The Gold of the Gods (7 page)

“It is said that those ones were created and shaped, they had no father, they had no mother, yet they were called men. They were not born of woman, they were not produced by creators and Shapers, nor by Alom and Caholom, only by a miracle, by magic were they created and shaped . . .”

 

A cuneiform tablet from Nippur, the town in Central Babylonia which was the seat of the Sumerian god Enlil in the third millennium B.C., has this account of the origin of man:

“In those days, in the creation chamber of the gods, in their house Duku were Lahar and Ashman formed . . .”

 

Here it might be objected that the parallels between the text of the
Popol Vuh
and the cuneiform inscription from Nippur are somewhat far-fetched, for it is about 8,000 miles as the crow flies from Central America, the homeland of the Mayas, to the fertile crescent between the Euphrates and the Tigris, the home of the Sumerians! But this is no carefully selected parallel from two cultural entities widely separated in space and time. It is well known that the Old Testament, especially the Pentateuch, contains a good many Sumerian concepts. What is not so well known is that the Old Testament and the
Popol Vuh
also have just as many obvious features in common, and even more hidden ones. Let sceptics compare the following passages:

“And the whole earth was of one language and of one speech.” (Genesis 11:1.)

 

“There they saw the rising of the sun. They had a single language. They prayed to neither wood nor stone . . .” (
Popol Vuh
.)

 

“And Moses stretched out his hand over the sea: and the Lord caused the sea to go back by a strong east wind all that night, and made the sea dry land, and the waters were divided.
“And the children of Israel went into the midst of the sea upon the dry ground: and the waters were a wall unto them on their right hand, and on their left.” (Exodus 14:21-22.)

 

“They hardly noticed how they crossed the sea. They traversed it as if there had been no sea; they crossed it on stones. Round stones rose from the sand and they walked across on the rows of stones. The place was called shifting sand; those who crossed the sea that divided itself gave it the name. That is how they came over.” (
Popol Vuh
.)

 

“. . . This is the token of the covenant which I make between me and you and every living creature that is with you . . .” (Genesis 9:12.)

 

“This will succor ye when ye call upon me. This is the sign of the covenant. But now I have to go, with a heavy heart . . .” (
Popol Vuh
.)

 

“Then these men were bound in their coats, their hosen, and their hats, and their other garments, and were cast into the midst of the burning fiery furnace . . .
“He answered and said, Lo, I see four men loose, walking in the midst of the fire, and they have no hurt; and the form of the fourth is like the Son of God.” (Daniel 3:21 and 25.)

 

“Then those men went into the fire, into a fire house. Within it all was red hot, but they were not consumed by fire. Smooth of body and fair of face they appeared in the twilight. The people in the places they had passed through had wished them dead. But that did not come to pass. Then consternation seized those from Xibalba.” (
Popol Vuh
.)

 

The reader is entitled to ask what this detour taking in a Sumerian cuneiform inscription, the Old Testament and the
Popol Vuh
has to do with my tunnel builders. I am trying to produce arguments for my conviction that in the very beginning
there was only one source of the origin of homo sapiens,
namely the spacemen who first made the mutation. Only much later, when peoples and races had settled in other parts of the globe, were
new
experiments in
new
places introduced into the first primordial tradition. But the
core
of the act of creation, namely that the gods created the first men in their own image, is preserved in all the worldwide traditions! The creation of man by extra-terrestrial intervention does not interfere with the theory of our ancestry or the theory of evolution.

Now there are two questions. Firstly, what event set off the process of becoming man? Secondly, why did
homo sapiens
alone of all the kinds of hominids become intelligent?

There are many answers, but none of them is convincing. About a million years ago all hominid types of ape had a brain capacity of about 25 cubic inches. If the climate drove the apes down from the trees during the following millennia, that must have included all kinds of apes and not just the one which was selected to produce
homo sapiens
. But if the ability to produce tools had been a prerequisite for development and further evolution, there should not really be any apes left today. “Is it absolutely essential to become man in order not to die out?” asks Oskar Kiss Maerth in his book
Der Anfang war das Ende
(The Beginning was the End). With regard to the problem of the origin of man, Maerth puts exciting questions like this:

“If one race of monkeys was forced to stand on its hind legs for fear of wild animals and because it was easier to feed themselves, why did not the other apes, too, stand on
their
hind legs, for the same reason?
“Basically all hominid apes were and are vegetarian . . .
“So were man’s ancestors; they only became meat eaters during the process of becoming man . . . Meat eating is supposed to have been a sign of increased intelligence and therefore an advance, because man could nourish himself ‘better’ and ‘more easily’ on meat. For this compliment thank the wolves and wild cats, who had been carnivores many millions of years before.
“Why did meat eating suddenly become an ‘easier’ form of nourishment for man’s ancestors? Since when has it been easier to kill a gazelle or a bison than to pluck fruit from a tree?
“During the last million years many dry and rainy periods alternated . . . all the great apes were able to withdraw to the remaining woods to continue leading their usual way of life. Why did all the great apes do this, except those from which man is supposed to have originated later?”

 

There is really nothing in the theory of evolution to explain the mighty leap by which
homo sapiens
set himself apart from his family of hominids. All we hear is that the brain suddenly became efficient, acquired technical know-how, was capable of observing the heavens and establishing communication in social communities. In terms of the history or evolution this leap from animalistic being to
homo sapiens
took place overnight. A miracle? Miracles just don’t happen.

The assertion that the intelligence of our earliest ancestors had already begun a million years ago and developed nice and slowly once they lived in communities does not hold water. All mammals live in groups, flocks and herds; they hunt and defend themselves communally. Have they become intelligent on this account? Even if a being resembling man has produced primitive tools, that in itself does not make him a
homo sapiens
. Professor Leakey of the National Research Center for Prehistory and Paleontology, Nairobi, refers to finds near Fort Ternan, which showed that
Kenyapithecus Wickeri
produced edged tools and that
homo habilis
used simple tools two million years ago. Leakey also tells us that Jane van Lavich-Goodall investigated chimpanzees in their natural surroundings and established that these distant cousins of man regularly make and use a variety of simple tools. Who is willing to admit these chimpanzees, which meet the criteria for membership of
homo sapiens
, into the circle of intelligent human beings?

Beings resembling man that made and used tools have always existed. Beings resembling man who worshipped and feared the gods, painted cave walls with frescoes, sang songs, had a feeling of shame, cultivated friendship and buried their fellow-men—
those kinds
of beings have not existed for so long. I doubt if they ever would have existed without artificial mutation by extra-terrestrial visitors. So I hazard the claim that the vanquished in a cosmic battle first set the process of becoming man in motion with their knowledge of the genetic code by means of an artificial mutation.

 

ON June 5, 1972, the Associated Press, Washington, distributed a news item on the 129-page report of the Committee for Astronomical Research of the American Academy of Science. In the view of these scholars the probability of intelligent extra-terrestrial civilizations existing in the universe has increased considerably during the last seven years. The Academy recommends that attempts by astronomers to discover such distant worlds with intelligent inhabitants should be supported by large government subsidies. Admittedly existing telescopes could already receive radio signals from extraterrestrial civilizations, but new instruments must be developed capable of picking up signals from inhabited heavenly bodies outside our solar system as well. The committee’s report says literally:

 

“At this very moment radio waves carrying the conversations of beings living vast distances away may be reaching us. Perhaps we could record these conversations if only we directed a radio telescope in the right direction and tuned in to the right frequency.”

 

Insofar as one can produce indications in support of a theory, I think one should introduce them into a serious discussion. It is not a question of asking for
proofs
. What scientific theory could be built up on proofs from its first conception?

Nor is it a question of a “substitute religion,” as many critics claim. If my theories smack of a substitute religion, then logically scientific firstborns, whose embryos were theories, must also have been “substitute religions” to begin with. The average man cannot carry out the series of experiments which ought to lead to the proof of a theory. Should he or must he
believe
in scientific theories even if the results of research finally show them to be wrong? I want to stimulate thought with my theories. No more, but also no less. And here I have put forward my new theories, stimulated by indications of how the tunnels in Ecuador and Peru could have originated and when
homo sapiens
may have celebrated his “birth hour.”

I leave it to the scientific world to answer me.

3: Traces of the Gods in China, Too

 

THE China Airlines Boeing had taken off from Singapore an hour behind schedule and had only made up half an hour when it landed in Taipeh at 1530 hours. And I had arranged a meeting with Mr. Chiang Fu-Tsung, Director of the National Palace Museum, for 1700 hours.

 

I left my luggage at the Ambassador Hotel in Nanking East Road, hailed a taxi, got in next to the friendly, laughing driver and said: “To the National Palace Museum, please.” The skinny little Buddha next to me smiled, but I had a strong feeling that he had not understood what I said. As he drove along at breakneck speed, I described my destination in all the languages I knew. My Buddha nodded indulgently, put his foot on the accelerator and finally stopped—outside the railway station! He whipped open the door smartly and with a radiant smile pointed to the station, which was obviously not the museum I was looking for. If only I had known a few words of Chinese! I went into the main hall and suddenly I had a brainwave. In the middle of it there was a bookstall with hundreds of postcards on sale showing all the interesting buildings in Taipeh and Taiwan. I bought postcards of all the places I intended to visit during the next few days. My Buddha nodded earnestly when I showed him the beautiful museum building and drove back the same way we had come. The museum was quite close to my hotel!

I knew that there would be no language difficulties with Mr. Chiang Fu-Tsung, who had studied in Berlin and spoke German.

I had been told this by Mr. Chi, proprietor of the best Chinese restaurant I have ever eaten in, the Lu-Taipeh in Lucerne. Mr. Chi spent most of his life as chef to Chiang Kai-Shek, before he decided to become a restaurateur in Switzerland. My friend Chi knew that I was obsessed with the desire to find out as much as I could about the mysterious finds at Baian Kara Ula.

That was the site in the Sino-Tibetan frontier zone where the Chinese archaeologist Chi Pu Tei found 716 granite plates in 1938. They were 2 centimeters thick, with a hole exactly in the center from which a double-tracked grooved script ran out spirally to the edge of the plate. In fact they were rather like our longplaying records. Brilliant scholars puzzled for years over the secret of the stone plates until Professor Tsum Urn Nui of the Academy of Prehistory, Peking, succeeded in deciphering part of the grooved scripts in 1962. Geological analysis showed a considerable cobalt and metal content; physicists established that all the plates had a high vibration rhythm, which led to the conclusion that they had been exposed to high electrical tensions at some time. The finds at Baian Kara Ula became a sensation when the Russian philologist Dr. Vyacheslav Saizev published some deciphered texts of the stone plates. They related that 12,000 years ago members of an alien people landed on the third planet, but their aircraft no longer had enough power to take off from that distant world. I have established these proven facts in detail in
Gods from Outer Space
.

But the reason for my journey to Taiwan was that the news published in Moscow, the scholar’s full report on the stone plates, was deposited both in the Peking Academy and the Historical Archives at Taipeh.

Thanks to a letter from my friend Chi, I had an appointment on this cold, wet January afternoon with the Director of the Palace Museum, who had confirmed our meeting in a courteous letter before I had even started on my third journey round the world.

The chances of my getting on the track of the stone plates in the Palace Museum seemed very good. The precious collection, with more than 250,000 cataloged items, had been moved from its original home in Peking on several occasions during the last 60 years. In 1913, during the uprising of the Kuomintang Party, in 1918, during the Civil War, in 1937, during the war with the Japanese, who occupied Peking, and in 1947, when Mao Tse Tung founded the People’s Republic of China with the People’s Army of Liberation and made Peking the capital again. Since 1947 the art treasures have been stored in Taipeh.