UFO religion
A UFO religion is, according to religious-studies scholars including Christopher Partridge, James R. Lewis, Stephen Hunt, and Benjamin E. Zeller, a new religious movement whose core doctrine holds that extraterrestrial beings or other non-human intelligent beings have contacted, taught, or genetically created humanity, and that renewed or intensified contact carries salvific or apocalyptic significance for the movement's members. Such movements are a subset of the broader category of new religious movements and frequently overlap with New Age currents and the contactee tradition, from which several drew their founders, but are distinguished from the ancient astronaut theory — an explanatory thesis about the past rather than an organized religion — even though several UFO religions incorporate ancient-astronaut premises into their own cosmology.
The category is generally traced to Guy Ballard's I AM Activity, founded in the 1930s around Ballard's claimed telepathic instruction from an ascended being on Mount Shasta, and identified by the religious-studies scholar J. Gordon Melton as the earliest movement of the type. The category grew substantially out of the 1950s American contactee movement — figures such as George Adamski and George Van Tassel, whose channeled "Council of Seven Lights" material and Giant Rock conventions fed directly into later organized movements — and became a recognized field of academic study following George King's founding of the Aetherius Society in 1955, described by the sociologist Stephen Hunt as "probably the first and certainly the most enduring UFO cult."
Movements
Scholars of religion have identified a number of UFO religions, among them the Aetherius Society, Heaven's Gate, Unarius, and the Raëlian Movement, and have set out the theological premises, iconography, activities, and cultural precepts of each.
Raelism, founded in 1974 by Claude Vorilhon after a claimed 1973 contact experience, is called by the anthropologist Debbora Battaglia "the largest ET religion in the world today" and holds that the Elohim of the Hebrew Bible were an extraterrestrial civilization who genetically engineered all life on Earth. Heaven's Gate, founded by Marshall Applewhite and Bonnie Nettles in the 1970s, taught that members were extraterrestrial souls temporarily inhabiting human "vehicles," and ended in the 1997 mass suicide of 39 members timed to the passage of the Hale–Bopp comet, deaths that the members themselves understood as a graduation. The Aetherius Society holds that its founder received, and continues to receive, telepathic transmissions from a hierarchy of "Cosmic Masters," among them a being said to reside on Venus. Unarius, founded by Ernest and Ruth Norman in 1954, teaches past-life regression therapy and an "Interplanetary Confederation" of ninety-one worlds due to make open contact with Earth. The Nation of Islam's Mother Plane teaching, developed by Elijah Muhammad and continued by Louis Farrakhan, describes a half-mile-wide wheel-shaped craft, identified with the "wheel" of the Book of Ezekiel, that will play an eschatological role in a coming judgment of white society. Scientology's OT III cosmogony, an origin narrative involving the extraterrestrial ruler Xenu and mass exile to Earth seventy-five million years ago, is likewise classified by religious-studies scholarship as belonging to the category, notwithstanding the Church of Scientology's own reluctance to publicize or foreground the material. The Czech-originated Universe People movement preserves a body of purported channeled communications compiled as Talks with Teachings from my Cosmic Friends.
The category and the groups' own names
"UFO religion" is a category the scholars apply; the movements it names describe themselves differently. The Aetherius Society calls itself both "an international UFO organization dedicated to world peace and enlightenment" and "a worldwide spiritual organization," the Raelian Movement an atheistic, scientific religion whose Elohim are physical beings, and the students of Heaven's Gate "members of the Kingdom of Heaven" temporarily occupying human vehicles, who gave outsiders the description of a celibate religious order. Gregory Reece, whose study sets the movements inside a wider "saucer culture," reports that the "nuts and bolts" ufologists who disclaim any interest in religious claims call the contactees the "lunatic fringe," and argues that "there is plenty of religious awe and irony found in the nuts and bolts of ufology, whether its proponents are aware of it or not" — which places the edge of the category inside ufology rather than around it. Reece reserves "cult" for Heaven's Gate at its end, which "became a 'cult' in the worst sense of that term," something different from the contactee movements it resembled.
Jacques Vallée draws the group differently: he sets the Raelian movement beside UMMO in Spain and Peoples Temple as belief systems that, some speculate, "may have attracted the attention of social engineers motivated by the observation and the management of such belief systems," so that a movement which looks like a spontaneous religion may be, in part, a managed one. The scholar Andreas Grünschloß reads the ancient-astronaut narrative that several of these movements absorb as a "broken" myth that always explains the supernatural away in rational terms, with the Raelian religion as the case in which it becomes a founding mythology.
Scholarly classification
Partridge situates the category within a longer lineage of Theosophical esotericism and occultism, arguing that UFO religions preserve Theosophy's belief in a guiding "Spiritual Hierarchy" while substituting technologically advanced space visitors for the Ascended Masters of the earlier tradition, a substitution that became widespread only after the 1947 Roswell case popularized the flying-saucer idiom. Many forms of UFO religiosity have been traced to occult, spiritualist, and Theosophical currents: Danijel Sinani finds the influence of Theosophy, its offshoots, and Spiritualism to be of exceptional importance for the development of UFO religiosity, and Partridge's later study of the malevolent extraterrestrial likewise grounds UFO religions in the Theosophical tradition. Hunt frames such movements as a "quasi-religion" bordering on more orthodox religiosity, in which adherents expect that alien technology and spirituality together will resolve humanity's ecological, spiritual, and social crises — a millenarian expectation Zeller's contributors trace across otherwise very different theologies, from Raelian genetic engineering to the Nation of Islam's Mother Plane judgment.
Demonological readings
Within American evangelical and conservative evangelical ufology, UFOs have often been interpreted as demonic entities or spiritual deceptions masquerading as extraterrestrials. Scholars have linked these demonological readings to the apocalyptic and jeremiad traditions of evangelical culture and to the reuse of older Christian myth and symbol in modern UFO belief, and Partridge traces the Christian roots of the malevolent extraterrestrial in UFO religions and abduction spiritualities.
Open questions
References
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