Return to the Stars: Evidence for the Impossible

Return To The Stars

By

Erich Von Daniken

Foreword

1 Interstellar Space Flight is Possible

2 On the Track of Life

3 A 'Sunday' Archaeologist asks Questions

4 Mankind's Storehouse of Memory

5 The Sphere the Ideal Shape for Space-craft

6 The Science-fiction of Yesterday is Tomorrow's Reality

7 Conversations in Moscow

8 Ancient Sites that deserve Investigation

9 Easter Island: an Inexhaustible Topic

10 To India to consult the Sacred Texts

11 The Perversions of our Ancestors

12 Questions and still more Questions

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Illustrations

Erich von Daniken in front of the Temple of the Inscriptions at Palenque (Mexico).

Stone Age cave painting of man floating in the air.

Figure of rock painting wearing what seems to be a space suit with steering gear on his shoulders and antennae on his protective helmet.

A monument to the space-travelling gods?

The Venus of Willendorf.

Man or hybrid of man and animal?

Female figure with four faces and a solar symbol.

A Sunday archaeologist on a journey of discovery through Mexico.

Fresco from Sehar in the Tassili mountains.

Erich von Daniken measuring the cyclopean walls above Sacsayhuaman (Peru).

Block of stone, the size of a four-storey house, with steps made with great accuracy.

Monoliths: Thrones for giants?

Rock that seems to have been cut through as if it were butter.

Celebrated calendar of Sacsayhuaman.

Erich von Daniken with an Indian on the plateau of Tiahuanaco.

The famous 'water conduits' of Tiahuanaco.

The angled section of a 'water conduit' from Tiahuanaco.

A great stone—What held it together?

The Gate of the Sun at Tiahuanaco.

A massive block of stone with sharp-edged grooves. With what were they shaped?

Statute from Tiahuanaco.

Fragment of a Tiahuanaco statue.

Man and naked female figure from Auanrhet, Tassili.

Cajamarquilla near Lima (Peru). Fox-holes? Grain silos?

Close-up of a hole.

Aztec ceremonial disc of serpentine.

Milestone of King Melichkhon.

Rock painting from Auanrhet, Tassili, about 8,000 years old.

The great Martian God.

Space travellers from a rock drawing in Val Camonica (Italy).

Rock painting found 25 miles south of Fergana (Uzbeck, USSR).

Circular Mayan calendar.

Two Assyrian cylinder seals.

Stone Ball standing outside a building in San Jose (Costa Rica) as a decoration.

A gigantic landmark on the solitary bay south of Pisco (Peru).

If you fly over the plain of Nazca, it looks like an immense airfield with radiating and converging landing strips.

An ape, about 260 feet high, included in a geometrical system of lines drawn with extreme accuracy.

Tracks running absolutely parallel and continuing up a neighbouring mountainside.

Pictures scratched on the hillsides near Nazca.

Worshipping figures in a rock drawing in Peru.

The Dragon Monolith in the Olmec Park of Villahermosa (Mexico).

The gigantic figures in this picturesque group seem to be wearing space-suits.

Hollow 'hats', with a maximum height of 7 ft 2 ins and circumferences ranging up to 25 ft.

Tablet with writing on it from Easter Island.

The meaning and origin of this petroglyph are obscure.

The 'egg of the gods' crumbles away on the beach at Easter Island.

A rock painting from the Central Kimberley district of Australia.

Stone giants line the sandy shores of Easter Island.

An unfinished statue on the side of the Rano Raraku crater.

A rock face of uncompleted giant statues.

Figures resembling 'Moais'.

Islanders use the remains of a once powerful culture to build houses and sea-walls.

Unfinished statues on the face of the crater Rano Raraku.

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About Erich Von Daniken

Erich von Daniken is not a scholar. He is an autodidact, which the dictionary defines as a man who is self-taught. Probably this helps to explain the success his first book met with all over the world. Completely free from all prejudices, he had to demonstrate personally that his theses and theories were not unfounded and hundreds of thousands of readers were able to follow him along the adventurous road he took—a road that led into regions that were surrounded and protected by taboos.

Besides, his fearless questioning of all the previous explanations of the origin of the human race seems to have been long overdue. Erich von Daniken was not the first man who dared to challenge them, but his questions were more impartial, more direct and more audacious. In addition, he was able to say exactly what he wanted to say, unlike a professor, for example, who would have felt bound to take the opinions of his colleagues or the representatives of similar academic disciplines into consideration. What is more, he came up with some startling answers.

Men who bluntly ask bold questions that cast doubt on time-honoured, accepted explanations have always been a nuisance and people have never been over-fussy about how they silenced them. In the past their books were banished to secret libraries or put on the Index; today people try to hush them up or make them look ridiculous. Yet none of

these methods has ever succeeded in disposing of questions which concern the reason for our very existence.

Erich von Daniken has the spontaneity of the enthusiast. In the summer of 1968 he read articles by Vlatcheslav Saizev in the Soviet journal Sputnik with titles such as 'Space-ship in the Himalayas' and 'Angels in Space-ships'. Von Daniken booked a flight to Moscow on the spot. There Professor Shklovsky, Director of the Radio-Astronomic Department of the Soviet Academy of Science's Sternberg Institute, answered his questions.

The author of Chariots of the Gods? was barely nineteen years old when his curiosity first drove him to Egypt where he hoped to track down the real meaning of some cuneiform inscriptions. Since his first journey in 1954, he hops on planes to clear up his theories the way we catch a bus. Thinking on the space scale as he does, distance means nothing to him so long as the goal of his journeys provides arguments for the impossible.

Wilhelm Roggersdorf

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Foreword

Return to the stars?

Return? Does that mean that we came from the stars?

The desire for peace, the search for immortality, hankering for the stars—all these are deeply rooted in the human consciousness and have been ceaselessly pressing for realisation from time immemorial.

Is this urge for realisation that is so deeply implanted in human beings something to be taken for granted? Is it really only a question of human 'desires'? Or does this striving for fulfilment, this nostalgia for the stars, conceal something quite different?

I am convinced that our longing for the stars is kept alive by a legacy bequeathed by the 'gods'. Memories of our terrestrial ancestors and memories of our cosmic teachers are both at work in us. Man's acquisition of intelligence does not seem to me to have been the product of a long and tedious development. The process took place too suddenly for that. I think that our ancestors received their intelligence from the 'gods', who must have possessed knowledge that made the whole process a rapid one.

Obviously we shall not find proofs of my assertion on the earth if we stick to the existing methods of archaeological investigation. If we do, we shall simply and inexorably increase the existing collections of human and animal remains. Each find will be given its catalogue number, put in a glass case in a museum and kept clean by the museum staff. But we cannot approach the heart of the matter with such methods alone. For the heart of the matter, I am convinced, lies in the important questions of when and how our ancestors became intelligent.

This book is an attempt to provide new arguments for my theory. It is meant to be another peaceful incentive to reflection about the past and future of mankind. For too long we have failed to investigate our remote past with daring and imagination. It will not be possible to produce the last conclusive proofs in one generation, but the walls which still separate fantasy from reality will have more and more breaches in them. I shall try to do my best to keep on breaking through them with new aggressive questions. Perhaps I shall be lucky. Perhaps questions of the kind that are also asked by Louis Pauwels, Jacques Bergier and Robert Charroux will be answered in my lifetime.

I should like to thank the countless readers of my Chariots of the Gods? for their letters and suggestions. I want them to accept this book as the response to their encouragement.

I should like to thank everyone who helped me to write this new book. I wrote it during my imprisonment on remand in the Remand Prison of the Canton of Graubunden in Chur.

Erich Von Daniken

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1 - Interstellar Space Flight Is Possible

When Thomas Edison invented his carbon filament lamp in 1879, gas shares fell overnight. In England, Parliament set up a Committee of Inquiry to examine the future possibilities of the new method of lighting. Sir William Preece, Postmaster-General and Chairman of the Committee, told the House of Commons that it had reached the conclusion that electric light in the home was fanciful and absurd.

Today electric lights burn in every house in the civilised world.

Obsessed by man's age-old dream of being able to fly, Leonardo da Vinci spent years secretly working on the construction of flying machines that were amazingly like the prototype of the modern helicopter, but he hid his sketches for fear of the Inquisition. When they were published in 1797, the reaction was unanimous that heavier-than-air machines could never leave the ground. Even at the beginning of this century the celebrated astronomer Simon New-comb thought that a motive force powerful enough to enable flying machines to cover long distance was inconceivable.

Yet only a few decades later aeroplanes were carrying tremendous loads over land and sea.

Reviewing Professor Hermann Oberth's book Rockets to I Planetary Space in 1924, the world-famous periodical Nature commented that a space rocket project would probably only become practicable shortly before mankind became extinct. Even during the 1940's when the first rockets had already been launched from the earth's surface and flown hundreds of miles, doctors insisted that any kind of manned space travel was impossible because the human metabolism would be unable to stand the condition of weightlessness for several days on end.

Yet mankind has not died out and rockets are a familiar sight, and contrary to all predictions the human metabolism can obviously stand the condition of weightlessness.