[Editor’s note: The following article contains excerpts from the timely message delivered by the Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan at The Final Call Administration Building in Chicago, Illinois, on Sunday, January 4, 1987.]
In The Name of Allah, The Beneficent, The Merciful.
News reports were published on the closing day of the old year (1986) that a Japanese pilot, Captain Kenju Terauchi, was flying a jumbo cargo jet plane (Japan Air Lines Flight 1628) from Paris to Tokyo over the Arctic when he saw a strange light and small circular planes following his plane.
They followed him for 400 miles, which meant that he had these strange objects in his view for 50 minutes, at least. In a jumbo jet, if he were going a little over 500 miles an hour, I would assume, then he had what he saw in view for approximately 50 minutes, which is a long time to look at something—and for something to be looking at you.
Now, he noticed the silhouette of a very huge object. Remember, he’s in the sky; I would imagine that he was between 30,000 and 40,000 feet in the air, approximately five miles up. So whatever he saw five miles up looking out of the window of his cockpit, was also up at a considerable height.
Mind you, he said it was a very huge object that appeared to be the size of two aircraft carriers. If you’ve ever seen an aircraft carrier, then you know an aircraft carrier is capable of having on board it up to 7,000 passengers, with, of course, a huge number of airplanes.
But now this was not the size of one aircraft carrier—seeing something that huge in the sky would frighten me, I’m sure. Frighten you, too! But something the size of two aircraft carriers. And an aircraft carrier of the huge type could be over 300 yards long (900 feet to 1,200 feet in length)!
Well, I can understand the pilot was shook. And for the first time, the FAA (Federal Aviation Administration) said that they took note of this object on their radar screens.
This man made a picture of it, and he put the jumbo jet near it to give you some idea of the relative size of this object that he saw in comparison to the huge jumbo jet—the biggest thing that White folks make—and the jumbo jet looked like it could fit in this other plane over 150 times.
Now, let us stop a moment. As Black people, we are very suspicious of Black people. And whenever a teacher arises from among our own ranks telling us something that you did not learn from White folks, we are automatically suspicious of that person, and we believe they have made it up.
As much as Black people have suffered, and are still suffering, and as much as you go to church and talk about God and talk about Jesus, and talk about Moses, you are very, very hypocritical in your praise of God and in your talk of the prophets for evidently deep down in your own being you really don’t believe that a man Jesus ever existed.
Now, I am saying deep down in your being—I know what you say out of your mouth, and what’s in your conscious mind, but I want to show you your actions, to show that underneath all your “talk” you are absolutely a hypocrite under it. When it comes to putting it to the test, you really don’t have any confidence that God is really real.
I know I’m upsetting you … I will never fail to tell the truth to give you a “good time.” It is better that you be hurt and helped than to be soothed and hurt later.
There are too many preachers that preach to soothe you, never to really help you, because to help you is to hurt you because of your ignorance and your failure to respect yourself and to really love God as we should.
Degenerative life conditions caused by our disbelief
Now, I’m coming right back to something that I said, and I’m going to prove my point. You talk this “God talk.” You talk this “Moses/Jesus/Abraham talk.” But under you there is disbelief. “Well, how can you say that, Minister Farrakhan?”
You say you believe that Jehovah gave Moses to Israel. You say you believe that Moses stood up against Pharaoh, and with the power of a rod given to him by Jehovah, he caused the Red Sea to open and part, and the Children of Israel went through and established a new nation under the guidance of God.
You say you believe that. You read about Ezekiel, you read about Isaiah, you read about Joshua, you read about Elijah and Elisha, and all the old prophets, and you “Right on!” for the work of those great worthies of God.
And when it comes to Jesus, when his name is mentioned a huge clamor arises in the church; just the mention of his name throws people into shakes and whatnot.
But now look at your condition, and mine and ours, and the condition of America and the condition of the world: With all your “love” for God and “love” for Jesus, and “belief” in the prophets, you are in need, right now, of deliverance.
You are poor, ragged, hungry, naked, out of doors and oppressed! No jobs in an economy that is falling apart! Your homes are racked with division and hatred among family members, where children are killing each other—parents killing the children, and the children killing their parents!
You are looking at your sons and your daughters, and the daughters and the sons are looking at their parents, snorting cocaine, spending valuable money buying crack. Saying you believe in God, but your hope is in the lottery; you believe in God,
But “Give me the number” and “Tell me your dream.” You believe that God will make a way, but He will make a way for you through something that He, Himself, condemns, which is gambling.
I want to reason with you. Your children look up and see mommy and daddy snorting coke, blowing reefer smoke in their faces. They see your condition degenerating from day to day, or week to week, from month to month;
And they see the “rise of a rabid racism” that we thought with the civil rights movement and the death of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., that we had conquered the old days of the past.
But now, the old days are back again, and coming back stronger, because White folk never got rid of their hatred of Black people just because they didn’t lynch us as they used to, or they allowed us to come into their hotels and motels and restaurants, and we could go to the toilet on the highway as we traveled.
So, that lulled you to sleep and made you think you were living in the “promised land.” Right where you work, they tolerate you. Even though we have a Black mayor working hard in the city of Chicago, they tolerate him. They tolerate Blacks in positions of power, but they wish they could wreck it and return it to “the old days.”
They want to make Chicago a plantation. They want to make America the old America … The old America where the Indians were subdued, where the Blacks are nothing but servants that are not needed anymore.
You used to be the porters; you used to be the ones to do the dirty work. Today, they don’t even have you portering anymore, dirty-working anymore; that’s given to foreigners. All you can do is “be all you can be,” and join the armed forces.
There’s plenty of room there for you to send your sons and your daughters to fight for a country that has not given us justice one day since our fathers were in this country!
We have eyes, but we cannot see. We have ears, but we are deaf to the truth. And our tongue, even when we know the truth, is stilled by fear of consequences, so we don’t speak even what we know.
We hush up our children when they seem to be bold and somewhat radical, not understanding that our children are from us, but not like us. They are born from your loins and from your womb to make a brighter day.
But since you don’t have the guidance to give them to help them on the way to a brighter day, they are turning, now, to destruction. And you are looking at this with churches on every corner and a bar in the middle of every block. …
My objective, beloved, is only to help you to think and to reason with your faith in God. What I am suggesting, dear beloved brothers and sisters, is that we have needed a deliverer. We have needed a Moses, a Jesus and a Muhammad.
We have needed all the prophets rolled up in one, because we are in all the conditions of their people rolled up into one. … We believe that God gave us the Honorable Elijah Muhammad, as He gave Moses. As He gave Daniel and Ezekiel and Noah and Lot, He gave us a man with guidance and power over the power of Reagan and Pharaoh!
And that man, Elijah, frightened you to death… But every one that came near him, he changed our lives and made us better men and better women. And you saw this with your eyes, but you disbelieved.
The Mother Plane (The Wheel): The Heart of the Teachings of the Honorable Elijah Muhammad
The Honorable Elijah Muhammad only went to the fourth grade of school, but he taught us what no college professor could teach us. And it was Elijah Muhammad, 55 years ago, who started teaching us about a Plane in the sky that was made like a wheel.
He said his Teacher, a Man, Master Fard Muhammad, pointed out to him a dreadful-looking Plane in the sky, a half-a-mile by a half-a-mile; built like the Universe itself (It is circular), and it holds within It 1,500 little wheel-like planes.
When we heard the Honorable Elijah Muhammad say these things, many of us believed. And some of us disbelieved. But Reagan, a classified, bona fide liar, and all of the liars that have surrounded Reagan—and Carter, and Ford, and all of the presidents ….
Since 1930, they have known that this Plane exists! But why won’t they tell the American people? It is because the White man does not want to admit that there is a technology in the world and a power in the world that makes his power look like that jumbo jet in comparison to that huge Plane!
He doesn’t want to admit that he doesn’t have what it takes to deal with what the news reports described the Japanese pilot’s drawing as a “walnut-shaped object” in the sky.
Elijah Muhammad said to us that Ezekiel envisioned this in the Year 595 B.C. And it’s recorded right there in your Bible: Ezekiel looked up—it was a vision—and he saw a Wheel in the middle of the air!
It looked like a “chariot of fire”; “a cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night.” This is what Ezekiel saw! And he said in The Wheel, there was “eyes” in The Wheel. (Ezekiel 1:15-19)
When Elijah Muhammad left the scene—I didn’t say “died,” I said, “left the scene.” Because only finite beings die, but divine men never die because that which they lived for is eternal, and the word that they teach is gone beyond their physical frame.
That’s why Jesus lives! And Moses lives! And Abraham lives! And the righteous live! It is only the wicked who die. So, when Elijah Muhammad left us, it was said that his teaching of a Mother Plane was a joke, it was false, it had other meanings, and his teaching on It was “explained away.”
The very heart of his teaching was ripped out, because the heart of his teaching was, and is, that America’s end as a power in the world has come and that The Lord, Mighty in Power, is here, judging America now! She is coming down, not going up.
I know you don’t want to hear this! That’s why I say you are hypocrites. Because when you pick up your Bible, your Bible tells you of a “Day of Judgment.” You don’t want to believe that you’re living in it.
The Bible tells you that a day would be coming that men and women, and the children, would be doing strange things… The Bible tells you that nation would rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom, and there would be earthquakes and famine and pestilence.
September 17, 1985: My Experience on The Wheel
I was taken up on The Wheel in a Vision, September 1985, and I heard the voice of the Honorable Elijah Muhammad speaking to me from that Wheel on that Wheel.
And I have described what I was shown; his voice was as clear as my voice is to you, telling me what Reagan was about to do. And I went and revealed what he had shown me from The Wheel, knowing that many of you would think I was crazy.
But I don’t care what you think! I’ve got to do what God put on me to do! I can’t try to be pleasing to you, and please God; sometime to please God is to displease you. So since I am not looking for my salvation from you—none of you—then if you are pleased by what I do or say, I thank God. But if you’re displeased in what I say is right, I don’t care.
They want to paint me as some anti-Semitic devil while they read the Book. You’ve got Bibles in every room in your house, but a Bible can’t save you if you won’t open it up and read it! Jesus condemned the Jews. Was he anti-Semitic?
He called them “devils” in the plainest language! He said they were a “generation of vipers,” “adulterers, seeking after a sign.” It’s in the Bible. But the thing is, when the Bible becomes real and somebody jumps off the page of the Bible and starts living it, that’s when you get frightened.
You don’t mind reading the Bible in your bathroom; or, reading it under the bed somewhere. But if a man comes off the page, and then says to a modern Pharaoh, “Let them go!” and says to the modern Jew that “You are the synagogue of Satan”… If I say it—and I say it—what can they do against me but whatever Allah please?
As the Jews instigated the Roman authorities against Jesus, they are instigating the fall of this government! And they are instigating the government to do something about me, right away. I say: Come on!
I went to Libya and told Muammar Gadhafi what America was planning against him before it ever happened. I told him what they were going to bomb, because it was shown to me; and I told him I got it from a Wheel-like object…
The U.S. government doesn’t want to tell you, but when the bombing started the first time, they looked up above and there was a bright-shining object over the Mediterranean that interfered with the communications on that highly sophisticated aircraft carrier. They had to send it back to Florida for repairs. They’re not telling you this!
There is a Power today around us that’s bigger than the power of White folks. I listened to the news; it said the planets were “lining up.” I said, “That’s strange.” White folks have a lot of power, but all they can do is report what’s happening with the planets.
They can line up [Black people], and they can line up preachers, and they can line up politicians, but they can’t line up planets. But the planets were lined up, The Sun, The Moon, The Earth; a few more planets.
In the Book of Luke, Chapter 21, verses 25-26, it reads: “And there shall be signs in the sun, and in the moon, and in the stars; and upon the earth distress of nations, with perplexity; the sea and the waves roaring; Men’s hearts failing them for fear, and for looking after those things which are coming on the earth: for the powers of heaven shall be shaken.”
I picked up my newspaper—my newspaper today is a witness bearer that there is no God but Allah and that Muhammad most surely is His Messenger! All praise is due to Allah. I read the newspaper, and I say, “You laughed at Elijah.
You mocked him. You thought he didn’t know what he was talking about.” The Honorable Elijah Muhammad said America would be “curtailed on all her sides.” She ain’t got but three: The Atlantic, The Pacific and The Gulf of Mexico.
And if you go there and look, the beach is eroding. People that you envied yesterday, that bought property on the beach, built their homes almost in the water, now their homes are gone—and they’re gone, too! And over a six-state area, they were told: “Move inland, quick!,” because the sea and the waves are roaring. What are you roaring about?
“… Men’s hearts failing them with fear for what they see coming upon the Earth.” Read it and weep, Reagan! Read it and weep, you infidels! Read it and weep, you demons! Your end is in sight, for Elijah Muhammad told us what that Plane was to do; and what death and destruction, as well as life, was carried on that Plane.
It’s getting closer, Reagan. What are you going to do when it shows up over Washington? You can’t shoot it out of the sky, you ain’t got nothing! I understand why you want a “star wars initiative.” I know why you want to build a space station:
You think that you will be able to get up there and do a little damage. You fool! You are just like the damn fools that fought against God in the past and thought they could win.
But God never loses—and He didn’t come here today to lose. That’s why today, He doesn’t think two cents of you! He won’t even whip you Himself, He will raise one from the ranks of those that you have destroyed, and then give him power and dominion, and make him Christ, and make him Lord and make him Master.
‘Your Companion errs not, nor does he deviate’
The Holy Qur’an, Surah 53 (“The Star”), verses 1-2: “By the star when it sets! Your companion errs not, nor does he deviate.” This is talking about the death, or the passing from the scene, of a great “star,” a great mind, a great being.
“By the star, when it sets!” Listen… When the Honorable Elijah Muhammad moved from the scene, that was like the setting of a great star. After that star was gone, we couldn’t get guidance from that star anymore unless we believe in the Unseen.
In the Holy Qur’an, Surah 2 (“The Cow”) opens with these words in verse 3: “[Those] who believe in the Unseen and keep up prayer… .” This teaches us that it is not what you “see” that is the power, it’s the Unseen reality (behind-the-scene expression of that reality).
That’s the real power, the Unseen. We see the Earth; we walk on the Earth, but the power behind the Earth, you can’t even see it. The Earth just floats on, in an orbit, is that right? What is the power that upholds the Earth?
You don’t see that power. All you bask in is the power that’s in the Earth, but there’s a power that upholds the Earth that’s bigger than the power that you get from the Earth. You follow what I’m saying?
If we believed in what Elijah Muhammad taught us when he left us, we would believe in the Unseen even though it had not been made manifest.
“Your companion errs not, nor does he deviate.” It’s just that we didn’t understand. The Honorable Elijah Muhammad didn’t speak out of desire. The Holy Qur’an, Surah 53 (“The Star”), verses 4-5: “It is naught but revelation that is revealed—One Mighty in power has taught him.” …
Who in America, who in the world was teaching about this “unidentified flying objects” 55 years ago? Nobody! But a man taught it, and stuck by it, and here comes, now, the revelation that “It’s real!” And even if you think the man was mistaken, soon you’re going to see them! …
Elijah Muhammad was right on it. I’m only too sorry that so many of us, since he has been gone, have lost our lives, lost our minds, lost our way, all because we took him to be in error. And we find out now, later on, he was not in error; we were the ones in error to go away from him.
And just as The Qur’an says, one day we will say: “Woe, is me!,” and we will “bite our [hands] in intense regret, saying: ‘Would that I had taken a way with the Messenger!’” and “Would that this one that deceived me, the distance between him and me was the distance between the East and the West.”
I say you should get away from the liars and deceivers, and fly to your God, Allah, and to His servant, the Honorable Elijah Muhammad.