The Alien/UFO Invasion is Real, and It's Succeeding Right Now
What if the real demonic attack was the curiosity we made along the way?
The idea that aliens and UFO sightings are but demonic deceptions is so obvious to conservative Christians that it is pointless to merely repeat that claim and add yet another article like Declan Leary’s piece at The American Conservative’s piece or Charles Gray’s or my own views on the topic from last summer I expressed while reviewing Diana Walsh Pasulka’s American Cosmic.
A Review of American Cosmic by Diana Walsh Pasulka
This is probably not a book to read if your faith is weak, even if it concludes with the story of a “conversion.”
In this ever-popular view right now, alien encounters, UFO sightings, and abductions are merely the way that demonic beings appear and bewitch people now, in contrast to an earlier choice of appearing as ghosts, goblins, monsters, witches on broomsticks.
As The American Conservative argued almost two years ago:
A new look does not necessarily mean new substance. This is the sense a discerning reader takes away from the more detailed alien stories, such as Whitley Strieber’s Communion. And is it not a more reasonable explanation than the proposition that a class of beings known for all of history as supernatural masters of deception should reveal their true selves to us now that we have figured out jet propulsion? But since the dawn of man there have been hostile powers and strange sights in the heavens, and an existential need to reckon with them both.
There remains a real, and as Pasulka makes clear, open question as to the material physicality of UFOs and aliens. As Mark Bisone argues, perhaps it is also not merely simple as demons manipulating our minds and imaginations. Mark’s speculative piece argues for a material reality behind UFOs, that is, they are real machines built and operated by rational animals like ourselves but ones who are not part of our normal human community. For him, these are physical beings but ones who have put themselves into a real alliance with or are controlled by demonic powers. In other words, we might say a lost civilization of men living underwater who have advanced technology while (or perhaps because of) worshipping the devil and doing his bidding to
Others might be less willing to go this far and instead think that UFOs and aliens while being demonic deceptions, are purely spiritual in their origin. Hugh Ross of Reasons to Believe thinks that UFOs, even if they leave physical effects such as radar data, visible sightings by hundreds of people at once, and even physical injuries, have no physical reality behind them but are merely demons attempting to trick us.
I tend towards Mark Bisone’s interpretation and am even open a little, although skeptical, of C.S. Lewis’ view that God could have created other living beings elsewhere in space.
But this all begs the question of course of what they want. If aliens and UFO sightings are demons, what are they trying to deceive us toward? What do they want out of us? Why as Leary continues, all this “flit[ting] about their skies—usually in dark, and never in the same place twice”?
Worship of them rather than God is one obvious answer, and yes there are many literal alien/demon-worshipping cults out there as my friends at Conspiracy Pilled regularly cover on their podcast.
The idea that we will consider these apparitions to be the work of an advanced alien civilization out there in space that wants to save us, and thereby look to “them” rather than God for moral and political guidance is another. Perhaps their goal is to lead us to disbelieve in God or in Christianity somehow.
But with all these, surely they’d be a little more efficient about it. Why flit around and be seen by a lot of people but not get to their point very often?
What if, instead, the mere fact that talk of aliens and UFOs are in the zeitgeist is their mission? If so, they’ve already achieved it.
Let’s consider the possibility that there are no physical UFO craft out there, no physical alien beings serving the wishes of demons, and that all sightings, such as the famous military encounters (and videos) of Ryan Graves and David Fravor, are mere demonic tricks acting upon the mind of a few individuals.
As is obvious, I’ve noticed that I can’t help being intrigued by the topic of aliens and UFOs. No matter how “kooky” the topic may still officially be, most of us probably have to admit that it grabs our attention as well. I’m not really sure how or why, but the fact that there have been multiple congressional hearings by military officer whistleblowers about secret government programs looking into all this shows that they are interested to.
On this level, it doesn’t matter if UFOs are real or not, or in what way they are real. We’re already being conditioned to act as if they are real. And this has real, physical consequences.
Take the French scientist Jacques Vallée who has worked on multiple private and public programs relating to UFOs, alien sightings, and other paranormal claims ever since he had an apparent sighting as a young boy back in 1955. Vallée claims in interviews to be skeptical and does have some very good arguments about how many apparent radar sightings of anomalous fast-moving objects could be due to deception and spoofing of radar technology, although he points to
But Vallée also speaks about how at one point in his life, he performed, out of “interest” some sort of mental ritual process for encouraging an encounter, and suddenly, in some difficult-to-describe way, was transported out of his body and brought into an encounter with a black glowing rectangular entity.1
He admits terror and has not repeated his “process” since. His explanation only encourages, alongside the stories told in Diana Pasulka’s book and those by Lue Elizondo, the interpretation that this is all demonic in nature.
But the element of curiosity here is what interests me most. Vallée only had this demonic experience because he had already given over most of his life to studying UFOs. So also with Lue Elizondo and his reports of glowing orbs oppressing and attacking him and his family in his home as soon as he began his government position studying UFOs. And likely so also is the case with David Grusch. Even Tucker Carlson, who has done a lot to “mainstream” the topic of UFOs over the last few years, reported a literal physical “attack.”2
And so also, albeit in a lesser way, have many of us out of mere interest and curiosity.
What if this was always the goal in the first place?
Our interest and quasi-belief in such things exert force and influence over others. The more that people believe in these “encounters”, and that they are communications of some sort of knowledge or wisdom, regardless of what one thinks about their real physicality, the more also are others pressured and subtlety persuaded to accept UFOs and aliens as just another part of the world. Not only might this pressure persuade us to believe that we have encountered something when we might not have, but we’re also being slowly domesticated and trained by the cultural pressure into expecting to see them. Not only that, but many of us are devoting serious time and attention to examining the possibilities, investigating reports, and even trying to reconcile UFOs with Scripture, with theology (e.g. how would redemption work), etc.
Perhaps there is, as Rod Dreher has been warning for a while, a secondary plan to bring many of us into full-on worship of the beings behind these things. As he points out in a recent essay, and as is very clear from watching the normalization of psychedelics, mystical meditation, and general occult stuff, this plan is already very well in motion both upon individuals and also, in the general, mimetic sense, of shifting the perception of our desires towards the occult.
Perhaps these two plans will merge into one someday.
I’ve wondered—fearfully—for a while whether the ultimate demonic deception will be a demonic parody of the Incarnation connected to UFOs, whereby the devil attempts to physically, and publically manifest himself and demand worship from a conditioned acclimatized public. Such was to be the epic conclusion of a fictional series of tales I mapped out and started to write, but got next to nowhere on as soon as I got distracted by history and philosophy rather than science fiction.
Even if something like this is the devil’s plan, he’s succeeded even before we’re at that point. Not ultimately and strategically, of course, but he’s won a tactical victory.
As a young child, having read of St. John Vianney’s wrestling with the devil and the similar stories of the Desert Fathers I grew up thinking, “I don’t want to be that holy, I’d be too scared to be able to handle that.”
But I’ve since realized that perhaps the demonic attacks and deceptions are more insidious or at least not always as profound. In one moment of curiosity when I was nine years old while staying at a friend’s house when one of my younger siblings was being born, I picked up a book of ghost stories off their shelf.
For several weeks thereafter, every time I tried to go to bed I heard, felt, or in some way, sensed a loud pulsing, buzzing noise all about me, felt cold all over, and was covered in goosebumps with a penetrating, all-encompassing feeling of terror.
That is until I asked my father for help. Seemingly without even having to stop and think, he picked out a few Psalms for me to pray when this was happening, I can’t remember exactly which, but possibly Psalm 7, 90, and 133 based on the context, but I did as he suggested for a few nights, and the problem immediately went away.
Of course, you’re probably thinking, “You were 9, you just scared yourself,” and yes. But what if the other interpretation that my curiosity had opened a door for some dark power to afflict me? Or said yet another way, perhaps I had for a time lost an inner peace that comes from the relationship to God and was being afflicted by what is outside him. I’ve had many lesser experiences like that since while doing nightly lock-up security patrols as part of a previous job I held, whereby, for me, the task was like doing an “examination of conscience.” If I was at peace and in a state of charity with regard to God and those around me, it would be easy that night, and if I was not, I’d be in a state of fear and terror for large parts of the late-night job.
Many others have stories like these. Yes, they’re anecdotal. But they had real effects because of how I acted based on said fear and said perceptions.
When we wonder how the devil is trying to attack and set us apart from God, it’s not always in the grand stories of spiritual combat like that again of St. John Vianney. Most of the time it’s in far smaller, far subtler ways. Demons can probably do more grandiose things to you and perform greater signs and wonders in the world. But their primary mode of attack is through our minds and hearts. If they can use an easier shortcut and take us over through our minds because we’re curious one day, they will. They’re demons, they’re probably lazy after all.
The best response to my childhood fear of being holy for fear of whatever spiritual combat it might entail was that it wasn’t some wild new thing that was going to start happening to me one day. In that particular set of incidents at the age of nine, and in smaller ways since it already had started. The best course of action was to solve the problem and battle right before me and turn towards prayer.
Perhaps the best way of saying this is that the fear I felt toward the possibility of some grander demonic manifestation, apparition, etc. WAS the real attack. That fear took away my peace, and set me away from the love of God, and the love of the love of God. That fear then and the time I spent dwelling on it was the real attack.
Much the same is possibly the case with aliens and UFOs.
Aliens and UFOs are probably not real in the strictest of senses. But as the demonic deceptions they most likely are, they’re already physically affecting us by changing our behavior, attracting our interest, and in doing so, distracting us from the spiritual battle that we already know is out there. By focusing on UFOs and aliens, pondering what they are, how real they are, and what their goal is, we possibly even help them succeed by distracting ourselves further from what we already know we have to do. And at this goal, even if there is some deeper, darker plan set for the future, they’ve already succeeded.
I’m not necessarily saying we should not think or read at all about this topic. I am still open to something like the more physicalist interpretation of
. But even if he’s right, it remains, both ultimately and primarily, at least according to current evidence and its indications, a spiritual battle. At this, evidenced again by those like Vallée who have been sucked into the topic to the seeming detriment of their eternal well-being, we at least must not let our interest in exactly how the enemy works and how it operates distract us from fighting it.Just be forewarned, unless you are doubly on your guard,3 your interest and belief in them gives them power over you.
Jacques Vallée Interview
And of course not you alone, but that you are on your guard by being close to God.
Good stuff. Thanks for the mention.
My initial thoughts run to my (bloody, lethal) experiments with ChatGPT, and how I was able to trip it up with certain ontic traps. "Real" versus "not-real" was a recurrent theme, because these are much trickier concepts than they appear to be at first glance. The machine dug around for analogies, but could only reproduce materialist dichotomies (e.g. physical/non-physical, material/immaterial, factual/fictional, etc.) Dangerous terrain, for a thing that's been designed to simulate a mind. But dangerous terrain for actual minds, too.
Without delving into my own cosmology, I can say that my essay about "aliens" was more of an extended thought experiment than a specific claim about origin. I do think what I wrote is a possible -- and maybe even the likely -- explanation for the evidence, but the point I was trying to make was more about the deception itself, which you do a very good job of exploring here. Illusions are primary weapons of Evil. That's not the same as saying the entities who wield them aren't real. any more than we could claim the magician on the stage isn't real.
As you mention, the most important illusion isn't flying pottery or little grey men. Those could be manifested in "normal" material structure just the same as any other consciousness The trick -- just like the trick on the stage -- is inherent in the misdirection. We are trained and groomed to look up instead of down, look right instead of left. Or, in many cases, to look both ways until we're cross-eyed and dizzy.
In any case, I agree that the other component of the spell is the attention magnet, of the kind that turns mere curiosity into obsession, fear, paranoia. Or, even worse, into foolish reverence for the devil's latest toys and puppets. It happens with politicians too, and with ideologies. If something is occupying a huge slice of your time and attention with no benefits to reap and no actionable knowledge gained, that's likely a signal that you're being somehow deceived and misled, by someone or something that doesn't have your best interests at heart (to say the least).
Excellent article.
A very prominent occultist named Alice Bailey wrote an influential book called, ‘The Reappearance of the Christ.’
Her thesis was very similar to your own, which is that the devil will mock the incarnation of the real Christ by becoming physically manifest as “Jesus.”
He will be the “second coming” of Christ, performing miracles and bringing the world together in peace through a Christ consciousness of inclusive love. Real Christians (paulites as she calls true believers) will be eliminated because they will know the deception.
It’s a very interesting read, and perhaps an accurate account of what will occur.
But you’re right, we need to focus on Him, not the enemy.