The 5,672-pound Mars Observer spent eleven months traveling to our neighboring planet and was scheduled to go into orbit around Mars on August 24. NASA officials initially theorized that the probe’s timing clock malfunctioned, making the onboard computer unable to process commands being radioed from the Jet Propulsion Lab. But as days passed and communication was never resumed with the craft, hopes dimmed of ever knowing precisely what happened to it.
The military-trained remote viewers, however, said they saw Mars Observer meeting the same fate as Phobos II as well as another, secret space launch that same month in 1993. They noted the similarity of fates between the Phobos missions and Mars Observer.
This pattern may have continued in another failed Russian attempt to probe the secrets of Phobos. In the fall of 2011, control over Phobos Grunt (literally, Phobos Soil) was lost, and fears grew that its ten-ton load of toxic fuel and oxidizer might wreak havoc when the failed craft reentered Earth’s atmosphere. The stricken craft reportedly crashed into the Pacific Ocean on Sunday, January 15, 2012, with no reported consequences. Why would all these probes be failing? Could it be that something on Mars doesn’t want us observing the planet? One thing seems clear—someone or something continues to operate far outside Earth.
HUMANKIND: THE ANOMALIES CONTINUE
B
EFORE TAKING UP THE CONCEPT OF ANCIENT ASTRONAUTS, ONE
must consider the origins of humankind. What is conventional science holding back regarding the beginnings of our species, and what might this mean to our future?
The squabble over how the world was created or whether some moons are artificial appears puny compared to the ongoing fight over the origins of humankind. The focus of this argument centers around the English naturalist Charles Darwin’s theories in his 1859 book
On the Origin of Species.
In this work, Darwin proposed a simple explanation for life on Earth—that life evolved through a series of biological changes deriving from random genetic mutations in conjunction with a process known as natural selection. This supposes that those species best adapted to environmental change are best suited to survive. Although Darwin never explicitly stated that man descended from the ape, his devotees advocated that conclusion, drawing criticism from religious fundamentalists. The idea of survival of the fittest is perhaps the best known of Darwin’s principles and has been taught in schools for several generations.
The evolution account is familiar—fish evolved into amphibians, which changed into reptiles, which became birds and mammals, which eventually evolved into humans. “However, it is far easier to explain this to schoolchildren—with cute illustrations and pictures of a lineup of apes (beginning with those having slumped shoulders, transitioning to those that are standing upright)—than it is to prove,” cautioned Will Hart, author of
The Genesis Race
. In fact, Darwin’s theory continues to generate controversy because, as Hart pointed out, it “is the only scientific theory taught worldwide that has yet to be proved by the rigorous standards of science.”
Even after a hundred years of effort, no one has been able to fully substantiate Darwin’s theories through documented fossil exhibits. Yet Darwin’s theory of evolution continues to be taught in most schools and continues to generate controversy. The late Harvard biologist Stephen Jay Gould noted, “All paleontologists know that the fossil record contains precious little in the way of intermediate forms; transitions between major groups [of species] are characteristically lacking.”
Darwin never actually insisted that man descended from the ape. This was a conclusion of his followers. Darwin himself admitted to giant holes in his own theory. “If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed, which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down,” he wrote in
On the Origin of Species
.
No such indisputable linkage to complex organs has yet been found, and some respected scientists use this as evidence against the theory of human evolution. Lehigh University biochemistry professor Michael Behe, after studiously researching blood clotting, cilia, the human immune system, transfer of materials between cells, and nucleotides, concluded that these aspects of human physiology are too “irreducibly complex” to have evolved from “less complete” predecessors through natural selection. Proponents of the intelligent-design theory of life seized upon Behe’s work as justification for their beliefs.
In 2005, Behe presented his theory of “irreducible complexity” in a Pennsylvania court case challenging a school district mandate that a statement about intelligent design be included with evolution in science classes. U.S. District Court Judge John E. Jones III, a conservative Republican appointed in 2002 by President George W. Bush, ruled that the required statement was unconstitutional because Professor Behe’s claim was not science but a form of creationism, a religious belief that had been “rejected by the scientific community at large.”
Although Behe’s ideas were rejected by the court, could he have been on to something about human development and the way it fits in with the theory of evolution? After all, we have every reason to doubt the timeline of our development, as it continually is being revised. For example, fishhooks and fishbones dating back 42,000 years were discovered in a limestone cave in East Timor in early 2012. This finding indicated that humans were capable of skilled, deep-sea fishing 30,000 years earlier than previously thought. One of the discoverers, Sue O’Connor of the Australian National University’s Department of Archaeology and Natural History, told the media, “There was never any hint of [what] maritime technology people might have had in terms of fishing gear 42,000 years ago.”
Alan Butler and Christopher Knight, best-selling authors of the alternative history
Civilization One
, have pointed to further evidence that the human race developed far earlier than believed. Butler and Knight described a large-scale gene-mapping program by researchers at deCODE Genetics in Reykjavik, Iceland, which found that it was possible to date the origin of a genetic difference among nearly thirty thousand Icelandic women. This was accomplished by counting the number of DNA differences from normal DNA. This study indicated that the differences began about three million years ago, long before modern humans were thought to have evolved.
The study of DNA also supports the idea that genetic connections can be found in a wide diversity of the human population, indicating widespread early migration and genetic mingling. Author Gavin Menzies found support for such far-flung travel in an unexpected place. In the study of human DNA, mitochondrial DNA carries a rare genetic marker, or haplogroup, called haplogroup X. Even rarer is haplogroup X2, which has been found in the Caucasus Mountain region, the Mediterranean, and, surprisingly, among the Ojibwa Native Americans living primarily around Lake Superior.
Analyzing blood gave credence to the idea of an island in the mid-Atlantic. In his 1978 book,
Our Ancestors Came from Outer Space
, aerospace engineer Maurice Chatelain, who helped conceive and design the Apollo spacecraft that journeyed to the moon, reported that five Incan mummies in the British Museum contained a blood type unlike that of their American neighbors but identical to the Basque population found on the Atlantic coasts of Spain and France. One even had an Rh factor not found elsewhere on Earth. Unfortunately, this intriguing study, conducted by a British scientist in 1952, cannot now be duplicated, as the mummies were destroyed when a water pipe burst in the basement of the British Museum. It is unclear if this was sheer accident. Chatelain also noted that the mummification processes of the Mayans and the Incas were the same as those of the Egyptians and Sumerians.
Fossilized bones found in China have been carbon-dated to more than 11,500 years ago and indicate that a previously unknown type of humanoid was living at the same time as modern humans. Termed the Red Deer Cave people because of the now-extinct red deer they cooked and ate, these fossils exhibit an unusual mixture of features both from modern humans and something else. Stone artifacts found at the site also suggest they were toolmakers.
The Red Deer Cave people fossils exhibited long, broad, and tall frontal lobes like modern humans. But they differed from modern
Homo sapiens
in having prominent brow ridges, thick skull bones, flat upper faces with a broad nose, jutting jaws lacking a humanlike chin, brains moderate in size by ice-age human standards, large molars, and primitively short parietal lobes, brain lobes at the top of the head associated with sensory data. “These are primitive features seen in our ancestors hundreds of thousands of years ago,” commented Darren Curnoe, a paleoanthropologist with the University of New South Wales in Australia. Scientists said the mixture of features made them difficult to classify either as a new species or an unusual type of modern human. “In short, they’re anatomically unique among all members of the human evolutionary tree,” said Curnoe.
In 2010, archaeologists found evidence in the Buttermilk Creek complex forty miles northwest of Austin, Texas, that proved humans were in the Americas as early as 15,500 years ago—around 1,500 years earlier than previously believed. “This is the oldest credible archaeological site in North America,” said team leader Michael R. Waters, director of the Center for the Study of the First Americans at Texas A&M University.
The squabble over Darwinism is not confined to religious fundamentalists. However, any mainstream scientists and academics who challenge evolution orthodoxy are often excluded from the debate and even find themselves unemployed, a grim reminder of the unforgiving nature of the status quo.
There is even controversy concerning the Ice Age, the most recent (Pleistocene) glaciation, an event recently popularized by three 20th Century Fox animated films. Author and computer scientist Kurt Johmann has noted that the conventional concept of the Ice Age is that a layer of ice up to two miles thick in places extended all the way from the North Pole down to where London and New York are located today and peaked about twenty thousand years ago. So much water was locked up as ice that the sea level worldwide was about 450 feet lower than it is now, and this lowering opened up land bridges, which made it possible for prehistoric humans to spread around the world.
“One may call these three beliefs—the alleged giant ice sheets, the alleged greatly lowered sea level, and the alleged Bering Strait land-bridge by which the Indians came—the holy trinity of the Ice Age,” Johmann wrote. “For the average educated American the truthfulness of this holy trinity goes unquestioned. After all, not only is one brainwashed with it in school, but that brainwashing is reinforced by the many books and magazines, and TV shows (including both fiction shows such as movies, and so-called science shows), that take the reality of the Ice Age for granted.
“Up until my recent reading of the book
Cataclysm!
[by D. S. Allan and J. B. Delair], I had assumed there were ice sheets, just as the Ice Age belief system teaches, and just as I had been brainwashed to believe. However, the authors of
Cataclysm!
say that the imagined ice sheets are a fiction, because the drift deposits and scratch marks, which constitute the primary physical evidence for the ice sheets, are better explained as the result of moving water (in effect, a great flood), rather than moving ice.”
Johmann suggested that the idea of moving ice was chosen over moving water because a great flood meant catastrophism, while moving ice sheets means gradualism. “The doctrine of gradualism better served the interests of the establishment than catastrophism,” he wrote. Likewise, the idea of a “missing link” between primates and modern man also has created a number of problems for modern science, which suggest that our entire understanding of the timing and origins of the human race could be flawed. Could conventional science be hiding a stranger truth to the story of the human race?
In their popular 1993 book,
Forbidden Archeology: The Hidden History of the Human Race
, Michael A. Cremo and Richard L. Thompson argued that the scientific community could be suppressing shocking evidence. Both Cremo, a U.S. Navy veteran who attended George Washington University, and Thompson, who received a PhD in mathematics from Cornell University in 1974, became involved in the topic of creationism from the perspective of Hindu Vedic writings. Based on the study of these ancient works coupled with a multitude of archaeological anomalies found worldwide in the past two centuries, they concluded humans have existed on Earth for millions, perhaps billions, of years. But they claimed such evidence has been suppressed. Needless to say, traditionalists have called their work pseudoscience based on specimens and artifacts that no longer can be produced.
However, such scientific arrogance was also noted by scientists Giorgio de Santillana and Hertha von Dechend. In the introduction to their 1969 seminal work,
Hamlet’s Mill
, they commented that “the experts now are benighted by the current folk fantasy, which is the belief that they are beyond all this—critics without nonsense and extremely wise.”
Cremo and Thompson provided an example of scientific suppression of evidence, recounting the discovery of sophisticated stone tools at Hueyatlaco, seventy-five miles southeast of Mexico City, in the 1960s. The tools rivaled the best work of Cro-Magnon man in Europe. More tools were found at the nearby site of El Horno. Both sets of tools seem to undoubtedly have come from layers of rock that are the same age. But what made the tools controversial was their age—they were dated to about 250,000 years ago.
A U.S. Geological Survey team headed by archaeologist Virginia Steen-McIntyre had established this age through the use of four separate dating methods, including uranium series dating, fission track dating, tephra hydration dating, and the study of mineral weathering, and their findings were confirmed by multiple peer-reviewed studies. If the dating had been accepted, “it would have revolutionized not only New World anthropology but the whole picture of human origins,” Cremo and Thompson noted. “Human beings capable of making the sophisticated tools found at Hueyatlaco are not thought to have come into existence until about 100,000 years ago in Africa.”
Steen-McIntyre was both blocked and ridiculed when she tried to get her team’s conclusions published. In a note written in 1976, she stated, “I had found out through back fence gossip that [team members] Hal, Roald, and I are considered opportunists and publicity seekers in some circles, because of Hueyatlaco, and I am still smarting from the blow.” She also soon found that she could not find more work in her chosen profession.
Writing to one editor of a scientific publication, H. J. Fullbright of the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory, Steen-McIntyre argued her case thusly: “Our joint article on the Hueyatlaco site is a real bombshell. It would place man in the New World 10 times earlier than many archaeologists would like to believe. Worse, the bifacial tools that were found in situ are thought by most to be a sign of H[omo] sapiens. According to present theory, H.s. had not even evolved at that time, and certainly not in the New World.