Mormons- The World's First UFO Cult.

            With the recent controversy in the Church of Latter Day Saints, with several thousand people leaving it due to the current demand that parents of homosexual children denounce them and vice versa, I decided to look into the cosmological roots of the Mormon church and … well what I saw sure looks like a UFO cult. Now most religious origin stories, at its core, comes across like a badly scripted D&D adventure. The Mormon religion however comes across like a badly written science fiction story. There are claims that the Book of Mormon is the world’s first science fiction story (Unfortunately that is untrue, the first universally accepted sci-fi novel being Somnium by Johannes Kepler written in 1608). Still I will postulate that Mormonism is the world’s first UFO cult. Allow me to offer some examples to back up my statement.

            Let’s get to the meat of the matter. The God of Mormonism did not create everything ex nilio as did the Hebrew Deity, but instead constructed the world from existing celestial debris. In fact the Mormon God was born a regular guy like you, me, Ghandi, and Hitler. He eventually rose past his mortality through a processes called “eternal progression” and became a divine being. And later on his Jewish son Jesus, or Heyzeus, or Yeshua ben Yoseph (take your pick) followed suit here on Earth.

            This concept of “eternal progression” or “exaltation” is a key element of the Mormon proclamation. That if a person strives for purity and righteousness (as defined by the boys in Salt Lake City) and to be “one with Heyzeus as Heyzeus is one with God”, then a mortal man might become joint-heirs with Heyzeus and become a God of a world. Now this part does sound a lot more like old school D&D, but it gets more sci-fi real quick. All of this happens after you die, naturally.

            The requirements for “exaltation” have changed over time. Originally you had to be white- as the Mormons’s proscribed that dark skin was the Mark of Caine and a sign of damnation. Thus it was forbidden to marry a dark skinned person, and they could never rise up to be even a low level cleric in the Church’s hierarchy. This requirement was changed in 1978 after Jimmy Carter threatened to remove the Church’s tax exempt status.

            Nowadays a Mormon adherent has to undergo a series of sacraments into order to become “perfect”. One is that a man has to have a “celestial marriage” to an opposite sex partner (the opposite part is explicitly stated) via an ordinance of sealing ritual, which goes not only unto death, but well beyond. So be careful, you will be stuck with whomever you marry until the heat death of the universe! The celestial marriage can occur in person, via a proxy strand-in, or even after the person has died. Under Brigham Young multiple celestial marriages for men were required to continue on the road to “eternal progression”. This naturally coincided with the Mormon’s former bigamous practices, the great legal sticking point of their religion. This, along with the murder of Joseph Smith in 1846, caused the Mormons to exile themselves to Utah in 1848, which at the time was outside the borders of the United States. The necessity for a pluralistic marriage was later rescinded in 1890, but the practice continued for some time after and still is in some isolated communities.

            That is how a regular Joe becomes a God. A bit nebulous I know, but the reality is that it is a simple step-by-step process of sacraments, similar to the Catholic Church’s first communion and confirmation. A route by the numbers procedure.

            But what about the Big Man himself? Mormon doctrine teaches that the Earth is not a unique place, but simply one of many planets where human beings live (like Star Wars), all of whom meet in God’s joint after they die. Each of these Earths were crafted by Jehovah and his boy Heyzeus, who shows up and dies on every one. Jehovah himself was born a dude on an unnamed planet where people like us live and eventually rose to become the God that we all know and blame our problems on.
             Where this unnamed planet is has never been stated, but the suggestion is that it is in a parallel universe, as none of the worlds were created until Jehovah showed up. He establishes himself in a place called Kolob, which is either a star or a planet (the word “star” is used interchangeably in The Book of Mormon). One day on Kolob is the equivalent to 1000 Earth years. Where this star or planet is has been up for speculation ever since the idea was written down. Theory’s range from it being the planet Mercury, to being at the center of the Milky Way, to its being a star outside of our galaxy entirely... Or of course it could just be made up.

            Moving onto the birth of Heyzeus, to the Mormon’s: God literally came to Earth, fucked Mary- despite her claims to not be worthy (is this the beginning of rape culture?)- and inseminated her with himself, which overrode her DNA. Thus he created a clone of himself (I assume Jehovah was Jewish in his past incarnation). He does this in order to die and ascend, showing people the true path to immortality, but unfortunately this wasn’t picked up on until over 1800 years after Heyzeus’s execution by the state.

             All of this is very science-fictiony. There are several other cosmological and doctrinal elements which mirror Christianity (regarding Satan and the fall of the Angels, and so on), but they are best summed up in the cartoon below. Enjoy and caveat emptor.

For more fun try books by Rex Hurst

Bigfoot Sightings Near Blood Mobiles

     In the otherwise peaceful area of Bath, New York a bizarre break-in occurred on the night of July 17^th, 1973. The Red Cross had been collecting blood that day from volunteers at Haverly High, the local high school, but their vehicle experienced a mechanical failure, forcing the group to spend the night in town. The local market offered the workers the use of their freezers to store the collected blood in for the evening, while technicians and nurses stayed at a nearby Howard Johnson's.

   The next morning the store manager arrived at the market to find that the back door had been broken into. Police were called in and discovered that the only articles to have been molested was the containers of blood. Several dozen packets were missing, while the rest of the consignment were thrown about the freezer. The market’s back door had not been picked open, but was savagely beaten in, the handle smashed off with a blunt object. Police suspected this to be the work of teenagers.

    The area had been experiencing severe electrical storms for several weeks, quite out of season for the region, and one such storm had struck on that particular night. Several large tracks were found embedded in a field adjacent to the store. The police ignored them as unrelated to the case, but a towns person later made a plaster mold of one of them. The bare footprint was measured at an incredible 22 inches long and 7 inches wide.

An old chestnut

    This discovery is compounded with a phone call the police received the night of the break in. A local man, Albert Biggs, reported being threatened by a monster when he returned home from a bar. He described it as being at least 8 foot tall, hairy, and naked. The creature, according to Biggs, walked upright and wielded a large club. The monster yelled at Biggs (not in English) and waved its weapon in a threatening manner. Biggs ran into his house and the creature departed. Police dismissed the call as a wild tale from one of the town’s many alcoholics.

    No person was ever arrested in connection with the break-in and eventually the case was shelved. The Red Cross workers collected the remaining donations and left Bath the next day. They have since come back nearly every year, with no re-occurrence of trouble.
 For more fun try books by Rex Hurst

The Vanishing Prisoner

            There was a bizarre incident at the Prussian prison of Weischselmunde (near Danzig) circa 1815, involving the disappearance of a man named Diderici. He had worked as a valet for an important man in the city. After his employer died suddenly of a stroke, Diderici had dressed up in his master’s clothes and a white wig and attempted to withdraw a large sum of cash from the family’s bank while impersonating the dead man. He was caught almost immediately and sentenced to 10 year imprisonment.

            One afternoon he was walking in chains in the walled prison’s exercise yard, with other prisoners walking directly ahead and behind him when, as described by the other prisoners, he “began to fade.” According to testimony taken of both guards and convicts within seconds Diderici became intangible, then invisible. His iron chains clanking to the ground.

Prison at Weischselmunde

 Officials suspected that the guards had been bribed in some way to let Diderici escape, but when the inquiry into the disappearance only yielded 28 identical stories, the authorities had no choice but to label the incident as a bizarre “act of God” and closed the case. Diderici, who had somehow made reality every prisoner’s dream, was never heard from again.

 For more fun try books by Rex Hurst

UFO Cultists and Cattle Mutilations

A series of possibly interconnected incidents occurred in rural Colorado in the summer of 1975. While occasional lone UFO sightings had been recorded in the area of Gunnison County, that July saw an explosion of activity. Various balls of green, blue, yellow, and red were recorded looping in odd patterns, chasing each other, and possibly fighting over the skies for four days. This was the mildest incident of the summer.

            At that time there were also several dozen cattle mutilations reported by ranchers. The majority of the blood had been drained from the cows and various pieces removed- ears, sex organs, kidneys, udders etc.- but never the same pieces from any two heifers. Most of the written accounts of this time use the phrase “surgical precision” when describing the wounds, but this may have been creative license on behalf of the reporters. It may simply be a person who is skilled at cutting meat. Several of the bovine appear to have been dropped from a height of twenty or thirty feet. Unusual, as they were found in their pens nowhere near any device capable of lifting such a heavy animal.

            While some may leap to a supernatural or extraterrestrial explanation for these dead cows, there may possibly (or probably to be exact) a very human cause. A blue plastic bag was found lying by a trash can in the Thornton City Greyhound bus terminal. Inside was a cow’s ear, a severed cow tongue, and a scalpel, but no blood. Whether it was left there by design or accidentally it indicates a very human origin to the mutilations.

      John Lahti, an investigator of paranormal claims, has come across an old organization which existed in the town of Pictin, Colorado, called the Silver Society or, alternatively, The Silver Raiment Society. It was originally formed (and even briefly incorporated) in the 1910’s and flourished in the 1920s. Very little documentation remains on this organization, but what does exist indicates that this group married the idea of astral projection with the possibility of contacting intelligent extraterrestrial life. Astral projection and other forms of meditation had become a fad in America during this time, along with many ideas imported from Eastern religions.  The organization was shut down in 1927, due to a federal court case involving back taxes.

            Or did it? A bizarre incident during the night of August 21^st, 1975 on the outskirts of Pictin may suggest otherwise. A motorist driving down Route 76 at about 3:30 a.m. encountered some 15 masked people in silver colored robes forming a roadblock with linked arms. As he stopped they attempted to encircle the vehicle, but he managed to turn around, nearly hitting several of them, and escape. The police paperwork on this incident has been lost in the subsequent decades or been misfiled. The incident has only been preserved because the motorist related the story to several reporters at the time.

            There has been some speculation, with no actual evidence, that the mutilations formed as part of a ritual for this group to communicate (or realistically, attempt to communicate) with an otherworldly entity. Whether this is a rite passed down through the generations or something new is up for grabs.