The Spaceships of Ezekiel

The Spaceships of Ezekiel (1974) is a book by Josef F. Blumrich (March 17, 1913 - February 10, 2002) on a spaceship that was supposedly observed by the prophet Ezekiel, written while the author was chief of NASA's systems layout branch of the program development office at the Marshall Space Flight Center. Blumrich went, after ufologists like Erich von Däniken had pointed to the possibility to interpret Ezekiel's vision as a report about an extraterrestrial spacecraft, to disprove this hypothesis. A thorough examination, though, convinced him that Ezekiel had, in fact, seen a spacecraft, and occasioned him to fabricate detailed drawings of the latter. He stated the technology of the creators of the craft must have been a little bit higher developed than that of mankind of the present, and that he had seldom felt as delighted, satisfied, and fascinated by a full defeat. In The Spaceships of Ezekiel Blumrich asserts that Ezekiel's account in the Bible was not a description of a meeting with God in a prophetic vision, but one of several encounters with ancient astronauts in a shuttlecraft from another planet. Blumrich analyzes six different translations of the Bible in conjunction with his experience in engineering and presents one possible version of Ezekiel's visions of how God—described as riding in an elaborate vehicle capable to see, attended by angels—supposedly showed him the future and gave him various messages to deliver. In the appendices to the book he presents technical specifications of the hypothesized spacecraft. Blumrich also published an article on his belief, "The spaceships of the prophet Ezekiel", in the UNESCO journal Impact of Science on Society.