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‘intelligent beings’ from other planets.’’ More aptly, the descriptions fit intelligent beings from this planet: beings that look like us but possess the peculiar special qualities of ultraterrestrials who share our world yet are a species apart from us. We must also note that these ‘‘angels’’ were, according to the Bible, frequently concerned with the propagation of the human race. Abraham’s elderly wife, well past childbearing age, is said to have given birth to Isaac after a visit from the three men (Genesis, Chapter 21). So we are told that these “‘men’’ possess the power of life and death. They are credited with the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, yet they restored Abraham’s Sarah to fertility. The Book of Revelation, the last section of the New Testament, is especially important to this study. At first reading it may seem to be filled with vague poetry and may defy interpretation, but if you take many of the passages literally, and avoid a symbolic or religious interpretation, new meanings will open up to you. For example, in Chapter 4 we are told that ‘‘a door was opened in heaven,” and there is a description of the interior of a place occupied by creatures similar to those reported by Ezekiel, together with a throne apparently surrounded by glass (‘‘And before the throne there was a sea of glass like unto crystal” [4:5]). Twenty-four beings in white robes sat around this ‘‘throne.” “‘They had on their heads crowns of gold’ (4:4). We must remember that the men who wrote the Bible had no knowledge of machinery or technology, and so they were forced to describe things in terms that were familiar to them. Those “‘crowns of gold” could have been helmets of some kind. In Chapter 10, John declares, ‘“‘And I saw another mighty angel come down from heaven clothed with a cloud; and a rainbow was upon his head, and his face was as it were the sun, and his feet as pillars of fire.”’ It sounds as if he were describing a brilliantly glowing sphere surrounded by vapors (‘cloud’) and colored lights (“‘a rainbow’’) and two beams of light or flame were jetting down beneath it (‘“‘pillars of fire’’). A well-known astrophysicist, Morris K. Jessup, sought links between UFOs and religion in his book The UFO and the Bible. Were the flaming crosses and other objects seen in ancient skies really religious omens, he wondered, or were they actually machines from some alien civilization? Dr. Carl Jung, the celebrated psychiatrist, and astronomer Dr, Jacques Vallee also wondered if the historical reports of these objects might not have been distorted by interpretations created by the climate of the times Thus, in Biblical days when men were seeking some indication that there was a higher power, they almost automatically considered objects in the Machines from Beyond Time / 65