How did a trained scholar of ancient Hebrew
literature and a Dead Sea Scrolls specialist get involved with research on
ancient aliens? Answer: I found myself dragged into it, kicking and screaming.
Some time ago, I was being interviewed on a nationally syndicated radio show,
“Coast-to-Coast A.M.,” when host George Noory asked me whether I thought some
of the ancient texts I deal with have anything to do with alien visitation.
Inexplicably, I found myself answering that from a Jewish perspective, it's
actually easier to talk about to talk about “space aliens” than it is to
believe in various and sundry supernatural entities, including Satan and an
assorted host of angels and demons. This is because Judaism as a faith is
strictly monotheistic, and from time immemorial has been wary of focusing on
intermediary beings between God and humankind. If we start paying too much
attention to angels and demons, God forbid, people might start worshiping them
instead of the Almighty.
My conclusion: ancient aliens, whether they ever
visited us in antiquity, are by no means un-kosher! After my interview that
night, I got to thinking about what I had said. There is in fact a veritable
library of ancient Jewish literature – books systematically “banned” from the
biblical canon – whose main focus involves supernatural entities, angels,
demons, and yes, Satan. The fact that Judaism has historically been so wary of
such entities is probably the main reason these books were excluded in the
first place. But the accounts are there, nonetheless, and this reality, over
time, forced me to go “where no scholar has gone before” – doing serious
research on what these ancient Israelites may or may not have seen. Were they
just fabricating the stories they told about these entities – a polite way of
calling them liars? Or did they really experience something? Did they really
have contact, “close encounters,” with what we can categorize, if not
“extraterrestrials,” then at least “non-terrestrial” beings? Perhaps what they
saw were “inter-dimensional” beings, who have been with us almost from the
beginning of time and manifested themselves in various ways to people of
disparate cultures, from the pagan gods and goddesses of antiquity to the
entities reported by modern UFO contactees.
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 into distinct
directions.
First, I discovered the research of Jacques
Vallée, the French computer scientist, venture capitalist and seminal ufologist
after whom the character “Lacombe” in 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 “inter-dimensional,”
who appear 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. A new temple
was 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. Being 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 Jacques Vallée’s “inter-dimensional hypothesis.” I began
to realize, at the risk of being shunned and marginalized myself, 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.
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