As many people, I have been interested in UFOs and Alien encounters since teenage years, it is really hard to avoid the topic as it's quite influential in the pop culture.
Interest really started to fuel when I met a young Serbian girl who would open up about her weird encounters with reptilian beings during the night, and how she would wake up with marks etc, and her parents started taking her to a psychologist as they thought she was crazy.
I remember reading a book at the age of 17 about these encounters, it was written by a secular author who would hypnotize victims of alien abductions and write what they would tell him, it was mostly all similar stuff, people are abducted, probed, and for some reason aliens would always sexualize the encounters, with weird reproductive stuff happening etc.
One of the interesting stories written in the book was from a Muslim women, who once abducted she would start praying, and apparently it made these being go mad and angry. I thought that was odd, why would such being care about prayer?
I got more involved in the subject and started reading more books, another book had a similar story of a Christian women who seen a UFO land, with beings coming out and running towards her, she ran to the car to pick up her Bible, at which point the beings attacked her and told her "you can't bring that where you are going". So again, why do interstellar beings care about the Bible?
I spoke to my priest about Orthodox views on demonic encounters etc, and they pretty much fit the picture what these books were stating of how encounters look like.
Than about 10 years ago I started noticing a lot of websites popping up by alleged abductees who have embraced Christianity claiming that the only thing that can stop their abductions is prayer to Jesus Christ.
Cut the long story short, about 2-3 years ago I listen to a podcast by a 30 year 'Paranormal Investigator' who claims that after 30 years of investigation, he has concluded that in areas where there are UFO sightings, there are also sightings of Bigfoot, weird creatures, ghosts etc - his conclusion is that all these phenomenon are caused by a single entity which manifests different things.
After that I was pretty certain that this is all demonic activity, and this Investigators conclusion is that sightings world wide are constantly increasing and have been growing since he started, and exploded with the introductions of Internet.
Than the final icing on the cake came last year, where I heard a YouTube podcast by a lad called John Ventre - who was a director of some big UFO organization who has come out to say that his research has led that Aliens are demons, and he had encounters at his house. And a shock to me, John Ventre became a Orthodox Christian - for some reason a lot of YouTube 'Truther People' are becoming Orthodox, always surprises me to discover who is Orthodox.
Anyway gents, what are your thoughts about this matter?
I also wonder why these things are becoming more common, signs of the times?
Cheers
In my view, most, if not all, of these are not even demonic deceptions - they are just outright hoaxes. I do not believe that demons appear to people as Bigfoot, or as UFOs, or as aliens. In the case of Bigfoot, it seems that this was just a silly hoax that a few guys came up with - and it took off. After a few years, a few fake plaster-cast footprints, a video of a guy in a gorilla suit - and people will be willing to believe it. They WANT to believe. I think that UFOs and aliens are the same. Based on the evidence that I have seen, it seems that the Roswell incident was a hoax story put out by the US intelligence community. People read these things and they get excited, and they start to believe in aliens, and they are very open to suggestion. The power of suggestion in the media is very strong. They have basically allowed themselves to be deceived, and so I think the demons will play upon that, leading people to believe that a flashing light from an airplane, or some weird sounds, or etc. is really some kind of paranormal sighting.
So I think that these so-called encounters are related to the following factors - 1) fake stories and testimonies disseminated for propaganda and social engineering purposes, 2) delusional people that think or want to think they saw something, 3) mentally ill people, 4) drugs and alcohol, and also 5) demonic forces deceiving people into attributing things that they experience in their lives to paranormal phenomenons.
I will say this too, we know that demons manifest themselves physically sometimes, for various reasons. We know from the Lives of the Saints that demons will appear as animals, humans, grotesque creatures, etc. However, this usually seems to be fairly rare, and God allows the demons to appear in this way generally to monastics who are living a highly ascetic life, they have voluntarily accepted a spiritual struggle that most of us cannot handle. So the idea that suddenly demons are appearing to random thousands of people as aliens and Bigfoot seems a little far-fetched to me, to say the least.
I would agree with you, there is a heap of hoaxes, government, mental illness etc - I don't deny that at all.
But I met unrelated people describing the same phenomenon, in both cases lizard people - one was the girl I wrote above who said Reptilians were attacking her and leaving marks on her body, when I asked her about UFOs etc she never cared about that stuff, when I showed her picture of Reptilians people place online, she said they looked like that.
Second is my sister-in-laws husband who isn't much of a conspiracy buff but swears he seen Reptilian beings on numerous occasions when he is alone. He is Muslim and is big on visiting old ladies who do magic etc so I can see the link.
I personally about 10 times seen weird things in the sky, lights etc. A light would drop down as a shooting star, stop in mid air, and shoot back up in lighting speed, most common around here I see was weird yellow type light, which would move weirdly in the sky, than start to lift up into the sky and disappear.
A few years back me, my brother and God brother were out doing some night fishing, we seen one of those yellow lights, crapped our pants and left home straight away.
So stuff is happening no doubt, I don't believe everyone straight away but I don't disbelieve them either..
My conclusion is as per that of the 'Researcher' I mentioned above, a lot of fakes, where they are genuine, they are all the same entity changing form seeking our attention - and we all know this as demonic.
Doesn't surprise me at all, we live in a time where literal Satanist are seen equal to Christianity, everyone is lost and thirsty for anything spirituality, hearts have became darkened, and everything is permissible.
If this isn't a demonic and satanic age I don't know what is.
Maybe the best way to combat this would be to stop feeding attention to negative things, be it music, movies, books or way of life.
Always choose the good and Godly in everything we do.
I believe the opinion of Father Seraphim Rose of pious memory - whose book that discusses that topic, The Soul after Death, is so widely received among Orthodox - asserts that these experiences are possibly sometimes real but demonic in origin. Others have claimed some experiences were interactions with military airmen in covert experimental aircraft whose suits and masks may look much like the typical idea of an 'Alien'. In my opinion both are credible hypotheses, but I don't believe a Darwinian-based race of hybrid human-insect-snake physical creatures that evolved on another planet or have been created in a lab by scientists, as TV/Movies fantasize.