I’ve been caught up in the chatter about Unidentified Aerial Phenomena since Trump began releasing previously top-secret files. Pastors who have seen files have said that these would destroy Christians’ faith1. Others are concerned about how we would be deceived as revelations ramp up. Rod Dreher has said these phenomena are demonic.

Now we are faced with a universe that is more mysterious and odd than our post-modernist world view has suggested. When I watched one UAP video, Facebook obliged and showed more. So I watched balls traveling through the sky over war zones with no propulsion. I saw one dive into the ocean. There was video that showed an angel dancing in the sky that turned out to be a Star Wars Storm trooper balloon. One man videoed a shadow moving across the ground when the sky was clear.

As a young girl, I was fascinated. I read Chariot of the Gods in one sitting, browsed through Project Blue Book and even started a UFO club at school, which didn’t last long. I remember wishing a spaceship would take me away when I watched jets on approach switch on their landing lights and drop their wheels. The last time I saw my brother, he swore he saw a flying saucer land on the flat, a low-lying field surrounded by the Normanskill. We saw black helicopters dropping into the valley south of us. (They were likely training for Viet Nam.) This is fascinating stuff, with a curiosity that feels illicit. Addison Hodges Hart identifies this as:

Turning to the matter of “spiritual delusion,” the Russian term for it is prelest (прелесть = “charm,” “fascination,” derived from a word meaning “allurement,” “flattery,” “adulation”).2

That says what this is. I’m being charmed and fascinated by these reports. My Facebook addiction and desire to write this post, keeps my eyes on it, where it might be better if I read Julian of Norwich’s Revelations or the Biblical readings for the day. It’s so easy because the powers of darkness are as spectacular as a tree falling, the crack of timber, the slow fall, the roots tipped up. And the powers of goodness are slow growing like said tree growing from an acorn to a twig to a tree that becomes the biggest creature in the neighborhood.

Stephen Spielberg, with glittering eyes says he wished E.T. were true when he made the movie back in 1977. He says now he believes there are extra-terrestrials.3 He is releasing Disclosure Day, a movie I think I’d like to see, though Bruce says no way.

Glenn Beck says that AI will destroy freewill because it has the ability to send propaganda tailored to us. It will shape our perceptions. We won’t know what’s true.

I have experienced this personally. My concerns for my aching legs are getting answers with Facebook ads that claim their products will ease my pain. I am sorry about a friend’s deceased dog and get notices about others who have lost beloved pets. Beck sounds an important warning:

Human propagandists could manipulate crowds. AI manipulates individuals, personally. And unlike people, the machine never sleeps. It runs billions of tiny emotional experiments every day: this image worked, that phrase increased fear, this music created trust, this story kept him engaged longer. Most people still think they are using the algorithm. The algorithm is using them.

And honestly, maybe that is why Spielberg’s movie lands at exactly the right moment. Because beneath all the UFO fascination sits the biggest question of our time: what is real? Seriously, what is real anymore? Videos can be fake. Voices can be cloned. Images can be generated. Outrage can be manufactured. Soon, entire realities may be personalized for every human being alive.4

I have felt the pull to dive deep into what the powers of darkness are up to because I’ve been attacked and I want to know what’s coming. It seems we are in the part of Revelation where Satan is “released from his prison and will come out to deceive the nations that are at the four corners of the earth,”5 the part just before the final judgement.

I am afraid of being deceived. I am afraid that I will think the antichrist is Christ. Just from seeing the Disclosure Day trailer, with images of a stag walking with a woman to a lighted building, the stag and light images for Christ, I can see how I could be deceived. (I wonder if Martin Shaw will speak/write about this movie.)

Addison Hodges Hart quotes St. Ignatius Brianchaninov (1807 – 1867) who offers some reassurance that maybe I’m in a kind of safe place. That drawing near to Jesus through prayer, scripture, the sacraments is a way to find the truth.

Spiritual deception [prelest] is the wounding of human nature by falsehood. Spiritual deception is the state of all human beings without exception, and it has been made possible by the fall of our original parents. All of us are subject to spiritual deception. Awareness of this fact is the greatest protection against it. Likewise, the greatest spiritual deception of all is to consider oneself free from it. We are all deceived, all deluded; we all find ourselves in a condition of falsehood; we all need to be liberated by the Truth. The Truth is our Lord Jesus Christ. (Emphasis added. One can read the entire text here.)2

Then there are the Longhorn ticks infecting people with Alpha Gal syndrome making them allergic to all meat products. The CDC estimates that the number of people infected is 450,000. This is up from an estimate of 110,000 cases between 2010 – 2022. A bio-ethicist research team published a paper saying that there is a moral imperative to make people stop eating meat. And Bill Gates has said that he would like to see ticks bioengineered with this illness. He wants to see all meat consumption stopped by 2030.6 Bruce and I have pulled ticks off our dogs, the horse, and ourselves, so this concerns me greatly.

The line from Shakespeare is apropos: Something wicked this way comes. It’s easy to be afraid. It’s easy to drop our eyes and gaze at the wicked because it seems to be so pervasive, though this spring, like every spring the leaves came out, the Irises blossom, the redwing blackbirds sit on the electric wires, our pastor blesses the eucharist, we stand with other members of Christ’s body to receive it.

I keep thinking of St. Paul’s admonition to St. Timothy:

“Now the Spirit expressly says that in later times some will depart from the faith by devoting themselves to deceitful spirits andteachings of demons through the insincerity of liars whose consciences are seared…”7

On Ascension Day, our pastor urged us to say, “He is risen. He is risen indeed.” And then we had to repeat, “He is ascended. He is ascended indeed.”

While Pastor Rosebrock preached, we looked at a picture of Jesus’ feet hanging down with his disciples, men and women, looking up as he lifted to heaven. Luke writes that before he lifted into the air, Jesus said, “everything that was written about me in the Law of Moses and the Prophets and the Psalms must be fulfilled.”8 Then he opened their minds to understand the Scriptures.

When John says at the end of his gospel: “Now there were also many other things that Jesus did. Were every one of them to be written, I suppose that the world itself could not contain the book that would be written.”9 I wish there were more post resurrection stories of Jesus.

I figured maybe we are those stories when I heard Fr. Stephen DeYoung ask, “If Christ is going to come into your family, your workplace, your school, your circle of friends, how is he going to come there? He’s going to come there through you.”10

Before Jesus opened their minds, the disciples were also the people who heard but didn’t hear, saw but didn’t see, along with the crowds that followed Jesus, along with the Pharisees. Right up to the days before his death, James and John asked Jesus if they could sit at his right and left when the kingdom came. They were clueless those places were reserved for the two thieves crucified next to him. Sometimes I think we can be just as clueless as they were. I am not happy that to be close by Jesus means taking up a cross, which was a gross way to die—naked, pinned down, not even able to flick away flies, losing breath.

I never would have thought His leaving would fill the disciples with such joy. He told them they would do greater works than he did. They saw demons cast out, people’s heaviness lightened. He sought a man with a legion’s worth of demons, crossing a sea that turned terrifying with wind, to release the man. He raised a little girl from the dead. He stopped a woman’s chronic bleeding. When he disappeared in the clouds, when their beloved teacher, was raised not to a cross but the heavens, their beloved teacher having died and was alive, they returned to Jerusalem, worshipped together and sang with joy.

In his sermon, guest pastor Rosebrock reminded us of how many times “all” was mentioned in the epistle reading:

And he put all things under his feet and gave him as head over all things to the church, which is his body, the fullness of him who fills all in all. 11

He reminded us that in spite of whatever trouble that’s in the world we can know that Christ is head over all things, his fullness fills all in all. And we have that fullness.12 And the natural world is full of God’s love. And people we pass in the grocery store or gather with in church, they bear the image of God, and can remind us what God looks like. All of creation has been put under His feet.

Feet that stepped into the Jordan river. Feet that felt the cool bottom and water swirling around. Feet tipping up off the ground as John baptized him. Feet that walked dusty roads, stepped in dried manure. Feet that were slathered with expensive perfume, wiped up by hair and tears. Feet that were pinned to wood, crying out with blood and pain. Feet that stepped into the valley of the shadow, as the dead were pulled out. Feet that stepped on stone and walked into a garden.

Think about that as your feet touch the ground. Listen to how those feet talk to you. Remember all things, all politics, all injustice, all weirdness, all pain, death have been put under his feet. Since you are hidden in Christ and Christ is hidden in God, those are your feet too. This is the shield of faith Paul urges us to put up to extinguish all the fiery darts of the evil one.

References

1 Alien Disclosure Imminent? Perry Stone Issues Warning. CBN.

2 Addison Hodges Hart. On demons and exorcism (Part 6): Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena and… The Pragmatic Mystic. An Orthodox Miscellany. https://addisonhodgeshart.substack.com/p/on-demons-and-exorcism-part-6-unidentified

3 DISCLOSURE DAY Official Final Trailer (2026) Emily Blunt, Steven Spielberg.

4 “The real disclosure in Spielberg’s comeback film isn’t about aliens” May 28, 2026. https://glennbeck.com/read/articles/the-real-disclosure-in-spielbergs-comeback-film-isnt-about-aliens?fbclid=IwZnRzaASG6jdleHRuA2FlbQIxMQBzcnRjBmFwcF9pZAo2NjI4NTY4Mzc5AAEe8OlpzqN9thKpxeV-HK3MwOst_Kc0rFnkDdaW33XsStv6ku_rUjE9vpSMVvE_aem_AIN-D2SEYMMJ0_VBVbHsOg

5 Revelation 20: 7 – 8, ESV

6 BREAKING: RFK Jr. Announces Major Trump Administration Actions To Combat Lyme Disease & Calls Alpha-Gal Syndrome “A Science Fiction Nightmare”. 2nd Smartest Guy in the World. May 30, 2026.https://www.2ndsmartestguyintheworld.com/p/breaking-rfk-jr-announces-major-trump

7 I Timothy 4: 1 – 2, ESV

8 Luke 24: 44 – 45

9 John 21:25

11 Ephesians 1: 22, ESV

12 Pastor Rosebrock. Immanuel Lutheran Belvidere. May 14, 2026

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