Seeing and Knowing: UFOs and the American Religion
“If a UFO lands in a forest and there’s no one there to see it, was there ever really a UFO?” – Mark Pilkington, Mirage Men
The American religion, wrote literary critic Harold Bloom, is only superficially Christianity or any of its mainstream varieties. If you look under the surface of the diverse varieties of Christian faith there is a singular, distinctively American core religion that has more in common with the Gnosticism of the church of the first centuries AD than it does with the more doctrinal Catholic and Protestant churches that replaced it. Gnosticism is a religion founded on direct personal experience, direct knowing of reality (which goes by a variety of names of which God is only one among several).
If you think about it, UFOs are perfect symbols of such a Gnostic religion. For example, I Know What I Saw is the title of a recent documentary by James Fox (the most significant and sober film treatment of the subject of UFOs) and the phrase “I know what I saw” is expressed verbatim or in paraphrase by many of the interviewees in that film. Indeed it is expressed by UFO witnesses everywhere. (The phrase is also used by witnesses to Sasquatch and other extraordinary phenomena.) It means knowing that is based not on the testimony of science or mainstream common knowledge, but on direct personal experience with something most of society dismisses as impossible or as fantasy.
As more and more Americans witness unexplainable objects in our skies, and as more and more reputable authorities (military personnel, pilots, astronauts, government officials) go public verifying the reality of a UFO presence, the more I believe UFOs will become a central symbol in the American Gnostic religion. We don’t know what these objects are, or even if they represent a single phenomenon. There is no evidence they are from space, and the extraterrestrial hypothesis is losing ground among many believers—there are other explanations. But whatever they are, seeing is believing, and the more people see them, the more they will become central features in the American religion.
Jacques Vallee has written of UFO cults as harmful tools of manipulation. But I’m not sure that direct personal experience is such a bad basis for a religion, in the sense of belief in — or rather, knowledge of — something “higher” that passeth understanding. Awe and wonder, a questioning of common sense and of the limited nature of science, are the typical effects of such extraordinary experiences and thus are an effective destroyer of human arrogance, something churches no longer do a good job at.
Ophamim. I believe some are what we would class as angels. The times I’ve witnessed craft (along with other witnesses)have also been times of high trauma and life changes. I believe they are part of our consciousness whether individually or as a group.