UFO Disclosure and Religion

Does UFO Disclosure Spell the End of Religion?

In a June 2023 interview with journalists Leslie Kean and Ralph Blumenthal (The Debrief), US Intelligence whistleblower David Grusch said, “I hope this revelation serves as an ontological shock sociologically and provides a generally uniting issue for nations of the world to re-assess their priorities.”

Grusch referred to the shocking revelation that members of the US Defense and Intelligence community have conspired for over seventy years to conceal the existence of UFOs and to deceive the population of planet earth about the existence the non-human intelligence behind the UFO phenomenon. Moreover, Grusch claims that the United States has in its possession several downed UFO craft and that the government has also recovered the remains of non-human pilots.

Of course, people in the know have been saying all of that for the last seventy years. How exactly is this revelation supposed to produce “an ontological shock sociologically” that will inspire humanity to unite?

Grusch may have been alluding to the type of sentiments expressed in President Reagan’s address to the United Nations General Assembly (September 21, 1987):

Perhaps we need some outside universal threat, to make us recognize this common bond [of humanity]. I occasionally think how quickly our differences worldwide would vanish if we were to face an alien threat from outside this world. And yet I ask you, is not an alien force already among us? What could be more alien to the universal aspirations of our peoples than war and the threat of war?

Reagan was thinking of a meeting he had with Gorbachev at the 1985 Geneva summit. During a break in the official diplomatic negotiations, Reagan and Gorbachev took a private walk with only their interpreters present. Reagan asked the USSR head of state, “What would you do if the United States were suddenly attacked by someone from outer space? Would you help us?”

Gorbachev replied, “No doubt about it.”

Reagan affirmed the sentiment, “We too.”

That conversation took an important step toward ending the Cold War.

Contrary to the optimism of Reagan and Gorbachev, the revelation of crashed saucers and alien bodies probably will not provide a uniting issue for humanity that forces us to reassess our priorities. Apparently, such revelation has just the opposite effect. Members of the Defense and Intelligence communities that hold these secrets have not beaten their swords into plowshares. Rather than incline toward some sort of universal collective brotherhood, the existence of UFOs and their non-human pilots has had the effect of engaging our government in a “publicly unknown Cold War for recovered and exploited physical material—a competition with near-peer adversaries over the years to identify UAP crashes/landings and retrieve the material for exploitation/reverse engineering to garner asymmetrical national defense advantages.” So says David Grusch. That doesn’t sound much like world peace, evolutionary enlightenment, or heightened consciousness.

A lot of thinkers anticipate an entirely different type of ontological shock, namely a partial or complete collapse of religious belief systems. The common assumption holds that the existence of aliens will make religious beliefs, particularly Judeo-Christian beliefs, unsustainable. For example, according to declassified files from the British government, when Winston Churchill saw evidence of RAF pilot encounters with UFOs during World War II, he ordered the files sealed lest the revelation cause mass panic. Allegedly, Churchill said, “This event should be immediately classified since it would create mass panic amongst the general population and destroy one’s belief in the Church”

A similar story told by UFO researcher Richard Dolan has it that, after receiving a 1977 US Intelligence briefing on UFOs, President Jimmy Carter broke down and wept. Popular speculation supposes that the information he learned that day shattered his religious beliefs.

Would disclosure really precipitate a mass defection from churches and synagogues? Would the revelation of the existence of intelligent non-human beings operating spacecraft spell the end of faith in God and belief in the Bible? Such a revelation might shatter inflexible dogmas and rigid literalisms of Christian fundamentalism, and it might shake religious people to reinvestigate their faith and to pose some difficult questions, but for anyone sincerely seeking answers, the Bible has robust mystical and ontological foundations which allow plenty of room for a wide diversity of beings in the universe and interactions with non-human intelligence. Think about it for a second. The entire faith of the Bible is premised on the notion of contact with non-human intelligence: namely God. In addition to introducing us to the Supreme Being, the Bible quickly introduces us to angels, spiritual entities both malevolent and benign, and angelic beings that consort with humans to produce hybrids. All of that happens within the first six chapters of Genesis, and the Bible is just getting started at that point.

Ever since the UFO phenomenon first burst into the culture with its dramatic debut in the1947 UFO wave across North America, people have been pointing to parallels in the Bible. A day or so after wire services carried Kenneth Arnold’s report of a fleet of UFOs flying over Washington, Arnold received a phone call from a preacher in Texas who informed him that the objects he had seen were harbingers of the apocalypse and the end of the world. On June 30, 1947, the Associated Press carried a wire story to the same effect:

The end of the world is imminent, declared Rev. Lester Carlson, pastor of the Gospel Tabernacle Church in La Grande, after “flying saucers” were reported by several persons here Monday. The strange zooming objects, first reported zipping across south-western Washington, are the signs of the second coming of Christ, Rev. Carlson insisted. He said the millennium would come at any minute.

Eugene Register-Guard, Oregon – 30 Jun 47

Not coincidentally, the first official government investigation into the phenomenon, launched later that year, was dubbed “Project Sign,” an allusion to the signs and wonders anticipated at the end of the age. As flying saucers swept across America in 1947, and then again in 1952, many thoughtful Bible readers measured their arrival against the Bible’s predictions of signs of the end times. With the threat of nuclear war looming, the end of the world no longer seemed like a remote religious concept.

Bible readers also turned to the first chapter of Ezekiel where we see strange angelic beings described as “living creatures” sporting multiple faces. Ezekiel depicts them as pilots, so to speak, of a flying chariot carried by another type of angelic being called “wheels.” Porthole (“eyes”) run the circumference of the rims of the wheels, and the flying wheels seem to make abrupt 90-degree turns on the whim of the living creatures. It’s worth noting that Jewish angelology identifies three primary types of angels: living creatures (chayot) which are also called cherubim, wheels (ofanim), and burning ones (serafim).

Such associations inspired Billy Graham’s book Angels which suggests that some UFOs might be angelic visitors. The world-famous evangelist also maintained that God has filled his universe with life and that there are likely to be numerous planets inhabited by a variety of his creatures. In 2008, a Vatican press release considering the question stated that there is no conflict between believing in God and the possibility of “extraterrestrial brothers.”

Jewish mystical texts, such as the Zohar, make plenty of room for the other worldly. They speak of stars as conscious entities and report non-human beings that live (or once-lived) in remote places in the earth and in the depths of the earth. More than that, Judaism teaches that this universe is only one of four planes of existence created by God and that beings from higher worlds often descend to ours.

Religious people have also pointed toward the Bible’s demonology as an explanation for the phenomenon. Many UFO enthusiasts balk at the suggestion, but a surprising number of secular UFO researchers have reached the same or similar conclusions, suggesting that the phenomenon is created by so-called “interdimensional beings” and supernatural “tricksters” who only masquerade as extraterrestrials. Consider John Keel’s disturbing book Operation Trojan Horse where he demonstrates the devious, deceptive, and outright malevolent behavior of the phenomenon, or read Jacques Vallée’s Passport to Magonia in which he compares the phenomenon to the fairies, sprites, and spiritual tricksters of folklore. Consider also the so-called hitchhiker effect by which people who experience a UFO sighting or alien contact go on to experience poltergeist activity in their homes and other unwelcome spiritual phenomenon. Then there’s the association with the nighttime visitors (Greys in the bedroom), sleep paralysis (including unwelcome encounters with Greys, “The Hag,” and strange mantis creatures), and abduction stories about people taken against their will by UFO occupants (whether in the body or out of the body, I do not know) and subjected to a variety of traumatizing indignities. It doesn’t sound like the behavior of benevolent space brothers who have come to warn us about environmental damage and to save us from nuclear war, nor does it sound like the behavior of spiritual mentors who have come to help us evolve to a higher level of consciousness.

Abduction researcher Dr. Karla Turner stated in a 1995 Mufon lecture, “We do not know with any certainty exactly what the entities may be—extraterrestrial, interdimensional, terrestrial in origin, some combination of all of the above, something we have yet to even dream of … I am not inclined to believe they are from another planet, we just don’t know.” Nevertheless, Turner did know of what she spoke through bitter personal experience with the phenomenon. In her books and in the lecture, she raised serious concerns about the credibility of any information derived from the so-called aliens. Turner stated, “The aliens themselves have identified a number of different origins to various abductees and contactees throughout the years … At least some of the aliens are liars. Through the past decade, the aliens have made various predictions and promises and made a series of warnings about various impending events, documented since at least the 1950s, and you and I all know that … very few of these things, and none of great consequence, have ever come to pass.”

Indeed, those who have accepted the claims of non-human entities channeled through mediums and contactees have sometimes organized themselves into unhealthy UFO cults which tend toward disastrous consequences in the lives of the devotees, such as the ill-fated Heaven’s Gate. Far from a heightening of consciousness, the people involved in channeling communications from UFO entities seem to fare no better than old-fashioned occult dabblers who end up finding their lives and psyche entangled in spiritual malaise they cannot easily escape. It bears repeating that Hitler also took inspiration and direction from contact with non-human intelligence channeled through mediums. Should UFO occupants arrive making claims of a religious nature, why should they be trusted?

In any case, whether they be demons, angels, or otherwise, it’s fair to ask, “Who will be more ontologically prepared to deal with an official UFO Disclosure or contact scenario should it happen? People who hold a secular world view or people who hold a religious world view?”. If religious people truly believe in the existence of God, spirits, angels, demons, and the supernatural, they will find the transition into a post-disclosure worldview much less traumatic than the average secular person who will find himself or herself clinging by fingernails to a materialist reductionist reality which does not allow room for a world of being beyond the perception of the five senses.

The Judeo-Christian tradition does anticipate a coming apocalypse—a word that is popularly understood to mean “cataclysm” but actually means “revelation.” According to the religious worldview of the biblical prophets, the nations will go through a time of trauma, deception, and environmental tribulation before the great revelation of God that ushers in a future utopian era of true heightened spirituality, human brotherhood, and world peace. To anyone holding such a religious worldview, it takes no great leap of faith to wonder if the visitors, whatever they may be, are not harbingers of that coming day. Be they the malevolent servants of the anti-Christ, angelic messengers of the Almighty, or simply creatures from neighboring star systems, their dramatic appearance over the last seventy-six years certainly heralds the arrival of a great ontological shift but not necessarily one outside of the bounds of biblical revelation. Indeed, their flyovers and occasional landings have, thus far, proven far less dramatic than the anticipated coming of the Messiah and the sociological and ontological shock that His arrival is supposed to bring to the world. In that day, humanity will find itself reassessing its priorities as swords are indeed beaten into plowshares and our differences are set aside in favor of a universal fraternity and expanded consciousness under the heightened revelation of God. That’s what the Bible says.

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