Chariots of the Gods

Chapter Three - The Improbable World Of The Unexplained

Our historical past is pieced together from indirect knowledge. Excavations, old texts, cave drawings, legends and so forth were used to construct, i.e. a working hypothesis. From all this material an impressive and interesting mosaic was made, but it was the product of a preconceived pattern of thought into which the parts could always be fitted, though often with cement that was all too visible. An event must have happened in such and such a way. In that way and no other. And lo and behold—if that's what the scholars really want—it did happen in that way. We are entitled, indeed we ought to doubt every accepted pattern of thought or working hypothesis, for if existing ideas are not called in question research is at an end. So our historical past is only relatively true. If new aspects of it turn up, the old working hypothesis, however familiar it may have become, must be replaced by a new one. It seems the moment has come to introduce a new working hypothesis and place it at the very centre of our research into the past.

New knowledge about the solar system and the universe, about macrocosm and microcosm, tremendous advances in technology and medicine, in biology and geology, the beginning of space travel—these and many other things have completely altered our world picture in less than fifty years.

Today we know that it is possible to make space-suits that can withstand extremes of heat and cold. Today we know that space travel is no longer a Utopian idea. We are familiar with the miracle of colour television, just as we can measure the speed of light and calculate the consequences of the theory of relativity.

Our world picture, which is already almost frozen into immobility, begins to thaw. New working hypotheses need new criteria. For example, in the future archaeology can no longer be simply a matter of excavation. The mere collection and classification of finds is no longer adequate. Other branches of science will have to be consulted and made use of, if a reliable picture of our past is to be drawn.

So let us enter the new world of the improbable with an open mind and bursting with curiosity! Let us try to take possession of the inheritance the 'gods' have bequeathed to us.

At the beginning of the eighteenth century ancient maps which had belonged to an officer in the Turkish Navy, Admiral Piri Reis, were found in the Topkapi Palace. Two atlases preserved in the Berlin State Library which contain exact reproductions of the Mediterranean and the region round the Dead Sea also came from Piri Reis.

All these maps were handed over to the American cartographer Arlington H. Mallery for examination. Mallery confirmed the remarkable fact that all the geographical data were present, but were not drawn in the right places. He sought the help of Mr Walters, cartographer in the US Navy Hydrographic Bureau. Mallery and Walters constructed a grid and transferred the maps to a modern globe. They made a sensational discovery. The maps were absolutely accurate—and not only as regards the Mediterranean and the Dead Sea. The coasts of North and South America and even the contours of the Antarctic were also precisely delineated on Piri Reis's maps. The maps not only reproduced the outlines of the continents, but also showed the topography of the interiors! Mountain ranges, mountain peaks, islands, rivers and plateaux were drawn in with extreme accuracy.

In 1957, the Geophysical Year, the maps were handed over to the Jesuit Father Lineham, who is both Director of the Weston Observatory and a cartographer in the US Navy. After scrupulous tests Father Lineham, too, could but confirm that the maps were fantastically accurate—even about regions which we have scarcely explored today. What is more the mountain ranges in the Antarctic, which already figure on Reis's maps, were not discovered until 1952. They have been covered in ice for hundreds of years and our present-day maps have been drawn with the aid of echo-sounding apparatus.

The latest studies of Professor Charles H. Hapgood and the mathematician Richard W. Strachan give us some more shattering information. Comparison with modern photographs of our globe taken from satellites showed that the originals of Piri Reis's maps must have been aerial photographs taken from a very great height. How can that be explained?

A space-ship hovers high above Cairo and points its camera straight downwards. When the film is developed the following picture would emerge: everything that was in a radius of about 5,000 miles of Cairo is reproduced correctly, because it lay directly below the lens. But the countries and continents become increasingly distorted the further we move our eyes from the centre of the picture.

Why is this?

Owing to the spherical shape of the earth, the continents away from the centre 'sink downwards'. South America, for example, appears strangely distorted lengthways, exactly as it does on the Piri Reis maps! And exactly as it does on the photographs taken from the USA lunar probes.

There are one or two questions that can be answered quickly. Unquestionably our forefathers did not draw these maps. Yet there is no doubt that the maps must have been made with the most modern technical aids—from the air.

How are we to explain that? Should we be satisfied with the legend that a god gave them to a high priest? Or should we simply take no notice of them and pooh-pooh the 'miracle', because the maps do not fit into our mental world picture? Or should we boldly stir up a wasps' nest and claim that this cartography of our globe was carried out from a high-flying aircraft or from a space-ship?

Admittedly the Turkish Admiral's maps are not originals. They are copies of copies of copies. Yet even if the maps dated only from the eighteenth century when they were found these facts are just as unexplainable. Whoever made them must have been able to fly and also to take photographs!

Not far from the sea, in the Peruvian spurs of the Andes, lies the ancient city of Nazca. The Palpa valley contains a strip of level ground some 37 miles long and one mile wide that is scattered with bits of stone resembling pieces of rusty iron. The inhabitants call this region pampa, although any vegetation is out of the question there. If you fly over this territory—the plain of Nazca—you can make out gigantic lines, laid out geometrically, some of which run parallel to each other, while others intersect or are surrounded by large trapezoidal areas.

The archaeologists say that they are Inca roads.

A preposterous idea! What use were roads that run parallel to each other to the Incas? That intersect? That are laid out in a plain and come to a sudden end?

Naturally typical Nazca pottery and ceramics are found here, too. But it is surely oversimplifying things to attribute the geometrically arranged lines to the Nazca culture for that reason alone.

No serious excavations were ever carried out in this area until 1952. There is no established chronology for all the tilings that were found. Only now have the lines and geometrical figures been measured. The results clearly confirm the hypothesis that the lines were laid out according to astronomical plans. Professor Alden Mason, a specialist in Peruvian antiquities, suspects signs of a kind of religion in the alignments and perhaps a calendar as well.

Seen from the air, the clear-cut impression that the 37-mile-long plain of Nazca made on me was that of an airfield!

What is so far-fetched about the idea?

'Research' (= knowledge) does not become possible until the thing that is to be investigated has actually been found' Once it is found, it is tirelessly polished and trimmed until it has become a stone that—miraculously enough—fits exactly into the existing mosaic. Classical archaeology does not admit that the pre-Inca peoples could have had a perfect surveying technique. And the theory that aircraft could have existed in antiquity is sheer humbug to it.

In that case, what purpose did the lines at Nazca serve? According to my way of thinking they could have been laid out on their gigantic scale by working from a model and using a system of co-ordinates or they could also have been built according to instructions from an aircraft. It is not yet possible to say with certainty whether the plain of Nazca was ever an airfield. If iron was used it will certainly not be found. For most metals corrode in a few years, but stone never corrodes. What is wrong with the idea that the lines were laid out to say to the 'gods': 'Land here! Everything has been prepared as "you" ordered'? The builders of the geometrical figures may have had no idea what they were doing. But perhaps they knew perfectly well what the 'gods' needed in order to land.

Enormous drawings that were undoubtedly meant as signals for a being floating in the air are found on mountain sides in many parts of Peru. What other purpose could they have served?

One of the most peculiar drawings is carved on the high red wall of the cliffs in the Bay of Pisco. If you arrive by sea, you can make out a figure nearly 820 ft high from a distance of over 12 miles. If you play at 'It looks like ...', your immediate reaction is that this sculptor's work looks like a gigantic trident or a colossal three-branched candlestick. And a long rope was found on the central column of this stone sign. Did it serve as a pendulum in the past?

To be honest, we must admit that we are groping in the dark when we try to explain it. It cannot be meaningfully included in existing dogmas, which does not mean to say that there may not be some trick by which scholars could conjure this phenomenon too into the great mosaic of accepted archaeological thinking.

But what can have induced the pre-Inca peoples to build the fantastic lines, the landing strips, at Nazca? What madness could have driven them to create the 820-ft-high stone signs on the red cliffs south of Lima?

These tasks would have taken decades without modern machines and appliances. Their whole activity would have been senseless if the end-product of their efforts had not been meant as signs to beings approaching them from great heights. The stimulating question still has to be answered: why did they do all this if they could have had no idea that flying beings actually existed?

The identification of finds can no longer remain a matter for archaeology alone. A council of scientists from different fields of research would certainly bring us closer to the solution of the puzzle. Exchange of opinions and dialogue would definitely produce illuminating insights. The danger of research coming to no definite conclusion lies in the fact that scientists do not take the posing of such questions seriously and ridicule them. Space travellers in the grey mists of time? An inadmissible question to academic scientists. Anyone who asks questions like that ought to see a psychiatrist.

But the questions are there, and questions, thank heavens, have the impertinent quality of hovering in the air until they are answered. And there are many inadmissible questions like that. For example, what would people say if there was a calendar which gave the equinoxes, the astronomical seasons, the positions of the moon for every hour and also the movements of the moon, even taking the rotation of the earth into account?

That is no mere hypothetical question. This calendar exists. It was found in the dry mud at Tiahuanaco. It is a disconcerting find. It yields irrefutable facts and proves— can our self-assurance admit such a proof?—that the beings who produced, devised and used the calendar had a higher culture than ours.

Another fantastic discovery made there was the Great Idol. This single block of red sandstone is over 24 ft long and weighs 20 tons. It was found in the Old Temple. Again we have a contradiction between the superb quality and precision of the hundreds of symbols all over the idol and the primitive technique used for the building housing it. Indeed it is called the Old Temple because of the primitive technique.

H. S. Bellamy and P. Allan have given a closely reasoned interpretation of the symbols in their book The Great Idol of Tiahuanaco. They conclude that the symbols record an enormous body of astronomical knowledge and are based, as a matter of fact, on a round earth.

They conclude that the record fits perfectly Hoerbiger's Theory of Satellites published in 1927 five years before the idol was discovered. This theory postulates that a satellite was captured by the earth. As it was pulled towards the earth it slowed down the speed of the earth's revolutions. It finally disintegrated and was replaced by the moon.

The symbols on the idol exactly record the astronomical phenomena which would accompany this theory at a time when the satellite was making 425 revolutions round the earth in a year of 288 days. They were forced to conclude that the idol records the state of the heavens 27,000 years ago. They write 'Generally, the idol inscriptions give the impression ... that it has been devised also as a record for future generations.'

Here indeed is an object of great antiquity which demands a better explanation than 'an ancient god'. If this interpretation of the symbols can be substantiated we must ask was the astronomical knowledge really amassed by people who still had a great deal to learn about building or did it come from extra-terrestrial sources? In either case the existence of such a sophisticated body of knowledge, demonstrated on both the idol and the calendar is staggering.

The city of Tiahuanaco teems with secrets. The city lies at a height of over 13,000 ft, besides which it is miles from anywhere. Starting from Cuzco (Peru), you reach the city and the excavation sites after several days' travel by rail and boat. The plateau looks like the landscape of an unknown planet. Manual labour is a torture for anyone who is not a native. The atmospheric pressure is about half as low as it is at sea-level and the oxygen content of the air is correspondingly small. And yet an enormous city stood on this plateau.

There are no authentic traditions about Tiahuanaco. Perhaps we should be glad that in this case acceptable answers cannot be reached by leaning on the crutch of hereditary orthodox learning. Over the ruins, which are incredibly old (how old we do not yet know), lies the mist of the past, ignorance and mystery.

Blocks of sandstone weighing 100 tons are topped with other 60-ton blocks for walls. Smooth surfaces with extremely accurate chamfers join enormous squared stones which are held together with copper clamps. In addition all the stone work is exceptionally neatly executed. Holes 8 ft long, whose purpose has not been explained so far, are found in blocks weighing 10 tons. Nor do the 16 1/2-ft-long, worn-down flagstones cut out of one piece contribute to the solution of the mystery that Tiahuanaco conceals. Stone water conduits, 6 ft long and 1 1/2 ft wide, are found scattered about on the ground like toys, obviously by a catastrophe of tremendous dimensions. These finds stagger us by their accurate workmanship. Had our forefathers at Tiahuanaco nothing better to do than spend years—without tools— fashioning water conduits of such precision that our modern concrete conduits seem the work of mere bunglers in comparison?

In a courtyard which has now been restored there is a jumble of stone heads which, on closer observation, appears to be made up of the most varied races, for some of the faces have narrow, and some swollen lips, some long and some hooked noses, some delicate and some thick ears, some soft and some angular features. Yes, and some of the heads wear strange helmets. Arc all these unfamiliar figures trying to convey a message that we cannot or will not understand, inhibited as we are by stubbornness and prejudice?

One of the great archaeological wonders of South America is the monolithic Gate of the Sun at Tiahuanaco— a gigantic sculpture, nearly 10 ft high and 16 1/2 ft wide, carved out of a single block. The estimated weight of this piece of masonry is over 10 tons. Forty-eight square figures in three rows flank a being who represents a flying god.

What does legend say about the mysterious city of Tiahuanaco?

It tells of a golden space-ship, that came from the stars; in it came a woman, whose name was Oryana, to fulfil the task of becoming the Great Mother of the earth. Oryana had only four fingers, which were webbed. Great Mother Oryana gave birth to seventy earth children, then she returned to the stars.

We do, in fact, find rock drawings of beings with four fingers at Tiahuanaco. Their age cannot be determined. No one from any of the ages known to us ever saw Tiahuanaco when it was not in ruins.

What secret does this city conceal? What message from other worlds awaits its solution on the Bolivian plateau? There is no plausible explanation for the beginning or the end of this culture. Of course, this does not stop some archaeologists from making the bold and self-confident assertion that the site of the ruins is 3,000 years old. They date this age from a couple of ridiculous little clay figures which cannot possibly have anything in common with the age of the monolith. Scholars make things very easy for themselves. They stick a couple of old potsherds together, search for one or two adjacent cultures, stick a label on the restored find and—hey presto!—once again everything fits splendidly into the approved pattern of thought. This method is obviously very much simpler than chancing the idea that an embarrassing technical skill might have existed or the thought of space travellers in the distant past. That would be complicating matters unnecessarily.

Nor must we forget Sacsayhuaman! I am not referring here to the fantastic Inca defence works which lie a few feet above present-day Cuzco, nor to the monolithic blocks weighing more than 100 tons, nor to the terrace walls, over 1,500 ft long and 54 ft wide, in front of which tourists stand and take souvenir snapshots today. 1 am referring to the unknown Sacsayhuaman, which lies a mere half mile or so from the well-known Inca fortress.

Our imagination is unable to conceive what technical resources our forefathers used to extract a monolithic rock of more than 100 tons from a quarry, and then transport it and work it in a distant spot. But when we are confronted with a block with an estimated weight of 20,000 tons, our imagination, made rather blase by the technical achievements of today, is given its severest shock. On the way back from the fortifications of Sacsayhuaman, in a crater in the mountainside, a few hundred yards away, the visitor comes across a monstrosity. It is a single stone block the size of a four-storey house. It has been impeccably dressed in the most craftsmanlike way; it has steps and ramps and is adorned with spirals and holes. Surely the fashioning of this unprecedented stone block cannot have been merely a bit of leisure activity for the Incas? Surely it is much more likely that it served some as yet inexplicable purpose? To make the solution of the puzzle even more difficult the whole monstrous block stands on its head. So the steps run downward from the roof; the holes point in different directions like the indentations of a grenade; strange depressions, shaped rather like chairs, seem to hang floating in space. Who can imagine that human hands and human endeavour excavated, transported and dressed this block? What power overturned it?

What titantic forces were at work here?

And to what end?

Still flabbergasted by this stone monstrosity, the visitor finds, barely 900 yards away, rock vitrifications of a kind that ought only to be possible through the melting of stone at extremely high temperatures. The surprised visitor is promptly told that the rock was ground down by glaciers. This explanation is ridiculous. A glacier, like every flowing mass, would logically flow down to one side. This property of matter is hardly likely to have changed just at the time when the vitrifications took place. In any case, it can scarcely be assumed that the glacier flowed down in six different directions over an area of some 18,000 square yards'

Sacsayhuaman and Tiahuanaco conceal a great number of pre-historical mysteries for which superficial, but quite unconvincing explanations are hawked around. Moreover, sand vitrifications are also found in the Gobi Desert and in the vicinity of old Iraqi archaeological sites. Who can explain why these sand vitrifications resemble those produced by the atomic explosions in the Nevada Desert?

When will something decisive be done to give a convincing answer to the pre-historic puzzles? At Tiahuanaco there are artificial overgrown hills, the 'roofs' of which are absolutely level over an area of 4,784 square yards. It seems highly probable that buildings are concealed beneath them. So far no trench has been dug through the chain of hills, no spade is at work to solve the mystery. Admittedly, money is scarce. Yet the traveller often sees soldiers and officers who are obviously at a loss for something useful to do. What is wrong with letting a company of soldiers carry out excavations under expert supervision'

Money is available for so many other things in the world Research for the future is of burning importance As long as our past is undiscovered, one entry in the account for the future remains blank. Cannot the past help us to reach technical solutions, which will not have to be found for the first time because they already existed in antiquity?

If the urge to discover our past is not sufficient incentive to set modern intensive research work in motion, perhaps the slide-rule could be usefully employed. So far, at all events, no scientist has been asked to use the most modern apparatus to investigate radiation at Tiahuanaco, Sacsay-hueman, the legendary Sodom or in the Gobi Desert. Cuneiform texts and tablets from Ur, the oldest books of mankind, tell without exception of 'gods' who rode in the heavens in ships, of 'gods' who came from the stars, possessed terrible weapons and returned to the stars. Why do we not seek them out, the old 'gods'? Our radio-astronomers send signals into the universe to try to make contact with unknown intelligences. Why don't we first or simultaneously seek the traces of unknown intelligences on our own earth, which is so much closer? For we are not groping blindly in a dark room—the traces are there for all to see.

Some 2,000 years before our era the Sumerians began to record the glorious past of their people. Today we still do not know where this people came from. But we do know that the Sumerians brought with them a superior advanced culture which they forced upon the still semi-barbarian Semites. We also know that they always sought their gods on mountain peaks and that if there were no peaks in the regions they inhabited they erected artificial 'mountains' on the plains. Their astronomy was incredibly highly developed. Their observatories achieved estimates of the rotation of the moon which differ from present-day estimates by no more than 0.4 second. In addition to the fabulous Epic of Gilgamesh, about which I shall have more to say later, they have left us one thing that is quite sensational. On the hill of Kuyundjik (former Nineveh) a calculation was found with the final result in our notation of 195,955,200,000,000. A number with fifteen digits! Our oft-quoted and extensively studied ancestors of Western culture, the Greeks, never rose above the figure 10,000 during the most brilliant period of their civilisation. Anything beyond that was simply described as 'infinite'.

The old cuneiform inscriptions credit the Sumerians with a literally fantastic span of life. Thus the ten original kings ruled for a total of 456,000 years and the twenty-three kings who had the arduous task of reconstruction after the Flood still managed to hold the reins of government for a total of 24,510 years, 3 months and 3 1/2 days.

Periods of years that are quite incomprehensible to our way of thinking, although the names of all the rulers exist in long lists, neatly perpetuated on seals and coins. What would happen if here too we dared to take off our blinkers and look at the old things with fresh eyes, the eyes of today?

Let us suppose that foreign astronauts visited the territory of the Sumerians thousands of years ago. Let us assume that they laid the foundations of the civilisation and culture of the Sumerians and then returned to their own planet, after giving this stimulus to development. Let us postulate that curiosity drove them back to the scene of their pioneer work every hundred terrestrial years to check the results of their experiment. By the standard of our present-day expectation of life the same astronauts could easily have survived for 500 terrestrial years. The theory of relativity shows that the astronauts would only have aged about forty years during the outward and return flight in a space-ship that had travelled just under the speed of light! Over the centuries the Sumerians would have built towers, pyramids and houses with every comfort, they would have sacrificed to their gods and awaited their return. And after hundreds of terrestrial years they actually did return to them. 'And then came the Flood and after the Flood kingship came down from heaven once again,' it says in a Sumerian cuneiform inscription.

In what form did the Sumerians imagine and depict their 'gods'? Sumerian mythology and some Akkadian tablets and pictures provide information about this. The Sumerian 'gods' were not anthropomorphic and every symbol of a god was also connected with a star. Stars are depicted in Akkadian picture tablets as we should draw them today. The only remarkable thing is that these stars are circled by planets of various sizes. How did the Sumerians, who lacked our techniques for observing the heavens, know that a fixed star has planets? There are sketches in which people wear stars on their heads, while others ride on balls with wings. There is one picture that instantly reminds one of a model of an atom: a circle of balls arranged next to each other that radiate alternately. If we look at the legacy of the Sumerians with 'space eyes' it teems with questions and enigmas beside which the terrors of the deep and the wonders of the heavens pale into insignificance.

Here are only a few curiosities from the same geographical area:

• Drawings of spirals, a rarity 6,000 years ago, at Geoy Tepe.

• A flint industry credited with an age of 40,000 years at Gar Kobeh.

• Similar finds at Baradostian are estimated to be 30,000 years old.

• Figures, tombs and stone implements at Tepe Asiab are dated 13,000 years back.

• Petrified excrement, which is possibly not of human origin, was found at the same place.

• Tools and stone engravers were found at Karim Shahir. Flint weapons and tools were excavated at Barda Balka. Skeletons of grown men and a child were found in the Cave of Shandiar. They were dated (by the C 14 method) to about 45,000 B.C.

The list could be considerably enlarged and every fact would strengthen the assertion that a mixture of primitive men lived in the geographical territory of Sumer about 40,000 years ago. Suddenly, for reasons inexplicable so far, the Sumerians were there with their astronomy, their culture and their technology.

The conclusions to be drawn from the previous presence on earth of unknown visitors from the universe are still purely speculative. We can imagine that 'gods' appeared who collected the semi-savage peoples in the region of Sumer around them and transmitted some of their knowledge to them. The figurines and statues that stare at us today from the glass-cases of museums show a racial mixture, with goggle eyes, domed foreheads, narrow lips and mostly long straight noses. A picture that is very difficult to fit into the schematic system of thought and its concept of primitive peoples.

Visitors from the universe in remote antiquity?

In the Lebanon there are glass-like bits of rock, so-called tektites, in which the American Dr Stair discovered radioactive aluminium isotopes.

In Egypt and Iraq there were finds of cut crystal lenses which today can only be made using caesium oxide, in other words an oxide that has to be won by electro-chemical processes.

In Helwan there is a piece of cloth, a fabric so fine that it could only be woven today in a special factory with great technical know-how and experience.

Electric dry batteries, which work on the galvanic principle, are on display in Baghdad Museum.

In the same place the visitor can see electric elements with copper electrodes and an unknown electrolyte.

In the mountainous Asian region of Kohistan a cave drawing reproduces the exact position of the constellations as they actually were 10,000 years ago. Venus and the earth are joined by lines.

Ornaments of platinum were found on the Peruvian plateau.

Parts of a belt made of aluminium lay in a grave at Chu-Chu (China).

At Delhi there is an ancient pillar made of iron which contains neither phosphorus nor sulphur and so cannot be destroyed by the effects of the weather.

This strange medley of 'impossibilities' should make us curious and uneasy. By what means, with what intuition, did the primitive cave-dwellers manage to draw the constellations in their correct positions? From what precision workshop did the cut crystal lenses come? How could anyone smelt and model platinum, since platinum only begins to melt at temperatures of 1,800° C? And how did the ancient Chinese make aluminium, a metal which can only be extracted from bauxite with considerable difficulty.

Impossible questions, to be sure, but does that mean that we should not ask them? Since we are not prepared to accept or admit that there was a higher culture or an equally perfect technology before our own, all that is left is the hypothesis of a visit from space! As long as archaeology is conducted as it has been so far, we shall never have a chance to discover whether our dim past was really dim and not perhaps quite enlightened.

A Utopian archaeological year is due, during which archaeologists, physicists, chemists, geologists, metallurgists, and all the corresponding branches of these sciences ought to concentrate their efforts on one single question: did our forefathers receive visits from outer space?

For example, a metallurgist would be able to tell an archaeologist quickly and concisely how complicated the production of aluminium is. Is it not conceivable that a physicist might instantly recognise a formula in a rock drawing? A chemist with his highly developed apparatus might be able to confirm the assumption that obelisks were extracted from the rock by wetting wooden wedges or using unknown acids. The geologist owes us a whole series of answers to questions about what is of significance in certain Ice Age deposits. The team for a Utopian archaeological year would naturally include a group of divers who would investigate the Dead Sea for radioactive traces of an atomic explosion over Sodom and Gomorrha.

Why are the oldest libraries in the world secret libraries? What are people really afraid of? Are they worried that the truth, protected and concealed for so many thousands of years, will finally come to light?

Research and progress cannot be held back. For 4,000 years the Egyptians considered their 'gods' to be real beings. In the Middle Ages we still killed 'witches' in our burning ideological zeal. The belief of the ancient Greeks that they could tell the future from a goose's entrails is as out of date today as the conviction of ultra-conservatives that nationalism still has the slightest importance.

We have a thousand and one errors of the past to correct. The self-assurance that is feigned is threadbare and is really only an acute form of stubbornness. At the conference tables or orthodox scientists the delusion still prevails that a thing must be proved before a 'serious' person may—or can—concern himself with it.

In the past the man who put forward a brand-new idea had to count on being despised and persecuted by the church and his colleagues. Things must have become easier, one thinks. There are no more anathemas and fires at the stake are no longer lit. The snag is that the methods of our time are less spectacular, but they are hardly less obstructive to progress. Now everything is more 'civilised' and there is much less fuss. Theories and intolerably audacious ideas are hushed up or dismissed by killer phrases, as the Americans say. There are many possibilities:

• It's against the rules! (Always a good one!) It's not classical enough! (Bound to impress.)

• It's too revolutionary! (Unequalled in its deterrent effect!)

• The universities won't go along with that! (Convincing!)

• Others have already tried that! (Of course. But were they successful?)

• We can't see any sense in it! (And that's that!)

• That hasn't been proved yet! (Quod erat demonstrandum!)

Five hundred years ago a scientist cried out in the law courts, 'Common sense must tell anyone that the earth cannot possibly be a ball, otherwise the people on the lower half would fall into the void!'

'Nowhere in the Bible,' asserted another, 'does it say that the earth revolves round the sun. Consequently every such assertion is the work of the devil!'

It seems us if narrow-mindedness was always a special characteristic when new worlds of ideas were beginning. But on the threshold of the twenty-first century the research worker should be prepared for fantastic realities. He should be eager to revise laws and knowledge which were considered sacrosanct for centuries, but are nevertheless called in question by new knowledge. Even if a reactionary army tries to dam up this new intellectual flood, a new world must be conquered in the teeth of all the unteachable, in the name of truth and reality. Anyone who spoke about satellites in scientific circles twenty years ago was committing a kind of academic suicide. Today artificial heavenly bodies, namely satellites, revolve round the sun; they have photographed Mars and landed smoothly on the Moon and Venus, radioing first-class photographs of the unknown landscape back to earth with their (tourist) cameras.

When the first such photos were radioed to Earth from Mars in the spring of 1958, the strength used was 0.000,000,000,000,000,01 watts, an almost incredibly weak output.

Yet NOTHING is incredible any longer. The word 'impossible' should have become literally impossible for the modern scientist. Anyone who does not accept this today, will be crushed by the reality tomorrow. So let us stick tenaciously to our theory, according to which astronauts from distant planets visited the earth thousands of years ago. We know that our ingenuous and primitive forefathers did not know what to make of the astronauts' superior technology. They worshipped the astronauts as 'gods' who came from other stars and the astronauts had no other choice but patiently to accept their adoration as divinities— a homage, incidentally, for which our astronauts on unknown planets must be quite prepared.

Some parts of our earth are still inhabited by primitive peoples to whom a machine-gun is a weapon of the devil. In that case a jet aircraft may well be an angelic vehicle to them. And a voice coming from a radio set the voice of a god. These last primitive peoples, too, naively hand down from generation to generation in their sagas their impressions of technical achievements that we take for granted. They still scratch their divine figures and their wonderful ships coming from heaven on cliffs and cave walls. In this way these savage peoples have actually preserved for us what we are seeking today.

Cave drawings in Kohistan, France, North America and Southern Rhodesia, in the Sahara and Peru, as well as Chile, all contribute to our theory. Henri Lhote, a French scholar, discovered at Tassili (Sahara) several hundred (!) walls painted with many thousands of pictures of animals and men, including figures in short elegant coats. They carry sticks and undefinable chests on the sticks. Next to the animal paintings we are astonished by a being in a kind of diver's suit. The great god Mars—so Lhote christened him—was originally over 18 ft high; but the 'savage' who bequeathed the drawing to us can scarcely have been as primitive as we should like him to be, if everything is to fit neatly into the old pattern of thought. After all the 'savage' obviously used a scaffolding to be able to draw in proportion like that, for there have been no shifts in ground level in these caves during the last few millennia. Without overstretching my imagination, I get the impression that the great god Mars is depicted in a space- or diving-suit. On his heavy powerful shoulders rests a helmet which is connected to his torso by a kind of joint. There are a number of slits on the helmet where mouth and nose would normally be. One would readily believe that it was the result of chance or even in the pictorial imagination of the prehistoric 'artist' if this picture was unique. But there are several of these clumsy figures with the same equipment at Tassili, and very similar figures have also been found on rock faces in the USA, in the Tulare region of California.

I should like to be generous and I am willing to postulate that the primitive artists were unskilled and portrayed the figures in this rather crude way because it was the best they could do. But in that case why could the same primitive cave-dwellers depict animals and normal human beings to perfection? So it seems more credible to me to assume that the 'artists' were perfectly capable of drawing what they actually saw. In Inyo County (California) a geometrical figure in a cave drawing is recognisable—without overstraining the imagination—as a normal slide-rule in a double frame. The archaeological opinion is that the drawing shows figures of the gods.

An animal of unknown species with gigantic upright horns on its head appears on a pottery vessel found at Siyalk in Iran. Why not? But both horns display five spirals to left and right. If you imagine two rods with large porcelain insulators, that is roughly what this drawing looks like. What do the archaeologists say to that? Quite simply that they are symbols of a god. Gods are good value. People explain a great deal—certainly everything that is unexplained—by referring to their unknowableness and super-naturalness. In this world of the undemonstrable they can live in peace. Every figurine that is found, every artefact that is put together, every figure that can be restored from fragments—they are all instantly associated with some ancient religion or other. But if an object cannot be fitted into any of the existing religions, even forcibly, some new crackpot old cult is rapidly conjured up—like a rabbit out of a top hat) The sum works out once again.

But what if the frescoes, at Tassili or in the USA, or in France, actually reproduce what the primitive peoples saw? What should we say if the spirals on the rods really depicted antennae, just as the primitive peoples had seen them on the unfamiliar gods? Isn't it possible that things which ought not to exist do in fact exist? A 'savage', who nevertheless was skilful enough to execute wall paintings, cannot really have been so savage. The wall drawing of the White Lady of Brandberg (South Africa) could be a twentieth-century painting. She wears a short-sleeved pullover, closely-fitting breeches, and gloves, garters and slippers. The lady is not alone; behind her stands a thin man with a strange prickly rod in his hand and wearing a very complicated helmet with a kind of visor. This would be accepted as a modern painting without hesitation, but the snag is that we are dealing with a cave drawing.

All the gods who are depicted in cave drawings in Sweden and Norway have uniform undefinable heads. The archaeologists say that they are animal heads. Yet isn't there something rather absurd about worshipping a 'god' whom one also slaughters and eats? We often see ships with wings and even more frequently typical antennae.

Figures in bulky suits occur again in Val Camonica (Brescia, Italy) and, annoyingly enough, they also have horns on their heads. I am not going so far as to claim that the Italian cave-dwellers shuttled backwards and forwards between North America or Sweden, the Sahara and Spain (Ciudad Real) to transmit their illustrative talents and ideas. Yet the awkward question is left hanging in the air—why did the primitive peoples create figures in bulky suits with antennae on their heads independently of each other?

I should not waste a word on these unexplained oddities if they only existed in one place in the world. But they are found almost everywhere.

As soon as we look at the past with our present-day gaze and use the fantasy of our technological age to fill up the gaps in it, the veils that shroud the darkness begin to lift. In the next chapter a study of ancient holy books will help me to make my theory such a credible reality that in the long run the investigators of our past will no longer be able to evade the revolutionary questions.

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