CULTISTS AND CONTACTEES: a topic outside the issue

In the ancient world, unusual items seen in the sky were cast in understandable frameworks of that time: flaming chariot wheels, spinning lamps, blazing torches, angelic, demonic or good like figures and the like.

In the Middle Ages - Europe - the world was defined by religion and so angelic and religious symbology was apparent in accounts.  Demons and heavenly beings battled overhead and for those more prone to their pagan roots the creatures might be a dragon or a warrior.

In the 1879's the first use of the household item, a saucer, was used in Texas to describe an object seen flying through the sky.  In1947, Kenneth Arnold attempts to find words to define what he saw as nine objects moving like stones or saucers skipped across a pond...

When confronted with something new and beyond the frame of common reference a person would struggle to find a way to complete the sentence, "It was like a ---."

In all of those time periods were also people who claimed they had encounters with a) the gods, b) their minions, c) mythic creatures, and d) had adventures and returned with mission to share a message for others.  This framework remained the same regardless of the time and changed to reflect what ever was a prevalent symbol in the culture.

Therefore many scholars who have looked at the broad topic of Contactees argue that they should not be examined as part of the UFO Phenomena at all.  They exist outside that experience (whatever one wishes to call the experience) and merely cloaks itself in the clothes of flying saucers, UFO's, abductions, contacts, travels, and messages of space love and fellowship in the same way that older societies utilized the tenets of the Church, the Dueling forces of Good (God and Angels) and Evil (Satan and his demons), to explain or conjure strange objects, unexplained events or missional messages of salvation and safety from destruction.