c. 1996 The Jerusalem Report

(RNS)-On Sunday, January 8, 1995, Herzl Ksantini was relaxing at home with a buddy in a small farming community in central Israel.”It was an ordinary evening on our moshav (village),”he says,”until suddenly, at 9 p.m., the house began to shake. It was like an earth tremor.” Ksantini opened the front door to investigate and came”face-to-face with a three-meter monster.”His friend tried to peek out through a window in the kids’ bedroom, but was thrown to the ground. Half a minute later, the”monster”was gone.

The 42-year-old Ksantini, married and a successful businessman, speaks calmly and convincingly of a”mud-colored monster, with long legs and no arms,”and recalls lights shining from its head. He makes no claim that it was extraterrestrial.”All I know is that it was too big to be a man,”he told The Jerusalem Report on the anniversary of his encounter,”and it wasn’t a horse, camel, or any other known animal.” Ksantini and his friend sat frozen with fear for 20 minutes. They then called the moshav security head, who in turn phoned the Border Police. By early the next morning about 30 officers were scouring the area. They found no aliens-but did find”deep footprints”which were tracked for some 8 kilometers. While skeptics claimed these were camel tracks, Israel’s small but enthusiastic UFO community swooped on the sleepy moshav of Yatzitz and proclaimed it the site of the latest visitation.

Over the last decade, hundreds of Israelis claim to have had close encounters with alien beings. Their experiences range from mere sightings of UFOs or their”crop circle”landing sites, to actual communication-with several claimed abductions. The more bizarre accounts include descriptions of cattle”mutilated by aliens”; one Acre woman maintains aliens visited her to”warn against the peace process.” American-born Beit Shemesh resident Barry Chamish, a self-professed UFOlogist, says”Israel is recognized as an international UFO hot spot-with an unsurpassed quantity and quality of evidence.”In January 1995, a crew from Paramount TV’s”Sightings”program came to Israel to film an episode-and ended up with enough material for three, two of which have aired to a global audience estimated at 60 million. UFOlogists are at a loss to explain the lack of sightings in Israel’s near neighbors-it is as if the aliens, unlike most earthlings, are aware of Israel’s borders.

One explanation offered is the Divine. Israeli UFOlogy divides into the majority rationalist and minority mystic camps. The mystics have no doubt as to the reason for the prevalence of sightings in the Holy Land: The angels of the Bible are returning. Mystics have constructed elaborate theories based on biblical and kabbalistic texts to support their contention that the”miracles”of the Bible-such as the pillars of cloud and fire that guided the Israelites through the wilderness, or the chariot of fire which spirited Elijah to the heavens-are actually descriptions of alien encounters. Most recently, local UFOlogist Hadassah Arbel has proffered a theory linking Kadimah, a moshav in central Israel where a number of encounters have been reported, with Kedmah, a biblical word for eastward, associated with the coming of the messiah. Rationalists counter by pointing out that, with minimal effort, almost any biblical passage can be interpreted as an encounter narrative.

Nachman Ben-Yehuda, associate professor of sociology at the Hebrew University, first looked at the UFO phenomenon when studying in the United States. He explains the recent spate of sightings as manifestations of”diminishing security tensions.”Accordingly, he sees Israel becoming”more and more like West Europe and America, witnessing more science fiction, more cults. People are becoming more aware of themselves and their experiences.”The advent of commercial and tabloid television-including”The X-Files,”the U.S. series on paranormal activity-may also have contributed to the phenomenon of reported sightings. A recent episode of Meni Peer’s”Mishal Am”(Referendum) program, on Israel TV, polled a 43 percent positive response to the question”Do you believe aliens exist?”A Tel Aviv paper runs a weekly column titled”X-files,”which details local encounter stories and ends with a phone number soliciting further testimonies.

Still, not all the action has been in the last decade: Claims of Israeli UFO sightings date back to the 1950s. Avi Greif, head of the Israel Center for UFO Research (a ragtag association of amateurs, wracked by internal divisions), has followed the local scene for decades. He says that”considering the size of the country, the number of encounters, particularly of the second and third kind, is remarkable.”(UFOlogists adopt the distinctions of American astronomer and UFO researcher Allen Hynek, who defined a sighting as an”encounter of the first kind”; the”second kind”is where physical evidence is found; and the”third kind”-popularized by Steven Spielberg’s”Close Encounters”-is actual contact.)

World attention has been sharply focused on Israel by a recent flurry of extraterrestrial activity here-what Israeli enthusiasts refer to as a”holy trinity”of”well-documented”encounters.

The most recent was Ksantini’s”monster.”Before that, between March and June 1993, five women claim to have had one-on-one encounters with aliens in Kadimah-and each has furnished similar descriptions of a”2.5-meter (7-ft) tall, bald, gray alien being, with an oval-shaped face, glittering eyes and a small dot-like nose.” One of the Kadimah women, Tziporet Carmel, told The Report her conversation with her alien was”extremely natural. It said, `Don’t worry, I’m not going to hurt you.'”Carmel asked the alien to take off a translucent mask that covered its face. When the being refused, and Carmel asked why, it replied in surly, colloquial Hebrew:”Kakhah Zeh”-“Just because.”This conversation-like all the others reported-was conveyed telepathically.

The Israeli aliens are known in the UFO biz as the relatively rare”Large Gray.”(There are about 70 identified types of aliens among cognoscenti; the most common are”Small Grays.”) All five Kadimah incidents were marked by”crop circles,”taken to indicate spacecraft landings, in back gardens.

The other encounter in the”trinity”occurred in September 1976, when a series of sightings, over Haifa’s Shikmonah beach, culminated in a spectacular explosion that October which scorched the sand in the shape of a spaceship. Tens of thousands of residents came to see the unique”alien signature.”Avi Greif says the site was unusually magnetic and contained extremely high concentrations of zinc. When a sample of the soil was tested in the U.S. laboratory of Dr. W.C. Levengood (who appeared on the”Sightings”program), it apparently”melted”under microscope light-because it had a photosensitive coating. Believers see this as an indication of UFO residue.

Other local encounters of note include the November 6, 1991,”visitation of a giant”to the home of Beit She’an police officer Yitzhak Mordechai, which resulted in a six-hour chase involving 300 soldiers in 19 jeeps all the way to the Jordanian border. The being is said to have stopped at the border fence, and then disappeared.

On the night of January 24, 1992, a UFO was sighted along the length of the country, from the Galilee to Eilat, triggering hundreds of calls to emergency lines. Operators are briefed in handling such emergencies; Rachel Holzman, of the Israel Center for UFO Research, has given several lectures to the operators on Israel’s 100 police emergency line.

Holzman, whose 200-member organization meets twice a year to exchange stories, boasts of a personal UFO sighting a decade ago-a spaceship which beamed bright lights into her Haifa home. She describes it excitedly as”the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen in my life-wonderful, more than wonderful. I hope one day I’ll have an encounter of the third kind.” But not everybody is ready to be swept away. Tel Aviv University astronomer Elia Leibowitz is skeptical about the new rash of sightings.”I’m sure they see something,”he says.”The question is the meaning people give to what they see.”Leibowitz points out that the world is full of unexplained phenomena,”like why my nose starts to itch.”He decries the logic that many UFOlogists and witnesses employ by first interpreting an unexplained phenomenon in a particular way and then using the very same phenomenon as”proof for the interpretation-there is no independent evidence.” To most mainstream scientists, UFOlogy remains a pseudo-science. Nachman Ben-Yehuda warns that”UFOlogy is simply plagued with fraudulent reports, forgeries, unreliable witnesses-you have to shed a lot of rubbish to get even a kernel of evidence.”But he recognizes that”you don’t have to be a crackpot to believe in UFOs.”He points to DNA code-cracker and Nobel Laureate Francis Crick’s last book,”Life Itself,”which argues that DNA was brought to earth by a rocket from another world.

Indeed, there is a growing academic respectability being given to UFO studies. Last year, Harvard psychiatrist Dr. John Mack published a best-selling book endorsing the testimony of many people who have detailed their extraterrestrial encounters. And the U.S. government is now conducting the biggest-ever search for extraterrestrial life through the 5-year-old global META (Megachannel Extraterrestrial Assay) program, simultaneously scanning over 1 million frequencies for any signs of intelligent communications-so far with no results.

Ben-Yehuda, who has specialized in the sociology of”deviant science,”sees an irony in the fact that respected government agencies and scientists spend billions of dollars searching the distant horizons of space, while people who claim to have been visited in the back garden are ridiculed.

Still, UFO enthusiasts are used to being disbelieved by a skeptical, often mocking public. Many UFO believers also speak of cover-ups and official conspiracies-charges which in Israel invariably implicate the military. The army spokesman curtly dismisses queries on the subject.

Undaunted, Israel’s amateur UFO researchers will doubtless continue to spend their weekends trampling through gardens photographing”crop circles,”collecting residue and silica, and dreaming of locating a large landing site in the Galilee, said to be closely guarded by the army, which has become tantalizingly known as”The Mother Lode.”

MJP END