How prophecy never fails: interpretive reason in a flying-saucer group

Sociology of Religion, Summer, 1998 by Diana Tumminia

Q. Well, can the future be seen incorrectly? I mean, can mistakes be made?

A. Yes, a student can see something that isn't accurate, especially if obsessions, or a past life gets in the way. An error in viewing of the future just points to the places inside yourself that need to be worked on. Usually people are just seeing their past, and that's where their karma is. But that's not what happened to Uriel. You see, you just don't understand the infinity of Uriel, this infinite being. She didn't make a mistake; she had a reliving to show us how to work out our past lives. We're not running around here gaa-gaa, chasing flying saucers. We're working on ourselves. That's the teaching of the Science.

Reality maintenance in groups invokes embodied enactments of articulated understandings (Preston 1988; Griffin 1995). I asked several Unarians how they knew it was a reliving, not a false prophecy. Their general response was that they experienced its healing power. Furthermore, they could still experience it, even if they joined the group years after the event took place. "Facing the past" of the Isis-Osiris Cycle brings powerful transformations, I was told. One of the ways Unarians face the past and experience a reliving is through filmed psychodrama. In the late seventies, Uriel took the students up to the landing site to work out their psychic scars over Isis-Osiris. The edited film of this event airs regularly on public-access television where I viewed it several times during the study. The films and testimonials by students are always cited as irrefutable evidence of the reality of the prophecy.

Prior to the filming, members worked on assembling their Egyptian costumes and collecting kitchen knives as props in the big murder scene. In a 1989 interview, Billie explained how much the psychodrama helped her.

Once Uriel took us out to the landing site in Jamul. She put on makeup which made her look like she had been beaten. They guided us a little, but there was no set script. We said whatever came out of our mouths. We had to go through this to remember the emotions of this past life. If you had the guilts over this past life, you would just cry. I cried all the time in psychodramas because of my negative past. She went to this extent to help us drag up what was inside. When you finally get through this and feel the remorse, there is a freeing inside of you. A psychiatrist can only take you back through this lifetime You have to go back many lifetimes to work these problems out. This goes back thousands of years.

The student Thomas reminded me that he was one of the many members who had a healing during the same filming at the landing site. He pointed me to his testimonial in a Unarian text.

. . . Uriel came to me and told me to lie down on the ground. I looked into the eyes of this Infinite Being and went out! She removed the hordes and hordes of religious obsessions. My hands and arms shot straight out to the sides and I looked like a cross! My arms and legs repeatedly beat and pounded the earth (Norman 1984b: 351-52)!