The Ancient Alien Question

by Philip Coppens

  During the Ancient Astronaut Society World Conference in Orlando, Florida, in August 1997, Belting and Eenboom gave a demonstration of the object in flight. I was a speaker at this conference, which was interrupted at one point so that attendees could go outside and watch the takeoff of the space shuttle from Cape Canaveral, which could be seen on the horizon. But going out to watch the Goldflyer II in action that afternoon was truly one of the most memorable events of my life. I saw how Goldflyer II behaved impeccably during takeoff and flying, and its landing was a thing of beauty.

  In 1998, Belting and Eenboom presented at the annual conference of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Luft and Raumfahrt, where the majority of scientists displayed a positive and open-minded attitude toward their ideas. The notion that the bee was an aircraft was beginning to be accepted, for Belting and Eenboom, along with Lübbers, had already demonstrated that the object could fly. Professor Apel of the Technical University of Bremen, Germany, even concluded, “Anyone who understands even a little bit about aerodynamics will be able to make one single prognostication: those approximately 1,500-year-old amulets from the pre-Columbian region have such perfect aerodynamic characteristics that they simply have to fly, and very well at that.”5

  It is impressive to see enthusiasts take this approach and demonstrate their case; no one can argue with the flight capabilities of the “insect” as it is. This is what the model looks like, and this is how it flies. In my opinion, Belting, Eenboom, and Lübbers have been able to demonstrate that the artifact is not an insect. At the moment, they have only been able to prove it is an anomaly, an “item” that has all the characteristics of an airplane. But is it an airplane? Or is it something else? Only new evidence, or comparisons with other findings of a similar nature, might give us the final answer.

  The Piri Reis Map

  Apart from tangible artifacts, knowledge can also be considered best evidence—Robert Temple argued as such in The Sirius Mystery, where he tried to demonstrate that the Dogon of Mali possessed knowledge that they simply could not have had. (Alas, in the final analysis, the evidence to support his claim is lacking.)

  Most people can accept the idea that any advanced civilization would have a detailed understanding of geography and would also have detailed maps of their region. This knowledge leads us to the well-known Piri Reis map, a medieval map designed in 1513 by the Turkish admiral Piri Reis. It was discovered in 1929 in the old imperial Topkapi palace in Istanbul by German theologian Gustav Adolf Deissmann while cataloguing the Topkapi Sarayi library’s non-Islamic items. At the time, it was the only known 16th-century map that showed South America in its proper longitudinal position in relation to Africa. One of the maps it was based on belonged to Christopher Columbus on his voyage to discover America. From the 1960s onward, largely due to the work of Charles H. Hapgood, who published Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings in 1966, the Piri Reis map has been seen as incorporating information that could likely only have been gathered through satellite photography. Thus, as our ancestors clearly are not credited with satellite technology, the map could constitute convincing evidence of an alien presence.

  Though dating from 1513, the Piri Reis map is known to have been based on numerous older maps, most now lost. Researchers came to this conclusion because the “center” of the map is the intersection of the Meridian of Alexandria at 30 degrees East and the Tropic of Cancer at 23 degrees North—the old bailiwick of Ancient Egypt. But the part of the map most relevant for Ancient Alien proponents is the manner in which the coastline of Antarctica is depicted: It conforms to pre-glacial conditions of about 12,000 years ago, which suggests that the mapmaker either had a very accurate imagination or had maps at his disposal that dated back thousands of years, allowing him to map a continent that was officially not even known to the Ancient Egyptians—Antarctica was only discovered in 1819 by the American seal hunter Nathaniel Palmer.

  There are even more interesting aspects to the Piri Reis map. For example, it shows a large inland lake in Brittany, as well as a large lake present in the Sahara. As mentioned, it is also the first map that showed the correct longitudinal position of Brazil in comparison to Africa—not an easy feat for anyone in 1513! The “other side” of the argument has maintained that more accurate maps of the world were created in the 16th century, including the Ribero maps of the 1520s and 1530s, the Ortelius map of 1570, and the Wright-Molyneux map of 1599. However, the idea that there were later, better maps is fine, but the real topic of intrigue with the Piri Reis map is precisely that it was the earliest, and had information on Brazil that was apparently only discovered in 1500.

  The Piri Reis map is an early 16th-century map known to have been constructed by synthesizing several other maps. It shows correct longitudes for the Brazilian coastline, and some researchers even suggest that it shows the correct, pre-glacial coastline of Antarctica, a continent that would only be discovered three centuries later.

  What about the coastline of Antarctica? Peter Kames and Nick Thorpe in Ancient Mysteries write that this mystery was “so shocking that professional archaeologists and historians could not bring themselves to discuss it.” Eventually, historian of cartography Gregory McIntosh did. He feels that the resemblance of the map’s Antarctican coastline to the actual coast of Antarctica is tenuous. He states that cartographers had depicted a massive landmass at the bottom of their maps for centuries before the actual discovery of Antarctica, and that Piri Reis merely followed in this tradition. He also believes that it is possible that the map’s “Antarctic coast” is actually the eastern coastline of South America, skewed to align east-west, for as simple a reason as getting it to fit on the page! There are even more solid concerns, such as the fact that if the landmass pictured is Antarctica, then 2,000 miles of South American coastline are missing from the map. So the map loses all of its accuracy when it comes to the southern half of South America, but picks up its accuracy in its display of Antarctica? Also, Hapgood relied on a seismic survey carried out in 1949 to argue his case for the pre-glacial coastline of Antarctica being depicted, but more recent scientific studies of the continent have revealed that the coastline of Antarctica looks radically different from the results of the 1949 survey.

  Either way, it is interesting to note the manner in which science has held the Piri Reis map debate: To explain away the anomalies of the Piri Reis map, traditional scientists have done precisely what the Ancient Alien proponents have done with the Pacal tomb slab, which is to take everything in isolation. When you only look at Antarctica, the similarities could be a coincidence, but if you look at the entire map as a whole, a vastly different picture emerges: It has correct longitude differences, at a time when calculating longitude was practically impossible. It also employed a projection that was more appropriate to ancient Egypt than the Turkish Piri Reis. Hapgood therefore felt confident to conclude that the Piri Reis map was evidence of one possibility: “It appears that accurate information has been passed down from people to people. It appears that the charts must have originated with a people unknown and they were passed on.”6 Those people possessed knowledge of our world with which we do not credit our ancient civilizations.

  But is it evidence of an alien presence? No. Graham Hancock has argued that the Piri Reis map is evidence of a lost civilization, but there is indeed no evidence that this lost civilization had any alien influences. So the quest for the best evidence continues.

  World Ages

  December 21, 2012, is the end date of a Mayan calendar round. For the Mayans, it is the end of the Fourth Age, which began on August 11, 3114 BC—roughly 5,000 years earlier, when the gods convened in Teotihuacán. This means that the First Age of the Mayan Calendar—the First Creation—was believed to have begun 15,000 or 20,000 years earlier—tens of thousands of years before archaeology accredits humankind’s presence in Middle America, let alone the existence of a Mayan civilization. However inconvenient this Mayan belief is for scientists—who dismiss it as fantasy—this time period does pus
h us back to before the last ice age, and could in theory explain why someone knew the correct coastline of Antarctica in preglacial conditions.

  Today, archaeologists are often reported as stating that the Mayans left us very little writings, and how hard it therefore is to draw any definitive conclusions about them. Compare this to what Father Diego de Landa, who accompanied the Conquistadors, boasted about: “We found great number of books...but as they contained nothing but superstitions and falsehoods of the devil we burned them all, which the natives took most grievously, and which gave them great pain.”7 It is therefore not so much the Mayans who left us with little, but we who destroyed what we had taken from the Mayans by force, thus creating a blank canvas on which we could rewrite the history of the Mayan world and pretend that they were poor pagan idiots.

  After the conquest of the Aztec Empire by Spain, after they committed most of the Aztecs’ books to the fire, in the late 17th century Don Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora studied some of the few remaining Aztec manuscripts and learned that the Aztecs possessed a calendar lasting 52 years. The calendar was a combination of a “regular” solar year, lasting 365 days (known as haab), and a calendar that was 260 days long (known as tzolkin). The former consisted of 18 months of 20 days, to which the Aztecs added five days to make it coincide with the solar year. The latter is normally linked with the duration of a fetus’s gestation inside the womb—the time from conception to birth. The tzolkin is known to have been used as early as 600 BC, and though it was found in Aztec material, it is Mayan in origin. Today, several Mayan people, specifically those living in the highlands of Guatemala, continue to use and cherish the calendar. “New Agers” in the West are beginning to embrace the calendar as well.

  De Sigüenza’s discovery was the first of many Mayan calendars that were found to have been used either throughout or for long periods of Mayan history. The most famous calendar today is the so-called Mayan Long Count Calendar, a calendar that was used for almost one millennium; it has been found on hundreds of monuments, dating from approximately 36 BC to AD 909, and it is the calendar that mentions the famous date of AD December 21, 2012.

  In the Mayan Long Count, the date December 21, 2012 is rendered as 13.0.0.0.0. This date should be read as 13 Baktun, 0 Katun, 0 Tun, 0 Unial, and 0 Kin, and illustrates the basic building blocks of the Mayan calendar:

  1 Kin equals 1 day.

  1 Unial equals 20 days.

  1 Tun equals 360 days.

  1 Katun equals 7,200 days, or 20 tuns.

  1 Baktun equals 144,000 days, or 20 katuns.

  This sequence shows the wheels within wheels of the Mayan calendar—its cyclical nature. The date marks the end of a cycle, which is equivalent to 13 times 144,000 days, or a period of 5,125 years. The Long Count therefore began on August 11, 3114 BC, annotated as 0.0.0.0.0—the beginning of the Fourth World, said to end on AD December 21, 2012.

  As mentioned, we can use this Long Count Calendar to work our way back to circa 18500 BC, when the First Age was said to have begun. But did you know that the Mayans had calendars that were 34,020,000,000 days, or more than 90 million years long? The Mayans were not alone in this. A Babylonian clay tablet in the Library of Nineveh gives to the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal (685 BC–Ca. 627 BC) a calendar that is 195,955,200,000,000 days long—a period that is many, many, many, many times the few billion years our planet has existed! It has therefore been suggested that the number does not represent days, but seconds, which would still make it 2,268,000,000 days, or a period that is more than six million years!

  As incredible as it may be, Dutch author Willem Zitman has been able to show that these two periods, one from Central America and one from the Middle East, are actually related: The Babylonian period is 15 times smaller than the Mayan period! This is not a coincidence, and shows that the two cultures either worked out extremely long cycles of time, based upon astronomical events, on their own, or that both cultures have a common heritage: a knowledge of astronomy that was somehow shared by two cultures that lived on two ends of the world at a time when standard history states there was no exchange of culture at all!

  Among the many questions this idea raises, one important one is why the Babylonians and Mayans were obsessed with such incredibly long cycles of time. The only light that Zitman can shed on this is that if we assume the Babylonians thought that the cycle of precession (a change in the orientation of the Earth’s axis resulting in changes to the position of the stars in the sky) lasted 25,872 years, then the Babylonian unit expresses 240 Precessional Cycles. As to why this would be important, again, no one has an answer, if only because science does not address the issue. But seeing as two ancient civilizations that were experts in astronomy highlighted the cycle, I would suggest that astronomy in future years is likely to uncover a very interesting significance for this period of time.

  Massive cycles of time are not only typical of the Mayans or Babylonians, but also of the Egyptians. In the 1970s, a French Egyptologist claimed to have discovered an inscription in the Temple of Isis in Denderah that represented a period of time of 36,159,177,600 years, or a staggering 13,207,139,618,400 days. Of what use is a period of time of 36 billion years? We do not know, but the Ancient Egyptians clearly felt it was important.

  Whatever these cycles represent, it is clear that our ancestors held these calendars to be important. It is equally clear that it had to have been a nonhuman intelligence that told our ancestors that a cycle of 90 million years was somehow important, for 90 million years ago there were no humans on this planet! Not even a lost civilization like Atlantis can bridge that divide. Therefore, whatever intelligence knew of this cycle was either millions of years old or had knowledge—if not technology—at its disposal that had calculated a period of 90 million years and had revealed its importance. That intelligence must somehow have made contact with humankind and given our ancestors this knowledge.

  Oannes

  In the third century BC, the Babylonian Berossus, head of the temple organization between 258 and 253 BC, reported on the existence of a mythical being called Oannes who had taught humankind wisdom. The name Oannes was a Greek rendering of the Babylonian Uanna, a name used by the god Adapa, a son of Ea. In mythology, he was indeed the god of wisdom and the one who brought civilization to the city of Eridu—the cradle of Sumerian civilization, and for some the word from which the name for our planet, Earth, originates from. Though Ea gave Adapa knowledge, particularly of the arts and civilization, eternal life was not bestowed upon him.

  What was remarkable about Oannes was not only that he taught people how to create temples, compile laws, and use geometry, but that he rose out of the Persian Gulf at daytime and returned to this watery abode at night. He had the body of a fish, but underneath the figure of a man—he was, by all accounts, nonhuman.

  The first century BC scholar Alexander Polyhistor summarized Berossus’s Babyloniaca and left us the following account of Oannes:

  At Babylon there was (in these times) a great resort of people of various nations, who inhabited Chaldæa, and lived in a lawless manner like the beasts of the field. In the first year there appeared, from that part of the Erythraean sea which borders upon Babylonia, an animal destitute of reason, by name Oannes, whose whole body (according to the account of Apollodorus) was that of a fish; that under the fish’s head he had another head, with feet also below, similar to those of a man, subjoined to the fish’s tail. His voice too, and language, was articulate and human; and a representation of him is preserved even to this day.

  This being was accustomed to pass the day among men; but took no food at that season; and he gave them an insight into letters and sciences, and arts of every kind. He taught them to construct cities, to found temples, to compile laws, and explained to them the principles of geometrical knowledge. He made them distinguish the seeds of the earth, and shewed them how to collect the fruits; in short, he instructed them in every thing which could tend to soften manners and humanize their lives. From that
time, nothing material has been added by way of improvement to his instructions. And when the sun had set, this being, Oannes, retired again into the sea, and passed the night in the deep; for he was amphibious.8

  Oannes was the first of the Apkallu, seven Sumerian demigods who gave civilization to humankind. They served as priests of Enki and as advisors or sages to the earliest “kings” or rulers of Sumer, before the flood. Gustav Guterbrock in his study of the Apkallu concluded that they were the “bird men” visible in many Sumerian depictions. The Greeks would label the Apkallu “heroes”: They were not immortal, but they were more than mere men. At the same time, they were religious educators and seem to have formed the blueprint of the priest class. In primitive civilizations, these priest classes were termed “shamans” and they were specifically identified with totem animals, most often with birds. This was because the shaman was said to fly and enter the Otherworld to seek advice from the ancestors.

  The story of Oannes was picked up by Carl Sagan in his book Intelligent Life in the Universe, where he commented, “I support the contention that a major cultural change did take place with the advent of the Oannes.” Elsewhere he noted: “These beings were interested in instructing mankind. Each knew the mission and accomplishments of his predecessors. When a great inundation threatens the survival of this knowledge, steps are taken to insure its preservation.”9 Sagan was therefore convinced that the series of nonhuman civilizers were part of a larger plan, as each one knew of its predecessor’s mission.