Making Sense of Flying Saucers and Extraterrestrials

When Your Eyes Seem to Play Tricks on You, What’s Your Bottom Line?

Photo by Haziq Mehboob on Unsplash

“I’d rather have questions I can’t answer than answers I can’t question” — Brian Keating, Professor of physics at U.C. San Diego

I have some doubts about ET sightings and their spiritual significance, similar to the uncertainties I encounter when facing life’s mysteries with no clear explanation.

I‘m reminded of when one of our guests “saw” a flying saucer over our property, my mind uttered a cosmic “nah.”

But we have to be careful with skepticism. It can contaminate direct experiences with the unknown, such as a miracle cure or a meeting with angels.

A close encounter

Back to the guest. This Twilight Zone episode unfolded in the sunset hours.

My response was similar to when someone observes cloud formations and comments, “Doesn’t that one look like a map of Africa?” I think “really, that looks like a cat.”

He was lying on the window seat, lazily observing the “cotton woods whispering above.” Suddenly, out of the blue, he saw a light the size of a beach ball casting a beam on the rock face across the highway. As it slowly approached the cliffs closer to him, it once again focused its spotlight on the mountainside.

At first, he assumed that it must be some aircraft or even a drone. But he started to freak out when he realized there was no engine noise propelling the light towards him. Curiosity gave way to fear. He jumped up and closed the door to the outside. He then pulled the window blinds down as if to make the strange apparition disappear. All the while he asked,

“Why no sound? What’s it scanning the rock face for? Am I in any danger?”

“Are my eyes playing tricks on me?”

The devil is not in the details.

He certainly had never seen anything like this disembodied light before. He did what is typical for all of us when we encounter things we don’t understand: fill in the gaps with the limited knowledge we do have.

The guests’ experience reminds me of a recent meeting between a group of Pentecostal pastors and a supposed ‘expert’ on extraterrestrial visits. To the majority of participants, the prospect of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe raised unsettling theological implications like “How does this fit with my theological perspective.”

In an article in the NY Times, Ruth Graham writes,

“For many of the pastors in the room, and some other Christians, there’s only one possible explanation for extraterrestrial beings: They are not neutral visitors from other planets or dimensions, but demonic entities.”

The possibility of a real-life ET in their backyard did not square away with their Bible’s account of the Earth, humanity, and their religious perspective on God’s plan for the universe.

So, when something does not fit the mold of your worldview, what do you typically do? Instead of remaining neutral and curiously looking for more evidence, we discount the experience.

In fact, Vice President JD Vance, who is a conservative catholic, when asked to comment on the reality of such entities, said, “I don’t think they’re aliens, I think they’re demons.”

I’ve had several readers comment on my postings about meetings with angels, ancestors, and departed loved ones. They inform me, with a deep sense of conviction, that I’m communing with demons. They challenge me to “Show evidence apart from your personal experience.”

Life on the border

There’s a fence in our minds between the natural and supernatural worlds. And when it comes to extraterrestrial visitations, that barrier becomes insurmountable to many. Much as the ancients viewed the world as flat and feared travel across an ocean, so our theories about the mysteries of life keep our minds closed.

Once, I expressed my curiosity about reincarnation to an Evangelical pastor who abruptly declared, “I believe in the resurrection.” I saw his mind snap shut like a mousetrap, and his clear message was, “Don’t mess with my certainties!” In another instance, at a church picnic, one of my Seminary professors asked, “Do you believe in the devil?” When I answered, “No, not a literal devil,” I noticed a look of puzzlement on his face. It was almost as if he wanted confirmation for his growing doubt about this tenet of Tribal belief.

Both these individuals had difficulty with life on the margins between the known of their experience and out-of-the-box ideas like reincarnation or skepticism about the existence of Satan.

So what do we do with ‘new’ or ‘foreign ideas’ like ETs, healing without traditional medicine, or communing with the dead?

Be like Curious George.

Sometimes curiosity supposedly killed the cat. That’s when an inquiring mind is nixed by conventional ideas.

I was recently discussing with a scientist/atheist friend about our adventures into communing with entities across the veil. He was absolutely adamant that such a stretch of imagination better reflected our needs than the facts of the situation.

My response was “don’t you have a shadow of doubt about your materialist world view? If you do, I find that strange because, as a scientist, your method of inquiry (hypothesis testing) is based on questioning and testing every theory that you have.”

In the end, my friend did concede that we must always be curious about what we don’t know and remain open to other ways of seeing the world.

In that moment of agreement, he became like Curious George, the beloved childhood story character. This monkey had an insatiable curiosity, which often led to mischievous but innocent adventures. As we emulate his inquiring mind when we run into an anomaly like ETs, instead of freezing, we state, “That’s very interesting. What can I learn from this situation?”

No pawnshop mentality, please

In our pursuit of truth, we need to take care not to become like a pawnshop that takes anything in. Gullibility is dangerous.

As we find ourselves face-to-face with the inexplicable, we still question our assumptions like

“Why would the divine only create a sentient species on this planet in the light of the vastness of the universe?”

And, why would this extraterrestrial entity be at the same development level as we are?

But at the same time, we attempt to be discerning about the mysteries of life, we recognize that there are more ways to evaluate the truth of a situation than measurements that factor in our five senses. How about

Gut knowing (our intuitions)?

Direct experience that, after thousands of observations, yields consistent data (like in Near Death Experiences)? That’s the stuff of mysticism.

Most truth starts with personal experience. Such data encourages us to trust our own encounters and insights.

• Moses had a direct experience with the great “I Am” at the burning bush.
• The apostle Paul had a mystical encounter with Jesus long before he wrote his letters to churches.
• I had an encounter with the Archangel Ariel that taught me infinitely more than my theological studies.

Conclusion

In closing, I agree with the observation of Russell Moore, an editor with Christianity Today who wrote,

“If we assume the possibility that there’s something outside of Earth, our basic default should be the way we treat strangers generally.”

And those ‘strangers’ are part of the ocean of Divine consciousness. And the core of that cosmic connection lies in both oneness and love.

In my books, Steven Spielberg got it right with his lovable movie character, ET. And it also took the mind of a child to grasp what his eyes saw. We can also thank Steven’s mother for telling him’

‘Let’s not be conceited to think that we’re the only intelligent life in the universe,”