Flying Saucers: A Spiritual Biography
Volume I in a series on the history of the idea of extraterrestrial visitation
During 2023, the flying saucer ‘flap’ that had begun with a sketchy 2017 New York Times article arrived on Capitol Hill. In a sensational hearing, witness David Grusch tried to validate decades of UFO conspiracy theories by declaring that the federal government secretly possessed extraterrestrial spacecraft and “biologics.”
In November 2024, however, almost no one showed up for the final UAP hearings of the 118th Congress. Between the two events, Grusch emerged as an explicitly spiritual leader of the ufology ‘community’ — a misnomer, because ufology is in fact split along a faultline between scientistic and spiritualistic belief communities.
Before Kenneth Arnold reported the first “flying saucers” in 1947, Americans already believed with spiritual certainty that people lived on other planets, both solar and extrasolar. Religious belief in aliens, and even alien visitation, is actually older in North America than the United States.
During 2024, I set out to tell this history in a series of premium subscriber essays. They are arranged here in historical order rather than the sequence in which I wrote them. What follows is a TL;DR summary of the work so far (Volume I), as well as an idea of what is still to come (Volume II).
The Heart Is A Hyperdrive: How Emanuel Swedenborg Talked To Aliens In 1758
Emanuel Swedenborg had his first great spiritual vision on Easter weekend in 1741 at the age of 53, when the Son of God appeared to him.
Published in Philadelphia by a friend of Benjamin Franklin, the original literary wellspring source of this inspiration in colonial America was an English translation of Other Planets by the late Emanuel Swedenborg. It was just one of dozens of volumes he had written in his lifetime. Networking internationally, followers of the “Swedish prophet” set out to create a Church of the New Jerusalem, also known as the New Church, in the new United States.
Among the most famous examples of missionary Swedenborgians is John Chapman, popularly known as Johnny Appleseed, who would unstring volumes of Swedenborg and leave the subdivided books with his hosts as he traveled the American frontier. It was a form of pamphleteering, like Gideon bibles in hotels and Watchtower tracts at the front door.
The Missionary Life Of Johnny Appleseed
Walt Disney’s 1948 The Legend of Johnny Appleseed presents John Chapman as a devout Christian, but the film does not say what kind of Christian he was. Popularizing the mythic Appleseed, poet Vachel Lindsay called Chapman “a New England kind of saint,” yet as I recently wro…
Huge in the early 1800s, the American ‘New Church’ is a tiny version of its former self. But every new American religion of the 19th century also reacted to Emanuel Swedenborg, receiving spiritual inspiration and ideas from his voluminous writings. His cosmology is still thriving among some Latter Day Saints today, for example. While not all Mormons subscribe to Swedenborgian beliefs, Saints are prominent within ufology today because the belief that human(oid) people inhabit other planets was foundational to their religion, even printed in its hymnals.
Joseph Smith And The Galactic Order
Within the cosmology of literalist Latter Day Saints, “Heaven or the Celestial Kingdom is seen as a real place which exists in time and space,” Lynn M. Hilton writes. “It consists of gigantic stars, (kolob plus others) at the center, each radiating with great energy and power” at the center of our galaxy. This “
During 2025, I intend to follow up with an essay on the Mormon believers in orbit around David Grusch and the Skinwalker Ranch. The video journalism of Steven Greenstreet at the New York Post has been invaluable in this research, but I still have much more reading to do besides.
After the Latter Day Saints, Spiritualism was the second new alternative religion born in the United States, and the indelible influence of Swedenborg is unmistakable. The literary founders of Spiritualism explicitly credited Swedenborg as their spiritual mentor and describe the beings supposedly living on Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, and the moon in Swedenborgian imagery. Just like Swedenborg, they could communicate with the aliens directly through the spirit. Combined with Mesmerism and utopianism, this eclectic occult religion was a potent spiritual force in America, especially after the Civil War.
Extraterrestrials In American Spiritualism
During the late 1840s, the Church of the New Jerusalem was torn apart by schism. Less than a century had passed since Emanuel Swedenborg had inspired the Protestant movement when “renegade members…claimed to have replicated Swedenborg’s practice of spirit communication and showed a strong interest in Spiritualism,” Bret Carroll writes.
But Spiritualism was short-lived, subsumed within decades of its appearance. A third new alternative religion appeared in the United States, this time with a Russian aristocrat named Helena Blavatsky. Like Spiritualism, the new Church of Theosophy believed they could contact people living on other planets by way of the spirit. In fact, Blavatsky received her revelations from the Lords of the Flame living on Venus.
Theosophy in turn influenced the history of the 20th century, mostly for the worse. By the 1930s it was already in serious decline. Meanwhile, psychoanalysis became a quasi-religious pursuit and a source of ersatz spirituality for the masses. After the Second World War, hypnotherapy in particular mainstreamed reincarnation as well as alien contact — both spiritual ideas from Theosophy that were inextricably bound together in esoteric doctrine. Humans were reincarnated as animals on other planets, Blavatsky said, reincarnating anew into humans again, progressing through the spirit-world towards union with the divine.
Science Of The Soul: Theosophy, Therapy, And The Evolution Of The UFO Cults
Secret societies always have esoteric beliefs at their core. In his explanation of Freemasonry, Albert Gallatin Mackey attributes the foundation of his faith to Abe Dom Pernetty, “a Hermetic philosopher,” and “a disciple, to some extent, of Jakob Böhme, that prince of mystics. To such a man, the reveries, the visions, and the spiritual speculations of [Emanuel] Swedenborg were peculiarly attractive.”
During the Great Depression, as the Church of Theosophy suffered a series of reverses, many American Theosophists synthesized their belief system with a larger measure of Christianity to attract mainstream interest. One of the most successful Christian Theosophy cults was the ‘I AM Activity,’ a movement so bizarre that it deserves to be the subject of a major motion picture. As a matter of fact, I strongly suspect that George Lucas borrowed lightsabers, force lightning, and force ghosts from Guy Ballard, so this one got a bonus post.
Just about everything we associate with the ‘New Age’ was already present in America before 1939. When the war ended, interest in esoteric religion was at a low point across the Western world. Science fiction now became the primary source of spiritual inspiration. An enterprising pulp science fiction writer borrowed from Aleister Crowley, who had also split with Theosophy, to build upon the same ‘bricolage’ of sources as the UFO cults, inventing a new religion called Scientology.
Lafayette Ronald Hubbard used trans-planetary reincarnation (“body thetans”), a spiritual idea borrowed straight from Theosophical bricolage, in his creation myth of Lord Xenu. Every post-1955 UFO cult I have studied so far attracted some seekers who were former Scientologists, while every UFO cult leader since then has studied Scientology.
Science, Fiction, and the Magician: How L. Ron Hubbard Conjured Scientology
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Future essays will explore more examples of this belief in interplanetary transmigration of souls that have been just as influential, even if they are not as famous; I intend to tackle The Urantia Book this spring. It is enormous. Wish me luck.
Among the symbols associated with the Church of Theosophy was the swastika. When added to the public misbehavior of Aleister Crowley, the collapse of Theosophy, and the sensational demise of Guy Ballard and his cult, the taint of Nazi association was too much for practitioners of alternative religion to overcome.
Just as suddenly, mass hysteria about objects seen in the sky provided the perfect vehicle for re-branding their beliefs. In 1952, just weeks after the first hydrogen bomb test, a theosophical practitioner of “scientific lamaism” named George Adamski “met” an alien from Venus. The Ascended Masters of Theosophy were back, and they were better than ever, for now they had spaceships.
Unidentified Flying Archons: How A Global Religion Reinvented Itself For A 'New Age'
The term ‘New Age’ has always been a false conceit in reference to the 1970s, or any time in the 20th century. American Christianity beheld a world of spiritual ideas during the 19th century. Across the globe, including the United States, new religions were forming around universalizing ideas of humanity. Hegel and Marx presented new revelations to explain
Adamski remains controversial among ufologists today. Scientistic ufologists — the ones who couch their belief in sciency-sounding terms — almost all reject him, while many spiritual ufologists also disdain him as an obvious fake, usually in order to frame themselves as a more credible interpreter of UFOs. In 1953, however, his story was international news, and his books altered the course of alternative religion in the West.
In Chicago, a group of spiritual seekers met through the auspices of Scientology and took inspiration from Adamski. Relying on messages from the risen Jesus(!) conveyed to them by their medium, this group became the object of global media fascination. They prepared to leave earth on a spaceship just prior to imminent doomsday. A team from the University of Chicago infiltrated the cult to learn more about them, producing one of the most important texts in the history of psychology as well as ufology. For example, When Prophecy Fails contains one of the earliest written encounters with mysterious men in black.
When Theosophy Fails: Flying Saucers and the Defining of Cognitive Dissonance
Published in 1956, When Prophecy Fails: A Social and Psychological Study of a Modern Group That Predicted the Destruction of the World is one of the most famous psychology texts of all time. Two years earlier, lead author Leon Festinger and a team of academic observers from Chicago had watched a small cult in Oak Park endure the “disconfirmation” of their prophecy that the world would end on 21 December, 1954. This message had come to earth from “Sananda,” the risen Jesus in heaven, yet the world had failed to end on schedule, and the expected flying saucer had not arrived to evacuate the believers as promised.
The infamous Heaven’s Gate cult is a more recent example of the UFO bricolage of beliefs. Cult founders Marshall Applewhite and Bonnie Nettles studied the same occult sources that had shaped Swedenborg, while their cosmology bore all the familiar hallmarks of Swedenborg’s influence. Their take on Protestant Christian Dispensationalism was stamped with Theosophy. Even the Art Bell radio broadcast which sparked the cult’s final decision to commit mass suicide told the same, familiar story of a spaceship and a spiritual upheaval on earth that is common to the bricolage. The cult communicated in their own patois of science fiction terms.
As an historical UFO cult, Heaven’s Gate has everything. Their obsession with “evolving” beyond human sex difference is also a modern conceit born from literary and spiritual reactions to Emanuel Swedenborg. While their actions seemed bizarre at the time, the idea that humans are evolving beyond male and female has become strangely popular among American elites in our time.
Riding A Comet Through Heaven's Gate
During the afternoon of 26 March 1997, San Diego sheriff’s deputies responding to a 911 call discovered 39 bodies decomposing at a residence in the suburb of Rancho Santa Fe, California. The dead wore black uniforms: Nike Decades sneakers, sweat pants, and shirts with patches reading “Heaven’s Gate Away Team.” Purple shrouds covered their faces. Everyone had $5.75, a five dollar bill and three quarters, in their shirt pocket.
During 2025, I intend to show how this pattern of spiritual-cultural foment recurs in other UFO cults, laying out the constant commonalities. I have selected three of them with a sufficient body of historiography. Like the disclosure cult of David Grusch, two of them are living cults. Unlike the cable television grifters who attached themselves to the world’s most disappointing ‘whistleblower’ in 2023, however, all three cults I have chosen are considered genuinely dangerous.
UFO religion is not monolithic. No flying saucer Vatican would ever even be possible, for the ufologists are as diverse as humanity, while by its very nature, esoteric religion calls to the independent-minded, intelligent seeker capable of forming their own opinions.
But UFO religion does not have to be centralized in order to share common themes. Every American roadside diner offers a menu of food options that is very similar to the menu of every other American roadside diner. Thousands of them still thrive across the United States, anyway.
Similarly, every UFO cult presents the spiritual seeker with a menu of beliefs that is drawn from that larger body of beliefs (the ‘bricolage’) from which the other UFO cults also draw their beliefs, with the result that all of them resemble one another to some degree, just like diner menus.
Both the roadside diner and the cult of the alien are quintessentially American. Aliens are an old time religion in America, indeed far older than diner restaurants. The cult of the alien is therefore not a new phenomenon even on Capitol Hill, so we should not be surprised by its persistence, or its constant attempts to rebrand itself. As Ronald Pakula, the “deep throat” informant on The X-Files, told FBI agent Fox Mulder, “they” have been here for a very long time.
The Extraterrestrial Evangelism of David Grusch
David Grusch, who made headlines last summer by telling a congressional committee about secondhand reports of dead aliens and their spaceships being held in secret facilities, said in November that he wants those supposed secrets released in order to bring a “spiritual awakening” to the world.