The Ancient Alien Question by Philip Coppens

make then of the whirlwinds or the creatures that materialized as a flash of lightning, which are clearly not typical of the zodiac? These were precisely the details that inspired Erich von Däniken to include the story of Ezekiel in his book as evidence of possible alien encounters in the Bible.
Josef Blumrich had received a copy of Chariots of the Gods while working as a NASA engineer at the Marshfield Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. He decided to use his 40 years of aerospace engineering knowledge, which included work on Skylab and the space shuttle, to explain how von Däniken had it wrong—for it was clear that the Swiss hotelier had no expertise in the subject area. “It was all rubbish,” Blumrich wrote:
From the wealth of material supplied by von Däniken, I found, when I came to the description of the technical characteristics of Ezekiel’s vision, a territory in which I could join in the conversation, so to speak, as I have spent most of my life in the construction and planning of aircraft and rockets. So I got a Bible to read the complete text, feeling sure that I would refute and annihilate Däniken in a few minutes. 1

It didn’t quite work out that way. From reading the very first chapter, Blumrich began to change his mind.
In his 1973 book, The Spaceship of Ezekiel , Blumrich describes how the main body of the spaceship was shaped like an ice cream cone: “It is a rather wide cone with some inward curves—and that main body is carried by four helicopter units.” In 1964, Roger Anderson, an engineer of the Langley Research Center in Norfolk, Va., had designed a vehicle with a similar configuration. Anderson had drawn this type of craft because he had been asked to design a vehicle that could make entries into planetary atmospheres.
What he achieved was a series of technical drawings, which suggested that Ezekiel had indeed seen a spaceship. Blumrich concluded that the ship Ezekiel had described was almost possible to construct with present-day technology, and that its shape was largely similar to a Gemini or Apollo capsule, with the addition of helicopter-like devices to control flight. From his interpretation of the Book of Ezekiel, Blumrich concluded that Ezekiel flew at least three, if not four times, inside this craft.
There is a 20-year gap between Ezekiel’s third and fourth encounter, in which he is taken to a temple, which most commentators identify as the Temple of Solomon in Jerusalem. However, it is clear that Ezekiel was intimately familiar with that temple, yet in his vision does not recognize it. Furthermore, some details of the setting of this temple do not match the landscape of Jerusalem. Von Däniken is among those who have proposed that Ezekiel was actually taken to a site known as Chavin de Huantar, in northern Peru, whose measurements and location do correspond with Ezekiel’s description. Of course, the most important observation is that it doesn’t matter where Ezekiel was taken; that he might have flown with unknown pilots to any location is the clincher.
Of equal note for the Ancient Alien Question is that Ezekiel took hundreds of precise measurements of the temple he saw in his vision, which the German engineer Hans-Herbert Beier used to make a detailed model. His conclusion, when incorporating the work of Blumrich, was that the temple was a purely technical construction, to accommodate the housing of the spaceship for maintenance. He believes it was in this “temple” that the nuclear reactor of the spaceship was maintained, and points to Ezekiel’s description of the workers wearing protective clothing, as well as the procedures used in replacing the fuel elements of the craft.
Historian Walter Webb has created a modern interpretation of Ezekiel’s vision, which, as he describes it, “is a free, imaginative interpretation and as such is purely speculative.” 2 This is his reading of the story: Sitting next to the river Chebar in circa 593 BC , Ezekiel saw a