Table of Contents
1: In Search of the Ark of the Covenant
2: Man Outsmarts Nature
3: Malta—a Paradise of Unsolved Puzzles
4: History Repeats Itself
5: Signs of the Gods? Signs for the Gods?
6: Right Royal King Lists
7: Prophet of the Past
Bibliography
Bonus: First chapter of Tomy and the Planet of Lies, the debut novel by Erich von Däniken
SIGNS
of the
GODS?
By Erich von Däniken
Copyright © 2011 by Erich von Däniken.
This electronic format is published by Tantor eBooks, a division of Tantor Media, Incorporated,
and was produced in the year 2011.
1: In Search of the Ark of the Covenant
AGATHA CHRISTIE, that incomparable detective-story writer, once gave an interview in which she explained the ideal pattern for a good crime story. She said that only when suspicion was clearly proved so that a criminal with a sound motive could be revealed at the end was a story satisfying and exciting. But she added that the working out of the plot was only convincing if it left lingering doubts after the end of the story. Agatha Christie was talking about fictitious crime. I want to tell you about a crime which actually took place but nevertheless fulfils all the conditions which the grand old lady laid down for a first-class detective story.
For me the crime began in a religion class. We were told that God commanded Moses to build an ark. We can read the instructions he was given in Exodus 25:10. However they cannot have been purely verbal; he must have had a model of the ark:
‘And look that thou make them after the pattern, which was shewed thee on the mount.’—Exodus 25:40
This ark is the material evidence involved in our crime. We must not lose sight of it. But although the crime is so incredibly old, experts are still arguing about it—just as nowadays the family quarrels about the presumptive author of a crime in a TV series.
What kind of object was the ark?
Theologians, who at this point in the story assume the functions of police investigators, have very contradictory ideas about it. In Pierers Universal-Lexikon1 the ark, also known as the ark of the covenant, is described as:
‘An acacia-wood chest, 1.75 m long, 1 m high and 1 m wide, covered inside and out with gold.’
Professor Dr Hugo Gressmann2, the well-known theologian, makes the chest quite a bit smaller:
‘About 1.25 m long, 0.75 m high and 0.75 m wide.’
Precise, but scanty details. We learn a good deal more in the Zohar, the most important of the Cabbalistic works, whose investigators showed more curiosity. In spite of the detailed information, the Zohar does not seem to have been included in the official reports, possibly because it was a secret Jewish work which appeared between A.D. 130-170. Yet it devotes nearly 50 (!) pages to the ark of the covenant and even gives minute details that escaped other criminologists.
At first glance it seems surprising that the ‘ark of the covenant’ is introduced as the ‘Ancient of Days’ in the Zohar, but a second glance makes it quite clear that the description refers to the ark.
The instructions in the Zohar are identical with the account in Exodus. Yahweh, the god of Israel, orders Moses to build a chest for the ‘Ancient of Days’, giving precise details. This container, together with the remarkable ‘Ancient of Days’, is to be taken on the journey through the desert.
So far no one has denied that the ark existed, but the experts differ about the measurements. The theological criminal bureau also argues about the purposes of the mysterious chest.
Reiner Schmitt3 claims that the ark was: ‘a container for a sacred stone.’
Martin Dibelius4 contradicts him and says it was: ‘A mobile empty divine throne’ or ‘a travelling divine car on which a divinity stood or sat’.
How are we going to find out more about our material evidence if the theologians are not even unanimous about what it was used for?
The conviction that the ark of the covenant was empty because God lived in it, which the theologian R. Vatke threw into the debate in 1835, would make further research superfluous.
Harry Torczyner6 stated that the ark of the covenant contained protocols, including two of the tablets of the law given to Moses. Here Harry Torczyner parts company with his colleague Martin Dibelius,4 who not only queries the accepted concept of ark of ‘the covenant’, but also doubts if Moses’ tablets of the law were ever in the receptacle.
Investigation of the weight of the mysterious ark is equally confusing. The prophet Samuel, who was also a judge and must have been an accurate observer by profession, writes:
Now therefore make a new cart, and take two milch kine, on which there hath come no yoke . . . And take the ark of the LORD, and lay it upon the cart: and put the jewels of gold, which ye return him for a tresspass offering, in a coffer by the side thereof.’ —I Samuel 6:7-8
Judge Samuel even tells us about another cart for transporting the ark:
‘And they set the ark of God upon a new cart, and brought it out of the house of Abinadab, that sitteth upon a hill.
And Uzza and Ahio, the sons of Abinadab, drove the new cart.’ —II Samuel 6:3
In spite of transport on one or two carts and the pulling power of two grown cows, the weight can hardly have exceeded 300 kilograms, for it was sometimes carried by the Levites, the priests in Yahweh’s sanctuaries:
‘And it was so, that when they that bare the ark of the LORD had gone six paces, he sacrificed an ox and a fatling’ —II Samuel 6:13
Really we ought to lecture the biblical criminologists about their disagreements, as Moses did in Leviticus, when he gave the priestly Levites their instructions.
Lazarus Bendavid (1762-l832), a philosopher and mathematician, lived in Berlin. He was head of the Jewish Free School and a very open-minded man. He was also editor of the celebrated Spenerschen Zeitung.7 Contemporaries of Bendavid say that he was a well-known Jewish scholar and philosopher, who had come to the conclusion,
‘that the ark in Moses’ day contained a fairly complete system of electrical instruments and produced effects by them.’
Lazarus Bendavid was not only an intelligent man, he was also far ahead of his time. As an orthodox Jew had he read the Zohar? Did he come across the ‘Ancient of Days’ in it? Did it make him suspicious? Was he dissatisfied with the research then known to him? Of course he knew that only a fixed, clearly defined group of people was allowed access to the ark and that even the high priests could not visit it every day. Because the ark was dangerous!
Bendavid:
‘According to the Talmudists mortal danger must always have been associated with these visits to the holy of holies.
The high priest always entered with a certain fear and thought it was a good day if he came back safely.’
The crime story gets more complicated! The ark of the covenant changed hands! After a victorious war, the Philistines, a Hebrew tribe of western origin, confiscated the ark of the Lord. They had noticed how important the mysterious apparatus was to the Israelites and hoped to derive advantages from owning it.
But the Philistines had no instructions for use; they were quite unfamiliar with it. At any rate, in a very short time they realised that anyone who came into close contact with the ark fell sick or died. They began to pass the apparatus they had requisitioned from town to town, like a hot potato, but everywhere it was the same story. All who were curious enough to approach the dubious booty were stricken with boils and scales, and their hair fell out. Children and adults, all were overcome by excruciating vomiting and many perished in a horrible way.
Judge Samuel was a witness
:
‘They sent therefore and gathered together all the lords of the Philistines and they said, Send away the ark of the God of Israel, and let it go again to its own place, that it slay us not or our people: for there was a deadly destruction throughout all the city; the hand of God was very heavy there. And the men that died not were smitten with the emerods: and the cry of the city went up to heaven.’ —I Samuel 5:11-12
The Philistines were in possession of the devilish object for seven months. Then all they wanted was to get rid of their booty. They put the chest on a cart, harnessed two cows to it and whipped the bellowing beasts to the borders of Beth-shemesh.
‘In the morning, when the men of Beth-shemesh came into the valley to harvest the wheat, they saw the cart with the ark on it. They slaughtered the cows on the spot and then summoned the Levites, who alone knew how to handle the ark. But 50,070 people, who had no idea how dangerous the ark was, died in a horrible way. They were curious and came too near the ark, and the Lord smote them.’ —I Samuel 6:19
Now the ark was back in the hands of the people who built it, but we still do not know what this apparatus really was.
The crime story continues, but a solution suggests itself.
In 1978, a book called The Manna Machine, the joint work of George Sassoon, an electronics consultant, and Rodney Dale, a biologist and engineering writer, was published in London. These British investigators used the Zohar’s very precise description of the ‘Ancient of Days’, which they interpreted and reconstructed in the light of present-day technical and biological knowledge. They decided that the ark of the covenant was actually a technical machine—as Bendavid also assumed—that supplied the Israelites on their trek through the desert with a food rich in protein, namely manna.
Now the enquiry has taken a giant step forward. The ark of the covenant = the Ancient of Days = the manna machine. A formula as faultless as the one times table!
As technology is not exactly a special concern of theologians, we can remove them from the team of criminologists. It is now clear:
that the ark of the covenant was not the holy of holies, but the receptacle for a machine which produced food;
that it could only be approached by the ‘elect’, i.e. those who were trained to operate it;
that the curious who were rash enough to approach it fell ill or died, because the machine was highly radioactive.
On the basis of the information we now have, the ‘Case of the Ark of the Covenant’ looks as follows:
For unknown reasons extraterrestrials were interested in separating a group of people from their environment and cutting them off from all contact with the ‘rest of mankind’ for two generations. Through their intermediary, a prophet, they ordered the withdrawal from civilisation of the chosen group. Moses—it may also have been another of the elect—led the Israelites through the wilderness. The extraterrestrials saved the nomadic people from their enemies, for the attacking Egyptians were drowned:
‘And the waters returned, and covered the chariots, and the horsemen, and all the host of Pharaoh that came into the sea after them; there remained not so much as one of them.’ —Exodus 14:28
The FBI, like any other group of qualified investigators, would dismiss the theories put forward by theologians to explain the above phenomenon as absolute nonsense. One of them claims that the Israelites marched through a sea thick with reeds or sand banks at ebb-tide, while the pursuing Egyptians were surprised by the waters of the flood-tide.
We can credit the chosen people with many special gifts, but we cannot imagine that the Egyptians, who first divided the year into 365 days after observing the regular advent of the Nile floods, did not know just as much about ebb- and flood-tides as the Israelites.
No, the Egyptians did not rush blindly to their destruction! They were deliberately led astray by a mysterious ‘angel’—by a pillar of fire:
‘And the angel of God, which went before the camp of Israel, removed and went behind them; and the pillar of the cloud went from before their face, and stood behind them. And it came between the camp of the Egyptians and the camp of Israel; and it was a cloud and darkness to them, but it gave light by night to these: so that the one came not near the other all the night.’ —Exodus 14:19-20
This cloud was not a chance meteorological phenomenon, as some scholars have suggested. Moses expressly says that the ‘pillar of cloud’ was a signal to lead the Israelites:
‘And the LORD went before them by day in a pillar of cloud, to lead them the way; and by night in a pillar of fire, to give them light; that they might go by day and night. He took not away the pillar of the cloud by day, nor the pillar of fire by night, from before the people.’ —Exodus 13:21-22
Chance meteorological phenomena usually appear for seconds, minutes or even hours, but not for months and years. This explanation simply does not stand up to examination.
As we are not on the trail of an individual Israelite or a small group, we have a slightly easier task than criminologists who have to try to uncover a narrow trail. Ahead of us lies the broad path left by a giant migration that wound slowly through the wilderness. The enemy were destroyed; the road was clear. Nevertheless, it was a tremendous undertaking to lead thousands of men, women and children through territory where it was impossible to live on wild fruit or game. Even modern armies have come to grief for lack of fresh provisions.
Temperatures in deserts, with their hostile environment, vary between 58° C and -10° C. Annual rainfall barely averages 10 cm. There are no natural products that could satisfy the hunger of a giant host, yet Moses risked marching his people through the endless burning wilderness.
Who supplied the people of Israel with food?
Extraterrestrials helped them and Moses knew it. For ‘the Lord’ who appeared to him in the burning bush showed him a machine that would take care of any worries about food supplies during the long years of the exodus.
It was a marvellous machine. It stored up water from the night dew, then mixed it with a microscopic type of green algae (chlorella) and produced as much food as was needed. There were complaints about having the same menu every day, but no one had to go hungry, as Moses pointed out when the people rebelled.
The food synthesised from dew and green algae was produced by radiation. Radiation needs energy. Where could it be obtained in the barren desert? What kind of source of energy was it that was unexhausted after 40 years?
Today we can erase the question mark. From our knowledge of existing technology it can only have been a mini-nuclear reactor. Reactors of this type exist and have been in service for some time. We have known this since February, 1978—from official sources.
The Russian espionage satellite ‘Cosmos 954’ crashed in the countryside around the Great Slave Lake in Canada. The Strategic Bomber Command of the US Air Force was alerted. Coded messages and orders went out to submarines at sea. Leave was stopped for all crews at rocket stations. The hot lines at NATO were glowing. ‘Cosmos 954’ was carrying more than 45 kilograms of radioactive uranium 235, a source of energy which, according to experts, could radiate for 1000 years or more and contaminate country and people with poisonous radioactive clouds. When ‘Cosmos 954’ crashed, the reactor melted owing to frictional heat and its deadly contents were released. After the politicians had shaken hands politely, reassurances were given. But their handshakes did not remove the radioactive emissions, they merely defused the explosive political situation.
Soon afterwards the Indian government revealed that years before the CIA had arranged for expert mountain climbers to take a mini-reactor to the Himalayas where it would act as an inexhaustible source of energy for the devices which are listening in to China around the clock.
Mini-reactors release energy by the disintegration of plutonium. Radiation energy is transformed directly into electricity, a process which differs from that in large atomic power stations which employ heavy water and fuel rods. The mini-reactor gives off radiation. It is dangerous, b
ut not fatal provided you do not stay close to it for too long. After all, the valiant mountaineers carried one to the Himalayas and came back safely.
Mini-reactors will be an indispensable source of energy in the spaceships of the future. A machine that uses radiation to produce a protein-rich foodstuff from water and green algae will also be of the greatest importance for interstellar space travel. I am certain that the discoveries of Sassoon and Dale have already been closely examined by space travel experts. With a manna machine on board the problem of a basic foodstuff for space travellers is solved.
Signs of the Gods? Page 1
