The Ancient Alien Question - Eindtijd in Beeld

187 Pages·2012·2.84 MB·English

by  Philip Coppens

THE
ANCIENT
ALIEN
QUESTION
THE
ANCIENT
ALIEN
QUESTION
A New Inquiry Into the Existence, Evidence, and Influence of Ancient Visitors
PHILIP COPPENS
Copyright © 2012 by Philip Coppens
All rights reserved under the Pan-American and International Copyright Conventions. This book may
not be reproduced, in whole or in part, in any form or by any means electronic or mechanical,
including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system now known or
hereafter invented, without written permission from the publisher, The Career Press.
THE ANCIENT ALIEN QUESTION
EDITED AND TYPESET BY KARA KUMPEL
Cover design by Howard Grossman/12E Design
Printed in the U.S.A.
Images on pages 86, 89, 91, 102, 104, 107, 131, 151, 152, 153, 154, 155, 157, 158, 159, 162, 186, 263, 280, and 281 are © Philip Coppens.
Image on page 145 is © Erich von Däniken, used with permission.
Images on pages 167 and 169 are © The Estate of Stan Hall, used with permission. [website]
Image on page 180 is © Marsyas, made available as part of the Creative Commons License on Wikimedia.
Image on page 183 is © Madman2001, made available as part of the Creative Commons License on Wikimedia. Image on page 191 is ©
Wikipedia.
Image on page 205 is © Jon Rolls, used with permission.
Images on pages 208 and 209 are © Hartwig Hausdorf, used with permission.
Images on pages 232 and 238 are © NASA.
Image on page 245 is © Christina Rutz, made available as part of the Creative Commons License on Wikimedia. Image on page 278 is
from 1875 and © The Hearst Museum.
To order this title, please call toll-free 1-800-CAREER-1 (NJ and Canada: 201-848-0310) to order
using VISA or MasterCard, or for further information on books from Career Press.
The Career Press, Inc.
220 West Parkway, Unit 12
Pompton Plains, NJ 07444
www.careerpress.com
www.newpagebooks.com
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Coppens, Filip.
The ancient alien question : a new inquiry into the existence, evidence, and influence of ancient visitors / by Philip Coppens.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references (p.) and index.
ISBN 978-1-60163-198-5 -- ISBN 978-1-60163-628-7 (ebook)
1. Human-alien encounters. 2. Civilization, Ancient--Extraterrestrial influences.
3. Unidentified flying objects--Religious aspects. 4. Life on other planets. 5. Extraterrestrial beings. I. Title.
BF2050.C67 2012
001.942--dc23
2011027037
Acknowledgments
I have been posing the Ancient Alien Question for almost two decades now, and hundreds of
people have joined me on my quest for an answer. I would particularly like to thank Erich von
Däniken, Uli Dopatka, and Gene M. Phillips for inviting me, as a young man in my 20s, to air my side
of the debate at a number of Ancient Astronaut Society World Conferences in the 1990s. Special
thanks, of course, are due to Erich, as he is not only the pioneer in this subject, but also the man who
kindly wrote the foreword for this book, which is truly a great honor and privilege. I thank Giorgio
Tsoukalos for a friendship that began then, which has grown since, and especially for his unending
devotion to the cause, however hard the going sometimes became.
My drive to answer the Ancient Alien Question was reignited by the wonderful team at
Prometheus Pictures, the producers of Ancient Aliens. Your professionalism is equal to none and
every minute of filming was a joy (yes, David Silver, that includes the eight-hour wait for a
replacement camera in Rennes-le-Château). However, I need to single out Kevin Burns for his
commitment and vision, as well as Evan Goldstein, with whom my part of the story began.
This book would not have come about without the vision of Michael Pye at New Page Books. You
and the team at New Page are the engine that made this book come true.
In my circle of friends, I would like to specifically thank: Paige Tucker; Jason Gossman; Sarah
Symons; Mary Parent; Patrick Ruffino; Patrick Bernauw; Marc Borms; Chris Norman; Cris Winter;
Gerard Lohan; Eileen, Cathy, and Janeth Hall; Debbie Nicastro; Herman Hegge; Dawn Molkenbur;
Tobi and Gerda Dobler; Marianne Wilson; Theresa Byrne; Cynthia James and Carl Studna; Gail
Heron Sterling; Geoff Potts; JoAnn Parks and MAX; Peter van Deursen and Anneke Koremans;
Isobel Denham; Kelly Cole; Philippe Canal. Apart from being the best friends anyone could desire,
you make life beautiful. By default, I will have forgotten some, and I sincerely apologize for that!
I thank the research and devotion of the following authors and often friends: Robert Bauval;
Graham Hancock; Greg Taylor; Wim Zitman and Hendrine; Sam Osmanagic and Sabina; John Major
Jenkins; Geoff Stray; Hartwig Hausdorf; Robert and Olivia Temple; Mark Pilkington; Howard
Crowhurst; Hugh Newman; Andy Collins; David Hatcher Childress and Jennifer; Jeremy Narby;
Antoine Gigal; Ralph Ellis; Jack Sarfatti; Uri Geller; Joseph Davidovits; John Ritchie; Duncan
Lunan.
Special appreciation to the photographic skill of Rivelino, and the fantastic photo shoots in the
streets and along the canals of Amsterdam.
I would like to thank my thousands of Facebook friends and followers, who allow me to have a
great virtual banter on a daily basis!
Each and every member of the Coppens, Sonck, Harkey, and Smith family, though I need to
specifically mention my parents; my brother, Tom, and his wife, Kathleen, and my nephews, Daan
and Arne; Papa and Mama; as well as Patrick, Conor, and Shane.
Finally, I thank Kathleen. It is best summed up by Giorgio, who in December 2009, when he saw
me again after many years, heard me speak about you and to you on the phone and concluded that
there was absolutely no doubt that I was totally in love. You changed my life, made me into a new
man, and were a constant source of inspiration throughout the writing of this book, and will remain
so. As fate would have it, the final paragraph of this manuscript was written on our anniversary.
Semper.
Philip Coppens
May 29, 2011
Contents
Foreword by Erich von Däniken
Introduction
Chapter 1: One Small Question for Man, One Giant Question for Humankind
Chapter 2: Ancient Alien Theories
Chapter 3: Of Gods and Men
Chapter 4: Old Buildings, New Techniques
Chapter 5: A Brave New World
Chapter 6: The Best Evidence
Chapter 7: Alien DNA, Earthly Life
Chapter 8: Evidence of Nonphysical Contact
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index
About the Author
Foreword
By Erich von Däniken
Dear reader,
From 1953 until 1958, I was a student at the Collège St-Michel in the small Swiss town of
Fribourg. There, among other things, we learned Old Greek and Latin. Time and again we had to
translate texts from the Bible, the Old Testament, from one language to the other. I read in Genesis:
“But when people started to multiply on the earth, and daughters were born, the sons of God saw that
the daughters of men were beautiful, and they took as their wives any they chose.”
I was confused. What “sons of Gods”? My professor said that this referred to “fallen angels.”
What “fallen angels”? I wondered. Later, we translated the words of the biblical prophet Ezekiel as
he described seeing a vehicle come out of the clouds with a lot of noise. He described the wings of
the vehicle, its wheels, and even its metal legs. My professor believed that this referred to a vision,
and that Ezekiel had described “God in his chariot.”
Doubts gnawed at my beliefs, and, as a 17-year-old, I wanted to know whether other cultures in
ancient times had similar descriptions to those of the Christian-Jewish tradition. So while my
classmates were playing soccer, I sat in the university library and read...and read...and read. Soon I
understood that many ancient human traditions contained similar reports to the stories in the Bible,
only with other words and other heroes. Could one believe the texts?
At that time I decided to take those texts that had been written in the first-person, as an eyewitness
report, to be true. And there were many. Again and again I encountered descriptions of “gods” who
drove around in the clouds, of beings who came down to earth with “smoke, fire, earthquakes,
noise,” and selected people who had the privilege of being taken to “heaven” by the “gods.” There,
these people experienced a training program. Even artificial insemination and changes in the genetic
code were reported in the old books I read.
At some point I realized that all these actions were not compatible with the traditional idea of the
“Beloved God.” But when I replaced the word god with the word extraterrestrial, everything
suddenly made sense.
In 1965, I had my manuscript for Chariots of the Gods finished—but found no publisher. From 24
publishing houses, I got the usual rejection: Sorry...not suitable for our program...too
unprofessional...and so on.
At that time I was director of a first-class hotel in the Swiss ski resort of Davos. (I come from a
restaurant family.) One of my guests, the chief editor of a German magazine, was friends with the
head of the large German publishing house ECON, and he arranged a meeting for me. Chariots of the
Gods thus found a publisher. In May 1968, the book was #1 on all German bestseller lists.
I gave up my hotel career and devoted myself entirely to my new profession: researcher of ancient
texts and searcher for clues in archaeological ruins. Chariots of the Gods was a provocative book
that had more than 230 question marks. I had written the book not in a scientific form of writing, but
in a popular one. It contained some errors (unavoidable for a young author). In the scientific literature
it is no different: There, too, one finds errors in books that are 30 or 40 years old. After all, science
is a living thing, and not a religion, in which one must simply believe. After Chariots of the Gods
there followed a further 28 nonfiction books. I corrected old errors and misunderstandings in the new
books. Today there is for me not the slightest doubt: Millennia ago, extraterrestrials visited the Earth.
These visits became myths, legends—and also religions.
We should set up new branches of science; for example, a “Central-American-Indology,” in which
the links between the cultures of Central America and India are examined. Or a “New-Age-
Philology,” in which old texts can be retranslated such that the religious “heaven of bliss” becomes
“the universe” or—depending on the circumstances—“giant spaceship.” Perhaps a science of the
“Chronology of the gods,” in which the unspeakably complicated information about the gods from
antiquity would be investigated in the aim of finding a common denominator. The questions when and
how often the aliens were here would also be a research objective of the “Chronology of the gods.”
Our limited knowledge of reality is mostly based on the present—quite understandable, because
we live in the “now” and not in “the day before yesterday.” What happened today, what makes
headlines today, concerns us. What happened yesterday no longer interests us. This fatal short-
sightedness robs us of the sense of historical events. We feel the presence of knowledge as a
culmination of all knowledge from the past. We claim to be the best-informed society, and
accordingly, all our ancestors knew much less than we do. However, this attitude makes us proud, it
makes us rather contemptuously overlook the past. This is dangerous, because those who do not know
history are doomed to repeat its mistakes. This backward attitude has led historians and
archaeologists to believe little about our ancestors. The astonishing thing is the smoothness with
which this fallacy is implemented in practice: If an old historian such as the Greek Herodotus, 2,500
years ago, says something that fits into our current knowledge, then that statement is happily placed
on record. But if the same historian, often on the same page, makes a remark that does not suit us, we
label it false without batting an eyelash, calling him a liar, an exaggerator; degrading him to the level
of an ignorant person who has not understood anything.
For example, the Egyptologists of our time copied from Herodotus that Pharaoh Menes (circa
2920 BC) diverted the Nile above Memphis. With closed eyes and ears is suppressed what the same
Herodotus, 18 lines later in Volume 2 of his Histories, notes: “After Menes followed 330 kings,
whose names the priests read aloud from a book.” The diversion of the Nile and the name “Menes”
fit, but the 330 kings interfere. The same Herodotus, in chapters 141 and 142, also tells of his visit to
Thebes (today’s Luxor). There the priests showed him 341 statues, and the high priest said to each
statue a few words. After the visit, the chief priest assured Herodotus that these 341 statues
represented a period of 11,340 years. At that time the gods had been on Earth in human form. What
did we do with those 11,340 years? They are dislodged, swept off the table, reinterpreted as a
misunderstanding, or read as “lunar years,” although in Egypt there never was a moon year and
Herodotus nowhere used one.
Around 300 BC, there lived in Egypt a high priest named Manetho. He was the “Scribe of the Holy
Temple” and surfaces with the Greek historian Plutarch as a contemporary of the first Ptolemaic king
(304–284 BC). To Manetho are attributed eight works, including a book on the history of Egypt and
the so-called Book of Sothis, which includes the names and years of the reigns of the prehistoric
kings, dating back to the time of the gods. Manetho wrote that the first ruler of Egypt was Hephaistos.
Then follow Chronos, Osiris, Typhon (a brother of Osiris), and then Oros (also Horus), the son of
Osiris and Isis. Manetho: “After the gods the family of the offspring of the gods reigned 1,255 years,
and in turn other kings reigned 1,817 years. After which are 30 kings, Memphite, 1,790 years. After
which there are others, Thinite, 10 kings, 350 years. And then the kingdom of the offspring of the