Joe Rogan suggests UFOs, drug use are in the Bible

Joe Rogan discussed whether the Bible depicts UFO sightings and drug use during a recent installment of his popular podcast.

The broadcaster, whose podcast The Joe Rogan Experience is among the world’s most listened-to shows, delved into the matter during a discussion with writer, producer and director David Holthouse in an episode released on April 2. Holthouse and Rogan spoke about various UFO sightings over the years, and theorized that they could be evidence of top-secret military projects or alien life forms.

Among the several ideas thrown forward, Rogan also floated the theory that UFOs have always been present on Earth, before pulling up scripture from the Bible’s Old Testament Book of Ezekiel, which speaks of an encounter with unknown beings.

The New International Version of the Bible talks of “a windstorm coming out of the north—an immense cloud with flashing lightning and surrounded by brilliant light. The center of the fire looked like glowing metal, and in the fire was what looked like four living creatures. In appearance their form was human, but each of them had four faces and four wings.

“Their legs were straight; their feet were like those of a calf and gleamed like burnished bronze. Under their wings on their four sides they had human hands. All four of them had faces and wings, and the wings of one touched the wings of another. Each one went straight ahead; they did not turn as they moved.”

These beings had human faces, the passage reads, and “each had two wings spreading out upward, each wing touching that of the creature on either side; and each had two other wings covering its body. Each one went straight ahead. Wherever the spirit would go, they would go, without turning as they went.”

“As I looked at the living creatures, I saw a wheel on the ground beside each creature with its four faces,” the text continues. “This was the appearance and structure of the wheels: They sparkled like topaz, and all four looked alike. Each appeared to be made like a wheel intersecting a wheel. As they moved, they would go in any one of the four directions the creatures faced; the wheels did not change direction as the creatures went. Their rims were high and awesome, and all four rims were full of eyes all around.”

While Ezekiel said that a human-like figure high above the beings was an “appearance of the likeness of the glory of the Lord,” Rogan and Holthouse floated the theory that perhaps this was an hallucinogenic experience.

“I mean to anybody that’s done DMT [dimethyltryptamine] or ayahuasca—really tripped on psychedelics—you read that and it feels sort of familiar,” Holthouse said. “The glory of God, these visions of these beings.”

“And the fact that these things are constantly changing their appearance,” Rogan said. “Like, that’s the thing about the DMT experience. It’s not a stationary, static experience. It’s constantly changing and moving in front of you. And to see something like that in the sky… And the fact that it’s so noteworthy that they wrote it down in the f****** Bible.”

DMT is a hallucinogenic compound and one of the main active ingredients in ayahuasca.

To back up his theory, Rogan appeared to cite Benny Shanon. The Israeli professor of cognitive philosophy wrote in the British academic journal Time and Mind in 2008 that Biblical figure Moses was likely high on psychedelic drugs when he received the Ten Commandments from God.

Shanon, a professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Israel, said that two naturally existing plants in the Sinai Peninsula contain psychoactive components.

“The thunder, lightning and blaring of a trumpet which the Book of Exodus says emanated from Mount Sinai could just have been the imaginings of a people in an altered state of awareness,” Shanon wrote. “In advanced forms of ayahuasca inebriation, the seeing of light is accompanied by profound religious and spiritual feelings.”

Speaking on his podcast, Rogan told Holthouse how it was “theorized that the Moses experience of the burning bush was a DMT experience… When you say, Moses saw the burning bush, well, what kind of bush would burn that would give you a psychedelic experience? Well, the acacia tree, which is very common to that area, is rich with DMT. And how do you psychoactively acquire DMT? You smoke it.

“So you’re smoking this tree, this burning bush, and you’re seeing God and God has brought to you the Ten Commandments on how to live life, which sounds like a lot of what you experience in the DMT experience. When you have that and you have this contact with the entities, they kind of give you guidelines on how to live.”