Are UFOs and Demons the Same Thing?

Term: Demon: in Christian teaching, a spiritual being opposed to God. The New Testament describes demons oppressing and deceiving people.

Term: Old Hag syndrome: a name for the experience of waking paralyzed, feeling a weight on the chest, and sensing a presence in the room. Modern medicine calls it sleep paralysis.

Term: Malaterrestrials: evil earthbound non-human intelligences, as distinct from the holy angels of heaven.

The demon side of my fiction appears in Sons of the Flood, which begins with The Giant’s Shadow.

Are UFOs and Demons the Same Thing?

Some Christian researchers say yes, and I am one of them. The Bible does not say UFOs are demons. The case rests on a pattern: the effects people report from UFO encounters resemble effects reported for centuries in encounters with spirits. That pattern is evidence for a link, but it is not proof, and ordinary explanations account for part of it.

The case for a link

Researcher Jacques Vallée argued in 1969, in Passport to Magonia, that modern UFO reports resemble older folklore about fairies and spirits. In a later book, Messengers of Deception, he argued that the phenomenon behaves like a system designed to shape human belief. Vallée is not a Christian apologist, and he does not accept that UFOs are extraterrestrial.

Christian writers including Chuck Missler and L.A. Marzulli read the pattern through Scripture. They argue that the beings behind the reports are the fallen angels the Bible describes, working a deception. In my book Disclosure: They Are Not Extraterrestrials, I compare nine kinds of reported effects in UFO cases and in historical accounts of spirit encounters.

The parallels, and the ordinary explanations

Paralysis and a dark presence. The parallel: Abduction accounts describe waking unable to move. Old Hag traditions describe the same across cultures. The ordinary explanation: Sleep paralysis, a well-studied condition that produces these sensations.

Missing time. The parallel: The Hill case of 1961 and old folklore about people taken by fairies and returning hours or years later. The ordinary explanation: Memory gaps, sleep, and memories rebuilt afterward, sometimes through hypnosis.

Lasting fear. The parallel: Abductees describe years of nightmares and anxiety. Historical accounts of spirit encounters describe similar terror. The ordinary explanation: Fear and trauma responses, which can come from believing an event happened.

Machines failing. The parallel: Reports of engines and radios failing near UFOs. Older accounts describe lights going out and mechanisms stopping. The ordinary explanation: Power faults, sensor errors, and coincidence, plus the limits of the accounts.

Mind-to-mind messages. The parallel: Children at Ariel School in Zimbabwe in 1994 described beings sending images without speaking. Early Christian writers described visions placed in the mind. The ordinary explanation: Suggestion, imagination, and the way the children were interviewed.

One study is often cited for the fear response. In 2004 a Harvard team led by psychologist Richard McNally measured heart rate, skin conductance, and facial muscle activity in people who said aliens had abducted them. Their responses to their abduction scripts were comparable to those of PTSD patients hearing scripts of real trauma. The authors drew a different conclusion from mine. They wrote that believing you were traumatized can produce the same physical response as a real trauma, so the response does not prove the event happened.

What the Bible adds

The Bible does not identify UFOs. It does say that Satan disguises himself as an angel of light (2 Corinthians 11:14), that deceiving spirits work signs (Revelation 16:14), and that a strong delusion will come on those who reject the truth (2 Thessalonians 2:9 to 11). It also tells us to test the spirits (1 John 4:1). Those passages are why Christians who hold this view treat the UFO subject as a spiritual matter. They are guidance on how to think, and they do not name any particular sighting.

Problems with the claim

First, many of the parallels have natural explanations. Sleep paralysis is the clearest example. Researchers David Hufford, Richard McNally, and Susan Clancy have all studied it in connection with supernatural and abduction experiences.

Second, the historical sources have limits. The source notes in my own book say so. The Loudun case was tangled in political conflict, and many historians think the possession was faked or hysterical. The Malleus Maleficarum was never officially endorsed by the Catholic Church. Caesarius of Heisterbach wrote his demon stories as moral lessons for monks, not as medical case files. The Smurl haunting rests on the testimony of the family and the Warrens, and its electrical disturbances were not verified by neutral parties. The marks on Anneliese Michel are documented as bruising and injury consistent with convulsions, and whether they had a supernatural cause or came from the exorcism process itself is disputed.

Third, a match in what people report does not prove a match in what caused it. Similar experiences can come from a shared human cause, such as the way the brain behaves in sleep and fear, as well as from a shared outside cause.

Fourth, most sightings are ordinary. The Pentagon’s AARO resolves most cases it closes as balloons, birds, drones, and satellites. The military data of objects on radar and infrared tell us that something is there. It cannot tell us whether a spirit is involved, and no sensor can test that.

Fifth, Christians disagree. Some read the phenomenon as natural or human in origin. Some think extraterrestrial life is possible and does not conflict with Scripture.

How I reach my conclusion

I do not claim that every sighting is demonic. I look at three things together. The speed-of-light barrier makes visits from other star systems very hard to explain. The unexplained cases share a pattern with older reports of spiritual encounters. And the messages in many contact accounts, such as the claim that other beings created humanity, contradict Genesis 1:27. Taken together, I find the spiritual explanation the best fit. I hold that as a conclusion about the evidence, and I expect thoughtful readers to weigh it themselves.

My book Disclosure: They Are Not Extraterrestrials sets out the full comparison, with source notes that flag where the evidence is weak. Disclosure is available on Amazon. You can find more of my work at ckqbooks.com.

Sources

Jacques Vallée, Passport to Magonia (1969) and Messengers of Deception (1979). David Hufford, The Terror That Comes in the Night (1982). Richard J. McNally and colleagues, Psychophysiological Responding during Script-Driven Imagery in People Reporting Abduction by Space Aliens, Psychological Science (2004). Richard J. McNally and Susan A. Clancy, Sleep Paralysis, Sexual Abuse, and Space Alien Abduction, Transcultural Psychiatry (2005). Chuck Missler and Mark Eastman, Alien Encounters. Source notes in Disclosure: They Are Not Extraterrestrials.