To promote his turn-of-the-millennium book Technology of the Gods (2000), Childress released a chapter on ancient nuclear weapons to Nexus magazine, the “alternative” magazine founded in 1987 to report unconventional and occult stories, or what owner Duncan Roads calls “suppressed information”: “It was a magazine that addressed itself to the alternative fringe of society and thus it carried many ‘alternative’ points of view on the subjects of health, human rights, the environment, human potential and suppressed information. I revived this magazine by deleting all articles on the new age, the occult, environment and similar subjects, and by concentrating on what I call ‘suppressed information.’”[107]
Childress begins his article by discussing a geological anomaly: namely that the same glass-like fusion of sand which occurs on the land beneath a nuclear blast can also be found in ancient strata dating back up to 8,000 years. Hatcher provides the scientific explanation, and then he rejects it: “The general theory is that the glass was created by the searing, sand-melting impact of a cosmic projectile. However, there are serious problems with this theory....”[108]
Childress rejects the theory because he says there is no evidence of an impact crater. The 1988 work of A.A. Qureshi and H. A. Khan concluded that a crater would no longer be visible because the glass did not form 8,000 years ago, as Childress would have it, but much longer ago: “Based on these studies a meteoritic impact, which caused the fusion of Nubian sand or sandstone and resulted in the formation of Libyan desert glass 28.36 m.y. [million years] ago, has been recognized.”[109] A 1988 study by A.V. Murali et al. found traces of the actual meteor in the Libyan glass.[110] Childress also ignores another possibility. Childress himself admits that there have been impacts which did not produce craters, like the Tunguska Event of 1908, of which mainstream science holds that an asteroid hit Siberia and vaporized without leaving any trace except flattened trees and an explosion so loud it could be heard in Moscow and so bright that midnight was bright as noon in London.
A whole mythology has grown up around the Tunguska Event. Many explanations exist, ranging from the scientifically-accepted asteroid theory to the crash of a UFO and the resulting detonation of its nuclear reactor. How anyone knows whether UFOs are nuclear-powered is not explained. One fringe theory that fits well with Childress’ conspiratorial view of Tesla is the Tesla ray. True-believer Oliver Nichelson says, “The idea of a Tesla directed energy weapon causing the Tunguska explosion was incorporated in a fictional biography (1994), by another writer, and was the subject of a Sightings television program segment.”
Nichelson continues: “Given Tesla’s general pacifistic nature it is hard to understand why he would carry out a test harmful to both animals and the people who herded the animals even when he was in the grip of financial desperation. The answer is that he probably intended no harm, but was aiming for a publicity coup and, literally, missed his target.”[111] Nichelson then gives his version of how Tesla directed an energy-ray across the globe to blow up a relatively uninhabited section of Siberia.
So what does the Tunguska Even have to do with ancient atomic warfare?
Well, the answer lies in the literary career of David Hatcher Childress, author of books on both antediluvian nuclear weapons and the so-called Tesla Death-Ray. Childress needs the Tunguska event to be something other than an asteroid to bolster his theories. In the course of his work, Childress became convinced that Tesla had only “rediscovered” technology that had existed in ages past, much as Ignatius Donnelly asserted in his Atlantis: The Antediluvian World (1882). Therefore, Childress asks: “[I]s it possible that the vitrified desert is the result of atomic war in the ancient past? Could a Tesla-type beam weapon have melted the desert, perhaps in a test?”[112]
IV. Big Theories, No Evidence
Childress built on the mangled quotations from The Morning of the Magicians and the supposedly scientific report from Davenport and Vittore to develop his own “evidence” from the same sources: “If one were to believe the Mahabharata, great battles were fought with in the past with airships, particle beams, chemical warfare and presumably atomic weapons. . . [B]attles in the latter days of Atlantis were fought with highly sophisticated, high-tech weapons.” Needless to say, for Childress, Atlantis is not only real but an active competitor for ancient India, which he calls the Rama Empire: “The Rama Empire, described in the Mahabharata and Ramayana, was supposedly contemporaneous with the great cultures of Atlantis and Osiris [Egypt] in the West. Atlantis, well-known from Plato’s writings and ancient Egyptian records, apparently existed in the mid-Atlantic and was a highly technical and patriarchal civilization.”[113]
There is neither proof of Atlantis existing outside of Plato’s mind, nor any evidence that the Atlanteans had high-tech weaponry. I know of no ethnographies describing the familial relations of Atlanteans. Osiris, we are told, is pre-dynastic Egypt. Childress’ source? “Esoteric doctrine” unrevealed to the reader. It is, in fact, material derived from the Lemurian Fellowship, a New Age society Childress was once associated with. As for the Rama Empire, Childress says it began with “Nagas (Naacals) who had come into India from Burma and ultimately from the “Motherland to the East”—or so Col. James Churchward was told.”[114] Churchward wrote about the lost continent of Mu in the early twentieth century. His books sold well, but were quickly shown to be a hoax when he could produce no evidence of the tablets where he read of the continent or the monks who gave them to him. (See Chapter 15.)
Of course, this is good enough evidence for Childress. He identifies Mu with Lemuria and uses material from the Lemurian Fellowship lesson manual to tell how the Ramas and the Atlanteans fought a great war which resulted in nuclear holocaust. Never mind that Lemuria was a failed nineteenth century scientific theory designed to explain the appearance of lemurs in both India and Madagascar before plate tectonics showed that the animals walked from one to the other when both were linked.
None of this made it into Childress’ story, and he tells how the Atlanteans were angry that the Ramas had beat them in battle: “Assuming the above story is true, Atlantis was not pleased at the humiliating defeat and therefore used its most powerful and destructive weapon—quite possibly an atomic-type weapon!”[115] As has been shown, the above story is not true and there was neither Atlantis nor Lemuria to fight with any weapons at all, let alone nuclear ones.
Childress cites L. Sprague DeCamp’s assessment of ancient oil-based weapons like Greek Fire to bolster the claim of sophisticated stone-age weapons. DeCamp, it should be noted, was one of the disciples of the American horror author H. P. Lovecraft, whose mythos of Great Cthulhu helped spawn the ancient astronaut theory when Pauwels and Bergier used him as inspiration for Morning of the Magicians (see Chapter 2). Childress then brings in another ancient astronaut supporter, Robin Collyns, to testify that on the authority of another Indian epic, the Vaimānika Shāstra, ancient peoples had plasma guns powered by electrified mercury. The Vaimānika Shāstra is no ancient text; instead it was “channeled,” supposedly between 1918 and 1923, but remained unknown until 1952 when G. R. Josyer “revealed” its existence. The text claims to be a transcript of an ancient poem composed in another dimension by a character from the Ramayana.
If that were not enough, Childress brings in moldy nineteenth-century tales of vitrified ruins in Death Valley, California to say that ancient atom bombs melted the bricks in those buildings. However, he also says that he could not prove they existed, let alone were the result of a nuclear blast. Nevertheless, they form an important piece of evidence for the author.
Remember what von Däniken said about Sodom and Gomorrah, that they were destroyed by a vengeful alien race? Childress also makes this claim: “Probably the most famous of all ancient ‘nuke ’em’ stories is the well-known biblical tale of Sodom and Gomorrah.”[116] Childress apparently does not think it is that well-known, for he then quotes it in full. He then sets up a straw-man, smashing the paper-tiger argument that the cities were destroyed by p
late tectonics. Obviously, this is false, and Childress knows it. He then claims there is but one hypothesis to explain the disappearance of the two cities: “Therefore we come back to the popular theory that these cities were not destroyed in a geological cataclysm but in a man-made (or extraterrestrial-made) apocalypse that was technological in nature.”[117] Obviously, Childress neglects to recognize that there are other explanations, the simplest of which is that the cities and their destruction are the product of a fertile imagination.
The theory of Occam’s Razor says we cannot accept this possibility without extraordinary evidence. Childress believes he has it. Quoting L. M. Lewis, the reader learns that Lot’s wife (the pillar of salt) proves an atomic blast because the pillar still stood in the first century A.D. when Flavius Josephus saw it. Sodom, of course, was destroyed in 1898 BCE, according to Lewis. Therefore, had the salt pillar been anything but the remains of a nuclear blast, it should have vanished. Of course, he fails to note that the Dead Sea area produces new salt pillars on a regular basis. These are still called “Lot’s wife” by the locals, but few are of any great age.
So where does this leave the theory of ancient nuclear activity?
There is no basis in fact for the empty assertions of alternative authors like von Däniken, Pauwels and Bergier, and Childress, but they are repeated by so many who read these authors that they take on a verisimilitude that endangers a rational view of the past. How can genuine mysteries be explored and the vast tapestry of ancient history displayed in its full color and glory when rampant and baseless claims throw dark stains on the delicate images of the past?
The final question we must ask is this: Why does this silly theory matter?
V. What It All Means
The first reason the claims about ancient atom bombs matter is that far too many people take them seriously. Recently, first the History Channel and then H2 have given von Däniken and Childress a weekly soapbox to opine unchallenged on the ancient astronaut theory, telling an audience that once reached two million viewers that aliens blew up ancient cities with nuclear weapons and genetically engineered early humans. These claims are utterly without compelling evidence, and do violence to our public discourse by misleading the public and using the power of television to circumvent the need for real evidence and sound theories.
What is more interesting, though, is not the alleged evidence for ancient atom bombs but rather why people come to embrace a belief in the existence of nuclear devastation in the remote past. Surely the History/H2 would not program Ancient Aliens if two million or more viewers weren’t ready and willing to embrace the idea of aliens with atomic weapons.
Though the Atlantis legend has its origins in an unfinished work by Plato written more than 2,500 years ago, the modern version of the Atlantis legend begins with Ignatius Donnelly, an American politician who wrote Atlantis: The Antediluvian World in 1882 to prove that the lost continent was very real and was the origin of all European, Asian, and Native American civilizations. Donnelly was the first to equate Atlantis with the destructive power of advanced weaponry. In the book he discusses an event from the Bible when “a fire from the Lord consumed two hundred and fifty men” who led a rebellion against Moses.[118] Tellingly, though, Donnelly interpreted this event through the lens of the technology of his time: “This looks very much as if Moses had blown up the rebels with gunpowder.”[119] He also thought gunpowder was responsible for explosions in India and Atlantis.
Though Donnelly believed Atlantis was roughly as sophisticated as the pre-industrial Europe of the eighteenth century, those who built on his work steadily expanded the wonders of the lost continent to include everything from lasers to antigravity devices to nuclear power, keeping the mythical Atlantis one step ahead of modern technology. By the time of von Däniken, Donnelly’s quaint ideas about gunpowder had gone out the window. Instead, von Däniken argued that biblical explosions, like the one at Sodom, were effected “deliberately, by a nuclear explosion.”[120] Granted, even nuclear scientists like J. Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the atom bomb, noted the (thematic, not literal) similarities between passages in the Bhagavad Gita and the destructive power of atomic weapons, but why was it that in the 1970s ancient texts started to seem like historical records of nuclear war?
Ironically, von Däniken provides the answer to this question, in a passage I quoted earlier: “[S]ince the dropping of two atomic bombs on Japan,” he wrote, “we know the kind of damage such bombs cause and that living creatures exposed to direct radiation die or become seriously ill.”[121]
Because the nuclear age had produced horrors on a scale previously unimaginable, and because nuclear war was a very real possibility during the Cold War (the Cuban Missile Crisis had occurred just six years before von Däniken published his first book), it made sense that some would begin to look for mythological and historical precedents for otherwise unprecedented events. This relationship between modern technology and the ancient atom bomb theory has kept it current even as so many other “alternative” beliefs of the ’70s—like psychic spoon bending, EST, and pyramid power—have lost their currency.
In fact, the same day that the Svalbard Global Seed Vault opened, an article appeared on the American Chronicle website declaring that the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, Atlantis and the lesser-known lost continent of Mu were all the result of ancient atom bombs. Like von Däniken, writer Paul Dale Roberts immediately understood the connection between his reconstruction of the past and his concerns about the present: “The world is in dire straights (sic) …With the threat of terrorism, crime, global warming, wars and the rumors of wars, new diseases arising, we are facing the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.”[122]
Roberts’s description of ancient atomic warfare leaned heavily on the work of the field’s most popular author, David Hatcher Childress, who in the late 1990s connected the dots to events then in the news, the development of nuclear weapons in the 1990s in both Pakistan and India, countries that had previously fought several (non-nuclear) wars: “The echoes of ancient atomic warfare in south Asia continue to this day with India and Pakistan currently threatening each other,” Childress wrote. “Ironically, Kashmir, possibly the site of an earlier atomic war, is the focus of this conflict. Will the past repeat itself in India and Pakistan?”[123]
Childress has appeared in countless television documentaries to testify to the advanced state of ancient technology, and cable channels like History, H2, and Syfy have been complicit in popularizing the story of ancient nuclear weapons, the myth of Atlantis, and the “reality” of ancient astronauts. The echo chamber of the internet reinforces these beliefs among the core of believers. And ancient mysteries sell better than science.
“I have to wonder,” geologist Mervine wrote in 2005, “what inspires such crazy notions and how people such as Von Daniken and Childress manage to sell so many books. Certainly, far more copies of a single one of their books have been sold than, say, all the editions of my igneous petrology textbook.”[124] For Mervine, the answer comes from the explanatory power of fringe theories, which offer a one-size-fits-all explanation for the otherwise complex and difficult tangles of ancient history. It’s easier to say the aliens or Atlanteans did it than to study the intricacies of history.
While this may be true for the Atlantis theory or the ancient astronaut theory, for the specific case of ancient atom bombs, it seems that contemporary anxieties are being projected backward into the past. Until the first nuclear blast in 1945, no human civilization had possessed the power to completely destroy civilization, but imagining such a civilization in the deep past serves two powerful purposes.
First, it provides a morality tale for the modern world. A great civilization (human or alien) once had the power to destroy the world. They misused the power and destroyed themselves. We must therefore avoid their fate. Second, it provides a comforting ray of hope. Although early human civilization had been destroyed, we are still here today. Humanity can and will survive nuclear wa
r, and the species will go on.
The story of ancient atomic bombs, therefore, is a morality tale with a promise for redemption. It tells us that we will be ok even when the technology we create threatens to destroy us. For this reason, the modern myth of ancient atom bombs continues to ricochet around the internet, cable television, and “alternative history” publishers and likely will for years to come.
14. The Case of the False Quotations
The very spring and root of honesty and virtue lie in the felicity of lighting on good education.
—Plutarch, Of the Training of Children
Ancient Astronaut Theorists (AATs for short) have spent fifty years arguing that ancient Hindu texts present firsthand reports of prehistoric nuclear explosions. (See discussion in the previous chapter). However, a major problem with efforts at debunking AATs’ claims is that most scientific debunkers focus on, logically enough, the science involved since the most prominent debunkers tend to be physicists, evolutionary biologists, astronomers, etc. Fewer are experts in history and the humanities, which AATs have exploited, basing much of their evidence on ancient texts and artwork that hard scientists are not always able to effectively debunk on the merits of individual cases. Even an archaeologist, by dint of specialization, may not have the broad cross-cultural knowledge to spot the mistake in a quotation from a sacred text from an unfamiliar culture or time period.
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