Free The Ancient Alien Question by Philip Coppens Page A

intriguing and interesting the parallels between the UFO field and the Ancient Alien Questions are, the problem is that you cannot answer one question with another one. Two enigmas do not make for one reality. But they do suggest that two enigmas might be related, or might even be two aspects of a larger enigma—the Alien Question.
Answering that question positively can currently only be done if we look at this question from a certain, skewed perspective. It worked well in the popular television series The X-Files , where it was clear that the conspiracy was thousands of years old. But television series like The X-Files and so many others use these phenomena to elaborate and entertain, not to prove.
With the all-encompassing theories unable to stand up to scrutiny or lacking in evidence, it is clear that one of the greatestquestions humankind is posing—Were We Alone?—cannot be answered easily. To paraphrase my friend Stan Hall, “If it was that easy, someone would already have done so.”

Chapter 3

Of Gods and Men
The Protestant bishop James Ussher wanted to provide an accurate history of the Bible, and felt that the best manner in which to do this was to establish an accurate date for Creation. He studied thousands of ancient books and manuscripts, written in diverse languages; by the time of his death, he had a library containing more than 10,000 volumes. After much study, Ussher wrote, “In the beginning, God created heaven and earth, which beginning of time, according to this chronology, occurred at the beginning of the night which preceded the 23rd of October in the year 710 of the Julian period.” Transposed to our calendar, that was the year 4004 BC .
Others have concluded that the Bible contains a code. Or several codes. By selecting letters, certain words and phrases are spelled out. For example, using every 50th letter of the Book of Genesis, the Hebrew word for “bible” is spelled out. This technique waspopularized by Michael Drosnin in The Bible Code , in which he reported on how computers had successfully been used to find such patterns in the Bible. Drosnin argued that it was exceedingly unlikely that these sequences could have been created by chance. He demonstrated the validity of the code by showing that it wrote of past events that had occurred and made a series of predictions for the future—which proved to be less accurate.
Ussher and Drosnin are but two examples of hundreds of people who have turned to the Bible for answers. They treat the Bible as infallible, quite often literally as the work of God, even though it is known that the Bible has been changed in time, if only through a series of translations. When the Ancient Alien Question first began to be posed, the Bible was mined for evidence to show that some of the encounters with “God” were actually Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
    The Spaceship of Ezekiel
Ancient Alien proponents have found places in the Bible where it is clear that something strange is going on. The story of Jonah and the whale is one of the Bible’s better-known “fairy tales.” In the story, Jonah was swallowed up by a whale but lived to tell the tale. Although the creature is commonly thought to be a whale, it is actually written as a “great fish.” And the Bible, in Jonah 2:6, relates how Jonah could walk around in it and breathe and that he even saw “the bottoms of the mountains” while inside this creature—suggesting that it was no creature at all.
Then there is the story of Sodom and Gomorrah. The exact locations of the cities are not known, but it is believed they were at the south end of the Dead Sea, between Israel and Jordan. Genesis 19 records that the cities’ inhabitants were so wicked that God rained fire and brimstone on them. Only Lot and hisfamily were spared; they had been forewarned so that they could leave the city. On the evening before the destruction, Lot was visited by two angels who informed him of the upcoming