Have They Really Been Here Before? Part 2

Following on the previous post, I’ll briefly discuss here why I think it’s possible that Earth may have been visited in the past by beings from elsewhere, most likely another planet.

First, let’s deal with the issue of traveling over vast interstellar distances. Science fiction writers (like myself) often invoke some heretofore unsuspected method for traveling faster than light. We all know, of course, that faster-than-light travel is impossible under General Relativity, and no one has yet shown that Einstein’s famous theory is false. As far as we know, it is not possible for a physical object to exceed the speed of light.

As far as we know.

Those are the salient words. We certainly don’t know everything there is to know about the universe. More than once, leading scientists have concluded that we pretty much knew everything except for some minor details, only to discover that we weren’t even close. I believe the current situation is no exception. We don’t know where the universe came from, or even if there is more than one. We don’t know where all the matter goes once it gets sucked into a black hole. We don’t know how quantum entanglement works. We don’t know whether there is or is not a faster-than-light particle called a tachyon.

People once thought it would be fatal for a human to travel faster than 25 miles per hour. People once thought powered flight was impossible. And if you asked anyone in 1900 if it would one day be possible to travel to the moon, they would have scoffed at you. It seems to me that there might very well be a way for a spaceship to travel superluminally (faster than light) through space, and we just don’t know about it yet.

Basically, I’m saying it is dangerous to state with certainty that anything is absolutely impossible, based on the limited state of our knowledge.

So, what evidence is there that might lead one to believe our little planet has had extraterrestrial visitors in the past? It turns out, there is quite a lot, far too much to describe it all here. As I mentioned before, there have been several books written about the subject, and each of them lists an abundance of evidence. (Not all of it is valid, mind you. For example, many books make a lot of hay over the 1513 Piri Reis map that supposedly shows a partial outline of Antarctica. Most scholars have concluded that it does no such thing, but even if it did, the knowledge could be attributed to Chinese explorers who apparently circumnavigated the world in 1421-1423.)

Let’s look briefly at three lines of evidence: Ancient writings, unusual artifacts and carvings, and ancient stoneworks.

Many ancient texts, including the bible and the Sumerian texts upon which much of the bible is based, speak of beings (gods) from the heavens who came to Earth, raised man up from the beasts, and took human women as wives. The bible speaks of the Elohim (plural) who came from heaven and took human wives. Gods are referred to in the plural many times in the old testament. That seems a rather curious thing for a supposedly monotheistic religion. Then there is Ezekiel’s description of a fiery chariot, which sounds just like a spacecraft seen through the eyes of a stone age person for whom advanced technology must have seemed like magic.

If you assume that space travel is impossible, or if you assume that we are the only semi-intelligent life in the entire vast universe, then you must come up with convoluted explanations for these texts that involve all sorts of mythological assumptions. If you assume that space travel is possible and that it is highly unlikely that we are the only civilization in the universe, then these texts are straightforward descriptions of spacecraft and technologically advanced beings. No convoluted mythologies or cultural assumptions required.

Sometimes the simplest explanation is the best one.

There are many more examples of this kind of thing, but there is not enough space here to go into them all. A simple internet search will reveal many more, along with explanations that both support and refute the idea that the texts could be describing aliens and spacecraft. You can be the judge of which explanations seem most valid.

Then there are the stone carvings and other artifacts. For instance:

This gold artifact from the Americas (dated to 500-800 CE) seems to depict, quite clearly, a jet aircraft. Attempts to explain it as a stylized bird seem to me to be rather desperate. And then there is this one:

This stone carving was discovered in Turkey and is dated to about 2500 years ago. It’s hard to see how this could be anything other than a representation of a rocket, complete with four engines in the back and a space-suited pilot in the cockpit. Even if the craftsman simply intended to create a carving of a mythical god, how on earth would he have come up with the idea to put the god in a mechanical contraption, and clothe the god in what can only be described as a space suit? It seems much more likely to me that the craftsman was simply re-creating, to the best of his ability, what he had seen.

Then there is this famous carving from the ruins of the ancient Mayan city of Palenque:

The carving seems to show a man at the controls of an advanced vessel of some sort, presumably a spacecraft. The man is reclined at an angle strongly suggestive of sitting in a cockpit, and his hands are clearly operating some sort of controls. At least, that’s the way it looks. It’s hard to envision what mythology would have the craftsman carve this highly technical looking contraption, but it’s not hard to imagine him representing something he had seen.

And finally, there are these heiroglyphs from Abdyos, in Egypt:

Traditional Egyptologists claim (and reasonably so) that the glyphs that seem to resemble aircraft are palimpsets, meaning they are the result of new carvings placed over old carvings, and then some of the new plaster broke off, leaving these “hybrid” glyphs. Well, maybe so. But I find it rather curious and not a little coincidental that those seemingly accidental glyphs so accurately resemble a helicopter, a jet, and two other modern-looking craft. One of them looks like a ground vehicle with a cockpit. Maybe if it were just one craft here, I could buy it. But four at once, on the same panel? That seems to me very unlikely. One would think that palimpsets would be much more random. For that reason, I tend to give little credence to the palimpset theory. It seems to me more likely that these glyphs are intentional and depict what the observer saw.

As I noted before, there are many, many more examples of ancient carvings, neolithic rock art, and medieval paintings that show spacecraft, flying saucers, and space-suited figures, from all over the world. I think you really have to stretch to try and explain it all away as imaginative mythology. Not that early humans weren’t imaginative, mind you, but it just seems curious to me that these artworks so faithfully depict the kinds of air and space craft we see today.

I’ll discuss the third item, ancient stoneworks, in Part 3.