“Our So-Called Galactic Brothers”

I had thought of entitling this piece “About UFOs”, but then quickly reconsidered, not wanting to blow all my credibility before anyone had begun reading it.  This piece is an unabashed and unapologetic rip-off of a chapter in Rod Dreher’s new book Living in Wonder in which chapter he deals with UFO phenomena and its current significance.  This chapter (along with a previous one dealing with the dangers of the occult and, come to that, the entire book) should be required reading by all seminarians and pastors today.  If you have read the book and the chapter on UFOs, consider this something of a précis.

       Like Dreher I would like to begin by confessing that I had never given much thought to UFOs.  If pressed for my opinion I would have said that if such phenomena were real they were manifestations of the demonic, as the demons masked themselves as aliens from outer space.  As anecdotal evidence I remember my (then) deacon share the story that his own father had seen a UFO tracking him when he was driving, and that it vanished when his dad invoked the Name of Jesus.  But mostly I didn’t take such things very seriously and I chalked up most of the reports of abductees to the ravings of strange people or to the unreliability of the internet world.  I did like watching The X-Files but realized that I was watching fiction.  Mulder’s wall poster proclaiming “I Want To Believe” (inset above) was amusing.  But it was television after all and I didn’t take the subject any more seriously than the old idiotic book Chariots of the Gods? by Erich von Daniken.  

       Imagine my surprise when I learned that many intelligent, educated, important, wealthy, and influential people did take UFOs seriously.  They did not believe that the UFOs contained aliens from another planet, but they did believe that they were manifestations of higher intelligences coming to us from a dimension beyond time and space.  Such was the view of Jacques Vallee, a computer scientist and venture capitalist.  Late Harvard psychiatrist John Mack also took seriously stories of UFOs and he spoke of “phenomena that can begin in the unseen realm and cross over and manifest and show up in our literal physical world” (from his interview in Nova 1995).  So did Diana Pasulka, a practising Catholic who has written two books on the subject, American Cosmic and Encounters.  So did the late Michael Heiser, a Biblical scholar who strongly believed in the reality of UFOs and their demonic origin.  Perhaps more significantly, there have been hearings on Capitol Hill in Washington, revealing that the US government has been covering up information about UFOs (now re-named UAPs or “unidentified anomalous phenomena”).  

So belief that UFOs were real is being taken seriously by important and serious people.  Who knew?  To quote Dreher: “Some of the world’s top scientist and tech pioneers believe that extraterrestrial intelligences are passing technological information to us”.  The malevolent intention of those intelligences is not always discerned.

       It is hard not to think that the late Fr. Seraphim Rose is smiling from heaven and saying something like, “I told you so!”  In his 1975 book Orthodoxy and the Religion of the Future Rose predicted such things and wrote that “the manifestations of today’s ‘flying saucers’ is quite within the ‘technology’ of demons…The multifarious demonic deceptions [documented in] Orthodox literature have been adapted to the mythology of outer space”.  He also wrote that such phenomena “prepare for antichrist, the ‘saviour’ of the apostate world [who is] coming to rule it”.

       The Antichrist, the final culmination of demonic opposition to God whose appearance heralds the end of the age, has been expected by the Church since the days of St. Paul.  Paul wrote about him, calling him “the man of lawlessness” in his second Epistle to the Thessalonians.  There he wrote that the Antichrist “opposes and exalts himself against every so-called god or object of worship, so that he takes his seat in the temple of God, proclaiming himself as being God…the lawless one will be revealed, whom the Lord Jesus will slay with the breath of His mouth and bring to an end by the appearance of His Coming. The coming of the lawless one is by the activity of Satan with all power and false signs and wonders, and with all wicked deception for those who are perishing, because they refused to love the truth and so be saved. Therefore God sends them a strong delusion, so that they may believe what is false, in order that all may be condemned who did not believe the truth but had pleasure in unrighteousness.”

       The final Antichrist will therefore find a warm welcome in the world, since not only will he be accompanied by “false signs and wonders”, but the majority of the population will succumb to strong delusion since their hearts were primed to accept the lies.  

       The Didache, a church document dating from about 100 A.D., concluded with the same warning:  “In the last days the false prophets and corrupters will abound…And then the world deceiver will appear as a son of God and will perform signs and wonders and the earth will be delivered into his hand…Then mankind will come to the fiery test and many will fall away and perish” (chapter 16).

       Let us ask a (perhaps) theoretical question:  if creatures from UFOs appeared and told the world that this man wanting to rule the earth was true and good and genuine and the fulfillment of all human hope and aspiration, and if they threw their supernatural support behind him and performed miracles to vindicate his claims to be the Son of God, what do you think the result would be?

 A big “if”, I know.  But let’s ask anyway.  If the Antichrist appeared as the final climax and pinnacle of human progress, the next glorious step in human evolution, the inevitable and hoped for fusion of technology and supernatural reality, people would believe the testimony of the other worldly visitors and accept the Antichrist.

The Antichrist would be, in fact, a materialist magician, uniting in himself the materialist hopes for technology and AI with the dazzling and enchanted experiences offered by supernatural powers—and all of it happily free from any involvement with the Christian God.  The fusion would be irresistible. 

Even C. S. Lewis (d. 1963) foresaw this development fusing materialism with magic.  In his Screwtape Letters, Lewis had Screwtape write to his junior apprentice demon, “If once we can produce our perfect work — the Materialist Magician, the man, not using, but veritably worshipping, what he vaguely calls ‘Forces’ while denying the existence of ‘spirits’ — then the end of the war will be in sight.”  In other words, the modern war against the Christian faith is heading towards a situation wherein man worships supernatural forces while disbelieving in demons.  This corresponds precisely to how some are describing the inhabitants of UFOs—as forces but not demons.  If this worship becomes general, the victorious end of the war of darkness against the light will indeed be in sight.  The Materialist Magician in the street will welcome the Materialist Magician ruling the world.

And then, of course (according to St. Paul), will come a very different end of the war, one in which the Lord Jesus will return and slay the Antichrist with the breath of His mouth and bring him to an end by the appearance of His Coming.  Until that day our task is be forewarned and forearmed, to love the truth and be on guard against lies.  The final delusion will not seduce us if we truly love the Lord and cling to His Church and live by its Holy Tradition.  Our sanctity is our safety.

I would like to conclude with Barry McGuire, who wrote somewhat prophetically himself.  Barry was (as oldsters like me will recall) first famous as a folk singer, whose anti-war hit Eve of Destruction was banned from the radio airwaves.  Barry converted to Christianity in 1971 and continued to write and sing songs.  One of his LPs, the 1978 Cosmic Cowboy, contained a song entitled “Face to Face” about the final showdown with Antichrist, involving the support of demonic UFOs.  How’s that for prophetic foresight?  Impressive enough that the final word may go to him.  Here are the lyrics of that song.  Thank you, Barry.

Face to Face

When our so-called galactic brothers
Come flying from outer space
To support the Antichrist
Fooling the human race
Pretending to be Jesus
Standing in His place
I wonder what they’re gonna do
When they meet Him face to face.

Well, don’t let those spacey scramblers
Blow away your brains
Pumping their pollution
Through your heart into your veins
Telling you lies about paradise
Deceiving the human race.
I wonder what they’re gonna do
When they meet Him face to facе.

If an angel of light
Comes slipping out of your dreams
Thе most beautiful sight
That you have ever seen
If what he’s got to say
Doesn’t match with the Word of God
He’s a liar and a killer
And he’s looking to rip you off.

Don’t you know that Lucifer
Will come in as an angel of light
To hypnotize and paralyze
’Til you don’t know wrong from right.
A third of all the heavenlies
Fell with him from outer space
I wonder what they’re gonna do
When they meet Jesus face to face.