The Connection Between Ancient Gods and Modern Aliens

Term: Sky god: a deity associated with the heavens, storms, or celestial bodies, found in nearly every ancient mythology.

Term: Interpretatio: the practice of ancient and modern people describing an unfamiliar experience using the language and categories they already have.

The fiction side of this connection runs through The Watchers' War, the first book in the Watchers' Universe series.

The Connection Between Ancient Gods and Modern Aliens

Ancient gods and modern aliens share more than a passing resemblance. Both are described as coming from the sky, both take an interest in humanity, both sometimes produce offspring with humans, and both leave behind fear, awe, and illness in the people who encounter them. I argue in my book that these are not two separate subjects. They are the same class of beings, described by people in different centuries using the language available to them.

Beings who come from above

Nearly every ancient culture placed its most powerful beings in the sky. Uranus ruled the heavens in Greek myth before his son overthrew him. Egyptian pharaohs claimed descent from the sun god Ra. Aztec and Mayan rulers traced their authority to sky gods. The Bible describes the sons of God, generally read by scholars as angelic beings, descending to Earth in Genesis 6. I cover the biblical case in an earlier post.

Offspring and consequences

Greek myth is full of gods fathering children with human women, producing demigods and heroes. Genesis 6:4 describes the sons of God fathering the Nephilim, described as mighty men of old, men of renown. The Book of Enoch expands this into a detailed account of 200 Watchers who descended on Mount Hermon and took human wives. Modern abduction accounts sometimes include claims of hybrid offspring, a detail that echoes this much older pattern rather than inventing something new.

Fear as the common response

Ancient accounts of divine encounters consistently describe fear and being overwhelmed, not comfort. I document this pattern in an earlier post on why UFO encounters often include spiritual experiences, citing Daniel 10 and Job 4. The same fear response appears in modern accounts of UFO and abduction encounters. If these were unrelated phenomena, separated by thousands of years, there would be no obvious reason for the emotional response to match so closely.

Why language changes but the pattern does not

A person in 1566 Basel had no word for a metallic disk, so records describe it as a plate or a hat. A person in ancient Egypt had no word for a modern aircraft, so a document describes circles of fire. I argue that each generation describes the same underlying encounter using whatever comparisons their own world provides. This idea, called interpretatio in other contexts, is well established in how cultures describe unfamiliar experiences generally, though applying it to UFO reports specifically is my own argument, not an established academic position.

What is solid and what is not

That ancient mythology and modern UFO reports share specific, recurring features, sky origin, offspring, fear, and illness, is documented across the individual cases in this series. That these represent one continuous phenomenon rather than an unrelated coincidence is my interpretation. In my book Disclosure: They Are Not Extraterrestrials, I build this case across many chapters rather than resting it on any single piece of evidence. Disclosure is available on Amazon. You can find more of my work at ckqbooks.com.

Sources

Genesis 6:1 to 4, Daniel 10:8 to 10, Job 4:13 to 15 (King James Version). Book of Enoch, chapters 6 to 16. C. K. Quarterman, Disclosure: They Are Not Extraterrestrials.