Return to the Stars: Evidence for the Impossible (16 page)

In the park-cum-museum of Villahermosa, Tabasco (Mexico), stands a neatly carved monolith on which a snake, or rather a dragon, taking up three sides of the colossus, is depicted. Inside the animal sits a man with bent back and raised extended legs. The soles of his feet are working pedals, his left hand rests on a 'gear-lever', his right hand carries a small box. The head is enveloped in a closely-fitting helmet that covers brow, ears and chin, leaving only the face free. Directly in front of his lips is an apparatus that can be identified as a microphone. Clothing and helmet of the sitting figure fit tightly together.

On a broad copper chisel, sharpened on one side, that was found in the Royal Cemetery at Ur, one can make out, reading from top to bottom: five balls, a small box like a loudspeaker, two absolutely modern rockets, which lie next to each other and emit rays at the rear, several dragon-like figures and a pretty accurate 'copy' of the Gemini capsule. The artist who made the engravings more than 5,500 years ago must have had an enviable imagination!

Senor Gerardo Niemann (Hacienda Casa Grande, Trujillo, Peru) has two remarkable clay vessels in his private collection. One vessel is 8 1/2 ins high and represents a kind of 'space capsule' on which motor and exhaust are as clearly recognisable as on the relief of the rocket-driving god Kulkulkan at Palenque. A dog-like animal with gaping jaws crouches on the capsule. The second clay vessel shows a man who is using the index fingers of both hands to operate a kind of calculating machine or switchboard. This vessel is 1 ft 4 ins high. Both artefacts were found in Chicama Valley on the north coast of Peru.

No, we are not at the end, we are only at the beginning of the great discoveries pointing out of the past into the future.

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9 - Easter Island: An Inexhaustible Topic

The remains of unknown great cultures lie on nearly all the inhabitable South Sea islands. Survivals of a completely inexplicable yet obviously very advanced technology stare the visitor mysteriously in the face and literally entice him to speculate and theorise.

Particularly on Easter Island.

We spent ten days on this tiny speck of volcanic rock in the South Pacific. The days are over when this island was only visited once every six months by a Chilean warship. We were taken there by a four-engined Lan Chile Constellation. There are no hotels there yet, so we spent the whole time in a tent. We had previously stocked up with provisions, which are scarce on the island. Twice the natives invited us to supper. We had baked salmon which they put in a hole in the earth and covered with glowing charcoal and many different kinds of leaves that form part of the secret recipes of the Rapanui housewives. We had to wait nearly two hours before the smouldering food was taken out. As a gourmet I must admit that finally palate and tongue were offered a feast that was really delicious, a pleasure that was on a par with the feast for the ears provided by the Rapanui islanders singing their folklore.

The horse is still the means of transport on the island— except for one car, which belongs to the twenty-six-year-old mayor, Ropo, who is of medium height and chubby faced, and was elected democratically by his fellow-countrymen. Ropo is the uncrowned king of the island, although there are a 'governor' and a 'police commissioner' as well. Ropo comes from an old-established family and probably knows much more about Easter Island and its unsolved puzzles than all the other islanders put together. He and two of his assistants offered to act as our guides.

The language of the Rapanui is rich in vowels: ti-ta-pe-pe-tu-ti-lo-mu. I do not speak it, so we conversed in a mixture of Spanish and English. When that failed, we tried to make ourselves understood with hands, feet and grimaces that must have been extremely funny to outsiders.

There are many accounts of the history of Easter Island and just as many theories about it. After my ten days' researches I naturally cannot say what took place here in the remote past, but I believe I found some arguments to show what cannot have taken place.

There is one theory that the ancestors of the present-day Rapanui chiselled the now world-famous statues from the hard volcanic rock during generations of arduous toil.

Thor Heyerdahl, whom I respect highly, describes in his book Aku-Aku how he found hundreds of stone implements lying about in confusion in the quarries. From this mass find of primitive tools Heyerdahl concluded that an unknown number of men chiselled the statues here and then precipitately abandoned their work at some time or other. They threw down their tools and left them lying where they had been working.

Using a large number of islanders who worked for eighteen days, Heyerdahl erected a medium-sized statue by-means of wooden beams and a primitive but successful technique, and then moved it with the help of ropes and about a hundred men on the heave-ho principle.

Here a theory appeared to be proved in practice! Nevertheless, archaeologists all over the world protested against this example. For one thing, they said, Easter Island had always been too short of men and food to have provided the necessary number of stonemasons to carry out the enormous task—even over many generations. For another, they claimed that no finds had yet supplied proof that the islanders had ever had wood at their disposal as building material (for rollers).

After my own reflections on the spot I think I may say that the stone tool theory will not stand up for long in view of the facts, which are hard in the literal sense of the word. After Heyerdahl's successful experiment I was quite prepared to cross an unsolved puzzle off my list as solved. But when I stood in front of the lava wall in the crater Rano Raraku, I decided to let the question mark stay on my list. I measured the distance hacked away between the lava and individual statues, and found spaces of up to 6ft over a distance of nearly 105 ft. Nobody could ever have freed such gigantic lumps of lava with small primitive stone tools.

Thor Heyerdahl made the natives hammer away for weeks with the old implements which were found in abundance. I saw the meagre result: a groove of a few inches in the hard volcanic rock! We, too, bashed away at the rock like wild men, using the biggest stones we could find. After a few hundred blows, there was nothing left of our 'tools' but a few miserable splinters, but the rock showed hardly a scratch.

The stone tool theory may be valid for some of the small statues which originated in an age nearer our own, but in my conviction and the opinion of many visitors to Easter Island it can in no case be accepted for the excavation of the raw material for the colossal statues from the volcanic stone.

The Rano Raraku crater today looks like a gigantic sculptor's workshop in which knocking off time had been suddenly announced in the middle of work. Finished, half-finished and just begun statues lie about vertically and horizontally all over the place. Here a gigantic nose towers from the sand, there feet that no shoe could fit sprawl on the scanty grass and elsewhere a face pushes its way through as if gasping for breath.

Mayor Ropo had stood by, shaking his head, as we attacked the rock with all our might.

'What are you laughing at?' my friend Hans Neuner shouted at him. 'That's what your ancestors did, didn't they?'

Ropo gave a broad grin. With a sly look on his face, he said drily: 'So the archaeologists say.'

So far no one has been able to produce even a tolerably convincing reason why a few hundred Polynesians who found it hard enough to win their scanty nourishment took such pains to carve some 600 statues.

No one has been able to give a clue as to the highly advanced techniques with which the stone blocks were freed from the hard lava.

So far no one has been able to explain why the Polynesians (if they were the sculptors) endowed the faces with shapes and expressions for which there was no model on the island: long straight noses, narrow-lipped mouths, sunken eyes and low foreheads.

No one knows who the sculptures are supposed to represent.

Not even Thor Heyerdahl!

Perhaps, it seems presumptuous of me not only to reject Heyerdahl's theory that stone tools were used to make the statues, but to use the presence of several hundred stone implements to try to prove exactly the opposite, namely that the colossal statues could not have been made in that way.

In case that sounds incredible, here is my explanation— as usual one that seems fantastic.

A small group of intelligent beings was stranded on Easter Island owing to a 'technical hitch'. The stranded group had a great store of knowledge, very advanced weapons and a method of working stone unknown to us, of which there are many examples around the world. The strangers hoped they would be looked for, found and rescued by their own people. Yet the nearest mainland was some 2,500 miles away.

Days passed in inactivity. Life on the little island became boring and monotonous. The unknowns began to teach the natives the elements of speech; they told them about foreign worlds, stars and suns. Perhaps to leave the natives a lasting memory of their stay, but perhaps also as a sign to the friends who were looking for them, the strangers extracted a colossal statue from the volcanic stone. Then they made more stone giants which they set up on stone pedestals along the coast so that they were visible from afar.

Until suddenly and without warning salvation was there.

Then the islanders were left with a junk room of just begun and half-finished figures. They selected the ones that were nearest completion and year after year they hammered doggedly away at the unfinished models with their stone tools. But the some 200 figures that were still only sketched on the rock face defied the 'fleabites' of the stone implements. Finally the carefree inhabitants who lived only for the day—even today they are not very fond of hard work— gave up the thankless task, threw away their tools and returned to their primitive caves and huts.

In other words, the arsenal of several hundred stone tools that had failed to dint the unyielding cliff was left by them and not by the original sculptors. I claim that the stone tools are evidence of resignation in the face of a task that could not be mastered.

I also suspect that the same masters gave lessons on Easter Island, at Tiahuanaco, above Sacsayhuaman, in the Bay of Pisco and elsewhere. Obviously it is only one of other possible theories and it can be opposed by referring to the great distances. But then people would be omitting to take into account my theory—and I am by no means the only one to hold it—that in the remote past there were intelligences with an advanced technology for whom the covering of vast distances in aircraft of the most varied kinds was no problem.

People may doubt my theory, but they must admit that it looks as if it had been child's play for the original sculptors to cut the stone colossi from the hard rock.

Perhaps it was only a spare time activity for them.

But perhaps they had a very specific purpose in mind.

Did they get bored with the statue game one day?

Or did they get an order that compelled them to stop.

At all events they suddenly disappeared.

So far no deep excavations have been made. Perhaps remains would be found in the lower strata that would make possible a significantly earlier dating.

The Americans are building an airfield; they are digging up the ground for a concrete runway. But I did not see any systematic excavations, nor have I heard of plans for any. The islanders—and why not indeed?—go about their business without worrying. The tourists who take the trouble to come here marvel at what they see and take souvenir snaps for the family album. Serious archaeological investigations that could clear up the puzzle are not taking place.

It is known that the Moais, as the islanders call the statues, once wore red hats on their heads and that the material for them was taken from a different quarry from the one used for heads and bodies. I have actually seen the 'hat' quarry. In comparison with the quarry in the Raro Raraku crater it is like a gravel pit dug by a child. The quarry must have been far too cramped a workplace for making the big red hats. The red hats themselves, which are brittle and porous, also make me sceptical.

Were they cut out and carved here at all?

I incline to the assumption that the red hats were cast from a mixture of gravel and red earth. Many hats are hollow inside. Did their sculptors want to save weight to make transport easier? Anyone who accepts the method of making the hats by a cast of gravel and earth—and it sounds reasonable—simultaneously has the baffling transport problem solved. The round hats must simply have been rolled from the gravel pit to the sites of the statues, which were always situated lower down.