W"Ancient astronauts" refers to the idea, often presented in a pseudoscientific way, that intelligent extraterrestrial beings visited Earth and made contact with humans in antiquity and prehistoric times. Proponents suggest that this contact influenced the development of modern cultures, technologies, religions, and human biology. A common position is that deities from most, if not all, religions are extraterrestrial in origin, and that advanced technologies brought to Earth by ancient astronauts were interpreted as evidence of divine status by early humans.
WTruman Bethurum was one of the well known 1950s UFO or alien "contactees"- individuals who claimed to have spoken with people from other inhabited planets and entered or ridden in their spacecraft. Bethurum was born in Gavilin, California, and in the early 1950s worked as a truck driver and a mechanic on a desert road-building crew. He later became a self-proclaimed spiritual advisor. In 1953, Bethurum first published magazine and newspaper accounts of being contacted on eleven separate occasions by the humanoid crew of a landed space ship in the Nevada desert, and repeatedly conversing with its beautiful and voluptuous female captain, Aura Rhanes. Saucer and crew, who spoke colloquial English, came from the unknown planet Clarion, allegedly on the other side of our Sun, and thus cannot be seen from the Earth. Bethurum's 1954 book, Aboard a Flying Saucer, gave many details of his suffering at the hands of skeptics and a great deal of information about Captain Rhanes, Clarion and its people.
WChariots of the Gods? Unsolved Mysteries of the Past is a book written in 1968 by Erich von Däniken and translated from the original German by Michael Heron. It involves the hypothesis that the technologies and religions of many ancient civilizations were given to them by ancient astronauts who were welcomed as gods.
WSalvador Freixedo was a Spanish Catholic priest and a member of the Jesuit Order. A ufologist and researcher of paranormal subjects, he wrote a number of books on the relationship between religion and extraterrestrial beings, and was a speaker in several international UFO congresses in Europe, the Americas, and Asia. He was also a contributor to a number of parascientific magazines, such as Mundo Desconocido, Karma 7 and Más allá (Beyond) among others. He also appeared in a number of TV and radio shows dedicated to these subjects.
WHeaven's Gate was an American UFO religious cult based near San Diego, California. It was founded in 1974 and led by Marshall Applewhite (1931–1997) and Bonnie Nettles (1927–1985). On March 26, 1997, deputies of the San Diego County Sheriff's Department discovered the bodies of 39 members of the group, including that of Applewhite, in a house in the San Diego suburb of Rancho Santa Fe. They had participated in a mass suicide, a coordinated series of ritual suicides, in order to reach what they believed was an extraterrestrial spacecraft following Comet Hale–Bopp.
WRaëlism, also known as Raëlianism, is a UFO religion that was founded in 1970s France by Claude Vorilhon, now known as Raël. Scholars of religion classify Raëlism as a new religious movement. The group is formalised as the International Raëlian Movement (IRM) or Raëlian Church, a hierarchical organisation under Raël's leadership.
WUnarius is a non-profit organization founded in 1954 in Los Angeles, California and headquartered in El Cajon, California. The organization purports to advance a new "interdimensional science of life" based upon "fourth-dimensional" physics principles. It is recorded that in 2003–4 Unarius centers existed in Canada, New Zealand, Nigeria, the United Kingdom, and in various locations in the United States. Membership figures are unknown.
WWhen Prophecy Fails: A Social and Psychological Study of a Modern Group That Predicted the Destruction of the World is a classic work of social psychology by Leon Festinger, Henry Riecken, and Stanley Schachter, published in 1956, detailing a study of a small UFO religion in Chicago called the Seekers that believed in an imminent apocalypse. The authors took a particular interest in the members' coping mechanisms after the event did not occur, focusing on the cognitive dissonance between the members' beliefs and actual events, and the psychological consequences of these disconfirmed expectations. One of the first published cases of dissonance was reported in this book.
WGeorge Hunt Williamson, aka Michael d'Obrenovic and Brother Philip, was an American flying saucer contactee, channel, and metaphysical author who came to prominence in the 1950s.