The Scars of Eden: Has Humanity Confused the Idea of God with Memories of ET Contact?

www.paulanthonywallis.com

Introduction & Chapter One

What Happened to Paul?

Bath, England – 1985

I know what it is to be asleep and I know what it is to be awake. Right now, I am wide awake. I know exactly where I am and can see clearly what time it is. It is 2am. The glow from the streetlight outside, and an open gable window with the curtains drawn back mean that everything in my room is clearly lit. I just can’t explain what I’m seeing.

I live alone in a top floor apartment in a chocolate box village on the outskirts of Bath. Being on my own in my apartment has never worried or unnerved me. I am not a fearful person. I love my independence. In fact, at this time of the night I am usually out on my own, exploring the dark hillsides, and the beautiful open spaces of Bath Golf Club, deep breathing in the moist midnight air. Usually I return home around 1:30am for a warming nightcap, and finally climb into bed around 2am. That’s my routine. Being out and on my own in the middle of the night doesn’t worry me in the least. Why would it? I am twenty years old. I’m indestructible.

For a good night’s sleep, I leave my curtains open and the window ajar to permit a good draught of fresh air. Thanks to the well-positioned streetlight, the open window always bathes my bedroom in a soft light. But tonight, in the warm orange glow something is moving, and I don’t understand what I am looking at.

I can see five things just beyond the end of my double bed. They are standing side by side between the foot of my bed and the gable window. The figures are short, grey, almost translucent, and moving just enough to show me that they are alive. But they are not human.

Knowing my voice will fail me, I hiss at them in a whisper. In the name of Jesus, get out!!

I am twenty years old, but I have pulled the bed covers over me like a two-year-old and I am shaking like a leaf. Suddenly, I am not indestructible. I am terrified.

Canberra, Australia – 2020

I have just stripped off for a shower when the bouncing tones of Skype panic me up the stairs in my bath towel. I really don’t have time for an interruption right now. I’m going to be on the air in a matter of minutes and I need to be ready. Why is the call coming through now, when the interview isn’t due for another half hour? Dripping and out of breath, I pick up.

"Joining us live all the way from Canberra, Australia is Paul Anthony Wallis, researcher of world mythologies and author of the controversial new book Escaping from Eden. Paul, welcome to Zone 51. How are you today?"

I do my best to slow my breathing and try and sound smooth and collected, Thanks, Tim and Jay. It’s great to be with you today. I... I had in mind we were going to be talking in about half an hour!

Yes, they laugh. The clocks’ changing has thrown everybody out! So, Paul, your book is stirring up quite a hornets’ nest of debate. Yet a couple of years back you were a regular pastor going about your work in the church. In fact, you were a senior churchman – an Archdeacon! What got you caught up in world mythologies and ancient aliens?

I sit at the end of my bed, wrapped in my towel, and thank my lucky stars this interview is audio only. We’re quickly going to get into some deep territory and all my notes are waiting for me in the other room. Can I get through a two-hour interview without my notes? Is my middle-aged mind up to the challenge? I feel I’ve been fumbling more for my words lately, starting a sentence and then having to work hard to make it coherently to the end. (I’m guessing three kids and not enough sleep can do that to you.) I really don’t want foggy memory to let my subject matter down and I’m feeling vulnerable sitting in my towel without my notes at hand. But it’s not the first time I’ve been asked, and it is all about my own journey. It’s about a sequence of discoveries that have upended my career, put my reputation on the line and changed the whole direction of my life. It is my own story. I can simply tell that. And so we begin.

We laugh about how an ultimate frisbee injury laid me up for weeks on end and gave me the time to get into some study while locked down in the shipping crate cabin at the end of my driveway. We talk about how I had been waiting for years to drill down into some of the logical and moral problems within the familiar stories of beginnings to be found in the book of Genesis. Anyone who has read those stories would know the kind of thing I mean. So, I run through the clues in the Genesis story which point to an even older narrative hidden in plain sight within the text.

Next, I walk Tim and Jay through the translation issues around various key words and show that the word the Bible often translates as God is really much better translated as Powerful Ones. I explain,

As soon as you make that translation switch the familiar stories of Genesis quickly reveal themselves for what they really are. They are the summary form of an even older body of stories – the Mesopotamian narratives of the ancient Sumerians, Babylonians, Akkadians and Assyrians. And those stories are not about God. They’re about our distant ancestors bumping up against visitors from another planet – Sky People – extraterrestrial visitors who came and colonised our planet and interfered in our evolution to make us a more useful workforce.

I am now shivering under the cold of the aircon, having sat myself right under the vent. I try to steady my voice by talking louder. I don’t want to come across all anxious and nervous when in reality I’m simply going into thermal shock.

Paul, after two thousand years of Christianity and more than three thousand years of Judaism, how likely is it that out of the blue, some random Australian researcher, yourself of course, could come along and say, ‘Hey, everyone! You’ve got this all wrong! I’ve got it worked out! The Bible isn’t really about God at all. It’s all about aliens.’ How credible is that?

This is a question I am ready for and as I jump into it I can feel my energy rising.

"Well, Tim, if I really were the first person to make these claims then, yes, you would be quite right to raise an eyebrow or two. In reality, I’m not the first. If you go back to the very early days of Christianity you will find some very significant Church Fathers who were totally comfortable with the explanation of human origins that I am putting forward in Escaping from Eden."

I am talking about people like Justin Martyr, Clement of Alexandria, Origen and Marcion. And in their case they didn’t get these ideas from the Mesopotamian stories. They got it from Plato.

You see, four hundred years before Jesus, Plato had already told the ancient world about the extraterrestrial beings who came and modified our ancestors. He called them ‘children of God’. He didn’t say what they were or where they were from, only that they came and adapted our ancestors to give us a higher capacity for consciousness and intelligence. Plato also wrote about some other company in the universe. He talked about others who are more advanced than we are. He said they live longer, they are more intelligent than us and they have an advanced knowledge of outer space. And, he said, they live on islands in the sky.

On top of all that Plato revealed that the Earth is a globe, floating in space, which every so often gets blasted by the movement of objects in space, triggering extinction level events. That’s why, he said, we are not the first civilization on this planet. Every few thousand years or so, something happens to take us down to a virtual zero to start again.

Now those Church Fathers I mentioned, who were strongly into Plato, knew everything he taught about ET interventions and past civilizations and they had no problem endorsing Plato in the strongest terms. So that put all those topics on the table and made them part of the mainstream conversation in early Christianity.

So, I am not the first on this territory. I am bringing back to the table things that in the beginning were part of mainstream conversation – and should be today.

I can feel my heart rate returning to normal and, although feeling a bit colder than I would prefer, I am beginning to get my groove on. I hope I’m not sounding too bullish. Talking about extraterrestrials is quite enough on its own to make people take a step back or get defensive. I am well aware that a hearer will automatically question the sanity of any speaker who trespasses into ET territory. I can’t take offence at that because it’s been a challenging change of mind for me in the last few years. It’s a big ask to expect people to take that turn with me in the space of a two-hour interview.

Before I made that turn, I lived and worked for thirty-three years in the world of Christian ministry. For much of that time I worked as a kind of Church Doctor. Like many in that field, I had my fair share of paranormal experiences. Somehow, though, I was always able to interpret any anomalous encounters as Divine, human, demonic or psychiatric. Those were my boxes and everything I ever encountered, one way or another, could fit into one of those boxes. Somehow, my theology had never really found a place for other kinds of entity or other intelligent life in the universe. So it was a revelation for me to realise that our ancestors embraced far more subtle thinking on these questions than I had ever imagined.

But, Paul, if in the distant past our ancestors knew about ET entities, how did all that knowledge get forgotten?

It’s a good question. It would seem a big thing to forget. So as swiftly as I can I lay out the dot point version of the answer:

In the Ten Commandments it was commanded out of Judaism.

In the C6th BCE it was edited out of the Hebrew Scriptures.

In the C1st and C2nd CE it was excommunicated out of the early Church.

It was illegalized from the Roman Empire by Emperor Theodosius in 381 CE and buried in the caves of the Nag Hammadi desert to protect it from obliteration.

In the C15th it was confiscated and burned out of the libraries of Central and South America by the Spanish and Portuguese conquistadors.

In the C16th its proponents were burned at the stake by the Roman Catholic Church.

In more recent times President Truman suppressed it when he signed the National Security Act of 1947 and that policy of suppression has continued unabated right up until last year when a number of cats got let out of the bag by US Department of Defense.

... So, Jay, to answer your question, you’re right there has been a lot of forgetting and none of it by accident!

I realise I have covered that ground rather quickly if you are not familiar with this history of official forgetting. But don’t worry, in the next few chapters I will show you exactly how all that played out.

I will also show you how a living memory of ET interventions has survived this history suppression in the form of indigenous memory – what we call folklore or mythology. When digging for what our ancestors knew that didn’t make it on to the news, our world mythologies and ancestral narratives are the most vital source. It is in these grassroots stories, passed from one generation to the next, that our ancient memories survive. In the pages that follow I will share with you my various notes on the subject and you will hear some stunning examples of prehistoric memory surfacing and resurfacing in cultures all around the world.

So, Paul, after thirty-three years in ministry you have boldly gone where few pastors have gone before! You must have ruffled a few feathers along the way. How many colleagues and friends have you lost through putting this material out there?

This is another good question! The fact is I have lost a small number. Honestly, though, as I have begun getting out there on George Noory’s Coast to Coast, Sean Stone’s Buzzsaw 2020, and countless other interview shows and podcasts, what has amazed me more than anything is the constant stream of letters, emails and messages that come to me from all kinds of people, all desperately relieved to hear a calm voice speaking into the airwaves on the topic of ET contact, ancient and modern. From week to week I hear from people of all ages and from every walk of life – scientists, engineers, nurses, teachers, police, defence personnel, researchers, therapists and pastors. Often those who reach out to me have experienced phenomena they don’t understand and can’t fit into conventional categories. I hear stories of close encounters, sightings of craft, interactions with non-human entities, even abductions. What humbles me the most is when from time to time I hear mature men in their sixties saying something like this:

I have told my wife and I’ve spoken to the person who was with me when the encounter happened. And I haven’t told another living, breathing soul in the fifty years since.

That’s how powerful the fear of shaming and ridicule can be. Yet all these decades after their experiences, my correspondents still need to find someone to talk to about it. They still need to process what it was that happened to them all those years ago.

As I have listened, I have come to feel even more passionately about the importance of breaking the taboo surrounding these subjects. Surely, we only impoverish our understanding of the universe if we embarrass into silence anybody with an anomalous experience to share. After all, the history of scientific discovery shows us that anomalies are our friends – if we want to understand reality more accurately. We just need to be willing to put our pre-packaged assumptions and beliefs back on the table for a moment and listen with an open ear to some accounts and experiences which may be puzzling, confronting and hard to understand.

So, Paul, why does this matter to you so much? Wouldn’t you be better off to keep your head down, and keep your speculations to yourself? What makes it important to you? Have you had some kind of a close encounter yourself?

If you had asked me this question only a few months ago, I would have simply said, No. Now, having compared notes with so many experiencers, I can feel something rumbling away in the back of my mind. There’s a restless memory, itching to resurface. I just don’t have a handle on it and find myself caught off guard by Tim’s question. Doing my best to think on the spot, I stutter my way through an answer. Whatever my own experience, I can say that, for whatever reason, I share a deep fellow-feeling with all those who share their stories with me.

As Tim has correctly surmised, not all have welcomed my trespassing into this controversial topic. And yes, I may have lost a few friends. Commenting on the publication of Escaping from Eden, two of my comrades in ministry told me just recently, Paul, let’s stay friends. But I won’t be reading your book.

Other friendships which were previously free and easy are perhaps not quite as free and easy as they were before. The fear of What has happened to Paul? or What if Paul undermines my faith? has kept some friends a degree more distant than in times past. Without a doubt, exploring ET territory can be somewhat isolating. With some at the fundamentalist end of the spectrum there is absolutely no possibility of a calm conversation. For those in that milieu I am a wolf in sheep’s clothing. I am, Full of the pride of Lucifer, says one. Luring people to the pit of hell, says another. You need Jesus, man! comes one reply. Open your Bible and read it, idiot! comes another.

Naturally, I want to defend myself. I want to tell my detractors, No, you’re wrong about me! I have been a believer since I was 17. I have not only read the Bible through countless times, but I served for fifteen years as a theological educator. I have trained pastors in the principles of hermeneutics [the principles of interpreting ancient texts – the Bible in particular].

I want to reply that I have designed training programs for pastors, served as a troubleshooter for churches, and as an Archdeacon in the Anglican Church in Australia. I really am a person of faith! For some, though, it is automatically impossible to acknowledge a person who accepts the possibility of ETs. Tony, my collaborator on The 5th Kind TV, jokes that I should merchandise a T-shirt that says, I lost them at ‘Sky People!’

So yes, Tim, I have to admit there is a cost to exploring this kind of territory. But I do it because it’s my journey. I want to know the truth. And as an addictive writer I just have to share that journey with others.

I sign off from Tim and Jay’s show, still sitting at the end of my bed in my bath towel. I think I did OK without my notes, which are still sitting undisturbed, patiently waiting for me in the other room. My hosts were right about how outlandish