Religious Scholar: “UFO Disclosure Is THE APOCALYPSE!”

Summary

Rice University religious studies professor Jeffrey Kripal argues that UFO disclosure is literally an apocalypse, a Greek word meaning an unveiling or revelation of reality, and that religious historians are the people best equipped to make sense of it. Drawing on his own 1989 Kundalini awakening, the alien sexual encounters of David Huggins, levitating saints, and a lightning-strike near-death experience that left a woman with precognitive abilities, he links mysticism, trauma, sexuality and the UFO phenomenon. He rejects both religious and skeptical explanations and argues for a 'third space' in which these experiences are taken seriously as real but not taken at face value.

Key takeaways

• 1Kripal says he had a Kundalini awakening and out-of-body experience during the Hindu festival Kali Puja in 1989, and believes it transmitted the content of his future books, starting with 'Kali's Child'
• 2Elizabeth Krohn was struck by lightning in a Houston synagogue parking lot in 1988, says she spent 2 weeks talking to God in her grandfather's voice, and correctly predicted Super Bowl and presidential outcomes; her story is told in 'Changed in a Flash'
• 3Charles Chase of Lockheed's Skunk Works invited Kripal to MIT to lecture on flying saints such as St. Joseph of Cupertino, suspecting levitation is related to how UFOs propagate; Hal Puthoff speculated that a medieval secret society knew how to fly
• 4Romanian scholar Ioan Culianu, successor to Mircea Eliade and author of 'A Historian's Toolkit for the Fourth Dimension,' was assassinated in a University of Chicago Divinity School bathroom in May 1991; the motive remains unknown
• 5Kripal says the term 'ontological shock,' popularized by John Mack in the 1990s, originates with theologian Paul Tillich in the 1950s; he says Stan Grof turned Mack on to UFOs at Esalen
• 6Other works and claims cited include Eric Wargo's 'Time Loops' (called the most important book since 'Passport to Magonia'), Carlos Eire's 'They Flew,' the Archives of the Impossible at Rice University co-founded with Jacques Vallée, and Jake Barber's claim that a UFO legacy program traumatized young people to 'call in' craft

Glossary terms

Source

Transcript excerpt

In 1989, during a a major Hindu festival called Kali Puja, I had what most people would think of as a Kundalini awakening, in which I left my body. And I was like, "Oh my god." And I came back into the body and felt this incredible charge or transmission. Really? I knew something had been transmitted into me. Dr. Jeffrey Kripal, you are a renowned professor of religious studies at Rice University. But beyond that, you've lent your credentials to all sorts of things, paranormals, UFOs, near-death experiences. You also created the Archives of the Impossible, which obviously explores the nature of reality. One of my favorite books of yours, it's called Changed in a Flash, and it's about a woman who gets struck by lightning. What happens next? Well, that's Elizabeth Krohn. She follows this light and she has this elaborate near-death experience. She spent 2 weeks talking to God. It was like an instantaneous download of information. And so she'd ask who's going to win the Super Bowl and who's going to be the next president, and it all came true. Wow. They experience the future. They're not guessing. The brain exists in the future. The human being is a tesseract, a four-dimensional worm spread out in time. You have Charles Chase, who was director of revolutionary technologies at Skunk Works. I believe invited you to lecture on flying saints. He did. Charles felt that was somehow related to how UFOs propagate through space and time. That's fascinating to me. I was talking to Hal Puthoff one time, and he was saying, you know, everybody's speculating about Alcubierre warp drives and negative energy and negative mass, and what if it was a medieval secret society, and they knew how to fly. ...

Excerpt from American Alchemy, Oct 21, 2026. Rights remain with the original creators. Hear the full episode at the source.