Supernatural (83 page)

In short, what Lethbridge suggests is that the ‘golden age’—Michell’s Atlantis—was an age in the remote past when visitors from space had landed on earth and taught human beings a great deal about the use of technology.
The result was a diffusion of this knowledge over the surface of the earth, which accounted for the similarity of artifacts found all over the world.

Because Lethbridge was such a loner, he was unaware that he had simply tuned in to the ‘spirit of the age’, and was raising questions that had occurred to other speculative thinkers.
Lethbridge was, in fact, devastated to discover just before his death that his ‘space men’ idea had been suggested by the Swiss writer Erich von Daniken, in a book called
Memories of the Future
(1967) and translated as
Chariots of the Gods
?, which suggested that all kinds of ancient artifacts and monuments—including the Great Pyramid—were the work of space men.
In fact, as early as 1958, a writer named George Hunt Williamson had written a book called
Secret Places of the Lion,
in which he declared that visitors from space had landed eighteen million years ago, and had dedicated themselves since then to the evolution of mankind.
Pauwels and Bergier repeated the suggestion in their
Morning of the Magicians
(1960).
The same idea was given popular currency in 1968 in Stanley Kubrick’s film
2001: A Space Odyssey.

If Lethbridge had had time to study Daniken more carefully, he would have felt less chagrined.
Although Daniken achieved international best-sellerdom with his books on ‘space visitors’, scholarly analysis revealed that most of his ideas were simply absurd guesses or distortions of fact.
Chariots of the Gods?
describes how, in the Assyrian
Epic of Gilgamesh,
there is an episode in which the hero Enkidu is borne upward in the claws of the sun god, so that his body feels as heavy as lead; he then flies for four hours in the talons of an eagle.
These episodes, Daniken suggests, are really accounts of a trip in a space craft.
A door that speaks with a human voice is obviously a loudspeaker .
.
.
In fact, a careful perusal of the
Epic of Gilgamesh
reveals that these events do not occur.

Von Daniken also suggests that the Great Pyramid must have been built by ancient astronauts because rope was not known in Egypt at the time it was built; in fact, many tomb paintings depict men using ropes.
(Von Daniken also manages to multiply the weight of the pyramid by five.) He insists that the statues on Easter Island must have been built by space men, because carving them and moving them was beyond the technology of the Easter Island natives; but modern Easter Islanders disproved that by carving and erecting a statue for the benefit of the explorer Thor Heyerdahl.
The lines drawn on the flat surface of the desert in Peru—known as the Nazca lines—were, according to Daniken, intended as landing strips for space ships; he ignores the obvious fact that the turbulence created by any large craft would destroy the lines, which have remained unchanged since 500
AD
only because the desert is windless.

In a later book,
Gold of the Gods,
Daniken indulges in actual deceit.
He describes in detail how he descended into a vast underground cave system in Ecuador, and examined an ancient library of strange metal leaves engraved with unknown characters.
Later exploration of the caves revealed no such library, and when Daniken’s companion revealed that Daniken had not even ventured underground, Daniken himself admitted that this was true, but explained that the writers of books like
Gold of the Gods
are permitted to embroider their facts.

The result of all this is that Daniken has now been totally discredited, and that the ‘ancient astronaut’ theory associated with his name has few serious supporters.
This is a pity, for there is far more convincing evidence than that presented by Daniken.
An impeccably scholarly book,
The Sirius Mystery
by Robert Temple, examines the question of how an African tribe called the Dogon came to know that Sirius is a double star, (since this can only be perceived through an astronomical telescope), and that its companion (Sirius B) is a white dwarf—a ‘collapsed’ star of tremendous density, which rotates on its axis and revolves around Sirius A every fifty years.
Temple argues that the Dogon derived their knowledge from ancient Egyptians, who in turn must have learnt it from ‘space visitors’.
Opponents of the theory have argued that early white missionaries may have brought astronomical knowledge to the Dogon, but there is not the slightest scrap of evidence for this.
The Dogon themselves insist that their knowledge of the Digitaria star (as they call it) is part of their ancient tradition.

More interesting evidence can be found in another scholarly study,
Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings
(1966), subtitled ‘Evidence of Advanced Civilisation in the Ice Age’, by Professor Charles Hapgood.
In 1956, a Turkish naval officer presented a copy of an ancient map to the US Navy Hydrographic Society.
A student of old maps, Captain Arlington Mallery, concluded that it showed the Antarctic coast of Queen Maud Land in the days before its bays were covered over by ice—about six thousand years ago.
Hapgood decided to recruit his students at Keene State College into the project, and got them studying the Piri Reis maps: Piri Reis was not (as Pauwels and Bergier state) a 19th century naval officer, but a Turkish pirate of Greek nationality who was beheaded in 1554, and whose seafaring maps had been preserved in the Topkapi Palace in Istanbul.
These also showed Antarctic bays that have been frozen over for six thousand years; yet seafaring began only about 2,000
BC.

The obvious conclusion seemed to be that a seafaring civilisation existed in 4,000
BC.
This, admittedly, is hardly proof of Lethbridge’s space visitors – perhaps men built ships two thousand years earlier than anyone suspected, at the time the Sumerians were creating the earliest known civilisation in Mesopotamia (and, of course, before the birth of writing).
What seems altogether odder is the evidence of another map—the Hamy-King chart—which showed a land bridge across the Bering Straits which has not existed for twelve thousand years.

Hapgood argued that all this seemed to show that a worldwide civilisation with a powerful navy probably existed twelve thousand years ago—at a time when, according to historians, the earth was inhabited only by primitive Stone Age hunters, and the earliest farmers had not yet appeared.

All this naturally excited devotees of the legend of Atlantis, (not to mention Mu, a similar civilisation which was supposed to have existed in the Pacific in an earlier epoch).
The publication of Daniken’s
Chariots of the Gods
in the following year poured cold water on all this excitement, much as the birth of Spiritualism had caused the eclipse of Buchanan’s psychometry; Hapgood found himself tarred with the same brush and labelled a crank.
Yet republication of his book, in a revised edition, in 1979, left no doubt that his theory of an ancient worldwide civilisation must be taken seriously.

All this, of course, is still no proof of Lethbridge’s space men theory.
In his book
Timescale
—a narrative ‘map’ of world history—Nigel Calder refers to our Cro-magnon ancestors, who replaced the more ape-like Neanderthal Man around thirty-four thousand years ago, as a ‘race of supermen, created by mutations among the highbrow subspecies living in warm regions’.
This race of supermen survived the last great Ice Age, starting twenty-eight thousand years ago, and when the thaw began, about fourteen thousand years ago, nothing seems more likely than that they quickly learned to take advantage of the seas with their teeming fish population.
So it may be that we merely have to revise our notions of history to accommodate the idea of a Stone Age civilisation with seagoing vessels.
But it is far more difficult to believe that these Stone Age seafarers created complex maps—even if they scratched them on bark.
Hapgood’s evidence suggests that we may have to choose between the legend of Atlantis, and the notion of ancient astronauts.

In
Legend of the Sons of God,
Lethbridge is inclined to accept both.
Atlantis, he thinks, may be a ‘garbled memory’ of the exploits of the Megalith builders.
But he is also inclined to believe that flying saucers may also be the vehicles in which the ‘sons of God’ originally came to earth.
Lethbridge had seen something that might have been a flying saucer in 1931—a shining disc like a large balloon floating down towards the road.
(Nicholas Roerich, who designed Stravinky’s
Rite of Spring
ballet, saw one in 1926, when he and a party of travellers were making their way across the Himalayas from Mongolia to India; this one behaved like the traditional flying saucer in moving at a great speed and then suddenly changing direction).
After discussing flying saucers at some length, he suggests that they could either be ‘space visitors’, or beings from some other dimension.
(Lethbridge’s studies with the pendulum had convinced him of the reality of ‘other dimensions’
¹
) But he is inclined to believe that the solution to the mystery lies in what he calls ‘bio-electronics’, the study of the living forces of the earth, which ancient man seems to have understood so well.
Like John Michell, he believes that there is some connection between UFOs and the ‘magnetic’ forces of the earth.
He also believes that there is a connection between these magnetic forces and the human mind.
He goes on to suggest that ‘out of the body’ experiences are a proof of the human mind’s ability to escape our earthly ‘vibration rate’ and move to a higher one.
(His neighbour at Branscombe—the ‘witch’—convinced him of this by paying an ‘astral’ visit to his bedroom one night, and later describing what she saw there.)

Lethbridge died in September 1971, before publication of
Legend of the Sons of God.
What is clear from that book—and from his final posthumous work
The Power of the Pendulum
—is that he was experiencing a problem that seems to haunt all investigators of the paranormal.
They begin by studying some phenomenon that personal experience led them to accept (as Buchanan’s experiences with his students convinced him of the reality of psychometry), and they propound some basically commonsense theory to explain it in scientific terms.
Then more evidence turns up that contradicts the theory—like Buchanan’s discovery that psychometry worked just as well on a newspaper photograph that had not been in contact with its original.
The theory is then expanded slightly to try to accommodate the problem—at which point some new anomaly makes its appearance .
.
.
And so on, until it is clear that no purely rational theory can accommodate all the facts.

Many who have decided to look into ‘flying saucers’ have encountered the problem.
One of these was an American journalist named John Keel, who had prepared a radio documentary as early as 1952, and decided that the evidence for UFOs could not be dismissed.

Like so many others, John Keel was also mildly sceptical about flying saucers until he tried the unusual expedient of studying the subject instead of passing a priori judgements.
In 1952 he prepared a radio documentary on things seen in the sky, and came to believe that—even then—there had been too many sightings of flying saucers to dismiss them as mistakes or lies.
In 1953, in Egypt, he saw his first UFO, a metallic disc with a revolving rim, hovering over the Aswan dam in daylight.
Yet even so, it was not until 1966 that he decided to undertake a careful study of the subject, and subscribed to a press-cutting bureau.
What then staggered him was the sheer number of the sightings—he often received 150 clippings in a day.
(In those days press clippings were only a few pence each; twenty years later, at about a pound each, the experiment would be beyond the resources of most journalists.) Moreover, it soon became clear that even these were only a small percentage of the total, and that thousands of sightings were going unrecorded.
(This is in fact the chief disadvantage of a chapter like this one; it cannot even begin to convey the sheer volume of the sightings.
Any sceptic should try the experience of reading, say, a hundred cases, one after the other, to realize why the ‘delusion’ theory fails to hold water.) What also fascinated Keel was that so many witnesses who had seen UFOs from their cars had later seen them over their homes; this suggested that the ‘space men’ were not merely alien scientists or explorers, engaged in routine surveying work.

In the following year, 1967, Keel was driving along the Long Island Expressway when he saw a sphere of light in the sky, pursuing a course parallel to his own.
When he reached Huntington he found that cars were parked along the roads, and dozens of people were staring at four lights that were bobbing and weaving in the sky; the light that had followed Keel joined the other four.
Keel was in fact on his way to interview a scientist, Phillip Burckhardt, who had seen a UFO hovering above some trees close to his home on the previous evening, and had examined it through binoculars; he had seen that it was a silvery disc illuminated by rectangular lights that blinked on and off.
The nearby Suffolk Air Force Base seemed to know nothing about it.

Keel was impressed by the witnesses he interviewed; most were ordinary people who had no obvious reason for inventing a story about UFOs.
His study of the actual literature convinced him that it was 98 per cent nonsense; but most individual witnesses were obviously telling the truth.
Keel had soon accumulated enough cases to fill a 2,000-page typescript; this had to be severely truncated before it was published under the title
UFOs: Operation Trojan Horse.

As his investigation progressed, Keel became increasingly convinced that UFOs had been around for thousands of years, and that many biblical accounts of fiery chariots or fireballs are probably descriptions of them.
In 1883 a Mexican astronomer named Jose Bonilla photographed 143 circular objects that moved across the solar disc.
In 1878 a Texas farmer named John Martin saw a large circular object flying overhead, and actually used the word ‘saucer’ in a newspaper interview about it.
In 1897 people all over American began sighting huge airships—cigar-shaped craft.
(This was before the man-made airship had been invented.) Dozens of other early.
‘UFO’ sightings have been chronicled in newspaper reports or pamphlets; Chapter 26 of Charles Fort’s
Book of the Damned
—written thirty years before the UFO craze—is devoted to strange objects and lights seen in the sky.