Alternative 3: Aliens responsible for life on Earth

" Today, according to the knowledge we have," concluded Dr. Yazeb, "we don't have any other explanation of the founding of the solar system, other than by the intervention of a superior civilization". Meanwhile, in a quiet Tel Aviv coffee shop, Israeli Kobi Drori, a guide for the Raelian movement within Israel, sips hot chocolate while calmly describing much the same thing. "We're talking," he says, "of the third hypothesis on how life was created on Earth. The first is by an Almighty God; the second is the theory of evolution." The third, according to the 60,000-strong Raelian movement, is that life on Earth was created by scientists belonging to a superior, alien civilization, who created man "in their own likeness". ...

According to the Raelian movement, information in each major religion's key text offers clues as to this "true" creation of man. This, says Drori, is especially present in the Jewish Torah, or Old Testament. Here, he says, distortion over the centuries has hidden the true meanings of many descriptions. For example, he says, the Hebrew word for god - Elohim - actually means 'Messengers', or 'those who came from the sky' and does not refer to a notion of one supreme God, with which the word has become associated.

The Biblical image of angelic creatures arriving on wings from the sky is, he says, just a centuries-old misinterpretation of the beings who arrived in a spacecraft. Similarly, another Hebrew word for God, he says, is Adonai, a plural rather than a singular, which can be translated as "Lords". This, believe the Raelians, points clearly to the existence of humankind's true creators, to whom they still refer as the Elohim." - rnb