Are UFOs the Key? The new Testament, the gnostic scriptures and the second coming.

While their presence may be more subtle than in other scriptures and religious writings, flying saucers do make numerous appearances in the New Testament and are an integral part of the story of Jesus Christ.

In the recent release from Global Communications, “Flying Saucers in the Holy Bible,” the Reverend Virginia Brasington addresses numerous instances where the New Testament makes overt references to miracles and signs that are consistent with what we in the present understand to be UFO-related phenomena. Throughout her section, which opens the book, Brasington takes as a given that flying saucers are “God’s transportation,” and this article will take that for granted as well. Among the many passages from the New Testament she uses to make her case is this one:

“When Jesus ascended into heaven,” Brasington writes, “the Bible tells us in Acts 1:9 that ‘He was taken up; and a cloud received him out of their sight.’ A cloud received Him. It was there already. It could have been a dull grey vehicle, or it could have been a vapor around the vehicle. At any rate, the disciples that had gathered, over 500 of them, were told that he would come back in exactly the same way he left.”

Verses that speak of him returning “exactly the same way he left” are also included.

Mark 14:62 says, “And Jesus said, ‘I am; and ye shall see the Son of Man sitting on the right hand of power, and coming in the clouds of heaven.’” Luke 21:27, “And then shall they see the Son of Man coming in a cloud with power and great glory.” Matthew 24:30, “And they shall see the Son of Man sitting on the right hand of power, and coming in the clouds of heaven.” Revelation 1:7, “Behold, he cometh with clouds; and every eye shall see him, and they also which pierced him.”

Brasington intends for us to read “clouds of heaven” as “flying saucers,” which reinforces the reality of the Second Coming. If we know flying saucers are real, does it take any great leap of faith to see the reality of the Second Coming?

“The first letter of Paul to the Thessalonians,” Brasington continues, “in the 4th chapter, beginning with the 13th verse, tells about Jesus coming again for the Church. It seems that when He comes, He will be accompanied by a great host from heaven. Read the thrilling words, beginning with verse 16: ‘For the Lord himself shall descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel, and trump of God; and the dead in Christ shall rise first; then we which are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air; and so shall we ever be with the Lord.”

This passage is one of the very few in the New Testament that speak of the Rapture, the miraculous escape of the righteous chosen ones from the chains of an evil Earth staggering under the oppression of Satan. This has in recent decades become a very popular interpretation of this particular scripture and has generated a great deal of speculation and anticipation, as well as the bestselling “Left Behind” series of books that offered a fictional account of the Earth in the post-Rapture era. Belief in the Rapture is a cornerstone of some people’s faith, and there have been many who have tried to pinpoint the exact time it will come, in spite of Christ’s warning that, “no man knows the day or the hour, not even the angels in heaven.”

But beyond the more apocalyptic prophecies, even the Christmas story has a flying saucer element, according to Brasington.

“In the story of the wise men of the East,” she writes, “visiting the Baby Jesus and following the star until it came and ‘stood over the place where the young child was,’ this ‘star’ has been explained in many different ways – and as far as I am concerned each of them is laughable. The favorite explanation declares the star was the conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn that occurred in 6 B.C. If so, the explanation certainly breaks down if one reads Matthew 2:9, where it says that the star came and ‘stood over the place where the young child was.’ In the first place, a conjunction of planets couldn’t possibly have done this. A conjunction simply means that in their orbiting, at certain times, two or more planets are so positioned that they are seen as one, thus making a very bright appearance.

“In the second place, how could the wise men possibly have followed a star that was presumably in the heavens with the Earth orbiting and, of course, changing the position of the star in relationship to the Earth? Anyway, it would have been so far away it could not have possibly led the wise men even to a large city, much less to the small town of Bethlehem, and much, much less the particular stable, or cave, where Jesus was.

“No, not even the wisest of the wise could have followed such a guiding star. It was bound to have been some special craft or manifestation of God that appeared to the wise men and then guided them to the very spot where Jesus could be found. Evidently this was the first time the ‘star’ had hovered over a particular dwelling since the wise men had been following it, because we read in Matthew 2:9-11 that, ‘When they heard the king (Herod), they departed; and, lo, the star, which they saw in the east, went before them, till it came and stood over where the young child was. When they saw the star, they rejoiced with exceeding great joy. And when they were come into the house, they saw the young child with Mary his mother, and fell down, and worshipped him; and when they had opened their treasures, they presented him with gifts: gold, frankincense and myrrh.’

“Truly, this was an ‘unidentified flying object,’” the Reverend Brasington concludes. “It has never been identified unless my ideas are correct! Why did they call it a ‘star’? What else would they have called a bright, glowing object that stayed above them in the atmosphere?”

Brasington was licensed as a minister in the State of North Carolina by the Church of the Nazarene. Her book “Flying Saucers in the Bible” was originally published in the 1960s by Gray Barker’s Saucerian Press, and later reprinted by Timothy Green Beckley’s Global Communications, which is the version portions of this article are based on. One would think it unlikely that a North Carolina minister would end up writing extensively on UFOs in the Bible, but Brasington’s back story was a little different than most of her peers in the clergy.

Regular contributor Sean Casteel has long approached the Bible as an historical UFO record.

“About 1918, in the late summer,” she explains, “my whole family and I were out in the yard after an early supper. We were spending the summer down in the South Mountains, where my father was born and where he had lived as a boy. We did not even have electric lights, and it was necessary to finish our evening chores early. So, we were just sitting around talking when out from behind the mountain back of the house flashed a huge, red, fiery-appearing craft that went across the sky and out of sight behind the horizon. It lighted up the atmosphere in a beautiful pink glow, and was silent as it sped across the sky. When it first appeared, my mother speculated that it was a meteor, but my father thought not because, being so low, had it been a meteor it would have fallen within our eyesight. But this sped straight across the sky and out of sight.

“I was eight or nine years old at the time and remember it vividly. At that time, we didn’t know much about airplanes, much less circular, glowing vehicles.”

Brasington goes on to recount other UFO sightings she had had as an adult, including one she shared with another pastor that involved two planes being unable to approach two rainbow-colored, rectangular ships. The local media’s subsequent coverage of the sighting could offer no explanation. Her point, she says, is that, as a Bible-believing Christian, the notion of space travel and UFOs is nothing new to her. Seeing them with her own eyes has made her sufficiently familiar with the phenomenon.

Writing many years before stories of abduction by aliens became commonplace, Brasington quoted another apt scripture.

“Paul says in Second Corinthians 12:4 that he ‘was caught up into paradise, and heard unspeakable words, which it is not lawful or expedient for man to utter.’ Whether it was beyond our comprehension, or whether he just didn’t have words to describe it, or whether God told him not to tell us lest we become so homesick for our heavenly home we wouldn’t be any earthly good, I don’t know. Anyway, he didn’t tell what he saw and heard, but he DID say he went there.”

Many an abductee has found himself at a loss for words after returning from the experience. Whether because of alien-induced forgetfulness or the traumatic effects of shock and awe the abductee is often left with, translating into language what has happened is often impossible, and the accounts given by abductees under regressive hypnosis are often frustratingly incomplete, rife with a groping for words and gaps in the narrative that leave many important questions unanswered. As in the experience of the normally quite articulate Saint Paul, expressing the inexpressible just doesn’t come easy.

While the canonical New Testament offers a wealth of UFO references, more than can be covered in this article, attention should also be paid to books written around that same time that never made the final cut, so to speak. In a book of mine called “The Excluded Books of the Bible,” I quote from the great scholar of myth, Joseph Campbell.

In part three of Campbell’s four-volume opus, “The Masks of God,” entitled “Occidental Mythology,” Campbell relates a story of Jesus from the Gnostic book “The Acts of John.”

“The Messiah has just come from his desert fast of forty days,” Campbell writes, setting the scene, “and his victory there over Satan. John and James are in their boat, fishing. Christ appears on the shore. And John is supposed to be telling, now, of the occasion.”

The scripture commences.

“For when he had chosen Peter and Andrew, who were brothers, he came to me and James my brother, saying, ‘I have need of you. Come unto me.’ And my brother, hearing that, said to me, ‘John, what does that child want who is on the shore there and called to us?’ And I said, ‘What child?’ And he said again, ‘The one beckoning to us.’ And I answered, ‘Because of the long watch we have kept at sea, you are not seeing right, my brother James. But do you not see the man who is standing there, comely, fair, and of cheerful countenance?’ But he answered, ‘Him, brother, I do not see. But let us go and see what he wants.’

“And so, when we had brought our boat to land, we saw him also, helping us to settle it; and when we had left, thinking to follow him, he appeared to me to be rather bald, but with a beard thick and flowing, but to James he seemed a youth whose beard had newly come. We were therefore, both of us, perplexed as to what we had seen should mean. And as we followed him, continuing, we both were, little by little, even more perplexed as we considered the matter. For in my case, there appeared this still more wonderful thing: I would try to watch him secretly, and I never at any time saw his eyes blinking, but only open. And often he would appear to me to be a little man, uncomely, but then again as one reaching up to heaven.”

This may seem a little like overreaching, even blasphemy, but I interpret parts of this physical description of Christ as being similar to a gray alien. For example, James sees that a “child” is beckoning to them from the shore, which correlates to the diminutive height of the gray aliens, while John sees a grown man standing there. At one point, John sees Christ as appearing to be “bald,” another characteristic of the grays. He also says Christ looked like a “little man, uncomely,” another thing in common with the grays. “Uncomely,” by the way, means “unattractive” or even “ugly.” John reports that Christ never seems to blink his eyes, which may be similar to a screen memory of the unblinking black eyes of a gray alien.

But there is more from the Acts of John.

“Another glory, also, would I tell to you, my brethren: namely, that sometimes when I would take hold of him, I would meet with a material and solid body, but again, at other times, when I touched him, the substance was immaterial and as if it existed not at all.”

This comparison should be a little more obvious. The gray aliens also seem to have the ability to be either solid or immaterial, to change from the physical to the ethereal at will. When I interviewed abductee and bestselling author Whitley Strieber in 1989, he told me that the grays sometimes seem so ephemeral that one can’t even believe they are alive, that something so delicate can survive in our physical dimension. Was the Apostle John, the author of this obscure Gnostic book, really touching a gray alien that he had come to know as Christ?

John tells us that he writes of these mysteries in order to strengthen our belief in Christ.

“And these things I tell you, my brethren, for the encouragement of your faith in him; for we must, at present, keep silence concerning his mighty and wonderful works, in as much as they are unspeakable, and, it may be, cannot at all be uttered or be heard.”

It is easy to understand why this view of Christ was considered too bizarre to preach publicly. According to Campbell, this was an expression of the ancient view that Christ’s body was “a mere appearance, the reality being celestial or divine, and its appearance, furthermore, a function of the mentality of the seer, not of the reality of the seen; a mere mask that might change but not be removed.”

For another book of mine, “Signs and Symbols of the Second Coming,” I interviewed the Reverend Barry Downing, whose 1968 book “The Bible and Flying Saucers” is considered a classic with close to half a million copies in print.

In our discussion of what the Second Coming will actually be like, Downing said, “I think there pretty much has to be two forms of the Second Coming. One form is, what happens when we die? The body ends. What happens to the person? I think that some Near-Death-Experiences give us a clue that there’s a part of us, another spiritual dimension to us that seems to coexist with our body and is not destroyed by death and goes on to some other form of life.

“One of the possibilities,” he continued, “is that one of the tasks of UFOs, or the angels, is to collect the souls of people when they die and take them off to another world where they begin the next life that they have. This is not the Second Coming as we usually think of it. But Jesus says in John 14, ‘I go to prepare a place for you. And if I go and prepare a place, I will come again and take you to be where I am.’ For this to be true, I think it has to be true when someone dies. That’s probably how it works.

“Likewise, Jesus says to one of the thieves on the cross, ‘Today you will be with me in paradise.’ So I assume there’s a kind of ‘coming for us,’ when we die, and it’s kind of like a return of Christ to take us, or at least the return of the angels to take us. But it’s not the end of history. Obviously, my death or your death is not the end of history.”

Downing began to describe the kind of Second Coming that IS the end of history.

“From my point of view,” he explained, “God is reluctant to bring down the curtain of history, because the scientific evidence suggests that the universe is about 15 billion years old. Our sun is five billion years old. It took millions of years to get the Earth and human civilization to the point it is now. And life on Earth as we see it now has been planned by God, and therefore is serving Gods’ purpose. To bring it to an end, only to have to start over again, either on another planet or on Earth, is just, to put it bluntly, a big hassle. So if I were God, having created Earth as it now is, and the human condition as it now is, I wouldn’t be anxious to bring it to an end.”

Downing also explained why the reality of UFOs strengthens his faith.

“I think one of the roles of UFOs would be,” he said, “to move us to the point where the Biblical faith is more scientifically plausible. You’ve got a huge split in American culture right now between fundamentalists who believe the Bible just because God inspired the Bible, and therefore it must be true. Then you have university types who don’t see the Bible as different from any other book and pretty much don’t believe that God is any part of the universe. They believe the universe was in some sense ‘self-created’ by ways we don’t yet understand therefore there’s no divine force behind anything that we see.

“So the question is,” Downing went on, “how do you get faith back in play? Not based on the Bible alone, but based on modern evidence that says, ‘Hey, the angels may still be here.’ To me, that’s where the UFOs come into the scene. Fundamentalist Christians, of course, tend to see UFOs as demonic. The assumption of fundamentalists is that if UFOs were really the angels of God, they’d show themselves openly. Yet, obviously, the angels of God do not show themselves openly to us. Otherwise, we’d all see them. There’s some part of God that holds God’s self back, that doesn’t reveal God directly to us.”

Downing believes that God shows himself enough that we see belief is possible, but at the same time hides enough so that belief is not “required.”

“It’s a choice you can make,” he said. “I think that God is more likely to use the UFO force to get faith back in business in what you’d call the intellectual side of our culture now, which is very atheistic. In any case, if it should be true that UFOs carry the angels of God as we understand them Biblically, then that would certainly seem to be the way in which the Second Coming would happen. If Jesus was taken up into the sky at his Ascension in a UFO, which is what seems to be said in the Book of Acts, Chapter One, then the other thing that’s said in that same chapter is this: ‘This Jesus, who was taken up from you into heaven, will come in the same way as you saw him go into heaven.’”

In other words, as he departed in a UFO, so will Jesus come back in a UFO. One begins to see the pattern of how UFOs make miracles plausible, as Downing was explaining earlier.

The books on which this article was based, “Flying Saucers in the Holy Bible,” “The Excluded Books of the Bible,” and “Signs and Symbols of the Second Coming,” all contain a great deal of material not covered in this article. More discussions from learned UFO and religious experts, more analysis of scriptures in the light of the flying saucer presence, and more fascinating UFO and Biblical history are included in all three books. Although the ultimate truth has not yet been revealed, a little exploration of the UFO/Bible connection may be the beginning of a new kind of wisdom for believers of all kinds.

Sean Casteel - UFO Digest