The Mammoth Book of Conspiracies

of about 100 miles south of Godman Field to an altitude of 33 thousand feet and did not sight the object. At about 1645 CST when NG800 reported not seeing the object I left the Control Tower.

At about 1735 CST I returned to the Control Tower and a bright light different than a star at a position of about 240° azimuth and 8° elevation from the Control Tower. This was a round object. It seemed to have a dark spot in the center and the object moved north and disappeared from the horizon at a point 250° from the Tower. The unusual fact about this object was the fact that it remained visible and glowed through the haze near the Earth when no other stars were visible and did not disappear until it went below the level of the earth in a manner similar to the sun or moon setting. This object was viewed and tracked with the Weather Station theodolite from the hangar roof.

MAYAN CALENDAR

If you are reading this in 2013 or beyond, then the Mayan Calendar was wrong and the world has not disappeared in a catastrophe.

The medieval Central American civilization of the Maya used three intersecting calendar cycles, the haab (civil year, 365 days), the tzolkin (religious year, 260 days) and the Long Count. The Long Count gives the total number of days which have passed since a fixed point in the past which, for we users of the Gregorian calendar, is 11 August 3114 BC. Since the Long Count or “Great Cycle” lasts for 5,125.36 years, this means that time runs out on 21 December 2012 .

Did the Maya know something we didn’t? Forgotten after the invasion of Yucatan by the Spanish, the Mayan Calendar was revived in the late twentieth century from information preserved in the study Relacion de las cosas de Yucatan by Fray Diego de Landa, a Franciscan monk, accompanying the conquistadors. Soberingly for the apocalyptically minded, numerous other native myths based on the sun cycle also end with the end of days.

How the catastrophe will arrive is open to conjecture. Some claim that 2012 is the year the Earth will experience a polar shift, others moot the final triumph of the New World Order. The End Game scenario with the most scientific substance is that 2012 will see massive solar activity on the scale of the 1859 supercharged sun strike known as the Carrington Event. Most worrying of all, the Earth’s magnetic shield ain’t what it used to be in 1859, meaning that solar activity has a large hole through which to enter and zap the globe’s electrical and electronic systems. Human cost, with no communications, refrigerated medicines, heat, financial services could be extreme. Some scientists postulate that full recovery could take a decade.

Further Reading

John Jenkins, Tzolkin: Visionary Perspectives and Calendar Studies, 1994

NAZCA LINES

Ever since the first explorers stumbled on the Nazca Lines, high in the Peruvian Andes, they have exercised the Western imagination. The artificial lines, cut into the red desert floor rock, range from animal shapes to complex geometric patterns. By carbon-dating the hundreds of giant geoglyphs, as the shapes are properly known, archaeologists have determined that the Nazca Lines are at least 1,500 years old. After that, it is open season on who made the lines and why.

Noting that some of the lines are only intelligible from the air, many theorists have reached for the stars for the answers. Frenchmen Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier proposed in The Morning of the Magicians that the lines had an alien origin, and that said ETs helped hairy lumbering proto-humans to stand up, count and take over the planet from other earthly life forms. The doyen of alternative history, Erich Von Daniken, climbed on the alien-wagon and mooted in his 1969 classic Chariots of the Gods?: Unsolved Mysteries of the Past that the Nazca Plateau was an airfield for ET-craft. The lines were markers for the runway, and the figures enticers by humans for the aliens to drop in (a sort of ancient take on the cargo cult). Going one better, a current troop of UFO-centric conspiracists maintain that the Nazca Lines are still a landing ground for alien astronauts, with members of the New World Order making up the reception committee. Quite how the ETs and the NWO manage to avoid the gaze of the hundreds of tourists to the Nazca Desert, an UNESCO World Heritage site, is left deafeningly silent. Neither do the “runway” theories explain how a spacecraft can land on the soft desert without getting stuck in the mud.

Closer to planet Earth, but still edging towards the wacky, is the notion of Jim Woodman of the International Explorers Society that the ancient Nazca Indians who inhabited the region fabricated hot-air balloons for “ceremonial flights” during which they could “appreciate the great ground drawings on the pampas”. Full marks to Mr Woodman for effort: using cloth, reeds and rope, Woodman and his colleagues made a balloon and basket, in which he and British balloonist Julian Nott made a shaky 300 feet high flight over the Nazca plain. When the balloon took a dive downwards, Woodman and Nott were lucky to escape with their lives, jumping clear of the craft ten feet off the desert floor. Woodman’s thesis flies about as well as his balloon: there is no evidence whatsoever that balloons existed 1,500 years back.

With her feet planted firmly on the Earth, Dr Maria Reiche spent nearly fifty years mapping and studying the Nazca geoglyphs, starting as the assistant to American archaeologist Paul Kosok. Like Kosok, who called the Nazca Lines, “the largest astronomy book in the world”, Reiche maintained that the geoglyphs comprised a sun calendar for the ancient Nazca peoples. Her magnum opus The Mystery on the Desert, however, attracted as many brickbats as bouquets, because numerous of the geoglyphs have no astronomical significance. The likelihood is that lines that do not align with the stars have a religious purpose, these drawings being a form of worship to their sky gods. Who, after all, would be in a position to see them.

Any Von Danikenesque belief that only alien astronauts could have ordered up the Nazca Lines was convincingly ended in a muddy field in Kentucky by researcher Joe Nickell in 1982. Using simple tools and technology available to Nazca Indians—such as wooden stakes, numbers of which archaeologists have found next to the Nazca designs—Nickell and a small team was able to recreate the geoglyphs within a week without any aerial assistance at all.

Further Reading

Erich von Daniken, Chariots of the Gods?, 1960

Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier, Le Matin des magiciens, 1960

Maria Reiche, The Mystery on the Desert, 1949

NAZI GOLD

Treasure hunters have flocked to Lake Toplitz in the picturesque Austrian Alps ever since a group of diehard Nazis retreated to the area in the final days of the Second World War. With US troops closing in, the Nazis transported metal boxes to the edge of the lake, by lorry and by horse-drawn wagon, then chucked them into the icy depths.

What was in the boxes? A rumour soon swept around that the said crates contained gold looted by German troops throughout Europe and carried back to Germany. Or gold stolen from the Nazis’ German victims.

In searching for the fabled lost gold of the Nazis many have died, causing the Austrian authorities to ban diving without express approval.

The tragedy is that the Nazis’ stolen gold was not dumped in Lake Toplitz—from which it would have been all but impossible to recover it, short of hauling a U-boat there—but in the altogether drier environment of the Merkers