Non-human intelligent beings as the origin of religion

Non-human intelligent beings as the origin of religion is the hypothesis that the world's religions were founded by non-human intelligent beings, or are the culturally filtered record of contact with them, rather than products of human spiritual experience alone. The philosopher Jason Jorjani holds that the UFO phenomenon is "absolutely inseparable" from revealed religions such as Judeo-Christianity and Islam and from archaic polytheistic ones such as the religion of ancient Egypt and the Vedic religion, whose gods he holds to be the same beings in two factions; the author Billy Carson and the biblical scholar Ella LeBain identify the biblical Yahweh with the Sumerian Enlil or Anu; and the religion scholar Diana Pasulka reports that the experiences catalogued in Catholic sources "from hundreds of years ago up to the present" match those of modern UFO experiencers. Pasulka describes her own method as the study of belief, for which "we don't have to believe in UFOs," and the skeptic Robert Todd Carroll holds that the identifications of Sumerian and biblical gods with extraterrestrials rest on translations that "do not jibe with the work of legitimate scholars in the field." The hypothesis extends the identification of the gods and of the angels with non-human intelligent beings, both branches of ancient astronaut theory, from the beings to the religions themselves; it contrasts with the Demonic UFO hypothesis, which holds the beings to be demons and the religions' warnings about them to be true.

The two-faction model

Jorjani, whose books Prometheus and Atlas (2016) and Closer Encounters (2021) set the claim out, identifies the same beings across traditions: the Vedic devas and asuras, the Greek gods and Titans, the biblical Elohim and the rebel angels or Nephilim, and the Sumerian Anunnaki and Igigi, with "two factions" running through "every human religious belief system on the planet." In each case, on his account, the controlling faction resists human advancement and the rebel faction transmits forbidden knowledge: there is "a through line" from Enki in Sumerian myth to Prometheus in the Greek, Quetzalcoatl in the Mesoamerican, and a leader of the Asuras in the Hindu context, "a sort of demi god figure that transgresses on behalf of man against the gods, brings forth some sort of sacred technology to them." The Judeo-Christian form of the rebel is Lucifer, who in Genesis opens the eyes of Adam and Eve; Jorjani reads Yahweh Elohim's words on casting man out of Eden — exile them before they "become like unto us, so that nothing becomes impossible to them" — as those of a god "jealous and afraid of humans achieving parity with the gods."

Yahweh as Enlil or Anu

The identification of Yahweh with a specific figure in the Anunnaki pantheon is a point on which the proponents differ. Carson places Yahweh as Enlil: in the story of the Tower of Babel "it was actually Enlil, who's Yahweh in the Bible" who "comes back and sees this and he goes, oh man, these people are getting too smart, they're going to realize they don't need us to rule over them." LeBain places him as Anu, the top Anunnaki authority, "because he has the power to punish the other gods," and argues that the Hebrew Bible's multiple Elohim have been mistranslated as one deity.

Catholic saints and the archive

Pasulka reports that, reading the primary sources on saints such as Teresa of Ávila and Francis of Assisi, she found the experiences "like an exact match" with those of modern UFO experiencers, and that on this basis she began to study UFO belief. Of Teresa of Ávila's encounter with what she took to be an angel, Pasulka says the saint described a being about three feet tall and very shiny, which she distinguished from the angels of her imagination as "an actual fleshy thing," and which "took this dart and it thrust it into her entrails." In the American Alchemy episode with Pasulka, the host Jesse Michels says the original translations of Francis of Assisi's encounter on Mount Alverna describe "a sound and fury atmospheric sparks and a flaming torch," telepathic communication, and a being by which Francis is "wounded with rays of light that ripped through his hands," wounds that are interpreted as the stigmata. Pasulka identifies the vision of Ezekiel with the Merkabah tradition, "a whole historical, mystical lineage that goes back to ancient Judaism," in which practitioners met angelic beings who "would impart and transmit this intense Gnostic wisdom."

Second-coming prophecies

Michael Salla interprets the second-coming prophecies of Zoroastrianism, Buddhism, Hinduism, the Abrahamic traditions and Islam as predictions of extraterrestrial return, citing the scholars Paul Wallis and Mauro Biglino.

Ritual and rocketry

Pasulka traces the rocket program's origins to Jack Parsons, who she says worked with the occultists Aleister Crowley and L. Ron Hubbard and "would do rituals in the desert" believing they would help him "download this rocket technology." On her account the transmission that earlier peoples read as divine visitation was reached, in the twentieth century, through ritual, with rocketry as its product.

Hermetic science

Jorjani argues that the suppression of Hermetic-alchemical science in the seventeenth century — Giordano Bruno's "very holistic... hermetic alchemical matrix for what could have been a very different form of modern science" destroyed by the "reductive dualistic model of Descartes" — was a religiously driven destruction of an alternative tradition that preserved the older awareness of contact. Billy Carson, discussing whether the universe is a simulation, answers that "I can only go by hermetic principles as above, so below," and compares the multiverse to the cells of a body; he draws the Hermetic maxim from the Emerald Tablets of Thoth.

References

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