‘Thou shalt not bear false witness. . .’ How many millions of men—since men have been able to think—have been sentenced on the basis of false witness? How many millions of times have men told lies about their neighbours. An intelligent law which is disregarded daily, but that does not make it a bad law.
The ninth commandment seems to have been formulated from a great wealth of experience:
‘Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s house, thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s wife, not his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor anything that is thy neighbour’s.’
How farsighted the ‘gods’ were! How well they knew the beings they had endowed with intelligence! Envy, they knew, was the destroyer of all communal life.
The trail of poisonous envy runs through the history of mankind, broadening as it goes. Is it not persistently propagated—both secretly and openly—in the universities by many interested parties? What other people have acquired by hard work must be redistributed! When all attendant phenomena are removed, is not envy the real reason for the major disputes between peoples and individuals? With their knowledge of evolution, the gods knew what laws to give and why.
Far from thinking in an arch-conservative way, worlds apart from those who infinitely prefer the past to the present (and the future), I assert that our planet would be close to paradise if men had stuck to the simple commandments of the ‘gods’. Those ancient commandments comprise every prerequisite for a flourishing communal life. Without ifs and buts. There is no set of laws in the world, however cleverly worked out, that provides anything like such a convincing code in so few succinct commandments and prohibitions.
I only hope that the gods will not make an inventory tomorrow and realise what has become of their grandiose plan.
So what do the extraterrestrials expect when they return? How will they react to the state of our society, with its dubious achievements?
The coordinates of our solar system are stored in the computer on board their spaceship and the goal, our planet earth, is also programmed on it. It makes no difference whether the original crew, only a few years older, or a new generation fulfils the promise to return. It is rather like our modern colonisers who instructed and helped ‘the natives’. They allotted praise and thanks if their orders were adequately carried out, or they took Draconian measures if they were not.
If anyone retorts that extraterrestrials would never behave like colonials, indeed, that the very idea is a product of reactionary thinking. I must convince him of his error. The ‘gods’ created human intelligence ‘in their own image’. That is why our thought processes are very similar to those of our divine ancestors. Tradition tells impressive stories which show that the ‘gods’ did not treat the inhabitants of earth with kid gloves in prehistoric times. They unceremoniously destroyed whole cities with fire and brimstone that rained down from heaven. Furious with their brood, they had no hesitation in drowning most of mankind, as described in the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh and the biblical account of Noah and the Flood. We must ask ourselves whether extraterrestrials could not behave equally rigorously in our day.
Time can be manipulated by energy. Anyone who has unlimited supplies of energy at his disposal can achieve anything, for time is on his side. If the crew of an extraterrestrial spaceship destroyed present-day human civilisation by a shower of bacteria, they could wait until human intelligence regained a certain degree of civilisation. The extraterrestrials possess enormous amounts of energy; they can board their spaceship and fly to another solar system. While they grow only a few years older, 10,000 years may pass on our planet, depending on the ship’s velocity. When they return, a new civilisation has developed. That is why the extraterrestrials can permit themselves to remove unsatisfactory products of their ‘colonial activity’ from time to time. For time is on their side.
What can we do to avert the wrath of the returning ‘gods’? Have we any chance of catching up with them, so that we need no longer fear their superior technology?
The original order said that we should ‘subdue’ the earth. Man was told to ‘Grow and multiply’. (German version of Bible.) ‘Grow’ and ‘multiply’ do not have the same meaning, i.e. they refer to two separate ‘godgiven’ orders. We understand growing as getting bigger, multiplying as reproducing on a large scale.
If extraterrestrials implanted their intelligence in us, ‘growing’ would refer to the growth of intelligence, and all intelligence finds the driving force to grow bigger in curiosity—especially scientific curiosity. Inspired by the intelligence of the superior extraterrestrials, scientific curiosity is confirmed in the discovery of the resources of energy on our planet.
I know the hoarse-voiced male choir which compassionately warns us against plundering our planet. It grieves me deeply how little they think of human intelligence. For it will always be ingenious enough to replace dwindling raw materials by others. The sum is simple. Rare raw materials are dear, and the rarer they are, the dearer they become, until one day they are priced out of the market. At this moment at the latest, intelligent man remembers that he can achieve the same effect with another material. Man will always find the way. All the engines in the world which run on petroleum and its products could be switched to hydrogen today. Born of the necessity which the proverb says is the mother of invention, recycling processes are popular. Something different or new can be made out of nearly every kind of refuse.
The ship’s surgeon Dr Robert Mayer (1814-1878) discovered the law of the conservation of energy. This states that the total energy in the universe is constant and that all forms of energy are convertible into one another. Wernher von Braun wrote:
‘Science has established that nothing can vanish without a trace. Nature knows no destruction, only change.’
Whether it came from the one God or my extraterrestrial gods, the charge laid on men always had the same meaning. They had to subdue the earth and grow, to emulate God or the ‘gods’. So it would be like committing hari-kiri to turn our ancient mission upside down: to calumniate the advance of technology, to impede the exploitation of our resources, to leave atomic power untapped. The divine mission entrusted to us was quite different.
Mankind should prepare itself morally, ethically and technically for the return of the ‘gods’. The Ten Commandments, the expression of perfect wisdom, should be enthroned again. Our intelligent curiosity should be given the value the ‘gods’ ascribed to it. With this ultra modern programme hunger could be banished from the world, wars would be a miserable spectre from the past and significant work would not be a dream of Utopia. Extraterrestrials will only accept us as their partners if we at least resemble their image. Given this creed, can anyone honestly claim that there is anything in the far-reaching gods=astronauts theory that wants or encourages people to stand idly by, awaiting the help of the ‘gods’? If the theory were grasped in its constructive, positive aspect, mankind could confidently move towards a peaceful future, blessed with progress. It would no longer have to fear the return of the ‘gods’. Nevertheless the state in which it has to show our planet does not inspire confidence. It is up to us to change it.
To quote the Olympian J. W. Goethe:
‘We are used to men deriding what they do not understand.’
* * *
Communiqué
IN its last number of the year, No. 52/1978, Der Spiegel included a fourteen-page report entitled ‘Astronomy: a new scenario of the cosmos’.
Careful readers of my books met many ‘old friends’ in this basic compact article.
To end this book I want to quote in full an article from Der Spiegel (Number 1/1979), because of its really remarkable contents. It makes me hope that the claim I have repeatedly made in my books and lectures that all the relevant branches of science should take on the search for extraterrestrial intelligences has at last found an echo:
Cosmic search
‘“I cannot imagine a more frightening nightmare than communication with a
so-called superior . . . civilisation in space.” This quotation from the Harvard biologist and Nobel Prize winner George Wald comes from the first number of a new periodical which is devoted to the search for alien intelligences, Cosmic Search will appear bimonthly as from January at an annual subscription of 16 dollars outside the USA and should be taken seriously. The editorial offices are at the Radio Observatory of Ohio State University and contributors include such serious scholars as the British astronomer Martin Rees of Cambridge University, Nicolai Kardachev of the Space Research Institute of the Soviet Academy of Sciences and John Billingham, Director of the American Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence programme (Seti). Nothing then to send UFO freaks on a trip, but good sound stuff for earthlings who miss a bit of fantasy in science.’
Bibliography
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Calder, Nigel, Mind of Man, London, 1970.
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Kramer, S. N., The Sumerians, Chicago, 1962.
Lapp, R. E., Kill and Overkill, The Strategy of Annihilation, New York, 1961.
Bonus: First chapter of Tomy and the Planet of Lies, the debut novel by Erich von Däniken. Available in ebook and print editions from Tantor.
Chapter 1
The Decision
His very existence was an impossibility. An anachronism. Looking at it from a scientific point of view, Tomy shouldn’t have existed at all, and yet he had been there—utterly real, and with a human body. Regardless of what science had to say about it. At any rate, Tomy was here and lived among us for several weeks and that was enough time for him to get to know plenty of people, both good and bad. God knows I wasn’t the only one that knew Tomy. Though I have to say that only a handful of people knew what I knew, and those who didn’t belong to this inner circle really had no idea who Tomy actually was.
Sometimes, in secluded moments, holding a glass of red wine up in front of my eyes, I was overcome by a great fear that I had dreamt the whole episode with Tomy. But Tomy wasn’t a ghost. At home absolutely everything reminded me of him: his room, the furniture, even the knives and forks. When signals like that are flying at you from every direction, you can’t really escape your past. So I tried to find an excuse and painfully realized that Tomy would have reprimanded me for my lying. As a result, as I said to Mario, the barman in the Suvretta House Hotel, I had suddenly felt that a change of air would do me good. And the air in St. Moritz seemed the best air of all.
“A wise decision,” said Mario and started telling me about various incidents that he had experienced during his 30 years at the Suvretta House Hotel. As I listened to Mario’s accounts I honestly felt my breath catch in my throat.
Seeing as most of the guests at this time of the evening were still chatting away in the
dining room, I invited Mario to join me in a bottle of champagne. He declined, as he had only just started his shift.
Three hours later, still propped on my stool and staring bleary-eyed through the array of bottles lining the mirrored wall behind the bar, I thought I saw the examining magistrate from Solothurn coming towards me. “Send that man away,” I commanded Mario. But he couldn’t see anyone, and his assistant too assured me that no one was there.
Signs of the Gods? Page 21