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Last weekend, the Lagos State chapter of the Christian Association of Nigeria instructed the leadership of the Lord’s Chosen Charismatic Revival Ministries to review how its members present testimonies at gatherings. According to a PUNCH newspaper report, the CAN had condemned one of the viral testimonies shared by a church member during the penultimate week. In the said testimony, the unnamed member claimed that an old man appeared to her in the examination hall and gave her answers to some questions. The Lagos CAN Chairman, Bishop Stephen Adegbite, described the testimony as ‘utter fabrication’.
In recent times, the Lord’s Chosen church has attracted widespread media attention because of some strange-sounding testimonies emanating from its members. The purported miraculous encounters have become the butt of social media jokes, and skit makers have cashed in on them to create sundry digital content. The phrase “I’m a Chosen”, which is an affirmation of denominational faith and loyalty for the church members, has now become a meme for all sorts of situational comedies.
However, I have an entirely different view of the Chosen controversy. I do not believe we should use one large brush to paint all Chosen testimonies as mere imagination. Equally, we are not doing our society any good if the only thing we can make out of a seemingly new phenomenon is farce and parody. A sophisticated society should have various prisms for scrutinizing events and social outbursts.
There is a high probability that some of these miracles are Unidentified Flying Objects encounters. A UFO is any perceived airborne, submerged, or transmedium phenomenon that cannot be immediately identified or explained. Ufology is the investigation of UFOs by people who believe that they may be of extraordinary origins. In ufology, a close encounter is when a person witnesses a UFO – or its occupants – at relatively close range, where the possibility of misidentification is presumably greatly reduced. Some of the Chosen testimonies are apt examples of a close encounter or contact.
For instance, the testimony that an old man appeared, and gave answers in an exam hall, sounds very much like the ‘saviour UFO alien’ encounter, whereby supposed angelic beings intervene in the affairs of humans. It is reminiscent of the presently trending UFO encounter story of the American man, Chris Bledsoe, which was published in the best-selling book entitled, “UFO of God: The Extraordinary True Story of Chris Bledsoe”. Bledsoe testified that initially, few people believed his UFO encounter, but the US national intelligence community showed strong interest, followed by emerging pieces of evidence confirming the authenticity of his experience.
Furthermore, there is an ongoing eschatological exegesis around UFOs in the Bible. In fact, there is a theological book, The Bible and Flying Saucers, by a Christian minister, Barry Downing, dedicated to this subject. As Frank Stranges, another minister who is the president of International Evangelism Crusades, puts it, “Some UFOs are gifts from God, angelic visitations sent to improve the lot of humankind.”
In the Book of Ezekiel, the prophet described a flying disc that came from the north (“a wheel in the middle of a wheel”) and hovered over the land. The color was metallic. Although some translations of the Bible describe the ‘eyes’ of the apparition, a correct interpretation shows that Ezekiel likened these openings to ‘windows.’ This wheel was no mere vision, Stranges said in a Los Angeles Times interview.
It was real. It was God’s work. It was a spaceship. Ezekiel saw something. The children of Israel saw something. When the Jews fleeing Egypt roamed the desert for 40 years, a UFO described as a pillar of fire warmed the multitudes at night with its glow. “Above them was this giant pillar of fire,” Stranges said. “This was not a natural phenomenon, this huge spaceship God provided in the wilderness.”
Going by this analogy, one would hazard the assumption that some of the Lord’s Chosen church testifiers may have seen something in the realms of the paranormal. However because Nigeria is not yet exposed to this arcane knowledge, they do not possess the frame of reference to grasp their experiences or accurately describe them. For example, the testimony where a church member narrated how a flying lion carried him to safety, resonates with the UFO encounter in the Biblical book of Ezekiel, where animal imagery was used to depict apparent machines – eyes on a wheel for windows on a curved spaceship.
The testimony goes like this, “Before you know it, something entered my back, lifted me like an aeroplane. When it reached (my destination), it dropped me… I tried to look, and I discovered it was a lion. When the lion dropped me, it raised its hand and showed me direction, after that, it waved me, bye bye.”
To be clear, even in the developed countries of the Western hemisphere, with all their sophistication, there are still many sceptics and unbelievers of the paranormal, UFO encounters to be specific. In fact, the American government kept denying UFO reality while gas-lighting close encounter experiencers, until recently when it declassified its UFO files, and admitted that indeed there are UFOs out there.
The point is, just the same way Chosen members are being trolled, many Americans were mocked and ridiculed when they came public with their close encounter stories. The difference is that the Nigerian experience is dressed in a religious cloak, while the American experience is more scientific and secular.
I feel compelled to share a YouTube comment by one of such Americans on a broadcast made by popular UFO abductee, Travis Walton, who under the username @shotbyabaldwin1409 wrote “I was abducted at the beginning of the year (2022). There is nothing worse than talking to people and needing someone to understand and having everyone think you’re crazy. It’s such a traumatising event that your entire perception of time is changed and you feel truly crazy. I ended up getting amnesia and losing my ability to talk for almost a month. It changed me for the rest of my life.”
Meanwhile, Nigeria is just one country in Africa with such testimonies. Two years ago, a Ugandan Christian minister, Prophet William Ssozi gave an incredible account of how he was physically sucked up into ‘heaven’ in his car while driving on the expressway in Kampala. He insisted it was not a dream. While driving, his car was lifted in midair. He found himself in a place full of light and abundance and was told it was heaven. Then he met Jesus, who had surgery on his head. Within an instant, he was dropped back to earth but discovered he had spent more than three hours in the UFO in the sky.
Interestingly, this Ugandan testimony sounds like the 1988 UFO encounter in Nullarbor, Australia, involving a family of four. The traumatised mother and three grownup sons narrated how a UFO plucked their car from the road on the Nullabor Plain. The Australian police said they were taking the report seriously after investigating damage to the car, which was covered in an ash-type substance. A truck driver and a car driver also witnessed the bizarre event after being chased by the UFO along the Eyre Highway just inside the Western Australia border.
It is high time we began a serious inquiry into the UFO phenomenon. Now that the subject has become mainstream, it is sad that we lack the intellectual sophistication to profile our citizens’ paranormal experiences. I ask myself, what if there is a real UFO disturbance here, the way it happened in China in 2010, would we allow panic and mass hysteria to take us hostage, or would we engage calmly and surely like the Chinese?
