Prophet Yahweh

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Prophet Yahweh

Ramon Watkins, more famously known as Prophet Yahweh, or The Seer of Yahweh (b. 1952 or 1953) is an American man who resides in Las Vegas, Nevada. Prophet Yahweh claims to have the ability to summon UFOs using passages from the Bible. He says that he developed this ability after studying the Old Testament in its original Hebrew form and gaining knowledge related to UFOs from his studies.

Contents

Biography

Prophet Yahweh was born as Ramon Watkins in Memphis, Tennessee. He briefly attended Tuskegee Institute on a basketball scholarship before accepting a football scholarship to Southern Illinois University where he joined the ministry. Prophet Yahweh's first radio ministry occurred on WYZE, an Atlanta, Georgia radio station, in 1978. In 1981, he began his first cable television program at Viacom. In 1996, he began airing a UFO cable TV show in Los Angeles, California.

In 1999, Prophet Yahweh claims he had a dream instructing him to move to Las Vegas. It was on August 1, 1999 that he began broadcasts of his cable television show; Prophet Yahweh – Ufologist.

Notably, "Yahweh" or YHWH is the name of God in Judaism; use of this name may be regarded as blasphemous by religious Jews.

Claims

Prophet Yahweh claims that Yahweh and angels are extraterrestrial beings and that UFOs are their manifestations. Furthermore, he claims that Yahweh in particular is an extremely powerful being residing on a distant planet who controls many if not all of the mechanisms of the universe and creation, he is thus the central figure in the Universe and is the real identity of the figure worshipped by the Abrahamic religions. He claims that UFOs are spacecraft, however unlike traditional thinking by ufologists he claims they are automated and not manned. Yahweh claims that he has been summoning UFOs for the past 25 years and has summoned over 1,500 UFOs but only decided to go to the media with his abilities because he was ordered to do so by Yahweh. His claims regarding religion and UFOs are somewhat similar to other New Age thinkers such as the Heaven's Gate cult; however Prophet Yahweh does not consider himself a New Age religious leader and instead views himself as being Jewish and believes that his beliefs fit into traditional Jewish religious thinking. Although he has adopted the name Prophet he claims he is not truly a prophet and is not the central figure in any coming religious revelation, he is a mere seer and messenger instructed by Yahweh to bring his message of coming UFO sightings to the people of Earth.

Yahweh has made controversial claims about Christianity. According to the Prophet, the modern day Gospel is a forgery in which Jesus is portrayed as a homosexual. However, the Prophet himself admits to being a homosexual in the past, along with being diagnosed as mentally ill.

May 2005 incident

Yahweh claimed that for 45 days, from June 1 until July 15th, 2005, he would summon a series of UFOs over the city of Las Vegas. In particular one ship would hover directly over the city for a period of two days, in an area where millions of people would be able to witness the craft. This event was referred to as The Descent by Yahweh as it is meant to reveal to the population of Earth that UFOs are real. Following The Descent would come another period of time where the UFOs would land, this time manned by the extraterrestrial beings who had created them, at which point the alien life will make contact with humanity, explain themselves and the Universe to a greater extent, and set up an eternal kingdom on the planet. However, these events never happened.

On May 28, 2005 a news crew from KTNV Channel 13 (a Las Vegas ABC affiliate) met with Prophet Yahweh in order to do a piece for the 11:00 news about his predictions. The piece was to be humorous and skewer Yahweh's far-fetched and seemingly frivolous predictions. The news crew chose the day, time, and location and Prophet Yahweh had no prior knowledge of where or when the event would take place until thirty minutes before. As Prophet Yahweh claimed to be summoning UFOs with KTNV's reporter Mike Dello Stritto near him and a camera-crew taping him, two unidentified objects appeared in the sky. One was a white object that appeared and maneuvered in the sky before disappearing. The second was an orange orb that appeared and made strange maneuvers in the air before disappearing as well. The incident was completely caught on tape and shown on that evening's newscast. The reporter, Stritto, claims that he went into the incident hoping to make light of Yahweh's claims but left impressed and genuinely believing he had seen some sort of unidentified object. KTNV subsequently made calls to Nellis Air Force Base to see if they could account for any aircraft or aerial objects in the area at that time. Nellis never responded.

A few days after the period when his prophecy was supposed to happen, the prophet announced that he was going to begin a 50 State UFO Summoning Tour 2005, during which he would travel to every state in the United States and summon UFOs for media outlets to film and photograph. He claimed to have been abandoned by all of the media in Las Vegas, resulting in the UFOs not coming during the 45 days he had prophesied:

The spaceship would never have appeared if I was not filmed calling it down. This is what the space beings wanted. They wanted me captured on film with their spaceship so everyone would know that these beings have chosen me to speak for them and no other person. The space beings kept their end of the bargain by sending a real UFO, on my signal, that was documented. But, Las Vegas media refused to film me calling down the spaceship. That's why it never happened.

Media

A short time before Prophet Yahweh's apparent summoning of UFOs on local news, Yahweh had appeared on the nationwide radio program Coast to Coast AM. Shortly after the incident, Prophet Yahweh appeared on the Alan Colmes radio program and conservative news website World Net Daily [1]. The story was also widely reported in digital, television and print media.

Although Yahweh received little media publicity in the immediate aftermath of the KTNV incident, the Internet news website UFO digest.com secured what they claimed was an exclusive interview with him. The Prophet also received lots of attention on various blogs in June 2005, such as boing boing [2], as well as many personal blogs who have reposted the story and video. He can be considered at least a brief Internet phenomenon.

JREF Challenge

In June 2005, Yahweh applied to James Randi's Million Dollar Challenge, and was set to undertake their challenge (to prove his ability to summon UFOs) in January 2006. However, in December 2005, the JREF closed his claim file, due to disagreements over new requirements proposed by Yahweh, particularly his request that armed security be present.

Debunking

1997 picture that claims to be of Prophet Yahweh holding a bundle of balloons

The picture to the right purportedly shows Prophet Yahweh holding a bundle of balloons. Prophet Yahweh himself, however, claimed on the Coast to Coast AM radio show that it is not him. He says that he is only half-African American and therefore rather light-skinned whereas the man in the photograph is rather dark-skinned. Prior to the Yahweh story, the picture was (and still remains) one of the first images that appears on a Google image search for "weather balloon". The picture comes from a Girl Scouts page from the website of Intel Computer Clubhouse, a project of Boston's Museum of Science in collaboration with the MIT Media Laboratory. source

One explanation that has been offered to account for Prophet Yahweh's purported ability to summon UFOs is that when he goes into meditation, he sends a digital signal to a friend a mile or so away who then releases balloons into the air. Yahweh then only has to scan the sky for the balloons. However this is mere speculation and no evidence of this has been found. Furthermore, during the KTNV incident, the news crew took Yahweh to a location of their choosing at a time of their choosing, without disclosing it to Yahweh beforehand. It would therefore be difficult for a friend to locate the crew and place himself in the vicinity in order to launch the balloons. Many have also claimed that the objects seen in the KTNV news segment do not exhibit the movements or characteristics of balloons.

It is claimed by some that Prophet Yahweh was involved in a program to help underprivileged African-American children in 1997 during which he developed an interest in weather balloons. 1997 was also the year Yahweh went public with his ability to summon UFOs, leading some to tie the two facts together. Yahweh claims he had been summoning UFOs for 25 years prior, however.

External links

Sceptical analysis and debunking


Copyright

"Original data received from Wikipedia on April 21, 2006. Credit given to original authors can be seen Here."

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