UFO beliefs enter spiritual dimension

Some say aliens here to help -- or to hinder -- humans

For thousands of people, unidentified flying objects are more than strange lights in the sky: They fit into a millennial world view with a spiritual pedigree that goes back before biblical times.

MSNBC
By Alan Boyle

For Charles Spiegel of the Unarius Academy of Science, the UFO phenomenon heralds a 21st-century golden age, when extraterrestrial beings will invite Earth to join 32 other worlds in the Interplanetary Confederation.

"It’s preconditioning for that time when the spaceships will land, and you will see that they are human beings like you and me."

For Christian commentator Chuck Missler, unidentified flying objects portend something far darker: a sign that demonic forces are at work on Earth, just as they were in the days before the Deluge.

"These UFOs and these strange reports of abductions may be a prelude to all this happening again," he says. "There’s so much nonsense and weird stuff and also deliberate disinformation about all this. But something really is happening."

Fifty years after the first flying-saucer reports, even the skeptics have to concede that something is happening. Although there is not yet indisputable public proof that UFOs have visited Earth, pollsters say almost half of all Americans hold such a belief.

And for thousands of people like Spiegel and Missler, unidentified flying objects are more than strange lights in the sky: They fit into a millennial world view with a spiritual pedigree that goes back before biblical times.

Mixing millennialism, space beliefs and cult charisma can result in a deadly brew, as illustrated by the Heaven’s Gate suicides. Forty people took their lives in the belief that shedding their earthly containers would enable them to board an alien rescue craft headed for the "Next Level" of existence.

The religious connection between the Heaven’s Gate suicides and the UFO phenomenon rubs some investigators the wrong way.

"That was an embarrassment," says Walter Andrus, director of the Mutual UFO Network, the world’s largest UFO organization. "It was a religious cult. It wasn’t a UFO cult, it was a computer cult."

But skeptics, scholars and even some of Andrus’ ufological colleagues point to similarities between modern-day "close encounters" and the mystical experiences of past ages, between the flying-saucer stories of today’s technological society and the allegories of old.

The techno-theological debate is hitting hot buttons for religious believers, UFO believers, scientists and society at large. And whether or not the spaceships land in 2001, all sides agree that the controversy will only get hotter as the millennium approaches.