A Note on the Vision of Ezekiel

          At the last SUAPS Reading Circle meeting 18 June 2026, which concerned C. G. Jung’s Flying Saucers:  A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies, one participant put forward a very common view concerning the Vision of Ezekiel as a premodern UAP sighting. Precisely because of this view’s ubiquity, I feel moved to set forth a counter, critical response, admitting, of course, that there is no knock-down argument concerning some ultimate truth of Ezekiel’s text (such are hermeneutics). Nevertheless, there are, I maintain, more and less warranted understandings…

          The Vision of Ezekiel, most famously since Erich von Däniken (and, most creatively, Josef F. Blumrich and even by more sobre researchers, such as Jacques Vallée (2)), has been claimed by some to be a premodern UAP sighting report, Ezekiel describing a(n) UAP and his interactions with the intelligence behind it according to the concepts and language at his disposal. Von Däniken sums up nicely the literalist reading of the opening of the Book of Ezekiel. He writes in Chariots of the Gods concerning Ezekiel’s likening “the din made by the wings and wheels to a ‘great rushing.’ Surely this suggests that this is an eyewitness report?” (39). There is much, however, that complicates matters. First, however much the Book of Ezekiel is the first written prophecy in the Hebrew Bible, its authorship is uncertain; the book attributed to “Ezekiel” is quite possibly the work of several hands. Then, the vision itself, for all its rococo detail is famously obscure in its complexity, as the many and varied attempts to concretely depict it attest, which suggests the description is perhaps more or other than a flabbergasted one of an alien object.

          Even if we take the vision to be an “eyewitness report,” the witness himself is not very reliable. As Michael Lieb writes in his invaluable Children of Ezekiel:

Scholars marvel at Ezekiel’s experience of bodily paralysis and periods of trances (Ezek. 3:15, 4:4-6); his accounts of levitation (Ezek. 3:12-14, 8:3, 11:1); his cutting, weighing, dividing, burning, binding, and scattering his hair (Ezek. 5:1-4); his sudden clapping of the hands and stamping of the feet (Ezek. 6:11); and his belief in his power to destroy with speech (Ezek. 11:13). (14)

Jacques Vallée would likely point to Ezekiel’s paralysis, trances, and levitation as consistent with the kinds of paranormal after-effects often associated with close encounters. But Ezekiel’s other behaviours (above) are part of a more concerning pattern (if we insist on taking the book at face value):

He is told to shut himself within his house. He is bound with cords, and his tongue cleaves to the roof of his mouth so that he is dumb (Ezek. 3:24-26). He is given to prepare his food with dung (Ezek. 4:15) and to accuse his enemies of worshiping dung balls (the term dung ball is found more often in Ezekiel’s prophecy than anywhere else in the Hebrew Bible). (14-15)

Unsurprisingly, “[s]uch circumstances have prompted some scholars to see in Ezekiel evidence of an especially pronounced pathology.” Today, such an “eyewitness” would not be believed, even by believers in the Phenomenon.

          However, such troubles are somewhat clarified when we understand how illegitimate it is to spontaneously take Ezekiel’s vision to be an “eyewitness” report by understanding that an “eyewitness report” is a modern genre of discourse and that of the book of Ezekiel another. As I have been at great pains at Skunkworks, it is an error to project an historically, culturally, and socially local communicative convention (here, the “eyewitness report”) onto temporally and culturally distant texts and artefacts. Simply, one need first situate the text in the context of the discursive practices of its day; even if it should, as something radically new, break with these conventions, that departure can only come into view in light of what the text departs from.           Logically, Ezekiel’s vision is either exoteric (visible to Ezekiel and anyone else within visual range of the phenomenon), esoteric (visible only to Ezekiel, consistent with the vision’s being a variety of religious experience or an hallucination), or, perhaps, a powerfully original work of religious poetry with prophetic import and intent. That is, I propose, the “truth” of the Book of Ezekiel is not in its “facts” but in the consequences of its revelations for the spiritual life of its intended readership, which is to read the book rhetorically (which is unavoidable, even for the “literal”—whatever that might finally mean—reading). It is my contention that precisely such philologico-rhetorical reflection is demanded of all culturally and temporally distant “accounts of encounters with Non-Human Intelligences” and that such accounts cannot be admitted as warranted evidence until that due diligence has been undertaken. Why otherwise learned scholars tend to such literalism reflexively is another, however interesting, matter….

Blumrich, Josef F. The Spaceships of Ezekiel. New York:  Bantam, 1974.

Lieb, Michael. Children of Ezekiel:  Aliens, UFOs, the Crisis of Race, and the Advent of End Time. Durham:  Duke University Press, 1998.

Vallée, Jacques. Anatomy of a Phenomenon:  Unidentified Objects in Space—A Scientific Appraisal. Chicago:  Henry Regnery, 1965.

Von Däniken, Erich. Chariots of the Gods? Unsolved Mysteries of the Past. New York:  Bantam, 1971.