Aliens Without Borders...
cont. from Page 1
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If mermaids were actually behind the alien abduction of mariners, then the logo design team at Starbucks has some explaining to do. At right, a stone sculpture of a siren on display at the Getty Villa in Malibu. How mermaids came to be viewed as birdlike creatures rather than fish is unclear.
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The Plot Thickens
Curiously, the Sirius star cluster is located in the Canis Major constellation. Orion's belt points to it, and ancient cultures on both sides of the Atlantic considered it a key spot in celestial navigation. The region remains a key benchmark for modern exploration. In his book, Dark Mission: The Secret History of NASA, Richard Hoagland documents several incidents of astronauts and NASA directors arranging space missions to coincide with alignments of Sirius and Orion.
The brightest star in the night sky (not counting the planets Venus and Jupiter), Sirius A is universally known as the "Dog Star". The old phrase "the dog days of summer" supposedly arose because of the star's heliacal rising (i.e. just before sunrise) in the hottest and driest part of that season.
This canine angle isn't lost on Temple. In his book, he goes to the same painstaking lengths ferretting out references to dogs in the ancient record as he does fish. The Egyptian god Anubis, for instance, has the head of a jackal and the body of a man. Anubis presided over mummification and the afterlife, which suggests a metaphysical association to the cosmos. Moreover, Temple sees a possible reference to Sirius A and B, and the orbit of the latter around the former, in the following remark by Plutarch:
"By Anubis, they understand the horizontal circle, which divides the invisible part of the world [Sirius B can't be seen by the naked eye], which they call Nepthys [Isis' sister goddess], from the visible [Sirius A], to which they give the name of Isis; and as this circle equally touches upon the confines of both light and darkness, it may be looked upon as common to them both -- and from this circumstance arose that resemblance, which they imagine between Anubis and the Dog, it being observed of this animal, that he is equally watchful as well by day as night."
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At top left, Anubis, Egyptian god of the afterlife. Notice the object he's carrying in the left hand, perhaps a stylized image of the "basket" we saw earlier. On the top right, the cover of Robert Temple's 2009 book, The Sphinx Mystery. Notice the depiction of a jackal superimposed on the much-eroded ruins of the Sphinx. Temple believes this was the original sculpture, while the head of an Egyptian pharaoh was later carved in place of the jackal's head during the Middle Kingdom. The bottom left photo shows Orion, the hunter with his "dog", the Canis Major constellation. Bottom right is a modern brass replica of Anubis created by The Magic Parlor. (For more on the Sphinx, see next page.)
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In the Odyssey, Homer describes another curious figure, Scylla, who had a fish tail and dog's head issuing out of her mid-section. Another Greek chronicler, Hesiod, wrote that Scylla was the daughter of Hecate, Isis' underworld twin.
Because Anubis and Osiris share many of the same functions in Eqyptian mythology, Temple speculates that the latter god may be a derivative of the former. There are references in Egyptian literature describing Osiris as being "devoured" by Anubis. Osiris is also commonly associated with the constellation Orion, which sits just to the right of Sirius. It just so happens that its three belt stars, thought by some scholars to be represented in the layout of the three Pyramids of Gizah, points to Sirius.
And then there's the role of the stone Sphinx, located on the Gizah plateau. Temple has argued for years that it was never a lion at all, but a dog. In his 2009 book, The Sphinx Mystery , he says the structure was carved inside a dug-out cavity and surrounded by a body of water known as Jackal Lake. The moat provided security for either a storage facility or daytime headquarters maintained by the aliens. Not surprisingly, mainstream Egyptologists have pooh-poohed all of this speculation.
Yet Temple is far from alone in his far-flung ideas about the past. Zecharia Sitchin, one of the best-read proponents of the ancient astronaut theory, has traced the Sumerian legend of the Anunnaki, or "Those who from the Heavens came," to extraterrestrial intervention. However, Sitchin thinks an undiscovered planet called Nibiru is home to the aliens, not Sirius. Nibiru has an odd orbit taking it far afield from the solar system, Sitchin hypothesizes in his bestselling book The 12th Planet. Significantly, whenever Nibiru swings through our corner of the galaxy, it wreaks gravitational havoc on Earth.
Other alien trackers have their own theories about the bizarre events reported in antiquity. According to von Daniken, the biblical figure Enoch provides a detailed account of his experience with extraterrestrials in a book that never made it into the canonical bible. After he was taken up to the heavens, Enoch describes in his first-person account how he was taught writing and other vocational skills by alien instructors. Three hundred years later, they returned him to Earth to pass on the expertise to the rest of humanity. In the 2010 History Channel documentary Ancient Aliens, von Daniken suggests that hieroglyphs at the Gizah pyramids specifically identify Enoch as the instigator of that building project.
On another front, author Sitchin cites numerous links between pre--pharaonic Egypt and the Olmec civilization in Mesoamerica, suggesting the two cultures may have been one and the same.
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At left, author Zecharia Sitchin with an Olmec head found in Mexico. At right, a figure chiseled in stone at the center of a Mayan 20-day calendar cycle.
His argument goes like this: When the "god" Thoth was exiled by Ra from Egypt around 3100 B.C., he and his followers migrated to the New World. Known by the Greeks as Hermes, Thoth is considered the father of alchemy. Now you may recall that Thor Heyerdahl's Ra and Kontiki expeditions in the 1970's proved ocean voyages between Africa and North America were possible in pre-Columbian times. Sitchin points out that the exile date of Thoth dovetails nicely with the first year of the Mesoamerican long-count calendar -- 3114 B.C. -- allegedly the year the Olmecs landed in the Yucatan.
Corroborating some of Sitchin's theory, the late astronaut Gordon Cooper examined Olmec artifacts firsthand while on assignment for National Geographic magazine three decades ago. Cooper's memoir Leap of Faith recounts a trip to a remote island and subsequent investigation that confirmed an approximate Olmec arrival date of 3000 B.C. The presence of aeronautics formulas and instruments further convinced Cooper that alien astronauts must have been present on Earth in the remote past.
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At left, carved elephant found among Olmec artifacts in Jalapa, Mexico. Of course, there are no elephants in Mexico. Even more amazing are the toys with wooden wheels found at Olmec sites. Amazing because mesoamerican indians didn't have the wheel until Europeans brough it over in the 16th century. Photo © Z. Sitchin 2000. Reproduced by permission. At right, the god Thoth is depicted on an ancient Egyptian monument.
And there's more. Artifacts unearthed in Mexico reveal that the Olmecs clearly descended from an African lineage, perhaps the ancient Nubian culture in the Sudan. Western historians generally date the Nubians only as far back as biblical times, but few excavations of their territory have ever been undertaken. Swiss archaeologist Charles Bonnet, however, has been on the job in an area just north of the Egyptian border since 1965. "At the time I was told: you are wasting your time, there is nothing in Sudan," he said in a 2010 interview for The Telegraph (UK). "Today, no one says that any more." That's because Bonnet has unearthed evidence of Nubian control over Egypt and found artifacts dating back to 7000 B.C.
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At left, a map of Nubia. At right, one of its famous temples in Southern Egypt. This one was built during pharaonic times.
Other excavations previously demonstrated that the deserts on either side of the Nile Valley looked more like savannas during the Neolithic era and earlier. That underscores the presence of extremely ancient, sedentary, sophisticated cultures heretofore unknown to western historians. Adding to the intrigue, the psychic Edgar Cayce argued that a large river once ran west across the continent to the sea. It was a controversial idea until satellite imaging recently identified an ancient riverbed at that very location.
The speculation has led a few scholars to wonder if the famous cattle and bull imagery used in pre-dynastic Egypt actually traces its origins to western Africa (and therefore African peope), rather than Mesopotamia or southwest Asia. In the foreward to his 2000 anthology, Egypt and Nubia, Gifts of the Desert, historian Renée Friedman wrote that "the discovery at Nabta Playa [near the Egyptian/Sudanese border]... of 'public architecture', including calendar circles, megalithic alignments, sculptures and other constructed features indicates a political or religious authority with control over human resources -- in other words, a higher level of social complexity than was ever supposed for a desert region."
A forthcoming book by Robert Bauval and Thomas Brophy, Black Genesis: The Prehistoric Origins of Ancient Egypt , will examine this notion in more detail. Significantly, the Dogon knowledge of Sirian astronomy would no longer seem that much of a stretch if the premise turns out to be correct.
Whatever Thoth's origins, Zecharia Sitchin believes his use of the number 52 in Egyptian calendars likely inspired the Olmec 52-year cycle called the Calendar Round. The similarity of the words Anubis and Nubia is probably no coincidence, either. The syllable "Nub" means gold in ancient Egyptian, and Sitchin theorizes that aliens used humans to mine precious metals thousands of years ago, eventually manipulating human DNA to create a smarter race of men to do the work. It was Noah, the great grandson of Enoch, who supposedly carried on this new and improved gene pool following the Great Flood.
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Continued on Page 3
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2012 Guide Home
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More Resources
Articles of Interest
"Flying over Peru's puzzling Nazca lines." iOL Travel 9/21/2000
"Top 10 Ancient Civilizations with Advanced Technology" by David Hatcher Childress
"What was the Sphinx? by Robert Temple." New Dawn Jan. 2010.
"The Unknown Catacombs of Giza." (PDF) Atlantis Rising Feb. 2010.
"The Olmec Enigma: Astronaut Corroborates Sitchin's Theory." From World-Mysteries.com
"Unvoiced Testimony: Visitors in the Dawn Times?" and "UFO's Throughout History". UFO Evidence.
Websites
Tiahuanaco and Puma Punku sites
Fingerprints of the Gods. Text online.
Mike Bara on Dark Mission: The Secret History Of NASA video
Books
Fingerprints of the Gods (1999) by Graham Hancock.
The Sirius Mystery (1998) by Robert Temple Buy now...
The 12th Planet (1978), The Earth Chronicles (several titles), and The Earth Chronicles Expeditions: Journeys To The Mythical Past (2004) by Zecharia Sitchin
Titles at Amazon...
Dark Mission: The Secret History of Nasa by Richard Hoagland and Mike Bara
Buy at Amazon...
Forbidden Archaeology (1993) by Richard Thompson and Michael Cremo. Buy now...
Technology of the Gods: The Incredible Sciences of the Ancients by David Hatcher Childress Buy now...
Chariots of the Gods (1968) by Erich van Daniken
Lost Civilizations of the Stone Age (2003) by Richard Rudgley
The Giza Power Plant : Technologies of Ancient Egypt by Christopher Dunn
Buy now...
They Came Before Columbus: The African Presence in Ancient America (2003) by Ivan Van Sertima.
Egypt and Nubia, Gifts of the Desert (2000) edited by Renee Friedman
DVD's and TV Programs
Ancient Aliens - The Series The History Channel - 3 seasons. On Sale at Amazon...
The Mysterious Origins of Man Based on the book Forbidden Archaeology.
The Mystery of the Sphinx. Featuring John Anthony West and geologist Robert Schoch. At Amazon...
Advanced Ice Age Civilizations and Atlantis (2006) Featuring Graham Hancock.
Chariots of the Gods(1970) Comprehensive worldwide review of alien evidence in ancient monuments and drawings.
