Anna Lutkajtis (University of Sydney), Review of Benjamin E. Zeller (ed.), Handbook of UFO Religions, Brill, 2021. Chapter: Carole M. Cusack, “Norman Paulsen and the Brotherhood of the Sun/ Sunburst,” pp. 354-368. (original) (raw)
Related papers
Nova Religio: The Journal of Alternative and Emergent Religions, Vol. 25, Issue 3, 2022, pp. 139-141.
Handbook of UFO Religions is a massive and significant contribution both on the critical study of ufology and on its ties to contemporary minority religions. Divided into five parts with twenty-four chapters, its eclectic, interdisciplinary, and international group of contributors extends the conversation beyond the Anglo-American confines that often circumscribe such endeavors. Several of the essays, however, are perhaps too specialized. Authored by second-language academics, the result is stilted, often-jargon laced, idiomatic prose that requires not a little extra focus to decode. Nevertheless, the text will surely serve as a significant starting point for future research into the intersections of religion and ufology.
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.
• „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.
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.
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.
The Production of "Science" and "Religion" in Ufology and UFO Religious Movements
This paper examines the ground-level efforts of UFO investigative organizations and UFOfocused religious movements in the US and Mexico to both define "scientific" and "religious" realms and to position themselves in relation to those realms and to each other. I suggest that these ufologists and UFO religionists negotiate the science/religion issue primarily by making and circulating knowledge claims, which they attempt to use to create positive and negative epistemic alignments with other actors. Those others include gatekeepers of scientific and religious mainstreams, media specialists and organizations, and a heterogeneous nonexpert audience. Focusing on claim-making and alignments has strong implications for reorienting the socialscientific study of science and religion. keywords: UFOs; new religious movements; epistemic alignments [~11,100 words total]