If you look more closely at the belief in UFOs and alien abductions, something curious begins to emerge: it all starts to look a bit more like a religion than simply belief in something which isn't generally accepted. Perhaps the fact that there are self-professed UFO religions in America isn't a coincidence - perhaps these beliefs predispose people to forming a religion around them?

According to an article from the February 2005 issue of Magonia:

Though many ufologists profess that UFO experiences are generated by mortal extraterrestrials flying secular machines, their language and emotions suggest otherwise. If their dreams came true and the saucers landed on the White House lawn, they would become yet more parts of the mundane world. Ufologists would smirk for a while and sneer at sceptics, but it would only be a few years, possibly only months, before they started arguing that explaining this or that wondrous experience in terms of the 6.15 flying saucer flight to Zeta Reticuli was to reduce it to the prosaic and human. The ETs would have been demystified.

It is not the solution which attracts but the mystery, and arguments about the rrality of UFOs and psychical phenomena look as though they are coded God-talk. It’s not about ETs and ectoplasm but about the existence of a sacred realm over and above what is seen as the world of the prosaic which crashes into our world transforming lives.

Ufology and related topics therefore have many of the properties of religions based on immediate personal experience, where all criticism is heresy, which devalues the meaning of the experience and denies the existence of an extramundane realm.

Peter Rogerson then proceeds to describe the skeptical critiques of UFO beliefs as similarly “religious.” Why? Because it embodies a “Protestant ethic” of hard work and reason. The fact that UFO believers speak with religious language and treat the objects of their attention in a religious manner is a good reason to regard their beliefs as religious in nature. After all, several explicit UFO religions have been founded, so it’s not hard to view the line between those who profess a religion around UFO beliefs and those who do not as not very strong.

Merely promoting hard work and skepticism, though, doesn’t establish much of a connection to Protestant traditions. It would be fair to argue that the Protestant work ethic has had an important impact on American culture generally and this, in turn, has influenced American skepticism — calling American skepticism in UFOs religious means taking the comparison a large step further and it’s not one which Rogerson justifies.

Rogerson is wrong, for example, to suggest that skepticism in the paranormal is “rather new” and everything he describes as “religious” in modern skepticism might equally be applied to science. His claims make no room for skeptical movements in other countries and his failure to take them into account undermines his case. Ultimately, he appears to be trying to force a strict religious dichotomy between skeptics of UFO and true believers in UFOs, perhaps in an attempt to present the debate as a continuation of other religious trends in American history.

 

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