Alien gods are the new gay marriage. A 2019 Gallup poll found 33 percent of Americans believed UFOs are occupied by extraterrestrials. In 2021, a Pew survey saw that number jump to 51 percent. During the 2020 COVID-19 panic, UFO sightings doubled from the previous year. Media hype is more potent than a Martian mind-control ray.
Even if you don’t believe in ETs or UFOs, you can’t help but rub elbows with those who do. They’re all over the place.
We all know the amateurs. They quote Joe Rogan, follow Jeremy Corbell on Twitter, and smoke DMT to contact interdimensional beings. They watch Ancient Aliens on the History Channel, or listen to Coast to Coast AM until sunrise. In the UFO scene, they’re “spiritual but not religious.”
Desert-dwelling saucer-chasers are pretty committed, at least professionally. Conference tickets get expensive, as do quality night-vision goggles. Still, hardcore chasers are more obsessive than religious.
Only serious fanatics join UFO cults. Some do it to summon ETs with magic spells. Others employ alien wisdom to clone human babies. One group cut their testicles off and drank cyanide to escape Earth’s gravitational field. That takes real commitment.
Historically speaking, UFO religion is just getting started. People have seen strange lights in the sky for millennia. But flying saucer sightings weren’t widely publicized until the 1940s. Unsurprisingly, the first major space cults appeared soon afterward.
What’s baffling is how many old school sects survived. You have to admire their tenacity. And now, after years of ridicule, important people are finally taking UFO phenomena seriously—including pop punk stars and former presidents.
Who’s laughing now?
Haters…
1 – AETHERIUS SOCIETY – (Europe: f. 1950s)
Here’s the story.
For millennia, various extraterrestrial Cosmic Masters—including Jesus, the Buddha, Lao Tzu, and Krishna—descended from outer space to guide human evolution. Presently, Jesus and the Buddha have retired to Venus. Krishna lives on Saturn. As usual, Lao Tzu has wandered off with no forwarding address.
In 1954, this Interplanetary Parliament noticed the Cold War’s nuclear arms race. The End Times were near. So they sent a Venusian emissary, Aetherius, to deliver a message of peace and cosmic consciousness to a British yoga fanatic, George West.
The Great White Brotherhood from the stars ordered this crusty eco-pacifist to form the Aetherius Society. His robe-clad army was to wage spiritual warfare against invisible black magicians, also from outer space. Through Operation Prayer Power, the Aetherians can amplify their prayers with Spiritual Energy Batteries in order to avert eco-collapse and nuclear annihilation.
The Aetherius movement, which is still active today, laid the groundwork for subsequent UFO cults. In a modern world dominated by science and technology, the only way for the old gods to stay relevant is to trade in their chariots of fire for gleaming flying saucers.
2 – NATION OF ISLAM – (America: f. 1930s)
Some time after 1917, a black man now known as the Noble Drew Ali claimed that African Americans are actually Moors. Building on his bloodline obsession, Ali rewrote the Islamic Qur’an, founded the Moorish Science Temple of America, and prophesied that during the End Times, he and his faithful followers would be taken up in a mysterious “apparatus,” from which they would watch the bad guys burn.
Some time after 1947, as flying saucers flooded the newsstands, Drew Ali’s spiritual descendant Elijah Muhammad claimed a circular Mother Plane flown by “Blackmen” was hovering beyond Earth’s orbit. Soon, he promised, precision saucers would descend and destroy white America for its sins against the oppressed.
On July 3rd 2021—a week after the U.S. government’s UFO task force report was published—an armed posse of black militiamen known as “Rise of the Moors” had a nine-hour standoff with Massachusetts police. To their credit, the militia refused to relinquish their arms. They insisted the Moorish bloodline is not beholden to U.S. imperial laws and customs.
George Washington University’s extremism expert, J.J. MacNab, said of the Moorish Sovereign movement: “They rely on an alternative history that borrows from Moorish Science Temple… Nation of Islam [and] UFO theories.”
3 – SCIENTOLOGY – (America: f. 1950s)
The failing sci-fi writer L. Ron Hubbard eventually gained literary success by launching a worldwide UFO religion. Hubbard spelled out his prescient vision in 1957:
“We are the heralds of the New Age. … Atomic reactors giving unlimited power. Automatic machines providing for most of Man’s animal wants. Space flight to the Solar System. New politics, new leisure, new hates, new loves… Scientology for the individual is a passport to this new time.”
In principle, Hubbard’s religion is a self-help program. Using various tech devices, such as “e-meters” (like an EEG, only magic), one can work out negative “engrams” (basically emotional hang-ups) and purge the soul of bad “thetans” (pronounced “Satan” but with a lisp).
By this method, one can “go clear” and become an “Operating Thetan” (similar to a self-realized personality, but with psychic powers).
So where did these thetans come from? According to Hubbard’s esoteric “Space Opera,” thetans are the troubled ghosts of aliens who were brought to Earth on DC-8 space planes, some 75 million years ago.
As Hubbard tells it, the Galactic Confederation faced a cosmic overpopulation problem. So the head of the Confederation—the evil Xenu—rounded up a trillion or so galactic inhabitants, froze them and delivered them to Earth like Schwan’s TV dinners, hucked them into Hawaiian volcanoes, blew them into the atmosphere with H-bombs, gathered their floating souls with force fields, packaged those souls into various “clusters,” brainwashed them with huge movie screens, then released them to wander the hills.
Therefore, each human soul is an aggregate of deluded alien ghosts. The goal of Scientology is to liberate your personal thetan from the parasitic thetans crawling all over you. That’s how you become an “Operating Thetan.”
The process costs a pretty penny. But if you want to compete in the Space Age, you’ve gotta pay to play.
Scientology worked for Tom Cruise and it can work for you!
4 – RÄELIANS – (Europe: f. 1970s)
As the story goes, in 1945 the galactic community was alarmed by the first atomic bomb’s explosion. Because these ETs are space gardeners who cultivate human evolution, they’re obliged to keep their pet project from going nuclear.
In 1973, a man now known as Räel—the “Prophet of the Age of the Apocalypse”—encountered a flying saucer in France. A small, human-like being emerged to explain the true history of the planet. This ET was one of the Elohim: highly evolved humanoids who’ve long been mistaken for deities.
According to Räel, “God” is a fairy tale. There are only atoms and the void—plus aliens. But not evil aliens. That’s another myth invented by reactionary Earthlings.
Two thousand years ago, Räel explained, the alien Yahweh took an Earth-woman aboard his spaceship to sire a son named Jesus. Down on the ground, Jesus was attacked by Earthling rabble. So he was taken up to the Planet of the Eternals, where he now lives with Moses, the Buddha, Muhammad, and King Yahweh. (Räel knows this because he’s been there.)
Ultimately, the Räelian aliens have eugenic goals for our human garden. Come the Rapture, the best and brightest will have their “cellular plan” taken up to the Planet of the Eternals to be cloned in perpetuity.
In fact, the Räelians have already gotten started. In 2002, their genomics company Clonaid announced they created the first human clone: Eve.
Despite global scorn, Räel has maintained a successful UFO religion that spans three continents. Most importantly, he’s managed to attract an enormous harem of hot women. Known as “Räel’s Angels,” these ladies play hostess to polyamorous Tantric rituals all over the world.
There can be only one explanation for a middle-aged man in white robes with a skullet-style topknot pulling so many chicks—alien psycho-technology.
Any alternative theories will get you abducted and probed by hostile feminists, so just go with the alien thing.
5 – FALUN GONG – (Asia: f. 1990s)
Given their aversion to extraterrestrials, the practitioners of Falun Gong aren’t a “UFO cult,” but interdimensional ETs do play a role in their belief system.
As articulated by founder Li Hongzhi – a man constantly threatened by the authoritarian thugs inside the Chinese Communist Party – the cosmos is a vast web of gods, buddhas, and animistic spirits. This includes alien life forms.
These aliens have high technology, but low morals. At the turn of the 20th century, they began an invasion to steal human DNA. That would explain all the abductee butt probes and forced extraction of sperm and ova. UFOs are just flying rape caves.
Typically, Li believes, God would protect us from such predation. But due to humanity’s moral decline, we’ve been left to our own defenses.
Li claims most of our tech innovations, such as computers and airplanes, were given to us by aliens. The ETs did this to make us dependent on technology rather than our innate spiritual powers—to turn us into subservient automatons.
In a 1999 interview with TIME Magazine, Li explained:
“If cloning human beings succeeds, the aliens can officially replace humans. … If people reproduce a human person, the gods in heaven will not give its body a human soul. The aliens will take that opportunity to replace the human soul and by doing so they will enter earth and become earthlings. … They will act like humans, but they will introduce legislation to stop human reproduction…
“Aliens have already constructed a layer of cells in human beings. The development of computers dictates this layer of body cells to control human culture and spirituality, and in the end to replace human beings.”
See that smartphone in your hand? Aliens are using it to control you. Think about it.
6 – HEAVEN’S GATE – (America: f. 1990s)
At first, the New Age power couple Marshall Applewhite and Bonnie Lu Nettles called themselves “Bo” and “Peep.” Having tested the waters with their thoroughly infantalized followers—mostly computer programmers harvested from the World Wide Web—the couple started going by “Do” and “Ti.”
Do and Ti taught that our earthly bodies are useless husks. Our true souls belong to TELAH (The Evolutionary Level Above Human) whose domain is “The Kingdom of Heaven,” somewhere in outer space.
In early 1997, the Hale-Bopp comet could be seen with the naked eye. Pointing upward from southern California, Do and Ti proclaimed there was a spiritual spacecraft hiding behind that glowing snowball in the sky.
Wait a minute! Why do non-physical beings need a spacecraft at all?
“Stop asking questions and remove your testicles!”
The cult’s dutiful men complied.
On March 26, 1997, thirty-nine Internet-addicted Americans—most of them castrated—donned matching Chinese-made Nike sneakers. Under the influence of two wackos called “Do” and “Ti,” each one guzzled enough cyanide to blow open Heaven’s Gate.
It’s an unsettling allegory for Western civilization.
7 – THE FUTURE OF POMO UFOs
Going forward, these extraterrestrial stories will only become more widespread and more elaborate.
Earthbound psychic orbs sent to inspire tech innovation. ET saviors committed to saving the whales from nuclear submarines.
Transdimensional sex tourists coming to enjoy “communion” with hapless humans. Interstellar social justice warriors hellbent on eradicating ra-sex-islamo-homo-phobia throughout the galaxy.
It’s all so Space Age, but so familiar.
The future of postmodern UFO religion will have no boundaries but the human imagination. Prepare for the worst. Watch for upturned eyes and rising body counts. The whole thing will be funnier than you think.
