© Tom Lethbridge 1967 [1]

The problem of the stone circles and alignments is really one proper to the old world although others are known, particularly in Peru. The new world has others of its own. For instance, what are we to make of the remarkable animal mounds found in considerable numbers to the south and west of the Great Lakes? The Indians have no idea who made them and there seems to be little archaeological evidence for their date.

The largest of these appears to be the Great Serpent Mound of Adams County, Ohio. The mound is five feet high on a thirty foot base and if straightened out would be more than a thousand feet, say three hundred metres, long. The work necessary to produce a mound of this size is great and what possible purpose was it intended to serve?

Seen from the ground it is nothing but a bank. Only from above is its serpentine form obvious. It is the same with the tortoise, alligator, eagle, lizard, elk, bear, otter, wolf and frog mounds, while some apparently represent human beings.

When once the possibility of the stone circles and alignments of the old world having been used as beacons for aerial navigation has entered one’s mind, the same possibility can be appreciated with regard to the animal mounds of the United States. However, in their case the beacons would only be visual ones, unless there was some method of charging them with bio-electronic force. This is not so impossible as most people would think today.

Now I bring in a new puzzle, even if I seem to be involving the reader in the imagination of space travel. As before, I do not know the answer, but it is evident to me that an answer could be found and should be sought, even if the seeker may be greeted with ridicule by those who have not the imagination to look for it. Of course I refer to the huge and growing mass of statements, often by highly competent eye-witnesses, that strange flying objects are frequently seen in the sky. These are known widely now as UFOs, unidentified flying objects.

Now people may exaggerate and they may mistake what they think they see. I have seen photographs in the papers, which look as if they had been the shades of Tilley lamps and I have read accounts which were obviously distortions of the real facts. However there is a large residuum, which clearly needs an explanation. People as a whole report truly what they have seen to the best of their ability.

A recent announcement on the BBC News makes it obvious that something needs investigation. As far as I can now remember the radio said that the American Air Force was closing down a department formed to investigate reports on UFOs. They had examined thousands of reports of sightings and there were only about seven hundred which they could not explain.

Good heavens, could any official department expect to get away with that? Seven hundred unexplained cases of what might be visitors from another planet, and it was not worth the trouble and expense of trying to find out what they were! Suppose you had many reports that there were thousands of spies in your country and of these only seven hundred could not be shown to be innocent, what would you think of a government which gave up vetting them?

If correctly reported, this must surely be one of the most naïve announcements in history! I don’t know whether UFOs exist or not; but I do think that it is most important to find out whether they do. However, before talking more about these UFOs, let me return for a moment to the reports of wheels in the sky.

There may be nothing more in it than coincidence. Someone, being unable to describe it in any other manner, may call a revolving object a wheel; but it is at least curious that symbols described by archaeologists as ‘sun discs’ are by no means rarely found carved on stones of the megalithic and early Bronze Ages in western Europe. Sometimes they are simply a ring; again they may be a ring with a dot in the centre and, more curiously, a ring with a cross carved on it.

A sequence of these carvings, not infrequently found together with symbols for ships, is published from Brittany to Ireland and from there to the celebrated Swedish rock engravings. A case has been made out for the existence of a complete sequence of ship and sun disc symbols from Scandinavia to ancient Egypt. Frequently they are so crudely executed that without a knowledge of more perfect examples it would be impossible to interpret the pictures. But with a sequence available there can be little doubt what was intended by the carvers.

In the most celebrated burial cairn of New Grange on the Boyne in Ireland there is one of these symbols in the central chamber. No one would probably have been able to identify it without a knowledge of the Swedish and Breton engravings; but with this knowledge the intention is clear. Are these discs meant to represent the sun at all; or was the idea to picture the vehicles in which the gods were transported through the heavens?

For many years I have just taken it for granted that when the older generation of archaeologists talked of these things as ‘sun discs’, they knew what they were talking about. Now, as with so many other current dogmas, I am not so sure that they did.

Even if the ancient Egyptian symbol did come to represent the Sun God, Ra, and the boat in which he daily crossed the heavens, is this what was originally intended? Was not Ra himself one of the sons of God, venerated in later years as the great God himself?

Of course it would be much less trouble to leave it all unquestioned; to go on as if nothing had happened and nobody had ever reported seeing wheels in the sky, or photographed objects up there which could not be explained in terms of present day knowledge. But, if we have any real curiosity in our make-up, we cannot just shrug it off.

What we can say at this stage is that at the approximate time when men all over the old world were apparently beginning to venerate a multitude of aerial gods, they were also suggesting that they moved about the heavens in boats and things with or like wheels.

Through the ages these gods took on varying characteristics, but this was doubtless due to frequent repetition and downright invention by priestly castes, whose job it was to keep the beliefs in being.

All this too was imposed apparently upon a set of earlier beliefs in which men had a tribal totem in the form of some animal. The combination of the totem animal with gods in human form who flew about in the heavens produced some very curious creatures indeed.

Although I am not qualified to do so and have no real personal experience of the matter at all, I must try to make some estimate of how the problem of the UFOs strike me as an ordinary member of the populace.

I look on it with a completely open mind. I neither believe nor disbelieve. My object in writing this book is just this, to stimulate people to think, observe and experiment for themselves and not just swallow the sayings of the authorities of the time as if these were the Word of God.

However I do have one article of faith and that is that a witness should be believed until he can be shown to be either lying or mistaken. The answer so often returned to a report on the supposed sightings of a UFO, that it was the planet Venus, has added to the general popular disbelief in the announcements of specialists. Next to the sun and moon, Venus has always been the most well-known object in the night sky. One of the first questions asked by children when shown the darkened heavens is: “What is that bright star?”

When, in addition, the supposed specialists have on occasion claimed this well-known object to have been the cause of a report and it has been shown that the planet was not above the horizon at the time, one’s doubts of the specialists’ qualifications rise considerably.

In fact the frequent mention of Venus and the recent statement from America that there are about seven hundred reports which they have not been able to explain, convinces me that there is a case to answer. Either there is something to hide, or the authorities are completely stupid; one remembers Bernard Shaw putting into the mouth of a foreign politician: ‘For God’s sake don’t frighten the British.’ Now it should be changed to the ‘Americans’.

For obviously if there are people capable of flying here frequently in large machines from outer space, they would also be advanced enough to flatten America, Russia, China and the whole caboodle had they wished to do so.

The reports on the size of these objects vary very much, but all agree that they are often much larger than the present day aeroplane and that they travel at much greater speed. They can also change their course at right angles to the line of flight which no earthly plane can attempt to do.

Accounts of the lighting of these machines vary considerably. They may appear as silvery discs in daylight or glow with different colours at night. They may also, when seen fairly close at hand, appear to have a ring of windows or ports which emit bright light.

There are a fair number of reports that these machines have been observed to land and also that humanoid figures have been seen to emerge from them. It is doubtful whether any of these reports can be taken at their face value. However it seems possible that some of them may be true.

I rather discount the accounts that observers have talked to persons emerging from these things and messages on the soles of shoes seem most improbable. If any conversations have taken place, which I doubt, they have not been recorded in such a way to carry conviction.

If visitors from elsewhere wished to make contact with people on earth, it does not seem probable that they would do so in American deserts or waste places in Scotland. Since they apparently can operate the machines at far greater speed than any earthly aeroplane, it would be reasonably safe for them to land openly on some civil airfield.

But they have been chased, so the reports go, and apparently attacked, with dire results to the attacker. There seems to be little doubt that these things have been picked up on radar screens and that warplanes have been sent up in pursuit; but whether this has only happened in America is not disclosed.

The term ‘flying saucer’ is not so inaccurate as anyone might suspect. A fair number of photographs appear to show large objects in the sky, not unlike a saucer with a rim facing downwards, but on what should be the base of the saucer there appears to be a small tower and something like a short mast. Seen from below these objects appear as discs and so we come to the description of ‘wheels in the sky’.

There are many reports of these things flying in formation and in quite considerable numbers. By that I mean you might observe eight or ten at a time. There are also reports of giant cylindrical mother ships on which the saucers home and into which they return. As far as I know there are no reports of such things from Britain, although there are several from France. More than one saucer is also not common in this country.

Of course all this rigmarole seems very improbable to many people and quite incomprehensible until this century. But students of the subject have noted that it is nothing new and that there are accounts at various stages of history, which could well be taken to refer to the same type of object.

Pride in the achievements of modern aeronautics and conceit in the intelligence of people on earth make it hard for most to look at all this objectively. For so long a time has humanity been taught that it is the highest product of nature that it is difficult for it now to believe that some other organism somewhere else might be more advanced. But this is not improbable at all. In fact it is more probable than not.

There are a few other significant points. For instance, it is not uncommon for it to be reported that the passing over of a saucer stops the magneto of a car, which in itself suggests some very powerful electronic device in operation.

Then some observers, including policemen in South Wales, have apparently observed a succession of saucers diving into the sea. They were well scolded for their pains!

Other policemen on night patrol in Devon have chased apparent UFOs in fast cars and been told that they were observing planes refuelling in the air. I am sure they did not believe this explanation. Policemen have to be good observers.

There are accounts, too, of filaments of unknown substance falling from these machines and known as ‘angel’s tears’. No one appears to have been able to collect and examine any samples. However ‘angel’s tears’ was the name given by German children to the fine silvery ribbons dropped by our planes during the war to deflect the German radar. I have seen plenty of these ‘angel’s tears’, but do not know of what metal they were composed.

This is a very brief summary of what appears to be known about a very curious subject. There are a host of books available from which the reader can attempt to form his own ideas. However, I think that it must be a very dull-witted person who does not want to know the answer. Is a very large proportion of humanity suffering from delusions or are we really having visitors from outer space? If the second is the right answer, what are they coming for?

The Russians are a hard-headed and incredulous breed, but years ago they let it out that they believed they had found evidence that there had been visitors from outer space. Of course they have also announced that some of their scientists had chased what we should call a Loch Ness Monster in a motor boat. This is another subject which is anathema to our orthodox zoologists.

Nether account may be true. We have no means of checking them. But here is a curious point; if either the Russians or the Americans had any doubt that the things were coming from elsewhere, one would surely have accused the other of infringing their air space. Both must have been having the same kind of visitors, or hallucinations, and they know it.

It is interesting too that both countries are working hard to find out the facts of extra-sensory perception or bio-electronics. They both hope to be able to talk by telepathy to people in rockets on the further side of planets which cannot be reached by radar. In our investigation then we appear to be chasing something which is cloaked in layer upon layer of official secrecy.

However, there is another school of thought with a far more original idea. This school believes that the visitors do not belong to our time at all; but are people living in the future who will have invented machines which are capable of coming back down the ages to see what was going on at a given time. We will now see whether we can conceive any possibility that this might be true.

However we must note that, in the event of it being correct, there is clearly no possibility that people in flying saucers could ever have been thought of as the sons of God or have fathered children on the daughters of men. They could only have been something resembling ghosts to the people in whose ages they appeared, for they would be on a different level of vibration, with no bodily functions comparable to the people they went to investigate. At least this is how the situation would appear to me with my very limited knowledge.

However if we remember what the pendulum has told us of future time and the second level of existence or vibration, there is much to be said in favour of this explanation of the appearance of flying saucers. Interest in the past is very widespread today and appears to be growing. It would be completely fascinating to be able to go back and see exactly what really went on in bygone ages. [2]

The ways that saucers are reported as remaining stationary in the sky for hours at a time is what you would expect if a party was examining a particular place at a particular period of time. The casual way in which only some people see them, while others do not, suggests that they may not be visible to anybody who does not have a high vibrational rate himself. In fact they are future ghosts if this explanation is correct.

We need not boggle at the word ghost. A ghost is something out of its normal earthly time sequence. All recorded television pictures are ghosts. They appear absolutely real on your television screen, but they are not there at all. Neither would this hypothetical type of unknown flying object be real in the sense that your breakfast is real. It would be something completely upsetting to what is called our ‘space time continuum’. But many upsetting things are always happening nowadays, so why not this.

This moving between two levels of existence, however, does not seem to demand any vehicle of transport. Our lady magician, who claimed to visit us in the night, also stated that she often talked with people living on the higher level. I asked her one day whether she could find out from her friends what flying saucers were. A few days later she returned with the answer: ‘They told me that they were made by the back-room boys. I asked them why and they said it was the kind of thing the back-room boys liked to do.’

I have no idea what degree of reliance to put on this statement. But if, by any chance, the saucers were the mechanical toys of experimenters on another level, it would explain why only certain people see them. There is no reason to suppose that men’s mentality would change after reaching the next level. Since everything else, but time, appears to be there, people with a mechanical bent might well experiment in many ways, and only those with a certain degree of psychic ability on this earth level would be able to see the results.

In one way this theory ought to be a considerable encouragement to the numerous people who work themselves into a fret through expectation of the destruction of humanity in an atomic war. If people are coming back from the future to look at us, there can have been no universal destruction before their time.

Still, once again this is not necessarily correct. The visitors need not be coming from the earth plane future. They may be people living on the second plane itself and be what is in earth terms described as dead. Of course if you have a rigid belief that life is confined to one short phase on earth, there is no point thinking about this possibility at all. But this is only a dogma and really the antithesis of any scientific outlook.

You do not know the answer and your belief is on a par with that of the moon being made of blue cheese. It is known that the composition of the moon is rock and not cheese, while such evidence as there is appears to point to the conclusion that life continues to infinity.

If it does, and people continue to live on a higher vibrational level on the next whorl and even on others above that, then presumably they might at times use the intelligences they had brought with them to study the past of the level which they had left.

They are not in the time sequence and not in the earth body, but it might be easier for them to lower their vibrations and even get out of their machines than people from the earth level itself. Have they ever done this? If they did, could they have had real personal contact with the earth humans they met on their trips?

Endnotes

[1] Source: The Legend of the Sons of God (1972) by Tom Lethbridge included in chapters 9 & 10 in The Essential T.C.Lethbridge edited by Tom Graves & Janet Hoult; Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1980, ISBN 0 586 05077 9.
[2] Should the construction of such machines become possible, they might well become subject to commercialism. You could hire a seat in a saucer to watch the building of a pyramid or the Battle of Marathon. hey would be of the greatest value in the study of geology and for estimating the probable changes in climate or sea-level. In fact they would be of considerable importance in many ways.