The UFO "story" is needed by Satan to get humans to buy into the Armageddon event in Rev 16 so humans will align themselves against Christ in Rev 19 as if humans expect an evil empire army to show up from space and attack them.
And you accuse me of making arbitrary claims about what will happen in the eschaton?
Just as there is no way I can positively declare the above will not happen (and indeed - I did not), there is no way for you to assert that the above will happen, since the text in Revelations does not specifically identify the form the demons will take in seducing the leaders of the world.
(Indeed, from an amillenial perspective the experience of the Orthodox Church has been that they will take whatever form is most advantageous to them, often impersonating unfallen angels, or taking the form of pagan deities (see Psalm 95 v. 5 LXX, “the gods of the gentiles are demons” or its somewhat less helpful Masoretic variant, Psalm 96 v. 5, “the gods of the gentiles are idols”, in either case, something demons can easily pass themselves off as”, or indeed in all probability being involved to some extent in some aspects of the UFO movement, specifically in people who believe they’ve had some positive interaction with beings from other planets, for example, in the late 1990s I met a young woman who was under the demonic delusion that she was being counseled in some form by some extraterrestrial power; one could imagine the Desert Fathers and St. Ignatius Brianchaninov with exasperation shouting at her ‘no, you’re not, it’s the devil, repent and run to the Church, run for your life!” since the Cross of Christ is our only defense against such delusions.
However in the grand scheme of things, UFO mythology represents only a tiny fraction of the ways in which demons manipulate humanity; if we look at a broader picture of the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries, far more people were deceived by Islam (indeed this is by far the biggest deception), Mormonism, the Jehovah’s Witnessses and other non-Trinitarian forms of Christianity (and consider, if someone can be persuaded to deny the Trinity and the Incarnation, one cannot worship God in spirit and truth, since God is the Father, Son and Holy Ghost and in the person of the Son became man for our salvation, as the Nicene Creed says), and various reincarnationist and ancient Pagan and animist religions of the Far East and the Indian Subcontinent, such as Buddhism, Shinto, Hinduism, Confucianism, Daoism, Chinese folk religion, Korean shamanism, Hindu, Sikhism, Jainism - all religions which have attracted interest and in many cases converts from the West, particularly Buddhism and Hinduism, as well as various syncretic religions such as the Bahai Faith and Unitarian Universalism (which started out as denying the Trinity and then expanded to denying the specific truth of Christianity and then denying the concept of truth on a philosophical level; I find myself wondering what happened to Trinitarian Universalists after the merger with the Unitarians, if they left for other churches like the United Church of Christ or if there are still some present - there are a few UUA churches which are tolerant of Trinitarians, and always were, but did not insist on the Trinity as being essential, for instance, King’s Chapel in Boston, which had been associated with the Church of England before the revolutionary war but after the Declaration of Independence decided to strike out on its own and later join the Unitarians, having modified the Book of Common Prayer to delete the Creeds and all references to the Trinity (although as was typical of early Unitarianism, not the references to Jesus Christ as Lord, as there was a faint whiff of Arian
heteroousia doctrine remaining by implication).
However if we read the
Life of Anthony, by St. Athanasius, or the Sayings of the Desert Fathers, or the
Ladder of Divine Ascent by St. John Climacus, or the
Arena of St. Ignatius Brianchaninov, and the Scripture those texts refer to (indeed one could read Scripture itself but the problem is in some cases our preconceived) it becomes clear that most of the time the devil will seduce us with human desires - the passions of greed, lust, wrath, slothfulness, despair, idle-talk, vanity, vindictiveness, avarice, gluttony, and pride (which is particularly dangerous as it tends to ensnare the most accomplished and disciplined Christians who have overcome the other sinful passions through ascetic effort enabled by the grace of the Holy Spirit).
Thus, my entire argument is that you can’t know that the devil will need to make use of the UFO “story” in the Eschaton as your post claims, if indeed the premillenial interpretation of your church should prove correct.
