The early British press in India gave many accounts of yogis sitting in a Buddha-like posture either upon air or on water. Fakirs would climb a levitated rope or levitate while holding a staff in one hand.
Tomas gives a comparatively recent account (1951) of a case of levitation in Nepal by E. A. Smythies, advisor to the government of Nepal, concerning his young native servant, who was in a trance: “His head and body were shaking and quivering, his face appeared wet with sweat, and he was making the most extraordinary noises. He seemed to me obviously unconscious of what he was doing or that a circle of rather frightened servants—and myself, were looking at him through the open door at about eight or ten feet distance. This went on for about ten minutes or a quarter of an hour, when suddenly (with his legs crossed and his hands clasped) he rose about two feet in the air, and after about a second bumped down hard on the floor. This happened again twice, exactly the same except that his hands and legs became separated.”
Furthermore, he says that “According to the 2,000-year-old Surya Siddhanta, the Siddhas, Adepts of High Science, could become extremely heavy or as light as a feather. This ancient concept of gravity as a variable force rather than a constant is in itself very remarkable, for there was nothing in the physical experience of the ancient Brahmins that we know of to indicate that objects could possibly become heavier or lighter.”24
In 1939 a Swedish aircraft designer named Henry Kjellson claimed he witnessed Tibetan monks levitating stones with the beating of large drums. Kjellson claimed in a book published in Swedish that 14 large or medium sized drums, suspended from a frame, and accompanied by trumpeters and a crowd of 200 monks, were beaten in a special rhythm until a large granite block was levitated onto a cliff. The heavy block of stone allegedly flew through the air in an arc and landed on the ledge of cliff on a steep mountain side 250 meters above the crowd.
Kjellson allegedly filmed the entire episode on 16mm film, but this film has never been released. The use of horns and drums to acoustically levitate something has been studied by NASA, and it is interesting to compare a modern stereo speaker cone with photos and diagrams of flying saucers. They look very similar! Horns were used in the biblical battle of Jericho to bring down the walls of the city. Ultrasonic weapons using soundwaves for destruction are a reality today. Were they in ancient times as well?127
The famous French explorer Madame Alexandra David-Neel, who died in 1969 at the age of 101, wrote in With Mystics and Magicians in Tibet, about her strange experiences with levitation in that country, where she had lived for fourteen years: “Setting aside exaggeration, I am convinced from my limited experiences and what I have heard from trustworthy lamas, that one reaches a condition in which one does not feel the weight of one’s body.”104
Madame David-Neel was fortunate enough to see a sleepwalking lama, or lung-gom-pa. These lamas become almost weightless and glide in the air after a long period of training. The lama she saw on her journey in north Tibet leaped with “the elasticity of a ball and rebounded each time his feet touched the ground.”
The Tibetans warned Madame David-Neel not to stop or accost the lama as that could have caused his death from shock. As this lama passed by with extraordinary rapidity on his undulating run, the French explorer and her companions decided to follow him on horseback. In spite of their superior means of transport, they could not catch up with the sleepwalking lama! In this trancelike state the lung-gom-pa is said to be quite aware of the terrain and obstacles on the way.
Madame David-Neel was given some very significant information about this levitation. Morning, evening, and night were said to be more favorable for these sleepwalking marches than noon or afternoon. Therefore, there might be some correlation between the position of the sun and gravity.
The power is said to be developed by deep rhythmic breathing and mental concentration. After long years of practice, the feet of the lama no longer touch the earth and he becomes airborne, gliding with great swiftness, writes David-Neel. She adds that some lamas create artificial gravity by wearing heavy chains in order not to float away into space!
While personal levitation may be convenient for some, and is certainly interesting in that it flouts known physical “laws,” it is nuts-and-bolts flying machines that we are really concerned with here.
The Rama Empire of India
In an archaeological sense, the idea that civilization began in Sumeria is fairly recent, beginning with the British and German excavations in the mid-1800s. At this time it was established that Sumeria was the oldest civilization in the world, and that all others must be more recent. Science essentially held that man lived in unorganized chaos for tens or hundreds of thousands of years until the Sumerians, circa 9000 BC. It is now thought that Sumeria is not the oldest culture in the world. It is theorized now that the cultures of ancient India and Southeast Asia are older.
India’s own records of its history claim that its culture has existed for literally tens of thousands of years. Yet, until 1920, all the “experts” agreed that the origins of the Indian civilization should be placed within a few hundred years of Alexander the Great’s expedition to the subcontinent in 327 BC However, that was before the cities of Harappa and Mohenjo Daro were discovered in what is today Pakistan. Later, other cities with the same plan were found and excavated, including Kot Diji, near Mohenjo Daro, Kalibangan and Lothal, a port in Gujerat, India. Lothal is a port city that is now miles from the ocean.
The discoveries of these cities forced archaeologists to push the dates for the origin of Indian civilization back thousands of years, just as Indians themselves insisted. A wonder to modern-day researchers, the cities are highly developed and advanced. The way that each city is laid out in regular blocks, with streets crossing each other at right angles, and with each city laid out in sections, causes archaeologists to believe that the cities were conceived as a whole before they were built—a remarkable early example of city planning. Even more remarkable is that the plumbing-sewage system throughout the large cities is so sophisticated that it is superior to that found in many Pakistani (and other) towns today. Sewers were covered, and most homes had toilets and running water. Furthermore, the water and sewage systems were kept well separated.
This advanced culture had its own writing, never deciphered, and used personalized clay seals, much as the Chinese still do today, to officialize documents and letters. Some of the seals found contain figures of animals that are unknown to us today!
Unlike other ancient nations such as Egypt, China, Brittany or Peru, the ancient Hindus did not have their history books all ordered destroyed, and therefore we have one of the few true links to an extremely ancient and scientifically advanced past. Modern scholars value ancient Hindu texts, as they are one of the last tenuous connections to the ancient libraries of the past. The super-civilization known as the Rama Empire is described in the Ramayana, which holds many keys to the truth of the past.
The Ramayana describes the adventures of a young prince named Rama who marries a beautiful woman named Sita. After some years of marriage, Sita runs off with (or is kidnapped by) Rama’s enemy, Ravanna. Ravanna takes Sita by vimana to his capital city on an island called Lanka. Rama uses his own vimana, and a small army of friends, to fly to Lanka and get his troublesome wife back. He brings her back to his home city, Ayodhya, where she banishes herself in the forest for being unfaithful. Rama, after years of anguish, finally gets back together with her, and they live happily ever after.
The city of Ayodhya as mentioned in the Ramayanais thought to be the small town of Ayodhya in northern India. Every year a Hindu festival occurs in the town and a mock-vimana is paraded through the town. Recently, it was reported in the Motilal Banarsidass Newsletter on archeology (February 1998) on the Indian subcontinent that a retired geography professor named S.N. Pande has proposed that Rama’s Ayodhya was actually in Afghanistan. Dr. Pande said that the current Ayodhya dated from only about 800 BC and the events of the Ramayana were much older.
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br /> Dr. Pande believes that the ancient city of Ayodhya was rebuilt as the city of Kushak, which was known after the tribe of Kashi and later by the name of Kusha, the son of Rama.
Thus Ayodhya and Kashi became synonymous in those days, says Pande. It is curious to think that many of the events of the Ramayana and Mahabharata occurred in Persia and Afghanistan, as well as in the Indian subcontinent. Considering the traditional connections between the eastern Mediterranean, Persia and India, this is not really so surprising. What is surprising is the tales of ancient flight and aerial warfare.
Rama ruled the earth for 11,000 years.
He gave a year-long festival
In this very Naimisha Forest.
All of this land was his kingdom then;
One age of the world ago;
Long before now, and far in the past.
Rama was kingfromthe center of the world,
To the Four Oceans’ shores.
—the beginning chapter of the Ramayana by Valmiki
Fly the Friendly Skies in an Air India Vimana
Nearly every Hindu and Buddhist in the world—hundreds of millions of people—has heard of the ancient flying machines referred to in the Ramayanaand other texts as vimanas. Vimanas are mentioned even today in standard Indian literature and media reports. An article called “Flight Path” by the Indian journalist Mukul Sharma appeared in the major newspaper The Times of India on April 8, 1999 which talked about vimanas and ancient warfare:According to some interpretations of surviving texts, India’s future it seems happened way back in its past. Take the case of the Yantra Sarvasva, said to have been written by the sage Maharshi Bhardwaj.
This consists of as many as 40 sections of which one, the Vaimanika Prakarana dealing with aeronautics, has eight chapters, a hundred topics and 500 sutras.
In it Bhardwaj describes vimana, or aerial craft, as being of three classes: (1) those that travel from place to place; (2) those that travel from one country to another; and (3) those that travel between planets. Of special concern among these were the military planes whose functions were delineated in some very considerable detail and which read today like something clean out of science fiction. For instance they had to be: impregnable, unbreakable, non-combustible and indestructible capable of coming to a dead stop in the twinkling of an eye; invisible to enemies; capable of listening to the conversations and sounds in hostile planes; technically proficient to see and record things, persons, incidents and situations going on inside enemy planes; know at every stage the direction of movement of other aircraft in the vicinity; capable of rendering the enemy crew into a state of suspended animation, intellectual torpor or complete loss of consciousness; capable of destruction; manned by pilots and co-travellers who could adapt in accordance with the climate in which they moved; temperature regulated inside; constructed of very light and heat absorbing metals; provided with mechanisms that could enlarge or reduce images and enhance or diminish sounds.
Notwithstanding the fact that such a contraption would resemble a cross between an American state-of-the-art Stealth Fighter and a flying saucer, does it mean that air and space travel was well known to ancient Indians and aeroplanes flourished in India when the rest of the world was just about learning the rudiments of agriculture? Not really [the perception of the absence of proof is no proof of the proof’s absence.—Jai Maharaj], for the manufacturing processes described alongside are delightfully diffuse and deliberately vague.
But it does display a breathtaking expanse of imagination which, had it ever been implemented, would have propelled us even further than Star Trek.
It would seem from the above article that modern Indians now view their own past as something out of science fiction. Aerial battles and chases are common in ancient Hindu literature. Buck Rogers, Flash Gordon, and Star Trek all come mind when reading the ancient Indian epics.
What did these airships look like? The ancient Mahabharata speaks of a vimana as “an aerial chariot with the sides of iron and clad with wings.” The Ramayana describes a vimana as a double-deck, circular (cylindrical) aircraft with portholes and a dome. It flew with the “speed of the wind” and gave forth a “melodious sound” (a humming noise?). Ancient Indian texts on vimanas are so numerous it would take at least one entire book to relate what they have to say. See, among others, Vimana Aircraft of Ancient India & Atlantis10by this author. The ancient Indians themselves wrote entire flight manuals on the care and control of various types of vimanas. The Samara Sutradhara is a scientific treatise dealing with every possible facet of air travel in a vimana. There are 230 stanzas dealing with construction, take-off, cruising for thousands of miles, normal and forced landings, and even possible collisions with birds.31,15,39 Would these texts exist (they do) without there being something to actually write about? Traditional historians and archaeologists simply ignore such writings as the imaginative ramblings of a bunch of stoned, ancient writers. After all, where are these vimanas that they write about? Perhaps they are seen every day around the world and are called UFOs!
Says Andrew Tomas, “There are two categories of ancient Sanskrit texts—the factual records known as the Manusa, and mythical and religious literature known as the Daiva. The Samara Sutradhara, which belongs to the factual type of records, treats of air travel from every angle....If this is the science fiction of antiquity, then it is the best that has ever been written.”24
In 1875, the Vaimanika Sastra, a fourth-century BC text written by Maharshi Bhardwaj, was rediscovered in a temple in India. The book (taken from older texts, says the author) dealt with the operation of ancient vimanas and included information on steering, precautions for long flights, protection of the airships from storms and lightning, and how to switch the drive to solar energy, or some other “free energy” source, possibly some sort of “gravity drive.” Vimanas were said to take off vertically, and were capable of hovering in the sky, like a modern helicopter or dirigible. Bhardwaj the Wise refers to no less than seventy authorities and ten experts of air travel in antiquity. These sources are now lost.10, 33
Vimanas were kept in a Vimana Griha, or hangar, were said to be propelled by a yellowish-white liquid, and were used for various purposes. Airships were present all over the world, if we are to believe these seemingly wild stories and look at archeological evidence accordingly. Besides being used for travel, airships unfortunately came to be used as warships by the people of Rama and Atlantis.
The plain of Nazca in Peru is very famous for appearing from high altitude to be a rather elaborate, if confusing, airfield. Some researchers have theorized that this was some sort of Atlantean outpost. It is worth noting that the Rama Empire had its outposts: Easter Island, almost diametrically opposite Mohenjo-Daro on the globe, astonishingly developed its own written language, an obscure script lost to the the present inhabitants, but found on tablets and other carvings. This odd script is found in only one other place in the world: Mohenjo-Daro and Harappa! Could it be that a trade network, operating even across the Pacific Ocean, was used by the Rama Empire and the Atlanteans? 52, 31
Aerial Warfare in Ancient India
The ancient Indian epics go into considerable detail about aerial warfare over 10,000 years ago. So much detail that a famous Oxford professor included a chapter on the subject in a book on ancient warfare!
According to the Sanskrit scholar Ramachandra Dikshitar, the Oxford Professor who wrote War in Ancient India in 1944, “No question can be more interesting in the present circumstances of the world than India’s contribution to the science of aeronautics. There are numerous illustrations in our vast Puranic and epic literature to show how well and wonderfully the ancient Indians conquered the air. To glibly characterize everything found in this literature as imaginary and summarily dismiss it as unreal has been the practice of both Western and Eastern scholars until very recently. The very idea indeed was ridiculed and people went so far as to assert that it was physically impossible for man to use flying machines. But today what with b
alloons, aeroplanes and other flying machines, a great change has come over our ideas on the subject.”100
Says Dr. Dikshitar, “... the flying vimana of Rama or Ravana was set down as but a dream of the mythographer till aeroplanes and zeppelins of the present century saw the light of day. The mohanastra or the ”arrow of unconsciousness“ of old was until very recently a creature of legend till we heard the other day of bombs discharging Poisonous gases. We owe much to the energetic scientists and researchers who plod persistently and carry their torches deep down into the caves and excavations of old and dig out valid testimonials pointing to the misty antiquity of the wonderful creations of humanity.” 100
Dikshitar mentions that in Vedic literature, in one of the Brahmanas, occurs the concept of a ship that sails heavenwards. “The ship is the Agniliotra of which the Ahavaniya and Garhapatya fires represent the two sides bound heavenward, and the steersman is the Agnihotrin who offers milk to the three Agnis. Again in the still earlier Rg Veda Samhita we read that the Asvins conveyed the rescued Bhujya safely by means of winged ships. The latter may refer to the aerial navigation in the earliest times.“
Dr. R. Dikshitar’s 1944 book.
Commenting on the famous vimana text the Vimanika Shastra, he says:In the recently published Samarangana Sutradhara of Bhoja, a whole chapter of about 230 stanzas is devoted to the principles of construction underlying the various flying machines and other engines used for military and other purposes. The various advantages of using machines, especially flying ones, are given elaborately. Special mention is made of their attacking visible as well as invisible objects, of their use at one’s will and pleasure, of their uninterrupted movements, of their strength and durability, in short of their capability to do in the air all that is done on earth. After enumerating and explaining a number of other advantages, the author concludes that even impossible things could be effected through them. Three movements are usually ascribed to these machines, ascending, cruising thousands of miles in the atmosphere and lastly descending. It is said that in an aerial car one can mount up to the Surya-mandala, ‘solar region’ and the Naksatra-mandala (stellar region) and also travel throughout the regions of air above the sea and the earth. These cars are said to move so fast as to make a noise that could be heard faintly from the ground. Still some writers have expressed a doubt and asked ’Was that true?‘ But the evidence in its favour is overwhelming.
Technology of the Gods: The Incredible Sciences of the Ancients Page 15