Forbidden History: Prehistoric Technologies, Extraterrestrial Intervention, and the Suppressed Origins of Civilization (10 page)

UNLOCKING AMNESIA THROUGH MYTH

David Talbott has already found himself the subject of a ninety-minute documentary, titled “Remembering the End of the World.” Unlike Thornhill’s work in the physical sciences, Talbott’s work rests upon unusual and unexpected patterns found in human memory. And what a memory!

Imagine a global event of extreme drama, experienced by the entire human race, involving great wonders in the sky. Imagine the intensity of the experience and its memory to be so great as to alter the course of human development. For the first time ever, entire nations began to erect grand monuments to the gods and perform passionate rituals in a futile effort to relive the earlier experience, to magically restore life to the way it was before the great collapse.

At the dawn of civilization, perhaps five thousand years ago, says Talbott, every dimension of civilized life pointed to the earlier time when things were better, when heaven was close to Earth, before the gods went away. The arts, the songs, the stories, the architecture, the religious beliefs, the military affairs, and the meaning of words and symbols all provide us with lasting evidence of what people experienced then. And according to Talbott, people used every device known to keep alive the memory of a glory that once was. That glory and its violent collapse involved catastrophic displays in the heavens as planets moved close to Earth and appeared huge in the sky.

But just as the fabled gods had gone away, the memory of the golden time would eventually go away. The memory of the violent collapse of the golden time would also go away, but its scars would not. Those scars of massive collective trauma, of doomsday, dwell within every human being alive today and powerfully affect how we relate to the world and to each other.

Velikovsky understood the way by which an individual suppresses the painful memory of trauma in the psyche. He reasoned that the entire human race has collectively suppressed the trauma of its expulsion from the womb-like golden time. Yet that suppressed trauma keeps expressing itself as human violence and alienation. We accept the background pain as a normal state of existence, because that’s what everyone has always felt, going back as far as anybody can remember. But Velikovsky would say that this state is not “normal.” We collectively suffer a distorted view of life because of this greatest of all traumas, when the Time of Perfect Virtue (as the Chinese call it) came to a cold and bitter end.

Talbott has extended Velikovsky’s work by showing, in exquisite detail, the way that Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, and Venus were intimately tied to human experience during primordial times. These planets traveled very close to Earth, actually assuming a stable and symmetrical, colinear configuration immediately prior to the myth-making epoch. The “Age of the Gods,” according to Talbott’s astonishing story, harkens both to the stable/peaceful period and to the violent/dramatic period when the colinear configuration destabilized and collapsed completely.

Throughout the world, people have drawn images and symbols bearing a distinctive crescent. Laypeople and experts alike always assume that the crescent represents the Moon. Sometimes the crescent has been drawn with a star in its center, but think about it. No star will ever be seen within the crescent of the Moon, as the body of the moon occupies that space. And no orb sits squarely in front of the Moon that we see today.

Talbott could speak for hours on this symbol alone to show that we are confronting an image whose imprint is far deeper in human consciousness and far more awesome than our familiar Moon. In fact, Talbott found no astronomical records of a moon prior to about 500
B.C.E.
, even though the people of early times were nearly obsessed with observing the activity in the sky.

The crescent was cast by our Sun on Saturn when Saturn occupied the pole position in the sky so close as to subtend up to 20 degrees of arc or more. The small orb in the center was Venus in her dormant phase. Venus appeared as a shining star when in her radiant phase.

Wallace Thornhill’s understanding of plasma-discharge phenomena allows even the nontechnical mind to visualize the way a young Venus might have produced the radiating luminous streamers found in ancient representations of the planet.

Using research methods borrowed from Velikovsky, Talbott examined the mythology of every major culture in the world. Since mythical stories become more locally embellished with the passage of time, he traced the stories back to their oldest and purest forms. This led him to the earliest writings from the cradle of civilization in the Middle East and ancient Egypt.

The great pyramids, according to Talbott, are filled with human writings that describe a world that we do not see today, a sky that we do not see today. That’s why the meaning of the hieroglyphs bewilders our best experts.
These inscriptions don’t answer to our world
. This is an important clue.

With support from Thornhill and a growing number of accomplished scholars, David Talbott is mounting a heresy even more radical than Velikovsky’s. He claims, with complete assurance, that Venus, Mars, Saturn, and Jupiter traveled very close to Earth within human memory. He says that together these planets presented a stupendous form in the sky, at times peaceful and at times violent.

The people alive during this “Age of the Gods” felt a deep kinship with these familiar forms. That’s why the battles of the gods in the sky and the departure of these gods caused such confusion and trauma. The emotional climate for those people might have resembled that of innocent children whose reliable and loving parents suddenly turned into capricious tyrants before finally abandoning them. For the first time, people began to experience the illusion of separation and all forms of human violence. The rest is history.

COMPARATIVE MYTHOLOGY

In contrast, David Talbott, inspired by Immanuel Velikovsky’s theory of interplanetary upheaval, developed a method for comparing the myths of far-flung cultures. His objective was to discover whether reliable memories were embedded in the different stories. This method is similar to the reasoning of attorneys in a court of law, questioning witnesses who may be lying, or incompetent, or remembering incorrectly. When statements from independent witnesses converge on unique details, they tend to corroborate each other, even if the witnesses are not reliable in other things they say. Similarly, according to Talbott, there are hundreds of common themes in world mythology in which different words and different symbols point to the same remembered events. The more peculiar the points of convergence, the more unreasonable it is to dismiss them.

When allowed to speak for themselves, these universal memories tell a coherent and detailed story, Talbott claims. But it is a story that seems preposterous from today’s worldview: According to Talbott, what the ancients worshipped and feared as powerful
gods
were
planets
positioned extremely close to Earth. This close congregation of planets appeared as huge powers in the sky. Their instabilities and unpredictable movements gave rise to one of the most common themes of myth—the wars of the gods. In these dramatic stories, the gods pounded each other with cosmic lightning while fire and stone descended on Earth.

THE WEAPON OF THE GODS

In ancient traditions, few images are more vividly presented than the thunderbolts of the planetary gods, Talbott notes. Consider the gas-giant Jupiter, whom the Greeks remembered as the ruler Zeus, the victor in the celestial clash of the Titans. “Jupiter is just a little speck of light in our sky, but ancient peoples recalled the
god
Jupiter as a towering form in the heavens, wielding lightning as his weapon of choice. What does this mean? If the gods were planets, then the thunderbolts of the gods were nothing less than interplanetary lightning discharges.”

In Hesiod’s
Theogony,
we read of Zeus, “From Heaven and from Olympus he came immediately, hurling his lightning: the bolts flew thick and fast from his strong hand together with thunder and lightning, whirling an awesome flame . . .”

When the dragon Typhon attacked the world, there was “thunder and lightning, and . . . fire from the monster, and the scorching winds and blazing thunderbolt.” Destroyed by a lightning bolt from Zeus, the world-threatening dragon came to be known as the “thunderstricken.” Indeed, it is remarkable how many mythical figures are struck down by lightning.

In Classical myth alone, these figures include Enceladus, Mimas, Menoetius, Aristodemus and Capaneus, Idas, Iasion, and Asclepius. “The biggest mistake a scholar can make,” Talbott says, “is to look for terrestrial explanations. The earliest forms of these stories are cosmic. The gods, the great heroes, and the thunderbolts that fly between them are celestial through and through.” Hebrew tradition has remembered well the lightning of the gods. Psalm 77 proclaims: “The voice of thy thunder was in the heaven: the lightnings lightened the world: the Earth trembled and shook.” From India, the
Mahabharata
and
Ramayana
relate that lightning of the gods filled the heavens like a rain of fiery arrows. From ancient Egypt, Babylon, Scandinavia, China, and the Americas, myths and legends describe conflagrations attributed to thunderbolts from the gods.

These stories of cosmic battles provide much of the content of the myths we know today. Talbott writes: “If we’ve failed to recognize the celestial players, it’s because the planets which inspired these stories have receded to pinpoints of light. In modern times, we see no interplanetary lightning arcing between them.”

But Talbott reminds us that if there is anything to these global memories, the physical evidence should be massive. This amounts to a call for objective investigation of the surface features of planets and moons, to see if the telltale markers of interplanetary discharges might be present.

ELECTRICITY AND ASTRONOMY

Unbeknownst to Talbott, the Australian physicist Wallace Thornhill had been pursuing just such an investigation. Thornhill had discovered Velikovsky’s books shortly before starting his university career. “I was the only physics undergraduate to haunt the anthropology shelves of the university library,” he says. “The result was a strong conviction that Velikovsky had presented a case that required further study.” But his next discovery was the reluctance, even hostility, of scientists to question the assumptions underlying their theories.

One of those assumptions that Thornhill questioned was the insignificance of electrical phenomena on astronomical scales. The Nobel laureate Hannes Alfven, a pioneering investigator of the properties of plasmas in electrical discharges such as lightning, had admonished theoretical physicists that their models were wrong. Real plasmas didn’t behave the way mathematical deductions predicted. They are not superconductors, Thornhill explains, nor can they be treated as a gas, as is implicit, for example, in the term
solar wind
. Electrical currents flow in them, pinching into long filaments and then braiding themselves into ropelike structures. These long, twisted filaments are visible in solar prominences, galactic jets, and comet tails. They were detected as “stringy things” in the forty-million-kilometer-long tail of Venus last year.

Following the suggestion of Ralph Juergens, an electrical engineer who studied Alfven’s work, Thornhill began to amass evidence showing that most features now being photographed on planets, satellites, and asteroids are scars of plasma discharges: interplanetary lightning.

“By scaling up electrical effects seen on Earth and in the laboratory, I can provide stunning support for the ancient imagery of a different sky and hence the likelihood that planets and moons
did
move in close proximity in the recent past,” he claims. “An electrical model provides a simple mechanism for re-ordering a chaotic planetary system in a very short time and maintaining that stability.”

One of the laboratory effects is produced by moving a high-voltage pointed rod just above the surface of a powder-covered insulator placed on a grounded metal plate. The spark forms characteristic patterns in the powder. A long, narrow main channel of fairly uniform width will have a narrower, more sinuous channel engraved along its center. Tributary channels run parallel to the main channel for a distance, then they rejoin it almost perpendicularly.

Thornhill points out that these same features are seen on a larger scale in lightning strikes to Earth, such as on golf courses. Trenches of constant width are created, with narrower furrows snaking down their centers. The soil blasted from the trench is deposited along both sides. Secondary channels may run parallel to the main channel, and tributary channels join at right angles.

PLANETARY PLASMA EFFECTS

Thornhill describes how the same effects are repeated on a planetary scale in features called sinuous rilles. Long, uniformly narrow channels snake across the surface, often with levees of material deposited along each side.

The more sinuous inner channels often have chains of small, circular craters precisely centered along their axes, or the craters overlap to produce fluted walls. There is generally no sign of rubble from collapsed roofs, as would be expected if the conventional “lava tube” explanation for rilles on the Moon were correct. Nor is there evidence of the outwash that would result if the channels had been formed by water, as has been proposed for rilles on Mars.

Furthermore, the rilles run uphill and down, Thornhill points out, following an electrical potential rather than the gravitational potential, as water and lava do. Where rilles intersect, the younger channel and its levees continue uninterrupted across the older as though the older channel weren’t there. This is especially obvious on Europa, where the levees are often darker than the surrounding terrain. They are also darker than the central channel, which creates a problem for the accepted explanation that they are darker material welling up through cracks in the ice. Thornhill surmises that the electrical forces of the arc altered the chemical or, possibly, the nuclear, composition of the debris.

Particularly remarkable is the series of
looping
rilles on Europa. Ice cracking in loops is unheard of, but the characteristic corkscrew form of a plasma filament arcing across the surface easily explains it.

Thornhill also notes the similarities of craters on the planets and moons to those created in the laboratory. Both tend to be perfectly circular because an electrical arc always strikes perpendicular to a surface. Walls are nearly vertical and floors are nearly flat as the circular motion of the arc machines out the crater. Impact and explosion craters, by contrast, tend to have a bowl shape: Instead of being lifted from the surface, excavated material undergoes shock displacement, shattering and flowing in a manner similar to that of a fluid for the duration of the shock.

Another common feature of electrically generated craters, Thornhill explains, is terracing along the sides, sometimes corkscrewing down to the floor, following the rotary motion of the arc. The Moon and Mars both provide many examples of terraced and corkscrew craters.

Central peaks tend to be symmetrical and steep-sided, similar to the central “nipple” left by plasma machining as the rotary corkscrewing motion of the arc cuts out the material around it. Thornhill contrasts this with the irregular mass of the so-called rebound peak in a lab-produced impact or explosion crater. In a number of craters on the Moon, the central peak connects to the surrounding terrain with an “isthmus,” just as in a plasma-machined crater when the arc is quenched before completing a full rotation.

A telling characteristic of electrical origin, Thornhill says, is a crater centered on the rim of another crater. This is a common sight on the Moon and some planets. It’s an expected effect of the arc jumping to or striking the highest elevations.

Finally, many volcanoes are more likely scaled-up versions of fulgamites, Thornhill claims. Fulgamites are blisters of material raised on lightning arrestors during a strike. Typically, a fulgamite has a steep, fluted outer edge and a crater at the top, formed as the more diffuse discharge that raised the fulgamite pinches down to a narrow arc. The most impressive example is Olympus Mons on Mars, six hundred kilometers across and twenty-four kilometers high. A six-stroke crater was machined into the top as the arc narrowed and jumped to high spots on each successive rim.