The Ancient Alien Question (18 page)

On the subject of vimanas, Thompson found references to a vimana in the possession of the ancient Indian King Salva, which he had acquired from Maya Danava, an inhabitant of a planetary system called Talatala:

Salva chose a vehicle that could...travel anywhere he wished to go, and that would terrify the Vrsnis. Lord Silva said, ‘So be it.’ On his order, Maya Danava, who conquers his enemies’ cities, constructed a flying iron city named Saubha and presented it to Salva. This unassailable vehicle was filled with darkness and could go anywhere. Upon obtaining it, Salva went to Dvarakak, remembering the Vrsnis’ enmity towards him. Salva besieged the city with a large army.... From his excellent airship he threw down a torrent of weapons, including stones, tree trunks, thunderbolts, snakes and hailstones. A fierce whirlwind arose and blanketed all directions with dust.
¹²

Dr. Dileep Kumar Kanjilal finds that if you delve into the literature of India, you come away with descriptions of modern tanks, armored cars, places for missiles on multi-wheeled carriers, sound-interceptor missiles, ground-to-air and air-to-ground missiles, laser beams, and mass-destruction weapons similar to nuclear bombs. The Vanaparvan speaks of Arjuna’s weapon, the Pasupata, which had the potential to destroy the entire world. Arjuna was strictly forbidden to use this weapon against human beings. He also possessed the Narayana weapon, mentioned in the Dronaparvan. This, too, could create total destruction, and it killed instantly all life at the epicenter. The heat generated was equivalent to 100 times the power of the sun; the sky became filled with dust and strong winds, while trees were incinerated and the sound caused people far away to tremble with fear. In fact, there is a tradition that the war mentioned in the Mahabharata occurred in either 3127
BC
(according to the Aihole inscription from the seventh century
AD
) or circa 1500
BC
(according to modern scholars). Indeed, from around 1500
BC
to 500
BC
(the birth of Lord Buddha), no literary or historical records are found, and it is clear that a real dark age reigned over India.

Mohenjo Daro
literally means “Mound of the Dead.” Sometimes referred to as a metropolis of the ancient Indus Valley Civilization, it was built around 2600
BC
and was one of the early urban settlements in the world. Whereas most Ancient Alien Questions focus on the origin of civilization, at Mohenjo Daro, the question has to do with how and why the city was abandoned around 1500
BC
.

The site was rediscovered in 1922 when an officer of the Archaeological Survey of India, Rakhaldas Bandyopadhyay, was led to the site by a Buddhist monk. A decade later, excavations began. And as the excavations progressed, they found hundreds of scattered bodies—in the middle of the street, some still holding hands. People were just lying, unburied, in the streets of the city; there seemed no one available to bury them.

What could cause such devastation? Why did the bodies not decay or get eaten by wild animals? Furthermore, Alexander Gorbovsky, in
Riddles of Ancient History
(1966), reported on the discovery of at least one human skeleton in this area with a level of radioactivity approximately 50 times greater than it should have been due to natural radiation. Also, thousands of fused lumps, christened “black stones,” have been found at Mohenjo Daro. These appear to be fragments of clay vessels that melted together in extreme heat, around 2,550–2,910 degrees F. The centers of both cities bear the traces of an explosion or something resembling it. The buildings are literally leveled. Whatever ended Mohenjo Daro, it was sudden, and extreme.

Albion W. Hart was one of the first engineers to graduate from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). During an engineering project in Africa, he and his colleagues were traveling through the desert. Margarethe Casson, in an article on Hart’s life in the magazine
Rocks and Minerals
(no. 396, 1972), writes, “At the time he was puzzled and quite unable to explain a large expanse of greenish glass which covered the sands as far as he could see. Later on, during his life, he passed by the White Sands area after the first atomic explosion there, and he recognized the same type of silica fusion which he had seen 50 years earlier in the African desert.”

Robert Oppenheimer was an American theoretical physicist and is often called the “father of the atomic bomb” for his role in the Manhattan Project, the World War II project that developed the first nuclear weapons. Oppenheimer had studied Sanskrit. He obviously witnessed the first atomic bomb detonation on July 16, 1945, in the Trinity test site in New Mexico. Afterward, he quoted from the Bhagavad Gita: “I have unleashed the power of the Universe, now, I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” In 1952, at a press conference at the University of Rochester, he was asked whether the Trinity test was the first ever nuclear detonation carried out. He replied, “Yes...in our times.”

It is clear that Oppenheimer was convinced of the reality of the ancient Indian accounts and felt that what he had accomplished at the Manhattan Project was merely the rediscovery of a science. And so, whereas our ancestors were clearly capable of building the most beautiful and largest of structures, they clearly were also able to wipe them out.

Chapter 5
A Brave New World

Terra Preta

Since the latter half of the 20th century, two leading
thoughts have come to the forefront of the world’s consciousness: One is the possibility that we could destroy our planet (including whether or not our industrialized economy is
already
killing the planet); the second is the idea of “terraforming” other planets—making them suitable for human habitation. Both “techniques” transform an existing ecosystem but reside in opposite camps—destruction, and creation.

Though topical (and for many perhaps theoretical), terraforming is not a purely modern issue, nor an outcome of our conquest of space, nor merely the science fiction of the generations that have
grown up in the 20th century. Indeed, during that same century, it has become clear to science that two millennia before humankind went into space, people in the Amazon created and used similar techniques.

“Terra Preta de Indio” (Amazonian Dark Earths) is the local name for certain dark earths—literally: dark-colored soil—in the Brazilian Amazon region. These dark earths also occur in several countries in South America (Brazil, Ecuador, and Peru) and possibly beyond. As ecologically rich as the rainforest may appear, the soil it stands in is unsuitable for farming—largely a result of the incessant rain washing away all nutrients. But those pockets of soil that are Terra Preta are suitable for farming and thus form an out-of-place patch of fertility in an otherwise-harsh environment.

In fact, this soil has the ability to maintain nutrient levels throughout hundreds of years. According to Bruno Glaser, a chemist at the University of Bayreuth, “If you read the textbooks, it shouldn’t be there.” And according to a study led by Dirse Kern of the Museu Goeldi in Belem, Terra Preta is “not associated with a particular parent soil type or environmental condition”, suggesting it was not produced by natural processes.
¹

Typical Terra Preta pockets in the Amazon are seldom larger than 2 acres, reaching down to a depth of approximately 25 inches, with traces going down to 6 to 9 feet deep. Terra Preta, in short, is like a small pocket of different soil, stretching over a small area of land, and not going to any depth. Still, when the various pockets are added up, about 10 percent of the Amazon landmass contains Terra Preta (though some argue that only 0.3 percent of the basin is covered)—a space roughly the size of France, or twice the United Kingdom.

As a rule, Terra Preta has more plant-available phosphorus, calcium, sulfur, and nitrogen than is common in the rain forest. The soil is specifically well-suited for tropical fruits. Corn, papaya, mango, and many other foods grow at three times the
normal rate of tropical soil. Fallows on the Amazonian Dark Earths can be as short as six months, whereas fallow periods on Oxisols (tropical rain forest soils) are usually eight to 10 years long. Only short fallows are presumed to be necessary for restoring fertility on the dark earths. However, precise information is not available, because farmers frequently fallow the land due to an overwhelming weed infestation and not due to declining soil fertility. In 2001, James B. Petersen reported that Amazonian Dark Earths in Açutuba had been under continuous cultivation without fertilization for more than 40 years.

What’s more, the soil behaves like a living organism: It is self-renewing and thus acts more like a super-organism than an inert material. But the most remarkable aspect of Terra Preta is that it is
man-made
, created by pre-Columbian Indians between 500
BC
and
AD
1500, and abandoned after the invasion of Europeans. (Other dating suggests 800
BC
to
AD
500.)

Francisco de Orellana, of the Spanish Conquistadors, reported that as he ventured along the Rio Negro, hunting a hidden city of gold, his expedition found a network of farms, villages, and even huge walled cities. When later Spanish settlers arrived, none could find the people of whom the first Conquistadors had spoken. Had they been lured here with a lie? And if the farms did not exist, a “city of gold” seemed to have been an even bigger lie. Later, scientists were skeptical of Orellana’s account, as in their opinion, the Amazonian soil could not support such large farming communities. These scientists were speaking at a time when Terra Preta was not yet identified, and it is now accepted that these vast cities were indeed there—Orellana wasn’t lying.

Wim Sombroek of the International Soil Reference and Information Centre in Wageningen, Netherlands, has identified one of the biggest patches of Terra Preta near Santarem, where the zone is 3 miles long and half a mile wide. The plateau has never been carefully excavated, but observations by geographers Woods and Joseph McCann of the New School in New York
City indicate that this area would have been able to support about 200,000 to 400,000 people.

Terra Preta was first discovered in 1871, but was misidentified as “terra cotta.” In 1928, Barbosa de Farias proposed that Terra Preta sites were naturally fertile sites. Camargo (in 1941) speculated that these soils might have formed on fallout from volcanoes in the Andes, because they were only found on the highest spots in the landscape. Another theory went that they were a result of sedimentation in tertiary lakes or in recent ponds. A natural explanation remained the best-liked flavor until the 1950s, when the camp became divided and more and more began to favor an anthropogenic (in other words, caused by humans) origin. During the 1960s and 1970s, Terra Preta sites all over the Amazon basin were mapped and investigated with respect to the physical and chemical parameters of the soil, which supported the anthropogenic origins of the material. The fact that most of the sites are not too far from navigable waterways, where people would be expected to settle, added to this conviction.

So was it a byproduct of habitation, or was it a clear example of terraforming, intentionally created for soil improvement? That question remained unanswered, though most now argue that people altered the soil via a transforming bacteria. In the 1980s, it was thought that Terra Preta was made as a kind of kitchen-midden, which acquired its specific fertility from dung, household garbage, and the refuse of hunting and fishing. The soil was also full of ceramic remains, another clear sign of human intervention. The preferred conclusion was therefore that biological waste products had been gathered and then used as fertilizer, resulting in Terra Preta. However, how the compost gained its stability and special properties remained subject to speculation. Could it really be true that this almost magical ability was an advantageous but totally accidental byproduct?

At the end of the 1990s, investigations on the molecular level showed that Terra Preta contained tremendous amounts of charring residues, which are known to contain high amounts of nutrients and to persist in the environment for centuries. This is a 21st-century problem that has been brought to worldwide attention due to its importance for the global climate. Soil organic carbon is an important pool of carbon in the global biogeochemical cycle. Because Amazonian Dark Earths have high carbon contents that are five to eight times higher than the surrounding soil, Terra Preta could, in some theories, be considered as “bad” soil. And if we were tempted to see this as contaminated earth, we should note that the areas that are enriched in organic matter are not 5 to 10 inches deep, as in surrounding soils, but may be as deep as 3 to 6 feet. Therefore, the total carbon stored in these soils can be one order of magnitude higher than in adjacent soils.

The Amazonian basin is not the only site where Terra Preta has been found. The terrain of the Bolivian Llanos de Mojos is savannah grassland with extreme seasons: floods in the wet, fires in the dry. Crops are hard to grow and few people live there. But back in the 1960s, archaeologist Bill Denevan noted that the landscape was crossed with unnaturally straight lines. Large areas were also covered with striped patterns. Clark Erickson, a landscape archaeologist, was drawn to the numerous forest islands dotted across the savannah, which he found littered with prehistoric potsherds, similar to the ceramics found in Terra Preta soil. Some mounds were as much as 54 feet high, and much of the pottery was on a grand scale as well. Together with his colleague, William Balée, Erickson realized that the entire region must have been linked with agriculture, but they needed evidence for their conviction. They soon found that some of the mounds were still inhabited by indigenous people and that their language had words for staple crops like maize, as well as cotton and dye plants. The straight lines they had observed turned out
to be canals for irrigation, next to which were found causeways. These canals themselves are a masterwork of engineering: The ancient engineers had wedged diamond-shaped rocks in the bottom of the canals, so that they would remain free from sediment. The water flow itself would clean the canals, and so a human agent was not required.