The Demon-Haunted World_ Science as a Candle in the Dark - Carl Sagan [63]
Put aside Gibbon’s social snobbery: the devil tormented the upper classes too, and even a king of England - James I, the first Stuart monarch - wrote a credulous and superstitious book on demons (Daemonologie, 1597). He was also the patron of the great translation of the Bible into English that still bears his name. It was King James’s opinion that tobacco is the ‘devil’s weed’, and a number of witches were exposed through their addiction to this drug. But by 1628, James had become a thoroughgoing sceptic -mainly because adolescents had been found faking demonic possession, in which state they had accused innocent people of witchcraft. If we reckon the scepticism that Gibbon says characterized his time to have declined in ours, and if even a little of the rampant gullibility he attributes to late classical times is left over in ours, should we not expect something like demons to find a niche in the popular culture of the present?
Of course, as enthusiasts for extraterrestrial visitations are quick to remind me, there’s another interpretation of these historical parallels: aliens, they say, have always been visiting us, poking at us, stealing our sperms and eggs, impregnating us. In earlier times we recognized them as gods, demons, fairies, or spirits; only now do we understand that it’s aliens who’ve been diddling us all these millennia. Jacques Vallee has made such arguments. But then why are there virtually no reports of flying saucers prior to 1947? Why is it that none of the world’s major religions uses saucers as icons of the divine? Why no warnings about the dangers of high technology then? Why isn’t this genetic experiment, whatever its objective, completed by now, thousands of years or more after its initiation by beings supposedly of vastly superior technological attainments? Why are we in such trouble if the breeding programme is designed to improve our lot?
Following this line of argument, we might anticipate present adherents of the old beliefs to understand ‘aliens’ to be fairies, gods, or demons. In fact, there are several contemporary sects -the ‘Raelians’, for example - that hold gods or God to come to earth in UFOs. Some abductees describe the aliens, however repulsive, as ‘angels’, or ‘emissaries of God’. And there are those who still think it’s demons.
In Whitley Strieber’s Communion, a first-hand account of ‘alien abduction’, the author relates
Whatever was there seemed so monstrously ugly, so filthy and dark and sinister. Of course they were demons. They had to be ... I still remember that thing crouching there, so terribly ugly, its arms and legs like the limbs of a great insect, its eyes glaring at me.
Reportedly, Strieber is now open to the possibility that these night-time terrors were dreams or hallucinations.
Articles on UFOs in The Christian News Encyclopedia, a fundamentalist compilation, include ‘Unchristian Fanatic Obsession’, and ‘Scientist Believes UFOs Work of Devil’. The Spiritual Counterfeits Project of Berkeley, California, teaches that UFOs are of demonic origin; the Aquarian Church of Universal Service of McMinnville, Oregon, that all aliens are hostile. A 1993 newsletter of ‘Cosmic Awareness Communications’ informs us that UFO occupants think of humans as laboratory animals, wish us to worship them, but tend to be deterred by the Lord’s Prayer. Some abductees have been cast out of their evangelical religious congregations; their stories sound too close to satanism. A 1980 fundamentalist tract, The Cult Explosion, by Dave Hunt, reveals that
UFOs ... are clearly not physical and seem to be demonic manifestations from another dimension calculated to alter man’s way of thinking... [T]he alleged UFO entities that have presumably communicated psychically with humans have always preached the same four lies that the serpent introduced to Eve... [T]hese beings are demons and they are preparing for the Antichrist.
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