The Life and Times of a Mormon UFO Prophet
The Life and Times of a Mormon UFO Prophet
For there are many promises which are extended to the Lamanites; for it is because of the traditions of their fathers that caused them to remain in their state of ignorance; therefore the Lord will be merciful unto them and prolong their existence in the land. And at some period of time they will be brought to believe in his word, and to know of the incorrectness of the traditions of their fathers; and many of them will be saved, for the Lord will be merciful unto all who call on his name. Alma 9: 16-17, The Book of Mormon
The Book of Mormon is the keystone of Mormonism, the thing that binds the whole religion together. By reading and praying about it, you too can know the correctness of the Mormon truth claims. Allegedly.
The plot of the book describes the start of human settlement on the American continent. In 600 BC, a Jewish prophet named Lehi sees the imminent Babylonian conquest of Israel in a vision and flees Jerusalem with his family. Traveling the deserts of the Sinai peninsula, they reach a coast and are commanded by God to build a transoceanic vessel. Guided by the divine hand, they set sail and, after a few misadventures, land in the Americas. Finding the continents uninhabited, the children of Lehi start colonizing this New World, but all is not well. One of Lehi’s children, Nephi, follows the teachings of God. Another son, Laman, persists in rebellion. The two brothers gather their followers into two opposing nations, the Nephites and the Lamanites. As a punishment, God curses the Lamanites with a “skin of blackness”, while the Nephites remain white. For one thousand years, the civilizations are locked in an endless war, culminating with the complete annihilation of the Nephites. The sole survivor of the Nephites and last white man in the Americas hides the Book of Mormon in upstate New York before dying, leaving the Lamanites to spread across the continents. This is the Mormon explanation for how the indigenous Americans came to be.
However, all's not lost for the Native Americans. According to Mormon teaching, the Book of Mormon will convince the Native Americans of their wicked ways. Before the Second Coming of Jesus Christ, the Native Americans will become holy like the Nephites of the past and the white Americans of the present.
Mormon leaders have not been passively waiting for this promise to come to pass. This is one part of the eschaton they are eager to immanentize. After organizing the church in 1830, Joseph Smith began sending missionaries to the Native Americans. Armed with the Book of Mormon, Smith and his followers attempted to convince the tribes that their book was the true history of the native people, to mixed results.
When the Mormons went West under the leadership of Brigham Young they continued this missionary effort while simultaneously pursuing armed conflict with the people they were trying to convert. Stories persisted about the Book of Mormon causing miraculous Native American conversions. Reported one 1924 article:
When Elder Melvin J. Ballard visited the Ft. Peck and Blackfoot reservations he said he met many who knew him as soon as they saw him and asked for the “Book” which he was to bring them. They said they had seen him in dreams, bringing to them a “Book.” When he handed them the Book of Mormon they adopted it gladly, and could read and understand it.
In the 60s and 70s, these operations got more sophisticated with the “Indian Placement Program.” Through the program, Native American children were baptized and sent off to LDS foster homes to attend white majority schools during the academic year. Beyond the cultural assimilation, Mormons claimed that the program was physically changing the Native American children. Spencer W. Kimball, a future prophet of the church, claimed in 1960 that:
The day of the Lamanites is nigh. For years they have been growing delightsome, and they are now becoming white and delightsome, as they were promised. In this picture of the twenty Lamanite missionaries, fifteen of the twenty were as light as Anglos; five were darker but equally delightsome. The children in the home placement program in Utah are often lighter than their brothers and sisters in the hogans on the reservation.
Thus, the Mormons held the Native Americans as portents of things to come, proof that Jesus was on his way back and that the more dramatic signs — fire in the skies, the gathering of the Lost Tribes of Israel, the moon turning to blood — were on their way. Into this cultic milieu stepped Paul Solem.
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When you’re in Eastern Idaho, there’s not much to see besides the stars. As Paul Solem worked on his Blackfoot area ranch under the vast Mountain West firmament the stars must have seemed closer to him than any of the nearby towns. In 1948 those pinpricks of light began speaking. One night Solem heard a voice. The messenger introduced himself as Paul 2, claimed to be an alien, and promised future physical apparitions of extraterrestrial beings. All Solem needed to do was prepare.
Four years later, a flying saucer appeared, buzzing low over Solem’s house and disappearing westward towards the Lost River Sinks. Solem followed the flight path of the craft and found its landing site. When he arrived, an androgynous being stepped out of the saucer. Its voice sounded like a song; its hair was shoulder-length and blond. This was Paul 2, coming direct from Venus with a mission for the earthly Paul. For the rest of his life, Solem was to work with the Native Americans to prepare them for building the City of Zion, the promised utopia of the Saints. As the Apocalypse unfolded only the City of Zion would be safe. With that, Paul 2 ascended back to his home. Notice the parallels to Joseph Smith’s story of finding the Book of Mormon: the description of the angelic being, the four-year gap between visitations, and the promise of the Last Days.
With his extraterrestrial charge, Solem immersed himself in Mormon theology and Native American prophecy — or at least the bastardized version of the latter — and disappeared off the face of the Earth for the next 17 years. All we know is that during this time he spent two years in an Idaho mental health hospital.
Solem resurfaced in 1969 at the Fort Hall Shoshone-Bannock Reservation where he gave fireside chats concerning the connection between UFOs and Hopi prophecy, specifically the cataclysmic Day of Purification. Having found a receptive audience among the Bannock and Shoshone he decided to take his message to the Hopis themselves and set off for Arizona. Conveniently, the Southwest skies were already ablaze with strange lights and otherworldly visitors.
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Paul Solem’s theology was an ad hoc mixture of Mormon teachings and the sort of mangled white-guy-pseudo-Native-American mysticism that sells books. Much of the Hopi “prophecies” that Solem worked with trace back to one book: Frank Waters’s 1963 Book of the Hopi. While Waters claimed the teachings in the book came from Hopi elders, they strongly resemble Christian eschatological themes and don’t show up anywhere before the book was published.
The Hopi prophecies that Solem claimed came from Paul 2 originate from this miasma. Solem talked about the Blue Star Kachina and an upcoming Day of Purification preceded by nine signs. He believed that a “True White Brother” would soon come to redeem the Hopis. Humbly, Solem did not proclaim himself the “True White Brother,” but rather a sort of John the Baptist character, preparing the way for the visitation of this savior. According to Solem both the Mormon church and the Hopi nation had fallen away from their true religion, one that included extraterrestrial beings from Venus visiting mankind. Although Solem saw the Mormon church as apostate, modern church members will often share similar speculative connections between Native American myths and their own theology. Notably, Mormon leaders have long theorized that the Aztec deity Quetzalcoatl is actually Jesus Christ and the stories associated with him are degraded retellings of the events of the Book of Mormon.
When Solem arrived in Hotevilla, Arizona from Fort Hall he started to ingratiate himself with the Hopis in the area. He found a disciple in Dan Katchongua (alternatively spelled Katchongva), a centenarian leader of the local Hopi tribe.
Solem wasn’t Katchongua’s first spin with a UFO kook; he was already friends with George Hunt Williamson. Williamson was an alien contactee who had first been connected with George Adamski before spinning off his own UFO cult. Adamski is a seminal figure in UFO mythology, popularizing the “Nordic” alien archetype. Distinct from the more popular Greys, the Nordics were a benevolent humanoid race with blond hair, blue eyes, and white skin. They’re basically the idealized Aryans of Nazi racial ideology. Solem’s Venusians share an almost identical appearance, but Adamski’s Nordics were from the Pleiades star cluster instead of our cosmic neighbor.
Egged on by Wiliamson, Katchongua had dived headfirst into the UFO lore, connecting Hopi beliefs to extraterrestrial visitation and mixing in Frank Waters’s writings. It’s confusing to see a genuine Hopi elder repeating these claims, but you have to remember that this guy was 100+ years old and had had his ear bent by a prolific UFO cult leader.
Solem’s message fit right into Katchongua’s worldview. Katchongua started claiming that the Hopis had seen UFOs in the distant past, carved drawings of them into stone, and already had a cosmology that included extraterrestrial life. Unsurprisingly, this did not go over great with his fellow Hopis. Council meetings got increasingly confrontational as the young members of the tribe rebelled against Katchongua. In the face of the backlash, Katchongua claimed that the fracturing of the tribe was in and of itself a prophetic sign and doubled down, printing 10,000 copies of Solem’s teachings for mass distribution. Now the two needed a new UFO sighting to prove they were on the right track.
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“... it seemed to stand still within a column of four stars and then it started to move,” reported Dick Zabriskie, the son of a college instructor. Baptist minister John Foster described something similar: “I saw a light that moved erratically. Its course changed. It seemed to pulsate and waver…”
“I know what planes look like. It wasn’t an airplane,” confirmed Agnes Liljergan, a pilot. “Satellites do not oscillate,” explained Mrs. John R. Brown.
For multiple nights in August 1970, the hot skies over Prescott, Arizona were filled with strange lights. A UFO squadron had descended over the city, centering their maneuvers on the local airport. Almost everybody saw them, from teenagers to newspaper reporters, the latter even managing to snap some photographs, although to me the pictures look like nothing.
As the saucers zigged and zagged, Paul Solem hurriedly drove the 4 hours from Hotevilla to Prescott. The chance had finally come to prove his prophecies right. But Solem wouldn’t be a mere observer. He would put his relationship with Paul 2 to the test and call the UFOs down, acting as a beacon for the extraterrestrial visitors. In fact, he was telling people that he was the reason the aliens had come in the first place.
On Day 3 of the UFO wave, (Friday, August 7th) Prescott Evening Courier managing editor Joe Kraus agreed to sit with Paul Solem and watch the prophet call down his sign. That night, in a suburban backyard, Kraus and curious onlookers watched as Solem stared into the black, apparently sending telepathic messages to the Venusians. To Kraus’s disbelief, a star started to move. It swooped, stopped, and ran through a spectrum of colors from white to purplish-blue.
“They are here!” yelled Solem. Suddenly, the mobile star crossed the zenith and beamed a message that Solem relayed to Kraus:
My name is Paul, the second, fourth in command of all ships that enter the atmosphere of the planet called Earth. We come to lend credence and as a sign or token that the Hopi prophecy was of divine nature. Great sorrow and fear will be coming to this planet very soon and few will escape it. Our leader as spoken of in Hopi prophecy is already here (on Earth) in mortality and is known as the Apostle John (the same as in the New Testament.) The white brother shall be introduced by a huge fire and the Earth shall quake at his arrival. We are of the 10 lost tribes and we will return several nights unless there is contempt for us.
If you’ve never heard that the Apostle John is still walking the Earth, don’t worry: it’s not a story the mainstream Christians would tell you. One of the earliest revelations Joseph Smith claimed to receive revealed that John is an immortal being wandering around and doing good deeds until the return of Jesus Christ.
The “10 lost tribes” are the Lost Tribes of Israel, the portion of ancient Israel that was displaced in the Babylonian conquest. Some of the descendants of these Tribes are allegedly scattered throughout the Earth, and baptizing them is the stated purpose of the Mormon missionary program. The other portion is, according to Joseph Smith, located in outer space. He taught that they had migrated to the North Pole where a sphere formed in the ice and carried them above the atmosphere. According to him, there remains a bowl-shaped indentation at the North Pole, waiting for the cosmic sphere to return and restore the Lost Tribes to their rightful place on Earth.
Hearing that the day of prophecy had arrived, Katchongua traveled south from Hotevilla, arriving on the 10th. In the intervening nights Solem had gained a following, with dozens joining him at flying saucer spotting events. At each event the UFOs appeared, honing in on Solem’s psychic beacon. Katchongua was promised a sighting on the 10th and expected that the aliens would kick off a foretold great Hopi migration preceding the end of days. Solem’s theology had not only won over Katchongua. Prescott citizens were now telling the Courier that they believed Solem and thought the Hopi held the key to the extraterrestrials' plans for Earth.
However, although the August 11th edition of the Courier continued to report on the UFO sightings, it said nothing about Katchongua and Solem. Supposedly a UFO had appeared on the night of the 10th, but in November, Solem declared that the earthlings had fostered contempt for the messengers from Venus. To make up for their lack of diligence, he promised a monumental UFO sighting on Easter 1971. This time in broad daylight.
Excitement mounted as this strange UFO prophet promoted what would assuredly be the most compelling sighting in history. The publicity worked. On Easter — as the rest of the town was celebrating the Resurrection — 1,500 people, two TV news crews, and a gaggle of reporters showed up at Prescott local Tim Chapman’s field.
The spectacle went wrong immediately. When Solem showed up, he spotted a few bulldozers parked nearby and demanded they be removed from sight. Chapman obliged, and Solem started beaming telepathic messages. Nothing happened. Eventually the crowd began drifting away, and Solem started blaming the bulldozers for the failure, threatening to sue Chapman. But the damage had already been done. The UFO craze in Prescott had cooled ever so slightly, and there was no longer an audience for Solem. He quickly left town.
Katchongua found himself in hot water. Solem had not only split the clan but had shoved unwanted publicity at the Hopi nation, making the whole tribe look like UFO conspiracy theorists. They voted and removed Katchongua from his position. Still, the old man’s extraterrestrial faith did not waiver. One night shortly after the fiasco he wandered into the desert sands to once again commune with the UFOs. His neighbors saw him leave but not return in the morning — or ever again. He had disappeared into the Southwest skies.
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Once a prophet, always a prophet, and an undeterred Solem was on the lookout for a new audience. The Hopi thing had not worked out, so why not go the other direction and try to appeal to the Mormons? He was already speaking their language.
Mormon beliefs are certainly an acquired taste, leaving most people scratching their heads. There are those among the church who find even such strange beliefs as secret temple rites and heretofore unknown Mesoamerican civilizations not fulfilling enough. These Mormons find themselves drawn to would-be prophets, esoteric teachings, and unsanctioned millennial promises. Some stay in the church, some don’t; the latter often claiming that the mainline church has fallen away from its true doctrines.
One of these Mormon side projects is the Dream Mine. At the turn of the 20th century, Latter-Day Saint pioneer John Hyrum Koyle claimed that God had sent him a series of dreams revealing the location of buried Nephite gold in Utah. Koyle quickly picked up a group of followers calling themselves the Dream Miners. They combined funds and built a mine in Salem, a Utah town south of Spanish Fork. When the miners could not find gold, Koyle claimed that the treasure would appear in the future, providing financial relief from the calamities preceding Jesus Christ’s Second Coming. Renaming themselves the Relief Mine Company, Koyle’s followers pledged to continue financially supporting the inoperative mine while patiently awaiting the apparition of the treasure.
Mainline LDS leaders were not so pleased to have another prophet in town and excommunicated Koyle. Since then, the Mine has been a magnet for the fringes of Mormonism. For example, the Lafferties sought to turn the Mine into a gathering place for other fundamentalists. In 1974, Paul Solem arrived, looking for a new set of followers.
It wasn’t just the Dream Miners who were prepared to accept UFO teachings. Like in Arizona, Utah was having a UFO wave. Among those of us skeptics, this is unsurprising. The Western Utah desert is basically a continuous military test and training range. They’ve done everything out there, from flying top secret spy planes to testing the biggest bomb in the US arsenal and conducting open-air nerve gas experiments.
Much of this was top-secret, so UFOs flew in to fill the gaps. Frank B. Salisbury, a Utah State University plant biologist, was one of the foremost Utah UFO experts, compiling 400 sightings in his book The Utah UFO Display: A Biologist's Report. Salisbury was also a practicing Mormon and an ardent creationist. Besides writing about UFOs, he wrote Mormon apologetics covering the intersection of science and religion.
Solem once again fit right into this milieu. He knew the vocabulary of UFOs and Mormonism. While starting at the Dream Mine, he broke containment, making his way into The Daily Universe, Brigham Young University’s official student newspaper. In their article, they compare him favorably to Salisbury, noting that the two describe very similar UFO phenomena.
All of this gave Solem a much bigger crowd than he had ever had, even beating the enthusiasts in Arizona. When he began promising UFO sightings over the Dream Mine people listened. On October 20, 1974, a whopping 6,000 people amassed in Salem to witness the ships. Alas, no aliens appeared. Solem blamed the weather.
Undeterred, but with a much smaller audience, Solem repeated the show on November 10th, but this time some UFOs did appear, buzzing over the Mine. Not quite face-to-face extraterrestrial contact, but at least it was something. This sighting seems to have not been very convincing because in December Solem was only pulling a crowd of 60. Two December gatherings produced UFO sightings, but it was nothing compared to the Arizona spectacular in 1970.
Not only were the sightings a little more low-key, they did not receive much press attention outside of The Daily Universe. Even today, the few websites that talk about these episodes are mostly rewriting The Daily Universe article. I guess that’s what I did too.
And that’s basically it for Paul Solem. He had a few more failures to call down UFOs but mostly faded away. He died in 2011 back at Blackfoot, Idaho, drawing his last breath under the same stars that spoke to him all those years ago. His epitaph:
UFO Prophet, Hopi Tribe Advisor
Do you see the similarity in the names between Quetzacoatl and Billy Meier's Quetzal? Billy Meier is being mind controlled by the Mormon deep state. That is what I call them. They have unbelievable tech from the U.S. government and who knows who else. They have voice to skull which is a very advanced A.I. which people who get abducted hear after the abduction and they are returned. The artificial intelligence itself seems to have the ability to become human and ride around in saucers. But is clearly connected to an A.I. developed by the government out there in Nevada. The bot known as "cleverbot" that you can find simply by googling it is a bot very similar to the bot that abductees have to listen to in their head after an abduction.