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Last Christmas, I bought my son some gifts online, and unbeknownst to me, the retailer used the purchase to sign me up for free trial subscriptions to about half a dozen useless magazines, which began showing up unbidden six weeks later, much to my surprise. It took many phone calls to track down where the magazines came from and to make sure I wasn’t being charged for them. The bottom line is that I have an unwanted weekly subscription to People magazine. I was shocked to discover an advertisement in the back of the current week’s edition making use of the ancient astronaut theory to promote an evangelical Christian limited liability corporation registered in Wyoming.
The ad comes to us under the auspices of World’s Last Chance, LLC, a corporation-cum-ministry headed by Galal P. Doss, a former Seventh-Day Adventist from Egypt with a track record of making bizarre prophecies, such as his failed prophecy that the pope to succeed Benedict XVI would be a demon pretending to be the resurrected John Paul II. Doss headed an Egyptian cosmetics company before leaving Adventism in 1999 over concerns that the Adventist church was too “soft” on social issues. His efforts to convince Coptic Christians of the error of their faith earned a reprove from the head of the Coptic church in the early 2000s. Doss remains the head of the Family Cosmetics Sae company, and his business success seems to help him to fund his ministry.
Registration information for the World’s Last Chance website lists Doss as the owner, and his name also appears on documents filed in Wyoming for the operation of the LLC.
The text-based advertisement, whose primary purpose is to attack the Pope over his failure to move the Sabbath to Saturday, covers a full page and has no pictures. In dense, narrow letters it claims that the prophecies of the book of Revelation are currently coming to pass and that the end of the world is near. It concludes its review of Revelation by asking readers to “imagine the panic that will grip the financial markets” when God destroys trees, crops, and fresh water. Yes—the most important consequence of the coming apocalypse is how it will affect the Dow Jones Industrial Average. Modern evangelical Christianity can be so confusing.
The relevant section of the advertisement refers to the fifth trumpet of Revelation: “The fifth angel sounded his trumpet, and I saw a star that had fallen from the sky to the earth. The star was given the key to the shaft of the Abyss. When he opened the Abyss, smoke rose from it like the smoke from a gigantic furnace. The sun and sky were darkened by the smoke from the Abyss. And out of the smoke locusts came down on the earth and were given power like that of scorpions of the earth” (9:1-3, NIV). According to the supposedly literalist Doss, this refers, bizarrely, to the arrival of fake space aliens in UFOs, saying that the passage foretells
… a celestial invasion of demons posing as “aliens.” The pain that these “aliens” will inflict is likened in the Bible to the sting of scorpion. The Scriptures state that people will want to die to escape the pain, but will be unable.
In the chaos that will engulf the world during the fifth trumpet, the powers that be will scramble to find a world leader that will end this “alien” invasion. They will rush to enlist the moral authority of this world, i.e. Pope Francis. The Pope will gladly accept the challenge and will engage the “aliens” in negotiations that will lead to the end of their invasion on the 150th day, just as foretold in the book of Revelation.
When the invasion ends, Pope Francis will emerge as the undisputed world leader and savior of mankind. Consequently, all nations will gladly surrender their power and authority to Francis and ask him for a roadmap and agenda that will ensure another invasion never takes place.
And what do the demon-aliens want? Why, to have church services held on Sunday, of course! This, Doss says, will make God furious because Sunday is a bad, nasty, horrible day, and only Saturday can make God smile. The demons will bring about the apocalypse and fake an entire alien invasion so that the majority of Christians, who make up only 30% of the world’s population, will continue to worship on the day they have set aside as the Sabbath already. It seems like a bit more effort than it’s worth.
“We know this looks CRAZY from the outset. We know it,” Doss writes.
The advertisement has appeared in a range of national publications over the past few months, including USA Today.
The idea that demons are masquerading as aliens goes back to the UFO prophets of the 1950s and 1960s, who attempted to fit the then-new idea of UFOs into a biblical framework. This is, however, the first time I’ve seen the demon-aliens obsessing over the Sabbath as the reason for their appearance.
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