A reader asked us recently to look at a site which was said to be about the "Sons of Seth" (and which is alleged to be by a Christian!). At the time of the letter, I was not online, so per my usual habit I clicked the link they gave and saved it as a bookmark in my browser, not having any idea what I would find. Now that I've looked, I may need an operation.

The link was to a site called "alienresistance.org" and it alleges that the historic church is "responsible for perpetrating the most enduring and damaging cover-up in regard to our planet's other-worldly visitors." The key text for this crowd here is Genesis 6, and our friendly goofs tie this passage in with alien abductions, to wit: The aliens are the "sons of God" of Genesis 6, and they abducted people for sex and other sundry reasons. To cover this up, the church declared, so we are told, that the "sons" of Gen. 6 were humans, not angels. That's rather funny, because you will find the view of the "sons" as angels in Genesis commentaries (as well as 1 Peter commentaries) all over the seminary; you will hear the Bible Answer Man speak of it often (in disagreement); I even speak of the idea in my book The Mormon Defenders. So the question is, is there really a coverup, as our goofy friends say, or are they just not much when it comes to reading?

Since I happen to agree that these "sons" of Gen. 6 were not actually sons of Seth (first century Jews certainly did not think so -- if anyone wants a look at my chapter from Mormon Defenders, drop me a line) I won't have anything to say about our goofy friends' rebuttal to this claim. It enough to point out that 1) there is no "coverup" going on here; 2) our goofy friends think the "angel" interpretation is enough to make a jump to "they were actually aliens," which reminds us of McPherson's "Yahweh was an alien" theory, in terms of being long on fantasy, short on evidence. The charges that Augustine, et al. "debunked and destroyed every document relating to the angelic invasion" is undocumented and frankly ludicrous. Roswell is introduced as a matter of course; then we are told that the great coverup was busted when 1 Enoch was found among the Dead Sea Scrolls in 1948. (We are told, "the Vatican paid top dollar for them," but actually, the Israeli Antiquities Authority, not the Vatican, owns the Scrolls.) Our friends are also apparently unaware that Enoch was well known before the DSS discovery (try for example Schodde's 1882 translation). But more is promised by our friends on this subject later. Shall we wait around?

Nah.