Lewis Ungit, 2024
The iconic History Channel show, Ancient Aliens promotes the hypothesis that most myths, legends, and religious stories from history are neither purely fiction nor true in the religious sense. Instead, it argues that most of the stories from history about gods, demons, and angels are in fact primitive people’s encounters with aliens. For example, when Elijah was drawn into heaven by a “chariot of fire” (2 Kings 2:11-12), the show would then have “ancient alien theorists” talk about how the chariot of fire was likely a UFO and that the ancients just misunderstood and called it an act of God.
The show is very silly, pseudoscientific, and pseudohistoric. It presents questionable (or simply wrong) historical accounts as true, it is fast and loose with facts, the “experts” it has are usually just random people with no relevant credentials, and it fails to address obvious counter arguments. No one should take it seriously and if it is to be watched it should be watched for fun not to learn.
However.
I find the central premise to be interesting. Anyone who, like I, had read C.S. Lewis’s “Space Trilogy” prior to watching Ancient Aliens would. Because throughout those three books (Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra, and That Hideous Strength), Lewis has humans interacting with “aliens” who are (in Lewis’s universe) in fact angels and demons.
In the first book in the series, Out of the Silent Planet, we learn of a particular type of entity, the “Oyéresu” (a particular type of creature that Lewis dubs the eldila) who is set to guard a world. Each planet has its own oyarsa, and they communicate to one another. Unfortunately for earth (nicknamed the Silent Planet by other Oyarsa), we have an Oyarsa that is not good. It is called the “The Bent One” or Satan. But the way that the story is told, Lewis doesn’t say “these are angels and demons.” In fact, he just talks about them as though they were a form of alien.
In the second book in the series, Perelandra, C.S. Lewis tells the following narrative as his narrator approached a lonely house in the dark,
“It was something more than a prudent desire to avoid creatures alien in kind, very powerful, and very intelligent. The truth was that all I heard about them served to connect two things which one’s mind tends to keep separate, and that connecting gave one a sort of shock. We tend to think about non-human intelligences in two distinct categories which we label “scientific” and “supernatural” respectively. We think, in one mood, of … Martians…In quite a different mood we let our minds loose on the possibility of angels, ghosts, fairies, and the like. But the very moment we are compelled to recognize a creature in either class as real the distinction begins to get blurred….”
This is an important point. When Joe Rogan or Bob Lazar talk about aliens they are talking about something they think is real. Something that can be seen. Something that can be studied. Perhaps they come from another dimension but they are here and they are real. And when an Catholic exorcist speaks of demons, he likewise speaks of something he thinks is real. Something we can study. Something in this world. And something that, at least at times, can make itself seen. Perhaps these demons dwell in some dark dimension but they are here and they are real.
But for most people, both aliens and demons are sort of fictional things. But what Lewis is saying is that when you realize that they are real – something from another world that is very much real and very powerful – the distinctions between what we call an alien and a demon fade. It just becomes some strange entity that might have dark desires and intentions for the world. It is just a thing. A real thing. A terrifying thing.
When I wrote the Return of the Dragon, I intentionally did not use language of “demons” when referring to the entities that people see when they take psychedelic drugs. But I did note that they could be seen. They were potentially from some other dimension. They could communicate. I argued that they were here and they were real.
Are they aliens? Are they angels/demons? As a Christian I prefer the names “angel and demon” but call them whatever you want. When a powerful, hyper intelligent entity comes to you in the middle of the night, it doesn’t matter what you call it.
In the final book in the series, That Hideous Strength, the powerful elites of the global organization, N.I.C.E., start taking direction from an alien force. This alien tells them that they need to consolidate power on earth and eventually start wiping out all life on earth. The human leaders view this advice as coming from a powerful, hyper-intelligent entity as advice that should be taken. They begin to follow through on this plan given by this “alien”.
And this is where the distinction and name matters. Alien is a somewhat neutral term. In science fiction, there are good aliens and bad aliens. There are evil aliens like Klingons and good aliens like Vulcans. Which is it that you are dealing with when you meet one? And most people don’t think this is a serious question because they don’t expect to meet an alien.
But here is the creepy and interesting thing. There is a growing effort to reach the aliens and to communicate with them. Last year, Justin Higginbottom wrote an article about a group of people he dubs “psychonauts” who are exploring “new frontiers in hallucinogenic research through a nascent technology known as extended-state DMT.” These people are using extended trips on one of the most powerful psychedelic drugs, DMT (the abbreviation for N,N-Dimethyltryptamine – the active chemical in Incan drug, ayahuasca). Their goal is to explore the world and to interact with the entities that they find there. But as I wrote about in The Return of the Dragon these entities are not like the sorts of things you find in a normal sleeping dream. Those who take DMT report that the entities that they see on the drug (and almost everyone sees entities if they do enough) are real and continue to exist after they stop taking the drug. The idea comes from the scientific establishment. Scientists like Andrew Gallimore (a neurobiologist, pharmacologist, and chemist currently based in Tokyo) and Rick Strassman (a clinical associate professor of psychiatry at the University of New Mexico School of Medicine) established much of the science behind this effort and similar studies have been done at organizations such as Johns Hopkins and New York University.
So here is a “scientific” effort to interact with “aliens” from another dimension.
And this is not the only effort. Steven M. Greer, a retired physician who founded the Center for the Study of Extraterrestrial Intelligence (CSETI) claims that he has developed a way to summon aliens. Greer has a set of meditation protocols that,
“allows humans to initiate contact with aliens — to essentially summon a UFO. Every month a group of Colorado Springs residents, led by Mike Waskosky, meets to discuss all things UFO, meditate, and potentially bear witness to strange lights in the sky.”
This method of using meditation to interact with something in the other dimension is hardly new to Greer. In fact, there are very old religions that teach very similar things. They just usually refer to the entities seen as gods, demons and angels instead of aliens.
And whether you take any of this seriously or not is up to you but the point is that there seems to be a growing “materialistic” spirituality. People that do not consider themselves religious at all contacting aliens or interdimensional entities (that are totally not angels or demons).
And as anyone who has read C.S. Lewis knows, this scientific approach to the spiritual world is like going in blind. It is a classic case of fools rushing in where angels fear to tread. There is an effort to find out the intentions of entities that are more intelligent and more powerful than us. The interesting thing is that Christianity has always been wary of seeing entities (for example see the Bible, 1 John 4:1-3, and in the lives of various saints, e.g. St. Maura). Christianity has developed ways to test the spirits (usually by asking them their relationship with the Christian God and his Son) that seem much more sophisticated and wise than letting “psychonauts” make a determination based on a short conversation with the entity.
And this brings us to something important. Modern science gives little thought to the “wisdom of the ancients”. In fact, there is a chronocentric hubris that is so strong it is hard to overstate it. Modern science leads forward – away from the ancients. In the minds of most, far from pushing knowledge forward, the greats of antiquity are more likely to drag us backward.
But if the things that science is now attempting to encounter (through drugs, meditation or beaming radio waves into space) were already encountered by the ancients shouldn’t that arrogance be tempered slightly? If the thing you have just discovered turns out to be the thing that some of the greatest minds of millennia past focused countless hours studying, wouldn’t it be worthwhile cracking open a book and seeing what they said about it?
Despite being ridiculous, the History Channel’s Ancient Aliens has a remarkable pretentiousness to it. Throughout it there is this idea that we in the 21st century are able to see clearly what the ancient world was confused about. They thought they were seeing angels and demons but we know they were seeing aliens. But what if the distinction is nonexistant? What if everyone is talking about the same thing? What if we are not discovering something new but something everyone up until very recently knew much more about than we do?
Perhaps the History Channel should consider a new show. This show could take alien abduction cases and UFO sightings and it could have experts come on and talk about the fact that people thought they were seeing aliens but they were really seeing demons of old.
It was only Charles Darwin’s fake theory of evolution that lent credence to the idea that alien civilizations could have “evolved” on distant planetary systems. No they couldn’t because life does NOT naturally transform from one one species into another, not even over long ages. Nevertheless, Darwin’s unproven theory became accepted by officialdom and by the general public, all of whom lent credence to the nonsensical idea that advanced alien civilizations evolved in outer space long before ours did, and that they had advanced vehicles that could traverse vast distances of light years as fast as ghosts could.
Before that, there had to be a discovery of such planetary systems by astronomers.
Before science arrived to explain the cosmos. people only thought in supernatural terms because they had experience with that, especially as their Bible explained it. They knew of supernatural beings called angels who were good and demons who were bad. They weren’t wrong, only the evolutionists are wrong.