Aliens, Bigfoot and AI chariots

Tin foil baseball caps, ritualistic satanic sex, the coolest car in the universe and the Biblical basis for Bigfoot were just a few of the items covered at the Area 52 UFO Conference.
In a sterile room at the River City Community Center Wednesday, Pastor Mike Hoggard stood behind a podium with the drawings of aliens flashing on a screen behind him.
A banner reading “Why are they here? Think Bible,” hung outside the door.
Hoggard, who calls himself “The UFO Pastor,” is a difficult man to describe. Hoggard runs the Bethel Church in Festus, Missouri, but also hosts a number of internet shows, ranging from a Wednesday Bible Study to his ‘Watchman Video Broadcast’ series, where he talks about anything from aliens to demons.
“For the last five years I’ve been going to different places in the country and showing groups like this that the UFO phenomenon is real,” Hoggard said. “It’s not like we’re trying to show them that Santa Claus is real … Congress is not covering up Santa Claus.”
Attendees, about 12 in total, were dispersed around an otherwise barren room. On one side, an older man with a black bird in a cage sat silently. Behind, Kevin York, an Indianapolis local, sat clad in an American flag short-sleeved t-shirt.
At one point, Hoggard asked the audience what “dark sentences” in the Bible means to them.
“Double bubble, toil and trouble,” York responded.
“Spells,” the man with the bird muttered.
At the back of the room was a table holding a mountain of DVD’s. Each guest who attended received 7 of them.
Some of the titles included “Aliens: The Phoenix Affair," “Aliens: The Northern Army," “Roswell’s Alien Gods” and “Alien: The Bible’s Answer to the Alien Threat."
“I am a Baptist preacher, but I also believe in weird stuff,” Hoggard said at the start of his presentation.
For over two hours, without interruption, Hoggard covered just about every topic under the sun.
It was only 20 minutes into the lecture that he brought up Alister Crowley, an English occultist and a man that, by Hoggard's own explanation, would have ritualistic, satanic sex with women to produce a spirit.
Spirits like this, Hoggard said, we perceive as aliens from the fourth dimension. Crowley’s spirit was named “LAM," a word that, according to Hoggard, comes from the Dalai Lama.
As things seemed to be winding down near the two-hour mark and attendees began to ease their way out of the chairs, the UFO Pastor dropped yet another bombshell that kept them in their seats for another half hour.
“I believe in Bigfoot and I believe Bigfoot is in the scripture,” Hoggard said.
According to Hoggard, Bigfoot is a satyr, a half-man, half-goat creature of legend. Satyrs have a tendency to howl, Hoggard said, and share their physical appearance and their walking pattern with Bigfoot.
Hoggard pulled up a video called the "Patterson-Gimlin film" that pictures a creature, who theorists say is Bigfoot, walking next to a river. According to Hoggard, humans cannot recreate that walking pattern.
That wasn’t nearly the most interesting revelation he gained from the video though.
“That Bigfoot has breasts,” Hoggard said.
“What?” asked Efe Albay, a Purdue junior in aeronautics and astronautics engineering, from the audience.
“Those are mammaries,” Hoggard responded.
“Oh yeah.”
Besides Bigfoot, Hoggard said the Bible also proves the existence of giants, demigods and dragons.
Though there were plenty of exciting and strange anecdotes about cryptids and extraterrestrials, that was far from what most of the content at the Area 52 UFO Conference covered.
In reality, the Bible, biblical teachings and prophecies in the Bible were the biggest subjects in his lecture-turned-sermon.
“I came here to use the UFO subject to bring awareness to you, to give you some free food, and to tell you that God does love you,” Hoggard said.
Though Hoggard believes that we aren’t alone in the universe, he still believes that humans are special.
“I’m a geocentrist with an explanation,” Hoggard said.
That explanation was that the Earth is the center of the universe, that hell exists in the core of Earth and that God will one day arrive on his chariot manned by AI and controlled by angels with large heads and almond-shaped eyes.
“We believe that God has the coolest car in the universe,” said Hoggard. “This is God’s chariot.”
Kat Stafford, a senior in entomology, said she’s heard lectures like Hoggard’s before.
“You have to look for these things,” Stafford said. “If you look for anything in the Bible, you’ll probably find it.”
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