Angels or Outer Space Visitors?

The celestial abode of the deity is evident in many places in Judeo-Christian scripture, from the passage about how the “Lord looked down on the Egyptian army” (Exod. 14:24) to Jesus’s reference to God as “Our Father who art in Heaven” (emphases added).Angels, of course, are self-evidently celestial beings by virtue of their wings. Decades ago the great psychologist Carl Jung noted religious themes in UFO discourse and dubbed flying saucers “technological angels”-that is, angels for an age that can no longer believe in the supernatural but that can believe in fantastic technological achievements. UFOs/flying saucers have been invested with religious significance almost from the beginning of their becoming a public phenomenon in the 1950s. This religious dimension of flying saucers is often expressed unconsciously, through certain themes in UFO literature. Of these, the celestial origin of the so-called Space Brothers is only the most obvious theme. Often, stories of encounters with space beings feature messages (e.g., of warning) to earthlings from advanced extraterrestrial civilizations. In this message-bearing role, they perform the central defining function of angels. Particularly in the 1950s when the threat of nuclear war seemed imminent, it was sometimes thought that the Space Brothers might intervene in human history to save us from our own self-destructive tendencies. In this redemptive activity, they were again playing a role traditionally reserved for angels.

Since the 1950s an entirely different concern has arisen to supplant the redemptive theme in ufological literature, namely, the abduction theme. Beginning rather modestly, stories by individuals who claimed to have been abducted by aliens grew steadily until the publication ofWhitney Strieber’s Communion in 1987. This fantastic, novelized account of abduction by aliens caused interest in the phenomenon to explode. At the time of this writing, more books on the abduction phenomenon are being published than books on all other ufological topics combined. These narratives almost always feature emotionless aliens subjecting abductees to some kind of painful operation, often sexual in nature. In these stories, extraterrestrials play the role of demons-that is, as fallen angels. Thus, if the earlier Space Brothers were technological angels, the kidnapping type of more recent decades are technological demons. The sexual or quasi-sexual themes in particular link modern extraterrestrials with the iccubi and succubi of the medieval period.

Another persistent topic in ufological literature has been the theme that the human race is the end product of genetic experimentation by aliens millennia ago with an earlier race of humanoid monkeys. This ancient-astronaut view sometimes includes a sexual theme, namely, that the aliens sexually abused our ancestors, or even that the extraterrestrials mated with human females to produce a superior race. As evidence for this peculiar view, advocates sometimes cite the Genesis verses about the Nephilim.

These sons of God, according to this line of interpretation, are the aliens that-by means of genetic manipulation or sexual insemination-produced the Nephilim, a superior terrestrial race. Interestingly enough, one of the traditional means of dealing with these verses was to say that the sons of God were fallen angels. This theme was particularly developed in the apocryphal Book of Enoch, which recounts how a group of angels desired mortal females, left heaven to mate with them, and fell from grace to become demons as a result. The offspring of this union were the Nephilim. Thus, in the genetic-manipulation-of-humanity theme of the ancient-astronaut theory, the Space Brothers once again play a role traditionally assigned to angels.