Beyond the nuts and bolts

NIGEL WATSON revisits the spiritual and religious aspects of UFO encounters from Ezekial to Bill Bean

PAUL BENNETT’S ENCOUNTERS

I have just been revising, revamping and tarting-up my 1990 book Portraits of Alien Encounters, which features my investigation of high strangeness encounters and experiences in northern England in the 1970s and early 1980s. A large part of the book covers the many UFO sightings and paranormal experiences of teenager Paul Bennett, so it was one of those fortean “coincidences” when I read Andy Owens’s letter about Paul’s book The Old Stones of Elmet (FT443:63). Andy is puzzled that in a book about the history of West Yorkshire standing stones, Paul writes about seeing dancing figures and strange lights at Blackstone Circle.

Paul was the first editor of UFO Brigantia and went on to produce the Earth Mysteries magazine Earth, and now runs The Northern Antiquarian website. In the “about section” he describes how he has been interested in “archaeology, folklore, history and mythic ideas underscoring megaliths and their compatriots for more than 40 years. It’s something of an obsession that’s been with me since I started venturing onto Ilkley Moor as a 10-year-old.” Surprisingly, he does not mention his multiple alien and UFO encounters. Perhaps he now regards them as no longer as significant or relevant to his current interests; however, those early UFO influences do explain why he introduces a weird encounter with those lights and whirling figures in his Elmet book. He cannot help channelling his inner “John Keel”. I should shamelessly add that my Portraits of Alien Encounters Revisited should be out next year.

SPIRITUAL SAUCERS...

My Portraits book covered some very unusual cases that many ufologists at the time dismissed as not irrelevant to the subject, as they did not involve sightings of tangible nutsand-bolts spacecraft. When I spoke to Charles Bowen, the late, great editor of Flying Saucer Review, at a UFO conference, he simply dismissed Paul Bennett’s experiences as figments of the imagination. I felt that attitude was rather closed-minded and it became my project to investigate these “damned” cases and to detail the profound effect the belief in UFOs and aliens had on the thoughts, feelings and lives of UFO percipients (or experiencers as we would call them today).

Scrolling forwards from my ancient 1970s cases, I note that DW Pasulka, professor of religious studies at the University of North Carolina, has written Encounters: Experiences with Nonhuman intelligences (St Martin’s

Essentials, 2023). It shows, like my book, the sheer complexity of UFO experiences that have a strong spiritual and religious aspect to them. Pasulka interviews people who not only see UFOs but also experience altered realities, encounter angels and demons and are often touched by uncanny coincidences and dreams. She is very much guided by the thoughts of Jacques Vallee and other more secretive ufologists in the USA, that these UFO experiences are interactions with nonhuman intelligences who live beyond time and space. This blend of techno/mysticism allows for UAPs to be physical objects that can mess with our minds and explains why they remain one-step ahead of our technology and understanding.

...AND SATANIC SAUCERS

Just to underline the religious aspect of alien encounters, 57-year-old Reverend Bill Bean, who is described as a non-denominational deliverance minister and exorcist, says that he has had all manner of supernatural and UFO experiences. Like many others, his experiences started when he was young. He said: “I suffered physical demonic attacks between ages five and 12. My mother was attacked even more severely, she suffered more than any other person I’ve seen in my life.”

He claims that after Satan and a third of the angels were expelled from Heaven, divine

Merkabah Chariots transported them to our unsuspecting planet. Not resting on their laurels, according to Reverend Bean, “They came down here and they took human women and produced a hybrid offspring of giants called the Nephilim.” Not content with the charms of human women, the Nephilim had intercourse with apes, bears, wolves, dogs and monkeys, resulting in the creation of Bigfoot and Sasquatch. Yet, like UAPs, “They are every bit as much a supernatural being as they are flesh and blood.”

This sounds like stuff out of the Zecharia Sitchin (1920-2010) playbook. He theorised that there was a 12th planet in our Solar System called Nibiru. It was populated by technologically advanced, humanoid extraterrestrials, who visited Earth 450,000 years ago to mine for gold. As they needed slave workers, genetic engineering was used to create Homo sapiens by mixing extraterrestrial genes with those of Homo erectus. The Bible, in Genesis, named the visitors from Nibiru the Nephilim (see FT138:47, 173:40-41, 271:24 404:44-47).

I must confess I had to Google what a Merkabah Chariot is, and it is our old friend Ezekiel’s four-wheeled chariot driven by four living creatures that he saw in a vision. NASA scientist Josef F Blumrich was so convinced that Ezekiel’s vision was of a real spaceship that he wrote The Spaceships of Ezekiel (1974). www.dailystar.co.uk/news/weird-news/ bigfoot-sasquach-alien-human-bear-32338348

HYBRID CHILDREN

Eleven years ago Julius Shields, now aged 28, says he saw orbs outside his home in Missouri, followed by a small creature. He said: “It had three tentacles and it raised them up and started tapping on my window. That was the first time I’d ever seen something that wasn’t human.”

After that night he began having dreams of life on other planets, and being in a gladiatorial arena. Then he said it escalated to a point where, “I was having sex with different creatures, women and just different stuff. I would wake up, and I would look at my pants and sometimes there’d be nothing and sometimes it would just be wet – there would be no actual sperm in there.” He now wonders if they used his sperm to create hybrid children. Perhaps his visitors were Nephilim; if so, I hope his offspring aren’t hairy Bigfoot types.www.dailymail.co.uk/ femail/ article-13187539/alien-abduction-took-spermsexual-experiment.html