Interview with Religious Studies academic states right out of the box that many UFO experiencers learn from it that a bad end of the world is coming lol

Gee, where did they get that idea?

The possible answers to that are not seriously addressed in this more-ways-than-one frustrating podcast with Ross Douthat of The New York Times.

 

... Douthat: When people report having a telepathic connection, you said they get information from, or they feel like they’ve gotten information from, these experiences. What kind of information do they get? What does that mean when people report this?

Pasulka: A lot of the people would report the information as something that had to do with the future. They would have ideas of basically an apocalypse, a bad scenario for the future.

The people who I talked to at this conference were pretty convinced that we were going to face some type of cataclysm. So I talked to them a little bit about how people have thought that for about 2,000 years. [Chuckles.] ...

Pasulka: It appears to be a perennial thing. So there appears to be something that interfaces with humans and has been identified in the various traditional religions.

Douthat: Identified as what?

Pasulka: Well, I’m not going to name it, because in some traditional religions it’s named in different ways. So it could be bodhisattvas, angels, demons — things like that. ...

 

The whole thing is here in "What if the Government Believes in U.F.O.s More Than You Do?"

If you are looking for a religion scholar to say that the UFO cult is a human creation just like every other religion, you won't find that from Diana Walsh Pasulka, a practicing Catholic who wants to argue for the legitimacy of mystery and of people's experience of that mystery, even if they work for a government which cannot be trusted on UFOs.

It is telling that a member of a hierarchical religion which is imbued with deference to authority finds the belief in UFOs among government employees somehow more compelling than that belief among private individuals:

... they have various titles. They have quote-unquote “day jobs” as, say, a mission controller at Cape Canaveral, things like that. And almost all of them called it this: They said, “my hobby job.” They would call it their hobby.           

Elites also run in herds.  

It's not called quackery for nothing, but now it's a $13 billion business in the United States

 Brown writes that, before he became the founder of chiropractic, Daniel David Palmer was a Spiritualist and practitioner of animal magnetism. Palmer subscribed to eclectic spiritual ideas based on the unity of God and nature and the idea that humans can restore themselves to a state of harmony without depending on divine intervention.

Palmer claimed to have received communication from a deceased physician who taught him the principles of chiropractic—a term he invented in 1896, combining the Greek words cheir and praktos to mean “done by hand.”

Palmer considered introducing Chiropractic as a religion in its own right but ultimately settled on describing it as an amalgamation of Christian Science and modern medicine. He wrote that it was based on adjusting the body to permit the free flow of “Innate Intelligence,” or just “Innate,” which he explained as “a segment of that Intelligence which fills the universe” (i.e. God) found in each individual.

More. 

How could ancient peoples be so gullible as to believe preposterous myths?

Because they were people just like us.

Of all the offspring of Time, Error is the most ancient.

-- Charles Mackay

  

 

 

Men only recover their senses slowly, one by one

Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one.

-- Charles Mackay, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, 1841

Truth comes like an intruder, and meets the intruder's welcome

Of all the offspring of Time, Error is the most ancient, and is so old and familiar an acquaintance, that Truth, when discovered, comes upon most of us like an intruder, and meets the intruder's welcome. We all pay an involuntary homage to antiquity. ... To the great majority of mortal eyes, Time sanctifies everything that he does not destroy. 

-- Charles Mackay, Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions, Volume 1 (London: 1841), p. 314. 

Same sex marriage: yet another extraordinary popular delusion and example of the madness of crowds

herd behavior

Erick Erickson, here:

"History is riddled with episodes of mass hysteria. Sometimes those episodes of mass hysteria lead to evil. Sometimes they lead to merely bizarre stories. But society, on occasion, has fits of hysteria and insanity burning like wildfire through it. The wildfire eventually burns out, but it often leaves destruction in its wake.

"The United States of America and much of the West are currently in a fit of hysteria. A wildfire is burning through it. Up is down. Down is up. Good is evil. Evil is good. Wrong is right, and right is wrong. Boys can suddenly be girls. Sex and gender are suddenly different things. And Justice Anthony Kennedy believes that because someone may look at the horizon and find loneliness, the Constitution guarantees him the right to marry another man.

"Leave aside the fact that any judge who can redefine a multi-thousand-year-old institution on a whim has more power than our Founders would want. Our society is going through a round of hysteria."

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"Therefore God sends upon them a strong delusion, to make them believe what is false . . .."

-- 2 Thessalonians 2:11