Are Christians Safe From Alien Abductions?

Some folks suppose that the UFO phenomenon is demonic* in nature, especially in light of so-called alien abductions. As a result of this belief, some have wondered how a Christian can be have an “alien abduction” at all if these experiences are the work of Satan. The following is a survey of the beliefs on this subject from those who hold to the Demonic Hypothesis of UFO.

Not even JESUS Is Safe??!

Pastor Chris Ward, one of the founders (along with Joe Jordan and Guy Malone) of AlienResistance.org, believed that any Christian could be abducted because he believed Jesus Himself was an abductee! Not everyone is willing to suppose that God Himself could be abducted by the Devil against His will. It’s borderline blasphemous. Maybe not even borderline. Either way, it’s a bridge too far.

Others in Ward’s circle were more conservative (and less heretical) in their views. Some began saying that committed Christians were safe from alien abduction experiences.

In “The Premise of Spiritual Warfare in Relation to Alien Abductions,” CE4 Research Group, Inc. co-founder Wesley M. Clark relates how he and Joe Jordan began supposing that “walk the walk” Christians were immune to alien abduction experiences.

“After several weeks of intermittent brainstorming, one of CE4’s researchers finally put a new question to the group: ‘Are Christians being abducted?’ A fair question, and one, as far as they knew, had never been addressed by the UFO/abduction research community.”

I too would say that was a fair question. It turned out the answer was, Yes, Christians were claiming to be abducted right along with everyone else:

“At first, religious belief seemed not to be a factor. Christians, Jews, Moslems (sic), Buddhists, agnostics, all seemed to share the abduction experience equally. But as more case studies were looked at, a puzzling trend began to emerge. The Christians reporting the abduction experience tended to be people who intellectually espoused the existence of God, but didn’t apply it personally. But there seemed to be an obvious absence of devout, Bible believing, “walk the walk” Christians. Where were they in this equation?”

Walk the Walk Christians Are Safe…

OK, so “walk the walk” Christians are the exception to the rule. So there’s some hope for some of us.

This forces us to ask what Clark means by this term. He definitely does not mean the “I’m a Christian, and I’m abducted all the time, and I see Jesus on the ship’ variety.” He rules those out verbatim and that makes sense if he intended to rule out UFO cultists who call themselves Christians but really believe Jesus is an alien rather than God incarnate.

He provides a contrast between “talk the talk” and “walk the walk” believers:

“As of this writing CE 4 Research Group has yet to find any evidence whatsoever of any Bible believing Christian abductees anywhere, and CE 4 is still actively seeking them out.

A key to understanding the premise of spiritual warfare is to understand there are generally two types of Christian; ‘talk the talk,’ and ‘walk the walk.’ The ‘talk the talk’ Christian is carnally minded, nodding mental ascent (sic) to Christian concepts and principles, but either chooses not to, or has never learned how to apply them in his personal life, navigating his way through life his own way via the senses realm. The ‘walk the walk’ Christian on the other hand is a Spirit filled Christian who has developed a relationship with Jesus Christ on an individual level and applies Spiritual principles in his personal life and is led by the Spirit in every situation. The data gathered so far indicates that each and every human being is potentially open to spiritual manipulation and deception by the enemy. A ‘talk the talk’ Christian can, knowingly or not, open up doors to the enemy, but a ‘walk the walk’ Christian, if confronted by the enemy, knows the power of the Spirit and knows how to wield it against the enemy, so the enemy seldom waste their time on ‘walk the walk’ Christians. ‘Talk the talk’ Christians make for an easier target.” [emphasis mine]

OK, there is a little bit to unpack here.

Note that Clark refers to walk-the-walk Christians as “Spirit filled.” That’s important because these researchers were Charismatics, mostly from the Assemblies of God denomination. In fact, the modern-day revival of the Demonic Eschatological Hypothesis of UFO might correctly be called the Charismatic Resurgence. It’s newest incarnation can be traced back to a March 31, 2001 Charisma article by Andy Butcher called “Aliens Among Us.”

Charisma is the flagship magazine of the Assemblies of God, but is read popularly by nearly all Charismatics and Pentecostals. The article mentioned Guy Malone, Chris Ward and Joe Jordan by name in relation to their Alien Resistance ministry. CE4 Research Group was founded earlier in the mid-Nineties. Some Charismatics really do think they’re closer to God than other Christians by benefit of being “filled with the Spirit.” I’ve attended Assemblies of God churches. They’re no different than any other Christians. Problematically, Charismatics have not quite grasped CS Lewis’ warning about giving the Devil more than his due.

…BUT Not All Walk the Walk Christians

The other thing to note is that Clark contradicts himself here. Earlier he states that walk-the-walk Christians never have these experiences, that he and his fellows have “yet to find any evidence whatsoever of any Bible believing Christian abductees anywhere.” Now he modifies that assertion to “seldom.” Committed Christians appear to be relatively safe from alien abduction experiences by this estimation, but they aren’t completely out of the woods yet!

At this point, Clark brings up the case of Bill D, quoting this section of the alleged abductee’s interview:

“I thought I was having a Satanic experience; that the devil had gotten a hold of me and had shoved a pole up my rectum and was holding me up in the air… So helpless, I couldn’t do anything. I said, ‘Jesus, Jesus, help me!’ or ‘Jesus, Jesus, Jesus!’ When I did, there was a feeling or a sound or something that either my words that I thought or the words that I had tried to say or whatever, had hurt whatever was holding me up in the air on this pole. And I felt like it was withdrawn and I fell. I hit the bed, because it was like I was thrown back in bed. I really can’t tell, but when I did, my wife woke up and asked why

I was jumping on the bed.”

So Satanic forces or aliens were holding this guy up in the air on a pole by his puckerhole…

Why??? Just why?????

This is not exactly standard fare in most abduction stories.

Oh, the anal probe is pretty much standard. Why that happens to be the case is a question all its own. In 2014, Jason Calavito asked:

“Why it is that aliens want to probe our butts; or, more specifically, when exactly did people start claiming that aliens gave them anal probes?”

He convincingly traced the prevalence of the phenomenon back to Whitley Schreiber’s Communion (1987).

Even as post-Communion accounts go, Bill D’s story is a little over the top. I think that should have sent up a red flag to Clark and Jordan. And in fact, they seemed to have dismissed it more or less at first. Yet that detail about the experience stopping at the name of Jesus brought it back to the center of their attention. Clark declares that Bill D’s experience typifies a certain type of Christian experiencer:

“Bill D.’s case is typical of many examples where the individual had recently become a Christian and hadn’t yet learned to develop their Spiritual walk, or establish fellowship with Christ. In this case, when Bill had come under the spiritual attack, he resorted to the only thing he knew to do, which was to cry out for Jesus Christ.”

Here Clark seems to designate another type of Christian who is a potential target for these ostensibly Satanic attacks: new believers. It certainly wouldn’t be fair to call them mere talk-the-talk Christians when they might well simply beginning to learn to walk the talk, as it were.

The Name of Jesus Is Losing Power?

Recently, LA Marzulli was interviewed by Josh Peck regarding the former’s new book, UFO Disclosure. Marzulli admitted that:

“We kept hearing from Christians who were being abducted, being taken and we’re saying “in Jesus’s name stop” wasn’t stopping it and this – This next part of our little chatter will be very troubling to some people, but I spoke about this at the last few conferences of the year when I was talking about the new book and while it’s very troubling I think it’s reality and it’s this: that Christians are being abducted, they are invoking the name of Jesus and it’s not stopping the abductions the way it used to do 20 or 30, 40 years ago.”

Joe Jordan immediately went on Facebook to call Marzulli a liar. He mostly objected to Marzulli’s claim that Jesus’ power was diminishing – and that is certainly cause for protest! Even so, Jordan went on to claim that invoking the name of Jesus was some kind of “guarantee,” so I asked him:

“So you’re NOW saying that the name of Jesus ALWAYS works to stop so-called alien abductions?”

Jordan responded:

“If you close all the open doors yes. And for many first timers God is there for them to show He is real. I have been saying this for over twenty years now. The testimonies are the evidence.”

Later he added:

“If people are having problems it’s usually because they are still dabbling in areas they should not , close all doors, get away from the subject, move on with real life. That’s how people get free.”

Dr. Michael Heiser weighed in on this several years ago:

“…about prayer stopping “all” abductions, I am (theologically) reticent to accept that. Why? Don’t I have enough faith? No — quantity of faith isn’t the issue. God is not a vending machine from which we get what we want at our beckoning, nor who “always” shields us from what we wouldn’t want. I am quite sure I’m not going out on a limb when I say that it’s probably a good bet that MANY Christians throughout the ages have prayed earnestly that some evil befalling them would stop, or would escape them entirely, or would not be repeated. Remember Rome and the unspeakable persecution and murder of Christians? How about the Christians in the Sudan who pray for food and water and not to starve? How about the Christians in other African dictatorships who are slaughtered? How about Christians in Indonesia today who are hunted down by Muslim nut cases? Aren’t these Christians praying? Don’t they know a prayer will just stop evil in its tracks? Maybe they didn’t pray enough, as though God was watching and said, “Bummer, one more prayer would have put them over the required number and I could help.” This too is (biblically speaking) theological nonsense. While they are asking for God’s help (and no doubt many see that help in a plethora of ways), these Christians aren’t praying with the expectation that they are going to be immune from evil, because there is no guarantee it will, and God never guaranteed that there would be.

…

Christians are not immune from any other type of evil whether it is “invited” or not. Christians are the victims of random violence (witness Columbine); they suffer at the hands of corrupt and evil people through no fault of their own. They are victims of uninvited fraud. When it comes to the more “directly demonic,” Ross’s position simply does not reflect the worldview of either the Old or New Testament, and in a way ties the hand of Providence from using this particular evil for His own glory . . . There were demonic strongholds in the Old Testament (like Bashan) whose threats were so real and ever-present that the “foe from the north” motif became proverbial in biblical literature. There is no hint that most or all of these threats were invited. We are told in I Peter 5:8 that Satan is OUR adversary, and so naturally he seeks to devour Christians. The text does not qualify his destructive appetite by noting “only if we invite his attacks.” Must Christians invite “the fiery darts of the wicked” (Eph. 6:16) for them to come? Does it make any sense to “put on the whole armor of God” (Eph. 6:11ff.) so as to withstand the devil when he and his minions won’t touch us without being invited? When we wrestle against “principalities and powers” (Eph. 6:12) is it our own fault for inviting the conflict? Did Jesus have to invite his own satanic temptation? Does spiritual warfare only happen when it is invited? This view is theologically incoherent.”

Hammering Out the Question with Joe Jordan

Relating the experiences of a few Christians he’s known, Marzulli clarified that they had no “open doors” to allow the evil a foothold for these things to occur, so I asked Joe Jordan to comment on that too:

“Marzulli is saying that these people are having these experiences but they are NOT dabbling or leaving open doors. Are you saying he must be mistaken?”

Jordan answered:

“He doesn’t actually say that. He just states what they say to him. I do more than just take experiencers word, i do real investigation, ask the deeper questions, find where the open door is and help them close it. They need help, help them.”

So Jordan was telling me that Marzulli must be mistaken. Still, I wanted clarification, so I asked Jordan:

“So you believe Marzulli is wrong in concluding that they are walk-the-walk Christians and your evidence is that they can’t be because they are having these experiences, right?”

And this is when he said something I did not expect him to say:

“people can be walk the walk believers and unknowingly have opened a door.”

Did Jordan just concede that walk-the-walk Christians can be abducted sometimes? I pushed a little further:

“OK, so your website says you noticed that walk-the-walk Christians were NOT having these experiences and now you seem to be saying that they can…

And do, apparently.

This was Jordan’s response:

“I guess you haven’t followed my work over the twenty plus years. We have learned more as we have done the work. I used to believe that people were actually taken somewhere too, but further research showed that was not true. It is true that in the beginning we did not have people come forward as walk the walk believers saying they were have reoccurring experiences like the others. But as the subject has become more well known, and more people looking into it, we see a few who have somewhere open themselves up to the attack of the enemy. But the focus is to help them close the doors not just say Jesus is not at our aid as He once was.”

This was certainly news to me. And I have certainly been paying attention, as I demonstrated next:

“I believe the Alien Intrusion movie leaves us believing that walk-the-walk Christians are immune to these experiences, right?

From the Alien Intrusion Cast page:
“Joe Jordan… helped discover the surprising information that ‘alien’ encounters can be halted by invoking the name of Jesus, and that serious, “walk-the-walk” Christians do not experience these encounters.”

I’ve been paying attention just fine.

I might have also noted that he insisted that walk-the-walk believers do not experience these encounters in his presentation at the Entertaining Angels Unaware mini-conference in Roswell, New Mexico in July 2018:

“So being a brand new Christian I put out the question, ‘Are Christians being abducted by aliens?’ I didn’t see any evidence saying they weren’t or they were. All I saw was the other researchers saying this reaches across all beliefs all, you know, all cultures, everything else. I said, ‘So let’s just put something simple out there and get a definite answer.’ This is the beginning of 25 years of research.

We asked the question. We got an answer: Yes and no. Oh, that’s not kind of what we were looking for. We needed a yes or no, but what we found was yes and no, and that totally surprised us.

The reason it’s yes and no, the two answers, is because we found walk the walk Christians (those having a personal relationship and trying to walk in Jesus’s footsteps, those are the walk the walk) and we found the talk to talk Christians (those that exposed Jesus Christ as our Savior but we’re not Living in a personal relationship with Him). It’s one thing to say you believe Jesus Christ is Lord master. It’s another thing to live under it. Two different things: walk the walk/talk the talk. That’s what we found. The walk the walk Christians, none of them were in the experiencer group, but the talk the talk we found Christians that were abduction experiencers.”

Jordan clarified:

“Again, ithat (sic) is true if you have not opened a door to let them in. Twenty years ago we had no testimonies to that.

Well, that begged an obvious question:

“So why oh why didn’t you mention this during the Alien Intrusion documentary?

Joe Jordan’s response fairly made me do with a spit take with my coffee:

“That wasn’t my movie, it was Gary Bates movie.”

Did he just…? Surely not!

I decided to press my luck:

“But you said what he wanted you to say. I could see it on your face. In the way you carefully phrased things so they would be *technically* true. And no one coming away from his film supported by YOUR testimony will suppose anything other than that walk-the-walk Christians NEVER have these experiences. And you’ve stayed silent about it, so…

btw, how are walk-the-walk Christians who’ve unknowingly left open doors to these experiences supposed to know they need to figure out how to shut these doors if you’ve let them believe no walk-the-walk Christian ever has these experiences?

And did you just disavow the Alien Intrusion movie?”

Walk the Walk Christians Are Safe, Unless They Ain’t

I was actually a little surprised when Jordan responded:

“i was following a scrip as what was needed to be covered. Lets get back to verbage here for a minute. If a walk the walk believer opens a door even unknowingly, is he still a walk the walk believer? Technically not, in the sense of the title. They may believe they are, and most would not admit if they weren’t, kind of human nature. But thats not the issue here. The issue is that it is being told to the lost, hurting, desperate people that the name and the authority of Jesus Christ ain’t what it use to be. And for that i say BULL. He will never leave you nor forsake you, He is the same yesterday, today, and tomorrow.

So now he was saying what he said in the beginning. If a person has had one of these experiences, they are by definition not a walk-the-walk Christian because he’s opened a door. I categorically disagree with his assessment. Dr. Heiser is correct in noting that bad things do happen to Christians, even if they’re doing their best to follow “in His steps.” And none of us are perfect. If you can open a door to the enemy’s attack even unknowingly, then none of us can ever be truly sure we’re walk-the-walk Christians. That means any of us would be a potential target.

The problem with this revision is that his definition of a walk the  walk Christians becomes descriptive rather than predictive. This means you could say no walk the walk Christian has these experiences, but only because that’s a condition of being a walk the walk Christian. You could not say you can predict a person will not have these experiences because they are a walk the walk Christian because they may only appear to be so until they have one of these experiences (through an action they were not aware opened a door in their life or through a door their parents opened). It leaves science and becomes circular reasoning.

His initial admission that walk the walk Christians can have these experiences is less problematic. Christians after all can be tempted and attacked by Satan according to God’s will, whether we’ve opened a door or not. Sometimes we’re Jonah but oftimes we’re Job.

I responded:

My how you flip flop!

SO now they can’t be walk-the-walk Christians if they have unknowingly opened a door? Because earlier, you said they could. I have a screenshot of it.

And are you saying you followed a script you knew was misleading, Joe?

Jordan returned to the issue of what Marzulli was saying with a few clarifying comments about Gary Bates’ Alien Intrusion:

“The issue is that it is being told to the lost, hurting, desperate people that the name and the authority of Jesus Christ ain’t what it use to be. And for that i say BULL. He will never leave you nor forsake you, He is the same yesterday, today, and tomorrow.

it was to the point that Gary wanted to make. Call on the name of Jesus for help, and there are no aliens visiting us.

The conversation continued a bit further, but we ended it amicably. Both of us are simply searching for the truth behind this phenomenon. Jordan favors the Demonic Hypothesis while I favor the PsychoSocial Hypothesis of UFO. Iron sharpens iron.

The one point we both agree upon is that LA Marzulli is wrong regarding the idea that the power of Jesus’ name has diminished. The Lord is the same yesterday, today and forevermore and His am is not short that He cannot save, as the Scriptures note.

LA Marzulli’s “Iron Dome”

So why would Marzulli say this, when it sounds like an affront to God’s omnipotence? Well, this is Marzulli’s explanation as to why Christians are able to be abducted.

“Abel’s blood cries out to me from the ground.”

Citing 1 billion deaths by abortion, he claims that this has:

“created an iron dome over this planet because it’s a Luciferian satanic sacrifice our prayers are hitting that. Boom! boom! boom!”

(His hand motion implies that our prayers are being stopped.)

“We’re under a different paradigm. The rules have changed, which is why Christians are being abducted. Can we break through? Of course we can break through it! We have the authority in Yeshua. So I’m not talking hopelessness, but people don’t know how to break through.”

He further opines that the church could do more if it took prayer, especially corporate prayer (in church), more seriously and, perhaps, especially after worshiping in song.

In fairness, there are passages in the Bible that speak of Satan impeding answers to prayer. For example, the prophet Daniel. On the other hand, the idea that Satan or man’s sin has created a prayer-thwarting force field around the planet is purest extraBiblical speculation. It reminds me of that other fellow who thought Satan was blocking prayers from the Moon!

The Mothman Connection and Walk the Walk Christians As Targets

It’s worth noting that the idea that Christians can have these experiences this is not a new concept for Marzulli. When he interviewed Lawrence Gray concerning his experience with the Mothman (which reads like a classic sleep paralysis episode, but anyway…”), Marzulli asked Gray why he thought the Mothman came after him. Gray said,

“Well. I’m not bragging on myself. As a young man I prayed a lot. I was trying to put into practice everything I knew. The Lord filled me with his Spirit, and I was trying to get close to the Lord. I think the devil didn’t like it. The devil is trying to get in your way. People who lead lukewarm lives, the devil leaves them alone, and that’s my opinion. You pursue God, and he will come close to you…”

This idea is the polar opposite of Joe Jordan’s view, the idea that Christians might experience these things as demonic attacks, not because they’ve opened doors to demonic forces, but because the enemy takes a walk-the-walk Christian more seriously.

That’s All Folks!

Of course, you guys know that I don’t really suppose that aliens or even demons are behind the experiencer phenomenon. The most rational answer is that it’s psychological, the sort of vivid hallucinations which accompany sleep paralysis. The fact that the phenomenon is subject to the power of the name of Christ doesn’t automatically mean its demonic in nature. ALL things under heaven and earth are subject to the power of the name of Christ, be they viruses, hallucinations or devils.

Let us be glad that God is sovereign and not give the devil more than his due.

---

---

Note:

*Actually, at the risk of splitting hairs, most of the advocates of the Demonic Hypothesis of UFO suppose that fallen angels rather than demons (and there is a difference between the two) are behind the whole charade.