"Ancient Aliens"!

UFOs, ETs, alien abductions… It’s surprising how many people want to know, not only about modern stories of extraterrestrials, but about the possibility of long-lost encounters with “ancient aliens.” Many people today are equally curious about whether the Book of Books – the Bible – relates the same kind of phenomena that in the modern world are the domain of ufologists. How many ancient Israelites experienced such “interdimensional” encounters? Just as I began to look into all of this, I was approached by the History Channel, which contacted me independently and asked if I’d be interested in doing an interview for their series “Ancient Aliens.” 

If any more impetus were needed for me to continue this line of research, this was it. I happily said yes and charged into the realm of “close encounters.” My immediate fear was obvious: I might never again be able to show my face in the halls of academia. But if this is where the research was leading, how could I not be honest with myself? My work would subsequently lead me in two distinct directions.

First, I discovered the research of Jaques Vallée, the French scientist after whom the film Close Encounters of the Third Kind was loosely based. Vallée had started by investigating the appearance of strange lights in the sky, looking into the possibility that we may have been visited by some kind of extraterrestrial spacecraft. His focus shifted however, to considering the possibility that we are dealing with beings who are truly “interdimensional,” appearing across space and time in apparent defiance of physical laws. 

Then, I began to examine the research of certain scholars of ancient literature, who have identified a group they refer to as the Visionaries. These were an assortment of ancient Israelite priests, returning from exile in faraway Persia, as early as the sixth century B.C.E. A new temple had been built in those days, replacing Solomon's great structure, destroyed by the Babylonians nearly a century before. But the new temple was ruled by a corrupt and power-hungry lot, as far as the Visionaries were concerned. Having been shoved aside and marginalized by the “powers that be,” the Visionaries instead cultivated spirituality. They began to have dreams, visions and revelations, in which the heavens were opened, and a host of spiritual beings were presented to them. 

Suddenly, the writings of Jewish antiquity began to dovetail with Jaques Vallée’s “Interdimensional Hypothesis.” I began to realize, at the risk of being shunned and marginalized by my fellow academicians, that I might really be onto something here. Are today's close encounters and alien visitations basically the same experience that the ancient Visionaries had, describing angels and demons, and writing scores of scrolls, parchments, and entire books, that were systematically banned from the Bible? Come what may, I had to find out.

Now, deep into researching the Visionaries and their peculiar stew of “unbiblical” writings, I have discovered that the movement they began was destined to last for centuries and would cultivate scores of non-terrestrial encounters, recorded in books such as Enoch and Jubilees, and ultimately the Dead Sea Scrolls, that were for whatever reason (perhaps because of the sensational visitations they relate) systematically excluded from Holy Writ -- "Banned from the Bible"!