Encounters: The UFO Phenomenon, Exposed!/Encounters - The UFO Phenomenon, Exposed (1995).iso/misc1/misc027.txt

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From [e-mail] (mark s gilstrap) Thu Aug  8 13:13:04 1991
Path: aramis.rutgers.edu!rutgers!rochester!cornell!batcomputer!rpi!usc!sdd.hp.com!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!sol.ctr.columbia.edu!bronze!anachem
From: [e-mail] (mark s gilstrap)
Newsgroups: alt.alien.visitors
Subject: Shattering Assault [part 1]
Summary: more words of warning
Message-ID: <[e-mail]>
Date: 8 Aug 91 17:13:04 GMT
Organization: Indiana University, Bloomington
Lines: 139


             <<< PRISM::$3$DUA42:[NOTES$LIBRARY]ORTHODOX.NOTE;4 >>>
          -< ARCHANGEL MICHAEL RUSSIAN ORTHODOX STUDENT ASSOCIATION >-
================================================================================
Note 11.0               "UFO's: the 'Shattering Assault'"             No replies
AMBER::GILSTRAP                                     252 lines   7-MAY-1990 14:28
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        UFO's: The "Shattering Assault"
        PART 1
        by Father Alexey Young
        'Orthodox America' issue #88
transcribed and posted with the permission of the publisher

"Let no man deceive you by any means...."  II Thess.2:3

    It is no coincidence that the ancient pagan mystery religions as
well as numerous mystical fraternities (such as the Theosophists and
Rosicrucians) speak of an "elite" --sometimes called "the Great White
Brotherhood," the "Ascended Masters," or the "Mahatmas" of Madame
Blavatsky -- a group of beings seeking to guide and control the destiny
of mortal man. Sometimes this "elite" is seen as non-human, at other
times as "highly evolved" or perfected humans. [transcriber's note: the
respondents in the FORUM topic "ORACLES" refer to their "higher power"
guides]

    The ancestor of this "elite" is the 'daimon' of the ancient pagan
Greeks - from which, in fact, we get the word "demon," and which prompted
the Holy Fathers to say that "the gods of the pagans are demons". [from
the Psalter] Thus, from the Christian point of view, there can be no
doubt that such an invisible "elite" exists, and is known to the
followers of Christ as the army of fallen angels, the demonic host. This
host enters into our fallen world through sin and heresy, as well as by
occult practices of all kinds  (from apparently "innocent" things such as
ouija boards to the New Age practice of "channeling")[see FORUM topic
"ORACLES" for a local selection]. Now however, fallen angels have found
a new and particularly dazzling way to enter the world of men.

    Whereas a generation ago only "cranks" and the
mentally/emotionally distressed believed in UFOs, today more than half
the population of the US, according to surveys, accepts the reality of
alien visitors. In particular, "many New Agers believe in unidentified
flying objects," according to Time, "crewed by oddly shaped
extraterrestrials who have long visited the earth from more advanced
planets, spreading the wisdom that created, among other things,
Stonehenge and the pyramids of Egypt."

    Although UFO literature is proliferous, the most respected and
listened-to UFO "convert" is Whitley Streiber, who has written two recent
books on his own experiences, 'Communion: A True Story' (1987) and its
sequel, 'Transformation: A Breakthrough' (1988). Both books have been on
the best seller list and the author has appeared in numerous television
interviews, partly because he writes well and has consulted many members
of the scientific community.

    Although Streiber says that he was never before interested in
UFOs and had read practically nothing on the subject, "this is the
story," he writes in the first book, "of one man's attempt to deal with a
shattering assault from the unknown. It is a true story, as true as I
know how to describe it. To all appearances I have had an elaborate
personal encounter with intelligent nonhuman beings. But who could they
be, and where have they come from? Are unidentified flying objects real?
Are they goblins or demons ... or visitors?"

    Beginning in December 1985 Streiber and his family experienced a
whole series of dream-like lights, voices, touchings and "night visitors"
with bug-like heads. "At first," he said, "I thought I was losing my
mind. But I was interviewed by three psychologists and three
psychiatrists and given a battery of psychological tests and a
neurological examination, and found to fall within the normal range in
all respects. I was given a polygraph .. and I passed without qualification
...The visitors marched right into the middle of the life of an
indifferent skeptic without a moment's hesitation."

    The fact that Streiber's first book 'Communion' also contains
official medical statements as to his normalcy and sanity, as well as
transcripts of hypnotic sessions (used to focus details of his
experiences) and that he acknowledges by name the help of prominent
scientists in many fields, adds to the veracious tone of his frightening
story.

    Streiber speculates that his "visitors" could be:

    1) "from another planet or planets;
    2) "from earth, but so different from us that we have not hitherto
understood that they were even real;
    3) "from another aspect of space-time -- another dimension;
    4) "from this dimension in space but not in time" -- in
otherwords, time-travel by our own descendants into their own past (our
present);
    5) "from within us;
    6) "a certain hallucinatory wire in the mind, or
    7) "an aspect of the human species" -- perhaps ghosts or, better
yet, "maybe you and I are larvae, and the 'visitors' are human beings in
the mature form."

    What makes Streiber's account so compelling is his apparent
objectivity: he projects himself as an innocent bystander, in no way
responsible for this bizarre encounter. Beyond the pages of these books,
however, one discovers that Streiber is also the author of several horro
stories, which contain similarities to his real-life experience. As one
critic pointed out: " 'Communion' seems like the end of a logical
progression leading from the fiction side of the bestseller list to the
non-fiction side" (Thomas Dirch in 'The Nation', March 14, 1987). What is
even more revealing, Streiber studied for 15 years with the Gurdjieff
Foundation, a cultish group whose teaching stresses "the development of
powers latent in the human psche," and whose spiritual eclecticism is
popular among today's New Agers. Obviously, Streiber's role was not as
passive as he would lead his readers to believe; he had -- unknowingly,
no doubt -- predisposed himself to cooperate with such an experience. And
one can more readily understand why the 'aliens' told him: "You are our
chosen one."

    Although he brings a diverse array of ideas and theories from
world religion and philosophy to bear on his subject -- everything from
Hindu mythology to the warefare of St Anthony the Great with demons --
religion and God in the traditional sense are conspicuously absent from
his thinking and he comes down in favor of the popular modern idea that
SCIENCE is the only "key" -- if still primitive -- to understanding these
experiences. But, as Hieromonk Seraphim (Rose) wrote in his study of UFOs
(in 'Orthodoxy and the Religion of the Future'): "Science fiction has
given the images,'evolution' has produced the philosophy, and the
technology of the 'space age' has supplied the plausibility for such
encounters".

    Rather than a boundless thirst for God, we have instead a "great
thirst for contact with superior minds that will provide guidance for our
poor, harassed, hectic, planet" (Jaques Vallee, quoted in ORF, p.138).
Indeed Streiber is himself a fervent environmentalist with an apocalyptic
sense of the destruction man is bringing upon his little earth-home.

    What is clear in Streiber's books is that mind or thought control
is being exercised on the human race by these "visitors" in a way that
can only be described in the classic sense as occult. The Orthodox reader
is chilled when, at one point, the author discovers that he can "call up"
these "visitors" at will and experience a kind of "communion" with them
(thus, the title of his first book) in a manner that is clearly
mediumistic.

    to be continued in PART 2

From [e-mail] (mark s gilstrap) Thu Aug  8 13:15:45 1991
Path: aramis.rutgers.edu!rutgers!rochester!cornell!batcomputer!rpi!usc!sdd.hp.com!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!sol.ctr.columbia.edu!bronze!anachem
From: [e-mail] (mark s gilstrap)
Newsgroups: alt.alien.visitors
Subject: Shattering Assault [part 2]
Message-ID: <[e-mail]>
Date: 8 Aug 91 17:15:45 GMT
Organization: Indiana University, Bloomington
Lines: 135


             <<< PRISM::$3$DUA42:[NOTES$LIBRARY]ORTHODOX.NOTE;4 >>>
          -< ARCHANGEL MICHAEL RUSSIAN ORTHODOX STUDENT ASSOCIATION >-
================================================================================
Note 11.0               "UFO's: the 'Shattering Assault'"             No replies
AMBER::GILSTRAP                                     252 lines   7-MAY-1990 14:28
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        UFO's: The "Shattering Assault"
        PART 2
        by Father Alexey Young
        'Orthodox America' issue #88
transcribed and posted with the permission of the publisher

    No Orthodox Christian even slightly versed in the lives of the
saints and the writings of the Holy Fathers can fail to understand what
is happening here. The similarities between Streiber's experiences (and
those of other UFO "contactees") and the demonic warfare of the saints is
compelling. The author himself even describes peculiar smells associated
with his "visitors" -- among them, a "sulfur-like" odor which he compares
to the head of a matchstick. His "visitors" have frightening, insect-like
heads with enormous eyes that he associates with statues of the pagan
goddess Ishtar. In 'Transformation' he writes:

    "I felt an absolutely indescribable sense of menace. It was hell
on earth to be there, and yet I couldn't move, couldn't cry out, and
couldn't get away. I lay as still as death, suffering inner agonies.
Whatever was there seemed so monstrously ugly, so filthy and dark and
sinister ... I still remember that thing crouching there, so terribly
ugly, its arms and legs like limbs of a great insect, its eyes glaring at
me."

    In his second book Streiber concludes that many of the "close
encounters" he has had (and is still having) are for the purpose of
"shattering my belief in the accepted paradigm of reality. And it
succeeded very well ... I suspect that experiences such as [these] are
the outcomes of a fundamental shift of mind. They are what happens when
people begin to abandon the old, *false* beliefs..." Truer words were
never spoken.

    Although Streiber now believes that his "visitors" are extra-
terrestrials and have a physical reality, he also calls them "goblins"
and "soul-eaters," who have the "ability to enter the mind and affect
thought," and much, much worse. He writes:

    "Increasingly I felt as if I were entering a struggle that might
be a struggle *for my soul*, my essence, or whatever part of me might
have reference to the eternal...It was clear that the soul was very much
at issue. People [have] experienced feeling as if their souls were being
dragged from their bodies. More than one person had seen the visitors in
the context of a near-death experience."

    In spite of all this, Streiber's delusion is so great that he can
enthusiastically say that "it is up to each one of us to seek our own
contact [with the 'visitors'], develop it if it occurs, and challenge
ourselves to use it for...spiritual growth..."

    By contrast, Bishop Ignatius Brianchaninov wrote a century ago:
"The perception of spirits with the eyes of sense always brings harm,
sometimes greater and sometimes less, to men who do not have spiritual
perception...He will unfailingly be deceived, he will unfailingly be
attracted, he will unfailingly be sealed with the seal of deception...the
seal of a frightful injury to his spirit; and further, the possibility of
correction and salvation is often lost. This has happened with many, very
many. It has happened not only with pagans, whose priests were for the
most part in open *communion* with demons; it has happened not only with
many Christians who do not know the mysteries of Christianity..' it has
[also] happened with many strugglers and monks..." (quoted in 'The Soul
After Death', Fr. Seraphim Rose, p.68)

    When he wasn't "seeing" them, Streiber nonetheless frequently
"heard" their voices, "as if from a small speaker just to the right of my
head." Without any difficulty at all he saw that this was similar to the
pagan oracles of old: "the oracles at Delphi and many other places in the
ancient world were channels answering questions in trance...With the rise
of Christianity the voice died...So the voice I was hearing, as also the
voices heard by modern channels, was possessed by an ancient and lofty
human heritage...I was still well within the tradition of human
experience."

    Streiber also speaks of psychic gifts that suddenly appear,
unbidden, in people who have UFO experiences: "precognition, apparent
telepathy, out-of-the-body perceptions, and even physical levitation.
Such people often find street lights mysteriously shutting down as they
walk down the street. (One wonders if he had ever seen the 1950's film
about modern-day witchcraft, 'Bell, Book, and Candle', in which a novice
warlock is able to turn out the street lights as he passes by.)

    Streiber concludes benignly; "I do not think we have even begun
to comprehend the visitors. I suspect that we are a lot farther from
understanding them than we are from understanding , say, the songs of the
whales..."

    But Fr. Seraphim wrote: "Such stories of demonic activity were
commonplace in earlier centuries. It is a sign of the spiritual crisis of
today that modern men, for all their proud 'enlightenment' and 'wisdom'
are becoming once more aware of such experiences -- but no longer have
the Christian framwork with which to explain them...A true evaluation of
UFO experiences may be made only on the basis of Christian revelation and
experience, and it is accessible only to the humble Christian believer
who trusts these sources" (Orthodoxy and the Religion of the Future, pps
137-138).

    Ever since the phenomenally successful movies, 'Close Encounters'
and 'E.T.'(just rereleased on video), we have seen a resurgence of
interest in UFO phenomena. It will doubtless continue to grow as
Christianity wanes in the West and people instead tune their ears to very
ancient "voices", once stilled by the Son of God.

    The Orthodox Christian, however must hold on to the redemption
offered by Christ, for as Fr. Seraphim wrote, "he knows that man is not
to 'evolve' into 'something higher', nor has he any reason to believe
that there are 'highly evolved' beings on other planets; but he knows
well that there are indeed ' advanced intelligences' in the universe
besides himself: these are of two kinds, and he strives to live so as to
dwell with those who serve God (the angels) and avoid contact with the
others who have rejected God (the demons)...he distrusts his own ability
to see through the deceptions of the demons, and therefore clings all the
more firmly to the Scriptural and Patristic guidelines which the Church
of Christ provides for his life...."(Orthodoxy and the religion of the
Future, pps. 144-145).

    O Archangel of God, leave us not defenseless against
    the spirits of evil in the upper air!

    from the prayer to St Michael the Archangel
[patron of Archangel Michael Russian Orthodox Student Association]

                written by Father Alexey Young
                published by Orthodox America
                Vol IX, #8 (issue 88), March 89
                available from GOLD::GILSTRAP
                or by subscription from:
                P.O.Box 2132, Redding CA., 96099

notes by transcriber set off by [...]