PART SIX
NEW MODELS TO PONDER
 

39 - Visitors from Beyond

Our Civilization Is a Legacy from Space Travelers, Says Zecharia Sitchin, and His New Book Offers to Unveil New Secrets of Divine Encounters
J. Douglas Kenyon
 

From a Human Potentials conference in Washington, D.C., to a Whole Life Exposition in Seattle, from campus bull sessions in Berkeley to cocktail party discussions in Boston, no talk of the hot alternative explorations into the mysterious wellsprings of civilization gets very far these days without at least a passing reference to the work of Zecharia Sitchin.

And there are no signs that interest in the author of the five volumes of The Earth Chronicles and Divine Encounters: A Guide to Visions, Angels and Other Emissaries is cooling.

In fact, "Sitchinites," as his true believers unabashedly call themselves, have managed to proclaim, in nearly every available forum from talk shows to the Internet, their gospel according to Sitchin -  namely, that mankind owes most of its ancient legacy to visiting extraterrestrials. Moreover, Sitchinist "evangelism" has - with some help from the movie Stargate - achieved a not insignificant foothold in the public imagination.

And while many may quarrel with Sitchin's conclusions, very few will dispute that the Russian-born Israeli resident and ancient language expert has indeed come up with some very intriguing, if not compelling, data.

Indeed, few can match Sitchin's scholarly credentials. One of a handful of linguists who can read Sumerian cuneiform text, he is also a recognized authority on ancient Hebrew as well as Egyptian hieroglyphics. Not a little controversy, though, surrounds his unusual method of interpreting the ancient texts. Whether biblical, Sumerian, Egyptian, or otherwise, Sitchin insists they should be read not as myths but rather quite literally, essentially as journalism.

Forget about Jungian archetypes and metaphysical/spiritual analysis.

"If somebody says a group of fifty people splashed down in the Persian Gulf," he argues, "under the leadership of Enki and waded ashore and established a settlement, why should I say that this never happened, and this is a metaphor, and this is a myth, and this is imagination, and somebody just made it all up, and not say [instead] this tells us what happened."

Beginning with The 12th Planet, Sitchin has expanded his unique explanation of the ancient texts into a vast and detailed history of what he believes were the actual events surrounding mankind's origins.

Presented is extensive six-thousand-year-old evidence that there is one more planet in the solar system from which "astronauts" - the biblical "giants," or Anunnaki - came to Earth in antiquity.

Subsequent titles in The Earth Chronicles series are The Stairway to Heaven, The Wars of Gods and Men, The Lost Realms, and When Time Began. (A companion book to the series, Genesis Revisited, was also published.)

Sitchin describes in detail the evolving love-hate relationship between men and the "gods" and his belief that this relationship shaped the early days of man on Earth.

Whatever the Anunnaki may have thought of their new creation, the literary critics have found Sitchin's work impressive.

"A dazzling performance," raved Kirkus Reviews. The Library Journal found it "exciting... credible."

Divine Encounters relates many stories from biblical, Sumerian, and Egyptian sources.

From the Garden of Eden to Gilgamesh, Sitchin believes all references to deity, or deities, are actually indicating the Anunnaki, but he does distinguish between the current so-called UFO abduction experience as studied by the Harvard professor John Mack and the ancient encounters.

Stressing that he personally has never been abducted, he points out that whereas the current experience is usually viewed as a negative phenomenon with needles and other forms of unwelcome intrusion,

"in ancient times, to join the deities was a great and unique privilege. Only a few were entitled to such an encounter."

Many of the encounters were sexual.

The Bible clearly states, he points out,

"that they [the Anunnaki] 'chose as wives the daughters of men and had children by them, men of renown,' et cetera, the so-called demi-gods regarding which there are more explicit tales both in Mesopotamian literature and Egyptian so-called mythology, and Greek to some extent - Alexander the Great believed that these sons of the gods were mated with his mother."

The Epic of Gilgamesh tells how one goddess tried to entice the hero into her bed and how he suspected that if she succeeded, he would end up dead.

Other encounters involved "virtual reality" and experiences "akin to the Twilight Zone."

Also up for analysis are the experiences of the prophets Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Isaiah. Finally, Sitchin claims to have unraveled the secret identity of the being named YHWH, and to have come to a,

"conclusion that is mind-boggling even for me."

Nothing further could be elicited on the subject.

In the nearly twenty years since The 12th Planet first appeared, Sitchin has seen a considerable change in attitudes toward his work.

Still, unlike von Dannikin's and others', Sitchin's study has not been lambasted by other scientists, a fact that he attributes to the soundness of his research.

"The only difference between me and the scientific community - I'm talking about Asyriologists, Sumeriaologists, et cetera - is that they refer to all these texts which I read [literally] as mythology."

Today, he says many researchers have come to follow his line of reasoning. By his latest reckoning, there are nearly thirty books by other writers that have "been spawned," he says, by his writings.

While Sitchin's "facts" may be beyond challenge, many of his conclusions are another matter, even among today's most avant-garde thinkers. The Mars researcher Richard Hoagland complains that Sitchin is trying to "treat the Sumerian cuneiform text like some kind of ancient New York Times, " while others, like the symbolist scholar John Anthony West, believe subtleties in the high wisdom of the ancients have eluded Sitchin.

For those, his views are essentially simplistic and materialistic.

He is a mechanistic reductionist and a throwback to nineteenth-century positivism. Still others are reminded of the efforts of fundamentalist preachers to pin the mystical visions of Saint John the Revelator on specific historical personages (e.g., Napoleon, or Hitler, or Saddam Hussein as the anti-Christ).

Sitchin, though, remains unrepentant, with little use for what he calls "the established view," which he says is that "the texts deal with mythology and that it all is imagination, and - whether metaphor or not  - that these things never happened. Someone just imagined them."

In contrast, he has "no doubt that these things really happened."

The argument that the Sumerian and Egyptian civilizations got their impetus from extraterrestrials, nevertheless, does not rule out the notion that there could have been earlier and perhaps even more-advanced civilizations on Earth.

"There's no denial of that," he says, citing Sumerian and Assyrian writings.

Ashurbanipal, for instance, said he could read writing from before the flood, and describes cities and civilizations that existed before the deluge, but which were wiped out by it.

So, on any question of whether there could have been an earlier civilization before the Sumerians or even before the flood -  which Sitchin places at seven thousand to eight thousand years prior,

"the answer is absolutely yes."

No matter how far back he goes, though, Sitchin sees behind human achievement only the hand of Anunnaki.
 

Plato should be taken literally too. though Sitchin says he has some difficulty placing the location of Atlantis,

"whether it was in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. whether it was in the Pacific in what was known later as Mu. or whether it was in Antarctica. I don't know what actually [Plato] was talking about. but the notion that once upon a time there was a civilization that was destroyed or came to an end through a major catastrophe. a great flood or something similar. I have absolutely no problem with that."

Sitchin is among those who believe that the Great Pyramid is much older than is maintained by orthodox Egyptology.

In his second book, The Stairway to Heaven, he took considerable pains to establish that the famous cartouche cited as evidence that the structure was built by Khufu was. in fact. a forgery. Sitchin meticulously makes the case that Colonel Howard-Vyse actually faked the marks in the spaces above the King's Chamber where he claimed to have discovered them.

Since publication. additional corroboration has come from the great-grandson of the master mason who assisted Howard-Vyse.

It seems that Colonel Howard-Vyse was seen entering the pyramid on the night in question with brush and paint pot in hand and was heard to say that he intended to reinforce some of the marks he had found. ostensibly to render them more legible. Upon failing to dissuade Howard-Vyse from his plan. the mason quit.

The story. however. was kept alive and handed down through the family until it eventually came to Sitchin. further reinforcing his unshakable conviction of the true antiquity of the Great Pyramid.
 

Regarding the "Face on Mars," Sitchin is ambivalent.

Whether or not the "face" is real or a product of light and sand. he is more impressed by other photographed structures.

Citing his own training at Jerusalem's Hebrew University in the 1940s, he argues,

"One of the rules you learn [in archeology] is if you see a straight line, it means an artificial structure, because there are no straight lines in nature. Yet there are quite a number of such structures recorded by the cameras."

According to Sitchin, it all corroborates the Sumerian statement to be found in his first book.

"Mars served as a way station," he says, citing a five-thousand-year-old Sumerian depiction and other texts. "They say that the turn was made at Mars."

He believes an ancient Mars base may have been recently reactivated, which could account for the disappearance of the Russian Phobos Mars Mission as well as the U.S. Mars Observer two years ago. He also speculates that such a site may prove to be where many UFOs are now originating.

When the reporter inquired as to just what Sitchin might think of Hamlet's Mill: An Essay Investigating the Origins of Human Knowledge and Its Transmission through Myth, the work of Giorgio de Santillana and Hertha von Dechend, Sitchin offered to kiss him on both cheeks.

It seems that the two M.I.T. professors, in their great investigation of the origins of human knowledge and its transmission through myth, had raised the question:

"But now, is Nibiru as important as all that?" and had gone on to answer it, "We think so. Or, to say it the other way around: once this astronomical term and two or three more are reliably settled, one can begin in earnest to get wise to and to translate Mesopotamian code."

Sitchin does not hesitate to stake his claim:

"I think that I achieved it."

For him it is clear, Nibiru is and remains the twelfth planet.
 

40 - Artifacts in Space

For Author Richard Hoagland, the Trail of Ancient ETs Is Getting Much Warmer

J. Douglas Kenyon

Since its discovery in 1981, a gigantic and enigmatic face gazing upward from the Cydonia region of Mars has held out the tantalizing promise of scientific proof that intelligent life in the universe is not unique to Earth.

Though photographed from a satellite five years earlier, the face had gone officially unnoticed, so the space expert Richard Hoagland (author of The Monuments of Mars) and his associates, including many top scientists and engineers who felt anything but optimistic about the chances for an effective official follow-up, proceeded to launch their own investigation.

The photos of the "Face on Mars" and an apparent complex of ruins nearby were subjected to years of exhaustive research.

Utilizing the most advanced tools of scientific analysis, The Mars Mission, as the group terms itself, has produced more than enough evidence to argue plausibly that the objects of Cydonia are the remains not only of an ancient civilization, but also of one possessed of a science and technology well beyond our own.
 

The startling possibility that such artifacts exist has created considerable public pressure to return to the Red Planet and was cause for more than a little consternation in the summer of 1993, when NASA lost contact with its Mars Observer probe just as it was about to begin a detailed photographic survey that could have proved the issue, one way or the other.

How long must we now wait until the argument can be tested? Well, perhaps not too long after all. As it turns out, the cherished, concrete evidence that man is not alone in the universe may well exist in our own backyard - relatively speaking, as the Hoagland group claims to have discovered, in numerous NASA photographs, evidence of an ancient civilization on our closest neighbor, the Moon.

And in this case, if NASA isn't up to the verification job, Hoagland insists that he and his backers are. The result could be the first privately funded mission to the Moon.

If anybody can pull it off, Hoagland may be the man. For more than twenty-five years a recognized authority on astronomy and space exploration, Hoagland has served as a consultant for all of the major

broadcast networks. Among his many valued contributions to history and science, the best remembered is probably his conception, along with Eric Burgess, of Mankind's First Interstellar Message in 1971: an engraved plaque carried beyond the solar system by the first man-made object to escape from the Sun's influence, Pioneer 10.

Hoagland and Burgess originally took the idea to Carl Sagan, who successfully executed it aboard the spacecraft, and subsequently acknowledged their creation in the prestigious journal Science. It was Hoagland who proposed the Apollo 15 experiment in which astronaut David Scott, before a worldwide TV audience, simultaneously dropped a hammer and a falcon feather to see if it was true - as Galileo had predicted - that both would land at the same time.

Once again, Galileo was vindicated. Since the 1981 discovery of the Face on Mars, Hoagland had devoted most of his time to the pursuit of scientific evidence for extraterrestrial intelligence.

Atlantis Rising spoke with Hoagland the day after Hollywood's latest space epic, Stargate, opened nationwide to enormous audiences.

Because the film deals with the idea of extraterrestrial intervention in Earth's history, we wanted to know what portents, if any, he saw.

"The problem with the movie," Hoagland said, "is that the vehicle for anything interesting isn't there after the first half hour. It disintegrated into a kind of shoot-'em-up with an awful lot of ends totally unfulfilled."

But the film's quality - or lack of it - notwithstanding, Hoagland is encouraged by the public reception.

"The fact that people are rushing to see this indicates to me there is almost an archetypal compulsion to know more, and if we put together the right vehicle, which we are attempting to do, we may have a ready audience."

Hoagland was alluding to a couple of film projects, now in the talking stages, based on the Mars and Moon work.

The outcome, hopefully, will be both a scientific documentary and a fictionalized treatment presenting some of the more speculative aspects of the research. Such matters, though, are not his primary concern.

Uppermost in Hoagland's mind and in those of his associates are recent discoveries on the Moon. In clear NASA photos, some nearly thirty years old - from both manned and unmanned missions, from orbiters and landers - can be seen giant structures unexplainable by any known geology - what Hoagland calls "architectural stuff."

"In sharp contrast to the Mars data, where we have been constrained to look at two or three pictures of the Cydonia region with increasingly better technology - 3D tools, color, polarametric, and geometric measurements - with the Moon we are data-rich. We have literally thousands, if not millions, of photographs."

Yet with pictures taken from many directions and many different lighting conditions, angles, and circumstances, Hoagland's team has produced "stunning corroboration" that all the photos are of the "same highly geometric, highly structural, architectural stuff."

In fact, he says,

"in many cases, the architects on our team now are able to recognize the standard Buckminster Fuller tetrahedal truss, a hexagonal [six-sided] design, with cross bars for bracing. I mean, we're looking at standard engineering, though obviously not created by human beings."

The structure appears to be very ancient,

"battered to hell by meteors... it looks like it had gone through termite school. It's been moth-eaten and shattered and smashed by countless bombardments," he says. "The edges are soft and fuzzy because of micro-meteorite abrasions like sand blasting."

Hoagland explains that on an airless world, there's nothing to impede a meteor from reaching the surface or reaching a structure on the ground.

Nevertheless, he says,

"we're seeing a prodigious amount of structural material."

Spread over a wide area, the material is turning up at several locations.

"It looks as if we're seeing fragments of vast, contained enclosures - domes - although they are not inverted salad bowls. They are much more geometric, more like the step pyramids of the Biosphere II in Arizona. We're looking at something that is extraordinarily ancient, left by someone not of this Earth, not of this solar system, but from someplace else."

One of the most interesting structures appears to be an enormous freestanding tower,

"a crystalline glasslike, partially preserved structure - a kind of a megacube - standing on the remnants of a supporting structure roughly seven miles over the southwest corner of a central part of the Moon called the Sinus Medii region."

If all of this exists, one of the most important questions may be: Why didn't NASA notice?

If Hoagland is right, he says,

"Something funny has been going on."

Indeed.

Recently Hoagland presented the lunar material at Ohio State University. In the months since, discussions have raged on the Internet, Prodigy, CompuServe, and other online computer services. Many questions now being put to him are coming from scientists and engineers within NASA, many of whom have had direct experience with the lunar program, yet have been kept in the dark regarding any ET evidence.

Hoagland has passed on the present state of the research and asked for input, and he's left with the inescapable impression that, as he puts it,

"something incredible has been missed."

As Hoagland sees it. there are only two possible explanations:

"Either we're dealing with incredible dumbness. in which case we spent twenty billion dollars for nothing because we went there. took photographs. came home and didn't realize what we were seeing. or we're dealing with the careful manipulation of the many by the few."

The latter may not be as implausible as it might at first sound.

"If you're in a system that is cornerstoned on honesty. integrity. openness. full disclosure," he explains, "and there are folks in there who are operating contrary to those precepts. they won't get caught because no one is suspicious."

Actually, Hoagland has moved beyond suspicion to belief. and he says he can prove his point.

The "smoking gun" is a report by the Brookings Institution. commissioned by NASA at its inception in 1959. Entitled "Proposed Studies on the Implications of Peaceful Space Activities for Human Affairs." the study "examines the impact of NASA discoveries on American society ten. twenty. thirty years down the road."

Hoagland says,

"On page 215 it discusses the impact of the discovery of evidence of either extraterrestrial intelligence - i.e.. radio signals - or artifacts left by that intelligence. on some other body in the solar system.

"The report names three places that NASA might expect to find such artifacts - the Moon. Mars. and Venus. It then goes on to discuss the anthropology. the sociology. and the geopolitics of such a discovery. And it makes the astounding recommendation that. for fear of social dislocation and the disintegration of society.

 

NASA might wish to consider not telling the American people. It's right there in black and white. It recommends censorship. Now that's what they've been doing," Hoagland says.

Hoagland believes that the anthropologist Margaret Mead, one of the authors of the report. was responsible for the recommendation. which he believes came out of her experience in American Samoa.

In the 1940s. Mead witnessed the devastation of primitive societies exposed for the first time to sophisticated Western civilization.

"That experience so moved her." says Hoagland. "so changed her perspectives that when she examined the whole ET possibility. she projected and mapped on that experience. She basically felt that if we even learned of the existence of extraterrestrials. it could destroy us; therefore people can't be told."

Believing as he does that NASA. and perhaps even higher levels of government. has been committed to keeping people in the dark regarding the realities of extraterrestrial intelligence.

Hoagland is not very sanguine about the chances of success for such high-profile programs as SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence).

"They are a complete. absolute farce. They are a false-front Western town." he says. "They do not mean what they purport to mean. They are a red herring. They are a bone to the Star Trek generation."

In fact, Hoagland has become so dubious of government intentions on such matters that he suspects the entire alien abduction phenomenon is a misinformation campaign calculated to scare people off the subject.

"If there has been a policy to obfuscate and confuse people on behalf of the objective data," he reasons, "what would that policy do and how far would it extend to the idea of ET contact? If you had a few real contacts with someone who was trying to give us messages and trying to lead us to new insights and the fear on the part of government structure had been that this will destroy civilization itself. would not that government also put in place a program to misinform. to confuse. to politically spin in the wrong direction those few real contacts. by submerging them in a sea of misinformation about contacts?"

Hoagland sees in the crop circle phenomenon part of the evidence for benign extraterrestrial contact.

"The thing that makes them different from the monuments of Mars or the ancient cities on the Moon," he reasons, "is that they are occurring in the crop field here on Earth and they are occurring in the present time."

He sees little doubt that the circles are not of this world.

"We simply do not have the technology, let alone the knowledge base, to construct the multileveled communication symbols that the crop circles represent. So that once you eliminated the hoaxers..." he chuckles. "If Doug and Dave hoaxed the circles, they deserve a Nobel Prize."

Hoagland resumes his thought:

"The level of sophistication of the information encoded in these symbols is so vast and so congruent with the lunar and Mars work that you're forced to conclude that whoever the artists are, they know a bit more than contemporary science, and/or the media, or, for that matter, the government."

At any rate, Hoagland's group is now planning an end run around the government's monopoly on ET-related space exploration information.

The time has come, he believes, for a privately funded mission to the Moon. Already investors have expressed interest.

"We're talking a few tens of millions of dollars," he says, "not really the price for the special effects in one major motion picture. We could go to the Moon and get stunning live CCD-quality color television images of the things we're seeing in these thirty-year-old NASA still pictures - still frames."

Such a mission, if funded, could be launched within fifteen months.

Using new technology and a solid-fueled rocket, a five hundred- to six hundred-pound payload could be delivered into lunar orbit, where it could provide,

"stunning camera and telescopic live transmission capabilities," he says.

The mission could even do more science. One group has expressed interest in sending a gamma ray spectrometer designed to survey the Moon for water, which, in Hoagland's scenario, there now has to be.

The mere possibility of such a mission may already be forcing NASA to be more open. Hoagland and other members of his group have recently received a front-door invitation to view extensive previously unreleased film archives.

The bureaucracy, he feels, is already moving to cover itself and forestall the eventual embarrassment of being proved out of touch, to say the least.

41 - The Pulsar Mystery

Could the Enigmatic Phenomenon Be the Work of an Ancient ET Civilization? A New Scientific Study Makes the Astonishing Case
Len Kasten
 

Logic would dictate that there must be some type of connection among all the worlds in our galaxy, the so-called Milky Way.

Viewed from afar, it appears to be a single, spiral-shaped unit with a luminous center. What forces operate to cause so many "billions and billions" of stars to cohere to this unit? They must be vast and incredibly powerful. Now, as we enter the twenty-first century, discovery of these forces is clearly the next frontier in physics and astronomy.

It is the next step in the logical progression that began only five hundred years ago with Columbus's discovery of the spherical shape of the planet.

This logical progression continued with Galileo's "heresy" that the earth revolves around the Sun, Kepler's discovery of elliptical orbits around the Sun, and then, triumphantly completing the "Copernican Revolution," Newton's deduction, in 1687, of the Second Law of Mechanics and the Law of Universal Gravitation, which elegantly proved Kepler's three laws of planetary motion.

Then, it wasn't until Sir William Herschel developed a powerful telescope in 1781 that we began to peer out into the cosmos and to comprehend its complexity and immensity and to understand that what we thought were clouds of cosmic dust were actually countless other stars like our Sun.

Herschel, his son John, and his daughter Caroline eventually cataloged over 4,200 star clusters, nebulae, and galaxies, thus setting the stage for the modern era of astronomy.

Then, with the orbital placement of the Hubble Telescope in 1990, we finally began to understand our stellar neighborhood. What has become known as the "local group" is dominated by our Milky Way and the giant spiral galaxy Andromeda, but also includes some minor galaxies. But even now, with all that we do know, we still know almost nothing about the implications of "membership" in our galaxy.

Has our solar system simply been fortuitously "captured" by the immense centrifugal force of the galactic hub, or does the entire galaxy somehow act as an organic whole?
 

GALACTIC EXPLOSIONS
Thanks to the author Paul LaViolette, Ph.D., we can begin to appreciate that certain galactic "events" have a very profound physical effect on our little Sun and planet way out here in the outer reaches of a spiral arm.

LaViolette, a physicist with a doctorate in systems theory, has postulated the existence of something called a "galactic superwave."

In his book Earth Under Fire: Humanity's Survival of the Apocalypse, he claims that astronomical and geological evidence suggests that a "protracted global climatic disaster" occurred on this planet about 15,000 years ago.
 

One piece of this evidence derives from a new technique developed by scientists in the late 1970s measuring the concentration of the element beryllium-10 in ice-core samples drilled at Vostok, East Antarctica.

Minute quantities of this rare isotope are produced when high-energy cosmic rays collide with nitrogen and oxygen atoms in our stratosphere.

Since a time frame can be associated with each layer of the ice-core sample by measuring the Be-10 concentrations at various levels, the fluctuations of cosmic bombardments of Earth can be precisely determined.

The Vostok samples clearly showed a peak of cosmic radiation between 17,500 and 14,150 years ago, associated with a sharp increase in the ambient air temperature from -10 C to about 0 C. This, claims LaViolette, caused the end of the ice age and ushered in the era of moderate temperatures that made modern civilization possible.

This concept of the galactic superwave, apparently caused by massive "explosions" at the galactic core, is not entirely new to astronomers. However, they view them as relatively rare events, occurring perhaps every ten million to one hundred million years and having no particular effect on our solar system because they believe that the galactic magnetic lines of force prevent cosmic radiation from propagating very far from the core.

But LaViolette has amassed an impressive profusion of evidence, from many different sources, that these events are much more frequent and that they are really massive bombardments of cosmic ray particles (electrons, positrons, and protons) with the power of five to ten million "highly-charged" supernova explosions that reach, in full strength, to the farthest limits of the galaxy!

The theories of Paul LaViolette are highly controversial in astronomy circles even though he makes his case with careful and thorough research. Perhaps it is because he is not afraid to boldly go where other scientists fear to tread - into the realm of myth and legend to find supporting evidence for his theories.

His book The Talk of the Galaxy: An ET Message for Us? puts forth another daring proposition. He argues that pulsars are high-tech galactic "beacons" very likely created by highly developed extraterrestrial civilizations, and are being used to signal the advent of galactic events, especially the superwaves.

These books, taken together, sketch out a fantastic scenario that radically changes the status quo of the astronomical, anthropological, and archeological landscapes, and opens up a new universe of potential research and investigation.

LaViolette may well be just the pivotal researcher to lift science out of stale, inbred stagnation into invigorating. human-oriented realms and new directions for the twenty-first century. In view of the importance of his theories. we set up an interview for the purposes of this article.

When we spoke with him. we were surprised at how deftly he was able to shift back and forth from science to mythology to support his ideas.
 

CONTINUOUS CREATION VS. BIG BANG
Perhaps one of LaViolette's most heretical theories relates to the purpose of these galactic core explosions. His explanation resurrects that bete noire of modern science, the concept of the ether.

LaViolette is convinced that these tremendous energy discharges are nothing less than an ongoing process of the creation of matter itself from the etheric flux. which invisibly pervades the entire universe.

This idea of "continuous creation" is in direct opposition to the now generally accepted "Big Bang theory." which most esotericists have never really been comfortable with. but which does seem to satisfy those religious groups who believe that "creation" was literally a single primordial act by God.

A complete discussion of this subject can be found in LaViolette's book. Genesis of the Cosmos: The Ancient Science of Continuous Creation. and also in his follow-up book. Subquantum Kinetics: The Alchemy of Creation.

The concept of the all-pervasive etheric substratum from which matter is created was really originally derived from ancient Hindu metaphysics. but had gained considerable scientific credence up until the late nineteenth century. when it was supposedly "put to bed" by the famous Michelson-Morley experiment in 1887. However. this experiment was seriously flawed because it assumed the ether to be another physical dimension rather than a precursor to energy itself.

Today. although orthodox science may not have granted respectability to etheric theory. it certainly doesn't mind using it every day to explain the propagation of radio and television waves.
 

FIRE AND FLOOD
According to LaViolette. these galactic explosive phases occur about every 10.000 to 20.000 years and last anywhere from several hundred to several thousand years.

Evidence of this frequency began emerging in 1977. but scientists considered it an aberration. The electrons and positrons travel radially outward from the core at near light speed. but the protons travel much more slowly because they are about two thousand times heavier.

They disperse and are then captured by the magnetic fields in the galactic nucleus.

The superwave itself would not normally have much of an effect on the Sun or Earth. since the energy would be about one-thousandth of that radiated by the Sun. But the solar system is surrounded by a cloud of dust and frozen cometary debris that remains on the periphery because of the solar wind. which has an expelling action and cleanses the entire solar system.

However. the superwave. when it arrives. would push back this dust cloud into the interplanetary medium and would block out the light of the Sun. Moon. and stars. and the Sun would appear to go dark. Also. the superwave and dust particles would energize the Sun and increase flaring activity so much that dry grasslands and forests would spontaneously catch fire. This heat would also melt the glaciers. releasing tremendous quantities of water. causing extensive flooding all over the planet.

A whole panoply of cascading catastrophes would then ensue, including earthquakes and increased seismic activity, high winds, failed crops, and destroyed vegetation, along with high, ultraviolet radiation, causing skin cancers and increased mutation rates. In short, it would be a time of cataclysmic destruction that would probably snuff out much of the human and animal life on the planet.

LaViolette, in Earth Under Fire, cites all the legends and myths relating to cataclysmic events, all of which appear to have occurred during the time of the last galactic superwave - that is, about 15,000 years ago.

The Greek myth of Phaeton, for example, the semi-mortal son of Helios, the sun god, who was given the reins of the sun chariot and caused it to crash into the earth thereby setting off a tremendous worldwide conflagration, is claimed to be a metaphor for that era when the superwave caused an extraordinary increase in infrared and ultraviolet emissions from the Sun, along with ultra-high flaring activity.

This could easily have caused a "scorched-earth" phenomenon, according to LaViolette. The Greek writer Ovid says of this event,

"Great cities perish, together with their fortifications, and the flames turn whole nations into ashes."

Then, as the glaciers melted and the ocean levels rose all over the world, large landmasses would have become submerged.

This might easily account for the flood legends in just about every ancient civilization. LaViolette compiled a list of about eighty societies with some sort of flood myth. He has no doubt that the deluge that sank Atlantis was caused by glacial meltwater.

He says,

"The... 'sinking' of Atlantis simply refers to the melting and ultimate wasting of the continental ice sheets," which "spawned a foray of destructive glacier wave floods."

Interestingly, the Phaeton myth concludes with massive flooding sent by Zeus to quell the flames.

According to Plato's Timaeus, this would have occurred about 11,550 years ago, right around the time of the last stage of the superwave.
 

LITTLE GREEN MEN
In The Talk of the Galaxy, LaViolette turns his attention to those puzzling anomalies of astronomy, the pulsars.

Having established, in his earlier books, a very convincing case for galactic events that affect all the worlds therein, it was natural to question whether or not pulsars have any connection with these events. The fact that they emitted such consistently regular pulsations suggested to him that they were of intelligent origin.

This was not a new theory. Several scientists involved in the SETI project have speculated on this subject. LaViolette tells us that Professor Alan Barrett, a radio astronomer, theorized in a New York Post article in the early 1970s that pulsar signals "might be part of a vast interstellar communications network which we have stumbled upon."

It was, in fact, the first thought that occurred to the two astronomers who discovered the first pulsar signal, in July 1967 at Cambridge University in England. Graduate student Jocelyn Bell and her astronomy professor, Anthony Hewish, named the source of the signal LGM 1, an acronym for Little Green Men.

By the time they published their astonishing discovery in Nature magazine in February 1968, having discovered a second pulsar, they were afraid to suggest an ETI (extraterrestrial intelligence) thesis because they feared ridicule from colleagues, and were afraid that the discovery would not be taken seriously by scientists.

But nevertheless, they continued with this naming convention up to LGM 4!
 

Of the many theories advanced to explain pulsars, the one that had prevailed by 1968, and is still accepted today by default, is known as the Neutron Star Lighthouse Model.

Proposed by Thomas Gold, it postulates that the signal comes from a rapidly rotating burned-out star that has gone through a supernova explosion that transformed it into a bunch of tightly packed neutrons.

This would have made it incredibly dense and much smaller, reduced from about three times the size of the Sun to no more than thirty kilometers. Gold theorized that as it rotates, it emits a synchotron beam, much like a lighthouse beacon, which is picked up on Earth as a brief radio pulse.

To match the pulsar frequencies, these stars would have to spin at rates up to hundreds of times per second.
 

SIGNAL COMPLEXITY
LaViolette has compiled a very impressive and convincing set of reasons why the pulsars are very likely of intelligent rather than natural origin and why they cannot possibly fit the Neutron Star model.

They all relate to the fact that the signal is totally unlike any other ever encountered in terms of both precision and complexity. Of major importance is the fact that the pulses are timed not precisely from pulse to pulse, but only when time-averaged over two thousand pulses.

Then the time-averaged pulse is exceedingly accurate and regular. Furthermore, in some pulsars the pulse drifts at a constant rate, adding another layer of complexity to the signal. Another factor has to do with amplitude modulation.

Some of the pulses increase in amplitude in varied yet regular patterns. Then many of the pulses exhibit something called "mode switching," wherein the pulse suddenly exhibits an entirely new set of characteristics that persist for a time, and then it reverts to its original mode.

In some cases, this switch is frequency dependent and in others the switching conforms to regular patterns. LaViolette argues that an ET civilization would expect us to understand that such a complex signal must necessarily be intelligently designed. Perhaps they assume that we have the computer power necessary to comprehend the logic behind all the variability. The Neutron Star model has to be

continually "stretched" to encompass these characteristics as they are discovered. At this point. it has been contorted beyond recognition in order to explain this complexity. but astronomers are reluctant to abandon "the sizable mental investment involved."

In terms of precision. some stars do show periodic. regular variations in color and luminosity. Several binary X-ray stars pulse with periods accurate to six or seven significant digits. Pulsars. on the other hand. are from a million to one hundred billion times more precise!

LaViolette speculates that if Bell and Hewish,

"had known then what we know now. perhaps they would not have rejected the ETI communication scenario as readily as they did."

MARKER BEACONS
Perhaps the most striking of all pulsar characteristics is their placement in the galaxy.

When their positions are plotted within the galactic "globe." which is a projection of the galaxy similar to the Mercator for Earth. they all seem to congregate in certain key locations. The densest concentration is found on or near the galactic equator. not the galactic center as one would have expected if they were created out of supernova explosions as theorized.

Then they seem to clump around two points along the equator. These two points are precisely at the one-radian marks measured from the earth. A radian is a universally understood geometric measurement of an angle that marks off an arc around the circumference equal in length to the circle's radius. and is always 57.296 degrees.

Using the earth as the center of the circle and placing the galactic center on the equator. perhaps the most significant pulsar in the galaxy falls precisely at a one-radian mark!

The so-called Millisecond Pulsar is the fastest out of all 1.100 discovered to date. It "beats" at 642 pulses per second. It is also the most precise in timing. being accurate to seventeen significant digits. which surpasses the best atomic clocks on Earth. and it emits optically visible. high-intensity pulses.

LaViolette believes that the Millisecond Pulsar was deliberately placed there by ETs to function as a marker beacon expressly for our solar system. as they knew we would understand the significance of the one-radian point.

LaViolette's main thesis is that all of the pulsars "visible" to Earth were put in place in order to convey a message to us relative to the galactic super-wave. This. he says. explains why two unique (too complex to explain here) pulsars that LaViolette calls the "King and Queen of Pulsars" were positioned in the Crab and Vela nebulae. both of which were the sites of supernova explosions.

He estimates that after reaching the Earth about 14.130 years ago. the last superwave would have reached the Vela complex about one hundred years later and detonated a supernova there by heating up the unstable stars to the explosion point. Then. about 6.300 years later it would have reached the Crab nebula and triggered a supernova there.

These very large supernovas would have become visible on Earth at 11.250 B.C.E. and C.E. 1.054. respectively. By placing marker beacons at these points. LaViolette believes the ETs were giving us information about that superwave that we could use to predict future waves. along with their associated cataclysmic effects.

LaViolette believes that we already have the technology to build our own Force Field Beaming Technology. Therefore. the day may not be far off when Earthlings can join the galactic community and help to inform some other unfortunate planet of the approach of a fearsome galactic superwave.
 

42 - The Physicist as Mystic

A child staring at the clear night sky beholds the wonder of the universe and its mystery.

How, after all, to such a simple mind, to any mind, can the starry expanse go on and on, never ending? For if it were to end, we imagine, there would always be something beyond. And then what about the beginning, and before that, and so on?

The two apparent extremes describe what the French philosopher and mathematician, Blaise Pascal called les deux infinis, the two infinities.

As science probes this mystery, subatomically and cosmically, it searches within the domain of finite understanding for its answer. Since Darwin, Western scientists have told us that matter gave birth to reality, to life, that reality is concrete, which is to say finite, the wonder of infinity as observed on a starry night notwithstanding.

But in its attempt to define reality, to put it into an intellectual box, materialistic science finds itself in the land of mystics, the realm it sought to avoid all along.

Delving deeply, relentlessly, into any subatomic particle in the universe, cutting-edge physicists find that nothing is as it appears to be. Indeed, they find that the physical universe is but a ripple in an ocean of infinite energy, even as hangers-on, such as Paul Kurtz and his Committee for Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal and so many others in the material sciences, assert that nothing exists beyond matter.

They assert, in fact, that matter is ultimate reality. Unfortunately for the absolute materialists, though, the tide turned some time ago.

Early in the twentieth century, Albert Einstein amazed the world with his discoveries in the world of astrophysics. With his general theory of relativity, he opened the doors of science to the M-word -  Mysticism.

He told us that space and time are intertwined, relative coordinates in reality that make up the space-time continuum. He also suggested that matter is inseparable from an ever-present quantum energy field, that it is a condensation of that field, and that this ineffable field is the sole reality underlying all appearances.

The implications brought into question the Western world's most basic assumptions about the universe, about matter, and about our perceptions as human beings. Einstein, though, only opened the door to the mystical realm. Much more followed.

Quantum theory evolved beyond Einstein's landmark discoveries. Physicists, in their quest to define matter's essential properties, found that the most minute particles in the universe, protons, electrons, photons, and so on - the very fabric of the material universe - transcend three-dimensional reality. Electrons, they discovered, are not matter in any standard sense.

The diameter of an electron, for instance, cannot be measured: An electron can be shown to be two things at once, both a wave and a particle, each with differing characteristics that should exclude the other's existence from a purely material viewpoint.

As particles, they behave like a larger visible object, a baseball, or a rock. As waves, though, electrons mysteriously shape-shift into vast energy clouds.

They display magical properties, stretching across space with the apparent ability to bilocate. Physicists have discovered, moreover, that these magical abilities characterize the entire subatomic universe, adding a mind-boggling dimension, and a mystical one, to the nature of the universe itself.

Even more astounding revelations waited in the world of physics. The observer. modern physicists found. actually determines the nature of a subatomic particle. When physicists observe particles as particles. they find them. understandably. to be particles.

But when observing the same particles as waves, they find them to be waves. the implication being that matter is defined by conscious perspective rather than being fixed or finite.
 

A MORE PROFOUND UNDERSTANDING
The physicist David Bohm. one of Einstein's protégés, delved more deeply into this mystery; he took the implications of the new physics even further.

He discerned that if the nature of subatomic particles depends on an observer's perspective. then it is futile to search for a particle's actual properties. as was science's goal. or to think that subatomic particles. the essence of matter. even exist before someone observes them. In his plasma experiments at the Berkeley Radiation Laboratory.

Bohm found that individual electrons act as part of an interconnected whole.

In plasma. a gas composed of electrons and positive ions in high concentration. electrons more or less assume the nature of a self-regulating organism. as if they were inherently intelligent. Bohm found. to his amazement. that the subatomic sea he created was conscious. By extension. the vast subatomic reality that is material creation may also be said to be conscious.

To those who foresaw the implications. Bohm shattered the useful but limiting premise that led science to its many achievements in modern times. crossing a new barrier beyond which lurked the unknown. a scientific twilight zone. Intellectual observation. it turned out. the fulcrum of the scientific method since Francis Bacon. could take an observer only so far.

As with any dogma. what was once a useful guideline became a stifling limitation. Negating the ability of the human intellect alone to fathom ultimate reality. Bohm. then. challenged the scientific world to adopt a more profound understanding.

Reality. Bohm's work suggests. has a more subtle nature than that which can be defined by linear. human thinking. the province of modern science and the intellect. Within the fabric of reality. Bohm found not just the wave/particle duality phenomenon as described above. but also an interconnectedness. a Non-Space or Non-Local reality where only the appearance of waves also being particles exists.

He saw. perhaps intuitively. that it is ultimately meaningless to see the universe as composed of parts. or disconnected. as everything is joined. space and time being composed of the same essence as matter.

A subatomic particle. then. does not suddenly change into a wave (at velocities that would have to be beyond the speed of light. as Bohm's mentor Einstein suggested); it already is a wave sharing the same Non-Space as the particle. Reality. then. is not material in any common sense of the word. It is something far more ineffable. Physicists call this "Non-Locality." Mystics call it "oneness."

In spite of those who disagreed. Bohm evolved a yet more profound understanding. that of an interconnected whole with a conscious essence. where all matter and events interact with one another. because time. space. and distance are an illusion relative to perspective.

He developed. in fact. a holographic model of the universe. in which the whole can be found in the most minute part - in a blade of grass or an atom - and where matter. circumstance. and dimension result from holographic projections of subtle but powerful conscious energy.

Actual location and, by extension, the shape-shifting of particles both manifest reality; in fact, they exist only in the context of relative appearances. Bohm discovered that everything is connected to everything else, past, present, and future, as well as time, space, and distance, because it all occupies the same Non-Space and Non-Time.

David Bohm brought to physics and the scientific world the understanding that has propelled mystics and sages since the dawn of time.

Rejecting the idea that particles do not exist until they are observed, he, like the Nobel laureate and renowned physicist Brian Josephson, understood that physics must see the nature of subatomic reality in a new way.

It is not simply that conscious perspective affects the nature of the subatomic quanta, Bohm revealed, but that the subatomic quanta is conscious, which means that everything is conscious, even inanimate objects and seemingly empty space, the very definition, if one were possible, of mystical or spiritual reality.
 

HALLOWED SPACE
Most physicists agree that a mere cubic centimeter of space brims with more energy than the sum of all the energy held in the entire material universe.

 One school of physics finds this calculation so incredible that it assumes it must be a mistake. But to those such as Bohm, the principle makes perfect sense. Matter, according to the avant-garde of subatomic physics, cannot ultimately be separated from what appears as empty space.

It is, rather, a part of space, and part of a deeper, invisible order from which reality's unseen, conscious essence precipitates, as material form, and then returns to the invisible again. Space, then, is not empty, but instead filled with highly concentrated conscious energy, the source of everything in existence.

In The Holographic Universe, an elaboration upon the implication of Bohm's genius, Michael Talbott describes all of material creation as a,

"ripple... a pattern of excitation in the midst of an unimaginably vast ocean."

Talbott goes on to say, paraphrasing Bohm, that,

"despite its apparent materiality and enormous size, the universe does not exist in and of itself, but is the stepchild of something far vaster and more ineffable."

Talbott tells Bohm's story, capsulizing the implications of his revelations and of modern science's implicit nihilism.

"Bohm," Talbott says, "believes that our almost universal tendency to fragment the world and ignore the dynamic interconnectedness of all things is responsible for many of our problems... we believe we can extract the valuable parts of the earth without affecting the whole... treat parts of our body and not be concerned with the whole... deal with... crime, poverty, and drug addiction without addressing... society as a whole."

Bohm, Talbott says, believes that such a fragmented approach may even bring about our ultimate destruction.

The problem, then, in reconciling modern science, even modern physics, with the wonder a child feels while staring at a clear night sky, les deux infinis, remains the dogma of absolute materialism, of non-interconnectedness. Although the tide has turned in certain circles within the scientific community, matter, we are still told, is the source of all life.

Nothing truly mysterious exists, they say, contrary to Einstein's belief that appreciation of the mysterious lies at the center of all true science.

In letters to a friend, Darwin himself argued strenuously in favor of gradualism, the theory that all life evolved slowly and inexorably from primitive matter without sudden changes, in order to avoid supporting any possible supernatural or biblical creation theories. That bias, we now find, remains fixed

to such a degree that absolute materialism has become the established dogma of the scientific and academic worlds.

According to Allan Bloom, a professor at the University of Chicago, the suggestion of the existence of an Absolute, even of the philosophical variety, is looked on with derision in academic circles. He reveals in Closing of the American Mind that "Absolutism" of any sort has become taboo in university classrooms. No underlying order or intelligence can exist in the universe, the academics say.

The avant-garde of theoretical physics, however, arrive with a new take on a very ancient philosophical and metaphysical Absolute.
 

ANCIENT WISDOM AND MODERN SCIENCE
Genesis of the Cosmos, Paul LaViolette's book about ancient myth and the "science of continuous creation," reveals an extraordinarily persistent message encoded throughout the ancient mythologies of the world, a message now echoed by quantum cosmologists such as Stanford's Andre Linde and even Cambridge's Steven Hawking.

Passed down to modern times from the mists of prehistory, these ancient myths repeatedly describe principles now pointed to in the newest of the new physics, that of a universal potential latent within all reality.

"In all cases," LaViolette says, "the concept [the myths] convey effectively portrays how an initially uniform and featureless ether self-divides to produce a bi-polar... wave pattern."

LaViolette elaborates, telling us that an "ancient creation science" comes down to us through myth, which,

"conceives all physical form, animate or inanimate, to be sustained by an undercurrent of process, a flux of vital energy that is present in all regions of space... Thus the ancient creation science... infers the presence of lifelike consciences or spirits in all things, even in inanimate objects such as rocks and rivers or the Earth itself."

While supporting his premise with the principles of quantum physics, LaViolette speaks to the materialists who inhabit the world of modern science:

"This view of a vast, living beyond contrasts sharply with the sanitized mechanistic paradigm... which has denied the existence of an unseen supernatural realm and forged a wedge between science and religion."

High priests of physics such as the Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg and other notable physicists clearly leave the door open to LaViolette's Continuous Creation, syncretizing - according to the physicist Michio Kaku, of the City University of New York - Judeo-Christian, Buddhist, and scientific cosmologies.

The high priests also express the likelihood of parallel universes, or a Multiverse, in which our reality is one of many that exist in Non-Time/Non-Space, a principle that sounds like the scientific version of transcendental existence.

Addressing the Big Bang theory's inability to account for what happened before the Big Bang, Kaku, in an article in the London Daily Telegraph, quotes Weinberg as saying,

"An important implication is that there wasn't a beginning... the [multiverse] has been here all along."

Grappling with how extremely unlikely it is that our reality, let alone another, ever presented conditions that would support biological life, Princeton's Freeman Dyson says, ominously for the materialists,

"It's as if the universe knew we were coming."

BEYOND THE VEIL
The principles that science now begins to embrace, those of an inherently intelligent universe, have, of course, been espoused for thousands of years.

Ancient Sanskrit texts describe the nature of Purusha, Supreme Consciousness, and Chittam, or mind-stuff, as fundamental to the nature of reality. The mineral, vegetable, and animal kingdoms exist as grades of Supreme Consciousness, and man, being highly conscious, participates in this vast flow of subtle consciousness.

Here, the mind is a miniature universe, and the universe is the expansion of mind. And while the debate still rages in Western science, throughout history practitioners of the yogic science report, as actual conscious experience, what the high priests of physics relegate to abstract theory. In an exalted state of consciousness, for example, the great yogi Paramahansa Yogananda, who spent much of his life in the United States, experienced his own awareness merged with cosmic consciousness, having devoted himself to that goal for many years.

In his famous autobiography, Yogananda describes his experience:

"My sense of identity was no longer confined to a body," he says, "but embraced the circumambient atoms... My ordinary frontal vision was now changed to a vast spherical sight, simultaneously all-perceptive... all melted into a luminescent sea. The unifying light alternated with materializations of form."

After describing a state of ecstatic joy, the renowned yogi goes on to say,

"A swelling glory within me began to envelop towns, continents, the earth, solar and stellar systems, tenuous nebulae, and floating universes . . .The entire cosmos... glittered within the infinitude of my being."

In the jargon of modern physics, this experience might be described as Non-Locality in the electron sea. In the jargon of Yoga, it is called Oneness with Supreme Consciousness, Ultimate Being, or God.

Like sages before him for thousands of years, Yogananda describes the universe beyond matter as being composed of indescribably subtle Light. He describes the material universe as being composed of the same essence but in a grosser form, a principle echoed throughout the world's mystical traditions and now in modern physics.

Regarding the source of this Light, Yogananda says,

"The divine dispersion of rays poured from an eternal source, blazing into galaxies transfigured with ineffable auras. Again and again I saw the creative beams condense into constellations, then resolve into sheets of transparent flame. By rhythmic reversion, sextillion worlds passed into diaphanous luster, then fire became firmament."

Perhaps more significant, the sage tells us that his experience of the center of all light and creation poured from a point of intuitive perception in his heart, not from his intellect, a point that emphasizes the limits of the Western scientific method.

And while Western science may balk at such a subjective account, claiming it lacks scientific verification, those mystics who have devoted themselves to absolute perception throughout history report similar experiences.

The yogic science, practiced within the laboratory of human consciousness, is, in fact, the science of consciousness, which physicists such as Bohm theorize as being inseparable from, and responsible for, all reality.

In his own way, our wonder-struck child beneath the stars probably draws the same conclusion.

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