Dr Matthew Bowman from Claremont Graduate University will discuss his latest book on UFOs, and we’ll dive into the 3 Nephites too. They were blessed to walk the earth without death. Is living forever a blessing or a curse? Cain was cursed to walk the earth without death. Are UFOs a form of spirituality outside of institutional religion?
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Blessed or Cursed to Walk the Earth? 3 Nephites
Interview
Matthew 00:43 Another good example of this is Three Nephites story.
GT 00:46 Well, and that’s what I was going to mention, because we think of the Three Nephites. They were so righteous that they live forever. But why is Cain, a very unrighteous person, allowed to live forever? What do you think?
Matthew 00:58 Yeah. In Genesis, God tells Cain, you’re going to wander the earth. And there are stories of Cain wandering the earth all the way back into the Middle Ages.
GT 01:08 So, he’s cursed with never dying.
Matthew 01:12 And then you’ll see some of these folktales. People say, Well, what about the flood? And the answer to that is that he clung to the outside of the ark, during the flood. And that’s the curse. Now, of course, this again, points to a lot of archetypes. One of the famous ones that you see back in the Middle Ages is the archetype of the wandering Jew, which is a Christian folk tale from the Middle Ages about this sometimes evil, sometimes dark, wandering Jewish figure, who would have maybe mocked Christ on the cross or something like that, but is cursed in similar ways. Again, you can see how this Cain legend echoes with other racist stories over the years.
GT 01:54 It’s strange to me and, I probably have some non-LDS listeners that don’t know who the three Nephites are. And, in fact, I will say this, especially since we recently had Community of Christ historian Mark Scherer on. One of the apostles, his daughter said, what’s the three Nephites? Because apparently, that’s not a thing in the Community of Christ. So, it’s interesting that Cain is cursed with never dying, but the three Nephites are blessed with never dying. Can you talk about that?
Matthew 02:24 And according to the Doctrine and Covenants, the apostle John, too.
GT 02:28 Right.
Matthew 02:29 There’s lots of these people wandering around out there.
GT 02:31 So why is one a blessing and one’s a cursing?
Matthew 02:32 Yeah, so Cain’s is a curse. This is, it’s not explicitly stated in the Book of Genesis, that he will live forever. This appears, I think, to come out of these other European folktales about people who are cast out, cursed and never to rest, never to have a home, to wander forever. In the Doctrine and Covenants and in the Book of Mormon, when the apostle John and then these three Nephites are told they will live forever, it is a blessing because they are specifically given work to do.
Matthew 02:39 And that is, they’re told [that] you will go and be missionaries, you will further the work of God. And that’s a righteous task given to them. And, of course, a whole folklore legendarium grows up around them, too, stories of these mysterious, helpful figures who appear and then vanish mysteriously. And just as with Cain, with stories, LDS stories of Cain intertwined with broader patterns in American folklore. And this happens to three Nephites as well.
GT 03:42 So explain how the three Nephites get called in the first place.
Matthew 03:46 They are figures in the Book of Mormon. When Jesus Christ appears in the Book of Mormon to this Nephite civilization, he calls 12 apostles, as he does in the Bible, in the gospels, and he gives them things. And three of these apostles ask. They say, “We want to stay on the earth, until Christ comes again, in order to further his work,” to serve as eternal missionaries, and guides people who are teaching about Jesus throughout human history. And in the LDS Church, this folklore grows up around these figures. They become. And again, this is a broad folklore archetype, these helpful, supernatural creatures that appear, do good work and then vanish. That’s a really, really old trope in western folklore, as well. And it becomes, in the mid-20th century, stories of the three Nephites become intertwined with some of this broader folklore patterns. The most famous of these is the vanishing hitchhiker motif, which is a archetype that you will see in American folklore dating way, way back. But it becomes particularly pronounced after World War II, with the rise of the automobile as a convenient thing, a leisure activity, and especially something that young people do. Of course, there’s all sorts of famous tropes of this, the movie American Graffiti, and so on and so forth, about young people driving all over the place as a leisure activity. And there emerges, most famously, maybe in Chicago, but certainly around the entire country, this archetype, ghost story.
Matthew 05:34 A young person is driving by themselves. They see a hitchhiker. Often this hitchhiker, often, not always, but often this hitchhiker is a young woman who appears lost, confused, puzzled, frightened. And the driver who is often in the folklore, a young man is chivalrous. He stops to help this young woman. He picks her up. They have a conversation. She says some enigmatic strange things. He takes her to her home. He stops. Sometimes she is sitting in the backseat. And when he turns around, she’s vanished. She’s gone. She’s no longer in the car. He goes to the house to ask what’s going on. And he discovers that this young person he’s picked up is the dead child of this couple who live here. Sometimes he goes to the cemetery and sees her grave. Sometimes he will give her a coat or his jacket to keep her warm. He goes to her grave. He finds it sitting on her grave. Right? This is a famous, famous ghost story, one of the most famous ghost stories in American culture. And it’s replicated in local patterns all over the country. You can go to many, many cities, find versions of the story in which they say, “This is the house and this is the grave and this is the name of the dead girl who stands on the side of this road.” In Chicago, her name is Resurrection Mary. There’s a specific stretch of highway in South Chicago where she is often seen. It’s a really famous story.
Matthew 07:07 Anyhow, just as in the 1980s, this LDS strand of Cain folklore blends with Bigfoot folklore, so we do. We start seeing in the 50s and 60s, the emergence of folktales that blend three Nephite stories with the vanishing hitchhiker motif. So, the person picked up is not a young woman. It’s usually an older man. Sometimes you can find in earlier versions of this, it’s an older Native American man. And he will sit in the back seat. He will talk about Jesus. He often gives warnings. He will tell people, “Be sure you have enough food storage,” or “You should go to the temple.” And then he vanishes. And then of course, his warnings, his advice proves to have foresight to it, that this family suffers a disaster, and they survived because of their food storage. Or they go to the temple and discover that they were given the name of an ancestor, something like that. There have been studies done [on] this, by folklorists like Wayland Hand, particularly in the 50s and 60s and 70s that I really modeled my work on Bigfoot after.
Matthew 08:29 We’ve seen the same pattern of how these folktales are a way by which Latter-day Saints become integrated with American culture. They take on the motifs and patterns of broader American society.
GT 08:46 Wow, that’s interesting. I know Chris Thomas. He has said, “If anybody wants a good Ph.D. idea, do the three Nephites stories.”
Matthew 08:59 Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
GT 09:01 I mean, even in my mission, and I went on my mission in the 80s, our mission president blessed our mission, to have the three Nephites come and perform miracles. And so, there’s still three Nephite stories happening today.
Matthew 09:18 And especially there. Right? There’s a famous article by the LDS folklore scholar, William Wilson, called On Being Human, the Folklore of Mormon Missionaries. And it’s seminal piece [that] the Mormon academics read. And he argues there, essentially, that Mormon missions are one spot where this folklore really thrives, and particularly folklore with a supernatural bent.
GT 09:47 Yeah, anything that’s a miracle or unexplained, “Well, it must have been the three Nephites.”
Matthew 09:52 Yeah, precisely. Missions are a hothouse for these sorts of stories. They just get passed around and exchanged and amped up, and then people leave missions and take them home. It’s a way that they were a seedbed for lots of other versions of LDS folklore.
UFO’s & Alternative Religion
Interview
GT 10:12 Very good. Well, let’s segue into your UFO book. First of all, are there any LDS ties to that or Mormon ties to your UFO book.
Matthew 10:23 There are not, But that’s not to say there is not LDS-UFO folklore because there is a great deal. And there’s lots of very interesting LDS UFO thought.
GT 10:35 Nice, now, what is the name of your book and when and where is it coming out?
Matthew 10:39 The book is called The Abduction of Betty and Barney Hill.
GT 10:43 Okay.
Matthew 10:44 And it is being published by Yale University Press August 29, 2023.
GT 10:49 Oh, so by the time this is published, it will be out.
Matthew 10:52 Great, I hope everyone buys two copies.{Rick laughing}
GT 10:57 So tell us more about what got you into UFOs?
Matthew 11:00 Yeah, that’s a good question.
GT 11:03 Was it Bigfoot?
Matthew 11:04 Yeah, it goes back quite a ways actually, and in part to Bigfoot. Right? So, I said a little while ago, that Bigfoot article was my first academic publication. And that was done because I was invited to be on a panel at the Mormon History Association. I believe it was 2005. actually 2005, on the supernatural in LDS folklore. One of my other panelists, a guy named Mike Van Wagenen, who teaches in Georgia now, did an article on LDS UFO folklore, and that got me interested in thinking about that. But more broadly, I think I’m interested in the 20th century, that’s my major area of academic research and scholarship. And I’m particularly interested in what happens to religion in the 20th century. There emerged in the mid-20th century, this story that a lot of scholars bought into for a long time, and that was what’s called a secularization thesis, which is this idea that as societies grow, more scientific, more bureaucratic, more meritocratic, as the authorities of our societies become more and more experts in fields, doctors with training, take over medicine. Right? And professional trained scientists with degrees take over science. This is all unlike the 1600s and 1700s, when everyone kind of did everything. When doctors were barbers, when the leading scientists were people like Benjamin Franklin, who just went into their backyard and did things.
GT 12:49 Let’s go fly a kite in a storm.
Matthew 12:51 Exactly, well, the guys of leisure said,” I’m going to be a scientist.” And they just start doing experiments. By the time you hit the 20th century, that’s gone. We have training, and we allocate the authority in our society to people with training. And that means often, the people who were there real intellectual, and social and cultural leaders in our society, in the 1600s, were ministers, were leaders of religious groups. So religion, as this thesis goes, becomes increasingly boxed in. The territory, the religion takes up in our lives shrinks. Right? It becomes something that you do on Sunday, not something that runs your life. Science becomes the primary explanatory mechanism of our society. We don’t say that the rain comes down because God sent it. We say rain came down because clouds were doing X and Y and Z.
GT 12:59 Right.
Matthew 13:51 So according to secularization theorists, as all that happened, people would stop being religious. Religion would just go away. And we would leave. It would fade. It turns out, that didn’t happen at all. Two things happened instead. One is; religion is actually surging in traditional religion, that is to say denominational religion, the “great religious traditions:” Islam, Christianity, Islam is doing very, very well, especially in the global south. Christianity is doing very, very well in the global south. It is true that in the north, in the global north, I’m talking here primarily Europe and North America, institutional religion, traditional churches, denominations, are declining in membership. However, at the same time, more and more people are pursuing other practices or beliefs that we might call religion. Astrology is booming. Tarot card readings are booming. New Age practices, what some people call energy work, or light work are booming. They’re doing incredibly well. So, it turns out that religion doesn’t go away. It just starts taking on new forms. And that, to tie this all the way back around, that is why I grew interested in UFOs.
GT 15:13 Okay, so you reject the secularism hypothesis.
Matthew 15:17 I reject the secularization thesis, I think religion changes. It doesn’t fade. It doesn’t vanish.
GT 15:23 So even in Europe, people are doing tarot cards and astrology and New Age stuff?
Matthew 15:29 Yes, so take Britain, for instance. In Great Britain, church attendance is down, 10%. Right? Very few people are going to traditional Anglican churches on Sunday for the Eucharist. That’s down. However, a great number of British people, upwards of two thirds, have told pollsters that they believe in guardian angels. Many, many people who say I’m not part of any religion, in particular, pray or meditate, or do energy work. These sorts of alternative practices are very much alive, and very much with us. And in the most recent poll, 42% of American Central pollsters said they believe in UFOs. And not just in UFOs, because, when you’re saying UFO, all that really means is a weird thing in the sky. An unidentified flying object, right? And it’s true. I think one of the things I track in this book is how “weird thing in the sky” becomes a craft piloted by extraterrestrial intelligences. Because that’s not an obvious connection. These things might have been anything. And certainly, if you believe in some UFO researchers, they will say, go back to the ancient world. Go back to Greece and Rome and ancient China. They’re seeing strange things in the sky. They did not think they were craft, piloted by extraterrestrial intelligences, because the idea that you could build a craft and fly it, was not terribly prominent then. But they thought, they gave them other names. They said, these are demons or angels. These are ghosts. These are spirits.
Matthew 17:14 So there have been odd things seen in the skies, as long as humans have been alive. What happens after World War Two, when there is a burst of the sightings, UFO people say there was a flap. That’s the word, there was a flap of UFO sightings between 1947 and 1952. What happens then is, because this is the age of airplanes. It’s the age of jet fliers. It’s the age of rockets. Right? They assume these things must be built. There must be technology. They must be something that someone made. Who made them?
Matthew 17:49 Well, initially, some people in the military think it was maybe the Russians. Right? Of course, it’s the Russians! It is always the Russians in the 1940s and 1950s. But many other people start to think, well, maybe it wasn’t the Russians. Maybe it was extraterrestrials. Maybe it was someone from another planet, who built these. And that gradually becomes the dominant explanation for these things in the sky. Now, what is (I think) really interesting about this, and this is also something I chart in the book, in the 1970s, especially the 1970s, the 1970s is the great decade of what we call the New Age movement. Now, the New Age movement is not—calling it that implies that it’s one thing, it’s like one kind of thing with a leader and a consistent ideology. And that’s not the case at all. But it is = a useful catch-all that scholars use to describe this real explosion of what might also be called alternative practices, things that are outside the mainstream, things that mainstream religious movements in particular aren’t doing. Often these are inspired by Asia. In 1965, Congress lifted immigration restrictions on Asia. And so you got a whole wave of migrants from the subcontinent, from Japan, from Korea, coming to the United States and bringing with them Hinduism and Buddhism and transcendental meditation, and ideas of karma and reincarnation. And so those things start spreading in American culture in the 60s. But at the same time, you also have a real revival in traditional European cultic practices, and I’m talking here are like things like ritual magic, psychic power, stuff like that.
GT 19:34 Crystal balls.
Matthew 19:35 Crystal balls, even crystals as the concept, pyramid magic, all that kind of stuff. And what happens in the 1970s Is that a lot of this stuff starts getting published. And bookstores become just a real hubs of spreading the ideas you start to see in the 70s and in the 80s, particularly people like Star Hawk who was one of the founders of Wicca in United States. Her handbook, I forget the title of it. It’s something like, “The Handbook Practitioner for The Solitary Witch” really explodes. You start to see reading groups, looking into things like psychic power and channeling, astral projection, tarot reading, all of this stuff becomes incredibly popular in the 70s and UFOs get plugged into that. And so by the 70s, there’s a lot of people who are associating UFOs not simply with hard science. We’re saying well, these are your this these are people from another planet who built a craft and flew it here, but UFOs are also representatives, higher levels of intelligence, of cosmic intelligence that have been sent here to help us, to help human beings transcend ourselves and to make our way to the next level of consciousness. They communicate with us psychically. Right? We can channel UFO intelligences in the same way that Joseph Smith wrote the Book of Mormon. Right? UFO people will put thoughts in our mind and then we’ll write them down. And there’s a number of books produced like that, UFO scripture, in a way.
GT 21:11 I saw something on, I want to say formerly the History Channel, because it seems like, well they have the Ancient Aliens.
Matthew 21:20 Ancient Aliens, yes.
GT 21:20 And there was one about an alien from, it wasn’t Kolob. It was some other weird place that came to Joseph Smith. And so, it wasn’t an angel. It was an alien. And I’m just like, where do they get this garbage?
Matthew 21:39 Yeah, it comes largely from a man named Erich Von Daniken who is Swiss. He’s a hotel manager. And in the late 1960s, he publishes a book called Chariots of the Gods. And this book argues that not simply Joseph Smith, but more or less every prophetic figure throughout human history, was either an extraterrestrial or inspired by extraterrestrials. So, his argument, well, and it’s interesting because his argument shows I think, how powerfully science as a concept has kind of taken over the western world. Right? It’s just to say, God is not some supernatural being…
GT 21:39 He’s an alien.
Matthew 22:23 …who flashes in and out of our dimension and who can make miracles happen by waving his hand. God is a being who lives on another planet, who is simply very far advanced, scientifically, than we are. And so, Von Daniken argues quite explicitly, he’ll go back to the ancient Babylonians, the Sumerians, the Mayans. He’ll look at their art. He’ll look at their folklore and their stories of their religion. He will look at the Bible,
GT 22:54 The pyramids too? Because the pyramids were built by aliens. Everybody knows that.
Matthew 22:58 Yeah, precisely. Right? Because he’ll look at the Bible and say, Look, in Ezekiel, the opening chapters of Ezekiel. Ezekiel has this great vision. And in this vision, Ezekiel says that he saw angels in the heavens, surrounded by flaming wheels. Wow, flaming wheels, that must be, that’s a spaceship. Ezekiel is trying to describe a spaceship. But he doesn’t have the language for it. So, we get this very bizarre description. But what it really is is a spaceship. He’ll look at the Sumerians and say very similar things. He’ll say like, “the Sumerians had the story of this god, whose name was Onanus, who came who came to Earth and taught them math.” Oh, well, that’s obviously an alien. He will look at Mayan art and say, this piece of Mayan art very clearly depicts someone wearing a spacesuit, a space helmet. And so, what he’s doing here, is trying to turn this category of religion and this idea of like supernatural creatures who can work miracles, to turn it into science.
GT 23:00 And he does this with Joseph Smith too.
Matthew 23:17 Precisely.
GT 23:17 That’s crazy.
Matthew 23:21 And, well, I think the fascinating thing here and this will plug in a bit to how UFO folklore becomes embedded in Mormonism, is that there’s a really powerful discourse in LDS theology going back to Brigham Young, but then especially progressing with your earlier 20th century apostles, like John Widtsoe, and B..H Roberts. What has sometimes been called materialism, or scientism, which is to say there is nothing supernatural. Everything is material, John Widtsoe says, fairly explicitly, that “God is a great scientist.”
GT 24:40 Well, Brigham Young said something similar too, so this sounds very Mormon in a way.
Matthew 24:44 Yeah, exactly. And I think that strain, that common-sensical strain of thought, in Mormon theology that goes through Brigham Young through these early 20th century thinkers, has meant that when you look at some Mormons who are interested in UFO work, they will invoke this. And they will sound a lot like Erich Von Daniken. One of the most famous of these people is a lawyer named James Thompson, who has written a number of [books.] He’s a ghostwriter. But he’s also written a number of books for LDS audiences. And he’s written a book about UFOs. And he argues essentially this. He says that “we know from the language of people like Brigham Young, that God has children on multiple planets, on multiple worlds.” Spencer W. Kimball said something similar. “Some of them are probably more righteous than we are. If they’re more righteous than we are, they’re more advanced technologically. And so, they’re probably building spaceships and flying them to our planet to help us.” And that’s his argument, essentially, that’s what UFOs are, is that they are they are righteous societies on other planets who have come to help us progress in the Gospel. And he is doing the same thing Von Daniken is doing but he’s drawing on both. And this goes back to Bigfoot, and to the three Nephites. He’s taking this broader cultural story, this folklore extreme of UFOs. And he’s saying, “how will this work? How can I intertwine this with my Mormon heritage and my Mormon traditions and the stories and the ideas prevalent within Mormonism?”
GT 26:30 This sounds a little bit like the Mormon Transhumanist Association. Is there a relationship there?
Matthew 26:35 Yeah, that’s interesting. Transhumanism is such a [variety.] There are so many different strains of it. But yeah, you can see, I think, especially with the Mormon Transhumanist Association, that same idea that everything fundamentally scientific. Science is not simply another invented human language, describing the world, like so many of our other languages are. But science is actually real. The world, the universe actually is scientific. Therefore, God is scientific. God is a scientist, and all of the things that we ascribe to God, His mystical powers splitting the Red Sea, raising people from the dead. Right/. None of that actually violates or transcends or overcomes the laws of nature, which is what you will find in some traditional Christian theology: that God is outside his creation. And so he can just override the laws of how the world usually works, if he wants to.
Matthew 27:37 Transhumanists will say no. It’s actually not like that. That the task of raising someone from the dead is a scientific task. We just don’t know how to do it. But God knows how to do it. He can reconnect, and reinvigorate our atoms and molecules and cells, scientifically. So yeah, Transhumanism is very interesting. Because traditional transhumanists would say religion is silly. Religion is bunk. Because it’s anti-scientific. That’s very much a Western narrative that I think comes out of the creationist evolutionist debates of the early 20th century. But transhumanists in the United States are very marked by that. They perceive religion and science as being warring ideas, and you can be one or the other, but you can’t be both, which I think ironically, a lot of religious people and atheists buy into that. It’s not necessarily true, but Mormon Transhumanists say it’s not true. Right? Their assertion is religion and science are the same thing, ultimately. And these atheists transhumanists on the one hand, they don’t recognize that, and a lot of religious people don’t recognize that either. So Mormon transhumanists, are trying to bridge that gap and say, :No, you guys are actually doing the same thing. You just have to talk to each other.” {Rick laughing}
GT 28:54 That’s interesting. As we were talking about, is there anything else about the UFOs before we move on?
Matthew 29:02 Oh, there’s so much to say about UFOs, {both laughing} But wherever you want to go is fine.
{End of Part 2)
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