Secrets of Lost Races #4
From the book by the same name published in 1977
Prehistoric Aviation!
CHAPTER 4
ADVANCED AVIATION IN PREHISTORIC TIMES!
Soon after the destruction of the Babel world center, a
number of secondary civilization centers emerged in various parts
of the world. The initial catastrophe that cast the globe into a
period of chaos and confusion may have lasted as long as a
century, during which time many of the pre-Babel nations lost
contact with one another, while still others were probably
overrun by migrating tribes uprooted in the confusion.
The technology of many of them was not affected, however,
and they were able to maintain their high level of sophistication
and knowledge. The Renaissance maps tell us that at least five
generations of ancient cartographers from a highly advanced
civilization made a series of uninterrupted surveys of the world
before, during and at the end of the Ice Age. The conditions
under which they operated must have been subject to major
modifications, for whereas in pre-Babel days they had lived under
a "one world command," the post-Babel world presented an entirely
different situation. The world was now split into political
factions, each one claiming sovereignty over and independence of
the others. The former global cooperation had evaporated, and the
various political and national entities began to strive for world
domination. During the first part of the century of confusion
after Babel, the rivalry did nothing to disturb the balance of
power, but toward the end of the first hundred years, natural
catastrophes, probably initiated by the beginning of the Ice Age,
greatly affected the already uneasy truce that existed between
them. The violence that followed led to the mutual destruction of
these groups. The advanced technology they had struggled so hard
to preserve for their national greatness now spawned an arsenal
of weaponry that ultimately destroyed them.
There were eight centers of post-Babel high civilization
where the remnants of the pre-Flood technology were treasured and
utilized. These centers were in the Middle East, northern Europe,
the Arctic, India, what is now the Gobi Desert, Antarctica,
western and central South America, and southwestern North America
and the Caribbean. During the initial period of chaos, these
centers were cut off from one another, but communications were
soon reestablished. One of these contact methods appears to have
been by air, strange as that may seem in our age, for we still
consider the Wright brothers' invention a spontaneous outburst of
creativity befitting the twentieth century. Many legends recorded
by subsequent peoples contain remembrances of a period when
aviation was a well-known concept and flight was a frequent
occurrence.
One of the earliest preserved records of flight is in a
Babylonian set of laws called the Halkatha, which contains this
passage: "To operate a flying machine is a great privilege.
Knowledge of flying is most ancient, a gift of the gods of old
for saving lives."
The Babylonian "Epic of Etana," describing a prehistoric
flight, is preserved for us in fragmentary text and cuneiform
dating back to a period between 3000 and 2400 B.C. The epic tells
of Etana, a poor shepherd who finds an eagle with injured wings.
He nurses the eagle back to health, and in return the eagle
promises to take him on a journey up into the heavens. Etana
thereupon mounts the bird, and together they soar off into the
sky, gazing at intervals down on the earth below.
At the first stage, the eagle cries, "Behold, my friend, the
land and how it is! Look upon the sea also. Lo, the land has
become like a hill and the sea like a watercourse!" This
observation is made after an ascent of a double hour's march - in
modern terms, six to eight miles high. Rising high above
Mesopotamia, Etana can see the mountains of Armenia in the north,
and to the southeast, the "sea" of the Persian Gulf looking like
a "watercourse" or river stretching to the horizon.
According to the inscriptions, the two climb three double marches
higher before the eagle again directs Etana's attention to the
earth's appearance. From here, he says, the earth looks like a
"plantation" and the land is like a "hut" surrounded by the
"courtyard of the sea." Etana has reached a height from which he
can see the waters of the Indian Ocean, the Red Sea, the
Mediterranean and the Black Sea, encompassing the Middle East.
As they look from still farther up, the land appears to be like a
"grinding stone" and the sea like a "gardener's canal" or
irrigation ditch. The mountains are no longer distinguishable;
from this altitude the surface appears even and curved, like the
surface of a grindstone. At the circumference Etana sees the
waters of the oceans surrounding Asia, Europe, and Africa.
Higher still, the eagle remarks that the earth now looks like a
"garden," the sea like a "wicker basket." The various
characteristic shapes of the continents are now apparent, as are
their orange deserts, dark green forested areas, gray valleys and
brown-yellow mountains, which look like the colored patches of a
garden. Now Etana also sees the oceans of the world, this time no
longer as a surrounding ditch but as separate basins, like
various "baskets" filled with water.
Finally he reaches a height where he in unable to
distinguish between land and sea. He has reached an altitude
where the clouds and water vapor of the atmosphere hide most of
the earth's features in a bluish-white haze. At this point the
journey ends, and Etana is returned to earth.
The only myth element the epic contains is the eagle, who
may represent some form of aircraft that with the passing of time
was transformed into a bird by a people ignorant of the mechanics
of flight. Whatever the vehicle of ascent may have been, the
"Epic of Etana" certainly supplies us with a very accurate
description of the earth's surface from various altitudes -
descriptions which were not verified in our own era until the
high-altitude aerial flights of the 1950s and the first space
shots of the 1960s.
Question: Who made and recorded this observation in the
ancient East before 2400 B.C.?
Another Chaldean work, the Sifr'ala, dates back more than
5,000 years, and though fragmentary, it is a work filling almost
a hundred pages of English translation. Archaeologist and
ethnologist Y. N. Iban A'haraon, who worked on its decipherment,
found to his astonishment that the Sifr'ala is a detailed account
of how to build and operate an aircraft. The text speaks of
various parts such as vibrating spheres, graphite rods and copper
coils; and on the subject of flight the writer comments on wind
resistance, gliding and stability. Unfortunately, many key lines
of the text are missing, making any attempt at reconstructing the
craft impossible.
Early Chinese annals also contain several references to the
art of flying. Emperor Shun, who reigned between 2258 and 2208
B.C., reportedly not only constructed a flying craft but also
tested a parachute - more than thirty-six centuries before
Leonardo da Vinci.
In 1766 B.C. another Chinese Emperor, Cheng Tang, ordered a
court artisan named Ki-Kung-Shi to construct a flying apparatus.
The craftsman built the machine and flew it to the province of
Honan on a test flight. The Emperor, however, had the aerial
craft destroyed so that its secret might not fall into the wrong
hands.
The secret of flight seems to have survived until the third
century B.C., for the Chinese poet Chu Yun penned his experiences
while flying in a jade-colored craft over the Gobi Desert to the
Kunlun mountains in the southwest. He made an aerial survey of
the region and accurately described how the high-soaring craft
was unaffected by the wind and dust of the wasteland below.
And even as late as the fourth century A.D. another Chinese
writer, Ko-Hung, spoke of a "flying car" made of wood and
possessing "rotating blades" that caused the car to travel
skyward. In the same century, a flying craft also appeared in
Ceylon, where the Buddhist monk Gunarvarman used it to fly to the
island of Java - a distance of 2,000 miles.
References to flight also appear in the Budhasvamin Brihat
Katha Shlokasamgraha of Nepal, a twelfth-century written version
of an oral tradition of unknown age. It was first published in
Europe in Felix Lacote's French translation in 1908. The Brihat
Katha tells the story of Rumanvit, the servant of a king who
desired to travel about the earth in a flying vehicle. In order
to satisfy his master, Rumanvit commanded the court designers to
construct the needed flying apparatus, but they informed him that
they were unable to do so. They knew the workings of many
machines, they declared, but the secret of flying machines was
known only to the "Yavanas."
Yavana was the Sanskrit name for the lighter-skinned peoples
of the eastern Mediterranean. More specifically, Yavana is
derived from Javan, the name of one of Noah's grandsons, whose
descendants inhabited mainland Greece and the Mediterranean
islands in the first few centuries following the Flood.
The story of Rumanvit ends with the appearance at his
master's court of a Yavana from the west who fulfills the
monarch's wish to see the world from the air, but without
revealing to him the mechanics of flying. There appears to have
been a conscious effort on the the part of the high civilization
centers not to proliferate advanced technology among those
post-Babel peoples who had lost knowledge, but rather to keep
that technology for their own use and power.
Ancient Flight in the Pacific
Legends very similar to those of the Nepalese are found
among the Polynesians. On the South Pacific island of Ponape, the
natives tell of learned men with lighter skins than their own,
who came from the west long before the European explorers
arrived. These former lightskinned men came in "shining boats"
that "flew above the sea." Their stay was very brief, but the
natives still speak of the "magical works" the ancient Westerners
performed.
The aboriginal inhabitants of Mangareva, the largest of the
Gambier Islands, also have a tradition of flight which dates from
the ancient past. They recount how a "flying canoe" with "great
wings clasped tightly to the side" appeared before them, and how
the "priests" who operated it were able to fly great distances -
as far as the Hawaiian Islands, nearly 2,500 miles away. Robert
Lee Eskridge, a collector of Polynesian folklore, found a native
on the island of Tara-Vai who gave him a detailed description and
showed him an actual artist's model of the ancient flying canoe.
According to Eskridge, it certainly represented some form of
flying apparatus, and the wings in particular reminded him of
those of the winged solar disc of the god Horus, frequently
pictured in Egyptian art.
The Saqqara "Bird"
In 1898, a small model plane was discovered in a tomb near
Saqqara, Egypt, and was dated at approximately 200 B.C. At the
time of its discovery, the birth of modern aviation was still
several years away, and so, when the strange object was sent to
the Cairo Museum of Antiquities, it was catalogued as Special
Register No. 6347, Rm. 22, and then shelved to gather dust among
other miscellaneous artifacts - unrecognized for what it really
was.
An artist's conception of the Saqqara "bird" as it was
discovered in an Egyptian tomb in 1898. This object, which at
first was thought to be a model of a bird, flies perfectly as a
glider, even though there are indications that it may originally
have possessed a propulsion mechanism at the tail. The design of
the "bird" is highly sophisticated.
In 1969, Dr. Kalil Messiha, an Egyptologist and
archaeologist, was cleaning out the museum's basement storage
area when he happened on a box marked simply "bird objects" and
discovered the model. The other contents of the box were obvious
bird figurines, but one artifact was definitely out of place,
possessing characteristics which, though not found in birds, yet
are part of modern aircraft. Dr. Messiha, who as a youth had been
a model-plane enthusiast, immediately recognized the aircraft
features and persuaded the Under Secretary of the Egyptian
Ministry of Culture, Dr. Mohammed Gamal El Din Moukhtar, to form
a committee to investigate the model. The research committee was
formed on December 23, 1971, and consisted of a number of
historians and aviation experts. They were so impressed by the
preliminary findings that they recommended the model be hung as a
centerpiece in the Central Hall of the Cairo Museum.
The model's wings are straight and aerodynamically shaped, with a
span of 7.2 inches. The pointed nose is 1.3 inches long, and the
body of the craft measures 5.6 inches long, tapered and
terminating in a vertical tail fin. A separate slotted piece on
the tail is precisely like the back stabilizer section of a
modern plane. The small craft is made of very light sycamore wood
and weighs 1.11 ounces.
When asked to analyze the model, several aerodynamics
engineers and pilots found a number of remarkable features, all
indicating knowledge of principles of aircraft design which had
taken European and American designers a century of airfoil
experimental work to discover and perfect. Besides an aerodynamic
shape of fuselage and wing that revealed design compensation for
camber - the rise of the curve of the wing - the wing itself was
found to be counter-dihedral, which provided a tremendous lift
force. It appears the ancient craft's purpose was more for
carrying large amounts of freight than for reaching high speeds,
for designers agreed it could have carried heavy loads, but at
extremely slow speed, i.e., below 60 miles an hour. One expert,
in fact, noted that there is a remarkable similarity between the
down-pointing nose and pointed wing of the Egyptian plane and a
new oblique-wing aircraft under consideration by NASA. It too is,
specifically designed for heavy cargo and low-powered flight. We
do not know, however, what the power source of the ancient craft
was. The lower part of the tail is jagged - evidently something
has been broken off - so that it may have held some form of
motor. The engineers noted that the model did make a perfect
glider just as it was; in fact, it would have taken only a small
catapult to get a life-sized model into the air. Even today,
though it is over 2,000 years old, the little plane still soars
through the air for a considerable distance with only a slight
push of the hand!
Another feature aerodynamics experts discovered when they
attempted to make a blueprint of the plane was that all of its
highly accurate integral proportions were present in ratios of
2:1 or 3:1. It is clear that the ancient model was not accidental
or meant only to be a toy; rather, it was the end product of an
enormous body of computation and experimentation. Dr. Messiha
noted that the ancient Egyptians always built scale models of
everything they made, for their tombs were filled with small
detailed temples, obelisks, houses, chariots, ships, etc. Now
that a model plane has been found, Dr. Messiha wonders whether
somewhere under the desert sands along the Nile there may be the
remains of life-sized gliders.
More recently, several other model planes have been
uncovered from other tombs and identified, bringing the total
number of Egyptian gliders to fourteen. As biologist-zoologist
Ivan T. Sanderson, head of the Society for the Investigation of
the Unexplained, commented, "The concrete evidence that the
ancients knew of flight was forced upon us only a few years ago.
Now we have to explain it. And when we do we will have to
rearrange a great many of our concepts of ancient history."
A Gold Plane from the New World
In 1954 the government of Colombia sent part of its
collection of ancient gold artifacts on a tour to six museums in
the United States. During the U.S. tour, Emanuel M. Staubs, one
of the leading jewelers in America, was commissioned to make cast
reproductions of six of the gold pieces. Fifteen years later, one
of the casts was given to Ivan T. Sanderson for an analysis.
After making a thorough examination of the artifact and
consulting a number of aerodynamics experts, Sanderson came to a
mind-boggling conclusion. In his opinion, the gold object is a
model of a jet aircraft at least a thousand years old.
The object is approximately two inches long and was worn as a
pendant on a chain around the neck. Discovered in northern
Colombia, the artifact has been classified as Sinu, a pre-Inca
culture dating between A.D. 500 and 800. For want of better
identification, the Colombian government labeled the find a
"zoomorfica"; that is, an animalshaped object. From a zoological
standpoint, however, both biologist Sanderson and Dr. Arthur
Poyslee of the Aeronautical Institute of New York concluded that
the object does not represent any known type of winged animal,
whether bird, bat, insect, flying fish, skate or ray. In fact,
the little Colombian artifact has features that are more
mechanical than biological.
Among the important features are the front wings, which are
deltoid, with perfectly straight edges - very animal-like.
Aircraft designer Arthur Young also noted that if the gold object
did represent a flying animal, the front wings are located in the
wrong place. They are too far back on the body to coincide with
the animal's center of gravity. The wings are in the right place
aerodynamically, however, for a tail-engine jet.
Test pilot and aerodynamics expert Jack A. Ullrich pointed
out further that the delta shape of the front wings and the
aerodynamic tapering of the fuselage imply that the original
aircraft was jetpowered, with the ability to fly at supersonic
speeds.
After examining close-up photographs of the gold model,
taken from the front angle, still another aircraft engineer,
Adolph Heuer, noted a third indication of the original plane's
potential of performance. While most modern planes have wings
angled slightly upward, only the higher-powered planes have wings
that tilt downward. This feature can be seen on the supersonic
Concorde, and it can also be seen on the Colombian gold object.
The tail is perhaps the least animal - but most airplane - like
feature of the gold model. It is right-triangular in shape,
flat-surfaced, and rigidly perpendicular to the body and delta
wings. No bird or insect has a tail like this. Only fish have
upright tail fins, but none has an upright fin without a
counterbalancing lower one. The triangular configuration of the
gold model, however, is standard design on modern aircraft.
Another interesting feature about the tail is the insignia
that appears on the left face of the rudder, precisely where
identification marks appear on many airplanes today. The insignia
is perhaps as out of place as the gold model itself, because it
has been identified as the Aramaic or early Hebrew letter beth,
or B. This would indicate that the original aircraft may have
come not from Colombia but from somewhere in the Middle East.
The gold airplane is by no means the only such model
aircraft discovered in the New World. Six very similar gold
objects, each complete with aerodynamically designed fuselage,
wings, and right-triangular rudder, are on display in Chicago's
Field Museum of Natural History, and two others are on exhibit in
the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C.,
and in the Museum of Primitive Art in New York City. Along with
those in Bogota, Colombia, such objects number fourteen in all.
Again, they are well over 1,000 years old, but the area from
which they come is quite extensive. These other planes were
discovered in Costa Rica, Venezuela, and Peru. If people from the
Middle East did make flights across the Atlantic, they must have
made a number of contacts with the semiprimitive inhabitants in
both Central and South America. Lookihg at the models together,
we find they appear to be variations of a single aircraft design.
They are either an artist's impression of something he saw
himself or his interpretation of a mythical or legendary
description of aircraft from the more distant past. The early
form of the Hebrew beth on the Colombian model strongly supports
this conclusion and puts the original aircraft and its flight to
the Americas before the second millennium B.C.
The Hindu Vimanas
Some of the most remarkable descriptions of prehistoric
aircraft come to us from India. Among the ancient Hindu sacred
books we find the Samaranga Sutradhara, a collection of texts
compiled in the eleventh century but which date back to unknown
antiquity. The Samaranga contains 230 stanzas that describe in
detail every possible aspect of flying, from how the apparatus
was powered to the proper clothing and diet of the pilots.
Recently the International Academy of Sanskrit Research in
Mysore, India, conducted a special study of the ancient work and
published its findings in a book entitled Aeronautics,
"a Manuscript From the Prehistoric Past." The text revealed a
knowledge of aircraft design, function and performance that is
above and beyond what the laws of chance would permit had the
work been only the product of someone's imagination. The
following are a few translated excerpts from the text:
"The aircraft which can go by its own force like a bird - on the
earth or water or through the air - is called a Vimana. That
which can travel in the sky from place to place is called a
Vimana by the sages of old."
"The body must be strong and durable and built of light wood
[Laghu-data], shaped like a bird in flight with wings
outstretched [mahavinhanga]. Within it must be placed the mercury
engine, with its heating apparatus made of iron underneath.
"In the larger craft [Data-Vmana], because it is built heavier
[alaghu], four strong containers of mercury must be built into
the interior. When these are heated by controlled fire from the
iron containers, the Vimana possesses thunder power through the
mercury. The iron engine must have properly welded joints to be
filled with mercury, and when fire is conducted to the upper
part, it develops power with the roar of a lion. By means of the
energy latent in mercury, the driving whirlwind is set in motion,
and the traveler sitting inside the Vimana may travel in the air,
to such a distance as to look like a pearl in the sky."
Conspicuously missing from the ancient text is any distinct
description of how the Vimanas were actually constructed. The
reason for the lack of detail, the ancient sages declared, was
that "any person not initiated in the art of building machines of
flight will cause mischief." In other words, the intricate
knowledge of aircraft and flying in the post-Flood era was
carefully controlled by a select few.
The chief puzzle concerning the Hindu Vimanas as they are
described in the Samaranga, however, is their propulsion, which
as the text stated was somehow supplied by "the energy latent in
mercury." It is interesting that the element mercury had a
special place in the sciences of the ancients and of the
alchemists of medieval Europe. The British nuclear physicist
Edward Neville da Costa Andrade, in a speech delivered at
Cambridge in July 1946, noted that the famed discoverer of the
laws of gravitation, Sir Isaac Newton, knew something about the
secret of mercury. Quoting Lord Atterbury, a contemporary of
Newton, Andrade said, "Modesty teaches us to speak of the
ancients with respect, especially when we are not very familiar
with their works. Newton, who knew them practically by heart, had
the greatest respect for them, and considered them to be men of
genius and superior intelligence who had carried their
discoveries in every field much further than we today suspect,
judging from what remains of their writings. More ancient
writings have been lost than have been preserved, and perhaps our
new discoveries are of less value than those that we have lost."
Andrade continued, quoting Newton, "'Because the way by
which mercury may be impregnated, it has been thought fit to be
concealed by others that have known it, and therefore may
possibly be an inlet to something more noble, not to be
communicated without immense danger to the world.'"
What it is about mercury that could be of "immense danger"
to the world we do not know. Yet it seems apparent that the
ancients were well aware of the practical application of mercury.
Recently Soviet explorers excavating a cave near Tashkent in
the Uzbek S.S.R. discovered a number of conical ceramic pots,
each carefully sealed and each containing a single drop of
mercury. A description and illustrations of the mysterious pots
were published in the Soviet periodical "The Modern
Technologist." There is no clue to what these mercury containers
were used for, but they must have been highly treasured and used
for something that is beyond our present understanding and
technology. It was a secret that was found, used and preserved by
a select few - only to be lost again, perhaps forever.
....................
To be continued
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