The Gods Have Landed

355 Pages·1995·24.056 MB·English

by  James R. Lewis (Editor)

THE GODS
HAVE LANDED
New Religions
from Other Worlds
Edited by
James R. Lewis
State University of New York Press
THE GODS
HAVE LANDED
Published by
State University of New York Press, Albany
© 1995 State University of New York
All rights reserved
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
The Gods have landed: new religions from other worlds / edited by
James R. Lewis.
p. cm.
Includes bibliogrClphical references and index.
ISBN 0-7914:2.;329-8 (hc: al~. paper)_.-ISBN 0-7914-2330-1 (pb:
a lk . paper) '. ., ,(" '. 011,· l.. '
1. U:1)~d,~ntified flying object cults. 2. Unidentified flying
object cults-United States. 3. Unidentified flying objects
-Religious aspects. 4. United States-Religion-20th century.
I. Lewis, James R.
BP605. U526 1995
299-dc20 94-10333
CIP
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2
CONTENTS
List of Illustrations vii
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction xi
1. The Contactees: A Survey 1
J. Gordon Melton
2. Religious Dimensions of UFO Phenomena 15
John A. Saliba
3. Religious Dimensions of the UFO Abductee Experience 65
John Whitmore
4. Unarius: Emergent Aspects of an
American Flying Saucer Group 85
Diana Tumminia and R. George Kirkpatrick
5. Women in the Raelian Movement:
New Religious Experiments in Gender and Authority 105
Susan Jean Palmer
6. Waiting for the Ships: Disillusionment and the
Revitalization of Faith in Bo and Peep's UFO Cult 137
Robert W. Balch
7. Spiritualism and UFO Religion in New Zealand:
The International Transmission of
Modern Spiritual Movements 167
Robert S. Ellwood
vi THE GODS HAVE LANDED
8. Exo-Theology: Speculations on Extraterrestrial Life 187
Ted Peters
9. UFO Contactee Phenomena from a
Sociopsychological Perspective: A Review 207
John A. Saliba
10. The Flying Saucer Contactee Movement, 1950-1994:
A Bibliography 251
]. Gordon Melton and George M. Eberhart
Index 333
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
Figure 1. Fate Magazine Cover 67
Figure 2. Ruth Norman (Uriel) 87
Figure 3. Prophecy 2001 91
Figure 4. Unarius students 95
Figure 5. The "Cosmic Generator" 98
Figure 6. Rael's Embassy to the Elohim 108
Figure 7. Transmission of the Cellular Code 109
Figure 8. Sensual Meditation 111
Figure 9. RaeI's Students 121
Figure 10. Claude Verilhon (Rae!) 131
Figure 11. UFO Flyer 146
Figure 12. 80 and Peep 147
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
First of all, I would like to thank my wife Eve for her loving sup
port, both for myself and for this project. Second, I would like to thank
Charles H. Long for his continuing interest in this wayward student.
Third, I would like to thank J. Gordon Melton, colleague and friend,
who originally sparked my interest in UFO religion. Fourth, a special
word of thanks to the contributors: Without their dedication to rigorous,
creative scholarship this volume could never have come into being.
Thanks to the University of Hawaii Press for permission to use
Robert S. Ellwood's "Spiritualism and UFO Religion in New Zealand/'
the substance of which was incorporated into UHP's Islands of the Dawn:
The Story of Alternative Spirituality in New Zealand. Thanks also to J.
Gordon Melton and George M. Eberhart for permission to use liThe
Contactees: A Survey" and "The Flying Saucer Contactee Movement."
Finally, I would like to acknowledge that earlier versions of George
Kirkpatrick and Diana Tumminia's "Unarius: Emergent Aspects of an
American Flying Saucer Group/' John A. Saliba's "UFO Contactee
Phenomena from a Sociopsychological Perspective/' and Susan Jean
Palmer's "Women in the Raelian Movement" appeared in Syzygy:
Journal of Alternative Religion and Culture.
INTRODUCTION
On the morning of the third day there were thunders and
lightnings, and a thick cloud upon the mountain. All of the
people in camp heard a sound like a loud trumpet blast, and
trembled. Then Moses brought the people out of camp to
meet God, and they took their stand at the foot of the moun
tain. Mount Sinai was wrapped in smoke, because the Lord
was descending upon it in fire. The smoke of it went up like
the smoke of a furnace, and the whole mountain quaked. As
the sound grew louder and louder, Moses spoke, and God
answered him in thunder. And the Lord landed upon Mount
Sinai.
-Exodus 19:16-20
While the tale of Moses' encounter with Yahweh is familiar to
everyone raised in the Judeo-Christian religious tradition, few would
COlU1ect that story with contemporary interest in UFOs. Yet it is not dif
ficult to see how one might interpret the above passage as describing
the landing of some great spaceship on Mt. Sinai. Utilizing suggestive
narratives about sky gods from the Bible and from many other reli
gious and cultural traditions, a popular writer by the name of Erich
von Daniken theorized that the "chariots of the gods" described in
ancient mythology were really the space vessels of an extraterrestrial
race concerned with the fate of humanity. While von Daniken's specu
lations have been severely criticized, it is nevertheless clear that his
ideas struck a respondent cord in the public imagination. The signifi
cance of the cOlU1ections he perceived may, however, lie in precisely
the opposite direction from what he theorized. Let us, therefore, invert
von Daniken's hermeneutic and consider how a religious tradition
emphasizing sky gods might influence one to invest religious signifi
cance in the contemporary phenomenon of unidentified flying objects.
xii THE GODS HAVE LANDED
Historically, the human race has derived spiritual meaning from
every dimension of the environment. For reasons that are too complex
to develop in this short space, the Western religious tradition desacral
ized the Earth, and came to imagine God as residing in the sky. The
celestial abode of the Deity is clear from certain events in Jesus' ministry
as recorded in the Gospels. The many relevant incidents include:
1. His reference to God as "Our Father who art in Heaven."
2. The Holy Spirit's descent from the sky following Jesus' baptism.
3. His return to the heavens after leaving his disciples in the book of
Acts.
These are only a few examples of a marked tendency in the Old and
New Testaments to portray divinity as being somehow "located" in the
sky. To recast this observation in more contemporary terms, we might
say that the deity of Western religions is-in some sense-an "extrater
restrial" being. There are, however, many other characteristics of UFOs
that link them to the religious consciousness.
One of the classics of religious phenomenology is Rudolf Otto's
The Idea of the Holy. In this work, Otto carefully distinguishes funda
mental religious experience-humanity's naked confrontation with the
Sacred-from the other components of religion, and then proceeds to
analyze this primordial experience into component parts. According to
Otto, one encounters the Sacred as a powerful, alien reality that does not
belong to the world of ordinary human existence. This experience
encompasses components of both fear and attraction: The Sacred simul
taneously repels and fascinates; it is "uncanny" and "awesome." The
Sacred is also mysterious-something we cannot grasp with our ratio
nal minds, yet which we endlessly attempt to understand.
The parallels between religious experience and UFO experiences
are clear enough. UFOs are uncanny and mysterious. If the reader has
seen the movie Close Encol/nters of the Third Kind, she or he will recall the
climactic final scene in which the mother ship appears: This enormous
piece of alien machinery is experienced by the gathered officials and
technicians as both beautiful and frightful-an incomprehensibly awe
some power before which they feel like helpless children. This is pre
cisely the kind of encounter that Otto characterizes as religious.
That flying saucers and their inhabitants have come to be invested
with religious meaning should not, therefore, be surprising. This reli
gious meaning can be manifested overtly in such explicitly religious
organizations as the Unarians and the Raelians (described elsewhere
in the present volume). It can also be manifested less obviously, in the