Our Cosmic Ancestors (2 page)

An astronomical calculator, discovered at the bottom of the Aegean Sea and certainly several thousand years old, could compute eighteen different astronomical cycles derived from the ancient Egyptian lunisolar cycle of 76 years, by means of a differential and various bronze gear trains.

Our ancestors could cross the oceans and navigate around the world by using the circular winds and currents. They knew their latitude from the height of the polar star and their longitude from the interval between sunset and moonrise which is different for every point on any particular day.

Modem calculation of ancient eclipse and conjunction dates shows that everything that is written in the Bible is the true story of historical events that really happened in the past but have been slowly distorted by many successive writers, translators, and interpreters who could not find the right words for events or objects which they had never seen before.

For example, there seems to be no doubt that the word ELOHIM, which is a plural in Hebrew, should have been translated as astronauts, that Adam and Eve also could have been astronauts, and that the Garden of Eden could have been an enormous spaceship in orbit around the Earth.

Is astrology an exact science or an enormous impostor? Sumerian astrologers invented 9700 years ago a zodiac with twelve signs, but the Mayas computed a more precise one with 13 signs which is now used by some modern astrologers.

The Earth poles and continents have shifted many times in the past. Our polar ice caps were once tropical jungles while our deserts were at the bottom of an ocean. This is why we never find ruins of ancient civilizations that are older than a few thousand years. The vestiges of the first human cultures must be now under the polar caps or at the bottom of the oceans.

There are many megalithic computers around the world, like Stonehenge and the Medicine Wheel of Wyoming. They all indicate a fantastic astronomical knowledge which could only have been obtained after tens of millennia of observations and recordings, or by the intervention of astronauts from another civilization from another world in outer space.

The Earth had three different moons in the past before the present one. The last moon was much larger and much closer than ours, which resulted in a huge tidal belt around the equator as well as frequent eclipses, lunar years of 264 days and solar years of 288 days.

The same numbers 264 and 288 were found in the dimensions of the Tower of Babel whose volume was 1/6 of that of the Great Pyramid and six times that of the Ziggurat of Ur in Mesopotamia.

There is now little doubt that the mysterious continent of Atlantis was a part of the American continent, a huge plateau between Cuba, Florida, and the Bahamas, which has now been submerged for 12,000 years, and where the ruins of enormous constructions and a huge pyramid have recently been discovered.
On the other hand, the numbers of flights and landings of alien spacecraft have been increasing recently, as well as mysterious messages received from outer space; and it seems that the time is not far when we will finally meet our cosmic cousins, the descendants of our ancestors from outer space.

Maurice Chatelain

THE APOLLO SPACECRAFT

Thirty years ago I was living in San Diego, California. I had come there from Casablanca in 1955 with my wife and my three sons at the time when Morocco was becoming independent. After seven marvelous years in Casablanca, I had no wish to return to my native France.

One lived well in Morocco, and we had many friends there. Among them were a few intimates who worked hard in the daytime and lived it up at night. That was exactly the kind of life that appealed to me. I worked ten hours a day and had five businesses going simultaneously, including a venture in television that really interested me. We spent seven years in Casablanca, and all went well when suddenly, under pressure from the United States, France decided to pull out of Morocco and grant it independence.

In just a few weeks a well-organized and prosperous country was turned into unimaginable social and economic chaos. Even the most secure businesses went bankrupt because no one paid what was due, and it wasn't even possible to send children to school because they could have been killed in the streets. Disgusted and sorry about being a Frenchman, I thought it better to leave, and the sooner the better. But first we had to know where to go.

One of our best friends in Casablanca at that time was an American of Greek ancestry, who, as the president of the United States Chamber of Commerce in Morocco, had helped me a great deal in the past. He was to be even more helpful now, since he was also the American vice consul in Casablanca.

I went to see him and asked for advice. He said I should have my head examined if I ever dreamed of returning to France, already crowded with refugees from Indochina and North Africa. His advice was to go to the wide, open spaces of California. A mutual friend, now residing in Beverly Hills, would certainly be glad to sponsor me
and my family and give the necessary guarantees to the United States immigration authorities.

I was tempted to follow his advice; I spoke English well enough. However my wife, who had for some strange reason studied German as a second language in school and had three small boys, was not so easily persuaded. I finally prevailed, and the very next morning all of us went to the American Consulate to sign the immigration papers and to receive warm recommendations given to our family by my Greek-American friend.

My decision to move to America proved to be right. For the next twenty years I worked for a number of aerospace organizations and industries and was supported by the United States Navy, the United States Air Force, and NASA. I was even reimbursed by the United States Government for the cost of moving my family to the United States, though it took a while to achieve that. If ever I regretted coming to the States, it was never for professional reasons; because working in California is so much more agreeable than it is in France, where I would never have succeeded as I have here.

After having lived in Beverly Hills for about a month and having found that it wasn't too difficult to find work in the electronics industries, I decided to look for a home in San Diego, where the rents were more reasonable and the landscape reminded me of the Cote d'Azur of southern France.

My first job was a three-year stint as an electronics engineer with Convair Astronautics. Convair was then building the delta-wing F102 and F-106 fighter planes and the Atlas intercontinental ballistic missile for the military, which were successes, as well as a commercial passenger plane that was not, even after its name had been changed several times.

I started working in telecommunications, which I knew well, and was soon shifted to telemetry, which I knew little about, until finally all my work was with radar, which I didn't know at all. After three years I had become an expert in each of these fields and was making a name for myself.

I had published some technical articles and had given a lecture. But then Convair's business turned sour. Its commercial airplane still did not sell and the Air Force started cutting contracts. Luckily for me, a competitor of Convair, the Ryan Aeronautical Company, that had built Charles Lindbergh's airplane in 1927, decided to start an electronics division and began luring specialists away from Convair.

As a result, in 1959, I landed at Ryan Electronics as head of an electromagnetic research group in charge of developing new radar and telecommunications systems. It was there that I finally had a chance to use my imagination and create new communication systems for which I received eleven patents. That was the great era of electronics, a time that will never come again.

Ryan was actually a small company and did not build airplanes or missiles. It specialized in building drones, small pilotless airplanes that were a big success. The Air Force used these drones for fighter pilot training and shot them down faster than we could build them. At a certain time we even started repairing the least damaged drones, quite contrary to certain principles of American business.

Ryan was also building the world's best radar navigation systems, which gave the most precise readings of aircraft position. One of these flight instruments enabled a military airplane to fly on automatic pilot from San Diego to Washington, DC, missing its target by less than two hundred yards.

Thus I turned out to be a specialist in electronic navigation. One of my patents - an automatic radar landing system that ignited retro rockets at a given altitude - was used in Ranger and Surveyor flights to the Moon, the latter spacecraft making soft landings without suffering damage.

But even Ryan didn't do well financially. The drones sold like hot cakes but the Air Force needed more than we could supply them; so Ryan lost one contract after another within only a few weeks, something that is typical of the American way of business. As a result Ryan was in financial difficulty. It became clear that I would have to look for another job. Since Convair, the only aerospace company in San Diego besides Ryan, by now faced even greater economic difficulties, I had to go up to Los Angeles to find a suitable position.

The job situation was much better there, but I did not want to move nearly a hundred miles north to Los Angeles for several reasons. First of all, Los Angeles is not a city like San Diego. Los Angeles is a chain of industrial suburbs stretched in line over sixty miles and nobody likes to live there if he can help it. In addition, we had just bought a brand new home in San Diego, with a magnificent view of the bay, and we had no wish whatever to go and live in the notorious smog of LA.

So it was decided that my wife and my three sons, together with our huge Newfoundland retriever, Katanga, would stay in San Diego; and I would drive to Los Angeles on Monday and return on Friday, as many of my friends had been doing. It was far from my ideal way of life, but what else could I do?

It so happened that at that precise moment when Ryan and Convair were having their great difficulties in San Diego, North American Aviation was building a new, gigantic aerospace plant for 30,000 employees in Downey, a southern suburb of Los Angeles, in the hope that it would receive the Apollo development and construction contract from the United States Government, the space project whose goal was to land a man on the Moon.

To start building such vast production facilities before receiving a contract seems foolhardy but very American; because how could you hope to get the contract if you didn't have the factory first to show the customer? But North American had no doubts that it would get the bid. The company had cemented its relations well with Lyndon Johnson, at that time the Vice President of the United States and in charge of the space program.

At the very time when the new Downey plant was completed, it was announced that North American had submitted the best technical proposal for both development and production of the Apollo spacecraft and therefore had been awarded the contract. It was worth billions of taxpayers' dollars, but nobody complained about it at the time. The only question was who would be first to land on the Moon - the Russians or the Americans?

All that was left to be done was to build the Apollo. First it had to be decided how to do it; and no one as yet had a clear idea of what, in reality, this project required. Engineers, thousands of the best engineers available, were needed. To make these engineers want to come and work in a dairy suburb of Los Angeles populated by over a million cows, the pay had to be good. But that was no problem; the money was there.

I was among the very first men who presented themselves to North American; and since I was already known in the industry as a radar and telecommunications specialist, I was immediately offered the task of designing and building the Apollo communication and dataprocessing system. Nobody specified my duties or functions, because no one at that time knew what these systems would be like. But that, again, was of no importance in view of the rush to land on the Moon!

I took my leave of Ryan, and within two weeks I was working at North American on the Apollo project at nearly double my Ryan salary and began to endure the endless commuting of over a hundred miles between San Diego and Downey. Fortunately, there was a magnificent four-lane superhighway almost door to door and it took me only an hour and a half to cover the distance for less than five dollars' worth of gasoline per round trip.

At that time I had the best car I ever owned - a pale green Chevrolet convertible with a powerful motor and a white top. For me, who always like to drive, even from Paris to Casablanca, this drive to work along the seashore was a sheer delight. In the fresh air of the early morning, I had lots of time to think about many things that had nothing to do with the space program.

For the first few months I left San Diego every Monday morning and returned Friday night at suppertime. In Downey I stayed in the Tahitian Village motel, which had been built at the same time as the new plant. The motel was charming, with waterfalls and tropical vegetation; but I did not have much time to appreciate all this. I worked twelve hours a day with little time to eat and sleep. Later, when my work became organized and I put in only eight hours a day like the rest of my colleagues, I would go home to San Diego every day.

When the Apollo project started, there was no communication equipment powerful enough or sensitive enough to make voice transmission possible from Earth to the Moon, not to mention transmission of television pictures over that distance. Such things had to be invented, perfected, and built. Relay stations had to be installed all around the globe in the Tropics with parabolic dish antennas, some over 200 feet in diameter, in such a way that one or two of them would always be in contact with any Apollo spacecraft orbiting around the Moon. All these stations had to be in contact with each other and all of them had to report to the Apollo Space Flight Center in Houston, Texas. All the new equipment, built by some twenty different suppliers from all parts of the United States, had to be coordinated and made compatible.