Our Cosmic Ancestors (28 page)

The two Russian scientists have not succeeded so far in establishing the exact origin of these signals, but they are positive that they must originate from our solar system, either from another planet or from one of its satellites or even from an alien spacecraft from another solar system. The third case of radio communications with outer space was that of the Izarian astronauts deciphered by Duncan Lunan and already discussed in this book.

There is another case history which links extraterrestrial civilizations and flying saucers. Everyone knows the story of Barney and Betty Hill who disclosed under hypnosis that they had been kidnapped in a flying saucer in 1961 and had undergone a physical examination. They had been shown a celestial map of the stars as seen from the planet of origin of the astronauts.

To tell you the truth, I did not believe a word of it at first. I only became interested in 1964 when Betty Hill was able, again under hypnosis, to reproduce the star map shown to her by the astronauts; but
I was still skeptical about the whole thing. I thought that maybe she was really going too far.

But then I became fascinated when an amateur American astronomer named Marjorie Fish discovered that the celestial map shown to Betty Hill corresponded exactly to the one that could be seen from the star Zeta Reticuli, which is located in the southern hemisphere of the celestial vault, between the two bright stars Achernar and Canopus.

I had good reasons to be excited because the main star drawn by Betty Hill on her map was a double star; and no one on Earth at that time, in 1961, or even in 1964, knew that Zeta Reticuli was a double star. This was only discovered in March 1973 by the American astronomer Peter van de Camp, who specializes in that kind of research, especially the stars that move in spirals instead of straight lines, which indicates stars with a planetary system or double and triple stars.

Then I knew that Betty Hill had been telling the truth all the time, because there was no way she could have known that Zeta Reticuli was a double star when she was drawing the star map. Also, that map was drawn in a way that I have never seen anywhere on Earth. The Reticulian astronauts, who were practical people rather than poets, linked their stars with traffic lines (double, single, or dotted), depending on the intensity of their traffic, instead of trying to draw bulls, lions, or even virgins as our ancestors used to do.

About thirty years ago, an incredible phenomenon happened in France that is very little known (it was reported in the September 1959 issue of
Aerospace Engineering)
but could very well have been a signal from an outer-space civilization for the purpose of informing us about their existence.

For almost five years, from 1953 to 1957, Maurice Allais, director of the French National Centre of Scientific Research, performed in his underground laboratory of Saint Germain on the west side of Paris experiments in terrestrial gravitation with a 7,500 g pendulum at the end of an 830 mm rod weighing 4,500 g, or, in other words, a total pendulum weight of 12 kg.
As proven by the 1851 experiments of Leon Foucault, a pendulum always oscillates in the same plane with respect to outer space, in such a way that its plane of oscillation seems to rotate relatively to the surface of the Earth.

The constant observation and recording of this apparent rotation and its variations, relative to the theoretical rotation that has been computed from astronomical data, allows a very accurate study of the different motions of the Earth and, especially, of the regularity of its rotation around its polar axis.

On 30 June, 1954, Maurice Allais was watching his pendulum with particular attention, for a total eclipse of the Sun visible in Europe was to happen that day around noon, which eventually could slightly modify the plane of oscillation of the pendulum. But he certainly did not expect what did happen during that eclipse.

When the eclipse started, the plane of oscillation of the pendulum suddenly shifted by 15 degrees, from 170
^°
to 185
^°
. It stayed at 185
^°
for the duration of the eclipse, but finally came back to its original position when the eclipse was over. As far as we know, this had never happened before and it has never happened since.

The announcement of this fantastic phenomenon made a lot of waves in scientific circles at the time, and Allais was almost accused of having made up the whole story; but he was a very conscientious scientist, and the angular shift of the pendulum was recorded by several of his instruments. It was indisputable. In the thirty years which have elapsed, numerous tentative explanations have been proposed without success.

Many scientists have been thinking for some time that outer space civilizations could very well have discovered a long time ago the secrets of gravitation, which they would thereafter know how to control and could use for the propulsion of their flying saucers. That would explain the incredible maneuvers flying saucers perform in our skies, which have never been explained by the classical theories of official science.

Let us now suppose that they had decided someday to use gravitational forces to catch our attention and give us scientific proof of their existence. They would evidently have many different ways to do it; but one of the best would certainly be to use gravitational forces to disturb suddenly the observations made by our astronomers and physicists during a total eclipse of the Sun, which would naturally be watched by thousands of scientists. Moreover, that would have the additional advantage of being noticed only by scientists, without the risk of causing a panic in the general public.

Also, that phenomenon did not happen at the time of just any solar eclipse. It happened during one of those famous total solar eclipses that occur precisely on 30 June every nineteen years, like the last one on 30 June, 1973, or the next one on 30 June, 1992. Is it still really possible to believe that it was just another
coincidence,
especially during the year 1954, when there was an
invasion
of flying saucers in France?

For that reason or some other, French scientists seem to take the problem of flying saucers very seriously. A few years ago a young French scientist by the name of Claude Poher, director of the French National Centre of Space Research in Toulouse, decided to prove scientifically once and for all the actual existence of flying saucers and to establish their composite sketch, as reported in
Paris-Match,
23 March, 1974.

Out of 35,000 UFO observation reports that he had been able to collect, he selected the thousand best, translated them on to IBM punch cards, and fed them to a computer. Then he fed to the same computer the apparent characteristics of everything that could be seen in the sky and be mistaken for a flying saucer, like the planet Venus or weather balloons so dear to the US Air Force, for the computer to compare with the UFO sightings and reach a final decision as to whether there was some correlation between the two kinds of data.

The verdict of the computer was that, first, flying saucers really do exist and cannot be confused with anything else in the sky. They have landed hundreds of times in deserted spots, far away from urban areas. They appear during the day as bright metallic objects reflecting sunlight and casting shadows, and during the night take on a yellowish or greenish-orange color. They can appear in the form of discs, spheres, or even cigars.

Seventy percent of the observations were made at night, one in ten involved landings, and one in twenty were cases when extraterrestrial astronauts were seen by or had contacts with humans. Very powerful magnetic forces were always present in any case, and these forces could cut the power of automobile or aircraft generators, disturb radio transmissions, and make all kinds of on-board electromagnetic instruments go completely crazy.

Moreover, flying saucers can fly at more than 25,000 km an hour and suddenly fly back in the opposite direction, a maneuver that no space vehicle of human construction could do at present without disintegrating on the spot. Also, Poher has investigated eleven landing sites in France and found impressions on the ground similar to those that would have been left by a three-ski aircraft landing gear. The depth of these impressions indicates a weight of from 50 to 100 tons and a length of 200 to 300 m for the spacecraft. Also, nothing can now grow in those impressions, as if the ground had been burned.

I am not going to retell the story of Ezekiel and the flying saucer he saw near Babylon in 592 BC because you can read it in the Bible or in a very interesting book published a few years ago by one of my colleagues at NASA,
The Spaceships of Ezekiel
by Joseph Blum-rich. But it is the oldest flying saucer report that I know of. I think, however, that I should make a personal contribution. I think I know how flying saucers enter our solar system and, step by step, arrive near Earth. In other words, I think that I have discovered their flight schedule.

In April 1973, when I was computing the revolution and conjunction periods of all the planets to verify the validity of the Nineveh number as a constant of the solar system, I was puzzled by the fact that Mars was in conjunction with the Earth every 780 days, or every 2.135 years, while it was in conjunction with Jupiter every 816 days, or every 2.235 years, a difference of only 36 days.

Then I remembered reading a few months before that flying saucer invasions seemed to occur precisely every 800 days, or a little bit more than every two years. That was enough to put my computer in motion and I discovered that the dates of flying saucer invasions corresponded precisely with the dates of Mars-Earth or Mars-Jupiter conjunctions.

Arriving from a faraway stellar system with a very high velocity, these spaceships could use the enormous gravitational attraction of the four big planets of our solar system to slow down and settle into an orbit around Jupiter or one of its four largest satellites. There, like in an airport terminal, they could wait for their connecting flight, the planet Mars, to pass by and then settle into an orbit around that planet. There they could wait again for the Earth to pass by and then settle into an orbit around the Earth or the Moon.

In astronautics, passing from one planet to the next with a minimum of fuel consumption is called using a minimum energy orbit, and space astronauts might just do that. Anyway, for the fun of it, and before we know for sure l have established a flight schedule for outer space travellers arriving on Earth and, believe it or not, it checks perfectly with the dates of the latest flying saucer invasions.

Of course, the interval between two flights will never be exactly 780 or 816 days, because of elliptical orbits, but do you know one single airline that is always on time? Anyway for optimal precision in arrival time, the Mars-Jupiter and Mars-Earth flights will coincide every 143 years.

MYSTERIOUS VISITORS

Thirty years ago, I did not believe in flying saucers. At that time I was working for NASA as a space scientist, on the Communications System of the Apollo spacecraft, which was to land on the Moon five years later. Then the UFO phenomenon was practically unknown; and anyway, none of us would have dared to mention it in NASA circles, because that would certainly have been the end of one's career.

Then I made several trips to France, where I learned from French scientists not only that the UFO problem was real, but also that it was seriously investigated by official agencies of several European countries including Russia. Unfortunately, I had to keep that for myself when I came back.

Now things have changed. First of all, I am not working for NASA any longer. Then NASA itself has been forced to recognize the existence of the UFO phenomenon, and even to admit that it did not know what it was or where it was coming from. Also, serious magazines now discuss the UFO problem with qualified scientists such as Jacques Vallee, for example. Moreover, according to recent astronomical discoveries, it is now very likely that there might exist other civilizations in outer space, and that some of them could even be far more advanced than we. It is therefore perfectly logical to try to establish a contact with these civilizations, first by listening to the messages that they might try to transmit to us, then by sending them simple messages ourselves with the primitive means at our disposal, such as radio and laser, for example.

We first have to determine the kind of message that would have the best chance to be received and understood by ourselves in the first case, or by them in the second case. Most information scientists now believe that the best message would be one made of simple numbers representing mathematical ratios, such as 22/7 for Pi or 89/55 for Phi, or prime numbers such as 7,11,13, for example, whose ratios have decimal values representing repetitions of figures that could not fail to attract attention.
As a matter of fact. it seems that we have already received several similar messages that went completely unnoticed, even by those who were supposed to notice and decipher them. But we are crossing a sacred and dangerous frontier between two different scientific worlds.

The first one is made of official scientists who might be willing to accept the possibility of extraterrestrial life in the universe, but would never accept the possibility of interstellar travel, or the idea that flying saucers could exist and carry astronauts from another world in outer space. The second one is made of independent or retired scientists like me, who can afford to discuss the UFO problem freely without the risk of losing their jobs, and very few official scientists who have the courage to take that chance. This is why interesting discoveries in the field of UFO research are always made by these independent scientists.

Since we are not accepted in scientific publications, we have to disclose our theories and discoveries in popular books, magazine articles, and television interviews. Personally, I first wrote a book which was published in French in Paris ten years ago and has now been translated into five languages, including two English editions here and in England. I also wrote a second book which has been published in French and Spanish, and will soon be published in English here, The publication of the first book has already resulted in several television interviews where I could discuss the UFO problem, and in my participation in
"In Search of Earth Visitors'',
an episode of the popular television series of Alan Landsburg.