They have landed, and they have no intention to leave

"The Gods Have Landed: New Religions from Other Worlds" is the slightly frivolous title of a perfectly serious scholarly look at the religious dimensions of the UFO phenomenon. The collection contains articles by J. Gordon Melton, John A. Saliba, Robert W. Balch and others. The book deals with both UFO cults, individual contactees and the religious (or quasi-religious) aspects of alien abductions and UFO observations at large.

The general reader will probably consider the book to be a very mixed bag, but I think everyone can find some goodies in it. George Adamski, Unarius and their Space Cadillac, Heaven's Gate, Raëlians, exo-theology and an extended survey of the contactee subculture in New Zealand are some of the topics covered. There is also an extended biography of contactee-related books and pamphlets.

The contributors to this volume trace modern UFO-related religions all the way back to Emanuel Swedenborg, the Swedish 18th century seer who claimed to have visited other planets in the solar system and spoken to their inhabitants. A more obvious source of inspiration is Madame Blavatsky's Theosophy, whose ideas about ascended masters on Venus were taken up by Guy Ballard, the founder of the I AM Activity. Ballard claimed to have met aliens from Venus at Mount Shasta in California. His story was published in 1935. From this, it was just a short step to connect the ascended masters from other planets with the emerging UFO phenomenon, something which indeed took place during the 1950's with George Adamski as the most notorious "contactee". Apart from the Theosophical influence, the authors also see parallels with Spiritualism, since many people who claim contact with aliens act like trance mediums.

The authors make the interesting observation that the UFO subculture both "de-mythologize" and "re-mythologize". Erich von Däniken is a case in point. By claiming that the gods of ancient myth were really alien astronauts, he de-mythologizes traditional religion. Simultaneously, however, Däniken's ideas function as an ersatz religion for modern man, hence his deconstruction of ancient myths is simultaneously the erection of a new myth. Curiously, "The Gods Have Landed" doesn't mention Zecheriah Sitchin, who seems to have taken Däniken's ideas further in a more explicitly quasi-religious direction.

Ironically, many of the contributors take Carl Gustav Jung's book on flying saucers seriously. Yet, Jung could be seen as part of the phenomenon itself, rather than a dispassionate outside observer of it. It's not a coincidence that Jung has become an icon of the New Age! Sure, Jung's ideas about a collective unconscious are interesting, but it's hardly a "secular" theory - yet, it's treated as such by the (presumably) secular scholars who wrote the articles in this book. Perhaps they didn't have time to assimilate Richard Noll's "The Jung Cult", published just the year before their own book?

The most sensational piece in "The Gods Have Landed" is Balch's article on Heaven's Gate, the bizarre UFO cult which committed collective suicide just two years after "The Gods Have Landed" was published. Back in 1975-76, Balch and another budding scholar had infiltrated Heaven's Gate, then known as Human Individual Metamorphosis. At the time, the group was chaotic and easy to join (or leave). This rather unusual way of carrying out research enabled Balch to contact later defectors from the group, when it had turned cultic, inward and paranoid. Balch also encountered the cult itself in 1994, when they had suddenly re-emerged into the public limelight, even to the point of holding public meetings. My impression of Heaven's Gate is that the group was small, tightly knit and super-cultic. It seems to have been obsessed with "leaving the earthly vehicles" already at an early stage, making the mass suicide a logical development of earlier beliefs, rather than something decided on a whim. (Art Bell isn't responsible.)

Personally, I think the religious and spiritual dimensions of the flying saucer phenomenon are obvious. UFO lore contains parallels with angels, demons, sky-gods and the little people. "Serious" ufologists would rather wish that the contactees just go away. The grand dame of secular ufology, Jenny Randles, have even insinuated that Adamski might have been an CIA dupe or operative. However, I don't think the angelic-demonic-elfish character of the UFO phenomenon will go away any time soon.

The gods have indeed landed.