The Various Chariots of God

Busy, busy, busy. What with working 9 – 5 (I don’t know how you non-shift worker types handle the daily grind, it’s ridiculous) and trying to get through a bit of Sam Harris and the tangents that’s led me on, time for writing has been at a premium. Nonetheless, I think it’s time I penned a missive concerning one of my favourite hypocrisies concerning modern religion, especially where your more fundamental believer is concerned.

You see, the books that make up the collection that include the Torah, Talmud, Bible and Koran seem to contain many references that could easily be construed to be close encounters of one kind or another. Well, especially if you’re into that sort of thing, but more about that later. First I need to say that personally, I put UFOs and ET firmly in the same basket as God, which is to say that I’ll believe it when I see some firm and testable evidence. Unlike my attitude toward God however, I am at least prepared to admit that there’s enough evidence at this point to suggest that it is at least possible, if not as yet probable, that we are not alone in space.


That said - as it needed to be - I found some “stuff” by way of history that I thought you might find interesting. I was poking around at SETI and got sidetracked by this article by Seth Shostak, the senior astronomer there, that speaks about the theoretical number of planets we might find in our galaxy. Here’s another one that talks about a possible “earth like” planet that’s recently been discovered. It got me to wondering just how far back the whole UFO/alien thing goes and why the bible itself might seem to contain a few tales about such things.

Well, it seems that it goes back quite a ways indeed. Here are some images that have no words to accompany them so really, we can’t be sure. I think you’ll agree however, that some of them do bear an uncanny resemblance to what we would call “aliens” and/or “UFOs” today:

Here’s an image that dates back to about 10,000BCE. It hails from Val Camonica in Italy and is a rather amazing image. They could be wearing some sort of costume and carrying some kind of ceremonial or practical implements, as yet unidentified. Some might say however, that they look a bit like ET, which explains nicely why the implements reman unidentified, but little else.



Then there’s this one from Tassiliin in the Sahara, North Africa which dates to about 6,000BCE. This one’s just freaky! It may be ET or it may be a costume of some kind, who’s to say, but the classic disc in the upper right might just make you wonder.







From my neck of the woods (Aus.) we have the Wandjina petroglyphs from the Kimberly. These lads date to about 5,000BCE.















This interesting looking chap was found in Kiev and dates back to about 4,000BCE.







There are many more than just these, of course. It’s unfortunate that the sites that have the most images seem to be concerned more with conspiracies and what have you, but that seems to be difficult to escape when you go looking for “ufo history” or “ancient ufo”. Nonetheless, drawings and statues like these are found all over the world and date to all eras and as we know, rumours and stories continue to persist today.

Is it any wonder then that there may also be stories of such things, as there are images, that have come to us through the folk law of ancient cultures? Given that the phenomena of the humble UFO could possibly be as old as man himself, I don’t think so. It was after all, the ancient stories, artwork and monuments that led Erich von Däniken to draw the conclusions that he did, erroneously or not.

But then there’s some of the distinctly christian art:




We’ll start with this one by Flemish artist Aert De Gelder in 1710. A classic disc beaming light down on John the Baptist and Jesus. “Beam me up Scotty!” Hehe…:)











Here’s a fifteenth century painting by Domenico Ghirlandaio (1449-1494). Note the detail in the UFO, port holes and everything. One might wonder why so much time was spent on such a small feature, but there it is, plain to see.



This one’s my favourite though. "Glorification of the Eucharist" was painted by Bonaventura Salimbeni to commemorate the Christian Jubilee in 1600 but it does not appear to contain a UFO. It contains, of all things, the humble Sputnik, albeit with only two antennae. Now correct me if I’m wrong here, but I’m sure that Sputnik wasn’t launched until Oct. 4 1957. Why then are Jesus and God respectively, each holding one of it’s antennae back in 1600? It’s a conundrum and no mistake.




But, and there’s always one of them, I think it’s an established fact that your more fundamental Christian is not particularly enamoured with the idea that we may not be the only intelligent and sentient beings in the universe. We are after all, supposed to be the pinnacle of God’s creation and the only one like it. “Unique in all creation”, as they say. I find this notion to be quite odd, especially when we begin to read the bible.

We’ll take a little look at Ezekiel here, just as an example:

1:4 I looked, and I saw a windstorm coming out of the north - an immense cloud with flashing lightning and surrounded by brilliant light. The centre of the fire looked like glowing metal

1:16 This was the appearance and structure of the wheels: They sparkled like chrysolite, and all four looked alike. Each appeared to be made like a wheel intersecting a wheel. 17 As they moved, they would go in any one of the four directions the creatures faced; the wheels did not turn about as the creatures went.

This chapter has an example of just about everything we’ve invented names for today; lenticular clouds, spinning lights, ring lights, classic “flying saucers” zooming around, etc. It seems a bit weird to me now, but there was I time I’d read this and see it all as evidence of God’s power and all round mightiness. Now I find I’m turning the page in anticipation of a description of the resulting crop circle, which viewed from the vantage of that hill over there, bears an uncanny resemblance to King Jehoiachin, alas…

But as I said earlier, fundamental Christians do not tend to believe that ET is a possibility. There’s no room for it, you see. Once every spare nook and cranny is filled with Jesus, there’s just not enough space left for anything else, not even “common” sense, or so it seems. Even so, it does seem a tad hypocritical to me to ridicule someone else’s belief in ET while at the same time subscribing to a book that has no less than 362 descriptions of what in today’s language would be nothing more than first, second or third hand reports of UFO sightings and rather dubious ones at that.