Director Ariel Semmel is convinced that aliens have abducted him, runs the headline in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz. And he’s made a documentary film about it.
My friend Professor Yaakov Ariel was kind enough to send me a link to the article by Nirit Anderman, which appeared on the Haaretz website on July 24, 2019. There’s an English edition of Haaretz, but this article apparently was published only in Hebrew. It deserves to be known to the world of non-Hebrew-speaking UFOlogy, not least because it breaks very considerably from what we’ve come to expect of an abduction narrative.
Semmel never sees the aliens who’ve supposedly abducted him. He never sees a UFO. His experience has other associations, which lead in directions that most UFOlogists wouldn’t anticipate.
I know nothing whatever about Semmel, apart from this article and what I’m able to glean from rudimentary Googling. For the information I’m about to present, I’m entirely dependent on Anderman’s account.
The abduction, or whatever you want to call it, is old news. It happened in 1996, when Semmel was 32 years old and alien abductions were just a little past their peak as a cultural phenomenon (mostly American). What is new is Semmel’s film on his experience–or on himself, and how his experience fit into his life story–which was shown at the Jerusalem Film Festival this past summer, a few days after Anderman’s article appeared. He called the film “Parano,” which I gather from Googling to be French slang for “paranoid.” (Overtones of “paranormal” also?)
He was born in 1964. His mother, 17 years old, conceived him in a one-night stand with a neighborhood hoodlum. He didn’t find out about this, however, until long afterward. He was adopted, illegally, by a 45-year-old Holocaust survivor who swore her family to absolute secrecy about the boy’s origins. Only when she died–in 2015, if I’m reading Anderman’s dates correctly, which would make her 96 years old–did they break their silence.
“One of them … asked me, ‘Ariel, if I told you you’re not Polish, what would you want to be?’ I said I had no idea. Then he said to me, ‘You’re an Iraqi,’ and burst out laughing.”
As a boy, Semmel knew nothing of this. He took for granted that he was an Ashkenazi, a Jew of East European origin, which connected him ethnically to the respectable establishment of 1960s and 70s Israel. (As opposed to the supposedly uncouth “communities of the East”–Jews from places like Iraq or Morocco.) Yet he was wild, rebellious, with a police record at age 12. Despite having an IQ of 184 (by his account), he dropped out of school at 16 because it bored him.
Anderman makes no mention of Semmel’s having done military service–remarkable for a young Israeli.
His career as photographer and cinematographer took off at meteoric speed. In his twenties he was shuttling between Tel Aviv and New York–where he perhaps heard stories about UFO abductions–living the high life of a libertine bachelor with plenty of money to spend. (“Sex, drugs, and rock ‘n roll,” Anderman describes it, writing English rock ‘n roll as a single word in Hebrew letters.) When his abduction experience came upon him in 1996, he was in bed with one of his many casual partners.
“Suddenly she stands up, gives me a blank stare, and says, ‘I can’t give you the genetic code’–the weirdest sentence I’ve ever heard in my life. I ask, ‘What did you say?’ and she repeats it, her pupils turn odd, and I feel like she’s drawing me in, the way you’re drawn into a tornado.”
Semmel stayed in that “tornado,” it would appear, for the next three days. “Suddenly I’m in space where there are a thousand illuminated cryptographies, turning and spinning about, and I realize that I’m looking at a three-dimensional language that has a mathematical logic. And as the letters turn about in front of me, I feel as if I have a super-intelligence, because these letters are always in motion, always forming new meanings. … And I feel like God … and I start talking in a crazy flow of words and I say to the girl who’s with me … ‘Find a pencil and write this down, because I don’t have any idea what I’m saying.'”
What he’s experiencing, he thinks, is “the mathematical mother-tongue of creation.”
But not only that …
“I saw alien planets with a technology that had nothing to do with anything I’d ever seen in a science-fiction movie. … What I saw was made of materials that don’t exist on Earth. I saw a city built of the most delicate bridges, like a dragonfly’s wings, with a color like bronze. There were buildings that flew in the air, with turbines on their roofs that didn’t make any noise, and entrances for flying machines to go in and out of these buildings. I know this wasn’t my imagination; it was hyper-realistic.”
His companion, meanwhile, watched him vanish and be replaced by a pyramid-like hologram, then by “a man with much larger eyebrows and eyes, and with a scar. Then he disappeared, and Ariel was back.”
They started out in bed. Semmel awoke to find the two of them on the living room floor, both of them naked and in a fetal position. “We said to each other, ‘They’ve stolen our time,’ which is the weirdest sentence I’ve ever spoken in my life.”
They slept and woke, slept again and woke, for three days.
The woman, Semmel told Anderman, actually saw the aliens. (If she told him what they looked like and he told Anderman, she didn’t put it in her article.) He himself had no recollection of having seen them or anything that could be described as a UFO, unless you want to count the flying buildings and the machines that went in and out of them. But he used the conventions of UFOlogy to make sense of his experience, and over the coming years he let himself be drawn into that world. He investigated cases of donkey mutilations, cognate to the American “cattle mutilations” of the 1970s, that had been reported from the south of Israel. He visited Roswell, paid court to Erich von Däniken. In good abductee style, he underwent hypnosis to bring back lost memories of the pivotal event.
Over a period of some 20 years, he made the film “Parano.”
Thus far Semmel’s story. How did he interpret it? How shall we?
To be explored in my next post.
by David Halperin
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David, this gave me chills.
I usually receive information via dreams and this account made me scramble back to my dream diary I’ve kept for 25 years to recall a visit from two human men. I’m in a glass building, tall but not particularly unearthly and I notice two men trying to get my attention. Finally I make time to see them, there’s an urgency about them – they tell me: ‘they have manipulated time.”
I have also had various dreams about Hebrew letters associated with other worldly spaces. I was shown (in true Da Vinci style) a cryptex showing four letters EHAD – very close to Echad (meaning ‘One’ in Hebrew) thus started another spiritual journey into Jewish writings/Kabbalah.
While we’re at it, this brings me to a real event about my phone call from the year 2049. This is just for interest and in this, I was not alone. I wonder if any of your readers have experienced similar ‘weirdness’.
https://medium.com/@avalinakreska/phone-call-from-the-future-18acd46cb6d2
I look forward to reading more about Semmel’s story.
This is fascinating, Avalina! Thanks for posting!
In the second installment, which will be up on Friday, I’ll have something to say about the Kabbalistic roots (as I think) of Semmel’s experience.