Could UFO's be a demonic deception ?

“In the end, the future may well be decided by the image which carries the greatest spiritual power.”

—Fred Polak, quoted in epigraph to Changing Images of Man put out by Stanford Research Institute,

Well, with the Pentagon set to release its info on UFO's 2020 is just getting odder. So I turn to ORTHODOXY and the Religion of the Future BY FR. SERAPHIM ROSE, which turned out to be quite prophetic, especially his chapter on UFO's.

Written in the 70's much since has happened, his contention that aliens may in fact be demons has been the conclusion now of three former chairmen of BUFORA - The British UFO Research Association, the largest UFO society - including the *founding President, Graham Knewstub, along with Capt Ivar Mackay and Roger Stanway, all becaming convinced that UFOs were of demonic origin.



Stanway resigned in 1976, explaining that he and his wife had become born-again Christian's and added: “…furthermore, I now believe that the UFO phenomenon has Satanic origins.”

Others believe the UFO phenomenon is a scientifically controlled artificial religion.

Looking back on Fr Seraphim's work, Hieromonk Damascene writes the following :

"In the area of UFOs, Fr. Seraphim’s conclusions have also been borne out by new developments....

With the experiences described by Whitley Strieber in his book Communion: A True Story (1987), the public has been shown that these so-called “visitors” are in fact cruel, malicious beings who wreak psychic havoc on those who contact them.

“I felt an indescribable sense of menace,” Strieber writes. “It was hell on earth to be there, and yet I couldn’t move, couldn’t cry out, and couldn’t get away. I lay as still as death, suffering inner agonies. Whatever was there seemed so monstrous and ugly, so filthy and dark and sinister....” Strieber also describes peculiar smells associated with his “visitors” — among them, a “sulfur-like” odor such as is mentioned when the ancient Lives of Saints speak of demonic encounters.

Since the publication of Communion, hundreds of thousands of UFO “abductees” have come forward with accounts of their contact with aliens.

Setting forth the evolutionist view that “we are passing into a great change of species,” Strieber writes: “As we express ourselves into the next age, we will come to a prime moment of this species, when mankind gains complete mastery over time and space and lifts his physical aspect into eternity, inducing the ascension of the whole species into a higher, freer, and richer level of being.... As mind frees itself from time and thus approaches singularity of consciousness, nations as we know them — directed by power politics, greed and lies — will end.”

Strieber sees this utopian dream being realized as mankind leaves behind the “the old hierarchies” of the past: “The absolute blackness of the past symbolizes the rigidly authoritarian nature of the past civilization. Indeed, its customs have echoed forward all the way to the present, where they persist still in our governments, our ritual-encrusted religions, and our moral lives with their emphasis on sin.”

As humanity abandons the “religious mythology” of those who “identify [aliens] with their version of demons,” it will become open to the “new world” offered by the visitors: “As we move into [the Age of] Aquarius, we do indeed see authority weakening in almost every human culture and institution. The new willingness to entertain notions like the presence of visitors and to largely reject the refusal of the old authorities to deal rationally with such matters signals a new eagerness to form opinions outside the traditional control mechanisms. As those mechanisms fade, the unknown uses their weakness to attempt to break through into the conscious world, and we find ourselves inundated with reports of UFOs, aliens, and all sorts of weird and wonderful things.”

In order to reconcile the obvious contradiction between the apparently sinister nature of the “visitors” and his own utopian ideas about aliens helping to usher in a New Age, Strieber attempts to blur the distinction between good and evil: “We live in an ethical and moral world that is like the ethical context of the [UFO] phenomenon, full of ambiguities, a place in which plain good and plain evil are rare.”

Strieber’s view, which is shared by many in today’s UFO network, is that the “visitors” are highly evolved beings which want us also to evolve — for their sake as well as ours. He speculates that, in their often terrifying encounters with humans, the visitors are exploiting us and at the same time “tempting” us to advance further in our evolution, to “close the gap” between us and them, so that we may “join [them] as a cosmic species”: in other words, that we may become like them. This, he says, “explains why many people are taken to an evolutionary edge in their experiences” of aliens.

Strieber notes that “In all the past fifty years, there has been no instance of the visitors directly adding resources. Nobody gets the plans to a starship. Nobody gets a map back to the home world. What we get instead are fear, confusion, cryptic messages, and a feeling of being pushed around — and the sense of something beyond price, lying just out of reach.... Rather than satisfying us, they are likely to tempt us further and further — with outrages, with dazzling displays, with promises — with whatever it takes.”

So, here are some portions of Fr Seraphim Rose's chapter on UFO's, and his case for calling them demons :

"....even if these experiences are not fully “real” (as objective phenomena in space and time), the very fact that so many of them have been “implanted” in human minds in recent years is already significant enough. Without doubt there issomething behind the “abduction” experiences also, and recently UFO investigators have begun to look in a different direction for an explanation of them.

Such experiences, and especially the “Close Encounters” of the 1970s, are noticeably bound up with “paranormal” or occult phenomena. People sometimes have strange dreams just before seeing UFOs, or hear knocks on the door when no one is there, or have strange visitors afterwards; some witnesses receive telepathic messages from UFO occupants. UFOs now sometimes simply materialize and dematerialize instead of coming and going at great speeds; sometimes “miraculous healings” occur in their presence or when one is exposed to their light. But “Close Encounters” with UFOs have also resulted in leukemia and radiation sickness; often there are tragic psychological effects: personality deterioration, insanity, suicide.

The increase of the “psychic component” in UFO sightings has led researchers to seek similarities between UFO experiences and occult phenomena, and to seek the key to understanding UFOs in the psychic effects they produce (The Invisible College, p. 29). Many researchers note the similarity between UFO phenomena and 19th-century spiritism, which also combined psychic phenomena with strange physical effects, but with a more primitive “technology.” In general, the 1970s have seen a narrowing of the gap between the “normal” UFO phenomena of the past and the UFO cults, in accordance with the increased receptivity of mankind in this decade to occult practices.




Explanation of the UFO Phenomena

Dr. Jacques Vallee’s newest book on UFOs, The Invisible College, reveals what reputable scientific researchers are now thinking about them. He believes that we are now “very close” to understanding what they are. He notes that the idea of “extraterrestrial” intelligent life has in a few years become astonishingly fashionable, among scientists as well as fortune tellers, as a result of “a great thirst for contact with superior minds that will provide guidance for our poor, harassed, hectic planet” (p. 195). He significantly sees that the idea of visitors from outer space has become the great myth or “wonderful untruth” of our times: “It has become very important for large numbers of people to expect visitors from outer space” (p. 207, emphasis in the original).

Yet he finds it naive to believe in this myth: “This explanation is too simple-minded to account for the diversity of the reported behavior of the occupants and their perceived interaction with human beings” (p. 27). Dr. Hynek has noted that in order to explain the various effects produced by UFOs, we must assume that they are “a phenomenon that undoubtedly has physical effects but also has the attributes of the psychic world” (The Edge of Reality, p. 259).

Dr. Vallee believes that “they are constructed both as physical craft (a fact which has long appeared to me undeniable) and as psychic devices, whose exact properties remain to be defined” (The Invisible College, p. 202, emphasis in the original). Actually, the theory that UFOs are not physical craft at all, but some kind of “paraphysical” or psychic phenomenon, was suggested by a number of researchers in the early 1950s; but this opinion was largely submerged later, on the one hand by the cultists, with their insistence on the “extraterrestrial” origin of UFOs, and on the other hand by the official government explanations, which corresponded to the widespread popular view that the whole phenomenon was imaginary (Keel, UFOs: Operation Trojan Horse, pp. 38–41). Only lately have serious investigators begun to agree that UFOs, while having certain “physical” characteristics, cannot at all be explained as somebody’s “space ships,” but are clearly something of the paraphysical or occult realm.

Why, indeed, are so many UFO “landings” precisely in the middle of roads? Why do such fantastically “advanced” craft so often need “repairs”? Why do the occupants so often need to pick up rocks and sticks (over and over again for twenty-five years!), and to “test” so many people — if they are actually reconnaissance vehicles from another planet, as the “humanoids” usually claim? Dr. Vallee well asks whether the “visitors from outer space” idea might not “serve precisely a diversionary role in masking the real, infinitely more complex nature of the technology that gives rise to the sightings?” (The Invisible College, p. 28).

He believes “we are not dealing with successive waves of visitations from space. We are dealing with a control system” (p. 195). “What takes place through close encounters with UFOs is control of human beliefs” (p. 3). “With every new wave of UFOs, the social impact becomes greater. More young people become fascinated with space, with psychic phenomena, with new frontiers in consciousness. More books and articles appear, changing our culture” (pp. 197–98). In another book he notes that “it is possible to make large sections of any population believe in the existence of supernatural races, in the possibility of flying machines, in the plurality of inhabited worlds, by exposing them to a few carefully engineered scenes, the details of which are adapted to the culture and superstitions of a particular time and place.”

An important clue to the meaning of these “engineered scenes” may be seen in an observation often made by careful observers of UFO phenomena, especially CE–III and “contactee” cases: that they are profoundly “absurd,” or contain at least as much absurdity as rationality (Vallee, The Invisible College, p. 196). Individual “Close Encounters” have absurd details, like the four pancakes given by a UFO occupant to a Wisconsin chicken farmer in 1961;23 more significantly, the encounters themselves are strangely pointless, without clear purpose or meaning.

A Pennsylvania psychiatrist has suggested that the absurdity present in almost all UFO close encounters is actually a hypnotic technique. “When the person is disturbed by the absurd or contradictory, and their mind is searching for meaning, they are extremely open to thought transference, to receiving psychic healing, etc.” (The Invisible College, p. 115). Dr. Vallee compares this technique to the irrational koans of Zen Masters (p. 27), and notices the similarity between UFO encounters and occult initiation rituals which “open the mind” to a “new set of symbols” (p. 117). All of this points to what he calls “the next form of religion” (p. 202).

Thus, UFO encounters are but a contemporary form of an occult phenomenon which has existed throughout the centuries. Men have abandoned Christianity and look for “saviours” from outer space, and therefore the phenomenon supplies images of spacecraft and space beings. But what is this phenomenon? Who is doing the “engineering,” and to what purpose?




Today’s investigators have already supplied the answers to at least the first two questions, although, being without competence in the realm of religious phenomena, they do not fully understand the significance of what they have found. One investigator, Brad Steiger, an Iowa college professor who has written several books on the subject, after a recent detailed study of the Air Force “Blue Book” files, concluded: “We are dealing with a multi-dimensional paraphysical phenomenon, which is largely indigenous to planet earth” (Canadian UFO Report, Summer, 1977).

Drs. Hynek and Vallee have advanced the hypothesis of “earth-bound aliens” to account for UFO phenomena, and speculate on “interlocking universes” right here on earth from which they might come, much as “poltergeists” produce physical effects while remaining themselves invisible. John Keel, who began his UFO investigation as a skeptic and is himself an agnostic in religion, writes:

“The real UFO story...is one of ghosts and phantoms and strange mental aberrations; of an invisible world which surrounds us and occasionally engulfs us.... It is a world of illusion... where reality itself is distorted by strange forces which can seemingly manipulate space, time, and physical matter — forces which are almost entirely beyond our powers of comprehension.... The UFO manifestations seem to be, by and large, merely minor variations of the age-old demonological phenomenon” (UFOs: Operation Trojan Horse, pp. 46, 299).

In a recent bibliography of UFO phenomena prepared by the Library of Congress for the United States Air Force Office of Scientific Research, the introduction states that “Many of the UFO reports now being published in the popular press recount alleged incidents that are strikingly similar to demonic possession and psychic phenomena which have long been known to theologians and parapsychologists.”Most UFO researchers are now turning to the occult realm and to demonology for insight into the phenomena they are studying.

Several recent studies of UFOs, by evangelical Protestants, put all this evidence together and come to the conclusion that UFO phenomena are simply and precisely demonic in origin.25 The Orthodox Christian investigator can hardly come to a different conclusion. Some or many of the experiences, it may be, are the result of hoaxes or hallucinations; but it is simply impossible to dismiss all of the many thousands of UFO reports in this way. A great number of modern mediums and their spiritistic phenomena are also fraudulent; but mediumistic spiritism itself, when it is genuine, undeniably produces real “paranormal” phenomena under the action of demons. UFO phenomena, having the same source, are no less real.

People who have actually contacted the UFO beings have much worse experiences; the beings sometimes literally “possess” them and try to kill them when they resist (UFOs: A Better Explanation, pp. 298–305). Such cases effectively remind us that, quite apart from the meaning of UFO phenomena as a whole, each UFO “Close Encounter” has the specific purpose of deceiving the individual who is contacted and leading him, if not to further “contacts” and spreading of the UFO “message,” then at least to personal spiritual confusion and disorientation.

The most puzzling aspect of UFO phenomena to most researchers — namely, the strange mingling of physical and psychic characteristics in them — is no puzzle at all to readers of Orthodox spiritual books, especially the Lives of Saints. Demons also have “physical bodies,” although the “matter” in them is of such subtlety that it cannot be perceived by men unless their spiritual “doors of perception” are opened, whether with God’s will (as in the case of holy men) or against it (as in the case of sorcerers and mediums).26

Orthodox literature has many examples of demonic manifestations which fit precisely the UFO pattern: apparitions of “solid” beings and objects (whether demons themselves or their illusionary creations) which suddenly “materialize” and “dematerialize,” always with the aim of awing and confusing people and ultimately leading them to perdition. The Lives of the 4th-century St. Anthony the Great and the 3rd-century St. Cyprian the Former Sorcerer are filled with such incidents.

It is clear that the manifestations of today’s “flying saucers” are quite within the “technology” of demons; indeed, nothing else can explain them as well. The multifarious demonic deceptions of Orthodox literature have been adapted to the mythology of outer space, nothing more; the Anatolius mentioned above would be known today simply as a “contactee.” And the purpose of the “unidentified” object in such accounts is clear: to awe the beholders with a sense of the “mysterious,” and to produce “proof “ of the “higher intelligences” (“angels,” if the victim believes in them, or “space visitors” for modern men), and thereby to gain trust for the message they wish to communicate. We shall look at this message below.



The Meaning of UFOs

What, then, is the meaning of the UFO phenomena of our time? Why have they appeared just at this time in history? What is their message? To what future do they point?

First, UFO phenomena are but one part of an astonishing outpouring of “paranormal” events — what just a few years ago most people would have considered as “miracles.” Dr. Vallee, in The Invisible College, expresses the secular appreciation of this fact: “Observations of unusual events suddenly loom into our environment by the thousands” (p. 87), causing “a general shifting of man’s belief patterns, his entire relationship to the concept of the invisible” (p. 114). “Something is happening to human consciousness” (p. 34); the same “powerful force [that] has influenced the human race in the past is again influencing it now”

In Christian language this means: a new demonic outpouring is being loosed upon mankind. In the Christian apocalyptic view (see the end of this book), we can see that the power which until now has restrained the final and most terrible manifestation of demonic activity on earth has been taken away (II Thess. 2:7), Orthodox Christian government and public order (whose chief representative on earth was the Orthodox emperor) and the Orthodox Christian worldview no longer exist as a whole, and satan has been “loosed out of his prison,” where he was kept by the grace of the Church of Christ, in order to “deceive the nations” (Apoc. 20:7–8) and prepare them to worship antichrist at the end of the age. Perhaps never since the beginning of the Christian era have demons appeared so openly and extensively as today. The “visitors from outer space” theory is but one of the many pretexts they are using to gain acceptance for the idea that “higher beings” are now to take charge of the destiny of mankind.

Second, UFOs are but the newest of the mediumistic techniques by which the devil gains initiates into his occult realm. They are a terrible sign that man has become susceptible to demonic influence as never before in the Christian era. In the 19th century it was usually necessary to seek out dark séance rooms in order to enter into contact with demons, but now one need only look into the sky (usually at night, it is true).

Mankind has lost what remained of basic Christian understanding up to now, and now passively places itself at the disposal of whatever “powers” may descend from the sky. The new film, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, is a shocking revelation of how superstitious “post-Christian” man has become — ready in an instant and unquestioningly to believe and follow hardly- disguised demons wherever they might lead.

Third, the “message” of the UFOs is: prepare for anti-christ; the “saviour” of the apostate world is coming to rule it. Perhaps he himself will come in the air, in order to complete his impersonation of Christ (Matt. 24:30; Acts 1:11); perhaps only the “visitors from outer space” will land publicly in order to offer “cosmic” worship of their master; perhaps the “fire from heaven” (Apoc. 13:13) will be only a part of the great demonic spectacles of the last times. At any rate, the message for contemporary mankind is: expect deliverance, not from the Christian revelation and faith in an unseen God, but from vehicles in the sky.

It is one of the signs of the last times that there shall be terrors and great signs from heaven (Luke 21:11). Even a hundred years ago Bishop Ignatius Brianchaninov, in his book On Miracles and Signs (Yaroslavl, 1870, reprinted by Holy Trinity Monastery, Jordanville, New York, 1960), remarked on “the striving to be encountered in contemporary Christian society to see miracles and even perform miracles.... Such a striving reveals the self-deception, founded on self-esteem and vainglory, that dwells in the soul and possesses it” (p. 32). True wonderworkers have decreased and grown extinct, but people “thirst for miracles more than ever before.... We are gradually coming near to the time when a vast arena is to be opened up for numerous and striking false miracles, to draw to perdition those unfortunate offspring of fleshly wisdom who will be seduced and deceived by these miracles” (pp. 48–49).

Of special interest to UFO investigators, “the miracles of antichrist will be chiefly manifested in the aerial realm, where satan chiefly has his dominion. The signs will act most of all on the sense of sight, charming and deceiving it. St. John the Theologian, beholding in revelation the events that are to precede the end of the world, says that antichrist will perform great signs, and will even make fire to come down out of heaven upon the earth in the sight of men (Apoc. 13:13). This is the sign indicated by Scripture as the highest of the signs of antichrist, and the place of this sign is the air; it will be a splendid and terrible spectacle”

Even the secular investigators of UFO phenomena have seen fit to warn people against their dangers. John Keel, for example, writes: “Dabbling with UFOs can be as dangerous as dabbling with black magic. The phenomenon preys upon the neurotic, the gullible, and the immature. Paranoid schizophrenia, demonomania, and even suicide can result — and has resulted in a number of cases. A mild curiosity about UFOs can turn into a destructive obsession.

We live near the end of this fearful age of demonic triumph and rejoicing, when the eerie “humanoids” (another of the masks of the demons) have become visible to thousands of people and by their absurd encounters take possession of the souls of those men from whom God’s grace has departed. The UFO phenomenon is a sign to Orthodox Christians to walk all the more cautiously and soberly on the path to salvation, knowing that we can be tempted and seduced not merely by false religions, but even by seemingly physical objects which just catch the eye."