“… at the 1987 meeting of the American Psychological Association in New York, participants agreed that a detailed study of alleged UFO abductees revealed them to be normal people from all walks of life. It was concluded that their experiences could not be accounted for strictly on the basis of psychopathology. Thus, what we ended up with are both professional and nonprofessional normal people, cutting across the total social strata, who really believe that they have been abducted by aliens from a UFO.”
Although it is usually assumed (as with any unconventional idea) that believers must prove without a doubt that the phenomenon is of an extraterrestrial nature, the burden of proof actually rests on the skeptical side of this issue. One should remember that only one UFO encounter out of millions need be real in order for the believers to be correct. To put it another way, skeptics must demonstrate that all cases are false if we are to rationally believe that otherworldly beings are not making their presence known on Earth. The Universe is an incomprehensibly large and exciting place. Things should be going on that we can barely begin to imagine.
One can discuss the subject of UFOs forever, analyzing various cases and arguing about whether or not they are legitimate examples of a superhuman presence on our planet. But perhaps the most convincing reason to believe modern stories of alien encounters is that remarkably similar stories have been told since ancient times. Though most people don’t see this connection, it is logical to look at religion first when trying to find examples of the phenomenon in the distant past: after all, the ancients would most likely cloak any encounters with higher beings in a profoundly mystical shroud of dogma, and these “visits by the gods” would certainly appear in holy scripture.
With the passage of time and the advancement of civilization, we have collectively cast aside our old belief in the pantheon of supernatural beings; but today’s knowledge strongly suggests that superhuman extraterrestrials really do exist and might somehow affect us. It is time to strip “God” of all his theological accoutrements, to lay bare the core nature of the various “lords,” “spirits,” “angels,” and such who have been said to populate the vast skies above.
Since the Bible is known by most people, we should ask if this widely believed history of the Hebrew people contains examples of superhuman beings coming down to Earth. Obviously it does – the angels and their leader Yahweh make prominent appearances in the text – but the real question is whether these higher beings are extraterrestrials, and if so, if they are the same aliens seen today. What is an “extraterrestrial,” an “alien”? Both terms basically refer to any nonhuman being who comes from somewhere other than planet Earth. What is a “superhuman”? Quite simply, it would be a being more advanced than us, possessing incredible technology and seeming supernatural in comparison to ourselves.
Thus, it can be concluded that the Bible does indeed deal with the subject of extraterrestrials, for the superhumans described therein come from the heavens (space) and have virtually unlimited power over the affairs of Earth (due to their high level of development). Some people may be automatically repulsed by this idea, but this is only because of comical stereotypes about aliens: the popular culture has turned the whole subject into a joke, and this lack of seriousness leads to a total misunderstanding of the UFO phenomenon. We must realize that ultra-advanced real extraterrestrials would not act like those in the movies and comic books (which are merely a creation of the limited human mind), instead appearing to humanity as a race of gods.
Before people knew that other planets and solar systems sprinkle the depths of space, before they could conceive of “space aliens” in the misguided sense we do today, our ancient ancestors interpreted visits from the sky in a much less sophisticated way. They idealized relatively higher beings as absolute rulers of the Universe – but remember that their universe was nothing more than the land, sea, and sky of what we now know to be one tiny planetary speck. “Heaven” was outside the world they knew, but we can now see that it should be only as exotic as another earth circling another star.
The gods of old are part of the physical Cosmos just like us, an idea that traditional religious institutions have blindly refused to accept. When Yahweh commanded the Israelites to “have no other gods before me,” when he said in the Torah “I am a jealous God”… his meaning was more literal than we wish to realize. Like a king who demands alleigance to the nation, so too was the Western God a lord who wanted to retain control of his angelic legions and his human slaves. The power struggle with Lucifer was much like a political campaign, each side producing propaganda to win over the simpletons who tilled the fields of Sumeria.
In any case, the important idea is that the early Hebrews believed in “Elohim,” a plural term which should be literally translated as “the gods.” The single being we today think of as God was the ruler of planet Earth during that time – a being called Yahweh by the people of Israel and Enlil by the people of Mesopotamia. He was physical and imperfect, as were all the other superhumans, but because of their relative superiority in all respects – biological, intellectual, spiritual, technological – they were deified by virtually every ancient culture including the one that produced our Bible. Consider that in the biblical creation story the Elohim say (Genesis 1:26), “let us make man in our image, after our likeness…” The plurality of God in this quote is no coincidence. As Dr. Zecharia Sitchin explains in his groundbreaking book, Genesis Revisited,