The Omega Point

by Whitley Strieber

  This is why, in The Omega Point, Christ is seen as a scientist. I think that’s exactly what he was, and his miracles reflect not supernatural powers but scientific knowledge of the way the energetic world actually works, and an ability to apply its principles to physical reality, thus effecting cure and defying death.

  Developing this assertion, it would therefore be probable that he learned his techniques during the time he spent in Egypt, and that he was specifically chosen because of his Davidic heritage, by practitioners who understood that their own world was coming to an end, and were seeking to bequeath their knowledge to the future. When the Romans tacked that sign on his cross, KING OF THE JEWS, they weren’t just being sardonic but also stating a fact: he was the heir to the House of David and thus the mortal enemy of Rome’s client-king Herod.

  If this knowledge still existed in Jesus’ time, it must have already been quite isolated from the central and public stream of Egyptian culture. For example, what we know of Egyptian religion suggests, in its elaborate use of magical implements and ritual, that it was enacting something that had lost its true meaning, somewhat like what happens when children who have observed an adult drive a car play at doing the same thing.

  As a child I did this—unfortunately, though, with a real car. I was no more effective at driving down the street at the age of ten than the Egyptians were, I suspect, at engaging conscious energy with their rituals.

  During World War II, natives in the mountains of New Guinea were exposed to Western technology for the first time when the U.S. Air Force began building bases in the area. When they saw planes landing and disgorging an unimaginable cornucopia of supplies, they responded by using sympathetic magic. They cleared jungle air strips. They built airplanes out of bamboo and leaves, and wove objects that looked to them like the refrigerators the airmen had. Then they devised ritual movements and sounds that to them mimicked the movements of the U.S. personnel back and forth between the airplanes and the refrigerators.

  But when they opened the doors to their “refrigerators,” no beer came out, and I speculate that this could be what was happening when Egyptians concluded their rituals, which mimicked the operations of a much older lost science, but were no more functional than bamboo airplanes.

  All was not lost, though, not entirely. Here and there, some traditions had retained at least some of that knowledge, and later in the discussion we will speculate about who and where.

  Nevertheless, for the most part, the science that once gave these rituals potency had been lost, I believe, in a phenomenal upheaval that swamped the world thousands of years before Egyptian civilization even appeared.

  Around twelve thousand years ago, the last Ice Age ended. And, as is not uncommon on planet Earth, this was a violent event. As the Laurentide glacier melted, sea levels around the world rose precipitately, and other upheavals caused further chaos.

  There is enigmatic evidence—necessarily ignored by modern science—that a much more potent human presence existed then, probably hugging coastlines which are now submerged to a depth of hundreds of feet, and in some cases actually swept into the abyssal deep.

  At the same time that this civilization was flourishing in the lowlands of the late Pleistocene, in the highlands of that world, human life was primitive. But go into a mountainous region today. Almost everywhere, you will find there the poorest people in the world. And where are our greatest cities? Hugging the coasts. If the future had only the remains of life in the Himalayas and the Andes to tell us about this world, it would not realize that our civilization had even existed.

  Many books have been published about the evidence of a lost civilization, but I would like to mention here just one telling piece of it that is rarely referred to, but which I find fascinating. It is that there are seventeen ancient ritual sites and cities around the world, all situated on the same great circle, with a southern axis point that falls about five hundred miles from the coast of Antarctica, and a northern axis in British Columbia roughly fifteen hundred miles from the present geographic North Pole.

  In itself, it is remarkable that places as diverse as the first Sumerian city, Ur, the Giza Plateau, Easter Island, Nazca, and the ancient Indian city of Mohenjo Daro would all be on the same great circle, but they are.

  Modern science has no real explanation for this, except that it must have been just random happenstance. But surely that isn’t enough of an answer. It’s satisfactory only if you want to cling to cherished theories and ignore evidence.

  I no longer ignore evidence. The last time I did that, I ended up being dragged out of my house by aliens. The evidence that such things could happen was abundant, but I assumed that it was absurd. So what might have been a fascinating meeting turned into a screaming confusion for me. It could have been more civilized, surely, but I will never forget the ghastly shock that coursed through me a few days later when my doctor said, “You’ve been raped.” It was so humiliating that it took me twenty years to actually utter those words. To this day, I suffer pain from the injury I sustained on that night, which I mentioned only in passing in Communion as the “rectal probe” that has made me such a laughingstock. Rape and laughter don’t actually go together all that well, though, at least not to the victim.

  Had I been aware that such things could happen, I would certainly have been more calm, and perhaps the experience would have been less chaotic. Over the eleven years of contact that followed, I ended up in a sort of school, the lessons of which were glimpses into the greater reality in which we actually live. In short, what started out pretty badly became the most precious of treasures. Even the fear became entertaining and profoundly instructive, especially when I realized that the outré little beings I have called “the visitors” found me every bit as terrifying as I did them.

  It’s too bad that science has not acknowledged their presence, because, even without direct contact with them, there is a wealth of physical evidence available for study. But they don’t fit our theories of the cosmos. According to modern theory, it is impossible for there to be physical travel across the universe because the distances are too great. But there is also no evidence of where they are from. Maybe they are far stranger even than aliens from another planet.

  As our rational culture has matured, it has also become, as is inevitable, more decadent. In science, this decadence finds expression in the fact that we’ve slipped into the trap of putting theory before evidence, which is the core reason that we are missing so much of what is real all around us.

  Given the evidence of all the sites along that great circle, for example, it is also likely that, in very ancient times, somebody knew that the Earth was round, had an awareness of its size, was in planetwide communication, and intentionally built these sites on a great circle measured from the physical North and South poles, which, during the cataclysm, moved when the earth’s crust shifted on its mantle.

  If such a movement were to have taken place, as Charles Hapgood first postulated and Rand Flem-Ath developed in his book When the Sky Fell, the consequences would have been fantastic destruction, a catastrophe beyond imagining.

  But what’s so unusual about that? This is planet Earth, where catastrophes beyond imagining happen pretty darned frequently.

  An earth movement that great and that sudden would have changed the planet’s coastlines—as, in fact, it did. But underwater archaeology is in its infancy. We have barely explored the ancient coastlines of the planet, but what we have explored, as Graham Hancock demonstrates in his book Underworld, seems to be populated with enigmatic ruins.

  Great catastrophes are ordinary events on Earth, and even mass extinctions are relatively common. Much more common are the smaller disasters that are not classifiable as mass extinctions, and there have been at least two of these just in the past fifteen thousand years.

  My story refers to the infamous upheaval that ended the Ice Age 12,600 years ago.

  Whether or not a sequel to that disaster is building now is unknown, b
ut certainly something is causing persistent changes in our solar system, and has been for about forty years, and possibly longer.

  A Dr. Alexey Dimitriev allegedly published an article in 1997 suggesting that charged particles were entering the solar system from the outside, resulting in changes to all bodies within the solar system. I say “allegedly” because I have been unable to contact Dr. Dimitriev, and there is some evidence that the paper may be a fabrication.

  But, in this case, that isn’t important. The Omega Point is fiction and, frankly, I would be flabbergasted if the world in 2020 was anything like what appears in the book. At the same time, though, more than one ancient calendar points to the immediate future as being a time of great change.

  Whether Dimitriev’s paper is real or not, there is evidence of increased planetary heating not only on Earth, but also on Mars and Jupiter. Planetologists observed an approximate 1 degree Fahrenheit warming on Mars between 1970 and 1990, and in recent years the Martian polar cap has retreated. An increase in the number of red spots of Jupiter, and other signs on various planetary bodies and moons in our solar system, point to the widespread presence of this phenomenon.

  As of this writing, the sun is also acting in an unusual manner, but rather than increasing solar activity, which would be expected if it was being bombarded from the outside, it has become unexpectedly quiet.

  At the same time, the amount of observed cometary and asteroid activity in the solar system may have been increasing. Because the amount of observation and the sensitivity of instruments is also increasing, it’s difficult to be certain. But when the Shoemaker-Levy comet struck Jupiter in 1994, it was thought to be a thousand-year event. Just fifteen years later, though, another large object struck Jupiter, surprising astronomers. It would never have been noticed, except that the scar it left was photographed by an amateur astronomer. A day before the object’s scar was seen on Jupiter on July 20, 2009, a similar scar appeared on Venus. Whether this was the result of an impact is not known, but if it was, then the object that produced it was a large one. Had it struck Earth on July 20 instead of Venus, it would have resulted in a massive planetary catastrophe very much like the one that overtook us 12,600 years ago.

  So, are we more than ordinarily exposed to an asteroid strike right now? Truthfully, nobody can be certain, but observation does suggest that there is more debris in the solar system just now.

  In my story, by the time 2020 has come around, the amount of material entering it has increased exponentially from where it was in 2012, and as a result the sun has begun to be affected by it.

  It is difficult to imagine the scale of what is happening, certainly for those living through it in the story, but as author and readers, we can visualize matters more clearly. A supernova emits two forms of material. The first is a radiation burst that moves at about 90 percent of the speed of light. This generally spreads through space as a gigantic expanding ball of energy. The second is a mass of debris, which moves much more slowly and unevenly, with the densest parts expanding most slowly.

  As a result, this expanding cloud has an irregular front, and it is this fact that gives rise to the fundamental premise of the story, that our solar system passed through one node of it 12,600 years ago, and is now entering another.

  While there is no certain evidence that this is actually happening, something must be causing the changes we are seeing in the solar system at the present time.

  One thing has become clear in the past few years: 12,600 years ago, there was indeed a tremendous upheaval on planet Earth. It hit North America the hardest, and was responsible for the mass extinctions that took place then, including the destruction of the entire human population of North America that existed at that time, the Clovis culture, and the extinction of no fewer than thirty-five animal genera, including most large animals in North America, such as the American horse, the mammoth, the mastodon, the American camel, and many others.

  There are dozens of myths about a time of flooding and upheaval in the world, some of which may date to this very early period.

  On May 23, 2007, in the General Assembly of the American Geophysical Union in Acapulco, Mexico, the work of a multiinstitutional twenty-six-member team proposed the theory that just such an impact caused the upheaval that ended the last Ice Age.

  They presented substantial evidence of the event, and three of them also published a popular book on the subject, The Cycle of Cosmic Catastrophes, which lays out their evidence for the nonscientific reader.

  But the event that took place 12,600 years ago was hardly unique in Earth’s history. In fact, it is simply one of a continuum of such events.

  Approximately 5,200 years ago something extraordinary caused the collapse of Mediterranean civilizations from archaic Greece to Egypt. Terrible drought struck the area. At the same time, in Peru, leafy plants were frozen so quickly that they did not wither—in other words, in a matter of seconds, like frozen food. Subsequently they were covered over by glaciers that remain intact even now.

  The climate there went from temperate to extremely cold in a matter of minutes or even seconds, and has remained extremely cold ever since in the area where Professor Lonnie Thompson of the Byrd Polar Research Institute studies these glaciers, in the Andean highlands.

  During the same period a man running through an alpine meadow in the Tyrol was overtaken by a blizzard and frozen. He—and the meadow—were then covered by a glacier that melted enough to expose his remains only in 1991, when the mummified form of Otzi the Ice Man was discovered lying in the frost of the retreating glacier.

  What sort of event would cause changes this sudden and yet long lasting across the globe? The simple answer is that the universe is a very messy place and even though Earth happens to be packed with a mind-boggling mass of sensitive, intelligent creatures who urgently seek to survive, it is still subject to arbitrary and random catastrophes, and—in terms of geologic time—they are relatively frequent.

  This book started with a thought: what if it happens? What if the world really does end for us?

  Teresa McDonald of the University of Kansas Natural History Museum says that 99.9 percent of all species that have ever lived are extinct right now, so extinction is certainly the norm—and, in fact, unless we happen to establish ourselves somewhere else in the universe, our time on planet Earth will sooner or later run out. And not only that, there is, in fact, no way at all to determine when this might happen.

  If an object that we happen to be able to see collides with the planet, we might have some warning, but there are many perils on Earth and in space—in fact, most—that will come as complete surprises.

  But was that always true, and need it still be true?

  Conventional modern wisdom asserts that time is immutable, reality is limited to what we can measure now, and that both evolution and civilization display rigid progressions occasionally punctuated by unanticipated changes, which are entirely unpredictable.

  However, that may not be entirely true, and it could be very far from true. As an example, there are buried in our past suggestions that somebody understood the world very differently from the way we do today, and perhaps saw a structure in the development of human civilization to which we have become blind.

  One of the oddest facts about our past is the number of very long-term calendars that exist, the most famous of which are the Zodiac and the Mayan Long Count calendar. The reason that this is odd is that our modern understanding of the ancient world leaves no room for the need for such calendars, let alone any ability to create them. For example, creating the Zodiac required understanding the precession of the equinoxes, which must necessarily involve thousands of years of observation as the Earth slowly gyrates and the stars its poles point at gradually change. Who could have made such long-term observations and recorded them? No civilization in recorded history has lasted long enough to create such a record.

  But then again, our understanding of the past does not have any room in it for the bui
lding of cities and sacred sites along the same great circle around the planet, either.

  One bit of evidence that cannot be disputed is that the authors of both the Old and New Testaments knew very well which signs of the Zodiac the books were being written under, and wove this knowledge into their texts.

  The Old Testament was written under the sign of Aries, the ram, and the ram is mentioned seventy-two times in it, more than any other animal. But, of course, that could be dismissed as a coincidence.

  But not when one realizes that the New Testament was written at the beginning of the next 2,300-year astrological cycle, Pisces, and its primary symbol, even more than the cross, is that of the fish. Jesus is the Fisher of Men. He gathers his apostles from among fishermen. Among early Christians, the universal symbol of recognition was the fish.

  The Old Testament that was written under Aries also reflects the demanding, stubborn characteristics of that sign, the exemplar of which is the dour personality of its governing deity, Yahweh. Similarly, Jesus with his message of compassion is characteristically Piscean. In addition, Pisces the fish swims in nurturing, supportive water, so if we are Pisces, then Earth is our water, providing us with everything we need to live.

  But not always. At present, we are leaving Pisces and entering Aquarius, and the water that has sustained us so long is being poured out. And indeed, Earth is already being plagued by droughts. In 2008, the southeastern United States came close to a catastrophic drought. In 2009, droughts afflicted much of Asia, parts of Europe and Africa, Mexico and the American Southwest, and the potential for catastrophic drought was reaching an extreme in Australia.

  In the February 28, 2009, issue of The New Scientist, it was suggested that a 4-degree Centigrade rise in planetary temperatures is likely by the end of the century, with the result that huge areas of Earth, including much of the United States, Africa, India, the Middle East, and most of the Amazon, are going to become much too dry to sustain the populations that now live in those areas. According to James Lovelock, the author of The Gaia Hypothesis, the situation is likely to lead to something approaching a 95 percent reduction in the human population of Earth, and, given present worldwide temperature changes, the predicted increase is probably already inevitable. In addition, as ocean currents slow, there could be serious and unpredictable shorter-term weather events, such as ferocious storms and, as the temperature of the planet becomes more even, the slowing and eventual stopping of essential air circulation.