What Aliens Teach Us About God — Part 4

This is part four of a series of articles published a by a friend of mine, Travis Perry. The original article is located at Lorehaven and the link to the rest of the article will be within the text below. With his permission, I’ve shared parts of it here:

It’s impossible to reasonably mention all the movies that portray aliens visiting Planet Earth–there are just so many of them. But a certain subset of such films portray aliens as if they are visiting us in secret in a particular way that this post will call the UFO alien phenomenon.

The Fourth Kind–levitation under hypnosis.

“UFO” famously stands for “Unidentified Flying Object,” and one of the key things about UFOs is nobody knows where they come from or what they are doing. Stories that have the aliens conducting meetings with humans (e.g. Arrival) or have them transition from mysterious flying objects into an outright invasion (e.g. Signs or Independence Day) or which portray the general public believing the objects are unidentified, while a secret government organization knows they are in fact already-observed types of alien spacecraft (e.g. Men in Black) don’t really feature UFOs anymore. The flying objects become identified during the story’s plot, at least a little.

But some movies keep the UFOs thoroughly unidentified. And if they feature encounters with aliens, the aliens also remain largely unexplained. In fact, these sorts of movies dramatically portray the sorts of situations that human beings who claim to see UFOs and who claim to be abducted by aliens say happens to them. This article will use 2009’s The Fourth Kind as the only example of this type of movie, even though its just is one out of many (and there have also been TV series on this same topic, most notably The X Files).

The Fourth Kind internally claims to be a documentary that switches back between “dramatized” scenes where actors portray events and the actual video recordings of “real people” who have had contact with unidentified aliens. Both portrayals are in fact equally fictional, but within the confines of the film, the story is about people having troubling dreams about a number of things, including disturbing owl faces.

An “owl” from The Fourth Kind–a suppressed memory of aliens.

The disturbed people seek the help of a psychologist who uses hypnotism to explore the actual events that inspired their dreams (the sessions with the hypnotist are captured by “real” video footage). And–you guessed it–the actual events that inspired the strange dreams were encounters with unidentified aliens and/or alien abductions, acted out in the “dramatized” scenes (note the owl faces people reported seeing were supposedly altered memories of “real”alien faces).

Again, this movie is 100% fiction and everyone who produced it admits it. However, the way the movie portrays the UFO alien phenomenon is based on the types of reports people actually make about having encounters with aliens, aliens that supposedly arrive on Planet Earth via UFOs.

For the continuation of this article,and to follow the entire series, please click here.