A NUCLEAR WAR some six to eight thousand years in the past? A fantastic idea – an impossibility? This idea, which would explain many mysteries about our past, and which at one time would have been dismissed out of hand, is being considered seriously today. We have heard it said by laymen – people whose minds are uncluttered by dogmatic scientific ideas – that an atomic war in the past would explain many things not at present understood. Perhaps the layman has hit on truths that are obscured by the scientific mind’s over-rationality.
Before the dawn of our own atomic age many puzzling features of the earth, and some aspects of mythology, would not have been linked with such a postulate simply because there was no conception of atomic weapons and their capabilities. For instance, until we started to experiment with radioactive substances, no living person on this planet could have described radiation sickness, for the simple reason that such a disease did not exist, and therefore could neither be predicted nor described.
Yet radiation sickness, in clinical detail, is described in an ancient Sanskrit text, the Mahabharata. Such an affliction could not have been described unless it had been experienced; otherwise how would the ancient chroniclers have been able to picture it so precisely?
The Mahabharata describes clearly the explosion of great fireballs, the gales and storms which they created, and the after effects. These after effects took the form of hair loss, vomiting, weakness, and eventual death: classic symptoms of radiation poisoning. Even more significantly, it was said that persons in the vicinity of these weapons could save themselves by removing all metal from their persons and immersing themselves in the water of rivers. There could be only one reason for this – to wash away contaminated particles – the same procedure followed today.
There seems to be a large body of evidence showing that nuclear science was known in the past. There is the Mahabharata, frequently cited by modem writers. Von Daniken mentions the description of nuclear weapons from this ancient text, and his explanation is that they were used by advanced aliens from space against the primitive people of this world. But it does seem unlikely that an advanced race would take such measures against primitive people armed only with spears and bows and arrows.
The Siddhanta-Ciromani, a Brahmin book, subdivides time until it reaches a final unit, truti, which is 0.33750 of a second. Sanskrit scholars are puzzled as to why such a small unit of time was used in antiquity, or how that unit could have been measured without instrumentation. Modern primitive peoples are notoriously vague about time – even hours have little meaning for them. There is no reason to suppose that ancient primitive people should have viewed time any differently, which makes the subdivision even more puzzling.
Tomas, in his book We Are Not the First (Souvenir Press, 1971), says, in the chapter “From Temples and Forums to Atomic Reactors”:
“According to Pundit Kaniah Yogi of Ambattur, Madras, whom I met in India in 1966, the original time measurement of the Brahmins was sexagesimal, and he quoted the Brihath Sakatha and other Sanskrit sources. In ancient times the day was divided into 60 kala, each equal to 24 minutes, subdivided into 60 vikala, each equivalent to 24 seconds. Then followed a further sixty-fold subdivision of time into para, tatpara, vitatpara, ima and finally kashta – or 1/300 millionth of a second. The Hindus have never been in a hurry, and one wonders what use the Brahmins made of these fractions of a microsecond. While in India, the author was told that the learned Brahmins were obliged to preserve this tradition from hoary antiquity, but they themselves did not understand it.”
The time unit of kashta – 1/300 millionth of a second – is absolutely meaningless without instrumentation and, more significantly, is close to the life spans of certain hyperons and mesons – atomic particles.
The Varahamira Table, dated approximately A.D. 550, gives a mathematical figure that compares closely with the size of the hydrogen atom. Were these figures also handed down from a much more distant time?
The yoga Vasishta says: “There are vast worlds within the hollows of each atom, multifarious as the specks in a sunbeam.” This seems to hint at the knowledge that not only is matter made of numberless atoms, but that the atoms themselves are, as we know, mostly empty space.
These writings, which stem from a remote period, suggest that knowledge of atomic physics existed in the past. The fact that the Brahmins were obliged to remember these mathematical symbols, even though they did not understand them, represents an effort to transmit knowledge from a vanished technological era. One can imagine scholars, upon observing their civilization collapsing, writing down their knowledge and entrusting to a certain group the responsibility of passing the information down the centuries, until the time should come when it would be understood once more.
Much has been lost; what has survived has survived in only a fragmentary form. But hidden in monasteries or in obscure texts, which have never been brought to the attention of scholars, there may still exist much more information about nuclear physics. As it happens, we have discovered the nuclear age for ourselves by a separate route, although it might have been better if such knowledge had never been rediscovered.
Something of this ancient knowledge seems to have filtered down through the ages in a more generalized form. Democritus two and a half thousand years ago proclaimed: “In reality there is nothing but atoms and empty space.” The Greek thought the atom was the smallest unit of matter and could not be divided, whereas Moschus, the Phoenician, who had acquainted the Greek with this information, asserted that the atom could be divided.
Lucretius, a Roman scholar of the 1st century B.C., wrote that atoms “rushed everlastingly through space, and underwent myriad changes under the disturbing impact of collisions. They were too small to be seen.”
After the collapse of the Roman Empire it was not until the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that serious work on atomic physics was undertaken.
Of course, the ancient scholars, whose fragmentary knowledge must have stemmed from a remote and forgotten technical age, could not demonstrate their theses in practice. The technology did not exist whereby they could do so.
A remote age during which nuclear science was practiced implies the use of atomic energy for many purposes. Some ideas, such as transmutation, which the alchemists kept alive in their endless search to turn lead into gold, most likely stemmed from ancient knowledge that manipulation of atomic structures could convert one element into another.
However, what we are concerned with here is not the use but the misuse of nuclear energy. It seems clear that a frightful holocaust occurred in a past age, and writings from different sources confirm this. Whether the conflict was purely terrestrial or involved another advanced race from elsewhere in the universe is a matter of speculation.
From India we have the evidence of the Mahabharata and the Drona Parva, which speak of great fireballs. Kapilla’s glance, which could burn fifty thousand men to ashes in seconds, sounds like either nuclear energy used as a beam, or some kind of laser weapon. The Drona Parva speaks of flying spears that could ruin whole “cities full of forts.”
Flying spears that could ruin cities – could these be missiles, possibly with nuclear warheads?
India is not alone in legends such as these. They exist also in China. Raymond W. Drake says that the accounts in the Fengshen-yen-i describe events with a close similarity to the Sanskrit Mahabharata. Rival elements fought for control of China, helped by celestial visitants who used weapons that remind us of our own advanced technology. The war was fought with blinding rays and dragons of fire, spheres of flame, shining darts, and lightning. According to the descriptions they seem to have possessed something akin to radar, whereby they could see and hear objects many hundreds of miles away. There were flying dragons of silver, and chariots of fire and wind. These all seem to refer to laser beams, nuclear weapons, missiles, and flying machines using rocket or jet engines.
In Siberian shamanistic legends there is a warrior with dazzling arrows who blows up anyone who laughs at him and rides away through the sky on a “shell of gold.”
The ethnographer Baker was told by a Canadian Indian, a wise man of a secret totemic society, that once there were great forests and meadows “down there” and also great shining cities and men who flew in the skies to meet the thunder bird. Then the demons came and the cities were all destroyed and only ruins exist now.
These legends stem from the regions of permafrost in the far north of the Canadian tundra, and they must refer to an ancient epoch when the climate in the polar regions was very different from what it is today. “Down there,” we must assume, was to the south where the shining cities lay.
This Canadian Indian tradition should remind us of the legend existing among the Maya and Aztecs about the cities where the lights never went out by day and night.
The Maya say: “These lands [referring to the southwestern part of what is now the United States] are the Kingdom of Death. Only the souls that will never be reincarnated go there . . . but it was inhabited a long time ago by ancient human races.”
There is a great similarity between the legends of a holocaust from many different parts of the world – consider Zeus of the Greeks with his lightning bolts and the Nordic Thor with his hammer and lightning. If there had been a world conflict in the remote past, wider even in scope than World War II and much more devastating, then surely this is what we should expect. Global conflict would leave echoes in global memories.
In the same way, the legends of the Golden Age are equally widely dispersed. Those who seek a marvelous “Atlantis” in any one place are, it seems, doomed to disappointment. If the whole world was highly civilized at a certain period in the remote past, then the legends of its former existence would be worldwide in extent. The fact that different accounts from all points of the compass have led people to believe that Atlantis existed in the Mediterranean, the Atlantic, Spain, Greenland or Iceland, America or Tibet, or even that an Atlantis-like kingdom of Lemuria existed in the Pacific, merely points to a civilization that was worldwide. This civilization was not limited to one mysterious island or continent now sunk beneath the sea.
A global civilization at a remote period would explain the similarities between widely separated cultures of antiquity – and also the differences. There are broad points of similarity between the civilizations of Egypt and Sumer, and between the Indus Valley and those of Central and South America, particularly in their legends. There are also great differences, although these may be largely a matter of detail, such as the Old World possessing the wheel and the New World not making use of this device. It should be remembered that at the period of megalithic building all over the world, the wheel was not in use anywhere.
Those who would completely debunk the idea of there being any connection at any point in time between all the civilizations of the past, both in the Old World and the New, do not seem to be taking all the factors into consideration. However, we seek in vain for one isolated area as the home of our “mother culture” from which all civilizations descended. The whole earth was the “mother culture.”
We may note a further peculiarity. Many of the legends that point to a great and disastrous conflict in the remote past point also to the regions where these conflicts took place. And most of these regions are now deserts.
The Chinese have such legends, and in that great land lies the largely unexplored Gobi Desert, which hides mysteries beneath its sands. India has its deserts, and where the Indus Valley civilization flourished is now desert. Much of the southwestern United States is desert, and the Maya called that the Kingdom of the Dead. In Egypt Horus cursed the Lands of Set for thousands of years, and vast tracts of North Africa, including the great Sahara, are deserts. Much of the Middle East is desert, with the great cities of the Babylonians and Sumerians lying now as ruins under the shifting sands. Australia is largely desert, and the Aborigines would seem to be the descendants of once highly civilized people. Perhaps here also lie buried the traces of cities from long ago.
Legends, mythologies present accounts of ancient weapons that sound like nuclear missiles, others that seem to refer to the mathematics of nuclear physics. The evidence seems to be piling up in favor of our hypothesis. Do we, however, need more than old texts and legends – more concrete evidence to support our views? This material evidence also exists.
When nuclear weapons were test-fired in the New Mexico desert, and also in the Gobi Desert near Lop Nor, the sand was vitrified (fused into glass) by the heat of the explosions. Intense heat is needed for this – volcanic action will not produce this effect, nor ordinary explosives, nor fires. The heat of millions of degrees, that of thermonuclear reactions, is necessary.
The Gobi Desert has areas of vitreous sand that have been there for thousands of years. Similar ancient glassy sands exist in parts of the California desert, and the mysterious glassy tektites found in the sands of the Middle East and North Africa are thought to have their origin in radioactive processes. Was it thermonuclear heat that produced these ancient areas of glassy sand? Rocks in Peru and Bolivia show evidence of vitrification, and desert conditions exist there also.
Should we not ask ourselves why do these great deserts exist? What brought them into being in the first place? Why should there be deserts surrounded on all sides by huge areas of vegetation?
Could it not be that these deserts were created, in the first instance, by the exploding of nuclear missiles of great power, destroying not only those people who may have lived there but all life as well, with radioactive contamination sterilizing these areas for centuries to come? Little grows in these deserts, and all that grows and lives there has developed special adaptations to the harsh conditions and survives only with difficulty. Perhaps there is truth in the legend of Horus: the curse against the Lands of Set was the curse of radioactive poisoning.
It could be said that our hypothesis is faulty if there were no trace that humanity had lived in these now-barren regions, that they had from time immemorial been lands hostile to large-scale human settlement. But this is not so.
There are ruins in the Gobi Desert, almost formless and of great antiquity. These ruins bear the marks of blistering by great heat, of the same kind that were noted at Hiroshima.
Some geologists maintain that many of the present desert areas of the southwestern United States and their curious rock formations were not brought about by natural causes.
During excavations near Chillicothe, Illinois, bronze coins were dug up from a depth of more than 127 feet. The pressure and the vast period of time which has elapsed since these coins were buried has erased all traces of any markings they may once have held.
In 1851 in Illinois two copper rings were found at a depth of more than 109 feet. In June of that year a vessel was found encased in pudding stone at Dorchester, Massachusetts. It was a bell-shaped jar made of an unknown metal with a floral design in silver.
A doctor in California found, inside a piece of gold-bearing quartz, a small gold object resembling a bucket handle. A similar handle was found in a cave in Kingoodie, northern England, in a block of stone, and it has been estimated as being at least 8,500 years old. One can assume that the California find is of similar antiquity.
In 1969, inside a rock from the “Abbey Gallery” in Treasure City, Nevada, were found the traces of a screw two inches long. The screw had long since disintegrated, but the space it had occupied left its tracer in the shape of the spiral thread markings. This was possibly tens of thousands of years old.
An American farmer named Tom Kenny, in the Plateau Valley, discovered, at a depth of more than ten feet, a section of pavement made of smooth symmetrical tiles. Analysis of the mortar proved it to be unlike the local valley materials.
All these things point to a possibility not previously considered: that there exist traces, sometimes buried far underground, of a civilization many thousands of years old in North America, and that this civilization appears to have been violently destroyed in a vast catastrophe involving levels of heat which can only be attributed to thermonuclear explosions.
Of civilizations in Central and South America we have evidence in abundance. Were those who founded the earliest elements of these civilizations survivors of the vast cataclysm to the north? The original habitat of the Toltec and pre-Toltec peoples, who built the vast pyramid complex at Teotehuacan, are not known; and the Aztec had a tradition of traveling down from the north – from the “Country of Painted Colors,” possibly the Grand Canyon region with its bands of different-colored rocks.
The pre-Inca and Inca peoples of South America worked in gold, silver, copper, and bronze – no other metals. Yet in the sixteenth century Spanish conquistadors found a seven-inch iron nail inside a rock in a Peruvian mine. The rock was estimated to be tens of thousands of years old. Who had made this nail so long before the time of the Incas?
Ancient iron nails have turned up elsewhere. In California, a Mr. Hiram D. Witt in 1851 discovered an iron nail with a perfect head inside a piece of auriferous quartz. The discovery was made, according to the London Times of December 24, 1851, when he dropped the quartz, which broke and revealed the nail. Again, in Kingoodie Quarry, where the golden “bucket handle” was found, an inch of iron nail, including the head, was found embedded in rock. All these items stem from a period before metals were used at all, according to the experts.
China, the Americas – here exist the legends of a vast conflict, and here also the evidence. In India, too, where we have the clearest reports of a past high technology, there are strange things.
The explorer De Camp mentions the existence of charred ruins between the Ganges and the mountains of Rajmahal, which seemed to have been subjected to intense heat. Huge masses had been fused together and hollowed “like lumps of tin struck by a stream of molten steel.” A British official, J. Campbell, observed similar ruins farther to the south. Other travelers have described ruined buildings made of unusual materials “like thick slabs of crystal,” and these also had been subjected to extremes of heat, being holed and split by enormous powers. A skeleton was found in India with a radioactive level fifty times above normal. (A. Gorbovsky, Riddles of Ancient History, Moscow, 1968.)
Buried under the shifting sands of the deserts there must be many things formerly unsuspected. Perhaps it would be useful to check in these areas for traces of higher than normal radiation. Perhaps the ancient radiation has long since dissipated, but there still may be lingering traces.
The jungles of India and Central and South America have scarcely been investigated. The subcontinent, for instance, has areas that have never been thoroughly explored. There are remote villages no white man has ever seen, in spite of the fact that Europeans have lived and worked in India for several centuries, building railways and dams and modern cities. These mysterious regions may hold keys to the past.
Do the pyramids of Egypt hold a clue to the riddle of a nuclear holocaust in ancient times? The Ein Shams University of Cairo, under Dr. Luis Alvarez, placed a cosmic-ray detector in the base of the pyramid of Khephren for the purpose of ascertaining if there were any chambers in the pyramid which had not been discovered. Cosmic rays shower down uniformly, and if there were any unknown hollow areas within the pyramid, the cosmic rays would pass more easily through these spaces and leave heavier shadow traces on the detector.
In September 1968, tests showed the detector to be in perfect working order, and yet the hundreds of recordings made during 1967-69 that were analyzed by the IBM 1130 computer at the university showed no common daily features. Dr. Amr Gohed, in charge of the installation, stated: “This is scientifically impossible. There is a mystery which is beyond explanation . . . there is some force that defies the laws of science at work in the pyramid.”
In Colony: Earth we suggested, being guided principally by legends – there is no other guide, as the ancient Egyptians themselves regarded the pyramids as a mystery – that the pyramids were not tombs but shelters constructed in the event of a vast catastrophe; not necessarily shelters for human beings, although some may have been sheltered there, but perhaps for the safekeeping of information and knowledge.
If the catastrophe took the form of a man-made disaster, including the use of nuclear weapons, then this hypothesis is given added weight by those cosmic-ray tests and their strange results. It may be that the pyramids, in addition to their other attributes as impregnable shelters, were also radiation proof. It also appears that whatever was used for this purpose is still functioning. Is there, as Tomas suggested, a generator situated somewhere beneath the pyramids? (See We Are Not the First, by Andrew Tomas, Chapter 22.)
Such a device may be situated deep underneath the pyramid, far below any excavations which have been attempted so far. What form it may take or how it may be detected is difficult to say, because such a device is beyond our technology, and we do not know on what principles it may operate, how large it may be, or the way it is powered.
Indeed, there are still many unsolved mysteries about the pyramids, and yet there are those who still insist that they were merely tombs of the pharaohs. This is not to say that we agree with the more fanciful stories that have been developed regarding these structures. There are some who say that the height of the Great Pyramid of Cheops, multiplied a million times, shows the distance from the earth to the sun. In fact, various measurements and figures have been produced from time to time to show all sorts of things – the length of the year, the lunar month, the weight of the earth.
Some have suggested the pyramids were built by Noah after the Flood, or that they were built by spacemen, or on the instructions of spacemen, or that they were guidance markers for astronauts from other planets.
The idea that all the world’s knowledge is concealed somewhere within the pyramids may not be altogether fanciful, but it is probably truer to say that the knowledge possessed by the ancient world was placed in them, but is no longer there. So much mystique has grown up around the Egyptian pyramids, particularly in the last hundred years, that the truth probably lies between the outrageously far-fetched and the prosaic.
We cannot agree with the more wild theories, but neither can we agree with the idea that these tremendous structures were built by a group of people without the wheel, with few tools, and no hoists or other weight-lifting tackle. Or that this was done in a country which, at the time the pyramids were supposed to have been built, was almost uninhabited (the population in total is reckoned to have been some 2 million), and possessed no cities and scarcely any trace of other than small settlements.
We are of the opinion that the pyramids, particularly the vast group on the Giza plateau, are pre-Egyptian. They were not built as religious structures or tombs but were protective devices, possibly for the storage of knowledge, much of which was used by the “culture bearers” when they emerged or returned to lead the savage descendants of the survivors of the catastrophe back to civilization.
Of all the pyramids in Egypt – and there are over sixty known – there has not in a single one been traced beyond doubt any burial. All the pharaohs, especially those most important and powerful rulers such as Rameses II and Thutmose III, were buried in the famous Valley of the Kings. This is where the treasure of the boy king Tutankhamen was found, we remember. It is surprising how many people think that the mummified remains of the pharaohs were discovered within the pyramids, simply because it has been stated so categorically by the experts that the pyramids were tombs of the rulers of Egypt.
If the greatest and most illustrious rulers of Egypt were buried in rock tombs in a valley, why is it assumed that less important, obscure, and by no means always real kings (the ancient royalty lists of Manetho do not have a Cheops) were buried in these vast edifices supposedly raised by so much human toil and sweat? The Egyptologists appear to be largely influenced by the records handed down by that great traveler of antiquity, the restless Herodotus. But Herodotus was guided by what the scholars and priests of his day told him, when the pyramids were already thousands of years old and as much a mystery to the Egyptians of the period as they are to us today. The purpose of the pyramids surely must be far different from that which has generally been supposed.
In the preceding we have discussed the possibility and offered the evidence for a nuclear war in the past. We have seen that not only nuclear bombs may have been known but also missiles and something akin to radar, together with aircraft. None of these things could have been produced without the resources of a highly advanced technology and therefore an industrialized society.
This being the case, the ancient lost Golden Age was probably only a Golden Age in retrospect – to the survivors, who probably remembered the benefits and preferred to forget the disadvantages.
In reality this lost technological era may have suffered from all the ills which beset ourselves, and, indeed, if its people were so much more advanced than ourselves, their problems may have been that much greater. The fabled Cities of Light must also have had their slums, traffic, noise, and stress; they also may have had labor and industrial problems; possibly difficulties with vast populations – overcrowding and the dangers of breakdown of the food supply. Even if these people were truly the godlike figures of mythology, with marvelous intellects and long life spans, there could still be psychological flaws in their makeup that could have created the same dangerous situation we find ourselves in today in our society.
Or if they were highly advanced colonists from another solar system, the radiation from the sun may have taken its toll. Possibly they suffered a degree of degeneration over the ages – we have mentioned the fact that radiation affects the brain structure more quickly than other parts of the organism. By the time a purely terrestrial conflict was imminent they may have already started to degenerate, even though remaining immeasurably superior to ourselves. This aspect would explain the Genesis statement that man became corrupt and that “evil was in his heart continually.”
On the other hand, they may have perfected a society far more advanced and more humane than ours. Perhaps the fault lay in their relations with other races elsewhere in space, and the catastrophic conflict that wrecked their world and almost destroyed the human race was brought about by a hostile intelligence from another planet or an invasion from another solar system.
Perhaps it was a combination of all or some of these factors. It may be that we shall never know the exact circumstances of man’s “fall” but will have to rely on our interpretation of the mythologies and the available evidence.
It does seem certain that something is sadly amiss in our planetary system, if planetary systems are formed in the manner described by our astronomers.
Many interesting speculations can be made – and supported – on the possible techniques of the great conflict. If a past era with a high technology possessed nuclear weapons, missiles, radar, etc., if its people followed a parallel to our own pattern of development, they will also have possessed other methods of waging war. We have evidence from both mythological and material sources that this may have been the case.
An ancient Sanskrit text, the Samara Sutradhara, talks of the development of biological weapons in the remote past. Samhara was one which crippled, and Moha induced paralysis. The Feng-shen-yen-i mentions biological warfare used in ancient China, and again we have a close similarity to the descriptions from ancient India.
This could lead us to an interesting thought: Is it not possible that certain diseases may once have been artificial in origin? There are many that seem to be exclusive to the human race, which do not affect animals. Venereal disease seems to hit only humans, and although indiscriminate sex is blamed for its spread, many species of animals are far more indiscriminate in their sexual relations. Cholera and typhus, although carried by animals, do not seem to affect the carriers. Could these and other human afflictions have been artificial in origin, the result of ancient biological warfare, raging unchecked, when barbarism descended on the world and medical services collapsed, and man had to await the coming of our twentieth century to once again find the cures?
Finally, we shall turn to another mystery that may well have a connection with a nuclear holocaust in the remote prehistoric past, and this is the matter of certain cave paintings and rock drawings scattered around the world.
This concerns the so-called spaceman figures which have received considerable publicity in recent years. The vogue was first given full prominence by von Daniken in his book Chariots of the Gods, but it has also been mentioned by many other writers.
The best-known drawing is the giant outline carving on the Tassili Plateau in the Sahara, discovered by Henri Labote and christened by him the Great Martian God. It could hardly have been called anything else – the resemblance to a figure in a spacesuit is quite remarkable. There are other, very similar, drawings in the Tassili region: one showing a group of four figures walking, who appear to be wearing something like space suits, complete with bulbous helmets.
Drawings like these have been found in many parts of the world. There is a rock drawing south of Fergana in Uzbekistan (U.S.S.R.) that shows a figure with the head enclosed in a ring with rays coming from it, which could represent a transparent “fishbowl” helmet with antennae. There are almost identical figures from Val Camonica in Italy. “Spacemen” figures have been found drawn on rock faces in Australia.
Related to these are the Dogu statuettes from the Jomon period of Japan, which have aroused considerable interest. These statuettes represent people wearing protective clothing of some sort, together with helmets having curious eyepieces. Isao Washio, the Japanese expert on these figures, says: “The gloves are fixed to the forearms with a rounded attachment while the eyepieces can be opened or closed. There are levers at their sides perhaps meant for manipulating them, while the ‘crown’ on the helmet is probably an antenna . . . the designs on the suits are not ornamental but correspond to devices suitable for regulation of pressure automatically.”
All these drawings and figures are today associated with spacemen and with the possibility that this planet has been visited by astronauts from other worlds in times past. They may, in fact, be representations of our early “sky gods.” The fact that these figures are often associated with flying discs, with spheres in which they are sometimes enclosed, and with other flying devices would appear to add weight to this theory. At an ancient astronomical observatory at Meroe there is further evidence of such flight: a perfectly clear drawing of something that appears to be a tapered rocket or missile, complete with antenna.
While it is agreed that there is a good case for these figures representing spacemen, there could also be another explanation. Are they, perhaps, people wearing protective clothing to guard them against radioactive contamination?
We observe that many of these drawings of the “spacemen” images have been found in present desert areas. We have already suggested that perhaps the deserts were created in the first instance by the use of nuclear weapons, therefore these regions would still be dangerously radioactive thousands of years later. The pictures could have been drawn by surface-dwelling survivors who had regressed to savagery; the suited visitors on survey missions had arrived by some sort of flying machine, either from areas not so severely affected by contamination, or from their deep underground shelters. We are aware that there exist many legends of man’s possession of flying machines in the past Golden Age; therefore the association of these suited figures with aircraft does not necessarily mean that they are extraterrestrials.
Nor do legends of flying machines exist only from the remote past. In 1972, near the Step Pyramid in Saqqara, there was discovered under the sand a wooden model of what appears to be an aircraft, very similar in its design to modern jet aircraft. The object has been dated as in excess of 5,500 years old. One daily newspaper dubbed it as “Tutenconcorde,” and although most experts thought it was merely a rough model of a bird, this seems unlikely. The ancient Egyptians were perfectly able to depict the shape of birds – the most popular one being the emblem of Horus, a hawk – and this object looked exactly like a rough wooden representation of an aircraft, the sort of thing someone not very good with his hands may make for a small child, or the kind of thing a child himself would make.
Of course, some of these drawings may represent visitors from other worlds, but we cannot overlook the possibility that these protective suits were worn by terrestrials as a shield against radioactive contamination. If people from other planets had to be so thoroughly protected against the terrestrial environment that they wore fully insulated spacesuits, it would most likely mean that they would be unable to breathe our atmosphere or tolerate our temperatures, which does not fit in with our picture, from mythology, of the sky gods, either in appearance or behavior.
If it is assumed that the ancient gods were spacemen, they must include Wirakocha, Quetzalcoatl and Kukulkan of the Americas, and perhaps also the gods of the Egyptians, Greeks and Hindus. These are never described as wearing protective suits. Therefore they were either terrestrials or aliens from other worlds whose physiology was so similar to that of terrestrials that they did not need space suits. Of course, short-stay visitors may have worn space suits as a protection against unfamiliar solar radiation or against unknown and possibly highly dangerous terrestrial microorganisms.
However, on balance, considering the location of the principal drawings and the evidence offered for a past nuclear holocaust, protection against radiation hazards may seem the more reasonable explanation.
Excerpt from Gods Of Air And Darkness
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