(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)
