; Phantoms and Monsters - Real Cryptid Encounter Reports - Fortean Researcher Lon Strickler

Thursday, September 29, 2016

Reader Response: UFO Incident Transforms Witness Spiritually


I received several responses to UFO Incident Transforms Witness Spiritually. Here are a few:

Hello Lon,

You asked this:

Could UFO incidents have a connection to BEK or black-eyed people? In the past, I have had experiencers tell me that they had 'found' religion after UFO / non-terrestrial encounters. As well, many of these people have said that alien beings (in particular higher order aliens) have told them that they are spiritually committed to a supreme energy. Is this really any different than how humans describe their spiritual beliefs? I wrote The Supernatural Savior several years ago. What are your thoughts? Lon

When I read the account that preceded your question, about the two men encountering strange lights and lightning bolts, with one remembering nothing of the experience, but becoming religious afterwards, I thought of Rudolf Otto's description of the numinous experience. Basically, an individual encounters something larger than himself (landscape, UFO, big event), is in awe of it, feels his own smallness, and yet, connects to something more vast than himself--the Tao, the Holy Spirit, not sure what to name it. This often results in spiritual awakening, even if the experience had been overwhelming or frightening.

I researched this with regard to how early encounters with the American landscape caused frontiersmen, explorers and other to have numinous experiences. Here is an excerpt about what I learned about Otto's definition of the numinous experience...

Rudolph Otto defines the numinous experience as encompassing mysterium tremendum fascinans et augustum (Almond 65). . . to the extent that the “fascinans,” or fascination, was equivalent to intoxication (75). According to Otto, in light of the august quality of the fascination, the experiencer is driven to the respond to the object evoking the numinous experience by paying homage or by designating it as sacred (75). Otto asserted that numen, the object evoking these experiences, was encountered in a variety of circumstances. Numen, thus:

… loiters in the secret dread of hollows or caves, found amongst men all over the world as stimulating and calling forth the sense of “awe,” the numen of the deserts and of regions of terror, of the mountain and the ravine, of haunted places and of overpowering natural phenomena, can only by a stretch of imagination be referred to an idea of ‘soul,’ or to any other clear conception (Almond 64)

The object evoking the numinous experience is ineffable, indescribable, and according to Dixon, “that aspect of sacrality or holiness that lies beyond either morality or specificity of creed” (169). It is something quite akin to the eighteenth-century Romantic notion of the sublime, as described by Edmund Burke...(Streetman 5)

So, Lon, I think that even if there is no conscious memory of the experience, the event did register in the experiencer's brain, and managed to influence the individual's subconscious or unconscious. He, thus, acts upon it in an effort to resolve what has been unearthed/shifted/quaked by the event. Even if the man does not designate the lights/UFO as sacred, it evokes in him this connection to the sacred, and thus, the orientation towards a path to religion.

Looking at the odd encounters throughout the bible and even other sacred texts--the Koran & Bhagavad gita-- and ancient alien theorists' interpretations, one could wonder if our entire history of religion has come out of these types of encounters with the unknown (in many forms) that seems more powerful than we are.

I don't know how the BEK experiencers are changed by their encounters, but hope you publish more about these fascinating events and what experiencers say about them.

Best regards,
Heidi

References:

Almond, Philip C. Rudolf Otto, an Introduction to His Philosophical Theology. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1984.

Burke, Edmund. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful: With an Introductory Discourse Concerning Taste, and Several Other Additions. Montrose: D. Buchanan, 1803.

Dixon, John W., Jr. “The Bible in American Painting.” In Gunn, Giles (Ed.). The Bible and the American Arts and Letters. Philadelphia, PA: Fortress Press, 1983.

Streetman, Heidi D. "The Rhetoric of Landscape and the Sanctuary of Parks." Master's Thesis. Georgia State University, Atlanta, GA, 2004. Available through Research Gate www.researchgate.net

I also received a response from crop circle researcher & author Kenneth Heck:

Lon,

I personally believe UFOs are involved in more activities today than people realize, from animal mutilations and mass death of wild life, collusion with world governments, men in black, BEKs, bigfoot, even earthquakes and volcanoes, etc. They have permanent installations in various parts of the world, including Antarctica, South America, the Solomon Islands, and others. Their increased visible activities on this planet are one aspect of the coming end of this age and the beginning of the next.

Their involvement in the world's religions is overstated by them, along with their involvement of creating plant and animal species. Their so-called commitment to a higher energy is deliberately obscure. No living being, including aliens, is free from the overlords who are responsible for maintaining various species, although there is some free will to choose which overlord to relate to. And the overlords have their own superiors.

Christ was not an alien - all his dna came from his mother, but it was technically modified to fit the image of his spiritual father. He had no physical father, and didn't look like his mother. Today with advances in genetics and physics we can more readily understand the miracles of religion. The same applies to the other major religions of this planet.

What are considered miracles are simply the result of higher technology (on the divine level) in operation. The technology of aliens and ufos is angelic, not truly divine. Divine technology is always invisible in operation - we never see it anymore than we see the divine realms where divine beings exist. Magical thinking (such as something happens when you wave a wand or speak magic words) must be left behind if we are to relate more maturely to higher beings and their higher technology. The final questions are - who possesses the highest technology? Who speaks the final words?

Best wishes,

Ken Heck

The Secret History of the Reptilians: The Pervasive Presence of the Serpent in Human History, Religion and Alien Mythos

The New Religion: Alien Spiritualism

The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark

The Anunnaki Chronicles: A Zecharia Sitchin Reader



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