On Creating "Angels, Archons, & Aliens"

My Writing Journey and Struggles

In late 2020, I began my research project investigating the Extraterrestrial/UFO phenomenon, thinking this would be a rather easy thing to investigate, and that I would be able to complete a book on the subject within a year. My very first book.

I was very naive.

Little did I know, there is no end to the information one can read on the subject. Every time I thought I had sufficiently read enough material to make my analysis, I would find something else that needed to be synthesized and accounted for. I would read one book only to discover that its contents were refuted by another book. Or perhaps I would read a certain refutation first, then find the source material, only to discover that the refutation was wildly wrong. I pretended to be a bird flying over a forest, trying to get an aerial perspective on ufology, with its thousands of military documents, and alleged military documents, to “report back to base” so to speak. It has proved to be a most annoyingly arduous task that I was unprepared to encounter. Some of the content is also very dark and extremely difficult to get through, such as the accounts of people who have been violated in a variety of ways, not to mention the personal, existential, epistemological struggles grappling with the content.

Three years later, accumulating a Google Drive of about 400 ufology books, watching over 400 hours of videos, every documentary I could find, countless articles, podcasts, Tweets, and Twitter Spaces, having to design, edit, format, and publish the book myself, I finally found myself in a position to complete my project by the final day of 2022.

As stated in the book, my primary audience is Christians, seeking to bridge the gap between the academy and the popular world, but I also say some things for the ufology community. The structure and development of the book is straightforwardly linear (each chapter assumes and requires that the previous chapter was read), but I do shift voices depending on the context, which makes it a bit of an unorthodox read which may, at times, surprise readers. For instance, in the first chapter of the book, when my purpose is to debunk bad arguments, I speak in the voice of an advocate. When I report on historical events (such as Chapter 2), my primary intent is to be a reporter to inform my presumably ignorant audience. When engaging historical-critical scholarship (such as Chapters 5-6), I try to be very careful and adapt accordingly. All of this is positioned inside the circle of a deeply personal, introspective, epistemological endgame.

However, every aspect of the book is designed with the intent to not fall into confirmation bias, double standards, or go overboard with the criticism of a Christian apologist, because this plagued past Christian attempts (as covered in the book). It is also extremely easy to attack anything different from oneself, so this would have been a pointlessly uninspired endeavor. This means that heretical territories are explored without bias, previously unquestioned authorities are critically examined, doctrines are audited, and I’m sure this will make everyone uncomfortable at some point. The reason I took this route is because I noticed that every single time a Christian went to investigate the Close Encounters phenomenon, it resulted in one of two conclusions (deceptive demons or foreign space brothers) which were both guilty of the same lack of self awareness as to how this subject might retroactively impact the Christian faith. My book actually examines these possibilities, and also highlights how Christians of every denomination have unfortunately kicked people out of their churches for having a Close Encounter which was interpreted in the most hostile manner possible.

There were moments when I intentionally did not take the low hanging New Age fruit for this reason. Other times, such as my harsh criticism of UFO debunker Philip J. Klass, I felt the need to match the aggression he (unfairly) gave to ufology in order to defend something ridiculed, and so my rhetoric is in full swing there. So while the structure of the book may seem a bit unusual to those expecting it to be “one thing,” its structure does have an internal coherence.

The most common question I get is why not separate it into multiple books? I realized early on that I could not do this, because I wanted to draw attention to a wide variety of data to be synthesized, and how certain disciplines inform other disciplines. Each chapter of the book is necessary to every other chapter, and so none of it can be read in a vacuum. For example, I cannot talk about the possibility of extraterrestrials in the Bible without first providing the necessary evidence to support this historical endeavor. Thus, I had to put the content of Chapters 2-3 before Chapters 4-6 to explain why I feel the need to make such a suggestion in the first place. If I unhinged those chapters and made them their own book, it would just be a ufology book, which is not the book I wanted to write. It had to be much more than a simple ufology book, it had to reflect the existential questions I was asking myself, and show the reasons why I was asking these questions. Furthermore, I wanted to synthesize everything into a single volume for convenience and affordability.

I hope this helps to clarify some things.