CHAPTER FOURTEEN

THE MOBIUS MISSION
 


'My own suspicion is that the Universe

is not only queerer than we suppose

but queerer than we can suppose.'
Haldane's Law put forward

by geneticist J.P.S. Haldane

 

We have com e on a strange journey since we first realized the science that lay behind the stone circles at Stonehenge, Brodgar, Avebury and thousands of other Neolithic sites across the British Isles.

We believe that our determination not to draw conclusions too early has paid dividends. We have refused to ignore those pieces of the puzzle that seemed outlandish or even downright impossible, and have retained our tolerance for unexpected results.

They say all progress is dependent on the unreasonable person.

 

Alexander Thom was certainly an unreasonable person, or else he would have capitulated in the face of the wave of rejection he received from the majority of professional archaeologists. How irritating of the man, his opponents thought, to repeatedly insist that his reams of data, gathered over scores of years, show that the Megalithic builders worked to an incredible degree of engineering accuracy and employed precise standardized units of length.

Any reasonable person, and certainly any academic who wanted future employment within a specific discipline, would have buried the data that showed that the Megalithic Yard and its accompanying geometry were integer to the Moon and Sun as well as the Earth. It sounds ridiculous, and those who are members of the 'club' will consider anyone who speaks of it equally ridiculous.

Yet the Moon unquestionably does conform to Megalithic geometry and now, we believe, we are beginning to understand why.

The SETI institute is still sweeping the skies looking for incoming electromagnetic radiation that deviates even a tiny amount from the anticipated background noise - something that could conceivably be an indication of intelligence elsewhere in the cosmos.

 

But the message they seek is already with us because, by the standards of what SETI considers might constitute a message, surely the material we have described here must be the world's first prime contact with a consciousness that existed 4.6 billion years ago.

The assumption of SETI and its operatives is that another intelligence will make contact from far away and so the searchers are focused on staring into the far depths of space for a message. But if any entity were that smart why would it have to make a long-distance call?

Four hundred years ago our solar system was the great mystery - but our own immediate environs hold less fascination in the light of incredible devices such as the Hubble telescope, which can reach far into space and into the past. We have ticked the box that is the solar system and astronomers are more interested in distant quasars and nebula. Is it this new leading edge of attention that has previously blinded us to the obvious in our own backyard?

The message we have received has told us about the way that the Moon was constructed to give life to the Earth, and there are tantalizing hints that this design may extend to the rest of the solar system, and possibly even beyond.

  • Why is Jupiter in such an untypical orbit that just happens to be a cosmic umbrella for Earth?

  • Why does Venus provide such a perfect clock and calendar when viewed from Earth?

Modern scientific culture has evolved from its roots in the ancient world and has become a complex web of m any highly specialized disciplines.

Gone are the days when one man, such as the seventeenth-century Robert Hooke, could be a groundbreaking inventor, microscopist, physicist, surveyor, astronomer, biologist and even artist. Today the sheer enormity of available information has led to highly defined specialisms, and academics are expected to keep to their field - despite the truism that science has no experts.

 

No one, for instance, doubted Alexander Thom's abilities as a professor of engineering but he was not welcome in the world of archaeology.

The gains from modern science are beyond counting. But the loss, arguably, is the synthesis of information generated by the many gentleman scholars that once existed, before becoming extinct somewhere around the late nineteenth century.

 

So few scholars now have a chance to view the bigger picture - to seek out patterns that might unexpectedly exist when apparently unrelated data is brought together. It has to be remembered that the difference between a major breakthrough and nothing at all can be just the angle of view rather than anything else.

Occasionally, two or more disciplines are brought together to form a new specialty in science. One of these turned out to be the subject that was directly invented by Alexander Thom, namely archeo-astronomy - a field of study involved with the use of astronomy by ancient cultures.

 

Our previous book, Civilization One, demonstrated the geometry that lies behind Thom's proposed Megalithic Yard. We unambiguously showed how it is directly related to other measurement systems (linear, volumetric and weight) and put forward a testable theory of how it was reproduced using Venus and a pendulum. We therefore decided to send a copy of our book to a man who we believe is the world's only professor of archeo-astronomy. He received a precis and the completed book but we received no response whatsoever.

We knew that the information we had put forward was not incorrect because people suitably qualified in astronomy and mathematics had carefully checked it.

 

So why no response? Perhaps the approach was so counter to the worldview of this particular expert he could not understand it. Or maybe he just did not like the implications of our conclusions.

We also attempted to get a copy of the book to a world-class physicist. When he was told of the subject matter he responded almost angrily by saying that it was well known that Thom's work had been discredited decades ago and only weirdoes clung onto the romantic hope that Stone-Age man possessed a rational and unchanging unit of length.

In actual fact he was repeating a mantra that has sprung up in academic circles but is no m ore than an urban myth, because no one has proven Thom to be wrong. We responded by pointing out that we had done our research very carefully and that whilst there are certainly people who have argued against Thom's conclusions, they have not proven his conclusions to be wrong - nor is it possible for anyone to prove a negative.

The academic then responded politely and accepted what we said, although he explained that he did not have time to read our book due to personal problems.

We therefore expect to have a fight on our hands when it comes to getting leading academics to review the findings contained in this book. But fight we will.

Finally, it is probably helpful to apply to our whole hypothesis a test created by the late, great astronomer Carl Sagan, that he called a 'Baloney Detection Kit'. Sagen suggested a set of tools shown below for testing claims and detecting fallacious or fraudulent arguments. We have put our responses beneath in italics.

Wherever possible there must be independent confirmation of the facts.

All of the key elements that we consider constitute a message are checkable using data published by leading authorities. Encourage substantive debate on the evidence by knowledgeable proponents of all points of view.

Yes please. We have tried and will continue to do so. Arguments from authority carry little weight (in science there are no authorities).

At least it should be a level playing field. Spin more than one hypothesis - don't simply run with the first idea that caught your fancy. We have had to dismiss only one possible hypothesis: coincidence, and have investigated every other avenue we can think of.

Try not to get overly attached to a hypothesis just because it's yours. Quantify, wherever possible. We struggled to accept our own results initially and we remain entirely open to any other interpretation that might be brought forward.

If there is a chain of argument every link in the chain must work.

Unlike the existing main theories of the Moon's origin and the origin of DNA, we believe that we have a very strong chain with no weak link. Occam's razor - if there are two hypotheses that explain the data equally well, choose the simpler. Absolutely.

 

But the simplest is also the weirdest, although it is also the most scientifically robust.

 

Ask whether the hypothesis can, at least in principle, be falsified (shown to be false by some unambiguous test). In other words, is it testable? Can others duplicate the experiment and get the same result?


The number sequences we have found are checkable by anyone with a book on basic astronomy and a calculator. The question is just how far people are prepared to go in claiming coincidence.

We believe we have made a case that deserves to be heard and investigated. It is hard to imagine how even the most skeptical, unimaginative academic could deny the possibility that we are looking at a message here. Not to investigate and discuss it further would be anti-scientific and, we believe, very foolish.

Everyone who has bothered to think about it is agreed; any message from the distant past either has to be very big or very small. We believe it is both.

We have good reason to think that Professor Paul Davies and others who suspect that there could be a communication addressed to us in apparently empty sections of DNA are correct. If the next layer of the message is, as seem s likely, contained in the cells of our own bodies - it must be sought out!

Our suggestion that the group of a million unused base pairs, found by geneticist Edward Rubin and his team, might be a viewable message if laid out on a format of 3663 x 273 has to be tested. It might be the answer and, if so, humankind is on the verge of a new age - an age of maturity.

But if the message is not detected in that way, the peculiarities of the Moon remain and we need all serious scientists to work together to solve this riddle - which must be almost in our grasp.

We call on the world to assemble a team of leading scientists from all of the disciplines that could possibly be involved in deciphering the Moon's message and, if our third scenario is correct, constructing the CTC - the time transport system. And we may need observers from the leading religions.

We suggest that this be called 'The Mobius Mission' - a project to begin all projects!

Albert Einstein was an incredibly wise man as well as a scientific genius. Amongst his many quotable observations he once said:

'Imagination is more important that knowledge.'

How true.

 

We therefore need people with depth of vision as well as knowledge and practical ability. So, it is our intention to first approach scientists such as Paul Davies, David Deutsch and Ronald Mallett.

 

We feel sure that their curiosity will help to change the world.
 

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