An Italian scholar who spent years translating the Hebrew Bible for a major Catholic publishing house says he was dismissed the moment he put his real conclusions on paper, conclusions that recast the God of scripture as a group of mortal, technologically advanced beings rather than a single divine creator.

Mauro Biglino, the translator at the center of the controversy, made the claim during an interview on the Project Unity podcast hosted by Jay Anderson. His argument hinges on one Hebrew word that appears 2,570 times in the Old Testament: Elohim.

Modern Bibles render that word simply as "God." Biglino insists the original text tells a different story, and that the institution he worked for wanted it kept quiet. The Daily Mail reported on Biglino's claims and the broader theory he has built across multiple books, including Gods of the Bible and the posthumous collaboration Skies Aflame, co-authored with the late Swiss writer Erich von Däniken.

What Biglino actually claims

Biglino's employer was Edizioni San Paolo, described as a major Catholic publishing house linked to the Vatican. The headline framing, "fired by the Vatican", is Biglino's own shorthand. The body of the reporting identifies Edizioni San Paolo, not the Vatican itself, as the entity that employed and then dismissed him. Neither Edizioni San Paolo nor the Vatican has issued any public statement confirming or denying the claim.

That distinction matters. Edizioni San Paolo is described as "linked to" the Vatican, but whether it is formally Vatican-owned, Vatican-affiliated, or simply an independent Catholic press is not clarified in any available reporting. Biglino's version of events collapses all of that into a single dramatic sentence.

"When I started to write what I really read in the Hebrew Bible, I was fired in one minute."

The core of Biglino's thesis is linguistic. He argues that Elohim is a plural noun that appears with both singular and plural verbs throughout the Old Testament, and that translating it as a single, omnipotent God is a theological choice, not a textual one. In Gods of the Bible, he wrote:

"Where people read 'God' and were led to believe that the biblical authors had written the word 'God,' scholars read the untranslated term 'Elohim' and were made aware that this term is problematic."

Hebrew dictionaries, Biglino notes, offer at least seven possible meanings for the word: "gods," "judges," "rulers," "superhuman beings," "angels," "children of God," and "those from above." Specialist editions of the Bible often leave the Hebrew word untranslated precisely because its meaning remains disputed.

From translation dispute to alien theory

Where Biglino departs from mainstream biblical scholarship, sharply, is in what he does with that ambiguity. He doesn't stop at arguing that Elohim is plural. He concludes that the beings described in the Hebrew Bible were flesh-and-blood extraterrestrials who possessed advanced technology and longer lifespans but were ultimately mortal.

"The Elohim were flesh and blood, but with a longer lifespan, but still mortal, with higher technology and higher powers."

The Vatican has not been shy about exercising institutional authority when it perceives threats to doctrinal order. But Biglino's claims sit in a peculiar space, outside any formal ecclesiastical proceeding and unsupported by any official Vatican response on the record.

Biglino also reinterprets the ancient Hebrew word ruah, traditionally rendered as "spirit" or "breath of God." He argues it had a far more concrete meaning:

"The ancient Hebrew term 'ruah' had a very concrete meaning, as it stood for 'wind,' 'breath,' 'moving air,' 'storm wind,' and thus, in a broader sense, for 'that which moves swiftly through the air space.'"

He applies this reading to the Book of Ezekiel, written more than 2,500 years ago, and arrives at a conclusion that would make any seminary professor reach for a red pen. In Gods of the Bible, he wrote that Ezekiel's famous vision amounts to "a description of a very close encounter with an unidentified object that was undoubtedly in the air." He added that the prophet saw "a fire (a propulsion system?) rotating around itself, like luminous radiation."

The von Däniken connection

Biglino's collaboration with Erich von Däniken places his work squarely in the "ancient astronaut" tradition that von Däniken popularized with Chariots of the Gods in 1968. That book argued extraterrestrials visited ancient civilizations and shared advanced technology with humanity. It sold millions of copies and launched a genre. Von Däniken died earlier this year, and Skies Aflame, his joint project with Biglino, was completed before his death.

The ancient-astronaut framework has drawn persistent criticism from mainstream archaeologists, historians, and theologians for decades. It also raises a question the reporting does not answer: does Biglino hold any formal academic credentials in biblical Hebrew or related fields beyond his work for Edizioni San Paolo? No credentials are cited.

The Catholic Church faces no shortage of institutional controversies at the moment. But Biglino's claims occupy a different category, less a crisis of governance than a fringe challenge to foundational theology, advanced without peer review and promoted primarily through podcasts and popular books.

A competing scholarly view

Biglino is not entirely alone in reading Psalm 82 as a reference to a divine council rather than a single deity. Biblical scholar Michael S. Heiser also interpreted that passage as describing multiple divine figures. But Heiser drew a very different conclusion: he viewed those figures as spiritual beings, not extraterrestrials. The gap between "a council of spiritual beings in a theological text" and "mortal aliens with propulsion systems" is not a small one.

Biglino frames the divide bluntly. "If Elohim are not God," he said, "the Bible is another Book." That line captures both the appeal and the problem with his thesis. If you accept his premise, that the Hebrew text describes alien visitors, then the entire architecture of Judeo-Christian theology collapses. If you don't, his work reads as a provocative misuse of genuine linguistic complexity.

The current papacy under Pope Leo XIV has taken bold and sometimes surprising positions on a range of issues. But on the question of whether scripture describes alien visitors, neither the Vatican nor any major Catholic institution has dignified Biglino's theory with a formal rebuttal, which may itself be a kind of answer.

What remains unanswered

Several basic questions hang over this story. No date has been provided for Biglino's dismissal from Edizioni San Paolo. No statement from the publisher has surfaced. The precise institutional relationship between Edizioni San Paolo and the Vatican remains undefined. And no independent Hebrew scholar has been quoted responding to Biglino's specific translation claims.

Biglino's podcast interview and book sales continue. His theory has found an audience among UFO enthusiasts and ancient-astronaut believers. Whether it has found any traction among credentialed biblical scholars is a different matter, and one the available reporting does not address.

The persecution of Christians around the world remains a deadly serious issue. Believers in China, the Middle East, and sub-Saharan Africa face imprisonment, violence, and death for their faith. Against that backdrop, a former publisher's translator selling books about biblical aliens is not exactly a threat to the Church. It is, at most, a footnote, one that says more about the market for sensationalism than about the text of scripture.

Ancient Hebrew is genuinely complex. The word Elohim genuinely raises translation questions that serious scholars have debated for centuries. But the leap from "this word is hard to translate" to "the Bible is about mortal aliens with spaceships" is not scholarship. It is speculation dressed in a lab coat, and the fact that a Catholic publisher once employed the man making the claim does not make it theology.

If the strongest evidence for your theory is that you got fired for it, you might want stronger evidence.