Alien Intrusion: UFOs and the Evolution Connection by Gary Bates, A Book Review

The next thing [Bill] knew, he was being levitated above his bed. He then had the sensation he was being suspended by what felt like a pole inserted into his rectum. By this time, he was alive with terror, but he couldn’t scream. The following is an excerpt taken directly from the transcript of Mr. D’s interview:

“I thought I was having a satanic experience; that the devil had gotten ahold 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 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 And I felt like it was withdrawn and I fell.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.”

ibid, p. 266

A while back, I posted a link to an interview with Gary Bates, in which I called him “a very sane UFOlogist.” This book confirms my initial impression. It’s 400+ pages, with endnotes to each chapter, appendices, and an index, yet it is accessibly written.

Synopsis of the Chapters

1. The Invasion Gets Underway deals with the social history of the UFO phenomenon, “the ETH,” or “extra-terrestrial hypothesis,” and its reflection of cultural fears and its symbiotic relationship with sci-fi books and movies. (Gates introduced the term ETH because although technically, a UFO just means any explained light in the sky, the term has actually come to mean “spacecraft filled with aliens from other planets.”)
2. The Science of Fiction addresses major sci-fi writers who have embraced and promoted the ETH. It also addresses the physical impossibility of ultra high-speed or light-speed travel, which is a necessary prerequisite for the ETH to be true. For example, “To propel an object that weighs one pound to 50% of the speed of light would require an energy source equal to the energy of 98 Hiroshima-sized atomic bombs” (69) and “at one-tenth the speed of light, the impact [of hitting a dust particle] would be equivalent to about 10 tons of TNT” (73).
3. Is There Life on Other Planets? The short answer is, there doesn’t seem to be. Earlier ideas about alien life had them living on other planets in our solar system. As these have been discovered to be unlivable, the aliens have been moved out to distant galaxies, raising the high-speed travel problem from the previous chapter. So far, earth is the only planet we have found that seems to have even the most basic preconditions for life … and it has them all, perfectly. Additionally, based on the red-shift effect, earth appears to be located at the center of the universe. (Everything else appears to be moving away from us.) This would make sense on an intelligent-design hypothesis, where the earth was designed for life including people, but non-ID astronomers find it unacceptable, and a variety of different universe shapes have been proposed to account for the fact that everything seems to be moving away from everything else. This chapter addresses the precommitments behind a belief that the universe came from a “big bang” which then coalesced into stars and planets.
4. Did Aliens Create Life on Earth? This chapter summarizes the reasons that natural selection cannot have created complex life forms. Natural selection reduces the amount of genetic information, but never increases it. Other than intelligent design, no explanation has ever been proposed for how the complex information got there in the first place. The discussion in this chapter is similar to Philip Johnson’s in his excellent Darwin on Trial, but it is more succinct. Most people who believe in the ETH, believe that since life evolved here on earth, it must have evolved in other star systems too. There is also a theory that aliens brought life to earth. Given that we see complex genetic information appearing on earth seemingly out of nowhere, perhaps it was brought or “seeded” by an intelligent race from the place where it did evolve. This, however, just pushes the problem of how complex information can appear out of nothing farther back in time and off to a distant planet.
5. Lights in the Sky — Where Are They Coming From? looks at the history of UFO sightings, including mistaken sightings (the majority of cases are Venus, government planes, and the like), hoaxes, and the small residue of sightings that remain truly unexplained. Interestingly, this is a global phenomenon. For example, the 90s saw a rash of well-documented sightings in Mexico, including in Mexico city, sometimes in broad daylight. This chapter also touches on government cover-ups of their research into the UFO phenomenon. This often because the people involved in the sightings were pilots whose activities had to do with national security, but of course the cover-ups give the public the impression that the government knows far more about aliens than they are telling.
6. Mysteries, Myths, Mayhem, and Money deals mostly with people who tried to capitalize on the UFO craze. Some of these people are true believers, others are hucksters, and many are both. But even the true believers have to use tortured logic in order to put forth their theories. This chapter discusses in detail Roswell, crop circles, and Erich von Daniken (a major proponent of “ancient astronaut theory”), among others. Interestingly, there was also a major UFO craze in the USSR, near weapons testing sites. Not surprisingly for a people who have been lied to about everything else, the Russian true believers are only able to think conspiratorially and impossible to convince otherwise.
7. Abducted — Close Encounters of the Fourth Kind is a really interesting chapter. Bates has just spent more than half the book showing that the extraterrestrial hypothesis, at least as it is usually understood, cannot be true for multiple reasons. But now, he turns his attention to the many people who have had alien abduction experiences. And instead of dismissing them as hoaxers (dealt with in the last chapter) or gaslighting them, he believes them. And he has a great deal of compassion for them. This is why I think so highly of Bates. This topic deserves more than a bullet point, so now I’m going to stop the synopsis and discuss in a little more depth.

A “Typical” Alien Abduction Story

According to Bates, drawing on the work of other researchers, here are the elements of “Classic Abduction Syndrome [CAS]”: the abductee is captured, often at night, and often while being seemingly paralyzed. Once on the ship, they are typically undressed and subjected to some kind of invasive and humiliating “medical” examination. Often, this escalates to sexual abuse of various kinds. Then, the aliens “teach” the abductee. This involves being told that they have been chosen for a special mission. Predictions are made about the future of earth or of humanity. The aliens are trying, and they want the abductee’s help, to raise humanity’s consciousness or to save humanity. Often, they say they are engaged in a breeding program, creating human/alien hybrids. Sometimes this is explained as a way for humanity to survive when the earth is destroyed. Abductees may be given a tour of the ship or of other locations, and they may meet a divine being or an entity claiming to be Jesus, the pope (!), or a dead relative. After the abductee is returned to his or her surroundings, they often don’t immediately remember their abduction experience. They may experience “lost time,” and recall the experience only later (sometimes under hypnosis, which raises other issues).

Abductees experience lasting physical and mental aftereffects of their experience, whatever its nature may have been. They have PTSD-like symptoms. They have may bruises, scars, or puncture marks on their body, though these are never of an obvious enough nature to prove their story. They may experience new chronic health problems, commonly with their reproductive system, even including uterine or breast cancer.

On the spiritual side, many abductees come out of the experience with a new openness to the occult and to New Age beliefs. Others, though they initially feel understandable anger and fear towards the aliens, after multiple abductions come to a passive state of appearing to love and be fascinated with their tormentors, almost like Stokholm Syndrome.

Assuming that all these people are not just making up these bizarre and traumatic experiences, it is clear that they have come into contact with entities that do not wish them well.

On their own testimony, the “aliens” can be shown to be unreliable. For example, they tell abductee they are torturing them “for your own good.” They say they are wise and want to help human beings evolve to the next level, yet they subject their human subjects to frightening and degrading sexual practices. Either these beings don’t understand humans very well, or they are traumatizing them on purpose to “break” them. The aliens also seem eager to explain exactly where they are from. In past decades, they would claim to be from Mars or Venus. Now that we know more about those planets, they tend to name a star or star system that is outside of our galaxy.

Aliens tend to appear to humans in whatever form is culturally expected at the time.

Over the decades, we have allegedly been visited by long-haired Space Brothers, stacked Space-Babes, black-eyed and large-headed dwarfs, bipedal reptiles, praying mantis-type creatures, and … well … the list goes on and on. But, they all seem perfectly comfortable with Earth’s gravity, temperature, oxygen levels, etc. Doesn’t that strike you as a bit odd?

Nick Redfern, UFO researcher, quoted in ibid, p. 321

So, we have powerful, apparently deceptive entities, which kidnap and traumatize people, and then unfailingly give them a New Age message to take back to earth, often going out of their way to say that the Bible has “gotten it wrong.” Furthermore, apart from claiming to be from space, these “alien” abduction experiences have a lot in common with abduction stories from past ages where the perpetrators were fairies, demons, or other paranormal entities. It is starting to look as if we are hearing the same song, but a different verse. And in fact, Bates suggests that these “aliens” are probably demonic, or fallen angelic, entities. They are, in short, the “elohim” described by Heiser and identified as “the gods” by Cahn.

Jesus Really Is the Answer

Two UFO researchers, Joe Jordan and Wes Clark, noticed that out of all the abduction cases they had heard of, very few were Christians. They put out a call for anyone who was a Christian and had an abduction experience to contact them. Confusingly, they were contacted by people who said things like “I’m a Christian and I was abducted and saw Jesus on the spaceship.” With further research, they found that while people who identified as Christian but did not “walk the walk,” as the researchers put it, were just as likely to experience abduction and subsequent New Age brainwashing by the “aliens.” However, “walk the walk” Christians had a different experience:

Clark said that many of the respondents claimed to be Christians who told of their own abduction experiences. He felt that they were happy to have someone to talk to; they usually felt uncomfortable talking about their experiences because most UFO investigators had New Age inclinations and ideas that opposed their own beliefs. In addition, the Christian church is not equipped to deal with such reports because the UFO phenomenon has been largely misunderstood and dismissed by organized religions. Clark comments:

“As the number of cases mounted, the data showed that in every instance where the victim knew to invoke the name of Jesus Christ, the event stopped. Period. The evidence was becoming increasingly difficult to ignore.”

ibid, p. 267