PARANORMAL ARTICLES PAGE 2

(All articles by Rhetta Akamatsu)

1. The Nephilim: Fallen Angels or Alien Beings?

2. Native American Ghosts

3.

1. The Nephilim: Fallen Angels or Alien Beings?

(This article appeared, in modified form, in the Journal of Anomalous Sciences, which you can read for free at http://www.dimensionzone.net.)

Whatever one's beliefs about the Bible as a religious book, it certainly must be acknowledged as a great source for the early belief systems of our ancient ancestors, and through it's telling of both Hebrew mythology and its re-telling of even earlier stories, it can provide some insight into the possible history of our evolution.

An interesting part of the earliest stories recounted in the Bible, those immediately following the Creation story, involves creatures referred to in the Bible as the Nephilim.

Here is the Biblical passage that refers to the Nephilim first:
"Now it came about, when men began to multiply on the face of the land, and daughters were born to them, that the sons of God saw that the daughters of men were beautiful; and they took wives for themselves, whomever they chose... The Nephilim were on the earth in those days, and also afterward, when the sons of God came in to the daughters of men, and they bore children to them. Those were the mighty men who were of old, men of renown.-"Genesis 6:1-4

There is a great deal of controversy over who these 'Sons of God' were who appear to have been the fathers of the Nephilim, giants and mighty men. Most theologians and authors have claimed that they were fallen angels, who broke God's rule by coming to earth and having sexual relations with humans. Others have claimed that they were a particularly pure race of humans called the Sethites, who had kept their blood line totally pure and some of whom then rebelled and went down and took wives from among the less-pure "daughters of men."

The commentary in the New American Bible parallels this passage and a passage in Jude 6:7, which states:
"And the angels which kept not their first estate, but left their own habitation...giving themselves over to fornication, and going after strange flesh…"

This, according to the New American Bible, indicates that heavenly beings came to earth and had sex with human women, and became the fathers of the Nephilim, who were powerful giants.

How much of a leap, for us, is it to define these "heavenly beings" that come down to earth and breed with earth women as aliens, that is, ancient astronauts from another planet?

Let us look at some of the words used in this description.
First, the term used for the paternity of the Nephilim, which is translated in the King James Bible as "Sons of God," is literally translated, according to Wikipedia, as "Sons of the Powers," a much more interesting translation.

The Hebrew word Nephilim is sometimes translated, again according to Wikipedia, as "Those who cause others to fall."

In The Watchers, Raymond E. Fowler states: "The Hebrew word for giants (nephilum) literally means the fallen-down-ones because these tall celestial beings fell from the sky. Their half-breed progeny and their descendants are often mentioned in the early books of the Old Testament until the last of them were finally killed off...Some scholars speculate that this tradition of giants born from the union of gods and humans formed the basis for the demigod of Greek mythology."
Robert Graves, in Hebrew Myths: The Book of Genesis, Also states that Nefilim (his spelling) means "Fallen Ones."

Among the ancient Aramiac people, Nephila referred specifically to the constellation Orion, and Nephilim were the semi-divine offspring of Orion.

There are other terms for giants in the Bible. Wikipedia lists these:
Emim ("the fearful ones")
Rephaim ("the dead ones")
Anakin (the long-necked ones,") (and logically associated with the Annunakah)

Robert Graves, again in Hebrew Myths, defines the Emim as "Terrors", and Repha'im as "Weakeners," and adds Gibborim ('Giant Heroes'), Zamzummim ('Achievers') and Awwim ('Devastators' or 'Serpents').
Footnotes in the Jerusalem Bible claim that the author of the Genesis passage meant the Nephilim to be an 'anecdote of a superhuman race.'
Let's look further at some of the descriptions of these 'superhuman' giants in the Bible and other extra-Biblical sources.
In Deuteronomy 3:11, we get a description of one of the Rephaim, who appear to have been the original inhabitants of what became Canaan, who were dispossessed and some of whom took refuge among the Philistines. The only remaining Rephaim in Canaan was Og, the King of Basham.

"Only Og king of Bashan was left of the remnant of the Rephaites. His bed was made of iron and was more than thirteen feet long and six feet wide."

Later, in Numbers, Jewish spies are sent on a mission, and they describe the inhabitants of the land they are passing through:
"The land, through which we have gone to spy it out, is a land that devours its inhabitants, and all the people that we saw in it are of great height. And there we saw the Nephilim (the sons of Anak, who come from the Nephilim), and we seemed to ourselves like grasshoppers, and so we seemed to them." Numbers 13:32-33

The Book of Enoch is an ancient text that was first discovered in Ethiopia in 1773 and is believed to be one of the oldest manuscripts in existence. In addition to the Ethiopian translation, more than twenty fragmented copies of the original Aramaic have been discovered among the Dead Sea Scrolls at Qumran. Robert Sepehr of Planet X Video writes in The Anunnaki and Nephilim that the Book of Enoch relates that around 200 angels came down to earth to mate with the human females. Their leader was a high angel named Azazyel, and their offspring were giant men. According to Enoch, at this time the angels taught the humans to make 'swords, knives, shields, breastplates, mirrors, jewelry, paint and dyes, make cosmetics, and use valuable stones. The people also learned sorcery, use of roots and plants for medicine, astronomy, astrology and other "signs", and the importance of the motion of the celestial bodies. (Sepehr, the Anunnaki and Nephilim)

Another "apocryphal" book, The Book of Jubilees, gives more description of this occurrence. In Jubilees, the Nephilim are fallen angels who know they are going to be punished for having sex with human women, so they make a pact that they will all do the deed and they will all share the punishment.

Enoch says that the Nephilim were cast into a place called Tartarus, which is sometimes translated as Hell, for their sins. The translation of this word is actually "place of darkness," or, according to Christian author Charles Missler, "the pit of darkness in the unseen world." Missler points out that Homer, in the Illiad, defined Tartarus as "...as far beneath hades as the earth is below heaven."

But while Enoch says that all the Nephilim were tossed into this pit in the 'unseen world," the author of Jubilees claims that 10% of the Nephilim were allowed to remain on the earth to roam about the earth, acting as demons and tempting men. Some Christian writers have made the claim that all ghosts and spirits are actually Nephilim, and evil. Others claim that only those who haunt churches and other sacred Christian locations are Nephilim. This, of course, is patently untrue to any objective observer. Many churches, monasteries, etc., have had reported hauntings by monks, nuns, pastors, and other obviously non-evil entities. The majority of these hauntings are no doubt residual, as are the hauntings elsewhere, and are neither evil nor benign, but have no more meaning than holograms on breakfast cereal boxes might have, other than the glimpses of past history they can provide.
Nevertheless, this is the explanation that some Christians choose to give for any church haunting.

In the above section concerning Og, King of Basham, we have seen that since his bed had to be thirteen feet long and made of iron. Indeed, giant bones have been found all over the world over many years, and while some of these have turned out to be hoaxes, some are unexplained.

The Bible reads these were "mighty men of old, men of renown."
Yet, according to anthropologist Stephen Jay Gould,

"Our skills and behavior are finely attuned to our size. We could not be twice as tall as we are, for the kinetic energy of a fall would then be 16 to 32 times as great, and our sheer weight (increased eightfold) would be more than our legs could support. Human giants of eight to nine feet have either died young or been crippled early by failure of joints and bones. At half our size, we could not wield a club with sufficient force to hunt large animals (for kinetic energy would decrease 16 to 32-fold); we could not impart sufficient momentum to spears and arrows; we could not cut or split wood with primitive tools or mine minerals with picks and chisels. Since these all were essential activities in our historical development, we must conclude that the path of our evolution could only have been followed by a creature very close to our size. I do not argue that we inhabit the best of all possible worlds, only that our size has limited our activities and, to a great extent, shaped our evolution."
- Stephen Jay Gould, "Sizing Up Human Intelligence," Physical Anthropology 96/97, pp.150-51

This would certainly seem to argue that the giants in the land in those days must not have been of purely human origin.

Many Christians believe that the return of the Nephilim is going to be a prerequisite for the End of Days before the return of Christ. They see UFOs and alien abductions as signs that that time is near. Of course, they are filtering all of the possible historical facts through their own belief system, and thus the information is necessarily biased. See the website, "The Return of the Nephilim," if you want to read more about this viewpoint.

These Christian authors who have embraced the idea that the Nephilim may have been an alien race often suggest that the purpose of alien abductions and other alien visitations may be to create a hybrid race here on earth. One of the authors, Chuck Missler, points out that while the Bible seems to indicate that one purpose of the flood was to destroy the hybrid race then in existence and return men to their "purity," at least some of the Nephilim seem to have survived even after the flood, as in Daniel's prophetic dream when he says, in Daniel 2:43,

"And whereas thou sawest iron mixed with miry clay, they shall mingle themselves with the seed of men: but they shall not cleave one to another, even as iron is not mixed with clay."

Since this was allegedly a prophetic dream, Missler speculates that this mixing of seed by creatures that were not of "the seed of men" could still be going on.

I do not know why it is so easy for Christians to believe in heavenly creatures if they call them "angels," and not if they call them "aliens," but it seems to me that the ancient historical records and the knowledge we have today make a very good case that the Nephilim were an other-worldly, not entirely human race of mighty giants, and that sounds like a good case for alien DNA to me.

Sources:
Wikipedia
The New Jerusalem Bible
The King James Bible
The New America Bible
The Book of Enoch
The Book of Jubilees
Raymond E. Fowler, "The Watchers"
Robert Graves, Hebrew Myths: The Book of Genesis
Robert Sepehr, "The Annunaki and the Nephilim"
Stephen Jay Gould, "Sizing Up Human Intelligence," Physical Anthropology 96/97, pp.150-51
Chuck Missler, "The Return of the Nephilim, " and "Mischievous Angels or Sethites?"
 

2. Native American Ghosts

While not all Native Americans shared the same belief system in the past, or share the same belief system now, there are some common threads in Native American belief, and most Native Americans believe in the spirits of the dead.

In the traditional northern Native American belief system, ghosts, even those of former loved ones, are considered bad luck. Every night, the dead visit the living in their dreams, and try to entice them to join them in the afterlife. They are very dangerous.

Because of this danger, the dead were usually buried far from the village in tribes that buried their dead. Islands were often used in the Pacific Northwest, since, as in many other belief systems, the Native Americans there believed that the dead could not cross water.

Despite this fear, many northern Native Americans also believed, and some still believe, that they could call upon spirit power to help them, and the shamans, in particular, use spirit power to heal.

The Iroquois tribe believed that there were three types of supernatural beings; spirits, ghosts of the dead, and gods. When a man died, his spirit departed for the afterlife, but his ghost hung around and watched and even participated in village life, although not in a way that affected the living.

In the Southern United States, the Catawba celebrated elaborate rituals to make sure the spirits of the dead were appeased. If the rituals were successful, after three days, the spirits would return and drink water from a jar of water that had been placed at the corpses's head. If the water rippled, that meant the spirit would pass on, and not bother the living.

In many tribes, the dead were cremated. This was done to prevent the dead from returning to haunt the living. All of his or her possessions were often burned, as well, so that the ghost would have no connection to the living world and no reason to return.

On the other hand, some tribes wished for the return of their dead. The Hopi, for instance, believed that the dead could help them, and offered them gifts to return.

So, we see that there is no real one "Native American" belief about ghosts, except that most Native Americans believed that ghosts exist, either to be feared or to be embraced and welcomed.
 

3. To Serve and Protect: Why It Is So Important to Acknowledge the Existence of the Paranormal

Thanks in part to the proliferation of television program and books about scientific investigation of the paranormal, no matter how flawed they may or may not be, and the burgeoning number of paranormal investigation groups, belief in those things that fit outside the norm is losing some of its stigma.

But this is not happening fast enough, particularly in the case of people who are, or believe they are, suffering a haunting.

In the Certified Paranormal Investigation course offered on the ParaNexus site, Doug Kelley talks about the power of belief. In some cases, people who believe that they are being haunted may be suffering from a pyschological problem, and in some cases, they may be actually experiencing a paranormal event. In the long run, which one of these is true may not make a lot of difference if the person is so afraid of being ridiculed or thought to be crazy that they don't seek help, or if they are not taken seriously when they do seek help.

In May of 2008, there was an article by Hamilah Abdullah in the Kansas City Star about Sgt.
Brian Rand. The article stated:

"Until the day he died, Sgt. Brian Rand believed he was being haunted by the ghost of the Iraqi man he killed.

The ghost choked Rand while he slept in his bunk, forcing him to wake up gasping for air and clawing at his throat.

He whispered that Rand was a vampire and looked on as the soldier stabbed another member of Fort Campbell's 96th Aviation Support Battalion in the neck with a fork in the mess hall.

Eventually, the ghost told Rand he needed to kill himself."

So, Sgt. Rand smoked a cigarette, wrote a note, went to the park where he and his wife married, and shot himself.

"My brother was afraid to ask for help," said April Somdahl. "And when he finally did ask for help the military let him down."

Yes, the military did let him down, but I feel that society let him down as well. Because people who claim to be haunted or who profess to believe in ghosts may still be scoffed at, especially tough military men. No one investigated this case, to see if there was evidence that Sgt. Rand really was being haunted by a real vengeful ghost. No one helped him figure out what was going on outside his head and then deal with what was going on on the inside.

If he had felt free to contact a paranormal investigation group, and was lucky enough to get one that would not only seek to capture a ghost but would seek to help, what difference might it have made to him? If he could have been in contact with a parapyschologist, who could have helped him deal with his guilt and pain and deal with this haunting, whether it was external or internal, what difference would it have made?

Even if he had gotten military help to seek normal psychiatric treatment, if the person treating him did not take the possibility of a real haunting seriously, and this was a real ghost, would it have helped?

How many people are suffering unnecessarily because they don't know who to turn to, or are ashamed to turn to anyone, or are too afraid that they are losing their minds to dare ask for the help they need?

Imagine living every day in a house where unexplainable things happen all the time, and being afraid to tell anyone. What if your parents, your school, or your church are telling you that to believe in these things is wrong, but they're happening right in front of your eyes? How is that going to make you feel?

What relief would it be to find someone who actually believed you, listened, and tried to help in a concrete fashion?

That is why we need to keep on getting out there and gathering the evidence and talking about what we do. We need to keep responsible, serious paranormal investigation in the public eye, so that if a person has had an experience they can't explain and can't handle alone, whether it is a ghost, a UFO encounter, or an encounter with some unknown creature, that person will know where to go for help and will not be shamed or scared out of doing so.