obstructive to progress. Now everything is more 'civilised' and there is much less fuss. Theories and intolerably audacious ideas are hushed up or dismissed by killer phrases, as the Americans say. There are many possibilities:
• It's against the rules! (Always a good one!) It's not classical enough! (Bound to impress.)
• It's too revolutionary! (Unequalled in its deterrent effect!)
• The universities won't go along with that! (Convincing!)
• Others have already tried that! (Of course. But were they successful?)
• We can't see any sense in it! (And that's that!)
• That hasn't been proved yet! (Quod erat demonstrandum!)
Five hundred years ago a scientist cried out in the law courts, 'Common sense must tell anyone that the earth cannot possibly be a ball, otherwise the people on the lower half would fall into the void!'
'Nowhere in the Bible,' asserted another, 'does it say that the earth revolves round the sun. Consequently every such assertion is the work of the devil!'
It seems us if narrow-mindedness was always a special characteristic when new worlds of ideas were beginning. But on the threshold of the twenty-first century the research worker should be prepared for fantastic realities. He should be eager to revise laws and knowledge which were considered sacrosanct for centuries, but are nevertheless called in question by new knowledge. Even if a reactionary army tries to dam up this new intellectual flood, a new world must be conquered in the teeth of all the unteachable, in the name of truth and reality. Anyone who spoke about satellites in scientific circles twenty years ago was committing a kind of academic suicide. Today artificial heavenly bodies, namely satellites, revolve round the sun; they have photographed Mars and landed smoothly on the Moon and Venus, radioing first-class photographs of the unknown landscape back to earth with their (tourist) cameras.
When the first such photos were radioed to Earth from Mars in the spring of 1958, the strength used was 0.000,000,000,000,000,01 watts, an almost incredibly weak output.
Yet NOTHING is incredible any longer. The word 'impossible' should have become literally impossible for the modern scientist. Anyone who does not accept this today, will be crushed by the reality tomorrow. So let us stick tenaciously to our theory, according to which astronauts from distant planets visited the earth thousands of years ago. We know that our ingenuous and primitive forefathers did not know what to make of the astronauts' superior technology. They worshipped the astronauts as 'gods' who came from other stars and the astronauts had no other choice but patiently to accept their adoration as divinities— a homage, incidentally, for which our astronauts on unknown planets must be quite prepared.
Some parts of our earth are still inhabited by primitive peoples to whom a machine-gun is a weapon of the devil. In that case a jet aircraft may well be an angelic vehicle to them. And a voice coming from a radio set the voice of a god. These last primitive peoples, too, naively hand down from generation to generation in their sagas their impressions of technical achievements that we take for granted. They still scratch their divine figures and their wonderful ships coming from heaven on cliffs and cave walls. In this way these savage peoples have actually preserved for us what we are seeking today.
Cave drawings in Kohistan, France, North America and Southern Rhodesia, in the Sahara and Peru, as well as Chile, all contribute to our theory. Henri Lhote, a French scholar, discovered at Tassili (Sahara) several hundred (!) walls painted with many thousands of pictures of animals and men, including figures in short elegant coats. They carry sticks and undefinable chests on the sticks. Next to the animal paintings we are astonished by a being in a kind of diver's suit. The great god Mars—so Lhote christened him—was originally over 18 ft high; but the 'savage' who bequeathed the drawing to us can scarcely have been as primitive as we should like him to be, if everything is to fit neatly into the old pattern of thought. After all the 'savage' obviously used a scaffolding to be able to draw in proportion like that, for there have been no shifts in ground level in these caves during the last few millennia. Without overstretching my imagination, I get the impression that the great god Mars is depicted in a space- or diving-suit. On his heavy powerful shoulders rests a helmet which is connected to his torso by a kind of joint. There are a number of slits on the helmet where mouth and nose would normally be. One would readily believe that it was the result of chance or even in the pictorial imagination of the prehistoric 'artist' if this picture was unique. But there are several of these clumsy figures with the same equipment at Tassili, and very similar figures have also been found on rock faces in the USA, in the Tulare region of California.
I should like to be generous and I am willing to postulate that the primitive artists were unskilled and portrayed the figures in this rather crude way because it was the best they could do. But in that case why could the same primitive cave-dwellers depict animals and normal human beings to perfection? So it seems more credible to me to assume that the 'artists' were perfectly capable of drawing what they actually saw. In Inyo County (California) a geometrical figure in a cave drawing is recognisable—without overstraining the imagination—as a normal slide-rule in a double frame. The archaeological opinion is that the drawing shows figures of the gods.
An animal of unknown species with gigantic upright horns on its head appears on a pottery vessel found at Siyalk in Iran. Why not? But both horns display five spirals to left and right. If you imagine two rods with large porcelain insulators, that is roughly what this drawing looks like. What do the archaeologists say to that? Quite simply that they are symbols of a god. Gods are good value. People explain a great deal—certainly everything that is unexplained—by referring to their unknowableness and super-naturalness. In this world of the undemonstrable they can live in peace. Every figurine that is found, every artefact that is put together, every figure that can be restored from fragments—they are all instantly associated with some ancient religion or other. But if an object cannot be fitted into any of the existing religions, even forcibly, some new crackpot old cult is rapidly conjured up—like a rabbit out of a top hat) The sum works out once again.
But what if the frescoes, at Tassili or in the USA, or in France, actually reproduce what the primitive peoples saw? What should we say if the spirals on the rods really depicted antennae, just as the primitive peoples had seen them on the unfamiliar gods? Isn't it possible that things which ought not to exist do in fact exist? A 'savage', who nevertheless was skilful enough to execute wall paintings, cannot really have been so savage. The wall drawing of the White Lady of Brandberg (South Africa) could be a twentieth-century painting. She wears a short-sleeved pullover, closely-fitting breeches, and gloves, garters and slippers. The lady is not alone; behind her stands a thin man with a strange prickly rod in his hand and wearing a very complicated helmet with a kind of visor. This would be accepted as a modern painting without hesitation, but the snag is that we are dealing with a cave drawing.
All the gods who are depicted in cave drawings in Sweden and Norway have uniform undefinable heads. The archaeologists say that they are animal heads. Yet isn't there something rather absurd about worshipping a 'god' whom one also slaughters and eats? We often see ships with wings and even more frequently typical antennae.
Figures in bulky suits occur again in Val Camonica (Brescia, Italy) and, annoyingly enough, they also have horns on their heads. I am not going so far as to claim that the Italian cave-dwellers shuttled backwards and forwards between North America or Sweden, the Sahara and Spain (Ciudad Real) to transmit their illustrative talents and ideas. Yet the awkward question is left hanging in the air—why did the primitive peoples create figures in bulky suits with antennae on their heads independently of each other?
I should not waste a word on these unexplained oddities if they only existed in one place in the world. But
