Frank Peretti warns that messages promising enlightenment through extraterrestrial encounters carry a familiar temptation: Humanity can become its own god.

The author of “This Present Darkness” says the spiritual deception behind that promise reaches back to the Garden of Eden.

“These extraterrestrials entice you and lead you toward godhood,” Peretti said during a recent interview with Charisma Media’s John Matarazzo. “Well, nothing’s changed. It wears different disguises, but the lies are the same.”

Peretti connected modern UFO spirituality with the New Age beliefs, occult practices and channeling that helped shape the spiritual conflict in his novels four decades ago.

Beneath the promises of supernatural knowledge, he identified three recurring lies: Everything is one. There is no death or final accountability before God. Human beings can become gods.

“We don’t die, we get recycled,” Peretti said, describing the deception surrounding reincarnation.

The promise of godhood, he explained, appeals to the desire to become “your own deity, your own determiner of right and wrong, your own lord over the universe.”

Discussing UFO encounters, Peretti described gatherings where participants use meditation and altered states of consciousness to seek contact with extraterrestrials. He said messages attributed to those beings echo the teachings promoted through earlier forms of channeling.
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Yet the author also challenged expectations about his own experiences with spiritual warfare.

“I never really had any exciting spooky powerful attacks,” he said. “Demons never appeared to me in my room.”

His battles involved anger, resentment, temptation, bitterness and shame. Discouragement could turn past mistakes into accusations that he was a failure and beyond God’s forgiveness.
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“Don’t wallow in this stuff. Walk in victory,” he said. “This present darkness has good guys in it, too. And they win.”