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It is certainly easy to see why signs in the heavens should
be of such peculiar concern to the Roman Catholic Church, or indeed, any
religious institution. For the link between divine presences and the skies
above is deeply ingrained in human consciousness and language. The very word
“heaven,” denoting God’s Kingdom with the vertical connotations of up = good,
down = bad, not to mention the importance “signs from above” throughout
recorded history argue that this connection is not accidental. It seems to be
an intimate archetypal association that is reflected in whatever geocentric
cosmologies we humans construct.
From Biblical times, signs in the sky have played a large
part in human religion. Are they supernatural or supertechnological? Does it
matter?
When Christ prayed, “Our Father, Who art in Heaven,” it is
important to remember that in the Ptolemaic world-view of the time,
“Heaven” was not the abstract, ethereal dimension of fluffy clouds and
white light we think of now. Rather, God’s realm was a physical place above
the outermost shell of stars surrounding the Earth. Just as nowadays, there is
a growing temptation to wonder just what planet Jesus was referring to!
Much of this is due to the wholesale recasting of
mythological themes by mass sci-fi, most notably by the Star
Trek and Star Wars franchises. Such literalization itself
reflects the mysterious connection between divinity and the dome of heaven that
makes the questions posed by UFOs profoundly religious ones.
CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE BIBLICAL KIND
The Bible, both Old and New Testaments, is filled with
accounts of encounters with divine beings that read uncomfortably to us moderns
like tales of extraterrestrial contact out of a bad space opera. Barry H.
Downing’s The Bible and Flying Saucers (1968), for instance, contains
a long litany of them. He bravely put forth the necessary questions
Christianity must now ask when faced with signs from the heavens.
A few of his examples: Abraham and the “smoking firepot and
a flaming torch” that appeared in the sky as a sign of acceptance of his
sacrifice (Genesis 15:17), the “pillar of cloud” by day and the “pillar of
fire” by night that led Moses and the Israelites (Exodus 13:22), God landing
on Mount Sinai in smoke, with a sound of a trumpet before them (Exodus
19:18-19), Elijah being “carried up to heaven” in a “chariot of fire” which
created a whirlwind (II Kings 2:11), and of course, Ezekiel’s famous
psychedelic close encounter (Ezekiel 1:1-28)
The New Testament likewise contains many familiar-sounding
sightings. Foremost is the famous “Star of Bethlehem” which Matthew
records that the “Wise Men” — probably Zoroastrian astronomer-priests —
followed “till it came to rest over the place where the child was” (Matt.
2:9) — most unusual behavior for a supernova, comet, or planetary
conjunction! The birth itself had been immediately announced by the appearance
of a messenger shining with “the glory of the Lord” to shepherds in the fields
at night. (Luke 2:9)
Downing, himself a minister, argues that many of the terms describing
such glorious and shining lights could be descriptions of UFOs. Even the shape
believed to be the Holy Spirit that was seen to “descend like a dove”
at Christ’s baptism and the “bright cloud” at the Transfiguration, (Matt.
17:1-8) might have been extraterrestrial craft. The men in shining clothes,
such as those the disciples believed were Moses and Elijah at the
Transfiguration, would then have been their occupants.
After the Crucifixion, yet another of these fellows came out
of the sky, rolled the stone away from the tomb and announced the Resurrection.
And of course, at the end of Jesus mission on Earth, he rose into the air and
“a cloud took him out of their sight” while two of those mysterious Men in
White consoled the disciples (Acts 1:6-11).
Downing recently has taken issue with Balducci, objecting to
the monsignor’s desire to have UFOs treated as natural physical objects that
have no impact on the faith. His own approach “does not presume that we can be
sure any insulation separates UFOs and the biblical faith. We cannot assume
that the ”pillar of cloud and of fire“ that led Moses and Israel during the
Exodus was supernatural. Nor can we assume it was not. We cannot assume that
modern UFOs are supernatural, nor that they are not. We cannot assume modem
UFOs were involved in developing biblical faith, nor can we assume they were
not.”
I thoroughly agree with this position. There may be no
difference between “the supernatural and the supertechnological.” We must be
open to these possibilities, not “insulate” faith from reason, and question
everything.
Is the Creator an alien?
One could argue that the sacred Torah, the very Law of God given to the Jews, could have been established to provide conditions in
which to breed healthy stock. The Levitical restrictions on marriage, the
prohibitions on homosexuality, premature withdrawal (“onanism”), as much as the
dietary laws, may all have this end of creating and causing a particular
bloodline to flourish. Recent studies proving the widespread existence of an
“Aaronic” gene among Jewish men
would indicate it succeeded.
But why would God want to selectively breed humans as if
they were cattle on his cosmic ranch? A Christian might speculate that it was
to prepare the proper genetic context for his Son, but that only begs the
question. Why would God need a certain genotype to incarnate? Just how close
“an image and likeness” of God are we, anyway?
Indeed, the Virgin Birth itself, where Mary was
“overshadowed by the power of God,” (Luke 1:35) has uncomfortable
echoes of tales of the alien-breeding program. Such parallels go on and on and
what is worse, the closer the tale is to the central mysteries of faith, the
more extraterrestrial the encounter can appear.
THE SAINT AND THE SILVER DISC
In any case, not all such UFO-like visions came from God.
Some were sent of the Devil. One such early example was a sighting by St.
Antony of the Desert (died 356), the first Christian monk. He was famed
for his “temptations;” that is, being frequently and violently assaulted by
grotesque devils of all varieties. He became a much sought-after expert on
demonic wiles and appearances. In the fourth chapter of his hagiography there
is this remarkable incident:
… but Antony at once set out for the mountain. Yet once more
the enemy [the devil],
seeing his zeal and wishing to check it, threw in his way a
large disc of silver. Antony, understanding the deceit of the Evil One, stood
and looked at the disc and confuted the demon in it, saying, “Whence a disc in
the desert? This is not a trodden road, and there is no track of any faring
this way. And it could not have fallen unnoticed, being of huge size. And even
if it had been lost, the loser would certainly have found it had he turned back
to look, because the place is a desert. This is a trick of the devil. You will
not hinder my purpose by this, Satan; let this thing perish with thee.” And as
Antony said this, it disappeared like smoke before the face of a fire.
It is a rather amusing image, this fearless hermit, probably
half-crazed by the sun, boldly berating a flying saucer, but it illustrates
that the Church long thought high-strangeness apparitions were caused by devils
if they resulted in negative experiences.
Throughout the Middle Ages this principle held. There were
certain interesting elements of the witchcraft craze of the early modern era
that resemble modern UFO and
abductee reports. The Men in Black, for instance, believed by all to be
Satan’s minions (or perhaps even Old Nick himself), were particularly active.
Strangely reminiscent of the alien hybrid-breeding program
was the idea, as reported by the Inquisitor Guazzo in the sixteenth century,
of succubae and incubi. These were evil spirits who could appear
to men as beautiful women, procure their sperm, and transport the seed across
great distances to women, whom they would manifest in the guise of handsome men
to implant their demon spawn, which they had somehow infused with their own
diabolical traits. This could still serve as a perfect explanation, perhaps,
for the Grey’s sexual agenda, according to the demonic theory of UFOs.
OUR LADY OF THE WHIRLING DISC
If, on the other hand, the encounter was of a sublime and
positive nature, it is inevitably ascribed to a divine contact. The most famous
of these happened less than a century ago whose repercussions continue to this
day. It was a series of incidents that has been carefully examined by both
theologians and ufologists alike, and pronounced by learned authorities in each
camp to be legitimate events within their own field. I refer, of course, to the
visions at Fatima.
Our Lady of Fatima to which the late Pope John Paul II
attributed his survival of the assassination attempt by Mehmet Ali Agca,
appeared to three young shepherds, Lucia, Francis, and Jacinta, in rural
Portugal beginning on May 13, 1917. In due course, the Roman Catholic hierarchy
authenticated these apparitions as being of the Mother of God, and the site has
become a world-famous place of pilgrimage, complete with miraculous healings.
A sudden white flash in the heavens announced her first
appearance. The entity appeared to the children as a veiled young woman in a
golden-edged white gown, decorated with golden stars on the breast and hem. She
appeared standing amid one of those glowing clouds over a small bush.
More visions followed on a monthly basis and others soon
became interested, including suspicious and hostile secular authorities. No one
other than the children ever clearly saw the Lady. However, during later apparitions,
the sun dimmed noticeably, the branches of the tree bent as if supporting a
weight, and a humming sound was heard. “A loud report like the explosion
of a rocket was heard at the end of the apparition, and at the same time a
beautiful white cloud was seen to rise from the tree and move towards
the east.” (Emphasis added.)
The children were given other visions on these occasions and
others, all thoroughly Catholic — the Sacred Heart, the baby Jesus. They were
shown even hell itself and in July, the Lady predicted the end of the First
World War and the beginning of the Second — the first two of the famous
“secrets of Fatima.” The next war would be heralded by “a night illumined by an
unknown light” which Lucy later thought referred to an extraordinary
transcontinental display of the aurora borealis on the night of
January 25-26, 1938.
Interestingly enough, a few months before the October
Revolutionbrought the Bolsheviks to power, the Lady promised that if her
requests for prayer and sacrifice were heard “Russia would be converted and
there would be peace.”
The police locked the children up to prevent them from
attending in August at the time set by the Virgin. She appeared to them at
another place the next week when they were again alone with their flock but was
apparently not happy about it.
Here is the account of the next encounter according to the
great French UFO expert,
Jacques Vallee:
The fifth meeting was September 13. There were a number of
witnesses, and they could see the “sphere of fire” used by the entity to come
to the place of the meeting. According to the very words of the Reverand [sic] General
Vicar of Leiria, who was one of the witnesses the lady came in an “aeroplane of
light,” an “immense globe, flying westwards, at moderate speed. It irradiated a
very bright light.” Some other witnesses saw a white being coming out of the
globe, which several minutes later took off, disappearing in the direction of
the sun.
Some said a shower of strange flakes, like snow or rose
petals, which vanished before they reached the ground or could be caught,
followed this. But the best was still yet to come.
The Lady had promised a grand miracle in October and she
certainly delivered a spectacular show. Indeed, at the final encounter exactly
one month later, a crowd of some 70,000 people, including both clergy and
scientists, witnessed the famous “miracle of the sun.”
One of the latter, a Prof. Almeida Garrett of Coimbra
University, later wrote:
It was raining hard, and the rain trickled down everyone’s
clothes. Suddenly, the sun shone through the dense cloud which covered it:
everybody looked in its direction. It looked like a disc, of a very definite
contour. It was not dazzling. I don’t think that it could be compared to a dull
silver disc, as someone said later in Fatima. No. It rather possessed a clear,
changing, brightness, which one could compare to a pearl. This is not poetry.
My eyes have seen it. This clear-shaped disc suddenly began turning. It rotated
with increasing speed. Suddenly, the crowd began crying with anguish. The sun,
revolving all the time, began falling towards the earth, reddish and bloody,
threatening to crush everybody under its fiery weight. (Emphasis by
Vallee.)
The disk, described as spinning and shooting off colors
“like a Catherine’s wheel” firework, plunged at the Earth three times according
to some witnesses before retreating back behind the clouds. Newspaper photos of
the crowd showed the mass of people cringing in fear and astonishment from
something seemingly sunwards above them. The spectacle, seen by some miles
away, completely validated the children’s claims. The Virgin’s wishes for
specific prayers and devotions to her that she expressed to them were widely
broadcast — and obeyed.
Lucy, the sole one of the trio to survive into adulthood
(still alive at 93 at the time of this writing), became a cloistered nun and
received many private revelations. During World War II, she wrote down the
three secret messages from the Virgin and sent them to her local bishop, who
passed them on to the pope to be revealed in 1960.
The mysterious Third Secret of Fatima, however,
supposedly contained such awful revelations it was suppressed, making the popes
who read it turn white. It has become the subject of much fierce speculation by
the devout. During his pilgrimage in May 2000, Pope John Paul II promised to
released it, and apparently has, although the Vatican was not slow to put its
own spin on it.
The Lady, identifying herself as “Our Lady of the Rosary,”
asked believers to pray for the conversion of Russia. A countless legion
of little old ladies diligently took up their beads, even calling themselves
the “Blue Army of Mary.” After several apparently unsuccessful attempts, the
pope, (by this time John Paul II), finally completed the powerful magical act
of consecrating Russia to the Sacred Heart of Mary in 1984, several reigns
later than asked, and in due course Soviet Communism fell.
Whether co-incidence or not, the whole question of the
Lady’s instructions and prophecies in this context is peculiar. If these were
purely spiritual events, why did they look and sound so much like UFOs? If the
entity were a masquerading alien trying to communicate to some primitives in
the guise of a god, why would it be so concerned about prayer, self-sacrifice
and Russia’s religion? Could that just be a cover for some other agenda?
Or was it truly providential? Could all those prayers for
Russia have somehow prevented planetary nuclear immolation? Was it foreseen?
Looking back on the Cold War and how close East and West came to mutually
assured destruction at times, one can only wonder if the events at Fatima were
carefully arranged to miraculously avert it.
(In all fairness, it should also be noted that the brutal
Spanish conquistadors came as Catholics and fought under the Virgin’s banner. A
decade after their triumph over the Aztecs, putting an end to their gory
civilization based on human sacrifice and ritual cannibalism, she made a
dramatic appearance to Juan Diego, an Indian (and recently, a saint), as
the Virgin of Guadalupe.
Her veneration quickly supplanted the now-discredited native religion and
became the most widely-popular devotion in the New World. Mary, it seems, may
have a more complicated agenda than just world peace.)
In any case, once again the combination of spirituality with
what could be highly advanced technology at Fatima is baffling. As Sir Arthur
Clarke is widely reported to have said, “Technology sufficiently developed is
indistinguishable from magic.” Maybe he should have said religion.
Part of the problem, it seems, is that there cannot be a
real distinction between ufology and theology, spirituality and technology, any
more here at the dawn of the third millennium after Christ. Perhaps there never
truly was, other than the arbitrary rift between faith and reason that was
created by the Church to maintain her monopoly on a superior form of “truth”
beyond mere scientific fact.
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