The UFO religion nexus

 

December 2025 (just pre-Christmas) saw the release of the first trailer for director Steven Spielberg’s UFO themed film “Disclosure Party”. It seemed heavily infused with religious and consciousness aspects, echoing in intriguing ways the trajectories of his classic “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” (1977-78), “ET” (1982) and even more so with the “Taken” (2003) series which was tagged with the descriptor “3 families, 4 generations, 50 years of alien encounters”.  “Disclosure Party” seems to be Spielberg re-embracing an emotional return to “aliens” and the pivotal question of what if we were all, directly and simultaneously, faced with confronting evidence that “we are not alone”, even embracing the haunting child perspective of “Taken” alien abduction “screen memories” of “animals” – elks, racoons (? – Kary Mullis’ talking racoon revisited?) and the confronting impression of Emily Brunt’s TV weather girl seemingly “possessed” by “aliens” to perhaps convey widespread “disclosure”. Maybe this is not the intended trajectory, but we have to wait until 12 June 2026 for the film release.  Lines like “if you found out we weren’t alone would that frighten you?” and “Why would he make such a vast universe … yet save it only for us,” the latter delivered by a nun, suggest religious pivots.

 

Back in February 2025, I participated in a discussion about UFOs and religion on the Australian ABC radio program “God Forbid” hosted by James Carleton.

“Close Encounters of the religious kind: how God and UFOs have both begun religious movements”                                                                                                                             

From the shows site:

https://www.abc.net.au/listen/programs/godforbid/god-forbid/105871668

(The program is no longer present on the site, but I archived a copy to assist any further discussion, research and for educational purposes)
“Looking towards the heavens for meaning doesn’t always mean looking to God. 

UFOs (and the modern moniker UAPs) have long been the food for thought of sceptics, theologians, and astrobiologists alike.  

“But what does belief in these mysterious phenomena have in common with religion? 

And what implications does life outside Earth have for the existence of God?” 

 

GUESTS:

• Bill Chalker, UFO researcher. Contributing editor, International UFO Reporter. Author of Hair of the Alien and The Oz Files: The Australian UFO Story. 
• Reverend Dr Tim Jenkins, Reader in Anthropology and Religion, Divinity Faculty, University of Cambridge. Author of Images of Elsewhere 
• Dr. Diana Walsh Pasulka, Professor, Religious Studies, University of North Carolina Wilmington, specialising in UFO and UAP religions 

                                                        

While I have done a lot of research in this area I have tended to avoid getting deeply involved in religious aspects, particularly because there is so much historical baggage associated with case studies often associated with toxic and tragic events.  Additionally, I have been centrally driven by potential scientific and historical aspects of the UFO/UAP subjects, particularly the search for physical evidence.

 

Obviously Heaven’s gate comes to mind, but even Falun Gong, the Aetherius Society, Scientology, the Raelians and other religious movements have had their problematic episodes, sometimes associated with UFO connections of the wayward kind. I was even “cursed” once by an Aetherius spokesman, decades ago. That didn’t pan out to anything. Also, oddly enough, investigation into the alleged alien abduction from Gundiah Queensland back in October 2001, highlighted Scientology connections, but it appeared to be a hoax. See my book “Hair of the Alien” (2005) for details, rather than just the preliminary report I wrote with Diane Harrison, based on our field investigation.

 

Many worthwhile tomes have appeared in this contested space. Tim Jenkins and Diana Walsh Pasulka have both published interesting works in this area.

 

Tim Jenkins has had published a 6 volume series of extended essays - “Images of Elsewhere” – which he kindly sent to me. I recommend them for their scholarship and perspectives. Across these volumes Tim explores the following:

Volume 1: “Flying Saucers – An Introduction”

“Flying saucers emerged as objects of concern to an intelligence unit operating within the US Air Force in the early Cold War. This book tracks the progressive identification and conceptualization of the UFO (Unidentified Flying Object) through contemporary documents and traces the fate of the “interplanetary hypothesis”. This small-scale history relates to extraordinary developments in the period in both weapons and communications technologies, as powered rocket flight beyond the atmosphere became a possibility and home radar had to be expanded to detect and meet the threat of enemy missiles. In this context, sightings provoked increasing division among investigators as well as growing public interest in flying saucers, and official policy shifted focus from research to management of reactions to these objects. All the features of early UFO sightings have continued into the present with controversies over UAPs (Unidentified Aerial Phenomena).”

Volume 2: “Religion and Science Fiction”

“Flying saucers display characteristic features, transmitted by an important strand of early science fiction, which express religious concerns entangled with new technologies and scientific discoveries. The extraordinary universe discovered by late nineteenth-century advances in the sciences, with its expansion in both space and time, was populated in spiritualist and other thought by intelligent beings attentive to and bound up with the progress of humankind. This book traces the appearance of these interplanetary guardians, active at every level from the atom to the Cosmos, and uses a pulp science fiction story from 1945 to describe how this theosophical worldview was expanded to explain important aspects of contemporary American wartime society, in this fashion preparing the landscape for the coming of the flying saucers.”

Volume 3: “Martian Linguistics”

“Ideas of «communication» and «information» are key to the project of seeking life on other planets. US Air Force encounters with flying saucers after 1945 and the search for signs of extra-terrestrial intelligence (SETI), pursued since 1960, both point to the necessity of composing and understanding interplanetary languages to allow meaningful exchange if contact were ever established. These themes are also explored in science fiction stories across the period to the present, responding to the changing understanding of the possibility of communication. This book traces the major questions that structure the search, together with the episodes raising (and dashing) hope of contact, the languages proposed as means of exchange, and some of the novels that explore this history. Taken together, these elements pose the question: can we ever cross the boundary between our and other minds?”

Volume 4: “UFO Reports”

“UFOs (Unidentified Flying Objects) were originally the subject of military intelligence interest but quickly became transferred to the civilian sphere in the late 1940s. All the later possibilities discovered by investigations were hinted at in the military materials but expanded in new contexts. This book traces the earliest discussions of UFO reports from the civilian perspective through two case studies. The first concerns the detailed claim by a journalist that flying saucers are real, met by denial at each point by an expert with scientific credentials; the second gives the history of the first “contactee”, showing the development of the idea of the flying saucer in various regards, reporting close sightings and even repeated meetings with interplanetary visitors. Taken together, this trio of possibilities – claiming the literal truth, or identifying error, or imagining new forms of life – created the frame for later engagements with the problem.”

Volume 5: “Alien Sightings”

“For the last seventy years, members of the public have reported seeing piloted craft, thought to come from other planets, in the sky or on land. Their reasons for making such reports often remain obscure and hard to separate from the accounts of investigators of various kinds drawn to these events. More, these witnesses’ reports have varied over that time, moving from distant sightings at the beginning to include Close Encounters and then abductions, and the focus of the report likewise altered, from description of physical objects to a concern with psychological reactions and, later, with the recovery of hidden memories. This book reviews a series of well-known reports by contemporary journalists of these sightings, showing the order and patterns that underlie both the events themselves and their reception.”

Volume 6: “Images of Elsewhere”

“In the modern period, with understandings shaped by new technologies, we are bound to find something like flying saucers, with a range of properties that are both real and imaginary, which can act as relays between human groups, places and times, providing new resources and allowing innovation to happen. This book reviews the different scientific models that have been employed in making sense of sightings, showing the broader schemes in which they have been put to work, and indicating the different possibilities these schemes contain, running from realistic claims about sightings of objects to claims of encounters with interplanetary creatures which are both psychologically and technically far in advance of our times. It offers a comprehensive account of the features, puzzles, anomalies and paradoxes of flying saucer reports.”

 

Diana Walsh Pasulka (D.W. Pasulka as she is identified in her books) had published “American Cosmic – UFOs, Religion, Technology” (2019), “Encounters – Experiences with nonhuman intelligences – Explorations with UFOs, dreams, angels, AI, and other dimensions” (2023), and scheduled for late July 2026 her follow up book “The Others – UFOs, AI, and the secret forces guiding human Destiny,” for which we have the following description on Amazon:

 

“In the early 20th century, a censured Catholic visionary predicted that humanity would soon encounter a new form of intelligence―one that would appear alien, but was something far stranger. By the mid-20th century, other Catholic mystics and science fiction visionaries like Arthur C. Clarke echoed similar prophecies, naming the 21st century as the critical threshold.

“In The Others, acclaimed author and religious studies scholar D.W. Pasulka uncovers a hidden history of alleged contact between human and non-human intelligences―some framed as angels, others as UFOs/UAP―interwoven with the rise of artificial intelligence and the dream of immortality. Pasulka examines the science of life extension laboratories to the beliefs of UAP experiencers. She unveils a hidden architecture of belief and influence―one in which human consciousness is being reimagined and extended.

“Drawing on first-person interviews, suppressed histories, and access to insiders in science and tech, The Others explores a startling new terrain: where the sacred meets the synthetic, and where the next phase of human evolution may already be underway.”

 

The censured Catholic visionary Pasulka refers to is Teilhard De Chardin and his idea of a “cosmic vision of evolution”, suggests consciousness is the “axis of creation, along with “the Omega Point”, the “Noosphere, leading to the “ultra-human.”

 

In my contribution to the “God Forbid” discussion I was trying to take the host, James Carleton, beyond his focus on everything being merely anecdotal, and there was no compelling evidence for UFOs or UAP.

 

I brought to the discussion the example of Harry Turner, an Australian Defence scientist, who prepared a classified report to DAFI – Directorate of Air Force Intelligence – that concluded that some of their reports may involve “extraterrestrial” sources.  He also was the chief Health Physics officer at the British atomic bomb tests at Maralinga in South Australia, where he looked into UFO reports on the range, and in one case in 1954, radar confirmed a UFO shadowing a Canberra bomber, with the object leaving at some 5,000 kilometres per hour - that was something way beyond the anecdotal. I mentioned the UFO encounter on the Woomera Range just prior to a Black Knight launch, witnessed by range officers and scientists. See my article “Tommy Leader”: Tom Dalton-Morgan and the 3% UFO solution” in UFO Truth and on my blog:

http://theozfiles.blogspot.com/2024/06/tommy-leader-tom-dalton-morgan-and-3.html

 

I drew into the discussion, by way of events that go beyond the mere anecdotal, the experiences of 2 Anglican priests - Reverend William Gill in 1959 in then Australian territory, Papua-New Guinea, and Reverend Lionel Browning at Cressy Tasmania in 1960.  I knew Bill Gill and spoke with him on a number of occasions.  I stood at the Cressy rectory window where Reverend Browning had his sighting. In DAFI UFO files there was a report from a USAF pilot having a sighting at Cressy around the same time. Two men of religion who were not alone in their sightings.  While higher ups dismissed Browning’s sighting in an atmospheric vein, their investigator Commander Waller, was so impressed with the sighting, that he developed a UFO patent based on it.

 

In the early days of Australian ufology, an article on flying saucers and the activities of Edgar Jarrold’s pioneer UFO group the Australian Flying Saucer Bureau, had brought together our two Australian UFO pioneers – Edgar Jarrold and Andrew Tomas.  Jarrold was certain he was in on the biggest mystery of all time – the flying saucer mystery - and that he was fast tracking through its convoluted pathways to the ultimate answer.  Andrew Tomas, an accountant in his ordinary life, also felt he had the answers, or at least a deep insight into them.  His were rooted in the mysteries of the Orient and the cosmic super races that had the future of mankind in their hands.  Mankind was lost and it needed to be guided back into a golden space age mediated by cosmic law. 

 

Tomas decided to seek out Jarrold, with a view to joining the group, and better grounding himself in the world of flyting saucers then holding sway in the Western mind – the Occidental world. On Sunday January 10, 1954, the two met and discussed for hours the question of life on other planets. Tomas showed Jarrold a book he had written under his Russian name A. Boncza-Tomaszewski and published in Shanghai China way back in 1935, entitled “The Planetary Doctrine.”  He drew Jarrold’s attention to an intriguing passage about “strange shiny objects” in the sky, which facilitated “communication … from planet to planet.”  Clearly Tomas had been thinking about the question of beings from other worlds and their dominion over us long before the modern flying saucer/UFO era began with American pilot Kenneth Arnold’s sighting in 1947, and certainly before Edgar Jarrold started his interest.

 

The passage from Tomas’ 1935 book revealed the following prescient statement:

“Travellers and explorers often noticed in the heights of the Himalayas strange shiny objects or creatures soaring high above the mountain crests, which are an eternal puzzle to Europeans.  Whether these mysterious objects are vehicles belonging to supermen we dare not assert, although such an explanation is quite plausible.  Cannot the reader believe that by such means utilising unknown energies, communication is maintained from planet to planet?”

 

Andrew Tomas had come to Australia in 1948 by a path that had taken him via sojourns in Harbin and Shanghai in China. Originally from Russia, he came down under, as part of the stream of people fleeing the turmoil in China, a place he had spent considerable time in particularly exploring the mysteries of the orient.  In 1935 he met his spiritual mentor, a fellow Russian, the mystic artist and explorer Nicholas Roerich, in Shanghai. 

 

Roerich was no ordinary explorer.  Eight years earlier he was leading an expedition on a mission to find the legendary Shambhala and to bring about a re-envisioned solution to the Great Game – “the coming Shambhala war.” In Shanghai in 1935 Roerich was lecturing and it was his fascinating description of a strange experience in August 1927 in northeast Tibet that captured Tomas’ attention and anticipated an enduring obsession to come.  Andrew Tomas would return to this theme and the 1927 incident in some of the best selling books he would later write, particularly “Shambhala: Oasis of Light 

 

Roerich’s travel diary “Altai-Himalaya”, the chronicle of his 1924-1929 Asian expedition, describes what happened:

“On August 5^th – something remarkable! We were in our camp in the Kukunor district not far from the Humboldt Chain.  In the morning about half-past nine some of our caravaneers noticed a remarkably big black eagle flying above us.  Seven of us began to watch this unusual bird.  At this same moment another of our caravaneers remarked, “There is something far above the bird.” And he shouted in his astonishment.  We all saw, in a direction from north to south, something big and shiny reflecting the sun, like a huge oval moving at great speed.  Crossing our camp this thing changed in its direction from south to southwest.  And we saw how it disappeared in the intense blue sky. We even had time to take our field glasses and saw quite distinctly an oval form with a shiny surface, one side of which was brilliant from the sun.”

 

Roerich had no immediate explanation for what he and his fellow travellers had seen, but given his mystic sensibilities he would have ultimately seen it as a sign of Shambhala. His wife Helena who was also there wrote in her diary it must have been a craft with people from somewhere else and even suggested the existence of life on other planets.  Swedish Explorer Sven Hedin's expedition was in Inner Mongolia at the same time and was regularly launching weather balloons, but the distance between his party and Roerich’s expedition in Kukunor district in north east Tibet as well as the rapid movement of the object seems to preclude this remote possibility.

 

When Andrew Tomas met Roerich in Shanghai in 1935 he suggested the aerial object was an “aircraft or spacecraft from Shambhala”.  Shambhala was the hidden civilisation than Roerich, Tomas and many others spent much of their lives seeking – a place simplistically captured in the classic book “Lost Horizon” (1933) and the 1937 movie of the same name, which immortalised the myth of the hidden paradise of Shangri-La.

 

It was a very strange wrinkle in the great sweeping canvas of the Great Game – the race for empire in Asia.

 

In Sydney Australia in 1954 Jarrold appointed Andrew Tomas to the position of AFSB’s “official Sydney observer”, whose duty was to supply “all information offered in New South Wales about flying saucers”.  In a 1955 interview for People magazine, he described his role as addressing the “philosophical and theoretical side of saucers.”  In the same interviewed Tomas described his own sighting.

 

“My first sighting was at National Park, (Sydney) on 24^th March (1954).  I had no witnesses and didn’t have my camera with me … The object I saw was not less than 3000 ft and no more than 12,000 ft up.  The object was hovering about in the sky so I put up my hand and waved, and for a moment it was stationary – observing me I am quite certain – then a plane appeared and the object zoomed off, leaving a white vapour trail.”

 

Andrew Tomas had made a request under the "Aliens Act 1947" for a name change from his Russian one in 1951 which was originally denied, but by 1954 he was using the name Andrew Tomas. It is ironic or something else to have this "Application by an alien for written consent to change surname", when one considers the following comment by Andrew at the end of an article he wrote for the last issue of Jarrold's Australian Flying Saucer Magazine, "Are you ready for a planetary Crash?", pg. 7 February 1955: "In the circles of the duly initiated Brethren of Space, fantastic stories are told of saucers, messages from space and cosmic decrees.  Perhaps I could tell you a science fiction story from my life how a saucer zoomed over the National Park in Sydney to say "Hello" to an incarnated spaceman.  But who would believe it? In these days of suspicion and witchhunts it is better to keep one's mouth shut.  Frankly, I am not too enthusiastic about a psychiatric test either.  Anyway, my cosmic friends tell me not to worry about what other people say, but just place this information before the public.  "It won't be long now," they say.  Jokes aside, let us think more of the stars.  Let us all become the children of Heaven.  Let us dream of an Utopia where there is no hatred and no wars.  But before we see that Utopia a red sign will flash in the skies, "Tighten your belts." As Ripley says, "believe it or not," but we are heading for a planetary crash."   Now was Andrew Tomas being tongue-in-cheek here, or trying to say something else.  He did have a UFO sighting at the National Park on March 24 1954.  An uninformed outsider might have read "a red sign" reference in an entirely different light.  Here I’m suggesting a paranoid member or informant of the intelligence community searching for evidence for “communist” infiltration.  But Tomas’ red thread was never that prosaic.

 

Tomas believed “that a War of Two Worlds is going on and that terrestrial and cosmic forces are arrayed for battle.”  “Saucers have been known in the East for thousands of years.   Their present appearance in mass has been foretold long, long ago.  They are only an effect, not the cause, and the cause is the great struggle between the Forces of Good, of Culture, of Enlightenment - and of Evil, of Hate, and Darkness”, wrote Tomas in a letter to Barker in 1956.   Tomas took such matters seriously enough that he made plans to respond to them.  In a letter to Frederick Phillips, a UFOIC co-worker, in 1957 Tomas revealed that he was planning to start up a business in the Queensland countryside with the President of the Queensland UFO group, Charles Middleborough.

 

“Besides in the bush there will be more scope for the realisation of Project Contact Space.  (Middleborough) had a UFO hovering right over his house already.  I wish you would materialise that plan about space contact you talked to me about.  This should have priority because (excuse me for talking like our mutual friend G.D.) I am absolutely certain of the approach of the cataclysm.  Confidentially, the friend in Queensland and myself have been working on a ‘saviour community’ for the last 2 years.  Not to save ourselves but some fruits of our culture.   There are at least 3 or 4 in America and a number in India and other countries.  Another one coming up in Sth. America.  All prefer to keep quiet about it.  Some have stocked up food for a year or more”, he wrote to Phillips.

 

By March, 1958, Andrew Tomas, as secretary and organiser of the International Organising Committee of the Planetary Pact, circulated a draft of the Pact to "top news agencies of the world." a draft for a PLANETARY PACT - “an international treaty for a planetary pool of natural resources, means of production, manpower and scientific genius.”  He was advocating “a planetary government for the Space Age”.  One of its ultimate aims was “to step up space projects once there is a Planetary Government to control the resources pooled by all the countries, and then to attempt contacts with other planets being prepared to find life on some of them.  From a narrow minded nationalist man will first become a planetary citizen and then a citizen of the Universe.” Tomas was optimistic that the pact would “concluded at the dawn of the space age so that people on this planet should live in peace and plenty building bridges to the stars.”  Tomas’ plans feel on deaf ears.  In the wake of the popularity of von Daniken’s book “Chariots of the Gods?” Tomas was able to get his own book out.  “We are not the first - Riddles of ancient science” was published in 1971.  It was dedicated the Count of Saint-Germain!  He followed it in quick succession with “Atlantis: From legend to discovery”, “Beyond the Time barrier”, “On the shores of Endless worlds” and his true passion, “Shambhala: Oasis of light” (1977), which included a revisiting of his old planetary peace pact ideas.  His lifetime of work in esoteric traditions had come full circle.  The UFO occult connections had taken him a long way.  

 

Jarrold’s journey was not quite so liberating.  Jarrold failed to see the shallowness and facile nature of much of the UFO occult claims.  Unlike Tomas, Jarrold could not readily see beyond it to avoid its inevitable pitfalls.  Harold Fulton's reaction to Gordon Deller was an entirely rational one.  Fulton was a New Zealand Air Force officer and his military pragmatic background rejected Deller's UFO vision steeped in spiritualism, "Oahspe - the Kosmon Bible", and sightings of mile long Etherian spaceships.   Deller even went into a trance transmitting purported messages from the Etherians to Fulton.  Deller indicated that Fulton and others (including Jarrold) had been specially chosen by the "Etherians" to prepare the ground for them.  Deller indicated he had see their ships but had only contacted the crew in trance.   Fulton could not accept these ideas at all.  He was only interested in factual sightings and not in any fantastic aspect of "explanations".   In short he thought Deller was a nut.   Occult diehards with UFO persuasions may cling to the claim that Fulton experienced an illness of 3 days duration following Deller's visit.  Coincidence is more likely as Fulton went on to provide a balanced and enduring legacy for New Zealand ufology through the 1950s.  Although old age slowed him down he was even representing MUFON during the 1970s.

 

 Whatever the original effects of Deller's theories, Edgar Jarrold was by the middle of 1954 experiencing the high point of his ufological career. He was moving into the centre of the Australian government’s uneasy embrace with the saucer problem. Jarrold had received an official invitation from the then Minister for Air, William McMahon (a future prime minister), for a meeting with Air Force Intelligence in Melbourne, on the subject of flying saucers.  The impetus for this was the coincidence of UFO sightings that seemed to confirm Jarrold's predictions of an increase in reports in June - July, 1954, during the closest approach of Mars to Earth.  Jarrold was not alone in support for this theory.  Even Harry Turner promoted it in the anonymous article he authored for the Melbourne Argus newspaper on June 26th, 1954.

Jarrold would disappear from the Australian UFO scene, becoming fodder for Gray Barker’s over-the-top “They Knew too much about flying saucers” stories.

 

We can see from this wandering down early pathways of Australian ufology there were a lot of religious impulses of differing creeds. Given such impulses are still evident in the richness of todays UAP offerings, we can probably predict with some confidence that fictional offerings like the forthcoming “Disclosure Party” (pending a name change) will probably get a huge outing of popular responses. However, our UFO UAP community and the broader world communities seem to be unpredictable. So let’s see what 2026 brings to our UFO sensibilities writ large on the ever changing world stage.