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self, upon a mountain, rise and take off, shrouded in a cloud of dark fog, radiating brilliance - this is how the Bible describes the Kabod - literally, "The Heavy Object" - in which Yahweh moved about. It all describes what we nowadays call, out of ignorance or disbelief, a UFO - an Unidentified Flying Object. In this regard it will be helpful to trace the Akkadian and Sumerian roots from which the Hebrew term had derived. While the Akkadian Kabbuttu meant "heavy, weighty," the similar-sounding Kabdu (paralleling the Hebrew Kabod) meant "Wing-holder" - something to which wings are attached, or perhaps into which wings can retract. And the Sumerian term KILBAD.DU meant "to soar to a faraway place...." We can only speculate whether the Kabod looked like the winged "Divine Black Bird" of Ninurta, the wingless (or with wings retracted) bulbous vehicles depicted in the murals of Tell Ghassul - or as the rocketlike object that Gilgamesh had seen rise from the Landing Place in Lebanon. Might it have resembled an American shuttlecraft. We wonder, because of the similarity to it of a small figurine, discovered a few years ago at a site in Turkey (the ancient Tuspa). Made of clay, it shows a flying machine that 307 DIVINE ENCOUNTERS