Twilight of the Gods: The Mayan Calendar and the Return of the Extraterrestrials Read Free Page B

that was made up of paying members and also had its own small elite troop unit. Adherents plastered the walls of universities and sports stadiums with posters, and handbills were distributed by the thousand. Lectures held by astronomers who disagreed with Horbiger's opinions were disrupted with boos and ironic laughter, and professors were badgered on the streets. Horbiger wrote to well-known engineers and astronomers: "Either you must learn to believe in me, or I must treat you as my enemy."'
    The Horbiger movement published a total of three extensive reference works and 40 further books aimed at a wider audience. Not only that, there were countless pamphlets and brochures. Their monthly magazine, Der Schlussel zum Weltgeschehen (The Key to World Events), achieved a circulation of 100,000 copies.
    Hitler believed in Horbiger and supported him publicly. They also met many times. Hitler listened avidly to Horbiger's lectures, even though the irascible Horbiger wouldn't allow even the Fiihrer to interrupt. In one of the pamphlets the group published at the time, one can read: "One Austrian, Hitler, banished the Jewish politicians. A second Austrian, Horbiger, will banish the Jewish scientists too!"'

    Luis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier, two great French thinkers and journalists, wrote about Horbiger's teachings:
Horbiger claims that he can reveal the truths about our planet's earliest history as well as its distant future. He throws all current theories on the history of cultures, the appearance and development of mankind and his societies simply out of the window. Hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of years ago, he maintains, there already existed god-like peoples, giants and highly developed cultures.. .the entire universe is undergoing a kind of uniform phase of development; it is a living organism in which every part exerts an influence on every other part. The quest of mankind is linked to the quest of the stars; everything that happens in the cosmos is reflected in events on the Earth, and vice versa.'
    But what has all this got to do with the highlands of Bolivia and mysterious ruined city of Tiwanaku?

    1.1. The Gateway of the Sun in Tiwanaku. Image courtesy of Tatjana Ingold, Solothurn, Switzerland.

    The answer is that one of Horbiger's followers was an archaeologist, a certain Dr. Edmund Kiss, who spent nine years carrying out research in the highlands of the Andes. There, in Tiwanaku, a monolithic gateway had been discovered-what is today known as the "Gateway of the Sun." For Edmund Kiss, the engravings on this sun gate represented some kind of calendar. It was possible, he claimed, to read the solstices, the equinoxes, every day of the year, the position of the moon for every hour-and all of this data even took into account the rotation of the Earth! "The people that invented this calendar belonged to a higher civilization than ours," insisted Kiss.' According to his calculations, Tiwanaku was erected around 27,000 years before Christ's birth. This calendar, he maintained, was engraved in the stone by astronomers from the tertiary period and provides us with "incontrovertible, scientific evidence."5

    1.2. Winged beings flank the central figure. Image courtesy of Tatjana Ingold, Solothurn, Switzerland.

    Indeed, Horbiger's followers actually did find evidence-in and around Tiwanaku-of some kind of global disaster. For instance, the remains of a large harbor, sea sediments at an altitude of 2.5 miles, volcanic ash mixed in with the mud from a flood of biblical proportions, and even fragments of bones from alleged giants. Not only that, all of these things originated from the time when our previous moon allegedly exploded, initially causing a ring of debris to form around the Earth that subsequently rained down catastrophically upon our planet. And let us not forget that-at least according to Horbiger-this was not the first time. There had been many previous moons and many catastrophes. Horbiger worked out that