 The
New Evangelists of Ancient Astronauts
The
trend within modern religious and academic communities
to accommodate emerging visions of astro-biology and
astro-theology can be seen as the natural extension of
a hypothesis (once considered heresy) made popular in
the 1960s known as the Ancient Astronaut Theory. This
notion claims that Homo sapiens (humans) arose as the
result of advanced extraterrestrials visiting earth in
ancient times and genetically upgrading hominid DNA.
These beings were the progenitors of the creation
myths according to this theory, including the
Bible’s revelations of “God.”
In
the introduction to his bestselling book, Chariots
of the Gods?, Erich von Daniken, (who, it might be
argued, is one of the fathers of modern ufology) said:
I
claim that our forefathers received visits from the
universe in the remote past, even though I do not
yet know who these extra-terrestrial intelligences
were or from which planet they came. I nevertheless
proclaim that these ‘strangers’ annihilated part
of mankind existing at the time and produced a new,
perhaps the first, Homo sapiens.[i]
As
illustrated in such Hollywood films as Contact
and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, von Daniken’s hypothesis took
America by storm in the ’60s with the proposition
that mankind was possibly the offspring of an ancient,
perhaps ongoing, extra-terrestrial experiment. New
Agers like Daniken assert that the myths of ancient
gods—from Sumeria to Egypt, Greece, and beyond—are
a crude record of this encounter with other-world
beings. Ancient men would have considered space
travelers as gods and would have recorded their
arrival, their experiments, and their departure, in
hieroglyphs, megaliths, and stone tablets, as a
“supernatural” encounter between gods and men. Mr.
Daniken continues:
While
[the] spaceship disappears again into the mists of
the universe our friends will talk about the
miracle—“The gods were here!”…they will make
a record of what happened: uncanny, weird, miraculas
[sic]. Then their texts will relate—and drawings
will show—that gods in golden clothes were there
in a flying boat that landed with a tremendous din.
They will write about chariots which the gods drove
over land and sea, and of terrifying weapons that
were like lightning, and they will recount that the
gods promised to return.
They
will hammer and chisel in the rock pictures of what
they had once seen: shapeless giants with helmets
and rods on their heads, carrying boxes in front of
their chests; balls on which indefinable beings sit
and ride through the air;
staves from which rays are shot out as if
from a sun…”[ii]
 Researchers
like Von Daniken further claim that the odd appearance
of some of the gods as depicted in various hieroglyphs
(human-like creatures with falcon and eagle heads;
lions with heads of bulls, etc.) could be viewed as
evidence that “aliens” conducted genetic
experiments and cross-mutations of both ancient people
and animals. It may surprise some to learn that many
conservative theologians agree with this assessment,
but hold that the “alien” invaders performing
these procedures were, in fact, fallen angels, not
advanced life forms from another galaxy. Scholars base
this idea on historical records dating back to the beginning of time within every major culture of
the ancient world where the remarkably consistent
story is told of “gods” that descended from heaven
and materialized in bodies of flesh. From Rome to
Greece—and before that, to Egypt, Persia, Assyria,
Babylonia, and Sumer—the earliest records of
civilization tell of the era when powerful beings
known to the Hebrews as Watchers
and in the book of Genesis as the benei
ha-elohim (sons of God) mingled themselves with
humans, giving birth to part-celestial,
part-terrestrial hybrids known as Nephilim.
The Bible says this happened when men began to
increase on earth and daughters were born to them.
When the sons of God saw the women’s beauty, they
took wives from among them to sire their unusual
offspring. In Genesis 6:4 we read the following
account: “There were giants in the earth in those
days; and also after that, when the sons of God came
in unto the daughters of men, and they bare children
to them, the same became mighty men which were of old,
men of renown.”
When this
Scripture is compared with other ancient texts,
including Enoch, Jubilees, Baruch, Genesis Apocryphon,
Philo, Josephus, Jasher, and others, it unfolds to
some that the giants of the Old Testament, such as
Goliath, were the part-human, part-animal,
part-angelic offspring of a supernatural interruption
into the divine order and natural evolution of the
species. The apocryphal Book
of Enoch gives a name to the angels involved in
this cosmic conspiracy, calling them “Watchers.”
We read:
And
I Enoch was blessing the Lord of majesty and the
King of the ages, and lo! the Watchers called
me—Enoch the scribe—and said to me: “Enoch,
thou scribe of righteousness, go, declare to the
Watchers of the heaven who have left the high
heaven, the holy eternal place, and have defiled
themselves with women, and have done as the children
of earth do, and have taken unto themselves wives:
Ye have wrought great destruction on the earth: And
ye shall have no peace nor forgiveness of sin: and
inasmuch as they delight themselves in their
children [the Nephilim], The murder of their beloved
ones shall they see, and over the destruction of
their children shall they lament, and shall make
supplication unto eternity, but mercy and peace
shall ye not attain.”
(1 Enoch 10:3–8)
According to
Enoch, two hundred of these powerful angels departed
“high heaven” and used women (among other things)
to extend their progeny into mankind’s plane of
existence. The Interlinear Hebrew Bible offers an
interesting interpretation of Genesis 6:2 in this
regard. Where the King James Bible says, “The sons
of God saw the daughters of men that they [were]
fair,” the IHN interprets this as, “The benei
Elohim saw the daughters of Adam, that they were fit
extensions” (emphasis added). The term “fit
extensions” seems applicable when the whole of the
ancient record is understood to mean that the Watchers
wanted to leave their proper sphere of existence in
order to enter Earth’s three-dimensional reality.
They viewed women—or at least their genetic
material—as part of the formula for accomplishing
this task. Departing the proper habitation that God
had assigned them was grievous to the Lord and led to
divine penalization. Jude described it this way: The
“angels which kept not their first estate, but left
their own habitation, he hath reserved in everlasting
chains under darkness unto the judgment of the great
day” (Jude 6).
Besides
apocryphal, pseudepigraphic, and Jewish traditions
related to the legend of the Watchers and the
“mighty men” born of their union with humans,
mythologized accounts tell the stories of “gods”
using humans to produce heroes or demigods
(half-gods). When the ancient Greek version of the
Hebrew Old Testament (the LXX or Septuagint) was made,
the word “Nephilim”—referring to the part-human
offspring of the Watchers—was translated gegenes,
a word implying “Earth born.” This same
terminology was used to describe the Greek Titans and
other legendary heroes of partly celestial and partly
terrestrial origin, such as Hercules (born of Zeus and
the mortal Alcmena), Achilles (the Trojan hero son of
Thetis and Peleus), and Gilgamesh (the two-thirds god
and one-third human child of Lugalbanda and Ninsun).
These demigods were likewise
accompanied in texts and idol representation by
half-animal and half-human creatures like centaurs
(the part-human, part-horse offspring of Apollo’s
son, Centaurus), chimeras, furies, satyrs, gorgons,
nymphs, Minotaurs, and other genetic aberrations.
Historian Andrew Tomas believes these mythological
records are “thought-fossils depicting the story of
vanished cultures in symbols and allegories,” or, as
Stephen Quayle, in his book Genesis 6 Giants explains: “The collective memories in the form of
myths, fables and fairy tales from various cultures
and ages of mankind are overwhelming evidence that the
Nephilim existed.”[iii]
All of this indicates that the Watchers
not only modified human DNA during the construction of
Nephilim, but animals as well, a point the book of
Enoch supports, saying in the seventh chapter that the
fallen angels “sinned” against animals as well as
humans. Other books such as the Book
of Jubilees add that this interspecies mingling eventually resulted in
mutations among normal humans and animals whose
“flesh” (genetic makeup) was “corrupted” by
the activity, presumably through crossbreeding (see
5:1–5; 7:21–25). Even the Old Testament contains
reference to the genetic mutations that developed
among humans following this time frame, including
“men” of unusual size, physical strength, six
fingers, six toes, animal appetite for blood, and even
lion-like features (2 Samuel 21:20; 23:20).
However, of all
the ancient records, the most telling extra-biblical
script is from the Book of Jasher, a mostly forgotten text referred to in the Bible in
Joshua 10:13 and 2 Samuel 1:18. Jasher records the
familiar story of the fall of the Watchers, and then
adds an exceptional detail that none of the other
texts is as unequivocal about, something that can only
be understood in modern language to mean advanced
biotechnology, genetic engineering, or “transgenic
modification” of species. After the Watchers had
instructed humans “in the secrets of heaven,” note
what Jasher says occurred:
[Then]
the sons of men [began teaching] the mixture of
animals of one species with the other, in order
therewith to provoke the Lord. (Jasher 4:18)
The phrase “the
mixture of animals of one species with the other”
does not mean Watchers had taught men hybridization,
as this would not have “provoked the Lord.” God
made like animals of different breeds capable of
reproducing. For example, horses can propagate with
other mammals of the equidae classification (the
taxonomic “horse family”), including donkeys and
zebras. It would not have “provoked the Lord” for
this type of animal breeding to have taken place, as
God, Himself, made the animals able to do this.
If, on the other
hand, the Watchers were crossing species boundaries by
mixing incompatible animals of one species with the other, such as a horse with a human (a
centaur), this would have been a different matter and
may cast light on the numerous ancient stories of
mythical beings of variant-species manufacturing that
fit perfectly within the records of what the Watchers
were accomplishing. Understandably, this kind of
chimera-making would have “provoked the Lord,” and
raises the serious question of why the Watchers would
have risked eternal damnation by tinkering with
God’s creation in this way. Yahweh had placed
boundaries between the species and strictly ordered
that “each kind” reproduce only after its “own
kind.” Was the motive of the Watchers to break these
rules simply the desire to rebel, to assault God’s
creative genius through biologically altering what He
had made? Or was something of deeper significance
behind the activity?
Some believe the
corruption of antediluvian DNA by Watchers was an
effort to cut off the birth line of the Messiah. This
theory posits that Satan understood the
protoevangelium—the promise in Genesis 3:15 that a
Savior would be born, the seed of the woman, and that
He would destroy the fallen angel’s power. Satan’s
followers therefore intermingled with the human race
in a conspiracy to stop the birth of Christ. If human
DNA could be universally corrupted or “demonized,”
they reasoned, no Savior would be born and mankind
would be lost forever. Those who support this theory
believe this is why God ordered His people to maintain
a pure bloodline and not to intermarry with the other
nations. When Israel breached this command and the
mutated DNA began rapidly spreading among men and
animals, God instructed Noah to build an ark and to
prepare for a flood that would destroy every living
thing. That God had to send such a universal fiat like
the Flood illustrates how widespread the altered DNA
eventually became. In fact, the Bible says in Genesis
6:9 that only Noah, and by extension his children,
were found “perfect” in their generation. The
Hebrew word for “perfect” in this case is tamiym,
which means “without blemish” or “healthy,”
the same word used in Leviticus to describe an
unblemished, sacrificial lamb. The meaning was not
that Noah was morally perfect, but that his physical
makeup—his DNA—had not been contaminated with
Nephilim descent, as apparently the rest of the world
had become. In order to preserve mankind as He had
made them, God destroyed all but Noah’s family in
the Flood. The ancient records, including those of the
Bible, appear to agree with this theology,
consistently describing the cause of the Flood as
happening in response to “all flesh” having become
“corrupted, both man and beast.”
While I believe
the theory of DNA corruption as an intended method for
halting the coming of Christ has merit, an alternative
(or additional) reason the Watchers may have blended
living organisms exists. This theory is original with
me and grew from my desire to incorporate the
voluminous historical texts, which described this
peculiar history, into a consistent account that
corresponds with Scripture.
To harmonize the
ancient records, I came to believe that the overriding
motive for whatever the Watchers were doing with the
DNA of various species had to be understood within the
context of their foremost goal, which was to leave
their plane of existence and to enter ours. My
challenge then became to answer the question of how
blending various species would satisfy this goal or
provide the Watchers with a method of departure from
“high heaven” and incarnation into man’s
“habitation.” While I will not take time here to
explain every detail, I eventually hypothesized that
the Watchers blended species in the way they did in
order to create a unique body outside the divine order
into which they could extend themselves. The rationale
is that every creature as it existed originally had
its beginning in God, who ordered each creature to
reproduce “after its own kind.” The phrase
“after its own kind” verifies what kind of spirit
or persona can enter into an intelligent being at
conception. When the sperm of a dog meets ovum of a
dog and the life of a dog is formed, at the first
spark of life the nature of a dog enters that embryo
and it grows to become a dog in traits and form. The
spirit of a man does not enter it, in the same way
that a man is not born with the qualities of a horse
or cow. This creature/nature integrity would have kept
the Watchers, who wanted to incarnate within the
earthly realm (not just “possess” creatures), from
displacing the spirits of humans or the natures of
animals and replacing them with their own. How did
they overcome this problem? Like scientists are doing
today, it appears based on the ancient records that
they blended existing DNA of several living creatures
and made something that neither the spirit of man or
nature of beast would enter at conception, for it was
neither man nor beast. As the quarterly online travel
guide Mysterious
World, in
its 2003 feature, “Giants in the Earth,” noted:
The
Nephilim were genetically manufactured beings
created from the genetic material of various
pre-existing animal species… The fallen angels did
not personally interbreed with the daughters of men,
but used their godlike intellect to delve into the
secrets of YHWH’s Creation and manipulate it to
their own purposes. And the key to creating or
recreating man, as we have (re)discovered in the
twentieth century, is the human genome—DNA.[iv]
IN
PART THREE WE WILL ASK THE DISTURBING QUESTION: ARE
HUMAN HYBRIDS ONCE AGAIN WALKING AMONG MEN?
************
This
series is based on research led by Thomas Horn and a team of
investigators whose report will be published this September
under the working title God's Ghostbusters.
All endnotes will be
included in the final published report
|
In
a paper for the 
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