ANCIENT ASTRONAUTS. MODERN MYSTERIES By John A. Keel TRIP THE LIGHT-YEARS FANTASTIC Time stands stil. This moment is being preserved in a million ways and some future historian may be able to hear you mumbling to yourself as you read this column. He may even be able to see you and watch you scratch your ear. Abraham Lincoln's high-pitched, squeaky voice droning the Gettysburg Address may stil be audible a thousand years from now. The terrible battles and great moments of yesteryear are still taking place. John F. Kennedy is still riding through the streets of Dallas. Christ is still speaking from the Mount. The hordes of Genghis Khan are still ravaging the Orient if you were an astronomer stationed on the other side of the Milky Way you would be peering at the Earth across tilions of miles of space and centuries of time. Your telescope would show the Earth not as its at this moment but as it was hundreds of years ago. You would not see the gleaming glass towers of Manhattan or the great dams spanning ur mightiest rivers. Instead, the North American continent would appear to be a pastoral, unspoiled wilderness. You could watch the Battle of Hastings (1066 A.D.) as if it were taking place this very moment. The light reflected by the Earth in 1086 A.D. is just reaching some of the star systems in our universe, and the light ‘radiated by distant stars thousands—even millions—ot years ago is only now entering our solar system. Some of the flickering stars you 09 in the night sky may no longer exist. Others have long since strayed to new positions far from the points where they presently seem to be. Consequently the universe, as we perceive it, is more illusion than reality. When we gaze into the night sky we are looking backwards into time, seeing things as they once were but are no longer. When NASA scientists plan a space shot to the moon or Mars they do not aim their rocket directly at their target. They are obliged to calculate where the target will be in space days or months later and the rocket is launched toward an empty gap—much the same way that a hunter aims and fires his shotgun ahead of a fiying bird. Space shots covering really great distances, such as the recent probe to Jupiter, demand months of computer work. A slight miscalculation could mean missing the target by hundreds of thousands of miles. The movement of objects in space is not the only consideration. Time is also a very important element. Time as we measure it can be different in space. The faster an object moves through space, the slower time becomes on- board. Gravitational fields also influ- ence the flow of time. Einstein post- ulated, correctly, that bodies affected by gravitational ‘fields move along a path in four dimensional space-time. An object traveling in a straight line through space can be deflected toward a larger mass. A beam of light, for example, bends slightly when it passes through the neighborhood of a large star. Thus many of the stars in the sky were never in the position where we view them because their light was “warped” in the passage through space. Time can also be warped by gravitational fields. Time aboard a manned spaceship changes slightly as the ship escapes the Earth's gravity. Things slow down minutely but measurably. The faster the ship moves, the slower time becomes. When the ship renters a gravitational field time speeds up again. Astronauts who have flown to the moon age at a different rate than those of us back home on Earth When they return they are, by a fraction of a second, slightly younger than the rest of us. This space-time warp eftect has long been a standard gimmick of science fiction writers. The commander of the starship Enterprise orders _ his helmsman to set a course for “Warp Two.” Science fiction heroes soar to galaxies hundreds of light years away by taking a short cut through an imagi nary time warp. Butis it really possible to circumnavi- gate time? In previous issues of SAGA we have outlined some of the many cases in which UFO occupants have expressed bewilderment over our measurement of time. Some UFO theorists have suggested that the ufonauts could be time travelers originating in our future. Others have proposed that they might be visitors from a distant planet where time is measured differently. If they have been studying our world from a distance of several light years they would be viewing our past and might arrive here expecting to find them- selves in the midst of our Civil War. This would explain why so many of the observed entities have been dressed in out-of-date clothes. The lie men in the rumored UFO crash of 1949 (never confirmed) were allegedly dressed in costumes from the Gay 90s! Our notorious Men In Black, who are appa- rently directly connected to the UFO phenomenon, are often seen traveling in very old cars that look brand new. Would beings intelligent enough to travel among the stars be so ignorant of the measurement of time? Since Earthtime and its measurement are strictly human inventions it is quite possible that alien beings might find it Confusing. Intelligent entities from another world might have an entirely different system. They might, for exam- ple, have arrived at a more complete understanding of Einstein's four- dimensional universe. They could even have a working knowledge of the elu- sive single law that controls the entire cosmos; the law that Einstein sought but never found. Our own ignorance of this law obliges us to use primitive measurements. There could really be a shortcut—a space-time warp—from (Continued on page 12)(Continued trom page 10) star to star as simple as the Great Circle Route airlines used to span great distances on this globe. By pursuing a course winding among the massive gravity fields of certain stars and “black holes” an alien spaceship could con- ceivably shorten not space but time. In a sense it would plummet through the fourth dimension, bypassing the rela- tively slow rays of reflected light and actually travel backwards in time. Or forward. A spaceship launched at this particular moment in time from the galaxy of Andromeda could arrive at the Earth in 1897—or 2200. If the occup- ants of the craft had no working know: ledge of our measurement of time they might fail to regulate their course for a specific period and would be very sur- prised to arrive at a planet populated with cavemen, or, possibly, a futuristic world dominated by computers and robots. The world observed by their telescopes would be quite different from the world linked by the space-time warp. The gods of ancient times and the mysterious spacemen of the 20th Gen- tury could be the same identical entities blundering back and forth in ime. Some of them might even be lost, temporarily trapped in our space-time continuum like the earthly ghosts who are sup- posedly caught in similar traps and doomed to haunt specific houses or cemeteries for centuries. THIS HAUNTED PLANET In June 1976, NASA launched Grav. ity Probe-A (GP-A), a rocket containing a very sophisticated clock specially designed to test Einstein's so-called ‘equivalence principle.” A four-stage Scout D rocket traversed a two hour eliptical trajectory over the Atlantic while a duplicate clock on Earth was compared with the signals from the space clock. These clocks used atomic hydrogen MASERs (Microwave ‘Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation), so accurate they lose less than two seconds every 100 milion years. They can measure within five thousandths of one percent (5 x 10-5) of the predicted effect. The test was one of a series to explore the strange realm of time. The space borne clock actually recorded a slower passage of time than its twin in the laboratory on Earth. For years now astronomers have been observing the Doppler effect, or “red shift,” which is actually a variation of this space-time warp principle. Dr. R. V. Pound, of Harvard University, con- ducted tests showing that the equiva- lence principle was valid within one percent (1 x 10-2) for a vertical dis- 12 * SAGA tance of 75 feet at the Earth's surface Now the GP-A has established an accuracy of 50 parts per million (5 x 10-5) in space. In essence, space, time, and gravity are all interrelated—just as Einstein theorized. It is highly probable that we can eventually learn to manipu- late these three factors and the space- time warp of the science fiction writers will become a reality. Our cumbersome rockets will then become antiquated junk Flying saucer contactees have said for years that UFOs operate on "beams of light” and force fields. If the ufonauts are real, and if the UFOs are technolog- ical machines (both of these “ifs” are stil very uncertain), they would not attempt to explain complex post- Einstein principles to simple farmers and traveling salesmen. They would be obliged to define things in terms of light beams and force fields... terms an ntutored earthling could possibly un- derstand. What they have been saying is that the UFOs have traversed beams. of energy between the stars, influenced by gravity and magnetism, and that they have somehow discovered ways to circumvent the accepted physical laws of our known universe. They defy gravity and atmospheric pressure here on Earth because they operate outside ‘our space-time continuum. They are interdimensional rather than extrater- restrial! Einstein calculated that when an ob- ject exceeded the speed of light it would become energy. A finite object would become infinite and the traditional laws of time and space would become nul- lifled or suspended. Such objects, and their occupants, would enter another dimension of existence and be in a time frame unrelated to the time frame of their source. A year aboard such a star ship might be equal to a million Earth years, and the ship could be traveling either forward or backward in the time frame of its home planet. You could take off from Earth in 1975, visit a distant star, spend five years there, and, return to the Earth in 230 B.C. So until we can work out all the mathematical problems involved, star travel will re- main impractical. Any star traveler who plummets to Earth in 230 B.C. could find himself in the uncomfortable posi- tion of being either worshipped or slaughtered by the natives ‘As we have frequently noted in past columns, UFOs and occult events tend to occur sporadically in the same geo- graphical areas year after year, century after century. These areas, known as windows” or “gateways,” often pos- ‘sess interesting magnetic and gravita- tional characteristics. They dot our planet and periodically erupt, simul- taneously into outbreaks of UFO land: ings, poltergeist activity, and the ap- pearances of strange monsters. It is probable that these window areas are the sites of geophysical anomalies re- ceptive to beams or rays of energy from ‘outer space; interdimensional energies which bridge the space-time gap. The ancient Chinese Yin and Yang concept was built on this notion, as were the beliefs of ancient astrologers and magi- cians. We are just rediscovering some ancient mysteries and relearning the ancient truths of how they work. The infinite energy of a star ship spanning entire galaxies could reassemble itself here in almost any form. The distant spacemen could appear as dragons, hairy monsters, litle green men—or Men In Black in antiquated cars, (Once we untangle the whole space- time puzzle we may be able to bridge that gap ourselves. We may be able to leave our space-time continuum and return to the past or visit the future. Yet, ironically, we may never be able to ‘move into the dimension that produces the UFO phenomenon because the occupants of that space-time con- tinuum are on a different level from us in a very special sense. We can pass through their beams of infinite energy but they must adjust their warp to intermix with us. Contact with them will always be one way. We might be able to visit Dallas in November 1963, Get- tysburg in 1863, or Andromeda in 2363, but we may never be able to find the source of the flying saucers because they come from some point far in the future or deep in the distant past completely beyond our space-time con- tinuum and unreachable by us unless we can understand and manipulate the laws that govern their dimension. If we could visit them, we might appear as monsters and ghosts in their world, and the earthly adventurers who risk the trip might be trapped forever there to haunt them in bewilderment as they haunt us. *