Forbidden History: Prehistoric Technologies, Extraterrestrial Intervention, and the Suppressed Origins of Civilization (2 page)

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Introduction

J. Douglas Kenyon

J
ust a few centuries after what the experts say was the first great laborsaving invention of the ancient world—the wheel—society crossed a major threshold and headed irreversibly toward the modern world. More than anything else, it was the wheel, we are told, that revolutionized primitive society and set the stage for the great achievements that were to follow. The prevailing assumption is that the rise of highly organized society was
unprecedented;
such is the conventional scenario for the dawn of civilization on Earth.

After all, it is argued, if there
had
been an earlier, advanced civilization we would have discovered unmistakable evidence of its existence. Presumably, we would have seen the remains of its highways, and bridges, and electrical wiring. We would have found its plastic bottles, its city dumps, and its CD-ROMs. Those are, after all, the things
we
will leave behind for future archeologists to puzzle over.

But could an ancient civilization have risen to heights similar to our own, yet have traveled a different road? What would we understand of a world that might have employed fundamentally different—though no less effective—techniques to harness the forces of nature? Would we, or could we, comprehend a world capable of, for example, creating and transmitting energy by means other than a power grid, traveling great distances without internal combustion engines, or making highly complex calculations involving earth science and astronomy without electronic computers?

Do we have the grace to recognize and respect achievements other than our own, or must we take the easy way out and resort to crude stereotyping of our mysterious primitive ancestors, dismissing out of hand anything we don’t immediately understand? Indeed there are some, including many contributors to this book, who would argue that the evidence of a great but forgotten fountainhead of civilization is overwhelming and needs, at last, to be given its proper due.

Forbidden History
, a compilation of essays gathered over time from the magazine
Atlantis Rising
, aims to put forward such evidence, and to propose ideas and theories with regard to the origins of life and the human race itself that may very well be more in accordance with reality than currently prevailing orthodoxy. In proposing these ideas, we hope to pose some interesting and provocative questions.

For example, could today’s reigning conception of the limits of prehistoric society be but another in the long line of self-serving conceits to which our ruling elite, if not our flesh, is heir? Take, for instance, the Darwinian/Uniformitarian view of history, which argues that our world is a very slowly changing place; wherein everything has developed spontaneously, albeit quite gradually, over millions of years, without the help of any external forces—no, God forbid, God!—to interfere in the process. According to this predominant school of thought, the way the world works
now
is the way it has
always
worked.

On the other side, some have tried to argue (without the benefit of much public exposure) that our world today is the product of a series of catastrophes. These “catastrophists” tell us that the story of mankind is one of a never-ending cycle of ascents followed by cataclysmic falls. For more than a century, the uniformitarians have dominated the debate, but this is a circumstance that may be changing.

Probably no one in the past half-century is more directly linked, in the public mind, with the concept of catastrophism than the late Russian-American scientist Immanuel Velikovsky. When Velikovsky’s book
Worlds in Collision
was published in 1950, it caused a sensation. His subsequent works,
Earth in Upheaval
and
Ages in Chaos,
further elaborated his theories and expanded the ongoing controversy. Here was a scientist of considerable authority suggesting, among other things, that Earth and Venus might once have collided, leaving behind a vast and puzzling chaotic aftermath that, if we could just decipher its resultant clues correctly, could do much to explain our peculiar history.

For such arguments, Velikovsky was roundly and routinely ridiculed. Nonetheless, many of his predictions have now been verified, and many who initially disagreed with him on many subjects, including the late Carl Sagan, have been forced to concede that, after all and in some ways, Velikovsky may have been on to something.

Very few realize that Velikovsky was a psychoanalyst by profession, an associate of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung. His insights into the psycho/sociological impacts of cataclysmic events, in my view, were his greatest contribution to a proper understanding of our ancient experience. Sometime in the mid-1980s, I ran across his book
Mankind in Amnesia,
and my own thinking about the condition of humanity on Earth has never been the same. According to Velikovsky, the psychological condition and case history of planet Earth is one of amnesia: We find the planet today in a near-psychotic state, left so by traumatic events of an almost unimaginable magnitude that, thanks to a collective psychological defense mechanism, we cannot bear to remember.

Today, psychiatrists have applied the term post-traumatic stress syndrome to a group of mental disorders that have been known to follow the witnessing of life-threatening events (e.g., military combat, natural disasters, terrorist incidents, serious accidents, and violent personal assaults such as rape). Symptoms of the disorder include depression, anxiety, nightmares,
and amnesia
.

The question that must be asked is whether or not such a diagnosis could be applied to the culture
of an entire planet
? And could a collective unwillingness to explore and define our mysterious past—unconsciously dreading that to do so would open ancient wounds—eventually harden into a systematic repression of the truth? Could it become tyranny? Certainly our reluctance to honestly explore the past has led to many such evils. Over time, this reluctance to consider the truth of our origins has often become codified and institutionalized, culminating in nightmares like the inquisitions of the Middle Ages and the book burnings of Nazi Germany. How often we have watched as a brutal elite, supposedly acting in our name, enforced the collective subconscious wish to keep such threatening—and thus forbidden—knowledge
safely
out of sight? The answer, Velikovsky believed, was, ‘all too frequently.’

In many ways, his views were supported by Carl Jung’s notion of an innate collective unconscious undergirding all of human awareness. From this vast and mysterious well of shared experience, Jung argued, emerge many of our greatest aspirations and many of our deepest fears. Its influence is recorded in our dreams and in our myths. In the subtext of such narratives, Velikovsky read the tale of a monumental, albeit forgotten, ancient tragedy.

As I reflected on Velikovsky’s theories, my own thinking came into sharper focus, for it seemed apparent to me that collectively we have indeed been persuaded to close our eyes to certain realities—to dissociate from them—and that, perversely, compounding the error, we have justified this willful blindness and endowed it with a certain authority, even
nobility
. The strange effect of this has been to turn many moral issues upside down—to make right wrong and wrong right, if you will.

Recall the Church fathers of the Middle Ages and their refusal, because of what they considered to be Galileo’s incorrect conclusions, to look through his telescope
for themselve
s. Galileo’s notion that the Sun, not Earth, was the center of the solar system was deemed heresy, no matter what the evidence might show to the contrary. In other words, the minds of the authorities had already been made up, and they had no intention of being confused by such minor annoyances as facts.

Does such blindness persist today? Some of us think so. The ruling elite of today may subscribe to a similarly intolerant “religion”—what John Anthony West has sardonically called “the Church of Progress.” As Graham Hancock affirmed to
Atlantis Rising
in a recent interview, “The reason we are so screwed up at the beginning of a new century is that we are victims of a planetary amnesia. We have forgotten who we are.”

Sadly, the establishments of government and industry and the academic world—along with those who categorically and systematically debunk any and all alternate theories which might undermine the ruling paradigm—today remain determined to thwart any reawakening from the ongoing amnesia.

Often, when it proves difficult to find an adequate rationale to support the misguided choices of our leaders, it is tempting to think in terms of dark conspiracy theories and treacherous hidden agendas. For Velikovsky, though, the explanation for behavior that some might describe as evil and others would view as, at the very least, self-destructive and unenlightened, lies in the classic mechanism of a mind seeking to regain its equilibrium in the aftermath of a near mortal blow.

In the case of amnesia, it’s not enough to simply say that a hole has been blown in our memory. The victim of a near fatal trauma is driven, it would appear, by fear—both conscious and unconscious—to exorcise, by whatever means possible, the demons of such a dreadful experience lest he or she be overwhelmed. How else can we get on with our lives, put the past behind us, think about the future? To rid ourselves entirely of the memory of such an episode, however, is not such an easy task. Much more than the record of the trauma itself may be lost in the process. The human identity—what some would call the very soul itself—is often the first casualty. Moreover, what is true on an individual level Velikovsky felt was also true on the collective level.

This process might move more slowly and allow for personal exceptions, but the institutions of society would in time come to reflect and then enforce a deep collective subconscious wish that, for the good of all, certain doors stay closed and certain inconvenient facts stay forgotten—that such history remain a forbidden zone.
And in the meantime, the risk of reenacting the ancient drama grows, as does our need for reliable guidance.

It is a premise of this book that the map we must follow in order to find our way out of the current dilemma is one that may be drawn from our myths, our legends, and our dreams—from the universal, collective unconscious that Jung talked about. The
real
story of our planet’s tragic history, we suspect, can be deduced from these mysterious records.

Read between the lines and Plato’s account of Atlantis in the
Timaeus
and the
Critias
is corroborated by the Bible, by the Indian legends of Central America, and by a thousand other ancient myths from every part of the world. Giorgio de Santillana, a professor at M.I.T. and an authority on the history of science, and his co-author, professor of science Hertha von Dechend, hypothesized in their monumental work,
Hamlet’s Mill: An Essay Investigating the Origins of Human Knowledge and Its Transmission through Myth,
that an advanced scientific knowledge had been encoded into ancient myth and star lore.

Indeed, the mythology of many ancient societies is filled with stories of cataclysmic destruction of Earth and its inhabitants. We agree with Graham Hancock when he says, “Once one accepts that mythology may have originated in the waking minds of highly advanced people, then one must start listening to what the myths are saying.”

What they are saying, we believe, is that great catastrophes have struck Earth and destroyed advanced civilizations (not unlike our own) and, moreover, that such cataclysmic destruction is a recurrent feature in the life of Earth and may very well happen again. Many ancient sources (again, including the Bible), warn of possible cataclysm in a future end time—perhaps in
our
lifetime. If it’s true that those who cannot learn from the mistakes of history are doomed to repeat them, these enigmatic messages from our past could very well prove to be something that we can ignore
only at our peril.

As Hancock points out, we’ve received a legacy of extraordinary knowledge from our ancestors, and the time has come for us to stop dismissing it. Rather, we must recapture that heritage and learn from it what we can, because it contains vitally important guidance. To prevail in the challenges before us now, we must recover our lost identity. We must remember who we are and where we came from.

We must, at last, be awake.

PART
ONE

THE OLD MODELS DON’T WORK: DARWINISM AND CREATIONISM UNDER FIRE

1
Darwin’s Demise

On the Futile Search for Missing Links

Will Hart

C
harles Darwin was a keen observer of nature and an original thinker. He revolutionized biology. Karl Marx was also an astute observer of human society and an original thinker. He revolutionized economic and political ideology. They were contemporary nineteenth-century giants who cast long shadows and subscribed to the theory of “dialectical materialism”—the viewpoint that matter is the sole subject of change and all change is the product of conflict arising from the internal contradictions inherent in all things. And yet, as much appeal as dialectical materialism had to the intellectuals and working classes of certain countries, by the close of the last century it had failed to pass the test in the real world.

Darwinism is beginning to show similar signs of strain and fatigue. It is not just creationists who are sounding the death knell. Darwin was well aware of the weaknesses of his theory. He called the origin of flowering plants “an abominable mystery.” That mystery remains unsolved to this day.

As scientists have searched the fossil record assiduously for more than one hundred years for the “missing link” between primitive nonflowering and flowering plants without luck, a host of other trouble spots have flared up. Darwin anticipated problems should there be an absence of transitional fossils (chemically formed duplications of living creatures). At the time, he wrote: “It is the most serious objection that can be urged against the theory.”

However, he could not have predicted where additional structural cracks would appear and threaten the very foundation of his theory. Why? Biochemistry was in an embryonic state in Darwin’s day. It is doubtful that he could have imagined that the structure of DNA would be discovered in less than one hundred years from the publication of
Origin of Species.

In a twist of fate, one of the first torpedoes to rip holes in the theory of evolution was unleashed by a biochemist. In
Darwin’s Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution,
Michael Behe, a biology professor, points to a strange brew bubbling in the test tube. He focuses on five phenomena: blood clotting, cilia, the human immune system, the transport of materials within cells, and the synthesis of nucleotides. He analyzes each phenomenon systemically and arrives at a single startling conclusion: These are systems that are so
irreducibly complex
that no gradual, step-by-step Darwinian route could have led to their creation.

The foundation of Darwin’s theory is simple, perhaps even simplistic. Life on Earth has evolved through a series of biological changes as a consequence of random genetic mutations working in conjunction with natural selection. One species gradually changes over time into another. And those species that adapt to changing environmental conditions are best suited to survive and propagate and the weaker die out, producing the most well-known principle of Darwinism—survival of the fittest.

The theory has been taught to children for generations. We have all learned that fish changed into amphibians, amphibians became reptiles, reptiles evolved into birds, and birds changed into animals. 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 two that are finally standing upright)—than it is to prove.

Darwinism is the only scientific theory taught worldwide that has yet to be proved by the rigorous standards of science. Nevertheless, Darwinists claim that Darwinism is no longer a theory, but rather an established scientific fact. The problem is not a choice between biblical creation and evolution. The issue to resolve boils down to a single question: Has Darwin’s theory been proved by the rules of scientific evidence?

Darwin knew that the only way to verify the main tenets of the theory was to search the fossil record. That search has continued since his day. How many paleontologists, geologists, excavators, construction workers, oil- and water-well drillers, archeologists and anthropologists, students and amateur fossil hunters have been digging holes in the ground and discovering fossils from Darwin’s day until today? Untold millions.

What evidence has the fossil record revealed concerning Darwin’s transitional species? The late Harvard biologist Stephen Jay Gould, the antithesis of a Bible-thumping creationist, acknowledged: “All paleontologists know that the fossil record contains precious little in the way of intermediate forms; transitions between major groups are characteristically lacking.”

Notice he didn’t say that there is a dearth of fossils—
just
of the ones that are needed to substantiate Darwin’s theory. There are plenty of fossils of ancient forms and plenty of newer ones. For example, we find fossils of early and extinct primates, hominids, Neanderthals and
Homo sapiens,
but no fossils of the transition linking ape and man. We find a similar situation with Darwin’s dreaded appearance of flowering plants, his Achilles’ heel.

Water deposits in the ancient past have left millions of fossils in a vast geologic library. Why do we find representative nonflowering plants from three hundred million years ago and flowering plants from one hundred million years ago still alive today but
no
plants showing the
gradual
process of
mutations
that represent the intermediate species that (should) link the two?

There are no such plants living today, nor are they found in the fossil record. That is Darwin’s cross.

This is a serious, even critical issue that needs deep and thorough analysis. In an interview about his penetrating critique,
Facts of Life
:
Shattering the Myth of Darwinism,
the science journalist Richard Milton describes what made him write the book: “It was the absence of transitional fossils that first made me question Darwin’s idea of gradual change. I realized, too, that the procedures used to date rocks were circular. Rocks are used to date fossils; fossils are used to date rocks. From here I began to think the unthinkable: Could Darwinism be scientifically flawed?”

Milton makes it clear that he does not support those who attack Darwin because they have a religious ax to grind: “As a science journalist and writer with a lifelong passion for geology and paleontology—and no religious beliefs to get in the way—I was in a unique position to investigate and report on the state of Darwin’s theory in the 1990s,” he said. “The result was unambiguous. Darwin doesn’t work here any more.”

According to Milton, who
had
been a firm Darwinist, when he began to rethink the theory, he became a regular visitor to Great Britain’s prestigious Natural History Museum. He put the best examples that Darwinists had gathered over the years under intense scrutiny. One by one they failed to pass the test. He realized that many scientists around the world had already arrived at the same conclusion. The emperor was as naked as an ape. Why had no one gone public with papers critiquing the theory?

What trained, credentialed scientist earning a living through a university or government position wants to jeopardize a career and earn the disdain of colleagues in the process? Apparently none. Rocking the boat is never popular. The HMS
Beagle
is still afloat and it appears to be buttressed by a Darwinist army that is every bit as dogmatic about its beliefs as are the creationists, who, Darwinists complain, have a religious, nonscientific agenda.

Scientists have dropped hints, however. During a college lecture in 1967, the world-renowned anthropologist Louis B. Leakey was asked about “the missing link.” He replied tersely, “There is no
one
link missing—there are
hundreds
of links missing.”

Gould eventually wrote a paper proposing a theory to try to explain the lack of transitional species and the sudden appearance of new ones. He called this theory “punctuated equilibrium.”

The public is not generally well informed about the
scientific
problems associated with Darwin’s theory of evolution. And while the average person is aware that there is a war going on between creationists and evolutionists, that is seen as a rear-guard action, an old battle between science and religion over matters that the Scopes trial settled more than a generation ago. And there is some consternation over “the missing link” between apes and man.

The true believers among Darwinists have long been puzzled by the lack of transitional fossils. The reasoning goes something like this: They must be out there hidden in the record somewhere. How do we know this? Darwin’s theory demands it! So the search goes on. But just how long a time and how many expeditions and how many years of research are needed before they finally admit that there must a good reason that the transitional fossils
are not there
?

Critics contend that the reason for the lack of transitional fossils is simple: Darwin’s theory fails to meet the rigorous scientific criteria for proof because it is fatally flawed. The main tenets did not predict what has proved to be the outcome of more than a hundred years of research: missing links instead of transitional species.

Darwin knew the flak would come should the fossil record not contain the necessary transitional species.

Geneticists have long known that the vast majority of mutations are either neutral or negative. In other words, mutations are usually mistakes, failures of the DNA to accurately copy information. It would appear that this is not a very reliable primary mechanism and it needs to be, because natural selection is obviously not a dynamic force that could drive the kinds of changes that evolutionists attribute to the theory.

Natural selection operates more like a control mechanism, a feedback system that weeds out poor adaptations and selects successful ones.

The problem with mutation being the driving force is several-fold. As Behe pointed out in his book, life within a cell is just too complex to be the outcome of random mutations. But Darwin didn’t have the kind of lab technology that molecular biologists today have at their disposal. Darwin was working with species, not the structure of cells, mitochondria, and DNA. But the mutation theory doesn’t work well on other levels, either.

Now we must return to the problem of the sudden appearance of flowering plants. There is a high degree of organization in flowers. Most flowers are specifically designed to accommodate bees and other pollinators. Which came first, the flower or the bee? We’ll get to that momentarily; the first question is: How did the alleged primitive nonflowering plant, which had for eons relied on asexual reproduction, suddenly grow the structures required for sexual reproduction?

According to Darwin’s theory, it happened when a gymnosperm mutated and then changed over time into a flowering plant. Is that possible? Let’s keep a few facts in mind: In flowering plants, the transfer of pollen from the male anther to the female stigma must occur before seed plants can reproduce sexually. The mutation had to start with one plant, somewhere, at some point. There were no insects or animals specifically adapted to pollinate flowers because there were no flowers prior to that time.