Faking History

by Jason Colavito

  22. Ancient Astronauts, Soviet Geopolitics, and the Spitsbergen UFO Hoax

  Is this the CIA’s smoking gun in ancient astronaut studies? Did the CIA know months before the publication of Chariots of the Gods (1968) that ancient astronauts flew through earth’s prehistoric skies? This passage from a declassified CIA memo would seem to confirm that they did. The relevant paragraphs are as follows:

  Some people think that UFOs have appeared in the earth’s atmosphere only during the past two decades. This is not the case. The UFO phenomenon has been observed throughout the history of mankind. There are medieval and ancient reports strikingly similar to our own.

  Among the earlier UFO reports, as an example, may be the well-documented observations of a “large saucer” in 1882 and a “procession of bolides” in 1913. These reports still await investigation.

  The most remarkable UFO phenomenon is the famous “Tungusky meteorite.” In recent years Soviet scientists have established that the Tungusky explosion had every parameter of an atmospheric nuclear blast. The USSR Academy of Sciences Reports (Volume 172, Nos. 4 and 5, 1967), include studies by Alexei Zolotov which attempt to prove that the Tungusky body could not be a meteorite or a comet.[152]

  A close reading of the document shows that it is not, in fact, confirmation that the U.S. government believed in ancient astronauts, but rather that CIA analysts were following Soviet ancient astronaut developments closely for what they had to say about potential Soviet weapons programs and technological developments.

  The document is actually a CIA abstract of an article written by Soviet ufologist Feliz Ziegel in 1968 in Soviet Life magazine, a publication aimed at Western audience, advocating for the study of UFOs in the months when Ziegel was pressuring the Soviet government to launch an official UFO inquiry, a request the Soviet government denied. By 1970, the Soviet Academy of Physics denounced Ziegel’s claims, including ancient astronauts and a nuclear blast at Tunguska, as “fables.” Not only that, but the article contains little original research; its ancient astronaut claims had been floating around Soviet circles since 1959 (see Chapter 21).

  The CIA made an abstract of this article as part of its longstanding effort to keep abreast of Soviet science. Out of context, it looks like CIA interest in ancient astronauts. In context, it is one of thousands of Soviet news reports and journal articles translated or abstracted on a bewildering variety of subjects. The CIA may have been interested in UFOs and ancient astronauts, but only because they could be used as leverage in the Cold War. Interestingly, the American embassy in Moscow sent Washington an unclassified airgram—a secret communication by diplomatic pouch—on February 20, 1968 following up on this Soviet Life article and reporting that a new article by V. Lyustiberg “debunks flying saucers completely.” The author, the embassy said, “makes no attempt to square this belief with previously published Soviet articles, including that rather spectacular article primarily for U.S. consumption in Soviet Life.”[153] The State Department could not have then known of the growing disapproval of UFO studies in the Soviet government or the efforts to end Zeigel’s pseudoscientific investigations.

  The embassy attached a copy of Lyustiberg’s article and someone at the NSA carefully circled a paragraph reporting on “an abandoned silvery disc” found buried in a Norwegian coal mine on an island in Spitsbergen in 1952, “pierced and marked by micrometer impacts.” It was, the article said, “sent to the Pentagon” where it disappeared. Upon receipt, the NSA marked this paragraph with the word “PLANT” in all caps, demonstrating that the U.S. government was in the business of fooling the Soviets with false UFO reports.[154] Unfortunately, the report fooled many Western ufologists, and when the story’s false premises began to unravel (witnesses, for example, turned out to be fictive), the tale was put down to fabrication on the part of a news reporter.

  Spitsbergen was (and is) a coal-rich Norwegian island in the Svalbard archipelago high in the Arctic.

  This much is well-reported in the ufological literature, including several books by journalist Nick Redfern. He dismisses the Spitsbergen crash as a government hoax, but does no additional probing to find out why it might have occurred. He simply implies nefarious government conspiracies of no certain purpose by the “all powerful” NSA.[155]

  CIA documents, however, present a plausible reason for the UFO hoax cover story, one that ufologists like Redfern would easily have found in the FOIA documents publicly available on the CIA website had they expanded their search beyond the keyword “UFO” and took the time to put together the clues scattered across a range of strategic documents. From these, the following story emerges relatively clearly:

  1952 was the same year that the CIA began monitoring the Yakutsk Cosmic Ray Station, a Soviet research facility whose work remained mysterious through the 1950s.[156] (It was monitoring neutron radiation from space, but the CIA thought it might have served as cover for nuclear research.) The site is a relatively short hop across the North Pole from Spitsbergen, and Spitsbergen was the closest Western territory to Yakutsk in 1952. The U.S. expressed strategic interest in Spitsbergen from at least World War II, and declared it a strategic imperative to monitor Soviet activities in concessions the USSR claimed in the Svalbard archipelago, where the CIA feared the USSR might build a covert air or submarine base to attack Europe or the United States.[157] The USSR had demanded Norway cede Bear Island and other Svalbard archipelago territories to the Soviet Union in 1944 and 1946, a request Norway rejected. Translated Soviet material kept classified by the CIA until 2009 confirms that the Soviets viewed Spitsbergen as an essential territory to control for unrestricted nuclear-armed submarine warfare against NATO.[158]

  Additionally, the CIA in 1954 wrote that it needed to study the effects of Arctic magnetism on magnetically-guided long-range missiles in order to counter Soviet advances in understanding Arctic magnetism.[159] This was sparked by a wave of Soviet aerial activity in the Arctic region, beginning in 1948, of immense concern to the CIA since the North Pole is the quickest route to deliver nuclear weapons from Russia to North America. This route had been thought closed to the Soviet Union until the first Soviet polar flight in 1947, the same year that UFO hysteria began in America.

  Putting it all together, the available information supports three possible conclusions: (a) America hoaxed a UFO crash as a message to the Soviets; (b) America hoaxed a UFO crash to cover up a weapons or vehicular test aimed at the Soviet Arctic; (c) America hoaxed a UFO crash to cover up the recovery of a Soviet missile, submarine, or aircraft. Without more information, it is not possible to determine which actually occurred, but none requires an extraterrestrial craft.

  Therefore, CIA monitoring of Soviet UFO and ancient astronaut research was about more than interest in ETs; rather, it appears to be intimately tied in to Cold War geopolitics by other means. Again, let me emphasize that no UFO researcher I have been able to discover has ever tried to place the Spitsbergen UFO hoax in its geopolitical context, or even acknowledged that Cold War tensions were playing out on the island. So much for “proof” of the CIA’s interest in ancient astronauts and buried UFOs.

  23. Taking Aliens and Ancient Texts Literally

  If alternative writers cannot be bothered to conduct a literature search regarding the context surrounding modern UFO claims (see Chapter 22), they fair no better in cherry-picking the texts of antiquity. The value of what ancient astronaut theorists (AATs) refer to as “ancient texts” (in reality a stew of poetry, prose, oral history, and later missionary or anthropological reports) cannot be underestimated. When they are not outright fabricating them, AATs believe that these ancient texts are a literal record of prehistoric events. According to these theorists, ancient people were something akin to stenographers, incapable of recording anything than the literal truth about what they saw and experienced, though some distortion may have occurred later in time. The theory’s most prominent proponent, Erich von Däniken, explained this idea in the theory’s key text, Chariots of the Gods?, i
n 1968:

  If we take things literally, much that was once fitted into the mosaic of our past with great difficulty becomes quite plausible: not only the relevant clues in ancient texts, but also the ‘hard facts’ which offer themselves to our critical gaze all over the globe.[160]

  The key to this phrase is, of course, the “if” clause.

  Similarly, Giorgio Tsoukalos, the head of the Ancient Alien Society, formerly the Archaeology, Astronautics, and SETI Research Association (AAS RA), and a talking head and “consulting producer” on Ancient Aliens, put it this way:

  Even after the “evidence” or the “artifact” was lost, hidden, or destroyed, the memories and recollections pertaining to the object and/or the visitors associated with it, remained. Facts were preserved orally through ritual traditions of significant events which happened a long, long time ago, dating back decades, centuries, or possibly even longer. Using this inherent form of “recording,” actual—at that time highly significant—events in the remote past were preserved over the course of millennia. These accounts should thus be used in the careful analysis of ancient myths and traditions containing intricate descriptions of “confrontations with technological content and background”.[161]

  According to the AATs, a “careful analysis” of the texts shows that the “gods” of ancient mythology are in fact accurate traditions of extraterrestrial beings whose superior technology made them seem magical and godlike. Further, descriptions of doomed cities like Sodom and Gomorrah are literal reports of nuclear explosions, and descriptions of Hindu flying chariots are first-hand accounts of alien spaceships. The publisher of von Däniken’s 2002 book, The Gods Were Astronauts, writes in the book’s publicity materials that the author entertains “the suggestion, based on a thorough examination of ancient texts, that alien beings employed high-tech vehicles in epic aerial battles” (emphasis added).[162]

  But such speculations are supportable only if we are justified in taking “ancient texts” literally. In order to justify a literal interpretation, AATs would need to show that ancient texts are verifiably accurate and that they consistently describe true events in a recoverable and understandable way. If these two conditions are not met, we end up with a situation like Nostradamus’ quatrains, where readers are actively creating their own (often contradictory) meanings from real or imagined suggestions in the text, leading to a multiplicity of interpretations.

  The key issue in the ancient astronaut theory’s view of ancient texts is that where the gods appear, the gods are aliens. Humans are unable to entirely comprehend these aliens and attribute to them godlike power. As von Däniken wrote in Chariots, the first humans “had tremendous respect for the space travellers. Because they came from somewhere absolutely unknown and then returned there again, they were the ‘gods’ to them.”[163] Their spaceships, of course, were titular flaming “chariots.”

  So, what becomes of what von Däniken himself admitted was “speculation” if the ancient texts fail to support the idea that the gods came from the sky in fiery spaceships?

  Let’s look at some “ancient texts” and find out.

  I’d like to start with Herodotus (c. 484 – c. 425 BCE), an obviously ancient author, and one that AATs have had no trouble citing when his material meets their purposes. For example, von Däniken cites Herodotus in Chariots and repeatedly in 1996’s Eyes of the Sphinx. According to Herodotus, the Thracians had a god named Salmoxis (Zalmoxis), who was their main deity, their savior god, and their lawgiver. Now, according to the ancient astronaut theory, if it has any predictive value, we should expect this god to have come from the sky and to have a flying saucer. What does Herodotus say of him?

  This Salmoxis I hear from the Hellenes who dwell about the Hellespont and the Pontus, was a man, and he became a slave in Samos, and was in fact a slave of Pythagoras the son of Mnesarchos.[164]

  Further, besides being unforgivably human, Salmoxis fails even the most basic test of ancient astronautics: He isn’t even from the sky!

  [Salmoxis] was making for himself meanwhile a chamber under the ground; and when his chamber was finished, he disappeared from among the Thracians and went down into the underground chamber, where he continued to live for three years.[165]

  That’s right: Salmoxis lived underground. Now, of course Herodotus doesn’t say he came from underground, but as a human neither did he come from the sky.

  Of course this is merely one god, and an obscure one. Surely, the Greek gods, whom von Däniken claimed were extraterrestrials in his 1999 book Odyssey of the Gods, and whom Giorgio Tsoukalos announced on Ancient Aliens lived in a flying saucer on Mt. Olympus, have better support in the “ancient texts” for their extraterrestrial bona fides?

  Here is Cyprian, writing in 247 CE, in On the Vanity of Idols:

  That those are no gods whom the common people worship, is known from this: they were formerly kings, who on account of their royal memory subsequently began to be adored by their people even in death. Thence temples were founded to them; thence images were sculptured to retain the countenances of the deceased by the likeness; and men sacrificed victims, and celebrated festal days, by way of giving them honour. Thence to posterity those rites became sacred, which at first had been adopted as a consolation.[166]

  But perhaps this is too recent (though it should not be since von Däniken has no trouble in Chariots citing Norse sagas from 1200 CE as “ancient texts” recording prehistoric traditions). Let’s look at what Cicero (106-43 BCE) has to say in De natura deorum, where the Republican Roman orator relates “the theory that these gods, who are deified human beings, and who are the object of our most devout and universal veneration, exist not in reality but in imagination.”[167]

  Such a philosophy derives from the work of the fourth century BCE Greek mythographer Euhemerus whose books, unfortunately, do not survive. His ideas, however, were preserved in the works of Diodorus Siculus and Plutarch, who explains in Isis and Osiris that Euhemerus spread atheism “by describing all the received Gods under the style of generals, sea-captains, and kings, whom he makes to have lived in the more remote and ancient times, and to be recorded in golden characters in a certain country called Panchon…”[168]

  So, we see that some “ancient texts” state that the gods were merely human beings promoted by time and ignorance to the status of gods. On what basis can we discount these texts while privileging other texts that hew closer to the ancient astronaut theory’s views? The answer, of course, is that we cannot. Of course, it is possible to argue that these texts represent a later development, or that they represent later efforts to interpret earlier myths that were in turn influenced by aliens. But this brings us to a paradox.

  On one hand we have actual, unambiguous ancient texts that literally state that the gods were not aliens but humans. And on the other hand we have texts that AATs have interpreted as seeming like they depict 1960s-era astronauts. So which do we believe: the ancients’ actual words, or von Däniken’s and Tsoukalos’ reconstructions of what they believe some (but not all) of those words mean?

  According to the rules of the ancient astronaut theory, as laid down by von Däniken and Tsoukalos above, we must assume that “ancient texts” are literal and accurate, while discounting the possibility of interpretation or subjective judgment, since according to the AATs, ancient people lacked the imagination or the ability to create fantasy wholesale. As von Däniken wrote in Chariots: “Even imagination needs something to start it off. How can the chronicler give descriptions that presuppose at least some idea of rockets and the knowledge that such a vehicle can ride on a ray and cause a terrifying thunder?”[169] Therefore, we must also ask what “imagination” led Euhemerus to suggest the gods were humans? What fact led to a thousand years of Greco-Roman “secret” traditions that the gods were mere human beings?

  To complicate matters further, the father of “alternative” history, Ignatius Donnelly, chose to interpret the ancient texts cited above literally in his Atlantis: The Antediluvian
World (1882) to argue that the Greek gods were in fact ancient kings of Atlantis: “The history of Atlantis is the key of the Greek mythology. There can be no question that these gods of Greece were human beings. The tendency to attach divine attributes to great earthly rulers is one deeply implanted in human nature.”[170] He then went on to interpret the rest of Greek mythology symbolically, to argue that it was a distorted reflection of the events of the last days of Atlantis.

  As the reader has likely realized, this exercise is predicated on incorrect assumptions. Ignatius Donnelly, Erich von Däniken, and Giorgio Tsoukalos have chosen to interpret some “ancient texts” literally and others symbolically, mostly according to how well these texts support their preconceived notions. As we have just seen, this ad hoc method supports diametrically opposed results with equal certainty. Any attempt to impose a blanket rule—even the ancient astronaut theorists’ own rule, observed mainly in the breach, that texts should be taken at face value—inevitably produces a paradox whereby “ancient texts” confirm and deny the same “facts.”

  The reason for this should be obvious: “Ancient texts” are not monolithic, literal records of what happened in the past. They were written by different authors for different purposes in different times and places. Every ancient document has its own unique history, composition, biases, and (for some) even false or fictitious elements. To truly explore ancient literature is to understand these facets of these works and to analyze them according to a methodology established prior to the attempt to use the texts to justify a prefabricated theory.

  The AAS RA ancient astronaut organization describes ancient texts as including: