1 Introduction1
Some scholars, pundits, and the general population might consider a discursive comparison of space aliens and deities as disrespectful and flippant thinking as they might that space aliens are fictional beings while deities are not. Equally, scholars and pundits might further argue that such a comparison is disrespectful to those who adhere to a system of belief and practice that upholds belief in a deity or deities. Such a position, however, assumes deity or deities are things in existence, while aliens are not, when indeed if one considers the current technological capacity of humanity, the vastness of the universe with its fourteen billion years of existence and two trillion galaxies, the existence of space aliens, non-earth life forms, seem very reasonable. Indeed according to the Drake and Seager equations it is statistically impossible for alien life not to exist. Whether you adhere to the validity of the Drake or Seager is immaterial since it serves as an aspect of our knowledge systems making claims about our universe, hence my use of it.
The Drake equation proposes:
N = The number of civilizations in the Milky Way Galaxy whose electromagnetic emissions are detectable.
R* = The rate of formation of stars suitable for the development of intelligent life.
fp = The fraction of those stars with planetary systems.
ne = The number of planets, per solar system, with an environment suitable for life.
fl = The fraction of suitable planets on which life actually appears.
fi = The fraction of life bearing planets on which intelligent life emerges.
fc = The fraction of civilizations that develop a technology that releases detectable signs of their existence into space.
L = The length of time such civilizations release detectable signals into space.2
Classical numerical outcomes for the Drake equation are 3,500 alien species in the Milky Way Galaxy alone.3 Thinking in terms of the Drake equation it becomes absolutely certain that life must be in play elsewhere in the universe. So why is it that space aliens are taken to be mere fictions of an overactive or paranoid imagination in light of these scientific equations? And furthermore, why is belief in deity – Allah, Jesus, YHWH, Kali, or Artemis to name a few – considered tenable and rational and not due to hysteria and paranoia as with space aliens by scholars of religion?
Standing in the position of a non-believer in deities, while I have yet to meet an alien, it strikes me as significant that deities, or at least some deities, are given discursive legitimacy and credence, while aliens are not, even in light of statistical evidence. I also note that in both kinds of narratives, they share similar aspects and kinds of relationships with their human followers. To follow up on this problem of the rejection of space alien existence and the embracing of deity existence, I compare the discursive representation of aliens and deities in terms of their imagined space, figuring, capacity, benefits and harms, forms of contact and relationships between human, alien and divine entities along with perceived complications in these relationships. I chose to look at these discursive aspects largely because they are often the assumed criteria that mark something as “religious.” To complete this study I compare narratives of destruction and retribution wherein a violent death accesses followers to the realm of deities or the worlds of space aliens. Comparing discursive formations it becomes evident that deities and aliens aren’t so different begging the question, why the linking of veracity to one kind, deities, and the rejection of veracity to the other kind, space aliens in the academic study of religion? In other words, why are narratives about deity given authority while narratives about space aliens are not? Could it be that as scholars of religion we precipitously shut the door if a system of belief and practice does not meet our debated criteria of a definition of religion? And what is that criteria that would allow for the exclusion of space aliens and their proponents, followers, and worshipers?
Human devised systems of belief and practice are referenced in text as early as writing itself, while the presence of these systems preceded writing and were certainly operating in the Neolithic period4 if not earlier. Attention to the celestial canopy overhead is equally an ancient practice and evidence for tracking stars, the sun and the moon appear at Neolithic sites as well; the circles and megaliths of Nabta Playa in Southern Egypt, dating to the middle and late Neolithic (5500 BCE), marked the summer solstice, while a sundial charted the passage of the sun.5 Stonehenge would do the same a thousand or more years into the future, while the ancient Sumerians and Babylonians charted the night sky linking their deities to stars and planets, much as the ancient Greeks and Mayans. Although not aliens from distant planets, the deities are nonetheless associated with the planets, stars, moon and sun to which their being, attributes and aspects are linked. From the outset, then, in human conceptualizations the space of the sky is the space of beings like, but unlike, and superior to human beings.
The concept of space aliens was not significantly operational in the ancient world and it would not appear as a persistent phenomenon until the modern era with their manifestation associated with UAO s (unidentified aerial objects).6 On 24 June 19477 pilot Kenneth Arnold reported that he saw “nine metallic objects flying near Mt. Rainier.”8 By the 1950s crashes of UAOs were reported and thereafter contact was made between humans and aliens, according to the testimonials of contactees like Joe Simonton of Wisconsin who said he provided water for some aliens when they landed their craft in the driveway of his farm on 18 April 1961.9 Certainly earlier contact through other kinds of media such as trance and automatic writing put spiritualists of the nineteen and early twentieth centuries in touch with space aliens, along with ghosts and other non-terrestrials,10 but now aliens had landed on earth and in due time would, according to abductee testimonial, reproduce with humans, referred to as earthlings in this discursive frame.
2 The U.S. Context
The contexts that produce discourses of sky dwelling entities are many over the space and time of human history, therefore this contribution focuses primarily on the US, as narratives concerning space aliens are abundant and the majority of its population, seventy-four percent, believe in a deity or deities. Of this seventy-four percent, sixty-five percent identify as Christian.11 Furthermore, the phenomenon of space aliens appears to have the greatest prevalence in the United States; although certainly other countries such as Sweden, Canada, the UK and so forth report sightings, these are considerably less in number. I have also limited the period of time and largely focus on mid to late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries’ narratives of physical contact between UAO encapsulated space aliens and humans.
After World War II there was a shift toward global engagement with the emergence of the United Nations, NATO, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. This shift to globalization, a shift that filled the power vacuum left by decolonization, ensured powerful countries continued to have access to the resources and peoples of once colonized locations. Accessing these resources required political and economic strategizing, which required intelligence, and so the CIA came into existence July 25, 1947,12 interestingly, one month and one day after the first official UAO sighting. This sighting, along with others over the next decades, consisted of space aliens in US air space apparently watching humans, much like deities are said to watch humans.
The US context over the period of the 1960s and into the 1970s was a turbulent time with challenges to domination based on gender, race and sexuality engendered, while oppressive, corrupt and villainous US actions at home (Nixon and Watergate in 1974) and abroad (Vietnam War from 1955–1975) came under broad social and political censure. Even as this social censure appeared in the US, the new right was beginning to organize in order to stem the “red tide.” It was in the 1970s that neoliberalism came into play exemplified in Chile by Pinochet’s new government in 1973, while the 1976 Soweto uprising and the murder of black high school students by white South Afrikaans police made apparent the continued horror of South African Apartheid. The 1973–1974 oil crisis and the founding of OPEC undercut non-middle Eastern control of oil and gas both of which contributed to the weakening of the US economy resulting in part in the economic crash of 1973–1974. The crash had a serious effect on US citizens who had begun to distrust their governments. The environmental tragedy of Love Canal (Niagara Falls, New York) exposed in 1978 and the Three Mile Island disaster of 1979 gave rise to further doubts about the US government, doubts about what happens behind the scenes along with suspecting the operations of a shadow government unchecked by the democratic systems in place. In the face of such doubts an environmental movement came into full swing, a movement that called into question the safety of nuclear power and the fear of mutual annihilation should there be a nuclear war. The 1979 film The China Syndrome was released twelve days prior to the partial meltdown at Three Mile Island, while the 1983 film The Day After and 1984 film Threads both imagined a world laid waste by nuclear war. All three films locate the US government (and Russia in two of the films) as a threat to its own citizens and the world.
The Moon Landing of 1969 and the beginning of the exploration of space with the launch of the two robotic probes Voyager One and Two in 1977 were preceded by the film 2001 a Space Odyssey released in 1968. Within a decade Star Wars and Close Encounters of the Third Kind were released in 1977, while a remake of the 1956 Invasion of the Body Snatchers was released in 1978 and Aliens in 1979. On television Star Trek had prepared viewers throughout the 1960s for alien beings and space travel, while shows like Space 1999 (1975–1977) and Battlestar Galactica (1978–1979) sent humans hurtling into unknown space looking for a new home and meeting many kinds of space aliens along the way.
In the films of this period, aliens are represented often as hostile and/or threatening to humanity, for example, Invasion of the Body Snatchers where aliens wipe out humanity and take over the earth, Aliens where humans are used to incubate alien young and the robotic Cylons of Battlestar Galactica who destroyed the Twelve Colonies and pursued to the death all the humans who survived this attack. Although many of the aliens in these science fiction films are hostile, there are moments in other films, such as the 1977 contact film Close Encounters of A Third Kind, where human and alien interact in meaningful ways. There are deep friendships made such as the human Hans Solo and the wookiee Chewbacca in Star Wars and sexual and reproductive intermingling producing Spock of Star Trek, for example, the son of a Vulcan father and human mother.13
If human space travel and aliens were making their presence known in the 1970s, so too were demons and gods in the novel The Exorcist published in 1971 and made into film in 1973. Following The Exorcist was The Omen (1976), Exorcist II: The Heretic (1977) and Damien: The Omen II (1978). As with space aliens, demons are presented as a threat to humans seeking to destroy them individually and as a group. These films use children as the doorway for demonic access to the human world underscoring the vulnerability of humans in the face of these non-human others. This pattern is also apparent in the film Rosemary’s Baby (1968) wherein the baby, the child of Satan and Rosemary, was the vector for demonic takeover of the earth under the auspices of the Antichrist. Rosemary’s Baby, The Exorcist and The Omen were iconic films and quickly became horror classics.14
If demons occupied the minds of many movie goers in the US, cults occupied the minds of journalists and governments. On 9 August 1969 the members of The Family headed by Charles Manson murdered Sharon Tate and her almost term unborn child, along with four others at her home. The next day The Family killed Rosemary and Leno LaBianca in their home. In total nine were killed on the orders of Manson.15 The particulars of the trial, which opened with Manson laying responsibility for the murders at the feet of the society that had essentially failed him, as he saw it, produced good headlines and horrified the public who wondered: how could these young, largely female, followers of Manson mercilessly slaughter nine people at the direction of their perceived messiah? Manson saw himself as a prophet who could understand the will of deity and even likened himself to the Christian Jesus:
Oftentimes, Manson would compare himself to Jesus Christ and other times, when the group was high on LSD, he would re-enact the crucifixion, with his followers pretending to nail him on a cross. Aligned with this display, there would often be bizarre tests of devotion. Manson would ask his followers to stand against a tree and he would throw a hatchet at them, asking, “Do you trust me? Will you die for me? Will you be me?”16
Sheila Whiteley referred to Manson as a “psychedelic Satanist” in her text,17 one who used the story of Helter Skelter, the racial war and end times, sexual ritual and rites that circled around obedience in order to convince his followers to torture and murder nine people. Other marginal systems of belief and practice in the US with views to end times were Jim Jones and The Peoples Temple Full Gospel Church organized in 1955 and affiliated with the Disciples of Christ in 1959, and Heaven’s Gate founded in 1974. Both shocked the world with their communal suicide, the Peoples Temple in 1978 and Heaven’s Gate in 1997.
The US context supports the idea that contact with space aliens and deities is possible. The paranoia and espionage of the Cold War years, the advancement of science that made space travel possible, the social upheavals of Civil Rights, the Women’s Movement, the environmental and anti-Nuclear movements all destabilized the certainty of knowledge, while revelations about governmental dishonesty, cover-up and corruption produced distrust in the government. Paranoia fostered a sense of watchfulness and being watched, technological development opened the door to the unknown and the challenge to certain knowledge opened the door to a multitude of narratives all purporting to be the truth. As to government dishonesty, cover-up and corruption brought in its wake cynicism, distrust and loss leaving many US citizens vulnerable to uncertainty and conspiracy narratives. Although such a context does not necessarily have to produce narratives of interactions between space aliens, deities and humans, it certainly provided the conditions whereby such narratives made sense. The followers of Manson took him to be an emissary of god or even Jesus Christ particularly when he grew his hair and beard out18 and within a framework of end times as proposed by Manson, Tex Watson, Susan Atkins and other family members, carried out their slaughter. Under Manson’s direction they were to initiate the race riots that would destroy the world, while Manson and his followers would hide in the bottomless pit in the desert until African American people (he called them “the blacks”) needed them to help rebuild the world.19
3 Imagined Spaces and Beings: Deities, Aliens and Humans
In the past, many systems of belief and practice looked to the sky to locate their deities. Apollo descends down the mountain from Olympus in Homer’s Iliad, while the Roman deity Jupiter occupied the north sky and through haruspicy and augury provided Romans with intelligence. Within the Hellenistic period under the influence of Plato and other earlier Greek thinkers like Pythagorus and Anaximander, deities were situated in the realm beyond the fixed stars. The idea of a realm of fixed stars operated within the Ptolemaic model of the universe, which had come to dominate thinking throughout the Hellenistic period (c. 322 BCE–30 BCE). This model of a sky located deity(ies) came to dominate three monotheistic systems that would shape the conceptualization of deity in the Eurowest and beyond in light of colonization.
Deity in the sky was not a problem as long as the sky was removed from human activity; the sky was the place where deity (and their helpers), unseen, watched humans. With the advent of flight and then space flight such conceptualizations had to be adjusted. Joni Mitchell laments in her 1973 song “The same situation,” “Still I sent up my prayer, Wondering where it had to go, With heaven full of astronauts …”20 Deity could not occupy the sky that planes and rockets flew through, so deity must occupy another sky – a different realm, the realm of deities that is not available to humans. In myth deity in the sky can be called (prayer) and when called is able to intervene in some fashion, frequently through emissaries such as angels and demons, divine children often from a human parent and a divine parent, prophets and other spokespersons such as ritual and theological experts.
Discursively, space aliens also come from the sky, but they do not occupy the sky like Zeus, Jupiter, Isis or Jesus: instead they enter the sky from behind the sky, or from the outer side, that is outer space. Aliens come down from space and enter the sky whereupon, like deities, they watch humans and interact with humans. Aliens are often emissaries for their distant planet/civilization. The capacity for air and then space travel in the twentieth century exposed the expanse of the sky and beyond. Such an exposure revealed the absence of deity(ies) and the emptiness of space, an emptiness that was soon filled with the possibility of aliens and their associated civilizations. Thirty-nine members of Heaven’s Gate took astral events very seriously and with the return of the comet Hale-Bopp in March 1997 took their lives in order to catch a ride on the comet to their new destination in space.21 Heaven’s Gate, a mix of Protestant Christianity, New Age orientations and UFOlogy combined the space of deity and aliens giving privilege to a human “spiritual” body over and against a human fleshy body, the former of which allowed the members of Heaven’s Gate to ascend to a fully evolved form, a form that allowed space travel.22
Occupying the same physical space of the sky and beyond, aliens and deities are brought together and are similar insofar as they are not bound to the earth in the same way humans are bound. It is in the space of sky that ideas around deities and aliens converge and are seen in the concept of celestial being(s), beings not from the earth; rather they come from beyond earth. For example, according to The Urantia Book, celestial beings journeyed from the Isle of Paradise, which is “the Absolute of the material-gravity control of the First Source and Center. …The Isle of Paradise has a universe location but no position in space”23 to bring knowledge to humans since “… there dwells within the human mind a fragment of God …”24 The Urantia Book is a book of teachings provided by “Orvonton Divine Counselor, Chief of the Corps of Superuniverse Personalities”25 and upon publication was disseminated freely by the Urantian Foundation. Urantia is the name for earth in the book, which works to bring into concordance three significant narratives of the modern period: Protestant Christianity, Enlightenment science and philosophy. Like the Bible, the Tanakh or the Qurʾan, The Urantia Book provides guidance to adherents.
3.1 The Morphology of Deities and Space Aliens
Narratives of deities and aliens locate the sky and space beyond as the “home” of these two kinds allowing for the convergence of the two seen, for example, in The Book of Urantia. Visually, demons, angels and deities have a human-like shape and are typically bipedal, with arms and hands for reaching and grasping, faces with eyes, nose and mouth even if the form is a non-human animal. In Christianities deity is masculine – a father – who has a son with a human female, Jesus Christ, who is represented as a male human and therefore bipedal with hands and a face. In the monotheisms deity is gendered masculine and when interacting with humans is presented as taking human form. In Genesis 18, for example, Abraham and Sarah receive three male “lords” in human form one or all of whom are deities and Joshua 5:13 when Joshua meets the war god YHWH, who takes the form of a male human brandishing a sword, and who provided Joshua with the means to conquer the Canaanite town of Jericho in the myth.
Certainly deities have taken the form of non-human animals, hybrid human and non-human animals, along with such forms as elements, mountains, stones, lakes, stars and planets, but always when interacting directly with humans, mythology presents deities in forms humans recognize. Dionysus of ancient Greek myth and Hapis and Ptah of Egyptian myth are represented as taking the forms of both bull and human, while the Kachina of the A:shiwi, take the form of ducks, and the Mayan twin deities Huanapu and Xbalanque take the form of the sun and the moon. As different as these presentations are, they are all familiar to the inhabitants of planet earth.
As with deities, aliens take recognizable forms appearing as humanoids of various kinds with the two dominant kinds being the Grays and the Reptoids with the Grays being the most human although they are quite diminutive in stature with large black eyes, a small mouth, no ears and long fingers. The Grays are the aliens most often represented as probing and experimenting on abducted humans. The Reptoids tend to be among the more hostile aliens and are a threat to human abductees. According to one contactee the Reptoids “rape, torture and murder” humans.26 The Reptoids are tall with reptilian eyes and mouth. Diana Tumminia has catalogued some alien types in her work providing descriptions from accounts of contactees and abductees. Some other alien forms are the tall white and blond Betas, the hairy Gammas like BigFoot, humanoid Martians, multidimensional travelling Ultraterrestrials and their human alien offspring called Starseeds.27 All these beings, and others not mentioned, share many features with humans such as bipedalism, faces, heads, torso and appendages and speech. Emergent from the narratives of contactees and abductees are space aliens who look, think, and act in the way people do, particularly people of the twentieth century. This is not surprising as humans have only their own world(s) to draw from in order to construct the world(s) of aliens.
Aliens and deities share characteristics with each other, which is not surprising in light of how both come into existence in and through discourse and discursive formations. Deities and aliens both communicate with humans through some form of speech either spoken or thought, they have and use their eyes – that is they give priority to the visual sense – and they often are represented as hearing. They walk, amble and run, while they carry things in their hands. They breathe oxygen and reproduce with human beings, producing semi-divine offspring, for example, Jesus Christ or semi-alien such as the Starseeds.
4 Systems of Belief and Practice Concerning Aliens and Deities: Abduction and Spirit Possession
In their respective mythic narratives, deities and aliens share space located in the sky and/or beyond in outer space and they share somatic structures having faces, appendages and torsos, while communicating with their mouths using speech and both reproduce with humans. In light of these similarities it is not surprising that they also interact similarly with humans providing them with messages and information about existence, the past and the future. Equally deities and aliens appropriate humans through such means as possession and abduction. The oracle at the Pythia at ancient Delphi, for example, was possessed by Apollo in order to respond to pilgrims’ queries; Muhammad, taught by an angel, became the great prophet of Islam relaying the mind of the deity Allah; while in Cuban Santoria individual Orisha such as Legba or Yemaya possess their followers in order to help them and others around them, but also to enjoy the sweetness of human life.
Discursively, among alien abductees and contactees similar relations abound but with aliens rather than deities. Among the members of the Unarius Academy of Science efforts are made to receive contact from the “Space Brothers” who have reached out to humanity to help them realize their glorious future when thirty-three interplanetary spaceships will land on Earth. In the films developed by Unarius, the Space Brothers are represented as tall, fully human-like, white-skinned with a third crystal-like eye in the middle of their foreheads. They teach love and peace being spiritual beings who take the form of cosmic scientists.28 Contact with the Space Brothers is made through “dreams, recovered memories of past lives, visions, bodily sensations, psychic readings, channelings, and other experiences …”29
In alien abduction narratives, however, there is less a sense of love and peace and a greater sense of fear and threat. The alien group referred to as the Grays are said to conduct physical exams of abductees, explore their bodies and seek to reproduce or have other aliens reproduce with humans. The famous Betty and Barney Hill 1961 alien abduction narrative, made public in 1965, indicated both had been subjected to physical exams with Barney having felt something removed from his groin30 and Betty having had a needle inserted into her abdomen. Betty reported that one of the aliens told her it was a pregnancy test.31 The Hill narrative of abduction established, as Brenda Denzler notes, “the basic pattern for the abduction subtheme of the UFO myth, the salient features of which involved missing time, physical examination while on board the UFO, a tour of the ship, conversation with the aliens, and the use of hypnotic regression to recover lost memories”32 and further added is the experience of being levitated often to and from the surgical bed.33,34 As the alien abduction narrative developed, reproduction of hybrid human and alien offspring was added. A significant figure in the alien abduction movement, Budd Hopkins, proposed that an “ongoing and systematic breeding experiment must be considered one of the central purposes of the UFO abductions” in his 1987 book Intruders:35 belief in the breeding myth has come to dominate alien abduction narratives.
Both deities and aliens, when interacting with humans at a distance, teach and protect them. Jesus and Mary, neither of whom as deities directly interact with humans, are represented as advising and protecting humans. However, when interaction between human and deity is close up and personal, the outcomes are said to be a little different. For example, a story in the book of Acts 2:4 relays how the holy spirit rushed like the wind into the house where the disciples were sitting and marking each with a flame filled them so that they spoke in different languages. In Acts 4:31 the Holy Spirit shakes the space within which they are gathered, filling them and providing them with “bold speech” while in Acts 10:44 the Holy Spirit falls on and possesses all those listening to the words of Peter so that they too could speak in tongues and extol deity. In all instances the Holy Spirit is presented as overtaking and controlling humans, much as demons were said to have done or do.
Others who have approached or come too close to deity or have caught their eye do not do well either. In Leviticus 10 the sons of Aaron are incinerated because they were ritually unclean when they entered the tent of the tabernacle or Miriam in Numbers 12 who was punished with leprous skin for having set herself against her brother Moses. Unclean, she remained apart from the people until deity made her clean again. In ancient Greek mythography too close contact with deity generally led to death or suffering as the narratives of Heracles, Helen or any other ancient Greek heroes relate. Semele, impregnated by Zeus died in his lightning fire when he revealed himself to her. Even in modern rural Greece, saints will trouble “chosen” village people until they recognize, interact with and properly honour the saint, whereupon some of these folks then take up fire walking enacted at the festival of the Anastenaria.36 In Cuban Santoria, the Orisha who sits on one’s head demands attention and proper acknowledgment lest they rain grief down upon their followers. The spirits and ancestors of systems of belief and practice, such as in Korean shamanism, are said to harass a person until they take the shamanic path.37 Close contact between humans and deities and humans and aliens represented as problematic appears to be a shared aspect of the narratives concerned with the interaction between humans and those others, deities and space aliens.
Deities at times, or those beings associated with them, are represented as having sexual congress with humans. In ancient Greek narratives Zeus has multiple offspring with human females as does Apollo, Hermes and the majority of the Greek gods. In Genesis angels have relations with human females, the offspring of whom are destroyed by deity in a flood. In Christian myth Jesus is the offspring of a human female and the spirit of deity who will save the world, while Satan is said to bring about the apocalypse through his offspring the Antichrist. Cú Chulainn is the hero son of warrior god Lugh of the Tuatha de Danann and Deichtine, the daughter of Maga and Cathbad the Druid. There are many other examples of the mythologies concerning the offspring of deity and human sexual congress, and indeed these demigods often generate their own mythologies that then ground systems of belief and practice.
Comparing mythic narratives concerning human interaction with deities and space aliens demonstrates that there is little actual difference between aliens and deities. Both are teachers of humans and provide humans with the capacity to know the “true” world, but when approached too closely both space aliens and deities become threats, intentional and unintentional, to humans. Too close to the fire of both and humans die, while reproduction with either alien or deity is fraught. For the best results interaction with deity and space aliens must be done at a distance; through prayer, priest, dream, telepathy, or past life regression.
5 Belief Deployed: Peoples Temple and Heaven’s Gate – The Dead from Both Groups
The organizations that have developed around the acknowledgment and appreciation of deities and space aliens are numerous in the case of deities and less so in the case of the space aliens. But as UAO religions only emerged in the twentieth century, they have had considerably less time to organize their systems of belief and practice. Equally, UFOlogy is not accepted as legitimate and therefore often dismissed, and dismissed it is then considerably understudied. For this last section I want to set side by side two groups, one adhering to the saviour Jesus and the other adhering to saviour space aliens: the Peoples Temple Christian Church with Jim Jones (1931–1978) and Heaven’s Gate with Marshall Herff Applewhite (1931–1997) and Bonnie Lu Nettles (1927–1985).38 The tragic end of these two groups was brought about by members drinking a cocktail of death in 1978 Guyana for the Peoples Temple and 1997 and the return of Hale-Bopp for the thirty-nine members of Heaven’s Gate.
The history of these two groups is beyond the scope of this chapter, but a few words. Both appear in the mid-twentieth century; Jones founded the Peoples Temple Full Gospel Church in Indianapolis in 1955 and moved the church to California in 196539 where they adopted a new name, the People’s Temple Christian Church, while Heaven’s Gate founders began their teachings in 1975 as a series of lectures across the US and Canada.40 Both groups, from the outset, were marginal; one marked by race and class in terms of the Peoples Temple and the other by reclusiveness with regard to Heaven’s Gate. In the latter case the two founders claimed to be the two witnesses in Revelation 11 who prophesy, die, and then are resurrected on the third day to dwell in heaven.41 They also indicated that they would, in the next evolutionary level, discard their human bodies and rise through the heavens to join the UAO and the Space Brothers who awaited them.
Both groups closed themselves off from the lives and world they previously had shared with family, friends and loved ones. Isolated, people of both groups recreated themselves under the guidance of their leaders. Members of Heaven’s Gate had to unlearn being human, to cease normal human practices, to alter their appearances and to reject loving relationships,42 while members of the Peoples Temple followed Jones from Indiana to California, California to Brazil and finally to a piece of jungle in Guyana where they lived isolated lives and followed the teachings of Jones.43 Removed from their past lives, the people of both groups used their systems of belief and practice to construct worlds where alien space ships and non-corporeal bodies made sense, as did the jettisoning of these bodies by poison in order to evolve into a new way of being and join the spacecraft that shadowed Hale Bopp’s appearance in March 1997, or to avoid the government and others said to be coming to torture and kill the children and people of Jonestown.44 Speaking to members, Jones encourages them to drink the cyanide-laced drink:
Don’t, don’t fail to follow my advice. You’ll be sorry. If we do it … have trust. You have to step across. We used to think this world was – this world was not our home – well, it sure isn’t – we were saying – it sure wasn’t. … Can’t some people assure these children of the relaxation of stepping over to the next plane?45
When the founders and leaders of Heaven’s Gate, Bonnie and Marshall, now called Ti and Do, wrote out and shared their first statement in 1975, they used the metaphor of a caterpillar’s metamorphosis to explain human existence according to what they knew as two who had come from the kingdom to guide others back:
He [Jesus] did not leave his body in the grave. He converted it into his body of that next kingdom. … Each human has that full potential. … There are two individuals here now who have also come from the next kingdom, incarnate as humans, awakened, and will soon demonstrate the same proof of overcoming death. They are “sent” from that kingdom by the “Father” to bear the same truth that was Jesus’. … Those who can believe this process and do it will be “lifted up” individually and “saved” from death – literally.46
Having created worlds where fleshy bodies are considered mere vehicles, the steps toward neutralizing and discarding the body appear to make logical sense. Ti’s death by cancer amounted to Ti leaving her “human vehicle” whereupon in the Kingdom she would be given a new body, one that was grown from a vine.47 Equally so with the Peoples Temple, most of whom had suffered under racism, racism based on a bodily condition that would no longer exist in “Zion,” as a woman declared prior to her drinking the poisoned beverage. She also thanked Jones, Dad as she called him,48 making apparent her complete acceptance of the world according to Jim Jones, a world that accorded in part or whole with her own experience.
The world constructions of the Peoples Temple and Heaven’s Gate were strongly influenced by biblical texts, particularly the New Testament and one of its central protagonists, Jesus. Jones, a healer, drew on the power of Christ to heal the blind, the sick, and the dying as well as resurrecting the dead, something he claimed he could do by the 1970s.49 Heaven’s Gate also spoke of Jesus but took him to be a traveller from the Kingdom, much like Ti and Do, who tried to show humans how to evolve to the next level. Ti and Do would provide a “repeat performance … [in order] to restate the truth Jesus bore …”50 The figure of Jesus in the Christian myth is that of one who was marginalized and scoffed at, disrespected and dismissed, and finally hunted and killed only to overcome his enemies and death by being apotheosized into the heavens. This narrative is certainly mirrored in the mythology of the Peoples Temple and Heaven’s Gate. Jones ran a series of white nights beginning in 1978 requiring members protect Jonestown from those who would murder Jones, take the children and torture others for their political beliefs. Jones, like Jesus, was being attacked by worldly powers. He and his believers had fled to remote Guyana but still his detractors and enemies followed and like Jesus, he would die, he claimed, “protesting the conditions of an inhumane world.”51 The two witnesses and the members of Heaven’s Gate equally saw themselves as misunderstood as Jesus. Their message of evolution to the next level was “criticized by almost every camp” including psychologists, Christians and their ministers, and UFOlogists.52 Although not feeling hunted, Heaven’s Gate members lived with each other in houses and although working to support themselves, kept their distance from distractions that kept them fixed in their human natures. Rejected by and rejecting the larger world, members of Heaven’s Gate embraced the reality proposed by Do even if they did not take it to be completely true:
The Peoples Temple and Heaven’s Gate are both beholden to the New Testament, although interestingly enough the first is (reluctantly) taken to be Protestant Christianity and therefore a religion, while the second is dismissed as a UAO cult. They have much in common, however, sharing a sense of alienation, disappointment and a hope for the future either in a remote community or in space with other beings of the Kingdom. The dream of the Peoples Temple, founded in the face of oppression (as they understood it), was to escape to “Zion” or the heavenly city, while Heaven’s Gate members, having waited for over twenty years in 1997 finally caught a ride on the spaceship that shadowed Hale-Bopp.
6 Implications and Outcomes of Comparison
In the context of the twentieth century of the US both aliens and deities are given credence, although the former is given less so than the latter, even if aliens are far more likely to exist than deities. Comparing the attributes and actions of aliens and deities found in the discourses of both, it is obvious that they are conceptually very similar. Indeed, when closely examined one notes variation but of the same kind – deities and aliens are other and belong to the realm of the other. Equally, their interaction with believers is similar; having equal measure of love, knowledge, and the threat to life and limb that comes with approaching aliens and deities too closely. When it comes to systems of belief and practice that enthrone principles of isolation, paranoia, secrecy, the rejection of current existence for another unseen existence, and organize around heroic figures, be they space aliens or deities, similar paths lead to similar outcomes, death to the practitioners.
Standing back and thinking about the comparison of aliens and deities and of the study of systems of belief and practice, it becomes equally obvious that treating some social practices as legitimate, those associated with deities, and others as illegitimate, those associated with space aliens, means we are doing more than studying religion; we are now in the business of caretaking religion, as Russell McCutcheon has argued.54 But more than this, we are constructing religion itself as a category55 even as we participate in the legitimization of systems of belief and practice themselves. This can only be the case since it has, I think, become also obvious in this comparison that aliens and deities are conceptualized similarly and are seen to interact with humans in similar ways, but aliens and all things associated with them are excluded from the study of systems of belief and practice as they have not been authorized or legitimated. Furthermore, in this process of caretaking in the study of religion we are also acting as gatekeepers, constructing the proper canon for Religious Studies. By caretaking and gatekeeping a theological agenda is made visible insofar as those systems of belief and practice, such as those encountered in communities wherein space aliens are at the center, are excluded and thereby deemed not worth studying.
Between practitioners practicing and scholars studying “religion” and kinds of “religion” are given social, cultural, and epistemological legitimacy and certitude. By not studying space aliens or other non-material beings given narrative and symbolic space in our social bodies, we deauthorize these systems of belief and practice as properly religious: the best we can do is provide them with cult status. By explicitly not authorizing the study of aliens and alien contact and abduction, for example, we are implicitly authorizing those systems of belief and practice we do study. For the purposes of the study of systems of belief and practice, then, Christianity is authentically a “religion,” Paganism is not; Judaism is authentic, Messianic Judaism is not; Islam is authentic, The Nation of Islam is not and so on. There are a limited number of systems of belief and practice that are given street credibility, and that street credibility is delivered by the scholars who study them. To further make this point of exclusion, consider the discipline of anthropology which does not actively exclude kinds of people on the basis of some deemed inauthenticity, or the discipline of sociology which does not dismiss a society because they are not authentically a society. Put this way it becomes apparent that there is more going on in the study of systems of belief and practice than meets the eye.
Bibliography
Almond, Philip C. The Devil: A New Biography. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 2014.
Applewhite, Marshall. “88 Update – the UFO Two and Their Crew.” In Heaven’s Gate: Postmodernity and Popular Culture in a Suicide Group, ed. George D. Chryssides, pp. 17–35. Surrey UK: Ashgate, 2011.
Arnal, William E. and Russell T. McCutcheon. The Sacred is the Profane: The Political Nature of “Religion.” New York: Oxford University Press, 2013.
Balch, Robert. “Waiting for the Ships: Disillusionment and the Revitalization of Faith in Bo and Peep’s UFO Cult.” In The Gods Have Landed: New Religions from Other Worlds, edited by James R. Lewis, pp. 137–166. New York: State University of New York Press, 1995.
Brown, Bridget. They Know Us Better Than We Know Ourselves: The History and Politics of Alien Abduction. New York and London: New York University Press, 2007.
Chryssides, George D. “Approaching Heaven’s Gate.” In Heaven’s Gate: Postmodernity and Popular Culture in a Suicide Group, edited by George D. Chryssides, pp. 1–15. Surrey, UK: Ashgate, 2011.
Danforth, Loring. Firewalking and Religious Healing: The Anastenaria of Greece and the American Firewalking Movement. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1989.
Davis, Winston. “Heaven’s Gate: A Study of Religious Obedience.” In Heaven’s Gate: Postmodernity and Popular Culture in a Suicide Group, edited by George D. Chryssides, pp. 77–104. Surrey, UK: Ashgate, 2011.
Denzler, Brenda. The Lure of the Edge: Scientific Passions, Religious Beliefs, and the Pursuit of UFOs. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001.
Harvey, Youngsook Kim. Six Korean Women: The Socialization of Shamans. St. Paul: West Pub, 1979.
Hodder, Ian, ed. Religion in the Emergence of Civilization: Çatalhöyük as a Case Study. Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010.
Hodder, Ian, ed. Religion at Work in a Neolithic Society: Vital Matters. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014.
Kaye, Heidi, and I.Q. Hunter. “Introduction – Alien Identities: Exploring Difference in Film and Fiction.” In Alien Identities: Exploring Differences in Film and Fiction, edited by Deborah Cartmell, I.Q. Hunter, Heidi Kaye, and Imelda Whelehan, pp. 1–10. London: Pluto Press, 1999.
Kreamer, Christine Mullen, with the assistance of Erin L. Haney, Katharine Monsted, and Karel Nel. African Cosmos: Stellar Arts. Contributors Randall Bird and et al. Washington, D.C.: National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution; New York: Monacelli Press, 2012.
Luhmann, Niklas and Dirk Baecker. Introduction to Systems Theory. English ed., Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013.
Maccone, Cladio. “The Statistical Drake Equation.” Acta Astronautic 67, no. 11–12 (2010): 1366–1383.
McCutcheon, Russell. Critics Not Caretakers: Redescribing the Public Study of Religion (SUNY series, Issues in the Study of Religion). Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001.
N.A.The Urantia Book. Chicago: Urantia Foundation, 1955.
Partridge, Christopher. “Alien Demonology: The Christian Roots of the Malevolent Extraterrestrial in UFO Religions and Abduction Spiritualities.” Religio 34, no. 3 (2004): 163–189.
Pasulka, D.W. American Cosmic: UFOs, Religion and Technology. New York: Oxford University Press, 2019.
Pew Research Center. In U.S., Decline of Christianity Continues at Rapid Pace. Washington, D.C., 2019.
Raine, Susan. “Reconceptualising the Human Body: Heaven’s Gate and the Quest for Divine Transformation.” Religion 35, no. 2 (2005): 98–117.
Smith, Jonathan Z. Imagining Religion: From Babylon to Jonestown. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982.
Snider, L. Britt. Congress and the CIA. New York: Nova Science, 2009.
Stephenson, Denice, ed. Dear People: Remembering Jonestown. Berkeley, Cal: Hayday Books, 2005.
Sutton, Danielle. “Durkheim, Totemism, and the Manson Family: Theorizing on the Relationship between Religion and Violence.” In Homicide and Violent Crime (Sociology of Crime, Law and Deviance), edited by M. Deflem, pp. 63–79. Bingley, UK: Emerald Publishing Limited, 2018.
Tumminia, Diana G., ed. Alien Worlds: Social and Religious Dimensions of Extraterrestrial Contact. Religion and Politics. Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 2007.
Tumminia, Diana G. “In the Dreamtime of the Saucer People: Sense-Making and Interpretive Boundaries in a Contactee Group.” In Alien Worlds: Social and Religious Dimensions of Extraterrestrial Contact, edited by Diana G. Tumminia. Religion and Politics, pp. 80–96. Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 2007.
Tumminia, Diana G. When Prophecy Never Fails: Myth and Reality in a Flying-Saucer Group. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.
Whiteley, Sheila. The Space between the Notes: Rock and the Counterculture. New York: Routledge, 1992.
Wolf, Margery. A Thrice-Told Tale: Feminism, Postmodernism, and Ethnographic Responsibility. Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press, 1992.
World Heritage Encyclopedia. List of Reported UFO Sightings. World Heritage Encyclopedia. http://worldheritage.org/article/WHEBN0000375217/List%20of%20reported%20UFO%20sightings (accessed 7 November, 2019).
Zeller, Benjamin E. “Scaling Heaven’s Gate: Individualism and Salvation in a New Religious Movement.” Nova Religio: The Journal of Alternative and Emergent Religions 10, no. 2 (2006): 75–102.
Zeller, Benjamin E. “Extraterrestrial Biblical Hermeneutics and the Making of Heaven’s Gate.” The Journal of Alternative and Emergent Religions 14, no. 2 (November 2010): 34–60.
When I speak of “system of belief and practice,” I use the term system to indicate a collection of independent but equally interrelated constituents that comprise a unified whole, while belief is any cognitive content held to be true, and practiced as a customary and/or traditional way of acting and being. My understanding of the phrase shows some continuity with Nikolas Luhmann’s systems theory, in that I understand systems to be open to their environments as well as to autopoiesis. See Niklas Luhmann and Dirk Baecker. Introduction to Systems Theory. English ed. (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013).
Claudio Maccone, “The Statistical Drake Equation,” Acta Astronautic 67, no. 11–12 (2010): 1367.
Maccone, “The Statistical Drake Equation,” 1371.
Ian Hodder, ed., Religion at Work in a Neolithic Society: Vital Matters (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014); Ian Hodder, ed., Religion in the Emergence of Civilization: Çatalhöyük as a Case Study (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010).
Christine Mullen Kreamer, et al., African Cosmos: Stellar Arts, contributors Randall Bird and et al. (Washington, DC: National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution; New York: Monacelli Press, 2012), 18–19.
World Heritage Encyclopedia. List of Reported UFO Sightings. World Heritage Encyclopedia http://worldheritage.org/article/WHEBN0000375217/List%20of%20reported%20UFO%20sightings.
There were earlier sightings of unknown celestial objects in a number of countries but no organized thinking on the subject was yet in place. A few UAO (Unidentified Aerial Object) sightings took place in the ancient Roman world and then some few others in the early modern period and the 1800s, but it is the twentieth century that sees a significant increase of reports and ultimately contact, something not seen in these earlier sightings. The so-called foo-fighters of WWII that Diana G. Tumminia refers to in her text Alien Worlds: Social and Religious Dimensions of Extraterrestrial Contact, or the ghost rockets that plagued Scandinavia of 1946 as Denzler comments on in her text, The Lure of the Edge: Scientific Passions, Religious Beliefs, and the Pursuit of UFOs, 7 are good examples. The 1947 event, which is the first officially recorded event, marks the beginning of organized thinking on the subject.
Brenda Denzler, The Lure of the Edge: Scientific Passions, Religious Beliefs, and the Pursuit of UFOs (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 4.
Denzler, Lure of the Edge, 40.
Diana G. Tumminia, Alien Worlds: Social and Religious Dimensions of Extraterrestrial Contact, (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2007), xxx–xxxi.
Pew Research Center, In U.S., Decline of Christianity Continues at Rapid Pace (Washington, DC, 2019), 3.
L. Britt Snider, Congress and the CIA (New York: Nova Science, 2009), 5.
Heidi Kaye and I.Q. Hunter, “Introduction – Alien Identities: Exploring Difference in Film and Fiction,” in Alien Identities: Exploring Difference in Film and Fiction, eds. Deborah Cartmell, I.Q. Hunter, Heidi Kaye, and Imelda Whelehan (London, UK, 1999), 1–10.
Philip C. Almond, The Devil: A New Biography (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 2014).
Danielle Sutton, “Durkheim, Totemism, and the Manson Family: Theorizing on the Relationship between Religion and Violence,” in Homicide and Violent Crime, ed. M. Deflem (Bingley, UK: Emerald Publishing Limited, 2018), 65.
Sutton, “Durkheim, Totemism, and the Manson Family,” 72.
Sheila Whiteley, The Space Between the Note: Rock and the Counterculture (New York: Routledge, 1992), 100.
Sutton, “Durkheim, Totemism, and the Manson Family,” 73.
Sutton, “Durkheim, Totemism, and the Manson Family,” 71.
Thanks to Bill Arnal for reminding me of Joni Mitchell’s song that nicely represents my point.
Benjamin E. Zeller, “Scaling Heaven’s Gate: Individualism and Salvation in a New Religious Movement,” Nova Religio: The Journal of Alternative and Emergent Religions 10, no. 2 (2006): 93.
Susan Raine, “Reconceptualising the Human Body: Heaven’s Gate and the Quest for Divine Transformation,” Religion 35, no. 2 (2005): 108.
n.a., The Urantia Book (Chicago: Urantia Foundation, 1955), 7.
n.a., The Urantia Book, 17.
n.a., The Urantia Book, 17.
Christopher Partridge, “Alien Demonology: The Christian Roots of the Malevolent Extraterrestrial in UFO Religions and Abduction Spiritualities,” Religio 34, no. 3 (2004): 180.
Diana G. Tumminia, Alien Worlds, 313–15.
Diana Tumminia, When Prophecy Never Fails: Myth and Reality in a Flying-Saucer Group (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 6.
Diana G. Tumminia, “In the Dreamtime of the Saucer People: Sense-Making and Interpretive Boundaries in a Contactee Group,” in Alien Worlds, 80–96.
Denzler, Lure of the Edge, 49.
Denzler, Lure of the Edge, 49.
Denzler, Lure of the Edge, 49–50.
D.W. Pasulka, American Cosmic: UFOs, Religion and Technology (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), 218.
Star Trek Next Generation episode 137 (airing Oct 19, 1992) entitled “Schism” utilizes this pattern to great effect. A number of the crew members are taken from the ship into another dimension where they are experimented upon and then returned to the ship. With the help of the ship’s counsellor, Diana Troy, they are able to reclaim their memories of their abductions and determine and close the breach between dimensions preventing the abduction of, experimentation on, more crew members.
In Bridget Brown, They Know Us Better Than We Know Ourselves: The History and Politics of Alien Abduction (New York and London: New York University Press, 2007), 83.
Loring Danforth, Firewalking and Religious Healing: The Anastenaria of Greece and the American Firewalking Movement (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989).
Youngsook Kim Harvey, Six Korean Women: The Socialization of Shamans (St. Paul: West Pub, 1979); Margery Wolf, A Thrice-Told Tale: Feminism, Postmodernism, and Ethnographic Responsibility (Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press, 1992).
George D. Chryssides, “Approaching Heaven’s Gate,” in Heaven’s Gate: Postmodernity and Popular Culture in a Suicide Group, ed. George D. Chryssides (Surrey, UK: Ashgate, 2011), 1.
Denice Stephenson, ed., Dear People: Remembering Jonestown (Berkeley, Cal: Hayday Books, 2005), 9.
Chryssides, “Approaching Heaven’s Gate,” 1.
Benjamin E. Zeller, “Extraterrestrial Biblical Hermeneutics and the Making of Heaven’s Gate,” The Journal of Alternative and Emergent Religions 14, no. 2 (November 2010): 47.
Robert Balch, “Waiting for the Ships: Disillusionment and the Revitalization of Faith in Bo and Peep’s UFO Cult,” in The Gods Have Landed: New Religions from Other Worlds, ed. James R. Lewis (New York: State University of New York Press, 1995), 149.
Stephenson, Dear People.
Stephenson, Dear People, 127–42.
Stephenson, Dear People, 142.
Marshall Applewhite, “‘88 Update – the UFO Two and Their Crew,” in Heaven’s Gate: Postmodernity and Popular Culture in a Suicide Group, ed. George D. Chryssides (Surrey UK: Ashgate, 2011), 22.
Applewhite, “88 Update,” 29.
Stephenson, Dear People, 141.
Jonathan Z. Smith, Imagining Religion: From Babylon to Jonestown (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 106.
Applewhite, “88 Update,” 22.
Stephenson, Dear People, 142.
Applewhite, “88 Update,” 35.
Winston Davis, “Heaven’s Gate: A Study of Religious Obedience,” in Heaven’s Gate: Postmodernity and Popular Culture in a Suicide Group, ed. George D. Chryssides (Surrey, UK: Ashgate, 2011), 98.
Russel T. McCutcheon. Critics Not Caretakers: Redescribing the Public Study of Religion. (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001).
See also, William E. Arnal and Russell T. McCutcheon, The Sacred is the Profane: The Political Nature of “Religion” (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013).