Belief in UFOs has boomed since the mid-twentieth century, and you won’t find a single person on
Earth who doesn’t have an opinion on whether they exist or not. With the number of people
who claim to have had close encounters increasing each year, so too is the number of people who put
more and more faith in extraterrestrials. Today, many religions have sprung up around
visitors from outer space. This is Unveiled, and today
we’re answering the extraordinary question; what are the most bizarre UFO religions?
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Over the last few decades, UFOs and extraterrestrials have become a staple
of popular culture, and culture generally. These days, everyone has heard of the Roswell incident
in 1947, and of Area 51, the US air force base where aliens and alien technologies are supposedly
researched. Many are probably also familiar with Barney and Betty Hill’s abduction story, or at
least the general formula that it established. In the 21st century, the release of UFO footage
captured by the US Navy has made more people than ever before wonder about visitors from the stars.
UFO religions had already started to form back in the 1950s, with proponents developing elaborate
religious systems around extraterrestrials. While some UFO religions claim that aliens are
going to arrive and wipe us out, others argue that humanity’s original creator wasn’t a divine being,
but an advanced visitor from another planet. Today, there are many UFO religions of all
different stripes in the world, ranging from almost totally harmless to utterly deadly.
The Universal Industrial Church of the New World Comforter, for instance,
was based in a vegan restaurant and has published a vegetarian cookbook. This is odd,
but it’s far from being harmful – unlike some other new wave UFO religions. For instance,
one Swiss UFO group with the acronym “FIGU” claims that its founder Billy Meier is the reincarnation
of Jesus and Mohammed, though Meier is widely regarded as a fraud and deeply anti-Semitic.
One of the best known UFO religions is Raëlism, founded in France in the 1970s.
It’s become popular to theorize that our world is some sort of alien simulation or experiment,
and that’s exactly what Raëlists believe. Specifically, they claim that an intelligent
race called the Elohim built humankind and are the closest things we have to real gods.
As in other UFO religions, Raëlists also believe that many of the world’s famous prophets were
“Elohim hybrids”, including both Buddha, Jesus, and Muhammad. This is all pretty standard stuff,
but what really sets the Raëlists apart is the idea that human cloning can grant eternal life.
They support the scientific development of a cloning initiative wherein people can transfer
their consciousness into a new, younger, healthier body, thus sustaining themselves indefinitely.
The movement has also come under fire for its inexplicable logo that shows a swastika
intertwined with a six-pointed Star of David – for obvious reasons, this greatly upset
many people and has put Raëlism at odds with Jewish groups. And although they generally claim
to support science and technology, they also don’t believe in evolution, instead claiming that humans
were made in the image of the Elohim – much like how God created Adam in his image in the Bible.
They’ve also spent a lot of time advocating for various forms of sexual liberation and freedom,
though many critics of Raël view these endeavors as attempts to garner publicity and attention.
Over in the UK, another particularly unusual UFO religion is the Aetherius Society,
which is still going strong to this day. It was founded by a taxi driver in the 1950s
called George King, who claimed he was able to communicate with all-powerful aliens called the
“Cosmic Masters”. He delivered this gospel to anyone who would listen and, over the course of
a few decades, built up a modest following. The Aetherius Society is, in a lot of ways,
what most people imagine when they think of what a UFO religion would be like; the alien overlords
are benevolent and want to help us reach our full potential. By praying to them we can draw
conclusions that will help solve problems facing humanity. It’s really not too dissimilar to the
world’s largest religions and also hinges, more or less, on doing your best and being kind to others.
But how do you achieve enlightenment and work in harmony with the Cosmic Masters?
Through yoga, of course; the Aetherius Society has no small number of books and events dedicated
to the study of its own unique brand of yoga, so-called “King Yoga” after the group founder.
But if the Aetherius Society is a relatively innocuous curiosity, the world’s foremost UFO
religion, Scientology, is anything but. It was founded by science-fiction author L. Ron Hubbard,
and it’s easy to laugh at the organization’s most unusual beliefs - such as that other religions are
an elaborate hoax devised by an alien ruler, Xenu. Supposedly, 75 million years ago, Xenu stacked
billions of his people around volcanoes on Earth and nuked them. He then captured their souls and
made them watch a movie that implanted the basis for world religions. While this doctrine has led
to endless parody, it’s important not to forget that the Church of Scientology is dangerous and
manipulative. It’s most notorious for the extreme lengths it goes to in order to keep people in the
church, pressuring them to sever ties with friends and relatives who disagree with their beliefs,
and orchestrating organized harassment campaigns against those who leave and speak out. Of course,
the church is also infamous for how much money it’s able to part followers from, including for
courses that teach adherents all about the secret history of Xenu and more. Over the years, a number
of high-ranking Scientologists have been convicted of criminal activity, on charges like espionage,
theft, burglary, conspiracy, coercion and fraud. In France, the church classed as a dangerous cult.
In light of all this, perhaps most bizarre is just the fact that Scientology boasts
so many adherents, and so much influence. However, a UFO religion that’s proven even more
dangerous to its own followers is the infamous Heaven’s Gate cult. It was started in the 1970s
by Texans Marshall Applewhite and Bonnie Nettles, who claimed to be the “two witnesses” referred to
in the Book of Revelation. Applewhite was into Biblical prophecy, and Nettles into Theosophy;
fusing these ideas and adding in aliens for good measure, they created their own religion.
Nettles even abandoned her husband and children to pursue the cult. Soon they began proselytizing and
managed to build up a few dozen followers. They taught them that they were celestial emissaries
sent to Earth as prophets to ferry people to the “Next Level” of existence. Initially,
this “Next Level” would supposedly be reached by a UFO that would arrive to collect believers.
Many other UFO groups believe or have believed that a UFO is going
to arrive on Earth that will take them from our planet to another one;
a much earlier organization called the Seekers believed the very same thing back in the 50s,
but the predicted UFO did not materialize. And in 1999, a small group called the Stella Maris Church
made up of around sixty people disappeared in Colombia while on their way to meet a spaceship.
However, after Nettles died of cancer in 1985, the cult’s thinking changed and became much more
dangerous. They began to believe that they could only reach the Next Level by dying - discarding
their bodies to become immortal creatures on a new level of consciousness. On March 26th, 1997,
police found 39 members dead in a house in San Diego. They included Applewhite. They had chosen
this date to coincide with the close approach of the Hale-Bopp comet, which supposedly had
a spaceship in tow. As if that wasn’t sinister enough, the Heaven’s Gate website still exists,
and it’s believed that the group’s only two members not to die that day are the ones keeping
it running. The site still bears an announcement that they are going to “leave ‘this world’”.
Though they may look harmless and ridiculous on the surface,
many of history’s most famous UFO religions and cults have proven themselves almost inconceivably
dangerous to their most devoted followers. And those are the four most bizarre UFO religions.
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