Tobias Wayland

Unhallowed aliens

September 6, 2015 |  7 comments
Image Credit: We are a species beset by monsters. We are haunted by ghosts, possessed by demons, stalked by Sasquatch, and abducted by aliens. Humanity rails against the shadows cast by these aberrations, as they threaten to invade our daytime civility, and yet we do not even understand who or what they are. We struggle furiously to identify and categorize any interaction with the bizarre, often creating elaborate narratives to explain—or explain away—the things that simply should not be. To the fundamentalist Christian worldview, anything as frightening as the unknown dwells decidedly in the realm of the demonic. Despite the evidence of our senses, or, in fact, any of the evidence to the contrary, all paranormal phenomena falls under the purview of the fallen. This is the foundation of their paranormal conspiracy, and to those who believe, it explains everything.

In The Paranormal Conspiracy, author and apocalypse enthusiast Timothy Dailey explores the possibility that all so-called paranormal activity is derived from the demonic. He wields science as a weapon in his argument, to be used to wound his enemies and then discarded before it can be turned back on him. In an interview on his website, paranormalparadigm.com, Dailey recounts the experience of an alien abductee:

In one intriguing case related in The Paranormal Conspiracy: The Truth about Ghosts, Aliens and Mysterious Beings, two women—longtime friends—reported having had the identical abduction experience. Questioned separately, both women described being taken in the night by what appeared to be alien beings to a massive underground chamber where UFOs were parked. A large number of other people who had apparently also been abducted were there as well.

The interviewer, abduction researcher Budd Hopkins of Missing Time and Intruders fame, took immediate interest in the presence of other people, as this would be one means of collaborating the women’s story. He inquired whether they happened to see anyone they knew. One of the women, Alice, stated that she was surprised to see a former schoolmate named Tiffany among the people in the hangar, and had gone over to speak with her.

Hopkins pressed Alice for details about what they had talked about. She had been out of contact with Tiffany for many years and asked her where she was living, what she had been doing—the usual questions. Tiffany told her that she was working as a pediatrician in Sacramento, California.

Sometime after that abduction experience, Alice succeeded in making contact with Tiffany and discovered that she was not a pediatrician and, moreover, lived in Cleveland, not Sacramento.

Dailey explains that “it is clear that Alice did not speak with her old friend Tiffany in an underground UFO hangar. The presence of such undeniable discrepancies in fact calls into question their entire abduction experience.” On the surface, this story would seem to make an excellent argument against either woman having actually been abducted. But not so to Dailey; to him, this only proves that they weren’t abducted by aliens. When it comes time to apply the same rationality that he uses to dissect the enemy’s experience to his own philosophy, all logic is suddenly absent, and we are meant to take his word that, yes, it was demons, and yes he is sure. Dailey’s theory is that “those who claim to have been abducted by aliens have in fact experienced a demonic virtual reality…These illusions are contrived by deceptive spiritual beings in possession of faculties and abilities beyond what mere mortals can conceive of, and are so persuasive that the victims of such mental manipulation often insist that it really happened…Their sensual perceptions had been commandeered by beings with an evil agenda.” His proof, of course, is based entirely in faith; which, to me, is the same as saying that he doesn’t have any. Dailey’s entire worldview is predicated on the idea that the Bible, as written, is historical fact. The level of cognitive dissonance it must take to apply critical thinking to only the parts of the paranormal that don’t fit his narrative must be staggering. Whether or not you are a Christian, I find that it is a reasonable position to take that there is no hard, undeniable proof of any objective, literal truth for the stories in the Bible. If you want to take those stories on faith, be my guest, but you can’t form a sound argument for the objective reality of a phenomenon predicated on the idea that your faith-based beliefs somehow hold more validity than anyone else’s, because in the world of objective truth they have no validity at all. That’s what faith-based means; you’re choosing to accept something despite the lack of evidence for its existence. But I have a feeling that Dailey isn’t overly-concerned with the objective reality of these loosely-related phenomena.

The war Dailey is fighting isn’t really against demonic aliens, rather it’s against the message he fears they are sending. The battles fought are purely philosophical, and the battleground is the mind and soul of every believer. One of the most insidious evils spread by these obfuscated devils is that of eastern mysticism. Whether it be learned from Madame Blavatsky or cosmic space brothers, it should come as no surprise to anyone that a fundamentalist Christian is no fan of this competing philosophy. Dailey sees the new age and spiritualist bent towards eastern philosophy as a rejection of God’s divine plan, and even goes so far as to speculate that “many of those who chose the dark path of involvement in psychic phenomena were the product of dysfunctional and broken families.” Presumably, their involvement in diabolism is a direct result of their family’s failure to provide the sort of good, Christian household that would prevent that sort of radical free-thinking. There is not, obviously, even a shred of evidence to suggest that occultism is a result of broken homes, and I think that if we want to concentrate on problems that derive from such sad circumstances, perhaps we should focus on drug abuse and sex education, instead of eastern wisdom.

What’s most interesting to me is that Dailey, and by extension many fundamentalist Christians, would go to such lengths to construct a narrative surrounding the paranormal. Rather than dismissing these events out of hand, he has absorbed them into the spiritual war raging in the lives of fundamentalists. As opposed to mainstream science, which often dismisses tales of the unexplained as impossible-to-prove nonsense (regardless of the validity of that opinion), Dailey uses them as evidence to support his own paradigm. Where these two polarized paradigms meet, though, is in their total unwillingness to accept the paranormal as it is—a laughably, maddeningly impossible set of events that seem to be actually happening to people. But hey, I get it, we all want answers; and it’s frustrating to the point of insanity to try to accept that there exists in the world forces that creep intimately into our lives for which we may never have any explanation.

You see, there was a time, before I grew up, when I was fervently religious. I had experienced many strange, wondrous, and sometimes horrific things; and Christianity was the only voice in my life offering any explanations. I needed to know what the monstrous beings were that I saw at night, and why my dreams sometimes literally came true. I know now that their tales of demons and prophecy are no better than any of the myriad explanations I’ve discovered in adulthood, and are in many ways much worse; which is why I’ve amended my belief system to agnosticism, and why I continue to investigate and question all manner of forteana. That people seek out and research the whole width and breadth of weirdness in our world, and then try to force it to fit their religious narrative, is fascinating to me. Perhaps, had I sought something more than truth in my belief I would have been the same. But, for me, my urgent need for answers has swung the pendulum of my interest towards science, which, naturally, as anything controlled and processed by humans must, includes its own cultural prejudices and dogmas. It is here that science meets religion; where the ends of the horseshoe of extremism almost touch. And it is here where the Christian believers in Satan’s paranormal conspiracy dwell.

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Tobias Wayland is a passionate Fortean and outspoken agnostic who graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He’s spent the last eight years investigating the preternatural; which has, at best, served only to illustrate the fact that any answers are still hopelessly outnumbered by questions.

His website can be visited at: http://singularfortean.com/ Comments (7)

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