In the 1996 blockbuster film Independence Day, directed by Roland Emmerich, the President of the United States (played by actor Bill Pullman) learns that aliens crash landed near Roswell, NM, shortly after the close of World War 2. He is told that their bodies were spirited away to a top-secret military facility in Nevada known as Area 51. It's one of the movie's sub-plots.

In developing his fictional storyline, Emmerich drew on events that are believed by some to have happened in 1947. That's when, on Independence Day of that year, a rancher in New Mexico reportedly found debris from a crashed UFO on his property. Air Force officials later told him that what had crashed on his property was a weather balloon. However, true believers in UFOs found that explanation profoundly unsatisfying. An entire industry subsequently grew up around the Roswell incident. Rumors persisted that the government was trying to cover up the fact that a UFO had crashed on earth. Some reports even said that the bodies of aliens had been recovered. The City of Roswell has embraced the UFO legend for more than half a century and does a brisk tourist business catering to UFO enthusiasts and curiosity seekers. For info from the History Channel about the Roswell incident,click here.

Wikipedia has a good summary of what we have known, up until now, about Area 51: click here

Now the government is declassifying more documents about Area 51 that were restricted as "top secret" during the Cold War era and even up until now. It turns out that the "weather balloon" explanation wasn't entirely on the up and up (surprise, surprise, the government fibbed!)--so the UFO people were onto something after all. A lot of what was happening in that sprawling, remote California-Nevada desert northeast of Edwards AFB was related to research, experimentation, and the testing of military aircraft, including stealth technology. So in that sense, there were, indeed, "unidentified flying objects" (UFOs) in those desert skies!

The National Security Archives are housed at George Washington University in Washington, DC. The latest batch of declassified documents is labeled "The Area 51 File: Secret Aircraft and Soviet MiGs--Declassified Documents Describe Stealth Facility in Nevada (National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 443)." It tells us, among other interesting tidbits of information, that the US military secretly obtained Soviet MIG fighters during the Cold War years for testing purposes. Where did they get them? We still don't know.

Check out the latest archive for yourself by clicking here.

Some skeptics charge that the Bible, like Area 51, also needs to be demythologized. Thomas Jefferson, the third president of the United States and main author of our Declaration of Independence, edited the New Testament to produce a version of the Gospels that omitted the miracles of Jesus. The so-called "Jefferson Bible" reflected Jefferson's belief that Jesus of Nazareth was a great religious leader and moral teacher but not a miracle worker. Jefferson evidently thought he had rescued the NT from religious mythology and fanciful imagination.

Unlike the mythology that grew up around Roswell and Area 51, however, the NT narrative has a firm historical foundation consisting of numerous consistent and credible eyewitness accounts (1 John 1:1-3). Furthermore, not all of those accounts were written by "friendlies." Ancient Jewish sources, for example, do not dispute that Jesus worked miracles; on the contrary, they assume that He did! The Talmud explains the miracles of Jesus by suggesting that He used magic that He learned in Egypt (Sanhedrin 107b; Sotah 47a). It never says the miracles didn't happen.

Wouldn't you think that if the Lord's miracles were a figment of someone's overly active imagination, His enemies in the first century religious establishment would have been the first ones to alert us to that fact?

That's why demythologizing the Bible is such a sticky business! It's dangerous because the skeptic ends up reading his own unbelief and hardheartedness back into God's Word. It mutilates the Bible by excising one of its central themes--namely, that God has invaded our world in the Person of His Son, Yeshua the Messiah, whose identity was confirmed by the miracles He performed (e.g., Acts 2:22-24).

As Yeshua-believers, we should be all about truth and evidence. We agree that there's a place for demythologizing things that aren't true. But when it comes to Yeshua the Messiah and God's holy Word, we'd better keep it real!