Return to the Stars: Evidence for the Impossible (23 page)

What international organization is ready to finance a cartographical institute that will finally clear up the specific geographical and geodesic connections that exist between the remains of mysterious primitive cultures on different continents?

Will an international organisation, possibly UNESCO, ever reach the decision to have the thousands and thousands of rock paintings and cave drawings all over the world catalogued?

Is it not possible that the keys to the 'kingdom of heaven' are hidden in many places on earth?

Were we smitten with blindness for thousands of years?

And are we still?

Actually the ancient 'gods' were always telling us that we were deaf and blind, but that one day we should know the 'truth'.

From time immemorial all religions have promised that we should find the 'gods' if only we looked for them, and that once we have found them we should go to heaven and eternal peace would reign on earth.

Why should we not take this promise literally?

Perhaps we are making a mistake when we interpret the concept 'heaven' as another-worldly, never ending state of bliss. Perhaps 'heaven' simply meant the 'universe'?

Surely we ought to seek the 'gods', and the messages they left, here on earth, instead of hoping for them somewhere in an interminable eternity?

May not these 'gods', whom mankind has longed for and prayed to in all ages, have left behind technical instructions which would enable us to meet them in the universe?

Since the beginning of human history wars have been and are being waged continuously somewhere or other on our planet. Did the 'gods' promise peace on earth because they knew that once the inhabitants of earth had felt the full impact of seeing their tiny planet from outer space they would realise that all terrestrial squabbles were utterly futile?

Do the 'gods' hope or expect that once earthly beings get to know space they will lose the national consciousness they have only assumed and instead consider the infinite cosmos as the universal motherland?

From the perspective of the universe all men will be simply inhabitants of the 'third planet', a minor sun on the edge of the galaxy—and not Russians or Chinese, Americans or Europeans, black or white.

Could mankind make its age-old dream of 'going to heaven' come true if it took up the promise of the 'gods'? That the 'gods' promised men the possibility of return to the stars is implicit in Genesis 11:6:

'(The Lord is speaking to the people) ... and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do.'

And when one day the first contacts with intelligences on other planets are made, we shall soon learn to understand one another in one language as in the time of the Tower of Babel. The 2,976 languages that are spoken on earth today can still be preserved as country dialects. But scholars from all countries and on all planets will exchange their knowledge in one language.

But then our familiar and carefully preserved world picture will collapse and the younger generation of the space age will erase from its consciousness the last nationalistic feelings, which will have become meaningless.

For that reason alone, I think, it is our duty to examine both apparently fantastic interpretations of traditional old texts and factual stone evidence with the greatest scientific care. Once we have absorbed all the messages left behind by the 'gods', flesh and blood encounters with astronauts from distant stars will lose their terror because we shall know that these beings have something in common with us: they, too, experienced the day of their creation at some point in time.

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