MrRING
Android Futureman
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This is the title of a novel written by Ronald A. Pokatiloff, as discussed on this blog talking about the 1977 Official UFO Special: Ancient Astronauts magazine.
https://www.jasoncolavito.com/blog/...aut-material-from-ancient-astronauts-magazine
https://www.jasoncolavito.com/blog/a-bizarre-1977-article-on-jesus-the-ancient-astronaut
https://www.jasoncolavito.com/blog/...aut-material-from-ancient-astronauts-magazine
And this is the original article that the blog was referring to:I will thank Terry again for supplying the name of the author of the article I discussed on Friday about Jesus as American time traveler: Ronald A. Pokatiloff, who eventually published a freestanding work, Was God a Future American Spaceship (1977), on the subject. In a follow-up article to his time traveling American Jesus in November 1977’s edition of Ancient Astronauts, Pokatiloff expanded on his reasoning for why he concluded Jesus was an American. It beggars belief, quite frankly.
According to Pokatiloff, he arrived at this conclusion by process of elimination—always the best way to prove a theory. He argues that we know space travelers could not have come from this solar system because no other planet could support advanced life, and they could not have come from beyond our solar system for two reasons, one of which we must give him credit for recognizing. The first reason is distance (obviously), but the second is intriguing: He recognizes that ancient astronaut theorists like Erich von Däniken and Zecharia Sitchin were proposing a “low level of technology” for the spaceships: Apollo-style rockets. He rightly concludes that rockets and propellers would make for terrible interstellar vehicles. But rather than conclude that the ancient astronaut authors were projecting their own fantasies onto ancient texts, he decides that this must mean that the technology was actual American rocketry.
To wit, he argues that there is a second, parallel earth abutting our own, whose denizens are in a timeline about 4,000 years in advance of ours and which must be nearly identical to our own or else the aliens could not have interbred and interacted with us. Since this world must be virtually identical, he leaps to the conclusion—unwarranted—that this world has a United States of America, that this America is, like here, the richest and most powerful country, and is identical to our own future. Consequently, the fact that Josef Blumrich wrote The Spaceships of Ezekiel (1974) identifying the vision of God’s chariot-throne in the Book of Ezekiel as a spaceship is pregnant with meaning because Blumrich was an NASA engineer: “it took a NASA engineer to properly interpret” the text. Therefore, the design must be one of NASA’s future plans!
Pokatiloff does not explain the impact on his theory of the fact that Blumrich only developed his bizarre interpretation of Ezekiel because the convicted Swiss embezzler Erich von Däniken suggested it in Chariots of the Gods, as Blumrich himself admitted.
https://www.jasoncolavito.com/blog/a-bizarre-1977-article-on-jesus-the-ancient-astronaut
It starts off soberly enough (by ancient astronaut standards) by mining the New Testament for evidence that Jesus was an astronaut. Matthew 28:2-3 the author explains as a human in a white spacesuit descending from a spaceship using a rocket pack: “And, behold, there was a great earthquake: for the angel of the Lord descended from heaven, and came and rolled back the stone from the door, and sat upon it. His countenance was like lightning, and his raiment white as snow.” The angel-astronaut seemed bright because, the author says, he had a search light attached to his helmet. The Resurrection, the author says, was performed on Jesus by astronauts to impress the Hebrews.
OK, so far this is just standard ancient astronaut nonsense, albeit applied to Jesus rather than, say, Gilgamesh. But it gets better! In order to set up the climax, I need to introduce two pieces of evidence for consideration. First, former NASA employee Josef F. Blumrich identified the conveyance of God in the Book of Ezekiel as a spacecraft in his 1974 book The Spaceships of Ezekiel, and the resulting design from his “reconstruction” of the spacecraft bore a passing resemblance to the basic design of the Apollo-era Lunar Excursion Modules, known as LEMs.
Secondly, in 1968, the Rod Serling-penned Planet of the Apes move proposed that American astronauts, through the magic of physics, could travel through time and end up mixed up in archaeological mysteries, albeit those of the future.
With that in mind, let’s proceed to Ancient Astronauts magazine’s conclusions about Jesus:
From evidence in the Old Testament we are aware that astronauts came here from a future earth and disguised themselves and their spaceships as a deity. So the Kingdom of God is the kingdom of the spacemen. Since the astronauts’ space vehicle resembles the American LEM and was identified by a NASA engineer, the reader should have no trouble deducing what the Kingdom of God is. It is THE UNITED STATES OF AMERCIA!! Yes! American spaceships landed on earth 4000 years ago!
And Jesus and the angels were American astronauts! After all, didn’t Jesus say He would return to this planet? As a U.S. spaceman, he would indeed come back.
And there you have it! Jesus was American, and America is God’s own Kingdom! It’s almost the perfect synthesis of American fringe history’s obsessions all at the same time. It explains UFOs, glorifies America, and grants a supposedly scientific reason to continue venerating Jesus. It is an Apollo-era cousin to the claim that secret Templar land claims mark America as godly country, and a space age update to the Book of Mormon placing Jesus in America to give divine sanction to Euro-American possession of the land.