“Spirit of the Sky, Remember!”

The following passage from Sekret Machines: Gods by Tom DeLonge and Peter Levenda offers a fictionalized but symbolically rich reconstruction of humanity’s first encounter with the phenomenon we now refer to as UFOs. Set in the mists of the Stone Age, this account is not presented merely as speculative history or science fiction. Rather, it is a metaphysical retelling of contact—as initiation. A sacred encounter with a reality beyond human comprehension, preserved through ritual, myth, and memory.

Here, the appearance of “Light Beings” descending from the heavens, accompanied by sound, light, and technological wonders, is interpreted not as mere alien visitation, but as a transformative moment—what ancient mystery traditions might call epopteia, the final vision granted to the initiated. These early humans did not understand what they saw, yet they experienced it viscerally: light where there should be night, voices without mouths, gifts descending from the sky. The encounter shattered their worldview and birthed a new religious consciousness.

The elders, in particular, emerge as proto-shamans or priest-kings—witnesses to the sacred who attempt to encode the ineffable into symbols, garments, implements, and prayers. Their descriptions of flying “buildings,” glowing “canoes,” and impossible devices are filtered through the limited vocabulary of a Stone Age people grappling with contact beyond time and technology. What modern observers might classify as extraterrestrial or interdimensional becomes, for these ancient witnesses, the divine—an initiation into a broader cosmic reality.

This passage stands as a mytho-historical allegory for the birth of religion, technology, and consciousness itself. It suggests that the UFO phenomenon, far from being a recent anomaly, has always been with us—guiding, testing, and awakening us. And like all true initiation, the experience was terrifying, transformative, and reserved only for those who dared to look skyward and remember:

SEKRET MACHINES: GODS

The Stone Age

The sound from heaven was like that of thunder, but it was a clear night. They stood frozen where they walked beneath the dense tropical canopy at the rumbling growl from the sky.

The oppressive heat was a physical presence they ignored. Water dripped from the leaves of the dense foliage all around them. This was their land, a land they knew intimately. They fished, they foraged for herbs and tubers, they built huts made of bamboo and grasses. They lived, they ate, they had children. But this . . . this was not from their land. It was not even from their earth.

They became statues, wide-eyed and trembling in the moonless dark, transfixed by what they heard; afraid of what they would see. Their chief was summoned, but there was no need. He already had been alerted by the sound, the insistent thrum that descended upon them from the sky.

Then the heavens opened and the night was full of light and fire.

Above the tree line, above the roof of palms and ferns, they could see the sun shining impossibly at that darkest hour. The jungle around them shivered, the ground vibrating with the steps of some unseen being. Most fled, to the doubtful security of straw walls and old habits, but the distance they covered in an hour was only a second’s work to the secret machines of the gods in the sky.

The ones that remained heard inhuman voices booming from above their heads. Lights played all around them, penetrating the branches of trees, the puddles of rank water at their feet, frightening the snakes, the rodents, the birds into taking flight. What power on earth or in the sky could turn night into day?

They crawled on their bellies, seeking the camouflage of weeds and grasses, and crept along the jungle floor towards the unholy din, the clamoring of demons, the ceaseless clattering like the shaking of dried peas in a gourd only so much louder, so many more gourds, so many countless numbers of peas. But these few had to know. They had to see the source of this light and this terrible sound. They were the elders of the People. They were the only ones who could understand the meaning of the sounds, of the lights, of the horror.

A kilometer further down a hill—a mound sacred to their fathers, for reasons no one remembered—they came upon a clearing and their hearts leapt into their throats. What they saw was impossible. What they saw no man had ever seen. What they saw had no words in the language of the People to describe.

Beings, clothed in light, descended from the skies. There were spheres turning in all directions. There were faces, like the faces of the People, shining from every direction. There was a canoe—a kind of canoe, a vessel, like a gourd—rising up from the ground and was the source of the insistent throbbing noise that had aroused them from their slumber hours ago.

The elders kept watch. In their minds, they tried on different words—like hats—for their images to describe what they saw. So they could tell the People when they returned. They were witnessing the arrival of beings with tremendous powers, beings who controlled light and sound and could fly through the air. They heard the voices of these beings—huge voices, voices that could carry through the air like the drums of the People—but they understood not a word.

They saw symbols, and they had no word for symbols. They were pictures but they were not images of anything they had ever seen. The elders knew, without expressing it in words, that what they were experiencing was a moment of initiation. It was a spiritual event, a crossing over into another existence.

The lights, like little suns, like giant stars, illuminated the night.

—

By morning, the images became clearer. There was more color. More activity. The elders could see beings that looked like People, and they were very busy. A huge building of some kind—but a building that could move all over the ground—was the source of many wrapped packages. These packages would be distributed to various beings, who then took them to other places, other buildings, sacred shrines or gravesites.

The elders quietly discussed whether they should approach these beings. Whether it was safe. Whether they would be welcomed. But before they could make a decision, there was another terrifying sound from the sky.

A sudden, blaring, shrieking noise caused the elders to drop to the ground, prostrate, in the presence of the most powerful, most unearthly event in their ancient history. Another “building” came flying down from the sky, and came to the ground some distance away. It crawled over the earth until it was close enough to see clearly. And from its stomach more packages were removed.

The elders took careful note of the design of the temple and its broad avenue. They noticed the lights. They noticed a high place, made of wood. At the top of that high place, the beings seemed to speak directly to the Father of the Sky.

The packages were filled mostly with things the People did not understand, but with some things they did. Some seemed to be food, for the beings ate from them. Others seemed to be implements of some kind. Clothing. Water. The elders smacked their lips at the sight of all that bounty.

They returned to their village. They told stories of what they had seen. Supernatural beings from the sky. Flying devices. Light. Sound. And the many, many packages sent from the Beings.

The People asked them many questions, over and over again. Finally, it became clear: The elders had been initiated into the mysteries of the Light Beings. They had become “illuminated.” (Only people who lived in darkness could appreciate the divinity of the Light.) They knew what to do. They knew how to summon these Light Beings so that they, too, could receive the gifts from heaven.

They made ceremonial clothing in imitation of what the Beings wore. They made implements in the same design as those of the Beings, magic devices to communicate with the Spirit in the Sky, magic devices to fly, magic devices to see at long distance, magic devices that made terrifying sounds. They found artifacts on the ground when the Beings finally left to return to their villages in the heavens, and they kept them as sacred relics of power. These machines were kept apart from the People and only revealed on sacred days.

The machines contained power and knowledge, and access to that power and knowledge was the privilege of those who had seen the Beings firsthand. There were no words to describe all that had been seen, no vocabulary available to people living in the Stone Age, so the essence of these machines remained secret, wrapped around with ritual language and arcane ceremony that made sense only to those who had seen.

The People built a broad avenue in the jungle near their village. They erected a high tower like the one they had seen. They stationed their elders on top of that tower to scour the heavens for a sign that the Beings were returning.

And they created a prayer: “Spirit of the Sky, Remember!”