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(Clarified "Plejaren", added another Semjase revelation, Billy Meier for kids)
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(Thomas Paine on revelation)
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== Religious overtones ==
 
== Religious overtones ==
   
This has long been suspected by some critics of UFO-contactee claims, like Carl Sagan. He argued in ILitU that contactees' Space People are sort of like deities in a context of present-day science and technology. Short of that, their Space People may be described as latter-day angels, and some of them are described as looking, er, angelic.
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This has long been suspected by some critics of UFO-contactee claims, like Carl Sagan. He argued in ILitU that contactees' Space People are sort of like deities in a context of present-day science and technology. Short of that, their Space People may be described as latter-day angels, and some of them are indeed described as looking angelic.
   
 
There is also the similarity of receiving revelations in remote locations:
 
There is also the similarity of receiving revelations in remote locations:
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There is even a bit of One True Religion among the contactees. Some of Billy Meier's fans consider him the One True Contactee, and some of Semjase's revelations to Billy Meier are that several other notable contactees are fakes. However, most other contactees have been more ecumenical, despite the discrepancies in their stories.
 
There is even a bit of One True Religion among the contactees. Some of Billy Meier's fans consider him the One True Contactee, and some of Semjase's revelations to Billy Meier are that several other notable contactees are fakes. However, most other contactees have been more ecumenical, despite the discrepancies in their stories.
  +
  +
A curious issue that the Space People select out single people for contact. This produces a problem also noted by Thomas Paine ([http://infidels.org/library/historical/thomas_paine/age_of_reason/part1.html The Age Of Reason - Part I]).
  +
<blockquote>
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As it is necessary to affix right ideas to words, I will, before I proceed further into the subject, offer some observations on the word 'revelation.' Revelation when applied to religion, means something communicated immediately from God to man.
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  +
No one will deny or dispute the power of the Almighty to make such a communication if he pleases. But admitting, for the sake of a case, that something has been revealed to a certain person, and not revealed to any other person, it is revelation to that person only. When he tells it to a second person, a second to a third, a third to a fourth, and so on, it ceases to be a revelation to all those persons. It is revelation to the first person only, and hearsay to every other, and, consequently, they are not obliged to believe it.
  +
  +
It is a contradiction in terms and ideas to call anything a revelation that comes to us at second hand, either verbally or in writing. Revelation is necessarily limited to the first communication. After this, it is only an account of something which that person says was a revelation made to him; and though he may find himself obliged to believe it, it cannot be incumbent on me to believe it in the same manner, for it was not a revelation made to me, and I have only his word for it that it was made to him.
  +
</blockquote>
  +
Not surprisingly, some contactees have claimed various independent sorts of evidence, like pictures, videos, and physical objects. However, they have yet to produce objects that are difficult to fake, like very pure single crystals of aluminum oxide enriched in oxygen-18 with maps of planets or other celestial objects engraved on them. Or else hair samples from their ET friends. Their keratin, a structural protein, ought to contain isotope anomalies like enrichment in deuterium (hydrogen-2).
   
 
== References ==
 
== References ==

Revision as of 04:40, 21 June 2015

A UFO contactee is someone who has had close encounters of the friendly kind with extraterrestrial visitors or UFOnauts. This contact involves communication with them, sometimes involves voluntarily entering their spacecraft, and even being given rides by them.

This is very different from a UFO-abduction case, a sort of case which may be called a close encounter of the involuntary kind. The UFOnauts take the abductees aboard their spacecraft against their will, and often do clumsy medical examinations of their captives.

UFO contactees' reports have a lot of similarities and differences. Some of them claim that their ET friends made physical contact, some claim interplanetary or interstellar Telepathic contact, and some claim both. They may have one contact or several among the ET's. The ET's often have great wisdom to offer humanity. The ET's reported in physical contacts are almost always human-looking, so we may call them Space People. Not only that, they are often very good-looking by human standards, often seeming angelic.

UFO contactees had their heyday in the mid-1950's US, though there have been other notable contactees since then, especially elsewhere in the world.

Notable contactees

George Adamski

The most famous one is likely George Adamski, though Billy Meier is now a strong challenger. He was born in Poland in 1891, and his parents came to the US when he was two. He served in the US Army, then had a series of odd jobs. When he moved to southern California, he got involved in the alternative-religion scene there, then moved on to run a hamburger stand on Mt. Palomar, home of the famous observatory. He got interested in UFO's back when they were called flying saucers, and he longed to encounter the UFOnauts. One day he and his friends went out hunting for UFO's and they found a big one in the distance. It flew away and he saw a flash of light at some nearby hills. He went to there, and when he returned, he had a strange story.

He encountered a rather angelic-looking, boyish-looking man with long blond hair who was wearing a brown jumpsuit. His spacecraft was a little distance behind him. The two communicated by gestures and telepathy. This gentleman was from Venus, and he was very concerned about Earthling nuclear-bomb development because of how destructive nuclear bombs are. The two talked about God and reincarnation, and this gentleman stated that many other planets have human inhabitants.

He told it in Flying Saucers Have Landed (1953), and he followed up with Inside the Spaceships (1955). Two mysterious gentlemen, one from Mars and one from Saturn, give him a ride out into the desert, where he meets the Venusian and his flying saucer again. He names the Venusian Orthon, the Martian Firkon, and the Saturnian Ramu. It's a short flight to a huge cigar-shaped mother ship, and GA gets to see a scout-ship hanger with similar saucers, a control room, and a lounge that looks like some fancy hotel lounge, though with no ashtrays. There he meets two lovely women in pastel-colored ankle-length flowing dresses, jeweled belts, and sandals, one from Venus he names Kalna and one from Mars he names Ilmuth. He learns that these angelic-looking women are two of the mother ship's pilots, and that they change into jumpsuits for that job. One of them even invites him into the ship's control room when she's on duty. GA encounters a spiritual master on board, one who teaches a mixture of more-or-less Theosophy and sort-of Christianity. He wasn't much of a Bible thumper, however.

On this and later trips, GA learned a lot about the Space People's society and beliefs. They live in a Star-Trek-ish sort of society, though one that is big on spirituality. It is a sort of interplanetary United Federation of Planets, where people are peaceful, happy, and prosperous, enjoying learning and exploration. However, the Earth has been off-limits to all non-covert contacts after Jesus Christ got crucified. The Space People are pacifists who are reluctant to kill even an Earthling barbarian. About the Captain Mantell incident, they state that they wanted to bring him on board, but instead that they accidentally destroyed his airplane and killed him, something that they deeply regret. Something like a failed version of Star Trek TOS "Tomorrow is Yesterday", where the USS Enterprise crew successfully teleports in the pilot of a military airplane that they also accidentally destroyed.

GA's ET friends described Venus in detail, its cities, its farmland, and its wilderness areas. Thus making Venus seem much like Portland, Oregon: a nice place to live that is perpetually clouded over. That is an overstatement for Portland, though not much of an overstatement for much of the year. On one of his trips, GA got to see the far side of the Moon, complete with trees, bodies of water, and cities.

As to what the planets are really like, GA's friend Desmond Leslie stated in ItSS about someone who described hostile conditions on Mars:

But Strughold ends by admitting that perhaps we have over­looked “some crucial factor” and really the only way to be quite sure is for us to travel to the other planets for ourselves and find out firsthand.

We have done that, directly for the Moon and by proxy for Venus and Mars. The Moon's far side looks very much like its near side, barren, airless, waterless, cratered, and mountainous, though with much fewer "maria" lava plains. GA's Venusian friends never told him how they beat the heat on their homeworld. The scorching 450-C / 840-F surface heat that several spacecraft have measured. Likewise for other planets.

Truman Bethurum

He met the captain of a huge flying saucer, 300 ft / 90 m across and 6 yd / 5.5 m deep. She was Aura Rhanes, who looked "tops in shapeliness and beauty", who wore a black shirt, a pleated red skirt, and a black beret with red trimmings.

She came from the planet Clarion, whose people live in a utopian society. People don't drink or smoke, they have no sickness and they live 1000 years, they have no criminality or politics or taxes, and their churches are always filled.

Clarion is hidden from the Earth. First it was behind the Moon, then it was behind the Sun. Such an extra Earthlike planet would have created small but noticeable perturbations on the inner planets and interplanetary spacecraft, but no such perturbations have ever been observed.

Daniel W. Fry

In 1949 or 1950, he took a ride in a flying saucer remotely controlled by some entity named A-lan. He rode to New York City and back in 30 minutes. He later communicated with A-lan by telepathy, learning that the people of the lost continents of Atlantis and Lemuria destroyed each other in a war some 30,000 years ago. Some Lemurians fled to Mars, then built giant free-flying space colonies for themselves.

George van Tassel

He moved to a giant rock in the southern-California desert so that he could have some solitude, and he lived under it for the rest of his life. A Venusian named Solgonda once met him and showed him his spacecraft, though he later did telepathic contacts. He'd host annual "Spacecraft Conventions" and he built a New-Age energy-recharging domed booth called the Integratron.

Howard Menger

When he was 10 years old, he saw a woman sitting on a rock. She told him that there are things that she'd have to reveal later. Twenty years later, that same woman reappeared with two men at her side. All three were wearing jumpsuits and all three were from Venus. Despite the passage of 20 years, she did not look any older -- she was much older than she looked.

Elizabeth Klarer

After being in telepathic contact with a certain Akon, she got to meet him in person and go with him to Akon's homeworld Meton in the Alpha Centauri system. The two made love and she got pregnant by him. She had a boy, Ayling, who stayed on Meton to be educated, while she returned home -- all over four months.

Cynthia Appleton

She was another female contactee who had been impregnated by a friendly spaceman. Her "space baby" child, a boy, would supposedly grow up to be a "leader of men", but that does not seem to have happened. (UFOexperiences: THE SPACE BABY (from the Fortean Times)).

Orfeo Angelucci

According to Professor Solomon, he

... was the most poetical of the contactees. A Los Angeles factory worker, he had a series of UFO experiences that read like medieval visions. Transported on one occasion to another dimension, he awoke—clad in a white robe and golden belt—on a luxurious couch in a fantastical city. “This is my real world, my true body,” he realized. “I have been lost in a dimension called Time and a captive in a forbidden land called Earth. But now, somehow, I have come home. All is serenity, peace, happiness and indescribable beauty here. The only disturbing factor is a troublesome memory of an unhappy shadow named Orfeo, a bondsman in a prison world of material called Earth.” (Orfeo Angelucci, The Secret of the Saucers [Amherst Press, 1955].)

Medieval visions? Instead of angels in Heaven, it's extraterrestrials on other planets, it seems.

Reinhold O. Schmidt

He once encountered a flying saucer operated by some Saturnians, and they were friendly enough to give him several rides. They found undersea Soviet missile silos, the Earth being 6 degrees off-tilt, which they fixed, Jesus Christ's flying saucer, and lots of mineral deposits, including some special quartz that can cure cancer. Associated with that remarkable quartz was a combination of money borrowed and not repaid, and affection promised but not delivered, and he got tried for fraud in 1961.

The prosecution invited Carl Sagan to testify on the impossibility of humanlike inhabitants of Saturn. He wrote about his experiences in Intelligent Life in the Universe giving ROS the pseudonym Helmut Winckler.

In my discussions with Winckler during recesses, I was unable to decide to what extent his escapades with the Saturnians were a conscious fraud, and to what extent he genuinely believed his account.

The same can be said of other UFO contactees.

Claude Vorilhon (Raël)

He is the founder of Raëlism. He claimed to have had several contacts with extraterrestrials called Elohim, singular Eloha, These were ET's who had genetically engineered humanity into existence (History of Raëlism - Wikipedia).

'Billy" Eduard Albert Meier

A citizen of Switzerland, he has claimed to be in contact with extraterrestrials for most of his life, and he has produced a large quantity of pictures and video of their spacecraft or "beamships" (Strahlschiffe).

Born in 1937, he states that he was first visited by then telepathically contacted by an old Plejaren extraterrestrial man named Sfath from 1942 to 1953, shortly before Sfath died. After that, he was telepathically contacted by a woman named Asket from a planet in a parallel universe from 1953 to 1964. After a 11-year gap, he is contacted in the flesh in 1975 by Sfath's granddaughter Semjase (pronounced Semyahzeh). Also that year is the beginning of telepathic contacts with Plejaren man Ptaah. Billy Meier now has a large volume of Contact Reports (Kontaktberichte) containing revelations from his contacts. They are all in his native language, German, and only some of them have been translated into English.

As he tells it, a beamship landed and out of it came a woman with long blond hair who wore a textured gray leotard, a skintight version of a jumpsuit. She praises him for his steadfastness and diligence and tells him that he can use the German familiar form of "you" (du) with her. She introduces herself as Semjase and states that she has come from the Pleiades star cluster. She and her fellow Space People have selected Billy because he is honest and competent and willing, and not associated with fakers and backward religions. She then describes how her people have succeeded in doing faster-than-light interstellar travel, and how Earthling spaceflight is still very limited.

27. Many frauds and charlatans claim to be in contact with human beings from other planets in your solar system and even to have flown with or in their beamships.

28. This is nothing but a lie, for most of the stars they mention and their planets are so desolate that human life cannot exist there.

There are numerous inhabited planets in the Universe, planets inhabited by numerous kinds of organisms. Some sentient species are nasty and warlike -- and very troublesome. Then some more slams of backward Earthling religions. She then assures Billy that she will return, and that he will someday get to ride in her spacecraft.

(把 - Billy Mejers Contact.pdf, The Future Of Mankind - A Billy Meier Wiki - Contact Report 001)

In later contacts, Semjase indeed does so, visiting the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project spacecraft when docked in orbit, and crossing interstellar space to visit the likes of the Horsehead Nebula. She also slams several other contactees as fakers, naming George Adamski, Reinhold O. Schmidt, Orfeo Angelucci, Daniel Fry, Elizabeth Klarer, Howard Menger, Claude Vorilhon (founder of Raëlism), and others. George Adamski she dismisses as a "hot-dog vendor" (Würstchenverkäufer).

She has plenty of other revelations, like

3. The human bears a spirit that does not die nor sleep during the deepest sleep; it records all thoughts and motions; it informs the human whether his thoughts are correct or false-if he has learned to pay attention.

(the basis: the spiritual teachings) Looking at them, one has to ask why she traveled all the way from the Pleiades just to tell us things like that. As opposed to her people's progress on such important and difficult problems as the P vs. NP computational-complexity problem.

She is from the Earthlike planet Erra orbiting the star Tayget near the Pleiades system, and her race is called Plejaren (Pleyaren).

Billy Meier has a fan club, FIGU: Freie Interessengemeinschaft für Grenz- und Geisteswissenschaften und Ufologiestudien (Free Community of Interests for the Border and Spiritual Sciences and Ufological Studies), and fan sites like Kontaktnotater fra Meiers møter med Semjase. (in Swedish), Semjase (in English), TheyFly.com | The Billy Meier UFO Contacts: The only extraterrestrial contact case, which contains SETI Sent Evidence of ET Contact by They Fly Productions | They Fly Blog

Billy Meier must be the only contactee to have a fan site like Billy for Kids - Stories based on Billy Meier experiences. Like some other Billy Meier fan sites, it is multilingual.

Religious overtones

This has long been suspected by some critics of UFO-contactee claims, like Carl Sagan. He argued in ILitU that contactees' Space People are sort of like deities in a context of present-day science and technology. Short of that, their Space People may be described as latter-day angels, and some of them are indeed described as looking angelic.

There is also the similarity of receiving revelations in remote locations:

  • Moses meets YHWH in the Sinai Peninsula
  • Mohammed meets the archangel Gabriel in a cave in a mountain near Mecca
  • Joseph Smith meets the angel Moroni in upstate New York
  • George Adamski meets Orthon from Venus in the southern-California desert
  • Billy Meier meets Semjase from the Pleiades in rural Switzerland

There are some differences, however. Angels are not known for wearing utilitarian clothing and traveling in vehicles.

So UFO contacteeism is something of a high-tech, science-fiction religion, something like Scientology.

The concerns of the contactees' Space People are often close to contemporary human ones. Back in the early 1950's, they were often concerned about nuclear war, while more recent ones are often concerned about environmental problems.

Carl Sagan from The Demon-Haunted World (Ch.6: Hallucinations):

Occasionally, I get a letter from someone who is in "contact" with extraterrestrials. I am invited to "ask them anything." And so over the years I've prepared a little list of questions. The extraterrestrials are very advanced, remember. So I ask things like, "Please provide a short proof of Fermat's Last Theorem." Or the Goldbach Conjecture. And then I have to explain what these are, because extraterrestrials will not call it Fermat's Last Theorem. So I write out the simple equation with the exponents. I never get an answer. On the other hand, if I ask something like "Should we be good?" I almost always get an answer. Anything vague, especially involving conventional moral judgments, these aliens are extremely happy to respond to. But on anything specific, where there is a chance to find out if they actually know anything beyond what most humans know, there is only silence. Something can be deduced from this differential ability to answer questions.

There is even a bit of One True Religion among the contactees. Some of Billy Meier's fans consider him the One True Contactee, and some of Semjase's revelations to Billy Meier are that several other notable contactees are fakes. However, most other contactees have been more ecumenical, despite the discrepancies in their stories.

A curious issue that the Space People select out single people for contact. This produces a problem also noted by Thomas Paine (The Age Of Reason - Part I).

As it is necessary to affix right ideas to words, I will, before I proceed further into the subject, offer some observations on the word 'revelation.' Revelation when applied to religion, means something communicated immediately from God to man.

No one will deny or dispute the power of the Almighty to make such a communication if he pleases. But admitting, for the sake of a case, that something has been revealed to a certain person, and not revealed to any other person, it is revelation to that person only. When he tells it to a second person, a second to a third, a third to a fourth, and so on, it ceases to be a revelation to all those persons. It is revelation to the first person only, and hearsay to every other, and, consequently, they are not obliged to believe it.

It is a contradiction in terms and ideas to call anything a revelation that comes to us at second hand, either verbally or in writing. Revelation is necessarily limited to the first communication. After this, it is only an account of something which that person says was a revelation made to him; and though he may find himself obliged to believe it, it cannot be incumbent on me to believe it in the same manner, for it was not a revelation made to me, and I have only his word for it that it was made to him.

Not surprisingly, some contactees have claimed various independent sorts of evidence, like pictures, videos, and physical objects. However, they have yet to produce objects that are difficult to fake, like very pure single crystals of aluminum oxide enriched in oxygen-18 with maps of planets or other celestial objects engraved on them. Or else hair samples from their ET friends. Their keratin, a structural protein, ought to contain isotope anomalies like enrichment in deuterium (hydrogen-2).

References