Return to the Stars: Evidence for the Impossible (5 page)

Many readers will ask what these biochemical digressions have to do with the theme of my book? I have followed these investigations with keen interest ever since they were first reported. Why?

The conclusions reached convinced me that they had logical consequence, which Sir Bernard Lovell, founder and Director of the radiotelescope station at Jodrell Bank, formulated as follows:

'In the last two years it seems that the discussion of the question whether life exists outside our earth has become both serious and important. The seriousness of the discussion is a consequence of current scientific views, according to which the development of our solar system and of organic life on earth is probably not a unique case.'

In the summer of 1969 Physical Review Letters announced that American scientists, using the radiotelescope at Green Bank, West Virginia, had proved the existence of formaldehyde in gas and dust clouds in the universe. Formaldehyde, which is used in chemistry as a preservative and disinfectant, among other things, is a colourless, unpleasantly acrid-smelling gas. This, the most complicated chemical compound in space to date, which was ascertained from fifteen out of twenty-three sources of radiation by the American scientists, extends the list of primitive substances which are accepted as building stones of life by way of amino acids. This news provides new fuel for the suspicion that life is present in the cosmos.

But if there is life on other planets, I think it likely that unknown cosmonauts brought with them to our earth branches of knowledge of the kind we are now acquiring and that they made our ancestors intelligent by manipulation of the genetic code.

In the earlier account of the creation in the Bible we read (Genesis, 5:1-2):

'In the day that God created man, in the likeness of God made he him.

'Male and female created he them; and blessed them, and called their name Adam, in the day when they were created.'

According to my speculations, this could only have taken place by an artificial mutation of primitive man's genetic code by unknown intelligences. In that way the new men would have received their faculties suddenly—consciousness, memory, intelligence, a feeling for handicrafts and technology.

In the later biblical story of the creation (Genesis, 2:21-23), we find a different version of the origin of woman:

'And the LORD GOD caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam, and he slept: and he took one of his ribs, and closed up the flesh instead thereof;

'And the rib, which the LORD GOD had taken from man, made he a woman, and brought her unto the man.

'And Adam said, This is now bone of my bones (!), and flesh of my flesh (!): she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of a Man.'

It is quite possible that woman was created from man, but Eve can hardly have blossomed forth in her naked beauty from the narrow rib of the male thorax by a conjuring trick—after a surgical intervention? Perhaps she originated with the help of a male sperm cell. But as according to the biblical Genesis there was no female human being in Paradise who could have received the seed, Eve must have been produced in a retort. Now a number of cave drawings showing objects like retorts in the vicinity of primitive man have been preserved. Could foreign intelligences with a highly developed science and knowing about the immune biological reactions of bones have used Adam's marrow as a cell culture and brought the sperm to development in it? The comparatively easily accessible human rib would obviously have been the most suitable container for this biologically possible act of creation. That is a speculation, but one that is practicable in the present state of scientific knowledge.

As Eve was allotted as Adam's mate very suddenly in the Bible, there should have been a sudden spate of drawings of female beings on cave walls or Stone Age bones following the artificial creation of woman I have described. In fact there is plenty of confirmation of such a surmisal. The so-called 'mother goddesses' make their first appearance in the early Stone Age. Female Stone Age figures are found at La Gravette (France), Cukurca (southern Turkey), Laussel (France), Lespugne (France), Kostyenki (Ukraine), Willendorf (Austria), Petersfels (Germany) and elsewhere.

All these female figures are flatteringly described as 'Venuses'. In nearly all of them the artists have taken pains to emphasise the sexual organs and symptoms of pregnancy. Archaeology dates these early Stone Age figures to the Gravettian. We do not know what purpose they could have served nor why they appear for the first time in the Early Stone Age. It is conceivable that homo sapiens originated in different parts of the world in two different ways: by the planned mutation of the genetic code of hominids and by the artificial production of a female being and her cultivation in a retort.

Nevertheless, the 'new' men later mated with animals again. These lapses must be attributed to the old Adam, because he alone remembered coupling with apelike animals. After the artificial mutation it should have been natural for the new human beings to mate with each other. Henceforth every reversion to the former habit of mating with animals that led to reproduction was a step backwards. Can this backsliding have been the Fall of Man? And was it at the same time original sin against the building up of the new kind of cells?

A few thousand years later the 'gods' corrected this Fall. (I shall have more to say about this.) They destroyed the hybrid animal-men, separated a well-preserved group of new men and implanted new genetic material in them by a second artificial mutation.

Palaeoanthropologists are puzzled by the sudden, breathtakingly fast separation of the neanthropids, the group of homo sapiens to which we belong, from the family of prehommids, who were still ape-like in form. So far the process has been provisionally explained by a spontaneous mutation.

If we adopt the preanthropological datings marking the essential changes in our first ancestors for our theory of a planned artificial mutation by unknown intelligences, then the first artificial mutation with the genetic code used by the 'gods' must have taken place between 40,000 and 20,000 B.C. And the second artificial mutation would have occurred in more recent times, between 7,000 and 3,500 B.C.

Assuming these datings are correct, the 'gods' first visit would probably have taken place in the age which yielded the first drawings and figurines of women.

Anthropological scholars shy away from datings that go so far back. But surely the time dilation effect, which is unreservedly accepted by science, must have been valid in all ages?

Time dilation is a known quantity for all planned interstellar space travel projects, both now and in the future. The fact that it was governed by a law was first 'discovered' in our own day, but just because it is governed by a law it obviously held good at all times, and would have applied to the 'gods' who could have visited the earth in their spaceships travelling just below the speed of light.

Surely the time has come for anthropologists to take this scientifically verified phenomenon into account?

If they did, many of the questions about how our forefathers originated and became intelligent would be answered instantaneously.

No eternities have passed for the 'gods' since their visit to earth! If they had paid a visit to our planet thousands of terrestrial years ago, only a few decades would have passed for the crew of the space-ship.

Anyone who accepts time dilation as applying to the visit of the unknown astronauts will understand at once that the same 'gods' who developed woman from homo sapiens could also have given Moses the highly technical instructions for building the Ark of the Covenant.

I know that it is difficult to grasp and yet it could be true. I must explain once again that this is not necessarily all speculation. For a long time astronomy has been working successfully with these remarkable time shifts. The only thing that matters now is for archaeologists and pre-anthropologists to accept them, too.

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3 - A 'Sunday' Archaeologist Asks Questions

The 'Sunday' archaeologist has the great advantage of being able to give his imagination free rein and ask the specialists disconcerting questions. Naturally I make the most of this advantage to shake the platform on which many prehistoric findings are built up and which is supposed to be sacrosanct. Amateur investigators are embarrassingly industrious. They are assiduous collectors, readers and travellers, because they like to find the best ammunition for their theories in the hope that they will ultimately hit the bull's eye.

The Research Institute for Electro-Acoustics in Marseilles moved into a new building in the spring of 1964. A few days after the move several of Professor Vladimir Gavreau's fellow-workers began to complain of headaches, nausea and itching. Some of them were so badly affected that they trembled like aspen leaves. In an Institute devoted to electro-acoustical problems it seemed likely that some uncontrolled radiations in the laboratory were causing the mischief. Using hypersensitive measuring apparatus the scientists covered the building from top to bottom in an attempt to find out the cause of their colleagues' unfortunate condition. Find it they did. However, it was not the radiation of uncontrolled electrical frequencies. It was low frequency waves which had escaped through a ventilator and subjected the whole building to subsonic vibrations.

By one of those lucky coincidences which have so often helped research, Professor Gavreau had specialised in the investigation of sound waves for twenty years.'

After the incident he said to himself that it ought to be possible to produce experimentally and deliberately what the ventilator had achieved unintentionally. So he and his colleagues built the first sound gun in the world in the Research Institute for Electro-Acoustics in Marseilles. Sixty-one tubes in a chessboard pattern were fixed to a grille. Then compressed air was blown through them steadily until a note of 196 hertz was given off. The result was devastating. Cracks formed in the walls of the new building; the stomachs and intestines of the laboratory workers began to vibrate painfully. The apparatus had to be switched off at once.

Professor Gavreau wanted to follow up this experiment, but first he had a protective device made for the sound gun's crew. Then he built a genuine 'death trumpet' which developed 2,000 watts and sent out sound waves of 37 hertz. This apparatus could not be tested at full strength in Marseilles because it would have sent buildings crashing to the ground over a radius of several miles. At present a 'death trumpet' seventy-five feet long is in the course of construction. It is expected to produce sound waves with the death-dealing frequency of 3.5 hertz.

Quite apart from the frightening vision such a 'death trumpet' conjures up for the future, it reminds us of an event in antiquity.

After the chosen people had crossed the River Jordan without getting their feet wet and besieged the town of Jericho with its twenty-one foot thick defence walls, the priests were given complicated instructions about marching round the city and blowing their 'trumpets'. The event is described in Joshua (6:20) as follows:

'... and it came to pass, when the people heard the sound of the trumpet, and the people shouted with a great shout, that the wall fell down flat, so that the people went into the city, every man straight before him, and they took the city.'

Neither the full blast of the priestly lungs nor a fanfare of many thousand trumpets could blow down walls twenty-one feet thick. But we know today that sound waves with deadly low hertz frequencies would have been perfectly capable of bringing down the walls of Jericho.

When Dr Mottier, an archaeologist at Berne University, and I were taking part in a debate on the Swiss Radio, she told me that giants had never existed because there were no fossil finds from which we could infer the existence of such a race.

However, Dr Lovis Burkhalter, former French delegate to the Prehistoric Society, holds a quite different opinion. In 1950, he wrote in the Revue du Musee de Beyrouth: 'I want to make it clear that the existence of gigantic men in the Acheulian age must be considered a scientifically proven fact.'

Which side is right? At all events, tools of abnormal size have been found that could not have been handled by men of normal stature.

Archaeologists excavated flint implements weighing nearly 8 1/2 lb near Sasnych (four miles from Safita in Syria). The flint tools found at Ain Fritissa (Eastern Morocco) are not to be sneezed at either. They were 12 1/2 ins long, 8 1/2 ins wide and weighed 9 1/4 lb. If we make a calculation based on the normal human stature and constitution, the beings who were able to handle these clumsy implements must have been about 12 ft tall.