The Fifth Science
Quotes from the Book
Could it be that God was an extra-terrestrial? What do we mean when we say that heaven is in the clouds? From Jesus Christ to Elvis Presley, every culture tells us of high-flying bird men who zoom around the world creating magnificent works of art and choosing willing followers to share in the eternal glory from beyond the stars. Can all these related phenomena merely be dismissed as coincidence?
Not until we have taken a look into the future shall we be strong and bold enough to investigate our paste honestly and impartially
The time has come for us to admit our insignificance by making discoveries in the infinite unexplored cosmos. Only then shall we realize that we are nothing but ants in the vast state of the universe. And yet our future and our opportunities lie in the universe, where gods promised they would.
Space travelers in the gray mists of time? An inadmissible question to academic scientists. Anyone who asks questions like that ought to see a psychiatrist.
How often the pillars of our wisdom have crumbled into dust!
On a clear night the naked eye can see about 4,500 stars, so the astronomers say. The telescope of even a small observatory makes nearly 2,000,000 stars visible, and a modern reflecting telescope brings the light from thousands of millions more to the viewer—specks of light in the Milky Way. But in the colossal dimensions of the cosmos our stellar system is only a tiny part of an incomparably larger stellar system—of a cluster of Milky Ways, one might say, containing some twenty galaxies within a radius of 1,500,000 light-years (1 light-year=the distance traveled by light in a year, i.e., 186,000 × 60 × 60 × 24 × 365 miles). And even this vast number of stars is small in comparison with the many thousands of spiral nebulae disclosed by the electronic telescope. Disclosed to the present day, I should emphasize, for research of this kind is only just beginning.
Scholars make things very easy for themselves. They stick a couple of old potsherds together, search for one or two adjacent cultures, stick a label on the restored find and—hey, presto!—once again everything fits splendidly into the approved pattern of thought.
Let us follow Ezekiel’s eyewitness account a little further: “Now as I beheld the living creatures, behold one wheel upon the earth by the living creatures, with his four faces. The appearance of the wheels and their work was like unto the color of a beryl: and they four had one likeness: and their appearance and their work was as it were a wheel in the middle of a wheel. When they went they went upon their four sides: and they turned not as they went. As for their rings, they were so high that they were dreadful; and their rings were full of eyes round about them four. And when the living creatures went, the wheels went by them: and when the living creatures were lifted up from the earth, the wheels were lifted up.
Innumerable careful examinations of all kinds of stones in all parts of the world prove that the earth’s crust was formed about 4,000,000,000 years ago. Yes, and all that science knows is that something like man existed 1,000,000 years ago! And out of that gigantic river of time it has managed to dam up only a tiny rivulet of 7,000 years of human history, at the cost of a lot of hard work, many adventures and a great deal of curiosity. But what are 7,000 years of human history compared with thousands of millions of years of the history of the universe?
Our Inheritance in the Great Pyramid, by Charles Piazzi Smith, published in 1864,
Proofs of the “truth” always start from the center of one’s own religion and work outward. The result is a biased way of thinking which we are brought up to accept from childhood. Nevertheless generations lived and still do live in the conviction that they possess the “truth.
Will Huxley’s Brave New World come true one day in all its improbability and chilling inhumanity?
The positive thing about the skeptic is that he considers everything possible!
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About Erich von Däniken
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