When Ozarkers want to take a little trip into the past, they might choose a museum, a Civil War battlefield, a cemetery or a theme park like Silver Dollar City.

Paul Von Ward thinks that for some "advanced beings," Earth might be that kind of destination.

"Some are trying to help humans -- to give us good information," says Von Ward of the visitors he calls "ABs." "Some continue to try to manipulate humans for their own ends. And for some, I think it's just plain observation, like our anthropologists and biologists study other species -- just to see what's happening with us."

If Von Ward's theories are correct, ABs helped make humans what we are today. They are not only the "gods" of myth and religion, but our ancestors: The speaker, researcher and author of "Gods, Genes, and Consciousness: The Case for Nonhuman Intervention Throughout the Ages," believes ABs mated with early humans to advance the development of the species. And he thinks they remained intimately involved with mankind until their own squabbling forced them to leave Earth -- or to be less open in their presence here.

"I think the significant story is not that there are a few UFOs or a few aliens around, but that they have always been here," says Von Ward, who will speak April 14-16 at the Ozark UFO Conference in Eureka Springs. "It's all part of the natural universe we ought to be studying."

Von Ward might seem the least likely proponent of a theory that elevates alien visitors to the status of gods. He started graduate school as a Southern Baptist minister who wanted to combine a career in religion and psychology "to be helpful to young people."

But, he counters, he was always interested in the big metaphysical questions: Who are we? How did we get here? What are we doing here?

"In graduate school, I became more and more interested in parapsychology, precognition, telepathy -- things outside both the religious perspective and the academic perspective," he says. "I dropped out of grad school in the middle of my doctoral program to go into the Navy and get a different perspective for myself.

"The more I traveled and worked in different parts of the world, the most I discovered that humans around the world see reality in many different ways," Von Ward goes on. "So my comfortable Southern upbringing was pretty much shattered. And once you break Humpty Dumpty, you can't put him back together again."

Von Ward admits he did have his own experiences -- "I don't call them paranormal, I call them natural," he clarifies -- and he was reminded by his parents of visits from ABs -- beings he called "Woke" and "Wokem" -- when he was a child. But it was study of world cultures that convinced him that "humans have been impacted by ABs from the beginning."

"If you look at every culture -- whether it's the Genesis story in the Hebrew tradition, Sumarian creation myths in Mesopotamia, the Hindu stories of the gods shaping human life -- around the world, it's the same story," he says. "Beings more advanced than humans came down from the sky and created life."

Other stories refer to the time when the "gods" lived on Earth with man. "Then," says Von Ward, "the stories stop talking about direct contact. My hypothesis, which is not unique to me, is that the gods, for their own reasons, pulled back from direct rule of humans about 4,000 years ago.

"If you look back into Middle Eastern history, about 2,000 years B.C., you see the decline of all the city states," he goes on. "Conventional historians call this period from about 1500 B.C. to about 500 A.D. 'the dark ages of Mesopotamia. All of those civilizations deteriorated because the gods who had been keeping everything in order left -- the same thing that happens in developing countries when the more advanced society pulls out."

However, says Von Ward, "the kings who had been given authority and the priesthoods that had grown up around the ABs wanted to keep their power and influence. So they just kept saying the gods would come back."

He thinks they do, regularly.

"Reality is not what they teach in school or the way we talk about it in church," he says. "When we tell the story, we need to take into account all of these pieces."

Dan Bogey, writing for ForeWord magazine, agrees.

"Whether or not one believes that 'advanced beings' even exist, let alone play a vital part in human evolution, 'Gods, Genes, and Consciousness' will prove to be a thought-provoking ... interpretation of human events."

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