What is the true story behind unidentified
flying objects seen in the night sky over every corner of the planet for
generations?
Are they, as leading UFO expert Stanton Friedman insists, strange visitors from
another planet, or planets, so advanced in technology they are equipped to zoom
in and out of Earth’s atmosphere at will?
Does the secret actually lie within the spiritual realm, as some fundamentalist
Christians maintain?
Many a Web site advocates the position that UFOs are nothing more than demon
spirits, part of Satan’s army, released in the “last days” to delude
earthlings and provide a convenient explanation for the antichrist to explain
the Rapture of the saints just before the seven-year Tribulation unfolds.
In a recent telecast, noted biblical author Jack Van Impe touted this idea, but
his staff didn’t respond to a request by The Register-Herald for a detailed
account.
Nor was there any answer to a similar inquiry posted at the headquarters of Hal
Lindsey, author of “The Late Great Planet Earth,” a best-seller on biblical
prophecy in the early 1970s.
Friedman, a nuclear physicist, is a leading lecturer lined up for a two-day UFO
summit this weekend in Charleston.
The Friday-Saturday event comes almost 55 years to the day of the invasion by
the so-called “Flatwoods Monster” in Braxton County, one that inspired two
books by Frank Feschino, another key speaker at the Charleston gathering.
Feschino will be autographing his latest effort, “Shoot Them Down,”
chronicling what he says was an aerial battle along the Atlantic Coast between
aliens and Air Force jetfighters.
Friedman says one of the bigger objections to getting the truth spread about
UFOs in modern times has come from the fundamentalist camp.
He quoted the late Rev. Jerry Falwell as dismissing so-called aliens as “the
work of the devil,” and insisting there is no intelligent life beyond Earth.
“What an insult to God if this is the best He could do,” Friedman countered
in a Register-Herald interview.
A new film titled “Unidentified,” produced by a Christian filmmaking outfit,
explores the demonic theory in fiction.
As two magazine writers dig into a sighting in a small Texas town, a veteran
government worker whose former agency was involved in the UFO controversy for
years before his conversion, tells them, “I think the world is going to end
soon and we’re living in the last days. As Christians, we believe that the
Rapture is the next big event on God’s calendar. The devil knows this and
he’s going to do everything he can to explain the event away. Now, that’s
where the UFO phenomenon really comes into play.”
A spokesman for John Hagee Ministries in San Antonio said he has heard the famed
preacher’s sermons more than a decade but cannot remember any of them
addressing UFOs.
“So I imagine that either he feels there is not much credence to the existence
of UFOs, or that their existence is unverifiable, inconsequential in comparison
to other, more pertinent issues, or a case of mistaken identify,” Edward
Martinez said.
There is no mention of UFOs in the Bible as modern man understands the term, he
said.