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The New Mythology: What UFOs Reveal About the Human Mind

The New Mythology: What UFOs Reveal About the Human Mind

Last updated on: October 24, 2026 at 8:10 am by Tom Rapsas

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The New Mythology: What UFOs Reveal About the Human Mind 2026-10-24T08:10:02-06:00 Tom Rapsas

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

Beyond the tales of UFOs and alien encounters lies a far greater mystery: human consciousness itself. Image by Gemini.

What Whitley Strieber and “The Visitors” Teach Us About Consciousness

In recent years, stories about UFOs and UAPs, Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena, have moved from the fringes of society into the mainstream news. Congressional hearings and declassified military footage have shown us that something is in our skies. Even if we don’t quite know what it is.

Yet, for all the evidence of flying objects that can move at astounding speeds, the most compelling piece of the story isn’t the technology. It’s the human element. There are now untold thousands of people who claim they’ve had direct, intimate encounters with the phenomena’s occupants. Among these witnesses, there are few as compelling as Whitley Strieber.

You may know Strieber as the author of a best-selling book.

In his 1987 book Communion, Strieber told the story of his terrifying late-night abduction from an upstate New York cabin by non-human entities. But while he became the poster child for close encounters of the fourth kind, Strieber has always dwelt on the larger mysteries of life. His books include Jesus: A New Vision, a well-researched study of the life, times, and original message of Christ.

How does a man write a serious work of historical theology while simultaneously insisting he was visited by alien beings? To understand where Strieber is coming from, you have to look at the backstory that has shaped his views.

When Communion was published, Strieber was inundated with mail. Letters didn’t just trickle in. They arrived like a tidal wave, at one point exceeding ten thousand letters a month from around the globe. He realized he was not alone. The letters reported encounters with beings that had identical details to the entities he encountered: thin, luminous faces dominated by large, dark, almond-shaped eyes.

Strieber didn’t jump to the conclusion that these gray-tinted aliens were travelers from another solar system. Instead, he described them with the neutral term “the visitors.” In his view, they might not be extraterrestrial at all. They could be interdimensional, sharing our space in a spectrum of reality we simply lack the sensory apparatus to perceive.

Strieber dug deeper into these strange encounters.

In A New World and The Super Natural, co-authored with religious scholar Jeffrey J. Kripal, Strieber tried to explain the bizarre world he was thrust into without his consent. He describes interactions that defy logic. The visitors communicate not in spoken words, but mind-to-mind, using vivid images placed directly inside his head.

Strieber and Kripal suggest that encounters with this type of phenomena aren’t new. It has been happening for centuries. In times past, people encountered fairies, spirits, demons, or “wee folk.” In remote areas, reports emerged of Bigfoot or Yeti sightings. Today, the unknown is more likely to materialize as UFOs, manned by occupants known as aliens or entities.

In the recent book The Others, author D.W. Pasulka mentions the legendary UFO researcher John Keel and his use of the term “ultraterrestrial” to describe these beings. They are described as non-human intelligence that originate not from outer space, but from other dimensions, realities, and planes of existence that overlap our own. Keel notes that the manifestations are not visible to most people, but only to those who are sensitive or biologically able to perceive them.

From Strieber and Kripal’s perspective, what we see is often not what is actually there. It is what our imagination trains us to see, shaped by our culture and spiritual beliefs. They mention the philosopher Kant who “taught us that we do not know the world as it really is. We only know the world as it is filtered through and shaped by our senses and the structuring categories of the human mind.”

Is it possible UFOs and aliens are our new mythology?

We used to rely on myths to frame our reality. We didn’t use literal answers to explain how the world worked, we used stories. Take the recent blockbuster movie The Odyssey, a myth that is 2,800 years old. Its message still resonates today, because its description of struggle, temptation, and homecoming is timeless—a myth that relates to our own inner reality. As the storyteller Michael Meade points out:

Myths can reveal the inner design of things, the hidden patterns and the universal truths that make life meaningful. As humans we are mythic by nature. It is when we forget or deny our capacity for mythic imagination that we become distant from our inner nature.

Meade believes that “modern people long for the healing presence of mythic stories.” It’s how we make sense of things that we can’t rationally explain. But in modern times, this ancient folklore has been pushed to the fringes. Yet the mysteries that life presents us haven’t vanished. They’ve simply changed their appearance.

Consider religious apparitions like the Miracle of Fatima which happened in Portugal in 1917. In that case, a group of children saw the image of the blessed Virgin Mary and heard her speak. But most of the people there experienced only bright “dancing” lights and a buzzing sound that left them terrified, running for shelter in the local church.

That’s just one instance of the weirdness surrounding many religious experiences. Consider the conversion story of Paul the Apostle who was knocked to the ground by a blinding light and then heard a voice from the heavens. Strieber calls out this and other instances, where strange phenomena were seen as the handiwork of the Divine. In his words:

Paul assumed that he encountered the risen body of Jesus on the Road to Damascus. Mohammed thought that the radiant being he encountered in the cave was the angel Gabriel. Moses thought that the burning bush was the presence of Yaweh.

The world may be stranger and more complex than we ever imagined.

In the instances of Paul, Mohammed, and Moses, the witnesses’ personal belief system may have influenced what they saw. Where they saw the divine, others might have seen something to be feared. And if comparing ancient prophets to modern alien abductees sounds like a leap, even Strieber admits his own tale of late-night encounters defies belief. He explains:

I know that all of this sounds fictional. Of course it does. But perhaps the world is far larger and more complex than we ever imagined. Something that has always been part of us, and which is now raising its ancient voice again, calling to all of us to look up to the stars and inward to the infinity of our minds, and find our own greatness, and save ourselves.

Ultimately, whether these visitors are from faraway galaxies, parallel dimensions, or emerge from the depths of human consciousness itself, the takeaway is the same. The world is far stranger than our everyday reality might suggest. The real mystery behind UFOs and close encounters may not be the alien technology. It may be what’s happening inside our own heads, as we deal with a phenomenon beyond our comprehension.

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