Michael Rothstein

Michael Rothstein, an assistant professor of the history of religions at the University of Copenhagen and an internationally published researcher on contemporary religion, appears in the book as an expert on belief in UFOs. His contribution is less a defense or dismissal of any single account than an explanation of how such accounts acquire meaning: modern ideas about extraterrestrials can carry older religious concerns, while interpretation shapes what people believe ancient texts and mysterious phenomena say.

Scholarly focus

Rothstein’s stated research interests include contemporary religions and, especially, the ways people believe in UFOs. In the interview, he is asked to explain why flying-saucer belief is widespread and how esoteric traditions may inform it. These questions let him treat UFO belief not simply as a claim about objects in the sky, but as a cultural form through which people imagine contact with what lies beyond ordinary human experience.

His answers distinguish the existence of a belief from the social and intellectual conditions that make it meaningful. Rather than treating UFO stories as an isolated modern oddity, Rothstein places them within a longer history of religious ways of thinking about encounters between humanity and a nonhuman or superhuman other.

UFOs as a modern religious language

Rothstein traces the UFO myth’s emergence to Cold War fears, but emphasizes that its significance did not remain fixed there. It gradually took on broader meanings, becoming a modern tale of human intercourse with what is nonhuman or beyond human, whether imagined positively or negatively. In his account, stories about extraterrestrials adapt a recurring religious concern to the idiom of an industrial, space-traveling, science-fiction-reading society.

This explanation does not reduce UFO belief to a single historical cause. The Cold War helps explain the myth’s initial setting; its continuing appeal rests on its capacity to express older questions in a form suited to modern expectations and anxieties. Rothstein’s framing thus links the technological appearance of flying-saucer stories with a much older imaginative pattern: the possibility of contact with powers or beings beyond humanity.

Esotericism and Nazi associations

Asked whether people with an esoteric worldview are more disposed than others to take an interest in UFOs, Rothstein answers cautiously. He does not claim that esoteric belief automatically produces greater interest. His distinction is that certain interpretations of alleged UFOs may arise more frequently or naturally among people already involved in esotericism. He points to George King and George Adamski, both of whom had careers as occultists before turning to UFOs, and whose accounts of the subject drew explicitly on Theosophical ideas.

Rothstein also distinguishes different kinds of connection between National Socialism and UFO lore. He acknowledges that Nazism has had links with occultism, particularly among some groups outside the actual Nazi parties, but describes this as fringe material. More significant to him is the recurrent interpretation of UFOs as German secret weapons developed by Nazi scientists. He considers that association more interesting than stories about Hitler’s clones concealed in UFO-related facilities beneath Antarctica.

The association works, in Rothstein’s account, because Nazis function as demons of the modern world in the eyes of many people: they are widely regarded as repellent and dangerous. Linking them with bewildering aerial phenomena therefore gives those phenomena a sinister or demonic cast. His analysis explains the symbolic force of the association without presenting its claims as established history.

Ancient texts and changing interpretation

The interview turns from UFO lore to Varg Vikernes’s reading of the Eddas as mythological memories of contact with alien gods, comparable to Erich von Däniken’s reading of the Bible. Rothstein replies that virtually any ancient text could be interpreted in this way. He calls such a reading historically nonsensical, while also observing that scholarly perspectives may regard religious representations as nonsensical when judged by their own standards of historical explanation.

His central point is about interpretation rather than proof: religious texts do not carry a complete, unchanging meaning that readers merely retrieve. Meaning is made through acts of interpretation, and those interpretations vary over time. The same text can therefore be recast through a contemporary explanatory scheme, including one that understands descriptions of gods or extraordinary beings as records of extraterrestrial contact. Rothstein’s answer neither validates that reading as history nor treats its existence as inexplicable; it identifies it as a radically new way of reading inherited material.

Role in the book

Rothstein provides a scholarly counterpoint to the book’s accounts of contemporary religious and occult ideas. Across the interview, he separates the historical origins of a modern myth from the meanings it later gathers, and distinguishes an interpreter’s worldview from the evidence offered for a claim. His recurring emphasis on changing interpretation is especially important: beliefs about UFOs and readings of ancient scripture are not presented as timeless conclusions but as modern constructions shaped by the questions readers bring to them.