Chariots of the Gods Read Free Page B

later.
    An attempt to warn our proteges of dangers in store would have little chance of success. Even if we showed them the most horrifying films of terrestrial wars and atomic explosions, it would not prevent the beings living on this planet from committing the same follies any more than it now stops (almost) the whole of sentient humanity from constantly playing with the burning flame of war.
    While our space-ship disappears again into the mists of the universe, our friends will talk about the miracle—'the gods were here!' They will translate it into their simple language, turn it into a saga to be handed down to their sons and daughters and they will turn the presents and implements, and everything that the space travellers left behind into holy relics.
    If our friends have mastered writing, they may make a record of what happened: uncanny, weird, miraculous. Then their texts will relate—and drawings will show—that gods in golden clothes were there in a flying boat that landed with a tremendous din. They will write about chariots which the gods drove over land and sea, and of terrifying weapons that were like lightning and they will recount that the gods promised to return.
    They will hammer and chisel in the rock pictures of what they had once seen:
    Shapeless giants, with helmets and rods on their heads, carrying boxes in front of their chests; balls on which indefinable beings sit and ride through the air; staves from which rays are shot out as if from a sun; strange shapes, resembling giant insects, which were vehicles of some sort.
    There are no limits to the fantasy of the illustrations that result from the visit of our space-ship. We shall sec later what traces the 'gods' who visited the earth in our remote antiquity engraved on the tablets of the past.
    It is quite easy to sketch the subsequent development of the planet that our space-ship visited. The inhabitants have learnt a lot by watching the 'gods' surreptitiously; the place on which the space-ship stood will be declared holy ground, a place of pilgrimage, where the heroic deeds of the gods will be praised in song. Pyramids and temples will be built on it—in accordance with astronomic laws, of course. The people grows, there are wars that devastate the place of the gods, and then come generations who rediscover and excavate the holy places and try to interpret the signs.
    This is the stage we have reached. Now that we can land men on the moon we can open our minds, to space travel. We know the effect the sudden arrival of a large oceangoing sailing vessel had on primitive people in for example the South Sea Islands. We know the devastating effect a man like Cortes, from another civilisation, had on South America. So then we can appreciate, if only dimly, the fantastic impact the arrival of space-craft would have made in prehistoric times.
    We must now take another look at the forest of question marks—the array of unexplained mysteries. Do they make sense as the remains of prehistoric space travellers? Do they lead us into our past and yet link up with our plans for the future?
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Chapter Three - The Improbable World Of The Unexplained
    Our historical past is pieced together from indirect knowledge. Excavations, old texts, cave drawings, legends and so forth were used to construct, i.e. a working hypothesis. From all this material an impressive and interesting mosaic was made, but it was the product of a preconceived pattern of thought into which the parts could always be fitted, though often with cement that was all too visible. An event must have happened in such and such a way. In that way and no other. And lo and behold—if that's what the scholars really want—it did happen in that way. We are entitled, indeed we ought to doubt every accepted pattern of thought or working hypothesis, for if existing ideas are not called in question research is at an end. So our historical past is only relatively true. If new