This legend can be traced to Berosus, a priest of the god Bel-Marduk in the city of Babylon at the time of Alexander the Great. Berosus would have had access to cuneiform and pictographic records (on cylinders and temple walls) dating back thousands of years before his time.
In one of his fragments, Alexander Polyhistor describes how there appeared from the Persian Gulf ‘an animal who was endowed with reason, who was called Oannes’. This creature had a fish’s tail, but also had feet like a man, and spoke with a human voice. It taught men letters and science, and every kind of art, as well as how to build houses and temples. ‘In short he instructed them in everything which could tend to soften manners and humanise mankind’. Oannes used to spend his nights in the sea, for he was amphibious. And after him came more creatures like him.
Another chronicler, Abydenus—a disciple of Aristotle—speaks of Sumerian kings, and mentions ‘another semi-demon, very like to Oannes, who came up a second time from the sea’. He also mentions ‘four double-shaped personages’—by which he presumably means half-man and half-fish—who ‘came out of the sea to land’.
Finally, Apollodorus of Athens mentions that in the time of King Ammenon the Chaldean there ‘appeared the Musarus Oannes, the Annedotus, from the Persian Gulf’, and later ‘a fourth Annedotus, having . . . the shape of a fish blended with that of a man’. And in the reign of King Euedoreschus there appeared yet another fish-man named Odacon.
Apollodorus speaks about Oannes the Annedotus as if it is a title rather than a proper name. I spent half an hour looking in encyclopedias, trying to find the meaning of annedotus and also musaru, and finally succeeded in finding musarus in Liddell and Scott’s Greek lexiconit means ‘abominable’. But I could not find annedotus. Then, recalling that Robert Temple had mentioned the fish gods in The Sirius Mystery, I looked in that work, and found that I could have saved myself so much effort—Temple had done the work for me. Annedotus means ‘the repulsive one’. It was amazing: the Musarus Oannes the Annedotus means ‘the abomination Oannes the repulsive’.
Temple feels—and I am inclined to agree with him—that this is an indication that we are dealing with truth rather than invention. You would expect a mythical account to glorify the godlike teachers of civilisation, not describe them as frankly disgusting. But we have only to conjure up an image of a fishlike being with slippery scales, huge white eyes and a large mouth to understand why frankness compelled men to admit that they found them repulsive. They may not even have felt the description to be pejorative—merely factually accurate, as in the case of Ivan the Terrible or Akbar the Damned.
Now Temple’s Sirius Mystery happens to be by far the most scholarly and convincing book on the possibility of ‘ancient astronauts’. Temple’s interest was aroused when he stumbled on an article about an African tribe called the Dogon, who live in northern Mali, and learnt that the Dogon believe that fish gods called the Nommo came from Sirius, and brought civilisation to Earth some three thousand years ago.
The dog star Sirius (so called because it is in the constellation Canis) is 8.7 light years away. And the Dogon tradition declares that it has an invisible companion, which they call po tolo (meaning ‘star grain’—and since the grain they refer to is their staple diet, digitaria, it can be translated ‘digitaria star’), and which is made of a matter far heavier than any on Earth. They declare that this invisible star moves in an elliptical orbit, and takes fifty years to do so.
In fact, Sirius does have an invisible companion, called by astronomers Sirius B; it is a ‘white dwarf’—that is, it is made of atoms that have collapsed in on themselves, so that a piece the size of a pea could weigh half a ton. It moves in an elliptical orbit, and takes fifty years to do so. The Dogon also showed a remarkable knowledge of astronomy. They said that the moon was ‘dry and dead’, and they drew Saturn with a ring around it—which is not visible to the naked eye. They knew about the moons of Jupiter, and that the planets revolve around the sun. Encyclopaedia Britannica says that the metaphysical system of the Dogon is ‘far more abstract than that of other African tribes’.
It was inevitable that, when Western scholars heard about the astronomical knowledge of the Dogon, they should try to prove that it was probably picked up from European travellers.
Western astronomers had known about Sirius B since 1862, so it was possible that the Dogon had learnt about it from a tourist or missionary. But it was not until 1928 that Sir Arthur Eddington postulated the theory of white dwarfs. And the two anthropologists who studied the Dogon—Marcel Griaule and Germaine Dieterlen—arrived in Mali in 1931. It seemed unlikely that another traveller had visited the Dogon in the intervening three years and brought them up to date on the latest cosmological theories.
There is an even better reason for dismissing the tourist theory (which, typically, was later espoused by Carl Sagan). Griaule had been studying Dogon mythology and religion for sixteen years before the priests decided that his dedication deserved to be rewarded by initiation into their deepest secrets. One of their wisest men was appointed to be his tutor, and to teach him the four degrees of religious knowledge. It went on for years, and, when the teacher died, another was appointed. Griaule realised, to his astonishment, that the Dogon religion is as rich and complex as, say, the Christian theology enshrined in Aquinas’s Summa Theologica. There can be no question of the fish gods being introduced during the past century as a result of an encounter with an astronomically inclined missionary: they form the foundation stone of a religious mythology that has taken thousands of years to formulate.
If we add that the Sumerian language has nothing in common with any other Semitic or Indo-European language, and that Sumerian specialists are puzzled that the civilisation seems to have appeared out of nowhere, we can see that there is at least a strong prima facie case for Shklovskii’s notion that the fish-god myth might have been a record of the contact with an extraterrestrial civilisation. And if we also take into account the Dogon and their Nommo myth—of which Shklovskii and Sagan were unaware at the time—the argument begins to look very plausible indeed.
This was to strike me even more strongly in March 1997, when the TV documentary took me to the ruined city of Tiahuanaco, near Lake Titicaca, in the Andes, and I wandered around that vast courtyard called the Kalasasiya, the sacred place of the remote ancestors of the Incas. Some time in the 1890s, Prof. Arthur Posnansky, of La Paz, who spent his life studying Tiahuanaco, calculated from the astronomical alignment of the temple (most ancient temples are aligned on the heavens) that it was built about 15,000 BC, a time when our ancestors were supposed to be living in caves. His colleagues were outraged—their own estimate was about AD 500—but in the 1920s, a German astronomical team confirmed Posnansky’s estimate, which was based on the fact that there are two observation points on the Kalasasiya that mark the winter and summer solstices, when the sun is directly over the Tropic of Cancer or Capricorn. Because the Earth rolls slightly as it travels around the sun, the position of the tropics changes by as much as two and a half degrees over forty-one thousand years. The Germans confirmed Posnansky’s calculation—that the position of the tropics built into the temple indicated 15,000 BC.
Of course, it is easy to make some slight mismeasurement when dealing with half a degree or so, and the Germans finally suggested that the date indicated could be more like 9000 BC. That still caused outrage, and, by taking other variants into account, the German team suggested that the date might be further reduced to 4500 BC. Posnansky decided to accept that estimate—probably muttering under his breath, like Galileo, Tut it moves all the same.
Four thousand five hundred BC is close to the date of the rise of Sumerian civilisation, and I was reminded of that fact when, on my second trip to Tiahuanaco, I summoned the energy to walk to a remote corner of the courtyard. (Tiahuanaco is two and a half miles above sea level, and the thin air produces a sensation like carrying two heavy suitcases.) I had seen there another statue, not unlike the ‘Great Idol’ tha
t stands in the centre of the courtyard, looking down on a sunken temple. Even my producer, Roel Oostra, had not felt it worth his while to walk that far. But we both agreed that the effort was worth it. The statue is known as ‘the Friar’ (El Fraile)—heaven knows why, because it looks nothing like a friar. It is actually a fish god, with huge eyes and scaly lower body, and is at least as impressive as the Great Idol which stands a hundred yards away, and which also seems to have a fish-scale design on its lower half. And, looking at this strange and powerful piece of sculpture, I found myself thinking of the fish god Oannes, who is represented on Babylonian and Assyrian cylinder seals. Could it really be pure chance that the fish god is found on opposite sides of the world?
I felt the same when I looked at the giant Olmec heads in the park of La Venta, in Villahermosa, southern Mexico. There can be no possible doubt that these are Africans—and that they represented kings who ruled about 1500 BC in Central America. There could hardly be a stronger proof for Hapgood’s worldwide maritime civilisation.
Now we know that, at some point in prehistory, the whole plateau containing Tiahuanaco and Lake Titicaca was at sea level; we know this because Titicaca is a saltwater lake, and has many sea creatures in it. At some remote epoch, a great convulsion of the Earth thrust it more than two miles in the air. But we also know that Tiahuanaco was once a port on Lake Titicaca—which is now a dozen miles away. It may be that Lake Titicaca has simply shrunk over the years. But Tiahuanaco itself suggests another reason. What used to be its port area, the Puma Punku (Puma Gate), is covered with massive blocks of stone, once part of a dock, then tossed around like ninepins by some convulsion of the Earth. The so-called ‘Great Gate of Tiahuanaco’ or Gateway of the Sun, a kind of miniature Arc de Triomphe which stands in the opposite corner of the courtyard from the fish god, was never finished, and has a crack running from one of its corners to the gateway in the middle. It looks as if this might also have been damaged in some cataclysm.
Could it have been the same cataclysm as caused such havoc in the area of La Brea around 11,000 BC?
Let me admit that I feel slightly inhibited about posing such questions. It is one of von Däniken’s most irritating habits: ‘Why are the oldest libraries in the world secret libraries? What are people afraid of?’ etc. I am fully aware that modern archaeology dates Tiahuanaco from around 500 BC to AD 700, and that these are the dates you will find on the chart in the Tiahuanaco museum. But the truth is that nearly all such dates are educated guesswork. And since modern archaeologists are determined to sound factual and scientific—in reaction against their nineteenth-century forebears, who were unashamedly romantic—they prefer to err on the side of conservatism, and make their dates as recent as possible. In the 1960s, Stonehenge was believed to date from 2500 BC; now the date has been pushed back to 3100.
Civilisation in the Middle East was supposed to have started around 5000 BC; now we know there were cities three thousand years earlier. Conventional archaeology dates the Sphinx around 2500 BC, at the time of the Great Pyramid, in spite of powerful evidence (which I discussed in From Atlantis to the Sphinx) that it must be thousands of years older. And we have seen that, in the 1920s, Tiahuanaco was believed to date from about AD 500; now it is accepted by the most conservative archaeologists to be a thousand years earlier. So I do not feel too concerned about suspecting that Posnansky may have been roughly correct about the age of Tiahuanaco and modern archaeologists wrong.
This feeling was strengthened when I spent a morning in the Library of Congress, looking at some of the portolans that had inspired Hapgood. My companion was Rand Flemath, who, together with his wife, Rose, wrote a book called When the Sky Fell (1996). The Flemaths had studied myths of many tribes of American Indians, and found again and again tales of a sudden violent catastrophe that had darkened the sun, and caused massive earthquakes and floods. And it was Rand who, as we looked at a map of the American continent and talked about the cataclysm of La Brea, remarked casually that Hapgood believed that the great crust movement that had caused the catastrophe had run from north to south through the American continent, and spared most of the rest of the world. Such a movement would be an obvious candidate for the cataclysm that cracked the Gate of the Sun, and tilted Lake Titicaca so that it retreated a dozen miles from Tiahuanaco.
And so, as I talked to John Harris, the director of the George C. Page Museum, about the catastrophe of 11,000 BC, my thoughts were never far from Hapgood. Admittedly, 11,000 BC was four thousand years earlier than the worldwide maritime civilisation suggested by Hapgood on the basis of the portolans. Yet the fish god of the Kalasasiya suggested a connection with Oannes, and with Shklovskii and Sagan’s theory of extraterrestrial contact, and with Robert Temple’s impressive evidence about the Dogon and their fish gods from Sirius. I had a feeling that it was all beginning to come together.
In fact, only that morning, I had found a number of books that would provide new pieces of the jigsaw puzzle.
When I woke up in my Los Angeles motel, I knew that I had a few hours to spare before I was due at the La Brea museum. I might have stayed in bed and tried to get over my jet lag, but that would have seemed a waste of time. I asked Roel, my producer, what he intended to do, and he said that he had to drive over to Santa Monica to interview someone about a future programme.
That seemed a good idea. I had known Santa Monica—on the northern outskirts of Los Angeles—since the 1960s, when I was lecturing in Long Beach, and came there to see Christopher Isherwood and Henry Miller. More recently, in the late 1980s, I had spent some time there with my friend John Wright, who runs a bookshop on Santa Monica Boulevard—I had given a number of lectures there.
It was seven or eight years since I had last seen John, and I no longer remembered clearly where the bookshop was situated. But I got Roel to drop me off at the end of Santa Monica Boulevard, and strolled south, suffering from the heat of a dazzling November morning. After a few blocks, it dawned on me that I had been rash to assume I could still find the shop—or even that it was still there.
Finally, I found a bookshop—though clearly not the right one. But there were copies of books on Gurdjieff in the window, and on religious mysticism, so I pushed on the door handle. The door was locked; I looked at my watch; it was a few minutes after 10:00. I was about to turn away when there was a shout of ‘My God, Colin!’, and John Wright appeared at the door.
A few minutes later I was seated at the counter, drinking coffee. It seemed that John had relocated farther along the boulevard. It was lucky for me that he had happened to look out of the window at that moment.
I picked up a new book by Budd Hopkins called Witnessed, and told John that I would like to take it with me. I had his earlier books Missing Time and Intruders.
‘Are you interested in UFOs?’
I explained that I had been commissioned to write a book on extra-
terrestrial life, and that I suspected it was going to turn into a book about UFOs.
‘We’ve got a big section on UFOs. You may remember, it’s a subject we specialise in’.
I didn’t, because I hadn’t been particularly interested in UFOs last time I had seen John. But now, as I began to look through a whole corner of the room devoted to them, my heart sank at the sheer number of books I had never heard of.
Some of them looked so weird they made you doubt the sanity of the authors—huge self-published volumes, some of them several inches thick, devoted to such propositions as that the aliens came from inside the Earth, or that they had gigantic underground bases in locations like South Dakota, and that these had been built with the connivance of the US government. There were dozens of volumes and even magazines about ‘conspiracy theories’. But there were also dozens of volumes with titles like UFO Report, 1991; Close Encounters of the Fourth Kind; UFOs: African Encounters; and UFO Chronicles of the Soviet Union, the last by my friend Jacques Vallee. It was obvious that the subject had so many remote byways that I could spend a lifetime exploring
them.
As if to increase my depression, John’s assistant Ramon told me that a local New Age bookstore, with even more books on UFOs, was closing, and that all books were being sold at a 60 percent discount. With a sense of plunging even further out of my depth, I agreed to let him take me there. The owner, whose lease was running out, cheered me by telling me that most of the UFO books had already gone, but that the few remaining could be found on the shelf between yoga and vegetarian cooking. In fact, there must have been a hundred or so titles. And Ramon, who was highly knowledgeable in the field, kept holding out volumes to me and saying, ‘That’s very important’, or ‘That’s a real classic’. So, having established that the books could be airmailed back to England, and that I could pay by credit card, I ended by buying a couple of dozen.
Back in John Wright’s bookshop, Ramon was equally helpful about books I ought to read, and I ended with a pile of fifty or so on the counter. My credit-card bill for that morning was approaching a thousand dollars. But, as I took a taxi back to my motel, I felt that at least I had made a start on the research for my book.
On the plane back to Heathrow, I read a remarkable book called The Holographic Universe by Michael Talbot. Its early chapters are about the brain and the theory of holograms, but towards the end Talbot devotes a few pages to the UFO phenomenon, and they left me more confused than ever.
Summarising the views of a number of writers, like Jacques Vallee, Michael Grosso, and Kenneth Ring, he seems to conclude that UFOs are largely a subjective and psychological phenomenon. He points out that in that classic early abduction case of Barney and Betty Hill, the commander of the UFO was dressed in a Nazi uniform, which sounds as if the event was closer to a dream or hallucination. He goes on: