THE MORE I THINK ABOUT IT, the more I lean toward the idea that extraterrestrials are a thing. Or at least they were. There are too many cross-cultural accounts of “gods” in our ancient past for there not to be something behind the stories.
Let me just state for the record that I don’t believe in an Almighty, personal God, at least not in the Biblical sense. My “God” is less in our likeness (or us in his) and more akin to the Hindu Brahman, the Supreme Existence or Absolute Reality, a Potentiality Matrix, if you will, from which all things spontaneously arise. I think of IT (not he or she) as the Source of All That Is, including our own Consciousness, and—if they ever existed—the Minds of the “gods” themselves.
Whether it’s the Greek Zeus, the Egyptian Anubis, or the Canaanite El or Yahweh, I think the existence of gods, if based at all in reality, was nothing more than an ancient encounter with life forms higher than ourselves at the time. These encounters could go back tens of thousands of years, millions even, to a time when our hominid ancestors resembled nothing of our modern-day selves. The Sumerians, Babylonians, Aztecs, Hindus—they all tell tales of “powerful ones”, “Sky people”, humanoids of gigantic size imparting the knowledge of the gods to us mere mortals. I can’t see there being nothing to these stories. They are too prevalent and too enduring. What’s more, they resonate with me on an intuitive level that makes me feel I’m tapping into a shared memory of our dim and distant past.
At the same time, I think there may have been many made-up deities over the years, and as things stand now I think even the “gods” that maybe did exist are dead and buried. They were never immortal, just powerful. Religion has dutifully kept their memory alive, no doubt hoping for their return from the Sky (or the grave) but as millennia have passed, it’s become apparent they’re not coming back.
So is that the end of the story? Maybe not.
Perhaps we will become the next Sky people. Elon Musk of SpaceX says humans will walk on Mars by 2030. Who knows what will happen beyond that? In hundreds or even thousands of years from now, humans may well be a space-faring people planting their feet on planets near and far. Who knows what or who we will find “out there”? Perhaps we will encounter a form of life lower than ourselves, on the cusp of their humanoid evolution, and we will be as gods to them.
We will be the people from the Sky, who arrived one day in our noisy, fire-breathing chariots, in silver skins and glass bubbles, breathing our own, bottled atmospheres and brandishing communication devices that seemed the stuff of magic. What more would one need to be a “god”? And when we are dead and gone, maybe we will be lucky enough to have our stories remain, crystallised forever in the collective memory of history. Maybe we will be remembered as the Elohim, the powerful ones, the mighty ones of old.