The Mystery of Aliens [Part 2]

Our earlier assessments about the gods and heroes of old differing from the extraterrestrial aliens of the flying saucer/UFO (modern) era needs to be supplemented apparently, as it has flummoxed some visitors to our blog(s).

Our premise, if there is one, is that the gods/heroes of ancient times were barely different from the humans who observed and recorded their visitations; whereas the alien beings of flying saucer lore (mostly from the 1950s and 1960s, aside from the alleged Space Brothers of the “contactee” tales) were either dwarfish or grotesque.





Moreover, we accept some ancient texts as (almost) literal…



And we find some accounts, as in The Old Testament of the Holy Bible [Confraternity-Douay Version] to be very intriguing (and human-like); e.g., Exodus 4:24

The Mayan Popul Vuh [Translated by Dennis Tedlock, Touchstone Books, NY, 1985/1996] is a source for extant renderings of the original Popul Vuh which dates, reliably from about 1550 A.D., but represents ancient oral and written texts of the early Mayans going back at least 1000 years.



The text contains creation stories similar to that found in The Hebrew/Christian Bible in Genesis.

And the gods, described therein, while adorned with animal parts and recounted as having grotesque accoutrements, were essentially human-like in appearance. [Page 145
ff.]



The Egyptian Book of the Dead contains descriptive similar to that in the Popul Vuh and precedes the Mayan book by several thousand years.



Most readers here are familiar with (or should be) the Egyptian iconography and the association with the ancient alien theory of Erich von Daniken at al.

Again, the gods of Egypt, while often adorned with animal parts, remain human-like in action and appearance, especially after the theological thrust of Akhenaton [circa 1354 B.C.]



From the text:

Åmen-Ra…president [sic] of all the gods, beautiful god, beloved one….the gods adore him…The gods love the smell of Him…the gods cast themselves down at his feet…the gods acclaim him, and he stretcheth out his hand to him that loveth him. [Page 108, The Book of the Dead, University Books, Secaucus, NJ, 1960].

Nothing pungent, odorous, or ugly there.

The Tibetan Book of the Dead can be traced back to the 12th Century with antecedents attributable to the 8th Century [after Christ].



The gods of Tibetan lore were described therein thusly:

Blessed Vajrasattva-Aksobhya will appear before you….His body is blue in colour, he holds a five-pointed vajra in his hand and sits on an elephant throne, embracing his consort Buddha-Locana, He is accompanied by the two male bodhisattvas…the two female bodhisattvas…[Page 43, The Tibetan Book of the Dead, Francesca Fremantle and Chögyam Trungpa, Shambhala Books, Berkeley, 1975].



Nothing grotesque or dwarfish there.

Then there is lacunae where the gods (and their minions) disappear, until the Christ incarnation and the appearance of Mohammed’s Allah [6th Century A.D.] and perhaps the appearance of Jesus to Jeanne d’Arc in the 1400s [A.D.] and possibly the visitation of god’s mother Mary at Lourdes [1858] and Fatima [1917].

Finally we have the visitation of weird, little beings outside or near flying saucers, a few years before the ubiquitous arrival of little gray beings of an almost benign nature.



Again, we pose the query, why such a dichotomy in nature, physically mostly and somewhat in behavior?

The early descriptions allow for a divine patina to the ancient “visitors” while the modern visitors hardly come of as divine in any way – pasty, wan, and frail or so grotesque that they invite revulsion rather than the glorification like that by those who provided ancient accounts.

Why?

The Mystery of Aliens

Ancient Astronaut theorists posit the idea that the messengers and gods of old were extraterrestrial visitors, which is not necessarily a faulty supposition, considering the circumstantial “evidence” presented to bolster the hypothesis.



The visitors were not gray with large, almond-shaped eyes as they are rendered today by descriptives.



In mythology and religious-oriented works, the visitors of old were manifested by an aura that bespoke something otherworldly but not grotesque.



Those visitors often mated with human beings, as recounted in the Genesis account of the Hebrew Bible [6:1]:

...The sons of God saw that the daughters of man were good, and they took themselves wives from whomever they chose. God said, ’My spirit will not continue to judge man forever, since he is nothing but flesh. His days shall be 120 years’. The Nephilim were on the earth in those days and also later. The sons of God had come to the daughters of man and had fathered them. They were the mightiest ones who ever existed, men of renown.



And they also appear in the Greek myths, as Gods, whose dalliances produced such Greek Heroes as Achilles and Heracles.



And Merlin, the great wizard of the Arthurian legends, was said to have been fathered by an Incubus. [Bulfinch]



In the 1950s, flying saucer “occupants’ – as reported by observers – were usually grotesque or small, bizarre creatures, akin to the little people folklore of the British Isles.



In the 1960s, those visitors morphed into the so-called “grays” which evolved out of the Betty and Barney Hill abduction saga.



There is a dispute, extant, about what Betty Hill really described, at first, about her “abductors” – mostly having to do with their noses. But the “creatures” she allegedly encountered eventually came into being as the ubiquitous UFO people pictured when UFO occupants are discussed:



The question posed is this…

What happened between 5,000 years ago when the Sumerians pictured their “gods” and the modern era when UFO beings are described? [Intelligent Life in the Universe, Shklovskii/Sagan, Delta, 1966]



That is, why has the intruders’ physiognomy changed?

Yes, we accept the reality behind the myths and Biblical renditions of gods (or messengers from above).

We also think that some relatively recent observations of creatures nearby, what some call, UFOs or, better, flying saucers, are true also, whether created as an illusion or actually as perceived.



(The alien abduction phenomenon, which remains controversial and not proven, has been, in one form or another, around since the beginning of oral and written history, as anyone familiar with mythology and religious texts knows.)

There is a mystery in all this, one that is connected in all its aspects by the similarities in the visitations.

The difference lies in how the “visitors” appeared, not in how they acted, but what they looked like.



Are there, or were there, two different classes of beings – some actually gods (or imagined as such) and some actually extraterrestrials (or imagined as such)?

It’s a mystery, either way…..

(And yes, we’ve covered this before, in 2007)