UFOs Essay Research Paper Unidentified flying objects

UFOs Essay, Research Paper

Unidentified flying objects, or UFOs, as they’re fondly called, are

one of the century’s most intriguing and controversial mysteries. Since

ancient times, UFOs of all types have been accounted for. More today than

ever, hundreds of thinkers, theologians, and scientists have tried to

answer why there are or whether there aren’t UFOs. According to some, the

speculation that UFOs are alien spacecrafts from another world is an

absurd and foolish proposal. Others vehemently disagree and assert that

extraterrestrial life is not only possible, but such life forms may be

superior, technologically advanced beings who visit our Earth regularly.

Are these “flying saucers” a figment of our imagination. Or, are they

a genuine reality we prefer to dismiss because we fear the scary truth

that we are not the only master race. Are we hesitant because society

dubs such “immature” psycho tantamount to subscribing to belief in ghosts.

These are a few of the many pertinent UFO questions the mature individual

must address.

One of the most popular theories that support and explains the

existence of alien beings is the ancient astronaut theory. This theory

contains three main schools of thought. The first states that aliens bred

with our primitive forebears thereby creating modern man. The second is

quite similar. Aliens performed genetic engineering on apes thereby

creating the Homo Sapiens and man’s intelligence. The third, and least

accepted, is that colonists from another galaxy came to Earth, mated with

the primitives and established a high level of culture, before being

destroyed by some natural catastrophe. And upon this catastrophe and

destruction, we build and grow.

Berossus, a Babylonian scholar, may have been the first astronaut historian.

He said that ” animals endowed with reason” bestowed the Sumerian culture

before 3000 BC. The Sumerians, along with their cultural inheritors, the

Babylonians, never referred to such beings as gods. Rather they were

depicted as “disgusting abominations,” a description only deserved by

uninvited alien visitors.

One step further takes the astronaut theory and surmises that with

it, we can understand the later religious cultures, such as the Hebrews

who are thought to have borrowed much of Sumerian practice. Such

religions and secret societies, with their elaborate and complicated

rituals may actually be “preserving from a previous epoch fragments of an

esoteric and little understood knowledge, just as the Egyptian, Hebrew,

and Mayan priests guarded in their temples the inspired word of their

self-possessed creators.” Alien originators may have set down certain

rites which became confused over the years, resulting in the various

ancient religions; aliens being the source of our notion of God. This

also may explain how miles long designs, only viewable from the air, were

created in ancient times. The only rationalization for the possibility of

such designs is that the ancients had assistance from the sky, namely

extraterrestrial assistance. Many UFO theorists, astronomer Morris Jessup

being the forerunner, go even further: not only were pre-Biblical and

Biblical times full of Alien intervention, but he contends that the UFO

phenomenon is the missing link between Biblical supernatural accounts of

miracles and established, contradicting science. Jessup explains that

“nothing is supernatural and nothing is outside nature.”

He continues that the Bible is full of UFO accounts, depicted by various

descriptions: angels, the revelation on Mt. Sinai, the burning bush, and

Elijah’s levitation to heaven. Jessup says the Bible is a physical

record, not a collection of divine revelation “although the miracles of

this and all religions invite rational and physical explanation, if we

grant the ‘existence of spatial intelligence (13).’” Another thinker,

Brinsley Trent, follows the theme of extraterrestrial interpretations of

the Bible and claims that the Garden of Eden was, as many ancient texts

point out, not the underground, but in the Underworld – i.e. outside the

orbit of earth, meaning Mars. When the Great Flood occurred, Noah built a

great “boat,” a spaceship, and landed on Earth (Life 16). However,

Cornell astronomer Carl Sagan warns that this ancient astronaut theory and

the “saucer myths” represent a compromise “between the need to believe in

a traditional God and the contemporary pressures to accept the

pronouncement of science (Fitzgerald 5);” therefore, according to Sagan,

the proposition that aliens exist and the astronaut theory should be

tossed.

Many theorists assume the Bible is a totally separate entity and

don’t associate or contradict the UFO phenomenon with the well established

theological belief system in the supernatural. Wilhelm Reich, for one, a