UFOs & the Cross
The Maze 3: The Great Experiment
You study by testing.
A test is a judge.
To judge is to measure.
You measure with a ruler.
A ruler is a king.
Experimentation & Anti-Stigmata
A frequently reported trope of “alien abductions” is the experience of being experimented on or undergoing strange medical procedures. People report being scanned, probed and examined in various ways. Sometimes they claim their bodies were cut open, altered or manipulated.
Reproductive experiments are common. The harvesting of sperm and egg samples may take place during one experience, and the person may have another later in which they are shown hybrid children and told these are their offspring.
These “abductions” tend to have a surreal, hallucinatory character. They frequently contain bizarre details. Abductees being levitated through closed windows, ceilings and other solid objects is a common one. The beings usually communicate telepathically. The abductee tends to experience time and memory distortions indicative of altered states of consciousness.
Yet these people provide other details that suggest a degree of materiality to these encounters. They claim to have awoken afterward in a new location, sometimes quite far away. They report unexplained injuries or scars. Some even allege that X-Rays later revealed small foreign objects in their bodies.
All these phenomena seem to be strange, distorted versions of earlier, otherwise unrelated supernatural manifestations. The visionary experiences of prophets carried up into the heavens are thematically similar. The heavenly vehicle described by Ezekiel is frequently likened to a UFO by enthusiasts.
Abduction-related injuries and scars likewise call to mind the Catholic stigmatics. The Catholic Saint, Francis of Assisi is said to have seen a seraphic apparition descending from heaven before receiving wounds like those of Christ on his own body.
These kinds of phenomena have appeared before, but were explained very differently and had quite different characteristics. Thankfully, we know from our own tradition that high-strangeness also means high symbolicity. Such visions and manifestations are always potent singularities of meaning.
In the Christian examples, the events and surrounding imagery are distillations of symbolic patterns pointing to the person of Christ. These events, though outwardly similar, seem incoherent to us because we do not know who or what they point to.
Alien experimentation.
Let’s dissect that, shall we?
The alien represents the stranger. However, the semiotics here are quite fascinating because the alien is from outside and from heaven simultaneously. Thus, it unites the ideas of divinity and extremity.
It is itself quite an exotic idea historically speaking. The Outer Gods of Lovecraft could have only found fertile psychic ground in a scientific civilization.
Experiment comes ultimately from the Latin experior, from which we get experience as well. Experior has several meanings, but the one that is primary is: to attempt, try or put to the test.
The word attempt, also of Latin origin, comes from tempto, the ancestor of the English tempt. Tempto means to test the strength of something.
The word test comes from teste which means an earthen vessel. It’s an allusion to a crucible — a metallurgic melting pot in which metals are refined. Crucible ostensibly descends from crux (cross) and is related to crucio (torment).
Lastly, the word try ultimately relates to legal trials descending from an old French word: trier (to choose, pick out, separate from others, sift, cull). Here the Hebrew meaning of Satan, which is accuser, is highly relevant.
The idea of experimentation in a scientific context is a compaction of this multitude of more archaic ideas: tempting, sifting, trials, tormenting and refining.
It is a perfect symbolic distillate of everything that fallen angels are traditionally said to do. It is as though the stories were already circling this latent idea which had yet to emerge psychically and historically.
The Biblical book of Job could be said to describe a very systematic experiment carried out by Satan upon a human being. The idea of scientific experimentation did not then exist, but one sees something very much like it in the tale. Satan subjects Job to a test. The man is coldly studied by an alien examinant. The connection between science and the demonic is only further substantiated by this observation.
An examiner can be one who scrutinizes something very closely or one who issues and marks a test. The word prove is a cognate of probe as is probability.
The invasive procedures carried out by these usually detached, unemotional entities can be seen as a microcosmic image of the alien invasion at large. The insertion of foreign artifacts into organic tissue is basically the same as the insertion of technology into nature and culture by the aptly named Watchers.
In an ominous, grand-scale symbolism happens moment, we ourselves lived to see experimentation upon a captive population at the beginning of the present decade.
These abductees are not hallucinating. They are seeing something more real than even they themselves suspect.
Remember: if something does not seem to make sense symbolically, that means it makes more sense symbolically than one is able to make.
Celestial Mystagogues
The prominent UFO researcher Jacques Vallée has compared the prototypical “alien abduction” to initiatic rites such as those practiced by the mystery cults of antiquity.
The secrecy with which abductions occur, the pattern of an ascent to a liminal space between lower and higher realms, tests and ordeals and an encounter with otherworldly beings all closely resemble occult initiation.