UFO religions

What it is

Religious movements in which extraterrestrials occupy the role that gods, angels or ascended masters occupy elsewhere — as sources of revelation, as humanity's originators, and as agents of a coming transformation.

Scholars group them as UFO religions or flying saucer cults, and the family is more coherent than it looks. Most share:

• Contact with non-human intelligences, usually by channelling rather than by landing
• Ancient astronaut claims — that extraterrestrials shaped human origins and were mistaken for gods
• An imminent transformation, often with the contactees rescued or elevated
• A synthesis with Theosophical material, which supplied most of the underlying cosmology

Where it came from

The modern era begins in 1947 with Kenneth Arnold's sighting and the newspaper coinage "flying saucer". The contactee movement followed almost immediately — George Adamski, George Van Tassel and others claiming meetings with benign Venusians and Saturnians who warned against nuclear weapons.

The theological material came largely from Theosophy. Ascended masters became Space Brothers with very little else changing, which is why the cosmologies feel familiar.

The principal movements:

• The Aetherius Society (George King, 1955), still operating, which regards Jesus and the Buddha as members of an interplanetary parliament
• Unarius (1954), with its detailed past-life material
• The Raëlian Movement (Claude Vorilhon, 1974), which holds that humanity was created in a laboratory by the Elohim, an extraterrestrial species, and which became internationally famous in 2002 for an unsubstantiated human cloning claim
• Scientology, which is usually classified separately but shares the extraterrestrial-origins structure
• Heaven's Gate (Marshall Applewhite and Bonnie Nettles, from 1974)

How it is practised

Through study, meditation, and in some cases prayer directed at spacecraft. Practice is generally modest; the material is doctrinal rather than ritual.

What we can and cannot say

We can say this literature produced one of social psychology's foundational studies. In 1954 Leon Festinger, Henry Riecken and Stanley Schachter infiltrated a Chicago group led by Dorothy Martin, who had channelled a message that a flood would destroy the world on 21 December and that believers would be collected by flying saucer. Members had quit jobs, given away possessions, and in some cases left spouses.

Nothing happened.

The prediction's failure did not destroy the group. Within hours Martin announced a new message: the group's faith had spread so much light that God had spared the world. The members who had given up the most became more committed, not less, and began proselytising for the first time.

When Prophecy Fails (1956) is the result, and it is where cognitive dissonance entered psychology — the finding that people faced with disconfirming evidence often resolve the conflict by strengthening the belief and recruiting others to it, particularly when they have paid a high price for it. It is now one of the most cited ideas in the discipline, and it applies to a great deal beyond flying saucers.

The study also has real methodological and ethical problems — the researchers' presence swelled a tiny group and probably influenced it, and covert infiltration would not be approved today. Both things are true.

We can say the ancient astronaut claims are not supported. Erich von Däniken's Chariots of the Gods? (1968) sold enormously and its specific claims have been examined and refuted individually. The archaeological objection is not merely that the evidence is absent — it is that the claim's structure requires believing that non-European peoples could not have built their own monuments, which is why archaeologists' objections to it are unusually heated.

We can say Heaven's Gate is the reason this article is careful. In March 1997, thirty-nine members died by suicide in California, believing they were leaving their physical "vehicles" to board a craft they held to be following comet Hale-Bopp. The group had operated for over twenty years, was not financially exploitative in the ordinary sense, and members' families frequently described them as gentle people. The warning signs were the ones listed under coercive control and high-demand groups: total severance from outside relationships, an unfalsifiable doctrine, the leaders' exclusive authority to interpret it, and a total-transformation narrative with a date attached.

And we can say the phenomenon is continuous with the rest of this site rather than separate from it. The structure — non-human intelligences, revelation, imminent transformation, an elect — is ordinary apocalyptic religion with a twentieth-century vehicle. Carl Jung noticed this in Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies (1958), reading the saucer as a mandala and the phenomenon as a psychological event, whatever else it might also be.

We cannot say what people are seeing in the sky, which is a separate question with its own literature. What we can say is that when a group builds a religion around it, the religion behaves exactly like other religions, and fails in exactly the same ways.

Further reading

• Festinger, Riecken and Schachter, When Prophecy Fails (1956).
• Benjamin Zeller, Heaven's Gate: America's UFO Religion (2014).
• Christopher Partridge (ed.), UFO Religions (2003).