Notable Muslim writers in English who have addressed the UFO issue include Nadeem Haque and Charles Upton. The latter is the author of numerous highly-recommended books on mystical and esoteric subjects. Here is his new article. -Ed.
A Possible Explanation of “The Collins Elite”
by Charles Upton
One significant element in contemporary UFO mythology is the notion of something called the Collins Elite, supposedly a group of Evangelic Christians who once operated within the Defense Department, people who believed that the UFO Aliens are not extraterrestrial astronauts but demons; the existence of this group was apparently first mentioned in the book Final Events (2010) by Nick Redfern. They seem to have come to this conclusion based partly on the career of famous rocket pioneer Jack Parsons, a student of black magician Aleister Crowley, who performed pagan rituals at his launchings and worked to invoke a demon he called Babalon, as well as on earlier examples of practices such as those of Steven Greer of the Disclosure Project and (I believe) Tom DeLonge of To The Stars University, who have developed apps and training courses designed to teach their followers how to psychically invoke UFOs, apparently with some success. (This alone certainly seems to argue against the extraterrestrial astronaut hypothesis.) The view of this group, if it ever existed, that has emerged in the Disclosure Movement—partly, it is said, based on statements by intelligence community graduate Lue Elozondo—is that the Collins Elite wanted to shut down all UFO investigations because of the Aliens’ demonic nature, an idea that makes little sense to me, but which can be explained by an attempt on the part of the powers that be to define any understanding that the Aliens might be demons, or kafir Jinn, as something opposed to Disclosure, rather than—quite possibly—the very heart of what needs to be disclosed. In light of this view, I have speculated that the major shift in tactics by the military-industrial-intelligence complex since perhaps 2012 away from debunking the whole UFO/Alien phenomenon to what appears to be a concerted attempt to promote the idea that UFOs are actually extraterrestrial spacecraft, may be explained as a last-ditch effort to hide not only the demonic nature of the “aliens,” but the fact that certain “treaties” or pacts with these demons, perhaps going back many decades, might well have been made by various powerful figures in the Deep State, or in some extra-governmental power bloc of which the Deep State is only one branch among many. Initially the story that the whole UFOs thing was something of interest only to tin-foil-hatted cranks had seemed to be working—but as the theory that these beings were not extraterrestrial astronauts at all but some sort of “interdimensional” entities who had been interacting with the human race for possibly thousands of years began to gain ground—a theory powerfully advanced by Jacques Vallee’s book Passport to Magonia (1969)—a general consensus emerged that the only way to divert attention from the demonic hypothesis under these new conditions was to emphasize the likelihood that these beings were actually astronauts from other planets, as witness Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb’s absurd and inexplicably persistent claims (as of 2025) that the interstellar object 3I/Atlas may not be a comet at al, as almost every other researcher has concluded, but might well be an alien spacecraft, since we must above all else keep what is called “an open mind,” apparently referring to a mind that always remains open to suggestion and has been meticulously trained never to arrive at any rational conclusions. (It has also been claimed by some that Prof. Loeb has connections with Israeli Intelligence.) Admittedly, people such as Lue Elizondo, with his background in the intelligence community like so many other “whistleblowers”, have in fact admitted that the Aliens might be interdimensional if not demonic, since it has undoubtedly been realized that the this hypothesis has become so well established in recent years that to simply dismiss it might actually arouse suspicion and so lend it greater credence. Consequently the approach now seems to be to create endless ambiguities and uncertainties around this possibility rather than always trying to openly discredit it. All this, of course, is only one more theory in the area of UFOlogy that, like so many others, remains unproven, though I believe that it is a viewpoint that nonetheless needs to be clearly articulated. Be that as it may, if anyone wonders why the debunking, or at least the de-potentiating, of the demonic hypothesis has now apparently become such an important issue to some, Jacques Vallee’s 2025 interview with Ross Coulthart on the interdimensional UFO hypothesis, “Project Blue Book, Space Travel and Military Secrecy”, which references Vallee’s new book Forbidden Science 6: Scattered Castles (2025), may provide part of the answer. Coulthart quotes from the book:
The phenomenon is hurting people, it is manifest, scary….evil….and what we’ve called ‘interference’ is very real….as much as I thought the Collins Elite was wrong in its fundamentalist attitude, I wouldn’t blame anybody for talking about demonology here….
Coulthart mentions those people he’s interviewed who have claimed that the use of the names Jesus or Mary has had the power to immediately dissolve “alien” manifestations, and asks Vallee if the Christians might be right. Vallee replies that not all Christians agree with this view, but nonetheless goes on to say that:
If we stop looking at what the evil side is doing, we’re in fact turning the world over to them….we should know as much as we can, I think that’s the view certainly of many Catholics, that we should know as much as we can about the evil side, if we accept that there’s an evil side that’s active, that’s actually impinging on what we think, what we do….
Coulthart then approvingly quotes from Vallee’s book:
Collins Elite members believe that no one should be interested in anything that’s coming from Satan. I say, if we’re about to do battle with Satan, we might as well learn everything we can
about his toys.
Next Coulthart, referring to the same book, mentions the 1977 Kolaris (Colares?) Island incidents in Brazil and the resulting Chupa-chupa (“bloodsucker”) attacks, reportedly resulting in a drainage of blood from the victims by some sort of light-beam, and comments: “There is no doubt at all, is there Jacques, that the phenomenon, whatever it is, has on occasion killed people, murdered people.” Vallee takes exception to this, explaining various deaths incident upon human interactions with UFOs as more likely unintended consequences of exposure to a toxic radiation of an undetermined nature. Coulthart comes back with evidence of deliberate attacks by UFO Aliens on human victims: “There are distressing cases though and I’ve seen the photographs from the Brazilian Air Force where they show people who have been mutilated, dead bodies with holes in them, pieces of flesh cut away….do they murder people?” But Vallee, based on extensive personal research into some of these incidents for which he traveled to Brazil himself and interviewed some of the people involved, persists in his unwillingness to term these death “murders.”
All this gave me the definite impression that Jacques Vallee, though the caution and dedication to strict accuracy that he is known for remain admirable, may nonetheless be walking a tightrope between what he feels he can say, and what he fears he can never say without dire consequences, as if he were haunted by potential sensationalistic headlines such as “PREMIER UFOLOGIST REVEALS SATANIC HUMAN SACRIFICE INSIDE THE PENTAGON!” or some other such horrible and irresponsible allegation. Nonetheless, given that he characterizes the UFO phenomenon as “active, demonic evil” and admits that it has indeed caused human deaths, it would only be one short step to the notion of deliberate murders if not actual sacrifices of human beings— a step that, given the conspiracy-theory mindset of so many today, somebody would be sure to take. Be that as it may, I would like to offer an explanation for the apparent desire of the Collins Elite to put a lid on all UFO investigations by the military, an explanation that might partially exonerate them. I certainly do not agree that all such research should be terminated, and sometimes wonder if that Collins Elite story was actually cooked up by somebody who needed to provide a plausible excuse for the fact that the military has as yet no made solid evidence of crashed UFOs or recovered alien bodies available to Congress, while at the same time portraying religious faith as inimical to Disclosure instead of something that could potentially provide a vital missing element in what needs to be disclosed. My conjecture is as follows: that the Collins Elite may have wanted to shut down all consideration of the nature of UFOs and their occupants because they worried that this might act as a temptation, and as well as providing useful opportunities, to those among their colleagues they feared could be interested in concluding a pact with the “aliens”, like the magicians of old and the Satanists of the present day, and might already have succeeded in doing so. Nonetheless I still agree with Jacques Vallee when he says: “If we’re about to do battle with Satan, we might as well learn everything we can about his toys”—and about his dupes and his agents as well.
Appendix: On the Ontological Status of the “Aliens”
I believe that the Alien/UFO manifestation is predominantly produced by those beings the Arabs call the Jinn, the Northern Europeans the Fairies, the ancient Greeks the Daimones etc., more or less as Jacques Vallee speculated in Passport to Magonia and elsewhere—beings who inhabit an etheric or subtle-material dimension, normally invisible to us, and therefore constitute a perennial aspect of terrestrial reality, comparable in some ways to the vegetable kingdom, the animal kingdom etc. Though they may have their own forms of technology, or something roughly analogous to it, they are not a race or races of corporeal beings like we human beings are who have evolved on other planets in the physical universe. Given that the Jinn traditionally possess the power of full though usually temporary materialization, the phenomena attending their appearances will exhibit qualities that lie at the outer limits of what physics is able to understand, measure, and conceptualize, which is why the most advanced and cutting-edge physics is capable of discerning laws that partly explain these phenomena and to imagine technologies that are theoretically capable of reproducing some of them; this is how the Jinn have acted in human history to inspire various advances in science and engineering. In Islam, the Jinn are divided into the faithful or mumin Jinn who follow various divine revelations, and the kafir Jinn, the unfaithful, who exhibit the precise range of characteristics attributed by Christians to the demons or fallen angels. Given their ability to completely materialize and measurably affect physical reality, the scientific study of various paranormal manifestations such as those associated with Skinwalker Ranch, which I take to be ultimately Jinnish in origin, is a valid and important line of inquiry which could substantially expand our knowledge of these beings—yet we will never come to a full understanding of the true nature of the Aliens or the Jinn until we can get a stable sense of the ontological status of these entities as defined by religion and metaphysics, based on their history of well-informed speculation on, and direct experience of, such realities that goes back for thousands of years. To ignore this vast body of data is every bit as unscientific as the Collins Elite’s insistence that all study of them should be terminated. Without both hard data and a stable metaphysical context, the Alien/UFO phenomenon will remain no more than a maddening, frustrating mystery to the human race.
