Aliens & Demons

(soft, chiming music) (sharp, ominous music) - The last place you'd probably ever suspect you'd find a Biblical scholar is at a UFO conference. I've been to a bunch of them. I've spoken at a few. The reason I'm there is because that subject matter is hugely popular. Just think of something like Ancient Aliens. Millions and millions and millions of viewers. This is a big deal, and it's a big deal for me as a Biblical scholar because when you get into this subject matter, it's inherently about questions like, what really is humanity? Who put us here? What

about God, is there a God? Maybe the God we think of is actually an alien superior being. Now, for me, this takes us right into the unseen world. The realm of angels and demons and gods, and God himself. Biblical stuff. (epic orchestral music) I see a great intersection, a significant intersection, between this kind of content and Biblical theology. People want to know what the truth is. They wanna know how to think about who they are, why they're here, and does this book we call the Bible have any validity at all? I'm often asked, "Well, are

there UFOs?" And when people typically ask that question, what they sort of mean upfront is, "Do you believe that there are extraterrestrials "flying craft around the sky?" It's a sort of a simplistic way to approach things, though. Yes, there are lots and lots of UFO sightings that are legitimate. But what does that mean, though? It means somebody's looking up in the sky and they see something that they can't identify. That's all it means. Now, even if they're a trained observer, like a pilot or a military person. Someone who's used to seeing aircraft. Even they will

see things that they cannot identify. They don't really know what that is. There are thousands of such reports every year in the United States. This is not an isolated sort of thing. So, if that's what we're talking about, yeah. There are UFOs. The question is again, how do we process what we've seen? There are experimental aircraft that very few people, even among trained pilots, would know what that thing is. We have a long history of this in the United States. All that said, though, there are some that just defy categorization. There's something about the object,

either in terms of the way it changes shape or you have instances where one will explode, for lack of a better term, come apart, and then reassemble. Things like this that just don't seem to fit any of the other templates. So, there are anomalies. When you start talking in those terms about something you visually see, you are inherently sort of drawn into the spiritual world. And that's at the point where a lot of people, again, are really especially interested in the topic. Because when they start treading into that turf, it gets them into religion. It

gets them into theology. It gets them into the Bible, and other sacred books as well. (sharp violin music) A lot of Biblical scholars have hobbies. Some tinker on cars, some are into cooking. What I do is UFO stuff. There are a lot of people who are interested in this subject, or they've had some experience or they know someone that they trust who's had some sort of experience. And oftentimes, in the Christian context, they get written off pretty quickly. A pastor... "Maybe you need counseling. "Maybe you need therapy. "Maybe we need to cast a demon out

of you." Or something like that! Now, I have found in my exposure to both Christians and non-Christians in this little world that they are primed to have really significant, life-changing theological discussions. I've met pastors, in fact, at UFO conferences, who are really making an effort to try to process this and keep their faith. I know one church in particular in Puerto Rico where almost the entire congregation claims to have been abducted by aliens. Now, that is really off the beaten path, but they're Christians and they're serious, and they don't wanna dump their faith. But they

want some answers. And I get in trouble for saying this, but I'll say it here as well. I have had better theological discussions at UFO conferences than I have had in church. If this is true, how do we think about the Bible? How do we think about the content of our faith? I've never had an unusual experience on my own, but for me, it was the 1997 Roswell conference, obviously in Roswell, New Mexico, the very famous UFO case. I had done a good bit of reading about that and one day I was listening to the

CNN broadcast of an air force debriefing, (colonel speaking, muffled) and there was a reporter at the conference who had apparently read a good bit of information about the event. And he asked the air force colonel, a guy named Colonel Haynes, about something in the report. And the question was, "Well, Colonel Haynes, in the report, "you and the air force say that "the bodies that witnesses claimed to have seen "in this crashed UFO at Roswell in 1947 "were actually crash dummies that the air force used." And of course, the colonel acknowledged that. And then the reporter

said, "Well, the report itself says "that the air force only began using these dummies "in the early 1950s." So, how do we get this disconnect? Cause it's several years. What he said was, "Yes, that is correct." And the reporter said, "How does that work?" And the colonel actually said, "We believe that the witnesses to the Roswell event, "we think have undergone time compression." (sharp violin music) And when I heard that, I thought exactly what the reporter said. "What's that? "What is time compression?" And the colonel answered, "Well, we think that the witnesses "are re-telling a

story that actually happened in the 50s "but they're remembering it as happening in 1947." Now, we're sitting at Roswell, you know. If I'm the reporter, and I'm listening to an event, a conference about an event, this is an anniversary event, in fact. The 50th anniversary of the event. And everybody can do the math. There were not just two or three witnesses to the Roswell event. There were hundreds of primary witnesses, people in those people's families, again, who heard about the story. It was printed in the Roswell Daily Record, July 2nd, 1947. It got picked up

by newspapers in 1947, the same week, across the country. But somehow, this guy's saying "No, no, no, no no. "No, it was really in the 50s." And as soon as I heard that, I thought, somebody, somewhere, in the military, in the government. You know, in this need-to-know world. Somebody, somewhere, wants this myth to live. Because that's all that this press conference is doing. It's feeding into the mythology of a government coverup, and the cover story is aliens. Because the answer that the colonel gave was so ridiculous and so easily falsified that I couldn't believe what

I was hearing. And so that sort of took me from a casual reader, somebody with a sustained but casual interest, into a person that thought, I need to do some research here, because there's something about this case. There's something about this subject. There's more than meets the eye here. Somebody wants this myth to live, and I wanted to know why. (shuddering, ominous music) So, when it comes to Roswell, you have some genuine documents that reference the event and the thing that was found and what you find is that it was not an extraterrestrial object but

it wasn't what the air force says it was either. So, that's interesting on a number of levels. On the one hand, it affirms the event, because hey. We're at the CNN press conference in 1997 and we can all do math, all right? It goes back to the 40s, not the early 50s. You also have documents that most everyone within the UFO community think are fraudulent, or are partly fraudulent. Those are called the Majestic documents. Now, there are a handful of UFO researchers that take them seriously. Most of them don't because of the way they came

out. There was literally microfilm showing up in a journalist's mailbox, (muffled radio announcements) and here you have a whole slew of documents. And it happened more than once. So, the Majestic documents really, again, are kind of shady. But what's interesting about them is, they actually mix and blend exotic technology that we know about from World War Two and the early Cold War era that was well in advance of what we were using in World War Two and what was rumored to sort of be possessed or at least have people working on in Nazi Germany at

the time. There was a process that was being worked on in Nazi Germany toward the end of the war to produce weapons-grade nuclear material without a reactor. It was a photochemical process. (air gushing) That was sort of considered quasi-mythical, but documentation has come out that, yeah, they knew how to do this. And there are parts of that process that show up in the Majestic documents. Now, I look at that and say, well, that's not a coincidence. They probably found some craft, some experimental thing that was using nuclear power, or that was part of this process,

and that's what crashed, and they didn't want anybody to know about it. So, the convenient cover story was flying saucers, because we've had in the early 40s leading up to 1947, you had reports of flying saucers and flying craft, and it became sort of a good misdirection. You could say, "Well, we don't know what it is," or, "It's just a weather balloon." (balloon hissing and inflating) And you could think, well, I wonder if the Russians would've figured this out, or if somebody working for us that figured it out. You know, we don't even know among

ourselves what's going on here. But eventually, the people in the know find it useful to create the confusion, and to sort of have the myth live. And the alien story becomes a very convenient misdirection. My view, and this is the view that I take in the facade, is that Roswell was an Operation Paperclip screw-up. This was a program begun by our government during World War Two. We knew we were gonna win the war. The question became, what do we do with some of the people who are sort of at the forefront of technologies we're interested

in, like the V2 rocket? (rocket firing) President Truman at the time did not want anyone from Nazi Germany or Japan who was involved in war crimes brought into our country, even if it was for an ostensibly good purpose. Let's tap their brains and get their technological knowledge. (rocket firing) - Rocket's fired, set! - There were people, though, who disagreed with him. (laughing) And so what they did, along the chain of vetting people, was if they got a really interesting candidate that they knew would be rejected because of a connection to the death camps, or something

like that, they would put a paperclip on that person's file, and that was a signal to the next person down the line to pull that file, give that guy a new history, clean up his record, and then pass it on. Now, we got over 700 Nazi scientists into the country working for us in this project. Some of the most famous. Wernher von Braun, who became number two at NASA. Really responsible for a lot of our rocketry, and a lot of our space program. And he also became Walt Disney's spokesperson for the Disney's World of Tomorrow.

I remember seeing von Braun on TV. He was a Nazi! But again, nobody really knew the exact details of his history because they'd been deflected, erased or manipulated. What I think happened is, we got a number of these people over, especially the ones who sort of knew about exotic craft. You know, flight modifications, how to build different craft. We know the Nazis were working on wingless aircraft, delta shapes. Which if you go back to the early reports of quote unquote flying saucers, the reports don't actually say that the craft looked like saucers. It says they

were triangular delta craft that moved like saucers skipping across water, like a stone or saucer. The flying saucer term actually comes from a case in the northwest, where I'm at right now. Kenneth Arnold is the big case. He was flying a small plane, and while he was in the air, he saw a number of craft flying in formation. And he said that they moved like plates skipping across a flat surface or water. And he used the term saucer to describe, again, this sort of skipping motion. And out of that came the whole term, flying saucer.

But when he was asked to draw what he saw, he drew delta wing craft. He didn't draw a perfect circle, in like we typically think of with flying saucers. Now we can look in hindsight, and we know, again, that some of the things they were working on. We know the processes that they were using to do this. And these things show up in the Majestic documents. And some also very human technologies. The craft at Roswell, for instance. You'll read about, again, the exotic things. "Oh, we don't know how this works or what it is." And

then they'll have things like gears. (gears grinding) You know, why would you need a gear in a craft of this nature, if it was truly something that could travel through space? There are incongruities there. You have Roswell. This is the place where we stored our nuclear bombs. This was an important base. What would the public reaction have been in 1947, right after the war, to find out that at this base, we had personnel who had been working on things from Nazi Germany? I mean, that would have just caused a-- (shell exploding) Even if they weren't

located specifically there, to learn that we had them in our scientific apparatus. That they had not been prosecuted. That their records had been sanitized, and here they are on our payroll, on the taxpayer payroll. That would have just caused an uproar. It's a very good cover story to take what happened at Roswell and call it extraterrestrial, or say it's a mystery, because it helps you cover up and misdirect attention from what you're really doing. Another reason, I think, that Roswell had to be covered up, or attention diverted from what it really was, are the bodies

that get reported in the Roswell incident. I don't think at all that they were extraterrestrial bodies. What I think they were were either young children, or perhaps children that had certain diseases like progeria, where they're bald, their heads get big. That sort of thing. There's documentation that these sorts of children, and also young adults who fit a certain height and weight profile, were taken out of prisons. There were death row inmates, and we experimented on them. Now, that's shocking, but where it comes from is Operation Paperclip again. The Japanese side of Paperclip, they had two

programs that are important to this discussion. One was Operation Fu-Go, which was high-altitude balloons. And the other one was the work done at Unit 731, which was bioweapons. These two things were gonna be married by the Japanese. They tested their high altitude balloons during the war. They would put an explosive on one of these balloons, launch it, and then the wind currents would take it over to the west coast of the United States. So, if they reached and exploded, they would know that it worked, and these balloons actually worked. And the plan was to not

hook explosives to the thing, but to hook biological weapons. You know, to infect the water supply, or spread diseases that had no cure. You know, just really nasty stuff. Think of anthrax, that sort of thing. You could deliver that with one of these balloons. Now, in this country, a few of them did reach here. The press was forbidden from talking about any of this by the military. And they actually obeyed, and the logic was, we don't want the Japanese to know that one of them ever got here. What we did was get people from Japan,

who were part of these programs, into this country. And then we started experimenting with high-altitude balloons. What could be done? We used human beings for altitude tests. There's something in this country called Project Sunshine, where we were taking death row inmates and using them (muffled radio chattering) to be experimental subjects, because we needed to know the effects of this or that on a human body. (muffled radio chattering) And so when one of them crashes, there's a screw-up, okay? Operation Paperclip experiment goes wrong in the desert there in Roswell. It's a very convenient thing to say,

"We have no idea what this is. "Oh, it's just a balloon." Or, "Hey, maybe the Russians are doing it," Or, "Or maybe it's space aliens." And to make the myth sort of real, real enough so that people talk about it and think that's what we're covering up instead of the thing we're really covering up. It's a very useful thing in that respect. (tense, shuddering music) One of the things that you'll run into if you spend any serious time reading about UFOs is something that ufologists call the Contactee Movement, or contactee literature. These are people's stories

when they claim to have been abducted by aliens, or they claim to have met alien beings. And what's interesting to me as a theologian and as a Biblical scholar is the messaging. There are a number of people in the field. They would attribute it to very human causes, and brainwashing techniques. People abused in various ways, and various reasons, and given screen memories. Something to remember in place of this. Okay, this is a very weird, vast field. It has deep roots in some very esoteric subjects that sound like they can't be real, like mind control, MKUltra.

(discordant beeping) To me, it's not a coincidence that the same people who are in the paperwork at the congressional hearing on MKUltra in the 70s? Their names show up in alien abduction narratives. This was a program that grew out of CIA and a few other government agency efforts to produce drugs for different purposes. It really began in the pursuit of a truth serum, believe it or not. In the 50s, there was a lot of effort put into, "Can we come up with a drug "that forces people to tell the truth? "And if we can do

that, can we use that, "take that drug and experiment on our own people "to build up a resistance in case they're ever captured?" Well, part of that research, the people discovered that when you traumatize an individual, the natural coping mechanism of the brain will dissociate. (crowd murmuring) Now, we all experience dissociation in our own lives in very minor ways. You're driving down the road, it's a fairly long trip. You get to your destination. You can't quite remember how you got there, but you know you're there, okay? Your mind went somewhere else. Well, the people in

this program discovered that you could deliberately do this to people and have part of their mind essentially split off. And then it was ready for programming. You could give it instructions. This used to be called Multiple Personality Disorder. It could either be done deliberately in a lab or it's what the brain did when the person was ritually abused, or repeatedly abused, all sorts of different contexts. The government decided to explore this area of research and one of the programs that did that was known as MKUltra. If you've ever seen the movie Conspiracy Theory with Mel

Gibson? He is an MKUltra victim in the movie. Manchurian Candidate. That is classic MKUltra mind manipulation, mind transformation and programming. It's a big theme in a lot of movies. And it was discovered to be in existence and explored by Congress in the 70s. Most of the evidence for it was destroyed prior to the Church hearings. That's what the hearings were called. But someone found 18 or 20 boxes that they had missed, and that's why we know about it. There are some very key names that show up in that literature, in that set of hearings, and

alien abduction research or events and I don't think that's a coincidence. So when I look at the subject, I think it's wicked. I think it's evil. I think people are deliberately abused in half a dozen different contexts, and this is the outcome. John Mack at Harvard, he compared it to shamanistic experiences, and we might even think of something like the Stockholm syndrome, when you begin to identify with your captors and you feel special. You're chosen, even though this was awful, they did it for a good reason, and I'm now their messenger. And this is where

you get messaging. You have a message now, to give to humankind, about the world's destiny. About what we need to do to evolve. I think it's deeply sinister. I think some of it could actually be overtly demonic. In other words, the mechanism that produces this set of memories can be different. I personally have two friends who focus on abduction research. They've documented over a hundred cases where they will either lead someone to Christ or train a person to make it a spiritual confrontation when whatever is happening to them happens. And they have been delivered from

repeated abduction experiences. In other words, they stop. If that's successful, to me that says there's some inherent spiritual element to this particular thing within this big umbrella world we call UFO stuff. But since it's inherently spiritual and it's evil and it's wicked, a lot of UFO researchers are the enemies of the whole subject. They think it's contrived or they think it's abusive. They don't think it has anything to do with aliens at all. I think, ultimately, if this is the content of the messaging, it's so directed, again, in anti-Christian or subversion of Christian theology that

it's very easy for me to think of it in terms of a deception, by, again, a superior intelligence, but not one that comes from another planet. We're talking about a sinister intelligence from the spiritual world. The kind of unseen realm that the Bible talks about. (dark, grating music) And we would use the word demons, demonic, for that sort of thing. It's actually much wider than that. Again, my specialty is the unseen realm, and that realm is a lot bigger than just angels and demons. But for the sake of talking about the messaging, it's really dark.

It's no exaggeration to say that the messaging that people supposedly get from aliens is inherently anti-Christian. And what I mean by that is, Jesus is nothing special. He is a human that we selected to communicate to other people, or he's one of us. And it really doesn't do that to other religions. (Buddhist chanting) And it might sound like a unsubstantiated claim but I can say it because I have read the contactee literature. If you've ever seen the movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind, one of the characters in that movie, the French ufologist, is modeled

after someone real, Jacques Vallee, who's a very famous figure in UFO studies. He's a Computer Science PhD. That was his real vocation. But Vallee, who is not a Christian, was one of the earliest people to say and to write for this audience that there is something spiritually sinister about this alien contact messaging. So, it's not just me. There are non-believers, non-Christians, who have noticed the same thing. There was actually a big conference in 1992 held at MIT. Yes. That MIT. On alien abductions. And part of it was because there was a famous professor at Harvard,

one of the psychology department. He was a psychiatrist himself, who was heavily into alien abduction research. His name was John Mack. He's no longer living. At that event, and it was held over a few days, there were a number of scholars who decided to tackle this subject. You can buy the papers, they were all published. And one of them was on, what are the similarities between abduction narratives and Satanic ritual abuse? (laughing) Good topic. (heavy, sinister music) For people that are unfamiliar with that term, we are actually talking about ritual activity, worship, so to speak,

in a Luciferian context that involves sexual abuse and other kinds of abuse. There are touchpoints between what people say that happened to them in these rituals or what the goal of an abduction experience was supposedly. There are lots of parallels, and we're not talking three or four. I've actually counted them. There are over 20. The metal tables, the types of wounds that people suffer, they're probed in all sorts of awful places. Messaging about "We're doing this so that "you can birth a hybrid child." Now, the kinds of things you would hear in a Satanic ritual

abuse situation or any sort of deliberate trauma episode that sort of linked itself to Lucifer or Satan would be, for instance, with children, where children are being sexually abused, and the perpetrator might pass themself off, even in costume, as Jesus, for instance. And so the whole notion is to get the child convinced that God hates them, or that Lucifer is the real God and Jesus is their enemy. With adults, again, it takes on a different sort of flavor. Although the messaging can be sort of the same. It can be a little more sophisticated. For instance,

messaging that would be consistent with "You're special, you're chosen." But there's sometimes this spin put on it that, even though this is suffering, it's the shamanistic sort of approach, that this event will help tune you in more to the realities of the spiritual world and that will prep you to take a message that people need to hear. Now, in terms of alien abduction narrative, this is very common. You'll often have women, for instance, who are convinced that they are carrying, as a result of their abduction experience, a child that is essentially a hybrid, that might

either be termed the Anti-Christ or there will be things or ways it's talked about that would remind a Christian of how the Anti-Christ is described or sort of beast imagery after the Book of Revelation. That sort of thing. But it's cast in a positive spin. In other words, this child is sort of a divine-human interface, or hybrid, that is going to be here not to do bad things but to help humanity realize what it could become. You might wonder what connection this sort of thing has to Satanic ritual abuse. Sometimes, there is a connection. Sometimes,

there's not. Again, people have these experiences and relate narratives, memories, for different reasons. It really, again, in my view, since I don't think that aliens are behind this at all, but I think most cases, the overwhelming number of cases, humans are behind these things. It just depends on what messaging people are given. What thing do we want you to remember that you will slide that in as your experience which will hide and obscure and deny what really happened to you? But when the messaging is so dark and what's done to people or what people think

was done to them is so sinister, and that has a very evil feel to it. I do leave the door open, though, to something that I would call direct demonization, where people have an experience where there is some sort of spiritual event. Something done to them by a spiritual being, and then this is the way they process it, or the way they could process it. In my mind, the ones that stand out as sort of pretty well probably, obviously getting into that territory, demonic in nature, are the ones that really have a reaction to a

person who's taught or remembers to interject Jesus into the conversation. When you have something going on and you invoke the name of Christ, for instance, or you speak to the perpetrator in the name of Christ and demand that they stop, or something like that. And again, there are hundreds of these sorts of cases, where a victim does this, deliberately, intentionally, and not only does the incident stop, but it never repeats. That tells me that there's a demonic element. A pretty clear demonic element to what's going on. Abductions often run in families, abduction experiences. Again, what

we're calling alien abduction experiences. They either run in families or they repeat with particular people quite frequently. It comes back again and again and again and again. And again, we're familiar with that too because of media. Movies and television shows. So, when you have that kind of situation and you address it with a spiritual weapon, and then it's done, to me that suggests pretty strongly that we had a supernatural event going on here. In terms of specific examples as far as contactee messaging that I would view as sinister. You know, something that is spiritual darkness,

lurking in the background. In the history of ufology, there have been a couple of very famous contactee episodes. One of them involved a guy named George Adamski. Adamski became very famous in the 50s and thereafter for supposedly being contacted by an alien presence, visiting Venus and all these different planets, having this or that vision. I call them visions, but he would actually say he went to these places with his alien friends. And his messaging was really nothing more than warmed over Gnosticism. That the aliens were telling him, "Oh, every human has the light of God

"or the light of the supernatural realm in them, "and they just need to remember who they are. "They need to be enlightened." Very typical gnostic messaging about the salvation of humanity being from within and recognizing their own divinity. Gnosticism was an ancient, and still is, belief system that was a strong competitor to the early church. Because it used Biblical language, it used Jesus stuff as part of its presentation of what salvation meant, and what the nature of the world was. The short version of Gnosticism is that there's the true God in most remote history, and

he took of himself to create other Aeons. And these Aeons were entities, and one of these Aeons transgressed the will of the supreme deity. The true God, as Gnostics would like to say. But one of these Aeons transgressed and decided, "Well, I wanna create a being sort of like me, "like my maker did." And that being, Sophia, creates a being that is evil and sinister, and that is the being that creates humankind. That is the God of the Bible. He's a bad guy in Gnosticism. And the good guy in the Gnostic story is the serpent,

because the serpent is the one who comes to humans and says "Hey, you people don't really realize "what's going on here. "Did God really say, did your maker really say..." Again, the bad guy. "This or that?" And so the serpent is viewed as trying to enlighten humans to the nature of who they are. There's a little spark of divinity in them because of where they came from. And it's a very old system. It's very self-oriented in terms of salvation. Salvation is not about taking care of a sin problem. It's about becoming personally enlightened to your

own divinity. And you can see this kind of messaging in a number of contactee episodes in the history of UFO studies. I think the reason why we get a similarity here, or an overlap between alleged ET messaging and gnosticism, is that there is a good part of the whole alien thing, the alien subject matter, that is inherently spiritual. Again, this is a wide, far-ranging kind of subject, and at least part of it is really about, apparently, spiritual messaging. And who's gonna be interested in spiritual messaging except spiritual beings? So you have competitors to God who

have their own kind of message to direct humanity away from the truth, and it's very convenient, again, to use a certain set of ideas. But here we are in the 20th century with these contactee events. And so I view this part of ufology as really nothing more than intelligent demonic beings using old lies and repackaging them for a 20th and 21st century audience. What, to a 20th and 21st century person, would be godlike? An extraterrestrial. It's very simple. It's an intelligent being that isn't us. It's not part of the animal kingdom. It's so transcendent when

compared to us that it becomes a very convenient vehicle, and if you really think about it, alien messaging, UFO stuff on that level, is really sort of like converting Heaven to space. You have Heaven without the God of the Bible. You have a transcendent destiny for humanity, without any accountability at all. The whole question of sin and salvation isn't even on the table, but yet you get to keep all the good parts. Oh, we have this great destiny. Oh, we're gonna become godlike. Oh, the deity is interested in us, and loves us, and has a

message for us, and picks some of us to convey this message and make us special. (discordant, twinkling music) You have all of that repackaged in this sort of technological society garb as aliens. The second sort of famous episode is that of Billy Meier. This actually happened in Switzerland, but it's gotten a lot of traffic in the wider UFO community and over here as well, because Meier was the guy whose pictures... Again, alleged pictures of alien craft wound up on the cover of National Enquirer and other things like that. And they looked really spectacular. It's kind

of a case of, that looks too good to be true. Meier was supposedly contacted by a female alien, who of course was good looking, and (laughing) her name was Semjase, S-E-M-J-A-S-E. That is strikingly close to the Samyaza with a Y, or the Shemyaza of First Enoch, who is a demon. In fact, one of the lead figures in the Genesis 6, the watchers episode. And so, again, if you have the Biblical background, you look at the story of this and you think, that really can't be a coincidence, that she would have this... Either he made it

all up and he picked a really bad name. (laughing) That's gonna telegraph, again, sort of a demonic messaging. It's easy to read the narrative of Genesis 6 when you have this sort of thing in your head as being kind of an ancient incident of the same sort of thing. And there are these touchpoints, especially, again, with the outcomes. Enoch's retelling of that story, instead of saying "Sons of God", he will often use the term "watcher". Now, that word does find its way into the Bible itself in Daniel. It occurs three or four times in Daniel

Chapter 4. It just refers to "watchful ones", or possibly those who don't sleep. There are good ones and then there are rebellious ones. Good ones are in Daniel 4. Watcher, and a holy one, comes down and tells Nebuchadnezzar, "Hey, you're gonna go crazy for a while." And we actually find out in that chapter that this punishment on you for your pride is quote "by the decree of the watchers", plural, in verse 13. A few verses later, it's also referred to as "the decree of the most high". So it's not like you got a bunch of

angelic beings running around saying "Hey, let's just go down and tell Nebuchadnezzar "this or that's gonna happen to him, "and we get to call the shots." We have to look at Genesis 6 pretty carefully. It's very easy to read that passage against this backdrop, and I think if there is a common denominator, it is the idea of quote unquote gods or spiritual beings, raising up maybe a population or a people group, a group of elites might be the best way to say it, that will somehow be the great civilizers, and in the alien abduction narrative

case, you have, again, chosen individuals to bring alien-human hybrids into the world, and that's gonna be the thing, the catalyst, that takes humanity from where it is now to its ultimate destiny of transcending being human. Being something more than human. And in Meier's case, and in Adamski as well, there would be additional claims of, "Jesus was one of us." And you bring Jesus into the conversation and "Oh, he was one of them. "Well, that explains the Bible, doesn't it? "That explains why Jesus could do "all this amazing stuff. "And I don't wanna reject them, "because

then I'm rejecting Jesus." Throwing Him into the conversation that what Jesus was really here to do is to, unfortunately, to quote Ben Hur, to convince us that there is a spark of God in every man and they are here to help us realize that, to awaken us to our own enlightenment. And either Meier made this up and picked a really unfortunate name (laughs). That, again, people who are familiar with ancient texts are gonna pull out. Or, he was met by an entity who took this name. And again, that's very suggestive of something sinister. (eerie, shuddering

music) So, what about stories that we hear about ancient aliens? Did ancient aliens really put us here? Are they really our creators? Did they give us the technology that we have, either now or in antiquity? Are they really the masters of civilization? Does the Bible, or any other ancient text, really describe extraterrestrials? Does it really describe beings that lived on and came from other planets, using technology to get here? Or is there something else going on? I think, as bizarre as it sounds, Ancient Aliens as a show, and shows like it; it's not the only

one, have a huge, vast reach into the pop culture. Millions and millions and millions of people have seen not only just one episode, but actually follow the series. And it's really truth by anomaly, and the Bible gets drawn into that, because it's an ancient book. It's not the only one. But if I can step in there and say, look. The people who are telling you these things or giving you these ideas, giving you these theories about human origins. They're lying to you. Zecharia Sitchin, who's no longer living, he's deceased a few years ago, claimed to

be an ancient languages expert. He was presented by his publisher and his publicist as a scholar of ancient languages. I don't believe that Zecharia Sitchin could read or translate any ancient language. It was disappointing at first, because I thought he might be a kindred spirit. He was not. He's basically making up an alien narrative out of ancient near eastern texts, like Enuma Elish or the Gilgamesh Epic, and his claim to fame, his original book, is called The 12th Planet, where he describes his belief, based upon his alleged translation work, that the Sumerian tablets describe a

civilization of extraterrestrials known as the Anunnaki, who came to earth from a planet called Nibiru, and created human beings, and/or genetically modify an existing ape-like creature to create humans out of that thing. This is his narrative, and he has convinced millions of people this is the true history of life on this planet. Now, the reason that's demonstrably wrong is you can actually go look up, online, the term Anunnaki in all of the Mesopotamian text that Sitchin cites. You will find that there isn't a single tablet that has the Anunnaki on Nibiru. You will find that

Nibiru is actually described as Jupiter or Mercury, or just a star, but no planet. Again, out in the outer reaches of the solar system where Sitchin puts it. You'll never find the Anunnaki riding in a craft anywhere. You won't find all of the core ideas or any of the core ideas that Sitchin has for his mythology. So, it's not very difficult to show that he's wrong. I've gone on a number of radio shows and basically just put it this way. How easy would it be to show that Mike is wrong? All you need to do

is produce one line of one tablet that has one of these specific claims that Sitchin makes, in that source, and Mike would have to go away. Mike is still here. And I'm very, again, you might say confronted. But I'm serious about it. I don't like when people are lied to, not just about what's the content of the Bible, but I don't like when they're deceived by the content, some narrative, that comes from any other ancient text. Another passage would be Genesis 6:1-4. This is the sons of God, the daughters of men who produce Nephilim and

the giants. So, Sitchin is quite known for this. He merges together the sons of God with the Nephilim. He treats them as though they're same character. But Genesis 6 describes spiritual beings assuming flesh. The most traditional reading is cohabiting with human women and producing as offspring, Nephilim. I believe, and I'm certainly not the only scholar who would believe this, that the term means giant. Cause there are other passages that connect to Genesis 6. But the Ancient Alien theorist loves this passage for some reason because, well, sons of God sounds like an extraterrestrial to them. And

they never ask the question about, are angels in the Bible really described as beings that need to perpetuate their species? That need to eat, need to drink? Again, have to expel and, you know. Hate their jobs, or whatever (laughing). Is this the way they're really described, as something being normative, for them? And the answer, of course, is no. But they never really get to that question, and then once you have aliens in Genesis 6:1-4, it's the aliens who create the Nephilim, and some ancient alien theorists will call them giants. Others will say, "No, these are

the men of renown." And that phrase is used in Genesis 6:4. The great civilizers of antiquity. The really smart people that civilized the world, or that are responsible for building massive projects like the pyramids or Baalbek. And so this is why, on a show like Ancient Aliens, you get a narrative that says, "Oh, look at this big object. "We couldn't figure out how to build that. "Therefore, it must be aliens." This is where it comes from. It comes from this passage, seizing on an extraterrestrial parentage for certain individuals who are called men of renown. Now,

I don't, as a Biblical scholar, buy into any of that. But it's a very familiar trajectory for anyone who reads a book by Zecharia Sitchin. They're going to get sucked into this world, and they're going to run across this narrative at some point. (sharp, whistling music) I was invited to speak at the Bay Area UFO Conference. And I was invited to speak about ancient astronauts. I'm an Ancient Studies scholar. I'm a Biblical scholar. "This is great! "He was on Coast to Coast, "and that was a wonderful interview. "Let's have this guy come out and do

this." I wasn't vetted at all. In other words, they thought they were getting a believer. I am not, again, an ancient alien believer. So I went to the conference and I basically did a lecture on Zecharia Sitchin. And I went to this conference and basically (laughing) tore his work apart. There's really no other way to say it. And I tried to be nice about it, but I wanted to be firm about it as well. Just dissecting where his errors were. I was asked to leave (laughing) the conference. I didn't get paid, that was okay, though.

I've never been invited back, nor did I expect to ever be invited back. But the great thing about the event was my second session, which happened before the one that got me in trouble, was a lecture on, "Could Christianity accommodate "a genuine extraterrestrial reality?" When you take that topic, you have to get into things like, well, would Jesus have to die on other planets? How would aliens be atoned for? And so it was well worth the visit, and it was worth getting tossed out of the place to do it. Because of the way most Christians

have been taught to think about demons, there is angels, there's demons, and then there's God, and that's pretty much the spiritual world. It creates some confusion when you listen to some of the things I've been saying. You actually have a number of different groups of rebels. In the beginning, you had intelligent beings that he had created that live in the spiritual world, and then there's human beings, okay? Intelligent beings that live in the terrestrial world. That's fine until, you know, we actually get some interaction. In Genesis 3 we have an initial rebellion, okay? So we

have the Satan figure. That's one rebel. Genesis 6, we have another group. That group, again, by all either Mesopotamian or Biblical or Jewish tradition, the guilty parties there wind up being send into the abyss until the time of the end. It's an eschatological judgment. So, that's a second group. A third group, we get from the Babel incident. Deuteronomy 32:8-9, when God divides up the nations and assigns them to other sons of God and then they become corrupt. God abandons the nations of Babel, and he says Israel's gonna be my portion now. Jacob is gonna be

my inheritance. And so he calls Abraham, and he makes for himself a new nation, Israel. This is why, in the rest of the Old Testament, it's Yahweh against the gods of the nations and Israel against those nations. The sons of God that are assigned to the other nations, this is the Old Testament explanation for why those nations got their own pantheons. We read in Psalm 82 that they have become corrupt. At some point in their history, they fail. They don't rule the nations the way God wants them ruled. Now, those guys aren't bound. They're not

in prison. The Genesis 6 ones are. What about demons? Just using that word demon. If you asked a first-century Jew, hey, where do demons come from? They would have an immediate answer. If you ask a Christian now, they would say "I don't know, "because the Bible doesn't tell me." That's actually not the case. A Jew would say, "Well, sure, "we know where demons come from. "They're the disembodied spirits "of dead Nephilim." That sounds very bizarre to our ear. That's not what you hear in church. It's not what you hear in seminary, either. But there are

hints of it in the Old Testament. Isaiah 14. Isaiah 26. Job 26:5. These are three passages that have Rephaim in the realm of the dead, what we think of as Hell. Now, that tells you, again, where a Jew would've gotten this idea. So, since they were part supernatural being and part earthly being, when you killed one, and this was an act of rebellion, again, their creation in the first place. Their soul, as it were, (demonic hissing) which is not a human soul, in Biblical thinking. It goes to Hell. This is where they're punished. They incur

the punishment that their fathers incurred, that get sent to the pit. In Peter and Jude, 2 Peter 2 and Jude, it specifically says that the angels that sinned are in chains of gloomy darkness. They're imprisoned in the abyss. There is no other sin in the Old Testament. Angels, plural. That you can point to to answer the question, what are Peter and Jude talking about? There is no other possibility other than Genesis 6. So a lot of people think, "Well, there was this great cataclysmic rebellion "before Creation, and Satan used to control the earth, "and then

he rebelled and then he became bad, "and then he went to the Garden of Eden and all." This whole idea about a Satanic rebellion before Adam and Eve, you will never find that in any verse in the Bible. But that's part of Christian tradition that's been passed down. I, personally, think it comes from Milton's Paradise Lost, a great Puritan book. But you will not find it in a single passage in the Bible. The closest you get is Revelation 12. Michael, the third of the angels. But if you read Revelation 12, that story is in conjunction

with the first coming of the Messiah. Not the Garden of Eden. Not something before Eden. So there is no other thing you can look at in the Bible to explain what Peter and Jude are talking about as far as angels that sinned winding up in Hell. And this is really part of our fallen angel tradition in Christianity, but it has some of these extraneous elements kind of thrown into it. In Hell passages, if you wanna use that term, in the Old Testament, Isaiah 14. Isaiah 26. Ezekiel 32. Job 26. You have Rephaim, which is a

term used for the giants that descend from the Nephilim in Hell. When you killed one, their spirits were then natural inhabitants of Hell. But they're never said to be bound. In fact, Jewish texts, and again, you get hints of this in the Bible too, can have them coming out and harassing people. Perhaps seeking to possess bodies, demonic possession. I've just described four different rebellions, or four different groups. Four different bad guys. Satan, the ones in Genesis 6, then the departed spirits of their progeny, who are the demons, and then you've got the principalities and powers.

They're actually different guys, okay? Different bad guys. But the way we're taught about demonology in church, traditional Christianity, is all those things get mashed into demons. As far as what I think about Genesis 6:1-4, spiritual beings are not beings from other planets. There's nothing in the Bible that orients them to other planets. And here's the surprise. There's nothing in any other ancient text that orients them to other planets. You will never find, in an ancient text, one of the gods coming from a planet to earth. Which sounds really shocking, especially in light of the success

of Ancient Aliens. You'd think, well, you'd think some text would say that. They don't. Now, there are lots of texts that have the gods flying around in chariots or some other structural thing. But you never have an instance where they come from another planet, which is exactly what you'd expect. If ancient people who wrote the Bible and who wrote other texts. If this is really what they're thinking, surely one of them would say it? But they don't. One of the things that always comes up in this discussion is Ezekiel 1. People will ask, "Well, Mike,

"how can you say this about the Bible? "Surely, Ezekiel 1?" This famous, bizarre vision that often gets portrayed in science fiction movies as a spacecraft (laughing). Surely that must be a spacecraft. Well, I think the simplest thing I could say to this is, we actually have the Polaroids of the day for what Ezekiel saw. We don't have to guess. We actually have pictures of what Ezekiel saw. And that sort of takes people back, like, "Well, they didn't have cameras back then." No, they didn't. But they did sculpture. They did things like this, and every element

of the description, the wheels within wheels, under a platform, four cherubim, four faces facing in different directions. On top of them you have a round, flat throne dais with the throne on top for the deity or the king. Every element of that description is found and known from Babylonian iconography or Phonetian iconography, and some cases Canaanite iconography. But the Babylonian stuff is important. Why? Because Ezekiel's in Babylon. (muffled radio chattering) What he's actually doing is not describing a spacecraft. He's describing an enthroned deity. But who does he have on the throne? He has the God

of Israel on a throne that people both from Israel and Babylonians would understand that it's the Israelites' God that is in control of time and space, the universe, the heavens, the flow of history, all this. And you say, why do you put it in those terms? It's because of the cherubim. It's not an accident that the four faces of the cherubim are the four iconographic images of the cardinal points of the Zodiac in Babylon. What is being described here is, who is the deity? The question is asked, who is the deity that controls the flow

of time? Who's on the heavenly throne in charge of what is happening? It's not Marduk of Babylon. It's the God of Israel. And so Ezekiel's message to the captives there sitting by the river Chebar, is "Yeah, you're in a bad place. "Yes, Nebuchadnezzar just conquered you, "and you might think that Marduk "has conquered our God, but he hasn't. "God is in charge. "The God of Israel is in charge of you here, "and he knows and dictates and directs "how history is going to run from this point on." In Genesis 6:1-4 has a Mesopotamian context. It's

the story of the Apkallu, and if you wanna know what that story is, you can get Unseen Realm and read that. But basically, in a nutshell, here it is. There were gods before the flood who helped humans to produce civilization, and some higher-up gods in Mesopotamia didn't like people. They decided to wipe them out with a flood. Well, the ones who liked humans and said, "Oh, well, we've invested a lot of time "helping these people. "This is a terrible thing. "What do we do? "Aha, we've got it, we will mate with a few of them,

"and then what we know, "the children that are produced "will be super-intelligent like we are, "and so our knowledge will survive the flood. "We've gotta make sure that a few of them survive "and our children, our direct progeny, "will be part of that, and humanity will be saved." So this is the Mesopotamian story. The ones who do this are the heroes. They're the good guys. Now, the higher-up gods look at this and say, "That is not what we had planned." And they send the gods who help into the abyss forever. However long that is. Now,

the Biblical story inverts that and says, "Look. "This is a transgression of heaven and earth. "This never should've happened. "This is not a good thing. "This is evil, it's wicked, "because humans will use this knowledge "to become better sinners, to be more self-destructive." Biblical texts and other texts say this is why humans are so efficient at war. This is why they have a problem with lust. This is where they learn to be astrologers. All sorts of stuff that really turned out to be self-destructive in other Biblical stories, the blame goes right here. And so what

Genesis 6:1-4 is, is it's a story about both human and divine rebellion against the boundaries that God has established, and the destruction that results from not staying where you belong and trying to become godlike, and thinking that you know better than God. So, at every point, the Biblical version of this kind of inverts the Mesopotamian version of this. So, to summarize Genesis 6:1-4, the most, if I can call it this, the most traditional supernaturalist reading of the passage is you have divine beings who can presume, create and take on bodies, and when they show up

in flesh, as they often do in other passages, flesh can do what flesh does, and they deliberately try to raise up their own populations, either thinking that, well, they could do better, cause the world is just in a bad place in Genesis 6:5. Whatever their motivations might have been, ancient texts outside the Bible vary on this. But they're the ones who produce the Nephilim, who are these giants. Now, in the Biblical story, it's this act. It's this incident that is the explanation for the giant clans that try to wipe out Israel later. In the Book

of Numbers 13:33, Moses and Joshua run into the Anakim. And it says explicitly in that verse, the Anakim are from the Nephilim. The Anakim were also known as Rephaim, and Emim and Zamzummim, and there's a whole bunch of names for them. In other texts we find that when you killed one of these, their disembodied spirit is a resident of Hell. So you have a demonic connection to them that is traceable all the way back to this incident. One of the reasons why a lot of Christians are troubled by the idea of whether there could really

be aliens or not, either in the past or in the present, is that, well, the Bible doesn't describe them. The Bible doesn't mention them. And so that becomes an argument against the idea, so that if they showed up, ooh, that troubles us. There goes our Bible out the window, because the Bible never said anything about that. So they'll take a stand that it can't be true because of absence in the Bible. Well, if you really think about it, that's a pretty poor argument, because the Bible doesn't mention a lot of things that we know are

real, like cars, or microwaves, or toilet paper, okay? There are lots of things that aren't in the Bible that we just know are real. - Hello? - Another one is the image of God. If there are really aliens out there then humanity is no longer unique. Now, when I put things that way, you can already tell that people are sort of predisposed to understanding human uniqueness and the image of God in a very particular way. They'll equate it with intelligence. To make the image of God any particular quality is a mistake, because not all human

beings at all stages of their development, either pre-birth or in old age, have certain qualities that have historically been identified with the image in their fullness, or even equally. We notice in Genesis 1:26 that we have the wording there, "Let us create humankind in our image." Then the very next verse, it switches to singular. So, God created humankind in His image. Why do we have plurals mixed with singulars? Well, the reason is because God is speaking to people, beings is probably a better word, that are already there. Individuals, intelligent beings. They're the sons of God

from Job 38, that were there present at the foundation of the world. He announces His intention, "Let's create humankind." But when He actually does, only God is the creator. All the verbs are singular, all the pronouns are singular. Only God is the Creator. So, the plural language is important because He's referring to the members of the spiritual world, the heavenly host. He's bringing them into the conversation about imaging. "Let us create humankind in, or as, our image." The plural's there because somehow, God and us and them are connected in some way. And the way we're

connected is, we image Him here, they image Him in their world. We have the same Creator, and we represent the same being, the same God, the same Creator. But only God Himself created either of us. Us, and the members of the spiritual world. And if you take that perspective when you say, "Well, what if there is ETs? "So what? "So what if we have intelligent alien life? "That is not what imaging is. "If there are extraterrestrials, "they're not even in the equation. "They're not even in the picture in Genesis 1. "They would be created beings,

in Biblical thinking, "but they're not images. "They're not members of the heavenly host. "They're not humans. "They are just intelligent beings "that exist somewhere else that God happened to make." God doesn't have to tell us everything He does, everything He did, or will do. And we're back to the whole "It's not in the Bible "so it can't be real," kind of argument. Which, again, is flawed. The Bible is not a record of everything that God has ever done, or will do. But this is the kind of thinking that goes into it. But once you take,

again, "It's not in the Bible," off the table. Once you take "Oh, they're intelligent, "so that ruins the image idea," off the table. Then the whole idea of having intelligent aliens becomes a little less theologically threatening. My view, personally, again, if we take off the table the nuts and bolts kind of discussions about, hey, could there be aliens or not? You know, the academic discourse. If we take that off the table and we talk about the spiritual messaging elements, I think what's going on is, we have intelligent beings, intelligent non-human divine spiritual beings, whatever you

wanna call them, trying to control the language of spirituality. A lot of the messaging and discussion really results in, for many, people... And again, I think this is the goal of intelligent evil in this regard. Redefining things like God. What does that word even mean? Who are we? What does it mean to be human? How did we get here? Who put us here? And what is our destiny? Do we have a relationship with this God? Have we offended him? Is there such a thing as sin or not? But I think the intelligent evil wants to

control and redefine the terminology. They want God redefined as a transcendent extraterrestrial. They want Jesus redefined as a messenger from the transcendent extraterrestrial, or an extraterrestrial Himself. They want the need of humanity not equated with sin, a solution for sin, but to evolve to be a transcendent being like they are. Think about it. If you had the same vocabulary that we use in religious discourse. God, Jesus, salvation, humanity, destiny, transcendence, glorification. Heaven. All these things. But they all had different meanings that attached themselves to this whole extraterrestrial question. Well, guess what? You get to keep

your Bible. We don't change any of the words. However, what the words mean is something different. This is something akin to, conceptually, at least, when the Nahash, the serpent, walks up to Eve and says, "Hey, did God really say..." And then they have a conversation where Eve is misled or misdirected, led to process what God said in a different way. In our theological discussions of today we almost let science fiction and the ET thing as part of that dictate the way we talk theology. Science fiction is like televangelism for the alien worldview. Again, we get

to keep God, that inner urge to have something more transcendent than we are, that will give us a destiny, that has the solution to our problems. We get to keep all that. If what we're talking about are extraterrestrials. Isn't that wonderful? It's all real! It's all true. But in doing so, in keeping it and having the language redefined, having the meaning of these terms altered even slightly, we are embracing a non-gospel. We are embracing a different Christ. And I think that's actually the goal. (tense, pulsing music) So, at the end of the day, we have

a really strange mixture of Biblical theology, the supernatural world, the unseen world, mixed in with all this UFO stuff, sightings, alleged alien contact and abductions. What do we do with all this? How do we process it? I really do think processing is the key, and what I mean by that is, we need to be honest. The world is a lot stranger than what we think it is. There are a lot of people who just go through life thinking everything is nailed down. We've been given every answer by science, or we will be given that answer

by science. There are no anomalies. There's nothing really strange that transcends the physical world. We know that isn't true. There is a spiritual world. And so what we need to do is be honest. The world is a strange place. There's a lot more going on than we might think and we need to just embrace that idea and then try to process what it is that people experience, what they see, in an honest way. (shuddering, eerie music)