For centuries, we’ve been told ancient civilizations filled their art with symbolism, mythology, and religious imagery. For the vast majority of images, this holds up. But a question, obscured by centuries of art history still remains unsolved:
Why did cultures separated by oceans, languages, and thousands of years keep drawing people descending from the sky, strange flying objects, and beings that look surprisingly familiar to the modern alien?
Every time someone points it out, the response is predictable: perhaps it’s symbolic, or perhaps the interpretation belongs to some long-lost cultural idea and is only mistranslated by our modern context.
And sure, this could be the case. It’s likely that at least some of these images we find scattered throughout the world’s deepest chambers are coincidences, and merely evoke the idea of an alien or UFO. But history has an annoying habit of reminding us that today’s impossible idea often becomes tomorrow’s accepted fact.
Ezekiel Didn’t Describe a Horse and Buggy
The Book of Ezekiel contains one of the strangest passages in the Bible. He describes a roaring cloud, flashing fire, brilliant light, living creatures, and the famous “wheel within a wheel” moving in ways that defied human understanding.
If someone reported seeing that over Washington today, the military would be tracking it before the evening news. Instead, because Ezekiel lived more than 2,500 years ago, we’re told it was simply a vision, some hallucination from times past.
But imagine it wasn’t. Imagine being faced with a creation beyond imagination, one that defies logic and is wholly incomparable to any creature or object you’ve seen before. You would be at a loss for words; perhaps we haven’t invented the appropriate words to describe such a scenario. Perhaps such words are not able to be created.
Or perhaps, the vocabulary of the time was simply too limited. If you’ve never seen an airplane, how would you describe one? A flying bird made of metal? A chariot in the sky? Without the word for plane, you would be forced to use the next best approximation from your own life.
Ancient people didn’t have aerospace engineering terms. They described extraordinary things with ordinary words. Although only spoken, it’s far from a stretch to label this enormous, physics-defying megastructure as alien, and it is simply accurate to label it an Unidentified Flying Object.
Ancient Artists Had a Curious Obsession
Travel the world and you keep bumping into the same face.
Egypt. Australia. Italy. Peru. The Sahara. Different peoples, different gods, different centuries, separated by oceans and deserts and languages that never touched. And yet the same figure keeps turning up on the rock. A round head. A ring of light around it. Great open eyes. Something coming down out of the sky.
The scholars have answers, and good ones. Ceremonial dress. Rain spirits. Shamans in trance. The formal language of sacred art. I am not here to call them fools; they have spent their lives on those cliffs and I have not.
I am only here to stand in front of four walls on four continents and say the obvious thing out loud. Strangers who never met, who could not have met, reached for the same image when they tried to draw what was greater than themselves. Either that is the longest coincidence in human history, or it is evidence of something we keep refusing to name.
We are one animal. We dream in one language. Under one sky.
South America Raises More Questions
The famous Quimbaya gold artifacts from Colombia are generally described as stylized fish, birds, or insects. Yet some have shapes that look surprisingly aerodynamic, and enthusiasts have even built enlarged models inspired by them that can fly.
Does that prove ancient aircraft existed? Of course not. But it does make these objects worth a closer look rather than simply dismissing the questions surrounding them.
Then there are Peru’s Nazca Lines, enormous geometric shapes and figures carved into the desert. Researchers generally connect them to ceremonial or religious practices, and there is no evidence they were made for ancient aircraft.
Still, their enormous scale raises an intriguing question: why create images that are so much easier to understand when viewed from high above?
Everybody Says It’s Symbolism
Medieval paintings are full of strange lights. Glowing spheres. Objects hanging in the sky above the manger, above the crucifixion, above the saints. Art historians file these under divine light, angels, the presence of God.
They may be right. Symbolism was the whole language of medieval religious art, and most of these details have ordinary explanations sitting right there in the tradition.
Still. Notice how one answer covers everything. Odd detail? Symbolic. Odder detail? Also symbolic. A word that explains all things explains nothing, and it has the added convenience of ending the conversation.
Sometimes symbolism is exactly what we are looking at. Sometimes the painter painted what he saw.
The honest answer, the one nobody gets tenure for, is that we do not know.
The Real Mystery
Here’s where both sides lose me.
The “everything was aliens” crowd jumps to conclusions without evidence. The “nothing unusual ever happened” crowd dismisses questions just as quickly. Neither position reflects genuine curiosity.
History is filled with ideas once considered absurd. But it seems as the issue may have been that the world is simply an absurd one. Meteorites, at face level, are an extremely rare event unlike any phenomenon- fiery rocks raining from the sky? Yeah right. Tiny microscopic creatures are responsible for disease? Get a grip. Continents, moving across thousands of miles and crashing into each other? Now you’re pushing it. But as humanity aged, we came to face and understand these absurd components of our reality.
Being skeptical doesn’t mean refusing to ask questions. It means following evidence wherever it leads, and accepting that this world’s complexities are to be studied, learned, over generations. To claim we know all is to be willfully ignorant of the beauty that arises from the complexity of our world.
Maybe We’re Asking the Wrong Question
Maybe ancient artists weren’t painting extraterrestrials, and maybe they were illustrating spiritual experiences. Regardless, we need to consider the fact that we know aliens exist. It would be foolish to assume that in the vastness of the universe, we are unique in our ability to comprehend and manipulate the world.
No, it is obvious, yet a hard pill to swallow. But if we want to advance as a society, survive the threat of total annihilation, and become a great civilization, it is one we must all swallow. These beings are there, and the will of man is strong enough to reach them. We cannot be derailed by wars of attrition, egoist leaders and their followers, hatred and bigotry, or any of our other minuscule qualms that pail in comparison to the scale of our world.
In recent years, the U.S Congress has taken a renewed interest in UFOs, or as they have been rebranded, UAPs (Unidentified Aerial Phenomena). 2022 marked the first public hearing on UAPs in over 50 years. Then came the congressional hearings of 2023.
The eyes this coverage brings is undoubtably positive. We must continue imagining worlds beyond our belief, trusting in the absurdity left to discover. But above all, we must not use these signs and sightings against each other as weapons of hate. Have no doubt, the first instinct of the elite upon the confirmation that extraterrestrial life exists, and has visited, will be one of greed and power. How can we use this to benefit us, to divide and enrage people, to go to war for my profit, they’ll all ask themselves. We must be prepared and we must have strength.
