Return to the Stars: Evidence for the Impossible (8 page)

Today it is an accepted scientific fact that memories are stored in memory molecules and that RNA and DNA molecules establish and transport memory contents. If these investigations were carried a step further, mankind might be able in the foreseeable future to stop knowledge and memory disappearing when a man dies, and to preserve and transmit the intellectual possessions he has acquired.

Shall we live to see hyper-intelligent dolphins, 'programmed' in underwater research, go to 'diving stations'?

Shall we see apes whose brains have been 'programmed' to handle road-making machines working in the streets?

These things may sound ridiculous today, but I think that the man who doubts their practicability is sticking his neck out more than the man who reckons with them as serious possibilities.

As yet there is no scientific proof that unknown intelligences knew how to carry out this kind of memory manipulation in the remote past. Nevertheless, famous scientists such as Shklovsky, Sagan and others do not exclude the probability that there are living beings on other planets who have advanced far beyond our stage of scientific research.

Once again the Old Testament gives food for thought. It tells of several prophets who were given books to eat by the 'gods'.

Ezekiel 3:3, recounts such a book feast: 'And he said unto me, Son of man, cause thy belly to eat, and fill thy bowels with this roll (of a book) that I give thee. Then did I eat it....'

So it is not surprising that prophets 'nourished' in this way knew more than anyone else and were more intelligent than their contemporaries!

Since the scientific discovery of the DNA double helix, we know that the nucleus of the gene contains all the information necessary for the construction of an organism. Punched cards are so familiar today that to simplify things I should like to call the building plan that is programmed in the nuclei 'punched cards governing life'.

These punched cards build life according to a very precise time schedule. Let us take our own species as an example. A ten-year-old boy and an eight-year-old girl are obviously adults in miniature, but they do not possess many of the attributes they will have one day as man and woman. Before they have grown up, the cells in their bodies will have divided a trillion times and with each cell division new building stages will be summoned from the punched card. Boys and girls begin to grow rapidly; pubic hair, facial hair and breasts begin to show. The punched cards never make a mistake; their holes determine the course of growing up at exactly the right times.

I should like to emphasise once again that this is a fact that applies to every organism. So on this solid scientific basis I should like to put up for discussion an idea that I personally find quite logical. Why should there not have been a comprehensive building plan for the whole of mankind—as for every individual being—since the remotest times?

Anthropological, archaeological and ethnological facts embolden me to add my theory to other hypotheses of the origin of mankind. I suspect that in the case of primitive man all the information, i.e. all the orders punched in the cards, was introduced from outside by a planned artificial mutation.

If we follow my theory back into the dark maze of mankind's prehistory, man is both the 'son of earth' and 'child of the gods'. Tremendous and fantastic consequences result from this dual descent.

Our ancestors experienced 'their' age, the primordial past, directly. They took it into their consciousness and their memory stored up every event. As each new generation came into being a part of this primitive memory was transferred to it. Simultaneously each generation added new holes to the existing ones in the punched cards. The cards were constantly enriched with new information. Even if some information was lost in the course of time or had stronger impulses superimposed on it, the sum of all information did not decrease. But now man houses not only the punched holes of his own memories, but also the programming of the gods, who were already travelling in space in Adam's day!

Between our present knowledge and the wealth of these memories there stands a barrier which only a few men manage to break through at fortunate moments. Sensitive men—poets, painters, musicians and scientists—sense the creative stimulation of this primordial memory and often struggle desperately to recapture the stored up information. The medicine man puts himself into a trance with drugs and monotonous rhythms so that he can break through the barrier to the primitive memory. I also believe that even behind the trendy behaviour of the psychedelic pioneers a primitive instinct is at work that drives them to seek access to the unconscious by using drugs and exacerbating music. But even if the door to a buried world is sometimes opened in individual cases, most people are incapable of communicating to others what they experienced in their exalted state.

For example, Aladdin's lamp is always quoted when people want to describe a fantastic apparatus or miraculous process. But not only do I take the prophets literally, I have also got into the habit of seeking something real behind the strange primitive memories of the men of antiquity, something real that may only await (re)-discovery by us today.

What was the special thing about Aladdin's lamp? The fact that it could materialise supernatural beings whenever young Aladdin rubbed it. Is it possible that he set a materialisation machine going when he rubbed it?

In the light of the present-day knowledge there is a possible explanation of the magic lamp. We know that atomic technology turns mass into energy and that physics turns energy into mass. A television picture is split up into hundreds of thousands of lines that are radiated over relay stations after they have been transformed into waves of energy.

Let us take a leap into the fantastic. A table—including the one I am sitting at now—consists of a countless number of juxtaposed atoms. If it were possible to split the table up into its atomic components, send it out in energy waves and reconstruct it in its original form at a given place, the transport of matter would be solved. Sheer fantasy? I admit that it is today, but in the future?

Perhaps the memory of the men of antiquity was still haunted by the remembrance of materialisations that had been seen in very remote times. Today steel is dipped in liquid nitrogen to harden it. To us a natural process that was discovered in modern times. But probably owing to a primitive memory this hardening process was already a reality in antiquity. At all events, it was practised with very crude methods. For case-hardening, the men of old plunged red-hot swords into the bodies of live prisoners! Yet how did they know that the human body is pumped full of organic nitrogen? How did they know the chemical effect?

Simply by experience?

How, I ask, did our ancestors get their advanced technology and their modern medicinal knowledge if not from unknown intelligences?

How do intelligent men and women come to believe that some audacious, way-out idea is empirically arrivable at step by step, that what is originally fantasy or vision will one day become reality?

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[Insert pic p066]

This mysterious drawing from Tell Issaghen II. Sahara is thought by some to show a mummy being transported. The two top figures seem to be floating in space.

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I am firmly convinced that scientists are inspired by the driving desire to know as many things, to turn into reality at least as many memories, as were introduced in the memory of mankind by unknown intelligences in the remote past. For there must be a plausible reason why the cosmos has been the great goal of research throughout human history.

Surely all stages of technical development, every tiny advance and all the visionary ideas were only steps towards the great adventure—the reconquest of space?

Ideas which we still find confusing and disturbing have probably already been turned into reality on our planet at some time in the past.

It was during my study of Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955), whose books have made a great impact on many people today, that I first came across the concept of cosmic primordial parts. Only later ages will realise what a decisive say this Jesuit has had in forming the twentieth-century world picture with his Palaeontological and anthropological researches, in which he wanted to combine Catholic teaching about the creation with the findings of present-day natural science. In 1962, seven years after his death, it was decided, after a violent theological dispute, that Teilhard's views violated Catholic doctrine.

I know of no concept that expresses so clearly what is meant by the cosmic processes. The primordial part of matter is the atom. The atom is also the material primordial part in the cosmos. But there are other primordial parts, for example, time, consciousness and memory. In ways as yet unexplained all these primordial parts are related and connected with one another. Perhaps one day we shall track down other primordial parts, i.e. forces, which cannot be defined as classified either physically, chemically or in other scientific categories. Yet even though they cannot be defined or conceived of materially, they have an effect on the cosmic process. And as far as I am concerned the frontiers where all research will and must end lie in the cosmos.

I sincerely hope that my observations will set up new signposts leading eventually to convincing results. Two cases which Pauwels and Bergier mention in their book Breakthrough into the Third Millennium are directly in line with my conviction that primitive memories await their discovery in the human consciousness. There is nothing occult or esoteric about either of them. The first concerns the Danish Nobel Prize winner Niels Bohr (1885-1962), who laid the foundations for present-day atomic theory. This world-famous physicist related how the idea of the atom model he had sought for many years occurred to him. He dreamt that he was sitting on a sun of burning gas. Planets rushed past him, hissing and spitting, and all the planets seemed to be connected by fine threads to the sun around which they revolved. Suddenly the gas solidified, sun and planets shrivelled up and became motionless. Niels Bohr said that he woke up at this moment. He realised at once that what he had seen in his dream was the atom model. In 1922 he won the Nobel Prize for his 'dream'.

The second case mentioned by Pauwels and Bergier also concerns two natural scientists who figured both as dreamers and men of action. An engineer of the Bell Telephone Company in the USA read reports of the bombing of London in 1940. They upset him badly. One autumn night he dreamt he was drawing the design of an apparatus that could train anti-aircraft guns on the previously worked out path of an aircraft and ensure that their shells would hit the aircraft at a specific point regardless of its speed. The next morning the Bell engineer made a sketch of what he had already drawn in his dream. He finally built a set in which radar was used for the first time. The celebrated American mathematician Norbert Wiener (1894-1964) was in charge of the project for manufacturing it commercially.

I believe that what these two brilliant natural scientists 'dreamed' already rested on the basis of their 'age-old' knowledge. In the beginning there is always an idea (or a dream) that has to be proved in practice. I think it quite likely that one day the molecular geneticists, who already know how the genetic code functions, will also find out how much—and even which—information was programmed on the punched cards of our life by unknown intelligences. It sounds fantastic, but one fine day we might even discover by which code word a specific piece of knowledge for a specific purpose can be summoned up from the primitive memory.

In my opinion cosmic memories penetrated more and more strongly into our consciousness in the course of man's evolution. They encouraged the birth of new ideas, which had already been realised in practice at the time of the visit by the 'gods'. At certain fortunate moments the barriers separating us from the primitive memory fall. Then the driving forces brought to light again by the stored up knowledge become active in us.

Is it only a coincidence that printing and clockmaking, that the car and the aeroplane, that the laws of gravity and the functioning of the genetic code, were invented and 'discovered' almost simultaneously at different times in different parts of the world?

Is it pure coincidence that the stimulating idea of visits to our planet by unknown intelligences has appeared simultaneously and been put forward in a great many books with completely different arguments and sources?

It is, of course, extremely convenient to dismiss ideas as coincidences when there seem to be no cut and dried explanation for them, but that is too easy a way out. Scientists, who have generally tried hard to find rules behind all processes, should be the last people summarily to reject new ideas—however fantastic they may seem at first—as unsuitable for serious research.