But clues to what happened to us could be discerned from sources other than humanmade objects. Nature would retain the imprint of a nuclear holocaust. For example, the release of neutrons would sharply increase the amount of carbon 14 in the atmosphere, and it would show up in biological remains, like wood, bone, and other organic material from that period of time. C14 is created when the reaction of cosmic rays with the ionosphere precipitates neutrons through the atmosphere. These neutrons react with nitrogen 14, creating C14. Immediately upon its creation, C14 starts to decay. Originallyitwas determined to have a half-life of approximately 5,568 years. (The half-life of radiocarbon was redefined from 5570 ± 30 years to 5730 ± 40 years in 1962.) Organic material takes in C14 at a constant rate, and, knowing what the level of C in an object was before it died, scientists can measure the amount left in it and calculate its age. Apart from normal variations, C14 stays at a constant level in the Earth's atmosphere. However, modern nuclear activities have increased the level of C14 in the atmosphere, and subsequently in everything that lives and breathes.
When Willard F. Libby first discovered radiocarbon dating in 1947, archaeologists, and especially Egyptologists, ignored it. They questioned its reliability, as it did not coincide with the "known" historical dates of the artifacts being tested. David Wilson, author of The New Archaeology, wrote, "Some archaeologists refused to accept radiocarbon dating. The attitude of the majority, probably, in the early days of the new technique was summed up by Professor Jo Brew, Director of the Peabody Museum at Harvard. 'If a C14 date supports our theories, we put it in the main text. If it does not entirely contradict them, we put it in a footnote. And if it is completely out-of-date we just drop it.' "2
The radiocarbon time scale contains other uncertainties, and errors as great as 2,000 to 5,000 years may occur. Contamination of the artifact may be caused by percolating groundwater, incorporation of older or younger carbon, and contamination in the field or laboratory. Willard Libby3 addressed the problem of contamination, and the ability to distinguish between the chemistries of life and death (the chemistries of death being the contamination). Washing techniques were then developed to separate the two.
Egyptologists have generally agreed on the dates that had been established for the time of the pharaohs. Consequently, when radiocarbon dating came back with results showing artifacts to be between two hundred and five hundred years younger than their established historical dates, the experts were not impressed. In other words, articles with a "known" date of 5,000 years were tested and, according to radiocarbon dating, were found to be only 4,500 years old. For instance, some of the wood that was found in King Tutankhamen's tomb, historically dated at around 1350 B.C., gave a C14 reading of 1050 B.C.
The further back into history the C14 researchers went, the larger the discrepancies became. The original assumption on which C14 dating was based was that its level in the atmosphere is the same at all times. Egyptologists and the carbon-dating scientists were, therefore, in contradiction with each other. The Egyptologists and the archaeologists would not budge, and so the scientists were forced to reevaluate their findings, and they searched for an accurate method of calibrating C14 to validate its usefulness as an archaeological tool. Until that was accomplished, doubt prevailed.
The answer came in the form of tree-ring dating, and the tree that eventually provided the means to accomplish this accurate C14 dating was the bristlecone pine, indigenous to the southwestern United States. As the oldest living tree on Earth, the bristlecone pine enabled scientists to develop the chronology to calibrate carbon dating and "adjust the clock." The results are noteworthy. It turned out that the Egyptologists and the archaeologists were correct in their dates and the original C14 results were in error. In some cases, for distant dates, the error was as much as eight hundred years. But this finding had more than one interpretation: The Egyptologists may be correct in their historical timeline; or there may have been an unexplained "infusion" of C14 into the atmosphere at some prehistoric time. David Wilson summed up the argument this way: "If present day measurements of the radiocarbon remaining in objects which died in, say, 2,500 B.C. give a date of 2,000 B.C., then there is 'too much' carbon 14 left undecayed—perhaps it is that there was 'too much' carbon 14 in the object originally in 2,500 B.C. This is now generally accepted as being the case, but that still leaves the question open as to why there was more carbon 14 in the atmosphere and biosphere."4 The question is still open, although scientists have speculated that if the latter scenario is true-there was more C14 in the ancient atmosphere than they would expect—the answer might be that variations in the Earth's magnetic field allowed increased amounts of cosmic rays to react with the ionosphere.
When carbon dating was first being developed, organic samples were collected for testing from around the world. The stipulation on the kind of samples that were collected was that they had died and ceased to draw carbon in from the atmosphere before the advent of our industrial age, and especially before nuclear testing had been carried out. The explosion of nuclear devices releases neutrons that would result in an elevation of C14 in the atmosphere. Tree-ring dating had revealed that there was an elevation of C14 in the atmosphere and in artifacts older than 1,000 B.C., which had thrown off the atomic clock. Around 8,000 B.C. to 10,000B.C., the level of C14 started to fall back to "normal."
What we are forced to consider is whether the high level of C14 in prehistoric artifacts is a "smoking gun" left behind by a highly evolved civilization 10,000 years ago. As I have argued, a complete interpretation of a civilization such as ours is beyond the scope of one individual or group of individuals who are trained in only one discipline. Archaeologists and Egyptologists have interpreted and explained artifacts surviving ancient civilizations from a perspective that has resulted in a belief that our own civilization is the first to develop technology that uses electricity as a means of performing work. Working from this premise, it is not surprising that evidence such as the granite artifacts found in Egypt, which demand that we include the possibility of advanced technological knowledge existing in prehistory, has been misinterpreted, disregarded, or overlooked.
We also must consider, however, that if this unthinkable nuclear catastrophe actually transpired, someone would have put into writing the horror they witnessed. It is possible that such writings would survive the centuries to provide future historians with some clues to the horrific events, assuming those records were interpreted correctly. Without doubt, an event of such magnitude would leave its mark. And indeed, written records do entice us with clues of what could have been an ancient nuclear accident—or even an ancient nuclear war.
The ancient Indian Sanskrit text The Mahbhrata is a work that has no precise chronological origin. It is estimated that it was written around 400 B.C. but probably was copied from earlier texts from a much earlier date. A complete translation in eleven volumes, though unelegant in some scholars' minds, was made by Kesari Mohan Ganguli and published under the name P. Chandra Roy between 1883 and 1896.5 The work is replete with references to terrible wars that involved the use of weapons that we normally do not associate with the primitive warriors ofprehistory. The writer, or writers, of The Mahbhrata seemed to exaggerate, or get confused, when describing weapons that—given the era in which they were used—should have been limited to swords, spears, and bows and arrows. Was it imagination or wishful thinking that prompted the writer(s) to describe weapons that included missiles and "birds" that swooped down from the heavens, issuing forth fire to demolish entire forests? There also was a terrifying device that moved in a way that, if considered to be a simple projectile, defied the laws of physics:
Thus the terrifying tumult of war was rampant when the Gods Nara and Nryana joined the battle. The blessed Lord Visnu, upon seeing the divine bow in Nara's hand, called up with his mind his Dnavadestroying discus. No sooner thought-of than the enemy-burning discus appeared from the sky in a blaze of light matching the sun's, with its razor-sharp circular
edge, the discus Sudarsana, terrible, invincible, supreme. And when the fiercely blazing, terror-spreading weapon had come to hand, God Acyuta [Visnu] with arms like elephant trunks loosed it, and it zigzagged fast as a flash in a blur of light, razing the enemy's strongholds. Effulgent like the Fire of Doomsday, it felled foe after foe, impetuously tearing asunder thousands of Dnavas and Daityas as the hand of the greatest of men let go of it in the battle. Here it was ablaze licking like a fire, there it cut down with a vehemence the forces of the Asuras. How it was hurled into the sky, then into the ground, and like a ghoul it drank blood in that war.6
There seem to be forces at work in this battle that we do not possess even today. There is an intelligence that guides this discus. Is this intelligence just the imagination of the writer, or is it the report of an eyewitness observation? In order to justify the latter, we have to consider not only the intelligence that guided this discus, but the source of its energy. As though to answer our question, the text later refers to the "Elixir" that brought an added dimension to the ancient Indian wars so that they more closely parallel our own: "When that grand bird had rid them all of life, he strode across them to look for the Elixir. He saw fire everywhere; blazing fiercely, it filled all the skies with its flames, burning hot and razor-sharp rays, and evil under the stirring of the wind."7 Then as if to make an association between the Elixir and its use: "He saw, in front of the Elixir, an iron wheel with a honed edge and sharp blades, which ran incessantly, bright like fire and sun. . . . And behind the wheel he saw two big snakes, shimmering like blazing fires, tongues darting like lightning, mouths blazing, eyes burning, looks venomous, no less powerful than gruesome, in a perpetual rage and fierce, that stood guard over the Elixir, their eyes ever-baleful and never blinking. Whomever either snake's eyes were to fall upon would turn to ashes."8 This passage brings to mind the important role gasoline has played in modern war, not only as a weapon, but as fuel for vehicles. Could the Elixir have been the gasoline that fueled these ancient conflagrations?
Perhaps the foregoing is just an ancient myth that has no basis in reality, although there are more references to other weapons of war that are closer to home and that have more meaning today than they did when the Sanskrit was first translated: "The King of the Gods, beholding the rage of Phalguna, unleashed his own blazing missile, which streaked across the entire sky. Thereupon the Wind God, who dwells in the sky, thunderously shaking all the oceans, generated towering clouds that sent forth shafts of water."9
With missiles streaking through the air against an opposing force, it may not be so surprising to find that the ancient Indians used these missiles in much the same way as the United States in the Gulf War with the Patriot missile: ". . . Filled with anger and vindictiveness, Parasurama brought forth a mighty weapon of Brahm. On my part, I produced the same excellent weapon of Brahm in order to counter the effect of his weapon. Those two weapons of Brahm met each other in mid-air, without being able to reach either Rama or myself. Around them a flame blazed forth, and living things were greatly afflicted thereby."10 As though to indicate the power of these mighty missiles, the ancient storyteller(s) wrote, "Thus sped by that mighty warrior, the shaft endowed with the energy of the Sun caused all the points of the compass to blaze with light."11
Knowing that the energy of the sun comes from the fusion of hydrogen atoms, the thought of hydrogen bombs brings terrible visions of vast destruction, mushroom clouds, and insidious radiation wafting across the land. These visions are included in other books that reference The Mahbhrata as testimony of nuclear war in prehistory. In We Are Not the First, Andrew Tomas wrote: "'A blazing missile possessed of the radiance of smokeless fire was discharged. A thick gloom suddenly encompassed the heavens. Clouds roared into the higher air, showering blood. The world, scorched by the heat of that weapon, seemed to be in fever: thus describes the Drona Parva a page of the unknown past of mankind. One can almost visualize the mushroom cloud of an atomic bomb explosion and atomic radiation. Another passage compares the detonation with a flare-up of ten thousand suns."12
Frederick Soddy, British chemist and Nobel prize winner for his work on the origin and nature of isotopes, discerned a vastly different meaning in these words than his contemporaries. Regarding the ancient Indian scriptures in 1909, before the atomic age, he wrote: "Can we not read into them some justification for the belief that some former forgotten race of men attained not only to the knowledge we have so recently won, but also the power that is not yet ours?"13 Soddy's work with British phycisist Ernest Rutherford added to our understanding of the atom and led to the splitting of its nucleus by Sir John D. Cockroft and Ernest T. Walton in 1932. Soddy believed that civilizations in the past were familiar with the awesome power contained within the atom and had suffered the consequences of its misuse. In 1910 he wrote in his book, Radium:
Some of the beliefs and legends bequeathed to us by antiquity are so universal and firmly established that we have become accustomed to consider them as being almost as ancient as humanity itself. Nevertheless, we are tempted to inquire how far the fact that some of these beliefs and legends have so many features in common is due to chance, and whether the similarity between them may not point to the existence of an ancient, totally unknown and unsuspected civilization of which all other traces have disappeared.14
Tomas pointed out that a skeleton was discovered in India that had up to fifty times more radioactivity than normal. He also puzzled over a meeting he had with Pundit Kaniah Yogi. He wrote:
According to Pundit Kaniah Yogi of Ambattur, Madras, whom I met in India in 1996, the original time measurement of the Brahmins was sexagesimal, and he quoted the Brihath Sathaka and other Sanskrit sources. In ancient times the day was divided into 60 kala, each equal to 24 minutes, subdivided into 60 vikala, each equal to 24 seconds. Then followed a further sixty-fold subdivision of time into para tatpara, vitatpara, ima and finally kashta—or 1/300,000,000 of a second. The Hindus have never been in a hurry and one wonders what use the Brahmins made of these fractions of a microsecond. While in India the author was told that the learned Brahmins were obliged to preserve this tradition from hoary antiquity but they themselves did not understand it.
Is this reckoning of time a folk memory from a highly technological civilization? Without sensitive instruments the kashta would be absolutely meaningless. It is significant that the kashta, or 3 × 108 second, is very close to the life-spans of certain mesons and hyperons. This fact supports the bold hypothesis that the science of nuclear physics is not new.
The Varahamira Table, dated B.C. 550, indicates even the size of the atom. The mathematical figure is fairly comparable with the actual size of the hydrogen atom.15
The indications that nuclear war was once a reality on this planet and was suffered by a civilization that was equally advanced as or more advanced than our own may be supported by some and rejected by others. However, we can no longer ignore the factual evidence that a prehistoric civilization capable of developing advanced machining techniques once existed on this planet. The theory I have presented in this book is based purely on fact, and I trust that readers will evaluate the deductions I have drawn from these facts with open-mindedness and objectivity.
That said, I would like now to revisit one of those deductions, the one that suggests the Egyptians understood the properties of gravity. It has been speculated on more than one occasion, and by more than one person, that this ancient civilization had the technology to neutralize the effects of gravity. If this were true, then the technological tools Egyptologists look for as evidence that the Egyptians were not primitive, such as the wheel or specific machinery, might have never existed—because the Egyptians would not have needed them! The simple fact is that the tools and machines we find so necessary in our gravity-bound civilization would not have been needed in a society that was able to control gravity.
If we were to develop the technology to overcome gravity, the energy expenditure of the peoples of the world would be sh
arply curtailed. Along with our diminished need for energy, we would no longer require many other ancillary products of an advanced society. Huge oil refineries, tire manufacturers, large manufacturing plants churning out massive engines and vehicle transmissions, and hundreds of thousands of miles of highways would conceivably become obsolete.
The point I am trying to make is that when we study the past seeking evidence of a highly advanced culture, we should not expect to find objects that we associate with our own culture. Different cultures develop along different paths. This process occurs even over relatively short periods of time, especially when one society is isolated from others. For example, when the Allies went into Germany after Hitler's defeat, they found that after only twelve years of isolation German technology was being developed along lines vastly different from our own. Pauwels and Bergier wrote:
When the War in Europe ended on May 8th, 1945, missions of investigation were immediately sent out to visit Germany after her defeat. Their reports have been published; the catalogue alone has 300 pages. Germany had only been separated from the world since 1933. In twelve years the technical evolution of the Reich developed along strangely divergent lines. Although the Germans were behindhand as regards the atomic bomb, they had perfected giant rockets unmatched by any in America or Russia. They may not have had radar, but they had perfected a system of infra-red ray detectors which were quite as effective. Though they did not invent silicones, they had developed an entirely new organic chemistry, based on the eight-ring carbon chain.
. . . They had rejected the theory of relativity and tended to neglect the quantum theory. ... they believed in the existence of eternal ice and that the planets and the stars were blocks of ice floating in space. If it has been possible for such wide divergencies to develop in the space of twelve years in our modern world, in spite of the exchange of ideas and mass communications, what view must one take of the civilizations of the past? To what extent are our archaeologists qualified to judge the state of the sciences, techniques, philosophy and knowledge that distinguished, say, the Maya or Khmer civilizations?16
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