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The first question I want answered when Donald Trump takes office next week is: “What’s with all those mystery drones flying over USAF bases in America and England lately?” Given Trump’s admirable willingness to talk matters ufological with podcast bro-hosts like Joe Rogan in the preelection run-up, I’m optimistic he might provide us with an answer.

Are such craft really UFOs at all, though? As they are Unidentified, they are Flying, and they are Objects, in the literal sense, yes. Yet, in the popularly understood sense of alien spaceships, surely not. The objects are smallish unmanned drones, not flying saucers per se, albeit seemingly of unusually advanced capability. The question is, where do they come from? Moscow? Beijing? Atlantis? The Hollow Earth? Alpha Centauri? Or maybe even…Hell itself?

You Scratch My Back, I’ll Scratch Yours
Takimag recently reported Tucker Carlson as guessing the drones came direct from Satan. Since his departure from Fox News allowed America’s most famous pro-Trump journalist to become even more outspoken and free, Tucker has been talking about both his Christianity and his alleged tendency to be “mauled” in bed at night by demons who cruelly scratch his torso.

Carlson called his witching-hour assault by Edward Scissorhands or Freddie Krueger a “transformative experience” that had left him “seized” with a “very intense desire to read the Bible.”

He should try Psalm 22: “For dogs have compassed me: the assembly of the wicked have inclosed me: they have pierced my hands and my feet.” This is because Tucker also confesses he sleeps with his four dogs in the same bed, another breed of fierce hairy being that also possesses sharp claws—but still he prefers to blame demons for his nocturnal stigmata.

Tucker blames demons for a lot of things these days, also arguing these very same sulfurous entities may have surreptitiously been behind various aspects of advanced technology, from nuclear bombs to UFOs.

For this, Carlson has largely been portrayed by skeptics and naysayers as a lone lunatic, but in fact (appropriately enough for an ET-spotter) he is not alone.

More ET, Vicar?
Here in England, there was the surprising post-WWII phenomenon of so-called “Flying Saucer Vicars,” most notably the Rev. Paul Eric Inglesby. Inglesby had a prophetic vision of UFOs whilst lying deliriously ill with a tropical disease in 1938, psychically perceiving a future Earth where Tucker Carlson-like demons in spaceships fought a nuclear war for possession of human souls: prophetic indeed, as the first widely accepted flying saucer sighting did not occur until nine years later in 1947, over Washington State’s Cascade Mountains.

In 1977, alarmed by a TV documentary about the growth in new UFO-based pseudo-religions, which he saw as mere fronts for satanism, the Anglican Inglesby established CHRUFORA, the CHRistian UFO Research Association.

The real leading British UFO Research Association of that time, BUFORA, also harbored sympathetic minds, no fewer than three of its directors similarly thinking saucers were piloted by devils. One abandoned the field altogether after becoming possessed by a malign entity urging him to throw himself under a train. When another BUFORA man burned all his saucer books, he claimed the resultant smoke “billowed up in the form of a human being and two hands began to reach out” toward him, a sure sign of demonic influence.

Prince Philip, the husband of Queen Elizabeth II, was a noted UFO enthusiast himself. When Inglesby found the couple were due to attend a royal premiere of Close Encounters of the Third Kind in London in 1978, he wrote them a letter of warning, saying the very experience may risk damning their immortal souls, but the Archbishop of Canterbury failed to pass it on for some strange reason.

Circle Jerk
Like my sort-of namesake Tucker, I too am interested in ufology, having written several books touching upon the topic. So, I know it is in no way unusual for a man to interpret strange lights in the sky in line with his own personal spiritual or intellectual worldview, as Carlson has lately done with his Devil Drones. In the past, people guessed UFOs to be fiery dragons, luminous witches, or glowing angels zooming by; the now standard idea that they are alien spacecraft is merely a modern, post-WWII development.

There were several far odder early competitors to this now near-ubiquitous notion. I once wrote a pair of books, The Saucer and the Swastika and Nazi UFOs (I wanted to call the latter Unidentified Fascist Objects, but the publisher wouldn’t let me!) detailing how various fantasists began theorizing the new post-1945 saucers were Hitler’s latest top-secret superweapons, akin to the V-2 flying rockets, aboard which he and his cronies had escaped bombed-out Berlin.

Some pushing this narrative were bizarre neo-Nazi occultists, like Miguel Serrano, a Chilean diplomat and poet, who invented his own pseudo-religion of “Esoteric Hitlerism.” This taught not that leading Nazis were flying across our unwary planet inside UFOs, but that leading Nazis actually were UFOs.

SS occultists had managed to perfect a new form of Aryan rune magic, Serrano said, that allowed men like Hitler to begin spinning around on the spot in mystical fashion like whirling dervishes until such a point as they suddenly transformed into giant flattened circles called mandalas, a type of traditional round Buddhist symbol of the soul, and spun away off up into the sky.

Here they now flew around, glowing eerily, awaiting the final glorious day when the ghosts of dead SS men would return from the Aryan afterlife in the form of the Wild Hunt, and the Third Reich would be paranormally reborn, with even its bomb-ruined old buildings suddenly shifting back into existence on this Earth plane from another, more agreeably fascist, dimension.

Buzzing the Earth
An even more outré idea came from Gerald Heard, an eccentric English intellectual and writer resident in California, where he explored alternative spiritualities, whose story I detailed in another old book, Space Oddities. Heard was the inventor of the whole “Killer Bee” genre of sci-fi yet thought UFOs were piloted not by normal earthling honeybees, but by a new cousin race of superintelligent bees from Mars with jewels in their foreheads.

Noticing the saucers’ reported impossible-sounding maneuvers, Heard deduced that any large, non-aerial beings of a humanoid form would be immediately splattered dead against the spaceships’ walls by the sheer g-forces involved. So, tiny flying creatures must have been piloting the crafts instead; bees seemed to him the best candidates.

Aware bees had a primitive quasi-language based upon dancing to inform one another about the location of pollen, Heard proposed special human translators should be employed to work out how to communicate with Earth Bees via the medium of dance. Then the translators would jiggle about and train the insects up to become our intermediary diplomatic corps with the Mars Bees. Finally, the special-agent insects could be flown up into space on rockets to ask the invaders what they wanted. Some free jam, probably.

Non-Killer Clowns From Outer Space
The more you look into the subject of UFOs, the more obvious it is that we are not being invaded en masse by aliens at all. I do think a certain hard core of encounters currently stand as being unexplained, but even many of these appear to be some kind of ultra-weird hallucinatory phenomena, sometimes of a mysteriously shared nature.

One of my favorite examples occurred in 1973 on England’s Isle of Wight, when two small children, a girl and a boy, were crossing a bridge from beneath which a seven-foot-tall extraterrestrial clown (see their amusing drawing here) abruptly emerged, or so the kids said.

Unlike Stephen King’s rather more disturbing ET clown Pennywise, this far more friendly one had two wooden antennae poking out from either side of his head. His face had two triangular slots for eyes, a brown square for a nose, and “static yellow lips” that couldn’t really open.

The alien bounded off in strange leaps, like an astronaut on the moon, toward his apparent spaceship, which was cunningly disguised as a windowless tin hut, like Dr. Who’s TARDIS posing as a big blue phone box. The children followed him inside, finding the internal walls full of dials.

The space clown took off his hat and asked them, through a handheld electronic voice-box, if they would care to see how he ate berries. He then popped one in his ear, bobbed his head, and it rolled into his triangular eye socket. Nodding again, it rolled down his throat. Understandably, the infants made their excuses and left.

Illegal Aliens
So, you see, when Tucker Carlson babbles excitedly away about extraterrestrial demons piloting flying saucers and scratching him with their iron claws whilst he lies dreaming on a mattress next to his pet dogs, he still has a long way to go when it comes to descending down into the true weirdest and most florid depths of ufological theorizing and ET encounters.

The time to truly start questioning Carlson’s state of mind is when he says he wakes up in bed one night bearing severe beestings all over his abdomen, spinning around in a big circle with mandala swastikas carved deep into his forehead, and with a large custard pie smeared right across his face and berries bouncing about inside his eyes.

In the meantime, I sincerely hope that Trump really does open up the White House X-Files and tells his great fan Tucker what he really knows about the space demons and the devil aliens next week. Come on, Donald! You know the poor man will get no sleep until you do.