UAP in the Nation of Islam?
UAP in the Nation of Islam? Really? Yes, really.
The very authority of The Honorable Louis Farrakhan (b. 1933) claims as minister-in-chief of the reconstituted Nation of Islam (NOI) comes from UAP (Unidentified Aerial Phenomena). But you might ask: why might we think of UAP in the Nation of Islam? Here is the answer: because Farrakhan was abducted, so to speak, by a UFO. Within the hovering craft, it was the voice of the deceased Elijah Muhammed speaking to Farrakhan that consecrated Farrakhan to become NOI’s sacred leader.
But isn’t NOI a racist organization?
But you might ask: isn’t NOI a racist organization? Wikipedia certainly suggests this.
The Anti-Defamation League classifies Farrakhan as a racist, and the Southern Poverty Law Center considers the Nation of Islam (NOI) as a hate group and a black nationalist organization. According to the SPLC, the NOI asserts that black people are racially superior to white people and promotes a “fundamentally anti-white theology amounting to an “innate black superiority over whites”. According to the NOI, whites were created 6,600 years ago as a “race of devils” by an evil scientist named Yakub, a story which originated with the founder of the NOI, Wallace D. Fard.
Let me ask you to set aside for a moment the racial dimensions so we can focus on a specific UFO inquiry: are UAP in the Nation of Islam?
A Close Encounter of the Third Kind?
Louis Farrakhan filed a UFO sighting report — well, sort of — during a press conference in 1989 which he affectionally called, “The Announcement.” What he announces looks a great deal like a Close Encounter of the Third Kind as categorized by J. Allen Hynek (Hynek 1972). Farrakhan is abducted by a heavenly wheel like Ezekiel’s. Well, sort of (Zimmerman 1997).
In a tiny town in Mexico, called Tepotzlán, there is a mountain on the top of which is the ruins of a temple dedicated to Quetzalcoatl—the Christ-figure of Central and South America—a mountain which I have climbed several times. However, on the night of September 17, 1985, I was carried up on that mountain, in a vision, with a few friends of mine. As we reached the top of the mountain, a Wheel, or what you call an unidentified flying object [UFO], appeared at the side of the mountain and called to me to come up into the Wheel. (Farrakhan 1989 / 1991).
What happens aboard the Mother Wheel looks quite like what the flying saucer contactees – such as George Adamski (Adamski 1953) or Orfeo Angelucci (Jung 1959) — of the 1950s described. Farrakhan engages in a conversation with the then deceased prophet and leader, Elijah Muhammed. After Muhammed’s death in 1975, the group known as the Black Muslims split, weakened, and dissipated. Then in 1989, when Farrakhan announced his UFO story to the press, his intention was to reconstitute NOI with himself as its divinely chosen leader. UAP in the Nation of Islam provided Farrakhan with an other-worldly ordination.
Farrakhan becomes the shaman or priest thanks to UAP in the Nation of Islam
If you’re familiar with the history of religions, you’ll immediately notice the connection between heaven and earth. Farrakhan goes up the mountain. The UFO comes down from the sky to pick him up. The mountain is the place, and Farrakhan is the person where heaven and earth become bonded. This is classic religious symbolism. It exemplifies what Mircea Eliade referred to as the axis mundi, the center of the earth where earth and heaven connect (Eliade 1957, 118).
While aboard the Mother Wheel craft, the voice of Elijah Muhammad appoints Farrakhan to reconstitute NOI and become its central minister, its axis mundi (Eliade 1957, 36). The shamanic traditions of many archaic cultures included the passing of the authority of the priestly figure through a call vision willed by heaven. In this case, heaven is represented by an interstellar spacecraft that has, among its many technological achievements, overcome death.
There is more here than merely a consecrating message from on high. There is also a promise of redemption. It is Louisiana State University Professor Stephen Finley’s interpretation that “his mountaintop experience in Mexico, is Christ-like—soteriological and protective with respect to black people and apocalyptic with respect to America” (Finley 2022, 213).
Now, we might ask: did this happen objectively as Farrakhan describes it? This would be a proper question for a scientist. However, I recommend we bracket the objective reality question and ask: what is the structure of meaning exhibited in this UFO report? My answer: consecration and threat. Farrakhan is consecrated NOI leader, and he threatens to destroy the white people on earth through a bombing raid by invading flying saucers.
From Consecration to Threat
In addition to his anointing as shaman or priest, Farrakhan delivers a prophetic if not apocalyptic warning: repent and stop racism or face judgment and destruction! “The white part of humanity—the part responsible for colonialism, imperialism, slavery, genocide, the Holocaust, world wars, and the threat of nuclear annihilation—would be gone. Peace and joy without sickness would follow without end” (Curtis 2016, 22). Unless the white race ceases is prejudicial treatment of the black race, alien military technology will devastate the United States of America.
You will see these wheels, or what you call UFOs, in abundance over the major cities of America and the calamities that America is presently experiencing will increase in number and in intensity that you might humble yourselves to the Warning contained in this Announcement (Farrakhan 1989 / 1991).
In the apocalypse to come, Allah will destroy the world with bombs, poison gas, and fire. The black race will be redeemed on earth by the powers of heaven unleashed by extraterrestrial warriors.
Envoi
Stephen Finley, cited above, would want to place Farrakhan’s UFO experience within the history of Black liberation in America (Finley 2022). This is certainly appropriate, to be sure. Nevertheless, when asking about UAP in the Nation of Islam, I’d like to place Farrakhan’s experience within the history of UAP in America and the dialectic between religion and science (Zeller Nov 2021).
“Those who claim to be channelers of extraterrestrial intelligence nearly always interpret those entities in a positive or benevolent light,” observes Stanford’s Richard Dolan (Dolan, 2022, 294). I might add that for contactees if not abuctees the alien experience is a religious experience in scientific or semi-scientific disguise.
It has been my observation over the decades that religious sensibilities are getting translated into the language of science and technology (Peters 2014). It will not be angels who come to destroy America to punish the white race. The judgement will be exacted instead by spacecraft which, as we know, are the product of scientific research and technological advance. Science and technology today bear the weight of meaning our ancestors experienced within religion (Denzler, Lure if the Edge: Scientific Passions, Religious Beliefs, and the Pursuit of UFOs 2001).
One of the most subtle dimensions of the UFO phenomenon has been the hidden faith that modern society places in science accompanied by its sister, technology. Science saves. And if terrestrial science fails to save us, then we hope for a more highly evolved extraterrestrial science to save us. This hope for scientific salvation is something Farrakhan in NOI shares with the UFO contactee tradition if not the UFO phenomenon more generally (Tumminia 2003).
Conclusion
Frankly, to cite Jesus (Matthew 7:26), to put faith in science is to build your house on sand. Oh, yes, the advances in medical science over the last two centuries have made human life on earth better. Thank God for science!
Yet, this same science has given us atomic bombs along with autonomous lethal drone technology. In short, science is ambiguous. That is, science is capable of evil to the same extent that it has the potential for good.
This applies to extraterrestrial science as well as terrestrial, I will bet. I guess this means we have only God left in which to put our faith.
Patheos SR 1195 UFO 25. UAP in the Nation of Islam
Are UFOs our Celestial Saviors?
SR 1177 UFO 7 Are UFOs demonic?
SR 1186 UFO 16 UAP Cryptoterrestrial Hypothesis
SR 1187 UFO 17 Scientizing Ufology
SR 1188 UFO 18 Are UAP from outer space?
SR 1189 UFO 19 Are UAP from future time?
SR 1190 UFO 20 UAP: the Interdimensional Hypothesis?
SR 1191 UFO 21 UAP and Ancient Alien Theology
SR 1192 UFO 22 UAP, ETI, and David Bohm’s Physics
SR 1193 UFO 23, A UFO for Christmas?
Ted Peters, “Muslims, Christians, Scientists, and Extraterrestrial Aliens” Theology and Science 21:3 (2023) 345-347; DOI: 10.1080/14746700.2023.2230423.
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Ted Peters directs traffic at the intersection of science, religion, and ethics. Peters is an emeritus professor at the Graduate Theological Union, where he co-edits the journal, Theology and Science, with Robert John Russell on behalf of the Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences, in Berkeley, California, USA. He authored Playing God? Genetic Determinism and Human Freedom? (Routledge, 2nd ed., 2002) as well as Science, Theology, and Ethics (Ashgate 2003). Along with Martinez Hewlett, Joshua Moritz, and Robert John Russell, he co-edited, Astrotheology: Science and Theology Meet Extraterrestrial Intelligence (2018). Along with Octavio Chon Torres, Joseph Seckbach, and Russell Gordon, he co-edited, Astrobiology: Science, Ethics, and Public Policy (Scrivener 2021). Along with Arvin Gouw and Brian Patrick Green, he co-edited Religious Transhumanism and Its Critics (Lexington 2022). He is also author of UFOs: God’s Chariots? Spirituality, Ancient Aliens, and Religious Yearnings in the Age of Extraterrestrials (Career Press New Page Books, 2014). Look for his newest book, The Voice of Public Theology, a collection of previous articles. See his website: TedsTimelyTake.com.
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References
Adamski, George, and Desmond Leslie. 1953. The Flying Saucers Have Landed. New York: British Book Center.
Curtis, Edward E. 2016. “Science and Technology in Elijah Muhammad’s Nation of Islam.” Nova Religio: The Journal of Alternative and Emergent Religions 20:1 5-31; DOI: 10.1525/nr.2016.20.1.5.
Denzler, Brenda. 2001. Lure if the Edge: Scientific Passions, Religious Beliefs, and the Pursuit of UFOs . Berkeley CA: University of California Press.
Dolan, Richard M. 2022. UFOs for the 21st Century. Richard Dolan Press.
Eliade, Mircea. 1957. The Sacred and the Profane. New York: Harcourt Brace and World.
Farrakhan, Louis. 1989 / 1991. The Announcement. Final Call. Transcript: https://noi.org/oct-24-1989-press-conference/: You Tube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P88cGqzPdYs.
Finley, Stephen G. 2022. In and Out of this World. Durham NC: Duke.
Hynek, J Allen. 1972. The UFO Experience. Chicago: Henry Regnery.
Jung, Carl. 1959. Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies. London: Routledge.
Peters, Ted. 2014. UFOs–God’s Chariots? Spiritualiy, Ancient Aliens, and Religious Yearnings in the Age of Extraterrestrials. 2nd. Pompton Plains NJ: New Page Books.
Tumminia, Diana. 2003. “From Rumor to Postmodern Myth: A Sociological Study of the Transformation of Flying Saucer Rumor.” In Encyclopedic Sourcebook of UFO Religions, by ed James R Lewis, 103-119. Amherst NY: Prometheus.
Zeller, Benjamin. Nov 2021. “(Dis)Enchanted Ufology.” Nova Religio 25:2 61-86.
Zimmerman, Michael. 1997. “The alien abduction phenomenon: Forbidden knowledge of hidden events.” Philosophy Today 41:2 235-245.
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