STRANGE ENCOUNTERS WITH ANOTHER WORLD

Tue, 25 Apr 2006 16:28:37 -0400

For years Cathy Land was plagued by an unsettling sense of being "visited." When she realized what was happening, she turned to God to end her abduction experiences.

The pieces started to fit together the night they dropped her. For years Cathy Land had been plagued by the sense that something wasn't quite right. There were periods of unaccounted missing time, mornings when she felt heavy and lethargic despite a full night's sleep, an unsettling sense of somehow having been visited.

Then she woke up with an alien's face inches from hers.

"He had dropped me. I could feel his breath on my face. It startled him that I woke up. He had this confused--'That's not supposed to happen'--look on his face. The second one still had hold of my legs. I rolled over into a fetal position and went right back to sleep."

In the morning she told her son what had happened. Usually the family dismissed her recollections as a joke. This time he told her: "Those were not aliens; they were demons."

"It finally all made sense," she recalls.

Her son's comment propelled her to the Internet, where she found some Christians who didn't dismiss her experiences as nonsense. Her faith was enriched and deepened as she discovered that God's power could free her from her years of torment.

"I stopped being so scared, and I got mad," she says. "I finally understood. These things were trying to get the world's attention away from God, and how better to do that than make people think they are being invaded from outer space? These are not benevolent little E.T.s come to clean up the environment, fix the hole in the ozone layer. They are not from a distant galaxy. They are raping women, they are murdering animals, they are terrifying children."

An office manager for a medical supply company, and one-time stock-car racer and singer-musician, Land began to read all she could to learn more about what had troubled her for so long. She had been fascinated by UFOs since early childhood, one time reporting a seashore sighting to the police.

"Many times I would have a strange feeling just before going to bed," she says, adding that precise memories were hazy when she awoke. "I would feel like something had happened during the night--but nothing I could put my finger on."

One time her son told of a frightening encounter he'd had with "a tall man." She admits that his account had scared her.

But she continued to devour books and TV shows on alien phenomena. She told family members about her experiences and talked about UFOs with friends, though most laughed her off.

"Sometimes it made me feel like I was losing my mind. Maybe I did dream this all up. But there were too many things over and over and over again," she says.

As she read all the Christian material she could find on the subject after her spiritual awakening, she began to see how she had been so deceived for so long. "Everything started to make sense," she says. "I realized that everything I had read had probably been happening to me all along, and it scared me. Then it made me mad. How dare they mess with me and my children?"

Land's anger over the years her life was "held" has spurred her to tell her story to others caught in the UFO mesh.

"This is war. It's the most ingenious hoax there is. It's a plan to get the world's attention away from the gospel of Christ, and it's working."

She says many exploring the UFO world are, as she was, "searching for love."

"That's what they are looking for, really, in their beliefs about aliens. But there's only one place they will find unconditional love, and they are looking in the wrong place."

An active part of her local Baptist church in Jacksonville, Florida, Land says that she now has a peace she never knew before. "I didn't know it for years.," she says. "It was a miserable existence from day to day. Nobody should be victimized like that. If I can save one person from being harmed, then I have to do this for God. It's my offering to Him.

"It's not the mission field I would choose for myself," she adds. "I would rather be feeding hungry people in India because maybe people wouldn't laugh at me. [But] who else is going to go and tell them, 'You are all being so deceived?'"

ALIENS, FALLEN ANGELS AND THE BIBLE

Evangelist Chris Ward has an unusual theory about the true identity of extraterrestrials.

In his ministry to the UFO world, Chris Ward boldly goes where few other Christians do. And his studies of the Bible and the UFO phenomenon have led him to an understanding that for many demands a radically deeper, if not new, look at Scripture.

Ward has no doubt UFOs are real and that people have had encounters with the beings in them. Where Ward disagrees with UFO believers, and where his explanation differs from many Christians, is what the aliens really are.

They are not from another planet, he maintains. But they are not demons, either, as many Christians are inclined to identify them, he contends. Rather, they are fallen angels.

That is not theological hairsplitting, he says. It is important both for everyday ministry to people in the scene and for understanding its crucial importance, he says.

"The people who are involved in this scene know the difference [between angels and demons], yet the church dismisses them as though they are ignorant," Ward says. "Many of the people we have met are also involved in Wicca or paganism or whatever, and they conjure up demons all the time. But these people think they are dealing with beings from another planet."

While most UFO apologists believe Earth is being visited from other planets, the perspective held by Ward--that aliens are extradimensional rather than extraterrestrial--is being considered more widely. A few respected secular figures in the UFO world have raised the idea of a spiritual dimension to the phenomenon.

Ward's studies have taken him not only back to Scripture but also to other ancient texts highly respected by early church leaders, such as the books of Enoch, Jasher and Jubilee. These writings, some of which are referred to in the Bible or appear in the Apocrypha, shed further light on what can be gleaned from the Old and New Testaments, he says. Among his conclusions:

* Demons are not angels that have fallen. The two are different entities. Although spiritual beings, angels can manifest in human or other physical form. Demons seek embodiment.

* Extraterrestrials are the fallen angels variously named in the Bible as "watchers," "wicked hosts in high places," and "principalities and powers." They want to divert worship from God.

* Demons were not created by God. They are the disembodied spirits of the Nephilim--the hybrids created when the angels who fell with Satan had intercourse with humans, as recounted in Genesis 6.

* The fallen angels wanted to mate with humans to pollute the genes of humankind so that it would be impossible for Jesus to be born. Some translations of the Genesis 6 account describe Noah as being found "blameless in his generations," a reference to his pure DNA.

* Old Testament accounts of Israel's wiping out idolatrous tribes make more sense if they were doing so to rid the Earth of the last of the Nephilim, some of whom were still to be found after the Flood.

* The rising number of alien abduction accounts is consistent with Jesus' warning in Matthew 24 that the time of His return will be "just like the days of Noah"--when the Nephilim roamed the Earth.

* Reproductive experiments and sexual encounters often reported by abductees are part of an attempt to produce a new generation of angel-human hybrids, from which the Antichrist will arise.

While referencing texts in addition to the Bible is considered approvingly by non-Christians who reject the authority of Scripture, it is viewed suspiciously by some believers. "I do look at extraneous material, but I prove it all through the Bible," Ward says. "You don't have to refer to any of these other books, but they are standard texts...broadly accepted."

Ward admits that his perspective seems unbelievable to some. "[But] I do not speculate. I only synthesize what I read. There is no need to speculate because the information is sensational enough on its own."

Complete article at:

Aliens Among Us - Charisma Magazine