By L. Alfred James
On October 11, 1973, Calvin Parker and Charlie Hickson were fishing from the bank of the Pascagoula River in Mississippi. Parker noticed a blue light reflecting off the water but didn’t think too much of it. He assumed it was just some police officers arriving to tell them they needed to fish somewhere else. But when he looked up, he was shocked to see that the light was coming from a craft like nothing he’d ever seen. In the summer of 2020, the Clarion Ledger published a fascinating interview with Calvin Parker about this incident:
“A big light came out of the clouds,” Parker said. “It was a blinding light.”
“It was hard to tell with the lights so bright, but it looked like it was shaped like a football. I would say, just estimating, (it was) about 80-foot. (It made) very little sound. It was just a hissing noise.”
Parker said three legless creatures floated from the craft. One had no neck with gray wrinkled skin. Another had a neck and appeared more feminine. Parker described their hands as being shaped like mittens or crab claws.
When one of the creatures put one of its claws around his arm, Parker said he was terrified, but then another feeling came over his body.
“I think they injected us with something to calm us down,” Parker said. “I was kind of numb and went along with the program.”
Parker said the creatures held his and Hickson’s arms and floated them into the craft where examinations were performed on the two. Then they were returned to the bank of the river.1
Parker and Hickson went immediately to the police to tell them what had just happened.
This story is made all the more interesting by two other things: First, the officer at the police station who was handling phone calls that night said that he received more than 50 calls from people who were disturbed by something unusual they saw in the sky. Second, an audio recording of Parker and Hickson’s report (given to Sheriff Fred Diamond and Capt. Glenn Ryder) has recently surfaced. This lends a great deal of credibility to their testimony.
Are they lying? Maybe, but not necessarily.
What Should We Think About Alien Abductions?
The phenomenon of alien abductions is just downright weird. If you need proof, just read this summary of the most common elements of an alien abduction:
Over the years a typical abduction account has emerged…Most experiences begin in bed at night…more rarely from a car or outdoors. The abductee experiences an intense blue or white light, a buzzing or humming sound, anxiety and the sense of an unexplained presence. He or she is then transported or “floated” into a craft and may be restrained or paralyzed and subjected to examinations, medical procedures, or the implantation of a small object in the nose or elsewhere. The aliens are typically grey, about four feet high, with a large head and black almond shaped eyes, though other aliens are occasionally reported. The aliens’ purpose in abducting people varies from benign warnings of impending ecological catastrophe to a vast alien breeding program.2
Very, very weird.
In addition to being a very weird phenomenon, it is also a very widespread phenomenon. According to a Roper poll several years ago, nearly 4 million Americans have been abducted by aliens.3 Many of these reports are undoubtedly fabricated in order to garner attention and money. And many of them are highly dubious since the only evidence for them are “memories” that emerged under hypnosis. However, some of these reports are quite credible, and they are corroborated by multiple witnesses, along with scars and serious physical injuries that the experiencers say the aliens inflicted on them.4
What Alien Abductions Teach Us
At first, this phenomenon appears to stand as some kind of evidence against Christianity. Obviously, aliens are nowhere mentioned in the Bible. And what the aliens say to abductees seems to confirm non-Christian worldviews like New Age religions. These beings also implicitly confirm the theory of evolution. Their existence is tacit proof that life evolves naturally in this universe. After all, that’s how they were created — evolution — right?
Most commonly, it is assumed that these aliens are physical creatures from another world: a distant planet, or perhaps another galaxy altogether. The official term for this interpretation is the extraterrestrial hypothesis. However, other interpretations of this phenomenon fit the evidence much better, and strongly support a Christian worldview.
Moreover, there are several problems with the extraterrestrial hypothesis. To just highlight a few of these problems (and there are many more) consider the following:
The home location of the aliens changes in accordance with trends in science and science fiction
The aliens often tell the experiencers where they have “traveled” from. In the 1940s and 1950s, they commonly claimed that they were from Mars, Venus, Saturn, or Jupiter. But as the science of astronomy advanced, it became clear that no life forms could really live on these planets. Since the 1960s the aliens have more commonly claimed they come from Zeta Reticuli5 or other star systems. Why this change?
UFO researcher Gary Bates explains how there is a strong correlation between trends in popular science fiction, and the stories that aliens tell:
The ability to travel millions of light-years (a light-year is about 5 trillion miles or 8 trillion km) in a matter of hours or days is one of the central concepts in modern science fiction. This differs from most early science fiction stories, which depict the exploration of the earth and its unknown reaches, such as the ocean depths or deep inside the core of our planet. Once these regions became familiar, stories focused on the planets within our solar system. Science fact showed these to be apparently inert and lifeless, or even highly toxic and physically violent to life. So now the focus has shifted to distant stars and galaxies. This pattern has also occurred in UFOlogy: in the early days, many of the supposed alien visitors to Earth were said to be from places such as Venus, Mars, and Jupiter, but nowadays they are said to come from distant star systems like Pleiades, Zeta Reticuli, or Sirius.6
The aliens are infatuated with telling people not to believe the Bible
Joe Jordan has observed hundreds of interviews with abductees. He has performed many of these interviews himself. He reports a common theme in communications from aliens. One of their most oft-repeated messages is that we should not believe the Bible. Here is Jordan’s own summary:
The message is usually an anti Judeo/Christian message. Jesus is not who we think he is, they [the aliens] are our creators; the Bible is not the inherent word of God. Why would these entities go through the effort to convince us of this when all the other religions of the world don’t even agree with each other? What is so important about the Judeo/Christian message that they want to make us believe it’s not true?7
John Ankerberg and John Weldon ask a very similar question: “How credible is it to think that literally thousands of extraterrestrials would fly millions or billions of light-years simply to teach New Age philosophy, deny Christianity, and support the occult?”8
The aliens practice sloppy medicine and have a dumb strategy
The aliens are obsessed with sex. They do all kinds of weird things to abductees’ sexual organs, and then appear to be collecting specimens or performing all kinds of experiments. Elizabeth Hillstrom forcefully demonstrates how the peculiarities of these supposed medical exams are a powerful argument against the extraterrestrial hypothesis:
So far there have been at least six hundred reported cases of medical exams that involve the removal of bodily fluids and tissues. Almost invariably abductees say these exams are traumatic, and many ostensibly leave visible scars. These facts are puzzling in light of current medical capabilities. If UFOnauts were really interested in secret, large-scale collections of human blood, sperm or ova, they could get such materials faster and with less possibility of detection by raiding blood and sperm banks or collections of embryos at major research hospitals. It is not necessary to inflict pain or leave scars to collect fluid and tissue samples; human doctors routinely take such samples for lab tests. Even the UFOnauts’ apparent (but unsuccessful) attempts to erase memories are suspect, because medical doctors now routinely administer drugs that completely erase memory during surgery. If we were dealing with advanced aliens, they should be able to carry out all these procedures at least as effectively as human doctors.9
Hillstrom has an excellent point. If these aliens have technology that allows them to travel light years across the universe, to move through physical walls, to fly at speeds approaching 7,000 mph in our atmosphere and instantly change direction, then their medical technology should not be lagging so far behind our own.
The abduction experiences stop when experiencers call on the name of Jesus Christ
This is perhaps the most fascinating piece of evidence in determining whether or not we are dealing with physical aliens. Joe Jordan explains:
In 1996 I interviewed a gentleman who shared his atypical abduction experience. During his experience, which was terrifying, he was able to stop the experience abruptly. Being a Christian, he called out in the name and authority of Jesus Christ. He immediately woke up startled in his bed. I had not heard of anyone being able to stop an abduction experience before. Puzzled by what we had, I called some of the top abduction researchers in the field to get advice. After sharing the story to them on the phone, they each asked if we could talk off the record. That means I can tell you what they said but not who said it. Each one stated they had come across similar cases in their research.10
Don’t miss the importance of this. Top researchers in the field have collected testimonies from abductees saying that their abduction experience was halted when they used the name of Jesus. Surprisingly, they have kept this information from going public:
My question was why we had never read or heard about such cases if they had come across them. Their answer was at first that they didn’t know what to make of it. I would have been fine with that answer had they not followed it with another. The other answer was they did not want to go there because it might affect their credibility in the realm. So silence was what they decided on. I have a problem with this, isn’t this what a cover-up is? Forget Government cover-up like we hear so much about, we are getting it from the very researchers that we are relying on for the truth.11
Since then Joe Jordan has collected hundreds of testimonies of a similar nature.12 Alien abductions are halted when the abductees cry out to Jesus or rebuke these “aliens” in the name of Jesus Christ.13
What Do We Learn?
In light of the foregoing (and what we will cover in my next blog post), the most likely explanation of alien abductions is not the extraterrestrial hypothesis. A better explanation is that this is an occult phenomenon. In other words, these are not physical creatures from another world. They are demons, satanic spirits who love to torment human beings and who absolutely hate God.
The fact that these beings flee the name of Jesus is yet another powerful piece of evidence for Christianity. In fact, this is the only thing that has ever been found to halt an abduction experience. You might recall an earlier article that noted how the discipline of anthropology universally recognizes demon possession as a phenomenon that occurs in virtually every people-group on the planet. And some anthropologists have also recognized that Christian exorcism is the only effective solution to the problem of demon possession.
Now, isn’t it strange that invoking the name of Jesus Christ is both the only way to halt an alien abduction and the only effective means of dealing with demon possession? What conclusion can we draw from this? I think the answer is obvious. It means that Christianity is true.
1. Brian Broom, “‘They didn’t make it up.’ Interview recording surfaces in Pascagoula alien abduction case.” Mississippi Clarion Ledger. July 13, 2020. See https://www.clarionledger.com/story/news/2020/07/13/pascagoula-ufo-alien-abduction-case-interview-recording-has-surfaced/3264064001/
2. Susan Blackmore and Marcus Cox, “Alien Abductions, Sleep Paralysis and the Temporal Lobe.” See https://www.susanblackmore.uk/articles/alien-abductions-sleep-paralysis-and-the-temporal-lobe/
3. Ibid
4. Timothy Dailey, The Millennial Deception: Angels, Aliens, & the Antichrist (Chosen Books: Grand Rapids, 1995), 90.
5. https://astronomy.com/bonus/zeta
6. Gary Bates, Alien Intrusion: UFOs and the Evolution Connection (Green Forest, AR: Master Books, 2005), 65.
7. See http://www.alienresistance.org/ce4marzulli.htm
8. John Ankerberg and John Weldon, The Facts on UFOs and Other Supernatural Phenomena. (Eugene, OR: Harvest House Publishers, 1992), 13.
9. Elizabeth Hillstrom, Testing the Spirits (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1995), 205.
10. See http://www.alienresistance.org/ce4marzulli.htm
11. Ibid
12. Joseph Jordan and Jason Dezember, Piercing the Cosmic Veil: You Shall Not Be Afraid of the Terror by Night (Seekye1 Publishing, 2020). See also https://youtu.be/wRKQP_WgjT0?t=4593 and https://creation.com/lifting-the-veil-ufo-phenomenon
13. See https://youtu.be/wRKQP_WgjT0?list=PL5ubI-Sm48Kn9RC4t4Rd0e1s6x7XCNrGx&t=4567
