6 - Rarities, Curiosities And Speculations

In 1863 the American diplomat E.G. Squire found a human skull that was dated to about 2000 B.C. at Cuzco in the Andean plateau in Peru. A rectangular piece of bone had been chiseled out of the skull. Squire gave his find to the French anthropologist Paul Broca (1824-1880), who was the first man to localize the seat of speech in a convolution in the front part of the brain (the convolution of Broca).

Broca found six extremely fine wires in the hollow skull and diagnosed a bone infection, which led him to conclude that an operation had been performed on the skull during the patient’s lifetime. According to this, skull operations are by no means epoch-making surgical interventions of our own time. The strange thing is that even modern men shudder when they read reports about brain operations. Everyone should be pleased when medicine makes progress which can liberate mankind from old afflictions. I should like to show that the essential needs arising out of plans for future space travel are an important stimulus to medical research.

Professor Robert Y. White, the neuro-surgeon, works in the Metropolitan General Hospital, Cleveland, USA. The goal of this grand old man of brain surgery is to tackle that scourge of mankind, the stroke, by operating on the brain. White builds on the research of his colleagues at Keo University, Tokyo, who perform operations with the brain chilled to a temperature of about 6ºC. With a body temperature of 36ºC. a surgeon has three minutes at most in which to operate.

For some years White experimented with super cooled monkeys’ brains. The news that during these experiments White had succeeded in keeping the brain of a rhesus monkey alive for three days when separated from its body hit the headlines in specialist medical journals. White kept the solo brain supplied by attaching its blood-vessels to the carotid artery of a living member of the same species.

Herbert L. Schrader, who was present at one experiment, wrote:

“The isolated monkey’s brain is alive. It emits electric currents ordering action like every living brain. It can have sensations pain, fear ... Perhaps it sleeps as well, perhaps it dreams. What is still left of the monkey’s personality cannot see, cannot hear, cannot smell, cannot feel. The brain can receive no information from the outside world, because all the sensory nerves have been cut off short.

 

Nor can it run away because it no longer has a body to carry out its orders. But it can issue orders, for the nerve center is intact and receives a good supply of blood-from the blood of another monkey. No one knows what goes on in such a brain, for no one has managed to decipher the traces left by its electric impulses. Consequently, even for the research worker it is only an organized bundle of many millions of nerve cells which have a metabolism and send out currents.”

Professor White’s collaborators are of the opinion that the functions of a brain separated from the body react more accurately and quicker than those of a brain “burdened” with the whole organism. In its solo state it is still only a center of stored information that it has received from the limbs and organs, but it is absolutely intact and capable of initiating new actions at lightning speed.

The inevitable development of such series of experiments is to couple a solo brain to a computer. Thus the Californian brain specialist Dr. Lawrence Pinneo replaced a small part of a monkey’s brain with a computer. It was then possible to control the animal’s arm movements through the intermediary of the computer.

Professor Jose Delgado of Yale University went a stage further. He sank several probes into the aggression center of the brain of Paddy, a female monkey, and in addition put a tiny radio transmitter under the skin of her head. If Paddy got furious, Delgado pressed some buttons on the control set and the lady monkey (who incidentally suffered no pain throughout the whole process) at once became as quiet as a lamb.

The London brain surgeon Professor Giles Brindley is already working on human brains. Brindley implanted eighty tiny electrodes in the soft brain matter of a blind old lady and she can already recognize geometrical figures again. At the University Clinic in New Orleans, three men had electrodes implanted in their sexual center. Using a control set which they could carry in their trousers pockets or hide under their pillows, they could be in fighting form for the sexual act in a flash. These technical aphrodisiacs may have a tremendous future in our stress-troubled male world.

Bio-engineering is still a very young offshoot of the established sciences, but it is coming on rapidly under the pressure of necessity. The development of bio-engineering is still in its infancy. Will it succeed in building a Cyborg, a combination of solo brain and computer? Undoubtedly it will. Dr. R.M. Page, Director of the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory, has seriously discussed the project of feeding a computer with ideas, plans and commands via a solo brain-free of all influences. When is this project to become reality?

Professor Robert L. Sinsheimer, California Institution of Technology, Pasadena, USA, has this general observation to make:

“The history of the natural sciences and technology has shown, especially in this century, that scientists, particularly the conservative ones, have nearly always erred when they tried to predict the rate at which the new theoretical findings of scientific research are put into practice.”

The Cyborg will inevitably have to come, because the dozen billion nerve cells, multiplied by the hundred billion cells in the supporting web of the nervous system, are the only ones in a position to store and make use of the knowledge of the present for the future. What the 45 ½ to 64 ounces of our brain mass really contains will not be known until there has been much more work in this broad new field of research. It will take a Cyborg to show that until now only a small fraction of the tremendous storage capacity of our gray cells has been used.

It should need no commentary to make clear how important brain research and brain surgery are for the well-being of mankind. But it is also obvious how important these results of medical research are for future space travel. There are two possibilities for the technical reach for the stars. If we do not succeed during the next decades in building propulsion units which can take spaceships close to the speed of light (186,283 miles per second), then a journey by human astronauts even to the nearest fixed star, Proxima Centauri, is impossible.

It is 4.3 light years away from us and 3,000 terrestrial years of cosmic flight are an absurd conception. However, time as the giant hurdle in the way of successful cosmic flight can be overcome by the Cyborg. The solo brain, linked to a computer and given a constant supply of blood, will be the control center of a spaceship. In the view of Roger A. McGowan, a practical scientist, the Cyborg will be developed into an electronic being whose functions are programmed in a solo brain and transformed into orders by the brain.

The Cyborg does not change, does not fall ill, does not catch cold, has no lapses of memory. It would be the ideal commanding officer of a spaceship. And the unbridgeable gap between us and the stars out of a sea of time would be spanned.

The leaps in the technical development of space travel are so enormous that it is useful to remember that the first measurements near the moon were made by the unmanned satellite Lunik 2 on September 13, 1959. Manned spaceships did not begin their journeys to the moon until ten years later, from 1969 onwards.
 

Up to that date, the year that opened up the heavens, the following were the successfully launched unmanned space flights.

(Table)

In the spring of 1973 Skylab, the first world space station and Wernher von Braun’s “favorite child,” will leave Houston.

Whereas on all the previous Apollo flights every pound of weight was grudged-each pound of payload needed” 2,360 pounds of fuel-Skylab will offer a degree of comfort on its four-week journey through space that might have been invented by science-fiction authors. It will be 45 feet long and 19 ½ feet wide, and the astronauts will have a workroom and a sleeping cabin at their disposal, not to mention a bathroom supplied from a tank containing 600 gallons of water. The refrigerators hold a ton of selected foodstuffs.

The astronauts will not only be in permanent contact with Houston by radio and television as before, they will also be able to type the results of their scientific missions on 160 rolls of telex paper and telex them to earth. And so that the astronauts do not have to wear the same clothes all the time, Skylab will have an extensive wardrobe with 60 items of clothing. What an outcry I should have heard if I had foretold Skylab for 1973 in Chariots of the Gods? in 1968!

Pioneer F, the American spaceship which is to report on Jupiter, was the first man-made flying object planned to leave our solar system. In March, 1972 it shot from the launching pad at Cape Kennedy on a journey that might last 100,000,000 years. After approximately 360 days, at the end of February, 1973, Pioneer F will pass the biggest planet in our solar system, Jupiter (diameter 88,700 miles). With a mass 318 times as big as the earth’s Jupiter is bigger than all the other planets put together. Then Pioneer F will leave our solar system.

The launching of the ship alone with a weight of nearly 600 pounds caused a sensation in the technology of space travel. With a three-stage Atlas Centaur rocket it had to be accelerated to 32,500 miles per hour so that the right ballistic curve- passing Jupiter with extreme accuracy-could be reached. This feat has broken all speed records. Pioneer F has an especially significant technical novelty on board.

As sunlight in the vicinity of Jupiter has only 1/27th of the force it has on earth, it has not been possible to build solar batteries for storing the sun’s energy. For the first time a tiny atomic power-station will be constructed for Pioneer F. The reactors will be driven by plutonium 238 dioxide and the energy produced will suffice with its wattage to send radio signals to earth on the 28 quadrillion (=10 <15>) kilometer-long space flight.

The data that Pioneer F will supply, however important they may be at the beginning of the age of inquiry and research into the outer planets, do not interest me as much as the aluminum and gold plaquette that Pioneer F has on board.

The American astrophysicist and exobiologist Carl Sagan of Cornell University and Frank Drake of the United States Astronomical Research Center persuaded NASA that a gold-covered aluminum plaque measuring 6 inches by 12 inches by % inch should be placed in the ship so that extra-terrestrial intelligences that might encounter Pioneer F could extract information from it. (Fig. 65.)

Fig. 65.

This is the gold and aluminum plaque which Pioneer F

took with it as a message to alien intelligences on its journey of 9,461 billion kilometers.

Carl Sagan and Frank Drake worked out a “cosmic” script.

The text of the message could not be written in any of the languages known to us, because it is 100 per cent certain that it would not be understood. So Sagan and Drake developed a sign language which in their view ought to be intelligible to all thinking beings.

What should the plaque’s message be? It should say where Pioneer F came from; who sent Pioneer F out into space; when it was launched and what its home planet was, among other things. At the foot of the plaque there is a picture of the sun and its nine planets, an “image” that does not have to be deciphered, as every intelligence knows them. The distances of the planets from the sun are given in binary numbers.

For example, if Mercury has a distance from the sun of ten binary units (expressed by 10 10), the earth is 26 units, or 11 0 10, distant from the sun. As the binary system of counting is the “language” of all logically constructed computers, Sagan and Drake say that it is the one that could be most readily understood by alien intelligences. On the right of the plaque the outline of Pioneer F on its flight path from earth to Jupiter is schematically engraved. Above it are a man and a woman in a standing position.

The man raises his right hand in the peace sign. The left half shows the position of the sun with 14 lines, cosmic sources of energy, which are supposed to explain by the sun’s position both the launching date and the home of the ship using binary notations.

An atom of hydrogen, which has been proved to have an identical structure in all worlds is drawn in the upper left-hand corner as the “key” to deciphering all the information. An alien intelligence (provided it thought in a technical way) could even work out the size of the woman’s body from it! The wavelength of the hydrogen atom in spectrum analysis (which radiates symbolically from the sun on the plaque with a line 20.3 centimeters long) is multiplied by the binary figure 10 00, which is marked next to the lady and corresponds to an “8.” This gives 8 X 20.3 = 162.4, and that is the height of the Eve on the plaque: 162.4 centimeters!

I met Dr. Frank Drake in New York and asked him why the aluminum plaque had been covered with a layer of gold.

“In theory the ship can cover 28 quadrillion kilometers. It may be 3,000 light years en route (a light year is the distance covered by light in a year and light travels at 186,000 miles a second). If we want to ensure that our plaque can still be deciphered by someone after its long journey, we have to protect it from corrosion with a precious metal. Aluminum covered with gold was the cheapest.”

 

“For whom is the information on the plaque intended?”

“For any intelligence who happens to locate the ship and then undertakes to examine and interpret it Sagan and I consider the very fact that we could equip Pioneer F with a cosmic message is a hopeful sign that our civilization is interested enough in the future to actually send out information and not merely await a sign from the universe.”

I think that Sagan and Drake’s enterprise provides a chance of passing information to intelligent scientists on distant planets.

Fig. 66.

Could this gold plaque be a message from alien astronauts to us?

Note the animals (left) and the “binary” markings.

Who will decipher this code? What has it got to tell us?

• But what happens if this Pioneer plaque lands in a civilization that understands nothing of binary arithmetic and computer technology?

• Will our unknown brothers in “space look on the gold and aluminum plaque as an extraordinary present from the gods up in heaven?

• Will our alien brothers teach their children to make similar “images”?

• Will they themselves make imitations and set them up in their temples?

• Will archaeologists claim, even out there in space, that the copies are ritual objects?

• Who knows what other interpretations might be given to the Cape Kennedy plaque?

If scientists in the year 1972 send two naked members of our species, plus suns, lines and circles, into the universe on a shining plaque, why should not extraterrestrial beings 3,000 light years away have brought MS similar messages or variations of them on a similar journey? If I put the Pioneer F’s plaque next to the Inca gold plaque and compare the signs under a magnifying glass, I ask myself why someone does not begin to examine and check all these circles, lines, zigzags, squares and dotted lines with the eyes of space-age men. Perhaps they could even be deciphered. (Fig. 66.) Surely the chances of success would make it worth the effort?

In Chariots of the Gods I briefly mentioned the possibility that the speed of light might not necessarily be the upper limit of all velocity. This frivolous suggestion was met with icy silence, because everyone knew that Einstein had proved that there was nothing faster than light. Einstein has shown that light is a universal constant. Nevertheless, he takes the factor t = time into account in his formula.

For example, the time in a rocket passes more quickly or slowly depending on the condition of motion, distances alter and the upper limit of the speed of light shifts. This says nothing counter to the theory of relativity, which proves conclusively and for all time that a body which moves below the speed of light can never exceed the speed of light with an expenditure of finite energy. But what happens with the expenditure of infinite energy?

Today physicists and astronomers actually confirm that the speed of light is not the upper limit of all motion. Professor Y.A. Wheeler of Princeton University, USA, who is an expert on the relativity theory and was a co discoverer of the hydrogen bomb, and therefore is no visionary, invented a model of a “super-space” in which time and the speed of light lose their values. However contradictory it may seem, spaceships in the super-space could be in any desired place without time passing. Does that mean theoretically all the possibilities for interstellar space flight exist? Perhaps. At some time in the future.

With the discovery of the subatomic particles called tachyons, luxons and tardyons, a new subatomic world swam into the physicists’ ken. All these particles move faster than light within their inertial system (this means a system in which there are no forces to overcome inertia, but in which a body remains in a state of rest or in uniform motion). Tachyons, luxons and tardyons always move faster than light. Consequently existing calculations of energy no longer apply to these particles because they are faster than light “by nature.”

Our world, in which the speed of light is the upper limit of velocity, is one inertial system, but the world of tachyons, luxons and tardyons with a velocity faster than light is another inertial system.

Physicists know this today, but astronomers have also discovered that the speed of light is not the absolute limit of velocity. A British research group from Oxford University led by Y.S. Allen and Geoffrey Endean came to the conclusion, after many years of study, that the electro-magnetic fields in the Crab nebula in the constellation Taurus must move at a speed of 375,000 miles per second. The celebrated English scientific periodical Nature also mentioned the possibility of speeds faster than light.

Yet these new discoveries are merely the first indications of conceivably infinite velocities. How long is it since an atom was simply identified as the smallest particle with the qualities of a chemical element, and how old is the knowledge that every piece of matter is composed of an inconceivably large number of atoms?

It was in 1913 that the Danish Nobel Prize winner Niels Bohr (1885-1962) laid the foundations of atomic theory with his atomic model. Today atomic energy, obtained from the combined energy of protons and neutrons in the atomic nucleus, is made use of industrially. Atomic energy alone can ensure the world’s supply of energy. Mankind became terrifyingly aware of this effective application of a radical physical idea when the USA exploded the first hydrogen bomb near the Marshall Islands in November, 1952-a bomb which was also a product of atomic energy, but whose “atomic mushroom” image still lowers menacingly over the peaceful use of such energy.

This recent example could be a very practical pointer to how rapidly original discoveries can lead to effective results via the imaginative applications of technicians. At least the stars have become a little bit closer to us with the establishment of faster than light particles. It is not so long since authors of adventure stories equipped mysterious foreign powers with ray guns which could cut holes in walls, destroy other weapons and vaporize men.

Today these rays exist. Every schoolboy knows them as lasers. The whole secret is an apparatus for light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation using a crystal. Very rapid technological development replaced the ruby originally used by other solid bodies, and even by gas mixtures that continually send out light. The heat at the focusing point of a lens placed in a laser beam is so high that even metals with a high smelting point vaporize.

When these rays are directed on to a microscopically fine point, they can be used not only for amplifying light in astronomical telescopes and for the transmission of radio programs without disturbance, but also for cutting tiny holes in skin-thin metal plates in watch factories. In eye operations they are used to weld detached retinas back on. It is no longer a secret that in both east and west experiments with laser rifles and laser cannon are being carried out.

Could it be that the idea of laser beams is not really so new?

In Exodus 17:10-14, I think the text refers fairly clearly to the use of a laser weapon:

“... and Moses, Aaron, and Hur went up to the top of the hill. And it came to pass, when Moses held up his hand, that Israel prevailed: and when he let down his hand, Amalek prevailed. But Moses’ hands were heavy: and they took a stone, and put it under him, and he stayed thereon; and Aaron and Hur stayed up his hands, the one on the one side, and the other on the other side; and his hands were steady until the going down of the sun.”

What happened here?

In the battle against the Amalekites, the Israelites only went on winning as long as Moses, up on the mountain, kept his arms raised. Now the raised arms of the weary commander alone could have been of little use, nor would they have been any more dangerous when the faithful supported them. So I assume that Moses held a rather heavy object in his hands that could decide the battle in his favor. On his field-marshal’s hill he had the hostile armies within his field of vision.

If he “hit” the Amalekites with his ray guns, his people conquered, if he let his arms sink (and with them the ray guns), the Amalekites, fighting with old-fashioned weapons, attacked successfully. This speculation of mine gets strong support in the same chapter, verse 9, where it says that Moses stood on the top of the hill “with the rod of God” in his hand. Looked at from this point of view, isn’t it logical that the battle turned against the Israelites when Moses grew tired and let the ray guns sink?

In Gods from Outer Space I included a petroglyph (Fig. 67ª) from Easter Island which showed a strange figure, half fish, half man. Since then a technically minded reader (Horst Haas) has pointed out to me that this drawing on the rock near the shore of Easter Island could easily be the representation of a ram jet engine (Fig. 67b). The “head” of the drawing would be the air intake, the narrow neck the fuel inlet, the paunch-like broadening out the combustion and pressure chamber and the concluding narrow part the exhaust for the high velocity gases, while the engraved star would be a symbol of the ignition spark.

In this way the whole drawing would be a stylized model of a ram jet propulsion unit.

“Even if the drawing as a whole does not conform to an aerodynamic shape,” writes Horst Haas, “perhaps further references to its flying behavior, etc., could be deduced by accurate measurements of the landing grounds marked out on the plain of Nazca.”

I suggest that the archaeologists ask their colleagues at a technical college for advice for a change! Easter Island is an island full of puzzles where research would be well worthwhile. In his book Phantastique lie de Paques, Francis Maziere tells of an excavation which brought to light an unknown type of stone head. Whereas the heads of all the other statues are clean-shaven, this head sported a beard and it had faceted eyes of the kind insects have (and as we know them from Japanese Dogu sculptures).

Fig. 67.

(a) A petroglyph on the coast of Easter Island,

(b) Interpretation of the drawing as ram-jet propulsion unit,

(c) Section of a modern combustion rocket.

But the most extraordinary thing was two staves that sprouted from the head. Now if anyone wants to claim that they were symbolical representations of animal horns, he is off target. There have never been horned animals on Easter Island! Even a humorous prehistoric sculptor had no model from which he could copy horns to put on a man! It is ridiculous to deny that prehistoric artists-without drawing on their imagination- carved antennae as they had seen them on the gods who came to them from the cosmos.

Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier describe representations of non-human beings wearing technical accouterments found in a quite different corner of the world. Granite reliefs depicting beings in diving or spacesuits with “elephants’ trunks” were discovered in the Hunan Mountains (People’s Republic of China).

We cannot avoid asking ourselves whether these trunks were not really breathing apparatuses. Interpreters of such finds will dismiss the question as absurd, because these trunked men are ascribed a date of 45,000 B.C. Yet every find of this type should worry us because every find increases the certainty of prehistoric visits by alien astronauts.

Must the cobbler stick to his old last? At Delhi there is an ancient iron column that contains no phosphorus or sulphur and so cannot be destroyed by the effects of weathering. However, it is not always necessary to leave the ransacked west to come upon equally wonderful discoveries. At Kottenforst, a few miles west of Bonn, there is an iron column which has been known locally since time immemorial as the Iron Man, writes Dr. Harro Grubert of Cologne.

The iron column rises 4 feet 10 inches out of the ground, but according to various estimates and magnetic resistance measurements it sticks 90 feet deep into the ground. The part above ground exhibits slight surface weathering, but surprisingly enough no trace of rust. The column (Fig. 68) is first mentioned in a fourteenth-century document, where it is described as marking a village boundary.

In the immediate vicinity of the iron column lie a well-built stone walk and the remains of an aqueduct, which does not-wonder of wonders-run in the usual direction Eifel-Bonn or Eifel-Cologne, but straight towards the column.

Fig. 68.

The Iron Man at Kottenforst near Bonn is embedded 90 ft. in the ground.

There is a similar iron column at Delhi

In spite of their age, neither of them has rusted!

So far no one knows what to make of the long rectangular column, and people know a lot about iron in this part of the world. Why should not metallurgists spare the time to travel to that developing country India to check whether or not the iron column in the temple courtyard at Delhi has a similar alloy to the strong column at Kottenforst?

Such factual knowledge might produce evidence as to the age of both columns, for I think it is absurd to accept the Iron Man as being no more than a village boundary mark. If it were, why should it stick 90 feet into the ground? Central Europe, too, may have been one goal of “visits by the gods” and then the Iron Man’s real significance would emerge.

There used to be a rarity in Salzburg, too. Johannes Von Butlar says:

“Who knows how to solve the mystery of Dr. Gurlt’s dice? It was the strangest object ever discovered in a block of coal from the Tertiary, where it was enclosed for many millions of years. This almost perfect dice was found in 1885. There was a deep incision round its middle and two parallel outer surfaces were rounded off. It consisted of a hard alloy of coal and nickel steel and weighed 785 grains. Its sulphur content was too low for it to have come from natural gravel, which occasionally occurs in remarkable geometrical shapes. Scientists were never able to agree about the dice’s origin. It was preserved in the Salzburg Museum until 1910 and then disappeared mysteriously. Mystery piled on mystery!”

If the dice came from the Tertiary, I can only ask: did monkeys know a process for making steel? The print of a shoe was found in a coal seam in Fisher Canyon, Nevada. The impression of the sole is so clear, says Andrew Thomas, that even traces of strong thread are recognizable. The age of this shoeprint is estimated at 15,000,000 years.

I can only answer the question with suppositions. Either the monkeys made shoes and plaited soles (in which case the horizontal profession is not the oldest profession in the world!), or beings who already knew that shoes were the ideal protection for the feet walked the earth millions of years ago. In 1972 the English archaeologist Professor Walter Bryan Emery found a lump of limestone in an underground passage near Sakkara in Egypt. As the scholar carefully scraped it, a statuette of the sun god Osiris appeared. Suddenly Professor Emery felt a stabbing pain and collapsed. Myocardial infarction. Two days later he died in a clinic in Cairo. He was the twentieth victim of the “curse of the Pharaohs.”

What hitherto unknown powers are to be sought behind these mysterious deaths, which are all officially documented? Is it possible that forms of energy that are still unidentified are activated as soon as anyone touches the accursed remains?

Such a speculation acquires a fairly solid background when we know that X-rays have only recently been used to verify the presence of the most peculiar objects in mummies that have lain in Cairo Museum since the beginning of the twentieth century. United Press International carried the report of the leader of an archaeological group, James Harris from Ann Arbor, Michigan. X-rays showed a holy eye on the left forearm of Seti I (died 1343 B.C.).

Thutmosis III (died 1447 B.C.) wore a technical gadget on his right forearm which the investigators described as a golden brooch. Queen Notmet wore four tiny statuettes and an oval stone on her breasts. Previously it had been impossible to see anything of these adjuncts because the mummies were covered with a thick black resinous paste. X-rays disclosed these technical accessories for the first time, although they are sure to appear in archaeological literature as simple ornaments.

According to James Harris, the Cairo authorities have not yet decided whether the precious, because hitherto unknown, finds can be removed from the mummies. It is devoutly to be hoped that this investigation can be continued with every kind of technical assistance. Perhaps science knows a solution to the puzzle of why small technical objects were placed in bodies whose insides had been removed. Perhaps they might even find out the secret behind the curse of the Pharaohs.

When the Pharaohs built their pyramids by the Nile, European history had not even begun. The first European “buildings” consisted of megaliths, the most famous of which are at Stonehenge, England, a Mecca for tourists from all over the world.

Professor Alexander Thorn, of Oxford, who has examined nearly 400 similar megalithic structures, explained to the newspaper Welt am Sonntag:

“Neolithic man had an almost incredible knowledge of astronomy and geometry”

Thorn found out that some of these layouts were magnificent lunar observatories and that Paleolithic men could “work out results in advance that would need the help of a computer today.” Thus Neolithic men (4000 to 1800 B.C.) could calculate the place where the moon would come out daily to the very slightest fraction of a second of arc. Three thousand years later this lost knowledge had to be rediscovered. These findings coincided with the reports by Professor Dr. Rolf Muller, who proved that Stone Age men had laid out their megalithic monuments according to the constellations.

How is our book-learning about Neolithic men, who learnt how to bore through stone in order to make stone axes, who flaked knives from stone or obsidian, who began to domesticate animals and practiced agriculture for the first time with a few useful plants, who had just emerged from caves to build primitive dwellings, how is this book-learning to be reconciled with the achievements of such a highly developed culture? Did the torpid cave dwellers have highly intelligent teachers? If so, where did they come from?

One continually comes across similar absurd contradictions. The banana, a delicious item of food, has been known in every tropical and subtropical region of the earth for many thousands of years. The Indian saga tells of the “wonderful Kandali” (= banana bush) which the “Manu,” the loftiest spirits and protectors of mankind, brought to our planet from another star which was much further along the path of evolution than our earth. But a banana bush or banana tree simply does not exist!

The banana is an annual plant which does not multiply by seeds, which it does not possess, but by suckers. Looked at in this light, the banana is a problem. It is found on even the most remote South Sea islands. How did this plant, which is so vital for the nourishment of mankind, originate? How did it make its way round the world, seeing that it has no seeds? Did the “Manu,” of whom the Indian saga tells, bring it with them from another star-as an all-round foodstuff?

The Uros, who live on reed islands in Lake Titicaca, Bolivia, claim that their people is older than that of the Incas, indeed, that they already existed before To Ti Tu, the father of heaven, who created the white men. The Uros swear black and blue that they were not men, for they had black blood and were alive when the earth still lay in darkness. We are not as other men, for we came from another planet.

The few Uros who are still alive avoid any contact with the rest of the world. Proudly and stubbornly they defend their otherness as the heritage they brought with them from another planet. Dr. Alexander Marshack of Harvard’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology examined several thousand bones, pieces of ivory and stones that all had the same patterns of dots, zigzags and circles. Up to now it has been said that they were decorations.

But Marshack says:

“They seem much more likely to be a form of writing which gives information about the phases of the moon and the constellations. The objects examined all date to a period from 10,000 to 30,000 B.C.”

What does this mean? Why did Stone Age men bother about astronomical representations? It is usually claimed that they had their hands full just to procure sufficient nourishment on endless hunting expeditions. Who instructed them in this work? Did someone advise them how to make these observations which were far above their “level”? Were they making notes for an expected visit from the cosmos?

In the Temple of the Frescoes at Tulum, Mexico, archaeologists specializing in Mayan studies (Refield, Landa, Cogulludo, Roys) discovered bee gods-I’m almost ashamed to write it! The literature gives no information about the bee state and its hierarchy, it simply mentions that the “Ah-Muzencab” were large bees, who ruled the others. The relief of the bee god bears not the slightest resemblance to a bee! It shows a being (certainly not a bee) lying on his stomach with arms apart and his forearms apparently supported on something.

From his position one would be tempted to say that he was gripping steering controls in his hands. His feet, which are shod, seem to be working pedals. The bee god is surrounded with all lands of technical gadgets that do not fit into any kind of beehive I have ever heard of! Is there anybody who is really prepared to accept this being as a bee god? If the artistically gifted Mayas had wanted, they would have conjured up the archaeologists a bee god which would have been much more convincing than this one. (Fig. 69.)

There is another bee god in the Codex Tro-Cortesianus in Madrid. Once again a hideous creature, with arms apart, is lying on its stomach. On its back there are two classically shaped bombs, with broad bands and a fuse (Fig. 70).

Fig. 69.

Below Left: The archaeologists call this strange being from Tulum, Mexico, a “bee god.” An odd bee!

Fig. 70.

Above Right: This hideous creature with his two bombs is also classified as a “bee god.”

Undoubtedly someone will say of the Madrid bee god that they are not bombs, but bee’s wings! But when did bee’s wings ever look like bombs? To be quite frank, I find it unintelligible that bee gods looking like technical monsters buzz their way through Mayan literature.

Some years ago Dr. Carl Sagan put forward a proposal for making our neighboring planet Venus inhabitable by having several tons of blue algae (cyanophyceae) blown into the hot Venusian atmosphere from spaceships. Blue algae are so resistant that great heat has no effect on them. They possess the quality of multiplying at a fantastic speed and in enormous quantities and producing really vast amounts of oxygen.

Sagan worked on the premise that the oxygen would enrich the - Venusian atmosphere and cool down the surface of the planet, so that with the rapid change storms and rain would make the soil fertile. The astrophysicist Sagan seems to be on the right track. The oldest demonstrable remains of forms of life on earth were discovered in 3.5 billion-year-old sedimentary rock in the Transvaal, South Africa. Their stage of development corresponds to that of the blue algae living today! But 3.5 billion years ago there was no kind of organic life on our planet.

The paleontologist H.D. Pflug of the University of Giessen assumes that life is older than the earth! One might well ask whether our blue planet was also prepared for future life and settlement by the insufflation of blue algae. And who initiated this process of biological transformation with that land of biological planning?

For the past five years an American-Iranian team has been excavating at Tepe Yahya, 155 miles south of Kerman. Tepe Yahya was abandoned by its inhabitants about the turn of the era. C.C. and Martha Lamberg-Karlovsky, a husband and wife archaeological team, found a large number of works of art made of bronze containing arsenic that were dated to at least 3500 B.C.

The material used in the Bronze Age-between the Neolithic and the Iron Age-was made of copper, tin and lead. Arsenic is found in nature in cobalt or united with other elements in many minerals. It is very hard to imagine how primitive men could have extracted arsenic for making bronze alloys. But if an extension course was held for the ancient bronze founders, we must look for the masters who conducted it.

Fig. 71.

 This vase from the private collection of the Springensguth family (San Salvador)

shows an astronautess with all the attributes of her profession.

In the collection of the Springensguth family in San Salvador, El Salvador, I saw an old Mayan bowl (Fig. 71), on which was shown a Mayan woman with the engine of a flying machine attached to her back. The figure has a very broad band round her stomach and the engine is fastened to it. A very similar figure decorates a vase in the Turkish Museum, Istanbul. In the American Museum, Madrid, there is a vase attributed to the Nazca culture.

The only real difference in the representation on the 6 ¾ inches high and 3 inches wide vase is that this time it exhibits a mother goddess, an astronautess, who has a broad band slung round her stomach. Her shoulders and thighs have two straps round them. The goddess carries the inevitable engine for the flying machine on her back.

This reminiscence of one-man flying machines, or rocket belts, seems to have left its traces nearly all over the world. Professor Ruth Reyna was commissioned by the U.S. space authorities to produce a report which was based on the interpretation of Indian Sanskrit texts. According to Dr. Reyna, the Indians began space flights around 3000 B.C. in order to seek safety on Venus from the threat of a deluge. The Sanskrit texts were translated in the University of the Punjab.

The Chuwashen, a Tartaro-Finnish people in Russia who live on both banks of the Central Volga, still number about 1,500,000. Their everyday speech is an independent branch of Turkish. The Brazilian linguistic scholar Lubomir Zaphyrov, who specializes in Inca studies, has established that some 120 compound Inca words are still used today by the Chuwashen! They are precisely explained by about 170 simple Chuwashen words.

Zaphyrov says that most of the words that have been preserved come from Inca mythology.

Here are a few examples:

• Viracocha - The good spirit from space

• Kon Tiksi Ula Viracocha - Ruler of highest origin, radiant like lightning, the good spirit from space

• Chuvash - God out of the light

I will gladly give Professor Lubomir Zaphyrov’s address to experts in the Chuwashen language who also understand Inca, and so that I do not have to send it all to them individually, here it is: Caixa Postal 6603, Sao Paulo, Brazil.

In 1972 the Unesco Courier gave an account of sensational finds made by the American archaeologist Manson Valentine and the underwater diver Dimitri Rebikoff immediately off the coasts of the islands of Bimini and Andros in the Bahamas. The came on submarine settlements with walls from 230 to 812 feet long. The buildings, which lay more than 20 feet under water, extended over an area of 38 square miles! There were parallel walls more than 2,000 feet long. The weight of a single 16-foot-long stone was 25 tons.

Scholars from the University of Miami assign the settlement a date between 7000 and 10,000 B.C., even though measured by the C-14 method. Thus, according to currently accepted archaeological data, the Pyramids of Gizeh could not have been built nor the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh “experienced” when these underwater buildings were constructed. Rebikoff is convinced that if these discoveries in the Bahamas were thoroughly investigated the reality would far exceed all the fantasy they can inspire today. Some of the foundations go about 250 feet deep!

Has Atlantis been located in the Atlantic? I should not be surprised. At a chemical congress in Los Angeles, Dr. John Lynde Anderson of Chattanooga, Tennessee, explained that his experiments with the radio-active carbon isotope C-14 had produced deviations from the results which should be obtained according to the theory. To make sure he repeated his experiments with different equipment and on hundreds of organic objects, yet even on one and the same object the results were different.

Archaeologists still look on the C-14 method as the only canonized process for dating artifacts. How can people be so blind and stubborn?

North of Fairbanks, Alaska, and in the Yukon valley, deep-frozen woolly mammoths have been taken from deep in the ground during the last fifteen years when gold was being extracted with high-pressure pumps and excavators. The deep frozen stomachs contained leaves and grass which the animals had eaten. The young lay next to the old, the babies beside their mothers.

Professor Frank C. Hibben, an archaeologist from the University of New Mexico, says:

“Such quantities of animals cannot have died all at once in a natural way!”

In fact, investigation showed that the animals must have died almost instantaneously and been deep-frozen on the spot, otherwise they would have shown at least minimal signs of decomposition. In addition 1,766 jawbones and 4,838 metatarsal bones belonging to a single species of bison were found near Fairbanks. Who organized this mass big game hunt here? And what cause brought about a change in climate that deep-froze animals that had just been grazing within a few hours?

When I rented a car outside the Taj Mahal Hotel in Bombay on November 8, 1968, to travel south to Kanheri, near the Malabar coast, I was tempted by a tourist attraction. I wanted to see the 87 caves in the rock, also known as “rock temples” in the guidebooks. But when I walked about in the 48-foothigh catacombs, I realized then (before I knew anything about the caves beneath Ecuador and Peru) that these caves blasted out of natural stone, mostly granite, that run to several stories just like houses, must have been used for something quite different from religious ceremonies.

One does not have to flee deep underground and sacrifice on altars in caves to gods who are worthy of adoration. No, cave systems like these were made by beings who sought protection from some prodigious threat. Plastic works of art depict the life of Shiva (Sanskrit: the believer) on anthracite-colored walls that are often gleaming and iridescent. Shiva, image of destruction as well as salvation, forms the Indian trinity, the Trimurti, together with Brahman, the power which creates all worlds, and Vishnu, mentioned in the Veda as the “penetrator.”

As I traversed the gigantic halls I admired and marveled at the ceilings, which were supported by pillars carved out of solid granite, and their masterly reliefs. Yet again I had to hear that the dating of the building period of these incredible structures is highly controversial, but that scholars of various disciplines assume that they were built by the Jains, representatives of a religion that originated before Buddhism, about 500 B.C. Once more one can only find the reasons for this titanic architectural feat in myths and legends.

They tell that the sons of the gods, who were defeated in a war with the Kurus, the oldest people in western India, withdrew into these cave fortresses. Jains means “victors” in Sanskrit. Were those apparently defeated in the war the victors in the end, because they had the sense to withdraw in time to caves prepared in advance? I assume that this was so, for Indian mythology emphasizes that the caves were made in the rock so that people could protect themselves from the terrifying forces which threatened the living from the universe, from heaven.

In his book When the Gods Were Numerous, Dr. Bernhard Jacobi refers to 150 caves at Junnar on the Deccan plateau, the biggest group in India, to 27 caves at Ajanta and to 33 caves at Ellora.

I put forward a speculation for which I have given some support in this book.

1. In the unknown past a battle took place in the depths of the galaxy between intelligences similar to human beings.

2. The losers in this battle escaped in a spaceship.

3. As they knew the mentality of the victors, they set a “trap,” in that they did not land on the planet that was “ideal” for their existence.

4. The losers chose the planet earth which was just acceptable in comparison with their home planet, but certainly did not offer ideal conditions. For many years the losers continued to wear gas masks in the new atmosphere in order to get used to the terrestrial air mixture (hence the helmets, trunks, breathing apparatus, etc., in cave drawings).

5. They burrowed deep into the earth and made the tunnel systems out of fear of their pursuers who were equipped with every kind of technical aid.

6. In order to deceive their opponents completely, they set up on the fifth planet of our solar system (i.e. not the earth) technical stations and transmitters which emitted coded reports

7. The victors fell into the trap and believed the bluff. They brutally annihilated the fifth planet. It was destroyed by a gigantic explosion, parts of its substance shot through the planetoid belt. (A glance at the map of our solar system shows that there is an “unnatural” gap of 300,000,000 miles between the present-day fourth and fifth planets, Mars and Jupiter. But the gap is not empty; hundreds and thousands of small lumps of stone, known collectively as the “planetoid belt,” are tumbling about in it. From time immemorial astronomers have been puzzling to explain how and why a planet can have “exploded” between Mars and Jupiter. I venture to assert that planets do not “explode” by themselves; someone makes them explode!)

8. The victors thought that the losers were destroyed. They withdrew their spaceship to their home planet.

9. Owing to the destruction of the fifth planet the gravitational balance in our solar system was temporarily thrown into confusion. The earth’s axis moved a few degrees out of position. This resulted in tremendous inundations (there are legends of floods and deluges among peoples all over the world).

10. The losers emerged from their magnificently built catacombs and began to create intelligence on earth. Using their knowledge of the molecular biology, the losers created man in their image from already existing monkeys (the genetic code, sagas about the creation of man, “God’s” promise to Abraham and others that their descendants would be as numerous as the stars in heaven, etc.).

11. The former losers, now absolute rulers and therefore gods, found that the progress and evolution of the human race was too slow. They knew perfectly well that the beings created by them were “like gods,” but they wanted more rapid progress (Genesis 1:6: “... this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do.”). The gods were often hot-tempered in their impatience; they were quick to punish and wipe out the malcontents and those who did not follow the biological laws laid down, “pour encourager les autres.” The gods had no “moral” feelings about such radical cleaning up operations for they felt that they were responsible, as creators of men, for their future development.

12. But men were afraid of the gods and their punitive expeditions, especially once the gods were no longer first generation gods, i.e. when they were their sons and daughters to whom men believed they were already assimilated (proof: mythologies of the families of the gods).

13. Then whole groups of men began to dig themselves underground hideouts out of fear of divine judgment. Perhaps these groups of men still had tools available that they had made under the gods’ guidance-tools with which they could perhaps work stone more easily than archaeologists can imagine today.

14. It is a fact that today more and more gigantic underground dwellings that are not identical to the tunnel systems in Ecuador and Peru are being discovered annually all over our globe. The subterranean human cities which are constantly being discovered are obviously the work of many hands; they were not made with sophisticated technical equipment such as the thermal drill.

     

    Such subterranean shelters, which men built out of fear of “destruction from the cosmos,” can be found, for example, at:

     

    1. San Agustin, Colombia: underground sanctuaries with connecting passages.

    2. Cholula, Mexico: underground temple with connecting passages. (Not to be confused with the passages stretching for kilometers installed by archaeologists.)

    3. Derinkuyu, Anatolia, Turkey: underground cities with several-storied “houses” and large assembly rooms.

        

15. If men, namely our ancestors, built safety bunkers underground by hand, with the expenditure of tremendous effort, they did not do so for pleasure, nor for protection against wild animals, nor to the glory of their religious ideals. Nor did they do so out of fear of some alien conquerors. Such excavations using simple tools and crude physical strength would have taken years. Alien conquerors would have had no difficulty in forcing these crazy defenders to surrender. They had only to sit down outside the cave entrances and starve the inmates to death.

16. I say that there was only one reason for the underground caves built by human hands and that was fear of attack from the air! But who could assail men from the air? Only those whom they knew by tradition, those gods who had once visited them long, long ago.

I know I am offering my head on a platter to every critic because of this daring speculation. But I am used to that by now. Criticism and odium could not rain down on me more fiercely than they did after I quoted Ezekiel in Chariots of the Gods I must recapitulate!

It says in Ezekiel:

“Now it came to pass in the thirtieth year, in the fourth month, in the fifth day of the month, as I was
among the captives by the river of Chebar, that the heavens were opened ... And I looked, and, behold,
a whirlwind came out of the north, a great cloud, and a fire infolding itself, and a brightness was about
it, and out of the midst thereof as the color of amber, out of the midst of the fire. Also out of the midst
thereof came the likeness of four living creatures.

 

And this was their appearance; they had the likeness of a man.

 

And every one had four faces, and every one had four wings. And their feet were straight
feet; and the sole of their feet was like the sole of a calf’s foot: and they sparkled like the color of
burnished brass ... Now as I beheld the living creatures, behold one wheel upon the earth by the living
creatures ...

 

The appearance of the wheels and their work was like unto the color of a beryl: and they
four had one likeness: and their appearance and their work was as it were a wheel in the middle of a
wheel. When they went, they went upon their four sides: and they turned not as they went. As for their
rings, they were so high that they were dreadful: and their rings were full of eyes round about them
four.

 

And when the living creatures went, the wheels went by them: and when the living creatures
were lifted up from the earth, the wheels were lifted up ... ‘Son of man, stand upon thy feet,

and I will speak unto thee.’ ... and I heard behind me a voice of a great rushing ...

I heard also the noise of the wings of the living creatures that touched one another,

and the noise of the wheels over against them, and a noise of a great rushing.”

Fig. 72.

At Derinkuyu, Anatolia (Turkey) there are underground cities

with several stories and rooms which hold as many as 60,000 men.

Using this passage from Ezekiel, reproduced in abbreviated form here, I formulated some questions based on knowledge of current space travel technology. It was so obvious: it was so unmistakable. But the criticism and mockery I had to suffer for my modern exegesis! On March 28, 1972, I had a conversation with Joseph F. Blumrich in Huntsville, USA. Blumrich, an engineer born in Austria, has been working for NASA for 14 years. He is head of the department in which future space stations are planned on the drawing board and worked out in detail.

For example, Blumrich was engaged on the construction of the last stage of Saturn V and is now planning the future orbital stations in which several astronauts will stay in space for weeks.

In July, 1972, Blumrich was awarded the NASA Exceptional Service Medal for his work on Saturn and Apollo - an honor received by very few NASA personnel.

“You have made a detailed study of the visions of the prophet Ezekiel in your spare time. First of all, how did a man in your position come to do this?”

“To put it quite bluntly-as a protest! I read your book Chariots of the Gods? with the superior attitude of a man who knew in advance that it was all rubbish. From the wealth of material supplied by you, I found, when I came to the description of the technical characteristics of Ezekiel’s visions, a territory where I could join in the conversation, so to speak, as I have spent most of my life on the construction and planning of aircraft and rockets. So I got out a Bible to read the complete text, feeling sure that I would refute and annihilate you in a few minutes. You could not, you simply ought not to be right! After a careful perusal of the text, my conviction was rapidly undermined and the few minutes became a long period of intensive spare-time research, during which I worked out in detail and proved what I had found out in the first few hours.”

“Did you take into account the prophet Ezekiel as a person?”

“Naturally. From three points of view: in relation to his personality in general, his quality as a reporter and lastly his participation in the events described. His personality influences the broad general evaluation of his report. As a reporter he possessed an outstanding gift of observation. As a participant he helps us to answer the question: was he the center of the occurrence? Since he was not, the next question arises: why not?”

“Previously the encounters between God and man in the Old Testament, which were always accompanied by secondary phenomena such as smoke, noise, fire, lightning and earthquakes, were called ideograms. Do you consider it possible after your Ezekiel studies that a meeting between the prophet and an alien intelligence can actually have taken place? If so, what indications do you base your findings on?”

“The answer to your first question is an unequivocal yes! But I don’t agree with the word indications.’ The general appearance of the spaceship described by Ezekiel can be winkled out of his account Then an engineer can set aside his report and reconstruct a flying machine with the same characteristics. If he then shows that the result is not only technically possible, but also practical and well thought out in every respect, and moreover finds details and processes described in Ezekiel’s account that tally perfectly with his own conclusion, you can no longer call them merely indications!” “I know that you have written a book about your reflections and your calculations based on the prophet Ezekiel’s data. (*) According to your calculations, was it possible to give data concerning comparative dimensions and technical know-how?”

 

[*] Blumrich’s book, The Spaceships of Ezekiel, is published by Corgi Books.

“To my surprise it was possible to do so fairly accurately. Because of the vagueness in the prophet’s original account, the mathematical side of the investigation was carried out parametrically, i.e. a series of variables were tried step by step. Naturally an extrapolation over and above the present-day state of technology that was partially based on theoretically known possibilities and partially on estimated values was also necessary. I found out that Ezekiel’s spaceship has very credible dimensions and belongs to a stage of technology which modern man will not reach for some decades!”

“I have no desire to pirate the results of your investigations before they are published, but I am naturally curious to know whether any questions are still left unanswered. Can you name two of them?”

“With pleasure. One concerns two rather similar possibilities. Does the account contain a mixture of visions and actual events or does it mention solely real observations? The second is what was the actual site of the temple to which Ezekiel was flown. Jerusalem cannot really be fitted into the two possibilities suggested. Obviously it would be of the highest importance to establish the actual site.”

 

“Mr. Blumrich, do you realize that you’re going to shock the Old Testament scholars - and others as well - with your logical calculations and reflections?”

“Undoubtedly a shock is unavoidable. Nevertheless, I hope to be able to reduce the duration of this shock to a minimum, because my book will contain all the technical data that I used for my calculations and reconstruction. It is all there in black and white. Anyone who doubts can check my work himself or have it checked. It doesn’t take long and once it has been checked, the biggest shock should already have been overcome. There is no other way out. Naturally a longish time will have to elapse before my conclusions are adapted for use in different fields.”

For once my dearest wish has been fulfilled! An outstanding technician has taken my speculations with all the attendant evidence literally. I want my stimuli to thought to provoke protest-as in Blumrich’s case.

But I should also like those scholars who so often turn up their noses to take off their opaque spectacles and put on new clear ones in order - like Blumrich - to verify whether the fanciful Daniken does not sometimes offer paths at the end of which more real truth is to be found than on the old beaten tracks which still only go round in circles.

Errare humanum est!

Sophocles (497-405 B.C.) makes Antigone say:

“Is it then so difficult, is it shameful to give up positions which, by tomorrow at the latest, will no longer be tenable?”

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