“UFO religions are the fastest growing religion!” the man claimed with an air of authority and half-surprise at his own pronouncement. The host matched his expression. The implications had not yet been spelled out, but it suggested a competitor for Christianity’s dominance in the USA if not the world and perhaps an ushering-in of the promised End Times apostasy. Tell me more about this boasting Goliath we must contend with!

…Hmm…

So recently, I was watching a Christian YouTube video that was quite adamant that aliens cannot exist in a Biblical Christian worldview and they followed the usual Satanic Panic era tactic of conflating the question of the possibility of extraterrestrial life with the separate question of whether some people believe the aliens are already here.

Those aren’t the same question. But people who think aliens are demons in disguise think that since by their view real biological aliens are impossible, anything claiming to be an alien must be a fallen angel or demon trying to lead people astray.

This has been a favored tactic ever since 1954 when faith healing evangelist and revivalist W.V. Grant was first invited by contactee Truman Betherum to the very first annual Giant Rock Spacecraft Convention (hosted by contacted George Van Tassel). Like many flying saucer conventions, especially in those days, attendees included people searching for answers to the riddle of the flying saucers and, inevitably, people who claimed to have conclusive answers to that Some like George Adamski and Truman Betherum claimed to have had contact and communications with real biological aliens. Some like George Van Tassel claimed telepathic contact with space intelligences through channeling (a practice the Bible forbids). Messages from these allegedly alien contacts could either be affirming of Christianity, espouse a New Age philosophy like Theosophy, or simply encourage us to love one another and warn us against the dangers of nuclear bombs. Grant lumped everyone together with the New Age elements and wrote a booklet called Men in the Flying Saucers Identified (1954) which not only first stated that aliens must be demons but voiced the first full-throated expression of the Demonic Eschatological Hypothesis of UFO: the idea that fallen angels will perpetrate a false flag alien event that will unify the world and usher in the Antichrist. Project Blue Beam before the idea had a name.

Why? Well, because people generally come down to one of two opinions when it comes to the authorship of New Age teachings: the devil or a con man (or woman). If you grew up in a Christian tradition that over-empasizes the Devil (the kind that speaks of spiritual warfare and discernment ministries as if there were a demon behind every bush but doesn’t seem to factor in humanity’s capacity for evil and deception except as pawns, puppets and victims of demonic activity), you basically ask, “Why not both?”

It’s a fair question. False dichotomies are a real thing. But so is humanity’s capacity for sin when the devil isn’t whispering in his ear. (Because, No, you don’t have an angel on one shoulder and the devil on the other.) Billy Sunday used to remark that there have always been people the Devil could catch with a clean hook. For example, contactee George Adamski wrote a Theosophical book and a science fiction book before he allegedly had an encounter with the angelic man from Venus named Orthon. And critics have rightly noted that those two earlier books are pretty much identical to the alleged flying saucer ride Adamski took and the teachings he was supposedly given by Orthon. Furthermore, when his photographs – yes, photographs! With amazing detail – were examined, they were found to be fakes. In fact, the trio of round landing gear on the “scout craft” were found to be light bulbs and the rest of the “saucer” the shade of a chicken warmer lamp! Adamski was a con man who peddled his own Theosophical teachings as the teachings of aliens for gain and fame. The Devil might have been taking notes, but there’s no indication the Devil made Adamski do what he did. Or even suggested it.

Amid the Satanic Panic, the Raelians became a favored talking point of the Devil Drives a Flying Saucer crowd. The Raelians are a UFO cult of personality founded by Rael, aka Claude Vorilhon. They believe we were made by aliens who were made by other aliens called Elohim; Adam and Eve were created in a laboratory called the Garden of Eden after the aliens terraformed our planet. Not all Elohim were friendly apparently though because one group under Satan opposed genetic experiments on Earth and argued that all humans should be destroyed as a threat or abominations or whatever. Noah’s Ark was a spaceship that preserved DNA that was used to resurrect animals through cloning after the Great Flood, which was caused by tidal waves resulting from an Elohim nuclear missile strike. The Tower of Babel wasn’ta literal tower but a rocket biilt to reach the creators’ planet. Ancient Aliens nonsense delivered with zero proof but loads of imagination.

After this science fiction subversion of Genesis, Rael took a shot at the Resurrection, claiming that the Elohim aliens used cloning technology to facilitate Jesus Christ’s apparent to restore him to life. This is the basis of their beliefs in life after death. Their baptism is called the “transmission of the cellular plan” because they believe their genetic code can be uploaded to an alien vessel that visits Earth 4 times a year.

Rael claims to be the last of forty Elohim prophets, including Moses, Elijah, Ezekiel, Buddha, John the Baptist, Jesus, Muhammad, and Joseph Smith. He apparently doesn’t realize Jesus and John the Baptist lived at the same time. Similarly, Vorilhon claims that Buddhism, Mormonism, and the Abrahamic religions all originate from the Elohim, not accounting for their often contradictory messages and doctrines.

The Raelians have been tasked with building alien embassy for the Elohim’s return to Earth in 2035. Their attempts to accomplish this task have been embarrassingly futile. It is likely that no such embassy will ever be constructed.

While some suggest that these sophomoric sci-fi re-inventions of the Biblical narrative are demonic deceptions, the truth is the Devil would be ashamed at the poor imagination displayed. Especially since most if not all of it seems to stem from ideas sourced (in paraphrased full paragraphs from Ancient Aliens authors such as Brinsley Le Poer Trench, Robert Charroux, and Jean Sendy, the latter of whom Vorilhon met several times gor drinks and conversation in 1973-74 prior to his alleged alien encounter.

Maryse Péloquin researched the Raelian movement for a decade. Her book, Thief of Souls: Biography of a Liar (French: Raël, Voleur d’âmes : Biographie d’un menteur),  reveals that Rael’s dialogue from an alleged encounter with an extraterrestrial rather closely resembles George Adamski’s encounter with Orthon.

So rather than a demonic deception, it seems more likely that the whole Rael bit is a much more standard human deception. The Devil gets too much credit.

This doesn’t keep Christian alarmists from trying to  wax wild-eyed over the dangers of the “growing” Raelian personality cult. Since their birth, evangelical end times conference preachers and Satanic Panic lecturers have warned that the world might rally around such a UFO Cult especially if fallen angels perpetrate a false flag aluen event in fulfillment of Voron’s promised return of the Elohim. Their views of Genesis and the Resurrection are already science fiction subversions; connecting them to a Project Blue Beam style event to usher in the Antichrist is apparently the only way to go! Especially since the Raelians are growing at an exponential level!

Calm down.

The Satanic Panic is over, and as for the personality cult of Rae-Rae… They are somewhat less than advertised.

The funny thing about Raelian numbers is that they’re padded by a lot of “prospective” numbers of Raelians. For example, the Raelians claimed that their membership was 77,209 worldwide in 2010; however, actual members only accounted for 16,737 people. The remaining 60,292 members were “prospective,” meaning they had done nothing more than create a Rael.org account in order to download free literature.  Keep in mind who might wish to download Rael material. Yes, there might be those interested in the cult’s beliefs and thinking of joining. There are also likely skeptics, journalists, and religious apologists who have no interest in ever joining their transhumanist Ancient Aliens UFO cult.

But it gets worse. In 2017, Raelians counted their total membership at 148,727, consisting of 124,991 not actually Raelian “prospective” members and 23,736 actual members; however, their report included a telling breakdown of their active membership into active and in-active members. There were 18,111 active members and 5,625 inactive members. Inactive members were defined as former members who weren’t anti-Raelian and deceased members. In other words, people no one else would ever consider members. Why? Because they believe their consciousness is uploaded into an extraterrestrial Elohim computer and will be downloaded into new cloned bodies in the Resurrection, so those deceased members aren’t really gone from their perspective.

Why haven’t my fellow Christian researchers stumbled upon the fact that these statistics are inflated? Sadly, I must suggest simple confirmation bias. It doesn’t fit their narrative.

During the Satanic Panic, the “alarming rise of UFO cults” was exactly the sort of rhetoric they needed. The Raelians’ ostensibly growing population allowed Satanic Panic experts and End Times Prophecy conference preachers alike to stir up a sense of urgency and get the troops to fall in line behind their teachings more readily. There was no need to fact-check the Raelian statistics because they were useful. The fearmongering message required mountains rather than molehills.

Similarly, Gary Bates and other ostensible experts of Christian ufology trot out the idea that millions of Americans are having alien abduction experiences, which obviously they don’t believe are really happening and *must* be demonic in order to give the impression of a Grand Satanic conspiracy to replace God with aliens; however, we examined the studies from which these “millions of abductions” are drawn and found them to be both flawed and misleading. Grandly overinflated, in fact. I got my hands on the study on a shoestring budget; creation ministries and “discernment” ministries with much, much larger budgets didn’t bother to fact-check because you don’t look a gift horse in the mouth apparently.

Fortunately, there had been groups like RaelianLeaks who had a vested interest in warning people about the cult and they were able to gain access to the internal communications that revealed, as the title of this essay notes, that Rael’s followers weren’t a Goliath we would have to contend with; rather that intimidating silhouette was just a skinny kid in a puffy winter coat.

I had taken a long beak from writing here at ExoTheology.org, due to personal issues and a focus on research and writing elsewhere. This awoke me from my slumber. A year had passed and the same old bad arguments against the possibility of intelligent extraterrestrial life were still being peddled as if I’d never said anything. And that’s concerning because the reasons the Church is called to be the ground and pillar of truth, yet so many Christian ministries follow the lead of Gary Bates in saying aliens can’t possibly exist and that they’re demonic.

I brought a few objections up to the video on Creation Today’s social media and was told that a public forum wasn’t the best place to have a discussion on extraterrestrial life. I thought this was weird, since the video is public and comments were enabled. The moderators gave me Eric Hovind’s email address and suggested that I send him him thoughts. Below is the email I sent.

“Eric Hovind,

Hello there.

I hope this finds you well. I sent a copy of this to your Facebook Messenger before I realized I’d been given an email. I apologize for filling that up needlessly. 

My name is Tony Breeden, a fellow Young Earth Creation apologist, an Appalachian Gospel preacher, a science fiction author, a Gen-X hose water survivor (heh heh), and a Fortean researcher. Since 2016, I have written on the subject of exotheology at a website appropriately though predictably named ExoTheology.org. Exotheology is the basically a theological discussion of the impact that the discovery of extraterrestrial life might have on our doctrine and our understanding of the Bible. We’ve been discussing exotheology from a Christian perspective since the Middle Ages, though not everyone is aware of that.

As I’m sure you are aware, last month’s episode of Creation Today caught my attention in which you hosted John Harris of Living Waters Europe to discuss the possibility of intelligent extraterrestrial life.

While it should be obvious, I’m not writing to you as an enemy but rather a fellow laborer. We’re both not only Christians but Young Earth Creationists. We have much common ground.

I’m NOT writing you to convince you aliens exist. I’m cheerfully skeptical on that possibility. Though there are certainly Scriptures we might point to retroactively as suggesting the possibility of intelligent ET life, the Bible is silent on this subject.

I’m NOT writing you to discuss the possibility of alien life in general. Creationists for the most part have wisely softened their position on this wise as it has little Christological significance. Which is why Harris spent much of his discussion of the possibility of ET bacteria on the backfoot. While I feel he was too bold in his presentation of arguments against that possibility, I appreciate his willingness to concede that he cannot be dogmatic on the issue for there is no clear Biblical support for his position. The question of non-sapient alien life isn’t really a threat to anyone’s doctrine. Said aliens would be subject to this fallen world in much the same way animals and plants and microbes are on this planet. They could even be as intelligent and social as bees or dolphins and still not qualify as sapient. Oh, I’m sure evolutionists would hail it as a victory for their theory, but that’s what they do with every new discovery anyway. Biblicists would simply be forced to recognize that their understanding of the specialness of Earth had nothing to do with the presence of life here, but rather that God created beings in His own image here. Just as we had to adjust our view of the specialness of Earth when geocentrism was disproven.

I’m NOT writing you regarding UFOs or the alien abduction phenomenon. I’m on record stating that whether life exists out there or whether life has already visited this planet are two very different questions. Exotheology should not be conflate with ufology.

I’m writing you in the hopes that I can persuade you to simply remain open on the possibility of intelligent extraterrestrial life.

I’ve already stated my motives in doing so in a Facebook message exchange with Creation Today; however just to be clear. This is why I’m writing you today: I am trying to prevent Young Earth Creation authorities from committing the Galileo Error. 

In his day, well-meaning Christians found proof texts for geocentrism and eventually viewed as heresy or dangerous doctrine any deviation from the idea that the universe revolves around the planet of God’s focus. And they were wrong. The fallout from saying “Thus saith the Lord” where God was silent is still used against Christianity to this day and, worse, is still a stumbling block to the faith for many. I strongly believe that a knee-jerk rejection of the idea of alien life somewhere in the universe based on a poor grasp of or outright rejection of historical exotheology will only serve to increase the effectiveness of the Satanic deception surrounding belief in ETs. 

Especially if influential creationists organizations continue to insist on creating a false dichotomy between Biblical Christianity and the possibility of alien life. The Galileo Debacle amply demonstrates that telling folks that the Bible says what it has almost nothing to say about at all places a potential stumbling block to the Gospel if the thing we deny turns out to be true after all!

With this preamble of intentions out of the way, let me address the matters on which I felt compelled to write to you.

We can dispense with the argument against the probability of extraterrestrial life by natural means because I agree with you that if aliens exist, God made them as He made all things. I agree that this universe is fallen in Adam, made in God’s image, and that the universe as a result is in the bondage of decay.

I’ve watched the video a few times now and I believe I have identified the main point of our disagreement, though there are several errors besides. Near the end of the 42-minute mark of your video, Harris shows a slide with several Scriptures. A subtle and common conflation of terms is inserted into his argument. It is the basis for his embrace of atheist Paul Davies’ claim that extraterrestrial life poses a challenge to Christianity. Davies asks whether Jesus is the Savior of only Earth or the entire cosmos? If sentient alien life exists, he wonders whether each alien world would need its own Savior?

 This is just a rephrasing of the question of whether Jesus would have to be crucified on multiple alien worlds?

Harris begins by correctly noting that the effects of the Fall of Adam extend to the entire cosmos in the form of death, corruption and decay. In a word, entropy. So his first objection to alien life is an appeal to fairness. A sapient creature suffers and dies through no fault of its own, their civilization doomed when the universe burns up in fervent heat to make way for the creation of a new cosmos. Or as Harris put is: “And eventually everything will be burnt up. It doesn’t sound like a happy ending. When God creates a new heaven and a new earth, so we know that their fate will be disastrous. It will be the end. Oh, almost certainly death.”

He seems not to be aware that even plants feel pain, that all animals would suffer this fate, even animals as intelligent and self-aware as dolphins, gorillas and elephants. Which tells us this isn’t really his chief concern. Yet since he brings it up, let’s answer it. An unfallen sapient alien would not condemn God for his fate. As Job said, “The good Lord gives and the good Lord takes away.” An unfallen race would thank their Creator for the gift of life not condemn Him for His righteous judgment on His fallen image-bearer. When a king falls, his kingdom suffers. They would know as Harris should that the fault was Adam’s and God’s judgment is perfect. For it is perfect. Now you may ask, how would they know the cosmos is fallen in Adam, and the very question assumes God would not reveal His will with anyone but mankind. He spoke to man in time’s past through prophets, dreams, miracles, and special revelation; God is no prevented from doing so elsewhere.

Then comes the conflation of terms.

Harris presents a common argument against the possibility of extraterrestrial life: the idea that since Christ died once for all, there is no means of salvation for them, therefore, given a just God, there can’t be aliens. God *is* just, but that doesn’t require Him to extend the grace of salvation to anyone deserving of His judgment. God chose not to extend a means of redemption to the angels who left their first estate, but He is no less just for the omission.

I’ve danced around it long enough; Harris’ conflation of terms is in the way he uses “fallen.” Everything in the universe does suffer the effects of the fall, but not entirely equally. Or do we preach the Gospel to rocks, dogs and stars? We don’t worry about the spiritual redemption of canine souls because while they suffer the universal effects of the Fall (death, decay, corruption, suffering, etc.), they do not suffer what I term the sanguine effects of he Fall. Only those of the bloodline of Adam require spiritual salvation through the shedding of blood, which is exactly why we required a kinsman-redeemer.

But what of aliens? The argument is that they would not be of Adam’s bloodline, so no means of salvation would be available to them, as Christ died once for all. To be fair, that also means they wouldn’t need it unless it were imputed to them. If a spiritually fallen nature were imputed to them apart from Adam’s bloodline, salvation by grace through faith in the Last Adam could also be imputed to them. And as discussed, the means could be revealed to them as God has always revealed things without the need for Christ to incarnate, die and resurrect on multiple worlds. If they spiritually fell on their own, apart from Adam’s fall, that is between them and God.

See, the assumption is that all aliens are fallen and in need of salvation. As CS Lewis noted, the rub is that “Perhaps of all races we only fell. Perhaps Man is the only lost sheep; the one, therefore, whom the Shepherd came to seek.” And as he pointed out, the vast distances of space could be God’s measures of quarantine for their safety, not ours.

The polygamy error is nothing more than a rhetorical trick. Everyone who is saved becomes part of the spiritual Bride (singular). Jews and Gentiles did not constitute two separate Brides. We Gentiles were grafted in. Likewise, neither Scripture nor logic dictates that a redeemed member of extraterrestrial species would require another Bride. That’s just an anthropocentric bias seeping through. If anything, they might be part of the “other sheep” Jesus said He must go to, but we’re all part of the same flock if they exist at all. As CS Lewis wrote in Religion and Rocketry, “Our loyalty is due not to our species but to God. Those who are, or can become, His sons, are our real brothers even if they have shells or tusks. It is spiritual, not biological, kinship that counts.”

It’s true that the Bible has an anthropocentric focus. It also focuses on one particular part of the world. That didn’t exclude the rest of the world from existing. If I write a book about the Civil War, we shouldn’t be surprised if Japan isn’t mentioned even once. Despite the fact that Union forces engaged the Japanese during Japan’s Boshin War during the American Civil War [The U.S. Navy’s USS Wyoming was the main Union ship at the Shimonoseki Strait, engaging the Chōshū clan’s forces on July 16, 1863, in the Battle of Shimonoseki Straits], the focus of any book on the Civil War is North America. As stated, When a king falls, his kingdom suffers. Of necessity, the focus of God’s redemptive work would be on where it started and needed to end. If you’re a heart surgeon, you don’t necessarily worry about the patient’s ingrown toenail. And lest we forget, the focus is mostly on us because we need redemption. We’re broken. He left the 99 to seek out one lost sheep.

I have made it very clear in my writings that I think the question of whether alien life exists out there somewhere (exotheology) and whether it has already visited us (ufology) are and ought to be very different questions; however, ever since 1954 Christians from the holiness traditions (Pentecostal, charismatic, fundamentalist, Adventist, and to a large degree evangelicals borrowing on those traditions) have trotted out the UFO cults and the experiencer phenomenon to poison the well and quite literally demonize the subject of the possibility of extraterrestrial life. Ironically, the sources of this conflation tend to identify themselves as discernment ministries.

UFO religions are NOT the fastest growing religion. That’s what old Satanic Panic literature said, of course, but statistical data does not bear this out. The Mormons, cited in support of this claim, aren’t even a UFO religion. Their views on UFOs are as varied as that of Christianity, ranging from aliens, to aliens driving God’s chariots, demons, natural phenomena, secret government aircraft, etc. Their views are varied because, like Christianity, UFOs are not an intrinsic part of the Mormon faith. 

Raelians are an even more ridiculous example because their numbers have always been inflated with “prospective” members (i.e., people who created an account on their website to download free literature, representing perhaps interest but not the investment of actual membership) and even their much smaller actual membership includes dead Raelians whom they believe will be Resurrected and ex-Raelians who aren’t antiRaelian (for much the same reason). As of November 8, 2025, the world population is an estimated 8.256 billion people; therefore, 100,000 Raelians would represent approximately 0.0012% of the total world population. But given that they count prospective, dead and former members so long as they don’t also become anti-Raelian, they actually number around 20,000 members at present and hardly represent the Antichrist Level Threat they’re made out to be. They’re a cult. A decidedly small cult.

Inevitably, the abductee experiencer phenomenon and the publicized portions of it with anti-Biblical messaging was noted. Historically, some claim these messages are from space intelligences (even if the message happens to be identical to what they believed prior to their alleged theophanies). Research reveals theophanies are a rare feature of abduction reports. Only 6 of 300 reports in a study by Thomas Bullard volunteered information pertaining to this feature – so perhaps 2% of experiencers come back with message from the stars, far less than what is implied in the exaggerated claim that they “usually” come back with such messages. [source: Bullard, Thomas E. “The Rarer Abduction Episodes.” In: Pritchard, Andrea & Pritchard, David E. & Mack, John E. & Kasey, Pam & Yapp, Claudia. Alien Discussions: Proceedings of the Abduction Study Conference. Cambridge: North Cambridge Press. pp. 72–74].

Just because theophanies were prominently featured in Satanic Panic UFO literature doesn’t make them common. Satanic Panic literature then (and now if we count Gary Bates’ Alien Intrusion) tend to make mountains out of molehills to alarm people into agreement with their claims. I watched an entire generation walk out the church doors due to fundamentalist and Satanic Panic nonsense I’ve no desire to see it revived.

Of course, there’s the issue of Joe Jordan and CE4 Research’s claim that alien abductions stop in the name of Jesus, therefore they must be demonic. Honestly, most alien abduction experiences are revealed through hypnosis which is just as likely to implant false memories as reveal hidden ones if done incorrectly. Another big section of such experiences are hypnogogic illusions which accompany sleep paralysis. We should also point out that, despite the charismatic bias inherent in his work, not everything that responds to the name of Christ is a demon. I mean, ALL things are subject to the power of Christ so even if it were a hypnogogic illusion, a bad dream or whatever and wasn’t demonic, the name of Christ would be no less effective. In other words, the fact that the name of Christ stopped something is still a poor litmus test for whether a thing is demonic. No one should be making the claim that the name of Christ *only* works on demons, which is the implication here.

But I talked to Joe Jordan and asked him a few pointed questions. He admitted that it doesn’t always work. When pressed on his claim that talk-the-talk Christians might experience alien abductions but walk-the-walk Christians never were, he admitted to circular logic. By definition, those who weren’t abducted were the walk-the-walk Christians because walk-the-walk Christians could not be abducted. Meanwhile I discovered studies which indicated that mere will power was sufficient to end an alien abduction experience in a lot of cases. Gary Bates has popularized CE4 Research’s claims in his Alien Intrusion book and the documentary by the same name, but the claim falls apart under scrutiny. Jordan is just too honest when cross-examined to sustain the fulcrum of Gary Bates’ sensational argument.

I also note that Harris conflated the terms supernatural and extradimensional. There is no evidence that if we confirm the existence of another dimension that it is analogous to a spiritual plane where angels and demons reside, though I can see where this is temptation to Christians looking for pat answers (we all do it), especially those of the charismatic persuasion. That could backfire on him someday – and anyone who repeats that assumption.

Which again underscores my point that we ought not be dogmatic where the Bible is silent. I believe wisdom is found in a Wait and See approach.

I thank you for your time.

Regards,

Tony Breeden

ExoTheology.org”

So how did Eric Hovind respond? Did he carefully explain why he thought I was wrong? Did he engage the topics with the same attention to detail as I did?

Well, no. He was dismissive and gave the impression that he’s rather important and didn’t have time for things like defending the fallacies he’s promoting as truth. I’ll dissect his response at a later date but the exchange underscored a reality. Those who hold to the idea that aliens are demonic do so dogmatically, and they do so even when you point out the logical fallicies their position is built upon.

Why?

Well, I suspect there are a variety of reasons. An unwillingness to go against the flow, eve if its wrong. A need for pat answers built on comfortable dichotomies with clear choices. Out of respect and admiration for Christian leaders who are sound in all other areas save one. A reliance on expertism from others who, like Gary Bates, claim to have given the matter much study, even if they’ve only themselves regurgitated Satanic Panic arguments uncritically. Some conflate the question of extraterrestrial life with ufology (and by this I don’t mean the study of the phenomenon so much as the UFO cults). Im sure there are other reasons.

The good news is that more Christians reject the dogmatic position that extraterrestrial life cannot possibly exist than accept this needless dogma. Even so, some Christianis hold the ministries and organizations that peddle these logical fallacies as authorities, not realized they’ve become iron mixed with clay, so we are left with an uncomfortable realization:

The fight is not over. We let the conversation fade for a year unchallenged. We shall not do so again. For all of the reasons I wrote to Hovind’s stone ears.

We might be a lone voice crying in the wilderness or be, as Gary Bates derisively suggested, a “lone wolf.” But we are not wrong because truth is not built on logical fallacies, and the consequences of letting the world think their dogmatic denials are the official Christian position if aliens were ever confirmed to exist would be catastrophic.

Until we reach The Last Door,

Tony Breeden

.

I don’t know if you’ve ever really thought about it, but Superman isn’t a super man; he’s an alien who looks very much like an Earth man. If he existed in the real world, there would be consequences to his very existence.

In Superman v Batman: Dawn of Justice, Neil Degrasse Tyson (as himself) comments on the implications of Superman’s existence:

“We’re talking about a being whose very existence challenges our own sense of priority in the Universe. When you go back to Copernicus where he restored the Sun in the center of the known universe, displacing Earth, and you get to Darwinian evolution and you find out we’re not special on this Earth; we’re just one among other lifeforms. And now we learn that we’re not even special in the entire Universe — because there is Superman. There he is, an alien among us. We’re not alone.”

This is the general belief some folks have of the implications of the discovery of intelligent alien life. It’s why Christian apologists barricade themselves behind arguments that exclude the very possibility of the concept. It’s why atheists gleefully trumpet the discovery of each Earth-like exoplanet that might even hold the hint of alien life.

It’s not even a new belief. I’ll be honest: It absolutely floors me that we are still arguing about this after Christian science fiction authors have addressed it ad nauseam. I might be biased, since I happen to be a Christian who writes sci-fi, but I have to ask why we ignore the conclusions of Christian speculative fiction authors on these subjects. After all, we and those who came before us have put a lot of thought about the theological implications of aliens and such in our worldbuilding.

For example, CS Lewis such addressed this issue a ridiculously long time ago. In his day, there were two equally opposite objections to Christianity based on whether or not we find life in space:

“If we discover other bodies, they must be habitable or uninhabitable: and the odd thing is that both these hypotheses are used as grounds for rejecting Christianity. If the universe is teeming with life, this, we are told, reduces to absurdity the Christian claim—or what is thought to be the Christian claim—that man is unique, and the Christian doctrine that to this one planet God came down and was incarnate for us men and our salvation. If, on the other hand, the earth is really unique, then that proves that life is only an accidental byproduct in the universe, and so again disproves our religion. Really, we are hard to please¹.”

If you believe in aliens, that’s OK because the Bible is silent on that question and we are free to speculate.

Of course, most of my fellow creationists take refuge in the latter scenario, supposing that our specialness is safeguarded by an absence of alien life. Similarly, evolutionists seem to have placed their hope in vindication form the discovery of life on other worlds. This dichotomy is as unnecessary as it is trivial; neither result would necessarily invalidate one view or the other, despite the partisan spin apologists for both sides have put on this issue.

For example, Lewis pointed out that evolutionists would trumpet a universe in which we are the sole inhabitants as evidence that the universe is hostile to life so we are an grand accident after all. Or they may take take a novel tack being presented by Dr. Aditya Chopra from the Australian National University Research School of Earth Sciences and Charley Lineweaver from the ANU Planetary Science Institute: aliens once existed but we can’t find them now because they’ve all gone extinct! [Wow. I mean… just wow.] Of course, Christians would say that it speaks more to the specialness of Earth, and that the Bible is silent on extraterrestrial life because it doesn’t exist.

On the flip side, if we found alien life, evolutionists would make statements similar to Tyson’s, and claim that it somehow disproves the Bible; whereas Christians would note that the Bible is, in fact, silent on the question, which left the whole possibility very much open. Our specialness would be relegated not to our physical position in the universe, nor to the presence of life on Earth, but in the fact that God chose to create us in His image and then die for us, though we were unworthy of such an honor! 

As disappointing as it must be for those who suppose that the discovery of extraterrestrial life would be the death-knell of Christianity, scientists have concluded that the impact on religion would be minimal; most folks affirm that their faith would remain very much intact after first contact. 

As Lewis noted in an essay entitled “Religion and Rocketry”:

“When the popular hubbub has subsided and the novelty has been chewed over by real theologians, real scientists and real philosophers, both sides find themselves pretty much where they were before².”

Until we reach The Last Door,
Tony Breeden

Notes:

1. C. S. Lewis, “Dogma and the Universe.” God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics. Ballantine Books (1990), 14.
2. C. S. Lewis. “Religion and Rocketry.” The World’s Last Night: And Other Essays. Mariner Books (2002), 84.

The Flatwoods Monster incident of September 12, 1952 was the end of a long day in which the United States military fought against flying saucers from another world, successfully knocking a couple down and forcing the aliens to mount a rescue mission. As someone who writes science fiction, I say, “Excelsior! When does it hit the big screen!” As a Fortean researcher, I say, “Wait, what? How did you come to that conclusion?”

I need more facts to convince me of this particular hypothesis. One of the lessons of Star Trek: The Next Generation is “Trust Data. Be suspicious of Lore.” And of course those of you who are familiar with my work know that I constantly remind people that, while an assertion not based on facts or based on poor data amounts to little more than opinion or informed speculation, even the best assemblage of facts do not interpret themselves. So after we examine the trustworthiness of the facts, we have to examine whether one’s conclusions flow naturally and logically from those facts or whether there are better explanations. In Fortean fields, our interpretation of the facts can often result in several solid competing explanations which are largely accepted or rejected according to our presuppositions. And that’s fine. In the case of Frank Feschino Jr’s proposed scenario, I have some rather heavy doubts.

Frank Feschino’s Crop Circles

But that is a subject for another time, for while investigating Feschino’s 1952 Flying Saucer Air War claims, I ran across a podcast which stated that his initial interest in the UFO phenomenon originated in a visit to his cousin’s farm in Frametown, WV near James Knob (about 17 miles from Flatwoods) in 1991, where crop circles were found on the property.

It was during his investigation of these crop circles that someone told him about the Flatwoods Monster, which he says began his investigation into the subject. Feschino lived in Connecticut at the time and was able to take his crop circle photographs to a MUFON Connecticut meeting and afterward show the photographs to British crop circle researcher Colin Andrews, who had moved to Connecticut to be near his love at that time. Feschino says he discussed the photos with Andrews for a couple hours.

It may interest you to know that I’m very open-minded about the question of crop circles. Initially, I accepted the official explanation that two men armed only with flat boards, ropes and a will-to-prank named Dave Chorley and Doug Bower in 1991 claimed responsibility for the UK crop circles that excited the public imagination, and the work was carried on afterward by copycats. Further investigation made it clear that the phenomenon researched by “cereologists” predated Doug and Dave and that their story was unlikely for many, many reasons, not the least of which was an inability to recreate the circles they claimed they were responsible for. It’s weird how deeper investigation caused me to reject the official skeptical explanations for both crop circles and the Mothman and to become more open-minded on the subject.

As to what crop circles are, I’m honest to admit that I need more data. In the case of Frank Feschino Jr’s “crop circles,” I know exactly what they are.

After a bit of fruitless research online and even a query to MUFON Connecticut, I finally laid eyes on Feschino’s crop circles. By Feschino’s own admission, his “weren’t the crop circles that Colin [Andrew] has been investigating for 50 years. They were like big gigantic rings and they would appear on the property overnight.”¹

The images below are from an article entitled, “A Highly Strange Braxton County Over the Years” by Alfred Lehmberg (March 20, 2010).²

The images are inarguably strange, even once you know what they are.

At first, I thought they might be tractor tracks or perhaps marks leftover from kids doing donuts while they’re partying late at night. Despite the expectation that you’d probably get shot for engaging in such destructive behavior after trespassing on someone else’s property, it does happen. A lot more than you’d think. Feschino isn’t from West Virginia; he can be excused for being ignorant of the things Appalachian adolescents do to stave off boredom.

Yet that wasn’t the answer.

The rings seemed natural. Something from a college botany lesson was tugging at the back if my mind. And then it hit me.

Fairy Rings

Fairy rings.

No, not eldritch portals to a fae realm. Fungal fairy rings.

It may surprise you but when we cut down trees to make pasture, we don’t remove the roots. They stay below ground. They decay. And they become food for fungi.

And then we get a fairy ring.

Fungal fairy rings on farm pastures are circular patterns of mushrooms, dark green grass, or dead/brown grass, caused by basidiomycete fungi decomposing organic matter (old roots, wood) underground, releasing nitrogen (greening) or creating water-repellent soil (browning).

They come in three types, though we usually only recognize the last type:

• Type I (Dead/Brown): Fungus creates a hydrophobic layer, making soil water-repellent, causing drought stress and dead grass in a ring.
• Type II (Dark Green): Fungus releases nitrogen, creating lush, dark green, taller grass as it breaks down organic matter.
• Type III (Mushrooms): Just mushrooms (puffballs, toadstools) appearing in a ring, with no significant damage or greening.

Feschino’s photos predominantly feature Type II fairy rings. The rings are formed when mycelium (fungal threads) grow outwards in a circle from a central point. Rings vary in size from a few inches to 200 feet or more and become larger each year depending on prevailing soil and weather conditions. The soil organisms that cause fairy rings are one of 60 or more species of fungi.

And that is that, in this case.

An interesting investigation, one that put the FUN back into FUNgus, but nothing to suggest extraterrestrial activity.

Crop Circles in West Virginia?

As to the larger question of West Virginia crop circles, we’ll have to look elsewhere. A couple of the crop circle databases out there gave alleged examples of crop circles in West Virginia; however, when I verified them it turned out that those sites had the right town cited but the wrong state entirely — they weren’t encountered in the Mountain State!

The Independent Crop Circle Researchers’ Association website cited 4 examples of crop circles in West Virginia. In my opinion, one of them shouldn’t have been cited at all!

Unknown County (August 1993) Multiple witnesses report seeing a UFO in an area, then a crop circle was discovered. No location was given. Crop type: unknown

Other than the month and year, there’s no data here. The other three were more interesting.

Point Pleasant is always interesting in light of the Mothman encounters and accompanying UFO sightings in 1966-77, and this was a bona fide crop circle.

Point Pleasant, Mason County (July 8, 2002). One flattened ring with a standing ring, and a flattened inner circle. Outer circle approximately 60′ in diameter; the first circle was connected to another flattened ring (approximately 40′ diameter) by a 40′ flattened path.

Another listing from Mercer County’s Oakvale in April 2004 was more of what we call a “saucer nest,” a swirling circle left in fields of grass. It was discovered after some UFO sightings.

Circling Back to Flatwoods

It was his citation of of a crop circle on Sept. 12, 1952 in Flatwoods itself that got my attention, especially since we were initially investigating Frank Feschino Jr’s ostensible crop circles nearby.

Two parallel, straight, flattened, rectangular marks spaced 10 feet apart which ran down a gentle slope towards a 30’ diameter, flattened circle — were discovered in tall grass down in a ravine on a farm, after witnesses report seeing a BOL (Ball-of-light). Several of the people who discovered the site reportedly smelled a ‘burnt odor’ and became ill after going inside the area.

The first part of the description aligns with the much-noted “skid marks” found at the site of the monster encounter. Gray Barker reported that these “skid marks” were found in parallel lines from the site where the Flatwoods Monster was seen by the oak tree down the hill to the site of a “huge globular mass down over the other side of the hilltop, to their right, about 50 feet away.”³ When asked to described it, Nunley said:

“It was just like a big ball of fire,” Nunley said, which seemed to dim and brighten at regular intervals. He didn’t know how large it was; some of the others said it was “big as a house.” It is not clear whether a complete sphere was seen, or a hemisphere, resting on the ground.⁴

All thoughts of the globe were deemed secondary when they spotted “a huge figure off to their left,”⁵ the Flatwoods Monster itself. Though the witnesses beat a hasty retreat back the way they’d come at the Monster’s appearance, witness Neil Nunley’s “description indicated the ‘monster’ was following a circular path which would take it back to the globe.”⁶ Barker notes that “A. Lee Stewart, Jr., co-editor of The Braxton Democrat, was the first outside observer on the scene. He arrived about half an hour after the incident.”⁷

Stewart was eventually able to persuade Eugene Lemon, one of the witnesses, to accompany him up the hill, but there apparently wasn’t much to see at night. “Returning at seven the following morning, before anyone else visited the hilltop in daylight,”⁸ he found the skid marks.

About ten feet apart, in the tall grass, were skid marks!

These marks proceeded from the tree where the “monster” was “standing” to the location of the globe. It was if some huge personage were on skis and had slid down the hill. But the summer skier surely was light in weight, for the ‘”skis” had not indented the ground; they had only ridden down the tall grass, and tossed a few small stones aside. Where the globe had rested, a huge area of grass appeared to have been crushed down.⁹

Tired Explanations

The accepted explanation for the “skid marks” is that they were tire tracks.

Barker notes that two young men, Junior Edward and Joey Martin, were the first on the scene, about a half hour after the monster encounter. Next came Max Lockhart.

Max Lockhart, a Flatwoods appliance dealer, drove his pickup truck up the narrow road to the scene about an hour after it happened, and before the sheriff arrived. Neither he nor the people with him could find any evidence of the elusive “monster.”¹⁰

An acquaintance of Barker’s had told him that the skid marks were “made by a tractor operated by Brooks Fisher, of Sutton, and the same tractor also could have left the odd, gummy deposits described as lying on the ground and foliage like oil.¹¹ Barker was able to rule out the tractor as the culprit.

I checked the theory my acquaintance had earlier presented. Brooks Fisher, who owned the farm, had, he said, harvested hay at the location, and had used a tractor. Fisher had done just that, a telephone call disclosed, but he had used no tractor mor other farming equipment where the marks were seen. That part of the farm, Fisher said, was too rough and steep for a tractor.

Others said Max Lockhart, an old friend of mine from high school days, had made the marks when he drove up the hill to investigate. I telephoned him.

He and some friends had driven up the hill, he confirmed, had been down where the “monster” was seen, but they were not down over the hill, obviously too steep for a pickup truck.¹²

Ultimately, Barker ruled out both possibilities, based Fisher and Lockhart’s testimony that while they could reach the site, the hillside where the skid marks were was too steep to navigate..

Yet 48 years after the fact, the late skeptic Joe Nickell, in the self-same article that armed credulous skeptics with a 5 foot tall owl as the answer to the Flatwoods Monster, paints a much different story.

Max had tried to explain to [Barker] and others the nature of the unidentified object that left the skid marks and oily/greasy deposit, namely Max’s black, 1942 Chevrolet pickup truck. Soon after news of the incident had spread around Flatwoods that evening, Max drove up the hillside to have a look around. He told me he left the dirt road and circled through the field, but saw nothing, no monster and no landing traces in the meadow grass.

At the time of the incident a few locals who had been skeptical that a flying saucer had landed on the hill attributed the skid marks and oil to a farm tractor. When several others told Gray Barker that the traces had actually been left by Max Lockard, he recalled his old high school chum and decided to telephone him. They had a proverbial failure to communicate and Barker—who admitted to seeing “an opportunity to get my name in print again”—concluded that Max’s truck had not been at the exact spot where the alleged UFO markings were found.

Reading Barker (1956), one senses his impulse to dismiss the tractor and pickup hypotheses and never even to consider the possibility of some other vehicle. It is not clear that Barker ever saw the traces. He arrived one week after the incident and during the interval rain had obliterated evidence. He could find “no trace of the oil reported to have been on the ground,” and although he saw “marks and a huge area of grass trampled down,” he conceded that could be due to the “multitudes” that had “visited and walked over the location” (Barker 1953. 1956).

Max Lockard took me to the site in his modern pickup. A locked gate across the road prompted him to shift into four-wheel drive and take us on a cross-country shortcut through a field, much as he had done in his search for the reported UFO and monster nearly a half century before. He has convinced me that he indeed left the supposedly unexplained traces.¹³

Since Nickell was casting aspersions on Barker’s journalistic integrity at a point where Barker was still a rather serious investigator, allow me to point out the obvious:

1. Barker admitted that he didn’t see the skid marks; this came from the testimony of A. Lee Stewart and described the tracks as they appeared at 7 AM the following morning.
2. Barker came at the story from a skeptical point of view and his only conclusion at the end of “The Monster and the Saucer” article for Fate magazine (January 1953) was that “they saw something,” but he wasn’t sure what it was. A debunking article would have got his name in print again (a fairly common occurrence for Barker even at that time) just as easily, since Fate‘s editor, Robert N. Webster, had already agreed to the story by telegram and thought it was likely a hoax anyway. I might offer the counter accusation that Nickell was projecting his own ethos onto Barker, especially given his half-baked article about 5 foot tall owls.¹³
3. Nickell criticizes Barker’s investigation for being conducted a little over a week after the encounter but wishes us to wink at the fact that his investigation occurs almost 50 years later!
4. Nickell didn’t note that the capabilities of a modern pickup to navigate that hill might be different from that of a 1942 Chevy pickup. He also only demonstrated he could navigate the hilltop but not necessarily the hillside where the skid marks were observed.
5. Nickell didn’t bother to suggest an alternative to Brooks Fisher’s tractor or Max Lockhart’s pickup either because it would have been purest speculation, something the Skeptical Inquirer allegedly frowns upon. He’s holding Barker to a double standard.

Besides, Barker had noted that the lines in the grass were 10 feet apart; however, I could find no vehicle in 1952 with a wheel base wider than 6 feet apart. For the record, fender to fender, Lockhart’s 1942 Chevy was likewise 6 feet wide. Ten feet between wheels is ridiculously wide, twice as wide as the average vehicle then and now, and this means that, to date, the Flatwoods “skid marks” lack a satisfactory solution.

And there’s another curious matter which needs to be considered. I remind you again of Barker’s description:

About ten feet apart, in the tall grass, were skid marks!

These marks proceeded from the tree where the “monster” was “standing” to the location of the globe. It was if some huge personage were on skis and had slid down the hill. But the summer skier surely was light in weight, for the ‘”skis” had not indented the ground; they had only ridden down the tall grass, and tossed a few small stones aside. Where the globe had rested, a huge area of grass appeared to have been crushed down.⁹

If this was the case, the flattened grass bears more the characteristics of a crop circle line than a tire tread, for neither tractor wheels nor pickup tires hover in this manner and the skid marks end at a circle. We also ask ourselves, Why were they only seen in this space between the tree and where the orb once rested below?

And 17 Years Later

To make this case possibly stranger, in 1969 the Charleston Daily Mail reported a pilgrimage to the Flatwoods Monster site by three young men from South Charleston, WV. While their overnight camping trip yielded little out-of-the-ordinary, they did take a photograph of the alleged “landing site.” The caption accompanying the photograph in the paper read:

LANDING SITE – Marked by a different kind of growth is a circular area where the vehicle of the Braxton County Monster was reported to have landed the evening of Sept. 12, 1952. Back on the spot last month to investigate were three South Charleston boys: Jim Ware abd George Webb, pictured, and photographer Rick Ware.¹⁴

It isn’t easy to see what’s going on in the photo. Based on their relative heights, the space between is roughly 18 to 20 feet across. Yet without a better picture or an angle showing more of the space in question, we’ve no way of knowing whether we’re looking at one of Frank Feschino’s FUNgal Fairy Rings, a crop circle/saucer nest, or something else entirely.

But isn’t that curious?

Until we reach The Last Door,

Tony Breeden

NOTES

1. “Frank C. Feschino.” Meanwhile, Here On Earth with Peter Robbins (Oct 7 2024). Youtube.
2. “A Highly Strange Braxton County Over the Years” by Alfred Lehmberg. Paratopiary (March 20, 2010), https://paratopiary.blogspot.com/2010/03/highly-strange-braxton-county.html, Accessed Dec. 10, 2025. Images appear under Fair Use (Section 107 of the US Copyright Act) for commentary, education and critcism; all rights belong to original owners.
3. They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers by Gray Barker (1956), pp. 23-24.
4. Ibid., p.24.
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid., p. 25.
7. Ibid., p. 28.
8. Ibid.
9. Ibid. pp. 28-29.
10. Ibid., p. 20.
11. Ibid., p. 17.
12. Ibid., p. 29.
13. “The Flatwoods UFO Monster” by Joe Nickell. Skeptical Inquirer Vol. 24, No. 9 (Nov/Dec 2000), p. 17.
14. “‘Monster’ Site Revisited” by Ann Johnston. Charleston Daily Mail (Sept. 16, 1969), p. 13.

“Where the eagles are silent, the parrots will jabber.”

There’s been quite enough jabbering from the folks who suppose the Bible forbids the very possibility of intelligent extraterrestrial life (it doesn’t) and that aliens must be demons (probably not). And while I have refuted the bad logic upon which their bad arguments are based, it appears I shall have to shout the louder.

Those of you have met me in person know this will not be a problem for me.

Jokes aside, I’ve been doing some soul searching over the past year, trying to figure out what fits and what doesn’t, what’s changed and what hasn’t, what’s effective and what’s diversion. This website fell through the cracks over the past year because I was dealing with some personal issues. And because I was writing about monsters for my Gray Barker’s Book of Monsters series.

The latter endeavor has actually forced me to look harder at several different Fortean¹ fields and to revisit subjects I thought were closed. For example, Mothman is dismissed as an owl in Strangers & Aliens (2016). 8 years later, I revisted the Mothman in Gray Barker’s Book of Monsters Volume Three (2024). Whatever it was, it’s unlikely it was either an owl or a sand hill crane.²

Since further research and new information causes my views to change and further develop over time, I still feel like this endeavor is worthwhile. What I have not changed is either my faith in the Bible or my commitment to truth. I am skeptically cheerful about Fortean subjects but I think I’ve earned a reputation of being both fair and thorough in my investigations, and I’m unapologetic that my views on Bigfoot, aliens, ghosts and miracles come from a Christian perspective. I don’t see any of that changing.

I’m hardwired for wonder but as Gray Barker once wrote, “But while our eyes may reach for the stars, we faithfully promise to keep our feet firmly planted upon the ground.”³

In the coming months, I will be posting the rest of the “That Was No Flying Saucer – That Was Gray Barker” series dealing with skeptical credulity, monsters, flying saucers and, you guessed it, Gray Barker. I also have several new articles on the works, including a few on crop circles, comet 3I/Atlas, and Disclosure, among others.

Last but not least, I should have a book announcement that might interest fans of this site at the beginning of 2026. Stay tuned. We are back.

Until we reach The Last Door,

Tony Breeden

NOTES

[1] Fortean regards strange phenomena which lies outside scientific acceptance, such as cryptids, UFOs, strange disappearances, odd things falling from the sky (i.e., Fortean rains), miracles, etc. Named after Charles Fort (1874-1932), who write four notable books on the subject.

[2] I’ll be posting the 2nd part of “That Was No Flying Saucer – That Was Gray Barker” within the week, which covers the Mothman as an owl argument in more depth.

[3] Editorial by Gray Barker. SAUCERIAN Vol. 1 No. 1 (Sept 1953), p. 2.

The Phantom of Flatwoods

73 years ago on this day, September 12, 1952, a group of boys were playing baseball at a local elementary school late in the evening in Flatwoods, WV, when a ball of fire streaked overhead. As it looked like the presumed meteorite had landed on a nearby hill, they set off to find it, thinking (in true Appalachian form) that it might be worth some money. Along the way, these kids secured an escort, Kathleen May (the mother of two of the boys) and Eugene Lemon (a 17-year old National Guardsman). At the top of the hill, they saw a strange glowing object where they expected the meteorite to be. Suddenly, their flashlight fell upon two glowing greenish-orange eyes attached to a strange being “worse than Frankenstein,” which had previously been hidden within the shadows, and a nauseating mist. The visitor which loomed over them had a round blood-red face framed by an “ace of spades” cowl. It stood approximately 9 to 10 feet tall, with “small, claw-like hands”, and cloth-like folds below the waist. It made a hissing sound and “glided toward the group,” at which point Lemon screamed and dropped his flashlight. The entire group ran in a panic. Kathleen May is said to have leapt a gate they’d passed through on the way up in a single bound.

The incident made national news. May and Lemon appeared on a New York television show called We the People, where a staff artist drew up the now-famous illustration of the monster.

The case drew the attention of Major Donald Keyhoe, who later co-founded and headed the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomenon (NICAP) and wrote about the “Sutton Monster” in his 1953 book, Flying Saucers From Outer Space. It also drew in well-known cryptozoologist Ivan T Sanderson, who released the results of his investigation in Sept 23, 1952 newspaper article distributed through the North American Newspaper Alliance. A Brooklyn minister and radio evangelist named Elder Charles Beck came to Flatwoods to determine whether the monster had anything to do with a prophetic dream. Notoriously, two Air Force officers in civilian clothes answering to Project Blue Book’s Edward Ruppelt posed as magazine writers while interviewing witnesses.[1]

It also caught the attention of a local film booker named Gray Barker. Barker was busy with West Virginia’s then-burgeoning drive-in movie theater boom, he was born in nearby Riffle and graduated from Sutton High. At some level, he felt the Flatwoods Monster owed him some answers, so he contacted Ray Palmer, the editor of Fate magazine, with the offer of writing up an investigation as a local insider. Palmer telegrammed that it was probably a hoax – and Barker’s own writings testify that he was, at the time, of a similar skeptical mind – but agreed to hire Barker.  Barker’s investigation led to a January 1953 article in fate magazine called “The Monster and the Saucer.” While he could only speculate on what had actually occurred, Barker concluded the following:

What I do know is that when you talk to seven people with honesty and fear in their eyes you know in your heart when they are telling the truth. These people did see something. And whatever they saw was very much like what they described.^[2]

Barker would continue to write and speak about the Braxton County Monster until his death in 1984. By all accounts, he started off as a serious investigator but as time went on, well, something …changed.

Owls All the Way Down

The late, great skeptic Joe Nickell had a lazy habit of decreeing every winged cryptid or monster he investigated to be an owl. Mothman? An owl in a threat posture.[3] The Kelly-Hopkinsville Goblins?[4] The Dover Demon?[5] More owls. It was his universal cryptid solvent. Unless it was a big hairy monster. Then it was a bear.[6]

This included the Flatwoods Monster, of course. In Nickell’s skeptical assessment it was an owl on a branch with a bunch of bushes making up the body.[7]^,

Truth be told, it wasn’t a new idea.

In Flying Saucers From Outer Space, Major Donald Keyhoe noted that during a telephone call in January 1953, Al Chop, the Air Force’s press secretary in the Pentagon, told him”

“…the group did see two glowing eyes, probably those of a large owl perched on a limb. Underbrush below may have given the impression of a giant figure, and in their excitement, they may have imagined the rest.”[8]

To be fair, Chop and the Air Force borrowed that one from Braxton Democrat editor A. Lee Stewart, who suggested this possibility in “Around a Bend They Saw a Pair of Bulging Eyes” (Washington Daily News, Sept 15, 1952), saying,

“I don’t know what they saw, but they sure saw something on that hill. Of course, at twilight, you can see lots of things. They could have been seen an owl sitting up there in a tree, and put a body under it.”

This was a reversal of his previous opinion recorded a day earlier in “Did It Ride Meteor?” (Charleston Gazette [WV], Sept. 14, 1952).

When questioned as to the possibilities of the thing having been a moss covered tree with an animal roosting in it, Stewart answered:

I don’t think so. They saw the ‘whatsit’ on the brow of the hill and there was nothing around except this large tree that it supposedly stood beside. The rest of the hillside is covered with small shrubs.”

In other words, the monster couldn’t both be the tree itself AND be standing beside it. It stood below a large branch on the tree that was 15 feet up the trunk; it wasn’t perched on it but rather the head was below the branch. Surrounding shrubs were low and therefore couldn’t have formed the tall body.

So why did he change his mind? My educated guess based on the available evidence is something reminiscent of the Men in Black: Two Air Force investigators in civilian clothing, who either appealed to his sense of patriotism and civic duty or simply threatened him.

Whether A. Lee Stewart was involved in a cover-up is another story entirely.

Examining the Joe Nickell Owl Monster

The facts remain that the standard skeptical answer for the Flatwoods Monster as popularized by Joe Nickell and the Center for Skeptical Inquiry (CSI) fails because it doesn’t fit the given scenario.

Joe Nickell’s drawing shows a barn owl perched on a branch under the 12-foot branch (Barker estimated the limb at 15 feet) used to gauge its height. Braxxie stood tall but lower than that branch. Tellingly, Nickell was aware that the has his owl perched on a branch that didn’t exist on the tree.

The Flatwoods Monster’s spade-like head is missing from Nickell’s explanation. He suggests that “the description of the creatures “face” “round” with “two eye-like openings” and a dark, “hood-like shape” around it” was “suggestive of an owl”; however, he was forced to admit than a barn owl lacked ““the “pointed” appearance” of the Flatwoods Monster’s spade-shaped head. And he never bothers to explain how the witnesses uniformly drew this feature in their drawings of the monster.

Now a barn owl in a threat posture (“toe-dusting”) can provide a flattened vaguely spade-like shape if the tail is also visible; however, at the height and angle the Nickell Owl Monster would have been viewed at, it’s unlikely the witness drawings would’ve uniformly rendered it with such a high (not flattened) spade-like shape.

This brings up another problem. If the nonexistent limb for Nickell’s owl to perch upon weren’t bad enough, there’s the matter of the rest of the body. The scale of Nickell’s drawing is highly misleading. A barn owl is 14 to 20 inches tall. Nickell’s drawing features a Flatwoods Monster whose height is half owl and half bushes below. If the Sutton Monster was 11 feet tall, there’s still more than 9 feet to account for – with low scrub. Nickell provides a more conservative height of 10 feet:

The “monster” reportedly had a “man-like shape” and stood some ten feet tall, although Barker (1953) noted “descriptions from the waist down are vague; most of the seven said this part of the figure was not under view.” These perceptions are consistent with an owl perched on a limb.

One can beg off that the witnesses didn’t really see the lower half all you like; they knew where the head was positioned and beside that tree was nothing that pareidolia could base a 8-to-9+ foot tall torso upon! And the fact remains that if Nickell proposes the Flatwoods Monster was 10 feet tall, he drew a picture of a 5 foot tall owl – and the Center for Skeptical Inquiry let that pass their peer review! Based on interviews with witnesses and further conjecture, Ivan T. Sanderson rendered the Monster’s visible portion as 4-and-a-half-to-5 feet, but he wasn’t silly enough to suggest an owl of that size. Ironically enough, if taken seriously, the Nickell Owl Monster provides a cryptozoological answer akin to Mark. A. Hall’s proposed “Big Hoot,” a proposed giant owl loosely named after Bigfoot.

Aside from this, we note that Nickell pointed out that the Braxton County Monster was definitely seen from the waist down. Here’s the problem If we suppose that the spade-shaped head was caused by an ow in a threat posture, the entire owl comprises the head, with no owl remaining to form an upper torso, much less a man-like shape. If we eliminate the threat posture as unlikely or unnecessary, we don’t have an explanation for the spade shaped head – which is now extremely tiny in proportion to the body! – and we’re left with a shape that is up to 20 inches high but only 6 inches wide. More bad news: the barn owl’s head takes up a third of its body, leaving us with 13-14 inches at most to make up the monster’s upper torso that was definitely seen.

So then, upon investigation that CSI definitely should have done themselves, the Flatwoods Nickell Owl Monster has a non-spade-shaped 7-inch head atop a 13-inch torso perched on a non-existent limb with its body formed of low scrub that definitely would not stretch up to meet the remainder of the monster’s 10-foot height.

Which is to say, whatever the Flatwoods Monster was, it wasn’t an owl.

Skeptical Credulity

How did skeptics allow such a ludicrous concept to enter their canon of standard responses? Simply put, it’s a case of what I call skeptical credulity, the willingness to swallow any explanation without critical review so long as it fits a skeptical worldview. It is this attitude which Mark A. Hall wrote about when he criticized skeptics as “status quotients.”

Some people have gotten a lot of mileage by portraying themselves as “skeptics.” They are attempting to appear to be cool and wise heads who are not easily fooled by new things that are being reported. Whatever the merits or lack of merit in their arguments, these people are not being skeptical. They are defenders of the status quo. They might better be identified as “status quotients. “

True skeptics are those who instinctively or habitually doubt, question, or disagree with assertions or generally accepted conclusions. We who are Forteans are questioning the conclusions of these defenders of the status quo. They want to stay in place. We want to tackle the tough questions of mankind: questions that are not easily carried into a laboratory, questions that threaten to stretch the boundaries of a comfortable existence.^[9]

In this regard, the modern skeptic acts more as an apologist for mainstream material science rather than an investigator or researcher. While I’m cheerfully skeptical, I tend to refer to myself as a skeptical believer or a Fortean researcher, especially because I am just as critical of supernatural credulity as I am skeptical credulity. It is this particular concept of skeptical credulity, where pat skeptical answers are accepted and repeated uncritically, that I will be exploring over the next few weeks as I look at a few more pat skeptical answers to West Virginia Cryptids.

Until we reach The Last Door,

Tony Breeden

Next Week: Part 2: Mothballing A Bad Argument

[1] Flying Saucers From Outer Space by Donald Keyhoe (1953), p. 119.

[2] “The Monster and the Saucer” by Gray Barker. Fate magazine Vol. 6 No. 1 (Jan 1953), pp. 12-17. Emphasis mine.

[3] “‘Mothman’ solved!” by Joe Nickell. Skeptical Inquirer, Vol. 26, No. 2 (Mar. 2002), pp. 20-21.

[4] “Siege of ‘Little Green Men’: The 1955 Kelly, Kentucky, Incident” by Joe Nickell. Skeptical Inquirer, Vol. 30, No. 6 (Nov/Dec 2006), pp.12-14. Nickell’s here is agreeing with a previous skeptical assessment by French ufologist, Renaud Leclet.

[5] “Identifying the Enigmatic ‘Dover Demon’” by Joe Nickell. Skeptical Inquirer, Vol. 47, No. 4 (July/Aug 2023), pp.12-14

[6] “Hidden in Plain Sight: Discovering the Bigfoot Bear” by Joe Nickell. Skeptical Inquirer, Vol. 46, No. 1 (Jan/Feb 2022)

[7] “The Flatwoods UFO Monster” by Joe Nickell, Skeptical Inquirer, Vol. 24 No. 6 (Nov/Dec 2002), pp. 15-19.

[8] Keyhoe, p. 120.

[9] “The Status Quotients Vs. the True Skeptics” by Mark A. Hall. Wonders! magazine #24, Vol. 6 No. 4 (December 2001), p. 1. This quote previously appeared in Chapter 20 of this book, p. 149.

“It’s all part of the Pattern.”

Gray Barker

In 1957, the Hur Sloth Monster made its one and only appearance at about 1 AM on a Sunday morning not far from the village of Hur, WV. As it lurched along, apparently injured in one leg, it dripped white foam and left frog-like tracks in the blacktop. The apparition was illuminated by flames which had mysteriously appeared in the middle of the road shortly before it was seen by the unknown driver of the car that screeched to a stop before the strange sight of the slimy humanoid. The driver watched as the Hur Sloth Monster picked up speed and then plunged into the woods, never to be seen again.

On August 17, 1976, teenagers Ronald Stark and Clifford Barnes were driving on Skin Creek Road near the Lovett Drive-In theater in Weston, WV, when they saw an 8 foot tall, ape-like monster in the middle of the road. Screeching to a halt, they froze in fear as the Bigfoot stared at them with idle curiosity and then lumbered off the road, wholly unconcerned.

On November 8, 1958, Charles Wetzel was driving near the Santa Ana River in Riverside, CA, when he was forced to stop his car at the sight of water flowing over the road and what he initially thought to be a warning sign. To his shock, the sign turned out to be a six foot tall creature with scaly skin, no nose, no ears, fluorescent eyes, and a protruding frog-like mouth. It made a gargling sound mixed with a high pitched scream and then, without warning, attacked Wetzel’s car with giant webbed talons. Wetzel gunned the car, running over the creature and speeding away to safety. Wetzel later described it as having a “round, scarecrow-ish head like something out of Halloween,” having scaly, leaf-like skin, two long spindly arms, and legs which grew out of its side instead of from underneath its torso.

In July 1968, Frederick H. Jennings was out hunting woodchucks when he heard a high pitched jabbering sound like a recording being played at high speed. He felt a prick in his arm and looked down, supposing he’d caught his arm in a briar patch — only to see a green 7 foot tall plant creature with hands terminating in three fingers about 7 inches long tipped with suction cups. Out of these suction-cup tips grew needles, which were drawing blood from his arm! Even so, he felt neither pain nor fear as the creature seemed to have a hypnotic effect on him, telling him telepathically that it meant no harm and only needed medical assistance. It’s slanted yellow eyes changed to red as the transfusion was completed. Releasing him, it bounded up the hill in great leaps and presumably flew away on its flying saucer.

What do these four stories have in common?

Well, they’re all monsters of some sort: aliens, Bigfoot, and stranger things still! They all have something to do with Gray Barker. And they all have something to do with how media influences our monsters. Specifically, how it influenced the monsters you just read about. You see, there’s a Pattern to these things.

Now I grew up watching monsters. Toho rubber suit kaiju destroying cities and armies. Latex monsters terrorizing Lover’s Lane on big screens and small. The stop-motion creatures of Ray Harryhausen battling live-action human foes. Release the Kraken, baby!

As much as I enjoyed watching giant apes or cowboys fight dinosaurs, swamp monsters or hairy apes terrorize lakeside communities, or aliens invade our skies and cities, I also loved learning about how such wonders were brought to the big screen. All my life, I have devoured documentaries and behind-the-scenes features revealing how these special effects were achieved. If you’ve read my chapter on the Bluff Creek Bigfoot in Volume Two of Gray Barker’s Book of Monsters, you know just how deep that interest goes! Seeing the technowizardry behind the curtain only enhanced my enjoyment of those monsters.

It’s little wonder then that I often evaluate purported real-life monster stories by trying to determine if pop culture monsters might have influenced them, or if such special effects or costumes might’ve been used to perpetrate a hoax. After all, I’ve spent the past decade or more investigating the life of WV ufologist and master hoaxer Gray Barker. Gray Barker was also West Virginia’s largest film booker during its drive-in theater boom. If anyone was aware of the possible popcorn monster influence on cryptid and alien accounts, it would’ve been Barker.

In exploring the monsters Gray Barker wrote about in my Gray Barker’s Book of Monsters series I’ve uncovered three specific ways that sci-fi and monster films have influenced real life monster accounts: Inspiration, Emulation and Appropriation.

Let’s start with Inspiration. Inspiration is the process of being mentally stimulated to do or feel something, especially to do something creative. I don’t think I ever watched a big screen monster fest without my art or writing being inspired by it. I’m speaking here of inspiration in the generic sense, where we take the big ideas of what we’ve seen and make something entirely our own.

For example, the perpetrators of the Hur Sloth Monster were Bob Weaver and Ronzil Lynch, who decided to create their monster after hearing the wild tales of aliens and monsters on the Long John Nebel Radio Show (singling out recurrent guest Gray Barker, in particular). Weaver donned webbed fins on his hands and feet and wore a beanie with slicked down hair, whereupon Ronzil liberally applied several cans of shaving cream to Weaver’s underwear clad body. It didn’t get the attention it derserved.

We can also count the Skin Creek Road Bigfoot, for it seems to only exist in Gray Barker’s writings. In fact, it seems apparent that he created this particular Bigfoot tale as a marketing scheme for a documentary showing at the Lovett Drive-In and the other theaters he booked in West Virginia. The documentary was called The Mysterious Monsters (1975), hosted by Peter Graves, which ran with big ads in the papers featuring a hulking, shadowy Bigfoot and promising “Proof! There Are Monsters Living Among Us!” Barker, of course, disavowed any official connection with the story, but the timing was pretty convenient.

Emulation is the process of copying something achieved by someone else and trying to do it as well as they have. The way we generally emulate monsters in media is by wearing masks and costumes. While we might include cosplay at conventions (and that definitely counts), I’m thinking more on the lines here of pranksters in outfits. Gray Barker’s Book of Monsters Volume Two includes the Riverside Monster encountered by Charles Wetzel. This was one of the stories Barker recounted often both in his own publications and in articles for other magazines. It was a fun story to explore. One of the last things I do when finishing up my research for a cryptid is an obligate drawing. In reviewing the description for the concept sketches, I realized that the Riverside Monster bore a striking resemblance to a lesser-known film monster that nevertheless featured prominently in monster fanzines, particularly in advertisements for masks and monster hands: The Mole People from the 1956 film of the same name. In other words, it’s very possible that the Riverside Monster was someone in a Mole People costume out trying to scare people. That said, this sort of emulation can be dangerous. Charles Wetzel ran his monster over with a car! As recently as August 2012, a Montana man was struck by two vehicles and killed while trying to hoax a Bigfoot scare. So perhaps we should confine our emulation to cosplay and donning costumes for fan films.

Appropriation is the use of pre-existing concepts or imagery with little or no transformation applied to them. It’s where we take a specific element from the media we consume and adapt it to our story. Which brings us to Frederick H. Jennings and Vegetable Man. Gray Barker learned about this story through correspondence and later interviews with Jennings. After Barker published the Vegetable Man account in an issue of Gray Barker’s Newsletter, John Keel wrote to Barker, noting that Jennings’ Vegetable Man with its retractable needles in its fingers bore a strong resemblance to the aliens from Invasion of the Saucer-Men (1957). And Keel is right! The resemblance to Vegetable Man is uncanny. The syringe fingers only differ in their application; the Saucer-Men inject alcohol into their victims while Vegetable Man used it to draw blood from his. (We could also go so far as to suggest that the heads of the Saucer-Men also look very much like one of the other space creatures Jennings claimed he’d encountered: a being named Zarcon.) But the basic design is still there; without seeing the movie, you might think the Saucer-Men were someone’s rendition of Vegetable Man!

Now to this point, we’ve discussed these concepts of inspiration, emulation and appropriation as acts of storytelling, ways of creating fictions. And by implication it would mean that the monsters we’re discussing are not real. The Hur Sloth Monster is an admitted hoax; no question there. While I strongly believe that the Riverside Monster was someone in a Mole People costume, I can’t prove it beyond the shadow of a doubt. Likewise, I strongly believe that the Skin Creek Road Bigfoot was a publicity stunt by Gray Barker, but he did deny it (like he denied so many other hoaxes he perpetrated). It may be that Charles Wetzel saw something that night and didn’t really get a good look at it, but his mind filled in the blanks with images from a film he was at least subconsciously aware of through local advertisements. It may be that Frederick Jennings experienced something so unusual and traumatic that his mind supplied repurposed imagery from a 1957 movie to filter his memories into something surreal but perhaps more palatable. This is purest speculation of course because Jennings clearly had a lot of imagination and a good degree of artistic talent.

Paul Devereaux proposed that UFOs and their occupants and things like Bigfoot might be a sort of proto-entity which transmogrified from one form into another, and that the form the entity takes might be based on our individual expectations and biases.

If that’s true, perhaps we’re creating the monsters somehow through our expectations and biases. And our pop culture references. Something is objectively experienced but is so alien that our minds have to translate it from what it knows. Even if parts of we see are derived from things that are entirely fictitious. For now. One person sees Bigfoot. Another sees a ghost or an alien.

As Gray Barker would likely say, “It’s all part of the Pattern.” Because if this is true, WE are part of the Pattern.

They didn’t take it seriously, of course. Nor did they answer the question of how humanity (much less Christians) might communicate with extraterrestrials, if they turned out to exist, because the official position of Ken Ham is that aliens can’t exist “because of the meaning of the Gospel.” And realistically we will probably have to wait until God calls Mr. Ham home before we see a paradigm shift on this subject in the house that Ham built.

In this case, Chaffey stressed that the Earth-centric focus of the Bible implies there are no aliens. (Yes, of course, I’m aware that the proper term here is geocentric. I’m using the term they used.)

They’re overstating their case. I’ll explain why shortly.

I respect Mr. Chaffey. I’ve very much enjoyed his insights and apologetics over the years. I don’t respect Mr. Webb as much. Someone needs to tell him to keep his entitled hands and pen out of Engler’s face and that no one wants to hear him constantly interrupt his co-hosts.

Sweeping aside the fact that this episode echoed the broad (and decidedly false) assumption that a belief in the possibility of extraterrestrial life is a position one only comes to from an evolutionary perspective (that’s not even a little bit true), let’s look at this variation on the argument from silence (because that’s what it is).

And let me address it by noting the very fact that Ken Ham claims that Australia and kangaroos exist, even though they’re not mentioned in the Bible at all. In this, he would note that kangaroos and Australia do exist, and that the implications of the Bible’s history (specifically the tale of Noah) are that kangaroos even existed in the Middle East immediately post-Flood before eventually migrating to Australia, even if there’s no specific mention of either of them in Scripture and very little evidence otherwise that this inferred migration in fact occurred. (I say this, even though I agree with him on this subject.)

Now we can independently verify that kangaroos exist apart from the revelation of Scripture.

And it shouldn’t be surprising that the Bible doesn’t mention everything that ever existed because not only does it not claim to be an Encyclopedia Galactica,  it is obvious from even a cursory read that most of the Bible focuses on the countries around the Meditteranean, and primarily the area in and around Israel at that. Yet its narrow focus doesn’t preclude a universal message. The Gospel is universal. Paul’s letter to the Ephesians has a message for folks well outside of the church at Ephesus in the 1st Century. Nor does the Bible’s specific geographical focus prevent the existence of anything outside that area of focus.

Why the Focus of the Bible Doesn’t Mean ET Doesn’t Exist

My point is that if the Bible’s focus is Earth-centric, centered on this Earth, and largely focused on a specific section of Earth at that, its specific geospatial and astronomical focus doesn’t preclude the existence of other Earths and extraterrestrial life, any more than its omission of nebulae and other planets as such means they can’t exist.

Neither kangaroos nor aliens nor microbes are ever mentioned in the Bible. Kangaroos and microbes were discovered a long time after the Scriptures were inspired and recognized in Canon. Extraterrestrial life may yet be discovered and nothing about the Bible’s focus will affect that. Aliens may be fallen or unfallen. They may have been offered a means of salvation or not. But the Creator who made nebulae and microbes long before we developed the technology to see and appreciate them did not see fit to mention them in His Word, because they aren’t the focus of His message and plan.

This isn’t all that unusual. Any communicator worth their salt focuses their message or story on their specific audience and tries to meet them where they are at. They avoid off-topic material or material that would be out-of-place for that setting unless it is important to the tale they’re telling.

You don’t really mention wallabies in a story set in West Virginia (unless your message is about the fact that it is legal to keep keep wallabies and other exotic pets in my home state or that one of these rare beasts escaped recently and was seen hopping around the local neighborhood), but obviously the omission doesn’t preclude the possibility they might exist nonetheless.

And given that our Creator appears to enjoy packing away little surprises for us in His creation, it may be that extraterrestrial life exists waiting to be discovered one day.

Why Argue About This?

Now why do I refute these arguments? Is it because I believe aliens exist? Maybe they do. I don’t know. Maybe they don’t. I don’t know that either. And neither does Ken Ham.

What I do know is that the so-called Theological Problems that ostensibly arose with the idea of extraterrestrial life were answered by theologians even way back in the Middle Ages, so anyone (including Ken Ham or anyone else at Answers in Genesis) who tries to tell you there are insurmountable Theological Problems with the possibility of aliens is just selling you a bill of goods. Personally, I think someone should counsel Mr. Ham about his myopic approach to the subject; not everything is all evolution versus creation. That’s a fallacy called bifurcation.

Point in fact, creationists believed in the possibility of extraterrestrial life before evolutionary theory was popularized, and 2/3rds of creationists continue to believe that extraterrestrial life is possible.

What I also know is that teaching that there are Theological Problems with Extraterrestrial Life (when there are not) potentially puts the Church in the same unenviable position we were in during the Galileo gaffe. To wit, based on the Earth-centric focus of the Bible, we inferred that the Earth was the center of the universe and then we became so confident on that inference that we turned it into a dogma. And when science refuted this unnecessary dogma, some of us dug in our heels and fought back. Others lost faith, supposing that the Bible did in fact teach geocentrism, even though it never explicitly said so. The geocentric error so undermined Christianity’s authority and veracity that even now we prefer not to invoke the term, even when we’re not referring to that specific theory.

Which brings me to the danger in dogmatically preaching this other geocentric inference. If aliens exist and we’ve unnecessarily told the world that the Bible teaches us otherwise, we will be guilty of giving people another reason to reject the Bible’s truth. By saying “Thus saith the Lord” where God has revealed nothing, we undermine our authority. And most importantly that places a potential stumbling block to the Gospel in the path of those we’re called to reach.

All because we dogmatically said, “Thus saith the Lord!” on a subject the Bible is silent on. All because we ignored the wisdom of many Christian counselors on the subject since the Middle Ages in favor of those who formed their opinions without their perspective.

In other words, respectfully Mr. Ham, we shouldn’t be dogmatic about the existence or non-existence of alien life because of the Gospel.