The Ancient Alien Question (13 page)

Cargo Cults

Could it be that nonhuman, but nevertheless not divine, entities were mistaken for or labeled as gods? The answer to this question is a simple yes, because there are numerous examples of that “mistake” having been made.

The natives of Tanna, an island of Vanuata, in the South Pacific Ocean, developed a cult around John Frum. Local legend has it that the king of a far-off nation called America visited Tanna and lived among the natives. His name was John Frum. He gave the natives coin and paper money, a helmet, and other objects, including a photograph. He explained lightning to them, as well as sound, wind, and the constellations, and he spoke in a strange language. The people have tattoos on their skin that read “USA.”

The religion practiced by the people of Tanna is what is known as a “cargo cult,” a religious cult that has appeared in many traditional, pre-industrial tribal societies in the wake of interaction with more technologically advanced cultures. The cults normally focus on obtaining the material wealth—the “cargo”—of the advanced culture. Many of these cargo cults emerged around World War II, when many of the islands in the South Pacific suddenly saw 300,000 American troops pouring in from the skies and seas. These “gods” indeed brought the locals what seemed to them to be endless supplies of food and goods—including Jeeps, washing machines, radios, canned meat, and candy—so much so that they believed it was all summoned by magic. After all, none of it was made locally, so where did it come from?

After the war, America lost interest in these islands and the locals saw an end of their “Golden Age.” They therefore began to construct piers and created airstrips in their fields, in the hope that these “temples” would entice the gods—the Americans—to return. Indeed, the locals prayed for the return of the ships and planes, for with the return of the gods, a new Golden Age would come.

Whether or not there ever was a real John Frum is unknown. There are variant spellings: Jon Frum and John From. He is normally described as an American World War II serviceman, sometimes black, sometimes white.

He is not the only man whom the people of Tanna have mistaken for a god. The Yaohnanen tribe of Tanna believe that Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh, is a divine being. He is in fact taken to be the pale-skinned son of a mountain spirit and the brother of John Frum. Whereas common knowledge in Britain holds that Prince Philip was born in Corfu, Greece, on June 10, 1921, the Yaohnanen believe that he was born in Tanna, then traveled over the seas to a distant land where he married a powerful lady and would in time return. And return he did....

It is not clear when the cult was formed, but it is believed to have been sometime in the 1950s or 1960s. It probably occurred when Queen Elizabeth I was somehow depicted as paying particular attention to Prince Philip during a public function, which the natives of Tanna either saw on television or as a photograph, and took Prince Philip as one of their own.

When the royal couple visited Vanuatu in 1974, the Yaohnanens’ beliefs were reinforced, though the Prince himself was at the time not yet aware of the fact that he was considered to be a local deity. A few years later, when he was told of the tribe, the Resident Commissioner got Prince Philip to sign a photograph, which was then given to his worshippers, who responded by sending him a traditional nal-nal club, with which the prince duly posed, sending the photograph back to the Yaohnanen.

The Papas of New Guinea called the first seaplane they saw “the devil who came down from the sky” and the first steamboat “God Tibut Amut smoking a long cigar.” During his expedition to New Guinea in the 1920s, Frank Hurley noticed that the natives from the village of Kaimari began to fashion small wooden replicas of his seaplane as toys, which were distributed to all the households. Natives from the Eastern highlands were seen making radio masts from bamboo—copying the Persian Oil Company’s transmitter. Following World War II, the natives of a small New Guinean island built a ghost airport near the village of Wewak, complete with bamboo airplanes, to entice the gods to return.

The Leahy brothers went to the highlands of Papua New Guinea in the 1920s to make a documentary about the cargo cults. In it, Mike Leahy recounts the story that a small group of adventurers had landed on the island and begun to clear a section of the jungle so that the aircraft could land. When they made contact with the locals, they told them they did not come to steal, but needed to make room so that the “barlas” could land—a big bird that came from the sky and made lots of noise. Grabowski, the pilot, was a tall fellow. Leahy observed:

Wearing a pilot’s flight suit, white helmet and black protective goggles, he opened the hatch and got out of the plane, while about 2,500 natives were standing in dumbfounded silence along the airstrip. No one uttered a word. They had no idea what was going on. To them, Grabowski was a god. A god who arrived in a celestial bird, also a type of divine creature.
⁴

What we see on these South Pacific islands is something that shows that men have been mistaken for gods; specifically, that an advanced technological civilization posed such a radical break from their traditional framework that the cargo and the men involved were deified. This is definitive proof that humankind could, and in fact has, numerous times, mistaken other humans—and maybe, by extension, nonhuman intelligences—for God.

John Frum was prophesied to one day return to the islands, when the Golden Age of the Gods would return. The existence of a Golden Age, when the Gods lived among humankind and taught them sciences, including the constellations, is precisely what we read in the legends and myths of our ancient civilizations. Later on, we will see the story of the Babylonian civilizing god Oannes, who appeared out of the waters of the Persian
Gulf, spoke to the local people, and offered them knowledge, including knowledge of the constellations. It precisely echoes the story of John Frum and the cargo cults. Like the Americans after World War II, some of these gods too promised to one day return.

It is therefore possible that men of flesh and blood, whether human or extraterrestrial, could be mistaken for gods. It is possible that the meeting Ezekiel had with God was truly with the pilot and operator of a spaceship. However, all legends can be interpreted in a number of ways. In the Bible, it is clear that there is a body of evidence that together clearly argues for the presence, in biblical times, of a race of giants. But the presence of these giants in itself is not proof that ancient aliens once bred with human women.

Legends, by default, cannot be proof, but we
can
accept them as evidence. And when we take the whole, rather than individual details, it is clear that there is substantial evidence to suggest that “gods” once came to our ancestors, interacted with them, on occasion guided them, and also seem to have helped them in the endeavor known as civilization. In the case of the gods of Vanuata, we know that the Western world and America, the land of their gods, was technologically advanced and possessed the “cargo” to impress the natives. But when we turn to ancient Egypt or Sumer and their claims that gods once ruled their nation, or that Oannes taught them civilization, we cannot look elsewhere on planet Earth and find evidence of a civilization far enough advanced to have sent missionaries to these cultures. Nor have we ever found evidence of creatures that lived a thousand or maybe tens of thousands of years. But, again, whereas a case can be made that the God(s) of the Bible and other legends are truly extraterrestrial beings, there is currently no hard proof. If we need hard proof, then we need to investigate the archaeological record of planet Earth.

Chapter 4
Old Buildings, New Techniques

The search for evidence to answer the Ancient Alien
Question has always been focused on buildings or artifacts that our ancestors left behind. The question is whether they created it themselves, or were helped or inspired by alien visitors. Erich von Däniken’s series of questions in
Chariots of the Gods
is specifically directed to these structures, which at the time were clearly not adequately explained by scientists and archaeologists. The official descriptions seldom explained the intricacies and wonders of a given site.

Now 40 years later, the situation has somewhat improved, but many of the original questions remain, and none more famous than those surrounding the greatest building on planet Earth constructed by our ancestors: the Great Pyramid.

The Greatest Pyramid

The Great Pyramid is the only remaining wonder of the ancient world. It is officially said to have been built as the tomb for Pharaoh Khufu, a king of the Fourth Dynasty who ruled from around 2589 to 2566
BC
, but there are skeptics who argue that there is no evidence that Khufu was ever involved with the construction of this pyramid. They point out that the sarcophagus inside the King’s Chamber was found empty, and there are no inscriptions anywhere in or on the pyramid to link it with him. Hence, they argue, the stories that the Great Pyramid is far older could definitely be true. The Arab writer Abu Zeyd el Balkhy actually stated that the Great Pyramid was built when Lyre was in the constellation of Cancer, which would take it to about 73,000 years ago.

The Great Pyramid of Khufu is the only surviving wonder of the ancient world. Many believe that the scale and precision involved in building this gigantic monument was simply outside the scope of the ancient Egyptians. Recent discoveries have shown that the method and science involved in its construction are so advanced that the how was only recently discovered.

There is, however, evidence that Khufu definitely
was
involved with the construction of the pyramid. In the relieving chambers above the King’s Chamber, there is a cartouche containing Khufu’s name, which clearly shows that Khufu’s men were there. These relieving chambers were never meant to be entered and had in fact been sealed at the time of the pyramid’s construction. Hence, they date back to the time the pyramids were built. The discovery of Khufu’s name inside thus provided definitive evidence that this pharaoh was responsible for the Great Pyramid.

In Zecharia Sitchin’s
The Stairway to Heaven
, published in 1980, the chapter “Forging the Pharaoh’s Name” argues that Colonel Richard Howard Vyse did not discover but instead
forged
a cartouche containing the name of Pharaoh Khufu. Vyse was credited with this groundbreaking discovery that placed his name in the annals of Egyptology in his book
Operations Carried on at the Pyramids of Gizeh in 1837
. Sitchin said that the cartouche had not been seen by previous visitors to the relieving chamber in question. How could they have missed what Vyse so easily found? Furthermore, Sitchin writes, “Wasn’t it odd, I thought, that for centuries no markings of any kind were found by anyone, anywhere, in the pyramid, not even in Davison’s Chamber above the King’s Chamber—and only Vyse found such markings where only he first entered?”

Next point of debate: The cartouche was executed in red paint. The experts had difficulty distinguishing it from other—recent—inscriptions, and its possible status as a recent addition wasn’t helped with claims that people had been seen entering the structure with red paint. Perring’s memoirs,
The Pyramids of Gizeh
, do state that the red paint “was a composition of red ochre called by the Arabs
moghrab
which is still in use.... Such is the state of preservation of the marks in the quarries that it is difficult to distinguish the work of yesterday from one of three thousand years.”