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by Bruce L. Cathie
extracted from
The Energy Grid - Harmonic 695
IN 1961 ARCHAEOLOGISTS DIGGING AT THE PALATINE Hill, Rome,
uncovered a previously unknown room. In a niche of this room there
was a painting, the subject of which was so startling that no
explanation satisfactory to all shades of belief has yet been
offered.
The painting?
In the centre ground stands what appears to be a modern spacecraft,
a rocket in fact. It stands on a launching pad, and from it runs
cables or guys; in the background there is a tall wall—for all the
world resembling a counterblast wall. Asks Ivan T. Sanderson, former
British naval intelligence officer and a distinguished biologist:
What was it that the Roman artist painted? Was it imagination?
Reality? A forecast of the future?’ A reproduction of the painting
appears in his book, Uninvited Visitors. It deserves careful
scrutiny. Why a painting of a rocket ship should appear on the wall
of a hidden room dating from ancient times — how it could possibly
be there (yet it is!) — could be anyone’s guess. Yet, curiously
enough, there may be many more links between places of worship and
space travel than one might first dare to think.
This is not intended as an irreverent statement; there need be no
offence taken by anything written in this chapter by readers of
devout Christian or other beliefs. But we would like to present some
facts and some theories that might tend to open up fascinating lines
of investigation for serious research work.
Consider, first of all, a typical place of worship in any country of
the world today; and reflect that religious architecture has
virtually
followed a specific pattern from ages past. Mathematically speaking
architecture of the kind displayed by the great cathedrals of
Europe,
for example, would present the greatest possible challenge to the
designers and the builders of the time, with the great naves, the
lowering structures, the superb arches. Chartres, dating from the
twelfth century, said by some to represent the finest flowering of
religious architecture, is believed to have been designed on principles of Platonic mathematics, in which the harmonies of the entire
universe were to be expressed.
Gaze upon the faces of the finely
sculptured kings and queens at Chartres, unidentified and unknown
representations; with expressions of supreme nobility they look down
upon the thousands of tourists who come each year. Look at the twin
spires of the mighty cathedral — and mentally compare their shape
and proportions with those of Apollo 12.
Look at any Christian
church with new eyes, and see the resemblance between the typical
church spire and a typical rocket ship. Study pictures of Islamic
mosques, oriental pagodas, Buddhist temples; places of worship in
India, Thailand, the Middle East: see how their towers soar upward,
towards where most people believe “heaven” to be located. Allowing
for differences between Occident and Orient in the interpretation of
detail, attempt to get a mental X-ray picture of the basic tower
structures — and see how alike they really are beneath the
superficial additions of various forms of buttresses, decorations of
gargoyles or carved relief.
Moscow’s Ivan the Great bell tower in the Kremlin, seen with
newly-opened eyes, is a three-stage rocket topped with a
semi-spherical capsule; the multi-stage rockets disguised as towers
surrounding St. Sophia’s, Constantinople, are suddenly obvious; the
beautiful gothic arches inside Cologne Cathedral repeat the rocket
shape;
Chinese pagodas, Indian temples and stupas, Armenian bell towers,
and simple country churches anywhere in the Christian world — all
suddenly appear to have been built expressly in imitation of
spaceships.
But granted the coincidence of shape — why? That is a question that
Vyacheslav Zaitsev, philologist at the Byelorrussian Academy of
Sciences, has sought to answer in a number of works (Cosmic
Reminiscences in Written Relics of the Past; The Evolution of the
Universe and Intelligent Beings; plus many magazine articles,
condensations of some of these appearing from time to time in the
magazine Sputnik). But this field of research was not opened up by Zaitsev; he gives credit to
Nikolai Rynin, a friend and pupil of
Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, the Russian scientist who at the beginning
of this century established principles for the building of space
rockets.
More than forty years ago Rynin was drawing attention to the
correspondences in the myths of various peoples in regard to earth
visits by beings from other worlds. In 1959 another Russian
scientist, Modest Agrest, considered that many events described in
the Bible were in fact references to visits made to this planet by astronauts from other worlds. Three years later the American
astrophysicist,
Carl Sagan, published a similar hypothesis.
Let us be clear about this, there is no scientific backing for the
theory that has been put forward and which we now draw attention to
that the resemblance between religious architecture and machines
designed for space travel is no mere coincidence. For a recently
published version and up-dated account of evidence drawn from
ancient rock inscriptions, Biblical sources and other writings and
artifacts, see Erich von Daniken’s Chariots of the Gods. This Swiss
archaeologist also puts forward the provocative theory that the
origins of man are linked with visits to earth by beings from other
planets in ancient times.
Returning to church architecture:
where did the archetype come from
— the archetype that has been perpetuated with slight variation from
ancient times up to the present day? And what are the reasons for
the particular form of that archetype?
When David ascended to
heaven, the Apocrypha relates, the angels showed him the “church
image” that was to become the archetype of the Temple of Jerusalem.
Returning to earth David built a model of this from memory, and
ordered his son Solomon to erect a House of the Lord along the same
lines. So, it is believed, the Temple of Jerusalem, built in the
tenth century BC, came to be conceived.
This is Zaitsev’s question it is, of course, a rhetorical one:
“Perhaps
the ‘church image’ was the image of a space-ship? Perhaps some
human being was induced by the astronauts to go aboard the
‘celestial machine,’ where he saw the abode of God? Such an interpretation of this ancient Judaic legend about the origin of
Solomon’s Temple would appear still more believable in the light of
other texts, notably the Apocrypha.”
Hindus believed their temples were built in the image of those of
other worlds, again the design being revealed by a deity. The
classical work, Ramayana, tells of a “celestial chariot,” a
two-storeyed vehicle with “many rooms and windows” which “roared
like a lion” at launching, “issued a single-toned sound” and “blazed
like red flames” as it raced through the air until finally it looked
like ‘a comet in the sky’.1 Another source, the Mahabharata, says
the vehicle was “activated by winged lightning.” the Sanskrit work,
Samarangana Sutradhara, contains a long description of the vehicle
which in Veda works is referred to as
vimana.
1 VyscheslavZaitsev, “Temples and Spaceships”, in Sputnik, Sept.,
1968.
As Zaitsev points out:
“Christian and Judaic, like Buddhist and Brahmanist, architecture go back to one source, a certain ‘celestial
temple,’ the look of which on earth was best imitated by domed
churches.”
Supposing space-ships from other planets landed on earth long ago,
to primitive man would not the effect have been closely similar to
that of “cargo cults” by modern aircraft landing in such places as
New Guinea and New Britain in recent times? In those latter cases
the arrival of aircraft led to a worship of the creatures who
arrived by the craft, and various religious practices were adopted
as a means of trying to induce the aircraft and their magical
cargoes to return. A word or two about the “cargo cults,” as
anthropologists have dubbed them.
Believed to have sprung up first
in Fiji in the 1880s, the pattern has always been repeated; a
prophet appears from among the people and proclaims the coming of
salvation, possibly in the form of a ship or an aircraft loaded down
with a host of goods ranging from refrigerators to canned food. He
orders certain rituals, and even such activities as the building of
a storehouse, an imitation landing strip or a wharf.
Basically all
such cults are probably primitive attempts to set in motion the
necessary social changes required for coping with a situation of
cultural conflict the impinging of the modern and the “civilised”
upon the ancient and “barbaric” — all in the guise of a new
religion. In ancient times, one might conjecture, ships came to this
planet from another world (other worlds?), bringing strange beings
and strange — but vastly useful — goods.
Perhaps the ships left,
perhaps some remained; perhaps some remained in orbit, and some men
of this planet, recognized for their superior intelligence or powers
of leadership compared to others in their group, were ferried to the
space vehicles and presented with gifts — and given instruction in
simple technology, such as the invention of the wheel, irrigation
canals, better techniques of working with stone or metal, and so on.
Certainly there is reason to believe that something of the sort may
have happened, possibly some 15,000 years ago. For it was about that
time that man began a massive break-through in the handling of
himself and his environment, a fact that has never been
satisfactorily explained. In that long ago man suddenly, for no
apparent reason, began to develop new techniques in such matters as
splitting bones to create tools, although existing techniques had
been in vogue for nearly a million years.
Man is a puzzle to biologists, so tremendously different from his
nearest relatives, the giant apes, if we are to accept the Darwinian
theory of evolution. Among the primates, recent studies have shown,
man has 312 unique and exclusive characteristics that no other
primate possesses. For some reason he has evolved at a pace which,
compared with that of the evolution of other creatures on this
planet, can only be described as fantastically rapid. The
evolutionary process is known to be very slow, imperceptible over
the course of even hundreds of generations.
Man’s greatest
evolutionary achievement was to develop a brain which from a
capacity of 400 cubic centimeters (established from very early
skulls of ape-like men) evolved to a capacity of 1300 cc, in the
space of a million years — a mere tick of the evolutionary clock.
Yet it took some thirty million years, on the other hand, for
primates to evolve a hand with an opposable thumb which, according
to the evolutionists, is what gave man his advantage in the race.
Two American writers, Otto Binder and Max Flindt, have recently put
forward a theory postulating that the answer can only lie with a
visit to this planet in ancient times of another intelligence from
another world, and a conscious effort on the part of the visitors to
breed a race of men on earth, either from motives of altruism or in
a spirit of biological experimentation.
If the spacemen were here,
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Did they ever really leave?
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Did their presence give rise to the
almost universal myth of racial origin, a descent by superior beings
from “the stars” or “the sky?”
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And did those feet in ancient times
walk upon England’s mountains green?
The question of biological experiments we leave to the biologists.
But dig into evidence for yourselves — and start an avalanche. We
suggest the following areas for fruitful investigation:
Myths and legends.
The ancient classical religious works from all countries inhabited
since long, long ago — particularly India, China, Sumeria, Babylon,
Egypt.
A fresh examination of “secret” systems of knowledge, religious and
scientific, including works on alchemy, astronomy, the secret books
of the Masonic orders and the Rosicrucians, and the system taught in
modern times by Gurdjieff. Religious architecture.
The “inexplicable” presence of what Ivan Sanderson calls OOPARTS (for
Out Of Place Artifacts) and OOPTHS (Out Of Place Things).
For the remainder of this chapter let’s have a look at some of the
more outstanding “out-of-place objects:”
- In 1965 a Chinese
archaeologist published a report which speculated that space beings
may have visited this planet some 12,000 years ago. His principal
items of evidence came from
caves in the Bayan-Kara-Ula Mountains,
on the China-Tibet border. Here have been found some 700 stone discs
covered with mysterious designs and writings. Each disc has a hole
in the centre, from which spirals a double groove out to the
circumference.
The caves are inhabited to this day by people of the
Ham and Dropa tribes — frail people, only some four feet in height;
they defy ethnic classification. The discs have been dated to
several thousand years ago. When finally deciphered, one of the
hieroglyphs, possibly set down by an ancient member of the Ham
tribe, reads:
“The Dropas came down from the clouds in their
gliders. Our men, women and children hid in the caves ten times
before the sunrise. When at last they understood the sign language
of the Dropas, they realized that the newcomers had peaceful
intentions...”
The discs were scraped free of adhering rock particles and sent to
Moscow for study. There scientists made two startling discoveries:
the discs contained a large amount of cobalt and other metals; and
they were found to vibrate in an odd rhythm, as though they carried
an electric charge or were part of an electric circuit. Primitive
art — cave drawings, clay figurines — provide an abundance of
material for the serious researcher into the possibility of space
visitors having been here long ago.
- A
rock picture found near the
town of Fergana, Uzbekistan, is of what looks like astronaut; an
artist in the Swiss Alps 4000 years ago drew a picture of a man in a
space helmet; the wall painting of a rocket ship in a niche of a
secret room beneath an old Roman church has already been mentioned:
a fresco in the Dechany Monastery, Yugoslavia, depicts angels flying
inside machines that closely resemble present-day spacecraft;
something very like a spaceship is seen on a seventeenth-century
icon. The Resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ, in the Moscow
Theological Academy, as representing the House of the Lord.
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Japanese archaeologists have found at several excavations
dogu-clay figurines — of humanoids clad in peculiar spacesuits, with
helmets entirely covering their heads. On the helmets are
representations of something akin to slit-type glasses,
breath-filters, antennae, hearing aids and even night-sight devices.
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Rock pictures of “spacemen” have been found in the Sahara, in
Australia, in Soviet Central Asia and in other parts of the Old and
New Worlds. There are so many known drawings and carvings of this
kind, in fact, that they have become known as “the visiting cards of
space travelers.”
When we come to look at OOPARTS, as opposed to representations on rock walls and in figurines, the former are “undeniably
manufactured or artificial objects said to have been found inside
solid, undisturbed rock strata, just as fossil animals and plants
are
found.” 1
1 Ivan T. Sanderson, Uninvited Visitors, Cowles, 1967.
Some of the more startling OOPARTS that have come to
light include,
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flat-headed steel nails discovered deep in a sandstone
quarry in Scotland
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fine gold threads inside a large quarried block
of limestone from northern England
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a bell-shaped, metallic vessel
blasted from rock in Dorchester, England, the metal containing a
large proportion of silver
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a variety of objects found inside
lumps
of coal (which would date them back to at least twelve million years
ago), including a beautiful gold chain of intricate workmanship, a
prize for a Mrs. Culp of Illinois who found it when a lump of coal
she was putting into her stove, in 1891, broke in two
An object in
the Salzburg Museum, Austria, is another mystery — a perfect cube of
meteoritic nickel-iron, about two inches square, which is encircled
by a precisely turned deep groove, understood to have been machined,
found in a block of coal that would have to have been between twelve
and twenty-six million years old.
A German engineer, engaged to
construct sewers for the city of Baghdad, discovered on a dusty
shelf in the local museum among objects labeled as “ritual objects”
some “stones” dating back a thousand years. Only one thing was known
for certain about these “stones” — they came from the Sassanid
period. The engineer added another piece of knowledge:
the “stones”
were in fact batteries.
Other out-of-place items include a remarkable model of the solar
system dating from olden times and recovered from a sea-bed, in
which the movements of both planets and their satellites around the
sun are accurately effected by the turning of a crank; the
workmanship and materials preclude the construction of this
incredible device in recent times.
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