Alien Dawn: A Classic Investigation into the Contact Experience (11 page)

But perhaps this discussion is taking us too far away from the simple facts with which we began—such as crop circles, abductions, and entities that claim to have come from the stars.
Let us take a deep breath and return to the facts.

3

HOW TO GET PEOPLE CONFUSED

In the third week of November 1996, I was in Los Angeles, filming part of a television documentary at the famous tar pit of La Brea—which can be found, still bubbling ominously below a watery surface, in the grounds of the George C.
Page Museum.
Thousands of animals died as they wandered incautiously into the oily swamp to drink the water, including giant sloths, mammoths, mastodons, and sabre-toothed tigers.
But, as far as the television programme was concerned, I was less interested in these animals who had died over tens of thousands of years than in the evidence of a sudden mass extinction around 11,000 BC.
The evidence seemed to show that more than a dozen species had been simply wiped out over a period of a mere twenty-five years.
That suggested some sudden catastrophe, such as the impact of a giant meteor, or some convulsion of the Earth’s crust that caused earthquakes and volcanic eruptions.

Now my own suspicion was that a professor of anthropology named Charles H.
Hapgood had correctly diagnosed the cause of the extinction.
He had first suggested the theory in a book called
Earth’s Shifting Crust,
in 1959.
What Hapgood suggested was that the crust of the Earth was a thin skin, which rested on a liquid mantle rather like the skin that forms on boiled milk or gravy.
The build-up of ice can induce a sudden wobble that causes the crust to slip on the mantle; the result is that whole continents move.
Lands that were subtropical, like Siberia, move into colder regions, while India and Africa, once buried under ice sheets, slide towards the equator.
Einstein was so impressed by the theory that he wrote an introduction to Hapgood’s book.

Now it has been known for a long time that movements of the crust cause continents to rearrange themselves—England was on the equator during the Devonian period, about 400 million years ago.
But it has always been supposed that such movements take millions of years.
Hapgood thought it could happen quite suddenly—his own view was there had been an enormous slippage of the earth’s crust some time since 15,000 BC, before which Antarctica had been 2,500 miles farther north, and had a temperate climate.

While Hapgood was writing
Earth’s Shifting Crust,
he learnt of a discovery that seemed to throw an interesting new light on it.
In 1956, the US Hydrographic Office became aware that it possessed a strange map that had been presented by a Turkish naval officer.
This was a medieval map which had belonged to a Turkish admiral (and pirate) called Piri Re’is, who had been beheaded in 1554, and it appeared to show the east coast of South America, and the coast of Antarctica—which was not officially discovered until 1818.
Moreover, it appeared to show certain bays on the coast of Queen Maud Land that were now no longer visible, since they were completely covered with ice.
Yet a 1949 survey team, which had taken soundings through the ice, had established that they were precisely where the map showed them to be.
What made it so baffling was that, as far as anyone knew, Antarctica had been covered with ice for thousands of years—possibly since about 5000 BC.

Of course, it was not Piri Re’is who had made the original map—he had merely had it copied.
His map was of a kind widely in use among medieval sailors, and known as a
portolan
(meaning ‘from port to port’).
Hapgood began to study other portolans—the Library of Congress proved to have hundreds—and was astonished to find that they were far more accurate than the maps being made by well-known mapmakers working in the same period.
One map in particular intrigued him; it was made by one Oronteus Finaeus, and showed the whole South Pole, as if photographed from the air, and again, the coastal region was shown free of ice.

Obviously, they were based on far more ancient maps.
But that in itself was baffling.
Historians generally agree that writing was invented by the Sumerians about 3500 BC.
We can assume that maps did not exist before that time, since a map is of very little use without writing on it.
So how could there have been maps that showed Antarctica as it was at least a thousand years earlier than the Sumerians, and possibly several thousand?

After years of study of portolans (aided by his students), Hapgood finally concluded that there existed a worldwide maritime civilisation around 7000 BC.
He stated this extraordinary conclusion in a book entitled
Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings,
which was published in 1966.

It was Hapgood’s misfortune that, six years before the publication of
Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings,
a book called
The Morning of the Magicians
had appeared in Paris, and quickly became a world bestseller.
Its authors, Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier, discuss the Piri Re’is map and other portolans, and ask, ‘Had they been traced from observations made on board a flying machine or some space vessel of some kind?’
And in 1968, two years after Hapgood’s book, the Swiss writer Erich von Däniken went even further in
Chariots of the Gods?,
stating that Hapgood had claimed that the portolans had been based on photographs taken from the air by ‘visitors from space’.

Von Däniken’s idea that the Earth had been visited in the remote past by ‘ancient astronauts’ was by no means implausible; in fact, it had been suggested in 1962 by the Russian astronomer Josef Shklovskii in a book called
Universe, Life, Mind,
published in America in 1966 under the title
Intelligent Life in the Universe,
in collaboration with Carl Sagan.
The problem was that von Däniken’s book was full of wild and absurd inaccuracies, such as multiplying the weight of the Great Pyramid by five, and suggesting that the Nazca lines, scratched on the surface of the Peruvian desert, might have been intended as an airport for spacecraft.
It was inevitable that Hapgood should be condemned through ‘guilt by association’.

Yet Hapgood’s book has never been truly discredited—merely ignored.
Not only had the 1949 Antarctic soundings revealed that the ice-covered bays shown by Piri Re’is actually existed, but a 1958 survey had shown that the Philip Buache map of 1737, which represented Antarctica divided into two islands, was also correct.
The Dulcert Portolano of 1339 showed accurate knowledge of the geography between Galway and the Don basin in Russia.
Another portolan showed the Aegean with numerous islands that do not now exist.
And, since the islands were probably drowned as melting ice caused the sea level to rise, it sounds as if the map was made before the end of the last ice age.
Altogether, there is strong evidence that civilisation appeared on Earth thousands of years before it arose in the Middle East, and that Hapgood was probably not far out when he talked of a worldwide seagoing civilisation around 7000 BC.
To study Maps of
the Ancient Sea Kings
is to be impressed by the sheer weight of corroborative evidence.

So, although most of von Däniken’s evidence about visitors from space cannot be taken seriously, the portolans certainly raise the possibility that Earth might have been visited by ancient astronauts in the remote past.
In
Intelligent Life in the Universe
(1966), Shklovskii and Sagan suggest:

Some 25 million years ago, a Galactic survey ship on a routine visit to [Earth] may have noted an interesting and promising evolutionary development: Proconsul.
The information would have filtered at the speed of light slowly through the galaxy, and a notation would have been made in some central information repository .
.
.
If the emergence of intelligent life on a planet is of general scientific interest to the Galactic civilisations, it is reasonable that with the emergence of Proconsul, the rate of sampling of our planet should have increased, perhaps to about once every ten thousand years .
.
.
But if the interval between sampling is only several thousand years, there is a possibility that contact with an extraterrestrial civilisation has occurred within historical times.

They go on to point out that, when primitive people record some important historical event in the form of a myth, the oral tradition often preserves the essence of the event with remarkable fidelity, even when it is embellished with certain mythological details.
Shklovskii cites the first encounter between the Tlingit Indians of North America and the French expedition of La Perouse, in which the sailing ships are remembered as great black birds with white wings.

Such ‘proofs’ can, of course, be deceptive.
The archaeologist Henry Lhote suggested that a fresco found in cliffs overlooking the Sahara at Tassili might be a man in a spacesuit, and labelled it ‘the Martian god’.
But a little research revealed that the Martian god was simply a human being dressed in a ritual mask.
(Von Däniken would nevertheless use it as evidence for his ancient astronauts.)

But there is a myth that seems to the authors altogether more likely to represent a contact between Earth and aliens from space .
.
.
the legend, they say, ‘suggests that contact occurred between human beings and a non-human civilisation of immense powers on the shores of the Persian Gulf, perhaps near the ancient Sumerian city of Eridu, in the fourth millennium BC or earlier’.

This legend can be traced to Berosus, a priest of the god Bel-Marduk in the city of Babylon at the time of Alexander the Great.
Berosus would have had access to cuneiform and pictographic records (on cylinders and temple walls) dating back thousands of years before his time.

In one of his fragments, Alexander Polyhistor describes how there appeared from the Persian Gulf ‘an animal who was endowed with reason, who was called Oannes’.
This creature had a fish’s tail, but also had feet like a man, and spoke with a human voice.
It taught men letters and science, and every kind of art, as well as how to build houses and temples.
‘In short he instructed them in everything which could tend to soften manners and humanise mankind’.
Oannes used to spend his nights in the sea, for he was amphibious.
And after him came more creatures like him.

Another chronicler, Abydenus—a disciple of Aristotle—speaks of Sumerian kings, and mentions ‘another semi-demon, very like to Oannes, who came up a second time from the sea’.
He also mentions ‘four double-shaped personages’—by which he presumably means half-man and half-fish—who ‘came out of the sea to land’.

Finally, Apollodorus of Athens mentions that in the time of King Ammenon the Chaldean there ‘appeared the Musarus Oannes, the Annedotus, from the Persian Gulf’, and later ‘a fourth Annedotus, having .
.
.
the shape of a fish blended with that of a man’.
And in the reign of King Euedoreschus there appeared yet another fish-man named Odacon.

Apollodorus speaks about Oannes the Annedotus as if it is a title rather than a proper name.
I spent half an hour looking in encyclopedias, trying to find the meaning of
annedotus
and also
musaru
, and finally succeeded in finding
musarus
in Liddell and Scott’s Greek lexiconit means ‘abominable’.
But I could not find
annedotus
.
Then, recalling that Robert Temple had mentioned the fish gods in
The Sirius Mystery,
I looked in that work, and found that I could have saved myself so much effort—Temple had done the work for me.
Annedotus
means ‘the repulsive one’.
It was amazing: the Musarus Oannes the Annedotus means ‘the abomination Oannes the repulsive’.

Temple feels—and I am inclined to agree with him—that this is an indication that we are dealing with truth rather than invention.
You would expect a mythical account to glorify the godlike teachers of civilisation, not describe them as frankly disgusting.
But we have only to conjure up an image of a fishlike being with slippery scales, huge white eyes and a large mouth to understand why frankness compelled men to admit that they found them repulsive.
They may not even have felt the description to be pejorative—merely factually accurate, as in the case of Ivan the Terrible or Akbar the Damned.

Now Temple’s
Sirius Mystery
happens to be by far the most scholarly and convincing book on the possibility of ‘ancient astronauts’.
Temple’s interest was aroused when he stumbled on an article about an African tribe called the Dogon, who live in northern Mali, and learnt that the Dogon believe that fish gods called the Nommo came from Sirius, and brought civilisation to Earth some three thousand years ago.