The Mammoth Encyclopedia of Unsolved Mysteries (99 page)

Other American scientists suggested that the explosion was caused by antimatter, a hypothetical type of matter whose particles contain the opposite electric charge to those of
normal matter. In contact with normal matter, anti-matter would explode and simply disappear. Only atomic radiation would be left behind. But there is even less evidence to support this theory than there is for the black-hole explanation.

Slightly more plausible – but still highly improbable – is the theory of the English scientist Frank Whipple that the earth had been struck by a comet. Astronomers still have no idea where comets originate, or how they are formed. The two chief objections to the comet theory are that it would be unlikely to produce a “nuclear” explosion, and that it would have been observed by astronomers long before it reached the earth. Supporters of the comet theory have pointed out that a comet coming in from the direction of the sun might be very hard to detect, and that the explosion of a comet might produce an effect similar to that of solar flares, which produce radio-activity. But none of the 120 observatories questioned by the Russians have any record of a comet on the trajectory of the Tunguska object.

More recently, it has been pointed out that the Tunguska event took place on 30 June and that on that same day each year the earth’s orbit crosses that of a meteor stream called Beta Taurids, producing a “meteor shower”. If one of these meteors had been exceptionally large, it could have survived burning up in the earth’s atmosphere, and as its super-heated exterior reacted against its frozen interior, it would have shattered like molten glass suddenly plunged into freezing water. If this theory is correct, then it seems that Kulik was right after all. But that only reminds us that Kulik was unable to find the slightest shred of evidence for his theory. Eight decades after it took place, it seems increasingly unlikely that the mystery of the Tunguska explosion will ever be solved.

Postscript to The Great Tunguska Explosion

Since this article was written, new research has suggested that the “Tunguska object” was almost certainly a small comet or meteor, and not, as some have suggested, an exploding space craft, or even a miniature black hole. A comet seems less likely than a meteor, since comets travel relatively slowly, and would surely have been seen approaching the earth. Professor Alexis Zolotov (the leader of the 1959 expedition to Tunguska) calculated that, whatever the object was, it was about 130 feet in diameter, and exploded about three miles above the ground with a force of 40 megatons, 2,000 times greater than the atomic bomb at Hiroshima.

57

Unidentified Flying Objects

“Flying Saucers” have undoubtedly been
the
great mystery of the era that followed the Second World War, and theories to explain them have ranged from the belief that they are superior beings from another planet (or another dimension) to the suggestion that they are some kind of supernatural occurrence, allied to ghosts. Among intellectuals the most popular theory is that of Jung, who suggested that UFOs (unidentified flying objects) are “projections” of the unconscious mind, which is a polite, scientific way of saying that they have no more objective reality than the pink elephants of a dipsomaniac. But most of these Jungians choose to ignore – or are unaware of – Jung’s later retraction of this view; he told his niece not long before his death that he had come to accept that UFOs
are
real objects.

The story of modern sightings began on 24 June 1947 when a businessman named Kenneth Arnold was flying his private plane near Mount Rainier in Washington State; against the background of the mountain, he saw nine shining discs travelling very fast – he estimated their speed at a thousand miles an hour, far beyond the speed of which any aircraft was capable at that time. Arnold said they were flying in formation, like geese, and that they wove in and out of the mountain peaks; he later compared their flight to a “saucer skipped across the water”. So UFOs came to be referred to as “flying saucers”.

Arnold’s story was widely reported in the American Press, for he had a good reputation and was taken seriously – he had been out searching for the wreckage of a lost plane at the time he made the sighting, and obviously had no reason to invent such a story. Four days later, two pilots and two intelligence officers saw a bright light performing “impossible manoeuvres” over Maxwell Air Force Base in Montgomery, Alabama, and in Nevada on the same day another pilot saw a formation of “unidentified flying objects”. As these and other sightings
were reported the Press began to give prominence to stories of flying saucers, and by the end of that year there had been hundreds of sightings – a number that soon grew into thousands.

In January of the following year, 1948, an “unidentified object” was spotted in the sky above Godman Air Force Base in Kentucky. Three F-51 Mustangs were diverted from a training exercise to investigate, and one of these, flown by Captain Thomas Mantell, had soon outdistanced the other two. The radio tower received a call: “I see something above and ahead of me – I’m still climbing.” “What is it?” “It looks metallic and is tremendous in size”. Then he announced: “It’s above me and I’m gaining on it. I’m going to twenty thousand feet”. But these were the last words Mantell spoke. Later that day the remains of his plane were found ninety miles away from the base.

The story was a sensation – “airman destroyed by flying saucer”. The Air Force announced that what Mantell had mistaken for a flying saucer was actually the planet Venus – a story that seemed, to put it mildly, unlikely. But then, the Air Force had shown the same confidence ten days after Arnold’s original sighting when it had announced that Arnold had been “hallucinating”.

It was obvious that the newspaper publicity was causing a certain amount of hysteria, and that many people thought they had seen flying saucers when they had only seen weather balloons or aircraft tail-lights. But was it conceivable that thousands of people – in fact, millions – could all be mistaken? For by 1966, a Gallup Poll revealed that five million Americans had seen flying saucers. And some of these sightings were at close quarters. A few days after Arnold’s original sighting, the SS
Llandovery Castle
sailed from Mombasa
en route
to Cape Town. At about eleven one evening a Mrs A.M. King, of Nairobi, was on deck with another woman when they saw what appeared to be a bright star approaching the ship. Then a searchlight switched on, illuminating the sea about fifty yards from the ship. They saw an object made of steel and “shaped like a cigar cut at the rear end”. It was about four times as big as the ship, and was travelling in the same direction; soon it vanished at a great speed, flames issuing from the “flattened” end.

Yet in spite of an increasing number of reports of this type, and thousands of “sky sightings”, the Air Force continued to insist that UFO sightings were hoaxes, mistakes or downright lies. An official investigation, known as “Project Sign”, began in September 1947, and later became known as “Project Blue Book”. One of its advisers was the astronomer J. Allen Hynek, who began as a skeptic, but was soon convinced by the obvious truthfulness of witnesses that UFOs were a
reality. But the Air Force remained adamantly skeptical. By the mid-1960s the belief that it was involved in a cover-up became so persistent that in 1965 the Air Force itself ordered that a new scientific panel should be set up; Edward U. Condon, a well-known physicist, was appointed head of this panel, and it was sponsored by the University of Colorado. But when the panel issued its report in 1969 it was obvious that the scientists of the University of Colorado had reached the same conclusion as the Air Force investigators – one newspaper headline summarized the findings of the 965-page report in the headline: “Flying Saucers Do Not Exist – Official”.

One basic problem was that many of the sightings were too preposterous to be taken seriously; the whole field of investigation had become a happy hunting-ground for cranks. In a book called
Flying Saucers Have Landed
a Polish-American named George Adamski claimed that in 1952 he and a number of other saucer enthusiasts drove into the California desert – their route dictated by Adamski’s “hunches” – and saw a huge cigar-shaped object in the sky. With a camera, Adamski wandered off alone, and saw a flying saucer land half a mile away. He hurried to the spot, and found a flying saucer, and a small man with shoulder-length blond hair, who identified himself in sign language as an inhabitant of the planet Venus. Then he flew off in his space craft. His friends had witnessed the encounter from a distance, and later signed notarized statements to this effect. In a second book,
Inside the Space Ships
, Adamski told how he had been taken for a trip in a flying saucer – called a “scout ship” – with his Venusian acquaintance, plus a man from Mars and a man from Saturn. On this occasion they flew into space and went on board the mother ship. On another occasion Adamski was taken to the moon, where he saw rich vegetation, including trees, and four-legged furry animals. He was also shown live pictures of Venus on a television screen, and saw that it had cities, mountains, rivers and lakes. Adamski died in 1965, four years before the moon landings, but three years after a space probe – Mariner II – had swept past Venus and revealed that it has an atmosphere of sulphuric acid gas, and that the surface is too hot to support life. But such small setbacks left Adamski unmoved – he was always able to claim that a mere space probe was less reliable than real Venusians – and he spent the final years of his life happily lecturing to audience of UFO enthusiasts all over the world.

Adamski’s friend Dr George Hunt Williamson, who had been one of the witnesses of Adamski’s original “contact”, achieved a similar celebrity. In a book called
The Saucers Speak
, he told of how he had originally made contact with the inhabitants of flying saucers by means
of automatic writing, and how later, a radio operator (whom he calls Mr R.) was able to establish direct contact. The “space men” were from the planet Mars, which they called Masar, and they explained that the earth was in grave danger of destroying itself. “Good and evil forces are working now. Organization is important for the salvation of your world.” These space intelligences had been observing the earth for seventy-five thousand years, and were now prepared to save the world by revealing all kinds of astonishing secrets about Life, God and the Creator’s place in the Divine Scheme. In a book called
Secret Places of the Lion
Williamson revealed some of these secrets – he claimed he had found them in a great library in a lost city high in the mountains of Peru, where a Master teacher, a survivor of the Elders, still lives and works. (This Master is thousands of years old – he lived on earth in the days when giants still roamed the planet.) This library (the author thanks one of the monks for translating its ancient records) reveals that the Star People came to earth eighteen million years ago (long before man appeared), and ever since then have been helping man to evolve. Their records are held in tombs and secret chambers, and one of their spaceships is at present hidden in the base of the Great Pyramid, which was built 24,000 years ago (and not a mere 4,500, as Egyptologists believe). These Star People were continually reincarnated as the great leaders and prophets of mankind, so Tiyi, the wife of the pharaoh Amenhotep III, later became the Queen of Sheba, Nefertiti, Queen Guinevere (wife of King Arthur) and Joan of Arc, while the Egyptian crown prince Seti became Isaiah, Aristotle, the apostle John and Leonardo da Vinci.
The Secret Places of the Lion
is a history of earth according to the ancient records, and is admittedly excellent value as historical entertainment. But the reader could be forgiven for thinking that Williamson decided that if Adamski could get away with it, then so could he . . .

In 1960 there appeared in France an extraordinary book called
Morning of the Magicians
, by Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier; it became an instant best-seller, and was translated into many languages. It discussed various “mysteries” – alchemy, astrology, black magic, mysterious ancient artifacts and the Great Pyramid – but its main argument is that much “lost knowledge” was brought to our planet by visitors from outer space. It discusses, for example, the so-called Piri Reis maps, dating to the sixteenth century, which show Antarctica (although it was not discovered until three centuries later), and also show a land bridge between Siberia and Alaska – a bridge that vanished thousands of years ago, giving way to the Bering Strait – and argues that such maps prove that the earth must have been surveyed from the air
more than two thousand years ago. It is also full of inaccuracies – for example, describing Piri Reis (who was a Turkish pirate who was beheaded in 1554) as an American naval officer of the nineteenth century. But it caused widespread excitement, and seemed to justify the increasing number of “ufologists” who believed that the “saucers” had been appearing for centuries, and that they are even described in the Bible (as the fiery chariots of the prophet Ezekiel, for example).

But it was in 1967 that the “ancient astronaut theory” finally reached a worldwide audience, in the form of a book called
Memories of the Future
, translated into English as
Chariots of the Gods?
(One newspaper serialized it under the headline “Was God an Astronaut?”) Its author, Erich von Däniken, borrowed liberally – and without acknowledgement – from predecessors like Williamson, Bergier and Pauwels, but presented his own “evidence” with a certain individual panache. His argument consists basically of the assertion that various ancient monuments – the Great Pyramid (naturally), the Easter Island statues, the Mexican pyramids, the megaliths of Carnac and Stonehenge – must have been erected with the aid of space men, because their technology would have been beyond the skills of the builders to whom they are attributed. It is full of misinformation – for example, he manages to multiply the weight of the Great Pyramid by five, and cites “legends” from the
Epic of Gilgamesh
which are simply not to be found in that work. Most of his major arguments proved to be faulty. He insists that the Easter Island statues were too big to be erected by natives; but the explorer Thor Heyerdahl persuaded modern Easter Islanders to carve and erect a similar statute in a few weeks. He asserts that the pyramids had to be built by ancient astronauts because the Egyptians had no rope – but pyramid texts show the use of rope. What Däniken claimed to be a picture of a man taking off in a space ship on the Palenque funerary tablet in Guatemala was shown by scholars to be a typical Mayan religious inscription, full of their basic symbols – birds, serpents and so on. He cites the mysterious Nazca lines on the plains of Peru as examples of structures that could only be understood when seen from the air, and suggests that they were giant runways for space craft – he even has a photograph of an aircraft “parking bay”. But the lines are drawn on the pebbly surface of the desert, and would be instantly blown away if an aircraft tried to land on them. The “parking bay” turned out to be a detail from the leg of a bird – its knee – and was hardly large enough to park a bicycle. Däniken insisted that this was a mistake made by an editor; but he has allowed it to stand in subsequent editions of his book.