UFOs & NRMs

Framing

Almost immediately after UFOs gained widespread notoriety in the early post-WWII years, people began coming forward with reports of contact with advanced, predominantly benevolent beings from outer space. These contactees related messages of a certain moral import to the people of Earth, frequently addressing the dangers of new technologies like nuclear weapons. Some went on to found organizations - many of which sought the benefits of legal status as religions - in order to spread their messages.

Through these pages I hope to highlight the small but growing literature on UFO NRMs (to which I have contributed), and the growing number of scholars doing research on them.

For More Info

U Virginia: Religious Movements homepage

Discussion

UFO religions would seem to be an exceptionally restricted and marginal topic, even in literature on new religious movements (NRMs). Furthermore, one might even argue that, since none of the groups lumped under this rubric actually worship UFOs, there is no such thing as a UFO religion. Consider the diversity among UFO "cults" on the proper treatment of UFOs. The majority of UFO NRMs, perhaps owing to their derivation from Theosophy and its offspring (see Melton 1995), place aliens in intermediary positions between humans and the divine. Raëlians and Unarians see their respective aliens bringing a golden age of galactic interconnectedness to Earth. While it was still in operation, the group known as Heaven's Gate divided the popular category of "aliens" into representatives of The Evolutionary Level Above Human and "Luciferians"--roughly, angels and devils. The leader of Chen Tao/God's Salvation Church insisted in his writings that God the Heavenly Father was not an alien, though he looked forward to a trans-dimensional rapture in "God's space aircrafts." But an alien messiah-intermediary is still an awesome figure, especially when it saves us from the end of the old world or ushers in the next.

Considering those caveats, the examination of UFOs in religion leads to many interesting issues and how they interact:

The use of science and technology by religious organizations. UFO religions are highly technologically informed systems of belief, even if their fashioners/believers do not understand the technology and its implications as the technologists do. The end of the world is often brought about by humans' technological virtuosity that has outrun our spiritual maturity, and the salvation of humanity, whether a redirection of its historical course or literal translation to a new world, comes in the form of - as Jung (1991) termed them - "technological angels."
The effects of "modernity" and "post-modernity" on religious creativity--the search for a credible symbol-set. I believe UFO religions embody and try to work through society-wide tensions caused by technological development and dependency, by technocracy, by displacements due to technology. In order to build credible religions in an age dominated by high technology and Big Science, one must - UFO religions suggest - configure the divine and transcendent in technological terms. For this process of technologizing the divine alone, UFO NRMs are worthy of study.
The transnational circulation of ideas and people (and money) in the so-called "cultic milieu." Like a lot of NRMs, more than a few UFO groups (like the Raëlian Movement) and others have the ambition to reach worldwide. A few groups are transnational by virtue of switching locations (like Chen Tao moving from Taiwan to the US). And at the very least, these groups tap into the truly transnational networks of occultism and UFO research.

Works Cited

C.G. Jung. 1991. Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies. Princeton: Bollingen.
J. Gordon Melton. 1995. The Contactees: A Survey. in The Gods Have Landed: New Religions From Other Worlds. James R. Lewis, ed. Albany: State University of New York.