Book Reviews Perceptions Magazine, January 2026
The Soul Trap:
Aliens, Ancient Scrolls, and Reincarnation
By Joe Lewels, Ph.D.
Wild Flower Press
An imprint of Granite Publishing, L.L.C.
P.O. Box 338
Mt. Pleasant, S.C. 29464
2025, Paperback, 242 pages, US $23.99
ISBN: 978-0-926524-04-0
Reviewed by Brent Raynes
Joe Lewels, the author of this book, explores both the scientific and spiritual dimensions of the UFO enigma. He admits a lot of the ufologists of mainstream ufology are not so keen on the spiritual aspects, but he points out that when you delve deeply into this phenomenon it goes much further back in history than Kenneth Arnold’s 1947 UFO sighting that ignited the beginning of the modern “flying saucer era,” as it had become known.
Back around January 1969, then a U.S. Army aviator, Lewels and an Army Colonel were flying near the Gulf of Mexico when, off in the distance, they noticed an orange orb following their single engine plane for more than an hour. After landing at Fort Rucker, Alabama, they decided not to file a report, afraid that their flight status might be jeopardized.
Lewels later became a professor of journalism at the University of Texas at El Paso (1972-1982). In the early 1970s he met and interviewed noted astronomer Dr. J. Allen Hynek, former consultant to the Air Force’s Project Bluebook. Later, after the UFO program was shut down in late 1969, Hynek formed a civilian group to study the phenomenon called the Center for UFO Studies. Hynek, impressed with Lewels, invited him to become a volunteer investigator for CUFOS, though at that time he turned it down for fear of damaging his reputation in the journalism field.
Nonetheless, Lewels’ curiosity was quickly growing. He recalls how one day in a bookstore he was drawn to novelist Whitley Strieber’s book Communion: A True Story, with a Grey type of entity featured on the front cover, describing his own personal UFO/alien experiences. He was taken aback by this, as he knew and admired Strieber’s work as a novelist and his writings on climate change and nuclear proliferation, in such books as Nature’s End, Warday, The Wolfen, and The Hunger. He regarded Strieber coming forward with his story as the act of a brave man who had so much to lose as a highly successful and acclaimed author.
He would later become very close to Whitley Streiber and Whitley’s wife Anne.
He first met Streiber at a large UFO conference in Brisbane, Queensland, Australia, in 1996 where he found himself seated between Streiber and Harvard psychiatrist Dr. John Mack, who would also become a close friend, both of whom wrote blurbs on the back cover of Lewels’ book The God Hypothesis (1997, 2005). He found he had a lot in common with the views and findings of both men. There was more to the UFO enigma than the way the mainstream’s “nuts and bolts” ET crowd saw it. Early on Dr. Mack told Lewels, “I don’t think they’re aliens. They are much closer to the Divine than Humans are.” Strieber admitted how he pondered the possibility that “we are prisons on our planet.” One day he asked them, “Who are you?” The answer he said he received was, “We recycle souls.”
In 1993, Lewels organized a team of psychiatrists and hypnotherapists to investigate the so-called “alien abduction” phenomenon. He even became a certified hypnotherapist with the American Institute of Hypnotherapy in 1995. He ended up interviewing and hypnotizing hundreds of them here in America as well as in Australia and Mexico. He noted how most didn’t feel like victims, though in the beginning of their encounters they would be fearful and experience trauma, but as Dr. Mack would come to point out over time the beings would become perceived more as “odd spirit guides.” Lewels would come to prefer calling these people “experiencers” rather than “abductees.” Dr. Mack would come to note how they would have expanded psychic or intuitive abilities, reverence for nature, many feeling that they possessed a dual human/alien identity, and various other positive traits, which Lewels agreed with.
Lewels found out himself how the use of hypnosis with these “experiencers” could not only have positive, healing effects in uncovering repressed UFO encounter memories, but also remarkable past life and in-between life memories that with many “experiencers” were related to earth missions that they had agreed to before incarnating here.
Others in the business of “abduction research” however, like Budd Hopkins and David Jacobs disagreed with such findings, claiming that Mack and others reporting such findings were not doing their hypnosis properly and discerningly, confusing elements of confabulation and fantasy as real events. However, Lewels counters that neither Hopkins or Jacobs were certified hypnotherapists nor did they work under the supervision of a psychiatrist.
To Lewels there are significant spiritual dimensions to the UFO encounter phenomena that the mainstream often overlooks. He takes seriously the idea that earth is a “soul trap,” a kind of prison, and how we must go through a series of reincarnations until we can “get it right,” and eventually, once we have, move on to a higher dimensional level. Almost all indigenous people believe they came here from the stars, and some have similar ideas about past lives.
