Iapetus’ Equatorial “Ridge” In Close Up.
Again, close attention to this photograph will reveal two more features: (1) the hexagonal craters already previously mentioned, and (2) the fact that the equatorial “ridge” appears to be composed of three parallel components, a fact that will assume some importance subsequently. As for the ridge itself, it is estimated to be some six miles high, and of slightly greater width. This feature, notes Hoagland, is “the greatest linear feature in the solar system,” a fact that takes on some scientific urgency, because “there is no viable geological model to explain a sixty thousand-foot-bigh, sixty-thousand-foot-wide, four million foot-long “wall”... spanning an entire planetary bemisphere... let alone, located in the precise plane of its equator!”650 And what about those three parallel lines that appear to make up the “ridge”? Hoagland minces no words: “It is a well-known cliché that ‘Nature doesn’t usually create straight lines.’ If that is true, then it certainly doesn’t create three of them... - all running parallel, not only to each other, but to the literal equator of the planet.”651
4. Iapetus’ Flat Plane Edges
As if this were not enough, the Cassini photographs revealed that Iapetus is not even a sphere at all, nor is it even a “squashed” sphere or ellipsoid. This feature was captured in all its obvious, though anomalous glory by a Cassini photograph taken when the “moon” was light by reflected light from Saturn.
Iapetus’ Straight Plane Edges652
Another view of these straight edges may be seen from yet a different point of view in a close-up photograph.
Iapetus’ Straight Edges
Looking at the horizon carefully, these straight edges are clearly visible once again. Iapetus is, on other words, not a sphere nor even an ellipsoid. Or as Hoagland quips, “Needless to say - natural planets or satellites do NOT come with sharply-defined ‘straight edges!’”653 And these effects are again not due to any photographic defect. To drive this point home, Hoagland cites NASA’s own press release.654
Whatever Iapetus may be, it is clearly not a moon, a natural satellite. It is an artificial body - of immense size to be sure — placed in an artificial orbit around Saturn. Hoagland observes that the fact that NASA had the Cassini probe take over a hundred distant images of the “moon” indicated “that NASA also strongly suspected... what we’ve just discovered: that Iapetus, for some reason, is NOT a ‘spherical’ moon...In fact...that it’s not a ‘moon’ at all!”655
But from the standpoint of this study and of the Cosmic War Hypothesis it advances, Iapetus must surely be understood as corroborative evidence that the participants in that war, as indicated by the myths themselves, included Saturn, for now with Iapetus, we have clear evidence of a civilization, and of a technology, sufficiently advanced to wage war of that destructive a nature. This does not, however, imply that Iapetus was a component in whatever dreadful arsenal was used, but merely that a technology once existed sufficient to that task.
D. Hoagland’s Three Hypotheses For Explaining lapetus
1. The “Ark” Hypothesis
While any survey of Hoagland’s Moon With A View paper could not possibly do it justice, no survey of the Iapetus anomalies that he so carefully catalogued in the over two hundred pages of analysis in that paper would not be complete without a brief mention of his own hypotheses for explaining the presence of this most extreme of all the anomalies in the solar system. Hoagland boils the main points of his argument for Iapetus’ artificial origins down to three basic facts, or as he calls them, “exhibits”:
Exhibit #1: the baffling, highly geometric, precisely equatorial ~60,000-foot-high “Iapetus Wall.”656
Exhibit #2, the equally astonishing, equally unnatural rectilinear geometry - evident all across the surface of this “moon.”657
Exhibit #3, without doubt our most astonishing Iapetus discovery - unique (so far...) in the entire solar system:
That, instead of being spherical - as natural moons larger than about 250 miles across must be (due to inexorable gravitational contraction) - the overall 900-mile-wide form of Iapetus is highly geometric... specifically, apparently an eroded truncated isocahedron!658
Viewing this planetary anomaly against the background of Van Flandern’s Exploded Planet Hypothesis, Hoagland advances his first hypothesis:
That, this extraordinary object was deliberately constructed as an “ark” — an artificial, world-sized spacecraft, designed to rescue as many as possible from the imminent, hyperdimensional explosion of an entire world, the destruction of a former major member of the sun’s planetary system which now no longer exists: Planet V. An event which would have inevitably, disastrously, affected the very existence of even an extremely advanced, solar system wide civilization...which we (and others) - based on a myriad of accumulating evidence - have proposed arose long before us...literally millions of years ago.659
But there is another, more disturbing possibility, one that perhaps the reader has already recognized, an imagery that comes from our own contemporary “mythologies”, and the fertile story-telling imagination of one of film-making’s most celebrated producers and directors...
2. The “Death Star” Hypothesis
Hoagland was not oblivious to this striking similarity, and in fact, captured the stunning nature of his next hypothesis in a very haunting visual comparison:
Hoagland’s Iapetus-Death Star Comparison
I have to confess that when I first saw this comparison on Hoagland’s website I was literally stunned. Even Hoagland had to ask an additional question at this point, not only wondering about what Arthur C. Clarke knew and when he knew it, but what Star Wars producer and director George Lucas knew, and when he knew it. As I have mentioned elsewhere,660 there are a whole host of parallels between the Star Wars “mythology” and that of the ancient myths themselves. Even “Anaken Skywalker’s” first name is a rough assonance on the Sumerian term “Anunnaki,” the beings who in Sumerian mythology came down from heaven and created mankind and subsequently taught him civilization.
Hoagland puts the case for his second hypothesis, his “Death Star” hypothesis, this way: Iapetus
Was indeed a “Deathstar world” — created as an instrument of war by that same civilization (which is still humans’ primary occupation, isn’t it?) - an “instrument” then used in some unimaginable conflict in this solar system a long, long time ago....
That Iapetus may somehow have even been instrumental in creating the almost unimaginable holocaust — a literal “war in Heaven” — which ultimately resulted in the deliberate destruction of that same doomed world ... with Iapetus itself caught by the aftermath. As an eternal silent tomb, forever trapped now in a permanent, unique orbit around Saturn....661
At this juncture, Hoagland mentions his third, and most favored, hypothesis, dismissing the other two for their lack of sufficient explanatory power.
3. The “Temple” Hypothesis
This third hypothesis is that Iapetus was designed as a kind of “temple world” and placed in its precise orbital positioning to model, and “sacralize” various “hyper-dimensional” physics and mathematics. In short, it is the geometries present on Iapetus and in its orbital mechanics that the “rescue ark” and “deathstar” hypotheses cannot explain.662
There is much to commend this last hypothesis, including something that Hoagland does not mention, though it is clearly implied from his extensive remarks throughout his paper, and it was surely in his mind when he proposed this hypothesis, and that is that the “Temple Hypothesis” would certainly square with the type of religious world-view evident in the ancient myths we have examined in this book, and with the preoccupation of Mesopotamian, Egyptian, and later, Graeco-Roman civilizations to build temples embodying precisely such mathematical relationships. This, the “Ark Hypothesis” cannot do.
But I am bold to suggest that his “Deathstar” hypothesis can account for these geometries, for as has been repeatedly argued not only here
but in my previous books, any weapons system based on scalar physics would seek to embody as many geometric analogues of local celestial systems and their mechanics into its structure as possible, in order to make it the most efficient resonator of those local space-time geometries. One would come to expect such redundancies, and such orbital mechanics, for they would serve a functional purpose for the weapons system. Similarly, as we have also pointed out in this book, such a physics can also be made the basis, in one and the same system, for a powerful interstellar communications network. So yet another possibility is that Iapetus may form some component or “base of operations” in such a network.
Moreover, Hoagland’s “Deathstar” hypothesis shares something in common with his “Temple Hypothesis” and that is that there is a mythological context in which it makes perfect sense: the war of the Titans, the giants of old, to overthrow the “first god” Kronos, Saturn. This fact, coupled with the fact observed earlier in this book that Saturn is often, for some reason lost to history, portrayed in conjunction with Mars, the god of war. Viewed in this light, Hoagland perhaps may have abandoned his “Deathstar” hypothesis too quickly.
In any case, our examination of the extra-terrestrial evidence for an ancient interplanetary civilization and war is now complete. Only one final problem remains: the antiquity of its observers and combatants themselves...
16.
THE ANTIQUITY OF MAN...OR OF WHOMEVER
“From the Vedic literature, we derive the idea that the human race is of great antiquity. For the purpose of conducting systematic research into the existing scientific literature on human antiquity, we expressed the Vedic idea in the form of a theory that various humanlike and apelike beings have coexisted for long periods of time. ”
Michael A. Cremo663
Any attempt to summarize the voluminous and well-documented research of Michael A. Cremo and Richard L. Thompson in one short chapter is doomed to failure at the outset. Their magisterial work on alternative paleontology and anthropology, Forbidden Archeology, runs a little over nine hundred pages. Its “condensed” version, The Hidden History of the Human Race, is itself over three hundred.
However, one may approach their work from the standpoint of the Cosmic War Hypothesis, and what it implies for their own thesis. Cremo and Thompson approached their work in the broadest possible sense, as a “sociological, philosophical, and historical critique of the scientific method, as applied to the question of human origins and antiquity.”664 Their basic thesis is that humanity is of far greater antiquity than the standard academic models will allow, hence, this places them in direct conflict with modern evolutionary theory. Again, this is not the place to examine their critique of that theory; however, as a result of their extensive review of the archeological evidence in the literature, oftentimes dating back a century or more, they conclude that the “facts” of evolutionary theory “turn out to be networks of arguments and observational claims.”665
A. A Brief Review of Cremo and Thompson’s Critique of Evolutionary Theory
One of the dogmas of the standard model concerns the discovery of Java Man, a “protohuman hominid” that was discovered
In Middle Pleistocene deposits generally given an age of 800,000 years. The discovery became a benchmark. Henceforth, scientists would not expect to find fossils or artifacts of anatomically modern humans in deposits of equal or greater age. If they did, they (or someone wiser) concluded that this was impossible and found some way to discredit the find as a mistake, an illusion, or a hoax. Before Java man, however, reputable nineteenth-century scientists found a number of examples of anatomically modern human skeletal remains in very ancient strata.666
After citing a series of reports and papers from such scientists concerning human remains from a date prior to the “evolutionary benchmark” of Java man, Cremo and Thompson observe that a similar set of papers and reports exists in support of the standard theory. One is left with the unpleasant alternative of rejecting both types of reports, or accepting both.
However, if one accepts the first set of reports,
Then we must accept the existence of intelligent, tool-making beings in geological periods as remote as the Miocene, or even the Eocene. If we accept the skeletal evidence presented in these reports, we must go further and accept the existence of anatomically modern human beings in these remote periods. This not only contradicts the modern theory of human evolution, but it also casts grave doubt on our whole picture of the evolution of mammalian life in the Cenozoic era.667
The Miocene era is generally understood to run from approximately 25 to 5 million years ago, and the Eocene from 50 or 55 to 45 million years ago. Thus, Cremo and Thompson’s work has the happy benefit of providing its readers with a veritable catalogue of “pre-evolutionary” evidence, widely reported in the literature of the day, that subsequently was forgotten, or worse, hushed up. In any case, they outline a substantial case that mankind is indeed of far greater antiquity than modern standard models will countenance.
For the Cosmic War Hypothesis, however, the antiquity of mankind is a given. What must be explained, rather, is the level of cultural achievement of this “paleoancient man,” or lack of it, for as we have already seen, the War Hypothesis demands that at some point between 3,200,000 and 65,000,000 years ago, there existed a sufficiently advanced culture - human or otherwise — in order to wage the war, if one accepts the dates of Van Flandern’s Exploded Planet Hypothesis as chronological benchmarks. This problem is acknowledged by Cremo and Thompson themselves in no uncertain terms, even though they most decidedly are not concerned with any version of the Cosmic War Hypothesis.
Up to this point, most of the evidence we have considered gives the impression that even if humans did exist in the distant past, they remained at a somewhat primitive level of cultural and technological achievement. One might well ask the following question. If humans had a long time to perfect their skills, then why do we not find ancient artifacts indicative of an advancing civilization?
In 1863, Charles Lyell expressed this doubt in his book Antiquity of Man: “Instead of the rudest pottery or flint tools... we should now be finding sculptured forms, surpassing in beauty the master-pieces of Phidias or Praxiteles; lines of buried railways or electric telegraphs, from which the best engineers of our day might gain invaluable hints; astronomical instruments and microscopes of more advanced construction than any known in Europe, and other indications of perfection in the arts and sciences.”668
Cremo and Thompson then go on to list a very suggestive catalogue of anomalous archeological artifacts that would seem to indicate some level of technological sophistication, even if not “astronomical” or “microscopic” devices, although as they also observe, such artifacts are very rare, and dispersed throughout the world.
B. Anomalous Finds of Great Antiquity Indicating the Existence of Technology
1. The Aix-en-Provence Find
One such discovery that Cremo and Thompson relate is the discovery made by French laborers from 1786 to 1788 in Aix-en-Provence, and recounted by the Count Bournon. Having dug to a depth of fifty feet through solid limestone, the workers then came upon a chamber, in which they discovered tools, hammers, coins, and other standard mason’s equipment. Some of the stones found in the chamber had already been worked. The American Journal of Science in 1820 cited the Count Bournon’s concluding words concerning the implications of this discovery: “The presence of man had then preceded the formation of this stone, and that very considerably since he was already arrived at such a degree of civilization that the arts were known to him, and that he wrought the stone and formed columns out of it.”669
2. Finds Reported in American Scientific Journals
In 1831, The American Journal of Science was at it again, reporting the discovery of raised characters on a block of marble taken from a quarry near Philadelphia, from a depth of 60-70 feet. The characters once again suggested an origin by humans who had worked the stone in the distant past.8
As no evolutionary college of cardinals existed at the time to suppress archeological Galileos making inconvenient discoveries, even a prestigious journal such as Scientific American could get in on the act. In its June 5, 1852 issue, the journal ran an account of a discovery of truly “paleoancient” proportions:
A few days ago a powerful blast was made in the rock at Meeting House Hill, in Dorchester, a few rods south of Rev. Mr. Hall’s meeting house. The blast threw out an immense mass of rock, some of the pieces weighing several tons, and scattered fragments in all directions. Among them was picked up a metallic vessel in two parts, rent asunder by the explosion. On putting the two pieces together it formed a bell-shaped vessel, 4-1/2 inches high, 6-1/2 inches at the base, 2-1/2 inches at the top, and about an eighth of an inch in thickness. The body of this vessel resembles zinc in color, or a composition metal, in which there is a considerable portion of silver. On the side there are six figures or a flower, or bouquet, beautifully inlaid with pure silver, and around the lower part of the vessel a vine, or wreath, also inlaid with silver. The chasing, carving, and inlaying are exquisitely done by the art of some cunning workman. This curious and unknown vessel was blown out of the solid pudding stone, fifteen feet below the surface....There is not doubt but that this curiosity was blown out of the rock, as above stated.... The matter is worthy of investigation, as there is no deception in the case.670
The Cosmic War: Interplanetary Warfare, Modern Physics and Ancient Texts Page 40