Aliens in the Bible — Paul Wallis in Conversation with Erich von Däniken

[Music] like you my journey into the field of patio contact began in the world of theology and the translation of the bible and in my work training pastors i trained them in hermeneutics the principles of interpreting ancient texts the bible in particular and we would do form criticism and that's where you look at the text and you say what kind of literature is this and you look for clues in the text and i taught them to do source criticism where you ask where did these narratives come from and you look for clues in the text and then you bring linguistic questions what do these words actually mean and eric i've heard you say that there are probably 10 words in the bible that if you go back to the root meanings that opens up the whole extraterrestrial aspect of the bible story and my research absolutely agrees with yours of course i study languages i was a deep deep believer in god and my father sent me into a swiss catholic boarding school which was led by jesuits and in that school we have to make translations of some parts of the bible from latin to greek and from greek to german now while translating these books i read for example the first book of moses before the lord of the bible descends to the holy mountain he gives order to moses to construct a gate around the mountain so that the israelites would not come close by otherwise they would be destroyed so moses construct the gate the israelites are in safe distance and then the lord descends with smoke and fire and trembling loud noise in the bible it even says the the mountain looked like a fern ace no i said to myself as a 14 year old boy why this god the real god the spiritual god first need a gate for protection god is only put in why this distance why they would say they would be destroyed if they would be closed the college in which i was studying had a direct connection with the library of the university in the city of freeburg in switzerland so i just had to go to the next door and i was in the library and the leader of the library was a jesuit too and i told him your brother told to me i should ask you for the book of enoch and he asked me what do you want to know about enoch i said everything i know nothing about enoch so i received the book of enoch of course i studied the enoch in two languages and it's very very fascinating but the main thing is enoch was taken up to the sky in religion they say he was taken up to heaven [Music] there he sees some garden in the religion they say well he's in the garden of the paradise in my eyes now he's not the god of the paradise he's in the plantation of a mother spaceship then he comes to the highest the room where the highest was sitting and the highest said hello he welcomed enoch and and two others in religion they said it was the almighty god so i didn't know it was not the almighty god it was the commander of a spaceship i saw different things in enoch with my eyes they told me in school when i was a boy eric when you live correctly when you do not harm anybody when you do not lie when you do not kill once when you die you will come to heaven heaven is the place of absolute happiness heaven is the place where you are together with the angel you praise the lord and so on later as an adult i learned that heaven was not a place of peace in heaven even in our own religion one day an archangel with the name of lucifer came and goes to the throne of the almighty god and says we don't serve you anymore then the almighty god asked for the archangel michael threw lucifer out of heaven heaven was not a place of peace and this happened in different texts so i suggested let's translate the word heaven into space we have been teached angels were there angels are the servants of god now angels are mostly spiritual beings but these angels are at least some of them it depends on the translation sometimes they call it the fallen sons of the gods guardians of the sky some of these so-called angels had sex with women's definitely including in the bible and some of these angels also behaved very badly sometimes including in the bible in the book of the kings the angel destroyed more than one hundred thousand babylonians or sumerians or assyrians just from the sky so i suggested let's translate the word angels into extraterrestrials now i have danny with two word heaven becomes space angels becomes extraterrestrial just translate a few of these old key words with modern interpretation and you change the meaning of the text [Music] as you were just saying if you go back to the root meanings that opens up the whole extraterrestrial aspect of the bible story but for me there was one key word and i took some time out to drill down into the meaning of this word and it's the word elohim it's the original word that gets translated as god in the bible there are other words too but elohim is the original word translated as god but when you ask the question what are the roots of the word it turns out it means the powerful ones it is a plural masculine word it takes plural verbs and then it exhibits plural behaviors you have conflicts among the elohim you have the wars of the elohim and human beings getting slaughtered in the conflicts of the elohim what would happen if we were to re-read the elohim stories but translate it as the powerful ones [Music] well the stories change but they don't change in a random way and as i went through that exercise and i share this journey in escaping from eden i suddenly realized that what we're reading in the elohim stories is the summary form of the sumerian arcadian assyrian and babylonian stories on which they're based the shock horror was to realize that the sumerian-based stories are not about god at all the elohim stories are the stories of the sky people in the sumerian stories and they make it very clear that the sky people are extraterrestrials everyone who makes this study deeply came to the same result we were visited by beings from outer space some thousands of years ago and we totally misunderstood our ancestor misunderstood the story so you think the different cultures around the world have in some way or other spoken about the same thing with different misunderstandings absolutely you can go to almost any country and any culture around the world and they will have folklore that speaks of a non-human presence on planet earth and they'll have stories of visitors from the stars in the deep past now those stories are held in the folklore because very often you'll have the official explanation of things so you'll have the mainstream scientific view you might have christian orthodoxy or the orthodoxy of islam but then you get the local stories and you'll discover other explanations and very often when empire goes in whether it's portuguese spanish dutch british the indigenous stories the folklore that remembers those who visited us in the deep past that's gotten rid of it's pushed down to the grassroots and then it's replaced with the mainstream of christianity and science and that's happened over and over again through history of course this is your your point of view your way to see things your arguments your indications and also your proofs is enlightening that will be the new understanding of our world and our religion this is exactly a point which i fully agree to 100 with you [Music] now you talk in new books about abductions this is a question really i have to you why should extraterrestrials abduct some humans what's the purpose of this when i wrote the scars of eden i had no ambition to write a book about et abductions because i think people really struggle to take it seriously and yet as soon as you start listening to world mythology and ancestral narratives abduction for hybridization is probably the most consistent theme in all those stories whether you're listening to the stories of the noble people or the other people from out of ireland or you're reading the work of robert kirk listening to the indigenous stories of scotland i'd learned of the mahurani stories from kenya the yamoya stories from the caribbean the dili ingonato the ancantos from the philippines i learned that the whole of europe is named after an e.t abductee that's torta's history in greece you've got the story of the greek gods and the titans you can go into the norse countries celtic countries and all the stories repeat and it's the details that repeat from culture to culture century to century cultures that had no contact with each other when you realize they're all telling the same stories you have to sit up and listen and realize that the folklore has something important to tell us they all speak about extraterrestrials hybridizing with us and it would seem strange people ask why would a more advanced species wish to hybridize with us but i think it's entirely possible that if we start with panspermia the belief that life in the universe is the rule rather than the exception that the cosmos has been seeded with the genetic coding for intelligent biological life you would expect similar life forms to arise on planets with water on them so we're all somewhat related but there will be something unique about human beings i do believe there's something about us that is very special we've got the blend of animal strength mammal emotion higher consciousness and it gives me an idea of why some of our neighbors might regard human beings as very attractive that's what genesis 6 says they found the humans very attractive and they want some of our uniqueness some of our features in their own gene pool so you go to the stories of the mommy water in ghana and what they say is that the mummy water people want to be more like us and that is why they are combining our genes with theirs to improve their own species just because another species might have better technology doesn't mean they're superior in every way and that's how i'm beginning to piece together the picture of why some of these abductions may be happening now this could make us proud we could say hey i'm something special but at the same time it makes us very very humble because every human is unique and that might be a reason that the ets make abductions they want to know more of this uniqueness of every of our individuals [Music] in the universe it might be that we have thousands and thousands and thousands of complete different species maybe we have forms of life which we cannot even understand we formal apply with on which really a communication is impossible but there are similar forms of life as we too because of panspermia but one day one of these civilizations decided to spread out their own form of life in a certain sector of their milky way you simply infect a section of your milky way with your own dna and of course you know that the biggest part of this dna will fall into a the gravity of the sun will be destroyed or into the gravity of a planet which is completely wrong for that form of life but the few of it will come into the gravity of a lot of a planet which is similar than the one they started by the way nasa says in the meantime more than four billions of earth-like planets must be out there so and now on this planet evolution starts i am still a believer in evolution we are the product of evolution but not only somebody always interfere in our genome they simply take one cell they change the code in the cell they put the cell into a liquid multiply it and put it into the womb of a female of the same species the female will now give birth to the child because of this artificial mutation the child has something which the rest of the family tree has not the so-called gods created are calling their own image and it makes all sense you don't say we are unique no there might be thousands of forms of life out there but some of them are similar to us because they are the offspring of it i was amazed to discover plato he has his way of talking about panspermia and then he has this language these entities who came in our distant past he called them children of god and they intervened in our development as a species and he said they adapted us to give us a greater component for consciousness and intelligence i've heard you express that same story in the language of they gave us curiosity turned us into a technological species if it's intelligent it has to be curious if you are not curious you are not intelligent curiosity is like a monster which is in our brain we can do nothing against curiosity and curiosity will guide every intelligent form of life into space because of curiosity we see little lights up there and curiosity forces us to ask what is this we have no alternative we have to go there to find it out to study it curiosity is the monster in our brain who brings every intelligent form of life sooner or later into space [Music] why do you think it is so difficult for academic and scientific communities to be seen to take seriously the possibility of previous civilizations or the possibility of et civilization it has to do with our education in 1956 i think it was the cia the american secret service has given out an order to all his agencies saying every person who makes his himself strong for ufos so flying sources societies who are founded with ufos who discuss these things in a serious way have to be ridiculed now scientists and journalists are normally intelligent and integral personalities but nobody wants to be ridiculed whatever they are afraid of be ridiculed so they don't touch the subject of extraterrestrials i make myself as a fool they are afraid of it so it's only this it's not even a conspiracy simply we are afraid to not be taken seriously to be ridiculed and nobody wants it but the situation changes now slowly and slowly the spirit of time has changed [Music] autos like you are changing what i call the spirit of time they are zeitgeist you see we are changing the spirit of time by our way of thinking developing and having speeches etc now what do you think could we do more you i and other colleagues in this field to change this spirit of time eric i think you and i and our friends should keep writing books and we should keep making appearances because i think it enables people to come to the table it enables academics to start discussing what this crazy writer has just said and it enables families and friends to do exactly the same it's part of the feedback i get people are delighted they can talk about this with their friends and their families because here's a book that they know will carry people into the conversation and i think if we can learn to listen to one another with respect we will actually begin to hear from our own families stories we've never heard before i've had friends tell me that they have shown the scars of eden to their mum and dad and all of a sudden they're hearing a story from their parents that is 50 years old that they've never heard before and the father will say son let me tell you what happened to me when i was 15 years old and now they're hearing the story of a close encounter i think if we can listen to each other not with ridicule but with respect we'll realize that stories of another presence on planet earth stories of contact are far more widespread than we've ever imagined so whatever we can do to encourage that kind of conversation i think that's the most important thing you see many authors as myself and i think you autos in this direction are criticized by the skeptics why not i accept critics we can react what is your reaction to the critics to the skeptics well sometimes i get people who come at me with a challenge or they're just very angry or they're attacking what i'm saying or they they think i'm debunking the bible whereas in fact i'm trying to understand it and i find 90 of the time if i listen to what they're saying and respond by saying well you've made some good points the reason i think this is this this and this i find we can have a conversation and ninety percent of the time we're the best of friends by the end of the conversation so i think critics very often they'll have something important to bring to the conversation sometimes they might bring something oh i hadn't thought about that i i will put some more thought to that and they can finesse our work but i think the best thing is always that we enter a conversation and even if it begins as a polarized one at least we're talking about it and that's perhaps the most important thing [Music] you broke the taboo but you got a lot of pushback as well and a lot of criticism did it come from scientists or religious people mostly religious people crashed me down later the scientific community came and said what come on who is he he's just he was just a waiter and now he writes a book and so what what is his scientific background etcetera so i was criticized and sometimes the critics were right and i was wrong but when we are young you don't understand this you have to become a little older but the critics are also just humans and some of them are wonderful people other than them were not very wonderful but i was crashed down practically by everyone first the critic said the scientific criticism he says that extraterrestrials exist we do not know if this is true or not we have no scientific proof at least not in 1968 then he says if extraterrestrials would really exist with what technology would they travel these distances of light years it was not possible in 1968 in the meantime we see a possibility that you can't travel it even if vondenke would be right if they would be able to travel why should they look like us extraterrestrials are never human-like in the evolution on other planets go completely different so that was all reasonable critics by the way and in the meantime we have answers reasonable answers for all these points so the spirit of time slowly changed in the meantime many of the critics and i have become good friends and okay today we can look at it with different eyes and more and more even the scientific community says eric von daniken's theories are still speculative but at least not impossible he could be on the right or the right way [Music] one of my favorite eric von danican stories was from the 1970s when nasa invited you to speak at their administrative facility in huntsville in alabama and in secret though they didn't want the world to know nasa was talking to eric bond anakin but they invited you to come and speak and after your lecture a senior engineer by the name of joseph blumrish took you to one side to correct your thinking so he thought but something else happened i remember it was in a hotel which had had the name carriage in and after my speech by the way everyone at nasa was there everyone who had to say something but we agreed in advance that no part neither nasa nor i would go to public we would not tell that i was speaking there so after my speech we had a dinner and this senior chief engineer mr joseph brumley came to me and said eric this was quite fascinating but you mentioned a prophet in the bible ezekiel and i do not believe that in the bible you will find anything technology the bible this is spiritual things stories maybe fairy tales dreams but nothing reality definitely nothing technological and he confessed to me he never read the bible and he said because of you teach the speech now i will do this and i will control the prophet ezekiel which you find in the old testament in every bible so he did start the purpose was to disprove me that i was wrong and then he became more and more fascinated and he start to calculate to sit down then two other engineers from nasa came to joe bloomberg's office and asked him joe what are you doing with the bible on your desk and he said this this prophet ezekiel this is incredible it can reconstruct and this man did they reconstruct phrase by phrase by the way the book of ezekiel in the bible and the result was another book with the english title the spaceship of ezekiel and in the beginning of the forward this senior nasa engineer pro dr bruni confessed he was starting this work to disprove me but he came to a complete different answer and it was a joy to work together with me and i think from joseph bulmer's work where he worked out how the wheels of ezekiel function i think they used that design on some of the mars rovers so we have a patent for a wheel which is used today on mars but finally the whole idea for this conception comes from the bible so if some of the listeners are the sentence of ezekiel you should maybe ask for money i think that's hilarious a patent for something in the bible that's wonderful [Music] your latest book has the title scars of eden what are these scars what do you mean with it well the bible talks about something called the sky council and what that is it seems to be a committee of extraterrestrial species different demographics who all feel they have a stakeholding in project earth and you read the stories of the bible or the sumerian stories or the greek stories or the stories from the vedas and it turns out that these et groups went to war with each other and they conflicted over how project humanity should be managed when you look at what the conflicts were they had arguments about how many humans there should be on the planet how long they should live what access they should have to knowledge understanding information how conscious they should be what access to food water medication and as you go through these stories you realize these are all the same wars that we are fighting today the powers are still conflicting over the exact same things right now we've got this clash between two models of farming which is actually in my view a clash between two et cultures that have visited us at different times and set us on different paths so that's that's another example i believe many of our paradigms of leadership were formed in the times when our ancestors were governed over by entities who were more advanced than ourselves and so we're hardwired to defer to those above us and you can see that all through human history so those would be just a few examples of the way has shaped the whole course of human history i guess you are familiar that the ex-defence minister of canada mr paul halea said that extraterrestrials are already among us and we could not difference them between normal humans general jaime ashe who was the chief of israel's space security program for 27 years has recently claimed that a government are in contact and there are some kinds of contracts with them do you agree what do you think about this i do believe that because it's a very consistent story when robert kirk a presbyterian minister in the late 1500s did his research in scotland he reached exactly that conclusion that not only is there another presence here they have an influence in human affairs so it's a very consistent story and you go right back to the beginning of christianity the stories are there of entities influencing human government i took very seriously the work of ed mitchell the sixth man to walk on the moon who even while bound by layers of official secrets laws campaigned for the u.s government to come clean about being in contact and he was allowed to say that and so for all those reasons yes i take that claim very seriously i do believe we are in contact and have been for a very long time i knew personally ed mitchell and mitchell was the sixth man on the moon and ed mitchell told me eric i was officially officially informed that extraterrestrials do exist and that we are under control and i said to ed mitchell what do you mean with officially you were the sixth man on the moon have you seen something up there said eric i have never saw a ufo i said so what do you mean with officially yet eric before we started to this trip to the moon we were three astronauts three hours before our starting the american astronomer carl sagan came to us very respected astronomer at that time and he said to us you are flying now to the moon and back and it is possible that you see something which you realize immediately this is not our human technology you are not allowed to speak to to use words like ufo extraterrestrials outsiders you must always use a code word i said to admit what was the code word for you on your trip to the moon and eric you won't believe it the cold war was grandma so it's all crazy we're getting some drip drips of information though we now know that there are materials being examined by these government departments we have film footage we're allowed to see of these anomalous craft in ancient history they didn't have film footage but they did make carvings and they dig make sculptures what are some of the most interesting ones that you've seen from all the things you've seen all around the world well i was in an interim in colombia and down in teledental they found tombs tombs of rich indians must be rich because they had a lot of gold gold objects around their head necklace etc and some of these cold objects they look like little aircraft the morphology is very clear the shape of the wings is clear you've got the cockpit that you could see there's a vertical tail there's no kind of insect as one of those it could not have been an insect you know insect for these people thousands of years ago was something which harms you insect was nothing holly nothing high you would never make insects in pure gold if you make something in pure gold because you adore it it has to do something with the gods now these objects they really look like aircrafts and they are different of them they were found in tierra dentro in colombia including some of the heads with helmets which the natives had not the stone age people never had helmets on also in central america central america colombia south america but you found some of these helmets in tierra dentro so the the world is fascinating we are learning more and more and slowly the spirit of time that zeitgeist will change [Music] now i'll give you one example from my own family i was preparing for my book escaping from eden to come out and i suddenly remembered oh my goodness my parents-in-law are going to read this book and they are devout christian believers they are baptists pentecostals and they're from ghana and i thought i have to prepare them for this book because they could be shocked they could be offended and i do want to stay their son-in-law so they came and visited one weekend and we had some wonderful food and some wonderful wine and when everyone was relaxed i said kofi patience let me tell you about this book that's coming out and i explained to them everything i've just said to you eric and i had no idea how they were going to react well when i paused for breath and i'd explained what the book was my father-in-law kofi sat back in his chair and he said paul a penny has dropped because all the things that didn't make sense in the old bible stories suddenly made sense suddenly he realized we're reading the stories of et's not god's stories in some of the old stories and then my mother-in-law patient said to my total surprise paul we already know this story because in ghana at school you were taught the modern scientific view you're taught christianity but we in ghana have known for generations of a non-human presence on planet earth and she told me the mommy water stories out of ghana and it is stories of contact with other species by the way i had a similar experience when chariots of the gods came on the market i was afraid to present my own book to my parents who were absolutely catholics finally i did it and my father looked at me and said eric but you don't lose god you still believe in god i say of course daddy god is all over omnipotent god is the almighty universe god is whatever you never lose god my belief is exactly the same as yours i still have my faith in god and i should say i wasn't worried about my own parents because it was they who introduced me to your work when i was 11 years old are you still working sometimes in churches all my pastoral work is one-on-one as soon as we're let out of our houses again i hope i will be doing some meetings in churches as well paul vallis you are a very intelligent and clever personality i have full respect with you everyone can understand and you have a way to speak and what to tell it in a way that everyone understands it thank you eric you really have changed the zeitgeist and i want to thank you so much for doing that pioneering work thank you for blazing that trail thank you for your courage paul vallis it was a pleasure to talk to you thank you hope to see you sooner or later again thank you eric i hope so too god bless you bye-bye it was a pleasure joe paul god bless [Music] thank you for joining me today on the paul wallace channel remember to subscribe and click on the bell for notifications for a full two hours of myself in conversation with eric von daniken you can go to the eric vondelican podcast on youtube and fb and also you can go to the fifth kind tv [Music] you