The Ancient Alien Question (37 page)

In appearance, it is identical to the many false doors that are found in and around Egyptian tombs, through which the spirit was said to pass to the Otherworld. At Lake Titicaca, the Gate of the
Gods is said to be a gateway to the lands of the Gods. In times long past, heroes went through it to join their gods, to a life of immortality. However, the door was said to swing in two directions, for it was known that those men, as well as the gods, came back from that realm into ours, though only for small periods of time.

The Gate of the Gods is located in the very region where the god Viracocha is said to have appeared on planet Earth, and his cult center is nearby, at Tiahuanaco. History has no answer as to where the builders of Tiahuanaco came from. Pablo Chalon was certain that the ancestors of the local Aymara had nothing to do with Tiahuanaco: “We must suppose that the builders arrived suddenly in that place from some region that was already civilized by the influence of the Old World, only to disappear after a short residence without leaving descendants and without having transmitted [to] their successors the secret of their prodigious capabilities.”
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The idea that people of the Old World were responsible were Tiahuanaco was inspired by the notion that Viracocha was said to have been white. But Viracocha could not have been European, for in Europe there was no one with the technical capability to create the intricacy of Puma Punku.

The obvious question to ask is whether Viracocha, a god, emanated from this gateway, the Gate of the Gods. There is, of course, no actual door. There is only solid rock. So this stargate is perhaps purely symbolic, is reliant on some form of technology that can turn rock into something else, or is something nonphysical. The skeptics and traditional scientists will endorse the symbolic nature, while the traditional Ancient Alien theorists will quickly adopt the technological perspective. But the likeliest scenario might be that the Ancient Alien Answer is found in the non-physical realm.

Coral Castle

South of Orlando, Florida, and Cape Canaveral is Homestead, home to one of America’s most enigmatic constructions: Coral Castle. Coral Castle is a stone complex comprising numerous megalithic stones, each weighing several tons, and mostly made of limestone formed from coral—thus its name. The complex is the brainchild of Edward Leedskalnin, a Latvian amateur sculptor who only received a fourth-grade education. At the age of 26, he was engaged to Agness Scuff, but when she broke off their engagement he decided to immigrate to the United States, finding work in lumber camps. When he contracted tuberculosis, he moved to the warmer climate of Florida, around 1919.

In the first half of the 20th century, Edward Leedskalnin, a Latvian immigrant with no formal education, built an elaborate stone complex in Homestead, Florida. He used no heavy equipment or machinery, and teenagers sneaking into the complex said they saw the stones float as if they were balloons. © Christina Rutz via Wikipedia.

Leedskalnin proclaimed, “I know the secrets of how the pyramids of Egypt were built!”
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If he had not built Coral Castle, this would have been just another big claim. But the way in which Coral Castle was built is evidence that he might have known what he was talking about. In fact, the things he knew may have surpassed the knowledge possessed by the builders of the Great Pyramid. For example, the average block used in the construction of Coral Castle is larger than those used in the Great Pyramid. There is one 30-ton rock, a 9-ton gate, a 22-ton obelisk, a moon block, and a coral rocking chair weighing in at 3 tons. He labored for 28 years, alone, using a total of 1,100 tons of rocks, using no cranes or other heavy machinery. He worked in utter secrecy, almost exclusively at night, to make sure that no one saw what he was doing. A few teenagers claimed to have seen him work, saying that he moved the blocks as if they were hydrogen balloons.

Leedskalnin originally built his oeuvre in Florida City, but moved it to Homestead in 1936, necessitating transporting several large rocks 10 miles north by truck. When preparing to place a 20-ton obelisk on the truck, Leedskalnin asked the truck driver to leave him alone. After a few minutes, the driver heard a loud crash, which he felt was ominous, only to realize that it was merely the sound of Leedskalnin somehow placing that obelisk on the flatbed of the truck. In Homestead, the driver was asked to leave the flatbed overnight; in the morning the stone was in position in its new home.

The U.S. government visited Leedskalnin, in the hopes of finding answers as to how he accomplished this construction, but he refused to cooperate. In 1952, Leedskalnin checked himself into a hospital, and shortly afterward passed away from stomach cancer, taking his secret with him.

Leedskalnin did not seem to possess any type of technology, though some suggest he did, largely in the effort to explain away the mystery of Leedskalnin’s building methodology: He had to
have machines, right? But how did he
really
do it? Leedskalnin stated that modern science had totally misunderstood nature. All matter, in his opinion, consisted of individual magnets. It was the movement of these magnets within materials and through space that created magnetism and electricity. It seems that Leedskalnin somehow understood and applied magnets in ways no one else could. And from all accounts, including the teenagers who witnessed it with their own eyes, the end result was that the stones somehow floated into position, “as if they were balloons.”

Coral Castle was made in the first half of the 20th century, but it sits in the same company as the ancient monuments that defy explanation: The stones at Coral Castle were fastened without mortar; simply placed on top of each other. The stones are fitted so precisely that no light passes through the joints. Most remarkably, when category-5 Hurricane Andrew hit on August 24, 1992, it leveled everything in the area, but nothing in Coral Castle even shifted.

It is unlikely that we will ever know where Leedskalnin acquired this knowledge. It is said that he healed himself from tuberculosis by using magnets, which suggests that he learned the importance of magnetism early on. Maybe it was handed down to him in his family, or maybe it was somehow given to him, not by a visiting alien being in a spaceship in a forest, but in a flash of “inspiration”—an insight?

Channeling The Nine

Thousands of people claim to be able to “channel” extraterrestrial intelligences. Channeling is an ability that entails inviting nonphysical entities into your consciousness and allowing them to speak through you. Some channelers are better known than others, and it is unfortunately quite often the more extreme and bizarre cases that have received public notoriety. One of the most
intriguing cases is the well-documented but little-known saga of “The Nine,” otherworldly intelligences that claim to be the deities of Ancient Egypt. They also claim that they have guided humankind throughout civilization.

From the 1950s onward, such contact was established from quite mundane living rooms in houses in the United States. The man responsible for this contact was Andrija Puharich, and though he is not a household name, he is regarded as the father of the American New Age movement. Puharich was born in 1918 in Chicago, of Yugoslavian parents. He graduated from medical school at Northwestern University in 1947, and his interest was immediately captured by the paranormal. He was particularly interested in the possibility of enhancing, in some way or another, the innate psychic abilities that many—if not all—of us seemed to possess.

The experiments to contact The Nine began in 1952 and involved a group of nine individuals, mostly friends and acquaintances of Dr. Puharich. It would be a few years later, in the late 1950s, that he wrote and published two books:
The Sacred Mushroom
and
Beyond Telepathy
. He then disappeared into the background and apparently worked for a number of years on his favorite topic, parapsychology, for a secret project of the U.S. government. In the early 1970s, with the full consent of the U.S. government and as part of a psychic experiment—most popularly known as “remote viewing”—Puharich traveled to Israel and returned with Uri Geller, the spoon-bending psychic who would create so much controversy and to this day is an international celebrity.

That Geller arrived in the United States as part of a secret CIA project was only officially confirmed in 1994 when the CIA declassified its series of remote-viewing projects, one of which was named STARGATE. These projects came about when the CIA learned that the Soviets were experimenting with psychically gifted people in the hope that they could learn secret, classified
information on the United States and its military capabilities. The United States felt it could not be left behind in this endeavor and turned at first to Puharich, and later to Stanford Research International and two physicists, Russell Targ and Hal Puthoff, to help them create a series of projects that would explore whether psychic intelligence-gathering could work. Eventually, a protocol was developed in which a series of coordinates were given to these psychics—all of them would eventually be employed by the Department of Defense—in the hope that they could locate information on the target, which included the locations of nuclear submarines, rockets, and whatever information the CIA and other intelligence agencies could not gather through technological means. Where technology failed, the psychics were meant to provide the answers that were needed. What is also now declassified, but still little known, is that the Israeli intelligence agency Mossad allowed the CIA to test Geller in return for a series of satellite images that allowed Israel to strike back at strategic locations during the 1973 Yom Kippur War.

Because of the controversy that would erupt over Geller from the 1970s onward, Puharich’s
The Sacred Mushroom
has received little attention, but it is a most important book for anyone trying to answer the Ancient Alien Question. In fact, its subtitle carried the intriguing word
doorway
: “Doorway to Eternity”—or, as we would tend to call it these days, a stargate. The book tackles seemingly random events occurring during the time when Puharich was doing psychic experiments as a “private initiative with government support” with two psychics, one of whom, identified as Harry Stone, frequently went into a spontaneous trance during which he spoke in riddles and performed motions that seemed to be rituals. In 1954, Puharich received a transcript from one of Harry Stone’s trances, some of which was in English, some in Egyptian. “The first time this occurred, Harry had been at Mrs. Davenport’s apartment in New York. When admiring a gold pendant, in the form of a cartouche, he had suddenly started to tremble all over, got a crazy staring look in his eyes, staggered around the room, and then fell into a chair.”
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From this no doubt bizarre-looking spectacle, Puharich was able to deduce that Stone was “remembering” a previous incarnation, when he was a high priest in Egypt, at the time of the building of the pyramids. Stone was stressing to Puharich the importance of a cult of a mushroom, the use of which the ancient Egyptians had ritualized, allowing its users to access another dimension where they could communicate with the gods. Puharich stated that a specific chemical in mushrooms, as was known at that time, was a hallucinogenic substance that allowed this connection between humankind and the gods—in this instance, the gods of ancient Egypt.

What fascinated Puharich the most was the trance description that Stone had given of a plant that could separate consciousness from the physical body. Stone’s drawings of the plant looked like mushrooms, and the description he gave was that of the fly agaric, or amanita muscaria. Puharich realized that Stone had given him the answer to his problem: This mushroom could enhance extrasensory perception in human beings. He knew that the ancient Greeks and the shamans in Siberia had an ancient tradition in which men partook of a plant that could detach the soul from the body, allowing it to travel far, and then return with knowledge that was otherwise inaccessible to the human mind. In this way, more than a decade before von Däniken would popularize the Ancient Alien Question, Puharich, working for U.S. intelligence, had likely come up with the answer to how alien intelligences were able to contact humankind, as well as how we had been able to acquire information and knowledge from the gods. That the answer is not as well-known as it should be is because it originated from the darkest corners of the intelligence community and involved “psychic abilities,” some made apparent through the use of hallucinogenic substances—both of which are controversial subjects.

From late 1955 onwards, Puharich tested 35 “psychically ungifted” people with the standard tests of the time, such as showing them the blank side of a card and asking what was on its other side, but none reported anything out of the ordinary. But in the case of Harry Stone, during a visit by the famous English writer Aldous Huxley, Stone asked to have the mushroom administered. Rather than chewing it, Stone applied the mushroom to his tongue and the top of his head, in a ritualistic manner he said he had been taught. Five minutes later he began to stagger around as though he were heavily intoxicated with alcohol. At that point, Puharich wanted to test whether Stone’s psychic abilities had enhanced. The results were positive. In fact, they were not just positive, but perfect: He scored 10 out of 10.