UFO and the Bible – Rael, Ancient Aliens, Evangelical UFOlogy

Joseph P. Laycock, “Unmasking the Alien Deception: Why Evangelicals Are Studying Ufology,” Brill Handbook of UFO Religions, ed. Benjamin E. Zeller, pp. 103-115.

Olav Hammer and Karen Swartz, “Ancient Aliens,” pp. 151-177.

Régis Dericquebourg, “Rael and the Raelians,” pp. 472-490.

“God is a Myth” proclaims the Las Vegas billboard, or at least it did ten years ago.  The bold assertion is accompanied by a picture of a domed flying saucer, rather like the one pictured here, and the web address www.rael.com–the billboard’s sponsor being the UFO faith known as the Raelian Movement.

The billboard’s aim, a Raelian spokesman explains, is to relieve passing motorists of their fear of hell, no doubt instilled in them by highway signs posted by other, less human-friendly religious sects.  “We should enjoy our precious lives to the fullest while of course giving love all around us.”  There is no God or Devil, any more than there’s an Easter Bunny.

So far, standard humanist stuff.  But with a twist: “What there are, however, are human beings who were advanced scientists who created all forms of life, known as the Elohim.”  And these Elohim fly around in UFOs.

And, what’s more, “you can read about them in the oldest versions of the Bible, and the oldest versions are always the less polluted versions.”

Most of us have heard by now about the Raelians and their prophetic leader Rael, a.k.a. Claude Vorilhon, former race car driver and current UFO contactee and revealer of the secrets of the Scriptures, one of these secrets being that there is no God.  We’ve probably noticed the most sensational aspects of their faith–their commitment to sexual freedom, their practice of “Sensual Meditation” to put you in touch with the cosmic orgasm, their demonstrations for women’s right to bare their chests in public as men do.  What we may not have realized–what I didn’t realize until I read Régis Dericquebourg’s lucid and thorough presentation of their doctrines and practices in the Brill Handbook of UFO Religions, to which I’m a proud contributor–is how thoroughly rooted their teachings are in an unusual but not wholly implausible reading of the Bible.

Nor did I fully grasp one of the implications of this doctrine: evolution is false.  Creationism is true.  On this point the Raelians, and the evangelical sponsors of the you’re-headed-for-eternal-hell billboards, are in full agreement.

“Les Elohims, créateurs de l’humanité.”  That’s what Rael calls the UFO beings who first made contact with him in December 1973, in the form of a 4-foot-tall humanoid with slanted eyes who designated himself as an “Eloha,” singular of “Elohim.”  This is in fact good Hebrew.  In the first chapter of Genesis the Creator is called Elohim, the word normally translated “God” throughout in the Bible.  It is peculiar that Elohim is indeed, as Rael represents it, a plural noun, of which the singular would indeed be Eloha.  (Which does appear in the Bible, also with the meaning “God,” but far less frequently.)  Stranger yet: the plural Elohim is almost invariably accompanied in the Hebrew by singular verbs.

So is God one, or many?  I remember having seen a long time ago the word Elohim offered as proof of the doctrine of the Trinity, the Three (plural) who are also One.  This sounds a bit quaint but if there’s a better way to account for the anomaly I’ve never seen it.  The Bible translations render the word in the singular, ignoring its plurality.  The Raelians prefer to ignore the singular verbs.  Voila: the UFO-riding Elohim.

For the broader context of the Raelian engagement with the Bible, you might turn to the article by Olav Hammer and Karen Swartz, earlier in the same volume.  Simply titled, “Ancient Aliens,” their essay offers a wide-ranging exploration of the theme that this planet has had visitors from other worlds in the remote past.  These have left a deep impression on human culture, so the claims go; and the darker riddles of the human past suddenly become crystal-clear once we suppose that we’ve not been alone.

Not all of the “ancient aliens” theories covered in this chapter focus on the Bible.  Desmond Leslie made little or no use of the Bible in the chapters he contributed to his and George Adamski’s 1953 Flying Saucers Have Landed; he focused instead on the allegedly UFO-like “vimanas” of Indian tradition.  (Which get a chapter unto themselves in the Handbook of UFO Religions: Layne R. Little’s “Vimanas and Hindu Ufology.”)  But passages like the first chapter of Ezekiel crop up again and again, and Hammer and Swartz make clear that Rael’s unorthodox approach to Scripture, creative as it is, had plenty of precursors.

Of course Erich von Däniken and Zecharia Sitchin are the stars of this show.  But less well-known figures also get their due, like my old friend Yonah Fortner–or Yonah Ibn Aharon, as he liked to call himself–who passed away in 2004.  In a series of articles on what he called “Extraterrestrialism,” Yonah proposed (in Hammer and Swartz’s words) that “the word Elohim, usually understood as merely a term used to refer to the deity, designated in fact an entire extraterrestrial collective” that visited Earth in remote antiquity.

This was back in the 1950s, long before Rael’s encounter with his personal Eloha.

How seriously Yonah took these speculations, I’ve never been quite able to decide.  I’m inclined to think that he was pulling UFOlogy’s collective leg, using his knowledge of Hebrew and Aramaic to invoke evidence that nobody could argue against.  Possibly also flipping the bird at his Jewish heritage, as Rael may have been doing with his boyhood Catholicism.  For there’s at least an implicit anti-religious thrust in the “ancient aliens” arguments.  If God Drives a Flying Saucer, as the title of a 1969 book cited by Hammer and Swartz has it, then to all intents and purposes God has ceased to be God.

Von Däniken, for one, was alive to the implications of his work for traditional religion.  He tried to reassure the devout that they had nothing to fear from him.  When he and I were interviewed together by Eugene Steinberg on “The Paracast” three years ago, he went out of his way to let us know that he did believe in God–a more old-fashioned God than the Raelian Elohim.  Not all the devout were persuaded, however.  One of the earliest debunkings of von Däniken’s Chariots of the Gods, the brilliantly titled 1972 Crash Go the Chariots, was written by an Australian evangelical named Clifford Wilson.

Which brings us to the chapter that I found one of the most eye-opening and challenging in the Handbook of UFO Religions: Joseph P. Laycock’s “Unmasking the Alien Deception: Why Evangelicals Are Studying Ufology.”

If Rael can read the Bible within an ET-oriented UFO agenda, picking and choosing which elements in it are genuine and which “polluted,” then surely turnabout is fair play.  Why shouldn’t evangelicals read the UFOlogical data within their own Biblical agenda, in which nothing in Scripture is “polluted” but all is the word of the living God?

And they do; and in their publications we can trace, with Laycock’s guidance, a UFOlogy that runs parallel to what’s become the normative UFO tradition yet is startlingly different from it.  Its crux: UFOs are real; UFOs are demonic.

“For example, [Bob] Larson (1997, 102) makes a strong case that crop circles are the product of human hoaxing and not evidence of alien visitation, but then he immediately points to evidence suggesting they are not a hoax in order to present a demonic explanation: ‘When the devil saw that the circles were a clever way to draw attention to the paranormal, he sent demons to help do what man had started. That’s why the crystal spun, why radio waves were detected, and why some say they actually saw UFOs near the circle sites.'”

Among the evangelical writers, distinctions can be made.  On the one side, there’s what Laycock calls the “lazy demonization” of UFOs by authors like Hal Lindsey, in which UFOs are dismissed as demonic and it’s left at that.  But that’s far from the whole story.  The thrust of Laycock’s article is to call attention to those writers who express, within the evangelical framework, a serious, sophisticated and nuanced engagement with the conventional UFO literature.

They’ve read and been impressed by the work of Jacques Vallee, John Keel, and J. Allen Hynek.  They know that the extraterrestrial hypothesis (ETH) isn’t the only game in town, that there are serious UFOlogists who recognize the problems posed by interstellar travel and advocate for a vaguer and less falsifiable option that’s coming to be known as the IDH (interdimensional hypothesis).  And once you’re ready to talk about a parallel dimension, why not sharpen your definition and call it the “demonic realm”?

Because that’s what the paranormal is: supernatural evil.

There’s a graphic illustration of this on a website cited by Laycock, alienresistance.org.  A frog, green and with slanted oval eyes like those of the iconic UFO alien, glares balefully at the viewer.  It’s accompanied by the text of Revelation 16:13:  “Then I saw three EVIL spirits that looked like FROGS …”

There are consequences to this identification, some of them gruesome.  “As recently as 1997,” Laycock tells us, “Pat Robertson stated that according to the Bible, abductees or anyone who believes UFO s are extraterrestrials should be stoned to death, because such individuals are actually trafficking with demons.”  Thus the Mosaic Law enters UFOlogy in all its grimness.  It’s a relief to turn from this to Rael, who reads a different chapter from his “unpolluted” Pentateuch.

“Since inheritance inevitably causes inequalities not related to the recipient’s abilities”–I’m quoting Dericquebourg’s article–“Rael proposes that the properties of the deceased become the State’s properties, excepting the family house which can be given to the owner’s children. According to this program, farmers would not own their farmland. They would rent it from the State for a 49-year term, with their successors being able to then renew the rental when they retire. Rael legitimized this economic humanitarism with an appeal to Leviticus (25:8, 14–16, 23) particularly the verse 23: ‘The land shall not be sold for ever: for the land is mine; for ye are strangers and sojourners with me.'”

This is the Biblical chapter that gave us our inscription for the Liberty Bell:  “And ye shall hallow the fiftieth year, and proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof: it shall be a jubilee unto you …”  It’s a nice touch that Rael, who proclaims a liberty that would seem wholly bizarre to the ordinary run of Bible readers, found himself drawn to it.

Raelian Bible exegesis may have its grotesqueries.  It has its beauties as well.

by David Halperin
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