Wonders in the Sky
Page 30
A second article was published about Melvin Gray’s fossil in Ray Palmer’s magazine Flying Saucers. In “A Fossilized Alien Spaceship and its Occupants,” Executive Director of the Kentucky-based National UFO Research and Investigation Committee, Buffard Ratliff, wrote that, after reading about Gray in Beyond, he contacted Mr. Gray and obtained the fossil.
Gray told Ratliff that he and his wife had come across the stone while cutting the grass in their back yard. He then examined the artifact carefully “for a period of approximately seven months and made several discoveries that led him to believe it might possibly be from outer space.”
Ratliff and Gray were able to find “seven very small creatures…in or on the fossilized stone.” Three of the creatures were ape-like in appearance. The other four were humanoid. All were approximately three inches in height, vertebrates, and very strong for their size. Ratliff and Gray concluded that the three tiny ape-like creatures “could very well be humanoids in special space suits,” and that these beings were in a separate section of the craft they labeled “B.” However they were quick to point out that one of the humanoids was also in that section, as opposed to section “A” of the spacecraft. As the two sections seemed to be divided, “apparently where the spaceship is fitted together,” this “indicates intelligent construction and design by intelligent beings.”
After some more interpretation the researchers arrived at a breathtaking theory: the craft had come from outer space and crashed into a large body of water during the last ice age. The water extinguished the fire, but the craft sank to the bottom and became encased in sand and clay, becoming a fossil. There it lay dormant for some 400,000,000 years till Melvin Gray almost trod on it as he was mowing the lawn in his back yard in Louisville, Kentucky.
It is evident from the information presented in Beyond and Flying Saucers that neither Gray nor Ratliff were able to present any basis for their incredible theory other than their own imaginative interpretation of the rough exterior of the stone. What reference material the investigators used, and exactly what tests were carried out was not explained.
12,000 years ago
Granite disks tell a story about Alien vehicles
This is yet another case of crashed spacecraft leaving mysterious material covered with alien writing, a recurrent theme in contemporary ufology. In July 1962 a German magazine called Das Vegetarische Universum [The Vegetarian Universe] published an article about a strange finding made in the mountains between China and Tibet. It is a tale that regularly turns up in UFO contact lists, in books, magazines and on the Internet. It therefore deserves our attention. The author, Reinhardt Wegemann, reports that:
“In the borderland between Tibet and China lies the cave area of the high mountains of Baian-Kara-Ula. Here the strange discovery of hieroglyphic writing tablets was made 25 years ago. Several thousand years ago, record-shaped plates were sawed out of the hardest granite rock, with untraceable and completely unknown appliances.”
Wegeman went on to state that 716 rock plates had been recovered, each resembling records, with a hole in the centre and a groove spiralling to the outer edge. He stated that it took two decades for archaeologists and linguists to decipher the script, the content of which so stunned the Academy of Prehistory in Beijing that they forbade its publication. However, one of the researchers, Professor Tsum Um-nui, is said to have discussed this matter with a small group of colleagues and decided to release a report without official consent. The archaeologists reportedly came to the conclusion that “The grooved writing tells of vehicles from the air, which must have arrived 12,000 years ago. In one place it says literally that the Dropa came down from the clouds with their air gliders. Ten times the men, women and children of the Kham hid in the caves until dawn. Afterwards they understood the signs and saw that the Dropa came with peaceful intentions…”
The story adds that the aerial fleet was destroyed on landing and that graves of small humans of the Dropa and Kham race with thin bodies and unusually large heads can be found in the caves, along with star maps carved on the rock walls. Furthermore,
“Rock particles were scraped off one of the writing plates and were sent for analysis to Moscow. A sensational discovery was made: The grooved plates are strongly cobalt and metallic. When a whole plate was tested with an oscillograph, a surprising rhythm of oscillation showed up, as though, once ‘loaded,’ the plates with the grooved writing would have somehow served as electrical conductors.”
The critical analysis of this amazing tale yields certain surprises. Oddly enough, very few who support the reality of it know anything about its origins. Whole books and articles have been written on or around this story with absolutely no reference to its author or first publication. This absence of detail is what gives the impression that its origins are “shrouded in mystery,” and therefore leaves its reality status open to all sorts of theories. Unfortunately, after several years inquiring through colleagues and journalist friends, and conducting thorough searches of newspaper archives, no German writer by the name of Reinhardt Wegemann could be found.
Fig. 38: The Dropa hoax
In July 1964 the same article was published again, as if new, in the German UFO magazine UFO-Nachrichten. Here, “Wegemann” made no mention of the fact that his report was now ‘old news,’ and added no new revelations about the discs.
From this moment on, the “Dropa” would become famous all over the world. The French/Belgian UFO organization BUFOI referred to them in March 1965, and in 1966 Wegemann’s article was translated into Russian and published by the Soviet journal Neman. A year later, Dr. Vyatcheslav Zaitzev wrote about the discs of Baian Kara Ula for the first edition of the Soviet magazine Sputnik. Owing to the enormous distribution of this publication, many have erroneously cited Zaitzev as the original source of the story.
News of the Dropa was published for the first time in the United States on 26 February 1967. A journalist of the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner, using the article from Sputnik, compared the finding of the cave drawings to a star map allegedly seen by UFO abductee, Betty Hill. By this time Reinhardt Wegemann had been forgotten and the tale’s origins completely obscured. Over the next three decades details would be lost, others invented, and the spelling of the name of the Dropa tribe would become increasingly exotic: Dzopa, Dhzopa, Dzohpa, Dhropa, and so on.
The first skeptical enquiries began in 1973, when the director of the British magazine Flying Saucer Review, Gordon Creighton, a serious scholar of the field, reported he could find no record of any archaeological expedition to Baian Kara Ula in 1938. Creighton also pointed out that the name of the mountains was more usually written “Bayan Khara Uula,” Mongol words meaning “the good black mountains” (“Bayan Har Shan” in Chinese), and that there were no records of any archaeologist named Chi Pu Tei. Likewise, all attempts to trace Tsum Um Nui or his report have failed.
In 1979 a further twist came in a book called Sungods in Exile, edited by one David Agamon, who declared it to be the posthumous work of a British scientist called Karyl Robin-Evans. The work describes an expedition to Baian Kara Ula led by Robin-Evans in 1947 with the aim to gather information about a disc that had been purchased in India or Nepal by a colleague of his in Oxford, a Polish scholar named Sergei Lolladoff. According to Agamon, the expedition met with a tribe of dwarves in a remote valley in the region and these beings, the Dropa, told him that their ancestors had come from a planet in the Sirius system and had been trapped on the earth in the year 1014 AD due to a mechanical problem with their spacecraft.
Years later, Agamon (using his real name, Gamon) confessed in letters to the editor of Fortean Times that Sungods in Exile was a hoax and none of the characters in it were real. Even so, photographs taken by Gamon of a fake “Dropa disc” are still believed by many to be authentic, giving rise to rumors and speculation. Meanwhile, the real Dzopa people of Tibet live in blissful ignorance of the whole affair.
Circa 4780 BC: The fiery Vimanas of King Citraketu
The Vedic literature, including India’s national epic, the Mahabharata, a poem of vast length and complexity, contains many descriptions of flying machines generally called Vimanas. Another text, the Ramayana, which can be loosely translated as ‘the travels of Rama,’ tells of two-storied celestial chariots with many windows that roar off into the sky until they appear like comets. Sanskrit books describe at length these chariots, “powered by winged lighting…it was a ship that soared into the air, flying to both the solar and stellar regions.”
There are no physical remains of ancient Indian aircraft technology but references to ancient flying machines are commonplace in the Indian texts. Several popular epics describe their use in warfare. Depending on one’s point of view, either it contains some of the earliest known science fiction (a sort of Indian Star Wars) or it records conflict between beings with weapons as powerful and advanced as anything used today.
Fig. 39: Flying Vimana at Ellora caves, India
It is a curious fact that the yantras (Sanskrit for “machines”) described in later Indian texts were less powerful than those mentioned in greater and older works. Does this imply a gradual departure from fantasy towards realism? Some have proposed the change reflects a loss of knowledge. Richard L. Thompson writes: “Some ascribe this to the fantastic imagination of ancient writers or their modern redactors. But it could also be explained by a progressive loss of knowledge as ancient Indian civilization became weakened by corruption and was repeatedly overrun by foreign invaders. It has been argued that guns, cannons, and other firearms were known in ancient India and that the knowledge gradually declined and passed away toward the beginning of the Christian era.” (Alien Identities, San Diego: Govardhan Hill, 1993, 258.)
Circa 2637 BC, China
Relativity and the Emperor’s dragon
According to an article circulating on the Internet, the legendary First Emperor Huang-Ti (the “Yellow Emperor”, who instituted the calendar that survives in China to this day for festival dates, and is said to be the ancestor of all Han Chinese) had a “dragon” named Changhuan, that could move through space at enormous velocities. One ancient writing mentioned that it “originated in the land where suns are born,” and was over 3,000 years old. Its enormous speed had an effect on the movement of time, affecting the ageing process, a surprising early reference to the relativity of time, 4,400 years before Albert Einstein.
Huang-Ti is said to have manufactured 12 gigantic mirrors of unknown nature and used them “following the Moon,” as well as miraculous tripods about 4 meters high. The legends of ancient China said that the “tripods” depicted “dragons, flying in the clouds.”
We have not been able to verify these statements or to consult the sources listed, which appear to come from the late scientist and orientalist Igor Lissevich (magazine “Asia and Africa Today”, 1974, No. 11, in Russian). Lissevich also presented his scientific findings at the 1975 Zelenchuk SETI Symposium (“Problem of SETI”, Moscow 1981, in Russian). Igor Lissevich knew Chinese and was a reliable source. The original references are quoted as “Records of the foremost deeds of Huang-Ti the Great” and “Glorification of the three tripods of Huang-Ti” written by Zao Ji. The Yellow Emperor Huang-Ti is said by tradition to have reigned from 2698 BC to 2598 BC.
Circa 2357 BC
Japan’s “divine man” and his luminous monster
Entries in various UFO lists mention that “According to Tau-se from an ancient manuscript called Sey-to-ki, during the time of Emperor Ton-Yo, in the year of “Mon-Sham” a divine man descended from the sky, using a “monster that was emitting light” (spacecraft?). The people called this man “the master.” He received the name Tan-kun (Sandalwood God) and his country was called Peson.”
The source for this item is Space Visitors in Ancient Japan by Mikhail Rosenshpitz in Unbelievable World No. 8, August 2004. When we tried to research this item it was found to contain spurious information and we could not locate anything supporting it, unfortunately a frequent situation with both online cases and UFO books.
In this case, our first goal was to obtain a copy of the original article by Rosenshpitz. This proved more complicated than we expected because it turned out that Unbelievable World did not exist. The correct Russian name of the magazine was Neveroyatnyi Mir, a paranormalparanormal news journal distributed in the Ukraine. Steering away from sensationalist press wherever possible, we decided this was not a source we could use.
Observant readers may have noticed that the year given is also spurious, because even legendary Japanese rulers date back only as far as Emperor Jimmu, who supposedly founded Japan in March 585 BC! No real or mythical Japanese emperor had a name resembling Ton-Yo. After playing with different spellings we realized the account must be from Chinese tradition, not Japanese. Indeed, Tause was just an unusual transcription of Tao-se, or “Tao Teacher.” The information may refer to the legendary Lord Yao or Tangyao, who supposedly reigned between 2357 and 2258 BC However, as we could find nothing resembling the story of the “divine man” and the light-emitting monster in the Chinese literature available to us, we quickly lost faith in the account.
Circa 2208 BC
A Chinese Emperor flies away from danger
The emperor of China is said to have flown in an aerial machine and descended back to earth. (reference: Hervey – Winkler catalog, published by FUFOR – the Fund for UFO Research). It turns out that this is a story about Emperor Shun, who supposedly reigned between 2258 and 2208 BC. However the actual incident has nothing to do with the ‘aerial machine’ account.
In the Shi Ji (Historical Records) Sima Qian relates that Shun’s father Gu Sou wanted to kill him. Finding him at the top of a granary tower, he set fire to it. Shun escaped by assembling a pile of large conical straw hats together and leaping down! See The Shorter Science and Civilization in China Vol. 4, by Colin A. Ronan: Cambridge University Press 1994, 290.
Circa 1900 BC
Egypt, the death star and a gold serpent
The first ancient reference to an unidentified object from the sky in relation to strange beings is found in an authentic Egyptian papyrus generally considered to belong to the twelfth dynasty, 1991 to 1802 BC. The text, known as The Tale of the Shipwreck, was discovered by chance in 1880 by Golenischeff in the Ermitage Museum of Saint Petersburg and is now on display at a Moscow Museum. It tells how the lone survivor of a shipwreck was carried by the waves to a mysterious tropical island that nobody had seen before. The ruler of the island was a giant, glowing, human-headed serpent, “his body overlaid with gold, and his color as that of true lapis-lazuli.” This being seemed pleased to meet the unfortunate sailor and invited him to his home as a guest.
Egyptologist G. Maspero, very much an authority in his day, translated the extract in Les Contes de l’Egypte Ancienne (4th Edition, Paris 1911):
We are seventy-five Serpents in number, my children and my brothers, not mentioning the young girl who was brought to me by the magic art. Because when a star fell, those who were in the fire with her came out and the young girl appeared; and I was not amongst the beings of the flame, I was not amongst them, else I would be dead, but I found her among the corpses, alone.
What ‘star’ is the serpent-being referring to? Unfortunately no details are given in the papyrus. Was the ‘star’ a meteorite, as most scholars suggest?
It seems possible but it cannot be proved. There was no word to describe meteorites in the Egyptian hieroglyphic system, so the word ‘star’ (“seba”) could be used as a wild card for any kind of luminous phenomenon travelling in the sky.
Analysis of the tale reveals that it already contains imagery that would become the framework of ‘encounter’ stories for the next three and a half thousand years. The island, which the text actually says will sink into the sea again like fabled Atlantis, would be replaced by what is nowadays called a ‘window area.’ The reptile king would hardly change at all over time, as humanoid serpents and “reptilian beings” are a staple element in mythology and UFO lore all over the world. And wherever supernatural beings dwell in folklore, mysterious lights, or crashing objects are never far away.
Similar stories come from ancient China: the dragon king had his palace on an island in the ocean. This island was said to vanish and reappear regularly, confusing sailors and giving rise to many strange beliefs. “Sometimes,” writes Donald Mackenzie, “a red light burns above the island at night. It is seen many miles distant, and its vivid rays may be reflected in the heavens.” A Japanese story describes the island as “a glowing red mass resembling the rising sun.”
Circa 1766 BC, China: Feathered guests from the sky
“The Xian were immortals capable of flight under their own divine power. They were said to be feathered, and a term that has been used for Taoist priests is yu ke, meaning ‘feathered guest’. The fei tian, which might be translated as ‘flying immortals’, also add to the numbers of airborne beings in the Chinese mythological corpus.”
“The Chinese tales of fei che, flying vehicles, exhibit the first understanding, perhaps, that humans would fly only with some kind of technological apparatus.”