological spirituality, the quest for a both a new science and a religious technology in UFO religions, and the religious significance of the "ancient astronaut" hypothesis which informs groups such as the Raelian movement.

" God's Descending in Clouds (Flying Saucers) " Anthropological Approaches to UFOs in the Religious Register AAA Annual Conference @BULLET

Drawing on social scientific research on flying saucer religions, including my own work on Heaven's Gate (US) and Chen Tao (ROC), I suggest several paths along which anthropologists ought to pursue UFOs in the religious register. The first, for which anthropology is uniquely qualified, is to trace the flows of people and information-including the diffusion of UFO beliefs-that connect flying saucer religions around the world. The second is to determine the nature of the relationship between culture, social conditions, and the adoption of UFOs into the religious repertoire. The third is to analyze the role of technology in UFO religions, both in conceptualizing the sacred and in mediating between those religions and the wider society.

UFO Mythologies: Extraterrestrial Cosmology and Intergalactic Eschatology

Traditiones, 2022

The initial flying saucer mythology that arose in the 1950s and 1960s is characterized by explicitly religious and mystical narratives that describe contact with extraterrestrial savior beings. These beliefs emerged in the Cold War era, in response to widespread fears of nuclear apocalypse. This essay traces the origins and development of the early UFO mythos, and presents case studies of several well-known UFO religious groups, analyzing the mythic aspects of their belief systems with particular focus on apocalyptic and millennialist scenarios.

Apocalypse in Early UFO and Alien-Based Religions: Christian and Theosophical Themes

Modernism, Christianity and Apocalypse Conference, University of Bergen, Hotel Solstrand, 18-20 July., 2012

UFO and alien-based religions crystallised as contemporary Western spiritual phenomena in the post-World-War-II era, and reflected both historico-political and moral anxieties about the atomic bomb attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, and the atmosphere of paranoia and expectation of the “end of the world” that emerged as a result of the arms race between the United States of America and the Soviet Union. The theology of such religions drew upon two principal sources, one physical and the other spiritual. First, the hardware-oriented, proto-conspiracist sightings of “flying saucers” by Kenneth Arnold in 1947 and the Roswell Incident the same year, in which an unidentified object crashed in Roswell, New Mexico, and the United States Air Force cleared the site of debris, seemed to provide evidence that UFOs and the extra-terrestrials who travelled in them were real. Second, the Theosophical idea of Ascended Masters who could transmit occult knowledge to humanity by means of clairaudient mediums or “channelling” was extended to include aliens from distant planets (in addition to Tibetan lamas, denizens of lost worlds like Atlantis and Mu, the dead, and other putative sources of wisdom).

Sacred Skies UFOs and the Religious Function of the Psyche

Psychological Perspectives, 2023

With his publication of “Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Sky,” the psychologist C. G. Jung boldly went where no psychologist had gone before, pos- tulating that enchantment with UFOs was indicative of a collective disturbance in the psyche. Like Jung’s, this essay likewise avoids any stance as to the factual nature of UFOs and chooses instead to view ufology through the lens of a fledgling mythol- ogy. It seems little has changed in the 60-plus years since Jung’s essay. This essay therefore attempts to modernize and update Jung’s approach through the work of past and present scholars such as William James, Lionel Corbett, and Jeffrey Kripal. By focusing specifically upon the paradoxical nature of the sacred—found within Jungian psychology, Christianity, and ufology—this essay suggests the archetypal current most at work here is the Trickster, who resides at the borders, transgresses norms, and embraces contradiction. Attention is paid to those areas of ufology in which materialism is championed—and how even those areas reveal a kind of Freudian return of the repressed; in this case the repressed being the sacred itself. My intention with this thesis is to show how mystical experiences, whether the result of religion or science fiction, might point us toward a new paradigm in which para- dox, contradiction, and even irreverence can be seen as manifestations of a newly- dominant archetype in the collective Western psyche.

Paranormal Path Dependencies in the History of Global Mythology: Their Relevance to UFO Phenomena as Forms of Mysticism (longer version of paper presented at the 2022 American Academy of Religion Conference, Denver, CO)

Paranormal phenomena, such as encounters with UFO’s and alien beings, have emerged as a viable category in the study of religion, and mysticism in particular. The work of scholars like Jeffrey Kripal has put such phenomena “on the table” of religious studies, where these powerful, seemingly nontraditional mystical experiences may be analyzed and compared alongside their more well studied peers. Exploring these as instances of mysticism involves an expansion of that category and an exploration of its own roots in the global history of religions and mythology. Using the novel methods of historical-comparative research into the deep history of human mythology developed by Michael Witzel and Wim van Binsbergen, as well studies of shamanism, I analyze a number of such paranormal UFO phenomena in terms of Witzel’s “path dependency” theory of mythology, which “indicates the influence of early, foundational cultural features on successor cultures,” which, transposed to the experiential level, indicates the influence of earlier forms of mystical experience coded in the deepest layers of myth on subsequent experiences and encounters extending to the present. When looked at against this wider cultural and religious background, these phenomena can be seen to have deep roots in human culture, roots which continue to exert their influence and constrain or condition the nature of mystical experiences, which, in this view, can be similarly shown even in their more classical expressions to be so influenced and conditioned.