Ancient Aliens' Native American Contributor Objects to Using the Word "Aliens" to Describe Visitors from the Stars

I’ve often complained that alternative history tends to overemphasize white, male views while ignoring or minimizing the views of the native peoples whose history they appropriate. When it comes to Ancient Aliens, I’ve often noted that they at least seek out opinions from women, African Americans, and Native Americans—even if they are all equally delusional believers in demonstrably untrue ideas. The program’s most frequent black contributor is a creationist, and its most prominent Native American voice—well, he apparently doesn’t believe in aliens per se.

At least that’s what he told someone filming him for the Star Knowledge Conference shortly after taping a segment for Ancient Aliens. In a clip released to promote the upcoming conference, Chief Golden Light Eagle, who also goes by the name Standing Elk and his legal name of Loren Zephier, explained that he was upset that the Prometheus Entertainment production crew wanted him to talk about “aliens” when he does not believe in flesh-and-blood beings from another planet but rather spirit beings from the stars:

Now, I was having a little bit of a problem with the term “alien,” and especially with EBEs, ETs—extraterrestrials, extraterrestrial biological entities—because they’re a form of negativity, a sound (?), and our brothers and sisters of the stars, they work with light. They work with a very high vibration. So these terms, alien and all that, sets up a negative vibration within you that’s not very good because of the laws of attraction. The Star People will not hang around you very long. They’re very sacred people, very enlightened people; they’re beings and people of light. 

So that must be why so many visitors to this website complain about my negative vibrations: I am scaring away the aliens!

Zephier is not a “chief” of his enrolled Native tribe (variously reported as the Yankton or the Dakota) but rather is a “chief” of the “Galactic Federation of Light,” a New Age group. He came to UFO believers’ attention when he claimed that symbols allegedly found on the control panel of the Roswell UFO (but of course) were the same symbols he received telepathically from metallic beings from Orion. He also claims that his book, Maka Wicahpi Wicohan, described as a Star Law Manual of the Galactic Federation, was “inducted” in the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian. I have been unable to find any record of the book in the Smithsonian collections, much less an “induction” ceremony. If this website is to be believed, the actual event was very much the other way round, with Golden Light Eagle presenting a copy of his book to the Cultural Resource Center of the National Museum of the American Indian in Maryland, which houses the museum library and would therefore have accepted the gift as part of its mission to collect Native American literature. That said, I can find neither the book nor Golden Light Eagle in a search of the museum archives.

Golden Light Eagle apparently has earned the enmity of many Native Americans for his jumbling and repurposing of elements of traditional Native beliefs in service of New Age mystical mumbo-jumbo tied to conferences and appearances that net big bucks. (He apparently mixes Apache words with Lakota dances and shout-outs to Jesus.) The Star Knowledge Conference does not, as of this writing, list prices, but people who have called to get the price say it runs about $400 per person, with $20 surcharges for particular “workshops.” Worst of all, they are encouraging children to come and be exposed to lies about how multicolored energy bubbles can protect them from harm, at $11 per child. (Click here only if you want to be depressed by what people want their children to learn.)

The whole thing makes me sad, both because of the numbers of New Agers who make a fetish of the indigenous in a bastardized form, and because people like Zephier/Standing Elk/Golden Light Eagle who are happy to cater to this fetish with fabricated fictions about UFOs and Native spirituality. But I guess it’s slightly better that Zephier wants to differentiate his Star People from Giorgio Tsoukalos’ extraterrestrials, though given David Childress’s claims that the “aliens” are really trans-dimensional time travelers, I think we’re talking a difference of degree, not kind.