Return to the Stars: Evidence for the Impossible (11 page)

I had heard about this sensation and because of it I spent ten days in Costa Rica, a typical developing country, that has so far been shunned by the vast mass of tourists. My journey turned out to be anything but a pleasure trip, but all the hardships were richly rewarded by what I saw.

The first balls I came across were lying around in flat country for no apparent reason. Then I found several groups of balls on the tops of hills. Some always lay in the centre of the hill's longitudinal axis. I waded through the mud of a riverbed and found great groups of balls in strange formations that were unintelligible, although they must have been deliberate.

Forty-five balls have been lying in the burning sun of the white-hot Diquis plain since time immemorial. Have they something to say that we were or are incapable of understanding?

In order to satisfy my curiosity to see and photograph the balls near Piedras Blancas south-east of the River Goto, also in Costa Rica, we had to spend a whole day in a Land Rover to cover a distance of only sixty miles. Time and again we had to remove obstacles from the track, pull the Land Rover out of ruts and grind round innumerable bends. Finally our vehicle would take us no further. Bubu, a half-breed, who was guiding us, ran ahead of us for an hour and cleared the way of creatures. Without his precautions we should twice have run into spiders' webs of a size you simply cannot imagine. The poisonous bite of these loathsome creatures can be fatal.

At last we stood before two enormous balls, both taller than we were, in the midst of the virgin forest. It was precisely because the stones near Piedras Blancas lay deep in the jungle that I had wanted to see them with my own eyes. It is said that these balls are only a few hundred years old. No one who has stood there as I have could believe that. The jungle itself is primaeval and I am convinced that the balls must have lain there before the luxuriant vegetation began to thrive.

Today we have managed to 'transplant' Abu Simbel to another site using all kinds of modern machinery, but I doubt whether we could deposit balls like these in a primaeval forest.

I saw still more balls in Costa Rica.

Fifteen giant balls lie in a dead straight line in Golfo Dulce.

I found twelve balls near the village of Uvita north of the Sierra Brunquera.

Four balls have been excavated from the muddy bed of the River Esquina.

There are two balls on Camaronal Island and several balls on the summit of the Cordillera Brunquera in the neighbourhood of the River Diquis.

Most of these mysterious balls are made of granite or lava. There is little chance nowadays of finding out the exact number of stone balls that once existed. Today many fine specimens decorate gardens and parks and public buildings. Since one ancient saga also related that gold could be found in the middle of the balls, many of them have been hacked to bits with hammer and chisel. A strange thing is that there are no quarries for producing the balls anywhere near the sites where they have been found. As in other places any trace that could lead us back to the 'manufacturers' is missing.

During the clearing of woods and swamps at the foot of the Cordillera Brunquera in the Rio Diquis district in 1940 and 1941, the archaeologist Doris Z. Stone discovered several artificial stones. She wrote a detailed account of them that closes with the resigned remark: 'The balls of Costa Rica must be numbered among the unsolved megalithic puzzles of the world.'

In fact, we do not know who made the stone balls; we do not know what tools were used for the work; we do not know for what purpose the balls were cut out of the granite and we do not know when they were made. Everything that archaeologists say today in explanation of the Indian balls or sky balls, as the natives call them, is pure speculation. A local legend says that each ball represents the sun—an acceptable interpretation. But the archaeologists reject this version, because in these latitudes the sun has been represented in all ages as a golden orb, wheel or disc, and never as a ball—neither among the Incas, Mayas nor Aztecs.

One thing is quite certain. The stone balls cannot have originated without mechanical help. They are perfectly executed—absolutely spherical, with smoothly polished surfaces.

Archaeologists who have investigated the balls of Costa Rica confirm that none of them deviates in the slightest from a given diameter. This precision implies that the men who made them had a good knowledge of geometry and possessed the appropriate technical implements.

If the stonemasons had first buried the raw material in the earth and then worked on the protruding section, unevenness and inaccuracies would inevitably have resulted because the distances to the part stuck in the ground could no longer have been checked. This primitive procedure is out of the question. The raw material must have been transported from somewhere, because there are no nearby quarries, and that alone must have been very arduous. In addition, the stone blocks must have been broken out or cut out of the rock. My conclusion is that many workers were engaged on the task for a long time and that they possessed tools which made possible such perfect stone dressing.

Even if all this is accepted, it still does not explain why the finished balls were rolled to a particular site, e.g. the top of a mountain. What an absurd idea and what a tremendous expenditure of labour! However, an explanation is given, though it only seems suitable for the most superficial kind of guide-book. The gigantic balls were rolled down riverbeds. I should laugh at such naivety if the problem involved were not so serious to me. The massive heavy balls would simply have stuck in the muddy, and in parts gravelly, riverbeds.

One irritating fact which cannot have altered in the course of the ages confronts the holders of the riverbed theory. Between the granite mountains in which the material for the majority of the balls must have been quarried and the sites where the balls were found in the Diquis delta the steaming jungle extends far and wide, and the three small rivers that exist are considerable obstacles to transporting material on such a scale without deeploading lorries, cranes and special freight ships. And as if these barriers were not enough, when seen from the granite cliffs most of the balls lie on the far side of the Rio Diquis! In other words, the forwarding agents would have had to 'conjure' the material over this barrier, too. I have noticed that whenever archaeologists cannot explain gigantic feats of transport, they have recourse to the so-called 'rolling theory'. But this is pitifully inadequate when one sees the giant balls on the tops of mountains. An expert has told me that at least twenty-four tons of raw material are needed to make a stone ball weighing sixteen tons. In view of the large numbers of balls, one can guess roughly what masses of raw material must have been moved about here in the past.

I had seen the miraculous world of the stone balls and convinced myself of their disturbing existence. Now I wanted to try to find the solution of this puzzle as well, but when I asked the Costa Ricans about the origin and meaning of the stone balls, I met silence and suspicion. Although visited by missionaries and 'enlightened' by continuous economic contacts with the west, the natives remained superstitious in their heart of hearts. Two archaeologists whom I questioned in the Museo Nacional of San Jose explained that the creation of the balls was connected with a star cult, perhaps too with calendar representations, and possibly with religious or magic signs. I needled away patiently, because these explanations did not satisfy me, but finally had to realise that the mystery of the balls was taboo to them, for some reason incomprehensible to me.

As the archaeologists could not or would not help any further, I tried asking some of the Indians. Trained by my acquaintance with natives in many countries, I soon sensed that they were afraid of something as soon as die conversation came round to the balls.

Nevertheless, it is extremely surprising that these poor creatures, who haggle over every centimo, would not guide me to a 1,800 foot-high cliff with three balls on top, no matter how much I offered them. Bubu was an exception.

A German, who has owned the Pension Anna in San Jose for over forty years, is considered to be the man who possesses most material about the balls. He pulled out many impressive pictures, but behaved as if he had to keep the secret of some buried treasure. He showed me sketches of formations and groupings of balls, but refused to give their exact location. I was not even allowed to copy his sketches. 'No, it's out of the question,' was his inevitable reply.

Even if I had not known it beforehand, I should have realised during my stay in Costa Rica that there is a mystery about the stone balls. I could not solve it, but my suspicion increased that the prehistoric balls and all the pictures of them in reliefs and on cave walls are directly linked with the visit of unknown intelligences, of intelligences who landed on our planet in a ball. They already knew and had proved that the sphere is the most suitable shape for interstellar space flights. .

One day in the not too distant future the long journey back to the stars will start from our planet, and probably in spherical space-craft, because the sphere is the most natural of all shapes for the flight into the universe.

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6 - The Science-Fiction Of Yesterday Is Tomorrow's Reality

In Chariots of the Gods? I wrote a chapter in which I predicted a mass exodus of people from our planet to another heavenly body. I thought that this fantastic idea of mine was one way of easing the murderous population explosion, from which there seems to be no escape. In the end I cut this vision of the future out of my manuscript before it went to the printers. I did not want to frighten my readers with such 'impossible' ideas. But progress has caught up with me; I should have had more confidence and left it in.

In the interim there have been Russian and American experiments whose ultimate aim is to put this idea into practice, even though it sounds like a science-fiction project today. Professor Carl Sagan of Harvard and Professor Dmitri Martinov of the Sternberg Institute in Moscow are both doing research work along the same lines. They want to conquer Venus for mankind—Venus, whose distance from the earth varies between 26,000,000 miles (inferior conjunction) and 160,625,000 miles (superior conjunction).

For research in the laboratory they have at their disposal 'reconnaissance reports' from the Russian Venus sondes and the American Mariner. On 6 June, 1969, TASS gave the surface temperature of Venus as varying between 400° and 530° C. This agrees approximately with the 1967 reports of the American Mariner V, which radioed back to its ground station a temperature of 480° C and an atmospheric pressure of 50 to 70. The Russians also received details from the sondes which had made soft landings. According to them, the Venusian atmosphere has a carbon dioxide content of 93 to 97%, while nitrogen makes up 2 to 5% and oxygen apparently only accounts for 0-4%. At a pressure of barely 1 atmosphere the measuring apparatus registered a water content of only 4 to 11 milligrams per litre.

These data are valuable working material. On the basis of them both Martinov and Sagan made plans for opening up the morning and evening star biologically. Carl Sagan published his ideas in the scientific periodical Science, which has the reputation of only publishing contributions that have been thoroughly examined and have stood up to strict scientific scrutiny.

Sagan thinks that in the near future—he is speaking of a few decades—space-ships with big cargo holds will unload thousands of tons of blue algae into the Venusian atmosphere, i.e. 'blow' them towards the surface of Venus. Blue algae stay alive even at high temperatures, but reduce the high proportion of carbon dioxide by their metabolism. Owing to this steady reduction of carbon dioxide the surface temperature would gradually fall and finally sink below 100° C. Blue algae would then cause the same chemical reaction as once took place in the 'primitive soup' of our earth. With the help of light and water carbon dioxide particles could be transformed into oxygen. But once the blue algae had lowered the temperature below 100° C, a rain like the Flood would fall on Venus. Light, oxygen and water would then provide the prerequisites for the first primitive life.

Since scientists have already thought of evacuating mankind to another planet, they have also planned protective measures for we sensitive delicate creatures. In the second phase of their colonisation of Venus chemicals would be sprayed to destroy micro-organisms that might be dangerous to the lord of creation.

Only very distant generations will live to see the execution of this gigantic project. For although such plans can be speeded up by modern technological development, we must allow a considerable period of time for the evolution of the new world. At present scientists talk of 1,000 years before the first evacuation space-ship can travel to Venus.