UFOs, Abductions & Alien Engineers: Was God An Ancient Astronaut?

By Richard Thomas

If some UFOs really are alien spacecraft from another planet the obvious question to ask is why are they visiting Earth? Initially, the consensus among UFO researchers was that aliens were visiting us to conduct scientific research; much in the same way NASA was sending missions to the Moon.

Alien abductions, like the 1961 Barney and Betty Hill case, where a New England couple were kidnapped by aliens and taking aboard a flying saucer for a series of bizarre medical examinations were compared to Biology students cutting up frogs in a laboratory. While this reasoning made some sense back then, today the idea simply doesn’t hold much water.

If the UFO occupants are conducting scientific research, then why then after over 50 years since the Betty and Barney Hill case do alien abduction reports continue even today? Human anatomy hasn’t changed since the nineteen-sixties, so why then do the aliens keep performing their “tests”? And if the claims of ancient astronaut theorists are true, that the Earth has been visited by extraterrestrials for thousands of years and not just since Kenneth Arnold’s 1947 sighting of nine flying saucers near Mt. Rainier in Washington State, then the scientific research explanation for alien visitation becomes even more untenable.

Cave paintings depicting that resemble flying saucers have been found in France dating to 13,000 BCE. And there are other examples of such evidence for alien visitation in ancient history, including a Peruvian Hill Carving from the 6th century of what looks like an alien being reminiscent of the grey aliens encountered in abductions.

So, if UFO researchers are interpreting such ancient depictions and monuments correctly, why has humankind been visited throughout its history by these sky gods? Abduction researchers like Dr. David Jacobs and the late Bud Hopkins have hypothesized that the aliens are working towards some unknown long term plan involving themselves, humans and planet Earth, but what? While the motives of the greys are difficult to decipher based on what little we know about them, there are some common themes reported by abductees. These include sperm and ova extractions and more bizarrely what is called a “child presentation” where the abductee is shown a child, which often has a mix of human and alien characteristics.

Similar stories involving “gods” and “angels” interbreeding with humans to create hybrid beings can be found in the ancient world. The ancient Egyptian Pharaohs claimed to be directly descended from various gods, and other examples can be found in the Bible. In Genesis, the first book of the Bible, between the events of Adam and Eve getting tricked by the “serpent” in the Garden of Eden and the Great Flood, the Bible says: “Now it came about, when men began to multiply on the face of the land, and daughters were born to them, that the sons of God saw that the daughters of men were beautiful; and they took wives for themselves, whomever they chose. Then the LORD said, ‘My Spirit shall not strive with man forever, because he also is flesh; nevertheless his days shall be one hundred and twenty years.’

The Nephilim were on the earth in those days, and also afterward, when the sons of God came in to the daughters of men, and they bore children to them. Those were the mighty men who were of old, men of renown.”

Could the “sons of God” in the Bible really be extra-terrestrials? Was God himself an alien or a group of aliens that genetically engineered humans, perhaps by splicing alien DNA with that of early humans? If such ideas sound absurd, it should be considered that scientists have already successfully spliced human DNA with that of cows and pigs.

The reasons for creating these human-animal “hybrids” was to produce better medicines and replacement organs for humans. BBC Online science reporter Helen Briggs wrote back in 2002: “Scientists believe cows could eventually be used to produce medicines to treat multiple sclerosis, infections and even cancer.”  (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/2183200.stm)

Is it possible aliens have similar motives for hybridising with humans? It has been suggested that one reason aliens could be visiting the Earth is because of the amazing diversity of life here. Maybe the UFO occupants long ago cut down their rainforests and wiped out all animal life on their planet, and are forced to come to Earth to seek new medicines. Such speculation isn’t incompatible with the idea of aliens using human-alien hybrids to create vaccines and cures for alien diseases.

Another scenario could be that the aliens are not visitors at all, but rather colonists. Hybridisation could be a method of better adapting to life on Earth.

Alien engineers were central to plot of Ridley Scott’s Alien-prequel Prometheus, but the theory that ancient astronauts engineered humans has long been a stable of science fiction. In the DVD commentary for Prometheus, Ridley Scott references Nigel Kneale’s six part serial Quatermass and the Pit, shown on British television in 1958/59, as an influence.

In one important scene in the later film adaptation made by Hammer Films in 1967, Professor Quatermass explains his theory that Martians engineered humans from apemen who lived on Earth five million years ago, and speculates it was done to create a Martian proxy colony.

BREEN: And you really believe this was possible? That apes were systematically taken from this planet to another and— 

QUATERMASS: Altered, by selective breeding, atomic surgery, methods we can’t guess, and with new faculties instilled in them, high intelligence, perhaps something else. 

HOWELL: In effect, a colonisation. 

QUATERMASS: It would be a way of possessing the Earth. Only a colony by proxy, but better than leaving nothing at all behind.

Perhaps much in the same way the invasive non-native grey squirrel has largely replaced the native red squirrel in Britain, grey aliens could be slowly colonising Earth with the endgame of replacing humans as the dominant lifeforms.

In his ominously titled book The Threat, abduction researcher and retired Associate Professor of History at Temple University, Dr. David Jacobs, seemed to be concerned about just such a scenario: “I have come to the conclusion that human civilisation may be in for a rapid, and perhaps disastrous, change not of our design and I am all the more uncomfortable because the reason for this change is the least acceptable to society—alien integration.” This pessimistic view however doesn’t fit well with the experiences of the contactees of the nineteen-forties and fifties, which pre-date the abductions. Contactees were often given messages warning mankind about environmental catastrophe and nuclear Armageddon.

If the aliens want to replace us, why then are they trying to save us? One answer could be that they don’t want to save us at all, just our planet. Based on the differences in appearance of the human-looking beings reported by contactees compared with the short grey beings encountered during abductions, it is a common belief among UFO researchers that we could also be dealing with multiple species from various extra-terrestrial civilisations. All with different agendas. Visit: www.richardthomas.com