UFOs: The Hidden Truth
New Liberty Films and Videos
Running time 74 minutes
Available from Penfold Bible & Book House, PO Box 26, Bicester, Oxon. OX6 8PB (01869 249574).
What should we make of UFOs? A new Christian video makes some startling claims.
Reported sightings of unusual aerial phenomena date back to ancient times. They seem to be pictured in Egyptian murals. In 329 BC Alexander the Great recorded his soldiers being harassed by two flying discs. It must have occurred to some Christians that Matthew's description of the star of Bethlehem could be interpreted in terms of the classic features of a UFO or unidentified flying object (Matthew 2.9).
But 'flying saucers' became widely discussed in the modern era after June 24 1947 with Kenneth Arnold's sighting of nine UFOs over the Cascade Mountains, Washington, USA, which received wide publicity.
UFOs: the hidden truth, using a mixture of photographs and film, some of which purports to be genuine UFO footage takes the viewer through a wide catalogue of material, including ex-Presidents Ronald Reagan's and Jimmy Carter's tales of sighting UFOs. Stories from World War II pilots, aircraft going missing mysteriously, sightings on radar screens and unexplained bright lights in the sky abound. It is claimed that most of the US space missions have encountered UFOs.
Close encounters
This, of course, is all very fashionable and marketable in our day, especially since August 7 when US scientists announced that a meteorite purportedly from Mars showed fossil signs of microscopic life.
Since the film Close Encounters of the Third Kind, TV's The X-files has taken hold of the imagination of millions of the viewing public. In 1966 a US Air Force major, Donald Keyhoe, promoted the idea that governments are involved in a high-level cover-up of the whole phenomenon. This Beyond Top Secret conspiracy theory is given credence by many people. In recent years stories of the abduction of human beings by aliens, some followed by medical examinations inside spacecraft, have come into vogue.
The scientists
Although the scientific community generally takes the possibility of extra-terrestrial (ET) life seriously, it tends not to be too impressed with UFOs.
From 1947 to 1969 the US Air Force sponsored an investigation into UFOs. Out of 12,618 reports received, all but 5.6% turned out to be fairly easily explicable in terms of natural phenomena.
However, in trying (in evolutionary terms) to estimate the distribution of life in the universe, astronomers have developed the Drake formula. This equation, named after the American astronomer Frank Drake, assembles the fact that the number of civilisations capable of communicating across inter-stellar space is dependent upon seven variables, six of which can only be estimated by wild guesses.
Radio from space ?
The most ambitious scientific search for extra-terrestrial life uses radio telescopes to scan the heavens for electromagnetic signals which may appear to be produced consciously. Using this method the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) project was set up by NASA in 1992.
The goal is to examine radio emissions from 1,000 nearby stars that resemble our sun. In 1993 the US congress cut funding for the project, but although private donations have enabled the research to continue, no convincing sign of ET life has been detected by SETI.
UFOs
The Hidden Truth video is too much lacking in a scientifically critical approach to its subject to be much more than entertaining. Everything seems to be swallowed. The truth is that most UFO reports can be identified as conventional objects, although time consuming investigations are often necessary to make such identifications.
Another dimension
There is, of course, the small percentage of reports for which no normal explanations are found.
The video takes the phenomena seriously, but rejects the idea of aliens from other planets. We are told that even travelling at the speed of light it would just take too long for an alien to arrive here from the nearest galaxy. If they came from the nearest star within our own galaxy, moving a million miles a day, it would still take 700,000 years to get here !
The thesis of this video thus becomes that unexplainable UFO and 'Close Encounter' phenomena are actually demonic in origin.
The reasoning behind this conclusion is not merely based on the vast distances involved in inter-galactic travel.
First, the sudden disappearance and impossible aerodynamics of objects involved in many sightings have led some UFO experts to give the opinion that we are dealing with something from a different dimension, a parallel reality, rather than from another planet.
Second, there are many links between 'close encounters' and altered states of consciousness and hypnosis. Some alleged victims of alien abduction claim that aliens communicate with them telepathically. Christian author Dave Hunt appears on the video and gives his opinion that the brain is a machine that is operated by our spirit and that hypnosis somehow loosens the connection between our spirit and our brain and allows another intelligence (usually that of the hypnotist) to take over and make us even see things that are not there. If a hypnotist can make people see things that are not there in this way, so, he argues could a demon.
Thirdly, the kinds of messages that aliens are said to give to their abducted victims are too much like the New Age agenda. The basic line is 'we have come from another planet to help our brother man. A new era is about to dawn. You are all gods and need to re-realise what is rightfully yours. You have misunderstood the man Jesus'. One researcher is quoted as saying: 'From our analysis, the teachings of the space beings appear to support many of the principles taught in oriental philosophy by seers of the Far East.' The video then asks how credible it is to think that aliens would travel such vast distances to tell us what many people on earth, supposedly, already knew.
Thus the thesis is built up that these phenomena are being demonically orchestrated to lead people away from the truth and tie in with the New Age lie of an immanent quantum leap into a new era for mankind. We are being softened and psychologically set up for this catastrophic delusion.
Omega conspiracy
Lastly, Dr. I. D. E. Thomas, a Welshman who now preaches in California, is interviewed to give his theory of all this explained in his book The Omega Conspiracy.
He says that the early verses of Genesis 6 do record contact and even sexual relations between humans and angelic/demonic personalities. Though for the last 1,500 years most heavyweight Bible commentators have interpreted 'the sons of God' and 'the daughters of men' in that passage as referring to the godly sons of Seth marrying ungodly women, he says that early church fathers like Tertullian and Ambrose knew of no interpretation except that of angelic beings having relations with humans. This polluted all the human race, apart from the family of Noah, who was 'perfect in his generations'. From there he goes on to take up Jesus' words: 'As it was in the days of Noah, so it will be at the coming of the Son of Man,' Matthew 24.37. The strange implication is something along the lines of us being near the end and Satan is about to attempt to come to earth passing himself off as an alien from space.
This is all very exciting and intriguing. But for this reviewer the treatment of the biblical text was about as flawed as the video's uncritical approach to the UFO reports. Even if we allow the interpretation of angelic beings in Genesis 6, Matthew 24 is completely misused. Surely the thrust of Christ's references to the days of Noah has more to do with the relative ordinariness of the times in which the Second Coming will occur. It is the 'business as usual' atmosphere of 'marrying and giving in marriage', and men working in the field, which lulls people into dismissing any idea of Christ's return. I am at a loss to see how such an unprecedented occurrence as invasion by alien/demonic visitors fits into this scenario of ordinariness.
Perhaps I am being too hard in my assessment, but whereas I found the thesis of the video unconvincing, I am impressed by the modern church's fascination with speculation, and ears itching ready to be entertained by novelty and myths rather than to be edified by simple sound doctrine. This indeed is a characteristic indication that we live in the last days (2 Timothy 4.3-5).
JEB
Dr John Benton
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