The UFO-Occult Connection: Crowley, Parsons, and Hidden Agendas

If UFOs are simply the spacecraft of a distant civilization, then the UFO phenomenon should have nothing to do with séances, secret societies, ceremonial magic, or demonology. It should be a clean story of technology and biology — astronomy, propulsion, maybe a first-contact protocol.

It is not.

From the very beginning, the UFO phenomenon has been tangled up with the occult. The first organized "contactee" movements grew out of Theosophical lodges. The most influential occultist of the 20th century drew a picture in 1918 that looks exactly like the entity the world would later call a Gray. A co-founder of NASA's jet propulsion lab conducted a ritual specifically designed to open a portal for such beings — and the modern UFO flap began the following year. This is not the pattern a nuts-and-bolts extraterrestrial story predicts. It is the pattern of something much older wearing new clothes.

Below is the documented thread — the figures, the events, and what serious researchers conclude from the overlap.

1. Aleister Crowley and the Portrait of "Lam"

The story begins, strangely, in 1918 — thirty years before Kenneth Arnold's 1947 sighting that gave us the word "flying saucer."

The British occultist Aleister Crowley, self-styled prophet of the religion of Thelema, performed a ritual in New York called the Amalantrah Working. During it, he reported contact with a non-human intelligence he called Lam. Crowley drew a picture of the entity. The drawing, reproduced in occult literature ever since, shows a bald, bulbous head, slit mouth, and enormous almond eyes. It is, to a striking degree, a portrait of a Gray — produced decades before the Gray image entered popular culture.

Crowley's own instructions to followers were to establish contact with such entities through ritual. Whether one takes Crowley's magick seriously or not, the timeline matters: the image that would define the alien encounter was already present in occult circles a generation before Roswell.

2. Jack Parsons and the Babylon Working (1946)

The most direct and best-documented link between rocket science, the occult, and the UFO phenomenon is John Whiteside "Jack" Parsons (1914–1952).

• The scientist. Parsons was a co-founder of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) and one of the founders of modern solid-fuel rocketry. The man whose work helped put Americans on the moon was, simultaneously, a devoted follower of Crowley and the head of Crowley's American lodge, the Agape Lodge of the O.T.O. (Ordo Templi Orientis), in Pasadena.
• The ritual. In 1946, Parsons and his friend L. Ron Hubbard (later the founder of Scientology) conducted a series of ceremonies called the Babylon Working — sex-magic rituals intended to incarnate the Thelemic goddess Babalon in human form and, in Parsons's understanding, to open a doorway between dimensions. Parsons believed the Working succeeded; he met the artist Marjorie Cameron shortly after, whom he took to be the incarnation.
• The aftermath. Parsons himself believed the phenomena we now call UFOs were directly connected to his magical operations. In his writings he speculated that the entities contacted through ceremonial magic and the occupants of the "flying saucers" were the same class of being.

And then, in 1947 — the year after the Babylon Working — the modern UFO era began with Kenneth Arnold's sighting and the Roswell incident. Researchers who take the occult connection seriously consider this more than coincidence. Parsons, on this reading, was not a scientist who happened to be a mystic; he was a scientist who used ritual to do exactly what he said he was doing, and something answered.

3. The Lodge Origins of Early UFOlogy

The overlap is not limited to two figures. The early organized UFO movement grew directly out of occult and metaphysical organizations.

• The Aetherius Society (1955). Founded by George King, a former taxi driver and Theosophist who claimed telepathic contact with a "Master Aetherius" from Venus. The society blended UFO contactee narratives with Theosophy's "Ascended Masters," karma, and spiritual evolution. Its "Space Brothers" were, in effect, Ascended Masters in spaceships.
• The "I AM" Activity and Ascended Masters. Theosophy (Helena Blavatsky, late 19th century) introduced the idea of hidden spiritual masters guiding humanity. Guy Ballard's 1930s "I AM" Activity Christianized this into a framework of "Ascended Masters" — and the 1950s contactees, almost without exception, described their space contacts in exactly these terms: wise, benevolent, spiritually advanced beings here to help humanity evolve.
• George Adamski and George Van Tassel. The most famous early contactees — Adamski (who claimed to meet a Venusian in the California desert) and Van Tassel (who built the Integratron near Joshua Tree on telepathically-received instructions) — were both steeped in occult and metaphysical practice. Their "space brothers" behaved exactly like the channeled spirits of the séance room: telepathic, morally instructive, vaguely godlike.

The pattern is structural, not incidental. The early contactee movement was, in substance, an occult movement that had swapped the vocabulary of spirits for the vocabulary of space travel. The entities had not changed; the story being told about them had.

4. What Researchers Conclude From the Overlap

Theorists who take this overlap seriously — most notably Jacques Vallée (in Passport to Magonia and Messengers of Deception) and John Keel — draw a specific and provocative conclusion.

If the UFO phenomenon were extraterrestrial, you would expect it to be new: spacecraft are a 20th-century possibility, so the phenomenon should appear in the 20th century and not before. But the phenomenon, in form, is ancient. The structure of the modern contact or abduction — a strange being, a telepathic message, a period of missing time, a transformation of the experiencer — is identical to the structure of the medieval fairy encounter, the shamanic spirit journey, the demonic possession, and the angelic visitation. The costume changes with the culture. The script does not.

Vallée's conclusion is that we are dealing with an intelligence — or a class of intelligence — that has been with humanity throughout history, and that adapts its appearance to whatever the host culture is prepared to believe. To a medieval peasant, it appeared as a fairy. To a 19th-century occultist, as a spirit. To a 20th-century American, as an alien. The phenomenon uses the beliefs of its witnesses as a delivery system.

The Christian and eschatological researchers push this one step further. If the same intelligence is appearing now as "alien" that appeared in older ages as "demon" or "fallen angel," then the UFO phenomenon is not first contact — it is the latest campaign of something very old. The reproductive obsession of abduction accounts, the interest in hybridization, the persistent link to occult practice: all of it maps onto the Genesis 6 / Watcher / Nephilim framework with uncomfortable precision. On this reading, the occult connection is not a weird footnote to the UFO story. It is the UFO story.

Why It Matters

The extraterrestrial hypothesis is comforting because it is material: aliens are just beings from another planet, and contact with them is a technological event. The occult connection destroys that comfort. If the same phenomenon that produces the Gray in a bedroom today was producing the fairy in a meadow eight hundred years ago, then we are not dealing with biology and propulsion. We are dealing with an intelligence that is interested in us, that is capable of manipulating what we see, and that has been here for as long as we have.

You do not have to accept the demonic reading to take the problem seriously. You only have to notice that the data does not fit the spacecraft story, and that the figures who built the modern occult and UFO movements — Crowley, Parsons, the lodge-trained contactees — believed they were in contact with the same beings, whether they called them masters, aliens, or gods. The question the overlap forces is the oldest question there is: not "are we alone in the universe," but "what has been with us all along."

This article synthesizes material from the GenSix411 libraries, drawing on the work of Jacques Vallée, John Keel, and the historical record on Crowley, Parsons, and the early contactee movement. For cited detail on any event or source, ask the AI or explore the related theories below.

The competing theories at a glance