Before long, young Halperin was writing letters to USAF officers with Project Blue Book, conducting futile field investigations of local UFO reports, and feeling “like a perpetual outsider, like I was different and apart from everyone else.” The journey led him to explore his Jewish ethnicity, to the ancient Hebrew texts, particularly the Old Testament, where Ezekiel’s fabled wheels were preceded by a “whirlwind … coming out of the north, a great cloud with raging fire engulfing itself.” Remembers Halperin, “It struck me, as a little kid, as something exceedingly spooky.”Background here. His dissertation was actually about merkavah-related passages in the rabbinic texts and was published as his first book. The book on Ezekiel came later (see background link).
Halperin’s quest for clarity would produce a dissertation on the prophet Ezekiel. What followed was an adventure in the scholarship of religion and mythology, numerous trips to Israel — where he lived for more than two years — and ultimately a realization: “What UFOs were there for was to give me a mirror to work out my anxiety of my mother’s slow dying. And when belief lost its function, I gradually lost interest in UFOs. Once you lose faith in something that may be potentially important in these accounts, they nevertheless become extremely dull.”
So last month, all these decades later, Halperin produced his first novel, Journal of a UFO Investigator, a somewhat autobiographical fantasy which is receiving critical acclaim. But the irony of his conversion from “believer” to “skeptic” is not lost upon him.
As for the supposed Jerusalem UFO footage in the interview, forgive me, but it makes me think of the UFO abduction scene in The Life of Brian.