The Mammoth Encyclopedia of Unsolved Mysteries (22 page)

The detail of handing over the panties makes it sound as if, whatever Van Dusen thought, this hallucination was conjured up by the gas fitter – who admitted that he had made “immoral” proposals to the woman and had been rejected. Yet her description of herself as the “Emanation of the Feminine Aspect of the Divine” offers an important clue. She was describing herself as the archetypal symbolic woman, Goethe’s “eternal womanly”. For a male, the incredible essence of the female is that she is willing to give herself; the handing over of her panties may be regarded as a singularly apt symbol for this essence.

Van Dusen was fascinated to discover that the Swedish mystic Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772) had described the lower and higher orders with considerable accuracy. They were, according to Swedenborg, “spirits”, and the lower order were earthbound spirits who were driven by malice or boredom. These tended to outnumber the higher spirits by about four to one. Like Kardec (see chapter 26), Swedenborg commented that spirits could only “invade” people with whom they had some affinity – which probably explained why the low spirits outnumbered the high ones. Swedenborg referred to “high spirits” as angels and said that their purpose was to help; low spirits might be regarded as devils, yet their function was often – in spite of themselves – a helpful one, for they pointed out the patient’s sins and shortcomings.

Could Swedenborg have been mad? asks Van Dusen, and replies that there is no evidence for it whatever. What is odd is that his high and low spirits are not confined to Christian mental homes; they transcend cultural barriers and can be found just as frequently among Muslim or Hindu lunatics.

Van Dusen reaches the interesting conclusion that “the spiritual world is much as Swedenborg described it, and is the unconscious”.

If he is correct, and the “spirit world” lies
inside
us – as another remarkable mystic, Rudolf Steiner, asserted – then we can begin to see why mental patients might experience hallucinations. They might have “opened” themselves to their own depths, to the curious denizens of those regions.

When Philip K. Dick’s strange experiences are considered in the light of these comments, it becomes clear that it is impossible to dismiss him as a paranoid schizophrenic. We must at least be willing to leave open the possibility that he was aware – as expressed in the title of Wilson Van Dusen’s second book – of “the presence of other worlds”.

14

The Dogon and the Ancient Astronauts

Evidence of Visitors from Space?

The theory that the earth has been visited, perhaps even colonized, by beings from outer space has been a part of popular mythology since Stanley Kubrick’s cult movie
2001: A Space Odyssey
(written by Arthur C. Clarke), came out in 1968. But it had already been “in the air” for many years – in fact, since 1947, when a businessman named Kenneth Arnold, who was flying his private plane near Mount Rainier, in Washington, reported seeing nine shining disks traveling at an estimated speed of one thousand miles an hour. Soon “UFO” sightings were being reported from all over the world – far too many and too precise to be dismissed as pure fantasy.

In 1958, in a book entitled
The Secret Places of the Lion
, a “contactee” named George Hunt Williamson advanced the theory that visitors from space had arrived on earth 18 million years ago and had since been devoting themselves to helping mankind evolve. It was they who built the Great Pyramid. Perhaps because it is so full of references to the Bible, Williamson’s book made little impact.

In 1960 there appeared in France a book entitled
The Morning of the Magicians (Le Matin des Magiciens)
by Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier, which became an instant bestseller and which may claim the dubious credit of having initiated the “occult boom” of the 1960s. (Before that the fashion was for political rebellion with a strong Marxist flavor.) Its success was largely due to its suggestion that Hitler may have been involved in black magic, but it also included speculations about the Great Pyramid, the statues of Easter Island, Hans Hoerbiger’s theory that the moon is covered with ice (soon to be disproved by the moon landings), and the reality of alchemical transformation. Fiction writers like Arthur Machen, H. P. Lovecraft, and John Buchan are discussed
alongside Einstein and Jung. And there is, inevitably, a section on the famous Piri Re’is map (see chapter 49), in which the authors succeed in mixing up the sixteenth-century pirate Piri Re’is with a Turkish naval officer who presented a copy of the map to the Library of Congress in 1959. They conclude the discussion: “Were these copies of still earlier maps? Had they been traced from observations made on board a flying machine or space vessel of some kind? Notes taken by visitors from Beyond”?

These speculations caused excitement because the world was in the grip of flying-saucer mania. Books by people who claimed to be “contactees” – like George Adamski – became best-sellers. And while many “sightings” could be dismissed as hysteria – or as what Jung called “projections” (meaning religious delusions) – a few were too well authenticated to fit that simplistic theory.

In 1967 a Swiss writer named Erich von Däniken eclipsed
The Morning of the Magicians
with a book entitled
Memories of the Future.
Translated into English as
Chariots of the Gods
?, it soon sold more than a million copies. This work was also devoted to the thesis that visitors from space had landed on earth when men were still living in caves and had been responsible for many ancient monuments, such as the Great Pyramid, the Easter Island statues, the Nazca lines drawn in the sand of southern Peru (he suggested they were runways for spaceships), and the step pyramids of South America.

But von Däniken’s almost wilful carelessness quickly led to his being soon discredited. Perhaps the most obvious example of this carelessness was his treatment of Easter Island. Von Däniken alleged that the island’s gigantic stone statues – some of them twenty feet high – could only have been carved and erected with the aid of sophisticated technology, which would have been far beyond the resources of primitive savages. In fact, the Norwegian explorer Thor Heyerdahl persuaded modern Easter Islanders to carve and erect statues with their own “primitive technology”. Von Däniken had also pointed out that Easter Island has no wood for rollers – unaware that only a few centuries ago, the island was covered with woodland and that the Easter Islanders had been responsible for the destruction of their own environment.

Most of von Däniken’s other arguments proved equally vulnerable. He had insisted that a stone tablet – known as the Palenque tablet – from Chiapas, Mexico, depicted a “spaceman” about to blast off. Archaeologists who had studied the religion of ancient Mexico demonstrated that what von Däniken mistook for instruments of space technology were traditional Mexican religious symbols. Von Däniken’s assertions
about the pyramids proved equally fanciful and uninformed. He asked how such monuments could have been constructed without the aid of ropes and managed to overstate the weight of the Great Pyramid by a multiple of five. Experts on the pyramids pointed out that ancient paintings show the Egyptians using ropes and were able to prove that ancient Egyptian engineers were more knowledgeable than von Däniken realized. As to the famous Nazca lines, it required no expert to see that lines drawn in the sand – even if made of small pebbles – would soon be blasted away by any kind of spacecraft coming in to land. In fact, the purpose of the Nazca lines – like that of all ancient fertility ceremonies – seems to have been to control the weather.

Much of von Däniken’s literary evidence is equally dubious. He discusses the Assyrian
Epic of Gilgamesh
(getting the date of its discovery wrong) and describes how the sun-god Enkidu bore the hero Gilgamesh upward in his claws “so that his body felt as heavy as lead” – which to von Däniken suggests an ascent in a space rocket. The tower of the goddess Ishtar – visited by the hero – is also, according to von Däniken, a space rocket. A door “that spoke like a living person” is obviously a loudspeaker. And so on. Anyone who takes the trouble to check the
Epic of Gilgamesh –
readily available in a paperback translation – will discover that none of these episodes actually occurs.

But the von Däniken bubble finally burst in 1972 when, in
Gold of the Gods
, the author claimed to have visited a vast underground cave system in Ecuador, with elabourately engineered walls, and examined an ancient library engraved on metal sheets. When his fellow explorer, Juan Moricz, denied that von Däniken had even ventured into the caves, von Däniken admitted that his account was fictional, but argued that his book was not intended to be a scientific treatise; since it was designed for popular consumption, he had allowed himself a certain degree of poetic license. Yet in a biography of von Däniken, Peter Krassa ignores this admission, insisting that the case is still open and that von Däniken may have been telling the truth after all. But Krassa has a skillful technique of making an admission and then quickly taking it back again. He concludes: “Of course his report was mad, and untrue; this story about underground caverns; his description of the golden treasure to be found there was a lie. This was the judgment of many scientists and journalists”.

In fact, a British expedition to the caves found them to be natural, with evidence of habitation by primitive man but no signs of von Däniken’s ancient library or perfectly engineered walls. A two-hour TV exposé of von Däniken subsequently punctured every one of his major claims.

Having said which, it must be admitted that von Däniken and other “ancient astronaut” theorists have at least one extremely powerful piece of evidence on their side. Members of an African tribe called the Dogon, who live in the Republic of Mali, some 300 miles south of Timbuktu, insist that they possess knowledge that was transmitted to them by “spacemen” from the star Sirius, which is 8.7 light-years away. Dogon mythology insists that the “Dog Star” Sirius (so called because it is in the constellation Canis) has a dark companion that is invisible to the naked eye and that is dense and very heavy. This is correct; Sirius does indeed have a dark companion known as Sirius B.

The existence of Sirius B had been suspected by astronomers since the mid-nineteenth century, and it was first observed in 1862 – although it was not described in detail until the 1920s. Is it possible that some white traveler took the knowledge of Sirius B to Africa sometime since the 1850s? It is possible but unlikely. Two French anthropologists, Marcel Griaule and Germaine Dieterlen, first revealed the “secret of the Dogon” in an obscure paper in 1950; it was entitled “A Sudanese Sirius System” and was published in the
Journal de la Société des Africainistes.

The two anthropologists had lived among the Dogon since 1931, and in 1946 Griaule was initiated into the religious secrets of the tribe. He was told that fishlike creatures called the Nommo had come to Earth from Sirius to civilize its people. Sirius B, which the Dogon call
po tolo
(naming it after the seed that forms the staple part of their diet, and whose botanical name is
Digitaria
), is made of matter heavier than any on earth and moves in an elliptical orbit, taking fifty years to do so. It was not until 1928 that Sir Arthur Eddington postulated the theory of “white dwarfs” – stars whose atoms have collapsed inward, so that a piece the size of a pea could weigh half a ton. (Sirius B is the size of the earth yet weighs as much as the sun.) Griaule and Dieterlen went to live among the Dogon three years later. Is it likely that some traveler carried a new and complex scientific theory to a remote African tribe in the three years between 1928 and 1931?

An oriental scholar named Robert Temple went to Paris to study the Dogon with Germaine Dieterlen. He soon concluded that the knowledge shown by the Dogon could not be explained away as coincidence or “diffusion” (knowledge passed on through contact with other peoples). The Dogon appeared to have an extraordinarily detailed knowledge of our solar system. They said that the moon was “dry and dead”, and they drew Saturn with a ring around it (which, of course, is only visible through a telescope). They knew that the planets revolved around the
sun. They knew about the moons of Jupiter (first seen through a telescope by Galileo). They had recorded the movements of Venus in their temples. They knew that the earth rotates and that the number of stars is infinite. And when they drew the elliptical orbit of Sirius, they showed the star off-centre, not in the middle of the orbit – as someone without knowledge of astronomy would naturally conclude.

The Dogon insist that their knowledge was brought to them by the amphibious Nommo from a “star” (presumably they mean a planet) which, like Sirius B, rotates around Sirius and whose weight is only a quarter of Sirius B’s. They worshiped the Nommo as gods. They drew diagrams to portray the spinning of the craft in which these creatures landed and were precise about the landing location – the place to the northwest of present Dogon country, where the Dogon originated. They mention that the “ark” in which the Nommo arrived caused a whirling dust storm and that it “skidded”. They speak of “a flame that went out as they touched the earth”, which implies that they landed in a small space capsule. Dogon mythology also mentions a glowing object in the sky like a star, presumably the mother ship.

Our telescopes have not yet revealed the “planet” of the Nommo, but that is hardly surprising. Sirius B was only discovered because its weight caused perturbations in the orbit of Sirius. The Dog Star is 35.5 times as bright (and hot) as our sun, so any planet capable of supporting life would have to be in the far reaches of its solar system and would almost certainly be invisible to telescopes. Temple surmises that the planet of the Nommo would be hot and steamy and that this probably explains why intelligent life evolved in its seas, which would be cooler. These fish-people would spend much of their time on land but close to the water; they would need a layer of water on their skins to be comfortable, and if their skins dried, it would be as agonizing as severe sunburn. Temple sees them as a kind of dolphin.