Faking History

by Jason Colavito

  I do not believe in the metal or platinum coffins. Hexagonal or octagonal basalt columns, overgrown with mussels and coral, could easily be mistaken for coffins under the water. Never mind. The fact remains that Japan exported platinum from Ponape after its mandate in 1919.

  Where did all this platinum come from?[146]

  Note that this story makes no sense as reported since the U.S. did not occupy Ponape during World War II, and Japan was only dismissed from the island after surrendering in 1945. Thus, the outbreak of the War in 1939 (though Japan had been fighting in China for several years), or 1941 (with U.S. entry) has no direct correlation to withdrawal, and thus no effect on the cessation of platinum extraction a decade earlier, based on the date I’m going to establish below. Also: How were they breaking up the underwater, water-tight coffins to take back chunks?

  Despite even the notoriously credulous von Däniken’s doubt over the authenticity of the platinum coffins, David Childress repeated the story, almost verbatim, in (as is his practice) several of his books. From there, it has become part of alternative lore, appearing in hundreds of books and websites as evidence for space aliens, Atlantis, Lemuria, African super-geniuses, and other occult ideas. Somehow, in the telling the story has mutated from divers breaking off bits of the platinum coffins to modern versions where the coffins were raised up and then melted down and cast into bars for transport to Japan. No one has ever made public a single shipping manifest or other piece of documentation proving that any platinum actually left Ponape during the Japanese mandate.

  Von Däniken derives this story not from firsthand knowledge but from the explorer and artist Herbert Rittlinger, in his 1939 book The Measureless Ocean, which puts a terminus ante quem on the story. Under the Treaty of Versailles in 1919, the Caroline Islands (including Ponape) were given to Japan as a mandate, taking them over from the defeated Germany. This puts a terminus post quem on the tale. This is the same Herbert Rittlinger who was a Nazi intelligence agent in Turkey for Hitler during World War II. His South Pacific trip is known to have occurred between his 1932 Turkish sailing jaunt and his 1936 Amazon sailing adventure. Therefore, the platinum, if it existed, was recovered entirely between 1919 and 1935, with an outside chance of extraction starting a few years earlier, since Japan was the occupying power on the island during World War I.

  In 1920, the U.S. exported 1,102 ounces of unmanufactured platinum to Japan, according to the U.S. Geologic Survey, a number consistent with other years, implying that no new source of platinum had reached Japan at this point, at least none capable of severely affecting demand or international platinum prices, as the discovery of whole coffins made entirely of the rare metal would have done. In internet chatter, the “several pieces” of platinum claimed in 1939 have now become “several tons” of platinum, which would certainly have distorted world commodities markets if true. Only 3.6 million troy ounces (roughly 230 tons) of platinum are mined on earth each year, almost all of it in South Africa and North America.

  Platinum was widely used throughout Southeast Asia, and as Japan colonized Southeast Asia in the 1920s and 1930s, the Japanese discovered immense amounts of platinum already in the hands of Southeast Asians, which, of course, they either confiscated outright or bought with inflated paper currency (military scrip). By the outbreak of World War II, the Japanese military had billions of dollars worth of platinum ingots, and the accused war criminal Yoshio Kodama alone had plundered millions of dollars’ worth of platinum during the Japanese occupation of China. Whatever else this means, it clearly implies that Ponape was never a primary, or even important, source of platinum for Japan.

  I can’t find any evidence that platinum was ever exported from Ponape, and I ask alternative writers to please show us the shipping documents proving it existed and was exported. How can von Däniken know that platinum supplanted all other island exports if there are no export statistics showing this? Platinum does not appear in the list of exports for the island collected by the U.S. government in the 1920s, let alone as the chief export.[147] How would he know the amount and its value to know it exceeded the value of all other products? And what type of platinum was this? Uncombined native platinum, or something refined from a sulfide? Why is there no more platinum off Ponape? The story, as given by Rittlinger, says the Japanese merely “stopped” collecting it, in 1935, because of mysterious disappearances, not because they ran out of platinum. So, surely some should still be there.

  The fact is that there is simply no mention of platinum on or around Ponape in any literature I could find prior to 1939 and no wild claims of aliens or super-civilizations prior to von Däniken’s popularizing of the ex-Nazi intelligence officer’s book in 1972. In fact, the only discussions of this story occur in “alternative” books, and none has any information not derived from the English translation of von Däniken’s summary of Rittlinger in Gold of the Gods, except, weirdly, Childress, who actually tried to find the platinum coffins and failed. So, there you have it: Von Däniken doesn’t believe they exist, and Childress couldn’t find them. Yet somehow they keep rising up from their watery graves time and again thanks to the alternative world’s endless penchant for recycling material. Rittlinger, a dedicated environmentalist, would at least be proud of the recycling effort.

  20. The Believer Who Almost Became President

  Did you know that an ancient astronaut theorist was almost president of the United States? It’s true, and, as always, there’s a weird connection to H. P. Lovecraft.

  Our story opens in 1944, during World War II, when an ailing President Franklin Roosevelt was running for his fourth term as America’s head of state. For the previous term, Henry A. Wallace had been serving as vice-president of the United States, and he served as the Secretary of Agriculture before that. Wallace recognized that Roosevelt was unlikely to survive his fourth term, and, of course, he wanted to remain on as vice-president with the near-certainty of succeeding to the top job. Party bosses were deeply troubled by the possibility of a Wallace presidency, and they worked behind the scenes to dump Wallace and replace him on the ticket with the more acceptable Harry Truman. What was it that made Wallace unacceptable? Ancient astronauts. Sort of.

  Wallace never formally joined any theosophical groups, but he was deeply influenced by theosophical thinking. One of Theosophy’s main tenets is that extraterrestrial spirit beings from Venus, the moon, and Mars came to the ancient earth and influenced the development of civilization on Lemuria and Atlantis. Wallace became deeply involved in the occult speculations of the Russian émigré artist Nicholas Roerich, who had joined Theosophy and developed his sub-discipline of Theosophy, called the Living Ethics or Agni Yoga, named for the Vedic fire god, Agni.

  Roerich believed that World War I had been the apocalypse that signaled the end of the Hindu Kali Yuga and the start of the next phase of human evolution and civilization. He claimed that this new world age would be directed by a mysterious cult of Mahatmas living in isolated splendor deep in Shambhala in Central Asia. These, of course, answer to the “deathless Chinamen” who live in Central Asia in H. P. Lovecraft’s “The Call of Cthulhu,” and they derive from Theosophical traditions, as appropriated from Buddhism, in turn derived from the Hindu belief that Vishnu’s incarnation as Kalki will rule the millennial kingdom of Shambhala thousands of years from now.

  Agni Yoga preserved Theosophy’s “astral plane,” on which some of the extraterrestrial beings were thought to live. (Roerich believed he was in communication with some of these trans-dimensional creatures, called the “Hierarchy of Light.”) It also retained Theosophy founder Helena Blavatsky’s race theory, which held that extraterrestrials from Venus, the moon, and Mars incarnated as earlier races of human beings. Agni Yoga taught that a new incarnation was manifesting as the Sixth Root Race in the present. The movement also adopted Blavatsky’s Secret Doctrine, with its tales of ancient astronauts, as one of its core texts.

  Wallace met Roerich in 1929, years before FDR’s election, and he qui
ckly hit it off with the spiritual leader and painter, referring to him as his “guru.” Roerich, for his part, opened a museum in New York City in 1930 to display his dramatic paintings, including some of Buddhist monasteries clinging to the snowy sides of the Himalayas. H. P. Lovecraft visited the museum shortly after its opening, and he was inspired by these strange vistas. “Surely Roerich is one of those rare fantastic souls,” Lovecraft wrote in a 1930 letter, “who have glimpsed the grotesque, terrible secrets outside space & beyond time & who have retained some ability to hint at the marvels they have seen.”[148] He modeled the Old Ones’ frozen mountain city in At the Mountains of Madness on Roerich’s paintings, which he explicitly cited in the story: “Something about the scene reminded me of the strange and disturbing Asian paintings of Nicholas Roerich, and of the still stranger and more disturbing descriptions of the evilly fabled plateau of Leng which occur in the dreaded Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred.”[149]

  Wallace was also quite taken with Roerich’s esotericism, and he brought his occult beliefs to Washington after FDR’s election and his appointment to head the Department of Agriculture. As Secretary of Agriculture he used his influence with the U.S. government to send Roerich on an official U.S. mission to Central Asia after FDR normalized relations with the Soviet Union in 1933. FDR also knew and liked Roerich, though he was not a believer in Roerich’s occult musings. Officially, Roerich went to the USSR in 1934 to collect grasses; unofficially, he was there on a spiritual journey. Wallace was fascinated by botany and agronomy, and he was one of the most brilliant men ever to head the Department of Agriculture. With his favorite on an expedition to collect grasses, Wallace’s special area of interest, expectations were high.

  The expedition was a fiasco; Roerich collected just 20 plants during a 16-month trek across Central Asia. A second expedition, sent by the Department of Agriculture in the same period, collected 2,000 plants in less time. Worse, Roerich began making indiscrete statements to foreign leaders as though acting with the authority of the U.S. government. Wallace was humiliated, and after more than five years in thrall to Roerich, he finally broke with Roerich and rejected his Agni Yoga and his millenarian expectations. Wallace directed the American embassy in India to refuse aid to Roerich and forward all Roerich’s communications directly to Wallace. He also held a press conference in which he accused Roerich of being a spy. Finally, he strongly encouraged the IRS to audit Roerich, which they did, producing a bill for nearly $50,000 in back taxes. Roerich, for his part, simply stayed put in India and lived out the rest of his life as a tax exile.

  Although Wallace had broken with Roerich, unease about his occult connections followed him after his nomination for the vice-presidency in 1940. Republicans obtained copies of the so-called “guru letters” from the early 1930s in which Wallace had written to Nicholas Roerich as his “dear Guru” and signed himself as “G” for Sir Galahad. In the letters, Wallace told Roerich that he eagerly awaited the imminent apocalypse and the arrival of the people of North Shamballah (a Buddhist term for heaven, but used in Theosophy to refer to the place of the Ascended Masters, the aliens, etc.), who would cleanse the earth of poverty and lead to a new era of peace. Democrats contained the scandal only by threatening to reveal Republican presidential nominee Wendell Wilkie’s extramarital affair with Irita Van Doren. The two parties agreed to suppress the other’s scandal.

  As a result of these events, party leaders and political journalists concluded that Wallace was a mystic and an occultist and unfit to be president. Unable to shake the accusations, Wallace saw his chance at the presidency evaporate in 1944 when party elders unceremoniously dumped him from the ticket. The final straw was FDR’s own agreement that Wallace had become a liability, both for his occultism and for his political ineffectiveness. Wallace saw the writing on the wall, but he refused to watch his chance at real power fade away. His supporters printed fake tickets to the Democratic National Convention in the hope of rigging the vote and nominating Wallace, but party leaders caught wind of the plan and called an early adjournment. After rooting out the fake delegates, Democrats reconvened and nominated Truman. FDR died in April 1945, and Truman duly succeeded to the presidency.

  Unwilling to let it go, Wallace tried to run for president in the next election, only to see the long-forgotten “Guru Letters” published in 1947, humiliating him (again) and helping to spark hostile questioning from reporters like H. L. Mencken. Truman would go on to win the nomination in 1948 and the general election as well.

  What the ancient astronauts giveth, the ancient astronauts taketh away.

  21. The Search for Soviet Ancient Astronauts

  Have you ever seen the pictures of the Soviet version of the space shuttle, the Buran? It looked almost like its American counterpart but was just slightly off, was used only once, and ended up on the scrapheap of history when its hangar collapsed on it, crushing it. In the same way, a lot of Soviet consumer goods were blocky, inefficient knockoffs of Western product. I bring this up because I’d like to talk about the Soviet version of the ancient astronaut theory. Like the country’s consumer goods, the Soviet ancient astronaut theory was derivative, clunky, and an ersatz copy of the West. But unlike Soviet cars and clothes, the Soviet ancient astronaut theory was influential.

  The communist government of the Soviet Union was staunchly atheistic, following Marx’s dictum that religion was the “opiate of the masses.” Soviet scholars struggled to find a way to combat religion by providing a suitably scientific-sounding explanation for ancient mysteries and beliefs. The West already had a mystical tradition, Theosophy, which had suggested that beings from other planets stood behind ancient gods and human evolution (see Chapter 2). There was also literature, known to Soviet thinkers, about ancient astronauts, most notably the famed French novella The Xipéhuz, about alien-like creatures in Neolithic Mesopotamia. By the 1950s, Europe had started to develop a science-fiction-inspired set of proto-ancient-astronaut texts, including the early work of the Italian Peter Kolosimo and the UFO works of George Adamski and others, which adapted Theosophy’s spiritual beings from other worlds as actual extraterrestrial, biological Venusians. Could Western pseudoscience, religion, and science fiction be adapted into a suitably socialist-realistic, materialist framework? And could it be used to defeat the claims of religion?

  The Soviet mathematician Matest M. Agrest (1915-2005) sparked the Soviet ancient astronaut craze nearly a decade before the theory gained widespread popularity in the West. In 1959, he proposed that Sodom and Gomorrah had been destroyed by an extraterrestrial nuclear device (which conveniently also killed Lot’s wife in the presence of witnesses), and that the terrace of Baalbek in Lebanon was a launch pad for alien spacecraft. Because Agrest was a scientist, unlike earlier European and American writers, his work attained a spurious credibility, especially with Jacques Bergier and Louis Pauwels, who saw in it not the anti-religious propaganda it was but rather confirmation that H. P. Lovecraft and Charles Fort had been on to something. His work found its way into Morning of the Magicians (1960), through which it was disseminated to Erich von Däniken, Zecharia Sitchin, and countless others.

  As the ancient astronaut theory developed as a pop culture phenomenon among New Agers in first France, then all Europe, and then America, in the Soviet Union officials wondered if it could be used as a propaganda tool for atheism. Beginning in the 1960s, Carl Sagan began working with Soviet scientists on questions of extraterrestrial life. He worked closely with I. S. Shklovskii, who in 1962 first developed the suggestion, expanded with Sagan’s input in 1966 as Intelligent Life in the Universe, that aliens had advanced civilizations on other planets and may have been responsible for creating an “artificial” satellite for Mars, the moon Phobos. While in the United States, these questions were met, essentially, with bemusement, in the Soviet Union the suggestion that aliens existed and could be contacted was treated much more seriously, largely because of Shklovskii’s credibility as a scientist. By 1964, the Soviets were
fully invested in searching for extraterrestrial intelligence.

  Western scholars attributed this interest in ETs and ancient astronauts to the Soviet commitment to atheism, materialism, and evolution. Soviet scholars argued that if advanced civilizations were proven to exist, and if they demonstrated aspects of socialism, then this would be another argument in favor of Marx’s assertion that socialism was the inevitable product of invisible forces. Further, any proof of intelligent life in the cosmos was a prima facie rebuke to religion’s claims of special creation, not to mention evidence in favor of materialist, godless evolution.[150]

  The consequences of these official dogmas was that much of the Soviet “evidence” for ancient astronauts was highly suspect, interpreted according to communist doctrine, and in many cases outright fabrications. Even Jacques Bergier, himself no strict adherent to truth, found the Soviet works suffused with “antireligious propaganda” and poor quality evidence: “Unfortunately, they accept such evidence a little too easily, and it is not always very convincing.”[151] This did not stop him, of course, from relying upon Soviet sources. Nor did it stop Erich von Däniken, Zecharia Sitchin, and sundry others from using Soviet “evidence” in their own ancient astronaut books of the 1970s.

  As we shall see in the next chapter, after 1970, Soviet interest in ancient astronauts declined at exactly the time the West began to embrace the idea.