Satanism Today - An Encyclopedia of Religion, Folklore and Popular ...

U
UFOs and Demons
Unidentified flying objects—“flying saucers”—
came into international consciousness when a
private pilot reported seeing nine disc-shaped
objects flying in formation and at high speed over
Mount Rainier, Washington, on the afternoon of
June 24, 1947. Other sightings followed, first in the
Pacific Northwest, then elsewhere, and have
continued unabated ever since. By the mid-1950s
the notion that UFOs might be extraterrestrial
spacecraft were widely popular, having eclipsed
the widespread suspicion that the objects were
secret American or Soviet aircraft. A minority of
hard-core UFO enthusiasts, however, were drawn
to occult interpretations of the phenomenon.
The early 1950s saw the rise of the contactee
movement in southern California. Contactees—
individuals who claimed personal associations
with benevolent extraterrestrials often called
“Space Brothers”—grafted occult doctrines to
flying saucers. Contact messages, which came via
face-to-face meetings, channeling, automatic
writing, dreams, or voices in the head, had unambiguous
religious overtones, including prophecies
and moral lessons; the Space Brothers recruited
contactees and their followers to spread the saucer
gospel and to prepare disbelieving humankind for
the day the skies will fill with spaceships and extraterrestrials
will bring peace and harmony to our
galactic backwater.
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Early on, however, a few participants in the
contactee subculture began to suspect that all was
not what it appeared to be. Longtime occultist and
newly turned contactee Trevor James Constable
(who wrote under the name Trevor James)
warned that some ostensible space beings were
really malevolent entities who were lying about
their true nature. Noting that several contactees
had been led astray, leaving families and jobs at the
direction of “unethical invisibles,” Constable wrote
that “the ‘spacemen’” exert “a psychic despotism
over innocent and well-meaning people” (James
1958, 20). According to Constable, good and evil
entities are locked in battle for the soul of the
human race. The evil entities live inside an astral
shell beneath the earth’s surface, allied with nearphysical
beings based on the moon. They have
earthly associates, prominently including advocates
of nuclear disarmament. Only atomic bombs
can penetrate the astral shell, posing a threat to the
astrals’ sinister plans.
Constable may have been the first saucer theorist
to incorporate traditional demonology into
ufological discourse. Two years prior to 1947,
however, Richard Shaver had regaled readers of
the science-fiction magazines Amazing Stories and
Fantastic Adventures, edited by the flamboyant Ray
Palmer, with his allegedly true interactions with
sadistic subterranean beings called deros, who
used advanced devices to cause hallucinations and