There has been a fair amount of crossover between paranormal events and Unidentified Flying Objects. Both are sometimes seen as dubious fields of study by mainstream science, and generally, have seen little support. Still, they both have had a measure of influence on popular culture.

• In his 1758 book Earths in the Solar World, Emanuel Swedenborg reported a number of visions where he was escorted around various planets. He regarded these visions as genuine.

• Among Madame Blavatsky’s writings were her descriptions of “The Lords of the Flame”, who resided on Venus. Guy Ballard - one of Blavatsky's disciples - popularised her teachings in the United States. He founded an offshoot, “The Great I AM”, which made contact with extraterrestrials a vital part of its teachings.

• Many early contactees spoke of extraterrestrial contact, but their accounts were quite similar to early Mystical accounts.

• John Keel and Brad Steiger promulgated various paranormal/UFO theories in a series of modestly successful paperback books in the 1960’s.

Religions and Ufos

Much mysticism has arisen around UFOs. Several religions have UFOs as a component of their mythology:

• Unarius Academy of Science : Founded in 1954 by Ernest Norman and Ruth Marian.
• Aetherians: A group founded by a British mystic who claimed to communicate with the Cosmic Master Aetherius
• Order of the Solar Temple: In order to move to somewhere near the star Sirius many believers committed suicide in Europe and Canada in the 90's
• Heaven's Gate: Believers committed suicide in California in 1997, believing they would be carried off in Comet Hale-Bopp.
• Raelians, who claimed they would clone their leader so he could live forever.
• Scientology: The higher-level beliefs of Scientology include the story of Xenu, a galactic ruler, who brought billions of people to Earth and killed them. A 1952 Scientology tape claims that a steady flow of flying saucers is still dropping off more entheta (malevolent) beings.

Belief system crossovers

Some have common beliefs around UFOs mixed with Christian elements:

• Heaven: Lights that come from the sky.
• Faith: you have no evidence what UFOs are. You can only see by yourself or believe others.
• Saviour: Superior beings coming out of those lights.
• Apocalypse and redemption: Superior beings coming from the heavens to at the same time destroy civilization as we know and save those few who accept them by carrying those believers in their spacecraft.
• Voices: Many claim to hear voices that might be from spirits, angels or aliens from a distant galaxy. Cethics see those as classical cases of schizophrenic hallucinations.

Examples and Famous people who wrote anything related to ufos and mysticism

An example of this overlap is the miracle at Fatima which occurred in Portugal in 1917. This involved over 70,000 witnesses observing strange aerial phenomena, which might well be considered as UFOs today.

Erich von Däniken goes the other way round and states that UFOs influenced certain ancient religions. He claims to have found evidence in old Aztec, Inca and ancient Egypt temples that phenomena identified as signs of Gods were the same as actual unidentified flying objects. In his book Were The Gods Astronauts, von Däniken goes farther and states that those objects were in fact alien visitors who landed on Earth a thousand years ago and influenced deeply the birth of civilizations.

Terence McKenna, in contrast, believed that UFOs are manifestations of the human soul, or collective spirit. He thought they appeared to individuals and groups in order to exert psychological influence over the course of history. He conjectured that in the year 2012 there might be a global UFO 'visitation'; a great manifestation that would convince humanity to adopt a UFO religion with precepts of universal love and ecologically sound culture.

Dr. Jacques Vallee, a French UFO researcher, has noted an almost exact parallel between UFO and "Alien" visitations and stories from folklore of Fairies and similar creatures. This was documented in his 1969 book "Passport to Magonia" and explored further in his later works. The significance of these parallels is disputed between mainstream scientists, who contend that they show both to be fanciful, and between Vallee and others who feel that some underlying, poorly understood, phenomenon is actually interacting with humans to cause both kinds of sightings. Incidentally, Vallee was the inspiration for the French scientist depicted by Steven Spielberg in his film Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

Carl Jung, the famous psychologist, also felt that UFOs had a primarily spiritual and psychological basis. In his 1959 book "FLYING SAUCERS: A Modern Myth of Things Seen In The Sky", he pointed out that the round shape of most saucers corresponds to a mandala, a type of archetypal shape seen in religious images. He felt that saucers reflected a projection of the internal desires of viewers to see them. However, he did not out rightly label them a delusion or hallucination; it was more in the nature of a shared spiritual experience.

The U.S. Government Printing Office issued a publication compiled by the Library of Congress for the Air Force Office of Scientific Research: UFOs and Related Subjects: An Annotated Bibliography. In preparing this work, the senior bibliographer, Lynn E. Catoe, read thousands of UFO articles and books. In her preface to this 400-page book she states:

"A large part of the available UFO literature is closely linked with mysticism and the metaphysical. It deals with subjects like mental telepathy, automatic writing and invisible entities as well as phenomena like poltergeist [ghost] manifestations and possession. Many of the UFO reports now being published in the popular press recount alleged incidents that are strikingly similar to demonic possession and psychic phenomena."

External links

• UFOs & the Cult of ET: The Phantasmagorical Manipulation