The New Narrative around UFOs

Which are now called UAPs so no one feels silly

UFOs are no longer called UFOs. They are now called UAPs, which stands for Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena. Or Unidentified Aerial Phenomena. But these days, it’s not just the sky which contains anomalies. Orbs of light have been seen coming out of bodies of water, so it’s all just anomalous, rather than just aerial.

The main thing is that a member of Congress can take part in a House Oversight subcommittee meeting about UAPs without sounding like a tin-foil-hat-wearing, Roswell-obsessed X-Files fan who believes that aliens are abducting people from their beds.

The Old Narrative around UFOs

In the 1980s and 90s, the narrative around aliens was formed around wildly successful movies and TV shows: Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977); ET (1982); The X-Files (1993) and Independence Day(1996). This period of interest, in the public imagination at least, came to an end probably before The X-Files wrapped up its TV series in 2002 (although you’re probably whistling the theme tune to yourself right now).

As a casual observer of interest in UFOs, the main narrative seemed to revolve around the idea that life had evolved on other planets to be technologically superior to ours, and flown spacecraft lightyears across galaxies, only to crash land in thinly populated areas of North America where these beings are now in league with the American military. Therefore, if you saw unexplained lights in the sky, you were seeing physical beings, like humans, flying physical spacecraft. Or advanced military aircraft developed in cahoots with aliens.

Let’s call this the Advanced Evolved Aliens from Another Planet Hypothesis. Or the AEAAP Hypothesis, since we can all make up acronyms. I didn’t believe in AEAAPs at the time. And I still don’t believe in them now.

Looking back, we can now see this was a theory born of scientific materialism. It was a sign of the times. Religion declined throughout the twentieth century to the point where a strident form of atheism became popular in the mainstream media. It peaked in the noughties, with the publication of The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins in 2006 and God is Not Great by Christopher Hitchens in 2007. I suspect it’s been downhill for strident atheists since then.

The Christian Perspective on the Old Narrative

The only theological question surrounding the Advanced Evolved Aliens from Another Planet Hypothesis was to ask whether these creatures were image-bearers of God, whether Jesus died for them and how they fit with a Bible which seems to make no mention of extraterrestrial life.

Christians never seemed terribly interested in engaging with any of these questions. Non-Christians, who weren’t interested either, were not asking questions about aliens – or the paranormal more widely since the big scary atheists had made it seem silly to do so. Having answers ready was not evangelistically useful for Christians, so the subject lay dormant.

There has since been a resurgence of interest in UFOs, re-christened UAPs so they don’t feel like Professor Richard Dawkins or Sam Harris are sniggering at them. Encounters is a new series on Netflix, which comes from Spielberg’s Amblin production company. It is a serious-minded well-produced look at close encounters with UAPs. It’s a world away from Spielberg’s ET.

Stay on Netflix and catch up on Stranger Things, set in the ET era of the early 1980s. Kids ride around on bikes, but the backdrop is a little more sinister: Cold War American military experiments and that crosses over into the world of the paranormal. It’s not just about people with psychic powers. There are powerful demonic forces at work.

Flick over to the History Channel and watch The Curse of Skinwalker Ranch in which scientists are attempting to figure out what’s going on with all kinds of UAPs, along with equipment malfunctions and historic tales of shapeshifting creatures called skinwalkers.

The New Narrative around UFOs, sorry, UAPs

Watch these shows and listen to the podcast equivalent. You will hear a shift in terminology. There is an acknowledgement that UAPs are moving in a way that isn’t just beyond our physical capability, but beyond the realms of Newtonian or Einsteinian physics itself. Orbs of light fly at astonishing speeds, change direction without decelerating, break into more lights, reform and then vanish. Where do they go?

There is only one rational explanation: they go into ‘another dimension’. There is now much talk of these lights, beings, or orbs being ‘inter-dimensional’.

This is where Christians can begin to relate. But we need to be careful. It is tempting to blunder in with our simplistic categories of angels and demons. These are real enough, but on closer inspection, the Bible shows that the world is much stranger than a spiritual realm populated by merely good angels and bad demons. We get glimpses of principalities and powers, Nephilim, sons of God, seraphim, unclean spirits, dragons, leviathans and more.

Educated with the same enlightenment values as Dawkins and Hitchens, Christians are just as guilty as the wider culture of looking down on previous generations for acknowledging the unseen realms and taking heed of those times when it pokes through into our own world.

We Are What We Watch

But what we watch on TV reveals what we really believe. We find TV shows like Stranger Things extremely compelling. In shows like this, we see a strong moral component to this strangeness. One person I know who saw lights in the sky said that she felt like she was being watched. It was troubling and unpleasant.

Dawkins would say this is evolutional fight-or-flight biochemistry. He might be right on one level. He may have described the chemistry, just as Eustace describes a star as “a huge ball of flaming gas”. Readers of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader will know Ramandu’s reply: “Even in your world, my son, that is not what a star is but only what it is made of.”

We live in a world that aches for Narnia and other enchanted realms. We are disenchanted our own but it won’t stay that way for long. It can’t. In our hearts, we know that the words of Hamlet in response to Horatio, written over four hundred years ago, are true:

HORATIO:

O day and night, but this is wondrous strange.

HAMLET:

And therefore as a stranger give it welcome.

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,

Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

The world is weirder and more anomalous than we thought. But we need to be careful that we don’t get sucked into the strange world of UAPs. And we’ll look in the new year.

In the meantime, why not listen to the latest edition of Cooper and Cary Have Words in which we talk about this very topic?