The Pentagon Calls Them Demons. The Ancient Greeks Called Them Daimons. Both Might Be Right

How a 2,000-year-old terminology collapse explains why UFO officials sound like medieval priests

Ingo Swann, Cosmic Egg, 1994; Oil on canvas.

We keep discovering the same thing throughout history, and calling it by different names.

In 158 CE, the Roman philosopher Apuleius stood trial in Carthage, accused of using magic to seduce a wealthy widow. His defense, preserved in his Apologia, is one of the most sophisticated treatments of daimonic reality from antiquity. Apuleius didn’t deny communicating with non-human intelligences. He denied that this constituted malevolent sorcery. There’s a difference, he argued, between theurgy (working with divine intermediaries) and goetia (coercive manipulation of spirits).

The judges acquitted him. They understood the distinction.

Three centuries later, that distinction would be obliterated.

By the medieval period, the entire category of “daimon” (beings neither fully divine nor mortal, intermediaries between human and cosmic consciousness) had been collapsed into “demon.” What the Greeks and Romans understood as a spectrum of non-human intelligence, some beneficial and some dangerous, became a singular category: evil spirits to be feared and exorcised.

The Church needed this simplification. A cosmos populated with beings that didn’t fit the heaven-hell binary was theologically intolerable. So the daimons were rebranded. Erased as a category. Transformed into something that required no discernment, only rejection.

But the experiences never stopped.

The Phenomenon Doesn’t Care What We Call It

Here’s what I find fascinating: the encounters persisted, but the interpretive framework kept shifting to accommodate whatever that specific era’s dominant paradigm could tolerate.

Ancient Greece and Rome: Encounters with daimons were normal. Socrates had his daimonion. Plutarch wrote treatises on them. Apuleius defended his philosophical relationship with them in court. These beings occupied liminal space. They could be helpful or harmful, trustworthy or tricksterish, but they were real features of a cosmos more populated than our material senses could perceive.

Medieval Europe: The same encounters now became demonic. The beings that appeared to people, that moved between worlds, that offered knowledge or demanded worship, these were now servants of Satan. The framework shifted from discernment (asking which daimonic intelligence is this?) to condemnation (deciding that all non-human intelligence except angels are evil).

Early Modern Europe: As the witch trials intensified, these encounters became evidence of malevolent conspiracy. The beings were still “real” in the dominant framework, but now they were operating through human agents, the witches who had made pacts with them. The same experiences that would have made you a philosopher in Athens or a mystic in earlier Christianity now got you tortured and burned at the stake.

Enlightenment and Victorian Era: The encounters still didn’t stop, but now they were fairies, nature spirits, or the “good folk”. The framework softened from demonic threat to folkloric curiosity, but the experiences remained strikingly consistent: beings that appeared and disappeared, that existed in liminal spaces, that sometimes helped and sometimes harmed, that operated by rules that didn’t match mundane reality.

Early 20th Century: Psychology pathologized the encounters. Jung tried to preserve some ontological dignity for the experiences by locating them in the collective unconscious. He characterized the experience as real in a psychological sense, if not material. But mainstream psychiatry was less charitable. The beings became hallucinations, delusions, symptoms of neurological misfiring. The framework shifted from “these beings exist in another realm” to “your brain is malfunctioning”.

Post-1947: The same encounters became extraterrestrial, little green men. After Kenneth Arnold’s sighting and the Roswell incident, the cultural imagination had a new category for beings that appeared suddenly, that defied material physics, that seemed to exist partially outside our conventional reality. The beings didn’t change. The name did.

2020s: The Return of Demonic Language

Then came an unexpected turn. Right as the extraterrestrial framework was achieving mainstream acceptance (government UFO programs going public, Congressional hearings convening, media coverage treating the phenomenon as a straightforward question of advanced craft) the officials with the deepest access to the data abandoned that vocabulary entirely. They reached for something far older.

“Demonic.”

Ingo Swann, Sun Center, 1975; Oil on canvas.

Multiple government officials, military personnel, and individuals involved in classified UAP programs have characterized the phenomenon not as extraterrestrial visitors, but as something far more unsettling: entities that behave less like space explorers and more like what medieval theologians would have recognized immediately.

This isn’t coming from religious fundamentalists outside the loop. It’s coming from people who’ve had access to decades of encounter data, retrieval programs, and classified analysis. People who went in expecting aliens and came out talking about demons.

What makes this development so significant is why they’re reaching for demonic language. According to their accounts, the phenomena:

• Demonstrate interest in human worship and spiritual allegiance

• Engage in deception systematically across encounters

• Show particular focus on religious individuals and sites

• Display behavior patterns consistent with historical demonic encounters

• Seem less interested in scientific exchange than in psychological manipulation

• Leave witnesses spiritually and psychologically damaged in specific ways

The extraterrestrial hypothesis predicts we’d encounter beings with inscrutable but ultimately comprehensible motives such as resource gathering, scientific curiosity, or observation. What these officials describe sounds nothing like that. It sounds like intelligence that operates through deception, that feeds on human attention and emotional energy, that seems to want something from us that isn’t material or perceivable.

One official involved in legacy UAP programs reportedly refused to continue working on the phenomenon after concluding its “demonic” nature. Others have described a consistent pattern: the more access someone has to the full scope of encounter data, the more likely they are to reach for theological rather than technological frameworks.

This should deeply unsettle our easy narratives about disclosure and contact.

Here’s what’s happening: The people with the most data access are abandoning the materialist framework. But they’re not retrieving sophisticated daimonic categories either. They’re collapsing back into medieval binaries: these entities are either “good aliens” or “literal demons,” with no middle ground.

This is the exact failure of discernment Apuleius warned against.

The medieval Church collapsed “daimon” into “demon” because it needed theological simplicity: everything non-human is either angelic or demonic, end of discussion. These modern officials are making the same move: if these beings aren’t benevolent space brothers, they must be demons straight from hell.

Religious studies scholar Diana Pasulka has documented this pattern extensively in her work on UFO phenomena and American religion. In her books American Cosmic and Encounters, and her Substack Godsend, Pasulka traces how the people working most closely with UAP data (scientists, military officials, intelligence personnel) consistently describe experiences and encounters that have more in common with religious mysticism than with scientific materialism. They use religious language not because they’re uneducated, but because the materialist framework fails to capture what they’re experiencing. The phenomenon, as Pasulka demonstrates, behaves like a religious encounter even when the experiencers try to force it into technological categories.

But what if the beings are neither? What if they’re exactly what the Greeks understood: daimonic intelligence that operates in liminal space, that can be beneficial or harmful depending on context and interaction, that defies our binaries precisely because it exists in the spaces between our categories?

The fact that government officials are reaching for “demonic” language tells us something crucial: the extraterrestrial hypothesis is failing under the weight of actual encounter data. The high-strangeness elements (the telepathy, the spiritual manipulation, the reality-bending aspects, and the focus on consciousness rather than technology) don’t fit “physical aliens in physical craft”.

Pasulka’s research corroborates this from another angle. She’s documented how the phenomenon functions like what religious studies scholars call “hierophany” - a manifestation of the sacred. In American Cosmic, she describes accompanying scientists and military personnel to “UFO crash sites” that function exactly like Catholic pilgrimage sites: places where the boundary between ordinary and extraordinary reality becomes thin, where physical artifacts carry numinous weight, where witnesses undergo conversion-like experiences. The encounters transform witnesses in ways identical to religious conversion experiences. They involve elements that blur ontological categories: physical traces that vanish, beings that seem both material and immaterial, experiences that participants describe as “more real than real”. This is the language of religious encounter, not technological contact.

One of Pasulka’s key insights is that the phenomenon generates what she calls “technological mysticism”. This is a new form of religion that uses the language of science and technology to describe fundamentally mystical encounters. The experiencers speak of “craft” and “advanced civilizations,” but their actual descriptions match historical accounts of angelic visitations, shamanic journeys, or mystical visions far more closely than they match our expectations of extraterrestrial contact. The technological framing is a translation layer, not the actual content of the experience.

Yet rather than developing more sophisticated frameworks that can hold both the physical and metaphysical dimensions, we’re regressing to medieval categories. We’re making the same mistake in reverse: the Church collapsed daimons into demons; we collapsed demons into aliens; now we’re collapsing aliens back into demons.

We’re going in circles because we never adopted the original, more nuanced framework.

What’s particularly telling is which aspects of the phenomenon push officials toward demonic language. It’s not the technology, since that could still be advanced aliens. It’s the behavior. The deception. The psychological warfare. The spiritual dimensions. The sense that these beings are playing a game with human consciousness that feels ancient and intentional.

The Greeks would recognize this immediately. Of course daimonic beings deceive. Of course they’re tricksters. Of course they operate in ways that seem spiritually significant - they exist in the liminal space between matter and meaning. That’s not evidence they’re “demons” in the medieval sense. It’s evidence they’re daimonic in the Greek sense.

Ingo Swann, Middle panel of the Millenium Triptych.

"Something divine comes to me, the very thing which Meletus ridiculed in his indictment. I have had this from my childhood; it is a sort of voice that comes to me, and when it comes it always holds me back from what I am thinking of doing, but never urges me forward”

- Socrates on his Daimon, as recorded by Plato in his dialogue, The Apology

The rush to “demonic” language should concern us for another reason: it forecloses discernment. If these beings are demons (servants of Satan, irredeemably evil, enemies of humanity) then there’s only one response: spiritual warfare, rejection, protection, elimination. No curiosity. No relationship. No learning. No discernment about which encounters might be beneficial and which harmful.

Apuleius faced exactly this accusation: that his engagement with daimonic intelligence was inherently evil. His defense was that this collapsed crucial categories. Some daimonic beings are beneficial. Some are harmful. Some are neutral. Wisdom lies not in blanket rejection but in learning discernment.

If government officials are abandoning the extraterrestrial framework because the data doesn’t fit, that’s actually progress. It means we’re finally taking the high-strangeness elements seriously. But if we’re abandoning it only to collapse back into medieval demonology, we’ve learned nothing from the last 2,000 years.

We’re currently still trapped in the same false binary Apuleius fought against: either these beings don’t exist, or they’re evil and must be rejected. Either material aliens or literal demons. Either embrace them uncritically or condemn them absolutely.

The daimonic framework offers a third option: these beings exist, they’re genuinely other, they require discernment and sophisticated engagement, and they’re neither automatically trustworthy nor automatically evil.

This is precisely what Pasulka’s work points toward, even if she doesn’t use the term “daimonic” explicitly. Her research reveals that the phenomenon operates in what she calls “the myth of technology”; We interpret it through technological language (craft, aliens, advanced civilizations) but the actual structure of the encounters is religious, mystical, transformative. The beings and experiences don’t fit our secular categories, so we dress them up in scientific language while the experiencers themselves describe something far closer to encountering the numinous.

Throughout her Substack essays at Godsend, Pasulka explores how we’re witnessing the emergence of a new religious form that weaves together technology, mysticism, and encounters with non-human intelligence. But what if it’s not actually new? What if we’re watching an ancient pattern re-emerge through whatever framework our era can accommodate? Pasulka’s work suggests we’re in the middle of a transformation where the secular, technological worldview can no longer contain what people are experiencing, and religious/mystical categories are reasserting themselves by necessity.

The Greeks had a framework for this: daimonic intelligence that exists between the purely material and purely divine, that manifests in ways that transform consciousness, that requires spiritual discernment rather than just technological analysis. That’s the framework we need to retrieve. Not to replace Pasulka’s religious studies approach, but to complement it by offering historical depth and philosophical sophistication to the patterns she’s documenting in real time.

The fact that we’re cycling back to “demonic” language shows how urgently we need this retrieval work. Because whether these beings are ontologically what the Greeks called daimons, what medieval Christians called demons, or what we call extraterrestrials or interdimensionals, one pattern is clear: human beings are encountering something, and our current frameworks are failing to help us navigate those encounters wisely.

The officials reaching for demonic language are telling us something important: the phenomenon doesn’t fit our comfortable categories. But the answer isn’t to retreat into older, equally inadequate categories. The answer is to retrieve the sophisticated frameworks we lost when we collapsed daimon into demon in the first place.

What If We’ve Been Renaming The Same Thing?

I’m not suggesting every historical daimonic encounter and every modern UFO sighting are identical phenomena. I’m suggesting something more interesting: that there is a category of experience, encounters with non-human intelligence that operates partially outside our standard spatiotemporal framework, that humans have always had. We just keep reinterpreting these encounters based on whatever our current cultural paradigm can accommodate.

The Greeks were sophisticated about this. Their taxonomy of daimonic beings was nuanced. They understood these entities as:

• Intermediary between mortal and divine

• Capable of moving between realms humans couldn’t access

• Operating by different rules than material causation

• Sometimes helpful, sometimes harmful, always requiring discernment

• Real, but not material in the way physical objects are real

Does that sound familiar?

Modern UFO/UAP encounters consistently feature:

• Craft and beings that seem to operate outside known physics

• Movement between dimensions or “spaces” humans can’t access

• Behavior that violates cause-and-effect expectations

• Encounters that are sometimes benign, sometimes terrifying, always transformative

• Phenomena that are undeniably real to experiencers but resist material verification

The Church collapsed “daimon” into “demon” because it needed theological simplicity. The Enlightenment collapsed “demon” into “delusion” because it needed materialist simplicity. We collapsed “fairy” into “extraterrestrial” because we needed a framework that preserved materialism while accommodating technological advancement.

But what if the phenomenon has been consistent, and only our interpretive frameworks have been shifting?

One of the great vices of modernity, as Patrick Harpur puts it, is that we mistake the material for the literal. The world of matter is no more literal than the world of spirit. This is why daimons and UFOs can give you a hard physical smack while simultaneously operating in ways that violate material causality. They leave physical traces, yet the traces are as mysterious as the phenomenon itself. The contradiction isn’t a problem to be solved; it’s the nature of what we’re encountering.

Ingo Swann, Pollution Encroaching on the Source of All the Pure Water, 1986.

Apuleius Knew Something We Forgot

When Apuleius defended himself against charges of magic, he made a crucial argument: that the cosmos is populated by gradations of intelligence and consciousness, and that humans can and should cultivate relationships with the daimonic realm, but always with discernment and ethical discipline.

He wasn’t denying the reality of these beings. He was defending the sophistication required to engage with them properly.

His accusers wanted a binary: either you deny these beings exist, or you’re trafficking with evil. Apuleius rejected the binary. He insisted on a third position: these beings exist, they’re neither wholly good nor evil, and wisdom lies in learning to discern which are beneficial and which are dangerous, and in what contexts.

This should sound familiar to my readers. This is exactly what Jung would later call the transcendent function; The psyche’s capacity to hold opposites without collapsing into either pole, and from that tension, generate a third position.

“The cooperation of conscious reasoning with the data of the unconscious is called the ‘transcendent function…. This function progressively unites the opposites. Psychotherapy makes use of it to heal neurotic dissociations, but this function had already served as the basis of Hermetic philosophy for seventeen centuries” - Carl Jung

Modern UFO discourse desperately needs this sophistication.

We’re trapped in the same false binary Apuleius faced: either UFOs are “real” (nuts-and-bolts extraterrestrial craft) or they’re “not real” (misidentification, delusion, hoax). Either we’re being visited by physical aliens from other planets, or nothing genuinely anomalous is happening.

But what if, like the daimons, the phenomenon is real in a way that doesn’t map cleanly onto our material/immaterial binary? What if it operates in liminal space, partially in our consensus reality and partially in something else?

The Greeks had categories for this. We don’t. We collapsed them.

Why The Collapse Matters

This isn’t just an interesting historical curiosity. The collapse of the daimonic category has left us intellectually and spiritually unprepared for what people are actually encountering.

When someone reports a UFO experience that involves:

• Missing time

• Telepathic communication

• Beings that seem to phase in and out of materiality

• Experiences that feel profoundly spiritual or initiatory

• Encounters that blur dream and waking reality

• Synchronicities that cluster around the event

...our current frameworks fail them completely.

The materialist framework says: “None of that is real, you need psychiatric help”.

The extraterrestrial hypothesis says: “Focus only on the physical craft, ignore the high-strangeness elements”.

The New Age framework says: “It’s all love and light, any fear or trauma you experienced isn’t real.”

None of these frameworks can hold the full complexity of what experiencers report. But the daimonic framework could.

If we understood these encounters as daimonic, meaning as interactions with intelligence that is genuinely other, that operates partially outside our conventional reality, that can be benevolent or malevolent and requires discernment, that is real but not material in the ways we typically mean, then we’d have categories adequate to the experiences people are having.

The Danger of Rebranding

Every time we rebrand these encounters, we lose accumulated wisdom about how to navigate them.

The Greeks knew that daimonic encounters required:

• Discernment (not all daimons are trustworthy)

• Preparation (altered states, ritual space, ethical discipline)

• Integration (you don’t return unchanged)

• Community (mystery schools, philosophical communities for processing)

• Humility (acknowledging we don’t fully understand what we’re encountering)

Medieval Christianity knew that encounters with “demons” required:

• Spiritual protection

• Careful documentation

• Recognition that these experiences can be genuinely harmful

• Support structures (exorcists, monastics trained in spiritual warfare)

We’ve lost almost all of this institutional knowledge because we keep insisting these encounters are something entirely new.

If we acknowledged continuity, and if we said “humans have always encountered non-human intelligence that operates in liminal space, and we need to relearn how to navigate these encounters wisely”, we could draw on millennia of accumulated experience.

Instead, we pretend UFOs are an entirely modern phenomenon with no historical precedent, which leaves every experiencer starting from scratch, reinventing frameworks that ancient mystery schools had already refined.

The Neo-Apologia: What Apuleius Would Say About UFOs

I think if Apuleius were alive today and witnessed modern UFO discourse, he’d be grimly amused at how little we’ve learned.

He’d recognize immediately that we’re encountering daimonic intelligence, beings that operate in the space between purely material and purely divine, that are real but not in ways our current paradigm can accommodate.

He’d warn us that these beings are not automatically benevolent just because they’re technologically advanced. The daimons could be helpful or harmful, trustworthy or tricksterish, and wisdom lay in learning discernment rather than blanket acceptance or rejection.

He’d tell us that trying to force these encounters into a purely materialist framework (nuts-and-bolts craft from other planets) is as foolish as the medieval Church trying to force them into a purely demonic framework.

He’d insist that we need the philosophical and spiritual sophistication to hold paradox: these beings are real AND they don’t operate by material rules; they’re genuinely other AND we can develop ethical relationships with them; they can be studied scientifically AND science’s current paradigm is inadequate to the task.

He’d probably write the new Apologia, defending the modern contactees and experiencers who are being ridiculed and pathologized for encounters that are, from the daimonic perspective, utterly consistent with what humans have always experienced when consciousness bumps up against something genuinely other.

The Preparedness Implication

This is why historical research into daimonic encounters isn’t just academic interest. It’s preparedness work.

If UFO disclosure happens or if contact experiences simply continue to intensify and proliferate, we’re going to need frameworks adequate to what people report. The materialist framework will fail. The New Age framework will fail. Even the extraterrestrial hypothesis will likely fail, because it can’t account for the high-strangeness elements that don’t fit the “physical aliens in physical craft” model.

But we have frameworks that could work. They’re ancient. We just need to retrieve them.

The daimonic framework:

• Acknowledges these encounters are real without requiring material proof

• Provides categories for discernment rather than blanket acceptance/rejection

• Recognizes encounters can be harmful and require protection

• Understands transformation is intrinsic to contact

• Holds paradox without collapsing into reductionism

• Takes seriously both the objective and subjective dimensions

We don’t need to believe ancient Greece had the complete truth about non-human intelligence. We need to recognize they had sophisticated frameworks for encounters with otherness that we’ve lost, and that might be worth recovering.

The Daimon Never Left

Here’s the bottom-line: The daimons (whatever they ontologically are) never left. They’ve been here all along, encountered by humans across every culture and era. What changes is the name we give them and the framework we use to interpret the encounters.

Sometimes we had sophisticated frameworks (ancient mystery traditions, certain esoteric schools). Sometimes we had oppressive frameworks (medieval demonology). Sometimes we had dismissive frameworks (Enlightenment materialism). Now we have confused frameworks (UFOs as extraterrestrial technology that somehow also involves telepathy, consciousness, and high strangeness).

But the encounters themselves? Remarkably consistent.

Beings that appear and disappear. Intelligence that operates outside normal space and time. Communication that bypasses language. Transformation of witnesses. Experiences that resist neat categorization.

The Greeks called them daimons and built mystery schools to train people in discernment and navigation. We call them extraterrestrials and have no institutional frameworks at all for helping people integrate contact.

Which civilization is better prepared?

An Invitation to Retrieve

I’m not arguing we should simply adopt ancient Greek demonology wholesale. Their cosmology is not ours; their cultural context is not ours.

But I am arguing that we’ve thrown out frameworks that could help us navigate what’s happening now. And the retrieval work of careful extraction of wisdom from historical encounters with non-human intelligence, is essential preparedness work.

What did the mystery schools know about navigating contact with daimonic intelligence? What did various esoteric traditions learn about protection, discernment, and integration? What can indigenous traditions that never lost their frameworks for non-human intelligence teach us?

These aren’t fringe questions. They’re civilization-level preparedness questions.

Because whether the phenomenon is extraterrestrial, interdimensional, consciousness-based, or something we don’t have categories for yet, one thing is clear: humans are encountering something genuinely other, something that operates partially outside our consensus reality, something that has always been here but that we keep renaming and misunderstanding.

Apuleius wasn’t put on trial for denying daimonic reality. He was put on trial for engaging with it.

Maybe it’s time we learned from his defense.

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What historical frameworks do you think we need to retrieve? Have you encountered the daimonic (by whatever name) in your own life? How did you make sense of it? Share your thoughts in the comments.

For more on the religious dimensions of UFO encounters, I highly recommend Diana Pasulka’s Substack Godsend and her books American Cosmic and Encounters.