UFOs and the Death of God

While Nietzsche intuited the death of God and Richard Elliott Friedman deals euphemistically with that death (The Hidden Face of God, HarperCollins, 1995), sensible persons know that God died shortly after His Ezekiel visitation [590 BC].



(The alleged appearances in the New Testament are allegorical and Jesus is a tangible metaphor.)

Thus, UFOs have come to replace God in the psyche of many ufologists.

Some in the UFO community replace God with UFOs for psychological reasons, others for academic reasons, and still others because they have a lacuna in their souls.

Stanton Friedman, for instance, needs UFOs as God because he knows that God abandoned his people many times over the millennia, and more horrendously during the Holocaust. So UFOs have become a surrogate for Mr. Friedman.



Richard Hall needs UFOs to be God because he knows that God was absent during the American Civil War and most certainly is dead. So Mr. Hall, who is closer to death than life, needs to fill a void that the absence of God creates for those near to the afterlife.



Jerome Clark, in his study of early Christianity, knows that God is a thought, not a reality, so he keeps UFOs on his cognitive burners as a kind of replacement for a theological concept that intrigues him but is lacking in many ways.



Bruce Maccabee is agnostic about UFOs one day and a believer on another day, just as variable as his belief in God is. UFOs come and go in his mind, just as God does. Mr. Maccabee knows, however, that God is dead, and UFOs are nearly so.



There are many deranged people in the UFO community, named at our UFO web-site, who need God, but in that absence, have created a belief system based upon the UFO phenomenon.

These people can’t come to grips with the death of God, so they’ve made UFOs into God, to assuage their “spiritual” debilitation.



Peripheral UFO aficionado Joseph Capp recognizes, almost unconsciously, that young people have no yen for a God, knowing that God is irrelevant, which is as good as dead in their minds, and some see UFOs as an interesting, real replacement.

Sci-Fi writer and über-geek Mac Tonnies runs intellectual circles around the concept of God, whom he knows is dead, and does the same with UFOs.



UFOs and God are amorphous concepts that Mr. Tonnies plays with, because life is plaything, and God and UFOs are toys for his fecund mind.

Abductees (so-called experiencers) are so distraught by the unconscious or pre-conscious recognition that God is, indeed, dead, they’ve taken to hallucinating about being taken to Him by His “messengers” who visit them at night or during daytime catnaps.



The motivation for their alternate reality is a need to replace the dead God with a still extant God, who resides in other-worldly spheres (UFOs and other realities) just as Elias and Ezekiel did, maybe even as Jesus/Christ did.

UFOs for the Greg Bishops, Nick Redferns, Paul Kimballs. Bruce Duensings, Linda Moulton Howes, and other intellectual types are a coolish replacement for he idea of God, whom they know is long dead, and ineffective as a player in the game of life.



UFOs have the attributes of God – the long ago chronicled attributes before He died: mysterious, uncommunicative, able to perform feats that mere mortals can’t, and ubiquitous.

So while God is dead for cognoscenti, UFOs have come to replace Him (or It), but as we contend, one shouldn’t get too attached to the UFOs as God concept, since UFOs are themselves dying even as this is being typed.

And some in the UFO community (Cullan Hudson for one) knows this, and take comfort in an existentiality that is really real.

The Roswell Fixation

The July 1947 “flying disc captured” episode in Roswell, New Mexico continues to absorb UFO mavens.



Kevin Randle, a Roswell investigator of note, has been fixated, for many years, on the so-called Roswell witnesses, especially Jesse Marcel who was the Intelligence Officer for the 509th Bomber Group at the Army/Air Force in Roswell.



Stanton Friedman is a Roswell groupie, and has been since the late 1970s. He believes that extraterrestrials crashed a flying saucer (maybe two flying saucers) in and around Roswell and Corunna, New Mexico.



He continues to flog the Roswell incident.

One interesting Roswell web-site can be found here:

The Roswell Files

And there are dozen, maybe hundreds more Roswell sites and blogs extant in the internet universe.

For UFO aficionados – the quasi-fanatic kind – Roswell is the Holy Grail of the belief in the alien (extraterrestrial) visitation hypothesis of “ufology” – ufos (flying saucers) contain explorers from outer space.

There is a mystery or two stemming from the 1947 incident in Roswell, but it can’t be deciphered by the fixation on contradictory witness testimony, Joseph Capp and other witness-defenders notwithstanding.

Kevin Randle is remiss by persisting in the illusion that the minutiae of Marcel’s testimonies over the years will provide a Roswell denouement.

But he has a batch of blog-followers who have assumed his obsession and debate the trivia of Marcel and a few others, ad infinitum, ad nauseum.

Roswell is interesting, we grant these people that. But it hasn’t been approached forensically by any ufologist, ever.

The overt details – the obvious “evidentiary” aspects – of Roswell have been mined and talked about for years now.







But those details haven’t been investigated with scientific or even journalistic rigor by anyone in the superficial discipline of ufology.

Dr. Randle – he likes to flaunt his Ph.D – should be an expert on Roswell but he has diminished that expertise by his obtuse fixation on the lies and/or truths of Jesse Marcel and others who’ve obtained Roswellian fame from the writings of Friedman and a few other Roswell quidnuncs.

Yes, something happened at Roswell in July 1947, and that something might be, could be clarified if persons like Nick Redfern, Paul Kimball, and our colleague Anthony Bragalia have their way.



But they have to sweep away the errant detritus that Randle and his ilk continue to strew in their path to the truth.