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We need to separate the UFO/UAP phenomenon from the accounts of those who claim they’ve been contacted or abducted by aliens. The sheer number of cases argues against all of them being hoaxes or hallucinations.

However, as Jack Brewer documents in his excellent book The Greys Have Been Framed: Exploitation in the UFO Community, the primary source of evidence touted by the UFO community—memories recovered by abductees under hypnosis—is unreliable, to put it mildly. Hypnosis is not a trustworthy method of retrieving memories, and may actually be harmful.¹ Sadly, as Brewer notes:

Traumatized individuals are then at risk of sustaining deeper emotional damage while failing to seek qualified professional treatment. Such professional treatment is often discouraged within the UFO community in lieu of compiling so-called evidence of fantastic encounters with extraterrestrials.²

Contactees may have various reasons for concocting stories of ETI encounters from just wanting to feel special to out-and-out delusions resulting from psychosis. Sadly, there are traumatized individuals whose treatment is of lesser importance to those who are most willing and eager to hear their stories—true believers desperate for “evidence” of ET’s existence.

The intelligence community doesn’t have to work very hard to push the ETI meme. The UFO community is doing just fine with that on its own.

Now, there are, without question, cases that can’t be explained away as delusions, hoaxes, or intelligence ops. Joe Jordan, co-founder of CE4 Research Group and a longtime MUFON investigator,³ has compiled hundreds of accounts of “alien” abductions that have been stopped by victims who called on the name of Jesus. And, according to Jordan, this happens consistently. Now, why would that be, if the abductors were, say, aliens from Zeta Reticuli? The logical answer, if one is open to a supernatural explanation, is that the alien abduction phenomenon is primarily spiritual—in other words, demonic.

But that isn’t an answer the UFO community wants to hear, either, which is why Jordan calls it “the unwanted piece of the UFO puzzle.”⁴

Here is the hard truth for sci-fi fans and true believers in extraterrestrial visitation: For all of the interest in ETIs and the continuing popularity of science fiction in pop culture, there is no concrete evidence that aliens are visiting Earth, if they exist at all.

So, why the deception? In part, spooks and military men find it a useful cover for things they’d rather not tell the rest of us. On a spiritual level, there is a darker agenda.

In 2010, researcher and author Nick Redfern published Final Events and the Secret Government Group on Demonic UFOs and the Afterlife, which he calls “probably my most controversial book to date.”⁵ It tells the story of an interdepartmental think tank inside the United States Government nicknamed the Collins Elite. The group, according to Redfern’s source, had been tasked with analyzing the UFO phenomenon, and it reached a disturbing conclusion: UFOs aren’t extraterrestrial, they’re demonic. Worse, the Collins Elite reportedly believes “the phenomenon ‘feeds’ upon a poorly understood form of energy contained in the human soul. In other words, we are being reared, nurtured, and finally digested, just like cattle.”⁶

According to Redfern’s source, these demonic entities are a type of cosmic vampire, sucking the spiritual life out of their human victims.

Furthermore, these so-called “aliens” anticipated that discerning Christians might identify them for what they are and countered that development. The ETI disclosure movement was developed to make Christians look foolish by convincing the public that extraterrestrial life is real.

Members of the Collins Elite reportedly settled on an odd strategy for dealing with the crisis—taking over the government and establishing a Christian-ish theocracy in America. According to Redfern’s source, the group believed that imposing Pharisaical laws on the country would turn the global tide against the infernal, soul-sucking entities.⁷

It sounds like the plot of a dystopian cable TV series. Exactly how forcing Americans to follow the Mosaic Law is supposed to defeat evil incarnate isn’t explained in the book.

Redfern can be excused as he admits to being agnostic on matters spiritual, but if the story of the Collins Elite is true—and bear in mind that Redfern’s work is mainly based on secret informants—then the U.S. government is in serious need of people who’ve opened a Bible at least once.

As Bible scholar Dr. Michael Heiser wrote in his review of Final Events:

In my mind, the most disturbing thing about the book is that highly-placed insiders within the intelligence community could think so poorly — especially if they are Christians. […]

What is the theological logic of this? That if the ruling elite are Christians, the demons will be powerless? Or that if a majority of U.S. citizens are Christians, then God can or will act? (This makes God capricious to say the least [“I won’t intervene against evil unless enough humans measure up”] or powerless to act unilaterally [“I cannot intervene against evil unless enough humans measure up”]). You can have that God. And how small-minded is this approach — to presume that the fate of humanity lies in the hands of the Church in the United States? What a muddled theological mess.⁸

But maybe putting out the story of the Collins Elite was itself an intelligence operation. As Redfern noted elsewhere, the United States government has been thinking about how to use religious ideas as propaganda for a long time.⁹ A 1950 RAND Corporation report commissioned by the Air Force, “The Exploitation of Superstitions for Purposes of Psychological Warfare,” details examples of how closely held beliefs were manipulated by operatives for various governments.¹⁰ The RAND report appeared just as the UFO phenomenon hit its stride in the U.S.

Predictably, the publication of Final Events seeded the notion among skeptics and atheists that evangelical Christians are willing to use the UFO phenomenon to justify “a concentration camp vision of America based in ancient Jewish law.”¹¹ Secular progressives had a field day holding up Final Events as proof that Christians really do want to use the power of the federal government to impose our view of morality on everyone else.

Now, since you’re reading this, the odds are that you’re laugh out loud at the idea that Christians will take over this or any other national government any time soon. Look at the culture around us, then ask yourself: Is this a society that’s going to vote a truly godly government into power?¹²

When we analyze the story of the Collins Elite, which serves as an appropriate summary of the 75-year history of the modern UFO phenomenon, the most likely explanation is this: Once again, human agents working for the principalities and powers arrayed against God carried out an op, using “official disclosure” to advance the kingdom of darkness.

1. Brewer, Jack (2016). The Greys Have Been Framed: Exploitation in the UFO Community, Kindle Edition. Kindle location 378.
2. Ibid, Kindle locations 210-212.
3. As of May 2023, Joe is MUFON State Section Director for Brevard County, Florida, and previously served as MUFON’s Field Director for South Korea. He has been a member of MUFON since 1993.
4. http://www.alienresistance.org/ce4.htm, retrieved 8/13/17.
5. Redfern, Nick (September 18, 2013). “Feeding the UFO Phenomenon”. Mysterious Universe. http://mysteriousuniverse.org/2013/09/feeding-the-ufo-phenomenon/, retrieved 8/26/17.
6. Ibid.
7. Heiser, Dr. Michael S. (November 27, 2010). “Review of Nick Redfern’s Final Events”. http://drmsh.com/review-of-nick-redferns-final-events/, retrieved 8/26/17.
8. Ibid.
9. Redfern, Nick (October 1, 2011). “A Religious Deception?” Mysterious Universe. http://mysteriousuniverse.org/2011/10/a-religious-deception/, retrieved 8/26/17.
10. Pilkington, Mark (November 3, 2010). “RAND, Superstition, and Psychological Warfare”. Mirage Men. https://miragemen.wordpress.com/2010/11/03/rand-superstition-and-psychological-warfare/, retrieved 8/26/17.
11. http://www.talk2action.org/comments/2010/10/2/142824/582/9?mode=alone;showrate=1#9, retrieved 8/26/17.
12. For a further examination of that idea, we recommend the books Saboteurs by Tom Horn and The Deeper State by Lt. Col. Robert Maginnis (U.S. Army, ret.)

Derek Gilbert

Derek Gilbert Bio

Derek P. Gilbert hosts SkyWatchTV, a Christian television program that airs on several national networks, the long-running interview podcast A View from the Bunker, and co-hosts SciFriday, a weekly television program that analyzes science news with his wife, author Sharon K. Gilbert.
Before joining SkyWatchTV in 2015, his secular broadcasting career spanned more than 25 years with stops at radio stations in Philadelphia, Saint Louis, Little Rock, and suburban Chicago.
Derek is a Christian, a husband and a father. He’s been a regular speaker at Bible prophecy conferences in recent years. Derek’s most recent book is The Great Inception: Satan’s PSYOPs from Eden to Armageddon. He has also published the novels The God Conspiracy and Iron Dragons, and he’s a contributing author to the nonfiction anthologies God’s Ghostbusters, Blood on the Altar, I Predict: What 12 Global Experts Believe You Will See by 2025, and When Once We Were a Nation.

Our goal in writing a book on the UFO phenomenon, The Day the Earth Stands Still, was not to document the crazy cults that have emerged since the beginning of the modern UFO era in 1947. There are plenty, and you, as a discerning reader, don’t need us to tell you how far removed from reality they are. Some are relatively harmless, and others are not—like the Heaven’s Gate cult that convinced thirty-nine of its members to commit suicide in late March of 1997 in the belief they’d be taken aboard a spacecraft following Comet Hale-Bopp.
It’s more important that we look at how the ancient astronaut/alien meme has influenced our society in more subtle ways. It’s shaping the beliefs of people who have been convinced by media and academia that the Bible cannot be true, so we must look elsewhere for answers to the Big Questions.
As Christians who should understand that we’re in the middle of a war for our souls, this shouldn’t surprise us. And yet it does, because too many churches have been lured by principalities and powers—fallen angels and their demonic minions—into a modernist or postmodernist worldview, either looking to science as the only tool for revealing spiritual truth or buying into the absurd, self-refuting notion that absolute truth doesn’t exist at all.
What should concern American evangelicals is not the role played by UFO researchers in spreading the ETI disclosure meme. That’s why they’re interested in the phenomenon in the first place. We expect that from them. No, what’s bothersome is that the government of our purportedly Christian nation has deployed a variety of agencies and operatives to sell the existence of ETI over the last seventy-five years.
It began early in the modern UFO era. About two weeks before the crash at Roswell, New Mexico made headlines, a harbor patrolman named Harold A. Dahl anchored in Maury Island Bay with his son, their dog, and two crewmen. At 2:00 P.M. on June 21, 1947 (the summer solstice, coincidentally), they spotted half a dozen odd, metallic, doughnut-shaped craft hovering a couple thousand feet above them. According to Dahl, one of the ships seemed to be in trouble, with the other five circling around it as it lost altitude. A small explosion showered Dahl’s boat with hot metal, killing his dog and injuring his son. Dahl beached the boat and took some pictures of the craft, which took off in the direction of Canada.
His boat’s radio was jammed, so Dahl headed back to Tacoma, got treatment for his son’s injured arm, then took his camera and some of the metal fragments to his boss, 27-year-old Fred L. Crisman.
The Maury Island Incident has gone down in the books as a hoax. Whether it is or isn’t is irrelevant. The important point is that more than twenty years later, Crisman, a former officer in the OSS (forerunner of the CIA), was subpoenaed by New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison in the conspiracy trial of businessman Clay Shaw, who’d been charged with being part of the conspiracy to kill President John F. Kennedy. Some thought Crisman was one of the three tramps picked up by Dallas police in the rail yard near Dealey Plaza, although evidence suggests he wasn’t in Dallas that day. In spite of that, Garrison apparently believed that Crisman was one of the trigger men on the grassy knoll.
Here’s where things get even weirder: A few days after the Maury Island incident, Kenneth Arnold of Boise, Idaho, a successful businessman, deputy federal marshal, experienced pilot, and member of an Idaho Search and Rescue Team—in other words, an excellent witness—was flying home from Washington when he spotted a formation of nine UFOs north of Mount Rainier moving at upwards of 1,200 miles per hour. That’s not a speed any known aircraft could reach in 1947.
Fred Crisman, even though he wasn’t a witness to whatever Harold Dahl claimed he saw, reached out to the editor of Amazing Stories magazine, Raymond Palmer. Palmer had already been in touch with Arnold, offering him an advance for an interview about his UFO encounter. After hearing from Crisman, who’d had a pair of letters to the editor published in Amazing Stories in the previous year, Palmer persuaded Arnold to fly from Boise to Tacoma to meet with Dahl and check out the Maury Island incident. Oddly, when he arrived, Arnold found all the hotels in Tacoma fully booked—until he tried the most expensive place in town and discovered a reservation in his name, although no one seemed to know who made it.
The odd series of events apparently gave Arnold the feeling that the situation was a setup, possibly an intelligence op to discredit both him and Harold Dahl. Because of this, he contacted the two Army intelligence officers who’d debriefed him after his initial report, Captain William Davidson and 1st Lieutenant Frank M. Brown. They flew to Tacoma immediately, arriving that afternoon and discussing the case with Arnold and United Airlines pilot Captain Emil J. Smith, who had likewise been invited by Arnold. The two pilots had become friends after Smith and his crew reported five “somethings” over Idaho the night of July 4, 1947, flying wings or discs similar to what Arnold had seen two weeks earlier near Mount Rainier.
After meeting with Arnold, Smith, Crisman, and Dahl, the intelligence officers seemed to think the Maury Island sighting was a hoax, and they prepared to fly back to Hamilton Field in California late the night of July 31 as their B-25 bomber was scheduled to fly in the first Air Force Day celebration the next day.

At the airport, an odd thing happened, one which has plagued UFO researchers for years. Crisman, the man the intelligence officers seemed to think was nothing more than an oddball hoaxer, turned up at the last minute and gave the men a heavy box which he claimed was filled with the debris from the damaged UFO. To Arnold, who was there, the contents looked like a bunch of rocks. The men stowed the box in the trunk of their car and left for the airport, catching their flight. They never made it back to base. Both Davidson and Brown were killed. The enlisted men on board parachuted to safety after the left engine caught fire—according to the report of one of the survivors—and the two officers remained with the aircraft for a full ten minutes before the B-25 bomber crashed to earth. No one has any idea why the two intelligence officers would have remained with the plane and not parachuted themselves; or why they did not radio a distress call.

It’s important to note that Davidson and Brown were preparing to fly their B-25 out of Tacoma at around 2:00 AM. What are the odds that Fred Crisman just happened to be driving by the airport at that time of night?
A report filed by the FBI’s Butte, Montana field office designated SM-X, for “Security Matter X” (real life X-files!), noted that Arnold remembered Crisman calling him and Smith at their hotel in the morning to tell them about the deadly crash, and wondering how Crisman had known who was on the B-25 before the Army had released any information to the press. And as for the press: Reporters for the United Press office in Tacoma were getting reports from someone who sat in the meetings between Crisman, Dahl, Arnold, Smith, and the Army intelligence officers, because bits of conversation were quoted back to Arnold and Smith verbatim.
The big question is this: what was Fred Crisman really doing in Tacoma that summer?
The UFO sightings by Kenneth Arnold and E. J. Smith were only two of dozens in the Pacific Northwest, and literally hundreds across the country, in June and July, 1947. On June 24 alone, seventeen reports of UFOs eventually surfaced in the Northwest from Boise, Idaho to Bellingham, Washington.
Crisman’s behavior after Dahl’s UFO sighting was odd, to say the least. And what path could possibly lead from the first flap of the modern UFO era to the Kennedy assassination?
In 1967, Harold Dahl authored an odd addendum to the Crisman chronicle in a note to UFO researcher Gary Leslie:

There is a TV series running now that I swear is based in the main on the life of F. Lee Crisman. I know him better than any living man and I know of some of the incredible adventures he has passed through in the last twenty years. I do not mean that his life has been that of this TV hero on The Invaders show… but there are parts of it that I swear were told to me years ago by Mr. Crisman… and I know of several that are too wild to be believed… even by the enlightened attitude of 1967.

Dahl made Crisman sound like the mysterious Cigarette Smoking Man from The X-Files. This may have been by design. Crisman may even have written Dahl’s letter himself to divert attention from what he was really doing in the Seattle area after World War II.

[Crisman’s] involvement with Maury Island may have had to do with covering up top-secret radar-fogging discs or the dumping of nuclear waste from the nearby Hanford plutonium reactor. Crisman wanted people to believe the [UFO] scenario, however. In early 1968, he corresponded with well-known UFO researcher Lucius Farish as the contact person for a group he called Parapsychology Research, under the pseudonym Fred Lee. The alias, which only dropped his last name, provided Crisman with a means to discuss himself in the third person, telling Farish: “Mr. Crisman is probably the most informed man in the United States on UFOs and also one of the hardest to find—as the FBI has learned several times.”

Even more bizarre is Fred Crisman’s link to another far-reaching conspiracy dubbed “the Octopus.” This was the name given by investigative journalist Danny Casolaro to a network of shadowy groups that overlapped the intelligence community, global bankers, the military-industrial complex, and the theft of powerful case management software called PROMIS by the Justice Department during the Reagan administration. Central to Casolaro’s investigation was an electronics and computer expert named Michael Riconosciuto, who claimed he’d modified PROMIS at the request of a friend of former Attorney General Ed Meese to allow secret back-door access by the government.
As it happens, Crisman worked for a Tacoma advertising agency owned by Riconosciuto’s father, Marshall, thus linking the earliest UFO sightings of the modern era, the Kennedy assassination, and major figures in the Iran-Contra scandal, the October Surprise, the savings and loan crisis of the ’80s and ’90s, and other global conspiracies too convoluted to get into here.
To give you a hint of the type of games being played: Casolaro was found dead, his wrists brutally slashed, in a motel room in August 1991. His death was officially ruled suicide. Riconosciuto was convicted early the next year of seven drug-related charges and given a minimum twenty-year sentence, despite his claim that the video evidence presented by the prosecution was faked. Riconosciuto was finally released in 2017 after serving about twenty-five years behind bars.
Back to Fred Crisman: As strange as his story is, he wasn’t the only spook linked to early UFO accounts and the Kennedy assassination. You see, the FBI agent who filed the SM-X report on the Maury Island case was Special Agent Guy Banister.
Banister is well known to JFK assassination researchers. He retired from the FBI in 1954 and, after a stint with the New Orleans police department, set up a private detective agency that may have served as a front to supply weapons used by Cuban exiles in 1961’s disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion. Banister’s mistress later said she was present when he advised Lee Harvey Oswald to set up a local pro-Castro Fair Play for Cuba Committee office in the same building as Banister’s agency.
In the 1940s, during the first wave of the modern UFO era, Guy Banister served as the Special Agent in Charge of the FBI’s Butte, Montana field office, which had jurisdiction over several western states. Declassified FBI documents obtained through FOIA requests include several telexes marked SM-X sent by Banister from Butte to Washington, D.C., all related to UFO sightings.
The assassination of John F. Kennedy had the fingerprints of the intelligence community all over it. But what were some of the same operatives doing with UFO reports in the 1940s?
And why have American intelligence agencies—and presumably those of other nations—remained involved in the UFO phenomenon to the present day?

Derek Gilbert

Derek Gilbert Bio

Derek P. Gilbert hosts SkyWatchTV, a Christian television program that airs on several national networks, the long-running interview podcast A View from the Bunker, and co-hosts SciFriday, a weekly television program that analyzes science news with his wife, author Sharon K. Gilbert.
Before joining SkyWatchTV in 2015, his secular broadcasting career spanned more than 25 years with stops at radio stations in Philadelphia, Saint Louis, Little Rock, and suburban Chicago.
Derek is a Christian, a husband and a father. He’s been a regular speaker at Bible prophecy conferences in recent years. Derek’s most recent book is The Great Inception: Satan’s PSYOPs from Eden to Armageddon. He has also published the novels The God Conspiracy and Iron Dragons, and he’s a contributing author to the nonfiction anthologies God’s Ghostbusters, Blood on the Altar, I Predict: What 12 Global Experts Believe You Will See by 2025, and When Once We Were a Nation.

If Lovecraft used horror to introduce the idea of contact with an alien “other” to the masses, the growing popularity of science fiction in the twentieth century established ET as a stereotype in popular entertainment. It’s hard to imagine, but our great-grandparents would have had no idea what the phrase “little green men” was supposed to mean.
Nineteenth century forerunners like Jules Verne and H. G. Wells demonstrated that fiction based on speculative science would sell. Verne’s 1865 From the Earth to the Moon was the first major work to feature space travel; in 1898, Wells produced the first ET invasion story with his classic The War of the Worlds. Another Welles—Orson—transformed The War of the Worlds into a compelling radio drama on Halloween Eve in 1938, although the story that the program caused a national panic is, sadly, a myth. (Newspapers lost a lot of advertising revenue to the new medium during the Great Depression and took advantage of an opportunity to condemn radio—an early example of “fake news.”)
The popularity of the genre took off in the 1920s with the arrival of the first pulp magazines that featured science fiction, such as Amazing Stories, Weird Tales, Astounding Stories, and Wonder Stories. The Golden Age of science fiction arrived in 1937 when John W. Campbell took over as editor of Astounding Science Fiction. Campbell is widely considered the most influential editor of the early years of the genre, publishing first or early stories by Isaac Asimov, Lester del Rey, Robert Heinlein, A. E. Van Vogt, and Theodore Sturgeon, thus helping to launch the careers of many of the biggest names in 20th century science fiction.
Despite his insistence that his writers research the science behind their stories, Campbell had an interest in parapsychology that grew over the years. Writers learned that with topics like telepathy helped them sell stories to Astounding. In 1949, Campbell discovered L. Ron Hubbard and published his first article on Dianetics, which Campbell described as “one of the most important articles ever published.” He suggested to some that Hubbard would win the Nobel Peace Prize for his creation.
Three years before selling Campbell on Dianetics, Hubbard participated in an event that comes from the “you can’t make this stuff up” file: From January to March, 1946, Hubbard and Jack Parsons, rocket engineer and one of the founders of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, performed a series of sex magic rituals called the Babalon (sic) Working. It was intended to manifest an incarnation of the divine feminine, a concept based on the writings of Aleister Crowley and described in his 1917 novel Moonchild.
So, through L. Ron Hubbard and Joseph Campbell, science fiction fans were connected to the Two Degrees of Aleister Crowley just as readers of gothic horror were through the works of H. P. Lovecraft and his successors.
Campbell managed to capture the paranoia and dread that marked Lovecraft’s work in his classic 1938 novella Who Goes There? The story has been adapted for the big screen three times—1951’s The Thing from Another World (featuring a young James Arnett, TV’s Matt Dillon, as the creature), 1982’s The Thing, starring Kurt Russell, and a 2011 prequel, also titled The Thing.
The Kurt Russell film, set in Antarctica, draws on key Lovecraftian themes—an ancient extraterrestrial that poses an existential threat to all life on Earth, the loss of self as one is assimilated by the monster, and a claustrophobic setting. The Thing was set at an Antarctic research station, where the bitter cold confines most of the action to the interior of the base. The paranoia-inducing monster imitates its victims perfectly, like the ETs in the 1956 classic Invasion of the Body Snatchers, which causes the base scientist, played by Wilford Brimley, to snap when he realizes just how quickly the creature could destroy the earth if it escaped the Antarctic—which makes Brimley’s character a lot like the protagonists in many of Lovecraft’s stories.
Even the setting near the South Pole recalls Lovecraft, whose classic novella At the Mountains of Madness introduced a theme that’s been revisited over the years in films like The X-Files and Alien vs. Predator—there’s something beneath the ice down there that shouldn’t be disturbed.

It is absolutely necessary, for the peace and safety of mankind, that some of earth’s dark, dead corners and unplumbed depths be let alone; lest sleeping abnormalities wake to resurgent life, and blasphemously surviving nightmares squirm and splash out of their black lairs to newer and wider conquests.

Not coincidentally, UFO enthusiasts claim to find alien craft half-buried in the Antarctic on a regular basis these days.
The point is that by the time Campbell began to elevate science fiction out of the swamp of pulp fiction in the late 1930s, the concept of unfriendly or uncaring ETIs intervening in Earth’s affairs was already several decades old. By the late 1940s, it was already fodder for kiddie cartoons; Marvin the Martian, with his Uranium PU-36 Explosive Space Modulator, debuted in 1948, just one year after Kenneth Arnold’s UFO sighting at Mount Rainier and the famous crash near Roswell, New Mexico.
In the decades since, science fiction has become, in the words of Dr. Michael S. Heiser, “televangelism for the ET religion.” People looking in from outside the genre may assume sci-fi is all rockets, ray guns, and lasers, but a lot of it theological. Films like Prometheus, Mission to Mars, Knowing, and 2001: A Space Odyssey, for example, conflate space travel, extraterrestrial intelligence, and religion by offering answers to the big questions the world’s religions have been addressing since the beginning of time—where we come from, why we’re here, and where we go when we die.
While human interaction with ETIs has been a stock premise for television for decades, sometimes played for drama and sometimes for laughs. And the mix of space travel and religion has never been off-screen for long. The original Star Trek reimagined the gods of Greece and Rome as powerful aliens when they encountered Apollo in the second season episode “Who Mourns for Adonais?”
Other entries in the Star Trek franchise likewise explored religious themes. The pilot episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation introduced Picard’s godlike nemesis, Q, who eventually appeared in a dozen episodes of TNG, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, and Star Trek: Voyager. A major plot arc of DS9 involved Commander Sisko’s role as the Emissary of the Prophets, the “wormhole aliens” worshiped as gods on the planet Bajor.
The 1994 film Stargate kicked off a long-running science fiction franchise that centered on the return of the old gods to Earth. In the Stargate universe, the deities of the ancient Near East were parasitic, technologically advanced ETIs called the Goa’Uld who ruled the earth thousands of years ago as gods. The movie follows a team of explorers who travel through a stargate to discover a world controlled by a brutal entity posing as the Egyptian sun-god Ra, whose spaceship looks a lot like the Great Pyramid of Giza.
The television series Stargate SG-1 and its spinoffs continued that theme. The Norse pantheon was introduced in the series as the Asgard, whose appearance inspired stories of the alien Greys (a look that just doesn’t work for Thor), and who, contrary to their reputation among ET contactees, side with humanity in the war against the Goa’Uld.
In other words, the Stargate franchise built an entire alternate history for the main religions of Earth: all of their gods are aliens. We don’t recall how they explained why the gods stopped visiting Earth for a couple thousand years, and of course they never touched the third rail of Hollywood, Jesus.
Considering what the series did to the pagan gods, it’s just as well.
SG-1 ran from 1997 through 2007, surpassing The X-Files as the longest-running science fiction television series in North America until it was passed by Smallville in 2011, a series that featured another godlike ETI, Superman.
Battlestar Galactica had two series runs, the first in 1978–79 and a second that ran for seventy-five episodes between 2003 and 2009. The original series was notable for being a thinly veiled dramatization of Mormon theology, including a council of twelve, marriage for “time and eternity,” and a planet named Kobol.
Religion was a prominent theme in the reboot, too; the twelve “Lords of Kobol” were the gods of the Greco-Roman pantheon (Zeus, Hera, Apollo, Ares, Athena, Poseidon, etc.), and the twelve occupied planets of humanity were named for the signs of the zodiac.
Interestingly, the Cylons, sentient robots who rebelled against their human masters, were depicted as monotheistic, a religion that looked a lot like a cross between Christianity and Judaism—basically Christianity minus Christ. Except for the part where they attempted genocide and nearly destroyed the entire human race, but that’s not surprising for a Hollywood view of the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.
The reimagined Battlestar introduced a new element: Humanoid Cylons so lifelike they were indistinguishable from humans. As the series developed, it was revealed that there were only seven models, but many copies of each. Model number One, Cavil, deceives the other Cylons by hiding the identities of the remaining humanoid Cylon models, the “Final Five.” Finding the unknown Cylons was a major plot thread in the series, and their ultimate disclosure to the human fleet was a turning point that led humanity to salvation on a new Earth.
Interestingly, that Cylon plot twist draws from several Western occult traditions, especially as they’ve been syncretized into Theosophy. Madame Blavatsky wrote in The Secret Doctrine that seven “rays” together form all energy and all forms produced by it—in other words, you, us, and everything around us. These “rays” are also intelligent beings called the Dhyan Chohans.
Since at least the early 1970s, however, some New Age leaders like Elizabeth Clare Prophet have been teaching that there are “five secret rays,” which “promote an action of detail, the final sculpturing of the mind and consciousness in the perfect image of the Christ.” We don’t know for sure why the writers of the reimagined Battlestar added the Final Five plot line, but we don’t believe the parallel to current New Age thinking is a coincidence.
And we are not coincidence theorists.
Comic books have also mined human theology for decades. Beyond the obvious, such as Marvel making a superhero out of the Norse storm-god Thor (who is a cognate for Jupiter, Zeus, and Baal—in other words, same god with different names), researcher and author Christopher Knowles makes a strong case in his book Our Gods Wear Spandex: The Secret History of Comic Book Heroes for comic book heroes as a modern rebranding of ancient mythological archetypes.

This culture is far more influential (and insidious) than most realize. Most contemporary action movies take their visual language from comic books. The rhythm of constant hyper-violence of today’s action movies comes straight from Jack Kirby. Elvis Presley idolized Captain Marvel Jr., to the point of adopting his hairstyle.
[…]
Although most of us don’t realize it, there’s simply nothing new about devotion to superheroes. Their powers, their costumes, and sometimes even their names are plucked straight from the pre-Christian religions of antiquity. When you go back and look at these heroes in their original incarnations, you can’t help but be struck by how blatant their symbolism is and how strongly they reflect they belief systems of the pagan age. What even fewer people realize is that this didn’t occur by chance, but came directly out of the spiritual and mystical secret societies and cults of the late 19th century—groups like the Theosophists, the Rosicrucians, and the Golden Dawn.

Popular movies based on comics or graphic novels featuring the ETI/religion theme include the Transformers franchise, X-Men Apocalypse, and the Guardians of the Galaxy films. The common thread: ETIs exist, they’re coming to Earth, and it’s either going to be awesome or apocalyptic when they get here.
And how has eighty years of pop culture pushing the ETI meme shaped our ideas about contact? Seth Shostak, lead astronomer for the SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Institute, hit the nail on the head:

I think we are ready for ET contact in some sense, because the public has been conditioned to the idea of life in space by movies and TV. And if you go into a classroom with a bunch of 11-year olds and ask them, “How many of you kids think there are aliens out there?” they all raise their hands! Why? Is it because their parents have been educating them about astrobiology? No. It’s because they’ve seen them on TV!
[…]
I think that Hollywood is by far the biggest term in the equation of the public’s reaction to confirmation of alien life.

It’s a concept that’s been drawn from nineteenth century occult groups and filtered through pulp magazines, sci-fi novels, radio dramas, cartoons, comic books, graphic novels, movies, and television, packaged as popular entertainment and sold as a worldview to the last four generations. How long before an official announcement that the ETIs—the old gods—are finally back?
One last thing: Isn’t it odd that the lead astronomer of the group searching for ETIs is named for the chaos god, Seth (Set)? And that the group’s acronym, SETI, is Egyptian for “man of Set?” Should we be concerned that Set-Typhon, the dark lord of chaos, is the one Aleister Crowley’s successor Kenneth Grant believed is the spirit of our age? And that he’s apparently reaching out to Earth from somewhere in the direction of Sirius?
Most likely another coincidence. It’s probably fine.

Derek Gilbert

Derek Gilbert Bio

Derek P. Gilbert hosts SkyWatchTV, a Christian television program that airs on several national networks, the long-running interview podcast A View from the Bunker, and co-hosts SciFriday, a weekly television program that analyzes science news with his wife, author Sharon K. Gilbert.
Before joining SkyWatchTV in 2015, his secular broadcasting career spanned more than 25 years with stops at radio stations in Philadelphia, Saint Louis, Little Rock, and suburban Chicago.
Derek is a Christian, a husband and a father. He’s been a regular speaker at Bible prophecy conferences in recent years. Derek’s most recent book is The Great Inception: Satan’s PSYOPs from Eden to Armageddon. He has also published the novels The God Conspiracy and Iron Dragons, and he’s a contributing author to the nonfiction anthologies God’s Ghostbusters, Blood on the Altar, I Predict: What 12 Global Experts Believe You Will See by 2025, and When Once We Were a Nation.