Category: Religion

I’ve been following conversations (such as this one on Reddit) around UAPs and “high strangeness” with a mix of fascination and caution for a few years now. Part of that comes from my work in and around academic consciousness studies, particularly where ecology, perception, and meaning intersect. Part of it comes from being an ordained pastor with a Masters from Yale in ancient religious literature who has spent 30+ years reading and academically studying ancient religious texts (mainly Ancient Near Eastern as well as Jewish, Greek, and Christian) that modern people often misunderstand as either naïve or hysterical.

A recent Substack essay by Maze to Metanoia, “The Pentagon Calls Them Demons. The Public Calls Them Aliens. Both Are Wrong.”, crystallizes many of these tensions well.

The piece traces how some government and military insiders have evidently described UAP phenomena not as extraterrestrial, but as “demonic,” while arguing that this language reflects a collapse of conceptual nuance rather than genuine discernment. I’m broadly sympathetic to that concern, especially the frustration with oscillating between reductionist materialism that modern scientific thinking takes on phenomena and experience, and reactionary supernaturalism that gets classified in modern parlance as “woo.”

But I also think something more subtle is happening and that’s why I’ve long been fascinated with “the phenomenon” or “UFO / UAP” or transdimensional entities or whatever tag we’d like to use for these experiences.

Was “demonic” language really a regression?

There’s a common assumption that invoking demons signals a return to medieval superstition. Historically, however, religious traditions were often far more phenomenologically careful and nuanced than we give them credit for (from Sumerian and Babylonian traditions through medieval mystics in both Jewish and Christian traditions). Early Jewish, Greek, and Christian sources did not assume that every non-human encounter was evil. What they assumed was that such encounters required discernment, ethical scrutiny, and attention to long-term outcomes rather than fascination, power, or spectacle (or immediate worship).

The question was rarely “what is this thing?” in the abstract. It was “how does this encounter shape desire, attention, humility, fear, or care for others?” Those traditions were less interested in cataloging beings than in evaluating relationships. We see this in Ezekiel, Enoch (the beloved book of many podcasters these days, such as Joe Rogan, when describing ancient conceptions of this phenomenon), ancient Greek texts, ancient Hindu scripture, etc.

Our difficulty today is not that we’ve lost belief in demons or angels. It’s that modernity trained us to reduce experience to either brute matter or fantasy. Or, perhaps worse, to a thin modern notion of “myth” that bears almost no resemblance to how ancient cultures understood symbolic or participatory reality/realities.

When that reduction collapses under the weight of lived experience, what people now call “high strangeness,” the nearest available language is often moralized, flattened, and extreme. Everything becomes either benevolent space saviors or literal demons from hell, and nuance disappears.

Daimons were never monsters

The retrieval of the Greek concept of daimōn is helpful here, if we handle it carefully. In Plato’s Symposium and Apology, Socrates speaks of daimons not as horned villains, but as mediating presences that operate between gods and humans, shaping conscience, attention, and orientation toward the good. They were not objects of worship, nor simply metaphysical species to be classified. They were relational realities that required discernment.

Later Christian thinkers inherited this complexity more than is often acknowledged. While the category of “demon” hardened over time as did some doctrines, early Christian writers were deeply concerned with testing spirits, examining fruits, and resisting fascination. The danger was not that non-human encounters existed, but that humans would become captivated, destabilized, or morally disoriented by them.

This emphasis on discernment persists well into medieval mysticism. Figures such as Evagrius Ponticus, John Cassian, Hildegard of Bingen, and later Teresa of Ávila were all deeply wary of visions and encounters that bypassed humility, patience, and care for others. Spectacle was suspect while psychological destabilization mattered. In this way, ethical aftermath mattered more than ontological explanation.

Pasulka and technological mysticism

Diana Walsh Pasulka’s work has been especially clarifying for me here. In American Cosmic (interesting read!) and subsequent essays, she documents how contemporary UAP encounters function less like technological contact events and more like religious disclosures

Experiencers often reach for the language of craft, technology, or engineering, but the structure of the experience itself closely resembles mystical visions. They are disruptive, meaning-laden, psychologically destabilizing, and interpretively plastic. The language changes with the cultural moment, but the phenomenological pattern remains strikingly consistent.

This does not make the experiences “supernatural” in a simplistic sense. It does suggest that engineering metaphors alone are insufficient. The encounters are not just about information transfer or hardware. They are about being addressed.

The daimonic as a stance, not an ontology

For that reason, I’d frame the daimonic not as a third ontological category alongside aliens (or angels) and demons, but as a disciplinary stance. It names encounters with beings or phenomena that address us, shape desire, solicit attention, and reorient meaning without being reducible to either hardware or hallucination.

This aligns closely with phenomenological approaches to consciousness, which bracket premature explanations to attend carefully to how experience presents itself, how it affects perception, and how it alters relational posture over time. I’ve written elsewhere about this in the context of ecological intentionality and vegetal empathy, where the question is not whether trees or ecosystems “have consciousness” in a technical sense, but how learning to attend differently reshapes ethical life.

Ancient traditions were often more patient than we are. They assumed that some aspects of reality disclose themselves slowly through disciplined attention rather than through spectacle or proof.

Slowing down instead of swinging wildly

If modern discourse around this issue (and many others!) could recover that slower, ethical, wary posture, one that resists fascination and immediate worship, we would be in a far healthier place than swinging between cosmic alien saviors and cosmic demonic enemies. Discernment is restraint, not denial.

Socrates trusted his daimon, according to Plato, not because it dazzled him, but because it restrained him. Christian mystics trusted experiences that produced humility, patience, and love of neighbor, not fear, obsession, or special knowledge. Ecology teaches something similar. Attention that rushes to mastery often destroys what it seeks to understand.

Whatever these phenomena ultimately are, ancient wisdom suggests that the most important question is not what they are made of, but what kind of relationship they invite, and at what cost. That feels like a lesson worth recovering to me, whether discussing the fascinating phenomenon, politics, community ethics, or our broader ecologies.