It seems that every year at the Christmas season some noteworthy scientist or brilliant observer of contemporary culture comes forward with an opinion that the reported actions of aliens and angels are very similar. On December 2, 2012, The Guardian newspaper carried a provocative headline declaring that neurologist Oliver Sacks had commented that today people are more likely to see UFOs and aliens when our ancestors would see angels.
Although comparisons between angels and aliens have existed in the UFO community for decades, when such pronouncements come from mainstream “experts” they are hailed by the general public as being completely unique and original, entirely acceptable answers to the superstitions of the religious and the hallucinations of those who report UFO experiences. However, rather than providing an answer to the possible link between aliens and angels that satisfies both the faithful churchgoers and the convinced UFO experiencers, the learned skeptics fail miserably. The churchgoers are offended by the blasphemous suggestion that the heavenly angels in the Christmas story who herald the birth of the Messiah are aliens, and the UFO contactees are insulted by the dismissive suggestion that their encounters were hallucinatory.
I was eleven-years-old when the event at Roswell occurred in 1947, and the subsequent news reports filled my mind with images of extraterrestrial aliens arriving from other worlds. One month later, I suffered a terrible farm accident and a near-death-experience that filled my mind with images of angels from higher dimensions. It is clear to see how two of the major interests on my life path were set at that young age.
At the time of my accident, my Evangelical Lutheranism severely separated a link between extraterrestrial visitors from other planets and extraterrestrial visitors from a heavenly kingdom. Today, however, after having authored or co-authored 22 books on UFOs and co-authored with my wife Sherry another 22 books on miracles and angels, I still find it difficult to draw a definitive line of demarcation. As Sherry and I wrote in the chapter “Aliens in Earth’s Prehistory and Religions” in our Real Aliens, Space Beings, and Creatures from Other Worlds, there does appear to be certain ethereal beings who are genuinely concerned about the well-being of us “hairless apes” and who have not materialized on our planet to conquer us, to enslave us, or to make us the main ingredients in their recipe books.
Throughout the course of human history there have always been accounts of mysterious supernatural entities seen riding in fiery chariots, moving within mysterious globes of light, driving strange aerial vehicles, or appearing suddenly m blinding flashes of light. These beings –humanlike in appearance, yet somehow different–always seemed supernatural compared to the struggling and evolving species of Homo sapiens. These “Others” have been called Angels, Devas, Star People, Light Beings, and, on occasion, demons and devils, as well as gods and overlords. Whatever the name applied, the various activities ascribed to these entities have remained constant through the ages and consistent from culture to culture.
In an analysis of the works of fifty writers of antiquity, W. Raymond Drake, author and scholar, found references to such celestial phenomena as airborne lights, shields, fiery globes, strange ships, and warrior-like “men” with the ability to fly. In addition, he discovered mentions of two or more “moons,” two or more “suns,” new “stars,” falling lights, unknown voices, “gods” descending to Earth, and “men” ascending to the sky.
Drake strongly believed that the old gods of Egypt, Greece, Rome, Scandinavia, and Mexico were not simply manifestations of lightning and thunderbolts. “By some strange twist of the human mind,” Drake once mused wryly, “we worship prodigies in old Palestine as manifestations of the Lord, yet scoff at identical phenomena occurring at the same time only a few hundred miles away.”
When seen on Earth, angels usually appear youthful, physically attractive, commanding. They are, in fact, described the same way that contemporary UFO contactees describe their “Space Brothers and Sisters.” The place of origin for these benevolent beings has been identified as heaven, other worlds, other galaxies, or other dimensions. But as the philosopher Voltaire once observed, “It is not known precisely where angels dwell–whether in the air, the void, or the planets. It has not been God’s pleasure that we should be informed of their abode.” And, we must add, we certainly do not where precisely the UFO entities dwell.
After researching, studying, and traveling throughout North America, Peru, Egypt, Jordan, and Israel pursuing the UFO mystery for over 60 years, I have learned that there can be no dogma in this field of inquiry. With that attitude of openness to a wide spectrum of possibilities, I offer these examples from our files that appear to demonstrate a possible connection between aliens and angels.
*Ed, a postal employee from Arkansas, said that he would always remember that Christmas night when he was six or seven years old and was awakened in time to look out the bedroom window and see a whirling, bright, silver UFO disappearing in the night sky.
“I believed that the entities that began appearing to me after the UFO sightings were angels,” he said.
One night, to prove their corporeal, as well as ethereal, existence, he asked them to turn on a desk lamp in his room–a lamp with a particularly stiff switch. The light came on.
“When I got a little older, I began to receive mental messages that I was not of this Earth,” Ed said. “I was told that I had come here to perform a special mission.
“These messages came to me in dreams and in reverie states, and they were delivered by silvery and bright beings. They seemed quite tall to me, and they wore whitish or dark blue tunics. Some seemed like patriarchal males with longish hair. The females seemed to have a kind of ‘Virgin Mary’ feeling to them.”
*Michael of Seattle was five years old, alone in the wooded area near the family home, when he heard someone call him by his first name.
He turned around to see a tall, slender, silver-haired, pale-skinned man with light blue eyes. At his waist was a belt buckle shaped like a “glittery pyramid.”
The strange man opened his arms to the boy, and inside his head Michael heard the being say, “I am pleased with you, my son.”
Michael recalled that such a salutation puzzled him. The man was not his father. “Who are you?” he asked the stranger.
The silver-haired entity smiled and told him that in the course of time Michael would come to know him. And then Michael heard inside his head the words that he would always remember and which would puzzle him for many years: “I am all you are, have been. and will become.”
At that moment, Michael remembered that he was distracted by the voice of his father, his Earth father, calling to him.
When he looked back to the stranger, he was astonished to see him fading from sight. “Don’t forget me,” the entity said. “Always remember me.”
Today, at age forty-two, Michael stated firmly that he never has forgotten the being. From that remarkable day forward, the pale-skinned, silver-haired entity has come to him in his dreams or sometimes by voice only.
“Sometimes, he tells me things that are about to happen to myself, family, or friends,” Michael said. “It always pays to listen to my angel.”
*Sherri of Brooklyn, New York, experienced her initial contact with multidimensional beings when she was eighteen.
She was lying in bed one night in that borderline state of consciousness when two entities in dark, hooded robes floated through her closed bedroom door. Sherri was totally terrified, not only because they had broken into her bedroom in the middle of the night, but because they seemed so aggressive.
The two hooded beings pulled at her blanket and asked, “Are you ready?”
Sherri screamed at them, and they disappeared.
Her next experience with the beings occurred in her mid-twenties.
She felt something gently touch my shoulder. Her husband was sound asleep, so Sherri knew it wasn’t him. She clicked on the bed lamp, turned, and saw the “visitors” once again.
As before, they disappeared when Sherri screamed at them, but just before they vanished, she was able to catch a fleeting glimpse of a large pyramid-shaped light hover over their bed.
Sherri’s “ultimate contact” occurred a week later. At 4:00 A.M., she was awakened by a “visitor” calling her name in a soft voice. As she got out of bed, she saw a large glowing object at her window.
“To my surprise,” Sherri said, “I saw two figures peering out at me from inside the object. It was so well- illuminated that I actually saw the interior of the craft, and there were other beings inside, moving quickly back and forth.”
Sherri opened the window of their apartment to get a better look at the figures and their glowing vehicle, but the craft suddenly appeared to transform itself into a flame. She remember attempting to shout at them to get away from the apartment building before it caught fire, but then she heard a voice inside her head say, “Don’t be afraid. Look at us. Stay at the window until we leave. Look…look.…”
Ten years after the second visitation, Sherri’s assessment of the experience remains firm that it was a mystical one. She believes that night she began to undergo a spiritual transformation. “I became more compassionate toward people,” she said. “I became cosmically oriented toward the evolution of humankind. I often ponder the purpose for my existence. Sometimes I feel as though I am on the outside looking in at this planet. The UFO and the visitors altered my state of consciousness.”
*Pat, a schoolteacher from Ohio, recalled the summer day when she was eleven and saw two strange, glowing objects hovering above the lake near their home.
“That night something awakened me,” she said, “and I saw a shining, silver humanoid being standing at the foot of my bed. I remember at first feeling the sensation of undistilled terror, but that soon changed to awe and wonder as I watched the being disappear.”
Pat did not see the entity again until that Christmas when she accompanied her father to take her grandmother home after her holiday visit with the family.
“Dad and I wound up on a dark, winding road,” she recalled. “It was icy and slick because of a sleet storm. Dad asked me to roll down the window and to watch to make certain that we didn’t slide off the road and down the steep banks.”
Pat remembers feeling very frightened, and it was obvious that her father was nervous and concerned for their safety. There was a very real possibility that they could slip over the edge of the highway and crash and freeze to death.
“It was cold, and my face was numb and stinging as I looked into the darkness from the open car window,” Pat said. “Suddenly I saw directly behind us and just above us a brilliant white light with a bluish center. I did not hear a voice, but I was unmistakably getting a message from the light. . . or from something. And I knew somehow that the message was something connected with myself.
“I survived that frightening, freezing night with the deep certainty that the white light had told me, ‘I am. ‘”
Pat said that it was not until many years later that she learned the significance of the I am concept in theology, as exemplified in the experience of Moses when the voice from the burning bush identified itself as I am that I am. But from that childhood Christmas evening onward, Pat has been keenly aware that the message that came to her from the brilliant white light with the bluish center was the assurance that there was within and without the very essence of her being an aspect that exists in the now, in the past, and will do so for all time.
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