But a change in direction had been apparent since a design that had appeared at Alton Barnes in July 1990, with more than half a dozen circles joined by lines, and with objects like keys or runes sticking out of the side. The same night, its twin appeared near the Allington White Horse. (Crop figures had always shown a tendency to appear near ancient sites.) From then on, an increasing number of circles seemed to have a symbolic rather than geometrical significance—some, for example, resembled signs of the zodiac.
If hoaxers were responsible, then we might have assumed that their passion for practical jokes would diminish after Doug and Dave confessed. In fact, their number has remained undiminished—in 1996, according to Bob Rickard, it actually increased. Perhaps hoaxers have turned it into a sport, like bungee jumping. On the other hand, perhaps the circle makers have decided to go on trying to communicate until they are understood.
I came upon Hawkins and his theory by a fortunate accident. After my lecture at the Fortfest in Washington in 1995, I strolled to the back of the hall, and met the conference organiser, Phyllis Benjamin. The man standing with her looked vaguely familiar. She asked me, ‘Do you know Gerald Hawkins?’
In fact, we had met at some academic conference years before. We exchanged greetings, and I mentioned that I had recently reread his Beyond Stonehenge in the course of writing a book on the Sphinx and ancient civilisations; then the next lecture started, and we had to curtail the conversation.
After John Mack’s Abduction had aroused my interest in the abduction phenomenon, I began adding to my out-of-date collection of books on UFOs, which I had picked up en masse in a second-hand shop in Plymouth in the mid-1960s—such works as The Case for the UFO by M. K. Jessup and the books of George Adamski. Seeking out the latest books on the phenomenon, I came upon Close Encounters of the Fourth Kind by C. D. B. (Courty) Bryan. It was an account of a five-day conference on UFO abductions held at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in June 1992. MIT is, of course, one of the most prestigious institutions of scientific learning in the US, and I was surprised that it should be willing to play host to a subject which, only a few years before, had been regarded by scientists with contempt and derision.
Bryan, an American journalist, went to the conference in a mood of total scepticism. His large book makes it clear that he ended by recognising that open-mindedness is a better attitude.
One of the people he met at the conference was Linda Moulton Howe, author of An Alien Harvest, one of the first to conduct extensive investigations of cattle mutilations, and their possible connection with UFOs. It was Linda Howe who told him about crop circles—how there had been around two thousand in the 1980s, from all over the world. She mentioned the conclusions of Dr. Levengood, who stated that the affected corn would have had to be subjected to the kind of heat found in a microwave oven. She then went on to discuss the ideas of Gerald Hawkins at some length.
Here, I felt, was something that looked a little more solid than ‘contact’ stories like those described in Uri and Prelude to the Landing on Planet Earth. I lost no time in ringing Phyllis Benjamin to get Gerald Hawkins’s address and phone number. Soon after that I was speaking to him on the phone.
He is an easy man to talk to, generous with his time and ideas. He began by advising me to purchase the Harvard Dictionary of Music to pick up the necessary technical background. (Although I have always been an avid listener—and collector of gramophone records—I have never learnt to read music.) And, not long after this, a fat envelope arrived, containing articles about his investigations, accounts of the five theorems, and even a copy of Zuckerman’s ‘Creations of the Dark’ review.
By this time, I had also laid my hands on the most important of his later books, Mindsteps to the Cosmos (1983). The premise of that book is that mankind periodically goes through what Hawkins calls a ‘cosmic mindstep’, a new, revolutionary change in man’s perspective on the universe.
Hawkins is talking about ‘mindsteps’ in astronomy, but they could apply just as well to the whole field of human evolution.
To begin with, says Hawkins, man was little more than an animal, stuck firmly on Earth. Then he began to take notice of the heavens, and to invent myths in which the heavenly bodies are gods—he demonstrates that the Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh is about gods who are also the sun, moon and planets. This was Mindstep 1. Then came the Greeks, who studied the heavens, and tried to explain the movements of the heavenly bodies—Mindstep 2. But, since Ptolemy placed the Earth firmly at the centre of the universe, his scheme was impossibly complicated. It was not until Copernicus placed the sun at the centre of the solar system that the next great mindstep took place. The invention of printing also brought about a ‘knowledge explosion’.
The next step was the age of space, when man began looking to other galaxies, and finally began to grasp the size of the universe. This was Mindstep 4.
And the next mindstep? Could it be some totally new technology, enabling us to explore the universe? Or perhaps contact with extraterrestrial civilisations?
And now, suddenly, I began to see why, unlike most of his fellow scientists, Hawkins was willing to admit the possibility that the crop circles might be some form of intelligent communication. Mindsteps to the Cosmos is a book about a vision—a clear recognition of how far man has come in a few thousand years. But, as man looks outward to a universe of black holes and cosmic gushers, the question of meaning becomes more insistent. Is man alone in the universe? Or is he a part of some vast and intelligible pattern of life? Should our knowledge of the size of the universe make us feel more lonely and frightened? Or should it make us feel that, in some strange sense, we ‘belong’, that we are a part of the universe, as our individual cells are a part of our bodies?
A few decades ago, a scientist who looked for ‘meaning’ in the universe would have been regarded by his colleagues as downright dishonest. The universe is self-evidently made of matter, and it operates according to material laws. Man is merely a product of these material laws, and has no more ‘meaning’ than the wind and the rain. Man’s notion that he is a priveleged species is a delusion. He is a product of mere chance.
But there were a few scientists who questioned these views—on purely scientific grounds. Around the turn of the century, a Harvard biochemist, Lawrence J. Henderson, noted that life could not exist without certain unique and quirky properties of water, such as surface tension and the tendency to expand when frozen. Similarly, the astronomer Fred Hoyle has argued that the universe seems oddly suited to the existence of life: alter just one or two of the conditions very slightly—like the way carbon is converted into oxygen by collision with a helium atom—and life would be impossible. It is, he says, as if some ‘superintendent’ has ‘monkeyed with the physics’ to make life possible.
In the early 1970s, the astronomer Brandon Carter, of the Paris Observatory, also noted these ‘coincidences’ that made life possible. For example, if the relative strength of the nuclear force and the electromagnetic force were different, carbon could not exist, and carbon is the basis of life. Noting the high number of such ‘extraordinary coincidences’, Brandon Carter suggested that the universe had to create observers (i.e., us) at some stage. This became known as the ‘strong anthropic principle’—the notion that intelligent life had to come into existence.
In their book The Anthropic Cosmological Principle (1986), John D. Barrow and Frank J. Tipler—an astronomer and a physicist—point out that, so far, life seems to have had very little effect on this vast material universe, and that, if it died out at this stage, it would be with a whimper rather than a bang. So why did the universe bring it into existence in the first place?
This may sound like the familiar complaint of poets and philosophers: why does God permit tragedy, etc.? But that is to miss its point. For the question is not based on the assumption of a benevolent god, but upon such matters as ‘extraordinary coincidences’ in physics, and the ‘Large Numbers Hypothesis’ of the cosmologist Pau
l Dirac.
Barrow and Tipler ask: if life had to come into existence, does not this at least suggest that it must eventually go on to colonise the whole universe? The question sounds as if it contains some element of religious optimism, so again it must be emphasised that it is strictly logical and scientific. If the laws of nature brought life into existence—laws that sometimes look as if some superintendent has been monkeying with the physics—is it not conceivable that the same laws dictate that life will never die out?
Of course, it is also possible that the laws contain some principle that dictates that life must die out—for example, when the universe reaches the limits of its expansion, and begins to contract. Yet it is hard to see that this makes sense. Think of an ordinary explosion—a bomb, for example, or a volcano. It creates only chaos. But, when the universe came into existence fifteen billion years ago—as most cosmologists think it did—with a big bang, it produced huge stars, whose immense inner pressure produced the heavy elements, which in turn produced life. Now life may be an accidental by-product, like fungus on a wall, but it is also intelligent and adaptive and enduring. So what Barrow and Tipler call ‘the Final Anthropic Principle’ could be correct after all.
But perhaps this discussion is taking us too far away from the simple facts with which we began—such as crop circles, abductions, and entities that claim to have come from the stars. Let us take a deep breath and return to the facts.
3
HOW TO GET PEOPLE CONFUSED
In the third week of November 1996, I was in Los Angeles, filming part of a television documentary at the famous tar pit of La Brea—which can be found, still bubbling ominously below a watery surface, in the grounds of the George C. Page Museum. Thousands of animals died as they wandered incautiously into the oily swamp to drink the water, including giant sloths, mammoths, mastodons, and sabre-toothed tigers. But, as far as the television programme was concerned, I was less interested in these animals who had died over tens of thousands of years than in the evidence of a sudden mass extinction around 11,000 BC. The evidence seemed to show that more than a dozen species had been simply wiped out over a period of a mere twenty-five years. That suggested some sudden catastrophe, such as the impact of a giant meteor, or some convulsion of the Earth’s crust that caused earthquakes and volcanic eruptions.
Now my own suspicion was that a professor of anthropology named Charles H. Hapgood had correctly diagnosed the cause of the extinction. He had first suggested the theory in a book called Earth’s Shifting Crust, in 1959. What Hapgood suggested was that the crust of the Earth was a thin skin, which rested on a liquid mantle rather like the skin that forms on boiled milk or gravy. The build-up of ice can induce a sudden wobble that causes the crust to slip on the mantle; the result is that whole continents move. Lands that were subtropical, like Siberia, move into colder regions, while India and Africa, once buried under ice sheets, slide towards the equator. Einstein was so impressed by the theory that he wrote an introduction to Hapgood’s book.
Now it has been known for a long time that movements of the crust cause continents to rearrange themselves—England was on the equator during the Devonian period, about 400 million years ago. But it has always been supposed that such movements take millions of years. Hapgood thought it could happen quite suddenly—his own view was there had been an enormous slippage of the earth’s crust some time since 15,000 BC, before which Antarctica had been 2,500 miles farther north, and had a temperate climate.
While Hapgood was writing Earth’s Shifting Crust, he learnt of a discovery that seemed to throw an interesting new light on it. In 1956, the US Hydrographic Office became aware that it possessed a strange map that had been presented by a Turkish naval officer. This was a medieval map which had belonged to a Turkish admiral (and pirate) called Piri Re’is, who had been beheaded in 1554, and it appeared to show the east coast of South America, and the coast of Antarctica—which was not officially discovered until 1818. Moreover, it appeared to show certain bays on the coast of Queen Maud Land that were now no longer visible, since they were completely covered with ice. Yet a 1949 survey team, which had taken soundings through the ice, had established that they were precisely where the map showed them to be. What made it so baffling was that, as far as anyone knew, Antarctica had been covered with ice for thousands of years—possibly since about 5000 BC.
Of course, it was not Piri Re’is who had made the original map—he had merely had it copied. His map was of a kind widely in use among medieval sailors, and known as a portolan (meaning ‘from port to port’). Hapgood began to study other portolans—the Library of Congress proved to have hundreds—and was astonished to find that they were far more accurate than the maps being made by well-known mapmakers working in the same period. One map in particular intrigued him; it was made by one Oronteus Finaeus, and showed the whole South Pole, as if photographed from the air, and again, the coastal region was shown free of ice.
Obviously, they were based on far more ancient maps. But that in itself was baffling. Historians generally agree that writing was invented by the Sumerians about 3500 BC. We can assume that maps did not exist before that time, since a map is of very little use without writing on it. So how could there have been maps that showed Antarctica as it was at least a thousand years earlier than the Sumerians, and possibly several thousand?
After years of study of portolans (aided by his students), Hapgood finally concluded that there existed a worldwide maritime civilisation around 7000 BC. He stated this extraordinary conclusion in a book entitled Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings, which was published in 1966.
It was Hapgood’s misfortune that, six years before the publication of Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings, a book called The Morning of the Magicians had appeared in Paris, and quickly became a world bestseller. Its authors, Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier, discuss the Piri Re’is map and other portolans, and ask, ‘Had they been traced from observations made on board a flying machine or some space vessel of some kind?’ And in 1968, two years after Hapgood’s book, the Swiss writer Erich von Däniken went even further in Chariots of the Gods?, stating that Hapgood had claimed that the portolans had been based on photographs taken from the air by ‘visitors from space’.
Von Däniken’s idea that the Earth had been visited in the remote past by ‘ancient astronauts’ was by no means implausible; in fact, it had been suggested in 1962 by the Russian astronomer Josef Shklovskii in a book called Universe, Life, Mind, published in America in 1966 under the title Intelligent Life in the Universe, in collaboration with Carl Sagan. The problem was that von Däniken’s book was full of wild and absurd inaccuracies, such as multiplying the weight of the Great Pyramid by five, and suggesting that the Nazca lines, scratched on the surface of the Peruvian desert, might have been intended as an airport for spacecraft. It was inevitable that Hapgood should be condemned through ‘guilt by association’.
Yet Hapgood’s book has never been truly discredited—merely ignored. Not only had the 1949 Antarctic soundings revealed that the ice-covered bays shown by Piri Re’is actually existed, but a 1958 survey had shown that the Philip Buache map of 1737, which represented Antarctica divided into two islands, was also correct. The Dulcert Portolano of 1339 showed accurate knowledge of the geography between Galway and the Don basin in Russia. Another portolan showed the Aegean with numerous islands that do not now exist. And, since the islands were probably drowned as melting ice caused the sea level to rise, it sounds as if the map was made before the end of the last ice age. Altogether, there is strong evidence that civilisation appeared on Earth thousands of years before it arose in the Middle East, and that Hapgood was probably not far out when he talked of a worldwide seagoing civilisation around 7000 BC. To study Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings is to be impressed by the sheer weight of corroborative evidence.
So, although most of von Däniken’s evidence about visitors from space cannot be taken seriously, the portolans certainly raise the possibility that Earth might have b
een visited by ancient astronauts in the remote past. In Intelligent Life in the Universe (1966), Shklovskii and Sagan suggest:
Some 25 million years ago, a Galactic survey ship on a routine visit to [Earth] may have noted an interesting and promising evolutionary development: Proconsul. The information would have filtered at the speed of light slowly through the galaxy, and a notation would have been made in some central information repository . . . If the emergence of intelligent life on a planet is of general scientific interest to the Galactic civilisations, it is reasonable that with the emergence of Proconsul, the rate of sampling of our planet should have increased, perhaps to about once every ten thousand years . . . But if the interval between sampling is only several thousand years, there is a possibility that contact with an extraterrestrial civilisation has occurred within historical times.
They go on to point out that, when primitive people record some important historical event in the form of a myth, the oral tradition often preserves the essence of the event with remarkable fidelity, even when it is embellished with certain mythological details. Shklovskii cites the first encounter between the Tlingit Indians of North America and the French expedition of La Perouse, in which the sailing ships are remembered as great black birds with white wings.
Such ‘proofs’ can, of course, be deceptive. The archaeologist Henry Lhote suggested that a fresco found in cliffs overlooking the Sahara at Tassili might be a man in a spacesuit, and labelled it ‘the Martian god’. But a little research revealed that the Martian god was simply a human being dressed in a ritual mask. (Von Däniken would nevertheless use it as evidence for his ancient astronauts.)
But there is a myth that seems to the authors altogether more likely to represent a contact between Earth and aliens from space . . . the legend, they say, ‘suggests that contact occurred between human beings and a non-human civilisation of immense powers on the shores of the Persian Gulf, perhaps near the ancient Sumerian city of Eridu, in the fourth millennium BC or earlier’.