Free Return to the Stars: Evidence for the Impossible by Erich von Däniken Page A

us from the primitive memory fall. Then the driving forces brought to light again by the stored up knowledge become active in us.
     
    Is it only a coincidence that printing and clockmaking, that the car and the aeroplane, that the laws of gravity and the functioning of the genetic code, were invented and 'discovered' almost simultaneously at different times in different parts of the world?
     
    Is it pure coincidence that the stimulating idea of visits to our planet by unknown intelligences has appeared simultaneously and been put forward in a great many books with completely different arguments and sources?
     
    It is, of course, extremely convenient to dismiss ideas as coincidences when there seem to be no cut and dried explanation for them, but that is too easy a way out. Scientists, who have generally tried hard to find rules behind all processes, should be the last people summarily to reject new ideas—however fantastic they may seem at first—as unsuitable for serious research.
     
    Today we know that the plan for the growth and death of every organism is coded in its nucleus. But why should there not be a master plan for the whole of mankind, a great all-embracing punched card on which prehuman and cosmic memories are registered? This premise would explain once and for all why world-shaking ideas, discoveries and inventions suddenly come into existence at some given point in time. The point in time is programmed in the punched card! The selector picks out the storage points in the card and summons up forgotten and subconscious material.
     
    The hectic rush of everyday life leaves us no leisure for getting to know the unconscious. Driven by a constant flood of new and stimulating impressions, our senses never reach the storage points of the primitive memories. So I find it logical that the wonderful sight of memories of the past and a vision of the future appears particularly to monks in their cells, scientists in the seclusion of their laboratories, philosophers in the solitude of nature and men dying alone.
     
    Since the remote past we have all lived in an evolutionary spiral that carries us irresistibly into the future, into a future which I am convinced has already been the past; not a human past, but the past of the 'gods', which is at work in us and will become the present one day. We are still waiting for definite scientific proof. But I believe in the power of those chosen spirits to whom a subtle selective mechanism is given that will one day release to them the information stored up in the dim past about realities that have existed. Until that happy day dawns, I support Teilhard de Chardin when he says; 'I believe in science, but has science ever taken the trouble to consider the world except from the outside of things?'
     
    -----------------------------
     
    5 - The Sphere The Ideal Shape For Space-Craft
     
    All the types of rocket in service today are pencil-shaped. Is that absolutely necessary? Surely there is constant proof that the pencil shape is neither necessary nor ideal in airless space? When a space-ship, which, unlike the multi-stage rocket, is at least cone-shaped, flies to the nearby moon, it has to revolve repeatedly on its own axis. How involved and dangerous! We know from all the accounts of space flight that every change of course calls for a highly complicated steering manoeuvre. The ship's computer has to find out deviations from the flight path in thousandths of a second and equally quickly actuate the small steering jets for course correction. A single, minute steering mistake would have devastating consequences, as only limited amounts of propulsive material are carried and they would soon be used up. Then the steering jets would no longer be able to carry out the course corrections, the space-craft would be unable to return to the earth's atmosphere and it would shoot through the universe out of control until it burnt up.
     
    Undoubtedly the rockets now in use have proved