Ezekiel And The Alien Space Ship

By James Donahue

Of all the strange stories appearing in the Old Testament, the Book of Ezekiel offers perhaps the most interesting account of an oval or "wheel" shaped ship filled with beings that drops from the sky for an encounter with mankind.

Back in my Christian exploration days, I recall having a great time pinning down the teacher of an adult Bible class over the story in Ezekiel. In our study, our teacher attempted to skip over Ezekiel 1:4-5 which reads:

"And I looked, and behold, a whirlwind came out of the north, a great cloud, and a fire enfolding itself, and a brightness was about it, and out of the midst thereof as the color of amber, out of the midst of the fire. Also out of the midst thereof came the likeness of four living creatures. And this was their appearance; they had the likeness of a man."

Indeed the verses go on to describe these creatures in great detail. They had hoofed feet and were winged, and they had multiple heads. These creatures may have had the body of a human, but they were not human. And the craft in which they arrived was something unlike anything humanity had ever seen before. Ezekiel’s description of it might have been how we might have described a contemporary jet-powered aircraft or even a helicopter coming in for a landing today, if the craft was something completely foreign to our eyes.

Indeed the whirling blades of a helicopter, or the power of jet engines would have appeared to Ezekiel like "a whirlwind" producing "a great cloud," with a "fire enfolding itself." That it was "the color of amber" suggests that it was a metalic craft, perhaps red hot from the ship's descent through the atmosphere.

That the beings that emerged had "humanlike faces" and "legs with the appearance of bronze" suggests that they were wearing special suits to protect them from radioactive particles while traveling through space, or perhaps they were parts of special space suits designed to protect them on alien planets.

Josef F. Blumrich, a NASA engineer, produced a book The Spaceships of Ezekiel in which he argues that the entire first chapter of Ezekiel is a detailed description of an encounter with a UFO.

Writer Jim Aho, in an Internet article titled "Ezekiel's Wheel," noted that Blumrich researched for his book with thoughts of disproving Erich von Daniken's theory concerning Ezekiel's wheel in his book Chariots of the Gods. But the deeper he dug in the project, the more he was convinced that von Daniken was right.

Aho quotes from yet another book: Extraterrestrials in Biblical Prophecy by G. Cope Schellhorn, which slices the first chapter of Ezekiel into descriptive parts, carefully arguing the theory that it was an alien encounter.

For example, Ezekiel's description of the four "beings" that emerged from the fiery craft with a wheel within a wheel as landing craft rather than living alien beings. Ezekiel said each had four faces and four wings. Blumrich suggested that Ezekiel was observing four blades of rotors and the fairing housings above the rotors that looked to him like shiny faces.

The description of the legs that "gleamed like burnished bronze" and feet with hooves could have been landing legs with round footpads, much like we have designed for moon landings.

One perplexing descriptive verse in Ezekiel says the faces of the creatures had four faces, that of men, but on the right side, the face of a lion, on the left side the face of an ox, and "each also had the face of an eagle."

Blumrich suggests that the fairing surfaces, designed to protect the gears and other control devices in the landing craft, were irregular in shape which appeard to the frightened observers on the ground as having faces of animals they knew.

That the "beings" observed by Ezekiel began moving back and forth above the ground, with lightning flashing out of them, were merely jet engines propelling the landing craft around as the operators inside looked for suitable landing sites.

The well-known description of the wheel within a wheel is found in Ezekiel 1:16:21. The verse reads: "They sparkled like chrysolite, and all four looked alike. Each appeared to be made like a wheel intersecting a wheel. As they moved, they would go in any one of the four directions the creatures faced; the wheels did not turn about as the cr eatures went. Their rims were high and awesome, and all four rims were full of eyes all around. When the living creatures moved, the wheels beside them moved; and when the living creatures rose from the ground, the wheels also rose."

Ezekiel looks up in verse 1:22 and sees: "spread out above the heads of the living creatures was what looked like an expanse, sparkling like ice, and awesome." Could this not be a description of a massive ship hovering overhead? It would have been so large it spread out across the sky like a "firmament" with a metallic, shining surface.

It after this that Ezekiel describes being "lifted up" and carried in the air before encountering the being he called cheribs and a godlike man that stood at the gate to Jerusalem who had a bronze colored skin. He said the beings spoke like the whirling of the wind. Thinking that he was standing before Jehovah, Ezekiel threw himself face-down on the ground.

That Ezekiel lived to write about what happened that fateful day suggests that the visiting aliens were benevolent beings. Their visit may have been for exploration or perhaps for human contact. Whatever brought them here, they probably had no idea that the humans they encountered considered them "gods" from the sky.