Paul Wallis, a former Anglican archdeacon in Australia who spent more than 30 years in church ministry, has claimed hidden clues in the Bible suggest humanity once encountered advanced, non-human beings who descended from the sky.
Wallis said passages traditionally read as encounters with God could instead describe contact with multiple advanced beings, a conclusion he reached after revisiting puzzling passages in the Old Testament and comparing them with stories preserved by ancient civilizations.
'I talk about ancestral narratives, and themes within those narratives that suggest our ancestors may have had contact with non-human intelligence,' Wallis told the Daily Mail.
He said biblical references to powerful beings, metallic objects and devastating weapons resembled tales of 'sky people' found in Sumerian, Babylonian, Mayan, Chinese and African traditions, and argued many such accounts followed the same pattern: humanity survived a cataclysm before advanced visitors arrived and helped rebuild civilization.
The 'Elohim' theory
His most provocative claim centres on 'Elohim,' the Hebrew term traditionally rendered as God, which he believes actually refers to a group he calls 'the powerful ones' and links to the Anunnaki of ancient Mesopotamian tradition. However, the material he presented did not demonstrate that the two terms described the same entities, and his theory relies on unconventional interpretation and perceived similarities between ancient stories rather than physical or archaeological evidence that extraterrestrials visited humanity.
NASA and the US government have long maintained there is no evidence extraterrestrials have visited Earth.
From archdeacon to alien theorist
During his church career, Wallis trained pastors to interpret biblical texts and rose to archdeacon, a senior position directly below bishop. He said his former role makes his theory especially controversial, since it is unusual for a senior churchman to argue publicly that evidence of non-human intelligence can be found in the Bible.
Questions about passages that appeared confusing or inconsistent had troubled him throughout his years as a preacher. When he traced their language back to what he considered its root meanings, he became convinced a 'whole layer of the story' had been lost through centuries of interpretation.
His exploration was also influenced by UFO theorist Erich von Däniken, whose work first captured his imagination when he was 11. Wallis began rereading the Book of Genesis and comparing biblical accounts with older Babylonian, Assyrian, Akkadian and Sumerian stories.
'I realized I was being confronted with a big question, which was, what do we do with God stories or stories that we've interpreted as God stories if they're actually based on Sumerian stories of sky people,' he said.
Flood myths and feathered serpents
Wallis also drew parallels with stories of feathered serpents in Mayan, Chinese and Egyptian traditions, along with narratives preserved among African and Native American peoples. Many, he said, began with a catastrophe such as a devastating flood, followed by powerful beings arriving to help survivors rebuild.
'When you read all these stories of these different traditions and picture what they're telling you, because they've all got different names, different metaphors, different similes, but you picture them and you realise they're all telling you to picture the exact same scene,' Wallis said. He believed the similarities were too specific for civilizations separated by thousands of miles to have independently created them.
Matching themes and images across cultures, however, do not prove ancient writers were documenting literal technology, and his argument depends on treating passages conventionally understood as spiritual, mythological or metaphorical as eyewitness accounts.
Wallis also pointed to 3,000-year-old Iron Age carvings in Turkey that he said preserved stories of events shortly after the most recent Ice Age. He interpreted the images as depicting advanced beings arriving to teach agricultural science, though nothing he cited directly identifies the figures as extraterrestrial.
Ezekiel, Exodus and 'flying craft'
Wallis applied a similar interpretation to passages in Ezekiel and Exodus, arguing that descriptions of a large object involving metal, smoke and fire could be references to machinery rather than spiritual manifestation. In his reading, the prophet Ezekiel was carried inside a capsule with metallic and transparent surfaces that made an engine-like noise and produced a physical sensation of force as it moved.
He also highlighted the destruction of two cities by an entity called El Shaddai, another biblical name translated as God, claiming the account evoked technology capable of demolishing a civilization.
'You've got references to flying craft, holes in the sky that the craft come through, noise they make, smoke they exude,' Wallis said. He believes translators presented such accounts as religious experience because they did not expect to find technology in the Bible, though descriptions of fire, smoke and journeys through the heavens do not necessarily describe aircraft or advanced weapons, and that reading applies a modern technological interpretation to ancient language.
Backlash and support
Wallis further argued that later translations merged accounts of different powerful beings into stories about one all-powerful deity. He said theologians were familiar with Mesopotamian influences on biblical stories, but ordinary churchgoers rarely encountered those discussions.
His theories have triggered fierce opposition, including threats from conservative believers who accused him of attempting to unravel their faith. Other readers said his books offered relief after they encountered passages that challenged conventional interpretations.
Wallis ultimately argued that Christians should prepare for the possibility of extraterrestrial life because, according to his theory, descriptions of non-human intelligence are already embedded in scripture. 'People need to be ready,' he said.
