Return to the Stars: Evidence for the Impossible (6 page)

Apart from finds of tools, at least three scientifically accepted finds point to the existence of giants in the past:

1. The Java giant.

2. The South China giant.

3. The South African (Transvaal) giant.

What race did they represent?

Were they lone-wolves?

Were they the wrongly programmed products of mutations?

Were they the direct descendants of gigantic cosmonauts from another world?

Were they especially intelligent beings with advanced technical know-how who had originated according to the genetic code?

The fossil finds give no conclusive answers to my questions. They are too meagre to form the stones for building up a proper genealogy. Will such a family tree ever be systematically investigated in some specially chosen region? Sensational discoveries are reported from time to time, but they nearly always turn out to be chance finds.

But documents—and we ought to take the old sources literally—clearly confirm the former existence of giants. Moses tells us in Genesis, 6:4:

'There were giants in the earth in those days; and also after that, when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bare children to them, the same became mighty men which were of old, men of renown.'

We get a graphic account in Numbers, 13:33:

'And there we saw the giants, the sons of Anak, which come of the giants: and we were in our own sight as grasshoppers, and so we were in their sight.'

Deuteronomy, 3:11, even gives us details that allow us to make rough estimate of their physical stature:

'For only Og king of Bashan remained of the remnant of giants; behold, his bedstead was a bedstead of iron; is it not in Rabbath of the children of Ammon? nine cubits was the length thereof, and four cubits the breadth of it...'

(The Hebraic cubit is about 1 ft 9 ins!)

But the Pentateuch is not the only part of the Bible that speaks clearly and unequivocally about giants, the later books of the Old Testament also give descriptions of these supermen. Their authors lived at different times and in different places, so they could not have communicated with each other. Nor could the giants, as theologists sometimes claim, have been interpolated into the texts later in order to symbolise evil. If these apologists looked at the texts more closely, they could see that the giants always appear when performing perfectly practical tasks—waging war and single combat, for example—but never when moral concepts or moral behaviour are under discussion.

Besides, the documentation of giants is not confined to the Bible. The myths of the Mayas and Incas also recount that the first race created by the 'gods' before the Flood was a race of giants. They called two prominent giants Atlan (Atlas) and Theitani (Titan).

Just like our 'flying gods', giants haunt the world of sagas, legends and sacred books, but they are never put on the same footing as the gods in any of these sources. One serious handicap kept the giants on the earth; they could not fly. Only when a giant is clearly defined as the offspring of a god is he taken along on a heavenly journey. The giants usually appear as the gods' humble and obedient servants, who carry out their tasks, until they are finally described as stupid brutish creatures and their traces in literature are lost.

A scholar as serious as Professor Denis Saurat, Director of the Centre International d'Etudes Francaise in Nice, has made a serious study of giants. He definitely confirms that they once existed, and even those scholars who raise doubts sooner or later stumble over giants' graves, over menhirs, those vertical, roughly dressed stone blocks, which range up to 65ft in height, over dolmens, burial chambers built of massive stones, or other megalithic monuments, and last but not least over the impossibility of explaining technical achievements such as the working and transport of gigantic stone blocks. The number of gigantic architectonic edifices and the number of artistically dressed boulders we can still marvel at today can only be plausibly explained if we assume the primitive erectors of these works to have been giants or beings with techniques unknown to us.

Whenever I stand in front of a prehistoric monument on my travels, I always ask myself whether we ought to be satisfied with the previous explanations of its origin and purpose. Surely we ought to band together and have the courage to find out if novel and fantastic interpretations have any validity.

During my last journey in Peru in 1968 my friend Hans Neuner and I revisited the megalithic buildings above Sacsayhuaman (Falcon Rock), which is situated at a height of 3,450 to 3,780 ft near the limits of the former Inca fortress of Cuzco.

Tape measure and camera in hand, we approached these ruins, which are not ruins at all in the ordinary sense of the word. This is no heap of crumbled stone, remains of some historical building that have become unrecognisable. The rock labyrinth above Sacsayhuaman gives the impression of a super-edifice constructed with the last word in technical refinement. Anyone who has spent days in the thin air of this plateau clambering about among stone giants, caves and rock monstrosities, will find it hard to accept the explanation that all this was created ages ago by human hands using damp wooden wedges and crude stone mallets.

Here is only one of the examples we measured: a rectangle 7 ft 1 in high, 1 ft 2 ins wide and 2 ft 8 ins deep had been cut out of a granite block 36 ft high and 59 ft wide that appeared to have been torn from the cliff face. A first-class piece of work! There is nothing botched or crude about the way it has been extracted, there is no uneven or clumsy dressing. Even if we are prepared to admit the possibility that extremely skilled stonemasons managed to free the four lateral incisions of the colossus from the rock face after many years of work, we are still left with the riddle of how they freed the rear side of the rectangle. In those days the stonemasons certainly did not have cutting jibs of the kind used today when excavating the stone for underground submarine shelters. And presumably they did not possess the chemical knowledge to free the stone block from the rock face with the help of acids.

Or did they?

We climbed down into some caves in the rock that were 180 to 240 ft deep. As if shaken by some primaeval force, the caves' course has been interrupted and they are partially destroyed or telescoped together. Large sections of the ceilings and walls have been preserved. They are so perfect that they could compete with any present-day piece of pre-cast concrete. Nothing has been joined together; there are no parts held together by a binding agent. The whole thing looks as if it had come from one casting-mould. The edges are cut at right-angles and are knife sharp. Eight inch wide granite ledges lie stepwise as neatly as if the wooden mould had been taken away yesterday.

We walked upright through galleries and chambers, waiting tensely for the surprise awaiting us around the next turning. I kept on thinking about the current archaeological explanations of these masterpieces of technology, but they did not convince me. It seems much more likely to me that superlatively built fortifications must have existed here above Sacsayhuaman. All these faultlessly dressed stone colossi could have formed part of a megalithic building complex. Presumably this lay-out could be excavated or reconstructed if systematic research was carried out on the site.

Naturally I have also asked myself whether there might not be conventional explanations for the 'ruins' above Sacsayhuaman.

Volcanic eruptions? There have been none for miles around.

Movements of the earth's crust? The last violent movement is supposed to have taken place about 200,000 years ago.

Earthquakes? They could hardly have caused the damage which leaves so much order recognisable among the disorder. To add a double question mark after all the questions, the dressed granite blocks show signs of vitrification of the kind that only appears as the result of tremendously high temperatures.

Freaks of nature? The granite blocks have accurately cut grooves and they have mortises as if they had been torn loose from the block next to them.

Neither the city archaeologist at Cuzco nor his colleagues in the museums of Lima could give me a satisfactory explanation of the structures we had examined. 'Pre-Inca,' they said, 'or perhaps the Tiahuanaco culture.'

Of course, there is nothing shameful about admitting one's ignorance. The fact remains that no one knows anything definite about the blocks we saw above Sacsayhuaman. Only one thing is certain. This great complex was built by a method unknown to us by beings unknown to us at an unknown date. It is also certain that it existed and had already been destroyed again before the famous Inca fortress of the Sun God was built.

This applies equally to Tiahuanaco on the Bolivian plateau.

I had studied many books on the subject and learnt extraordinary things about Tiahuanaco in the process, but everything in them was surpassed by what I saw with my own eyes. I had also read a lot about the remarkable 'water conduits' that were discovered at Tiahuanaco. During my last journey to the Bolivian plateau I singled them out for special study.

There I stood in Tiahuanaco, 15,000 ft above sea level, for the second time. I had paid too little attention to the 'water conduits' during my first brief visit, but this time I wanted to rectify the omission.

I found the first remarkable example of these half-pipes set in the wall of a reconstructed temple. It had been put there arbitrarily. Where it sat in the wall the half-pipe was quite pointless, except perhaps in a decorative sense, as if it was aimed at the tourists.

When I was able to examine the 'water conduits' in other places, I found that what I had read about them was true. They had a completely modern shape with smooth cross-sections, polished inner and outer surfaces and accurate edges. The half-pipes have grooves and corresponding protrusions that fit together. They can be joined like children's Lego pieces.

If I was staggered by the technical and mechanical perfection of these works that the archaeologists attribute to pre-Inca tribes, I was absolutely flabbergasted when I saw that the finds long classified as 'water conduits' existed in the form of double pipes. One conduit was masterpiece enough, but now there were double pipes made out of one piece of rock. What is more, double pipes with faultlessly executed right-angled sections.

But how can anyone explain the fact that only the upper parts of the pipes have been found?

For the upper parts of 'water conduits' can be dispensed with, but not the lower pipes.

Did these stone pipes serve as water conduits at all?

Perhaps there is a quite different explanation, fanciful though it may seem.

Traditional legends and existing stone drawings tell us that the 'gods' met at Tiahuanaco, before man was even created. In the language of our space age that means that unknown astronauts constructed their first base on the Bolivian plateau. They had a highly developed technology at their disposal, just as we today use laser beams, vibrating milling tools and electric apparatus. Looked at from that point of view, is it not more likely that the 'water conduits' were protective pipes for energy cables between individual buildings of the complex?

Beings who were capable of making pipes like those at Tiahuanaco must have possessed outstanding technical skills. Beings with such a high level of intelligence would not have been so stupid as to make water conduits with double pipes when they could simply have bored a larger hole in the same stone to let double the amount of water pass through by a very much simpler process and with very much less work. Intelligent beings with such abilities would not have chosen a right-angled shape for the transport of water because they would have known that water and dirt would collect in the corners. And naturally these technicians would also have made the lower sections of piping, if it was really needed for the transport of water.

When the Spanish conquistadores asked the natives about the builders of Tiahuanaco in the 1530's, they could give no information about them. They referred the Spaniards to the sagas, according to which Tiahuanaco was the place where the gods had created men. I suspect that the same 'gods' also made the pipes and that they did not use them as water conduits.

Archaeologists and anthropologists do their best to give dates to all historical finds. Once a find is dated, it assumes its predestined place in the existing system and, of course, it is given a catalogue number.