Gods and Saucers

The Crisis Nobody in the Pews Is Expecting

There is a prediction sitting underneath the whole disclosure conversation that almost nobody bothers to state, because everyone assumes it is self-evident: confirmed contact would break religion. The churches would empty. The scriptures would be revealed as parochial. A billion people would wake up one morning and find the floor gone.

In the late 2000s a theologian decided to check. Ted Peters — Professor of Systematic Theology at Pacific Lutheran Theological Seminary and at the Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley — built a survey with his research assistant Julie Froehlig for the express purpose of confirming or disconfirming the collapse hypothesis. He did not start from scratch: he adapted the key question from Victoria Alexander's 1994 clergy survey, and set out to test it against a larger and broader sample. He asked religious people directly.

The Peters ETI Religious Crisis Survey

• 1,325 total respondents — 1,171 by email, 154 on paper
• 433 mainline Protestant · 245 evangelical Protestant · 205 non-religious · 120 Roman Catholic · 89 other · 70 Buddhist · 50 Orthodox Christian · 46 Jewish · 39 Mormon
• 14 Hindu and 14 Muslim — both below the study's 35-respondent threshold, and excluded from the numerical analysis
• 69% of self-identified non-religious respondents projected a crisis for religion following confirmed contact
• 34% — the average among the religiously affiliated

The caveat travels with the numbers or the numbers do not travel: this was a self-selected snowball sample, not a probability sample, and the respondent pool was international rather than American. DOCUMENTED — the figures are on the page of the primary report, which is self-published and undated on its face.

Peters' own summary, from page 13, is a model of restraint: "Our central finding is this: the hypothesis that the major religious traditions of our world will confront a crisis let alone a collapse is not confirmed by the Peters ETI Religious Crisis Survey. Furthermore, it appears that non-religious persons are much more likely to deem religion fragile and crisis prone that those who hold religious beliefs." The grammatical stumble is his. So is the epistemic modesty: not disproved, not refuted — not confirmed, with the burden shifted back onto the people making the prediction.

The number that matters is the gap. Ask religious believers whether alien contact would shatter their faith and they say no. Ask the non-religious and they say yes — about somebody else. The collapse of faith upon contact turns out to be, primarily, a belief held by people with no faith to lose.

Two things keep that from being a knockout, and both belong here rather than in a footnote. The percentages are not symmetrical: affiliated respondents were largely rating the world's other religions, while the non-religious were rating religion in general. And neither figure measures a reaction. Both measure a forecast — including the believer's, and a believer asked whether contact would shake his faith has every reason to say it would not. What the survey establishes is who predicts collapse, and for whom. CONTESTED Whether faith would actually hold is not a thing anyone has measured, because the event has not happened.

The sampling deserves the same treatment. The pool was assembled by asking Berkeley seminary students for leads, mailing pastors, and then watching the thing propagate — the report notes cheerfully that "a web accelerator factor then kicked in, as the survey was spread by independent blogs, such as the Wired blog." Paper surveys were gathered at seminary dining halls over four meals, using, in the report's own words, "chocolate and alien suckers as an incentive." It is not a poll of America. It is 1,325 self-selected people.

It does not stand alone. The 2002 Roper poll commissioned by the Sci Fi Channel — a cable network promoting UFO programming, so hold it loosely — reported that "very few Americans say that an official government announcement about the discovery of intelligent extraterrestrial life would cause them to question their religious beliefs. A full 88 percent say that such an announcement would have no impact on their religious beliefs." Resilience climbed steadily by age: 80 percent among 18-to-24-year-olds, 93 percent among those over 65. Roper did what Peters could not, a probability sample of 1,021 American adults. But the original scifi.com report is long gone, and the number survives only as Peters quotes it, on page 4 of his own report — which makes it a stronger instrument reaching us through a weaker channel.

And fourteen years before Peters, Victoria Alexander surveyed Protestant, Catholic and Jewish clergy about UFOs specifically and concluded: "In sharp contrast to the 'conventional wisdom' that religion would collapse, ministers surveyed do not feel their faith and the faith of their congregation would be threatened." Jeff Levin reanalyzed her raw data in 2012 and got the same answer. Alexander is not independent corroboration — Peters built on her instrument deliberately. Three studies, one of them a replication of another, all pointing the same way, none of them a measurement of the event itself.

The Institutions Were Never as Rattled as You Assume

The picture of a Vatican thrown into doctrinal panic by a landing is a fantasy of people who have not read the Vatican.

Mormonism settled the question of inhabited worlds in 1832, in canonized scripture — Doctrine and Covenants 76:24. That is a hundred and ninety-four years of getting used to it. In 2008 the Vatican Observatory's José Gabriel Funes gave an interview under the headline L'extraterrestre è mio fratello. In 2009 the Pontifical Academy of Sciences convened a twenty-eight-person study week on astrobiology. In 2014 the Vatican astronomer Guy Consolmagno published Would You Baptize an Extraterrestrial? with Paul Mueller, through a mainstream trade house, and won the Carl Sagan Medal the same year; he went on to direct the Observatory for a decade. The same year, the Vanderbilt astronomer David Weintraub published a denomination-by-denomination survey of how the world's faiths would actually metabolize the news.

The groundwork is older than the saucers by centuries. Tommaso Campanella argued that inhabitants of other planets would need no salvation, not being descended from Adam. Swedenborg thought it absurd that large planets should be "empty masses created merely to wander aimlessly around the sun." The word exotheology has been in print since about 1971, in Norman Lamm; Aryeh Kaplan marshaled medieval and Kabbalistic authorities in favor of extraterrestrial life and wondered whether such beings might lack free will and therefore moral responsibility. Joseph B. Soloveitchik is reported to have said, sensibly, that it would only reflect God's greatness.

Peters then turns the instrument around. Having tested whether SETI would destroy religion, he concluded that SETI was one — reading its contact optimism as a myth of salvation dressed in scientific language. He also says he heartily endorses SETI. Both things can be true.

The Saucer Religions Wrote the Liturgy

What the UFO religions supply is not weirdness. It is grammar — the specific grammar the disclosure conversation now speaks without knowing where it learned it.

Christopher Partridge's key structural observation is that pre-1947 contactees involve no UFOs at all. The saucer is a costume put on a figure who was already standing there: theosophical, esoteric, ascended-master. Adamski and Desmond Leslie's Flying Saucers Have Landed (1953) gives us a beautiful Venusian warning humanity off nuclear weapons — a message that, as Michael Barkun noticed, closely resembles Adamski's own occult teachings from the 1930s, and whose journeys Adamski had already described, in strikingly similar terms, in his own 1949 novel Pioneers of Space.

Elijah Muhammad's Mother Plane, set out in Message to the Blackman in America (1965), is the only eschatology in mainstream American religion in which the instrument of judgment is explicitly a spacecraft, read out of Ezekiel's wheel. Heaven's Gate did not invent a religion around a spaceship. Applewhite and Nettles read the spaceship out of Revelation 11, verses seven through twelve. The vehicle was new; the plot was two thousand years old.

Imminent Revelation, on a Schedule

Each revelation below is ALLEGED — a claim with a date attached, which is the only part of it anybody can check.

• 1832 — Doctrine and Covenants 76:24 canonizes inhabited worlds. No landing required.
• 18 July 1952 — the date George Van Tassel assigns to the first Ashtar message, warning humanity off the H-bomb.
• 1953 — Adamski and Leslie publish the Venusian's warning. The contactee template is set.
• 8 May 1954 — George King reports the command: "Prepare yourself! You are to become the voice of Interplanetary Parliament."
• 1959 — Van Tassel's Giant Rock convention in the Mojave peaks at a reported 10,000 attendees. Not a fringe of a fringe.
• late 1960s — Scientology releases OT III to members, withheld until after more than a decade of auditing and donations of tens of thousands of dollars. Disclosure as a paid tier.
• 13 December 1973 — Claude Vorilhon's encounter at the Puy de Lassolas. Elohim is re-read as "those who came from the sky." Scripture retained; referent swapped.
• 26 November 1977, 5:10 p.m. GMT — a hijacked transmitter puts "Vrillon, representative of the Ashtar Galactic Command" over an ITN news summary for about five minutes, urging Britain to destroy its weapons, closing "May you be blessed by the supreme love and truth of the cosmos." The Goofy Gophers follow. Nobody is ever caught. DOCUMENTED
• 2001 — Ruth Norman's rescheduled Unarius landing date arrives. The Space Brothers do not.

What Happens When the Date Passes

When Prophecy Fails (1956) is remembered as a study of a doomsday group. Festinger, Riecken and Schachter were watching a flying-saucer group. The saucer was in the sociology of failed prophecy from the beginning. Their finding is the counterintuitive one: when the date passes and nothing happens, believers do not quietly disperse. Under the right conditions they proselytize harder. Disconfirmation, properly handled, is fuel.

The Unarius case is the purest specimen, because it has a receipt. Ruth Norman put four thousand pounds on the landing with Ladbrokes. The bookmakers kept the money. She moved the date to 2001, and 2001 came.

Set that against the disclosure conversation as it actually behaves. Imminent revelation: perpetually eighteen months out. A hidden elect: those who have been briefed, those with clearances, those who know. Promised transformation: everything changes, all at once, the day it lands. And a date that always slides — 1952, 1977, 2001, the next hearing, the next tranche, the next witness under oath.

Disclosure discourse inherited the entire apparatus. What it did not inherit is any mechanism by which the prophecy could conclusively fail. There is no Ladbrokes slip. There is no morning after which the Space Brothers are officially not coming, because nothing was ever specific enough to be falsified — and because the one thing that would supposedly settle it, an official announcement, is precisely what the framework predicts will be withheld.

That is not a bug in the movement. That is the movement working. A millenarian structure that has already survived every failed date it ever set is not a system for producing revelation. It is a system for producing anticipation, indefinitely, at low cost, with the emotional benefits front-loaded and the bill never coming due.

For about five minutes on a Saturday evening in November 1977, the Ashtar Galactic Command really did interrupt the evening news to tell Britain to destroy its weapons. Nobody was ever caught, and nothing whatsoever changed. It aired at ten past five, between the Rhodesian Bush War and a cartoon about gophers.