The Four-Faced Visitors of Ezekiel, Arthur W. Orton [best e books to read txt] 📗

15. Then I came to them of the captivity at Tel-Abib, that dwelt by the river Chebar, and I sat where they sat, and remained there astonished among them for seven days.

Just what do we have? We have a description of four spacesuited and helicopter-equipped men, getting off of, or out of something that landed in a cloud of dust or smoke. The four men start their helicopters, take off and fly to some height. On returning to the ground they remove their flying gear and wait. They are met by a fifth man, riding on a flying platform. Such an event would cause some interest in any community today, but in those times it could only be interpreted as supernatural—a miracle. The miracle may well be that the story has been preserved for us, twenty-six centuries later.

A word for word interpretation is only part of the oddity of this chapter. Several other aspects are worth pondering. The whole chapter has a well-worn feeling, as though the author had told and re-told it many times. It reads like a deposition, taken down by a police officer, after the witness, who prides himself on truthfulness, has told the story over and over to his incredulous friends. It has a certain poetic beauty. It has the style of one who is telling you the truth, no matter whether you are going to believe it or not. It is the presentation of a tableau that makes no sense to the man who witnessed it, or to those to whom he is describing it.

The product of a man's imagination is tied to his own experience, his own time. A wonderful tale of the supernatural may sound very imaginative to the contemporary of the teller, but it will date itself to a later generation. The lives of the Greek gods are related to the lives of the early Greeks. An imaginative science-fiction writer such as Jules Verne is limited in the same way. As good as he was, experience has set an outer limit to his imagination. Ezekiel's tale is not in this class. To his contemporaries, it was out of step with reality. To us it is real enough, but out of step with time. The most credible explanation is that it really happened.

Perhaps there are some points of my interpretation that you do not agree with, but as a whole the story does hang together rather well. If you have the feeling that it would be easy to fit the words around an entirely different set of circumstances, I suggest that you try.

It is interesting to know that some years ago a verbal battle raged in theological circles as to whether Ezekiel wrote the Book of Ezekiel. One school of thought held that he did, while the other school held that the first chapter was a "forgery," written in the third century before Christ, and tacked on as a sort of "leader" to Ezekiel's book. For our purposes it cannot be a forgery. It makes little difference how long ago it was written, so long as it was not since World War II!

Suppose Ezekiel or some ancient man actually saw what I have proposed. What are the possible explanations? Is it possible that some ancient race, unknown to us, could have developed such equipment? It is not likely. During the last one hundred years we have been prodding about in the earth and finding so many ancient records that someone else besides Ezekiel would certainly have left us a report on them.

The things that were science fiction twenty years ago are solid fact now. We know that a landing on the Moon is only a question of time, a few years at the most. The planets of our Solar System will follow, at least some before the turn of the century, probably. As for the planets of neighboring stars we cannot say. We have no way of exploring them at present, but that is not the same as saying that we never will. If the past performance of the human race is any measure, they will likely fall to exploration within two hundred years.

If you concede that it is possible that we can visit other star systems in a future not too distant, why then could we not have been visited some time in the past? It may tend to deflate our ego to think that there may be intelligent beings not too different from us who are advanced beyond us. It need not. One of the most striking features of Ezekiel's story, if it has been decoded correctly, is that these beings are very much like we are, right at the present time. That puts them three or four thousand years ahead of us, a very small amount indeed when we consider the long sweep of human life and development before the dawn of written history.

We are so used to stories of "Bug-eyed Monsters" coming to Earth, that the idea of beings from other worlds looking and acting human seems fantastic. It should not. There is good sound scientific reason to believe that there is little chance of it being any other way. Life is a delicate and fragile thing when compared to cosmic extremes of temperature and environment in our universe. If life formed on earth as science now believes that it did, we must have had just the right size planet at just the right distance from a particular type of star. While such extremely narrow limits are going to reduce the number of places in the universe where life can develop, it is also going to limit the differences. In our creation things operate by rule. The rule is that in similar circumstance there are similar solutions to a problem. Man is the solution of the problem of building the highest form of life on Earth. On a similar planet we can expect to find a similar solution. This is simply the extension of the theory of parallel evolution to a cosmic scale.

If then, we were visited by people from another world, what were they doing here? Strangely enough, there is considerable evidence of what they were up to from Ezekiel's own testimony. Let us suppose that these creatures were very much like we expect to be in five hundred years. They have come from some other star system in a ship whose principle of operation is as yet unknown to us. We can assume that it was a rather large ship, being that there were five beings on board at once, and we can presume that enough of a crew remained aboard to return it home in case something happened to the explorers. How would we proceed in such a case?

It is not likely that such a large ship would be brought down to the surface of the earth. After arriving in the neighborhood of the earth, it would be put into orbit, and the surface of the earth would be studied through telescopes for days or weeks. The entire radio spectrum would be scanned to determine if there were inhabitants below, capable of operating electrical equipment. A small—manned or unmanned—flyer would be sent down into the upper atmosphere to determine the level of radioactivity, air components, spore and bacteria count and radio signals incapable of penetrating the atmosphere. From the ship the land areas would be mapped and studied. Any large object on the ground that appeared to be of an artificial nature would be given particular attention. During the night-time hours below, these objects and areas would be very carefully observed for signs of light.

In the case of our visitors of twenty-six centuries ago, this is what they would have found: Quite a few artificial works could be seen. Cultivated fields and large buildings would be easily visible in many places around the eastern end of the Mediterranean. The Pyramids were old even then. (The Great Wall in China probably had not been started.) There would be no radio sounds, except for an occasional lightning click. We do not know how well their cities were lighted at night, but they were probably too dim to see. Tiny orange pinpoints of light from outdoor bonfires could probably be seen around the globe, but there would be more of them around the Mediterranean and in the East and Near East than anywhere else. The radioactivity level would be low. Our visitors would conclude that the inhabitants were either in the early stages of civilization, or were once highly civilized and now sunk back to a primitive stage. They would know that this was due to something other than atomic war.

We have to conclude that these were moral beings. If the conditions below were as they seemed to be, that of an early civilization, they would not want to interfere. They would want to observe without being observed, so even if it were technically possible they would not want to bring a large ship down. They would send down as small and inconspicuous a vehicle as possible.

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