Paul Wallis

Paul Anthony Wallis is an Australian author and former senior churchman whose six-book Eden Series (2020–2025) argues that the Hebrew Bible, read from the root meanings of its key words, preserves memories of contact between early humanity and a plurality of technological visitors — the elohim, in his rendering "the Powerful Ones." He arrived at the position from inside the institution most invested in the conventional reading: thirty-three years in Anglican ministry, fifteen of them training pastors in hermeneutics, ending as an archdeacon in the Anglican Church in Australia. Within the contemporary reinterpretive landscape the corpus places him beside Mauro Biglino as one of the two most consequential living voices of neo-euhemerism , and registers him across its entries as "the principal Anglophone popularizer of the Biglino-adjacent approach."

Wallis's independence is part of his evidential value to this project. A full-text search of the six Eden books finds no mention of Raël , of the Raëlian source material, or — more surprisingly for the genre — of Zecharia Sitchin. His convergences with the framework were reached from the text alone, which is precisely what makes them worth mapping. The full-length comparison lives in the Explainer The Archdeacon and the Dragon; this entry gives the biographical and bibliographical record.

Biography

Wallis was born in Britain and grew up in Buckinghamshire. By his own account his parents introduced him, at age eleven, to Erich von Däniken's Chariots of the Gods? and to the comparative mythology of Immanuel Velikovsky — "both writers invited me to look more deeply at the stories of our past, to notice the anomalies and the unexplained in the mainstream theories." As a schoolboy he wielded ancient-astronaut arguments against his born-again classmates until, at seventeen, reading the New Testament to sharpen his attacks, he converted: "The Jesus of the Gospels appeared to be about liberating people from hierarchies and from living in fear. That is how my journey as a Christian began."

The church career that followed ran thirty-three years: parish ministry and church-planting, "Church Doctor" assignments as an intentional interim minister sent to struggling congregations, fifteen years as a theological educator, professional-standards work during Australia's Royal Commission into institutional child sexual abuse, and the senior rank of archdeacon. He published books on Celtic spirituality and Eastern Orthodox mysticism. Nothing in the public record of that career anticipates the turn it took.

The turn came through an injury. Playing Ultimate Frisbee with his church youth group, Wallis wrecked his lower right leg badly enough to spend weeks in a traction device, convalescing in a converted shipping crate at the end of his driveway while preparing to preach through Genesis. Slowed down, working from an interlinear Bible with the Hebrew on one side and the Greek of the Septuagint on the other, he found the text he had preached for three decades would no longer cooperate: "Each time I sat down to read through the book of Genesis, the same anomalous verses kept getting in my face and flagging me down, as if to say, 'Paul! Stop! Don't read any further. You've got the story wrong!'"

Escaping from Eden was published in 2020 and ended his ministry — he describes releasing his congregation "from their obligation to me" and becoming "a heretic on my own dollar." His retrospective five years later is the nearest thing the series has to a credo: "All my professional credibility as senior churchman of thirty-three years' standing … were laid on the line because of the conclusions to which these narrative connections inevitably led me. As inconvenient as it was to my livelihood and reputation, where the data led, I had to follow." He now writes and broadcasts full-time, principally through the YouTube channel The 5th Kind TV, where his interlocutors have included von Däniken and Biglino — Biglino's standing blurb on his books reads, "Though far apart geographically we are spiritually close! We are a good team."

Method

Wallis's method is continuous with the Biglino Method while carrying his own emphases. Its elements:

• Anomalies as portals. "Anomalies are supposed to be our friends. They're the little clues that our metanarrative is off… Give them enough attention and you'll realize they are the portals to another world" (Escaping from Eden). The starting anomalies are the ones theology never metabolized: the mineral survey of Genesis 2, the plural "let us make," the moral incoherence of punishing beings who lacked moral knowledge, the Nephilim's survival of a total flood.
• Root meanings of key words. Elohim read as the plural "Powerful Ones" on the strength of ordinary -im morphology ("a kruv is a cherub. Kruvim are many cherubs, not the various superlative qualities of cherub-kind"); technical terms — kavod, ruach, ap, bab-el — returned to their concrete senses.
• Mainstream criticism as platform. Wallis accepts the documentary hypothesis, the exilic redaction, and "a very broad scholarly consensus" on the Bible's composite character before departing from the consensus on what the recovered stories describe. He engages hostile experts by name — most notably Michael Heiser, whose divine-council scholarship assembles the same plurality data against all paleocontact readings.
• Comparative triangulation. "The moment you begin to compare notes with cultures around the world, that's when you see the repeats and overlaps. That's when you start cracking the code" (The Eden Enigma). The comparanda run from the Mesopotamian cuneiform corpus through the Popol Vuh, West African Mami Wata traditions, Hawaiian Mo'o narratives, Aboriginal and Cherokee Pleiades traditions, and the Urartian reliefs of the Van highlands.
• Narrative candor. The books are memoir-travelogues as much as treatises, and Wallis discloses the genre's license: "I have conflated various visits, characters and occasions with just enough creative license to protect the privacy of those who have entrusted me with their conversations." Quotations of his dialogues should be treated accordingly.

The Eden Series

Escaping from Eden (2020) does the philology and states the method. Its thesis: restore the plural to elohim and Genesis performs a "volte-face" — from polemic against the Mesopotamian stories into their summary. Its proof-text is Joshua 24, "the smoking gun," where Israel is told to put away the elohim their ancestors served and serve Yahweh alone: one Powerful One demanding exclusivity against the others. Two further moves make the book more than a translation exercise. Wallis reads Genesis 1 not as a creation account but as a recovery account — the tohu wa bohu, the "chaotic, empty wasteland" of verse 2, as the ash-canopy and meltwater of a real post-cataclysm Earth (he ties it to the Younger Dryas extinction), and the six days as a terraforming and re-seeding by a superior species. And he counts the cast precisely: pre-Flood Genesis holds "at least four kinds of entity" — two ET species (elohim and benei elohim), humans, and the hybrid Nephilim — governed by a body he simply calls "the Council," because, he notes, "in Genesis 1 elohim doesn't have a heavenly council, elohim is the heavenly council." The darker corollary is a "slave-wiring" thesis: humanity was engineered as a workforce, and the reflex to defer, tithe, and sacrifice is the vestige of that original design.

The Scars of Eden (2021) takes the result on a world tour of contact traditions and asks the subtitle's question — has humanity confused the idea of God with memories of ET contact? Its central analogy is the Spanish missionaries' equation of the Incan Viracocha with the Christian God: "This is why confusing GOD with other entities, whether Viracocha, the Elohim, the Sky People or the Engineers, is such a critical error." The world's origin stories, he argues, "read like the flashbacks of a patient with amnesia." The book assembles a star-origin catalogue — Sirius (the Dogon), Orion (the Egyptian and Mayan books of the dead), and above all the Pleiades (Cherokee, Aboriginal Australian) — and reads Job 38's roll-call of the Pleiades, Orion, and "Sirius with her satellites" as a surviving "Sky Council" text. It names the mechanism of forgetting as a seven-stage suppression running from the Ten Commandments through the sixth-century redaction, Theodosius, the Nag Hammadi burial, and the conquistadors to the 1947 National Security Act — and, at its boldest, turns the telescope around: in the "Hugo is my cat" parable Wallis casts humanity as, to some visitors, "like pets… like cattle… like vermin."

Echoes of Eden (2022) asks what human capacities were buried along with the memory of contact. Its answer is a cognitive-downgrade thesis: reading the Popol Vuh's account of a "noxious vapour" sprayed over early humanity to "limit their power of vision," Wallis proposes that our makers deliberately dialled down a species they had made too intelligent, switching off latent faculties — "telepathy, precognition, and remote viewing" — to leave a manageable workforce. He grounds the claim in Acquired Savant Syndrome (Darold Treffert's catalogue of injury-released genius) as evidence that the faculties remain inhibited rather than absent. The book also debuts the Akhekh argument and its wider dragons-and-teachers duality (below): the serpent-dragon is kept deliberately "light and shade," and its benevolent pole — the feathered serpent as the engineer of humanity — is the seed of the reading the corpus most values. Its thesis line: at all costs "we mere humans must forget who we really are: powerful cosmic beings with … advanced cognitive abilities lying latent and waiting to be activated."

The Eden Conspiracy (2023) reconstructs the redaction on a divine-council foundation. Its presiding figure is El Elyon, "above the others," and Yahweh, Wallis concludes, "is in fact the junior of El Elyon, one of a number of subordinate elohim," each allotted a share of the planet (see The Council of Power, below). Onto that he lays two distinct upheavals a reader should keep apart: the "silent coup" — the Josiah-era textual centralization and sixth-century redaction whose "grammatical glitches were the scar tissue left by the surgery that changed the Bible from a library of paleocontact into a book about God" — and the "Great Coup" of 1 Samuel 8, where the people themselves replace Yahweh's direct rule with a human king. He details the editorial machinery: the priest Hilkiah's conveniently discovered scroll, the "blame the foreign wife" device for excusing pro-Asherah kings, and Hezekiah's destruction of the bronze serpent Nehushtan as "a deliberate and radical rebranding of YHWH himself." Asked directly whether the Bible is a conspiracy, Wallis answers "Short answer: 'Yes!'" — then adds at once, "I don't think it is fair of us to demonize these redactors… to their own thinking there was an integrity to what they were doing." Its moral thesis: "worshipping a monster makes monsters out of us."

The Invasion of Eden (2024) asks the darkest form of the question — whether some of the remembered visitors were exploiters — and keeps the answer deliberately non-binary. The "invasion" he argues for is cultural annexation, not bombardment: he stresses that in the whole filed record of modern encounters "there is not even a single incidence of 'non-human' aggression," and locates the signature of conquest in soft controls — loss of land-rights, debt-money, proxy war, governance by threat — read off the Hawaiian Mo'olele traditions and the biblical Seba Hassamayim ("Sky Armies"). Of the visitations in his own proof-texts he counts roughly two-thirds benevolent, and warns that "it is not that we humans are the goodies and the ETs are the baddies": world mythology is "a kaleidoscope of colours," and the task is to "move beyond a 'friend or foe' mentality." The book closes forward-looking, on a note the corpus reads with interest — that when humanity "finally master[s] spacetime and become[s] a truly space-faring civilization" the relationship will change, and "we will be in each other's midst, not as retrievals, abductees or resources for research, but as neighbours."

The Eden Enigma (2025) goes to ground in the Van highlands of eastern Türkiye. Reading the Urartian reliefs of winged Dingir ("Advanced Beings") tending trees of life — pinecone (mullilu) and bucket (banduddu) in hand — Wallis takes the hand-pollination motif literally: "when the royal artists at Ayanis and Erebuni show the benevolent Dingir hand-pollinating the trees of life, they are showing us the dawn of civilization as we know it." He argues the geography of Eden is here: Ezekiel's gan elohim ("garden of the powerful ones") is behar elohim ("in the mountain country of the powerful ones"), Genesis sets the reboot al hare Ararat, and "Ararat is the Masoretic Hebrew way of writing Urartu. It is the same word." Above the city of Van, the "Light Gate" of Meher Kapı — whose doorway names forty-seven Dingir who "materialized … in the deep past" — carries a local promise that Haldi "will return one day on a beam of light." And the book takes on the biblical scholar Michael Heiser directly: crediting him for admitting the Bible's Mesopotamian dependency, Wallis rejects his "inversion" thesis point by point and reads the First-Temple-era Yeho'ezer seal, engraved with a winged figure "indistinguishable from an Urartian Dingir," as evidence a senior Judean official still signed his name under the old imagery. Its summary line: "Our ancestors were the rememberers. We are the ones who have misunderstood."

Signature readings

Wallis's argument rests on a small, fixed lexicon of Hebrew and Greek words returned to their concrete root senses; the same retranslations recur book to book. Several parallel readings the corpus catalogs in the list of etymological readings ; others are distinctively his own.

The plural and the Council

• elohim = "the Powerful Ones." The foundation of the series, read as an ordinary masculine plural (the -im of kruv/kruvim), not a plural of majesty. The canon's own gloss is functional — "those who came from the sky" — while Wallis's is root-based; they pick out the same referent.
• benei elohim = "the God-like ones." Not "sons of God" but, on his reading, a distinct species standing to the elohim as "humans" stand to "humankind" — the Watchers of Genesis 6.
• El Elyon = "above the others." Not the abstract "Most High" but a relative rank — "higher than the rest," a position of command — which Wallis makes the president of the Council (below).
• El Shaddai = "the Powerful One, the Destroyer" (root shadad, "to act with violence, to devastate"), against the traditional "God Almighty," a sense the standard lexica themselves call uncertain.
• seba hassamayim = "the Sky Armies." The airborne "armies of the sky," not the "heavenly host" of the hymnbooks.

The craft in the text

Wallis's boldest cluster reads a set of technical terms as the vocabulary of machinery rather than glory:

• kavod = "a heavy thing." Ezekiel's kavod as hardware: "not what we think of as the 'glory of God.' It was a machine."
• ruach = a hovering, wind-making craft (a Sumerian loan, he argues, surviving in the Amharic roha), not "spirit."
• tub = "the goods," heavy equipment rather than divine "goodness"; hayyah (conventionally "living creature") = the "life-form" piloting the kavod, which addresses Ezekiel as "Earthling."
• keli mashetow / keli mappasow = "the destroying thing" and "the shattering thing," the weapons of the executioners in Ezekiel 9.
• bab-el = "the gateway of the Powerful Ones," cross-read with the Sumerian dispatch of "three hundred observers to their stations in the stars"; the Babel event as the destruction of "a technological, spacefaring civilization."

The reframed theology

• YHWH as a loan word and "the memory of a sound." The name enters the record at Midian with no Hebrew etymology, to be treated "as the memory of a sound, rather than a memory of meaning" — the hinge of the dragon reading below.
• olam ≠ "eternal." Following the lexicographer Daniel Garrone, Wallis reads olam as "the unknown," "the Great Beyond," even "plural worlds or universes" — draining the word of the timeless-eternity theology built on it.
• Yeshua = "salvation from Yahweh." A deliberate re-pointing of the name usually read "Yahweh is salvation," turning Jesus's mission against the Powerful One rather than toward him.

Places and names

• adam = "the earthling" (from adamah, the soil) and Eve = "the Living" — "the stories of Adam" and "of Eve" read as stories of the earthling and the living rather than of two individuals.
• Ur of the Chaldees relocated. Reading Xaldaion through the Urartian god-name Haldi ("taken" or "conquered"), The Invasion of Eden and The Eden Enigma move Abraham's origin from Woolley's southern Ur to the high country of Ararat / Urartu — "the same word," on his reading, as Genesis's al hare Ararat.

The one reading the corpus formally audits — the Akhekh identification — is treated in full below.

The Council of Power

The spine of The Eden Conspiracy is a divine-council reading that runs close to the corpus's own. Wallis calls the body the El-Ba'adat, "the Council of Power," and identifies it with the seba hassamayim: "project Earth," he writes, "has been governed over by a federation of beings as diverse as the crowd in the famous Star Wars bar scene." At its head is El Elyon, "above the others"; beneath him sit a number of subordinate elohim, each allotted a territory and its people. Wallis reads Deuteronomy 32:8–9 as the literal record of that allotment — Elyon "parceling the humans out among the elohim," with "Yahweh's portion" being Jacob — and reads the Hebrew Bible's rival deities as fellow council-members holding neighbouring jurisdictions: Akhekh of Egypt, the El of Ekron (with whom Yahweh trades insults as one elohim to another), El Shaddai the Destroyer, the "prince of Persia" of Daniel 10. The decisive move is his placement of Yahweh within, not above, this body: Yahweh "is in fact the junior of El Elyon, one of a number of subordinate elohim." He cites the textual scholar Emanuel Tov for the reading that "Elyon, El and Yahweh correspond to three different individuals," and Mauro Biglino's tally of some twenty distinct beings in the text.

This is, structurally, the Council of the Eternals of the Raëlian canon — a governing body of the Elohim, deliberating over the human project and presided over by one of their number. The convergence is striking given Wallis's independence from the source material. The sharp divergence is one of rank: Wallis subordinates Yahweh beneath El Elyon as a regional junior, whereas the canon makes Yahweh himself the Council's president. The corpus reads the "Most High" language not as a superior standing over Yahweh but as one of the Council's own titles; Wallis reads it as the trace of the senior whom the redactors later fused with Yahweh to manufacture a single God.

The dragon, the serpent, and the teacher

The reading that most caught this project's attention is Wallis's treatment of the dragon. Across Echoes of Eden and The Eden Conspiracy he assembles a worldwide family of serpent- and dragon-names that share a percussive k-k / k-ch / ch-ch sound — Kukulkan, Ququmatz, Quetzalcoatl (Mesoamerica), Kucedra and the Stoor Worm (Celtic), Kholkhis (Georgia), Coca (Iberia), the Nagas (India), Teng (China), and, in Egypt, Akhekh — and argues, through a sound-softening ("affrication") chain, that the name behind YHWH belongs to the same family: "Akhekh is the Egyptian dragon. Yakhwekh is the Hebrew name." On this reading the Bible's own dragon-language is Yahweh's — the fiery ap (nostrils), the leathery skin and flight-feathers, the tribute of "gold, beef, lamb and virgin girls," the Leviathan of Isaiah 27:1 — and Joshua's Shechem assembly becomes a choice between "ACH ECH of Egypt or yACHwECH of Israel." (The corpus's philological audit, in The Archdeacon and the Dragon, finds the specific phonology fails — YHWH is written with he, not the guttural ḥet the argument needs — while judging the structural claim beneath it, Yahweh as one regional Powerful One among peers, well founded on other grounds.)

What makes the reading matter to the canon is that Wallis keeps the dragon dual — "light and shade," in his phrase. Drawing on Julien d'Huy's morphological work, he distinguishes an ancient stratum of dragon-stories — benevolent rain-, river-, and agriculture-giving serpents "taking pity" on humanity — from a later stratum of predatory overlords. His emblem of the benevolent pole is the Chinese tale of the four dragons who "break rank" to bring water to starving humans against the sky-emperor's will and are punished for it, buried each beneath a mountain. It is the same shape he reads in Genesis 3: the Serpent is a Council member who performs an "unauthorized upgrade" on humanity and is exiled to Earth for it — a dissenting benefactor, not a tempter.

Here Wallis and the canon read the same figure from opposite ends. In the Raëlian frame the serpent-and-dragon imagery belongs to Lucifer 's faction — the Elohim who broke the Council's discipline to give humanity the knowledge of its own making, were punished for it, and in part remained on Earth to help the people they had raised. Wallis's benevolent dragon — the one who breaks rank, upgrades humanity, and is exiled beneath the Earth — is, structurally, that faction reconstructed from the outside, from Chinese, Mesoamerican, and Hebrew sources at once. The two frameworks part only on where they pin the hostile dragon: Wallis makes it Yahweh himself, the overlord to be escaped; the canon keeps Yahweh a man, president of the Council, and reads the pursuing dragon-language of Isaiah 27:1 as Yahweh's government hunting the exiled Lucifer faction. The picture that survives the disagreement is the one Wallis's dragon-material makes vivid: the serpent as a teacher who paid for the gift, not a monster who tempted.

Theology

Wallis did not exit into atheism. His constructive position separates YHWH-as-character — "a Powerful One … often punitive and brutal" — from "GOD – the harmonious Source of all things," glimpsed in Amos, the Johannine prologue, and Paul at Athens. His Jesus stands against the Yahweh narratives ("Jesus never used the name Yahweh as a name for God. It's that simple.") in a reading he acknowledges as the vindication of Marcion's distinction, though unlike Marcion he keeps the Hebrew Bible as indispensable evidence. He describes himself as "a fan and follower of Jesus for forty-two years" on the model of the pre-Constantinian communities of Thomas and Q, and his pastoral practice with alarmed believers is documented at length in the books: "ninety percent of my detractors are willing and able to make their way into a friendlier discourse once we actually get talking."

Relation to the Wheel of Heaven framework

Beyond the Council polity and the dragon treated above, the convergences are specific and load-bearing: the plural Elohim; the Eden enclosure as a managed installation near exploitable resources, with the prohibition on the tree a matter of policy rather than morality; the Serpent as a dissenting member of the making team, exiled to Earth for upgrading the humans; the Flood as a council decision with a dissenting benefactor forewarning Noah; Babel as the destruction of a spacefaring capability; and a monotheizing edit that concealed all of it. The corpus's Satan entry additionally credits The Eden Conspiracy with "substantial Satan–Lucifer disentanglement content" — Wallis, like the corpus, refuses the late conflation of the Eden serpent with the Job prosecutor.

The divergences are equally structural, and honestly held. Wallis subordinates Yahweh beneath El Elyon and pins the Bible's dragon-imagery on him; the corpus keeps Yahweh a man and president of the Council of the Eternals (both set out above). Wallis reads Jesus against Yahweh; the corpus reads Jesus as Yahweh's son and envoy. Wallis retains a Source-God above the Powerful Ones; the corpus's ontology has no such being — above the Elohim it finds only the infinite in both directions. And where the later Eden Series weighs the evidence for exploitation and invasion, the corpus reads a project conducted, on the whole, in love, with a return to be welcomed rather than an occupation to be resisted — a difference that narrows, notably, in Wallis's own closing image of contact-as-neighbours. The full argument for both lists, with the philological audit of the Akhekh reading, is in The Archdeacon and the Dragon.

Reception

Within the paleocontact tradition Wallis's standing is documented on his own covers: von Däniken ("Paul Wallis is one of my best colleagues. I have full respect for him") and Biglino blurb the later books, and George Noory called Escaping from Eden "this generation's Chariots of the Gods." From his former world the reception ran from quiet distancing — colleagues telling him "let's stay friends, but I won't be reading your book" — to the hate mail he reprints verbatim and answers with pastoral patience. Mainstream biblical scholarship has not engaged the Eden Series in the academic literature; the nearest engagement is adversarial by proxy, since Michael Heiser's divine-council corpus covers the same plurality data while rejecting paleocontact readings categorically, and Wallis answers Heiser directly in The Eden Enigma. The corpus's own positioning is on record across a dozen entries and is best summarized by its source-catalog verdict on The Eden Conspiracy: "broadly compatible with the corpus's reading; the principal accessible recent treatment."

Paul Wallis. (2026). Wheel of Heaven. https://www.wheelofheaven.world/wiki/paul-wallis/

"Paul Wallis." Wheel of Heaven, 2026, https://www.wheelofheaven.world/wiki/paul-wallis/.

"Paul Wallis." Wheel of Heaven, 2026. https://www.wheelofheaven.world/wiki/paul-wallis/.

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  author       = {{Wheel of Heaven}},
  title        = {Paul Wallis},
  year         = {2026},
  howpublished = {\url{https://www.wheelofheaven.world/wiki/paul-wallis/}},
  note         = {CC0-1.0 public domain}
}