UFO Religions

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In the spring of 1947 a private pilot named Kenneth Arnold reported nine objects flying near Mount Rainier, and a newspaper rendered his description as “flying saucers.” Within a decade the saucer had stopped being merely a thing seen in the sky and had become a thing that spoke. The men and women who said they had heard it called themselves contactees, and out of their messages a new kind of religion took shape — one in which the beings who watch over humanity travel by spacecraft, the rescue comes from above in a literal and engineered sense, and the heavens are populated not by gods or angels but by extraterrestrials with better machines. Religious-studies scholars group these movements under the awkward but durable label of UFO religions, and the awkwardness is part of the point: the saucer is new, but almost nothing else about them is.

The first contactee, and the most famous, was George Adamski (1891–1965), a Polish-American writer and amateur philosopher who said that on November 20, 1952, in the California desert, he met the humanoid occupant of a saucer who had come from Venus, communicated by telepathy and gesture, and warned of the danger of atomic weapons. Adamski’s Flying Saucers Have Landed (1953) and Inside the Space Ships (1955) sold in the hundreds of thousands and drew a wave of imitators — Truman Bethurum, Orfeo Angelucci, Howard Menger, Daniel Fry — each with his own beautiful, benevolent visitors bearing the same broad message of cosmic brotherhood and nuclear peril. Investigators concluded that Adamski’s photographs were fabricated; the celebrated “scout ship” resembled the parts of a lamp or an incubator. That the photographs were hoaxes is not in serious dispute. What matters for the history of religion is something the debunking leaves untouched: the contactee narrative, with its kindly Space Brothers and its scripture-like channeled warnings, supplied the seed-myth that the organized movements would institutionalize.

The earliest of those to endure was the Aetherius Society. Its founder, the Englishman George King (1919–1997), was already steeped in yoga and occultism when, by his account, a voice announced in his London room on May 8, 1954: “Prepare yourself! You are to become the voice of Interplanetary Parliament.” King said he received telepathic teaching from the Cosmic Masters — advanced spiritual beings residing on other planets, the first of them a Master named Aetherius, of Venus. He founded the Society in the mid-1950s and later opened a major branch in Los Angeles. The teaching held that Jesus and Buddha were themselves Cosmic Masters, that a being designated Mars Sector 6 was among the intelligences in contact, and that the believer’s work was to cooperate with the Masters in helping humanity into a New Age. The Society’s practices have an inventiveness all their own: Spiritual Energy Batteries said to store the power of directed prayer for release in a crisis, and Operation Starlight (1958–1961), a campaign of pilgrimages to charge eighteen mountains as holy. The sociologist Stephen Hunt calls it “probably the first and certainly the most enduring UFO cult,” and what it endures by is openly syncretic: Theosophy, Christianity, and the karma and reincarnation of the yogic traditions, fused.

Unarius, founded in California in 1954 by Ernest and Ruth Norman, took a similar shape around reincarnation and channeled ascended masters; Ernest claimed clairvoyant readings of past lives and described journeys to Mars and Venus, and after his death his widow Ruth, taking the name Uriel, became the movement’s flamboyant public face. Early in 1974 she predicted that a fleet of benevolent Space Brothers would land that year, and the group bought property to receive them. When the ships did not come, the prediction was reinterpreted and the date revised again and again, settling at last on 2001. The Space Brothers did not arrive in 2001 either, and the group lost no appreciable membership — a detail worth holding onto.

The pattern of a prophecy that fails without ending its movement is the subject of the field’s classic study, Leon Festinger, Henry Riecken, and Stanley Schachter’s When Prophecy Fails (1956), which followed a small Chicago group, the Seekers, gathered around Dorothy Martin. Martin said that through automatic writing she had been warned by beings from the planet Clarion of a flood that would destroy much of North America on December 21, 1954, with a saucer to lift the faithful clear beforehand. The researchers joined the group in disguise to watch. When neither flood nor saucer came, the believers sat in silence; then, in the early hours, Martin announced that the group’s faith had persuaded God to spare the world — and the once-secretive Seekers began actively seeking converts. From this Festinger drew his account of cognitive dissonance: under the right conditions, disconfirmed prophecy does not destroy conviction but redoubles it. The study became foundational, and it deserves a caution. Its covert method raised ethical objections from the start, and recent archival work has gone further, alleging that the researchers’ own confederates shaped the group they claimed only to observe and that some of the book’s central claims were known to its authors to be false. The dissonance pattern it described is real; whether this particular case demonstrates it cleanly is now in dispute.

The youngest of the major movements is also the strangest in its commitments. Raëlism began in 1974 when the French journalist Claude Vorilhon (b. 1946), taking the name Raël, published an account of meeting extraterrestrials he called the Elohim — a Hebrew plural he glosses as “those who came from the sky.” On his telling the Elohim created all life on Earth some twenty-five thousand years ago by advanced biotechnology, the God of scripture is a misreading of these alien makers, and the great prophets were their messengers, with Raël the fortieth and final one. Here the contemporary UFO religion and the older ancient-astronaut current touch most directly: that current treats the gods of antiquity as visitors mistaken for the divine, a claim about the deep past, and Raëlism takes the same premise and builds a living church on it, with a hierarchy, an embassy planned to welcome the makers home, and a membership. What sets it apart from its cousins is its temper. Raëlism is atheist and scientistic — perhaps the most thoroughly secular of all these movements — promising not communion with spirits but salvation by technology, including human cloning as a road to a kind of immortality. That promise produced the movement’s most public episode: the company Clonaid, founded in 1997 and later led by the Raëlian bishop Brigitte Boisselier, which announced in December 2002 the birth of a cloned child it called Eve. No child was ever produced for independent testing, and the claim, never verified, is widely read as a publicity exercise.

A related motif appears in a movement that is not a saucer cult at all. The Nation of Islam, a Black-nationalist religious movement, teaches a cosmology in which a great spacecraft — the Wheel, the Mother Plane, named with female pronouns — hangs above the Earth. Elijah Muhammad described it as a small human planet about half a mile across, carrying smaller craft; it is identified with the wheel of Ezekiel’s vision and held to house Fard Muhammad and his scientists, and in the movement’s eschatology it appears at the end of the present order to deliver the righteous. Louis Farrakhan has described being taken up to it near Tepoztlán, Mexico, in 1985. Scholars such as Michael Lieb read the Mother Plane as a weaving together of biblical apocalyptic, Black-liberation hope, and the saucer imagery of the mid-century — an adjacent case rather than a member of the family, and one that shows how widely the figure of salvation-by-spacecraft had traveled.

The family’s deepest sorrow is Heaven’s Gate. Marshall Applewhite (1931–1997) and Bonnie Nettles (1927–1985) met in Houston in 1972 and formed their group within a few years, identifying themselves as the two witnesses of the Book of Revelation and teaching under paired names, finally Do and Ti. They held that the human body was a temporary vehicle to be left behind, and that salvation meant graduating to a literal, physical Next Level above the human, reached by leaving Earth. Members lived in strict celibacy and monastic discipline; after about 1976 the group withdrew from the world and stopped recruiting. When Nettles died of cancer in 1985, the theology shifted from expecting a bodily pickup by spacecraft toward the soul’s transfer to a Next-Level body. In 1997, with the comet Hale–Bopp approaching and a rumor circulating that a craft trailed behind it, Applewhite read the comet as the awaited sign. Over the days around March 22 and 23, 1997, in a rented house in Rancho Santa Fe, California, thirty-nine people died — Applewhite and thirty-eight followers, women and men, the youngest twenty-six and the oldest seventy-two. They had taken phenobarbital and vodka in measured groups. They were found dressed alike beneath purple cloths, their bags packed. Applewhite had left a recording that spoke of the act as a departure they had chosen. They believed they were leaving the vehicle behind to go home.

What the religious-studies literature offers, above all in the work of Christopher Partridge, is a way to see these movements as continuous with something far older than the saucer. Heaven’s Gate, with its imprisoned soul and its body called a container and its salvation defined as escape from matter, repeats the structure of ancient gnosis almost line for line, though it spoke the vocabulary of the space age. And the broader genealogy runs straight back to Theosophy: Helena Blavatsky’s hidden Spiritual Hierarchy of Masters, guiding human evolution from a higher plane, supplied the template, and the UFO religions kept the template and changed only the address. The Masters who once dwelt beyond the Himalayas now reside on Venus or aboard the Mother Plane; the Cosmic Masters of the Aetherius Society are that Hierarchy moved to the planets. Partridge’s reading carries weight precisely because it accounts for so much at once — the channeled teaching, the evolving soul, the benevolent watchers — and what it suggests is that the most modern of religions is also among the most inherited. The chariot became a saucer and the angel became an astronaut, but the longing that the sky hold someone who means us well is the oldest furniture in the house.

→ Related: Ancient Astronaut Paleocontact Current · Theosophy · Gnosis · Helena Blavatsky