The Ancient Alien Question

by Philip Coppens

  The Zoser pyramid is the oldest pyramid built in ancient Egypt. The entire complex, both in layout and inscriptions, reveals the true purpose of the pyramids. They speak of a festival in which the pharaoh was said to become one with the gods, so that his power and character as a proper ruler was proven in the eyes of the country.

  There is also the famous Heb Sed dance, in which the king circumambulated the courtyard, which represented the country of Egypt—such large courtyards stand in front of the Pyramid of Zoser, and are also present at the Giza pyramids of Khufu and his successor Khafre. In the Heb Sed ceremony, the pharaoh would arrive by boat and moor at the Valley Temple. From there, the procession would make its way up the causeway, which at the time was actually a covered walkway, with only a slit in the roof to allow daylight to penetrate. The next stop would be at the Pyramid Temple, from which entrance to the pyramid would be the logical—and only available—next step. The “tomb chamber” inside the pyramid would thus be the secret chamber, with the sarcophagus being the site where the secret ceremony of the Heb Sed would occur.

  What was this ceremony? Details are sketchy, but it was described as the king unifying the two dimensions: the divine realm of the gods, and Earth. In mythology, this occurred at a “Mound of Creation,” and the pyramid was considered to be just that: a place where heaven and earth met, where the pharaoh communicated with the gods, where he ascended to heaven, and/or where the gods came down to earth. That the pyramids were therefore landing places for the gods is literally true, but should not be interpreted physically, in the sense that their spaceship landed there.

  Other aspects of the pyramids confirm that the Heb Sed festival was their purpose. For example, the Zoser complex incorporated chapels for statues of visiting gods of the regions of Egypt who attended the ceremony. This fits with archaeologist Gilles Dormion’s observation that the gallery leading into the Queen’s Chamber originally had niches for statues; other pyramids have similar niched corridors, all of which have been found to be empty, and were therefore interpreted as evidence that tomb robbers had penetrated into the structure. But, if used for the Heb Sed festival, the niches would only ever have contained a statue during the festival; afterward the statues returned to their temples elsewhere in Egypt.

  With this interpretation, we have explained the pyramids of Egypt within the emerging framework that is slowly replacing the outdated Egyptological dogma. Remarkably, it appears that the rituals and symbols of the Egyptian pyramids are similar and sometimes identical to their colleagues across the world, such as the baktun-ending rituals of the Maya. But there is more....

  The New Fire Ceremony

  A series of rituals was also performed at Teotihuacán. They were written down by Martin Matz of the Mazatec Indians, who had transmitted them for several centuries within his community before finally committing them to paper. His text is known as the Codex Matz-Ayauhtla, or “the Pyramid of Fire,” and describes a series of legends, from the Creation Myth to the New Fire ceremony. The latter is the finale of the initiatory spiritual journey that is encoded in the codex. The text underlines the essence of the Maya’s religious experience, namely that life is a spiritual journey to ascension—a return to God, the One who created the universe. The text states how the supreme deity, Tloque Nahauque, manifested itself as three forces: a duality functioning against a neutral background, from which the four prime elements—earth, water, wind, and fire—were created.

  Matz only wrote the texts after he had made the journey himself; he visited an initiatory site with his shamanic guide, where he took a hallucinogenic substance (in his case, mushrooms), entered a cave at a specific moment in the calendar year, and consequently had visions of a landscape of pyramids, including one that was dedicated to the moon. The initiate was then taught about the World Ages and how ascension and World Ages were connected via the New Fire ceremony, as well as how they were performed every 52 years. The American author John Major Jenkins has described this as “the ultimate self-sacrifice that is the ritual death attending the mystic initiation into divine life...in order to merge with Quetzalcoatl,” who is seen as the intermediary deity that connects the living with the Creator God Tloque Nahauque.6

  This New Fire festival was performed at the temple complex of Teotihuacán. The complex was physically laid out in the pyramid landscape the initiate saw in his vision. Similar to the secret rite of the Heb Sed festival inside the pyramids of Egypt, the Pyramid of the Sun contains a cave, and it is known that this cave was specifically aligned to certain stellar phenomena. The cave is 7 feet high, runs eastward for more than 300 feet, until it reaches a point close to the pyramid’s geometrical center. Here it leads into a second cave, which was artificially enlarged into a shape very similar to that of a four-leaf clover. Each “leaf” was a chamber, about 60 feet in circumference, containing a variety of artifacts such as slate discs and mirrors. There is also a complex drainage system of interlocking segments of carved rock pipes. This is strange, as there is no known source of water within the pyramid, and leads researchers to believe that certain rituals were performed inside this sanctuary.

  When astronomer Gerald Hawkins investigated Teotihuacán, he discovered that the streets were laid out on a grid system, intersecting at angles of 89 degrees, rather than the 90 degrees you would expect to find. He thought this could simply be a design flaw, until he realized that the grid was not aligned to the four points of the compass, but was instead twisted sideways so that the Avenue of the Dead ran north–northeast, pointing to the setting of the Pleiades. On May 17, circa AD 150, the Pleiades rose just before the sun in the predawn skies. This synchronization, known as the heliacal rising of the Pleiades, only lasted a century. It is now suggested that it was this event that was at the origin of Teotihuacán and marked its foundation. It is no coincidence that the cave opening points directly to the setting sun on that important day.

  Teotihuacán was a place of pilgrimage in Aztec times; the Aztecs identified it with the myth of Tollan, the place where the sun was created, which had occurred in 3114 BC. Yet another legend stated that the complex was built to transform men into gods. But how was man transformed? Technology, if anything, tends to ensure a more methodical approach to a process, guaranteeing a better success of the desired outcome. If a technology was used to aide this transformation, there may be an explanation for the strange sheets of mica that have been found between two of the upper levels of the Pyramid of the Sun.

  In summary, it has been shown that the Teotihuacán complex was linked with a series of rituals that enabled contact with the gods. These rituals were definitely held at key dates of the calendar, which is why most temple complexes were aligned to certain stars and constellations. It seems that contact with the divine—at least in some cultures—was established at specific moments in time. And it is clear that this contact was nonphysical in nature, often aided by hallucinogenic substances.

  Does that mean that our ancestors’ gods were nothing more than hallucinations? That the gods are not real? The answer to that question is actually also the answer to the Ancient Alien Question. And to find that answer, we need to leave civilization and all the best evidence for the Ancient Alien Question far behind and travel to the depths of the Amazonian jungle.

  The Cosmic Serpent

  In July 1995, I was one of the few attendees at a nevertheless wonderfully organized conference in Fribourg, Switzerland. As it happened, the number of speakers outweighed the number of attendees. Titled The Incident, the conference explored phenomena such as UFOs, crop circles, and the wonders of the mind. The best minds in all three fields had gathered, ufology led by Budd Hopkins and Jacques Vallee, and the “mind” category presented by the controversial American writer Terence McKenna and the then almost totally unknown Swiss anthropologist Jeremy Narby.

  At the conference, McKenna proclaimed his famous slogan that UFOs were not nuts and bolts, as most ufologists believed, and he implied that the methodology used by UFO researchers
in trying to prove the existence of extraterrestrial beings visiting the Earth was never going to be successful, pointing to 50 years of documented UFO reports that had led to no solid conclusions. McKenna believed that UFOs were real, but were not physical machines. Instead, McKenna proposed that we had to use our minds to explore and answer the alien question.

  McKenna’s emphasis was on the use of hallucinogenic substances, specifically DMT, or dimethyltriptamine, which he almost single-handedly made famous. McKenna graduated from UC Berkeley, majoring in ecology, resource conservation, and shamanism; with his diploma in hand, he set off for India and later the Amazon, where he studied the native hallucinogenic drugs used in various South American shamanic traditions. The specific substance he was after was oo-koo-hé, a plant preparation containing DMT, a chemical naturally produced by the brain. It is therefore something of a misnomer to call DMT a hallucinogenic substance, as it does not create a hallucination as such, but does things to our brain that science at the time did not understand at all, and therefore hastily labeled a hallucination.

  In the Amazon, at La Chorrera, at the urging of his brother Dennis, McKenna allowed himself to be the subject of a psychedelic experiment led by the local shaman, which he claimed put him in contact with a nonhuman, other-dimensional intelligence. Until his death in 2000, McKenna advocated the use of drugs, and particularly organic hallucinogens such as ayahuasca, which contained DMT, as it was his conviction that DMT opened a doorway to the Otherworld, the Realm of the Gods.

  He was clear that these drugs should not be used by the masses, but only by carefully selected individuals, along the model of the Amazonian tribes and ancient civilizations, in which drug use was carefully regulated and taught, and largely restricted to a class of priests.

  With the rising popularity of UFO abductions in the 1990s, McKenna began to preach that this phenomenon was linked with what he termed “hyperspace,” and that the DMT experience was similar if not identical to the abduction experience, in which he believed the “machine elves of hyperspace,” as he often called them, were seen as aliens in UFOs. This was merely the latest form they had taken on, he theorized, after their former manifestations as faeries, elves, or angels. Whatever we called them, they were real, and they were to all intents and purposes Ancient Aliens.

  In his books, including Food of the Gods, McKenna mapped the history of drug usage, specifically of DMT and psilocybin, arguing that both substances had been used throughout the ages in humankind’s efforts to enter another dimension and speak with these otherworldly intelligences. He believed these beings had helped humankind throughout the ages, guiding them along the path of civilization. He argued that the extraordinary and anomalous wisdom that had often gone into ancient monuments might have been inspired and assisted by these intelligences. Rather than only a theory, he had a very personal experience that suggested this had been indeed the case.

  From his very first experiences with DMT at La Chorrera, the denizens of hyperspace had given McKenna a mathematical formula that became known as “novelty” and “TimeWave Zero.” In McKenna’s opinion, the formula explained the mathematical construct and nature of time itself. It was said to be a system that showed how “new things”—novelty—would spring about in our timeline. Time itself was a fractal wave of novelty—the output from this wave. Time was thus built around a series of new ideas and paradigm shifts, and, in McKenna’s opinion, this could explain why our ancestors were so ridiculously preoccupied with calendars and mapping time.

  Whether or not the TimeWave has a foundation in reality remains a question. Too few people have seriously studied it, and, most problematically, modern science hardly knows anything about the nature of time. But the extraordinary importance of the TimeWave for the Ancient Alien Question is that it was definitely a gift of the gods to humankind, received through McKenna. The knowledge he received was highly complex and mathematical in nature, so much so that those who have studied it have been able to see the extraordinary mathematics—fractals—linked with the formula, even though they are still at a loss to grasp its full meaning. This phenomenon reveals that human beings are able to receive advanced mathematical models from an otherworldly source—which is what we find in the Ancient Alien controversy: that our ancestors had an extraordinary understanding of mathematics and the cycles of time, on a level exceeding our ancestors’ and even our own understanding. Those two very ingredients were paramount in McKenna’s otherworldly revelation of the TimeWave theory.

  McKenna would argue that if cultures across the worlds had built pyramids for their gods, this was not necessarily evidence of physical contact between these civilizations or the result of a space-traveling ancient alien. He believed that the shamans of each culture had entered another dimension, where they made contact with an intelligence that had been contacted by our earliest ancestors. When asked, this intelligence had always provided our ancestors with the required information so that we could advance on our path of civilization. Various cultures, across time and space, that contacted it, would always come away with the same message; this is why, for example, there was such uniformity between pyramid complexes in Egypt and Mexico. McKenna would have interpreted the invention of geopolymers by Imhotep as that priest entering in contact with this otherworldly intelligence, which subsequently gave him the chemical understanding and processes through which to create geopolymers.

  Anthropologist Jeremy Narby was the other speaker at the conference who impressed me greatly, and I had the absolute pleasure and joy of having lunches and dinner sitting with both him and McKenna at one table. Narby had largely followed in McKenna’s footsteps, going where McKenna had not yet gone. Narby grew up in Switzerland and Canada, studied history at Canterbury, and received his doctorate in anthropology from Stanford University. Then, he trekked into the South American jungles, and like McKenna before him, came away with an understanding that is potentially the greatest revelation in the history of modern science.

  In his youth, Narby had been an aspiring tennis player, but back problems prevented him from making it his profession. By the time he reached the Amazon, his back gave him so many problems that he finally succumbed to the invitations of the local shamans, who told him that they could cure him. Ever since, his back has not ailed him. It is a similar story to the one told by one of my guides, when I explored the jungles of Iquitos in 2004: My guide had been a computer programmer with a true Western mindset, until he fell seriously ill and could no longer work or provide an income for his family. Modern medicine could not help him, and as a final act of desperation, he tried—without any hope that they would offer him solace from his pain—the local shamans. When they cured him, he changed his profession, focusing on the tourism industry and telling tourists of the wonders and miracles of the Amazonian rain forest.

  Narby himself left the Amazon with the knowledge that the rain forest is a veritable chemical lab, containing substances the shamans can mix in a manner that supersedes the techniques and knowledge of modern pharmaceutical companies. To demonstrate this, in 1999, Narby took three molecular biologists to the Peruvian Amazon to see whether they could obtain biomolecular information in shamanic sessions. The drug of choice was ayahuasca, which in itself is a miracle of science. Ayahuasca is a brew prepared from the Banisteriopsis vine—also known as the spirit vine—and is usually mixed with leaves of shrubs that contain dimethyltryptamine. Depending on the availability of the species of plants, the ingredients vary locally throughout South America. The potion is then brewed for more than 24 hours before it is drunk. If it is taken in any other way, the potion will have no effect at all. Ayahuasca is absorbed into the bloodstream, where it creates an inhibitor that temporarily (typically for a period of half an hour) stops the creation of certain chemicals in the brain, which creates what skeptics call a hallucination, but that is incorrect: Experiencers describe it as the entry into another dimension, where communication with an otherworldly intelligence occurs. The shamans say that ayahuasca
itself is a gift of the gods, and Narby has underlined that it is simply impossible for someone to have accidentally stumbled upon how to make ayahuasca: It uses specific plants, which have to be brewed for more than a day. In short, someone told the shamans how to concoct this alchemical potion. Ayahuasca should therefore be described as technology—chemical in nature—that aids humankind in establishing contact with an alien intelligence.

  Narby wrote a book titled The Cosmic Serpent: DNA and the Origins of Knowledge, in which he concluded that the shamanic experience induced through ayahuasca connected with an intelligence, and that this intelligence resided within our own DNA. The “Cosmic Serpent”—a name often given by the shamans to the intelligence they connect to—was in fact the double helix structure of DNA. In short, Narby stipulates that the means to contact the alien intelligence is through DNA, which, as we have as seen, is alien in origin itself.

  A third explorer of Amazonian shamanism is anthropologist Michael Harner. In his studies, after he drank the ayahuasca potion, he described how “I met bird-headed people, as well as dragon-like creatures who explained that they were the true gods of this world.... I realized that anthropologists, including myself, had profoundly underestimated the importance of the drug in affecting native ideology.”7 Is it indeed just a coincidence that the ancient Egyptians depicted their deities as bird-headed people? Or have we come to the core of the problem—and the answer, which is that these otherworldly denizens were indeed seen as the Egyptian deities and that it was these otherworldly intelligences that provided the extraordinary knowledge that went into the Egyptian monuments?