Backdrop
On October 31, 2025, Pastor Gary McKibben and I conducted a livestream titled Per Aspera Ad Astra—Latin for “through hardship to the stars”—a phrase famously embraced by Jack Parsons, one of the godfathers of America’s early space program. In that discussion, we traced the modern rocketry enterprise back to Parsons and his notorious, explosion-prone circle of engineers at Caltech and JPL, sometimes nicknamed the “Suicide Squad.” Yet Parsons’s obsession extended far beyond propulsion and pyrotechnics.
By the mid-1940s, he was deeply immersed in the ritual occultism of Aleister Crowley and Crowley’s system of Thelema, attempting to merge technological ascent with spiritual and metaphysical ambition.
That convergence reached its apex in January–March 1946, when Parsons conducted the Babalon Working at the Agape Lodge in Pasadena. Assisted by L. Ron Hubbard and guided through correspondence by Crowley, Parsons undertook a series of Thelemic sex-magick rituals intended to invoke the element of Air and incarnate the archetype of Babalon. In late January 1946, he claimed a breakthrough during a solo conjuration, and by February 1946, he identified Marjorie Cameron as the manifestation of the Scarlet Woman, believing the Working had succeeded in bringing a cosmic principle “down to earth.”
While no direct evidence links these Enochian rituals to later UFO phenomena, the timing has fueled ongoing speculation. The Working concluded in early 1946, roughly 18 months (six + six + six) before the Roswell incident of July 1947, and unfolded within a post-war landscape saturated with the Nuremberg Trials, experimental rocketry, military secrecy, intelligence activity, and esoteric exploration across the American Southwest. Advocates of a speculative connection argue that Parsons’ language of “opening gateways” symbolically overlaps with a period soon marked by anomalous reports of UFOs and heightened secrecy.
While modern historians and mainstream researchers deny any link between the Babalon Working and Roswell, there are those within the Pentagon and Intelligence circles who saw the potential in weaponizing (or at least harnessing) this spiritual endeavor that is still practiced to this day.
Present Day
While it is true that linking Parsons’ desert ritual to Roswell, and the ensuing UFO phenomena that would soon engulf the nation for the next 70-plus years, is on the speculative side of things, it’s not out of the realm of possibility that one thing led to another. The timing is at least very intriguing.
This past Monday’s livestream, Disclosure, the Rapture, and the Coming Great Delusion, as well as an earlier one, What Lurks Above, highlights the abundance of activity in both the near and far cosmos that is captivating mankind in these last days.
But I want to bring the conversation back to earth for the remainder of the conversation. You see, I don’t doubt Parson’s amateurish attempts at invoking some hellish fallen angel didn’t work; I believe it did. Not because of Parson per se, but because Satan, seeing Israel surviving the atrocities of the Third Reich and the Holocaust, was soon on their way to gaining statehood, and Satan knew the time was ripe to enact his final coup d’état of the world’s present global order. He planted the seed with Roswell, but knew this, along with the predictable government’s coverups, would fuel the fire of speculation and modern mythmaking, which was made possible by a hedonistic and humanistic Hollywood media industry.
But he didn’t stop there.
He began fanning the fires of greed in capitalism, replacing God Almighty with the Almighty Dollar. We see him fanning the flames of envy in those purporting Marxism as the answer…yet it has failed every nation that has embraced it.
We see that by the end of the Tribulation, the kingdom of the Beast will become so depraved that it will think nothing of making merchandise of the souls of men, marking them at the bottom of the list of items as if it were the least of them (Rev 18:11-13). Babylon Incorporated, that great whore of a system, which trades in the souls of men and women as merchandise, will one day bring down such divine wrath from God that the rest of the world will weep and wail at her passing.
“The kings of the earth who committed fornication and lived luxuriously with her will weep and lament for her, when they see the smoke of her burning, standing at a distance for fear of her torment, saying, ‘Alas, alas, that great city Babylon, that mighty city! For in one hour your judgment has come’” (Revelation 18:9-10).
While free-market capitalism may be the best form of economics fallen man can aspire to in this present dispensation, it comes paradoxically at the same time a booming economy enables hedonism, idleness, moral depravity of every kind; propelling an immoral world into a freefall of self-destruction, ensuring the exponential collapse of Eastern and Western Civilizations.
Satan also began fanning the flames of technology, helping mankind unlock the forbidden secrets of splitting the atom, discovering the genetic building block of man, the internet, off-world exploration, artificial intelligence, nanotechnology, and quantum computing, to name just a few.
Mankind had once again fulfilled the prophetic warning God uttered in Genesis 11:6, in that “…Indeed the people are one, and they all have one language, and this is what they begin to do; now nothing that they propose to do will be withheld from them.”
Between the moral failings, the collapsing influence of the American church, a booming economy, and the skyrocketing technological advances, Satan flooded the skies with things we couldn’t fully understand, invoking both fear and fascination, leading from denial to disclosure, to confirmation, and finally activation. All of this he did to the most powerful nation the world had ever seen, solely building her up, knowing her collapse at the Rapture of the Church would provide all the scientific, economic, and military technology his forthcoming kingdom of the Beast would need.
Things to Come
“But of that day and hour no one knows, not even the angels of heaven, but My Father only. But as the days of Noah were, so also will the coming of the Son of Man be. For as in the days before the flood, they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the day that Noah entered the ark, and did not know until the flood came and took them all away, so also will the coming of the Son of Man be. Then two men will be in the field: one will be taken and the other left. Two women will be grinding at the mill: one will be taken and the other left.
“Watch therefore, for you do not know what hour your Lord is coming. But know this, that if the master of the house had known what hour the thief would come, he would have watched and not allowed his house to be broken into. Therefore you also be ready, for the Son of Man is coming at an hour you do not expect” (Matthew 24:36-44).
While none of us are going to know exactly when the Rapture of the Church happens, we can and should recognize the season of His return, because Scripture gives us ample signs and evidence for its general timeframe. The time just before His return would be marked by signs such as wars and rumors of wars, earthquakes in various places, pestilences, global moral collapse, and perhaps the most clear and obvious sign, the supernatural rebirth of the nation of Israel.
We know this because Jesus begins the list of signs by detailing the events surrounding the nation of Israel. This framework is evident because Jesus begins His prophetic discourse by foretelling the destruction of the then-standing Jewish Temple (Matt 24:1-2, Luke 19:41-44, 21:20-24), then goes on to describe a future desecration of a Temple (Matt 24:15) that must first be rebuilt. Such a scenario necessarily requires Jewish control of the Temple Mount, which in turn presupposes Jewish sovereignty over Jerusalem and the nation in which it resides. In this way, biblical prophecy itself establishes the geopolitical and spiritual conditions that define the season of His return.
That season began in 1948…a little over two years after Parsons’ occultic soirée in the Californian desert.
Conclusion
While Satan certainly does not know when Jesus will return for His bride, the Church, he’s not blind either. Satan knew exactly how long man had been on the earth, because he offered the temptation to the first couple in the Garden.
Satan knew exactly how long it was from Adam to Abraham…and from Abraham to when Jesus was born, because he whispered worries into Herod’s ear to kill the “One born King of the Jews.”
He was there sowing pride and envy into the hearts of the Sanhedrin to crucify this Jesus of Nazareth. He was there whipping the Roman legions into a zealous frenzy when they sacked Jerusalem in AD70. And he has been there all along with the rising and falling of empires, always having a man ready, in the wings, to bear the mantle of the ‘son of perdition’ and become the face of Satan’s final kingdom.
This is no game to Satan. He is not playing for half-measures. He knows the Lake of Fire awaits him should he fail. For this reason, he is going to pull out all the stops when the restraining ministry of the Holy Spirit is removed.
“For the mystery of lawlessness is already at work; only He who now restrains will do so until He is taken out of the way. And then the lawless one will be revealed, whom the Lord will consume with the breath of His mouth and destroy with the brightness of His coming. The coming of the lawless one is according to the working of Satan, with all power, signs, and lying wonders, and with all unrighteous deception among those who perish, because they did not receive the love of the truth, that they might be saved” (2 Thessalonians 2:7-10). (my emphasis)
Beloved, we are entering into the final stretch before our Lord’s return. We should expect to see the deception ramp up to unprecedented levels. I fear that AI in 2026 will surpass all that we’ve seen thus far, and it will require increasingly discerning judgment to distinguish what is real from what is not. Should “aliens” appear and be trumpeted around as our new glorious leaders, know that these are not our ancient forefathers but fallen angels bent on deceiving mankind into uniting into one government.
Troubling news from around the world will increase, bringing even more trouble to an already troubled world. Desperate times will make men more desperate, and thus, more dangerous. The United States, desperate to cling to its place at the top, is increasingly selling its soul to do so, which will one day require a divine reckoning.
But despite how dark the times will become, the Christian has a glorious future right around the corner. The Church has been promised in numerous places in Scripture, both indirectly in Old Testament type and foreshadowing, as well as directly from Christ and the Apostles (John 14:1-3, 1 Thess 1:10, 5:1-9, Titus 2:13, Rev 3:10).
I cannot say exactly when, but we all know it is soon, given the lateness of the hour and the abundance of signs converging in this present generation.
So don’t lose hope, and don’t lose sight of what lies just ahead.
Our Blessed Hope.
Lord bless you in this new year and Maranatha!
“Let not your heart be troubled; you believe in God, believe also in Me. In My Father’s house are many mansions; if it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you. And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and receive you to Myself; that where I am, there you may be also” (John 14:1-3).