Was Jesus Christ an ‘Ancient Astronaut’? Part Two

The mythological and supernatural gods, even the monotheistic God, have been stripped of their mythological and supernatural status by those proposing that they were actually ‘humanly’ flawed flesh-and-blood beings ‘who came to Earth with powers and abilities far beyond those of mortal men’ (apologies for stealing Superman’s introduction). In other words, the gods (including God) were ‘ancient astronauts’. One being not usually cited in the ‘ancient astronaut’ literature is Jesus Christ. However, I see no reason to exclude him from consideration and speculation. 

Continued from yesterday’s blog…. 

Now it maybe impressive for J.C. to have miraculously healed someone of, say cancer. But, it would have been far more impressive for J.C. to have come up with an overall cure for cancer – surely within the powers of a supernatural (but maybe not an extraterrestrial) being. In any event, there’s no stunt or miracle that J.C. pulled off that you can’t also find in the annals of the various polytheistic gods. Raise the dead? That’s old hat stuff – that trick don’t impress me much anymore!

One other thought at this particular juncture comes to mind. One often repeated theme in mythology when it comes to the gods is the conflict between father and son. Sooner or later, the son grows up and ultimately poses a threat to daddy and daddy’s power. Gods were known to plot against their own kids, sometimes swallowing their newborn in order to prevent any further on down-the-track rivalry for power with their legitimate heirs. Daddy gods could be and often were jealous of their own offspring. So what about the relationship between J.C. and God?

Well our monotheistic God is indeed a jealous God by His own admission via the Ten Commandments, so it stands to reason that He’s going to be miffed that His son J.C. has stolen His limelight. That is, J.C. had achieved better P.R. overall and perhaps a greater following than God Himself commanded 2000 years ago.  However, God laughs last and best because obviously J.C. didn’t get to follow Dad home, alive at least, since he of course met his waterloo nearly 20 centuries ago. One would think that an all-powerful God could have easily saved His son from execution via The Cross, if He had wanted to. However, allowing the execution to go ahead was a really easy and guilt-free way of eliminating a future rival. Actually our extraterrestrial ‘God’ wasn’t totally without compassion for His executed son (the straw that broke the camel’s back?), so before departing He no doubt ‘beamed’ J.C.’s body aboard His Starship Heaven, and in so doing explains J.C.’s resurrection and his empty tomb!

What I’m speculating here is that God has left the building. The basis for suggesting this is that even if you take the evidence for God’s existence as revealed in the Bible at face value – burning bushes, pillars of salt, universal floods, etc. there has been nothing one can hang one’s hat on for the past several thousand years in the way of evidence for God. No interviews, no photographs, no new Commandments, no verified miracles that God and only a God could preform, total and apparent wilful ignoring of the pope’s prayers for all the sorts of things popes go on and on about (like praying for world peace – a futile gesture if ever there was one), etc. Now, if God were really not God, but ‘God’, an extraterrestrial, well Starship Heaven and crew might have left the building (Planet Earth) eons ago and sought greener pastures. I mean God’s Old Testament temper tantrums got Him nowhere; we still take His name in vain and curse Him “God damn it”; His Ten Commandments are often ignored by the great unwashed; J.C. seems to get more press coverage and positive P.R. as noted above; God has lots of competition from other deities, as well as other goods and services that rival His. I mean God can no more compete with prime time reality television and rap music and cell phones and iPods and the Internet’s MySpace and Facebook, than J.C. can now compete with consumerism and commercialism on the 25^th of December! No, I think ‘God’ (the extraterrestrial since I don’t believe the supernatural God exists) has voluntarily give humanity the ‘big finger’ and taken his bat and ball and gone home to sulk. Or perhaps ‘God’ has been involuntarily exiled. I mean if ‘God’ exists, then perhaps the ‘gods’ must also exist, and because there are many, many ‘gods’, (in this context God is outnumbered many thousands upon thousands to one) well I mean even the schoolyard bully can be sent packing with tail tucked between legs if enough of the bullied gang up and fight back. There’s no love lost between God and the gods since God ascended the Top Dog throne and Commanded that the gods be considered persona non-grata.

However, that aside, J.C.’s ‘mission’ seems to have been somewhat akin to our terrestrial missionaries who spread out to the four ‘corners’ of the globe, including way too often knocking on your door; spreading the ‘good word’ (although often that’s often different words for different missionaries). So, J.C. comes to Earth (probably via Dad’s Starship Heaven) to spread the good news about intelligent life in space, our ‘space brothers’, which was totally misinterpreted and moulded into a supernatural context by our ancient ancestors. That’s understandable – J.C.’s strutting his high tech stuff wouldn’t be comprehensible to the masses 2000+ years ago.

I’ve deliberately used the phrase ‘space brothers’ above, because I want to make a connection between J.C. as an angelic-like extraterrestrial being, and the way more recent (1950’s) contactees who claimed to have had personal contact with and messages from angelic-like extraterrestrial beings, often called by the contactees our ‘space brothers’ who have come to Earth in their ‘flying saucers*’. 

The contactees were often bucketed as total loonies back then (in the 50’s) by the mainstream, even mainstream people interested in extraterrestrial life and UFOs, including myself. That’s no less so today if someone is still foolish enough to mention them – like me here and now. But a question remains on the grounds of ‘innocent until proven guilty’, did the contactees (collectively) invent these angelic-like extraterrestrial beings with the intent of fraud; or to have some fun and hoax the public and pull the wool over their unsuspecting eyes; or perhaps they just, collectively, had some serious mental issues, say delusions of sorts. Or, perhaps the contactees were relating the truth as they thought they had experienced it, when perhaps the angelic-like extraterrestrial beings were being less than 100% honest with them for reasons best known to themselves, though one can speculate.

In the light of J.C. as a role model, passing himself off as a deity acceptable to the populace rather than as a technologically advanced extraterrestrial which might be beyond the comprehension of that same populace, so too in the 1950’s our ‘space brothers’ only told as much of their story as would be comprehensible to the relatively simple people of that era. Now truthfully, the contactees (George Adamski say as an example of the general contactee stereotype) were relatively simple folk. They weren’t university deans, or theoretical physicists, or four-star generals, or diplomatic statesmen and legal eagles and MD’s, etc. That brings up an obvious question, why would our ‘space brothers' bother with the great unwashed when they could just as easily land on the White House lawn and be addressing Congress within hours? Well, back to J.C. as template, the contactees, simple folk, were the sort of folk that – if you believe traditional Biblical J.C. mythology – J.C. would have associated with. However, the contactees were fed enough bovine fertilizer that their idealistic philosophical messages got buried along with their tall tales of trips to Venus and Saturn, etc., where the ‘space brothers’ lived. Although then again, you have that angelic-like ancient Near Eastern goddess Inanna or Inana (Ishtar) identified with the celestial planet Venus, so who knows where the ‘gods’ have actually set up camp!

Or did those 50’s idealistic ‘space brother’ philosophical messages really get buried? Perhaps our ‘space brothers’ are a bit more clued than given credit for.

I can’t help but wonder, maybe it’s no coincidence that almost immediately following the heyday of the contactees came the era of the Hippies and counterculture with their idealistic philosophical concepts (influences which have filtered down to this very day and age) of “hell no, we won’t go”; burn your draft card; bra-burning; flower-power; love; peace; brotherhood (and sisterhood); the dawning of the Age of Aquarius; free love, drop out, tune in, etc. You can’t help but feel that the Biblical J.C. as generally described, would have fitted right into that picture. J.C. might have been more at home with people who smoked pot and attended Woodstock than lunching with politicians and generals smoking cigars, drinking scotch-on-the-rocks and sanctioning the dropping of napalm and Agent Orange on Vietnam.   

As an interesting, but possibly irrelevant aside, the Visoki Dečani is a major Serbian Orthodox Christian monastery located in Kosovo. Within are various murals. On the "The Crucifixion" (of J.C.) fresco, painted in 1350, objects similar to UFOs can be found. They represent two comets that look like space ships, with two men inside of them, and are often cited by those interested in ‘ancient astronauts’. The images are certainly striking and again, Google Images can bring up the relevant pictures. You have to decide for yourself, but if not representing really real ‘ancient astronauts’, well then I’m pretty well stumped. 

So, was J.C. an ‘ancient astronaut’? Only you can be the judge. But if you interpret J.C. related events of roughly 2000 years ago firstly as having been embellished, but secondly when viewed in light of current and projected terrestrial technologies, then it’s not that hard to view J.C. not a saviour, but as an ‘ancient astronaut’ – a dead ‘astronaut’. But if J.C. really was an ‘ancient astronaut’, that just might give a whole new credibility to those 50’s contactees.

*Contactees didn’t use the term UFOs or the phrase ‘unidentified flying objects’ because to them there was nothing unidentified about them.

The Contactees: A Reassessment or Re-evaluation

If the subject of UFOs brings embarrassment to the scientific community, then the subject of the contactees brings embarrassment to the UFO community! Shortly after the dawn of the modern UFO era (1947), an offshoot appeared; humans claiming to have been contacted by the extraterrestrials of those UFOs. Unfortunately, those making the claims, the contactees (as they came to be called) told such outlandish tales that not only did they discredit themselves, but took nearly the whole UFO subject down the gurgler with them. Perhaps it’s now time for a reassessment or reevaluation of the contactees: perpetrators or victims? Did the contactees knowingly try to hoodwink the public with tales of the “Space Brothers”, or did real “Space Brothers” hoodwink the contactees, at least in part, into telling on the surface rather outlandish tales?

Certain privileged humans (called ‘contactees’) have claimed to have had personal and/or mental (psychic; channeling) contact with friendly, completely human-appearing space aliens – at least claimed by their own admissions. These angelic-like UFO related extraterrestrial beings, fully human in appearance, were pretty much a stand alone staple of the (mainly 1950’s) contactees who claimed to have had personal contact with and feel-good cosmic messages from said like angelic-like extraterrestrial beings, often called by the contactees as our ‘space brothers’ who have come to Earth in their ‘flying saucers*’.  Of course many contactees were further privileged to have been taken for rides in these ‘flying saucers’, and traveled into space and to other planets, usually the home abodes of their angelically-human hosts, most often Mars, Venus, Jupiter and Saturn. Well actually the ‘flying saucers’ were more akin to Star Trek’s shuttlecraft; the real alien vessels were the orbiting ‘Mother Ships’, akin the Star Trek’s NCC 1701 Enterprise, and it was these ‘Mother Ships’ that usually zipped our contactee passengers on a grand tour of our solar system and their home planet.

It was unfortunate that such claims tarnished the wider subject of UFOs (as possible evidence that extraterrestrial intelligence existed). However, in some degree of historical hindsight, when perhaps tarnished then, that clearly might not be quite the case now.

The contactees were often bucketed as total loonies back then (in the 50’s) by the mainstream, even mainstream people interested in extraterrestrial life and UFOs, including myself. That’s no less so today if someone is still foolish enough to mention them – like me here and now. But a question remains on the grounds of ‘innocent until proven guilty’, did the contactees (collectively) invent these angelic-like extraterrestrial beings, the ‘Nordics’, with the intent of fraud; or to have some fun and hoax the public and pull the wool over their unsuspecting eyes; or perhaps they just, collectively, had some serious mental issues, say delusions of sorts. Or, perhaps the contactees were relating the truth as they thought they had experienced it, when perhaps the angelic-like extraterrestrial beings were being less than 100% honest with them for reasons best known to themselves, though one can speculate.

Unfortunately, they didn’t provide much in the way of actually evidence in their own defence. Sometimes a supporting witness or two; perhaps a plaster cast of a sandal imprint (the ‘space brothers’ tended to wear quasi-ski gear and sandals. Also in support of their claims, some early 1950s contactees produced photographs of the alleged ‘flying saucers’ (sometimes known as ‘scout ships’) or the much larger often cigar-shaped ‘Mother Ships’ though rarely of the ‘space brothers’ themselves. More than a number of ‘genuine’ photos of  typical extraterrestrial ‘flying saucers’ were noted to bear a suspicious resemblance to mundane terrestrial artifacts like a commonly available chicken egg incubator, complete with light bulbs serving as ‘landing gear’. Pretty obviously faked photographs did nothing to assist their credibility quotient.

However, let’s start with the assumption that the contactees are or were in fact innocent (until proven guilty) and told their stories as actually perceived or as it seemed by them.

In the 1950’s our ‘space brothers’ only told as much of their story as would be comprehensible to the relatively simple people of that era. Now truthfully, the contactees (George Adamski say as an example of the general contactee stereotype) were relatively simple folk. They weren’t university deans, or theoretical physicists, or four-star generals, or diplomatic statesmen and legal eagles and MD’s, etc. That brings up an obvious question, why would our ‘space brothers' bother with the great unwashed when they could just as easily land on the White House lawn and be addressing Congress within hours? Well, the contactees, simple folk, were the sort of folk that our gentle hippy-like ‘space brothers’ would have associated with. However, the contactees were fed enough bovine fertilizer that their idealistic philosophical messages got buried along with their tall tales of trips to Venus and Saturn, etc., where the ‘space brothers’ lived. Although then again, you have that angelic-like ancient Near Eastern goddess Inanna or Inana (Ishtar) identified with the celestial planet Venus, so who knows where the ‘gods’ have actually set up camp!

I mean here that any advanced technological civilization can boldly go and thwart Mother Nature’s hostile environments with a bit of can-do effort. Obvious terrestrial examples show how humans can now live on the polar icecaps; under the ocean; in extremely arid regions; even on the lunar surface. So, who’s to say the ‘space brothers’ didn’t have an HQ on Venus or Saturn or the far side of the Moon? 

Now about the cosmic messages from the ‘space brothers’; dead and buried hogwash, or did those 50’s idealistic ‘space brother’ philosophical messages really get buried? Perhaps our ‘space brothers’ are a bit more clued than given credit for. The contactees thought that universal truths and consequences would be accomplished very simply by the ‘space brothers’ or extraterrestrial brotherhood spreading a message of love and associated brotherhood ideals across the world via themselves. That wasn’t to be then, it isn’t now, but (there’s always a ‘but’ somewhere along the way).

I can’t help but wonder, maybe it’s no coincidence that almost immediately following the heyday of the contactees came the era of the Hippies and counterculture with their idealistic philosophical concepts (influences which have filtered down to this very day and age) of “hell no, we won’t go”; burn your draft card; bra-burning; flower-power; love; peace; brotherhood (and sisterhood); the dawning of the Age of Aquarius; free love, drop out, tune in, etc. You can’t help but feel that the ‘space brothers’ as generally described, would have fitted right into that picture. Our ‘space brothers’ might have been more at home with people who smoked pot and attended Woodstock than lunching with politicians and generals smoking cigars, drinking scotch-on-the-rocks and sanctioning the dropping of napalm and Agent Orange on Vietnam.   

However, there’s nothing overly unique about the 50’s and our contactees. Apart from, though not directly linked to ‘flying saucers’ or UFOs, or the 50’s contactees, there is a rather long history of claims of contact with non-earthly intelligences, if by non-earthly intelligences you include all things supernatural – the deities/gods of mythology. Most of the world's polytheistic religions involved ongoing contact between ordinary humans (or more likely as not rulers like kings and emperors) and a supernatural source of wisdom, such as the gods in human form or, moving on to monotheism, an angel(s) or equivalent. It might be predictable therefore that many of the 1950s contactees, or their followers, would form their own religious cults, with the contactee usually as sole spiritual leader. And so that too came to pass, almost invariably.

There might be another historical connection. It’s been speculated that the ‘gods’ (including ‘God’ were really ‘ancient astronauts’ – presumably that would have to include Jesus Christ. So, was J.C. an ‘ancient astronaut’? If J.C. really was an ‘ancient astronaut’, that just might give a whole new credibility to those 50’s contactees. J.C. was a near clone of the 50’s ‘space brothers’.

For example, the ‘space brothers’ are often labelled as the ‘Nordics’ – Fully human in appearance, they tend to be tall, blond hair, rather long-haired in fact, blue-eyed, with athletic builds (male), or Playboy figures (female). In fact, the ‘space brothers’ sort of resemble the Greek (Titan and Olympian), Roman and Norse gods – physical perfection, profound wisdom, all things bright and beautiful. You can also identify with J.C. as a ‘Nordic’ type and he’d fit right in on a ‘flying saucer’ in the 1950’s chin-wagging with the contactees.

The purpose of the ‘space brothers’ is quasi-missionary, not religion so much as preaching morality, ethics, ecology, profound wisdom, brotherhood, make-love-not-war, ban-the-bomb, things of cosmic importance, all the sorts of things one associates with Hippies and the New Agers. You can associate with J.C. as a sort of New Ager Hippy type and thus as a typical ‘space brother’ as the ‘space brothers’ were considered to be highly spiritually evolved beings.

Of course there’s another possible explanation. Might the ‘contactees’, and through them their readers, have been the victims of cosmic pranksters – the trickster gods of mythology, who in the modern context are the ‘gods’ – flesh-and-blood extraterrestrials and sometimes hangers-on from the glory days of the polytheistic gods who weren’t really gods but ‘gods’? The reader is reminded that every ancient mythology not only has a pantheon of gods, but at least one trickster god in every pantheon, with accent on the word “trickster”. The ‘contactees’ could easily have been relatively innocent victims of a massive hoax. You can hear the tricksters now – “ha, ha – fooled you – again”.

There is an interesting quasi-parallel between the 50’s contactees and the later abductees, even though the “Nordic” “Space Brothers” appear vastly different than the abductee’s “Greys”. The contactees were pre-Hippy New Ager types. In contrast, many abductees seem to undergo quasi-New Age lifestyle changes post abduction(s). They may have become vegetarians, gave up smoking or drinking, joined community groups, started participating in charity work, developed ecological concerns and/or become overall a more spiritually-oriented being.

*Contactees didn’t use the term UFOs or the phrase ‘unidentified flying objects’ because to them there was nothing unidentified about them.

Aliens: The New Religion? Part One

Aliens, as in extraterrestrials, are popular. The number of sci-fi novels, short stories, films, TV shows, factual documentaries, and the popular non-fiction literature (books and articles) must number in the multi-thousands. Are our interest and belief in, and search for, aliens, just a way of a substitution for a lack of belief in God? Do we have to believe in a higher power (advanced technology?), and if it’s not God, then extraterrestrials?

There are those who suggest that our obsession with ancient astronauts, UFOs, SETI (the Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence), and the like is nothing more than a religious fever under a different disguise. Instead of looking towards the heavens for salvation and ultimate truths in God, we reject God and instead we look towards the heavens and seek out new intelligences and new civilizations to boldly lead us on the path to a universal brotherhood; aliens that in their eternal wisdom will show us the one true path and give us all the benefits of their experiences and knowledge, knowledge that which gives us warp drives, a universal truth and justice, and the golden brick road that leads towards the cosmic way (the way of the cosmos?).

Balderdash! Well, sort of. 

God, assuming a God, is about supernatural explanations for creations like the origin of our planet and of us.

God is supposedly about good vs. evil; heaven vs. hell, salvation vs. damnation, and a warm fuzzy eternal afterlife.

God is about morality (never mind the lack of His own).

We don’t look to aliens for creation mythology; the afterlife; and our moral codes.

Certainly SETI (Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence) scientists do not sit in worship at their radio telescope cathedrals that great alien in the sky that they seek. Seek they do, but not to worship. However, some do go a bit over-the-top in suggesting the types of societies they are likely to find and communicate with – it’s their version of the dawning of the Age of Aquarius. See below for more elaboration.

Assuming ancient astronauts, and assuming ancient astronauts were aliens, then the peoples of those ancient times obviously worshiped said ancient astronaut aliens. However, people interested in ancient astronaut aliens today hardly worship that what takes their interest. It’s just another facet of SETI (even if traditional SETI professionals would be horrified at having the study of ancient astronauts lumped in with what they do).

UFOs are slightly different kettles of fish to SETI (well, sort of) or ancient astronauts; different horses of many other colours. One such colour – at least to most people - is the cultist ‘giggle factor’ or ‘silly season’ colour. To the minority of others, well, they (cultists) believe in the ‘space brothers’ and are usually called contactees and they form various - for lack of a better phrase - New Age themed UFO societies. They do indeed worship, if not quite as gods, at least as ultra advanced supreme beings, who, for all practical purposes are as close to godlike and perfect as makes no odds. All is peace and harmony and enlightenment and utopia and perfect health and beauty and eternal rainbows in and on the worlds (including Venus and Saturn, etc.) of the ‘space brothers’. The ‘space brothers” collectively make even our most saintly of saints look like hardened criminals behind bars if not on death row!

UFO ‘space brother’ contactees or cultists often ‘preached’ their sermons of gloom and doom while offering salvation and enlightenment to the great unwashed via the messages they conveyed from those uppity-up pure-in-heart-and-mind aliens. Somehow the ‘space brothers’ offered us the one true pathway away from our destruction, often literally, as in the end of the world.

If I had some $$$ for every time the end of the world had been predicted, lets just say my bank manager and the tax office would both be pleased. I’m sure not a year goes by, probably not even a month, without someone (not always by any means UFO cultists) calling out loud and clear that ‘The sky is falling; the end is here; prepare to meet thy doom’.  For those misguided beings who take one such ever ongoing prophecy seriously, it might, I guess, be more logical to put your salvation eggs in an extraterrestrial basket carried around by UFOs. There’s way more evidence for the UFO ETH (ExtraTerrestrial Hypothesis) than for God. God hasn’t been seen (for at least 4000 years or so), tracked on radar, left physical trace marks on our environment, nor has He been filmed or photographed.

But some of these New Age Themed UFO societies can be hazardous to your health. The Heaven’s Gate group in 1997 were going to hitch a ride with this UFO concealed in the Hale-Bopp Comet as it swung around the Sun. There was one catch however - to get from terrestrial ground zero, to Hale-Bopp, you had to do yourself a fatal mischief. According to the “M*A*S*H” theme song, suicide maybe painless but it is still suicide. [There have been several other instances of mass suicide among the membership of religious cults – the Branch Davidians (Waco, Texas) and followers of Jim Jones and his People’s Temple (Guyana) – but these had nothing to do with aliens.]

Other New Age themed UFO societies are more harmless to your physical health (not sure about your mental health however), like the Unarius [Educational Foundation] Society; the Etherean Society; the Aetherius Society, and dozens more, both major and minor.

It has got to be said that bona fide UFO investigators dislike these cultists for muddying the UFO waters and turning what should be serious study into a joke within the larger general community. Riding with your racially pure white ‘space brothers’ in their UFOs to visit their home worlds (which either no one has ever heard of or which scientists have proven to be hellish enough, way beyond incapable of supporting complex life) and delivering their New Age words of cosmic truth and wisdom is going to generate a lot more column inches in the tabloids than serious investigations will in the major metropolitan press.

Fortunately, these contactees, and the New Age contactee movement were primarily a 1950’s fad. While there are those still around, they now have little real impact or influence today. However, their damage has been done, and the UFO field can not totally shake off their immense contribution to the UFO ‘silly season’ ‘giggle’ factor. 

In general however, serious UFO investigators who take the phenomena, well, seriously, most certainly do not worship whatever aliens, if any, may pilot said UFOs. I’ve never seen any evidence that UFO investigators are any different from the general population in terms of religious affiliation or church attendance.

To be continued...