UFOs, Demons, and Discernment: What Christians Need to Know

The question isn't whether the lights in the sky are real. It's what doors you're actually opening when you go looking for them.

Something strange has been happening at the intersection of UFO culture and spirituality. People are gathering in the dark, meditating in circles, performing rituals, and then pointing cameras at the night sky and calling it contact. Steven Greer has built an entire ecosystem around it with documentaries, paid expeditions, and a protocol he calls CE-5 or Close Encounters of the Fifth Kind. And long before Greer, a man named Albert Bender was sending telepathic transmissions into space from a room he'd converted into a chamber of horrors, complete with an altar.

What is the Christian response? Many believers aren't sure how to engage the UFO conversation without dismissing it entirely or getting pulled into frameworks that are functionally occult. This episode names that tension and gives you a theological map to navigate it. 2 Corinthians 11:14 says Satan disguises himself as an angel of light. His strategy is not to appear monstrous, but to appear luminous, benevolent, and higher. The CE-5 framework, examined through that lens, looks less like a spiritual frontier and more like a very old deception wearing a new coat of paint.

And underneath all of it? The desire is real. People want to know they're not alone. That contact with something higher is actually possible. That desire isn't wrong — it's just aimed at the wrong door. John 10:9: "I am the door. If anyone enters by me, he will be saved."

0:00 – Introduction
0:53 – Albert Bender's Origins
2:47 – World Contact Day
5:40 – Steven Greer & C5
9:18 – Benevolent ETs Claim
13:26 – Prophet Yahweh's Hoax
15:21 – Genuine UAP Phenomena
17:07 – Demonic Spiritual Danger
20:06 – The Gospel Answer

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Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:00

Let's talk about conjuring aliens.

SPEAKER_04 0:06

Like, show me, I want to see, I'm ready. And I was looking up at the sky, and I was doing what I've been doing for a few weeks now, which is projecting my thoughts, and I saw a blur of orange light in the top left peripheral vision. When the prophet started praying for a sighting, I wasn't exactly convinced.

SPEAKER_02 0:18

I think suddenly straight up, it's an orange sphere that appeared out of nowhere.

SPEAKER_00 0:23

Well, there's a lot of weird stuff with orbs where people say that they could summon them. Yeah. There's someone, a friend of mine wants me to go and do it with her.

SPEAKER_03 0:29

So, Chris, the CIA's studying you, NASA's studying you, the History Channel studying you. You can summon alien orbs.

SPEAKER_04 0:39

I ask them to come and they come.

SPEAKER_03 0:40

How do you ask them?

SPEAKER_04 0:41

I just simply say a prayer and uh and they come.

SPEAKER_02 0:44

Welcome back to the wonderful world of Remnant Radio. My name is Joshua Lewis, and in this program, we're going to be talking about the growing phenomenon surrounding aliens or summoning aliens. Are they really summoning aliens or are these individuals actually conjuring up demons? Or is all of this simply an elaborate hoax? In order to understand this modern practice, we actually need to go back to the 1950s and discuss a man by the name of Albert K. Bender. In 1952, Bender founded the International Flying Saucer Bureau, or IFSB, and published a magazine called Space Review. The organization quickly grew to a thousand members worldwide, and it was operating out of his home in Bridgeport, Connecticut, and was considered the first major civilian UFO research club in the world. The foundation was Bender himself. In his own words, in his book in 1962, Bender wrote, along with my objective interest in space, its suns and planets, I genuinely enjoyed the mystery. As I had enjoyed reading fantasy literature, reports of haunted houses, parapsychology, and all subjects bordering on the supernatural, had long intrigued me, so I supposed it was an interest which led me to change my decor of my room and developed the so-called chamber of horrors. What was the chamber of horrors, you may ask? Well, it turns out Menner had converted his attic into this dark and foreboding place filled with paintings of demons and witches and ghosts, even an altar designed to summon up who knows what from who knows where. He documented his own engagement with occult practices, including self-hypnosis, mental telepathy experiments, and paranormal investigations, which he conducted from the isolation of his own attic. Now, the idea of communicating telepathically was doubtlessly smuggled in through Albert's practice of the occult. The idea of communicating telepathically was with higher beings is not new at all. It actually has deep roots in the 19th century mysticism. It appears in Bender's worldview and has deeply shaped his occult understanding of metaphysics. And this worldview was smuggled into his understanding of extraterrestrials. So, in 1953, Albert Bender decided that he should gather the IFSB and to send a telepathic message into space. The IFSB theorized that if both telepathy and alien life were in fact real, a large number of people focusing on an identical message might be able to transmit that message through space. The message the IFSB members focused on was calling occupants of interplanetary craft, calling occupants of interplanetary craft that have been observing our planet Earth. We of IFSB wish to make contact with you. We are friendly and would like you to make an appearance here on Earth. Your presence before us will be welcomed with the utmost friendship. We will do all in our power to promote mutual understanding between your people and the people of Earth. So on March 15th of 1953, at 6 p.m., hundreds of participants participated in what is called World Contact Day. Now, there's no historical record of any unusual aerial phenomena reported across the IFSB membership on March 15th of 1953. No mass sighting, no coordinated events in the sky. The experiment, at least outwardly, produced nothing observable to the broader group and the public. However, Bender himself shares a rather troubling experience from his experiment. At the appointed time on C Day or World Contact Day, Bender lay down in his bed and mentally repeated the message again and again. It was after the third time I felt a terrible cold hit my body, he recounted. And the response wasn't friendly. Bender's message did not go over that well with these extraterrestrials. His room continued to fill with the smell of sulfur, and he was telepathically ordered to cease delving into matters that were not his concern. What happened next is one of the most strangest chapters in all of the UFO history. Allegedly, in the late summer of 1953, Bender made a series of discoveries that led him to believe that he'd finally found the truth about the UFO cover-up. He planned to reveal his findings in the October issue of Space Review, but before he issued the publication, Bender was visited by three men in black who had already somehow read the unpublished report and confirmed its findings. These silencers, as Bender called them, were scared Bender to the point where he did not publish that report, but they left him with a warning. We advised those engaging in saucer work to please be very cautious. Bender then suspended his publication and dissolved the IFSB. Just like that, Albert K. Bender shut down the IFSB, burned his notes, and withdrew from the public eye for years. At the time, Bender's sudden disappearance from the UFO scene shocked the growing community of saucer chasers, but Bender did not speak of these events for several years until 1962 when he wrote a book talking about flying saucers and these three men in black so that he could tell his story. And recounting these men in black, he says that they were in fact from another planet and they communicated with him telepathically. Following Bender's hiatus, however, attempting to contact extraterrestrials through telepathic means may have in fact been popular within the UFO enthusiast. However, there was no figurehead popularizing this technique. That is, until a man by the name of Stephen Greer came on the scene. So who is Stephen Greer? Born on June 28th, 1955, in Charlotte, North Carolina, Greer's own account centers around him being visited as a child by extraterrestrials. Through learning joint meditation with these ETs, he was able to then invent protocols allowing what he calls goodwill telepathy, inviting E.T.s to know that we're the good guys, and this is where you can find us. Greer calls these protocols of telepathic communication CE5s. Since the early 90s, he's been publicly claiming direct contact with extraterrestrial intelligences and built an entire ecosystem around that claim. Documentaries, books, paid field expeditions, where participants attempt to contact aliens alongside him. The mechanism is eerily similar to that of Albert Bender's, send out good vibes, attempt to notify the ETs that you're a peaceful, friendly, and eager to meet them. In Greer's view, these aren't aliens in the science fiction sense. They're actually civilizations so spiritually advanced that he equates them with what ancient humans called angels, suggesting that many religious encounters throughout history were actually extraterrestrials contacting people, and but they just lacked the framework to understand what was happening to them. To Greer, aliens are not intergalactic space travelers, they are interdimensional spiritual beings who phase in and out of our reality. For Greer, contact with these ETs isn't really a physical event, it's a spiritual one, a communion with a higher consciousness that permeates the entire universe. Something I find striking is when you spend time with Greer's material, is how little he actually talks about aliens and how much he's fully developing a spiritual practice. The CE5 protocol begins not with a telescope or radio equipment, but with a meditation. Participants are led into states where they can quiet their consciousness, what Greer calls a coherence, where the individual ego is silenced and the group merges into what he describes as a unified field of awareness. He teaches that extraterrestrials exist at a higher biofrequency and a higher astral realm, and that you simply can't perceive them without first elevating your own consciousness to meet them where they're at. Turns out remote viewing is also central to this practice. Greer leads exercises where participants attempt to transmit thoughts to one another telepathically and receive these impressions from others in the group, framed not as a party trek, but as training for the kinds of conscious-to-conscious communication that he says extraterrestrials use. The spiritual borrowing in CE5 is remarkably eclectic. Before expeditions, Greer performs a puja, or a Hindu ritual involving offering up flowers, food, water, and incense in order to purify a space. This is a Hindu practice and it literally means worship. He's trying to cleanse the space of bad energies. He invokes Native American traditions describing how indigenous people sat in a circle and had contact with the people from the stars. He references Sanskrit materials and he discusses the Catholic concept of consolementum, a medieval rite to help the dying cross over to the other side, which he claims he performed personally in an emergency room where someone had died. Again, it's the idea that ghosts can kind of stick around the body, and somehow within Catholic practice, you can help these ghosts get to the other side. Well, he's doing that too. The effect is kind of a universal spiritual framework where every tradition points toward the same destination, a conclusion of a higher non-human consciousness. CE5 positions itself as the methodology that finally makes that contact possible. Perhaps the most telling aspect of Greer's teaching is his absolute non-negotiable insistence that every extraterrestrial civilization is benevolent. They're not bad aliens. None of them. None of them are bad. Full stop.

SPEAKER_01 9:26

And what these cobert programs want you to believe is that there are the good aliens and the bad aliens. And the good aliens are this and the bad aliens are that. It's all stagecraft. That's the term used in the CIA. And people don't want to hear this, but I will tell you, if you think that there are civilizations allowed out of their solar system technologically that have malice and hostility and all that and are in our environment, you're wrong.

SPEAKER_02 9:55

Now he says this in order to, again, press the point home that these are not technological beings, they're interdimensional spiritual beings, and then additionally that they're not out here trying to abduct people and commit sp experiments on them in order to violate their personhood. He has an entirely different, benevolent spiritual view of these beings. But he goes even further, arguing that the very belief system determines whether contact is possible, meaning that skepticism about alien intentions is itself a barrier to contact. And this is worth sitting with. In Greer's framework, the requirements for contact is complete surrender of your critical discernment regarding these beings. Any fear, any doubt, any consideration that some of these entities might not have your best interest at heart will actually prevent you from contacting these individuals. Any reports of negative or threatening encounters, abductions, aggressions, manipulation, they're actually just dismissed as government malfactured psychological warfare, i.e. statecraft. It's just the deception designed by a shadowy covert program designed to make you afraid of the very beings who want to help you. The result then is a closed-loop epistemological system. Positive experiences confirm the teaching, and negative experiences are reframed as governmental lies. There's no data point that could falsify the benevolence claim, and conveniently the willingness to abandon the discernment entirely is the price of admission. If you would, take a moment to look past the cosmology and examine what the expedition actually captures on film. A light flashing briefly in the night sky, a dim glow near a bush hundreds of yards away, a shape visible and a single frame out of hours and hours of footage. Every one of these is presented as confirmation, and the framework explains away exactly why these images are so vague. They only appear for a fraction of a second, so they don't get targeted by military satellites. The blurry orb is actually sharp. It's the background that smeared because the craft phases in and out of our dimension faster than the shutter speed can capture. When you've been told in advance that these beings are transdimensional and appear only for a millisecond, then the anomalous lights of passing planes, satellites in space reflecting the light of the sun, a distant flashlight, a lens flare, well, those become evidence. That ambiguity isn't weakness of the proof. It's actually package as the very signature of something more exotic. The social pressure doesn't help either. 30 people have traveled from all around the world and spent real money and are now sitting in the dark after days of meditation. And when the authority figure points out a flash and says, Look, that's definitely in interdimensional ships, the group interpretation is already set by all the hours of meditation. So what are my thoughts on Bender and Greer? Well, when someone shows you who they really are, you should believe them. It is clear from at least a Christian oral view that these men are deeply embedded in dangerous forms of syncretism and occultism. While I suspect that Greer, in addition to concocting his very own religion, is likely a grifter. See, a flashing light is not a UFO, it's a plane or a helicopter. A light glowing in the bushes hundreds of yards away is just a kid with a flashlight. If Greer had a rational bone in his body, and I perceive that he actually does, he should not be portraying these natural occurrences as supernatural phenomena. But at the end of the day, Greer actually needs his cult to have proof of ETs that are more substantive than their experiences of meditation. So I suspect that he actually encourages people to see the supernatural when the evidence can actually be explained away with simple reasoning. A similar fabrication like this can actually be seen in Raymond Watkins, who changed his name to Prophet Yahweh. So Prophet Yahweh, i.e., Raymond Watkins, claimed to be the chosen vessel of a divine being Yahweh, a figure he described not as a traditional god, but as a superhuman extraterrestrial being. In his belief system, Yahweh and his angels were a race of superhuman black men from another planet who traveled the universe in spaceships with UFOs and glowing orbs being the byproduct of those craft. He claimed to be the only person on earth selected by these beings to serve as their spokesman and prophet, having learned uh through deep study of the Old Testament and original Hebrew for how to summon these craft on command. He claimed that for 25 years he had been able to summon these orbs on command, and he had only gone public with these abilities when Yahweh had ordered him to do so, with the ultimate goal of revealing the truth about extraterrestrial beings to the entire world. Well, on May 26th, 2005, a Las Vegas ABC News affiliate, KTNV Channel 13, sent a reporter to meet Raymond Watkins at a local park. On camera, Watkins raised his hands, began to pray and calling to the sky, and within moments a glowing orb appeared and slowly moved across the sky, all while the news crew filmed the event. The reporters had chosen the date, the time, the location themselves, meaning Watkins had no obvious way to pre-position anything in the area ahead of time. The footage went viral and made international headlines, and viewers were split between those who believed they had witnessed something genuinely unexplained and skeptics who suspected the object was simply a balloon that Watkins or an accomplice had secretly placed out beforehand. But did Watkins even have access to a weather balloon, you ask? Well, it's not as if we have photos of him on the internet with weather balloons in hand, right? Well, what are you doing with those uh those weather balloons there, Watkins? Now, I want to be careful here because I think that we need to make a distinction that's often lost in discussions like these. Uh, first and foremost, is that we're talking about very different things. I'm not trying to get rid of all the UFO sightings and then just kind of uh carte blanche taste all of them and say, oh, these are just flashing lights in the distance. When we're talking about Raymond Watkins and his weather balloons or Stephen Greer pointing off his camera to a passing satellite and calling it a trans-dimensional craft, we're talking about something fundamentally different than what the U.S. Navy has documented on radar-locked FLIR cameras, traveling at speeds and performing maneuvers that really break our understanding of physics. These are not the same conversation at all. A glowing orb drifting lazily across the Las Vegas sky is not the same as a Tic-Tac-shaped object outrunning an F-18, splitting into multiple objects, and then disappearing into the ocean with no heat signature and no visible means of propulsion. The pilots reporting these encounters aren't spiritual seekers with puja altars, and they don't have meditation abs. They're trained military aviators filing official reports, and the objects that they're encountering were tracked on multiple sensor systems simultaneously. So let's be honest, some of this is absolutely a fraud, and some of this is misidentified planes and drones and wishful thinking. And then there is a genuinely unexplained phenomenon that serious people should take seriously. Putting all of this into the same bucket is a huge disservice to the conversation. But here's where I want to pump the brakes, because even if we grant all of that, even granting that these things could potentially be real, unexplained aerial phenomena that governments around the world cannot account for, that does not vindicate what Bender or Greer or their followers are actually doing. Because the problem was never really about lights in the sky. The problem is about opening a spiritual door that we should not be opening. And that open door is dangerous. Yes, I think Greer is completely a grifter. And Raymond Watkins is a few curly fries short of the happy meal. And when you see this, and I think you will see this, you'll be tempted to believe that what they're doing is not spiritually dangerous because it's just a hoax, right? They're just kids playing with their imagination and hunting UFOs. This is just factually incorrect. One can employ an elaborate hoax while trafficking in demonic deception simultaneously. Geronimmy 18, 10 through 12 forbids divination and sorcery and mediums and necromancy. And I know someone's gonna say, well, Joshua, these people aren't calling up the dead. They're just contacting aliens. And I would debate on what they're actually doing there. I don't think they're conjuring up the dead. I think they're definitely communicating with demons. Uh, but that's neither here nor there. It I'll grant you the ground. Technically, true, but look at what all of these practices have in common. Every single one of them is an attempt to make a contact with a spiritual intelligence outside of God. His authority structure, what Bender was doing in his attic and what Greer is doing in the hillside of Joshua Tree, and with his puja altar and mantros is functionally the same thing with a different coat of paint. They replace the Ouija board with meditation apps and they call it science. God doesn't forbid these things because he's trying to be arbitrary. He forbids them because he knows what's on the other side of that door, and it's dangerous. Paul writes in 2 Corinthians 11 14 that Satan disguises himself as an angel of light. His primary strategy is not to show up as a monster under your bed, it's to appear luminous, benevolent, and higher. Now, look at Greer's framework. Uh, these beings, they exist at a higher biofrequency. They're spiritually advanced beyond human civilization. They are, without exception, completely benevolent. And if you have any doubt about that, you are the problem. If you were going to design a theology specifically engineered to make people spiritually defenseless, you would design exactly this beings pre-certified as good. Skepticism, treated as a spiritual defect, and to completely surrender your discernment as the price to participate in this activity. This is not enlightenment. This is a setup. To anyone who has dabbled in CE5 and hasn't experienced anything overtly demonic, hey, I believe you, but the absence of an immediate negative consequence is not the same as safety. A door doesn't have to fly off its hinges the moment you unlock it. Deliberately and repeatedly inviting non-human spiritual intelligences to contact with you, lowering your defenses, and silencing your discernment is not neutral territory. The UAPs may be genuinely unexplained, but the spiritual practice of reaching out to contact them through meditation and rituals is not ambiguous. Scripture addresses it directly. Don't open that door. But here's the thing: the desire underneath all of this is real and probably even God-given. People want to know that they're not alone and that contact with something higher is actually possible. And that experience does exist. Communion with an intelligent being that is genuinely, unconditionally good, a being that knows your name and has been reaching towards you your entire life. That's not science fiction, that's the gospel. Jesus says in John 10, 10, the enemy comes to kill, steal, and destroy, but I've come to give life and all of its fullness. And then he says in John 10, verse 9, uh, I am the door. If anyone enters by me, he will be saved. Here, Jesus is not a door, he is the door. If you've been drawn to these practices because you're hungry for something real, well, Jesus has come to give life and all of its fullness. I understand that desire, but the door that you're looking for is actually right behind you. And you need to turn, repent, and believe in the gospel and the experience of being united to Christ, it is something that is promised to you. Life and life more abundantly. Guys, I hope you enjoyed this episode of the Remnant Radio. If so, subscribe. If you've got questions, drop them down below. I'll try to answer them to the best of my ability. And additionally, if you want us to make more content specifically about various sides of the alien controversy, uh, please let us know in the links below or in the comment section below. Guys, thank you so much for tuning into this program. We'll see you next time.