Alien beings

It'ancis King

The Timeless Earth Peter Kolosimo (Garnstone Press £2.95)

The Gold of the Gods Erich von Daniken (Souvenir Press £2.20) During the 1960s, a decade throughout which Public interest in manned space flight was at

'high level, there were published a surprisingly large number of semi-occult books which were primarily concerned with the possibility of humanity having at some

time in the past made contact with alien beings.

The authors of these books — notably Rayond Drake and Brinsley le Poer Trench in Britain, Robert Charroux in France and Peter !Colosimo in Italy — almost all seem to have independently reached very similar conclusions. That the Old Testament, Buddhist and Hindu scriptures, primitive myth and legend, all include material which is really a confused description of the visits to Earth of n"-human astronauts; the Chariot of the Prophet Ezekiel, for example, was a spaceship. That because of their advanced technology these astronauts were worshipped by primitive earthmen. and became the gods of antiquity — Thor and his hammer, Jove and his thunderbolts, were both originally spacemen equiPped with rayguns. That the nature of tnuch archaeological material must be reinterpreted in the light of Earth's contact with Space; thus the great stone platform at Baalbek in the Lebanon must now be looked upon as a landing platform for spaceships. Peter Kolosimo's Timeless Earth, originally,

published in 'Italy in 1968, illustrates both the strength and weaknesses of this literary school of space travel occultism. The former is to be found in its provision of what is essentially the same simple answer to all the problems of prehistory, mythology and Biblical exegesis. The destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah? The thermonuclear explosion of a spaceship's fuel supply. The dragons of Taoist legend? Spaceships. Peculiarly shaped prehistory pottery? Primitive man's attempts to make models of the space helmets he had seen on alien visitors. Its weaknesses lie in its logomachy, its specious reasoning and, above all, its reliance on the supposed authority of utterly worthless pseudo-scholarship. Thus Mr Kolosimo devotes much space to the supposed destruction of the legendary lost continents of Mu and Atlantis, quoting as his authorities the writings of 'the unorthodox scholar' Colonel James Churchward and the translations of Mayan hieroglyphs made by August le Plongeon. In reality the late James Churchward, who believed himself capable of arriving at an intuitive understanding of the meaning of unknown symbolism, was not a scholar, unorthodox or otherwise, but a totally eccentric occultist who was, as W. B. Yeats described his own occult teacher, 'half lunatic half knave'. As for le Plongeon's translations, they were pure occult fantasy — the Troano Codex, which he 'translated' into a history of the destruction of MO, is in reality a treatise on Malayan astrology.

Similarly unreliable sources are approvingly referred to in The Gold of the Gods by Erich von Daniken, unquestionably the most successful of the God-was-an-astronaut authors — his two previous. books, Chariots of the Gods and Return to the Stars, have sold between them somewhere around nine million copies. He tells us, for example, of the Book of Dzyan, which contains: " ... a secret doctrine ... preserved for millennia in Tibetan crypts. The original text ... was copied from generation to generation and added to by

intiates. Parts ... that have been preserved circulate around the world in thousands of Sanskrit translations, and experts claim that this book contains the evolution of mankind over millions of years." It would be nice to know the identity of the ' experts ' who make this unlikely claim; for the 'thousands of Sanskrit translations' are non-existent and the original text, far from having been preserved for thousands of years in Tibetan crypts, was forged in the 1880s by H. P. Blavatsky! Nevertheless, there is more to The Gold of the Gods than the usual mixture of distorted fact, eccentric theory and unlikely rein terpretation of history and mythology. Its author tells a story concerning his own experiences which, if true, goes far to subs tantiate his case. He claims that in the company of a certain Juan Moricz he entered an immense network of artificial tunnels, ex

tending over hundreds of miles, the entrances to which are situated in remote parts of

Ecuador; 750 feet below the surface they entered an immense hall which contained a table and chairs made of some unknown substance, a whole zoo of animal models cast in solid

gold, and an incredibly ancient library of between two and three thousand metallic plaques which were "stamped and printed regularly as if by a machine" and "created to outlast the ages, to remain legible for eternity."

Unless von Daniken suffered a delusion it is clear that either he has made a most important discovery or he IS a most outrageous liar.

It is perhaps significant that Juan Moricz, supposedly von Dankien's companion in his potholing exploits, has been described by Crespo Toral, director of the Archaeological Institute at Quito, as 'a fraud and an adven turer,' and that before he became a best-selling author von Daniken himself engaged in a series of fraudulent embezzlements that eventually resulted in him being sentenced to three and a half years imprisonment.

Certainly there are extensive networks of caves in parts of Ecuador, but they are not artificial. Those who have visited them have found, not solid gold zoos and galactic libraries, but exactly what one would expect to find .in-lithestone caves — stalactites, stalagmites and. vast accumulations of bat .droppings.

Francis King is currently writing a book on the connections between the occult and political groups of the extreme right.