Unidentified Flying Objects

On Halloween night in 1967, Beverly, Bill (age 9), Tim (age 3), and I returned home from the Halloween Carnival in downtown Fort Valley. We walked out to see the Halloween display placed near the highway by Beverly. Suddenly, a UFO appeared overhead. Since it was nearly dark, we couldn’t make out what it was. It was unnerving while it hovered overhead. We ran to the house as fast as we could. We were afraid the aliens would draw us up into their space-craft. Suddenly, the space-craft quickly moved away. To this day, we don’t know what it was. It was too large to be a helicopter. Was it a spacecraft from outer space or an experimental aircraft from planet earth?

Two movies, “Close Encounters of a Third Kind” and “ET,” exploited the theme of alien visitors. In 1938, Orson Wells broadcast a fictional invasion of New Jersey by Martians. So realistic was the radio broadcast that thousands of alarmed listeners flooded authorities with calls. People have reported seeing strange objects in the sky for hundreds of years. Since World War II, there have been thousands of UFO sightings. Many UFO reports have logical explanations such as weather balloons, meteors, planets, or mirages caused by weather conditions. An alien spacecraft reportedly crashed in Roswell, New Mexico, in 1947, but its investigation was kept secret by the U.S. government. The Air Force, under Project Blue Book, conducted investigations of all UFOs from 1947 to 1969. Of 12,618 reported sightings, 701 remain unsolved and unidentified. The Air Force concluded the sightings posed no threat to national security. Acknowledging the possibility of alien life in the universe, the U.S. Congress in 1992 directed NASA to begin monitoring artificial radio signals from outer space to determine if another civilization was attempting to communicate with us.

The first recorded UFO in Biblical history was the Star of Bethlehem. Halley’s Bible Handbook states that “the star the wise men saw was a supernatural light, which by a direct act of God, went before them and pointed out the exact place where the Christ child resided.” Stars are seen in the distant heavens; they do not hoover above the earth as the Star of Bethlehem.

Another UFO was seen by Elisha when a chariot of fire suddenly appeared in the sky and carried his companion, Elijah, on a whirlwind into heaven. 

A mystical passage in the Bible implies the visitation of space aliens. Genesis 6.4 reads: “There were giants in the earth in those days; and after that, when the ‘sons of God’ came in to the daughters of men, and they bore children to them.” There is a popular view that the “sons of God” were either fallen angels or space aliens who bred with the women of earth. How did they get here? Bible scholar, Barry Downing, firmly believes that extraterrestrial beings came to earth in flying saucers, and wrote a book “The Bible and Flying Saucers.” 

The earth is a small, insignificant speck in a vast universe containing billions of galaxies. Is it incomprehensible that intelligent life exists in outer space, possibly civilizations far superior to our own who have mastered the science of intergalactic travel?