(Note: This article was written for the magazine bOING bOING, more than six months before the Heaven's Gate cultists commited mass suicide.)

Everyone's trying to see past the boundaries. They want to see past the edges of mortality; or past the frontiers of perception; they want to see past the barriers of time and space, which really means past the barriers between themselves and people around them. They try to see into the future; they try to peer into the dust-trailed past. They don't spend much time in the present. They crowd along the fences of the fringes of the consensus reality. They're motivated by fear and hope and sometimes by something profounder than those and deeper than curiosity. Step into the fringes, and you see a suggestive chaos. If you don't erect a skeptical filter, the Rorschach effect will take hold; the chaos will Rorschach-twitch itself into whatever you came there hoping to see...

The impulse to explore the fringe of consensus reality is, in many people, and unknown to them, something more: an underlying spiritual hunger. In those people, it is something sacred. This sacred impulse for seeking has been desecrated and violated by cults and cult leaders and false prophets and false gurus. The most recent manifestation of this violation of the sacred impulse to seek comes from the new crop of FLYING SAUCER CULTS.

The UFO field, if field it can be called, is an exemplar of a thesis beloved to me; that many things are true and untrue at once; that yes and no can be said in answer to the same question, accurately, for many, if not most, situations. The Israelis have been unfair to the Arab people; at the same time the Israelis have acted logically and reasonably. The PLO and related groups are terrorists; at the same time they're not terrorists, they're freedom fighters; both things are true, and are contradictory. Yes a serial killer is a victim himself, is the result of forces too powerful for him, in his life, in both nature and nurture; no he doesn't deserve to live because of it. Yes he's a victim; no he's not just a victim. Both things are true.

It's true that the UFO field is bogus and largely inflated with credulity and deception and that this makes flying saucers improbable; it's simultaneously true that it's founded in a reality, and that there is good reason to believe that flying saucers are real.

The saucer cults push us toward incredulity.

The saucer cults go back a ways, even before the saucers (which entered public awareness chiefly in 1947 with Kenneth Arnold's sighting and his coining of the term) to the pseudo-Theosophical I AM cult of the 1930s, which had regular psychic congress with Venusians. According to Peter Jordan in UFO Magazine, the sect was founded by Guy and Edna Ballard who were the Earthbound intermediaries of a Venusian named Sananda, also known, on our world, as Jesus Christ. Among the thousands of I AM followers were those "absorbed from American fascist William Dudley Peley's Silver Shirts -- the influence was conveyed strongly by I AM's staunch paramilitary character." The fascist, and racist strain in UFO cults crops up frequently. Steeped in the literature of the I AM cult was Marion Keech, a 1950s housewife who "contacted" aliens from the planet Clarion. Keech passed on warnings and advice from her alien chums; a group of her followers gathered at her home on a fateful night when the Western USA was ET-predicted to be engulfed in a sort of re-enactment of Noah's deluge; there the saucers were to come, Marion calmly explained, to carry the faithful to safety. Of course, neither flood nor saucers came, but followers who need to believe despite the obvious contradictions will concoct outrageous rationales for failures of proofs. As psychologist Leon Festinger had it, in studying this group, "...new cognitions or rationalizations are created in order that the belief system can be preserved..." in the mind of the devotee. (Hence Scientology too survives every damning accusation against Hubbard and his "org").

As a child I adored the books of George Adamski, an imaginative UFO contactee who provided photos of what looked like flying saucers coming in for a landing (and which later turned out to be chicken-coop feeders hung from a wire). He also provided home movie film of what are obviously hubcaps and the like bouncing around on wires like something from PeeWee's Playhouse. Adamski met a blond, white skinned, Aryan-type alien who took him motoring in space and pronounced Adamski to be Chosen Among Humanity -- aliens typically explain to the various leaders of saucer cults that they and their followers are chosen and special. Adamski was discredited many times. The story I most remember is that he professed to be "working at Mt Palomar" -- he was, in a hamburger stand...

Another Grand Old Contactee was Ruth Norman, the founder of Unarius; a veritable fount of Kitsch, the cosmically-big-haired Ruth dressed something like the good witch Glinda in the Wizard of Oz, all aglitter, with high, spangly collars, and even a wand. On dying in 1993, Ruth ascended to become the angel Uriel (aliens and angels are interchangeable, in Unarius). Wiser than Marion Keech, Ruth scheduled a mass saucer landing for the year 2001, a time far enough in the future to be unproblematic at the time of the original prediction decades ago. The Unarians still hold a marvelous pageant night, that rather looks like a Vegas chorus line without the exposed gams, with representatives from various planets marching front and center on the stage in rhinestone outfits and carrying a big rhinestoned banner proclaiming, "Planet Zooberiam!" (or whatever)... "Planet Casteroyl!"... "Planet Dolebobb!" The Unariuns still offer classes extolling "your alien heritage," served up in a conceptually boiled mush of reincarnation, New Age vibrations and the traditional halfbaked Southern California therapies.

In 1947, Allen Michael was in his truck in Long Beach when he was beamed up via "an ultraviolet light entwined with gold threads" (even their space-rays are kitschy), whereupon he was inspired by an ET contact to start a radical political party: the "Utopian Synthesis Party." Utopia involves, among other things, making Allen Michael your leader.

Sean David Morton, a longhaired contactee of recent vintage has parlayed his rockstar style into a modest cult called Delphi Associates. He arranges expensive field trips to Area 51 to see lights that he explains are flying saucers and which the locals calmly identify as specific, predictable air plane flights from local airports. He prophesied that Mt Rainier would erupt and destroy Seattle in 1993 and 1994.

There are half a dozen other familiar cults; Swiss farmer Billy "hubcaps" Meier, who used catalog-recognizable hubcaps in his "photos of flying saucers", contacted the gloriously advanced Pleidians about 20 years ago and has been thriving off merchandising ever since.

Belgian (if memory serves) race car driver Claude Corilhon encountered space aliens while hiking in 1973; the aliens explained that people are lab creations of ETs called Elohim. Now called Rael, Claude humbly wishes to "unite all religions under one ideology," handily headed by himself. Doing cult leader Rajneesh one better, Rael has encouraged wild sexual promiscuity among his funloving followers (perhaps this accounts for the cult's widespread -- legspread? -- popularity) all in search of an Elohim-blessed "cosmic orgasm".

"The Two," also called the Total OverComers Anonymous, mix UFO imagery with Biblical imagery with hysterical abandon, and have provided what may be the template for many contemporary UFO myths at a time when alien encounters are beginning to pendulum to a negative perception of space aliens: Space aliens are using humanity for their own sinister purposes ("I think we're property." -- Charles Fort) and intentionally keep humans "programmed" through false religious concepts; the "Luciferian" aliens abduct humans for "genetic experimentation" and enslavement... But of course joining the cult is the way to spiritual and material freedom... The sinister "genetic experimentation" theme has been consumed and much developed by the ever-voracious beast that is UFO folklore.

Another new and well organized saucer cult is Center of Attention, or COA, for whom saucers regularly land, even now, though somehow video footage of subsequent contact with aliens is never obtained.

Speaking of missing footage, I recently attended a lecture by Dr. Stephen Greer, a physician from North Carolina who has founded the Center for the Study of Extraterrestrial Intelligence, or CSETI. Greer's perception of the alien situation incorporates both the sinister and the benevolent: an X-Files type shadow government called PI-40 has become totally independent, above even the President and the Joint Chiefs, and has taken advantage of Roswell-retrieved ET artifacts to create its own secret high-technologies, for example a device which sends special microwave beams into your head causing you to see "exactly what they want you to see", even to detailed encounters with God; Greer claims to have met with high level officials from the White House who commiserated with him over the power of this sinister group, and nearly wept in despair. Greer offers courses ($300 for starts) in the "protocols" of "vectoring in" flying saucers -- meaning that you use "remote viewing techniques" -- to summon flying saucers... as he has. He and his associates have, they claim, summoned saucers with these telepathic techniques to a remote mountainside (presumably it's gauche to summon them to the White House lawn, say, or Woodstock 2) where they communed with these beings who told them that an astronomically-originated catastrophe is coming, a collision course comet or asteroid, and they are here partly to help with that and partly to study us. But getting in the way of all this is the evil PI-40 which only Greer and his friends can save us from. At his lecture he showed slides of photographed saucers (some of them never proven inauthentic) which were taken from various UFO books, and not one photo of the saucers he himself summoned, or their aliens. He explained that cameras and the like tend to malfunction around the saucers if you're that close -- doh! -- and on other occasions the cameraman happened to be distracted or...

Despite his lisp, Greer is a charismatic, powerfully-articulate man, probably one of the best public speakers I've ever heard. And I can definitely say that he's probably the best damn liar I ever heard and this possibly makes him, despite his politically correct trappings, the most dangerous of all UFO cult leaders. He tells his stories of encounters with ET-obsessed intelligence groups with just enough detail and name dropping, balanced by plenty of "...I wish I could reveal his name" asides. He's thought through his vaguely Deepak-Chopra-style extraterrestrial philosophy of quantum uncertainty and astrophysical anomalies and mystical buzzwords: it all comes out sounding convincingly of a piece.

The best cult leaders and false gurus mix in a little truth with their concoctions of fantasy -- and Greer has had splendid grounding: he's a former instructor for Transcendental Meditation (TM); one wonders if he was involved in the notorious TM film depicting alleged "levitation" by "TM adepts" -- a film that was easily debunked. He's learned his lesson somewhere; he's careful not to provide anything that can be debunked; no faked "Majestic 12 documents," no vague film footage (not at that recruiting lecture, anyway). He creates his "evidence" in the mind of the listener, or in the minds of those who buy his books; he weaves a story that sounds real, like any good novelist would do. He missed his calling; he'd make a great novelist, he'd make you believe. But then it's not likely that novelists get laid as often as popular ET contactees.

The enormously successful charlatan who channels "Ramtha" tells her students that they are "masters who have forgotten who they are." Since this sort of flattery is exactly what the student came for, she wins them over handily. UFO contactee cult leaders confer the same kind of specious specialness on their followers. They are special. They have been chosen to lead humanity out of the planetary darkness; the darkness of the way things are. More deeply than flattery, cult followers respond to the easy-fix offered by a leader who tells them that they are not necessarily going to die, that life as they know it isn't necessarily all there is, and that a cosmic parent has come to replace the parent who fled, or was never quite there when they were growing up.

Brilliant longtime paranormal and UFO researcher Jacques Vallee, author of Messengers of Deception, warns that not only could some UFO cults be subverted and co opted by intelligence groups, some could have been created by them. He has come up with good evidence that various intelligence services have staged, via drugs and other devices, certain "UFO abductions" as part of developing "control systems." The following is a direct quote from an actual letter (a photograph of the document can be found in the book Above Top Secret by Timothy Good) written by Walter B Smith, Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, around 1952: "1. I am today transmitting to the National Security Council a proposal in which it is concluded that the problems connected with Unidentified Flying Objects appear to have implications for psychological warfare as well as for intelligence and operations..." Would they go that far? Since there is new, convincing evidence (as presented in The San Jose Mercury News) that the CIA was involved in marketing crack cocaine to the American people, it appears they are capable of anything...

Cult followers are sheared of money; they often sacrifice their freedom, they always squander their time. If Rael goes the way of David Koresh, they may squander their lives. But these losses are minor compared to something else that is squandered on cults: the original impulse to Seek for something greater, something Higher, something finer than what we are. The impulse to Seek the Sacred; the truth that cult leaders defame and disfigure.

UFOs may well be real; every other day I think they are. A reasonably objective source of ongoing info -- debunking as well as authenticating -- is UFO Magazine, Edited by Don and Vicki Ecker. You can find information at http://www.ufomag.com/

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