The Ancient Alien’s Bible: Part One

Erich Von Daniken asked the question “was God as astronaut?” Traditional Christians, Muslims, and those of the Jewish faiths of course answer “No”, God was (and is) a supernatural deity. Those more inclined to be free thinkers pondering realities outside of the religious box, answer anywhere from “Maybe” to “Yes”. If the latter, how might Biblical characters, places and events be interpreted in an ‘ancient astronaut’ context. Who’s who, Where’s where and what’s what?

All interpretations are based on the text of the King James Version of all things Biblical.

WHO’S WHO

God: OIC and captain of the Spaceship Heaven. His real alien name is of course Yahweh, or in the vowelless version YHWH, but I’ll just shorten that to God, a name that all and sundry recognise.

Satan: God’s original First Officer and second in command of the Spaceship Heaven, later exiled to Hell, or at least to Earth, for mutiny. 

Fallen Angels: Fallen Angels are those officers and crew who were in cahoots with Satan in the unsuccessful mutiny against Captain God and who were court-martialed and stripped of their status and rank and exiled to Hell on Earth. 

The Seraphim: Because the Seraphim have six wings, they are probably a separate extraterrestrial race aligned with the alien race of beings to which God and company belong. [Well Star Trek exhibited a multi-species crew from the start.] One such alien was apparently someone called Metatron, an angel who acted as the ‘voice of God’, a scribe, and is the tallest and greatest of the lot. ‘He’s’ sort of the chief cook and bottle washer on the Spaceship Heaven.

The Cherubim (singular is cherub): The extraterrestrial Cherubim might be related to the Seraphim in that they are enormous four-winged beings. The definitive book in the Bible on cherubim is the Book of Ezekiel, mainly the first and tenth chapter.

Governor or Watcher Angels: These are your typically obedient angels who just sort of watch over humanity in general, a sort of extraterrestrial Peeping Tom some of who had an eye for the Daughters of Men.   

Archangels: Senior officers of Spaceship Heaven. Those messenger and battle ready angels. The best known of the lot were the archangels who are very high-ranking angels indeed, starting with Michael, Gabriel and Raphael, but followed by Uriel, Simiel, Orifiel and Zachariel.

Angels: Ordinary crewmembers of the Spaceship Heaven, forever running errands for the senior officers.

Sons of God: Apparently hand chosen senior crew members, perhaps literally biological offspring of Captain God. The Sons of God were apparently some or all of the Governor or Watcher Angels.

Daughters of Men: Human females.

Nephilim: The offspring of the Sons of God and the Daughters of Men. They were apparently the ‘giants’ referred to ‘in the Earth’, though exactly how giant was giant isn’t spelled out.

Jesus: Another offspring of the Sons of God and the Daughters of Men, albeit much farther on down the historical track, or perhaps the offspring between God himself and the Daughters of Men (well one anyway). Jesus would later rise (from the ‘dead’) to become First Officer on board Spaceship Heaven. That Jesus is an extraterrestrial is admitted by himself in John 8:23. Of note here is that Jesus probably used holographic technology to give an appearance of walking on water and/or appearing alive and in the ‘flesh’ post execution – which he survived, another sign of high technology in operation. 

Baal: God’s prime extraterrestrial rival for power and authority in the region, though there’s never any direct and open physical conflict twixt the two.

Moses: Just one of several abductees noted and logged in Biblical texts. He was abducted by a ‘cloud’ and carried on up the mountain for a close encounter with a supreme alien lawmaker. Upon his return his face had an unnatural glow about it which caused those waiting his return to be afraid of him.

Jacob: Witnessed (or dreamed about) angels ascending and descending to and from Spaceship Heaven.

Ezekiel: A human who had a close encounter of the third kind (those Cherubim) plus an associated abduction event.

Jonah: Spent three days and nights in isolation inside a technological craft.

Joshua: 1) Was in possession of high technology sonic weaponry at Jericho. 2) He later witnessed several UFOs that stood still in the sky providing illumination for his army.

Enoch and Elijah: These two human males are the only two whose ultimate fate (death) we don’t know anything about. Both humans apparently joined the Spaceship Heaven at the behest of her captain never to be seen again, albeit Elijah was spotted with Jesus by three of his disciples (see Transfiguration).

Old Age Pensioners: Methuselah, Noah, Adam as well as others, apparently lived to really, really ripe old ages, way, way, way beyond the standard three score and ten. The explanation: these were humans invited by the officers and crew of Spaceship Heaven to take a relativistic interstellar journey at velocities at a considerable fraction of the speed of light. They aged normally on board, but because of the time dilation effect, time passed more rapidly back on Earth, or more slowly on the spaceship (same difference), such that they returned home hundreds of terrestrial year’s later – Earth time - thus the false appearance that they were hundreds of years old at journey’s end but didn’t look a day over thirty because they really weren’t a day over thirty! It’s referred to as the Twin Paradox of Special Relativity, though it’s not really a paradox at all, just the logical conclusion of the equations of Special Relativity which have been verified by observation and experiment, at least on the micro scale.

Matthew, Mark, Luke & John: A quartet of roving reporters who independently investigated what was to them relatively recent history – just several generations had passed – each in his own way. The topic of their investigation was an alleged historical figure, a figure that seemed to have gained some degree of uniqueness, notoriety and prominence as a possible deity and the quartet wrote up their short biographies accordingly. 

To be continued…

Biblical Tall Tales: Jonah and Joshua

Ah, the Bible! The Bible is an endless source of inspiration. Inspiration that is for trying to figure out how to deal with the idiocies contained within. Some tales are plausible like David and Goliath; many aren’t, like Jonah and the whale or large fish; and some, like Joshua at Gibeon (Gideon) violate so many laws of physics that no sci-fi authors in their right minds would perpetrate such nonsense on their reading public. 

It never ceases to amaze me that an awful lot of people take every word in the Bible literally. I consider that a very poor reflection on the human intellect and the ability to think logically. To believe the Bible as literal truth today is now akin to believing that the Earth is flat and that the Sun goes around it. Once upon a time it might have been understandable, but those days are long gone. 

However, scholars who don’t accept Biblical truth as the undisputed literal word of God, when stumped for an actual alternative physical explanation, retreat to nebulous and wishy-washy concepts and start throwing buzz words like parable, metaphor, archetype, symbolism, ancestral memory and other psychological mumbo-jumbo around – anything that’s an alternative to 1) pure make-believe or 2) a real and unexplainable event. But those are my alternatives: the tales of Jonah and Joshua are either just make-believe or reality. Make-believe is more way more plausible, but it’s boring. So, let’s try for reality, but not supernatural reality – that’s a contradiction in terms.   

Jonah First:

Despite a large percentage of people taking a literal interpretation of all things Biblical, including the ‘Jonah and the Whale’ of a tale, now you know, and I know since we can think for ourselves, that while it might be theoretically possible for a very large fish, or some whales (like the sperm whale) to swallow you alive and whole (thus avoid biting you in half in the process), it’s unlikely in the extreme because no marine creature currently known exhibits that sort of feeding behaviour. Large fish or toothed whales have teeth for a reason, and humans are fairly large prey – we’re not minnows. Other very large fish like the whale shark (an endangered species that needs your help) don’t have teeth the shark in “Jaws” would have been proud to display, rather they are filter feeders. Filter feeders include the very large baleen whale – but it couldn’t swallow you without choking to death. So, you’re gonna be bitten and chewed first before being swallowed. Further, you’re not going to survive in their stomach for very long – minutes at most in all likelihood. If you don’t drown first, the lack of oxygen will soon do you in or the digestive acids will soon turn you into digestible fish food. So the ‘Jonah and the Whale’ story is rubbish, unless the whale were really a submarine that was embellished and given flesh-and-blood in order to provide the narrator and reader with something in a more familiar context. But then there weren’t no subs back then were there?

So the story of ‘Jonah and the Whale’ (or large fish) is in all likelihood just another of the numerous Biblical tall tales. It can not be a literal event. However, let’s play that ‘what if’ game again.

I interrupt the story here to point out that 1) behind all mythology, including Biblical mythology lurks a tiny grain of historical truth and that 2) God isn’t a supernatural deity but just one of many extraterrestrials who have arrived on Earth eons before and have divided jurisdiction over various terrestrial geographical areas among themselves. God’s patch of turf to oversee and govern of course is what we now call the Middle East. The logic behind that is too long and complicated to go into again; I’ve done that previously. Let’s just say if you believe in God then you actually believe in extraterrestrial life, extraterrestrial intelligence and ‘ancient astronauts’. 

Now if I get the story right, God (the E.T.) sends Jonah on an errand. Jonah doesn’t want a bar of this and heads off in the opposite direction that involves a sea journey*. God ain’t amused at mutiny and so causes this storm at sea, which makes the sailors very unhappy indeed. The sailors, a superstitious lot, make Jonah walk-the-plank or otherwise heave Jonah overboard, actually at Jonah’s own suicidal suggestion. Now that throws a monkey wrench in God’s plans. God therefore had better save his errand boy from drowning and so Jonah is rescued by one of Captain God’s Starship Heaven’s shuttlecraft, or a UFO. But, Jonah gets punished with a three day and night solitary confinement prison sentence for his disobedience, locked away inside this so-called ‘fish’. But, Jonah, inside the belly of the ‘beast’ is eventually released (regurgitated) unharmed, repents and is able to complete his mission for Captain God. A happy ending!

Now Jonah, being a rather typical Biblical character, unsophisticated in the ways of high technology (and you can’t blame him for that – you couldn’t exactly enrol for a Ph.D. in engineering way back then) found himself floundering in the ocean one moment, then locked inside something strange for three days and nights before being deposited on dry land. The only logical explanation to such a Biblical lad lacking an engineering Ph.D. was the whale/large fish alternative. In fact to his mind, there was no alternative – that had to have been the only possible explanation.

Now Jonah wouldn’t of necessity have to have actually seen the aliens piloting the UFO shuttlecraft sent by God (the E.T.) that rescued him from certain death.

So, in conclusion, here are your options: 1) Supernatural God works a miracle and allows Jonah to get swallowed alive by a large marine creature and live to tell the tale after surviving a lack of oxygen and digestive acids for three days and nights; 2) There was no such person and no such marine creature, rather the author of the Jonah tale was on some sort of Biblical-era LSD – the option any sane betting person would take; 3) the story has some sort of foundation, in which case the ‘fish’ had to have been something technological complete with oxygen supply and no digestive juices.  

*Obviously Jonah didn’t perceive God as all-knowing and all-powerful, otherwise he would have known that ‘resistance is futile’!

Joshua Second:

Then we have the tale of Joshua, a relatively minor figure in the Bible, a sort of sidekick apprentice to Moses during all those Exodus bits, at least until he gets his very own Biblical book, the “Book of Joshua” (how original). He was a sort of Biblical James Bond and military officer who commanded the Israelites in the destruction of many places, like Canaan and Jericho. But it was at Gibeon (Gideon) that everlasting historical fame, if not fortune, awaited Joshua, for at Gibeon he asked God to cause the Sun and the Moon to stand still, so that he could finish his battle, a battle on behalf of God, in daylight.

The exact quote from the King James Version is:

Joshua: 10: 12 – “Then spake Joshua to the LORD in the day when the LORD delivered up the Amorites before the children of Israel, and he said in the sight of Israel, Sun, stand thou still upon Gibeon; and thou, Moon, in the valley of Ajalon.”

Joshua: 10: 13 - “And the sun stood still, and the moon stayed, until the people had avenged themselves upon their enemies. Is not this written in the book of Jasher? So the sun stood still in the midst of heaven, and hasted not to go down about a whole day.”

Now the first and minor objection is that if the Moon and the Sun are in the sky at the same time, the additional lighting the Moon provides is so marginal that the average person wouldn’t even notice it. The Full Moon, when you get maximum illumination from the lunar orb, only rises at about the same time the Sun is setting; setting when the Sun is rising in the east. As long as the Sun was up and shining, Joshua had all the light he needed.

Now the second and major objection is that in order to get the Sun to stand still – hover in the sky – Planet Earth has got to stop rotating on its axis. God would have had to cause the Earth to brake very suddenly. Now, what happens if you’re driving along at a rapid rate of miles per hour and all of a sudden have to apply the brakes full force? Well anything not tied down inside the car is going to keep on travelling in a forward direction. Apply that principle to the Earth, which is rotating a hell of a lot faster than any family car, and anything not tied down, like you, will go shooting off into space! So, the Sun standing still in the sky would result in the Mother of all Disasters down here on not so terra-firma. Since that didn’t happen, the Joshua story is another example of Biblical bovine fertilizer.

Now the third and also a major objection is that since the Moon goes around the Earth, stopping just the Earth’s rotation wouldn’t stop the Moon from travelling across the sky. God would have had to stop the Moon dead still in its orbit. But that adds the complication that the gravitational attraction between Earth and Moon would then cause the Moon to start dropping like the proverbial stone – right towards target Earth (actually the Earth would also head towards the Moon as well; each celestial object gravitationally attracting the other). It’s only because the Earth orbits the Sun that prevents us from colliding with it; ditto the Moon orbiting the Earth in constant motion results in no lunar-terra collision. Of course God also needed to freeze the Earth’s rotation since that too would cause the Moon to move in the sky from east to west.

Now what sort of natural or even unnatural but closer-to-home terrestrial objects might substitute for a stationary Sun and Moon? Well, nothing really comes to mind. Since there were no helicopters, flares, blimps or balloons, or spotlights back then, and no other natural source of light, say ball lightning, stands still, then we’re left with either a total fabrication or something extraterrestrial. 

So the only escape clause as I see it, apart from the observation that the tale is pure fiction, is that the objects weren’t the Sun and the Moon at all, but UFOs under Captain God’s command. Brightly glowing UFOs could hover overhead, for as long as this was required, providing the illumination required for Joshua to complete his military rape and pillage, which of course God gave His stamp of approval to.

P.S. The moral to these stories is that once you reject the literal interpretation of any one of the Biblical tall tales (The Brothers Grimm should have written so many), like Jonah and Joshua, then you have to question the literal aspects of all the texts; every Biblical book, chapter and verse.

And the Walls Came Tumbling Down: The Battle of Jericho

One of the more popular Biblical bedtime stories is Joshua and the Battle of Jericho, a sort of Biblical version of the big bad wolf who huffed and puffed and blew the house down, only in this case the huffing and puffing went into playing musical instruments and the resulting noise brought the house down. Is this just another example of a story in the Bible’s collection of stories that only the gullible could accept? In this case, I’d have to say the answer is a very loud and unmusical “yes”.  

Despite extensive archaeological excavations at Jericho, there is no actual hardcore evidence that emerges that supports the Biblical (“Joshua 6”) account of Joshua and the Battle of Jericho. Jericho was in ruins many hundreds of years before Joshua (if there ever was a Joshua) existed and stumbled across the site.  So if the walls came a-tumbling down, they tumbled way before the Biblical account.  Joshua and the Israelites hadn’t yet been dreamt up in anyone’s mythology, and those ruined walls were probably done in because of numerous earthquakes that naturally occur in the region.

However, let’s play the ‘what if’ game. Can Joshua’s priestly jazz band comprised of seven ram’s horns bring down massive stone walls? Can pigs fly?

Here’s the basic story as outlined in the Biblical “Book of Joshua: Chapter Six” (King James Version).

Now God wanted Joshua to take the ‘city’ of Jericho, but in a rather strange way at least for a typical military strategist. That strange bit is why God’s war strategy (which surely must be perfect coming from an all-knowing deity) isn’t taught in the war colleges of the armed forces of the world – I surely don’t recall it having been used in any other military campaign, ancient or recent. Anyway, God’s strategy, the key to the success of the siege of, or the Battle of Jericho as led by Joshua, was to apparently circle the city for six days with his men of war and seven priests carrying ram’s horns. Maybe the inhabitants were meant to laugh themselves to death at such antics.

Anyway, on the seventh day, those priests, renowned musicians all, were to play those trumpets shaped in the form of ram’s horns, play them fortissimo, and then some. Oh, and everybody was to shout long and loud, but not before the actual time required – dawn or shortly thereafter on that fateful seventh day (which you’d think would have been a day of rest from all that previous six days of marching ‘round Jericho). Timing was everything! So you have a lot of noise – seven ram’s horns making really loud trumpet sounds, and lots of shouting. Then, and only then, would the walls of Jericho come a-tumbling down and Joshua and his army could lay siege to the city and among other things grab all the city’s gold, silver, brass and iron to add to the Lord’s collection of treasures for His treasury. Why God needs silver and gold and brass and iron is quite beyond me since presumably He could create as much of the stuff as He wanted! Anyway, The Ark of the Covenant was also present, but what actual role it played, if any, isn’t made very clear. Probably none as it was just a storage device – a portable library containing all those Biblical “thou shall nots”. 

Okay, so at dawn or thereabouts on the seventh day the priests played (blasted out) their number one song on the Biblical hit parade; everybody shouted (exactly what they shouted isn’t made clear), and the walls of Jericho came a-tumbling down. Then Joshua’s henchmen stormed the city, and except for one family, took no prisoners, putting all and sundry (even oxen and sheep) to the sword – no doubt this is where General Santa Anna got his ‘show them no mercy’ inspiration from at the siege of the Alamo. Anyway, then for good measure they burned what was left of Jericho’s rubble (except for the gold and silver and brass and iron which went into God’s coffers). Because of Joshua’s actions, God saw to it that he achieved everlasting fame (though I’m not sure it’s the sort of something I’d like to be remembered for in the history books). That’s the Battle of Jericho in summary. So, what do we make of sound as a military weapon?

In terms of application to warfare, it is known that very low frequency sounds can create the sensation that your bowels and contents have turned to jelly. Translated, it’s very difficult to be a 100% efficient soldier if you are in desperate need to go to the bathroom!

Very high frequency sound on the other hand can disorient one. A disoriented soldier is not an effective soldier.

However, we don’t see anything along those lines from the front lines in any current military conflict that I’m aware of. To the best of my knowledge, sound hasn’t been used to any great extent, if ever, on the battlefield, maybe because of limited range; maybe because sound doesn’t discriminate between the opposing sides.

So, sound as a military weapon against a biological enemy must not be all that viable.

Still, the biological viability aside, that sort of military application has no effect on the nonliving, which I assume the Walls of Jericho were – nonliving that is.

Sound (vibrating air) is a force. It’s a pressure wave in the atmosphere. Just like a water wave can push things around, and destroy solid objects (as we’ve all seen in recent films of tsunamis), so too can sound waves, but of course because or since air is way less dense a medium than water, the effects are equally reduced. Sound can of course travel through solids as well and is also a pressure wave that compresses the ‘solid’ (which is actually mostly empty space) as it passes through, just like sound travels through liquids – think of whale songs or sonar.

If you’re looking at just pure air pressure, or the pressure exerted by the air in the form of the winds, I doubt whether even a massive hurricane (or typhoon/cyclone) could have caused even minor destruction to the walls of Jericho, not that that region of the world is normally subjected to such extreme weather events. 

A series of F-5 tornadoes might have done the trick, but then the Bible should have given credit where credit was due – to an act of God (no need for a middle man or men or musicians). It would have been a miracle actually since F-5 tornadoes aren’t standard weather issued events in the Jericho region either. When’s the last time you saw tornado footage and destruction from that part of the world?

That leaves the wind or blast of a nuclear weapon, but then Joshua and his priestly jazz band would have become toast too, being within a trumpet-shout of ground zero. There would have been no survivors inside left to slaughter, and those treasures of gold, silver, brass and iron wouldn’t have been worth a damn thing – just radioactive slag. Besides, there’s no archaeological evidence of intense heat (vitrified or fused sand) at that site or of anything blowing up of any nature for that matter. 

But that’s not quite the end of the story. If it were, Jericho’s walls would still be standing (assuming no earthquakes of course). There’s a physics phenomenon termed resonance. Most physical objects have some sort of natural property which causes them to not only act in phase with external vibrations of a just-so nature, but those very vibrations keep on building up to ever greater and greater amplitudes. The solid object in question oscillates back and forth to ever greater extremes. If those extreme violent swaying motions become so strong that they become greater than the physical forces holding the object together, the object shatters in a resonance disaster – in other words, it suffers a catastrophic failure.  

We’ve all heard of or seen (even if just in the movies), that parlour ‘trick’ where an opera singer shatters a wine glass through just the sound of her voice alone. The vibrations from her voice are in sync with the natural resonance frequency of the glass. But then again, if the opera singer sings softly, softly, the glass is out of harms way. Of course a thin wine glass is one thing; a massive stone walled fortress is quite something else yet again.

I’d suggest that not even a modern metal heavy rock band, with all the high tech available to it, even circling Jericho with boom-boxes galore, wouldn’t have come close to bringing the walls down. The residents might flee in terror from the so-called ‘music’ but the walls would remain intact.

That’s true even for other modern loud noises like a sonic boom or say the launch of a Saturn V rocket or the Space Shuttle. There’s a heck of a lot of loud rumbling, but all those infrastructures in the vicinity still stand after-the-fact. The vibrations of the one either don’t match the natural resonance of the other, and/or just aren’t energetic enough.  

It’s going to have to take something more powerful than existed back then (like shouting and ram’s horn trumpets) or even something we have today like heavy metal bands and rockets. If the Battle of Jericho is true, if sound really did bring down massive stone walls, then alien technology must have been employed – terrestrial technology of that era (and ours as well) just wasn’t and isn’t up to the task. However, given a choice of believing extraterrestrials (‘God’ and company) had some sort of grudge against the residents of Jericho and employed some of us humans to resolve that grudge (buck-passing), or that the Battle of Jericho was nonsense from opening notes to final coda, well you would have to bet on the side of pure nonsense. I mean is there anyone reading this who seriously believes they could, as a parallel event, fly a seven or even a seventy piece band to say the Great Wall of China and knock even a tiny section of it down just by playing a bit of Wagner, Gershwin, or even rock & roll?  I didn’t think so.

Speaking of Biblical sites and destroyed cities that have no archaeological evidence to establish their historicity whatever, there’s the very tall Biblical bedtime tale of Sodom and Gomorrah. Those twin cities were destroyed in a rain or fire and brimstone (no earthquake or trumpets here), but there’s been no active volcanic activity in that region of the Dead Sea for multi-thousands and thousands of years. Of course it might have been a nuclear weapon as some speculate that there was an advanced human civilization that existed tens of thousands of years ago that had attained such advanced high-tech (highly doubtful), or perhaps a meteor strike. Such speculation however is of no use unless an actual site can be identified, explored and evacuated by archaeologists, and that’s proved ever elusive, as elusive as the ancient Lost Continent of Atlantis, the one that’s allegedly beyond those Pillars of Hercules.