Blumrich wrote it while chief of NASA's systems layout branch of the program development office at the Marshall Space Flight Center.

[1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8] It was originally published in German by Econ Verlag GmbH under the title Da tat sich der Himmel auf (March 1973).

After ufologists such as Erich von Däniken had pointed to the possibility of interpreting Ezekiel's Merkabah vision as a report of an extraterrestrial spacecraft, Blumrich decided to disprove the hypothesis.

He decided the technology of the builders must have been somewhat higher than mankind's at the present, and added he had seldom felt as delighted, satisfied, and fascinated by being proven wrong.

Blumrich analyzes six[11] different translations of the Bible in conjunction with his experience in engineering and presents one possible version of Ezekiel's visions of how God—described as riding in an elaborate vehicle capable to see, attended by angels—supposedly showed him the future and gave him various messages to deliver.

Blumrich also published an article on his belief, "The spaceships of the prophet Ezekiel", in the UNESCO journal Impact of Science on Society.

Jerome Clark wrote that Blumrich "offered a creative but misplaced effort to translate the metaphorical biblical account into a properly engineered spacecraft".