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Sept. 30, 2013 - Art Bell

03:29:19

Dark Matter with Art Bell - UFOlogy, ET's and MJ-12 - Dr. Michael Heiser

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49:43

dr michael heiser

01:47:56

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unidentified		Inside the sound, the smell of the touch, the something Inside that we need so much The sight of a touch or the scent of a sand Or the strength of an oak room's deep in the ground The wonder of flowers to be covered and then to burst up To tarmac to the sun again Or to fly to the sun without burning a wing Want
		To take a ride from the high desert and the great American Southwest, exclusively on SiriusXM Radio, this is Dark Matter with your host, Art Bell.
		Now, here's Art.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You know what?
		Some things may change, but this is my new theme, and I love it.
		In fact, when I hear this, it raises little hackles on the back of my neck.
		I don't even know what hackles are, but...
		they're raised I'll tell you that hey everybody Guess I've got to tell you about last Thursday, huh?
		When it was no show No show Did I have a hundred and three fever?
		Was I sweating in bed, coughing up well, you don't want to know Was my liver failing?
		Was I having a very serious brain operation?
unidentified		No.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		None of the above.
		What happened is I was laying in preparation for my show.
		Laying down on the couch.
		About five o'clock, the phone rang, and it was a big honcho back at SiriusXM, and they said, all right, our lines are down.
		And so you're getting an extra day off.
		I said, what do you mean our lines are down?
		Well, there are major programs in DC went down.
		They just went down.
		So that's what happened.
		There were no phone lines of any kind.
		I guess earlier in the day, Dr. Laura went down and on and on and on.
		So that's what happened last Thursday.
		No, I was not ill.
		Except at not doing a program.
		But here I am.
		All right.
		I want to note these are important things.
		You can email me.
		I'm Artbell at Artbell.com.
		Easy.
		It's on the website, artbell at artbell.com.
		Twitter.
		Yes, you can follow me, and I do make announcements on there.
		Not pronouncements, announcements.
		I'm Art Bell51 on Twitter.
		And don't forget about the wormhole.
		You can wormhole me, just like Bill has done here.
		Bill says, hi, Art.
		Wanted to voice my opinion on Hoagland and his anomalies on Mars.
		I bought into, literally, the face on Mars, but not another one of his finds.
		Note that his number nine photo looks like all the rocks around it.
		Oh, Bill, really, really.
		That's a wormhole message.
		You know, you bought into the face on Mars and some other stuff, I guess.
		But you can't buy into number nine?
		Oh, Bill.
		Since when, when does the good lord on Mars or Earth put a pipe in the middle of a rock?
		Even if you consider that to be a rock, which I don't.
		Look real hard, Bill.
		There's a pipe there sticking out horizontally.
		It's kind of hard to ignore.
		By the way, Richard will be here for an hour tomorrow night.
		He'll be talking about Comet Ison, which has turned green.
		As it nears Mars, for some reason, instead of having a red influence, you would think by Mars, right?
		It's turned green.
		We'll find out what that means tomorrow night, along with a lot of other stuff about comets.
		Now, Sirius XM is looking really hard into the possibility of a four-hour timeout being worked on.
		You know, so if you're listening to the stream, it won't, you know, disconnect you after 90 minutes.
		Roswell's art, I'm so glad the show is back.
		This is email.
		My 11th grade Spanish teacher turned me onto the show back in 2001.
		Anyway, to address the inactivity timeout that everybody's having problems with, the listeners must click something within the player interface.
		Aha, good tip.
		Not just move their mouse around the screen.
		Easiest way and the least disruptive is just double-click the pause button during a commercial break.
		Yeah, who cares if you mess up our commercials, right?
		Glad the show is back and so forth and so on.
		Remember, if you want to say welcome back, folks, Roswells are the way to say it instead of saying it.
		So they're working on this four-hour timeout thing, and we might get it to four hours.
		It'd be really cool.
		If you didn't, because I was not here last Thursday, we got this really cool thing up I wanted to tell you about last Thursday regarding Scotty's Tower.
		Now, he moved that through a house, you know, and we had the photographs of it up.
		But what Scotty did was he made a video.
		It's kind of like a, I don't know, video slideshow, and it's really, really cool.
	You should go to artbell.com and take a look at it.
	It's hilarious.
	Absolutely hilarious.
	Artbell.com, Scotty's video.
	You'll have to dig for it a little bit.
	Now, I think we're just going to call it, everybody's asking about this, everybody.
	We're going to call it Dark Matter Halloween.
	And we are going to do nothing but ghost stories.
	Now, I have a couple of ideas about this.
	We do it every year.
	We're going to do it this year.
	What I want you to do, if you can, is, of course, we're going to take open lines, unscreened open lines.
	I think, wait a minute, maybe we will screen a little bit to be sure you have a ghost story.
	But if you want to email me, you can do so.
	And if you're going to email me and you have a really good ghost story, include your phone number and we may call you.
	So that's a way to get some of the really, really, really good ones in.
	So if you've got one, email me, artbell at artbell.com.
	Include your phone number.
	And on Dark Matter Halloween, your phone may ring.
	And it may be us.
	Well, I checked about, I don't know, 15 minutes ago, turned on CNN briefly.
	The countdown clock was still going.
	Are we launching to Mars?
	No.
	We're counting down to the close of the government.
	Again.
	It's interesting.
	I've noticed that Congress now has a 10% approval rating.
	Higher, actually, than Satan himself.
	Oh, by the way, if they do close the government up.
	It's so sad, isn't it, that agencies like the IRS will close.
	Oh, but wait, they won't.
	The IRS!
	Even though our state parks are gone, trying to apply for a passport, forget it.
	But the IRS will stay open.
	Essential to national security?
unidentified		Oh, boy.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		It's been said that when you're one step ahead of the crowd, you're a genius.
		When you're two steps ahead, you're a crackpot.
		All right, looking around the world very briefly, inspectors charged with the enormous task of overseeing the destruction of Syria's deadly chemical weapons stockpiles kicked off their mission Monday racing to meet tight deadlines against the backdrop of civil war and probably also racing to catch up with the people who are trying to move the weapons around, I would think.
		Syria says it is fighting rebels who eat human hearts.
		Serious about this.
		Syria's foreign minister claimed Monday that his government is fighting a war against al-Qaeda-linked militants who eat human hearts and dismember people while they're still alive, then send their limbs to family members.
unidentified		I thought that was an old Russian trick.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Nearly three dozen migrants marched across the U.S.-Mexico border without papers on Monday.
		The latest group of younger generation brought to the U.S. illegally as children seeks to confront head-on immigration policies they consider unjust.
		Well, good luck with the government doing anything about that or anything else, including even continuing past Midnight Eastern.
		Now, listen, I've got just in case there is a last-moment resurrection and the government is going to stay open in case they vote the right way, be sure and wormhole me right away, please.
		That just doesn't come out right.
		Doesn't matter how you say it.
		Send me a wormhole message if they suddenly keep the government open, all right?
		This is a very, very interesting story.
		Credit to the anomalist.
		Authentic alien images from Roswell finally found.
		Does that end in a question mark?
unidentified		Yes.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		The UFO iconoclast.
		These images exist as Kodachrome slides, and Anthony Regalia, late of the Roswell Dream Team, hopes to set the record straight on the truth and what's a lie surrounding the leaked stories in the past week.
		There have been rumors everywhere of new real Roswell photographs.
		Thing is, though, Anthony says they're not going to release them to the general public since the owners are put off by some unprofessional ufologists.
		Is it a shell game to maintain interest in Roswell by teasing all of us?
		Or are the slides owners genuinely creeped out by the unwanted invasion of their privacy?
		Well, I'd go for the latter.
		This is fireball time, folks.
		I mean serious fireball time.
		A huge fireball explosion created a power outage and a lot more in Yucatan, Mexico.
		That was Sunday evening last night.
		A weird sky phenomena broke up the monotony of a small Maya town as a huge object thought To be a fireball, and you can tell me what it is because you're going to be able to see it.
		It lit up the skies over the town of Iqmul in the southern Yucatan around 8:30 p.m. local time.
		The falling object was accompanied by a strong thundering noise, loud blast, and it hit the ground.
		And it did hit the ground.
		Now, the crash, that's the word used here, was followed by flashing blue hazes, if you can imagine that, flashing blue hazes, and a power outage.
		The flames were observable until about 2 a.m. at the object's landing site.
		See, they used the word landing there.
		The sky phenomena was also observed in several other Mexican townships.
		What was it?
		We don't know.
		As you can imagine, people got totally freaked out by all this.
		And they found stuff.
		Now, you can see this thing.
		Or these things.
		I'll leave it up to you.
		You take a look.
		Of course, we've got photographs.
		Something pretty good size crashed in Yucatan.
		If you go to RBL.com, you can take a look-see at it.
		Now, the police there were toying with some of the debris of whatever the hell this was.
		By the way, maybe one of you can name it for me.
		I have no idea what this thing is.
		It looks like number nine.
		Well, not really.
		But you get the idea, right?
		Pretty big.
		Whatever it was, it came down was pretty darn big.
		Space debris, maybe.
		And the police were playing around with some of the debris, and there is the picture of a human-like figure made of the debris.
		Now, whether the police did that or it came that way, I don't know.
		Other fireballs.
		I'll tell you tomorrow.
		We're out of time here.
		Other fireballs in Ohio.
		So it's like we're in Fireball City here, folks.
		I mean, lots and lots of fireballs.
		I'm not sure what's going on.
		But keep your eye on the sky, huh?
		All right.
		Well, I'm not going to take any more of Mike Heiser's time.
		He is our guest tonight, Mike Heiser, and he will be coming up in just a very few moments.
		The number one song, actually, of all time.
unidentified		You know that, right?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		From the high desert and the great American Southwest, this is Dark Matter, raging in the nighttime.
unidentified		Music
		Music
		I can see for miles and miles and miles and miles and miles.
		If you think that I don't know about the tricks you play.
		And never see you on the list with me, but see you in the right way.
		Well, here's a broken view, you're gonna choke on the truth.
		You're gonna lose that swell because you're the wild.
		I can see for miles and miles and miles.
		It's at MD to call Art Bells.
		Please manipulate your communication device.
		Sand call 1855.
		Real UFO.
		F1-855-732-5836.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Oh man, everybody's criticized, Bill, sends a message through the wormhole that says, oh, come on, Art.
		Art Bells Halloween?
		That isn't what I said.
		I said dark matter Halloween.
		Anyway, he goes on, how about something more creative like Phantom Matters?
		Well, look, if any of you have a brilliant idea of what we can call it, then feel free by all means to suggest it to me an email.
		And if I like it, I'll change it.
		Nothing's written, you know, in stone here.
		Some of the things Mike Heiser talks about now, on the other hand, are written in stone.
		Mike Heiser is a scholar in the fields of biblical studies and the ancient Near East.
		He is currently the academic editor for Logos Bible Software in Bellingham, Washington, and serves rather as an adjunct professor at three colleges and universities.
		Mike has a Ph.D. in Hebrew and ancient Semitic languages, along with two master's degrees in biblical studies and ancient history.
		In 2005, he was named one of Fate Magazine's 100 most influential people in ufology.
		I wish I'd seen that list.
		Mike is a well-known critic of ancient astronaut beliefs and for having the majestic documents tested by a computational linguist for authenticity.
		He is also known for his supernatural thriller, The Visad, which focuses on how an E.T. disclosure might impact traditional religious beliefs.
		Oh, we're going to have fun with that tonight.
		And how the alien question might be related to ancient texts, including, of course, the Bible.
		Mike, welcome to Dark Matter.
dr michael heiser ▲ ● ▼		Boyard, thanks for having me on.
		I just have to say, listening to you read the news is like listening to Lin Scully call a baseball game.
		Really?
		It's just, oh, yeah.
		I mean, I'm just, I've got to take a breath here.
		I don't want to sound like too much of a fanboy, but I'm just thrilled that you're back on the air.
		I don't know how you waited this long to come back because it sounds like you just love it.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, it's called a non-compete, Mike.
unidentified		Oh, man, I would have just been pulling my hair out.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		What little I have left, yes.
dr michael heiser ▲ ● ▼		Oh, it's great to hear you.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, thank you.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I've never received a compliment for just reading the news.
dr michael heiser ▲ ● ▼		I thought that was I have hackles, too, you know, at your introduction.
dr michael heiser ▲ ● ▼		You know, your.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		What part really got you?
		The eating of the hearts?
		Was it?
		No, no, no, no, no.
dr michael heiser ▲ ● ▼		No?
		Oh, it's just rhythmic.
		You know, just taking simple headlines, and it's art bell reading the news.
		You know, you could just sort of sit there and listen to it for hours.
		It just brings back great, great memories, you know, for me.
		Because I listened to you for years while I was in grad school all by myself.
		I'm holed up as a security guard in my little shack or the genetics lab that I had to guard, and I'm listening to Art Bell.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I know you mean that in the world.
		I know you mean that in the very best way.
		Oh, great.
		I know, but it makes me feel old.
dr michael heiser ▲ ● ▼		Well, I'm as old, you know, X number of years removed, you know, as you are, but it's just great to hear you again.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
		Well, then listen to this, Mike, and then we'll come right back to you.
		Mr. Bell, this is an email.
		I'm so glad you're back on Sirius XM.
		Discovered your show about 15 years ago on a regular radio by accident.
		Enjoyed it very much.
		Get this, folks.
		I had originally heard your show on the island of Okinawa when I was a nine-year-old kid, and we lived in Naha.
		My dad was a pilot in Vietnam.
		We were stationed on the rock.
		And you introduced me to the rock and roll music that became such a big part of my life.
		You were the first DJ I remember, and I had my little transistor radio I listened to with a single earpiece.
		Yeah, they refer to something I did when I was there.
		I was on a teeter-totter in a contest with a couple of Marines.
		I had a Navy guy as partner, and we were up against two Marines.
		And we went for 57 hours, something like that.
		Anyway, he ends the email.
		Remember now, he first heard me when he was nine years old.
		I'm 56 now, Art, and will always have a special place for Art.
		Fellow, my heart and mine.
		You're my Wolfman, Jack.
		56 years old now, and this person first heard me when they were nine.
		See?
		What you said is right down that alley.
dr michael heiser ▲ ● ▼		Well, it's not quite that far, but that's pretty impressive.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		At least you didn't hear me when you were nine.
		All right, let's get started.
		I want to talk about ufology.
		I mean, did you hear the first story that I read about the Roswell...
dr michael heiser ▲ ● ▼		Oh, yeah, I've heard them, and I've read the, I'll be charitable here, the conflicting accounts of the story of the photos surfacing.
		And, boy, this is just going to be a big fight.
		I mean, it's already been a big fight, but it's going to be a big fight.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		What would you say, Mike?
		This is just a sort of a what-if, but if they released these Roswell photographs, they were authenticated, and it was proven that we were visited by these creatures that, you know, who knows, probably were at Area 51 for a while or disposed of in some manner or are still alive.
		Whatever.
		In other words, real creatures.
unidentified		If it's proven, what will you say?
dr michael heiser ▲ ● ▼		Well, I would say I'm not terribly surprised.
		You know, personally, I don't have any difficulty theologically or religiously.
		But on the heels of that, that's me talking.
		I mean, I can say, well, I'm not real surprised that given this or that, that it's not really too much of a stretch.
		I mean, I look at it as an academic, and as an academic, I know that this question has been around literally, you know, for 2,000 years.
		It goes all the way back to Aristotle, you know, before this is pre-Christian.
		Are there other worlds?
		I mean, everybody's been talking about this for millennia.
		It's only really been recently that it's just become this scary thing, you know, for religious people.
		So I would try to get people to pay attention to the conversation that's been happening for so long and say, look, I mean, it's a big deal because it is.
		Now we have evidence of this.
		But as far as the discussion, this sort of just falls right into place.
		Then the questions change.
		They become different.
		It's not, are we alone or not?
		Then it's like, well, what does this mean?
		Where do they come from?
		Are there others?
		And all this sort of thing.
		I'd like to live in the Star Trek world where there's life elsewhere and so on and so forth.
		I'm known for just asking what I think are reasonable questions about evidence and things like that.
		But if we ever had it, I wouldn't be unenthusiastic about it at all.
		But that's me.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Mike, don't you think that in this era of discovering suddenly hundreds and hundreds of exoplanets, planets that are like Earth that could conceivably support life, that's a major discovery, you've got to admit, in terms of the probability of life being discovered.
dr michael heiser ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, I think those kind of finds are better than something like the Drake equation.
dr michael heiser ▲ ● ▼		I tend to be in the crowd that has a fairly low view of the Drake equation because I don't know how to do it.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Explain for everybody the Drake equation is.
dr michael heiser ▲ ● ▼		Well, this is Frank Drake, the astronomer, came up with a famous equation that tried to articulate the probability of life existing elsewhere.
		And that's a worthy thing to attempt.
		The problem with the Drake equation is that every point of the equation was made up.
		In other words, there wasn't any data for it.
		Now, that's why I say this kind of thing.
		When we actually are starting to get data, there's X number of planets now that, to the best of our scientific ability, will support life, that starts To fill in some of those gaps.
		And so when I think probability, if someone's talking to me about the Drake equation, it's like whatever.
		But if they're talking about discoveries like this, to me that helps.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		The last five years of the discovery of these exoplanets changes the equation?
dr michael heiser ▲ ● ▼		Well, if you're making a pun there, yes.
		I would say, yeah, it changes the conversation in this way.
		I think the conversation on probability actually becomes more data-driven than a sort of a contrived equation.
		And I don't want to say contrived there in a negative sort of way, because I think it's worth trying to speculate.
		But without data, that's what you've got.
		You've got speculation.
		I think it's a reasonable conclusion if it becomes a more reasonable conclusion, let's put it that way, if we have evidence that there are other places that, again, life as we know it could be sustained.
		It doesn't prove anything, but it does make the probability reasonable.
		For me, it gets it on the table.
		If we didn't have any sort of planet other than Earth that we could talk about in these terms, and then we're going to have this probability discussion without that, to me it doesn't even really deserve to get on the table.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		We're just looking at little dots of light and saying, man, it would be a great waste of space if there weren't.
dr michael heiser ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, that's an emotional argument.
dr michael heiser ▲ ● ▼		But I'd rather have data than, I don't want to sound cold here, but I'd rather have data than the emotional argument.
unidentified		All right.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, we're beginning to get that data.
		And with those planets, for example, I had somebody from SETI on, Seth Shostak from SETI.
		And, you know, they haven't heard anything yet, Mike, but it occurs to me.
		me that if there's all these exoplanets that are like Earth, capable of sustaining life, why do we suppose that life would evolve the way we have technologically and even have radio or TV or even imagine it?
dr michael heiser ▲ ● ▼		I think that's a reasonable question to ask, and I've wondered that myself.
		And you and I aren't alone there.
		I mean, there are criticisms of SETI in that regard, that why aren't you using a different strategy to look for this or that?
		So, you know, the truth is, the blunt truth is we don't really have any reason to make that assumption that they would be communicating the same way.
		But the reality is that's what's within our reach.
		And, you know, it's a funding issue.
		It's a technology issue.
		You know, it's a garnering enough interest to get people to care issue.
		You know, all those things are part of the discussion.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You would describe yourself how?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		As a skeptic?
dr michael heiser ▲ ● ▼		I would describe myself as someone who, again, would like these things to be true, but I want there to be real evidence for it.
		I'm not impressed with anecdotes.
		I'm not impressed with emotional arguments.
		I just like to know, and when I say I believe or think X, I'd like to have something concrete to sort of base that on, to fall back on.
		So with some people, that makes me a skeptic.
		With other people, especially in the more fundamentalistic wing of Christianity, what I've already said tonight is just awful, because there's this tendency to equate the whole question of extraterrestrial life with one of two things, and probably both, and that is the demonic realm.
		And then, well, you must buy into Darwinian evolution.
		And I'll confess, I'm not really disturbed by evolution.
		I don't really like materialistic Darwinism, but that's not the same as the idea of evolution.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Are you convinced of evolution, Mike?
dr michael heiser ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, I think evolution is a reality.
		The question in my mind, there are questions in my mind like to what extent, what mechanisms did it need.
		You know, I'm sort of at an advantage here because when I was in graduate school, the place where I went to church was heavily, heavily populated by professors from the hard sciences at the university there, the University of Wisconsin.
		We had the head of environmental studies, we had the head of botany, we had two research physicists, we had a geologist, we had a professor of electrical engineering, we had another one in chemistry.
		I mean, people like me in the humanities were like completely outnumbered.
		And all of them were very serious about their faith, their theological commitments.
		And every one of them accepted the idea that, well, evolution, that's how God did it.
		No kidding.
		It's a no-brainer.
		They just didn't flinch about it.
		It was not trying to start a conversation with them.
		Well, what do you think about people who might be here, even in our church, or some colleague you have somewhere, or some acquaintance that don't agree?
		To them, it was just, it wasn't even a sensible question to ask, but yet they were very serious.
		Well, I spent nine years in that environment.
		And so I just have to chuckle when I read things or hear things about how this is sort of an all-or-nothing proposition.
		We either have to accept this or that, the Bible or evolution.
		There's no in between.
		It's like, I just know better.
		I know intellectually better because I read lots of stuff.
		But I know by experience as well that these are not mutually exclusive things.
		And so I'm not a scientist.
		I have to depend on scientists to sift arguments for me.
		I read things that I appreciate on evolution.
		There's a lot of debate within the hard sciences about evolution.
		Evolution don't all agree.
		Right.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Isn't it easily said, Mike, that God may have started the process of evolution, and that sort of cleans it all up right there?
dr michael heiser ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, and that's where most of these guys were.
		I mean, I think there may have been one or two that would be willing to say it was sort of random.
		In other words, when you take that position that you just articulated, that God started the process, that involves a deliberate decision.
		You're speaking of God as a person making intelligent decisions and whatnot.
		And that's the common view for people who are in the sciences, who happen to be Christians, who accept evolution.
		There might have been one or two of these people that I knew that would have taken a step back even from that and made it a little more random, closer to what you would think of as a secular Darwin position.
		They were somewhere in between there.
		But I agree with you.
		I think that that idea, and then the sub-question is, tell me why God couldn't make that decision.
		Right, exactly.
		On what basis would you say that God is limited and kept from making that decision?
		And to me, that just kills the conversation.
		But again, that's me.
		So I'm not troubled by the idea that if there is this thing, this force of nature, and in God's hand, some providential thing that we call evolution, maybe life evolved somewhere else.
		Then the discussion changes to, well, would God have a purpose in that?
		What would the point be?
		What's the relationship between that and us?
		You get into a whole number of layers of other questions, but I don't think the discussion needs to stop with the first question about probability.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		It simply could have evolved from stardust.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I mean, basically, stardust, mud puddles, lightning strikes, you name it, right?
dr michael heiser ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, I mean, see, that is an issue because if I were to say that to one of my friends, you know, Professor So-and-so, he would say, whatever.
		But someone who's sort of been trained to think that, well, the reason, you know, Art Bella is suggesting that, or the reason someone is saying that, is because they want me to accept the idea that I'm an extraterrestrial, or extraterrestrials are our space brothers.
		In other words, because they've sort of been conditioned to respond a certain way, they unfortunately will.
		They won't really stop to think, well, there's two or three or four or ten different ways to sort of look at this.
		And they'll kind of gravitate to the one they really dislike.
		And then it becomes a real thing to fight over.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
		So with regard to extraterrestrials, you're not married to the idea.
		Nor are you that distant from it that you can't embrace the possibility.
dr michael heiser ▲ ● ▼		No, like I said, I'd love, I have this, again, this romantic spasm in me that, boy, wouldn't it be nice if Star Trek were real?
		You know, minus the Klingons and the Romulans, I guess.
		But, you know, that would be really interesting.
		It'd be fascinating.
		It's sort of on my short list of, boy, wouldn't I like to see this before I die?
		You know, that kind of thing.
		But on the other side, yeah, well, I have things like, let's clone a mammoth and all that kind of stuff.
		I mean, there are just some things I'd love to see them do.
		And again, this is on the list who I'd like to know.
		But on the other side, I don't think we really have evidence yet.
		You know, a lot of what people accept as evidence, I just don't think is really good evidence.
		And so I sort of suspend it and, like, hope.
		But because I hope one direction doesn't mean I'm going to embrace what I think is a really bad argument.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Or the people who would ask you to accept the evidence, Mike, or the, I should say, preponderance of the evidence.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		When you look back at all the UFO sightings, when you look, you know, all the stories, they claim it all adds up to it's got to be true.
dr michael heiser ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, they do claim that, and that's the part I have difficulty with.
		I don't think it adds up to that at all.
		Ask yourself this question.
		Why do we, with the whole UFO thing, why do we think about UFOs and think extraterrestrial?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		What do you think most people do?
		In my case, Mike, I had a sighting, right?
		A very close sighting, a very convincing sighting.
		I could have thrown a rock at the damn thing.
		It floated over my head or more likely defied gravity.
		And then I watched it float out across the valley with my wife at that time.
		And once you've seen something like that, then yes, you begin to ask questions like the ones you were just talking about.
dr michael heiser ▲ ● ▼		Right.
		Now, if I saw, and you're referring to the triangle, I remember you just talking about that on the air at length.
		If I saw one of those, my first thought would be either, let's get in the house or, boy, that's really cool.
		But I've read this sort of technology, especially the slow-moving ones, is really on the board in patents.
		I mean, I actually blog about this stuff with some frequency back into the 20s and 30s.
		In other words, you could have seen a dirigible or a dirigible married to nuclear power.
		It's harder to talk dirigible when they go real fast and make turns and all this sort of thing.
		What I'm getting to is you think extraterrestrial because it's an unfamiliar technology.
		And it seems like the technology is something that because we haven't experienced, the assumption is that it's not ours or that we couldn't do it.
		I've actually become more convinced that the technology is a dead end.
		Again, the Germans were making craft, triangular craft, in the 40s.
		They had passed all the tests.
unidentified		What do you mean when they were testing?
dr michael heiser ▲ ● ▼		They actually had nuclear power and the whole thing.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Mike, what do you mean it's a dead end?
dr michael heiser ▲ ● ▼		Explain that, please.
		I don't think it's the question to ask.
		In other words, I don't think it's the thing that will tilt the question one way or the other.
		To me, the tougher issue is biologicals, okay, you know, the claims of bodies and whatnot.
		So for me, that's what I would have to have.
		I would have to have, let's say that, you know, we have these pictures or there's some other, you know, real clear biological evidence.
		Okay, well, that answers question one.
		Question two is actually a little different, and that involves visitations and then individual sightings, and then you sort of have to go from point one to these other points.
		But for me, the fundamental question of are there extraterrestrials, intelligent extraterrestrials out there, I would need a biological entity because there's so much that you can look at and dig out, and people have, that have just devoted their life to tracing these exotic technologies.
		Even in the Majestic documents, there are majestic documents that actually have the elements in the quote-unquote power plant of the craft that you can find were used in technology during World War II to produce.
		Nuclear power without a reactor.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Right, I'm going to have to do it.
dr michael heiser ▲ ● ▼		They're all the same elements.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I'm going to have to interrupt you there, Mike.
		Hold tight, please.
		We're going to do a break.
		And I do want to talk to you about the Majestic documents because I know that you had them tested and you got findings back on the Majestic documents.
unidentified		So we'll talk to you about that.
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		Yeah.
		Mike Heiser is my guest.
		So stay right where you are because it will be quite a night, ladies and gentlemen.
unidentified		We're in a moment of trouble.
		There's a guy's on.
		You're a lot of energy.
		You're going to play this turn inside.
		It's 2 a.m.
		The figure is gone.
		It's 2 a.m.
		The gun still walks.
		Do my connection, flyin'a baby's chin.
		Yeah, there's no one who lose.
		There's a sign in my head.
		Yeah, there's no one who lose.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		There's a sign in my head.
dr michael heiser ▲ ● ▼		got them tested can you describe how you did that and the results sure and and for listeners if you if they go to my website which is just drmsh.com at the top there's a link that says quick links and if they go to that page they'll be able to download the the study we did for free and one of the links there I'll just sort of overview it what we did and I say we because I
		had known of someone named Dr. Carol Chasky who did this for a living she is a computational linguist and she did her doctoral work at Brown University and actually came up with her own program as part of her dissertation to test something called authorship attribution and she has made a career like in court cases when someone needs to either verify or
		rule out that a document was written by the person that say signed that letter or claimed authorship to be able to test that and so she has had A long career, and her work has been featured in numerous court cases.
		If you look her up on the web, you know, she has a whole list of that.
		So, when I found out about her, I thought, well, this is the ideal person to test some of these documents if she was interested.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		A quick question, Mike, and it is this.
		Can you rattle off briefly the criterion she used?
		In other words, how does she authenticate?
		What methods?
dr michael heiser ▲ ● ▼		What she focuses on would not be common vocabulary, but would be what we call in grammar function words, little words like conjunctions, prepositions, interjections.
		In other words, the words that you don't really think about, but you just sort of habitually use in certain ways.
		That everybody sort of develops these unconscious patterns.
		And so she actually focuses on the uncommon in terms of, you know, non-specialized vocabulary.
		But another way to look at it is they're the most common words that everybody uses.
		So when you go through a document, again, in her procedure, this is what you're looking for.
		And the whole idea is to establish patterns.
		Now, it's only the methods we used only apply to documents in the majestic group that had authorship attribution.
		In other words, a particular document that supposedly was sent by Roosevelt or Tillencotter or somebody like that, General Twining.
		So we had to pull those out, and then we needed documents that were more than one or two sentences, because some of these are just memos, just one sentence.
		And so we had to have at least a paragraph.
		So we winnowed that.
		And then we wanted to zero in on the documents.
		And this was really a funding issue because I was paying for this.
		Which are the ones that have the most content that is the most explosive?
		Which are the ones that talk about extraterrestrial bodies or something that really has an important role to play potentially in the whole narrative.
		And so we got a hold of those.
		And so what you do then is you have your documents that you want to test the attribution.
		So what I had to do, and I enlisted the help of a couple people to find, okay, we're going to test two documents here that were written by General Twining.
		Well, let's go to archive websites, and we would try to find documents that nobody is going to dispute by this particular person.
		So we'd pull half a dozen of those, and we had to get them all typed out.
		We typed them as they were.
		We didn't correct anything if there were typos in there.
		And she basically takes all of that, and she's trying to establish, again, using the computer, patterns, again, isolating on the function words, within that person's consciousness.
		So even if they were dictated, as opposed to handwritten letters that were later transcribed, it's still reflecting the thought pattern of the person that produced the particular document.
		And so all of the knowns get fed in, and then patterns are established.
		And then the unknowns, really, and what she did was kind of interesting, she took all of them, regardless of author attribution in one round of tests and sort of put those against all of the knowns by all the different people.
		There were 17 total documents, eight or nine different authors.
		And I asked her, well, why would you do that round of testing?
		And she said, if some of these documents, regardless of who the authorship is attributed to, if they start matching each other, regardless of the name, that's going to tell us that there may have been a common hand in producing them.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I've got it right.
		Let me just say one second, and that's fascinating.
		What is her record?
		In other words, this sort of a test must have some sort of percentage of success associated with it historically, right?
dr michael heiser ▲ ● ▼		Well, there's going to be, in the results that are produced, you're going to have this.
		If you look at the actual document, the actual article on the website, I have the Excel tables reproduced in that document.
		It's a PDF.
		And there's going to be a number.
		I hate to use the word percentage, but I'm not a math person, so I'll use it.
		There's a percentile number that is produced by the databases, the procedures that she uses.
		And she will then, she actually would tell me, because I can't decipher this, she told me what the numbers meant as far as, okay, this one fits in with the patterning of the knowns, and so I would colorize them in the document for the reader.
		This one doesn't, this one does.
		And then she actually went through every line of the spreadsheet, and she said she would highlight which ones that appeared to her eye mathematically.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Again, according to the colours of the colour, Mike, I'm sorry to interrupt.
		I know you're having a hard time hearing me when I start to talk, but this is really important to me to understand what her record is.
		In other words, what her in past documents of the same sort.
		Is she right 80% of the time, 70% of the time, 50% of the time, 99.9?
		What kind of hit record does she have?
		I'm trying to explain what kind of science we've got here.
dr michael heiser ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, she's going to be well into the 90s because her work is regularly tested in court, like under oath and things like that.
		So anyone who's interested in her, again, could go to her website.
		She describes different court cases that she's been part of and what she did, what she was at.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		No, it's just fine.
		If it's in the 90s, that's fine.
		I just wanted to understand the science that we were hearing about.
		So, you know, I think genetics is like in the billions, right?
		Only one chance in five billion, that's not your child.
		So 90% or better.
dr michael heiser ▲ ● ▼		Right.
		So what the end result was, of the 17 documents that were tested, again, it's a limited pool, and only the ones that have an authorship attribution, only one of them she was able to look at and say this one is legit.
		And that was the General Twining memo to General George Shulgin.
		It's a 1947 document.
		The other ones did not align with the knowns by the same author.
		And so she said, in a court case, this would just get thrown out.
		You know, we could not draw any conclusions.
		We could not say anything factual about this document.
		We couldn't base anything factual on this particular document.
		So one passed the test.
		The most interesting thing to me was that eight of them had authorial affinities with documents in the pool that were supposedly authored by somebody else.
		And she said, look, it doesn't prove that the documents were produced by a common hand, but it does suggest it.
		And she was real picky about her terminology there.
		And I reproduced her terminology in the document.
		She would say it doesn't prove that they were all manufactured by the same hand, but it sort of...
art bell ▲ ● ▼		The twining document, the one that she authenticated, could you give all of us an idea of what was the essence of the twining?
dr michael heiser ▲ ● ▼		It would probably be looked at as neutral by UFO enthusiasts.
		There's no extraterrestrial speculation in that one.
		It's the one where Twining says that within his phrases, within present U.S. knowledge, we could reproduce these kind of craft that he was talking about.
		If any of your listeners are going to look at the document, it's point F in the document where that language comes from.
		He talks about speeds at 7,000 miles an hour that are subsonic.
		And Twining's assessment in that particular document is that we're not thinking extraterrestrial here.
		Now, obviously, there are other documents within the Majestic cache that we couldn't test because they have no authorship attributes.
		So the study itself was limited, but I should mention this one other thing to give Stan Friedman some kudos here.
		I deliberately also chose, again, when there was an author, documents that Friedman and others had, by other means, forensically shown that were fakes.
		And her study flagged those same documents.
		They did not pass the test.
		Only one did.
		So I didn't tell her about that either.
		I sort of used that for my own sake, because I don't understand the science.
		I'm depending on her.
		To me, there would have been something wrong if one of those came up good when I knew they weren't.
		And so it actually validated some of what the work that Stan had done on some of these other documents.
		Now, I know he's very committed to the extraterrestrial view of the documents, so it doesn't prove or disprove that.
		It does show, though, that there's a lot in this that really looks suspicious.
		And that shouldn't be earth-shattering either, because anybody who knows about the history of how we got the Majestic documents, it's a very shady history.
		For your listeners, again, I think one of the best things they can read on this is the 2007 MUFON Symposium document.
		That was an update on Majestic Research.
		I have a link to that on my QuickLink site.
		But I'm kind of sour on the Majestic documents, and I know that there's a lot that's post-1989, which is a year that matters for this discussion, that could very well be genuine, and some of the older ones might be.
		But it's got such a checkered history that I don't feel like I can trust them for a whole lot.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay, so other than the Twining document, the others showed basically attributes that would say, look here, the same person wrote all of these, except this one.
dr michael heiser ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, for instance, you'd be looking at a Hillencotter document that matched the profile of a JFK document.
dr michael heiser ▲ ● ▼		That just shouldn't happen.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		No.
dr michael heiser ▲ ● ▼		Because they're different people.
		And she just flagged, you know, again, eight of the 17 just sort of, you know, stuck out like sore thumbs to her that she just thought there's just something not right here.
		And she flagged those right off the bat.
		The other ones didn't pass the test for other reasons.
		But those eight, she said, there's eight in here that just look suspicious.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		My next question for you, Mike, would be the UFO community.
		In other words, when you came out with these findings, how did the UFO community react to it?
		Was there a lot of anger?
		Were people lashing out at you?
		Or what happened?
dr michael heiser ▲ ● ▼		Well, it was mixed as you might expect.
		I unveiled this at a conference in Roswell, and Rich Dolan and I talked afterwards.
		And Rich was really enthusiastic about it.
		I mean, he more or less said this is the kind of thing that we need to be doing.
		And I expect that from Rich.
		I think Rich is a serious researcher and have a high regard for his commitment to doing real research.
		My biggest disappointment was actually Stan Friedman because he didn't want to really hear anything about it.
		I think he somehow got my novel, which has a lot of, there's a lot of religious angle to it and the whole UFO question, confused with this report because he just sort of went off on it and I was a religious fundamentalist or something like that.
		It's like, Stanton, It validates this other work you did.
		I think you might want to actually read the document and not get it confused with the novel.
		So it was mixed, but that wasn't a surprise, and that's okay.
		I just wanted to.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Is it unfair, Mike, to suggest, as Stanton seemed to, that your religious background influenced you in some way?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I mean, I think it's a fair question.
dr michael heiser ▲ ● ▼		Well, it would be if I had written any of the documents, and if I was the computational linguist that had it tested, and I was the computational linguist that produced the program that had it tested.
		I'm none of those things.
		I was just the guy that said, hey, here's somebody who does this for a living.
		Would she be interested in testing these documents?
		And she was.
		So it didn't really go anywhere as far as a huge impact because, to be honest with you, people are sort of committed to what side of this question they're on.
		Most people are more interested in looking at evidence that kind of leans the way they hope it leans.
		I wanted to know, because I'm a language guy, and we do this kind of work in the office with not forensic authorship attribution, but we do lots of stuff with software that applies to languages.
		And so this just seemed an area that I could actually contribute something into ufology.
		So we did it.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay.
		Well, it certainly wouldn't surprise you, Mike, would it, that a lot of people would perhaps accept Stanton's notion that you are committed to a particular point of view and this fits that point of view.
		And I'm not suggesting that there's anything wrong with the findings or the testing or anything else, but I can see why people, you know, might say you're married to a certain point of view as well.
dr michael heiser ▲ ● ▼		Well, I don't really care one way or the other.
		I mean, if there are aliens out there, then great.
		I just like to know, and I'd like there to be real evidence.
		I don't want cloak and dagger anecdotes.
		I don't want accusations going from this ufologist back to that ufologist where I have to pick which one I like.
		That is not data.
		And if that irritates people, well, I'm not responsible for that.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay.
		All right.
		No, that's entirely fair.
		You've also debunked the ancient astronaut idea, right?
		I mean, what about the long runways down south and all of that?
		All the rocks that have been decorated seeming to show aliens with space helmets and all of it, Mike.
		In what way do you feel, in other words, do you have something, I don't know, equivalent to what you did with the majestic documents when it comes to ancient alien theory?
dr michael heiser ▲ ● ▼		I don't, in my mind, I distinguish everything we've talked about up to this point.
		You know, the question of are there extraterrestrials, are these documents real or not, so on and so forth.
		I distinguish all of that.
		To me, that's serious ufology.
		The ancient alien stuff, I don't take seriously at all because I do know ancient texts and I do know ancient history.
		I know where to get to information and archaeology and anthropology and all this stuff.
		And that part, and I know they get lumped together, and I understand why they get lumped together, but I treat one seriously and I treat the other not seriously because frankly the work is extraordinarily poor and in many cases just literally made up.
		And I don't think it really deserves the amount of attention that the other part of ufology gets.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, there is some hard evidence in forms of pictograms, in the form of what appear to be runways, that kind of thing.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		How do you handle that?
dr michael heiser ▲ ● ▼		So we have a pictogram from a foreign culture.
dr michael heiser ▲ ● ▼		We have no text that tells us what it is.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Very true.
dr michael heiser ▲ ● ▼		So what we have, and this is just the blunt reality, okay?
		This is realville here.
		We have a picture that I'm going to use my 21st century mind, part of which is influenced by this narrative.
		And now I'm going to interpret that picture.
		I could be miles and miles and miles and miles and miles away from anything accurate.
		And in most cases, people have been able to produce the same picture in other provenanced objects where it's clear as to what the purpose of this thing was or what there might be a text that goes with it.
		That's when you really get lucky, when there's actually textual material that goes with it.
		And enough bad work has been demonstrated in that area, and it's inherently subjective.
		Again, to me, it's the badness of the work that's out there that, I will admit, colors my opinion of the enterprise, you know, of the whole thing.
		I'll give you an example.
		You have these quote-unquote reptilian figurines that are circulating on the web, and people are referring to them as Anunnaki figurines.
		Well, guess what?
		Yeah, they come from Iraq, but they come from a civilization that predated the writing, predated writing period.
		They predate the Sumerian text, and they don't have any text on them.
		Why?
		Because writing hadn't been invented yet.
		There is nothing about the object that tells you anything about it, that identifies it in any way.
		But people will take it and just run with it.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right, hold it right there for a second, Mike.
		We're going to take a break, and we're going to be right back.
		Fascinating stuff.
		So we'll get to the pictures on the rocks, the runways, ancient astronauts, how it all just isn't right.
		I don't think he agrees with Zachariah.
unidentified		Tonight is my world, city lights, painted colors.
		In the day, nothing matters, it's the night, time to platter.
		In the night, no control, to the wall, something's breaking.
		Where in white, and you're walking down the street.
		How about the moon?
		Thank you.
		Thank you.
		I can feel it coming here tonight.
		Oh, Lord.
		And I can wait for this home for my life.
		Oh, Lord.
		Can you feel it coming in?
		Oh, Lord.
		Oh, Lord.
		From the area of 51, this is Dark Matter with Art Bell.
		To join the show, please call 1-855-REALUFO.
		That's 1-855-732-5836.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		And we'll get back to Mike Heiser in just one second.
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		Operators are never really standing by.
		The number is 1-800-522-8863.
		That's 1-800-522-8863.
		You can call them right now.
		All right, Mike, welcome back.
		I guess you're not married to much of the Anunnaki stuff, right?
dr michael heiser ▲ ● ▼		Well, as far as ancient aliens goes, no.
		I mean, the Anunnaki, of course, show up in Sumerian, Kaneha-formed texts.
		I mean, it's a little over 100 times.
		You know, I should say something.
		I don't know whether to encourage people to go see this or not.
		One of the things I did on my website that's devoted to Zacharias Sitchin and ancient astronaut stuff was I figured, well, I don't want people to just take my word for it.
		When I say insane things like, look, the fundamental ideas of what Zacharias Sitchin is saying, that the Anunnaki come from Nibiru, that they were here to mine gold, that Nibiru is this planet beyond Saturn, and really the fundamental tenets of the system.
		Rather than take my word for it, what I did was I created a screen capture video of me going to a website called the Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature.
		And I know it does make it sound exciting.
		Talk about things that do not translate well to radio, or really anything for that matter.
		I put in a search for the term Anunnaki, and the video is me putting the search term in, clicking the button, getting all of the occurrences of the term Anunnaki, where they occur in the tablets, getting them back in the search, showing people, now look, if you hit TR here, that takes you to an English translation.
		There are 117 or so of these.
		This is on my website, the Sitchin website, Sitchin is a very good thing.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You did this, Why?
dr michael heiser ▲ ● ▼		So that people could watch it and do it themselves.
		Because I don't like arguments from authority.
		Yeah, here's Mike with the PhD in ancient Semitic languages and all this stuff.
		Big deal.
		Okay, you should not have to depend on what Mike says about this.
		Go to the site, run the search, click the translation, and you will see that I'm correct here.
		None of these ideas about the Anunnaki that Sitchin really depends on to roll out his extraterrestrial narrative, the texts don't say anything about the Anunnaki in regard to these items at all.
		It literally doesn't even exist.
		It's not a question of, well, Mike would translate it this way, but someone else would translate it that way.
		I'm saying the material doesn't even exist.
		Now, if I made a crazy claim like that without knowing that it was real, I mean, I'd have to have my head examined, okay?
		But I got so tired of trying to explain to people this is not a translation issue, at least in regard to the Anunnaki.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Are you suggesting by implication that Zachariah needs his head examined?
dr michael heiser ▲ ● ▼		No, the late Zachariah Sitchin did not need his head examined.
		What I think, and I've heard people say really nasty things about Sitchin that I just think are nutty.
		I do not think Zachariah Sitchin is a reptilian.
		I do not think he was an Illuminati agent.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		No, but you know, everything pretty much that he thought was wrong.
dr michael heiser ▲ ● ▼		I think his narrative, his explanation of the Sumerian text is completely wrong.
		What I think he actually did is he reads the text in translation, you know, using Kramer or some other known translation at the time.
		And I think he essentially created what you could loosely call an allegory.
		I think he tried to marry what he was reading with the characters and the mythologies, and then he would get into cosmological text.
		And he married that somewhat to Velikovsky, you know, the whole world's in collision thing.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Right.
unidentified		Right.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, I interviewed him.
dr michael heiser ▲ ● ▼		He created the narrative.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I interviewed him many times, and he, believe me, was very, very married to it.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		There's no question about it.
dr michael heiser ▲ ● ▼		Oh, I know.
dr michael heiser ▲ ● ▼		He was absolutely committed to it.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Like an article of faith.
dr michael heiser ▲ ● ▼		Yep.
		Yep.
		And I'm just saying, look, there's just nothing here.
		I mean, it's not the same in other issues, you know, where you do, you know, there are issues of this is a good translation, that's a bad translation.
		It's not anything you could put in one category.
		But as far as the, I should mention this too.
		One of the other things I did beside creating that exciting video for people was I looked up all of the scholarly academic articles on the Anunnaki I could find.
		There were three of them.
		Unfortunately, they were all in German.
		There's nothing more recent than the mid-20th century.
		And I hired someone, a specialist in German, to translate the documents.
		People can get those translations as they are.
		It's a lot of pages because they're 50, 60 pages.
		But you can actually have the best research on the Anunnaki Sumerian Assyrian scholars.
		And I try to do this because I don't want people depending on Mike.
		I don't like arguments from authority.
		I like to direct people back to primary texts and say, just go read them.
		Don't take somebody's opinion.
		Just go read the things and you'll see.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
		Here's Linda who sends me a message.
		Art.
		He does not believe the scientists who carbon date things.
		If you come up with a test done by other scientists, he will tell you that they did it wrong or made mistakes.
		Unfair?
dr michael heiser ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
dr michael heiser ▲ ● ▼		What's wrong with carbon dating?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I don't know, Linda.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Linda apparently heard you reference something that was carbon dating.
dr michael heiser ▲ ● ▼		I got one of these today.
		Let's use this.
		Here's a good teaching point here.
		This is what Mike will do.
		I got an email from somebody that sent me a picture of an object and says, what do you think of this object that I discovered?
		And it starts telling me what it is.
		That's ancient alien stuff.
		My first question is always, okay, I need to know where it was provenced.
		In other words, where was it discovered?
		I need to know that it was not a disturbed site.
		Can you direct me to the publication, to the archaeological publication?
		I have access to lots of databases as a faculty member.
		I can get to a lot of things that other people can't.
		Can you give me the archaeologist's name or the art?
		I mean, I'll find it if you give me the information.
		And I'll go read it.
		And maybe I'll post it on a blog if you like.
		I mean, I'll ask them.
		99% of the time, I don't get anything back.
		What I want is I want real data.
		If you give me a carbon date for something, my first question will be, who dated it?
		Show me the report.
		All this stuff gets published.
		This is not secrecy.
		There are millions and millions and millions of pages put out in the social sciences, archaeology, anthropology, every blasted year.
		I can get that stuff.
		I want to go read it so that I know sort of where to start.
		Who did this?
		Who discovered it?
		I'll email those people and say, hey, Professor So-and-so, I read your article on this and that.
		And I have a question.
		I'll do stuff like that.
		I don't think that's unreasonable.
		I really don't.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		No, it's not unreasonable.
		But again, when people look at you, they...
		Well, perhaps a little.
dr michael heiser ▲ ● ▼		I call myself the equal opportunity offender because I'll do this with Christians that email me, too, about some point of, well, you know, you're a heretic out there because you don't believe in the global flood or you don't believe in this or you don't believe in that.
		You know, and whether I do or not, or you know, most of the time they're just repeating something they heard.
		I'm going to ask them for the same thing because, look, even if I like your position, a bad argument in defense of a good position is still a crappy argument.
		That's what it is.
		So wouldn't you rather have a good argument for what you believe as opposed to a bad one?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		And people get tried.
unidentified		They get angry.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, okay, let's try this.
		Look, the world has been around for a very, very long time.
		I don't know if you saw the series on TV about after man or after man.
		It showed how quickly society, the buildings, the things that we see every day would be dust and gone.
		And the answer is pretty quickly.
		So is it really beyond reason to suggest that there could have been others here from elsewhere or there could have been civilizations prior to the one we're so proud of right now?
dr michael heiser ▲ ● ▼		Well, that's an argument that could actually be used both ways to argue that point and also to argue against that point.
		And its other problem is it's an argument from silence.
		Well, I don't see a whole lot of buildings in this place, but boy, the Earth's been around here so long, so they must have been here.
		Well, that's kind of really not a sound argument.
		I mean, in theory, we have evidence of writing, which is a mark of a high civilization.
		People don't stop to think about how important writing is, but you need to preserve thoughts for the next generation on practical things, how to build things, how to make things, so on and so forth.
		So I would expect if there were these long ago civilizations like, let's say, Blavatsky talks about millions and millions and millions of years, well, it's really convenient to attach that number to it because then you think that that exempts you from having any evidence.
		Well, it really doesn't because if you're going to make the claim, I need to know that the claim is reasonable.
		And I don't think that is an unreasonable thing to ask for.
		I can sit here and say, well, it's possible.
		Sure, Art, it's possible.
		Sure, whatever the questioner's name was, that's possible.
		It's possible, maybe, in the sense that I could be the next American Idol.
		Okay, that's possible, too.
		I could wake up tomorrow with a bump on the head, and I wake up, and I have a great voice.
		I audition for the show, and I win the American Idol.
		Yeah, that's possible, really.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, not based on what I've heard so far tonight.
		It's a great conversation, but you're not singing.
		You're not singing anything.
		But it's possible.
dr michael heiser ▲ ● ▼		Stranger things have happened.
		I mean, you see where the conversation goes.
		So on the one hand, I don't have any problem saying, well, yeah, that could be.
		But I'm not going to base what I think or believe on a could be.
		I think it's more reasonable to just ask, is there one thing that makes this a little more concrete, that takes it out of the realm of complete speculation into the realm of, hey, look at this thing we have here.
		We need to think about this object or this text.
		I just don't think it's unreasonable.
		And I know it irritates people.
		Irritates my wife when I'm like that, too.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Would you apply the same standards of proof, Mike, to the concept of intelligent design?
dr michael heiser ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, I've said for a long time that I think intelligent design really doesn't prove anything, if I could be really blunt about it.
		I mean, intelligent design is not really a theory about who the designer or designers are.
		I've said for many years that, look, you can take all the arguments for intelligent design and put an S on the end, and you can make the same arguments.
		And again, a Christian audience, that just irritates the heck out of them because they're going to assume that the designer must be the God of the Bible.
		And it's like, well, sure, I want to think that too.
		But if we're actually looking at the argument, intelligent design, all it says, all it argues for is that the best explanation for some natural phenomena is some sort of intelligent cause.
		And it's a reasoning by analogy.
		Here's a thing that looks like it has intricate design, therefore it probably maybe had a designer.
		Okay, that's wonderful if you can test it.
		But ultimately, at the end of the day, even if you're right, you still don't know who the designer is.
		And so it's extremely limited.
		I don't want to say it's not useful because I think it is.
		I don't want to see God divorced from the conversation about creation and things like that.
		But the other side of it is it's quite limited.
		It's more limited than the average person who gets excited about it, really thinks about it.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Do you believe in intelligent design?
		One way or the other, whether you say God did it or it was a natural process with somebody's hand in it or an extraterrestrial hand or whatever, do you believe in intelligent design?
		Or is it all random?
dr michael heiser ▲ ● ▼		I do believe that there is a creator.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Creator.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		A creator.
dr michael heiser ▲ ● ▼		And what I mean by that is I see a philosophical necessity to have a distinction between creation and the causation, some causation, whether that's an impersonal thing like Big Bang or whatever.
		You're at a different level of questioning there.
		But I don't see all as one.
		I'm not a monist.
		I would be a dualist, that there's a distinction between creation and then its causation.
		And so because I hold that position, yeah, I think that there are some things that do speak to intelligent design, but in terms of an honest philosophical argument, winning that particular argument does not link that argument to a specific creator.
		I mean, that's just being honest, you know, with the philosophical argument.
		And most intelligent design theorists themselves will tell you that.
		I mean, when this kind of stuff filters down into the lay community and in the internet, then it starts to become more of a religious argument.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		So you believe, you do believe, to boil it down in intelligent design, that there was a creator.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Is that creator the one of the Bible?
dr michael heiser ▲ ● ▼		I think that any creator would have to be a creator like is described in the Bible.
		And that is totally distinct from creation.
		And again, characteristics of omnipotence and that sort of thing.
		I don't believe, however, that creation had to be perfect.
		In fact, I actually think, and this gets me in trouble again with the Christian camp, I don't think that the Bible describes a perfect creation.
		That opens all kind of worms for that audience.
		But when you start to say things like, well, the Creator would have done this or that, or would not have done this or that, and evolutionists who want to be materialists, who are atheistic, they say these things all the time.
		Well, you can't have intelligent design because God wouldn't have done this, would he?
		Well, you're making a theological argument.
		I hope you realize that, Mr. Scientist.
		That's a theological argument.
		You're telling me what the deity that you don't believe in would or would not have done.
		That's not a science-based argument.
		That is a theological argument.
		So, again, just to get that off the table, I don't believe that imperfection argues against intelligent design.
		Let's just put it that way.
unidentified		I accept imperfection.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		you think that the process of evolution is ongoing, as in still?
unidentified		Yeah, I don't see if...
dr michael heiser ▲ ● ▼		I don't know how you'd demonstrate that.
dr michael heiser ▲ ● ▼		I don't see any reason to conclude that.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Where do you think we're going, Mike, with quantum physics?
		It is a real mystery, spooky action at a distance, or whatever it was that Einstein said about it.
		It is pretty weird stuff to try and wrap your mind around.
unidentified		What do you think?
dr michael heiser ▲ ● ▼		I'm fascinated.
		I'm not a physicist.
		I don't have the mechanical mind to really grasp a lot of this stuff.
		But I think that stuff is just fascinating.
		I also think it's the friend of theology.
		And again, this is going to get me in trouble with that part of your audience, but whatever.
		Think of it this way.
		Most Christians, many Christians, whether they could tell you where the idea comes from, are really disturbed by the idea that God doesn't have everything predestined.
		If I walk into a room full of Christians to speak on something and I say, hey, look, I don't believe that everything is nailed down.
		I don't believe that foreknowledge, God's foreknowledge, necessitates his predestining of all things.
		That freaks people out.
		But that's exactly what quantum physics has demonstrated.
		There's this certain random quality to it.
		And I can show you passages in the New Testament that talk about how creation mirrors the character of the Creator.
		I can take you to passages that very clearly show that God foreknows things that do not come to pass.
		And that tells you immediately, point blank, that God knew something that didn't come to pass.
		Therefore, that thing was not predestinated.
		But I hate to say it this way.
		A lot of Christians are not very familiar with their Bible.
		They aren't aware of a lot of these things in it.
		Again, the academics, you know, this stuff gets thrown around all the time.
		But when you try to do stuff on the Internet, when you try to do stuff on radio, you try to get people interested in the discussion, people don't like it.
		I don't know how else to put it.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Wouldn't it be interesting to actually give the Bible to that same lady who looked at the majestic documents?
dr michael heiser ▲ ● ▼		You know, we have actually talked to her about that.
		This is an interesting rabbit trail.
		Oh, really?
		Yeah, her undergraduate degree, Carol's undergraduate degree was in Greek.
		So I'll just describe what we have asked her in the past.
		There are certain books of the New Testament that are what are called disputed authorship books.
		The past real epistles, for instance, that would be 1 and 2 Timothy and Titus, are sort of notorious in the academic realm for scholars fighting about did Paul really write this or not.
		So we've asked her, you know, hey, are you interested in this because we can give you the digital form of the Greek New Testament and check out authorship attribution?
		And of course, she brings up the obvious problem.
		Well, you'd have to also hand me documents to create a profile that you know for certain were written by this particular individual.
		And she, and, you know, frankly, we, you know, we wonder, could we do that?
		Because most of Paul's letters, we'll just use Paul for an example, most of Paul's letters are disputed in some way at some point in the letters, even the ones that are sort of, you know, everybody accepts as genuinely Pauline.
		So is there a way we could actually construct this test?
		There have been whole books on something called stylometry, trying to test this.
		Now, Carol's methods are a little different.
		And there are computational linguists in our field who are applying this to certain books, usually in the New Testament, because it's shorter.
		And it takes less work to produce the raw data.
		And the results are mixed, but she'd have her own unique approach.
		So that might happen.
		We might be able to convince her to do this, and it would have to be worthwhile.
		We'd want to get something publishable out of it.
		But there are scholars who do that.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You wouldn't be afraid of that.
dr michael heiser ▲ ● ▼		Oh, no.
		I think it would be very interesting.
		Again, my view of inspiration, this is a theological term that Christians throw around a lot.
		And conservative Jews throw it around too.
		That scripture comes from God.
		Well, I believe that.
		I think that God, if I embrace the idea of a creator, the idea that a deity could influence somebody to write something seems like a pretty short jump.
		I mean, I can do that.
		You know, I can influence somebody to write something down for posterity, big deal.
		So I don't view inspiration as this paranormal event, like the prophet wakes up and starts making breakfast, and then, you know, God zaps him, and his mind, you know, leaves his body, and then he wakes up an hour later and looks down at a text and says, boy, wow, look at that.
		Didn't I do a great job of that?
		That isn't the way it's described, even in the Bible.
		It's a very human process where specific literary genres are used, specific forms of literature, like an Old Testament passage about a treaty.
		Well, guess what?
		It'll conform to treaty patterns in the ancient Near East.
		Law codes will conform.
		Writers would do this because if they didn't do it, you'd think they were hacks.
		You'd think they wouldn't know what they're doing.
		Like, doesn't this guy know how to write a treaty?
		I mean, what a bonehead.
		The writers were people, and they used the tools, the knowledge, the vocabulary at their time to produce what, you know, I would say what God wanted them ultimately to do.
		I have a very providential view of inspiration that's very human but doesn't...
unidentified		All right.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Hold tight right there.
		Mike Heiser is my guest.
		And my guess is that you have questions for him.
		And we'll be getting to that.
		Feel free to challenge away.
		That's what it's all about.
		It's interesting, isn't it?
		what he does not believe in, and what he does?
unidentified		Thank you.
		They turn back time Either strolling through the crowd like Pizza Laurie contemplating a crime She comes out of the fun In a silk dress running Like a water cup in the rain Don't bother asking for explanation She will tell you that she came In the air of the kind
		To be part of Dark Matter this night, please direct your finger digits to dial 1-855-REAL UFO.
		That's 1-855-732-5836.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, okay, Mike Heiser is my guest.
unidentified		And, um, gee, I've got a good question.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		It involves Adam and Eve.
		Mike, I wonder if you think the whole idea, the whole story of the original Adam and Eve is even possible.
		I mean, there are genetic arguments, I guess, against it.
		Is that true?
dr michael heiser ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, there are certainly genetic arguments against it.
		I've actually followed this one for the last two or three years pretty closely.
		It's quite controversial, even within Christian circles, because you have Christian geneticists on both sides of this one.
		Here in my neck of the woods, the guy lives who's more or less started the whole thing, Dennis Benema of the Trinity Western, produced an article that really argued against historical Adam and Eve because of statistics, that you can't account for populations, as we know them, as coming from a single pair.
		And that's been batted around quite a bit.
		Some people, and I think about this, some people would say, well, we don't really need to care about a single pair because if we go back to a literal reading of Genesis after the flood, we have more than one pair.
		We have four, Noah and his sons.
		And so then the argument proceeds from there.
		My view is I don't think that theologically we have to affirm a historical Adam, although I'm not convinced that we shouldn't affirm that.
		In other words, I think the genetics is still divided on the issue.
		So I think, you know, 5, 10, 20 years, you know, we may, you know, statistical genetics Might be an area that really gets a lot of attention.
		More work's put into it.
		We might have something more conclusive than it is now.
		But there are good arguments.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You sound pretty unsure, but I don't know where to come down.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, but I have noticed that arguments that could go either way, like somebody who is a little married to what he believes, you have them fall down in your direction.
dr michael heiser ▲ ● ▼		I don't know means I don't know.
		Now, for your readers or your listeners, I think one of the better books on this is by a guy named Peter Enz.
		It's about the historical Adam, the evolution of Adam, it's called.
		Enz is an Old Testament scholar like I am.
		I know Pete.
		He got into trouble for a neutral position on this, or actually one that favored the evolutionary argument.
		But his argument is actually text-based, and that is he marshals a lot of evidence, depending on the dissertation that somebody else wrote in part, that the story of Adam is actually a deliberate parallel to the story of Israel.
		And if that's the case, then the whole point of the story of Adam might be, again, something literary, talking about the nation, using this story to parallel the history of the nation.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You mean metaphorical?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		It's a metaphorical.
dr michael heiser ▲ ● ▼		Right.
		And I think he does a good job of laying it out for the non-specialist.
		It's controversial.
		I like parts of what his argument says.
		I don't like other parts of it.
		But I think in this case, I don't think genetics lies, obviously.
		I do think, though, that, and the people who are in the field will tell you this in the articles they produce, that statistical genetics is still somewhat new because the genome isn't that recent.
		It's a burgeoning field.
		So I think for this one, it's like 10, 20 years down the road, we may have something more conclusive.
		But either way, in terms of biblical scholarship or theology, I think this is something that can go either way.
		And I know that would upset a lot of people for different reasons.
		But again, for those of you who are Christians out there listening, I can say this because I do not take Romans 5 the same way most of you do.
		So we'll just leave it there, I guess.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Then it becomes a very good question.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		So when you get to the genetics, you would think the percentages would be way below what the MJ-12 document reader was able to achieve.
dr michael heiser ▲ ● ▼		You know, I don't know that I'm qualified to comment on a comparison because I don't really know either field.
		But, you know, genetics doesn't lie.
		I mean, we depend on genetics for a lot of different things, you know, in terms of medicine, agriculture, all sorts of things.
		I mean, genetics is genetics.
		I mean, it's real.
		The data are real.
		The issue is the statistical analysis of the data, so who knows?
		I mean, Carol might be able to look at it and say, well, this is like what I do or not like what I do.
		I'm just not qualified to say that, you know, make that comparison.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, I was just interested in the weight that you put on one versus the other.
dr michael heiser ▲ ● ▼		If people want to go, if you're interested in this question for your listeners again, if you go to my website, drmsh.com, up at the top, one of my blogs, it's called The Naked Bible.
		You click on that, and you can go to that site, and on that site, there is a tab that talks about anthropology, biblical anthropology, which includes the Adam question.
		And there's one on Romans 5.
		Again, it's a key passage in this.
		I've blogged a lot on this because I'm interested in genetics.
		I think it's kind of fascinating.
		Again, even though I can't digest a lot of it, I'm really fascinated by it.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, if genetics comes along and begins to say things that are, I don't know, in direct contrast to what you believe, and I know you do have faith, Mike, and some of what you say has got to be influenced by that faith.
		It would be an uneven world if it was not so.
		So would you admit that that is to some degree true?
dr michael heiser ▲ ● ▼		Well, here's my secret art.
		Your listeners can get the alert here.
		I don't believe at all that Genesis and the Bible, for that matter, was written, was inspired to teach us science.
		We talk a lot about the need to interpret the Bible in context, especially.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Again, you think it was metaphorical, really.
dr michael heiser ▲ ● ▼		No, no, I think the context for the Bible is the context that produced it.
		In other words, it's not the Reformation, it's not the early church, it's not the Catholic Church, it's not this creed or that creed.
		The context that produced the Bible is the one that was around when the biblical writers were living and writing.
		And as a scholar, again, as a close reader of the text in the original languages, what you have in Genesis is really, really close, very similar because of the common worldview to other ancient Near Eastern cosmologies.
		You know, they're not trying to teach us science.
		They're trying to teach us theological messaging.
		That we have a Creator.
		Here's who the Creator is.
		It's Yahweh, the God of Israel.
		Humanity's here because He wants them here.
		We are His imagers.
		We're His representatives.
		That should work its way out into our lives in certain ways.
		They're not scientists.
		They live in a pre-scientific world, so the messaging isn't about science.
		Now, I don't think the theological messaging contradicts science, though.
		I am a theist.
		I am someone who believes in a creator.
		And I can stack PhDs all night long of people in the hard sciences I personally know who would stand with me in belief in a creator.
		I don't think it overturns that apple cart at all.
		Now, what's problematic about that with a lot of hearers, People that would hear me is that they're used to having their Bible filtered to them through a creed or a tradition.
		And I don't really, I'm not antagonistic to creeds and traditions.
		I'm more apathetic toward them.
		And I'll grant you, I can say that because I've had the training and I know all the languages and all that stuff, but I have to be honest with people and say, look, this is the way I look at things.
		I take the Bible for what it is.
		I do believe there's a God.
		I believe in a creator.
		I believe that the God is behind this thing we call the Bible.
		But we have to put it in its own context and ask ourselves what I think are reasonable questions.
		Why would God choose this time and place to do this?
		What's the point of it?
		What is he trying to message to us and what is peripheral?
		Things like this.
		So I, you know, as a scholar, I'm very mainstream in that.
		But when it comes to, you know, people who don't work in the field, some things I say can bother them.
		And I understand why that is, but I just don't feel that.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I guess bother people.
		A lot of my guests bother people.
		For example, I had a fellow on named Matthew Alper recently.
		Matthew wrote a book called The God Part of the Brain.
		Have you ever heard of that?
dr michael heiser ▲ ● ▼		Oh, yeah.
dr michael heiser ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, and I've heard, you know, not the most recent show, but I've heard previous shows with Matthew.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
		So basically, he's saying that, look, human beings have an innate fear of their own mortality, and the brain has adapted over time to embrace the concept of a creator in order to assuage that fear of mortality.
		And it is a reasonable thing to imagine.
		I wonder how you address something like that.
dr michael heiser ▲ ● ▼		Well, your audience will understand when I say this, and I'll try to unpack it.
		If I had to put my money on Matthew Alper or Dean Raden, my money is on Dean.
		In other words, Alper's position depends on philosophical materialism, that all that is real is somehow biologically based or material based.
		I don't believe that.
		Lots of people don't believe it who have nothing theological invested in it.
		And lots of neuroscientists don't believe it.
		The real question comes down to, is all this stuff something the brain produces or something the brain receives or mediates or filters?
		You have the radio and you have radio waves.
		Okay, one of Alper's things is, well, if you took this gene out or you took this drug, it would sort of shut the thing off.
		Well, if I took the battery out of a radio that I've been listening to, I cannot conclude that the radio waves are not still there.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, one of the things he did say, I want you to address this, is that, look, if you take somebody who is very religious and they have an accident, they hit their head, many times they're suddenly not religious anymore.
dr michael heiser ▲ ● ▼		Exactly what I would expect.
		That phenomenon works just fine with the idea that the brain is a receiver or filter of consciousness.
		You do not need to have the idea that the brain produces consciousness or is consciousness to explain that.
		Both paradigms can explain that very same thing.
		Again, I think, on one hand, what Alper's saying is, I think, more intelligent than weird stuff like the God helmet guy, which I think is just ridiculous.
		So I'm going to give Alper credit for coming up with a more thoughtful idea.
		It's not unique with him.
		I mean, if anybody who's studied, again, this is something else I'm interested in, the whole problem, quote-unquote, of consciousness gets into the mind-body problem, the mind-body issue.
		And neurosciences, you know, neuroscientists are divided on this issue.
		I mean, I would want to know things like, well, why doesn't everyone believe in God then?
		Why do some people who believe in God later embrace atheism?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, the number of things.
dr michael heiser ▲ ● ▼		Why are conceptions of God so different?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Right.
		Let me repeat.
		The percentages are very, very high.
		I mean, even if you go to islands.
dr michael heiser ▲ ● ▼		Percentages for which?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Those who believe either in God or a God, those who worship You can go to islands that have been buried.
dr michael heiser ▲ ● ▼		Oh, I would expect that.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay.
dr michael heiser ▲ ● ▼		Well, I mean, again, if we're going to, well, let's just throw the Bible in here again.
		Romans 1, Ecclesiastes teach the idea that since we are made by God, we are designed to want to seek Him.
		We have this innate sense, innate urge, again, this...
		So again, it's a very first century or more ancient way of saying just what you said.
		I mean, we would expect that if we are made in God's image, there would be something in us that would be attracted to him, that would seek him, that would feel incomplete without it.
		So that doesn't surprise me at all.
		Again, going back to the two sides of the issue, you don't need Alper's position to explain that.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Alper would agree with a lot of what you just said.
dr michael heiser ▲ ● ▼		Oh, I know.
		And neuroscientists who would disagree with his explanation of it would also agree with him.
		There's a lot of agreement here.
		It comes down again to that sort of radio analogy.
		Is it the thing that produces the sound waves or does it receive them from somewhere else?
		So ultimately, it comes down to this issue of, are you a materialist or are you not?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay.
		What about, let's go back for a second to intelligent design.
		What about the argument that as we look around us every day, Mike, everything is just as it has to be?
		Now, you can attribute that to a maker, or you can attribute that to the fact that we're here and we wouldn't be unless it was as it must be.
		We need, you know, we came up in a world where we need this kind of oxygen mix, the right gases, the right, you know, there's water, there's everything that we need.
		Well, you can attribute that to a designer if you wish, or you can attribute it to the fact that it couldn't be any other way.
		And have a specific question.
dr michael heiser ▲ ● ▼		That's true.
		And someone who, I mean, you've interviewed Hugh Ross before, and this is exactly where Hugh Ross is at.
		The so-called anthropic principle.
unidentified		Right.
dr michael heiser ▲ ● ▼		The second option, you know, if I were Hugh Ross, I would say, well, isn't that less of an explanation than the first option?
		Because the first option allows the second to exist, whereas the second one doesn't allow the first to exist.
		In other words, we're designed as intelligent beings, and intelligent beings will at some point ask that question.
		So that's a long way of saying, yeah, both are on the table.
		Both people, both options are held by different people.
		And that's kind of where these arguments stall.
		It becomes a philosophical argument rather than a scientific argument.
		Which one is more coherent?
		And that's where the argument takes place.
		I think the argument for theism is more coherent.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Would you think that if you were addressing a whole room full of ufologists, would you basically tell them they're wasting their time?
dr michael heiser ▲ ● ▼		No, no.
		If it's ancient alien stuff, I would say yes, you're wasting your time.
		If it's, again, what I define as serious ufology, again, I think most people who witness these things are being very forthright.
		They're telling the truth.
		I saw this or that.
		So I don't think this is a field that is full of, I mean, we have hoaxers, but I don't think it's full of them or people who want publicity.
		Again, we know those people are out there, but for the most part, I think people really are serious about it and really want to know.
		And I'm in that bunch that would like to know.
		And so if we're talking about in our world today, again, back to the technological and the biological question, since I think it's reasonable to discuss the idea that extraterrestrials could exist, then I'd like to know if they do and if this particular sighting or a crash or whatever it is, that might help us answer one of those questions.
		Why not?
		Why shouldn't we be doing that?
		So I don't think they're wasting their time at all.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay.
		Here's one for you.
		This is just a what if.
		I'd kind of like to know how Mike would react.
		Okay.
		Is that all right?
dr michael heiser ▲ ● ▼		Sure.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		If we were contacted, if we were suddenly to receive a signal, and that signal was verified by everybody in sight as being extraterrestrial, and the signal included the information that, yes, we have been watching you since it all began for you, since you became intelligent beings, and we are your makers.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I wonder how you personally would react to that.
dr michael heiser ▲ ● ▼		I would like proof for that.
		In other words, the fact that you're a communicative being that's been around longer than we have and has some whatever point of superior technology, I've learned from my human experience that advanced technology does not translate necessarily to truth-telling and good motives or ethics.
		And so I'm going to assume that you perhaps evolved along the same trajectories, and so I need you to prove that case.
		And then I'd also like to know, why are you telling me that?
		Are you trying to make me fear you?
		Are you just preparing me for your overlordship?
		Or what is it?
		I mean, I would want it to be a conversation rather than a statement.
		And I think a lot of what I would think past that would have a lot to do with the reaction.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I don't know.
		Perhaps as a father would sit down with a matured son and explain to him that, I don't know, son, you're 21 now, and I've got to tell you that we adopted you when you were very young.
		Something like that.
		In other words, we had matured to the point that we were prepared or we were ready to hear something like that.
dr michael heiser ▲ ● ▼		Right.
		Well, I would want to know.
		I mean, I'd have questions.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You'd want proof.
dr michael heiser ▲ ● ▼		Well, I would want proof, but in that scenario, I'd also want to know why.
		I mean, why, you know, I know you're telling me that I had to be at a certain maturity level.
		I get that part.
		But I'd want to know things about, well, why was I up for adoption?
		What about my biological parent?
		I would want to know what the history is behind that a little bit.
		So I think my own reflex, given the first scenario with the extraterrestrial question, is I think it'd be very natural to have questions that relate to validation.
		I think as human beings, that's a normal reflex with us.
		I don't see any reason to suppress it or to hide it at that point.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
		Hold it right there.
		We've got a break.
		What I want to do is open the phone lines, okay?
		1-855-REAL UFO.
		That's 855-REAL UFO from Mike Kaiser.
		Should be a very, very interesting discussion.
unidentified		Get some rain in the pop meantime.
		Stop the river, you're stopping your whole heavy river.
		Let's go with 60.
		Double phone.
		When you hear the music ring.
		You hear the music ring.
		You hear the music ring.
		You hear the music ring.
		Coming to you from Geosynchronous Orbit at the speed of light.
		This is Dark Matter with Art Bell.
		Do Cohart, please light up the lines at 1-855-REAL UFO.
		That's 1-855-732-5836.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		My guest is Mike Heiser, and I'd love to have you get into it with him if you would like to.
		The numbers are easy, 855-REAL UFO.
		That translates to 855-732-5836.
		And I think the field is wide open.
		In other words, any kind of question you have, I think, is certainly fair game.
		And I'd invite you to pick up the phone and join in.
		Mike, you think you're ready for some questions?
dr michael heiser ▲ ● ▼		Absolutely.
dr michael heiser ▲ ● ▼		That's what the show is about.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		That's what it's about, is right.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Dark Matter, you are on the air with Mike Heiser.
unidentified		Hello?
		Hello?
		Yes.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Hi.
unidentified		Yes.
		Hi.
		Mike.
		I have a question for you.
		Right at the beginning of the show, you mentioned that you needed proof for UFOs or ancient aliens and so forth and so on.
		But you set the Bible as set in stone.
		Like it's the law.
		It's actually literal.
		But there's no proof of the Bible or God.
		Can you provide the proof that there is a God or a Creator?
dr michael heiser ▲ ● ▼		Well, I didn't say that the Bible is literal.
		A couple times during the conversation, I've pretty much said the exact opposite.
		But your fundamental question is, can I prove that there's a God?
		If you're asking for scientific proof, the answer is no, because, again, the theological idea, the philosophical idea, is that God is distinct from creation.
		So you can't put him under a microscope and prove him.
		This is why the argument is philosophical.
		And what I mean by that is, what is more coherent?
		The idea that everything is here because of nothing or everything is here because of something.
		So when it comes to the philosophical argument, yeah, I think there are really good philosophical arguments that favor the existence of a being that we would call God.
unidentified		Okay, so the being could be God or it could be an alien or some other life form.
dr michael heiser ▲ ● ▼		In terms of an alien, I mean, if, again, I think we have to be on the same page here.
		I kind of think we are.
		I define the alien as an extraterrestrial life form that is the product of evolution.
		And so that's quite different than God.
		So there's a disconnect there.
		I'd have to hear what you thought about that.
unidentified		Okay, because in terms of other civilizations or God or Adam and Eve, I mean, I looked at the Bible and it depends.
		You take some passages as literal, some as metaphoric.
		And again, you went back to the author, the writers of the Bible.
		How can you prove that what they've written in the Bible itself is literal or metaphoric?
		Or what do you think about that?
dr michael heiser ▲ ● ▼		Well, on one level, I don't care because I think the point of the Bible is not to teach us science.
		Now, I think creation is something that we should study, something that God would expect us to study.
		Science is just as much of a worthy endeavor as pastoring a church or something like that.
		It's about a set of ideas.
		And I think the ideas, not just with the Bible, but other ancient texts, are coherent.
		We didn't put creation here, the creation we experience and see we're not responsible for it, so somebody else must be.
		Okay, that takes you into this idea of a creator.
		Again, I think that's a reasonable assumption.
		It didn't make any sense.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		But Mike, Mike, Mike, Mike, Mike, Mike, Mike.
		I think that a lot of ideas that talk about previous civilizations and or creatures from elsewhere are coherent.
		I think a lot of these ideas are coherent.
		And it does seem to me, Mike, that when it comes to those sorts of things, you demand a very great level of proof.
		But when it comes, you're...
dr michael heiser ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, yeah.
		Oh, yeah.
		Maybe that.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		It's kind of what the caller is saying here.
dr michael heiser ▲ ● ▼		Well, when it comes to the demand for proof for a biological entity, I would like biology.
		When it comes to the demand for proof for a non-biological entity like God, then I think by definition we have to look at it philosophically, you know, the rules of logic.
		It's kind of the difference between scientific evidence and legal evidence.
		We use them both, but they're not the same, and we can argue about which one's better.
		But the fact is that each of them applies in its different realm.
		And so I can't reproduce a crime or a crime, some event that happened in court, but I can argue, again, using the rules of logic and points of evidence, for this scenario is more coherent than this other scenario over here.
		So I think the requirements for both are appropriate to the realms in which they're operating.
unidentified		Caller?
		So you have faith in God, but in terms of a biological being, you need actual physical proof.
		Your faith in God is basically your proof that there is a Creator which you call God, correct?
dr michael heiser ▲ ● ▼		I would not use the word faith.
		I would use the idea that there is a God is more reasonable.
		I don't really divorce reason and faith that much.
		And I mean, some people do, some people don't.
		But I think faith without reason is pretty useless.
unidentified		Right.
unidentified		I mean, I look at faith as just something in your head, just something that you believe in, but there is no actual proof that faith in it.
dr michael heiser ▲ ● ▼		But you do have reasons that you believe in whatever it is you believe.
		And I think that's perfectly appropriate.
		So what I'm saying is I believe that it's more coherent to believe in a Creator than not.
		To me, that's more reasonable.
		And this isn't a logic class, so we don't need to go down a really boring road for radio.
		But I'm hoping you get the idea.
unidentified		Yeah, I do.
		I do.
		I'm just trying to understand faith and actual proof of a biological being being the Creator.
		Because when it comes to God, we all believe that God with our faith, not actual proof of any physical proof of an actual God or biological being.
dr michael heiser ▲ ● ▼		Correct?
		It's actually a little hard to make a really clean-cut distinction in some regards because even in the realm of science, there's an interpretive aspect to certain things where we have data.
		Data is produced by scientific observation and inquiry and experimentation and all that.
		But when we think about the data, then we're actually in the other realm.
		Again, we have to form arguments and see if one is more coherent than another.
		How to parse whatever the data is in front of us.
unidentified		Right.
		We have hypothesis, right?
		And then we build experiments or studies or research to prove the hypothesis is correct or not.
dr michael heiser ▲ ● ▼		Right.
		That science, it's really nice that part of that process is repeatability.
		You know, like again in the courtroom, using that as an analogy, you can't depend on that, unfortunately.
		It's just a different realm, but the goals are the same at any rate.
unidentified		Okay.
		Well, great.
		Thank you very much.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Thank you very much for the call.
		And take care, and let's do this and say hello there.
		You're on the air.
		Hello, line one.
		You're on the air.
unidentified		Hello.
		Hi.
		My question is, he says he doesn't believe in ancient aliens, but what about the drawings on the Mayan pyramids where they got a spaceman and a spacesuit and a spaceship?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Ancient Aliens.
dr michael heiser ▲ ● ▼		You know, I would suggest that you go to either YouTube or directly the URL Ancient Aliens Debunked.
		It's a three-hour video.
		It's free.
		It's got almost two and a half million views.
		And one of the segments is about just that, the so-called Polenke astronaut.
		And I'd invite you to watch it.
		You can also go to the website and get a transcript of the actual video with resources, with sources, where the material was sourced.
		Basically, what's been interpreted as hardware, rocketry, that sort of thing, really are known motifs from other pieces of Mayan art that are about the underworld.
		So it's not about ancient astronauts at all.
		Now, I know for someone who's committed to the ancient astronaut view, they're not really going to swallow that.
		But what I would say is, look, go back.
		This is a good, again, a teaching moment here.
		We want to understand the culture on their terms.
		They didn't make just this one object.
		They made lots of objects.
		And some of those objects have texts with them where you get the objects explained.
		Underworld texts.
		So if you compare all of the data collectively, the ancient astronaut view of that particular artifact is going to disappear.
		And again, my argument is primary source based.
unidentified		Okay, when I was 10, I lived in Culver City, California.
		And there was a giant cigar-shaped craft that flew between my yard and the neighbor's yard.
		And so many people saw it, because it's on a weekend, that it was on the news.
		And they called it a runaway missile.
		And it was probably back in 1968.
		But missiles don't have windows.
dr michael heiser ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, yeah, yeah.
dr michael heiser ▲ ● ▼		It's ridiculous.
unidentified		Yeah.
unidentified		So it was all miles an hour.
dr michael heiser ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, I believe you entirely.
		I mean, I believe you saw what you saw, and you're not making it up.
		My only question is, why would you conclude it's extraterrestrial?
		And again, because it's different.
		It's not what you'd normally see.
		But again, lots of people who know more about ufology than I do, you know, have gone through and cataloged all these sorts of objects and technology.
		You know, I really recommend for this one, triangle or otherwise, again, to go to my website, drmsh.com, click on the quick links, and then look for my review of Marler's book on triangular UFOs.
		I pull out a lot of images, again, from patents and other technologies back into really the turn of the century, the late 1890s, all the way up to today, for all the different shapes.
		And that doesn't mean that what you saw is not extraterrestrial.
		It just means that what you saw has a really good explanation that might compete with that.
		And so that's why I'm saying I need more.
		I need a biological entity to move me to that position.
unidentified		Well, Art saw a triangle in his hometown.
dr michael heiser ▲ ● ▼		I wish I would see one.
		I mean, true confessions here.
		Every time I go out and walk the dog, I look up at the sky just hoping to see something, but I never have.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		So you've never seen anything, huh?
dr michael heiser ▲ ● ▼		I've never seen anything.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
		I think we've got another caller on the line.
		You're on the air with Mike Heiser.
unidentified		Hello.
unidentified		Hello.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes, sir.
unidentified		How's it going?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Just fine.
unidentified		Go ahead.
		My question for you is the human body has a couple different parts that it's not used, and it's just kind of like your appendix and stuff like that.
		Do you think that maybe is there from the creator for breathing apparatus in a different atmosphere or different Earths?
		And I'll take my question off the air.
		Thank you.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Thank you.
dr michael heiser ▲ ● ▼		Well, since I'm not an anatomist, I probably shouldn't be saying anything here, but I'll venture into this territory.
		My short answer would be that I've never read anything about vestigial organs like that.
		I have done a little reading about vestigial organs, but nothing to that effect.
		I don't know how you would get a breathing apparatus out of your appendix.
		Maybe if it was connected to the lungs or something, you'd have some sort of argument there.
		But other than that, I'm not going to venture much further into anatomy.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
		Let's see.
		You're on the air with Mike Heiser.
unidentified		Hello.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, my control of these phones seems somewhat marginal.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Hello there.
unidentified		Hey, how you doing?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay, sir.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Where are you?
unidentified		I'm in Philly.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Philadelphia, okay.
dr michael heiser ▲ ● ▼		All right, Philadelphia.
unidentified		Okay, my question is, when I listen to you, you know, with your theories and your beliefs and, you know, biblical times and the Bible, it kills me that black people have been just excluded from everything.
		And then your source, which you probably would admit, is mostly lies and deception and things have been taken out and added to it.
		So where are you coming up with all this?
dr michael heiser ▲ ● ▼		Well, I am really glad you called.
		Believe it or not, this is something I'm really interested in.
		The whole how the Bible was used to justify really terrible views of racism.
		And again, for your listeners who are interested in this and for the caller, I would recommend getting a book called Adam's Ancestors.
		It's a scholarly book.
		It's dense, but you're going to love it because it shows where, essentially how this happened.
		And it's not an issue of what's in the Bible.
		It's an issue of how badly, how poorly people thought about the Bible in the wake of, in the 1500s, discovering new peoples and other continents, discovering the new world.
		I mean, I agree with you.
		I think there's been horrific Bible interpretation that has been foisted on not just the Christian community, but on the African American community.
		That's just ridiculous and shameful.
		And it's abominable.
		The Bible itself doesn't teach a lot of what people say it teaches.
		And this is one of the best examples in the world.
unidentified		Well, and I understand where you're coming from, but my point is also, like you said, when the Bible was put together in the 14th and 15th century, they excluded my people from almost everything.
		Well, everything.
		You know, and so when you do something like that, how can, you know, now in the 21st century, a person like you could speak, you know, with such authority about who the Creator is and what took place during biblical times?
		You know, I feel like until, I mean, you probably got a white Jesus hanging at your house.
		And until you get rid of that, how can you sit up here and talk about the Creator?
		I mean, it kills me.
		I mean, when I hear white people talk about religion and I'm black and they exclude my whole, I mean, I mean, everything.
		And they talk with such authority and I think almost arrogance, I mean, it just kills me.
dr michael heiser ▲ ● ▼		Well, I don't have a white Jesus.
		I have a Middle Eastern Jesus because that is the context for Jesus.
		The Bible doesn't talk about white Europeans.
		It knows nothing of Nordic races or white European races or anything like this.
		So what you're attacking and what you're upset with, I'd agree with you.
		It's just really crappy Bible interpretation.
		I don't know how else to put it, but these kinds of ideas that you're reacting against have come basically because people handled the Bible really, really badly.
		Now, I'll correct you on one point.
		It wasn't put together in the 14th and 15th centuries.
		I was referring to the Reformation.
		That's a Christian tradition.
		It has nothing to do with when the Bible was produced.
		It's much older than that.
		But it's a Mediterranean-centered document.
		It's an ancient Near Eastern-centered document.
		You can say blacks are excluded.
		There's actually more African-American material in the Bible than there is white European material.
		There's no white European material.
		It's a totally foreign world.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Mike, hold it right there.
		I've got control of some software here, so stand by.
		We'll take a bit of an early break, and we'll be right back with Mike Hodges.
unidentified		Trying to get myself ashore for so long.
		For so long.
		Listening to the stranger's stories.
		Wondering where it all went wrong.
		For so long.
		I don't wanna cry with bombs in the devil and the kids keep coming.
		But wait a minute, it'd be easy, no time to be young.
		But I tell myself that I was doing all right.
		There's nothing left to do with my eyes.
		It's so crazy on you.
		It's XM, baby, and we're very serious.
		To call Art Bell, please manipulate your communication device and call 1-855-REAL UFO.
		That's 1-855-732-5836.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		My guest is Mike Heiser.
		Anything you'd like to ask is absolutely fair game.
		Do not be afraid to ask hard questions or make challenging statements.
		That's what we're here for.
		It's kind of one of those anything-goes things.
		Mike, welcome back.
		And if you're ready, we're going to go back to the lines.
		You're on the air with Mike Heiser.
		Hello.
		Yes, hi.
unidentified		Hi, Roswell Art.
		This is a very interesting subject that I think that everybody contemplates at some point.
		My question is, and it pertains to something that I seen when I was younger, I seen a creature that was obviously not human but did contain, that did possess obvious technology that was not introduced to us until much later years.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay, well, I want to know exactly what you saw.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Was this a humanoid type creature or what?
unidentified		This was a humanoid lizard type person.
		I was within four feet of it.
		I lived in the Midwest.
		In the Midwest, in the 1970s, we had no air conditioning units.
		You left your windows open in the summertimes.
		Being a kid, the storm windows that you have, you know, to keep the buzz out, mine was busted out from basketball.
		So it was just basically an open window.
		I was sitting in bed.
		I've always been a very light sleeper.
		And I found myself sitting up and I was watching the back of a creature that was obviously lizard-type creature.
		This creature, I was fascinated, but as a kid, I don't think being a kid, you get scared at just observing things.
		I observed this thing in fascination.
		This thing turned around and looked at me.
		I looked right at its eyes, and I didn't see eyes.
		What I seen were what looked like glass bulbs that had a red tinge around the very edge of it, such as what you would see maybe as nighttime vision.
		That's hypothetical to me because I don't have that in my possession.
		I never had that in my possession.
		It's not evidence other than what I look back on and review it.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You said you were a kid.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		How old were you?
unidentified		I was 11 years old.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		11 years old, and you were not asleep?
unidentified		I was not asleep.
		I was sitting up in my bed observing this as it was going through the items that I had on my dresser.
		And when this thing turned around and looked at me, it probably looked at me for what seemed like a long time, but in reality it was probably two to three seconds.
		Now, this is where people think that, and they laugh at me, that it's hokey-pokey.
		This thing took its hand, which did have fingers.
		I don't recall how many fingers it had, and they weren't like dexterous fingers like human fingers, but it was actually like animal-type fingers, and it touched a yellow belt that it was wearing, and I watched this thing disappear.
		Okay?
		Now, I don't know how much time had passed, but I then regained a consciousness.
		My closet door was open, and this same creature was rummaging around in my closet.
		I was still not panicked because it was moving slow.
		This thing did turn, you know, and observe me.
		It was observing my condition of me observing it.
		Once it observed that I had seen it again, this thing moved so fast that it was like a strobe light, and it leaped right out that open window.
		And that's when I panicked.
		As a kid, I panicked when it moved fast.
		When it didn't move fast, I was able to observe it with fascination.
		I then screamed, ran to my parents' room.
		My parents came, opened, you know, turned on the light, looked around.
		My closet door was obviously open.
		Things had been strewn out of it, and whatever.
		I slept in my parents' room.
		They didn't believe me.
		The next morning, I checked on everything that I could find, you know, that might be disturbed in my room.
		Earlier that day in the 1970s the elderly people that lived next door to me, they had a yard sale and I bought a huge Rand McNally dictionary for $1.
		That's the only thing I could find that was missing from my room.
		Besides, there was a mess that I hadn't made.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right, well, what do you think you encountered?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Do you think you encountered something demonic or something alien?
unidentified		No, no, I don't think I encountered something demonic, and I don't necessarily think I experienced anything that was extraterrestrial because I didn't see any kind of a flying object or anything, but I did see.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay, but let me rephrase it.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		What do you think you did encounter?
unidentified		I think I encountered some sort of secretive subculture that has technology that observes or was trying to learn more about us and gathering information.
		And here's what happened.
		The very next night, I waited for this thing.
		I sat up all night waiting for this thing to come through my window with a baseball bat.
		I know it sounds crazy.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		We're short on time here, so did it come in or not?
unidentified		No, but the third night, I was getting a drink of Kool-Aid.
		And I seen my mother had a plant that had toothpicks in it.
		It was a potato plant sitting in the windowsill in the kitchen.
		I was drinking Kool-Aid, and I seen the hand come up and lift that thing up out of that.
		And I looked out, I peeked out, and I got scared because of the previous experience.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
unidentified		And I seen this thing packing this thing into a cardboard box.
		This thing then picked that cardboard box up, looked at me now for the second time that it had seen me.
		Our garage was detached.
		This thing took about four steps and leaped up on the top of our garage and walked off towards the back where I couldn't see it.
		I couldn't wait until the next morning to get out there and climb up on top of the garage to see if there was some sort of fort, a nest, or anything.
		There was no evidence.
		There was nothing.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay, well, it sounds to me like you drank the Kool-Aid, all right.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Mike, yeah, LaF, I know, but people have these encounters.
dr michael heiser ▲ ● ▼		Absolutely.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		He described a creature that was lizard-like.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Into what category, pray tell, would you put that?
dr michael heiser ▲ ● ▼		Well, you know, the not shocking answer is I don't know what the guy saw.
		I mean, I could take up the time and go through the four or five different categories of, you know, people who've studied abduction research and the so-called old hag and the night terrors and all this stuff and come up with categories that this could go into.
		But ultimately, I don't know what the guy saw.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Mike, does your philosophy allow for demons?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Demonic intelligence?
dr michael heiser ▲ ● ▼		I believe in a non-materialist, since I'm a theist, I'm not a materialist, I believe in the so-called, for lack of a better term, spiritual world.
		Non-human intelligences that are disembodied and all that kind of stuff.
		I'm going to say something.
		This might be a little controversial here.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		What you're shocking.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		In what you believe and demand evidence for versus what you have faith in and don't.
unidentified		Okay, go ahead.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Go ahead.
dr michael heiser ▲ ● ▼		If this happened to somebody that I knew personally, we had a good relationship, the first thing I would want to know was, were you living near a military installation or do you have near relatives in the military?
		Now, the reason it's controversial is, as I will confess, I have been influenced by the work of people like Leah Haley, who believe a lot of this stuff, you know, the whole MyLab thing.
		You know, for somebody like her who was deeply entrenched in abduction research and this sort of stuff, for her to take the position she does now and for the reasons she does, that would be really, really, really on the forefront of my mind.
		Again, if this happened to me or somebody that I particularly knew.
		But ultimately, the honest answer is, I don't really know what the guy saw.
		I think there could be interdimensional realities, spiritual realities.
		I mean, it's all vocabulary we have to use for this non-material world.
		Again, I'm not a materialist, so I believe these things could exist.
		But if you're going to put it in the extraterrestrial category, I'd like to first know that there are such biological entities as opposed to some other description, non-biological description.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay.
		All right.
		Let's see.
		You are on the air with Mike Heiser.
		Hello.
unidentified		Hello, Art.
		Yes.
		Hey, Roswell, first-time caller.
		I'm this West from northern Michigan right now.
		I just wanted to ask your guest what his ideas, his thoughts are on other dimensions, higher dimensions, which is something that really cannot be proved, actually.
		And if he does believe in a God, does he or does he not believe if it's like a multi-dimensional being, which in itself means that it cannot be proved?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right, let's start with the dimensions.
		Theoretical Peels right now thinks there may be 11.
		What do you think?
dr michael heiser ▲ ● ▼		I don't see any reason to deny that there would be more than all these dimensions.
		The caller's right.
		I mean, you can't necessarily prove these things.
		Again, they're postulates and there are ways you can sort of attack the problem that make it more or less coherent.
		But I don't see anything problematic about it.
		I mean, who ultimately knows?
		Yeah, if there is a God, That God, that deity, could by definition exist outside our time and space and intrude upon our time and space, come and go, all that sort of thing.
		I don't have any problem with those suggestions by the world of physics, theoretical physics.
unidentified		Okay.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		And about care.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Or God could exist across all of those dimensions.
dr michael heiser ▲ ● ▼		Sure.
		I mean, we just don't.
		We don't know.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay.
		First time, not first time.
		What am I talking about?
		You're on here with Mike Heiser.
		Hello.
		One number of many people.
unidentified		Hello?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Hi.
unidentified		Hi.
		My question.
		Hello.
		Go ahead, Ann.
		Yeah, go ahead.
		Okay, I'm sorry.
		My question is that, and kudos, Roswells, and hello, Mike.
		This stuff that's going on in the Middle East, does that make the Christianity Muslim fighting a moot point?
		that the Bible really doesn't matter much other than a directional.
		And my other, in addition to that, do you think that we...
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I'm not sure I got it straight.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Mike?
dr michael heiser ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, I'm not quite sure what the caller's asking either.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Right, okay.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Again, please, what are you asking about the Middle East?
unidentified		Well, with the Muslims and all their fighting, and they're saying that they have to beat the Christians and this, this, does it really, I mean, where does that fall into theology and the God image and the whole ball of wax?
		Is that moot point?
		Is it useless?
		I mean, is it just something they're taking to extreme for no reason?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I'm not sure I'm getting it still.
dr michael heiser ▲ ● ▼		Well, I'll take a stab at it.
		Again, I'm not quite sure either.
		If the question is, is all this stuff in the Middle East now about Bible prophecy?
		I'm one that would say no.
		I don't really see a real one-to-one connection there.
		If it's something bigger than that, that, you know, yeah, there's fighting and there's wars, and I mean, Jesus did talk about that this is going to go on and on and on.
		Well, then there's that connection.
		But I'm not quite sure what she's asking beyond that.
unidentified		Yeah, it's more or less in that ball right there, what you had just said, the answer.
		My other thing was to do with creation.
		Do you think that with our higher intellect that that is basically not to be rude, but you could take a redneck and try to explain something to them and they're not getting it, whereas you could take a scholar and it's the most simplest thing to them.
		Do you think that our intellect allows us to see these other dimensions and things that other people wouldn't comprehend?
dr michael heiser ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, I don't see how someone's grasp of this or that piece of content, in other words, their intelligence, I don't see any correlation of that being some sort of gateway to seeing other dimensions.
dr michael heiser ▲ ● ▼		So I guess that's the best way I can answer that.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay, very good.
		You are on the air with Mike Heiser.
		Now you're on the air, I think.
unidentified		Hello.
		Hey, this is Dunzi.
		Hi there.
		I had a question about the UFOs.
		Well, one-third of the angels fell with Satan.
		Could the UFOs be manifestations of the angels?
		Because they're not leaving sonic booms.
		They're not leaving vapor trails or anything.
		So could it be just the manifestation that they have projecting onto us as a way to deceive us from God?
		crickets
		You know what I mean?
dr michael heiser ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, yeah.
dr michael heiser ▲ ● ▼		I was just waiting to see if you were done.
unidentified		Oh, yeah.
dr michael heiser ▲ ● ▼		Oh, well, this will open up a can of worms here.
		First, I don't actually believe that there's any passage in the Bible that says one-third of the angels fell with Satan.
		That comes from Revelation 12.
		but the comment about the third of the stars is actually in connection with the first coming of Jesus.
		So it's not...
		So you can tell I'll get some good email out of that one.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Oh, I'm sure you will.
dr michael heiser ▲ ● ▼		I mean, I do believe that there are angels and demons and all this kind of stuff.
		I just don't believe that particular thing.
		But let's just set that to the side.
		The whole thing about UFOs and angels.
		To me, when we talk about UFOs, we're talking about craft.
		We're talking about entities that are humanoid.
		Angels in the Bible are always depicted in human appearance, which is quite different than these craft.
		They don't need craft.
		Again, if this is an interdimensional reality, you don't need nuts and bolts technology to carry you from one place to another.
		If you have command over dimensional passage, you don't need to get into anything that's going to burn fuel to get you there.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
unidentified		Let's see.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You're on the air with Mike Heiser.
unidentified		Hello.
		Hello.
		Hi.
		You got me?
		I got you.
		Hey, this is Billy.
		How y'all doing today?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Fine, Billy.
unidentified		Good.
		I've got a couple questions.
		I got a point to make.
		And first of all, we're all over the page here.
		First, we got a Creator, which is the Lord, right?
		Okay.
		So you need a biological point.
		Well, let's just say here, if an alien kidnapped us and was dissecting us, would you think that he would need a biological point too?
		You know, everything is molecular and made up by molecular.
		And if you have a creator, the creator made the molecular team for it.
		You know what I'm saying?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay, Mike, Mike, you're breathing into the phone.
dr michael heiser ▲ ● ▼		Okay.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay, there you go.
dr michael heiser ▲ ● ▼		Go ahead, Mike.
unidentified		I can't wait my duelist.
		I can raise my two other points that I'll leave you alone here.
		Okay.
		With the African American that was talking earlier, now if you read in the Bible when it had Cain and Abel, and Cain killed Abel, right?
		Well, the Lord came to Cain and he put a mark on his body.
		And he said that he will be recognized from now on with this mark.
		Now, could you believe that's where black people came from?
		But also, when he sent them out in different tribes, remember when he had the land of Babel, okay?
		He sent them all out in different tribes.
		Now, that's how we get the separation of racist, not racist, racist.
dr michael heiser ▲ ● ▼		All right, can I interject there?
unidentified		Sure.
dr michael heiser ▲ ● ▼		Okay.
		No, I don't believe that the Cain and Abel story has anything to do with black people, with African-American race or the Negro race.
		There are no physical characteristics attached to any of the tribes or nations in the table of nations in Genesis 10.
		Up until the 20th century, well, late 19th century, let's be generous here.
		Race was defined in terms of language and religion.
		That's the way it always was in the Bible.
		You defined a person's race by what language they spoke and what God they worshipped.
		That was separated, okay, those things were separated, severed to make a biological argument by, believe it or not, the Nazis, okay, early Nazi thinking, because of their wish to identify a particular biological set of characteristics with what they perceived to be an original race.
		So, again, the Bible doesn't reason that way because they didn't know anything about science.
		They're not doing biology.
		You know, nowadays we go by genetic lineage and differentiation.
		You know, we're more sophisticated than they were in the 19th century and certainly in real primitive times, the second millennium B.C. or something like that.
		So I think a lot of this racial theory, this racial talk that people try to attach to the Bible, like I told the African-American caller, is really misguided.
		And it's really contrary to the biblical world.
unidentified		Yes.
		But you know, when they split them up, it's to the different tribes.
		Whether it was the Moses walking around, they split them all up, different tribes.
		Then they brought it, you know, that they had the land of Babel, which was, you know, hopefully I can get pulled over.
dr michael heiser ▲ ● ▼		Well, if you go back and look at the table of nations, all those names are not actually people.
		Some of them are locations.
		Some of them are tribal groups.
		Some of them are geographical regions and things like that.
		So, again, I would suggest that it's because of a very careless reading.
		Again, this goes back to the late 19th century, of passages like Babel that we get a lot of the racism that we've been living through in the 20th century and still in the 21st century.
		And the Bible just doesn't think on those terms because it wasn't about physical characteristic.
		It was about language and about, again, which part of divine turf are you on and what God do you worship and that sort of thing.
		So my view of these passages is really linked to the biblical world itself and not what Christians or Jews or Aryans or whoever, Europeans, did with the Bible in later times.
unidentified		Okay.
		What do you think about the, you were saying you were needing a biological proof.
		What biological proof would it take for you to be, to tain your faith and to believe?
dr michael heiser ▲ ● ▼		Well, this is an excellent question.
		And I'm going to have to be a little careful here because it actually takes me into sequel territory.
		I'm almost done with the sequel to the facade, which is called the portent.
		So I'll try not to dance too badly here.
		But let me say it this way.
		It would be sufficient to me to either have something microbial, the elements of which could not come from Earth.
		In other words, non-terrestrial, clearly non-terrestrial elements.
		Something that's microbial or bigger that had to go by the same set of criteria.
		Again, non-terrestrial stuff.
		Now the problem is, if you know what synthetic biology is, and if your listeners are interested in this or want to find out about it, look at the book called Regenesis.
		It's by the guy who teaches genetics at Harvard.
		Synthetic biology means not only can we read DNA, but we can write it from the atomic level on up.
		And what that means is that in our near future, 10, 20, 30 years out, we will be actually able to create DNA that has never existed before and cannot exist on Earth.
		Now if you have someone that can do that, they can actually fake best evidence.
		And that's the problem.
		Again, since I read a lot of this weird stuff, this weird technology stuff, it's a little scary.
		Because since I'm into ufology, I take the whole paranoia of the military-industrial complex pretty seriously.
		I'm suspicious of it.
		I'm suspicious of the black world.
		And if they're talking about this at Harvard, I know they're talking about it at other places.
		And so it's a little frightening for me.
		So I'm Being honest with you, that would do it for me, but in the back of my mind, I'd still be wondering: okay, is this real, or did somebody make it to create almost like a genetic Photoshop?
		It's even worse.
		Look, nowadays we could, think of what you could do, Art, if you have the ability to write your own DNA, you just make it up, and now marry that to 3D printers, that idea, and again, that piece of technology.
		I mean, it's really frightening.
		It is just honest to goodness frightening that if someone wanted to, they could do that kind of thing to move people towards certain sets of beliefs that would put them in situations where their behavior was predictable to steer them in certain directions.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, I wonder what you're going to do that, Mike.
		I'm serious.
		What are you going to do then?
		When somebody can come forth with a creature that they have, in essence, created and they're going to present it to you, and you're going to have biological evidence in front of you.
unidentified		Yeah, then what?
dr michael heiser ▲ ● ▼		This is why I write fiction.
		Because I want to confront myself with that problem.
		You know, the honest answer is I don't know.
		I would sort of be predisposed to thinking, okay, this is probably real.
		I'm probably being too paranoid, again, to think that someone would have this kind of power and would want to wield it for God only knows what purpose, again.
		But I'm just telling you, maybe I've been in ufology too long, but I just have this strong, again, suspicion that if I can think these thoughts, people who are a lot smarter than me can think these thoughts too.
		It's kind of a dilemma.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
		Hello there.
		You're on the air with Mike Heiser.
unidentified		Hello.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Hi.
unidentified		Hello.
		How are you doing, Mark?
		Fine.
		I love your show.
		Your show is so wonderful and inspiring.
		I have a real great question for, oh, let's see.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Mike Heiser.
unidentified		Mike Heiser, yes.
		You have just explained a whole lot of things that would basically belief in God.
		I'll get to the first part when I started holding here is you were saying that there was a DNA struggle between science and theology created from Adam and Eve.
		It couldn't be done with just a couple, and then it went to Moses, and they had four sets.
		But it doesn't explain the fact that we have discovered in the past cavemen, pro-magnums, Neanderthals that preexisted Adam and Eve with their DNA.
dr michael heiser ▲ ● ▼		Why would we assume that they preexisted Adam and Eve?
unidentified		Because they're going back millions and millions of years ago.
dr michael heiser ▲ ● ▼		And why would we presume that Adam and Eve couldn't as well?
unidentified		Well, that's where I'm, you know, I'm not a theologist or a PhD or a scholar or anything like that.
dr michael heiser ▲ ● ▼		You don't need to be.
unidentified		And I'm just listening to you, and you're saying just now here recently of someone being able to write a DNA.
		I keep listening to this show, and I look up in the stars and all the vast universe and all the stars and billions and billions of Fontrilli as like infinity up there.
		And I'd have to be pretty naive to think that we were the only little speck in the infinite world that life exists as we know it.
		I would assume that there was something somewhere in some far away galaxy or whatever.
		How come they haven't reached that technology that they can write DNA as that, oops, made a mistake?
		I'm going to throw it over here on this rock, let it grow, and see what happens.
		So the way you're describing it to me is, there's my God.
		He just created us.
		So who is he?
		Who created him?
		Someone did the same thing to them and threw them on a rock and let them grow?
		I don't understand.
		Well, that could go home.
dr michael heiser ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, what you're doing is you're taking points of data, you're taking specific ideas, and you are connecting them, again, which is a normal impulse.
		But the question is, is that connection coherent?
		Is it compelling?
		Is it the only connection that can be made?
		The answer to all three of those is no, no, and no.
		So I wouldn't be too disturbed over the fact that you can think those connections.
		That doesn't make them real.
		I certainly would not say that because we can do something now that somebody did before back in Adam and Eve.
		I have no basis to make that sort of statement.
		And nobody else does either.
		All we're describing is, to be really, really blunt about it, and I think based on other guests that Art has had now and in the past, we're going to get ourselves in a whole lot of trouble because we seem to be hurtling toward this, fulfilling this impulse, which isn't a good one.
		That is to be as gods.
		And that's what frightens me.
		It's not the idea that we can do this and now I'm going to project that back into the remote past and that must be why we're here.
		Again, my concern is really the here and now, that we are at this point where we're entertaining some of these thoughts.
		And again, I am not predisposed to thinking that people in power who have these technologies are only thinking about wonderful ways to use them.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Mike, does it scare you to hear what people embrace and believe these days?
dr michael heiser ▲ ● ▼		Boy, that's probably your most loaded question of the night.
		Yeah.
		I mean, it does.
		And part of the reason it does is not necessarily the conclusion.
		I mean, you know, this person's a theist, this person's not, this person's a Christian, this person's not.
		What really frightens me, and the way you ask that question, is that people often believe things and the path that they take to get there makes absolutely no sense at all.
		In other words, they don't check for evidence, they don't test, they don't probe this connection to that connection, they just move to the next connection.
		People seem to be, I think part of this is the information explosion.
		There's so much out there, and it's so wearying to think that I have to think about all this stuff.
		So there's this propensity to sort of just take a narrative, and I like it, and I'm going to go with it, and that's where I'm at.
		So it's this unexamined, you know, unprobed sets of ideas that just sort of get jumbled together, and people come out somewhere on the other end.
		Because if that's the way you're thinking, you can be led to believe almost anything.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
		Stay right where you are, and we'll be right back.
		This is Dark Matter.
		Mike Kaiser is my guest.
		I'm Mark Bell.
		Great to be with you this evening.
		What do you believe?
unidentified		What do you believe?
		For a world on fire, no one can sleep for you.
		Strange words desire to make foolish people.
		It's XM, baby, and we're very serious.
		To call Art Bell, please manipulate your communication device and call 1-855-REAL UFO at 1-855-732-5836.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Isn't it fascinating?
		We do.
		We live in an incredible information age.
		And maybe we're beginning to morph into a situation where all beliefs sort of get mixed up and, I don't know, mixed together and ingested.
		And then somehow or another settled on, and it all comes through the internet.
		What do you think, Mike?
dr michael heiser ▲ ● ▼		That's the scariest thing you said all night, Art.
		Man, it's really scary.
		It really is, because there's just no filter.
		And you marry that to the real suspicion of authority that this generation that's growing up with the Internet has.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		It's not all their fault.
		It's not all the Internet's fault.
		Authority began to go out the window with Richard Nixon.
dr michael heiser ▲ ● ▼		That's true.
		That's true.
		And we are living, unfortunately, we're living on the very bad capital of a lack of leadership, a lack of ethics, a lack of trustworthiness.
		And you marry that to access to lots of information.
		And I don't really care to have you help me sift it.
		I'm going to do it myself.
		And it's just a free-for-all.
		It really is.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I remember when I was 13 or 14, Mike, you could go to the TV and one day the news would come on, and a guy from the FBI would come to the podium, and he would tell you this or that.
		And it was like gold.
		I mean, everybody just flat believed it.
		If the FBI said it, hey, baby, it was true.
		Today, the exact opposite is true.
		If some sort of government official, and by the way, the government did close by government, if some government official comes to the mic and says something, people almost automatically disbelieve it.
dr michael heiser ▲ ● ▼		Yep.
		Yep.
		To use a biblical phrase, we are reaping what we have sown.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Apparently.
		You're on the air with Mike Heiser.
		Hello.
unidentified		Hi, Art.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Hi.
unidentified		I have a question for Dr. Heiser.
		This is Josh in Utah.
		Have you ever considered the possibility that some UFOs might be from ancient civilizations, considering the things that were built back then?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Mike thinks about that all the time.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		He thinks, right?
dr michael heiser ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, I would say not on the basis of things that are built.
		A lot of people really don't, again, I know it's boring, okay, I'll admit that, but a lot of people don't really spend the time to read the high-level, dense, detailed stuff by specialists like in ancient engineering and technology that are put out in what we call in academia the fugitive literature that only people in the guild are going to read.
		But I do read a lot of that stuff, and I don't think we need aliens to explain the pyramids and Baalbek and all these sorts of things.
		But having said that, I thought you were going to go to time travel with the question.
unidentified		No, I mean, time travel might be possible, but there's other theories out there.
dr michael heiser ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, I mean, let's say that science, physicists at some point were able to really nail this down.
		It was possible, not only possible, but we know it can be done.
		And then the question comes, well, did somebody else figure this out and do it?
		I mean, that's, again, it's a different kind of question.
		But I actually think that's worth more time thinking about than stuff like the ancient alien view puts out.
		I mean, to me, there's more of a rational basis for that, assuming we ever get that point of knowledge that it's real.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		The only thing that bothers me about you, Mike, is that you seem to have one standard of proof for anything alien, whether contemporary or ancient, and another standard of proof for anything that is biblical or involves creation or the creator.
dr michael heiser ▲ ● ▼		Oh, I don't think so.
		I think I'm actually pretty simple.
		I proceed from some really simple assumptions.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Oh, you dance well, Mike.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You dance well.
dr michael heiser ▲ ● ▼		No, I'm trying to be honest.
dr michael heiser ▲ ● ▼		I'm trying to let your listeners understand the way I think.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I'm trying to be honest, too.
		Right.
		I'm just giving you my observation.
dr michael heiser ▲ ● ▼		Right.
		And that's fine.
		You know, for a biological entity, I need biological proof.
		And God isn't a biological entity.
		I don't think we can prove God.
		So we're left to philosophical arguments.
		What's more coherent as opposed to what isn't?
		So again, I don't have blind faith.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You're on the right.
dr michael heiser ▲ ● ▼		I want faith to be reasonable.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		With the man who doesn't have blind faith.
unidentified		Hello.
unidentified		Hello, gentlemen.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
unidentified		Well, we segue it off in the DNA, and I wish I'm going to be a little bit vague because I don't remember the professor that wrote this book, but he wrote a book for college on chemical evolution.
		And as I understood him, he said for a while that was like the given textbook used to explain chemical evolution across the country.
		And then one of his students challenged him, brought up a question as to where does information come from?
		Where does the information that's in the DNA actually evolve from?
		And I guess I'd be interested just in your thoughts on that, Art, your thoughts on that.
		And then I think you were saying, you know, for life to exist, it takes DNA.
		For initial life to exist, it takes DNA to, you know, as the blueprint to build life.
		And so prior to life, what would be the precursor to DNA that would even, well, I guess, you know, where would the DNA come from?
		And again, as complex and as sophisticated as it appears to be, I mean, this is a blueprint tied up in, you know, a microscopic piece of biology.
		And this challenged this professor's belief that evolution, life could exist without a creator.
		But when the student got him thinking about that, it got him rethinking as to evolution and origins.
		And I do apologize, I don't recall this professor's name.
		It's been about a year since I looked at his material.
dr michael heiser ▲ ● ▼		Well, that's a design argument.
		And in fairness to the people who don't accept intelligent design, they would more or less say, well, we know all about that particular argument, that before you have DNA, you have to have elements, and they have to come together to form DNA as we know it.
		But they will attribute that to, again, even though it looks design, they'll attribute it to a process that does not have a creator behind it.
		And that's sort of illustrative of where the argument's at.
		First of all, do we have design?
		We're looking at this and we think it's design because, holy cow, it's incredibly complex.
		Is this design or is it random?
		And at that point, it becomes a philosophical argument.
		Which one makes more sense?
		That's what I mean by these philosophical arguments.
		Which one just makes more sense?
		Which one's more coherent?
		And you'll find people on both sides of that, which is why we have a debate over intelligent design.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		That's right.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay, you're on the air with Mike Heiser.
unidentified		Hello.
		Hi, Mike.
		I really enjoyed the conversation.
		I guess I come from a very different kind of thinking.
		I'm from continental philosophy schools, like Jacques Derrida and some of the deconstructionist thinkers.
		So I guess I'm approaching all of your notions a little differently.
		But I guess I have a little problem with the point you made, where you said you're disturbed by the fact that people's path to belief makes no sense at all.
		It seems to me that by its very definition is that.
		So, you know, if you have faith in something, that's a path to belief that makes no sense.
		You are taking a leap.
dr michael heiser ▲ ● ▼		I would agree if the path is full of unreasonable conclusions and arguments.
unidentified		Well, let me make an argument about time then.
		From some of the thinkers that I read, the notion of time itself requires a kind of relational thinking, where the present moment is a relation of past to future.
		So the now is never available to us immediately, which means that presence itself is a problem.
		The sovereign subject, the person that's in control of thinking itself.
		If you're a dualist thinker, you're holding on to the idea that there is a sovereign subject that is present in the now.
		And I would argue that that's a kind of irrational thinking.
dr michael heiser ▲ ● ▼		Well, I would say that the fact that we cannot come to grips or cannot explain that now is one thing.
		As far as that being the, you know, taking that inability and drawing a conclusion from it like you've just drawn, I don't know that that's necessarily coherence.
		It seems like an argument from our inability.
		But, I mean, someone who, and I'm not saying I take this position, this whole God outside of time thing, which has some significant problems, which you're probably already aware of.
		But it also has, you know, its adherence, you know, within cosmology and philosophical theology, that the arguments sort of aren't really relevant to a being such as that.
		And so the path that you've taken to demonstrate that this being is in this moment that doesn't exist, that moment wouldn't exist in our dimension, if we can use that term, whereas it would not be relevant in a different dimension.
		I mean, there's any number of, again, I'm not saying I'm married to any of these positions, but I'm trying to illustrate for the audience that there are other ways to take the same set of ideas and wind up somewhere else.
unidentified		I guess I would argue that thinking itself occurring within this kind of time, any notion that there's something outside of that, if you're arguing for like a God that exists outside of time, is unthinkable and in some sense nihilistic because it's opposed to life, which occurs within time and that's the way we experience it.
unidentified		So wanting something outside of time is in a sense a kind of nihilism or denial of life.
dr michael heiser ▲ ● ▼		And I would agree that that's a good argument against it.
		I don't argue that God is outside of time.
		I would argue that God can be in our time, or he cannot be.
		I mean, in other words...
unidentified		But if God's in our time, this is a radically different God than a traditional Christian God.
unidentified		Now we're talking about...
dr michael heiser ▲ ● ▼		it might be radically different than the Christian thinkers you're thinking of or accustomed to.
		But I'll give you an example, and it gets really...
		You sound like the guy that would enjoy this sort of reading.
		If you go up to William Lane Craig's homepage, he spends a lot of his career, frankly, on this God in time sort of thing, showing that, hey, it's really kind of theologically specific, And one of the arguments is just exactly what you said.
		Another one would be, if God exists out of time, then how can he really empathize with our experience?
		And that has implications for things like prayer and whatnot.
		So a lot of Christian theologians are not where you're putting them.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		What makes you think he has anything to do with our experience at a macro level anyway?
dr michael heiser ▲ ● ▼		Again, that's just a theological statement, and you could approach it two ways.
		You could say, well, the Bible says that, and that would be one argument.
		The other way to look at it is reasoning from the analogy of ourselves.
		And that is, well, if I would have made things, it seems more reasonable that if I made something, I'd like to at least watch it, if not spend time with it, as opposed to not.
		And so, again, that's where the philosophical argument lands, and that's the ground on which it's fought.
unidentified		Okay, well, thanks a lot.
unidentified		I really appreciate the conversation.
dr michael heiser ▲ ● ▼		You've got me too.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Take care.
		Here's somebody, Shep, who says, Mike, Mike says that a lot of people's path to belief makes no sense.
		But faith is itself, by definition, a path to belief that does not make sense.
		Isn't his fundamentalism caught up in the same problem?
dr michael heiser ▲ ● ▼		Well, first, I'm not a fundamentalist.
		The people who fired me from my last teaching job would certainly say I'm not.
		So I'm not in that camp.
		And I think that's the same question that the previous caller just asked.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		That's right.
unidentified		That's true.
unidentified		I mean, basically, yeah, it's true.
dr michael heiser ▲ ● ▼		I'm going to go out on a limb and say it's true that not all beliefs are equally coherent.
		Not all paths to a certain conclusion are equally coherent.
		I don't think that's really going out too far on a limb.
		Okay, I can believe that pink bunny rabbits invaded the earth millions of years ago.
		Okay, I believe it.
		Does that make it coherent?
		No, it doesn't.
		They're not all the same.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You're on the air with Mike Heiser.
dr michael heiser ▲ ● ▼		Hello.
unidentified		Yes.
		Is this Mr. Art Bell?
		It is.
		Hello, Art Bell Roswell's Tea, sir.
		I'd like to thank you for your services and all the entertainment you gave us over the years.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Thank you, sir.
unidentified		Okay.
		Mr. Michael, Dr. Mike, excuse me, I've got a question in the Bible.
		It says that man was created in the image of us.
		Speaking of God, I guess, when he says us, what does he mean by that?
		I mean, when he says, is there more than one God?
		Or what does it mean when he says man was created in the image of us?
dr michael heiser ▲ ● ▼		Well, I'll answer you quickly, but just so that you know, if you go to my website, drmsh.com, go to the quick links and click on the quick link page to click on the word Elohim, and you'll get this answer written out, so you don't have to try to remember it.
		Let us create humankind in our image.
		Again, these plurals are well known.
		They are what's called grammatically the plural of exhortation.
		If I walk into a room and I say, hey, let's go get pizza.
		I am a single speaker speaking to a group.
		This is exactly the same thing that's happening in Genesis.
		God is speaking to who?
		Well, I would say the heavenly host, the angels, whatever, the inhabitants of the spiritual world, whatever.
		It says, hey, I have a great idea.
		Let's make humankind in our image.
		Now, that plural implies that the image, whatever that is, and I have my own view of that, which you can read about, is shared between God and these other beings, the heavenly host, angels, whatever, Elohim, whatever, and humans.
		There's something shared there.
		Again, I think the image is not a quality like sentience or thought or prayer or whatever.
		I think it's a status.
		I think it has to do with representation, ruling representation.
		We are God as though he were here.
		We are his representatives.
		It's equally shared.
		And the angels are God's representatives in whatever domain God gives them.
		That's the short answer.
		So I'm a single speaker.
		I'm speaking to a group.
		And in the case of Genesis, when the creation actually happens, God created humankind in his image.
		There's a singular pronoun, and the verb is singular, and the subject is singular.
		There is only a single creator in Genesis 1, but that creator announces it to a group.
		And here's where I depart, obviously, from Sitchin.
		And even in the Mesopotamian text, the Anunnaki, if you actually go and look at the Atrahasis epic, Anuma Eilish, the Anunnaki do not create humankind, but they are in the room.
		They're watching.
		A single deity does the creation.
		So there's a relationship there, but not the one that Sitchin is going to argue for or did argue for.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You're on the air with Mike Heiser.
unidentified		Hello.
dr michael heiser ▲ ● ▼		Hey, Art Roswell.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Thank you.
unidentified		Mike?
		Yes.
		My name is Mike too.
		I guess too, Mike, they may go make it right, huh?
		I would agree.
		If God created everything, then who or what created God?
		And I'll take my answer off there.
		Thanks, Mark.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You're very welcome.
dr michael heiser ▲ ● ▼		Well, my answer, since I'm a theist and a dualist, is that there was nothing before God.
		So again, that's a philosophical position.
		I don't believe that string theory or universes burping other universes into existence answers this question at all.
		All it does is set up an infinite regress.
		Well, what about the universe before that one?
		And what about the one before that one?
		It doesn't really do anything.
		So we're back to the, are we monists or are we dualists?
		You know, that kind of thing.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I once heard somebody say something that I found fascinating, and it was that in the beginning there was God and only God.
		And That he, in essence, became lonely and so blew himself up.
		And that was the Big Bang.
		And we are all, therefore, a part of God.
		Randomly tossing that out there.
dr michael heiser ▲ ● ▼		Right.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		No biological proof for you.
dr michael heiser ▲ ● ▼		No, I know.
		That's actually Gnosticism, which doesn't mean it's a bad word.
		And if you hold that position, Art, here's something for you to wrestle with.
		Because I remember you talking about that and you finding some real, you know, there's an emotional impact that that had with you that you really like that argument.
		But if you hold that, you have to be a materialist.
		In other words, you don't really have a consciousness outside of the material world because if God is everything and everything is God, there is nothing outside the material creation.
		And I don't know if you want to go there intellectually.
		I mean, obviously you can.
		But I've heard a lot of content on your show that would suggest to me that you do think consciousness is different than the material world.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Now, maybe...
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I'm open to proof, Mike.
dr michael heiser ▲ ● ▼		Right.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I'm definitely open to proof.
dr michael heiser ▲ ● ▼		Right.
dr michael heiser ▲ ● ▼		That's where it happens to be.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Hold tight.
		We're at a breakpoint.
		The final break.
		Take it right here and we'll be right back.
		Mike Heiser is my guest.
unidentified		You could read my mind, love, what a tale my father could tell.
		Just like an old-time movie about a ghost to wish him well.
		In a castle dark or a fortress strong, with tape upon my feet.
		You know that ghost is me.
		And I will never be set free, as long as I'm a ghost, you can't see.
		I will never be set free, as long as I'm a ghost, you can't see.
		music
		Listen to the wind blow Watch the sunrise Listen to the wind blow Run in the shadows, damn your love, damn your lies And if you don't love me now, you will never love me again I can't
		feel, I hear you say, you will never break the chain of pain again From the area of 51, this is Dark Matter with Artfell.
		To join the show, please call 1-855-RIO UFO.
		That's 1-855-732-5836.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		By the way, I think you might enjoy the very end of the show tonight.
		So be sure and stick around.
		My guest is Mike Heiser, and he's all yours.
		Anything you want to ask, absolutely fair game.
		And so, here we go.
		You're on the air with Mike Heiser.
		Good morning.
unidentified		Evening.
		Morning, guys.
		Well, it's morning here.
		Hey.
		Yes.
		I'm going to try to be pretty concise with my question and hope I don't lose my train of thought on the way.
		I probably don't believe in God the same way you believe in God, and I definitely don't believe in religion the same way you do.
		I'm kind of a Taoist in that I think the God you can name is not God.
		And so my question is kind of a comment.
		I do believe that I have come in contact with something that is what you would call a higher intelligence because what I experienced, it manipulated the physical world that I experience every day in its own way.
		And I experienced it the same way I would experience you face to face.
		So I know it's out there.
		I don't know what it is.
		But it got me to think that if there is a higher intelligence such as this, wouldn't it be easy for them, and if it's not easy, wouldn't it at least be interesting for them to manipulate our world to make them appear godlike?
		That doesn't mean they are God, but they certainly could appear that way to us.
		And one of the things that got me thinking on this direction is I have a friend who's certain that he met Jesus in a vision.
		And he wants to tell everybody about it.
		You know, I had what you might call a vision, but I'm not going around saying that Jesus or Krishna or any other God came to me.
		Something I witnessed, I don't know what it was, it opened my eyes up.
		So how can you trust anything you see?
		When I listen to you talk, I think the only things certain are death and taxes.
		Everything else is just a way to cope, right?
dr michael heiser ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, the old bromide.
		In answer to your first question, could these higher intelligence appear godlike, I would say yes.
		So that's a fairly straightforward question.
		I'm wondering, is this something that you experienced to this higher intelligence?
		Do you assign personhood to it?
		Was it a person?
unidentified		Well, I'll tell you, my grandma and I both saw it.
		And she was, she was, she believed it may have been my grandfather who died before I was born.
		We both experienced something paranormal.
		I just experienced something very strange.
		It was a light, and it had form, and it was a real, it was a thing.
		She experienced a light, but it had a different appearance to her.
		So her impression, she's a very religious person, by the way.
		So I was surprised that she didn't come out of it as a religious experience.
		But she felt that it was her husband, Bob, my grandfather.
		I got no impression from it other than that it was not of, I can't say it was not of this world because obviously it was of this world, but it was not something that performed according to the nine-year-old physics that I knew at the time and never has.
		So there's something else out there.
		I know this.
		I don't know what it is.
dr michael heiser ▲ ● ▼		Even though you didn't get an impression.
		I hope you don't mind the conversation here.
		I'm just curious.
		Even though you didn't get an impression, would you does that rule out a person?
		In other words, personhood for this thing or whatever it was to you?
		I'm not sure.
unidentified		In person, in what form.
		I got the impression that it was intelligent.
		Absolutely.
		Did I get the impression that it was human or that it spoke to me in any way?
		No.
		I just got the, it would be like maybe a lower form, if we're a lower form of life, it'd be like pulling a fish out of water and saying, hey, fish.
		And that fish would be like, what are you?
		You know, it's another form of life.
		I would say that.
		And it was bright white.
		It was the whitest light I have ever seen.
		But it didn't, it was, it was pure white.
		So you would think it had all the hallmarks of a religious experience, but I did not get, if anything, it made me less religious and more open-minded to the fact that we are not the end-all-be-all.
dr michael heiser ▲ ● ▼		Right.
		The reason I ask, and the way I'm thinking about personhood, I should have been clear.
		I'm talking about things like intelligence, which of course suggests decision-making ability.
		In other words, it made a decision to appear to you or something like that.
		And I would say, even though I can't process that experience because I didn't have it, my own worldview here, again, these are just thoughts that I'm thinking as I'm listening to you.
		The fact that this may have had these personal abilities, that's probably a better way to say it, of course doesn't rule out that there's a higher form that we would call God.
		And I would agree that this form, whatever it is, could appear God-like.
		In other words, all these thoughts that could be extracted from this, I would find not threatening, again, to a theistic worldview.
		And since I accept a theistic worldview and I'm not a materialist, I could look at you and say, hey, I really think you did have this experience.
		I don't think it was something flickering in your brain that wasn't working right or whatever, that you actually could indeed have this.
		But again, if you and I were friends having a friendly debate over a cup of coffee or something, I would say, hey, maybe you ought to fit this into a theistic worldview.
		That's the way you break a training.
		I would process it.
unidentified		But to me, it is a mystical experience.
		Because I didn't pull anything religious out of it at the time, it still had that effect on my perception of my world as I see it.
		And I can tell you what I saw that defied physics.
		But I don't expect you to believe it because you were not there.
		You can't experience it the way I did.
		And so when I talk to my friend who had a seriously religious experience and it has made him a very religious person, I believe him up to a point, but I can never experience what he experienced.
		All I know is what I was experiencing, and I cannot say anything for certain.
dr michael heiser ▲ ● ▼		Well, I think you probably could say one thing for certain, that you're not a materialist.
dr michael heiser ▲ ● ▼		I mean, it seems to me that this experience yanked you out of that category.
unidentified		You're right about that, absolutely.
dr michael heiser ▲ ● ▼		And I think, again, if we were pals at the coffee house, I would say that that's an excellent place to start.
		And art, this is a really good segue for your earlier question about UFO stuff.
		People are not wasting their time to think, again, and I'm referring to what I call serious ufology here.
		I love going to UFO conferences, and I have colleagues in academia that ask me, what in the world are you doing?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Do they love you, Mike?
dr michael heiser ▲ ● ▼		If they're patient enough to hear me out, yes.
		But I tell them, look, the people that listen to shows like this, like Dark Matter and, of course, Coast to Coast and other shows, and go to these UFO conferences and are into this.
		I have found, my experience, is that they are the most predisposed to having really good big picture question discussions, which ultimately fall into the religious category.
		Who are we?
		Why are we here?
		Is there a God?
		All this kind of stuff.
		And I have found a lot more predilection to really getting into discussions of some depth in that area more so than church.
		I mean, that's just me.
		I like going to those things for that reason.
		People really like to talk about this sort of stuff.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, they do.
		Very quickly, Rick is asking, what are your thoughts on the camp of thinkers that claim there is no free will?
		We have very little time here.
dr michael heiser ▲ ● ▼		I would disagree.
		I think if we do not have free will, we cannot image God.
		That's an attribute we share with him.
		That's the shortest answer I can give you.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		And a good one, too.
		Very quickly, you're on the air with Mike Heiser.
		Hello.
unidentified		Hey, Roswell's art.
		Thanks for having me on.
		Just a quick question, Doctor.
		You guys were talking about some frightening beliefs, and one really scary contingent to me is the New Earth Creationists.
		You know, they think that the planet is 5,000 years old, and they've built a museum to prove it.
		I just wondered if you could offer some insight on that.
dr michael heiser ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, are you referring to young Earth creationists?
dr michael heiser ▲ ● ▼		Like recent Earth?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
dr michael heiser ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, I would be in the Old Earth camp, although I have to say I'm not offended by the idea because, yeah, if God created everything immediate, who am I to say he couldn't do that?
		But I think we need to take science seriously, and I think a lot of it points to old earth.
		And I know there's arguments on both sides, but I would be more predisposed to be in the old earth camp.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay, we're wrapping it up.
		We're out of time.
		Mike, I want to thank you for being here.
		It's been very stimulating and at times confusing, but all in all, a wonderful appearance.
		And I'm sure we'll have you back again.
unidentified		And your website again is TRMSH.com.
dr michael heiser ▲ ● ▼		And Art, thank you for having me on and thank you for coming back.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Oh, well, you're very welcome.
		It's just a pleasure.
		You know, what would I do without these stimulations?
		Be on the couch doing nothing.
		All right, my friend.
		Thank you.
		Thank you very much.
		And you have a good night, Mike.
dr michael heiser ▲ ● ▼		You too.
unidentified		Bye-bye.
		This is a song that we wrote for a late-night talk show radio host, Art Bell.
		And we had a great time running this one.
		Midnight in the desert, shooting stars across the sky.
		It's a magical journey.
		Could take us on a rise.
		Filled with belonging, searching for the truth.
		Will we make it to tomorrow?
		Will the sun shine?
		Midnight in the desert And we're left in We're left in the moon We're left in the moon Oh, good night, everybody.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		And remember, if you have an idea for what we can call our special show, the one on Halloween, I thought just dark matter Halloween, but if, listen, you've got brainstorm or a vision, be sure and email it to me.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		And don't forget, ghost stories, those can be emailed as well, along with your phone number.
unidentified		If it's a good one, we'll call you.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Good night.
unidentified		Good night.
		In the devil, there's wisdom in the air.
		I've been looking for the answer.
		All my life I felt you there.
		Does the world be living quicker?
		Are we heating up the fight?
		Have we lost our wrench and we shall be?
		Are we running out of time?
		High the night in the dark.
		I will.

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