Hello and welcome to episode number 95 of the Point of Convergence podcast as always I am your host, ExoAcademian. Over the last 12 months or so, those associated with uphology have seen their excitement level around the matter of official disclosure reach a fevered pitch.
Much of the optimism has been tied to the remarkable specificity of the language included in the Schumer Amendment, which makes clear not only that sophisticated non-human intelligences in our midst exist, but that various elements of the military industrial complex have constructed elaborate schemes to study this phenomenon while shielding this consequential reality not just from the American people, but also from Congress and the rest of government.
While much of that amendment was eventually gutted before being passed into law, in many ways the proverbial train has nevertheless left the station. There is just too much momentum heading into 2024 for this progress-triverse course. It may take longer than some within uphology would prefer, but this march towards an official acknowledgement of the reality of this phenomenon and the various unconventional intelligences behind it seems unstoppable at this point.
While this particular matter of when disclosure will actually happen has been front and center in the uphological dialogue over the last year, what has been discussed much less regularly is the matter of what will be actually disclosed. Many of us obsessed with this topic have been so focused on crossing this one particular threshold, yes this is real and yes so are they, that we spend far less time pondering what might be disclosed or commented upon,
beyond this initial civilization changing acknowledgement. Truth be told this is precisely where the challenge really arises for the powers that be, and frankly that's because they really have no clear understanding of where this all leads, yes it's real, yes it's been present in our midst, even if in stealthy manner, perhaps as long as we've been around as a species, but as to its ultimate nature and how it changes our understanding of fundamental reality,
that's a matter of ongoing contention and confusion, even for the insiders who spend decades studying this with the highest security clearances available. For those who take the most overarching view, considering not just the more contemporary manifestation and interpretation of this phenomenon, but also ways that deep human history seems to point to interaction stretching back millennia, even if described in terms and frames much less familiar and comfortable to modern ears,
it's clear that these other intelligences have not only been with us all along, likely shaping our development across time in the process, but likely we're responsible for our very seating upon this blue pearl of a planet to begin with.
In today's episode we'll be taking a deep dive into the ways one can make a very solid case for the notion that ancient encounters was so-called gods, or ultimately part of the very same enterprise as the more modern UFO slash UAP and alien abduction slash hybridization at Nigma. How has framing and a poor understanding of the different cultural context that have tried to make sense of these phenomena over time obscured the underlying truth of these reality-shaking revelations?
These are the very daring, daunting, and highly disruptive matters we'll be exploring in this, the 95th episode of the Point of Convergence podcast.
As we begin this week's episode, I want to remind everyone that if you'd like to support this podcast and in doing so, also get access to all of my content, which includes not just Point of Convergence and Limital Frames, but also the various features series I create, as well as OTC Squared, those are two additional podcasts and access to my Discord server, you can do so by becoming a patron on patreon.com slash exo-academyon or by subscribing on Sponify.
Alright, let's jump into this week's episode. We're going to be doing a deep dive into ancient history, ancient human history, and how evidence when read in the correct context suggests strongly that beings that were being interacted with then, even though modern ears often hear that as mythological stories that aren't real, speaks to the very same enigma as the so-called UFO phenomenon, a much more modern convention.
To Adesonism Debra, we're going to be drawn largely from a book titled Secret Machines, Gods, Volume 1 of the Gods, Man and War trilogy. This is by Peter Leventa and Tom DeLong, Tom DeLong, of course, of TTSA fame. Peter Leventa has written many, many books, a very interesting variety, to do with occult history and other kinds of secret societies and alike stretching across the broad expanse of human history.
Now truth be told, when I first read this book when it first came out, it had less of an impact than it does now, and that's largely because my perspective has shifted, has evolved based on evidence I've come across. It also speaks to some of the bias that I also brought into the endeavor based on my religious studies history.
In other words, because I studied this in college, I had a certain bias that didn't allow me to see this with the new eyes I needed to, and it is really only uncovering the depth of the strangeness of the UFO phenomenon, how high strangeness and general paranormality are baked in, as I like to say, to the UFO phenomenon.
That's allowed me to see not only it differently, but then in consequence also look back at ancient history differently as well, because it became clear to me that the way we're taught to think about these things is dripping in its own kind of bias based on the way that modern society thinks about the nature of reality and ancient human history.
More specifically, we as modern so-called scientific people assumed that ancient peoples, our ancient ancestors, couldn't possibly have been really understanding reality, and so when we come across things that don't match up with modern conventions, we assume they were just making up stories whole cloth to try to make sense of an incredibly complex environment that they simply had no tools by which to understand.
Again, I think the picture is much more complex than that, and that while our own scientific views have helped us to transform the physical world, they've also hidden from us other parts of reality that exist even when we don't want to believe in them. And again, that speaks to the nature of the UFO phenomenon and also interactions that were recorded in ancient history that again, based on what we're trying to meet the case for today, may speak to the very same enigma.
As different historians and anthropologists have looked back at deep human history, even prehistory, they see evidence in things like ancient architecture, art, and mythological slash religious writings along with the apparent sudden leap in technological progress, including advanced astronomical knowledge, and conclude that perhaps there was some sort of intervention that happened in ancient history that allowed for this leap-proguing in progress.
And of course, that speaks to the so-called ancient aliens hypothesis or ancient astronauts. Now, as I mentioned in the introduction, what largely steers us a skew here is that we attach too much to the terms that are used. So in modern convention, we say aliens, and by that we often mean space aliens, even though Jacques de lait and other people have made a very strong case that it's much too narrow a way of framing this even though that may be part of it.
But in the same way, when ancient stories are told, the others encountered there are framed as gods or deities. But these are really misnomers. These speak to cultural expectations, cultural framing, that quite likely obscure the fact that these are referring to the very same kinds of entities. Not necessarily the same entities per se, but the same kinds of entities coming from the same other domains of reality, domains that we are challenged to really even conceive of correctly.
And so we try with these different terms, gods, aliens, and such. But really, it's speaking to some sort of intervention by some other kind of intelligence that is superior to human beings, not just back then, but even today. And that these beings, coming from this particular domain or domains, not only seated our civilization, but are actually kinds of overlords who are watching the progress of our civilization across time.
Now I've already mentioned that a misreading of ancient literature is partly what leads us astray here. And this really comes down to the fact that when you take into account ancient cultures, you have to not only consider the different tongues they spoke with, and translate that accurately, but also translate idioms and things like that and account for cultural differences, framing difference in terms of worldviews and that kind of thing.
There's a term that we should keep a mind here, and it's anachronism, which speaks to an act of attributing a custom event or object to a period to which it does not belong. We do that frequently. We anachronistically assume that the past, thought, and conceived of things the same way that we do today.
And that makes us frequently misunderstand, misapprehend, how ancient cultures were actually trying to discuss various matters, especially matters that even today we struggle to really even engage with. And of course, origin stories in the notion that other kinds of intelligences might be overseeing our development are one of those very topics we have a very hard time engaging with.
Again, the modern myth, and yes, we have our own myth, those in the modern time, speaks to the notion that we are the apex species, the apex intelligence alone and an otherwise inert universe, making our way as we see fit.
Again, not only recent experience with the UFO phenomenon and those beings, but also ancient history, speak to the fact that that is a very misguided notion, which of course many moderns are not prepared to hear, and that's why this goes on not being really considered, not being really investigated with kind of breadth that it needs to be. Alright, so let's get into some of the text from this book titled again, Secret Machines, Gods, Volume 1 of the Gods, Man, and War, Trilogy.
Quoting from the book now, quote, perhaps the foremost proponent of an ancient astronaut theory involving Sumer is the late Zachariah Sitchin, who lived from 1920 to 2010. A former London journalist and native of Azerbaijan, who relocated to New York, Sitchin taught himself Sumerian in an effort to decipher the ancient Kuneiform texts of that civilization.
His work has been criticized by scholars of Sumerian, Akkadian, and the civilizations that centered in and around Babylon. Sitchin's translations of key texts, as well as the decipherment of some cylinder seals, was idiosyncratic to say the least, but that did not stop his works from becoming worldwide bestsellers, translated into 45 languages.
Less a scholar than an intuitive, one of those writer mediums of which Professor Jeffrey Kriple writes, Sitchin nevertheless touched on some specific weaknesses and speculations of current astronomical theory, introducing the idea that at some point in the distant past, there was a planet or planets in our solar system that exploded, a theory put forth by the late astronomer, Dr. Thomas Van Flandern,
to account for both the asteroid strike that killed a dinosaurs 65 million years ago, as well as the existence of a civilization on Mars. Sitchin's main theory, however, that human beings or a hybrid race created as slaves for extraterrestrial rulers has no actual basis in the Sumerian text themselves, nor is the existence of his twelfth planet, evidence by the Sumerian cylinder seals, even though he has insisted that such evidence exists.
Yet, something about this story spread over more than a dozen books touched a nerve in the general population, it seemed to explain something to fill in a blank in the human record that has not been filled by evolution or astrophysics or genetics.
As while the Sitchin's theory may be, there is an element of something in the midst of all the mistranslated Sumerian, the mistaken Aramaic, and the unsupported astronomy that resonates with those who understand that there is a continuing presence in the world that cannot be explained by science at its present level of understanding and who do not feel they can wait for the scientists to catch up.
So they gravitate to works like those of Zacharias Sitchin and Eric Von Daniken and others, and to the cable shows hosted by Giorgio Tuklos and David Hatcher-Childris, because at some level they know there is truth there, somewhere, unquote.
And now speaking of this person, Thomas van Flandern, this astrophysicist, I want to quote from something he said here, quote, there is a general distrust of authority in the world, whether it is of governments or of academia, of the military and the scientists. So conspiracy theory that used to focus on political assassinations has now expanded to include metaphysical speculations as well.
The crossover from political conspiracy theory to ancient astronaut theories, holy grail romances and uphology has created an underground that is part art and part literature, part science and part magic. Part politics and part mysticism. Events in my late caused me to start questioning my goals and the correctness of everything I had learned. It matters of religion, medicine, biology, physics and other fields. I came to discover that reality differed seriously from what I had been taught.
Again, that's astronomer Thomas van Flandern, speaking to realities that much of us have grappled with over time as we become obsessed with this particular UFO phenomenon topic. Indeed, this is the ultimate rabbit hole that makes you question much of the narrative about 20th century history and even about the origins of our species, the nature of reality, etc. Now you may notice there that we mentioned the ancient civilization of Sumer, the Sumerians.
The more one studies ancient history, the more that you come back and back to this same civilization and that much of our later myths and later civilizations that grew up actually adopted some of these earlier mythological stories to describe the nature of reality. Sometimes co-opting them and evolving them, changing them to fit certain propaganda, but nevertheless referring back to this ancient tale.
Again, what we're suggesting here is that these are not just tales, but the remnants of a story about something that really happened, an actual event or series of events in ancient history that again those people trying to grapple with in their own language and their own limitations in the same way that we do today.
According again from the book, quote, a Samuel Noah Kramer wrote, history begins at Sumer, and with the beginning of recorded history we have the beginning of paranoia and the suspicion that always not what it seems, while the truth may not be as such and conceived it, there is still a strange and persistent element of terror in the kuneiform texts of Sumer that may reflect concerns among these ancient peoples that are eerily similar to our own.
Again, very interesting parallels between common occurrences that happen today with a phenomenon and occurrences spoken to in some of these ancient texts going all the way back to the Sumerian civilization.
Now, considering that modern anthropology and whatnot tends to believe that different cultures grew up independent of each other at different parts of the world, what's quite surprising is the commonalities found in some of these ancient mythologies, some of the ancient literature, even some of the ancient structures and artworks.
As I already mentioned, it's commonly believed by scholars that Jewish mythology about beginnings is generally understood to be reworked to some degree and propagandized versions of older myths, often aiming to turn a polytheistic reality, in other words multiple gods interacting, into one suited for a monotheistic framing.
So again, that's where the propaganda comes in, but still adopting these earlier stories about the way the world began, which again makes us wonder if they took those earlier stories because that really was believed to be speaking to some actual events that were real. Now again, in addition to propaganda, in other words deliberate changing of the text to suit certain belief systems, is it also possible that some things became corrupted over time, some things were misremembered?
Absolutely, like a game of telephone that probably did happen, but again, this still speaks to the fact that under-lyingly, there's this ancient event or series of events again that were believed to be the actual source, the origin of the world and of human civilization, and that all of these different religions that share this common historical beginning point to something that really happened in ancient history,
something that's just as significant for us today as it was for those ancient peoples from ancient times. Now jumping back into the book again, I quote, various New Age authors have emphasized the importance of Sumer and its rituals, scriptures, and architecture to the ancient alien hypothesis, and there is an element of truth to these assertions, although it may not be obvious at once.
While Zacharias Hitchin has written extensively about his beliefs that the Sumerian concept of the Anunaki referred to alien technicians, most contemporary scholars of Sumer find no substance to these ideas, setting poor translations of Sumerian texts, as well as misinterpretations of Sumerian scriptures, and conflation between Sumerian and later Babylonian texts.
Sometimes though, the most revealing evidence for non-human or non-terrestrial contact is hidden in plain sight. In this case, it can be found in the Babylonian creation epic, the Anuma Alish, and the story of Marduk himself. Most are familiar with the creation story as it appears in the book of Genesis. In Dan version, God creates the heavens and the earth and eventually creates Adam, the first man, and Eve, the first woman.
This story is told in different ways in the Bible, even within Genesis itself, and it is believed that this seeming inconsistency in the accounts is the result of two separate versions, the priestly version and the Yahwist version being included.
That the creation story in Genesis is a reframing of the Mesopotamian original, with a view towards presenting a monotheist interpretation as opposed to the prevailing polytheist version, we find in most creation stories in the Middle East, is a subject of some debate among biblical scholars today. The biblical process of creating the universe and then the humans who inhabit the earth is a relatively benign one. There is no violence involved in Genesis 1, no struggle between opposing forces.
In fact, in Genesis, God appears as a single, uncreated entity with no consort or female companion, yet he is anthropomorphic enough that he can walk through the Garden of Eden and speak with Adam. This is explained by saying that God created Adam in his own image and likeness, thus human beings are somehow reflections or versions of the divine original. The character or extent of this likeness is nowhere specified, however.
Do humans look like God? Do they possess faculties similar or equivalent to those God possesses? We are only told that we share something in common with our creator. Indeed, when God creates Adam from dust, he breathes life into him, the divine spirit may be the key to understanding how human beings are made in the image and likeness of God. It may be a way of explaining consciousness.
The scholar, Alan F. Seagull, has written about the fact that for a long time there was a tradition among the Jews of, quote, unquote, two powers in heaven. There was the invisible transcendental God that we know from the Bible, but also a kind of vice-regent of God, a visible, large anthropomorphic entity that could walk and talk among the created humans. It was only much later that this belief was corrected, and the idea of a vice-regent officially excised from Jewish theology as a heresy.
In fact, it was still a common understanding during the time of Jesus, which is one reason why Pius Jews could contemplate the idea that God could look and live like a human being and dwell among them. In this case, it is clear that image and likeness means just that, at the very least, human beings are similar acrims of the divine original.
In the Babylonian creation story, the Anuma Alish, there is a long protracted battle between various gods that fund the results in the creation of human beings. This story pre-existed the biblical version by hundreds, if not a thousand years. It is now generally believed that the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Bible, also known as the Torah, or the Books of Moses, was written or compiled in the 6th century BCE.
The Anuma Alish has been dated to anywhere from 1000 BCE to 1800 BCE at the earliest. Now again, as I've already explained, part of what has obscured this matter for a very long time is that Eufology itself has tended to exclude certain kinds of data that is nevertheless part and parcel of the experience people are having with these various mysterious others.
We think again about Skinwalker Ranch, as I mentioned on a recent episode of Limit of Frames, what was clear there was that you had to study the high strangeness that Cola Rose with Eufos, if you were hoping to understand it, because it was all contextually connected. Again, correlated, maybe not causative, but somehow high strangeness or general paranormality, however you want to refer to it, Cola Rose with appearances of apparent Eufos.
Again, this doesn't make a lot of sense when you think about Eufos just being kinds of space aliens, full stop. In the same way, when you read these ancient tales, there are very mysterious things that happen, high strangeness is also front and center there. Again, it's larger because we've excluded the high strangeness from the modern Eufo phenomenon, and tended to explain away ancient accounts as just made up stories that we haven't made the connection.
But again, people that have spoken about their encounters recently speak to this high strangeness. Ray Hernandez, one of the founders of Free and NowCCRI, spoke about a giant wheel or hub appearing to him in a vision, and it was from that vision that he developed his understanding of the contact modalities, and how they were related to consciousness and to fundamental reality.
And then a friend of mine, David John Lange, who speaks openly about his encounters with the phenomenon on social media, wrote the following recently, quote, while he had very physical, waking close encounters with orbs, craft, and grays. Some of the experiences involved the liminal space between the astroplane and waking reality. This event seemed to affect my wife and daughter simultaneously, both physically and astrally, unquote.
Again, you read those kinds of accounts, which have notions of supposed space aliens, grays and whatnot and craft and orbs, but also things that seem to happen in an alternate frame of reality or alternate state of consciousness. Again, we struggle to understand how to even conceptualize about these things. So did our ancient ancestors. That's the point, and it's because we've excluded or not wanted to pay attention to that kind of data that we have missed some of the connection.
I already spoke about bias. When we think about the high strangeness, we also think about bias, preventing us from seeing the writing on the wall. For instance, again, because historically, you follow just have wanted to be accepted within mainstream science, they tended to downplay the high strangeness or not report on it at all.
And that's what you've come up with, these different kinds of categories. You have uphology on the one hand, and then you have hunt, apology, or the paranormal on another. You have some shows that will investigate one and another show that investigates the other, but very rarely do the two meet.
Again, it was because of historic enterprises like what Osab did with the Skinwalker Ranch investigation that we finally see that co-mingling of this data that's always been part and parcel of each other. Again, the data itself suggests that these dividing lines speak more to our false conceptions of reality than they do about the way things actually are.
Indeed, notions like magic, put in quote, as a kind of occult technology, and the calling on of beings from other realms are mixed in with the rest of this. God's technological craft and non-humans, but often still humanoid beings, et cetera, they're all part and parcel of the same enterprise.
And I want to jump into a section of the book that speaks to this right now. It may be that the Enlightenment idea of a secret society whose members have special knowledge about the workings of the world became a lancester which later writers would understand the ancient texts of Sumer and Egypt.
Did these civilizations possess secret knowledge about the origins of the world and especially of human beings? Knowledge that was suppressed by later cultures and institutions such as the Catholic Church, only to surface in the occult rituals and secret teachings of the Rosacrucians and the Freemasons? If we are to believe Sitch and Vandanaquin and the other ancient astronaut theorists, this indeed would seem to be the case.
Unquote. Again, we have the collapsing of categories, modern categories. The occult is often considered its own thing. This is a different kind of study than uphology or even than the paranormal. But nevertheless, what we seem to see here is a collapsing and transcending of these into a new model of reality itself that speaks to different kinds of domains that can co-mingle, interspersa amongst each other.
And that these kinds of beings can move across domains or dimensions or frames or planes of reality. Again, we struggle with the right language, but nevertheless the reality seems to speak to this and to try to make sense of this complex array of data, we split it up into different categories, different fields of study. All of those studies basically being also non-conventional and not considered kindly by academia.
And then you end up with a situation like what we see today where you have certain fringe groups looking into uphology and looking into hauntology and looking into the paranormal, etc. while you have the rest of mainstream society sticking to the usual understanding of the way reality actually works. Again, bias, prejudice, and I would argue a lack of curiosity range supreme.
But the thing is, this speaks to what I talked about in the introduction, when it comes to the nature of what actually is disclosed as part of official disclosure, all of these converge into some overarching question, a fascinating question, but a perplexing question about the way things really are. That's where this is ultimately headed.
And again, much of the challenge here for modern society, our western society, is that we have long assumed we are the apex intelligence, only religion really has grappled with the notion of beings, intelligences that are beyond us, and yet beings that are beyond us are clearly in play here.
And this led famed French uphologist Amy Michelle to say the following, quote, since the very earliest times of mankind, there has existed a particular mental attitude on the part of man as regards the existence of a thought, supposed to be superior to his own. This is the religious attitude. Until now, human thinking has never been applied to a category of thought, supposed to be superhuman other than a religious context.
The particular difficulty of uphological research is, consequently, the difficulty of applying oneself to a superhuman phenomenology merely with a methods of science and excluding all mysticism. Unquote, I could not agree more, mysticism is key to this entire endeavor. I think we need to focus there much more than we do now. As we've been saying for a while now in this episode, again, part of this comes down to a misunderstanding of language differences and cultural differences.
When the ancients talked about gods, they weren't necessarily gods as we think about today. They often spoke about these beings coming from the stars or from the heavenly abode. But again, to them, heavenly abode often meant the stars. There wasn't really a distinction there. Indeed, the whole notion of a distinction between science and religion, of course, didn't exist for these ancients.
So again, we come back to, especially when you bake in the high strangeness, how much common ground there is between the common UFO phenomenon conventions of today and the events of ancient history as they were described across the world in these different traditions.
Indeed, speaking to common grounds, sometimes you have a one for one kind of comparison that you can make between the past and more recent times. For instance, recently craft have been encountered that seem to have what appeared like hieroglyphics, ancient Egyptian kind of hieroglyphics on the side of the craft, or inside the craft even.
Again, why would you have hieroglyphics that speak to this far gone era of ancient history unless there's some sort of connection that we've been missing up until now? Now I want to jump back into the book that discusses this even further in terms of the notions in ancient history about the origin of humankind.
Quote, no matter which source one consults however, from the dusty kuneiform tablets of the Samarians to the popular texts of the ancient astronaut theorists, one thing seems consistent, religion as we know has its origins either in reality or in fantasy in the stars, and there seems to be an agreement that humans have a divine or at least astral origin.
The tantric texts of ancient India and the Egyptian narratives both describe the appearance of the cosmos as a result of a sexual act by the gods. The Bible specifically identifies the creation of Adam as an act of God who mixed mud with his own breath, a retelling of the Marduk story, to create a being in his own again quote-unquote image and likeness.
That breath has a divine origin itself is attested not only in the Bible and the kabbalistic works of the Jews but also in the Indian tantros and in the yogic practice of Prenayama, as well as in the books of the European alchemists. This commonality of themes should be unexpected if not impossible.
After all, human beings roamed the earth and lived in different climates, different ecological environments, developed tools at different points in their evolution, spoke different languages, and racially and ethnically distinct. From a postmodern perspective, it would be foolish to insist that there is a kind of common or urmeth those that humans from entirely different cultural backgrounds would share.
Yet it is obvious that human beings from entirely different cultures of different races and ethnicities share some ideas in common such as ritual surrounding birth and death and puberty, events that happen within all human societies and for which various myths quote-unquote are composed, recited and enacted. These rituals provide a social function and contribute to the coherence of the community that celebrates them, as well as suggesting a larger context for the shared human experience.
Keeping that in mind, we should remember that rituals and myths that pertain specifically to supernatural beings and their interactions with human beings are also fundamental to many societies around the world and have been since the beginning of recorded history, if not earlier.
Creation myths usually refer to supernatural events and supernatural beings. It is rare to encounter an explanation for the existence of human beings that does not involve the action of gods, as humans we are obsessed with origin stories, as if knowing where we come from is relevant to who we are today and what we will become tomorrow.
At this point, for regular listeners, I'd like to ask you to think back to the conversation I have a Bernardo Castro when we talked about the possibility that humankind is a seeded civilization by some more ancient and superior civilization.
Again, he suggests that when he looks at the data, that seems quite likely. It seems a stretch, but less of a stretch than the other possibilities on the table, that conventional science tends to put forward. So again, we have even in the notion of conventional contemporary science, this struggling with understanding how the human species came to be.
We are anomalous. When you speak about anomalous affairs, we are front and center. We are so unlike every other species on the planet, it doesn't make a lot of sense, especially you look at this sudden leap we made cognitively at various points in our history. Now, beyond everything we've talked about so far, another key ingredient that we have in common between the ancient stories and more recent accounts of people's experience with these mysterious others is hybridization.
Again, hybridization experiments are part of the enterprise. The Mac archives that I'm a big part of in terms of developing the AI and it's going to look into that, speak to this over and over again. A massive enterprise that happened towards the end of the 20th century, we're massive numbers of people. We really don't know how many, but it's a large number.
We're taken, abducted and then hybridization experiments were performed. And again, as I've said before, they often met the offspring of these experiments. And again, even here you think about the fact that conception happened without traditional intercourse. Again, that's spoken to also in ancient history. They just use different language to describe it.
Now, often these hybrid beings that were discussed in ancient history were described as giants. Now, I will ask you to recall the most recent episode of Point of Convergence where I talked about the blue men, the blue humanoids who appeared apparently human, but were often described as eight feet tall.
You will also remember that while they were sometimes manifesting in physical form, they had a non-corporeal kind of nature to them that had developed through technology over time as well. So again, we have this intermingling and this mixing of these elements that we tend to keep separate in modern convention. But the reality of the UFO phenomenon and the tales told in these ancient accounts speaks to something that transcends and collapse these common categories.
Now, I want to get back into the book again, quoting about the sons of God and the Nephilim. Quote, there were giants in those days. The new international version, the NIV of the King James Bible, begins Genesis 6 this way. When man began to increase a number on the earth and daughters were born to them, the sons of God, so that the daughters of men were beautiful and they married any of them they chose.
Then the Lord said, My spirit will not contend with man forever for he is mortal, his days will be 120 years. The Nephilim were on the earth in those days and also afterward when the sons of God went the daughters of men and had children by them. They were the heroes of old men of renown. There are great many mysteries tied up in these few lines, who were the sons of God, who were the Nephilim, what is the meaning behind all the non-secretors in these two paragraphs.
Why does God interject his statement about his spirit not contending with man forever between the two descriptions of the sons of God and the daughters of men? And if the children of their union gave rise to heroes of old men of renown, if we are supposed to read the sequence that way, then why does the author of Genesis complain that men were wicked in the paragraph that follows?
The Lord saw how great man's wickedness on the earth had become and that every inclination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil all the time. The Lord was greed that he had made man on the earth and his heart was filled with pain, so the Lord said, I will wipe mankind whom I have created from the face of the earth. Obviously we're missing something. The sons of God were supposed by many commentators to mean angels or some type of supernatural being.
Later research indicates that the term son of God was used to refer not to angels but to a kind of royalty, to kings or to high-ranking ministers, that indicates a social disconnect between men and sons of God. The opening sentence says that the sons of God saw that the daughters of men were beautiful. Thus the sons of God were not men in any kind of normal sense, but they had bodies that functioned as those of humans.
The Hebrew term used in Genesis 6 is Ben Elohim. It is a term that has been used in different ways to mean slightly different things. David Penschanski, a professor of theology writes that Ben Elohim refers to a divine counsel, a group of beings who serve as ministers to God, that either have human bodies or can assume human bodies in order to function on the earth.
When they do assume human bodies, it seems that they are able to propagate through sexual intercourse with human women, the Ben Elohim are exclusively male as the count in Genesis 6 suggests and produce offspring from this union. In common UFO parlance, these might be considered hybrids. Enter the Nephilim. Sitchin wants to translate this word as fallen, i.e. fallen angels after the Hebrew word Nephal.
That was a popular interpretation among biblical scholars for a while, but it has since been demonstrated to be faulty and not consistent with the rules of a Hebrew grammar. It was actually a long word from Aramaic, Nephilia, that had been hebracized and given its plural form Nephilim. For some reason the translators of the King James Bible kept the word Nephilim in their version without translating it themselves.
There was confusion or perhaps astonishment over the real meaning of Nephilim, which is probably what kept it in its transliterated form. Nephilim, according to scholars of Hebrew and Aramaic, can only mean one thing. Giants. This was not a word used in a general sense, metaphorically referring to someone of great, personal stature or charm.
The word refers specifically to beings of extraordinary size. Genesis tells us that the Nephilim were around in those days and afterwards, the implication being after the flood. The further implication is that they are no longer around, for they were only around in those days and also afterward, but evidently not now. It may be the Nephilim who are described as men of renown. There is also the repetition of the phrase on the earth. It appears four times in those six verses.
Not to be coy, but where else would man be but on the earth? Were these men elsewhere in creation? Was it only those on the earth who had become troublesome in the eyes of the creator? Otherwise, why was the repetition a form of emphasis necessary? And where did the Nephilim, the Giants, come from? One reading, the most commonly accepted, links the offspring of the sons of God with the daughters of men with the Nephilim.
In other words, when the two made it, these monstrous forms were created. That would indicate that the sons of God were not part of the same gene pool as the men and the daughters of men. In other words, the kings of the earth, the Benelohem, the royalty, those holding an authority from God, were not human themselves.
The human men were the slave race as indicated above. Their daughters were part of the same race, obviously. The meeting of the daughters with the Belloheem produced Giants, genetic abnormalities.
Briefly, we considered whether what was being described was some kind of Neanderthal, were the Nephilim or their progenitors in the Andrthals. And fortunately, for many reasons that can't be true, for one thing that the Andrthals were considerably shorter than Homo sapiens, sapiens. They may have appeared more brutish perhaps, but they were a good, head or more shorter than the hominid siblings.
Definitely not Giants. Is there some clarification to be found in the earlier Babylonian sources? Fortunately, there is. One of the most famous personalities from Babylonian literature is Gilgamesh, the hero of the Gilgamesh epic, and intimately associated with the Babylonian flood stories.
In order to fully understand the idea of the Nephilim then, we have to go back to earlier non-Jewish sources that had a more finely articulated history of this period, and that helped to clarify matters even as they present a startling alternative now. This includes the Gilgamesh material and those ideas associated with it, including the Apcaloo or Abgal. The Apcaloo to use the Babylonian term, Apgal to use the Sumerian, were seven wise beings, seven sages who existed before and after the flood.
They were responsible for teaching the newly created human beings the benefits of civilization. These were not humans, but divine or quasi-divine beings who could assume human form when necessary or desired. In other words, they were the template for the biblical idea of the Ben Elohim. I'm quote, and now just jumping further into this particular part of the book, continuing quote,
If biblical scholars such as Michael Heiser or David Penschenski are correct, then there is a strong Mesopotamian tradition of a council of normally invisible beings, the Apcaloo, the Amgal, or the Ben Elohim, who appeared on earth as a divisor to the human race and who eventually made it with human women, creating monstrous offspring in the process. The biblical account is clearly a somewhat sanitized version of the Mesopotamian original, given a monotheistic spin.
If we subtract the ideological changes from the story, we can see a very strong indication of a general belief that there was non-human contact with humans at some point in prehistory. This non-human contact is not merely a euphemism for God or angels, because the words that are used for these terms in the Bible, L, L, O, Him, Yodhe, Vav, Malachim etc, are quite different from those used to characterize the Apcaloo, Ben Elohim.
These were beings of an order quite different from humans. Normally, invisible, they would assume human form to interact with human beings and even produce offspring from sexual intercourse with human women.
Again, remarkable translation of some of these original texts and understanding of these original texts, but even more so, noticing the parallels with recent stories we've covered even on this podcast about contemporary encounters with different kinds of beings described often as giants, sometimes taking coporial form, sometimes not.
Again, very interesting, perhaps suggesting that these very same beings have been with us all along. And to be clear, I'm not suggesting the blue humanoids from last time's episode are these same beings. I'm saying that these kinds of beings clearly exist and are attested to a cross-human history, and that knowledge should fundamentally change how we think about our origins and the very nature of reality itself.
One of the key conclusions put forward in this book, Secret Machines, Gods, Volume 1 of Gods, Man of War, by Tom DeLong and Peter LeVenda, is that ultimately all religions are UFO religions.
That makes it somewhat ironic that we talk about in the modern era, the notion that perhaps new religions would form around UFOs. The point being made here is that that's been the case all along. All of our origin stories, all of our meaning-making models have been based on interactions with these beings from beyond. UFO again is just a term we use in the most recent kind of convention. Historically, they might have been spoken to as fiery chariots in the sky.
This is what the authors DeLong and LeVenda have to say in reflecting on these matters. Quote, the entire basis of human sovereignty is predicated on an anthropocentric view of the world, of reality. In other words, we will never have disclosure the way we understand it, because that would involve our human authorities acknowledging another, higher, potentially more powerful authority in the world.
Paradoxically, if our human authorities did acknowledge the existence of another authority that would automatically undercut their ability to make such an acknowledgement, catch 22, it was not always thus however. Nevertheless, historically sovereignty was less anthropocentric. From millennia, nature and the gods were thought to have causal powers and subjectivities that enabled them to share sovereignty with humans, if not exercised to mean outright.
In modernity, god and nature are excluded. Humans are sovereign and human sovereigns rule over other humans. Anything that calls this into question is a threat to modern ideas of rulership and to the loyalty of human subjects to human rulers. Again, even though the earth is no longer the center of the universe, the anthropocentric, the human-centric view of the world has replaced the theocentric god-centric one.
Humans are now the center of the universe and scientists and governments, the sole arbiters of what is real. The entire structure of modern societies depends on it. In fact, the very word real is cognit with royal. Reality is whatever the king says it is. This is why the phenomenon is unacceptable to both science and government.
This is why there can be no such thing as a UFO. At least that is why we are not able to define what it is for that would automatically challenge the sovereignty of our institutions. It would shift the focus away from us to them and we have no idea what the repercussions of that shift would be. Indeed, and that brings us to the point I made in the introduction, the real question is not when disclosure happens but what will the nature of disclosure be?
For in the end, this is not just about technology and our future, but it ultimately leads on a long road to our very ancient past to the very origins of our species that speak to the fundamental nature of underlying reality. Consulential matters to be sure, rolling out as we speak in the time that we are alive. What a revelation.
And on that note, we've come to the close of another edition of the Point of Convergence podcast. If you'd like to support this podcast, you can do so by going to patreon.com slash exoecodamian or by subscribing on Spotify. But until next time friends, from deep within the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina, this is exoecodamian signing out.