Religious studies scholar Dr. Stephen Finley (Louisiana State University) is almost singular in his academic study of the UFO origins of the belief system of the Nation of Islam (NOI.) In the late 1980s, Louis Farrakhan, the leader of the most popular offshoot of the group, announced that he had an encounter with space people on a mountaintop in Mexico, and was taken aboard what he referred to as the ”Mother Wheel,” where he claimed to have met with the deceased leaders of the religion and given the blessing and authority to lead the group into the future.

Dr. Finley joined me to discuss this episode and the tributaries of personalities and events that led to it, and how it has affected the history of the Nation of Islam ever since. We traced the origins of the African American experience that led to this belief system, and his claim that “you cannot make sense of the NOI without looking at it as a UFO religion.” Finley believes that his study “says something about who we are as a people” and that the very act of marginalizing the subject (especially among his fellow academicians) was what drew him to it in the first place.

LISTEN/ DOWNLOAD