Return to the Stars: Evidence for the Impossible (14 page)

'Then how did the stone plates originate? Are the apes supposed to have made them?'

'Of course not. In Chi Pu Tei's view they were placed in the caves by people from a later culture. On the face of it his theory did seem rather ridiculous. Who ever heard of rows of graves made by apes?'

'What happened next? Were the finds filed away in the archives of unexplained anthropologico-archaeological cases and forgotten?'

'Very nearly! For twenty years several clever men racked their brains to solve the riddle of the stone plates. Not until 1962 was Professor Tsum Um Nui of the Academy of Prehistoric Research in Peking able to decipher parts of the incised script.'

'What did they say?'

Kassanzev became serious: 'The story that was deciphered was so hair-raising that at first the Academy for Prehistoric Research forbade Tsum Um Nui to publish his work at all.'

'And that was that?'

'Tsum Um Nui is a stubborn fellow; he went on working doggedly. He could prove without any doubt that the incised script was not just a bad practical joke by some authority on prehistoric writing. For even serious scholars often show a sense of humour. Think of Piltdown Man. In cooperation with geologists he showed that the stone plates had a high cobalt and metal content. Physicists found out that all 716 plates had a high vibration rhythm, which led to the conclusion that they had been exposed to very high voltages at some time.'

Kassanzev turned off from Kropotkinskaya Quay and drove to the kerb of Volkhonka Street. The car stopped outside the Pushkin Museum. I was so entranced by his story that I wanted to hear the rest of it standing on the pavement, but Kassanzev took me by the arm and led me into the museum. We sat on a bench between tall glass cases.

'Please go on!'

'Tsum Um Nui now had four scientists who supported his theory. In 1963 he decided to publish it in spite of the Academy's doubts. I have heard that his publication was known to you in the west, but was not taken seriously. Over here, too, only a few courageous scholars took any notice of the stone plate theory. Very recently our philologist Dr Vyatcheslav Saizev published extracts from the stone plate story for the periodical Sputnik. The whole story is preserved in the Peking Academy and the historical archives of Taipeh in Formosa.'

'What is so explosive and shocking about the stone plate story?'

The story is only upsetting and bizarre to people who are unwilling to face things that may throw new light on our origin. The stone plate story says that 12,000 years ago, reckoned from today, a group of their people had crashed on to the third planet in this system. Their aircraft—that is an exact translation of the groove hieroglyphs—had no longer had enough power to leave this world again. They had been destroyed in the remote and inaccessible mountains. There had been no means and materials for building new aircraft.'

'Is all that written on the stone plates?'

'Yes, and then we are told that these beings who had crashed on to the earth had tried to make friends with the inhabitants of the mountains, but had been hunted down and killed. The story ends almost literally: "Men, women and children hid themselves in the caves until sunset. Then they believed the sign and saw that the others had come with peaceful intentions this time ..." That's more or less how it ends.'

'Is there anything else that corroborates the contents of the stone plate story?'

'There are the graves in rows, the rock drawings and the plates themselves. And there are also the Chinese sagas which precisely in the Baian Kara Ula region tell of small spindly yellow beings who came down from the clouds. The myth goes on to say that the alien creatures were shunned by the Dropas because of their ugliness, indeed that they were killed by the men in "the quick way".'

'Kassanzev, why isn't this fascinating story discussed all over the world? Is it really well enough known?'

My companion laughed, put his hand on my arm and said with mild resignation: 'Here in Moscow the story is known, you only need to keep your ears open. But the story contains too many facts which cannot be slotted straight into the painfully constructed chronology of archaeology and anthropology. Authorities who attach importance to their reputation in the scientific world would have to abandon a great deal of their own theories if they were to take serious notice of Baian Kara Ula. Surely it is very human to take the easy way out? To keep silent or laugh discreetly and condescendingly? When recognised scientists stick together and smile or say nothing, the boldest man loses enthusiasm in a subject that is too hot to handle.'

I am still too young to be able to resign myself. I believe in the disturbing power of ideas that cannot be hushed up.

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8 - Ancient Sites That Deserve Investigation

When I was in Peru in 1965, the closest view of the 820 foot-high three-armed trident on the cliffside in the Bay of Pisco was from a mile out at sea. On our journey in 1968, Hans Neuner and I planned to go ashore, free at least part of an arm from the sand and take photographs.

After an unsuccessful attempt to reach the three-armed trident by land in a rented car that kept on bogging down in the sand dunes, we persuaded a fisherman to take us into the bay. For a good two hours we swung along in a light breeze until the fisherman explained that he could go no nearer the coast because his boat would be in danger of being ripped apart by the sharp underwater reefs.

So we had no choice but to get into the water and wade and swim the remaining fifty yards to the shore with all our clothes on, including our shoes—because of the stinging fish. We pushed our tools, measuring tapes and cameras ahead of us, wrapped in plastic containers. When we reached the first coastal cliffs, we took off our wet things and tramped through the hot sand to the cliff face.

Unfortunately well-disposed gods do not lend supernatural powers to curious idealists. After a few hours of hard work we had to admit that it was beyond our powers to free even a single bit of the trident from the hard layer of sand.

Nevertheless, we took some accurate measurements that were worth our while. The individual arms of the trident are about 12 ft 6 ins wide. They consist of snow-white phosphorescent blocks that are as hard as granite. Before they were covered with sand, i.e. as long as the early inhabitants kept them clean, these dazzling, brilliant signals to the 'gods' must have 'shouted' to heaven.

There are some archaeologists who think that the trident on the cliffs of the Bay of Pisco was a landmark intended for shipping. The fact that the trident lies in a bay and cannot be seen from all sides by passing ships is against this theory. Another argument against it is that a landmark of this size would have been excessively large for coastal shipping, and the existence of deep sea shipping in remote antiquity is doubtful, to say the least. But the main thing against it is that the makers constructed their trident facing heavenwards. We might also ask why, if navigational marks were needed for some kind of shipping, the ancients did not make use of the two islands which lie far out at sea on the line of an extension of the central arm of the trident. They provided natural aids to orientation which would have been visible from afar to any ship regardless of the direction from which it approached the bay. So why a navigational mark that seafarers coming from either north or south could not see at all? And why one that points heavenwards? I may mention in passing—to clinch matters —that apart from a sandy desert there is absolutely nothing that could have attracted seafarers and that the waters with their sharp reefs must have been an unsuitable anchorage even in prehistoric times.

Another fact supports my theory about this signal that faces heavenwards. Only 100 miles away as the crow flies lies the plain of Nazca with its mysterious ground markings, which were only discovered in the 1930's. Since then archaeologists have been racking their brains over the geometrical system of lines, animal drawings and neatly arranged bits of stone which extend over an area some 30 miles long between Palpa in the north and Nazca in the south. To me they look just like an airport lay-out.

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[Insert pic p115]

This sketch by Maria Reiche clarifies the relative size of the stylised figures on the pampa of Nazca. The biggest figure (not shown here) is about 275 yards long.

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Anyone who flies over the plain can see the lines shining up at him clearly—even from a great height they are perfectly recognisable. They stretch for miles, sometimes running parallel to each other, sometimes intersecting or joining up to form trapezoids with sides as long as 850 yards. Between these dead straight tracks it is possible to make out the outlines of enormous animal figures, the largest of which in its great extension measures some 275 yards.

Seen at close quarters the lines turn out to be deep furrows which expose the yellowish-white subsoil of the pampa and stand out clearly from the crustlike upper layer of brown desert sand. Maria Reiche, who has been working on the preservation, measurement and interpretation of the drawings since 1946 and was the first person to prepare field sketches with measuring tape and sextant of the triangles, rectangles, straight lines and numerous animal figures, found out later why the ground above the Ingenio valley was more suitable than any other for making clearly recognisable markings that would survive the centuries. The reason was that it only rains for an average of twenty minutes a year in the Nazca region. Otherwise a dry, hot climate prevails. Weathering is done by the sand-bearing wind which also carries away all loose material lying on the surface, leaving behind only pebbles which continually break up owing to the great differences in temperature. Moreover, the so-called 'desert varnish', which has a brown glint after oxidisation, has formed on them. In order to make the gigantic drawings show .up, the constructors only had to remove the dark surface stones and scratch up the light subsoil of fine alluvial material.

But who made the pictures and why did they make them so big that one can only get an overall impression of them from a great height, for example from an aircraft?

Did they already possess a highly developed system of surveying by means of which they transferred their small-scale plans to a gigantic scale with absolute accuracy?

Maria Reiche says: 'The designers, who could only have recognised the perfection of their own creations from the air, must have previously planned and drawn them on a smaller scale. How they were then able to put each line in its right place and alignment over large distances is a puzzle that will take us many years to solve.'

So far scholars have taken far too little notice of the phenomena on the pampa of Nazca. At first they thought that the dead straight lines were old Inca roads or irrigation channels. Both explanations are nonsensical! Why should 'roads' begin in the middle of a plain and then suddenly come to a stop? If the lines were roads, why should they intersect in a system of coordinates? And why are they laid out towards points of the compass when the purpose of roads is to reach earthly goals by the shortest possible route? And why should irrigation canals be in the form of birds, spiders and snakes?

Maria Reiche, who has worked the longest and most extensively on solving the secret of the Nazca plain and has written about it in her book Secret of the Desert, published in 1968, rejects these interpretations. She thinks it much more likely that the drawings are connected with the calendar, besides having a religious meaning. In her view the ground markings are observations of the heavens meant to be handed down to posterity in an indestructible form. However, she makes the following reservation: 'It is not absolutely certain if it is possible to interpret all the lines astronomically, for there are some (including many north-south lines) which could not have corresponded to any star appearing on the horizon during the period in question.

But if it was intended to draw the position of constellations not only on but also above the horizon, there would be so many possible explanations of the lines that it would be extremely difficult to prove any of them.'

I know that Maria Reiche does not share my interpretation of the geometrical drawings at Nazca, because the results of her investigations to date do not justify such daring conclusions. In spite of that I should like to be allowed to expound my theory.

At some time in the past unknown intelligences landed on the uninhabited plain near the present-day town of Nazca and built an improvised airfield for their spacecraft which were to operate in the vicinity of the earth. They laid down two runways on the ideal terrain. Or did they mark the landing strips with a raw material unknown to us? As on other occasions, the cosmonauts carried out their mission and returned to their own planet.