Christian Ufology and Demonic Aliens

I received a very detailed email this morning from a fellow who wanted to pass along a warning that the Knights Templar precursors who came to America before 800 CE had set into motion the End of Days, through which were are living now. I’ve edited the message for length and clarity:

There is a definite agenda that is directed by a power of darkness that has a direct and purposeful goal. It’s to keep us asleep [and] from realizing that we all are a "One Consciousness", but we just can't see it because they've kept us asleep! It's their goal that they claim is for our own good, that of the destruction [of] us... The NDAA [National Defense Authorization Act] has recently bought 2.5 billion rounds of ammunition and 2,700 tanks for the USA only. A 1 million camp capacity prison that’s empty now but recently built up for the calamity of the U.S... The Powers That Be—and they know who they are, i.e. Government—is propagating, anticipating, and preparing for the anarchy that's awaiting those who are sleeping... Basically, "The End" is truly at hand… Right after the one world currency kicks in it will be only a matter of a handful of years left in the Earth’s existence! So there is some strength of possibility that the precursors if the Knights Templar did arrive early around 800 AD in order to set up this last of days... (ellipses in original)

The numbers incorrectly attributed to the NDAA refer to Dept. of Homeland Security purchase orders (publicly disclosed) that were so badly mangled by the media and right-wing conspiracy theorists that even Breitbart.com debunked them. The writer also later wrote asking me to clarify that he does not necessarily believe all of these conspiracies but is exploring them as a path toward truth.

You will, of course, remember many of these claims from Jim Marrs’s weird ranting on the William Henry Revelations radio show last month, but this is the first time I’ve seen the conspiracy visited upon the Templar fakery from America Unearthed. (So far as I know Scott Wolter is unique in imagining the alleged Roman-Jewish colony of Calulus as a proto-Templar base.) I suppose this is an outgrowth of the writer’s claimed research into “the Bible, the Books of Enoch, the books of Adam and Eve with Satan, The sons of God,  the Illuminati, Freemasons, the Watchers, the Aeons, the Elohim, the Luciferians, the Anunnaki, the Mayans and their 20 count 2012 calendar, Planets X and Nibiru, etc.” These claims become an entire alternative history ecosystem, self-referencing and self-replicating.

The writer asked me to read the work of conspiracy theorists Alex Jones and David Icke, wherein one might find the truth about how the Devil was planning the End of Days through the offices of Barack Obama, though he felt that former president George W. Bush and former vice president Dick Cheney were actually the lizard people who put the program in place to be carried out by a duped Obama. This writer has apparently adopted the view popular among some Christians that UFOs and extraterrestrials are not from other worlds but are instead manifestations of demons. As Bob and Suzanne Hamrick, writers who feel that apocalyptic Christianity is too soft on Satan, wrote:

UFO's have been reported for many centuries. […] New Age types believe, because it feeds into their world view, that these are superior beings from other planets, another dimension, or whatever. Unfortunately, many Bible-believing Christians have been sucked into this belief system, perhaps due to unwillingness on the part of pastors or Christian authors to comment on these strange phenomena. […] No one who is indwelt by the Holy Spirit can possibly be demon-possessed, much less transported to a demonic space ship for sexual relations, invasive "medical" procedures, etc., as have been described by many abductees of both sexes. What does this mean? We find it remarkable that, of all of the reports of abductions by aliens, none seems to have been of anyone claiming to be a born-again Christian. If this is true, then it is the single greatest indication that "aliens" are actually demonic manifestations posing as extraterrestrial creatures. 

That’s a rather neat inversion of the ancient astronaut theory’s line about the aliens posing as gods. This led me to discover that there is an entire world of Christian UFO “experts” preaching that the ancient astronaut theory supports the Christian worldview because it provides compelling evidence that Satan’s fallen angels, in the guise of the Watchers from the extra-canonical Book of Enoch, were flitting about the world in the pre-Flood days and continue to fool humans today. It’s sort of the inverse of the UFO preachers of the 1950s and 1960s who tried to convince audiences that they could still believe in the Bible because God was an alien and therefore, in some sense, the Bible was literally true. More to the point, it is just another version of St. Augustine arguing that the pagan gods were “most impure demons, who desire to be thought gods” (City of God 7.33).

The Hebrew Bible and the New Testament speak nothing of a host of fallen angels except in Revelation 12:3-4, in which the Great Red Dragon uses his tail to sweep a third of the stars of heaven to earth and Revelation 12:9, in which the devil “and his angels” are thrown down to earth. To the author of Revelation, this event apparently had occurred fairly recently, though this obviously complicates the interpretation of Genesis and Job as featuring the same serpent-devil. In modern discussions, the actual actions of the alleged fallen angels are drawn mostly from the extra-canonical texts that expounded on Genesis 6:1-4. As a technical matter, the Bible does not identify demons as ex-angels, which is probably why the Christian UFO experts seem a bit confused about whether the pilots of UFOs are Enochian Watchers, infernal demons, or some combination of them.

But it’s not enough to simply identify the aliens as demons, or to see the demons as secretly promoting Satan’s End Times agenda. Recent writers have also tried to tie this in with reasons why one can only save one’s soul through the Protestant, specifically Evangelical, version of Christianity. Earlier this year, Cris Putnam and Thomas Horn published Exo-Vaticana, in which they claim that while Protestants correctly understand UFOs as demonic illusions from Satan, Catholics are prepared to disclose the existence of extraterrestrials and embrace them as fellow Christians and “space brothers,” forwarding Satan’s End Times agenda.

Given that the Vatican holds sway to over 1 billion followers as well as influencing an even greater number of peoples, governments, and policies world-wide, and puny obstacles to their revised Christianity will thus hardly keep most of the world’s “spiritual” people from wholeheartedly embracing the alien serpent-saviors on their arrival. (quoted here)

According to the authors, the traditional Protestant anti-Catholic arguments about the vile Vatican, its worship of false gods, and its corrupt popes in service of Satan are amplified by the realization that Satan is using UFOs to lead people away from Protestantism. The authors tell their audience that the Antichrist will be—wait for it—an “Alien Serpent Savior” whom the Catholics will take for the Second Coming: David Icke’s lizard people! But good evangelicals will know better! The authors urge evangelicals to “prepare” for a violent conflict against Catholics and aliens. Catholics, they say, may be willing to presume that extraterrestrials can qualify for Christian salvation, but evangelicals know that earth is the only true creation of God, and human evangelicals the only beings meant for heaven.

This is just Alexander Hislop’s Two Babylons (1853) warmed over, with the Satanic-Babylonian Nimrod allegedly worshiped by the Catholic hierarchy replaced with a Satanic-extraterrestrial Serpent Savior.

Imagine the intellectual fireworks at a debate where Giorgio Tsoukalos and Erich von Däniken defend the proposition that Biblical demons and extra-Biblical Watchers are extraterrestrials while Cris Putnam and Thomas Horn take the opposing view that supposed aliens are really demons. Surely it would be as revelatory as the old (and possibly apocryphal) concern for “whether a million of angels may not sit upon a needle’s point,” as Chillingworth so memorably phrased it in his Religion of Protestants (1637).

Of course, they’d probably just conclude that the needle’s point was another secret base for trans-dimensional extraterrestrial demons, too.