February 2026
Ancient myths about celestial visits to earth may be worth revisiting with an open mind, propose four scholars from prominent U.S. universities in a scientific essay.
The prophet Ezekiel’s vision, believed by some to have been an ET encounter. ILLUSTRATION Matthaeus Merian the elder / Wikimedia
Four mainstream scholars, including Harvard University psychology research scientist Tim Lomas, want academia to be more open to the idea that “non-human intelligences” (NHI) may have been visiting, or at home on, Earth since ancient times.
“Celestial (be)longing: A case for scientific interest in humankind’s yearning for, and potential origins in, the heavens,” published as a preprint essay on ResearchGate on January 10, suggests some ancient myths and religious stories that reference angels and other heavenly phenomena may have some basis in fact.
“Virtually every human culture has myths telling of humanity’s ancestral link to the stars,” write Lomas of The Human Flourishing Program at Harvard; Michael P. Masters, professor of biological anthropology at Montana Technological University; Steven Brown, associate professor of teaching at the department of philosophy at Ohio State University; and Brannon Wheeler, professor of the history of religion at the U.S. Naval Academy. The essay specifies that the authors worked on the project out of personal interest, not as part of their institutional research.
While popular media accounts of the idea (such as the TV series “Ancient Aliens” or the work of the recently deceased Erich von Däniken) often lack scientific rigor, sufficient credible information is now emerging that ought to be investigated, the authors suggest. It includes voluminous citations, and serves as a veritable compendium of UAP research.
This work is significant because academia has dismissed accounts of angels and alien life as imaginative fiction by primitive peoples. Yet modern worldwide encounters with purported non-human technology, phenomena and intelligences are increasingly being evaluated seriously, including hearings in the U.S. Congress. And many credible sources are adamant those encounters have been occurring since early in man’s evolution.
For example, Timothy Phillips, former acting director of the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, the U.S. Department of Defense’s UAP investigation program, said in an interview last year: “This been going on for the existence of mankind and was referenced to (sic) extraordinary things in the Bible.”
Christopher Mellon served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence in the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations. He posted last year on X: “There is a growing body of evidence that at least one alien civilization has found Earth and is monitoring us and perhaps even seeking to influence the trajectory of our development.”
The authors of this paper join a growing number of scholars moonlighting as UAP (unidentified anomalous phenomena) investigators. In fact, Brown also serves as a research associate on The Visible College, a new group of volunteer scholars probing the subject.
The team also notes that various theories in modern physics suggest reality is far more “strange” than we have imagined. These theories might plausibly explain NHI and UAPs.
“From this perspective, NHI might be understood less as visitors from other planets and more as participants within a shared field composed of something like mind or information: beings whose ontological status transcends or even avoids the physical,” the paper states.
See also FJN Topic Brief: Covering Life Beyond Earth
Written by Tom Zolper
Edited by Anders Bolling & Liza Horan
