Earlier this week, we did the large radio show, Coast-to-Coast, to promote the new book, Future Events: A Prophecy of Coming Times. Normally, the show hovers upon esoteric, occult, and extraterrestrial themes. But they were open (and gracious enough) to spend a couple hours discussing Catholic prophecy and apparitions.
Being the show it is, a discussion of UFOs naturally came up, allowing us to express the viewpoint (and warning) that many such reported phenomena are deceptions of the demonic (we would never say all of them; it’s a big universe).
And it brought to mind how UFOs have gone “mainstream.”
In fact, the staid Atlantic Monthly — usually focused solely on political and academic topics — two weeks ago carried an article (excerpted from a new book called UFO) that was headlined:
The U.S. Government UFO Cover-Up Is Real—But It’s Not What You Think
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As it explains in the subhead: “Decades of declassified memos, internal reports, and study projects create the sense that the government doesn’t have satisfying answers for the most perplexing sightings.”
That’s true, and the reason UFOs are so elusive — a phenomenon that is tremendously widespread, but fleeting as quicksilver — is that for a growing cadre of observers, there is that spiritual nature to them.
And thus caution is urged.
In the Middle Ages (during a great pandemic back then), one bishop was called to the scene of a “UFO.” In some locales the bubonic plague was believed to descend like a ball of fire. “One such ball was fortunately spotted while hovering above Vienna and exorcised by a passing bishop,” wrote the historican Philip Ziegler. “It fell harmlessly to the ground and a stone effigy of the Madonna was raised to commemorate this unique victory…”
A wise bishop, this was. For as the Virgin Mary foresaw during her appariton at LaSalette, France, way back in 1846, and as we brought up on the radio program, “The demons of the air together will the Anti-Chrst will perform great wonders on earth and in the atmosphere, and men will become more and more perverted.”
We’re not sure about the Anti-Christ on the stage just yet, but who can deny the rest?
The New York Times has carried articles about UFOs; so have major news media such as Associated Press. And no longer is it with the tone of dismissal or parody; to the contrary.
That’s a big change.
Everyone feels something afoot. Spiritual and earthly forces are merging in variuous spots in various (and sometimes precarious) ways.
“There aren’t many secrets that John Brennan doesn’t know,” wrote Garrett Gaffe in that Atlantic piece. “He spent 25 years in the CIA, became the White House homeland-security adviser, and then returned to the CIA as its director. If a question interested him, he could’ve commanded legions of analysts, officers, surveillance networks, and tools to find the answer. Yet in a December 2020 interview with the economist Tyler Cowen, Brennan admitted, somewhat tortuously, that he was flummoxed by the wave of recent reporting about UFOs: ‘Some of the phenomena we’re going to be seeing continues to be unexplained and might, in fact, be some type of phenomenon that is the result of something that we don’t yet understand and that could involve some type of activity that some might say constitutes a different form of life.'”
Meanwhile, the Catholic news site Aleteia reports this week that a symposium on the topic held mid-November at Stanford University included two Catholic authors, Diana Walsh Pasulka, professor of religious studies at the University of North Carolina (her book is American Cosmic) and Dr. Paul Thigpen (his book, available in our store, is Extraterrestrial Intelligence and the Catholic Faith) “Consider: Our government may well possess physical evidence (as many investigators have suspected for years) of spacecraft (and their occupants?) visiting from another world,” Thigpen intoned. “I asked myself, shouldn’t we be talking about this matter?”
Two years ago, Father James Kurzynsk of the Vatican Observatory said, “However, let’s be careful not to jump to false conclusions and drink the Kool-Aid of cultural hysteria and sensationalism. Let’s figure out what they are so the unknown can become known.”
Of course. But in the task, let’s also not forget that Satan is the great deceiver.
[resources: Future Events: A Proiphecy of Coming Times and Extraterrestrial Intelligence and the Catholic Faith]
[Michael Brown’s appearance on Coast-To-Coast]