Josef Blumrich

Josef F. Blumrich was a European-born engineer who worked at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama, where he was chief of the systems layout branch.

After reading Erich von Däniken, he set out to show that Ezekiel's vision in the Bible could not describe a spacecraft. By his own account he ended up convinced it did, and said he had rarely been so pleased to be proven wrong. His book appeared in German in 1973 and in English in 1974 as The Spaceships of Ezekiel. He reconstructed the four 'living creatures' and the wheels within wheels of Ezekiel 1 as helicopter-like units with legs and multidirectional wheels supporting a central craft, and drew engineering diagrams of it.

Critics said he adjusted the biblical text to fit his design. Biblical scholars read Ezekiel's vision as a description of God's throne-chariot in the imagery of ancient Near Eastern royal and divine iconography, and Ezekiel himself calls it the likeness of the glory of the LORD. Blumrich's idea for a wheel that rolls in any direction is sometimes noted as an engineering by-product of the book.