SITCHIN AND VATICAN THEOLOGIAN DISCUSS UFO's,
EXTRATERRESTRIALS, ANGELS, CREATION OF MAN
Report
by Zecharia Sitchin
In what must be a historic first, a high official of
the Vatican and a Hebrew scholar discussed the issue of Extraterrestrials
and the Creation of Man, and though different from each other in upbringing,
background, religion and methodology, nevertheless arrived at common
conclusions:
* Yes, Extraterrestrials can and do exist
on other planets
* Yes, they can be more advanced than us
* Yes, materially, Man could have been fashioned
from a pre-existing sentient being.
The Participants
The high Vatican official was Monsignor Corrado Balducci,
a Catholic theologian with impressive credentials: A member of the Curia
of the Roman Catholic Church, a Prelate of the Congregation for the
Evangelization of Peoples and the Propagation of the Faith, leading exorcist
of the Archdiocese of Rome, a member of the Vatican's Beatification Committee,
an expert on Demonology and the author of several
books. Appointed in the Vatican
to deal with the issue of UFO's and Extraterrestrials, he has made in recent
years pronouncements indicating a tolerance of the subjects; but he has never
before met and had a dialogue with a Hebrew scholar, and gone beyond prescribed
formulations to include the touchy issue of the Creation of Man.
The Hebrew scholar was me -- Zecharia
Sitchin: A researcher of ancient
civilizations, a biblical archaeologist, a descendant of
Abraham
The
Monsignor and I almost met for such a dialogue last December, but it did
not come about. This time we were scheduled to meet in Bellaria, Italy,
at a conference whose theme was The Mystery of Human
Existence. I arrived there
with my wife and a score of fans from the USA, on March 31st, scheduled to
address the audience of over a thousand the next
day. The Monsignor was nowhere
in sight; but he was there the next morning to hear my
presentation. I drove
the whole night from Rome to hear you, he said.
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Sitchins Presentation
My talk, ably translated by my Italian editor Tuvia
Fogel, included a slide presentation that added a pictorial dimension to
the evidence from ancient times in support of Sumerian texts, on which my
eight books based the following conclusions:
We
are not alone -- not just in the vast universe, but in our own solar
system; There is one more planet in our solar system, orbiting
beyond Pluto but nearing Earth
periodically; Advanced
"Extraterrestrials -- the Sumerians called them Anunnaki, the Bible
Nefilim -- started to visit our planet some 450,000 years
ago; And, some 300,000 years
ago, they engaged in genetic engineering to upgrade Earth's hominids and
fashion Homo sapiens, the Adam. In
that, they acted as Emissaries for the Universal Creator --
God.
The Dialogue
"We
have much to talk about, Msgr. Balducci said to me as he came forward
to congratulate me on my presentation;
"I have great esteem for your scholarship," he
said.
We
returned to the hotel for lunch.
Our table was surrounded in a semi-circle by my American fans, intent
on not missing a word of the forthcoming
dialogue. In the hours-long
session, Msgr. Balducci outlined the positions he was going to state, from
a prepared text, in his talk the next
day. While my approach was based
on physical evidence, his was a purely Roman Catholic theological-philosophical
one, seeking the spiritual aspects.
Yet, our conclusions converged.
Msgr. Balducci's Positions
ON
UFO's. "There
must be something in
it." The hundreds and thousands of eyewitness
reports leave no room for denying that there is a measure of truth in them,
even allowing for optical illusions,
atmospheric phenomena and
so on. As a Catholic theologian
such witnessing cannot be
dismissed. "Witnessing is one
way of transmitting truth, and in the case of the Christian religion, we
are talking about a Divine Revelation in which witnessing is crucial to the
credibility of our faith.
ON LIFE ON OTHER
PLANETS: That life may
exist on other planets is certainly possible... The Bible does not rule out
that possibility. On the basis
of scripture and on the basis of our knowledge of God's omnipotence, His
wisdom being limitless, we must affirm that life on other planets is
possible." Moreover, this is not only possible, but also credible
and even probable. '"Cardinal
Nicolo Cusano (1401-1464) wrote that there is not a single star in the sky
about which we can rule out the existence of life, even if different from
ours.
ON
INTELLIGENT EXTRATERRESTRIALS: "When I talk about Extraterrestrials, we must
think of beings who are like us -- more probably, beings more advanced than
us, in that their nature is an association of a material part and a spiritual
part, a body and a soul, although in different proportions than human beings
on Earth." Angels are beings
who are purely spiritual, devoid of bodies, while we are made up of spirit
and matter but still at a low level.
"It is entirely credible that in the enormous distance between Angels
and humans, there could be found some middle stage, that is beings with a
body like ours but more elevated
spiritually. If such
intelligent beings really exist on other planets, only science will be able
to prove; but in spite of what
some people think, we would be in a position to reconcile their existence
with the Redemption that Christ has brought
us.
The Anunnaki and the Creation of
Man
Well then, I asked Msgr. Balducci, does it mean that
my presentation was no great revelation to
you? We appear to agree, I said,
that more advanced extraterrestrials can exist, and I use science to evidence
their coming to Earth ...I then quote the Sumerian texts that say that the
Anunnaki (Those who from heaven to Earth came) genetically improved
an existing being on Earth to create the being that the Bible calls
Adam.
My conclusion regarding your presentation, Msgr. Balducci
answered, is that more than anything else your whole approach is based on
physical evidence, it concerns itself with matter, not with
spirit. This is an important
distinction, "because if this distinction is made, I can bring up the view
of the great theologian, Professor Father Marakoff, who is still alive and
is greatly respected by the Church.
He formulated the hypothesis that when God created Man and put the
soul into him, perhaps what is meant is not that Man was created from mud
or lime, but from something pre-existing, even from a sentient being capable
of feeling and perception. So the idea of taking a pre-man or hominid and creating
someone who is aware of himself is something that Christianity is coming
around to
The key is the distinction between the material body and the
soul granted by God."
From Anunnaki
to God
Yes,
I responded to the Vatican theologian, in my writings I deal with the physical
evidence; but already in my first book (The 12th Planet), the very
last sentence of the last paragraph raises the question: If the Extraterrestrials
"created" us, who created them on their
planet?
From
this my own thinking and the contents of my subsequent books evolved toward
the spiritual or "divine" aspects.
The Anunnaki, I have explained, were just emissaries (and that is
what the Hebrew word Malachim, translated Angels,
means). They thought that it
was their decision to come here for selfish reasons and to fashion us because
they needed workers; but in truth they only carried out the Almighty God's
wishes and plans.
If such Extraterrestrials were so involved, Msgr. Balducci
said, even by your own interpretation they had to do with Man's physics,
body and rationality: but God alone had to do with the Soul!
My second book, that deals
with Man's aspiration to ascend the heavens, is titled The Stairway to
Heaven, I told Msgr, Balducci, "it seems to me that we are ascending
the same stairway to heaven, though from different steps," I
said.
We ended the dialogue as friends, determined to stay
in touch and continue.
Reproduction is permitted if accompanied by the
statement
© Z. Sitchin 2000
Reproduced by permission.