We shall not be very surprised when we learn in the Ramayana that Vimanas, i.e. flying machines, navigated at great heights with the aid of quicksilver and a great propulsive wind. The Vimanas could cover vast distances and could travel forwards, upwards and downwards. Enviably manoeuvrable space vehicles! This quotation comes from the translation by N. Dutt, 1891:
'At Rama's behest the magnificent chariot rose up to a mountain of cloud with a tremendous din ...'
We cannot help noticing that not only is a flying object mentioned again, but also that the chronicler talks of a tremendous din. Here is another passage from the Mahabharata:
'Bhima flew with his Vimana on an enormous ray which was as brilliant as the sun and made a noise like the thunder of a storm.' (C. Roy, 1889.)
Even imagination needs something to start it off. How can the chronicler give descriptions that presuppose at least some idea of rockets and the knowledge that such a vehicle can ride on a ray and cause a terrifying thunder?
In the Samsaptakabadha a distinction is made between chariots that fly and those that cannot fly. The first book of the Mahabharata reveals the intimate history of the unmarried Kunti, who not only received a visit from the Sun God, but also had a son by him, a son who is supposed to have been as radiant as the sun itself. As Kunti was afraid—even in those days—of falling into disgrace, she laid the child in a little basket and put it in a river. Adhirata, a worthy man of the Suta cast, fished basket and child out of the water and brought up the infant
Really a story that is hardly worth mentioning if it were not so remarkably like the story of Moses! And, of course, there is yet another reference to the fertilisation of humans by gods. Like Gilgamesh, Aryuna, the hero of the Mahabharata, undertakes a long journey in order to seek the gods and ask them for weapons. And when Aryuna has found the gods after many perils, Indra, the lord of heaven, with his wife Sachi beside him, grants him a very exclusive audience. The two of them do not meet the valiant Aryuna just anywhere. They meet him in a heavenly war-chariot and even invite him to travel in the sky with them.
There are numerical data in the Mahabharata that are so precise that one gets the impression that the author was writing from first-hand knowledge. Full of repulsion, he describes a weapon that could kill all warriors who wore metal on their bodies. If the warriors learnt about the effect of this weapon in time, they tore off all the metal equipment they were wearing, jumped into a river and washed themselves and everything that they had come into contact with very thoroughly. Not without reason, as the author explains, for the weapon made the hair and nails fall out. Everything living, he bemoaned, became pale and weak.
In the eighth book we meet Indra in his heavenly jet chariot again. Out of the whole of mankind he has chosen Yudhisthira as the only one who may enter heaven in his mortal frame. Here, too, the parallel with the stories of Enoch and Elijah cannot be overlooked.
In the same book, in what is perhaps the first account of the dropping of an H bomb, it says that Gurkha loosed a single projectile on the triple city from a mighty Vimana. The narrative uses words which linger in our memories from eye-witness accounts of the detonation of the first hydrogen bomb at Bikini: white-hot smoke, a thousand times brighter than the sun, rose up in infinite brilliance and reduced the city to ashes. When Gurkha landed again, his vehicle was like a flashing block of antimony. And for the benefit of the philosophers I should mention that the Mahabharata says that time is the seed of the universe.
The Tibetan books Tantyua and Kantyua also mention prehistoric flying machines, which they call 'pearls in the sky'. Both books expressly emphasise that this knowledge is secret and not for the masses. In the Samarangana Sutradhara whole chapters are devoted to describing airships whose tails spout fire and quicksilver.
The word 'fire' in ancient texts cannot mean burning fire, for altogether some forty different kinds of 'fire', mainly connected with electric and magnetic phenomena are enumerated. It is hard to believe that the ancient peoples should have known that it is possible to win energy from heavy metals and how to do so. However we should not oversimplify and dismiss the old Sanscrit texts as mere myths. The large number of passages from old texts already quoted turns the suspicion that men encountered flying 'gods' in antiquity almost into a certainty. We are not going to get any further with the old approach which scholars unfortunately still cling to: 'That doesn't exist... those are mistakes in translation ... those are fanciful exaggerations by the author or copyists.' We must use a new working hypothesis, to wit one developed from the technological knowledge of our age, to throw light on to the thicket behind which our past lies concealed. Just as the phenomenon of the space-ship in the remote past is explicable, there is also a plausible explanation of the terrible weapons which the gods made use of at least once in those days and which are so frequently described. A passage from the Mahabharata is bound to make us think:
'It was as if the elements had been unleashed. The sun spun round. Scorched by the incandescent heat of the weapon, the world reeled in fever. Elephants were set on fire by the heat and ran to and fro in a frenzy to seek protection from the terrible violence. The water boiled, the animals died, the enemy was mown down and the raging of the blaze made the trees collapse in rows as in a forest fire. The elephants made a fearful trumpeting and sank dead to the ground over a vast area. Horses and war chariots were burnt up and the scene looked like the aftermath of a conflagration. Thousands of chariots were destroyed, then deep silence descended on the sea. The winds began to blow and the earth grew bright. It was a terrible sight to see. The corpses of the fallen were mutilated by the terrible heat so that they no longer looked like human beings. Never before have we seen such a ghastly weapon and never before have we heard of such a weapon.' (C. Roya, Drona Parva 1889.)
The story goes on to say that those who escaped washed themselves, their equipment and their arms, because everything was polluted by the death-dealing breath of the 'gods'. What does it say in the Epic of Gilgamesh? 'Has the poisonous breath of the heavenly beast smitten you?'
Alberto Tulli, formerly Keeper of the Egyptian Department in the Vatican Museum, found a fragment of a text from the time of Tuthmosis III, who lived about 1500 B.C. It relates the tradition that the scribes saw a ball of fire come down from heaven and that its breath had an evil smell. Tuthmosis and his soldiers watched this spectacle until the ball of fire rose in a southerly direction and disappeared from view.
All the texts quoted date from millennia before our era, The authors lived on different continents and belonged to different cultures and religions. There were no special messengers to spread the news in those days and inter-continental journeys were not an everyday occurrence. In spite of this, traditions telling almost the same story come from the four corners of the world and from innumerable sources. Did all their authors have the same bee in their bonnet? Were they all haunted by the same phenomenon? It is impossible and incredible that the chronicles of the Mahabharata, the Bible, the Epic of Gilgamesh, the texts of the Eskimos, the Red Indians, the Scandinavians, the Tibetans and many, many other sources should all tell the same stories of flying 'gods', strange heavenly vehicles and the frightful catastrophies connected with these apparitions, by chance and without any foundation. They cannot all have had the same ideas all over the world. The almost uniform texts can only stem from facts, i.e. from prehistoric events. They related what was actually there to see. Even if the reporter in the remote past may have exaggerated his story with fanciful trimmings, much as newsmen do today, the fact, the actual incident, still remains at the core of all exclusive accounts, as it does today. And that incident obviously cannot have been invented in so many places in different ages. Let us make up an example: