Alternate Perceptions Magazine, January 2026
An Interview with Joe Lewels, Ph.D
The author of The God Hypothesis, Rulers of the Earth, and his latest volume The Soul Trap: Aliens, Ancient Scrolls, and Reincarnation, which I just reviewed in this issue.
By Brent Raynes
The interview below I did back in April 2007.
Joe Lewels, Ph.D., authored the thought-provoking The God Hypothesis, and recently a second UFO book entitled Rulers of the Earth (Galde Press). I interviewed Dr. Lewels in Eureka Springs, Arkansas, where he was a featured speaker at the 19th annual Ozark UFO Conference on April 14, 2007.
Editor: How did you become involved in the UFO field?
Joe Lewels: The way that I got involved in UFO research was by coming to this conference in 1993, kind of on a dare. I really didn’t know what to expect and I really had a bad image in my mind of what a UFO conference was and what it would be like. It turned out though that I found a lot of very bright, intelligent and educated people. A lot of people like myself who were just very curious about the subject. So that’s where I got involved with it, in actual research, but I had a UFO sighting when I was an Army aviator. I was just back from Vietnam. It was either January or February of 1969. I was flying a night flight out of Fort Rucker, Alabama. That’s in southeast Alabama, and I was flying towards the Florida coast.
It was a beautiful night, and there was an orange-amber ball of light, a sphere of some kind that was just hanging in the air, at a higher altitude. I was a Captain in the Army at the time and I was with my boss who was a Lieutenant Colonel, and we had both just gotten back from Vietnam and had lots of flying hours and seen a lot of things. But neither of us could identify what this thing was. It kind of gave us the chills.
After that I was very interested in the UFO phenomenon. I couldn’t say that that was a spaceship or anything, but it was certainly something that I hadn’t ever seen before. So I started reading a lot of books and tried to find out as much as I could, and coming to this conference was kind of an almost accidental thing. It happened to be at a time when I really wanted answers, so I left the conference and I went back to West Texas and I started a chapter of the Mutual UFO Network. We started meeting every month. I started to meet people who had had a lot of UFO experiences. That’s in an area near where White Sands Missile Range is, the U.S. Army Air Defense Base is, and there’s a NASA installation. It’s right on the Mexican border, so we had cases from Mexico and cases from New Mexico and West Texas.
We had some very interesting cases. I worked with a psychiatrist who volunteered and we started interviewing people who had had close contact experiences, shared missing time experiences, which is something that is not in the psychiatry books. The only way that you can have a shared missing time experience, according to psychiatry, is if you both bump your heads at the same time or you both take the same drugs at the same time, but if those two things aren’t present then there’s no such thing as shared missing time. Except that we kept running into it all of the time, and so in those cases people would have conscious memories at the beginning of an experience, they might have actually seen a UFO or beings that were not human, and they might have had some awareness of the end of the experience where they saw the thing fly away. But the critical moments of what happened during the experience they couldn’t recall, so then we would work with a certified hypnotherapist who would do the hypnosis and try to regress the person and get them to be able to remember what transpired.
So, we were doing basically the kind of research that was being done by John Mack at Harvard and by Budd Hopkins and David Jacobs and many other researchers around the country. We were just doing it on our own and on a volunteer basis, and we were doing it for research purposes. I ultimately ended up writing a book about that research project. That book was published in 1997. It was called The God Hypothesis. It had pretty good reception, it sold out and it’s in its second edition right now.
My current book is the sequel to The God Hypothesis. Basically, what the Hypothesis is in opposition to what is commonly known as the extraterrestrial hypothesis. In other words, that hypothesis states that we’re being visited by aliens from other planets, they got here about 50 to 60 years ago, just coincidentally at the time that mankind started using nuclear weapons, which I find extraordinarily coincidental. Also, it goes that they’ve been studying us, messing with our DNA and doing genetic experimentation on us for the last 60 years, and this is either a study or an invasion. Okay?
I have a problem with that because when I really started to look into this phenomenon I began to see that it was a lot older than just 50 or 60 years. I started finding evidence for similar kinds of UFO activity in ancient texts, in the Bible, in the Vedic literature in India. In fact, in every culture around the world there are stories of similar things happening. So, I thought that the only way to get to the bottom of this mystery was to try to put the UFO experience into context with human history. When I did that, I could see clearly that this was something that had always been with us. It was an ongoing, almost symbiotic relationship that I couldn’t really understand, but it went way back. Probably back to whenever life first appeared on this planet. I’m talking billions of years, and certainly as far back as the origins of the human race.
So, the hypothesis is this. There are beings who have seeded life on this planet, and probably other planets. They monitor the evolution and they tinker with the evolution. It’s kind of an experiment for them. They are always present and always involved and carefully and meticulously making plans for their experiment, and we are the guinea pigs. And that’s not a very popular hypothesis because it makes us seem very powerless, but nevertheless, I think if you look at the evidence that is something that makes a lot more sense than just an alien invasion theory because if we were being invaded I think 60 years would have been plenty of time to take over the planet. I think we’d all be in concentration camps, or dead or something if this was an invasion. So, I think that it’s much more sophisticated than that and more complicated than that, and it has to do with who we are, why we’re here, and what happens to us when we die. I think to really answer the question as to what is the UFO and what does it mean, I think that we have to cross over from science into theology, and that’s where most UFO researchers have a problem because UFO research has wanted very much to be taken seriously by the rest of science. Science is not going to take ufology seriously if they’re talking about theology.
That’s really anathema to the UFO field, so most UFO researchers have bent over backwards trying to limit this thing to something that started about 60 years ago and keep it to a very physical type of phenomenon with hardware and propulsion systems, and that kind of thing. It’s very hard for them to cross over that line in spite of all of the evidence. I can understand their problem, and the only reason that I’m able to do it is because I really don’t give a damn what science thinks about me and I’m not trying to impress scientists or anybody else. I’m just trying to get at the truth.
Editor: You’re just going wherever the evidence takes you.
Joe Lewel: Wherever the evidence takes me. That’s what I’m going to write about and what I’m going to share with the public, and I believe that that’s an important part of it. If you do the research and you come up with things that people need to know then it’s our responsibility to share that. Just sitting on it doesn’t help anybody. So that’s why I wrote the first book and that’s why I wrote the sequel because there was a lot to be said about it.
I can’t get into all of the details right now, but I do think that if people would read my books with an open mind and an open heart then they would see that there’s a lot of truth in it. I love to get letters from readers, so if readers read the books and send letters to the publisher, they will forward them to me, and I’ll get back to them and we can talk about it.
Editor: Are you optimistic about the future with this?
Joe Lewel: Okay. The future is another thing. Entirely. The last chapter of my previous book, The God Hypothesis, dealt with the issue of global warming and the extinction of species, and these are things that I learned about through the subjects that we were studying because these beings, whatever they are, they were implanting that information in their minds, showing them holographic projections of great disasters that would befall the earth if we didn’t take better care of it, so I was sounding the alarm back in 1997 with that book. It’s only recently that the public has really become aware of global warming. Even the government has taken notice. But I think that the UFO beings have known that for a long, long time. Maybe as early as the 1950s they understood where we were heading. They know us better than we know ourselves. So, they have been trying to wake us up to this problem.
So many people who are UFO experiencers are very ecologically aware. They’re very conscious of the problems in ecology and are actively trying to do something about it. But when I interview people about their experiences, I brush upon that because I like to get their take on it, and almost all of them have an awareness that there is this problem and that it has been a problem for a long time.
How we’re going to deal with that problem is still up in the air, but it certainly seems as though we’re heading toward a time where something has got to give. We have to change the way we do things or we’re going to end up on the list of possible extinct species on this planet. Which that lists keeps growing and growing in spite of what the government tells us, and unfortunately that’s getting worse with every passing day.
