The (false) Gospel According to E.T. (Part 2)

So here is my account of the MUFON meeting in Greeley Colorado on May 12th 2011…and my subsequent interaction with Dr. Leo Sprinkle. Wow…this was almost a month ago! Time just passes through our hands like water huh? It is so important that we don’t waste it.

A bit of the backstory…MUFON is the Mutual UFO Network. Here is their website http://www.mufon.com/ . I work fo a nonprofit organization that attends to various needs of people living with developmental disabilities. One of my coworkers is an active member of MUFON. This person is one of those people that exudes kindness and a certain humble gentleness that is very rare these days. I am very thankful that they are in that place because sometimes kindness and humble gentleness is in short supply…just like in any office I am sure. I know I don’t usually reflect those qualities. Anyway, this meeting was the second one that my coworker had invited me to attend. The first one was a couple of months prior. I wasn’t sure if I was going to go to this one or not and had forgotten about it until the day of. I had received a tweet that day that Chris White had posted a link to an article that reviewed the movie Paul…and that reminded me about it. I still wasn’t sure if I was going to go because the first one I went to, which was held at a steakhouse, was a bit on the uninteresting side. That nights speaker talked about his recent trip to Area 51 where he met a National Geographic camera crew and really didn’t do much…they just kinda drove up to a gate somewhere in the desert of Nevada and he showed the camera men a sign saying you couldnt go any further and they saw the security cameras . So I was hesitant really. However, what first caught my interest was that this time instead of being at the steakhouse the venue was going to be at the local Unitarian Universalist Church! (For space reasons…HAHAHA…I mean due to space…I mean it had more seating! Phew…) Here is their website http://www.greeleyuuc.org/ . A MUFON meeting in a Unitarian Universalist Church?!?!? What could be more interesting? Please…Don’t read that as sarcasm. I found it genuinely interesting. A friend of mine encouraged me to go reminding me that at the very least I could find someone there to pray for…that was truth and I decided to go. The guest speaker that night would be hypnotherapist Dr. Leo Sprinkle.

Unitarian Universalist Church of Greeley

Biography of R. Leo Sprinkle (Taken From: http://rmoa.unm.edu/docviewer.php?docId=wyu-ah400031.xml )

Ronald Leo Sprinkle was born in Rocky Ford, Colorado, in 1930. Receiving his PhD in Counseling Psychology from the University of Missouri in 1961, he held the position of Assistant Professor of Psychology at the University of North Dakota from 1961 to 1964. He then was hired at the University of Wyoming and served as Associate Professor of Guidance Education, Counselor and Assistant Professor of Psychology, Director of Counseling and Testing, Professor of Counseling Services, and Counseling Psychologist. Sprinkle’s major professional interests were counseling and hypnosis, the psychological aspects of UFO research, and parapsychology. In his career, he published extensively on UFOs, served as a consultant for several T.V. programs, and founded the Rocky Mountain Conference on UFO Investigation. He corresponded with many ufologists and abductees, including Ida Kannenberg. Sprinkle resigned in 1989 to become a professor emeritus and a counseling psychologist in private practice.

Dr. Leo Sprinkle

I had no idea who this guy was or that he had been in this field for so long! I had never heard of him. So anyway, before the meeting started I took the opportunity to look around the church…I had only heard about Unitarian Universalist and never had been in one of their churches. I found some free literature and read through it. That got me all kinds of depressed. (Maybe that will be another blog post) Anyway, the meeting began and after a bit of MUFON business Dr. Sprinkle took the stage.

My first impression of the guy…I liked him! He seemed like a kindly older gentleman and said he wanted to start off by giving his biases…which were leveled at the institution of psychology. He gave an entertaining anecdote that basically drove home the point that psychology doesn’t focus on the soul. Cool…we agree. He also mentioned the whole 9/11 conspiracy…alright…we agree. So, I listened with anticipation, knowing he was billed as a hypnotherapist, I wondered what he was going to say about it. I am strongly against hypnotherapy. I think it is dangerous both spiritually and psychologically…(indeed you can’t really separate the two). The Bible says to guard your mind…not give it over to someone…thats all hypnotherapy IS really.

So anyway, it was crazy! Let me tell you that MUFON’s mission statement is this: The scientific study of UFOs for the benefit of humankind. Well…Dr. Sprinkle sure stepped out of that parameter…leaving all traces of “science” by the wayside. I was watching his presentation with such anticipation as it went from solid ground very quickly to speculation and then very quickly it just became a New Age religious sermon! I was blown away! I was looking around at the people there hoping to see expressions of discontentment because this man’s presentation wasn’t jibbing up with MUFON’s stated practices…but no…I only saw the opposite…a crowd of eager like minds…totally eating out of this man’s hands. I found his speech completely interesting once he arrived at its true nature and point. This quote from a MUFON site talking about a past event he spoke at sorta summarizes what he talked about that night:

Dr. Sprinkle spoke about the “Pros” and “Cons” of the ET presence. The “Cons” are the “confidence” people who try to con us into discounting or denying ET while the “Pros” are the professional ones who profess the reality of the ET presence. Has ET been with us throughout human history? Leo raised the question: are we former ET souls who have accepted the human challenge?

There it is! The exact seeds of the deception that God had been showing me for years. It was the first time I had actually heard someone espousing it live. I gotta say…it was exciting. Lemme explain. It was alluring…or inticing…to be in a room with someone giving out this new “truth” and fifty or so people all nodding along in agreement! If I didn’t have the Spirit of Truth dwelling within me I might have totally gone for it. It is very seductive. His talk that night was specifically on his findings, through hypno-regressive “therapy” on people who have sought him out, that humanity is basically being “schooled” by these E.T.’s and that we are being prepared for a cosmic-spiritual paradigm shift. I found a quote from Dr. Sprinkle on this website: http://www.ufoevidence.org/researchers/detail79.htm that kinda sums up what he was saying that night, “My approach is to minimize the tendency to ‘explain’ (or explain away) the reality of psychic experiences, and to emphasize the willingness to ‘explore’ the personal meaning of these human experiences of spiritual emergence.¨ Pragmatism. He himself even brought up the fact that He has “guides” that he is in communication with and he encouraged everyone to go home and to “open themselves up” to these beings and to “send out a signal” to them to invite them “in”. Towards the end he flat-out said that he has no assurance whether or not these beings were benevolent or malevolent, but that they were real and had manifested themselves to him and communicated with him so he was going to follow them. Dangerous irresponsible pragmatism. That to me is a perfect rendering of 2 Thessalonians 2:9-22…

The coming of the lawless one is according to the working of Satan, with all power, signs, and lying wonders, ¹⁰ and with all unrighteous deception among those who perish, because they did not receive the love of the truth, that they might be saved. ¹¹ And for this reason God will send them strong delusion, that they should believe the lie, ¹² that they all may be condemned who did not believe the truth but had pleasure in unrighteousness.

He then started to talk about The Kingdom of Heaven and at one point he started to quote from the Bible…though taking it out of context. He quoted the last part of Luke 17:21, “…the kingdom of God is within you.” He related it his view, or his “guides” views of how we are all connected and one and how the kingdom is within our “midsts”…within our connections to one another. He then went from (mis)quoting Jesus to mocking Him…sorta outta nowhere. He brought up the fact that the Bible doesn’t speak about the life of Jesus from His early teens to the point where He starts His ministry. Dr. Sprinkle said in a mocking whisper, putting his hand up to his mouth, “It’s probably because the early christian writers didn’t want anyone to know he went to india and learned Buddhism because that would prove that he wasn’t really God.” Again, I was blown completely away!!! I had just been led to look into that very matter by having someone assert to me that the New Testament was plagerized…specifically the Gospel in relation to the Indian text the Bhagavad Gita. (I hope to blog about that someday) But wow! The Spirit had really prepared me for this whole thing! It was awesome. So, I promised God that if Leo did a question and answer I would say something. Dr. Sprinkle ended his presentation by saying, “Well, I guess that’s my sermon.” in a forced irreverence.

The two immediate problems that I had were: 1. Yes…he then opened it up for a q and a session…and 2. No…I had no idea what to say. I few people asked questions that allowed him to talk for another twenty minutes, the time in which I spent praying…but still nothing came to mind to say…and then he asked if there was anyone else with a question. My hand shot up (I had a big Cross on my wrist that I had drawn on myself that day with a Sharpie). He pointed at me and said, “Yes…” Still not knowing what I would say I started with, “Let me begin by giving out MYbiases…I am a relatively new Fundamentalist Bible Believing Christian…and given your views on Jesus I think it is quite fitting that this meeting is being held in a Universalist Unitarian Church.” To which he raised his hands and pivoted back and forth as if to say, “Yeah…isn’t this great.” (my impression). Then I said, “I am with you on 9/11, and I do think that “disclosure” is a real possibility…but do you see how that could directly lead to a persecution of Christians?” He, didn’t understand and asked me to elaborate. I told him how the whole thing could be a set-up to deceive people away from God and that if it happens it would be the christians, or at least some christians, who will rise up to speak the truth and will become hated by all those who love the lie. The “beings” could say that in order for humanity to move forward, become like them…like gods, everyone has to be on the same page and that it’s been the misguided monotheistic fundamentalists that have been the root cause of all of humanity’s woes and those people must either change their minds or be removed. He responded after a perplexed moment, “Well, the Bible doesn’t say that christians will be persecuted in the last days.” To which I wanted to respond to but couldn’t because as soon as I started he went on to say, “You know…look at Paul…he started out persecuting christians…then he turned around and persecuted non-christians.” I was dumbfounded…he either didn’t know his Bible…or he was purposefully lying…I think he just honestly didn’t know what he was talking about. Then he turned to take someone elses question, but I stopped him by saying, “Paul didn’t persecute non-christians…what are you talking about?” He then got as serious as I would see him get that night and said, contradicting what he said just a few minutes earlier, “You know…the christians that WANT to be persecuted…will be. And the ones who want to enter into the kingdom will be joyous.” Which I still take as a dismissive veiled threat but have come to realize that that is the most truthful thing that he said that night. It was a true statement that he said erroneously…the truth is that the two aren’t mutually exclusive…they are interconnected. The entire truth is…the christians who want to glorify Jesus Christ will be persecuted for his name…AND they will enter into the kingdom…AND they will be joyous…but it will only be by the power of the Spirit.

There is hope for Dr. Sprinkle. Let us pray for him that God might grant him repentance and that he may accept what Jesus has done for him on the cross. Let us pray that we who are in Christ remain in Him and walk in the Spirit. Let us ask for discernment and wisdom in these confusing times. Let us let the Gospel of Christ be the light that leads us through the darkness of our days.