Chariots of the Gods (18 page)

On 17.11.67, under the headline 'Second Thoughts', Die Zeit said: 'For years the Russians have ridiculed western hysteria about flying saucers. Not long ago Pravda contained an official denial that such peculiar celestial vehicles existed. Now the Air Force General Anatolyi Stolyakov has been appointed director of a committee which is to examine all reports of UFO's. In this connexion the London Times writes: "Whether UFO's are the product of collective hallucinations, whether they originate from Venusian visitors or are to be understood as a divine revelation—there must be an explanation for them, otherwise the Russians would never have set up a Committee of Enquiry".'

The most spectacular and puzzling incident connected with the phenomenon of 'matter from the universe' took place at 7.17 on the morning of 30 June, 1908, in the Siberian Taiga. A fire-ball shot across the sky and was lost in the steppe. Travellers on the Trans-Siberian Railway observed a glowing mass which moved from south to north. A thunder-bolt shook the train, explosions followed and most of the seisomographic stations in the world registered an appreciable earth tremor. At Irkutsk, 550 miles from the epicentre, the needle of the seismograph went on quivering for nearly an hour. The noise could be heard over a radius of 621 miles. Whole herds of reindeer were destroyed. Nomads were whirled up into the air with their tents.

Not until 1921 did Professor Kulik begin to collect eyewitness accounts. Finally he also succeeded in collecting the money for a scientific expedition to this sparsely populated region of the Taiga.

When the expedition reached the Stony Tunguska in 1927, they were convinced that they would find the crater made by a gigantic meteorite. Their conviction turned out to be quite wrong. They saw the first trees without tops as much as 37 miles from the centre of the explosion. The nearer they came to the critical point, the more barren the district became. Trees stood there like shaved telegraph poles; in the vicinity of the centre even the strongest trees had been snapped off outwards. Last they found traces of a tremendous conflagration. Pushing on further north, the expedition became convinced that a vast explosion must have taken place. When they came across holes of all sizes in swampy ground they suspected the impact of meteorites; they dug and drilled in the marshy ground without finding a single remnant, a piece of iron, a bit of nickel or a lump of stone. Two years later the search was continued with bigger drills and improved technical resources. They drilled to a depth of 118 ft without finding a single trace of any-kind of meteoric material.

In 1961 and 1963 two more expeditions were sent to the Tunguska by the Soviet Academy of Sciences. The 1963 expedition was under the leadership of the geophysician Solotov. This group of scientists, now equipped with the most modern technical appliances, came to the conclusion that the explosion in the Siberian Tunguska must have been a nuclear one.

The type of an explosion can be determined when several physical orders of magnitude that caused it are known. One of these orders of magnitude in the Tunguska explosion was known in the vast amount of radiant energy emitted. In the Taiga the expedition found trees eleven miles from the centre of the explosion that had been exposed to radiation and set on fire by it at the moment of explosion. But a growing tree can only catch fire if the amount of radiant energy per sq. cm reaches 70 to 100 calories. Yet the flash of the explosion was so bright that it continued to cast secondary shadows at a distance of 124 miles from the epicentre!

From these measurements they worked out that the radiant energy of the explosion must have been around 2-8 x 10 <23> ergs. (Let me explain: the erg in science is the so-called 'measurement of work'. A beetle with a mass of 1 gramme performs 981 ergs' worth of work when it climbs a wall 1 cm high.)

The expedition found branches and twigs on the tops of trees that had been carbonised, up to range of eleven miles. From this they concluded that sudden heating had taken place. This was the result of an explosion, not a forest fire! These carbonisations were only found where there had been no shadows to interrupt the diffusion of the flash. Clearly and unquestionably it must have been a case of radiation. The sum of all these effects makes the energy of 10 <23> ergs necessary for the gigantic devastation. This immense energy corresponds to the destructive power of an atom bomb weighing 10 megatons or 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, ergs!

All the investigations confirmed a nuclear explosion and related to the realm of fable explanations such as the impact of a comet or the fall of a great meteorite.

What explanations are offered for this nuclear explosion in the year 1908?

In March 1964, an article in the reputable Leningrad paper Svesda put forward the theory that intelligent beings living on a planet in the constellation Cygnus had tried to make contact with the earth. The authors, Genrich Altov and Valentina Shuraleva, said that the impact in the Siberian Taiga was a response to the colossal explosion-like eruption of the volcano Krakatoa in the Indian Ocean that had sent a large concentration of radio waves into the universe when it erupted in 1853. The distant stellar beings had erroneously taken the radio waves for a signal from space; so they had directed a Laser beam, which was much too strong, at the earth, and when the beam hit the earth's atmosphere high above Siberia, it had turned into matter. I must admit that I do not accept this explanation because it seems too far-fetched.

I am equally unable to accept the theory that seeks to explain the incident by the impact of anti-matter. Even though I believe that there is anti-matter in the depths of the cosmos, there cannot be any left in the Tunguska, because the collision of matter and anti-matter results in their mutual dissolution. Moreover, the possibility of a piece of anti-matter reaching the earth without a collision with matter on its long journey is very remote. I prefer to adhere to the opinion of those who suspect that the nuclear explosion was caused by an unknown spaceship's energy pile bursting. Fantastic? Of course, but does that make it impossible?

There are shelves and shelves of literature about the Tunguska meteorite. There is one further fact I want to emphasise: radioactivity around the centre of the explosion in the Taiga is twice as high—even today—as elsewhere. Careful investigation of trees and their annual rings confirm an appreciable increase in radioactivity since 1908.

Until a single, exact, indubitable scientific proof of the phenomenon—and many others—is produced, no one has the right to discard an explanation within the bounds of credibility without giving his reasons.

Our knowledge of the planets in our solar system is pretty comprehensive; Mars is the only planet where 'life' in our sense of the word might exist and then only in limited quantities. Man has set the theoretical boundary to the possibility of life in his sense; this boundary is called the ecosphere. In our solar system only Venus, the Earth and Mars lie within the limits of the ecosphere. Nevertheless, we should remember that the determination of the ecosphere is based on our conception of life and that unknown life is by no means necessarily bound to our premises for life. Until 1962 Venus was considered as a possible home for life, that is until Mariner II got within about 21,000 miles of Venus. According to the information it transmitted, Venus can now be ruled out as a supporter of life.

It emerged from Mariner II's reports that the average surface temperature on both light and dark sides was 420 (deg) C. Such a temperature means that there could be no water, but only lakes of molten metal on the surface. The popular idea of Venus as the twin sister of the earth is over and done with, even though the carburetted hydrogen present could be a culture-medium for all kinds of bacteria.

It is not long since scientists claimed that life on Mars is inconceivable. For some time now that has become 'is scarcely conceivable'. For after the successful reconnaissance mission by Mariner IV we must concede, even if reluctantly, that the possibility of life on Mars is not unlikely. It is also within the bounds of possibility that our neighbour Mars had its own civilisation untold millennia ago. In any case the Martian moon Phobos deserves special attention.

Mars has two moons: Phobos and Deimos (in Greek, Fear and Terror). They were known long before the American astronomer Asaph Hall discovered them in 1877. As early as 1610 Johannes Kepler suspected that Mars was accompanied by two satellites. Although the Capucine monk Schyrl may have claimed to have seen the Martian moons a few years earlier, he must have been mistaken, for the tiny Martian moons could not possibly be seen with the optical instruments of his day. A fascinating description of them is given by Jonathan Swift in A Voyage to Laputa and Japan, which forms Part III of Gulliver's Travels. Not only does he describe the two Martian moons, but he also gives their size and orbits. This quotation comes from Chapter 3:

'(The Laputan astronomers) spend the greatest part of their lives in observing the celestial bodies, which they do by the assistance of glasses far excelling ours in goodness. For although their largest telescopes do not exceed three feet, they magnify much more than those of a hundred yards among us and at the same time show the stars with greater clearness. This advantage hath enabled them to extend their discoveries much further than our astronomers in Europe for they have made a catalogue of ten thousand fixed stars, whereas the largest of ours do not contain above one third part of that number. They have likewise discovered two lesser stars, or satellites, which revolve about Mars, whereof the innermost is distant from the centre of the primary planet exactly three of the diameters, and the outermost five; the former revolves in the space of ten hours, and the later in twenty one and a half; so that the squares of their periodical times are very near in the same proportion with the cubes of their distance from the centre of Mars, which evidently shows them to be governed by the same law of gravitation, that influences the other heavenly bodies.'

How could Swift describe the Martian satellites when they were not discovered until 150 years later? Undoubtedly the Martian satellites were suspected by some astronomers before Swift, but suspicions are not nearly enough for such precise data. We do not know where Swift got his knowledge from.

Actually these satellites are the smallest and strangest moons in our solar system. They rotate in almost circular orbits above the equator. If they reflect the same amount of light as our moon, then Phobos must have a diameter of 10 miles and Demos one of only 5 miles. But if they are artificial moons and so reflect still more light, they would actually be even smaller. They are the only known moons in our solar system drat move round their mother planet faster than she herself rotates. In relation to the rotation of Mars Phobos completes two orbits in one Martian day, whereas Deimos moves only a little faster round Mars than the planet itself rotates.

In 1862, when the earth was in a very favourable position in relation to Mars, people sought in vain for the Martian satellites—they were not discovered until fifteen years later I The theory of planetoids came up because several astronomers suspected that the Martian moons were fragments from space which Mars had attracted. But the theory of planetoids is untenable, for both the Martian moons revolve in almost the same planes above the equator. One fragment from space might do that by chance, but not two. Finally, measurable facts produced trie modern satellite theory.

The renowned American astronomer Carl Sagan and the Russian scientist Shlovsky in their book Intelligent Life in the Universe, published in 1966, accept that the moon Phobos is an artificial satellite. As the result of a series of measurements Sagan came to the conclusion that Phobos must be hollow and a hollow moon cannot be natural.

In fact, the peculiarities of Phobos's orbit bear no relation to its apparent mass, whereas such orbits are typical in the case of hollow bodies. The Russian Shlovsky, Director of the Department of Radio-Astronomy in the Moscow Sternberg Institute, made the same statement after he had observed that a peculiar unnatural acceleration could be confirmed in the movement of the Martian moon Phobos. This acceleration is identical with the phenomenon which has been established in the case of our own artificial satellites.

Today people take these fantastic theories of Sagan and Shlovsky very seriously. The Americans plan further Martian probes, which are also intended to take the bearings of the Martian moons. In the years ahead, the Russians intend to observe the movements of the Martian moons from several observatories.

If the view supported by reputable scientists in east and west that Mars once had an advanced civilisation is correct, the question arises why does it no longer exist today? Did the intelligences on Mars have to seek a new environment? Did their home planet, which was losing more and more oxygen, force them to look for new territories to settle? Was a cosmic catastrophe responsible for the downfall of the civilisation? Lastly, were some of the inhabitants of Mars able to escape to a neighbouring planet?

In his book Worlds in Collision, published in 1950, and still much discussed in scientific circles, Dr Emanuel Velikovsky declared that a giant comet had crashed into Mars and that Venus had been formed as a result of this collision. His theory can be proved if Venus has a high surface temperature, clouds containing carburetted hydrogen and an anomalous rotation. Evaluation of the data provided by Mariner II confirms Velikovsky's theory. Venus is the only planet which rotates 'backwards', i.e. the only planet that does not follow the rules of our solar system as do Mercury, the Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune.

But if a cosmically caused catastrophe is a possible reason for the destruction of a civilisation on the planet Mars, that would also provide material for my theory that the earth may have received visits from space in the very remote past. The thesis that a group of Martian giants perhaps escaped to earth to found the new culture of homo sapiens by breeding with the semi-intelligent beings living there then becomes a speculative possibility. Since the gravity of Mars is not as strong as that of the earth, it can be assumed that the build of Martian men was heavier and bigger than that of the earth men. If there were anything in this argument, we should have the giants who come from the stars, who could move enormous blocks of stone, who instructed men in arts still unknown on earth and who finally died out.