MUFON Spreads the ET Gospel

 

Author Derek Gilbert is a prolific researcher and amazing author. His books and articles dive into areas the mainstream church chooses to ignore. This exclusive article for APPI gives information that millions of people are buying into everyday. Pastors and ministers need to wake up and see/learn what your people are dealing with at home, at school, on TV, and in the workplace! There are many detailed eye-popping articles like this archived in our website written by Derek. Thank you Derek!  (Paul Pickern)

You can say one thing for Erich von Däniken—he isn’t shy about challenging accepted history:

I claim that our forefathers received visits from the universe in the remote past, even though I do not yet know who these extraterrestrial intelligences were or from which planet they came. I nevertheless proclaim that these “strangers” annihilated part of mankind existing at the time and produced a new, perhaps the first, homo sapiens.

Chariots of the Gods? had the good fortune of being published in 1968, the same year Stanley Kubrick’s epic adaptation of Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey hit theaters. The film, based on the idea that advanced alien technology had guided human evolution, was the top-grossing film of the year, and was named the “greatest sci-fi film of all time” in 2002 by the Online Film Critics Society. By 1971, when Chariots finally appeared in American bookstores, NASA had put men on the moon three times (including Edgar Mitchell in Apollo 14, who later tried to meet with President Obama to discuss ETIs from a “contiguous universe”) and the public was fully primed for what von Däniken was selling.

It’s hard to overstate the impact Chariots of the Gods? has had on the UFO research community and the worldviews of millions of people around the world over the last half century. In 1973, Twilight Zone creator Rod Serling built a documentary around Chariots titled In Search of Ancient Astronauts, which featured astronomer Carl Sagan and Wernher von Braun, architect of the Saturn V rocket. The following year, a feature film with the same title as the book was released to theaters. By the turn of the 21^st century, von Däniken had sold more than 60 million copies of his twenty-six books, all promoting the idea that our creators came from the stars.

This, even though von Däniken told National Enquirer in a 1974 interview that his information came not through archaeological fieldwork but through out-of-body travel to a place called Point Aleph, “a sort of fourth dimension” outside of space and time.

Wow. Might that be the same cosmic place Kenneth Grant found the ethereal Necronomicon?

The claims of von Däniken just don’t hold water. His theories have been debunked in great detail and he’s even admitted making things up, but lack of evidence has never stopped crazy ideas for long. And now, thanks to a new generation of true believers, Ancient Aliens and its imitators are still mining von Däniken gold five decades after his first book hit the shelves.

Ancient alien evangelists have effectively proselytized the American public since Chariots of the Gods went viral nearly fifty years ago. As we noted earlier, more adults in the U.S. believe in ETI than in the God of the Bible. Interestingly, serious UFO researchers are disturbed by the impact of the ancient alien meme on their work.

MUFON, the Mutual UFO Network, which calls itself “the world’s oldest and largest UFO phenomenon investigative body,” has gone all in with ancient aliens in recent years. The group now openly supports pseudoscientific and New Age (in other words, occultic) interpretations of the UFO phenomenon instead of sticking to what can be supported by evidence. For example, the theme of MUFON’s 2017 national convention was “The Case for a Secret Space Program,” which was described by one critic as “blatantly unscientific and irrational.”

One of the conference speakers claimed he was recruited for “a ‘20 & Back’ assignment which involved age regression (via Pharmaceutical means) as well as time regressed to the point of beginning service.” In plain English, he says he served twenty years in an off-planet research project, and then was sent back in time to a few minutes after he left and “age-regressed” so no one would notice that he’s twenty years older than the rest of us.

O-kay.

Another speaker claimed he was pre-identified as a future president of the United States in a CIA/DARPA program called Project Pegasus, which purportedly gathered intel on past and future events, such as the identities of future presidents. He also claimed Barack Obama was his roommate in 1980 in a CIA project called Mars Jump Room, a teleportation program that sent trainees to a secret base on the red planet.

Um-hmm.

The content of MUFON’s 2017 symposium was so over the top that Richard Dolan, a longtime advocate for ETI disclosure, felt it was necessary to publicly explain why he’d sit on a MUFON-sanctioned discussion panel with men who claimed, without any corroboration whatsoever, that they’d been part of a “secret space program.”

[W]hen I learned I would be on a panel with Corey [Goode], Andy [Basiago], Bill [Tompkins], and Michael [Salla], I phoned Jan [Harzan, MUFON’s Executive Director] and politely asked him what was he thinking. I mentioned my concern about MUFON’s decision to bring in individuals with claims that are inherently impossible to verify. MUFON, after all, is supposed to have evidence-based standards.

Maybe it shouldn’t surprise us that MUFON has morphed from an “evidence-based” organization to one that promotes unverifiable claims at its national convention. As the controversy grew over the theme of MUFON’s 2017 convention, it was revealed that MUFON’s “Inner Circle” included New Age teacher J. Z. Knight.

According to MUFON’s website, the Inner Circle provides “advisory guidance” to the organization because its thirteen members—a curiously coincidental number—have “shown unparalleled generosity towards MUFON by donating in excess of $5,000 in a single donation.”

Hmm. So, the only qualification to advise and guide America’s premier UFO investigating collective is an extra five large in your pocket. And one of MUFON’s Inner Circle makes her living by packaging and selling rehashed teachings of Madame Helena Blavatsky.

J. Z. Knight, born in Roswell, New Mexico (!) in March of 1946, just about the time Jack Parsons and L. Ron Hubbard were wrapping up their magickal ritual, the Babylon [sic] Working, claims to channel the spirit of Ramtha the Enlightened One, a warrior who lived 35,000 years ago in the mythical land of Lemuria.

Ramtha, Knight says, led Lemurian forces against the tyrannical Atlanteans before eventually bidding his troops farewell and ascending to heaven in a flash of light. Ten years after he first appeared, Knight founded Ramtha’s School of Enlightenment, through which she has become a very wealthy woman by selling counseling sessions based on the wisdom of the ancient Lemurian warrior.

While Ramtha has no need for creature comforts, Ms. Knight apparently likes nice things.

As of 2017, the school employed 80 full-time staff, and annual profits from book and audio sales ran into the millions. According to Knight, Ramtha’s teachings can be boiled down to mind over matter: “Ramtha tells people that if they learn what to do, the art of creating your own reality is really a divine act. There’s no guru here. You are creating your day. You do it yourself.”

Even so, your author assumes Ms. Knight still looks both ways before crossing the street.

Three students of RSE produced the 2004 film What the Bleep Do We Know?, a low-budget movie that twisted quantum physics into pseudoscientific New Age propaganda. Of course, Ramtha’s doctrine of changing the physical world through proper spiritual discipline was the heart of the film. In spite of the criticism of actual physicists, Bleep has grossed nearly $16 million worldwide to date.

J. Z. Knight may be MUFON’s wealthiest benefactor. This begs at least three questions: First, how much “advisory guidance” do the thirteen members of MUFON’s Inner Circle give? Second, how much did Knight donate above and beyond the $5,000 Inner Circle threshold? And third, how did her wealth and worldview influence MUFON’s approach to the subject of ETI disclosure?

For the record, your author is not the only one asking these questions. Former MUFON state director James E. Clarkson, a thirty-year member, publicly resigned July 22, 2017, citing Knight’s position of influence within the group: “I will not have my reputation in this field compromised by affiliating with a rich and powerful cult leader who is now a member of the MUFON Inner Circle.”

It sounds bizarre when we step back and summarize things, but there is no way to make it sound rational: The horror fiction of H. P. Lovecraft, who was apparently inspired by the same spirits behind 19^th century occultists like Helena Blavatsky (and possibly the same spirit that communicated with Aleister Crowley), was filtered through the French science-fiction scene in the 1960s, adapted by a Swiss hotelier named von Däniken, and recycled back to the United States at the time of the first moon landings, where it’s grown into a scientistic religion that replaces God with aliens.

Wow.

To paraphrase our friend, Christian researcher and author L. A. Marzulli: As we approach the 50^th anniversary of Chariots of the Gods, the ancient alien meme is real, burgeoning, and not going away.

And the old gods are using it to set the stage for their return.