The Case of the False Quotes

Historic Astronaut Theorists (AATs for brief) have spent fifty years arguing that historical Hindu texts current firsthand stories of prehistoric nuclear explosions. I’ve mentioned and debunked the case of nuclear weapons in my eBook Ancient Atom Bombs, the place a fuller dialogue of the declare could be discovered. Nonetheless, a serious drawback with efforts at debunking AATs’ claims is that the majority scientific debunkers concentrate on, logically sufficient, the science concerned for the reason that most distinguished debunkers are usually physicists, evolutionary biologists, astronomers, and so on. Fewer are specialists in historical past and the humanities, which AATs have exploited, basing a lot of their proof on historical texts and paintings that onerous scientists should not all the time in a position to successfully debunk on the deserves of particular person instances. Even an archaeologist, by dint of specialization, could not have the broad cross-cultural data to identify the error in a citation from a sacred textual content from an unfamiliar tradition or time interval.

Right here, I’d prefer to concentrate on an issue with texts utilized by the AATs to point out precisely how a false perception arises, how it’s sustained, and the way a combination of ignorance, half-truths, and misrepresentation creates fanciful new extraterrestrial “texts” out of very completely different originals. Our pattern textual content might be an alleged “citation” from the Mahabharata “reporting” on a nuclear explosion and its aftermath.

In 1960 Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier printed Morning of the Magicians, their outrageous, Fortean compendium of conspiracies, misinterpretations, and lies. In that e-book, they drew on some bizarre Soviet “science” that urged nuclear weapons had been utilized in historical India. To assist their declare, they quoted what they mentioned was the Indian Mahabharata, an historical Sanskrit epic poem from c. 400 BCE:

Based on a Google E book and scholarly database search, the spelling “Mausola Purva” turns up nowhere earlier than the 1963 English translation of the Morning of the Magicians, and all later references with that spelling derive from later writers copying that e-book with out checking the supply. The traditional spelling since not less than 1807 is Mausala Parva, and it’s the sixteenth parva, or division, of the Mahabharata, which one wouldn’t know from studying Morning. Equally, “Curka” is a misspelling of Sakra, one other title for Indra, a misspelling discovered solely in Morning and its derivatives. The misspelling occurred as a result of nineteenth century French translations of the Mahabharata transliterated Sakra as Çakra, with the c-cedilla (Ç) having the sound of an “S.” Pauwels and Bergier, or their writer, mistakenly dropped the cedilla (the small hook) from the Ç, and misinterpret the “a” as a “u.” This error seems in each the 1960 French version and the 1963 English translation.

Based on Pauwels and Bergier and different AATs, these passages report the blinding explosion of nuclear weapons and precisely report the fallout from a nuclear blast, together with radiation burns, the lack of fingernails, and so on. As we will see, this isn’t the case once we have a look at the unique textual content. However for now, let’s concentrate on the textual content these authors present.

What we’ve got up to now is an English translation of a questionable French translation of a Sanskrit authentic. Now watch what occurs when historical astronaut theorist David Hatcher Childress,* will get maintain of this passage. In his Misplaced Cities of Historic Lemuria and the Pacific (1988, repeated in 1992’s Vimana Plane), he conflates the 2 passages into one steady passage, after which he breaks it up into traces to make it seem like authentic Sanskrit poetry, calling his mangled poetry “genuine verses”:

One way or the other the god Sakra, mistakenly referred to as “Cukra” in Morning, has now turn into “Gurkha,” the title of a Nepalese tribe. This, in flip occurred as a result of Erich von Däniken,** or his writer, mistakenly transliterated Cukra as Gurkha within the German version of Chariots of the Gods? when summarizing Pauwels and Bergier, probably on account of misreading the phrase as a French rendering of the famed Nepalese navy unites, the Gurkhas. The error was carried over into the English version: “In the identical e-book [the Mahabharata], in what is maybe the primary account of the dropping of an H bomb, it says that Gurkha loosed a single projectile on the triple metropolis from a mighty Vimana.”

Childress adopted the spelling of von Däniken, although von Däniken didn’t present the textual content Childress reprints. Observe that in Childress the fabric has been rearranged, traces altered, phrases dropped, and ellipses added, as if Childress have been presenting a scholarly excerpt from an extended textual content. However he isn’t. This textual content seems on this alleged “translation” nowhere earlier than Morning of the Magicians, and definitely not within the false poetic type given right here, or within the rearranged and deceptive conflation offered right here. The origins of this “poetic” type are a bit obscure, however based on one bibliographic entry on a website and Childress’s bibliography, it apparently originates in Charles Berlitz’s Mysteries from Forgotten Worlds (1972), which presents “excerpts” from the Mahabharata (correctly cited however not conventionally translated) however doesn’t declare they’re a steady poem (pp. 214ff.). Berlitz is merely repeating Pauwels and Bergier, although with the inclusion of some unwarranted ellipses, apparently the inspiration for Childress’s extra quite a few personal. Joseph Rosenberger’s The Atlantean Horror, a 1985 novel about an motion hero who takes on unattainable missions, makes use of the excerpts as a single poem. On web page 25 of the novel, half (however not all) of the quote from Morning of the Magicians is about in verse (with out ellipses) as a “prophecy” from Atlantis of nuclear struggle as Russians and Individuals battle in Antarctica. The textual content, in poetic type, additionally seems in The Journal of South Asian and Center Jap Research, however that was in 2007 (vol. 30), and is way too late. So, Childress both conflated the excerpts and rendered them right into a poem, or he relied on a supply unknown to me and unacknowledged in his work.

Greater than 35 books and hundreds of internet sites have printed Childress’s model of the textual content.

So now we’ve got a conflated, rewritten model of an English translation of a questionable French translation of a Sanskrit authentic. “Genuine verses” certainly.

So, what precisely did this Sanskrit authentic say? Humorous factor: It doesn’t say something about nuclear weapons. Turning to the Mahabharata, we discover the next 4 wholly separate and both unrelated or distantly associated passages (as given in the usual Ganguli translation):

Observe that the supposed “bomb” is definitely a bolt (like a scepter), that the king feared the bolt, and the king destroyed it earlier than it may very well be used.

From a distinct part of the parva comes the bit about supposed radiation poisoning, which has nearly nothing to do with the earlier passage in regards to the iron bolt that was by no means used besides that they have been incidents within the lives of a specific folks, over many a long time:

This destruction, by the way, occurs three a long time after the destruction of the iron bolt, when the Vrishnis and Andhakas (and I’m not making this up) killed one another by beating each other with pots and pans. Not precisely a nuclear bomb. Observe that the supposed impact of radiation poisoning recorded within the Pauwels/Bergier/Berlitz/Childress textual content, the lack of nails, is a whole fabrication. Within the authentic mice and rats ate the nails. Once more, hardly a nuclear bomb.

The bit about Sakra using the vimana comes from a completely completely different parva, the Karna Parva, the eighth e-book of the Mahbharata, and once more has nothing to do with the opposite passages:

Observe that Maheswara (Siva), not Sakra (or Cukra or Gurkha), is the motive force of the automobile within the authentic; and in addition word that it’s the Asuras (evil gods), not the Vrishnis who’re the topic of those weapons. Observe, too, simply how a lot textual content it took Pauwels and Bergier to discover a half-dozen traces they may string collectively to supposedly present nuclear weapons.

As needs to be clear, this passage is referring to the facility of thunder in destroying the evil gods, the Asuras, parallel to the thunder-god Zeus utilizing the thunder bolt to destroy the giants within the Gigantomachy of Greek mythology. Moreover, it’s clear that the “weapon” is envisioned as an arrow (not an explosive), which pierces the cities and causes them to fall down, to not evaporate as Pauwels and Bergier and Childress assert.

Thus, I hope I’ve now proven at adequate size that the
AATs’ methodology is little higher than slapping collectively random
sentences to create a misunderstanding. Pauwels and Bergier appear to have deliberately mistranslated Sanskrit sentences into French to create a misunderstanding, however have been sincere sufficient to permit that the sentences weren’t associated to one another and to go away in some baffling particulars, just like the disintegration of the thunder-bolt. However Berlitz, Childress, and their
followers are content material to mangle a nasty English translation of a French
mistranslation of a Sanskrit authentic with out ever checking the unique
supply materials. Texts are conflated, separate incidents mixed into
one. No context is taken into account or analyzed. Particulars that don’t assist
the AATs’ concepts are eradicated with no indication that they have been
dropped. Mistranslations are purposely created, copied uncritically however
modified at will to assist the creator’s views, and repeated endlessly as
revealed reality.

The Mahabharata is 1.8 million phrases lengthy. These authors appear to have purposely used no references or citations to the precise textual content of the traditional epic, trusting that nobody will have the ability to search by way of that a lot textual content to search out the passages to which they’ve carried out a lot violence. My guess, from the variety of later writers who declare “Gurkha” as a Hindu god, is that the majority later copyists by no means consulted the unique in any respect.

David Hatcher Childress asserts: “The general public wants scientists and the scientists want the general public. Nonetheless, many occasions the lay particular person is the higher supply of knowledge” (Atlantis and the Energy Techniques of the Gods, 2002, p. 36). What precisely are we to think about this? As we’ve got seen, Childress is a horrible supply of knowledge. He, these he copied from, and those that copy from him are at finest responsible of ignorance and poor scholarship; at worst they deliberately altered texts and misrepresented historical past to idiot their readers—all whereas claiming “scientists” are those hiding the reality.

* After I wrote The Cult of Alien Gods (2005), David Hatcher Childress demanded that I chorus from referring to him as an historical astronaut theorist. I honored this request from 2006 till Childress started showing on the Historical past Channel’s Historic Aliens sequence in 2009 as one of many program’s resident AATs. (On one program, for instance, he argued aliens put a satellite tv for pc in orbit to take electrical energy from Egyptian obelisks and beam it to Easter Island to maneuver the island’s statues.) I subsequently really feel no compulsion to proceed to keep away from describing him as an AAT. I’ve an extended dialogue of this here.
** My because of Francesco Brighenti for bringing to my consideration the looks of the phrase “Gurkha” in Chariots of the Gods?.