It was their firm persuasion that the air which they breathed was peopled with invisible enemies; with innumerable daemons, who watched every occasion, and assumed every form, to terrify, and above all to tempt, their unguarded virtue. The imagination, and even the senses, were deceived by the illusions of distempered fanaticism; and the hermit, whose midnight prayer was oppressed by involuntary slumber, might easily confound the phantoms of horror or delight which had occupied his sleeping and his waking dreams . . .
[T]he practice of superstition is so congenial to the multitude that, if they are forcibly awakened, they still regret the loss of their pleasing vision. Their love of the marvellous and supernatural, their curiosity with regard to future events, and their strong propensity to extend their hopes and fears beyond the limits of the visible world, were the principal causes which favoured the establishment of Polytheism. So urgent on the vulgar is the necessity of believing, that the fall of any system of mythology will most probably be succeeded by the introduction of some other mode of superstition . . .
Put aside Gibbon’s social snobbery: the devil tormented the upper classes too, and even a king of England – James I, the first Stuart monarch – wrote a credulous and superstitious book on demons (Daemonologie, 1597). He was also the patron of the great translation of the Bible into English that still bears his name. It was King James’s opinion that tobacco is the ‘devil’s weed’, and a number of witches were exposed through their addiction to this drug. But by 1628, James had become a thoroughgoing sceptic -mainly because adolescents had been found faking demonic possession, in which state they had accused innocent people of witchcraft. If we reckon the scepticism that Gibbon says characterized his time to have declined in ours, and if even a little of the rampant gullibility he attributes to late classical times is left over in ours, should we not expect something like demons to find a niche in the popular culture of the present?
Of course, as enthusiasts for extraterrestrial visitations are quick to remind me, there’s another interpretation of these historical parallels: aliens, they say, have always been visiting us, poking at us, stealing our sperms and eggs, impregnating us. In earlier times we recognized them as gods, demons, fairies, or spirits; only now do we understand that it’s aliens who’ve been diddling us all these millennia. Jacques Vallee has made such arguments. But then why are there virtually no reports of flying saucers prior to 1947? Why is it that none of the world’s major religions uses saucers as icons of the divine? Why no warnings about the dangers of high technology then? Why isn’t this genetic experiment, whatever its objective, completed by now, thousands of years or more after its initiation by beings supposedly of vastly superior technological attainments? Why are we in such trouble if the breeding programme is designed to improve our lot?
Following this line of argument, we might anticipate present adherents of the old beliefs to understand ‘aliens’ to be fairies, gods, or demons. In fact, there are several contemporary sects -the ‘Raelians’, for example – that hold gods or God to come to earth in UFOs. Some abductees describe the aliens, however repulsive, as ‘angels’, or ’emissaries of God’. And there are those who still think it’s demons.
In Whitley Strieber’s Communion, a first-hand account of ‘alien abduction’, the author relates
Whatever was there seemed so monstrously ugly, so filthy and dark and sinister. Of course they were demons. They had to be … I still remember that thing crouching there, so terribly ugly, its arms and legs like the limbs of a great insect, its eyes glaring at me.
Reportedly, Strieber is now open to the possibility that these night-time terrors were dreams or hallucinations.
Articles on UFOs in The Christian News Encyclopedia, a fundamentalist compilation, include ‘Unchristian Fanatic Obsession’, and ‘Scientist Believes UFOs Work of Devil’. The Spiritual Counterfeits Project of Berkeley, California, teaches that UFOs are of demonic origin; the Aquarian Church of Universal Service of McMinnville, Oregon, that all aliens are hostile. A 1993 newsletter of ‘Cosmic Awareness Communications’ informs us that UFO occupants think of humans as laboratory animals, wish us to worship them, but tend to be deterred by the Lord’s Prayer. Some abductees have been cast out of their evangelical religious congregations; their stories sound too close to satanism. A 1980 fundamentalist tract, The Cult Explosion, by Dave Hunt, reveals that
UFOs … are clearly not physical and seem to be demonic manifestations from another dimension calculated to alter man’s way of thinking . . . [T]he alleged UFO entities that have presumably communicated psychically with humans have always preached the same four lies that the serpent introduced to Eve . . . [T]hese beings are demons and they are preparing for the Antichrist.
A number of sects hold UFOs and alien abductions to be premonitions of ‘end-times’.
If UFOs come from another planet or another dimension, were they sent by the same God who has been revealed to us in any of the major religions? Nothing in the UFO phenomena, the fundamentalist complaint goes, requires belief in the one, true God, while much in it contradicts the God portrayed in the Bible and Christian tradition. The New Age: A Christian Critique by Ralph Rath (1990) discusses UFOs, typically for such literature, with extreme credulity. It serves their purpose to accept UFOs as real and revile them as instruments of Satan and the Antichrist, rather than to use the blade of scientific scepticism. That tool, once honed, might accomplish more than just a limited heresiotomy.
The Christian fundamentalist author Hal Lindsey, in his 1994 religious best-seller Planet Earth – 2000 AD, writes,
I have become thoroughly convinced that UFOs are real . . . They are operated by alien beings of great intelligence and power … I believe these beings are not only extraterrestrial but supernatural in origin. To be blunt, I think they are demons . . . part of a Satanic plot.
And what is the evidence for this conclusion? Chiefly, it is the eleventh and twelfth verses of Luke, Chapter 21, in which Jesus talks about ‘great signs from Heaven’ – nothing like a UFO is described – in the last days. Typically, Lindsey ignores verse 32 in which Jesus makes it very clear he is talking about events in the first, not the twentieth, century.
There is also a Christian tradition according to which extraterrestrial life cannot exist. In Christian News for 23 May 1994, for example, W. Gary Crampton, Doctor of Theology, tells us:
The Bible, either explicitly or implicitly, speaks to every area of life; it never leaves us without an answer. The Bible nowhere explicitly affirms or negates intelligent extraterrestrial life. Implicitly, however, Scripture does deny the existence of such beings, thus also negating the possibility of flying saucers . . . Scripture views earth as the center of the universe . . . According to Peter, a ‘planet hopping’ Savior is out of the question. Here is an answer to intelligent life on other planets. If there were such, who would redeem them? Certainly not Christ . . . Experiences which are out of line with the teachings of Scripture must always be renounced as fallacious. The Bible has a monopoly on the truth.
But many other Christian sects – Roman Catholics, for example -are completely open-minded, with no a priori objections to and no insistence on the reality of aliens and UFOs.
In the early 1960s, I argued that the UFO stories were Grafted chiefly to satisfy religious longings. At a time when science has complicated uncritical adherence to the old-time religions, an alternative is proffered to the God hypothesis: dressed in scientific jargon, their immense powers ‘explained’ by superficially scientific terminology, the gods and demons of old come down from heaven to haunt us, to offer prophetic visions, and to tantalize us with visions of a more hopeful future: a space-age mystery religion aborning.
The folklorist Thomas E. Bullard wrote in 1989 that
abduction reports sound like rewrites of older supernatural encounter traditions with aliens serving the functional roles of divine beings.
He concludes:
Science may have evicted ghosts and witches from our beliefs, but it just as quickly filled the vacancy with aliens having the same functions. Only the extraterrestrial outer trappings are new. All the fear and the psychological dramas for dealing with it seem simply to have found their way home again, where it is business as usual in the legend realm where things go bump in the night.
Is it possible that people in all times and places occasionally experience vivid, realistic hallucinations, often with sexual content, about abduction by strange, telepathic, aerial creatures who ooze through walls, with the details filled in by the prevailing cultural idioms, sucked out of the Zeitgeist? Others, who have not personally had the experience, find it stirring and in a way familiar. They pass the story on. Soon it takes on a life of its own, inspires others trying to understand their own visions and hallucinations, and enters the realm of folklore, myth and legend. The connection between the content of spontaneous temporal lobe hallucinations and the alien abduction paradigm is consistent with such a hypothesis.