I’ve been looking for more info on all this Farrakhan/Nation of Islam UFO stuff, and it appears to actually be legitimate. Um, legitimate insofaras they actually seem to teach it as part of their religion, that is. I guess I’m just surprised by all this because Farrakhan was so prominent in the news in the 90’s (Million Man March, anyone?) that you’d think all this fucking UFO stuff would have really haunted him. I guess in the end though the racism was probably a more hot-button issue even than UFO’s.

Actually, they don’t call them UFO’s, not officially. They seem to use the phrase “Great Mother Plane” or “Great Mother Wheel”. This is allegedly from a 1996 speech by Farrakhan:

The Honorable Elijah Muhammad told us of a giant Motherplane that is made like the universe, spheres within spheres. White people call them unidentified flying objects (UFOs). Ezekial, in the Old Testament, saw a wheel that looked like a cloud by day but a pillar of fire by night. The Hon. Elijah Muhammad said that that wheel was built on the island of Nippon, which is now called Japan, by some of the original scientists. It took 15 billion dollars in gold at that time to build it. It is made of the toughest steel. America does not yet know the composition of the steel used to make an instrument like it. It is a circular plane, and the Bible says that it never makes turns. Because of its circular nature it can stop and travel in all directions at speeds of thousands of miles per hour. He said there are 1,500 small wheels in this mother wheel which is a half mile by a half mile. This Mother Wheel is like a small human built planet. Each one of these small planes carry three bombs.

The Honorable Elijah Muhammad said these planes were used to set up mountains on the earth. […]

The white man writes in his above top secret memos o the UFOs. He sees them around his military installation like they are spying.

That Mother Wheel is a dreadful looking thing. White folks are making movies now to make these planes look like fiction, but it is based on something real. The Honorable Elijah Muhammad said that Mother Plane is so powerful that with sound reverberating in he atmosphere, just with a sound, she can crumble buildings.

I’m just learning about the NOI (Nation of Islam) myself, so let me give you a little background. The NOI was founded by Wallace Fard, who later renamed himself Wallace Fard Muhammad around 1930. Some sources allege the NOI was formed by Fard subsequent to his prison release, and they call him a professional con-man.

the NOI was also shaped by a Depression-era con-man, and convicted drugdealer, Wallace Dodd Ford [Fard]. Upon Ford’s 1929 release from California’s San Quintin Prison, he moved to Detroit to start a new life. Ford used a number of names, including Wali Farad and Master Fard and claimed to be from Mecca, Arabia. Being that Ford’s parentage was a mixture of white and South Pacific Maori, he used his skin color and his prison con skills to pass himself off to blacks as a “mystic” and a “prophet” from the Middle East.

I can’t obviously attest to the truth of that, but you can go back and check out the original source for yourself. Not surprisingly though, NOI holds that Fard Muhammad (as he became known) was the incarnated form of Allah. Of course, to “real” Islam, this is the most base of all heresies: “There is no God but Allah, and Muhammad [not Fard Muhammad] is his prophet!”

Anyway, from various sources, it seems that one of the central tenets of the NOI is that the white race was genetically created from the black race by a demented scientist named Yacub. I guess Yacub had been exiled from Mecca almost 7,000 years ago, and was creating the white race to get back and enslave the Tribe of Shabazz (as in Betty Shabazz, Malcolm X’s widow) for some 6,000 years.

So wait, the tribe of Shabazz, guess where Elijah Muhammad (second in command after Fard) taught that they came from… the Moon! Cool right? I’d say so. Elijah Muhammad supposedly taught:

We belong to the Tribe of Shabazz. This tribe is the first of the human family on the planet earth. It came with the earth when we departed the moon 66 trillion years ago. We settled on the best part of the planet in the heart of Asia at the holy city Mecca in Arabia.

[…] our departing from the moon was caused by one of our very smartest scientists who became discouraged with his people, because they were not like he wanted them to be. So, he drilled a tube or hole in the center of the moon’s surface, which was a little over half the diameter of the moon, filled it with explosives, and set it off. And, this explosion split the moon into two parts: one piece dropped 36 thousand miles, which is the part we live on, called earth; while the other part went out 12 thousand miles and turned over and over again, which caused its civilization to be destroyed and all of its water to drip on the first part. The part that lost its water and destroyed the life on it is the moon. There is no such thing as earth. It is the moon, the part which is our nearest planet.

Anyway, right, so the Mother Wheel / Mother Plane / Mothership is apparently orbiting Earth (possibly between Earth and the Moon) in the meantime, piloted by “13 youths“. In 1995 Louis Farrakhan was whisked away/abducted to this spaceship. While there, he met with Elijah Muhammad (who’d died in 1975) and Elijah inspired and gave him instructions to put together the Million Man March.

I can’t find a solid original source for this, but Farrakhan is supposed to have said:

“I was transported by a small, circular plane- you call it a UFO-to a great mother wheel,” he claims. “Before you call me crazy, these wheels will be seen all over America. They’ll be coming down over the major cities. You will look up one day and see them, and I don’t want you to be terrified. They’re your friends.”

If this is a real quote from Farrakhan, I’d have to wonder what he means when he says they are our friends. From what I understand, the Mother Plane is supposed to be equipped with bombs to get revenge on all the white people. Maybe I’m wrong, or maybe he’s trying to trick us into welcoming our destroyers. According to Tynetta Muhammad (Elijah’s widow):

“The Great Mother Wheel is a space vehicle of an advanced technology beyond the limits of the present world. And she does house an advanced civilization with power and force capable of making this world bow in submission to the divine will of its creator.”

It seems that Malcolm X may have even been in on all this:

“[Malcolm X] told [a congregation at New York’s Muslim Temple No. 7] that there was a space ship 40 miles up which was built by the wise men of the East. And, in this spaceship, there are a number of smaller spaceships, and each one is loaded with bombs. [Malcolm X] stated that when Elijah [Muhammad] of Chicago, Illinois, gives the word, these ships will descend on the United States, bomb it, and destroy all the `White devils.’ According to [Malcolm X], these bombs will destroy all the `devils’ in the United States, and . . . all the Muslims in good standing will be spared.”

Hm, it also turns out that this may not have been Farrakhan’s first visit to the Great Mother Wheel:

On October 24, 1989, at the J.W. Marriott Hotel in Washington, DC., Louis Farrakhan stated that had a vision of being abducted in 1985 by an invisible pilot in a UFO and carried up on a beam of light to a “human built planet” known as the Mother Wheel . There the voice of Elijah Muhammad informed him that the president and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, under the direction of Gen. Colin Powell, were planning a war, which Farrakhan said he later came to realize was “a war against the black people of America, the Nation of Islam and Louis Farrakhan. ”

“I saw a city in the sky,” Farrakhan said, after which the UFO “brought me back to Earth and dropped me off near Washington…to make The Announcement. “

And for anybody who hasn’t already had quite enough of all this, you might be interested in checking out Elijah Muhammad’s book, The Mother Plane. Not sure when this was first published, or when this whole cosmology was adopted, but it obviously seems pretty closely related to the “ancient astronaut” hypothesis of Von Daniken, Sitchin and others. And then there’s Prophet Yahweh…. but I’ll come back to that.

[Special thanks to Platitudes & Paragons for the genesis of this idea. He’s got some other great leads to follow for anybody interested.[