Faking History

by Jason Colavito

  Maybe the Egyptians can do better.

  According to the Pyramid Texts, the sky was conceived as a solid mass that required support from gods who hold it up. Max Müller argued based on several texts that the Egyptians believed the sky to be a dome made of iron from which the stars were suspended on cables. They knew it was crafted from iron because meteorites that crashed to earth were made of iron and must therefore have been pieces of the dome.

  Well, this isn’t going well. Let’s try the Greeks.

  The two oldest extant Greek sources are Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey. According to the Iliad, the dome of heaven was a solid roof of bronze,[95] while the Odyssey claims that the heavens were instead made of iron.[96] Other myths make evident that the sky was conceived as a solid dome, or else Atlas would have had nothing to hold. The stars, the Greeks thought, were fixed in the dome of the heaven.[97]

  But certainly the Book of Enoch at least means that the Jews had special knowledge of the heavens.

  In Genesis 1:6-8, God separated the water above from the water below by creating a vault within the waters, just as in the Babylonian and Sumerian creation stories. Since there was water above the sky, the sky, called the “firmament”—the Hebrew term meaning literally the “solid sky”—must be solid to hold back these waters from merging again with the waters below. St. Augustine elucidated this position, which Christians adopted. Crucially, Jewish apocryphal literature makes clear that the ancient Jews speculated whether the firmament were composed “of clay, or of brass, or of iron.”[98] Origen, the Christian father, writes in his first homily on Genesis: “Omne enim corpus firmum est sine dubio, et solidum”—that without doubt the firmament was both firm and solid.

  Apparently Temple’s flying space frogs did a poor job educating the Sumerians or any other group. So where, exactly, do AATs think the ancients imagined their aliens coming from?

  13. Ancient Atom Bombs?

  I. The Myth of Ancient Atomic Warfare

  In February 2008, global dignitaries gathered to inaugurate the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, a repository for plant life designed to withstand nuclear war so survivors could restart civilization with healthy seeds. Magnus Bredeli-Tveiten, who oversaw construction of the vault, told the Associated Press that he expected it to last as long as the 4,500-year-old pyramids of Egypt. However, for a certain percentage of the public, ancient civilizations like Egypt are just one key to a nuclear war that already happened—thousands of years ago.

  Believers maintain that in the distant past either extraterrestrials or a lost civilization like Atlantis detonated nuclear weapons, producing terrible devastation. This disaster was recorded, they say, in the Bible, Hindu scriptures, and world mythologies. Sodom and Gomorrah felt the sting of nuclear weapons when “the LORD rained down burning sulfur on Sodom and Gomorrah—from the LORD out of the heavens.”[99]

  An ancient Indian epic was said (erroneously, as we shall see) to describe a “single projectile charged with all the power of the universe. An incandescent column of smoke and flame as bright as ten thousand suns rose in all its splendor.” To believers, these sound like eyewitness accounts of nuclear bombs being dropped from above. To skeptics, these sound like imaginative interpretations of the equivalent of prehistoric science fiction.

  No mainstream scientist or historian endorses the idea of prehistoric atomic bombs, and nearly all experts believe the evidence cited to support the idea is misinterpreted at best and fraudulent at worst. For example, believers hold that deposits of 28-million-year-old glass found buried in the deserts of Libya are the result of ancient atomic bombs that melted the desert sand. In fact, according to geologist Evelyn Mervine, the glass (while still not completely understood) is likely the result of either a meteorite impact or volcanic action.

  Textual Literalism

  One of the key tenets of the modern ancient astronaut or lost civilization craze is the belief that ancient scriptures are the literal testament of what has gone before. For this reason young-earth creationists still claim that the earth is only 6,000 years old, and others take literally the harrowing adventure the Hebrew patriarch Enoch was said to have had in heaven. But this textual literalism tends to be highly restricted, confined to specific texts, typically those that are least familiar or accessible to the average reader and thus most difficult to check.

  From the very beginning of the ancient astronaut movement, Hindu mythology, exotic to Western eyes, has been a mainstay of ancient astronaut theories. Ancient Vedic epics, running into the hundreds of thousands or even millions of words each were perfect for out-of-context quoting since ancient astronaut writers could be fairly certain no one would be able to find and check their accuracy. These theorists wish us to believe that ancient Indian Vedic literature is every bit as true as a modern-day news report. “Researchers” like self-proclaimed “real life Indiana Jones” David Hatcher Childress fervently argue that the flying machines and powerful weapons described in the Indian Vedas were actual airplanes and even nuclear weapons.

  It is this latter claim of ancient atomic warfare that has sparked the interest of many internet conspiracy mongers, and these ancient atom bombs are a mainstay of the History Channel-style “ancient mystery” documentaries. As of this writing, claims of prehistoric nuclear warfare continue to be repeated in newly-published books of “alternative” history, and are broadcast frequently on Ancient Aliens, seen by more than a million people in the United States and many more worldwide.

  It is therefore important to examine this strange theory critically to see where it came from and why anyone would believe aliens used nuclear bombs on prehistoric humans.

  II. The First Ancient Atomic Bomb Theories

  Obviously, the earliest references to the theory that ancient sites were destroyed by atomic or nuclear weapons do not predate the creation of those weapons in 1945. After the United States developed the first working atomic bombs, J. Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the atomic bomb, used a line from ancient Indian epic the Bhagavad Gita to reflect on the enormous power of the Bomb: “Now, I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” He spoke these words not at the time of the detonation in July 1945, but twenty years later, on a television documentary, The Decision to Drop the Bomb. From this, an apocryphal story arose that Oppenheimer had told students in 1952 that the Manhattan Project produced the first atomic weapon “in modern times.” There is no evidence that Oppenheimer ever said this, and his reference to the Bhagavad Gita was meant as a poetic reflection, not a serious scientific reflection on ancient weaponry.

  Among fringe thinkers, an allegedly scientific paper by two researchers named David W. Davenport and Ettore Vincenti is said to have recorded the scholars’ belief that an archaeological site they investigated in India, the famous city of Mohenjo Daro, was destroyed in ancient times due to a nuclear blast. However, the authors’ 1979 book, 2000 a.C. Distruzione atomica (Atomic Destruction in 2000 B.C.), was not a scientific paper but another work of pseudoscience, unrecognized by academia. There is to date no evidence of nuclear explosions prior to 1945.

  Instead, the earliest reference to prehistoric nuclear warfare appears to be the Soviet mathematician and ethnologist Matest M. Agrest, who argued in 1959 that Sodom and Gomorrah had been destroyed by nuclear bombs from alien spaceships. This claim was brought to the attention of the other side of the Iron Curtain through The Morning of the Magicians (1960), a French work by Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier which outlined one of the earliest complete (nonfiction) versions of the modern ancient astronaut theory (see chapter two) and offered outlandish claims about ancient nuclear warfare.[100] We will examine their specific claims about ancient India momentarily, but first we turn to the other alleged prehistoric bomb blast—the one from the Bible.

  Biblical Bombs

  Those who support the theory of ancient atom bombs tend to be believers in a lost civilization like Atlantis or in extraterrestrial intervention in ancient history, the so-called “ancient astronaut” theory popula
rized by Swiss hotelier Erich von Däniken in the 1960s and ’70s with his book Chariots of the Gods? (1968), its sequels, and movie adaptation as In Search of Ancient Astronauts (1973), narrated by Rod Serling of Twilight Zone fame. It was von Däniken who introduced mainstream audiences to the idea (borrowed from the French writer Robert Charroux, as well as Pauwels and Bergier) that the “aliens” had blown up Sodom and Gomorrah with atom bombs. Pauwels and Bergier quote what they say is a description from the Dead Sea Scrolls about the nuclear effects of the Sodom bomb,[101] but I have been unable to find this passage in published versions of the scrolls. It appears to be a lightly paraphrased and reordered version of the Genesis account, translated from its original tongue to French to English with modern terms like “explosions” added in. No references are given. As we shall see, this is not the only case where Pauwels and Bergier offered an unusual translation to support their belief in ancient atomic warfare.

  Von Däniken argued in Chariots of the Gods? (1968) that atom bombs destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah, the biblical cities of sin: “since the dropping of two atomic bombs on Japan, we know the kind of damage such bombs cause. . . Let us imagine for a moment that Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed according to plan, i.e. deliberately, by a nuclear explosion.”[102] From his offhand remark, asked as a question rather than stated as fact, a whole sub-genre of ancient warfare grew, usually without reference to the earlier and (slightly) more serious versions proposed by Pauwels and Bergier or Agrest. However, this remark was, well, remarkably ill-considered. Here is what Genesis says about the destruction of the two cities:

  By the time Lot reached Zoar, the sun had risen over the land. Then the LORD rained down burning sulfur on Sodom and Gomorrah—from the LORD out of the heavens. Thus he overthrew those cities and the entire plain, destroying all those living in the cities--and also the vegetation in the land. But Lot’s wife looked back, and she became a pillar of salt. Early the next morning Abraham got up and returned to the place where he had stood before the LORD. He looked down toward Sodom and Gomorrah, toward all the land of the plain, and he saw dense smoke rising from the land, like smoke from a furnace. So when God destroyed the cities of the plain, he remembered Abraham, and he brought Lot out of the catastrophe that overthrew the cities where Lot had lived.[103]

  This description is notable for its brevity, but even this brief mention has little in common with an actual atomic or nuclear blast. When atomic bombs go off, the majority of their destructive power derives from the blast wave—a wall of wind that knocks down all around it. No mention of this blast wave—the most prominent effect of a nuclear blast—shows up in Genesis. Theoretically, with Lot so close to the site of the destruction, he should have felt the blast. While nuclear weapons can set off fires, this is entirely dependent on the amount of flammable material and the distance from the blast site; whereas in the biblical description the dominant motifs are first, a rain of burning sulfur and second, heavy smoke and fire lasting into the next day. The clear implication, taking the story as literally as von Däniken would like, is that the two cities were destroyed by a shower of flaming rocks from the sky. This led some researchers to propose recently that cities were destroyed by an asteroid, though this is, like so many theories, unproven since neither Sodom nor Gomorrah has ever been found (though some Bronze Age candidates like Bab edh-Dhra have been proposed), or even proved to have once existed outside the Bible.

  The Indian Connection

  As I have noted, von Däniken’s most important source was not scientific literature, or even first-hand observation; instead, von Däniken derived much of his information and wild speculation from a The Morning of the Magicians. Pauwels and Bergier misquote out-of-context passages from Vedic Indian literature to claim that India experienced atomic warfare ten thousand years ago.[104] We will explore their specific misquotation momentarily. For now, it is important to note that von Däniken read and repeated these claims for an international audience and continued the tradition of misinterpretation. The author gives a lengthy quotation in Chariots of the Gods? from the Mahabharata, the ancient Indian epic, which he likens to the devastating effects of a nuclear blast, suggesting that the ancient poem is a record of nuclear war in the distant past. The quotation describes what sounds like the effects of a nuclear blast:

  It was as if the elements had been unleashed. The sun spun round. Scorched by the incandescent heat of the weapon, the world reeled in fever. Elephants were set on fire by the heat and ran to and fro in a frenzy to seek protection from the terrible violence. The water boiled, the animals died, the enemy was mown down and the raging of the blaze made the trees collapse in rows as in a forest fire. The elephants made a fearful trumpeting and sank dead to the ground over a vast area. Horses and war chariots were burnt up and the scene looked like the aftermath of a conflagration. Thousands of chariots were destroyed, then deep silence descended on the sea. The winds began to blow and the earth grew bright. It was a terrible sight to see. The corpses of the fallen were mutilated by the terrible heat so that they no longer looked like human beings. Never before have we seen such a ghastly weapon and never before have we heard of such a weapon.[105]

  However, this quotation is translated into English from an 1889 German translation of the Sanskrit original, with no indication of where in the 1.8 million words of the epic the quotation came, or in what context this amazing weapon worked. In Book 7, I found what I believe to be the same passage in the standard Ganguili translation:

  The very elements seemed to be perturbed. The Sun seemed to turn round. The universe, scorched with heat, seemed to be in a fever. The elephants and other creatures of the land, scorched by the energy of that weapon, ran in fright, breathing heavily and desirous of protection against that terrible force. The very waters being heated, the creatures residing in that element, O Bharata, became exceedingly uneasy and seemed to burn. From all the points of the compass, cardinal and subsidiary, from the firmament and the very Earth, showers of sharp and fierce arrows fell and issued, with the impetuosity of Garuda or the wind. Struck and burnt by those shafts of Açwatthāman that were all endued with the impetuosity of the thunder, the hostile warriors fell down like trees burnt down by a raging fire. Huge elephants, burnt by that weapon, fell down on the Earth all around, uttering fierce cries loud as those of the clouds. Other huge elephants, scorched by that fire, ran hither and thither, and roared aloud in fear, as if in the midst of a forest conflagration. The steeds, O king, and the cars also, burnt by the energy of that weapon, looked, O sire, like the tops of trees burnt in a forest fire. […] Burnt by the energy of Açwatthāman’s weapon, the forms of the slain could not be distinguished.[106]

  The context for this passage makes clear that the speaker is describing an imaginary weapon composed of fiery arrows that rain flame down onto the ground. Unlike an actual nuclear weapon, which produces a mushroom cloud, vaporizes the area beneath it, and then dissipates, this weapon is specifically said to be like a “smokeless fire.” It causes the sky to fill with clouds that rain blood, but instead of vaporizing those it hits, instead, it causes the air to boil, setting alight all around it. In an actual nuclear explosion, the blast force is the force that kills once one passes the hypocenter. And anyone who survived to describe the blast would by definition have been in the region where the blast wave overtook any flame. Outside the small area where the actual explosion occurs, the thermal radiation from a nuclear blast is intense, but brief, lasting perhaps one or two seconds. It can cause severe skin burns (but not light a person aflame). Thermal blasts can ignite highly flammable materials, though these do not include elephants or trees; nor would it boil the rivers and seas.

  All of this is irrelevant, however, since the description makes clear that the weapon is no bomb but instead a type of imaginary sky-cannon, shooting flames like arrows or thunderbolts to the ground below. The context notes that the weapon is wielded by an individual, who fires it. It is not dropped like a bomb.

  But this type of c
reative interpretation pales against the wholesale rewriting of Indian myth to suit the needs of the ancient astronaut theory that we find in The Morning of the Magicians and the unscrupulous writers who altered and mangled even its dubious scholarship. In Morning, two passages from the Mahabharata are cited as proof of ancient atomic warfare. In later works, like those of David Hatcher Childress, these two distinct passages from a prose translation of the epic are conflated into a single block of text and then rewritten as poetry in order to show that ancient Indians knew the effects of radiation poisoning; of course no such passage exists in the Mahabharata. It is instead a misquotation of a mistranslation. The flawed transmission of this passage is so complex that the entire next chapter of this book is devoted to exploring this one passage, but suffice it to say for now that the “radiation poisoning” passage originally referred to the scavenging of corpses by vermin.

  The false version of this passage appears time and again in alternative works—more than three dozen times in print and thousands more online. In a half dozen books, Childress alone repeats the same alleged passage from the Mahabharata, gleefully explaining that the excerpt describes in precise detail the exact pattern of radiation poisoning seen after a nuclear event—something ancient people could not possibly have known yet recorded in their literature. Childress is not the only author to rely on this false quotation, merely the most prolific, but he has an important reason for needing it to be true.

  III. The Tesla Death Ray

  David Hatcher Childress is perhaps the most famous proponent of the atomic warfare theory. Childress calls himself a “lost science scholar,” and claimed in his book Extraterrestrial Archaeology that the moon and nearby planets contain pyramids, domes and spaceports visible by telescope and satellite. (Full disclosure: Childress publicly criticized my discussion of his theories in my 2005 book The Cult of Alien Gods as inaccurate because it linked him with those who believe in alien visitations in the remote past. He claimed at that time that ancient anomalies were the work of a lost super-civilization, but he returned to the alien intervention theory in 2009 when he joined the History Channel’s Ancient Aliens television series.) He has a profound respect for the scientist Nikola Tesla, who Childress believes invented antigravity, time-travel, death-ray, and thought machines. Childress is also prone to seeing conspiracies, arguing in his book The Fantastic Inventions of Nikola Tesla that the U.S. government conspired to suppress the discoveries made by Tesla to protect big business. Incidentally, Childress claims only to be the posthumous co-author of Fantastic Inventions with Tesla as the main author.