Denver, Colorado. Just past 10 p.m. Peggy Otis drove down a quiet residential street with her young granddaughter, Jennifer, asleep beside her.
Suddenly something in the sky attracted her attention. It was an airplane, apparently coming in for a landing at Denver’s Stapleton International Airport.
Guess again.
It wasn’t an airplane. It was way too low…and it was going to crash into the street right in front of her!
Peggy remembers that “sparks were being emitted from underneath it, and it suddenly came down so low that I thought it was going to smash the top of my car. I screamed at Jennifer to wake up and jumped out of the car. The craft was dome-shaped, and I could see someone moving inside it. We were terrified, thinking that it was going to crash into us.”
It didn’t crash into Peggy’s car, nor did it fall into the street. Instead, after lingering for a few scary moments, it simply floated away. But before it did, something even stranger happened.
Someone from the craft spoke to her. She didn’t hear an audible voice, but the message was strong and clear: “Don’t forget us.”
That was all.
Later that evening, when Peggy told her husband, he called the airport to see if anyone had reported seeing anything out of the ordinary. No one had. Mrs. Otis described the craft as making a noise like that of a garbage disposal and said that it came low enough that she could see people inside of it—and yet nobody else saw a thing.1
What was it that Peggy Otis saw that night in Denver? Whose voice did she hear?
Cochran County, Texas. The sheriff ’s department responded to an agitated call from a rancher who complained that “something” was killing his livestock. The rancher said things were so weird he couldn’t explain them over the phone.
When the sheriff went to investigate, the rancher drove him to a spot a couple of miles from the house, where a circle about 30 feet in diameter had been pressed into a wheat field. And there, in the middle of the circle, was a dead cow that had been butchered with surgical precision. Its tongue had been removed, along with its navel. Apart from the tongue no other edible meat had been taken. Whoever had killed this animal wasn’t interested in food, and they hadn’t butchered it at that spot. There was no blood on the ground.
About a quarter of a mile away from the cow, the men found a dead steer lying in the middle of another large circle. It had been butchered in exactly the same way, but there was something different here. Within the circle itself, the wheat had been burned down to within four inches of the ground. The only explanation was that something very hot had come out of the sky and almost landed there…almost, but not quite—otherwise, the wheat would have been burned to the ground.
The sheriff ’s subsequent investigation turned up nothing further, except that several area residents reported seeing “strange lights” in the sky around the time the animals had been killed.2
What had happened in Cochran County, Texas…or Denver, Colorado?
AN OLD STORY THAT KEEPS GETTING WEIRDER
A businessman by the name of Kenneth Arnold first coined the term “flying saucers” back in 1947. Arnold was describing some weird-looking aircraft he had seen from the cockpit of his private airplane.
Over the next several years, thousands of people all over the world reported seeing other strange crafts maneuvering through our skies. Some were saucer-shaped, like the ones Arnold saw, some were cigar-shaped, and still others seemed almost jelly-like—blobs that had no clearly defined shape. All agreed they were like no other aircraft anyone had ever seen. They flew at speeds several thousand miles per hour. Sometimes they hung almost dead still in the sky. Other times they shot up into the sky so fast that they completely disappeared within seconds. They also made impossible 90-degree turns and could stop in an instant.
In 1948 some claimed a flying saucer had crashed near Roswell, New Mexico and the Air Force had recovered bodies from the wreckage. The Air Force later issued an official statement saying that the crashed vehicle wasn’t a spacecraft at all, but a harmless weather balloon. Many people didn’t believe it. Some still don’t.
By the mid-1950s several books had been written accusing the Air Force of trying to keep the American people in the dark about what was happening. Most of the authors felt something otherworldly (and most likely sinister) was going on, and the Air Force was keeping a lid on it—probably because the truth was too frightening for us to handle.
These authors also believed that “something big” was just around the corner. They felt the secrecy was going to end, and we’d all know the truth about unidentified flying objects by 1959 or 1960 at the latest. More than likely, they said, the government was going to announce that we had made contact with advanced beings from a nearby planet, probably Venus or Mars.
It didn’t happen.
Here we are, 50 years later, and we don’t know any more about flying saucers than we did when Kenneth Arnold reportedly saw the first. We don’t know where they come from. We don’t know what they’re made of. We don’t know why or if they’re really here.
But one thing we do know…the reports won’t go away. Thousands of sightings are reported to authorities every year. UFO investigator J. Allen Hynek says that since Arnold’s day, there have been a minimum of 700,000 sightings in the United States alone and millions worldwide.3
Over the years the sightings have changed. Now strange circles are supposedly being imprinted into grain fields here and in Europe. There are also numerous reports of cattle mutilations. And more interesting, the sightings have become much more personal.
Millions of people throughout the world claim that they have made contact with aliens from deep space—many of them against their will. UFO researcher Clifford Wilson says he believes there are 50,000 cases of these “close encounters of the third kind” on record.4
WHO ARE THEY, AND WHAT DO THEY WANT?
Some alien abductees report having medical experiments performed on them. They say the aliens seem especially interested in the human reproduction system. Others tell of being chased and taken aboard spacecraft against their will. Some say they’ll never again be able to sleep without a light on.
Of course all of this is disturbing. But what’s even more disturbing is that a growing number of people have been “given messages” to deliver on behalf of the aliens. Most of the messages have to do with love, peace, and learning to live in harmony with each other. On the surface that all sounds very good.
But underneath there’s a secondary message that sounds strangely familiar—often, something along these lines…
You are gods. Learn to unlock the power within you.
Throw off the shackles of your narrow-minded religions (especially Christianity) and join us in experiencing your divine godhead.
The message is identical to much of the occult teachings delivered by the fallen angels we discussed in chapter 2.
What’s even more coincidental is that thousands of people throughout the world now claim to be making contact with beings from space through meditation, channeling, automatic writing, and similar methods that are all considered occultist in nature. It seems strange for any “advanced civilization” to use these questionable and unreliable means of delivering important messages to us. But then again, the messages we’re receiving from these “aliens” aren’t exactly trustworthy.
Going back to the early days of close encounters, we almost always find that the UFOnauts claimed to be from Venus, Mars, or one of the other nearby planets. But since science now indicates there are no advanced civilizations on nearby worlds, the aliens have simply changed their story. Now they come from Zeta Reticuli, Wolf 24, Alpha Centauri, or some other distant region of the universe—areas that, coincidentally enough, we can’t check out.
Even if they did come from somewhere in the neighborhood of Alpha Centauri, which is the nearest star, it would take them 80,000 years to get here by conventional means. Even traveling at the speed of light, it would take hundreds or even thousands of years to get here from most points in space. This means they would have to travel faster than the speed of light, which, according to the laws of physics, is absolutely impossible.
AND SINCE WE’RE TALKING SCIENCE…
Astrophysicist Hugh Ross, founder and president of the organization Reason to Believe, has spent years analyzing hundreds of UFO sightings. Dr. Ross states that people are definitely seeing something unusual. Even though 95 percent of all sightings are eventually explained as cases of mistaken identity, there are still far too many unexplained sightings to write the whole thing off as weather balloons, swamp gas, and such.
But having said that, Hugh Ross also believes that the 5 percent of legitimate UFOs can’t possibly be physical objects. If they were, they would have to follow the laws of physics—and they don’t.
Here are 10 reasons from Hugh Ross as to why UFOs are not physical objects:5
1. NO PHYSICAL ARTIFACTS HAVE BEEN RECOVERED.
Despite numerous rumors of crashes, captures, and other close encounters with unidentified flying objects, Dr. Ross says that to date, there’s not one documented case of physical evidence being collected. If UFOs were physical objects, 50-plus years of visiting planet earth most certainly would have resulted in some sort of physical evidence being left behind.
2. SOME UFOS HAVE BEEN SEEN BUT COULDN’T BE PHOTOGRAPHED. OTHERS HAVE BEEN PHOTOGRAPHED EVEN THOUGH NOTHING COULD BE SEEN.
Dr. Ross says the same thing has happened with radar. On occasion UFOs have been plainly seen hovering in the sky, but radar screens at nearby airports or military installations don’t show a thing. At other times radar has picked up strong signals from craft moving through the sky, but nothing has been seen.
It’s impossible for physical objects to behave in this way.
3. UFOS DON’T CREATE SONIC BOOMS.
If you’ve ever lived near an air force base, you know the thunderous boom that occurs when a supersonic jet breaks the sound barrier. It shakes the house. Occasionally it breaks windows. And yet UFOs travel in and out of our atmosphere at speeds many times faster than sound, and they do it in complete silence. According to the laws of physics, that’s impossible.
4. UFOS HAVE BEEN SEEN MAKING 90-DEGREE TURNS AT SPEEDS ESTIMATED IN EXCESS OF 18,000 MILES PER HOUR.
Remember the last time someone took a corner too fast and you were thrown to the side of the car? Or they hit the brakes and you flew forward? Try that at 18,000 miles per hour!
Solid aircraft simply couldn’t survive such turns, nor could any creature inside of them. A person who was inside a spacecraft that did make a turn like that would have to be scraped off the walls with a spatula. A solid ball of steel can’t survive a right-angle turn at only 5,000 miles per hour.
Nothing can survive such a turn at the speed these craft are reported to be moving.
5. UFOS HAVE BEEN OBSERVED TO CHANGE SHAPE, SIZE, AND COLOR AT RANDOM.
A solid object can’t change instantaneously from an oval to a circle to a square and back to an oval. Liquid, yes. Gas, yes. But a solid, no. And yet UFOs have been observed to do all of this and more.
6. UFOS HAVE BEEN PERFORMING A NUMBER OF OTHER MANEUVERS THAT ARE PHYSICALLY IMPOSSIBLE.
For example, on one occasion, two UFOs were reportedly seen traveling at a high rate of speed directly at each other. Observers on the ground braced themselves for a disastrous crash, but it never came. Instead, the two objects simply merged into one larger “craft.” After a few minutes they separated again. During another sighting a large UFO suddenly split into five smaller objects, which then came back together. UFOs have also disappeared and then reappeared, and they have disintegrated only to “reintegrate” a few moments later as if nothing had happened.
When two cars collide head-on, even if they’re only going 20 miles an hour, the result can be devastating. How is it, then, that objects traveling hundreds of times that speed can merge without causing so much as a dent in each other? It can’t happen—not to physical objects. And yet, according to dozens of witness reports, it does.
7. NO COMMUNICATION BETWEEN UFOS HAS EVER BEEN DETECTED.
If “flying saucers” were interplanetary spacecraft, we almost certainly would have intercepted communications between them. But even though we’ve had our ears turned to the skies for decades, we haven’t heard a thing. Instead, these craft speed through our skies in complete silence.
This brings up another interesting point. If these objects really came from deep space, their arrival would have been recorded by some of the world’s top observatories. And yet, even though there are dozens of extremely high-powered telescopes in observatories around the world, none of them has ever recorded an image of a craft approaching the earth from space. Nobody sees them coming. Then, all of a sudden, they’re here.
8. SOME UFOS HAVE BEEN SEEN SHOOTING OUT “FINITE” BEAMS OF LIGHT.
In other words they send out a beam of light that goes out so far and just stops. But light simply doesn’t behave that way. It keeps going, either until a solid object, such as a wall, stops it, or, if there’s no object to stop it, until its energy is dissipated. According to Dr. Ross, this is just another of the many things UFOs do that aren’t compatible with the rules that govern our physical universe.
9. ALTHOUGH THOUSANDS OF PHOTOGRAPHS OF UFOS HAVE BEEN TAKEN OVER THE YEARS, NONE ARE OF HIGH QUALITY.
Have you ever seen a clear photo of a UFO? I haven’t. They’re almost always blurred. My first inclination would be to believe the blurring was intentional on the part of the photographer who was trying to pull a fast one. But then some of these objects photographed have been seen by hundreds of people, so that rules out deception. And yet, if the UFOs were real, physical, solid objects, they wouldn’t blur this way.
Think about the photos you’ve seen of the space shuttle. Were any of those blurry? More than likely, they were crisp, clear, and sharp, even though the shuttle was traveling at a very high rate of speed. Ross says that physical objects simply do not blur the way UFOs do when they’re photographed. The fault doesn’t lie with the photographs or their photographers, but with the objects themselves. They appear blurry on film because they are blurry. They aren’t real in the sense that they aren’t solid, physical objects.
10. MAGNETIC FIELD MEASUREMENTS DON’T CONCUR WITH MAGNETIC DISTURBANCES THAT ARE TAKING PLACE.
UFOs have reportedly caused disruption of earth-bound communications. They have made car engines stall, induced power blackouts, caused clocks and watches to stop dead in their tracks, and so on. And yet when we’ve tried to measure the electromagnetic energy that has caused this to happen, it’s simply not there. In other words, Dr. Ross says something “real” is taking place, but it’s not physical. If it were, we could measure it.
WHERE DO UFOS REALLY COME FROM?
But if the UFOs aren’t physical, what are they? Why are they here? And where have they come from?
The “space aliens,” whoever they may be, seem very religious and zealous in spreading their views. When they “communicate” (through seances, automatic handwriting, psychics, and abductees) they often urge us earthlings to open our hearts to the universe through meditation and other mystical practices. They seem quite comfortable with Eastern-style religious practices and very much in agreement with many of the components of New Age teachings.
The only religion they seem to disdain is Christianity, which they label as “narrow-minded and divisive.” They have no problem throwing Christ’s name around, but they have zero tolerance when he’s mentioned as the only begotten Son of God who died on the cross to save us from our sins.
Again, it’s highly unlikely the UFOs zipping through our skies are interplanetary spacecraft. All indications are that they represent a supernatural phenomenon of a far different kind.
UFO investigator John Keel says:
Thousands of mediums, psychics and UFO contactees have been receiving mountains of messages from “Ashtar” in recent years. Mr. Ashtar represents himself as a leader in the great intergalactic councils which hold regular meetings on Jupiter, Venus, Saturn and many planets known to us. But Ashtar is not a new arrival. Variations of this name, such as Astaroth, Ashar, Asharoth, etc., appear in demonological literature throughout history, both in the Orient and the Occident. Mr. Ashtar has been around a very long time, posing as assorted gods and demons and now, in the modern phase, as another glorious spaceman.6
WHO IS ASHTAR?
He’s actually mentioned in the Bible as one of the pagan gods the Israelites were commanded not to worship when they entered the Promised Land. God told his people that when they came into Canaan, they were to “break down their altars, smash their sacred stones and burn their Asherah poles in the fire” (Deuteronomy 12:3, emphasis mine). (Asherah is another name for Ashtar.)
That, alone, ought to be enough to make us wonder who’s really behind the whole UFO phenomenon.
Jacques Vallée is one of the world’s most noted UFO investigators. He holds a master’s degree in astrophysics and a Ph.D. in computer science. He has addressed the United Nations on the topic of UFOs and was the inspiration for the character Lacombe in the film Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
During the years Dr. Vallée has been involved in UFO research, he has carefully analyzed hundreds of the most baffling sightings and written several books on the subject.
When he first began investigating UFOs, he wasn’t convinced there was anything mysterious or sinister about them. Most of the sightings, he figured, would be fairly easy to explain as a simple misinterpretation of data. If UFOs were real physical objects, the most plausible explanation would be that they came from other planets.
Today Dr. Vallée is convinced UFOs are real. But he’s no longer certain they come from planets.
He writes that during his years of researching UFOs, “I had become aware of some pretty shady business behind the apparently harmless antics of the contactee groups. Now I wanted to focus my attention on the problem at hand: the question of who was doing all this and what their designs on us might be.”7
I don’t know anything about Dr. Vallée’s spiritual beliefs. If he believes in God, he’s not outspoken about it. But in everything he does, he tries to be the consummate scientist—completely open-minded, judging every bit of evidence on its own merits. And yet in his book Messengers of Deception, he has proposed the idea that UFOs are part of a master plan to sweep away the earth’s old social order, including all existing religions, to make room for the new.
Over the years he has interviewed dozens of people who claim to have made contact with or received messages from beings they believed came from other worlds. Almost universally these people talked about the importance of establishing a unified, one-world government that would put an end to wars and rumors of wars. They’re excited about the potential of a new economic system in which money will be eliminated and all people everywhere will share equally in the planet’s worth. And they talk about a new worldwide religion that would reveal the true nature of the universe and free us from all our old, outmoded notions of eternal truth. In many ways it sounds exactly like the social and political climate of the one-world government spoken of in Revelation, the last book of the Bible.
Dr. Jacques Vallée isn’t the only one who believes that aliens—or whoever they are—are trying to bring about a change in our society. Dr. Allen Hynek, whose credentials include his tenure as chairman of the astronomy department of Northwestern University, wrote:
I have the impression that the UFOs are announcing a change that is coming soon in our scientific paradigms. I am very much afraid that the UFOs are related to psychic phenomena.
Certainly the phenomenon has psychic aspects. I don’t talk about them very much because to a general audience the words “psychic” and “occult” have bad overtones. They say, “Aw, it’s all crazy.” But the fact is that there are psychic things; for instance, UFOs seem to materialize and dematerialize. There are people who’ve had UFO experiences who’ve claimed to have developed psychic ability. There have been reported healings in close encounters and there have been reported cases of precognition, where people had foreknowledge or forewarning that they were going to see something. There has been a change of outlook, a change of philosophy of persons’ lives. Now you see, those are rather tricky things to talk about openly, but it’s there.8
Ronald Story, in his book Guardians of the Universe? adds, “It can be said, with certainty, that a ‘conditioning process’ is taking place, which is either directly or indirectly related to the UFO phenomenon.”9
OCCULT-LIKE EXPERIENCES
It seems obvious that many people are ready and willing to believe any message that comes from space. After all, they figure, if these beings are so technologically advanced that they can travel billions of miles through space, it only makes sense that they’re also far advanced when it comes to things like philosophy, religion, and personal morality.
That’s the type of thinking that sent Whitley Strieber’s book Communion rocketing to the top of the best-seller lists for several weeks. It told of Strieber’s encounters with strange beings who often invaded his home in the middle of the night. Prior to these uninvited visits, he sometimes saw lights in the sky, so Strieber naturally assumed his strange visitors came from outer space. Wherever they came from, their visits always left him feeling depressed, angry, and worried about the safety of his wife and young son.
Initially Strieber didn’t remember anything about these intruders. He only knew he was experiencing panic attacks and felt troubled by bits and pieces of strange memories that made no sense—such as looking up into huge, almond-shaped eyes as he lay frightened in his bed. It was only through hypnosis that he remembered the full scope of what had been happening to him.
To Strieber’s amazement he received hundreds of letters from readers saying they had undergone similar experiences. They told him he was reporting their own stories in exacting detail, right down to the almond-shaped eyes of the intruders.
Certainly, Whitley Strieber’s stories about strange beings from outer space invading his home in the middle of the night are scary. But there’s something even more troublesome. In Transformation, his follow-up to Communion, Strieber writes, “Maybe the visitors are gods. Maybe they created us.”10
He goes on to say that one of the creatures “seemed almost angelic to me, so pure and so full of knowledge.”11
When Strieber asked the creatures why they were here, they responded that they had come to “recycle souls.”12
Over time, as Whitley Strieber’s relationship with his strange “friends” deepened, so did his foray into the world of the occult. He had out-of-body experiences and was able during one of them to visit with his long-dead father. He became involved in shamanism, which he describes as “the oldest of all human religious traditions,” and Wicca (which we will look at in depth later).
It’s not surprising Strieber’s encounter with “aliens” led him into the world of the occult. Dr. Hugh Ross has interviewed many people who claim to have been abducted by aliens, and he says he found that every one of them had been involved in the occult prior to their abduction.
There’s simply no way we can reasonably deny the connection between the occult and UFO encounters.
Strieber has come to believe the appearance of his “visitors” has a strong connection to ancient—non-Christian—religions. He writes, “We have a life in another form—and it is on that level of reality that the visitors are primarily present.”13
To any student of the occult, the most frightening of Strieber’s comments is this:
What is interesting to me now is how to develop effective techniques to call them [the visitors] into one’s life and make use of what they have to offer...The most effective technique seems to be simply to open oneself, asking for what one needs the most without placing any conditions at all on what they might be.14
But if I open myself up to one of these beings, who am I really inviting into my life?
Are the creatures who come in UFOs mankind’s saviors, as they claim to be? Do they really want to lead us to an era of peace and enlightenment?
Unfortunately, when the facts are closely examined, they speak for themselves. We’re simply talking about old deceptions wearing new clothes. Not natural, but supernatural; not extraterrestrial, but extradimensional. It’s the same old story—demoniac entities finding new and improved ways to deceive, control, and torment.