Forbidden History: Prehistoric Technologies, Extraterrestrial Intervention

Book Preface

Just a few centuries after what the experts say was the first great laborsaving invention of the ancient world—the wheel—society crossed a major threshold and headed irreversibly toward the modern world. More than anything else, it was the wheel, we are told, that revolutionized primitive society and set the stage for the great achievements that were to follow. The prevailing assumption is that the rise of highly organized society was unprecedented; such is the conventional scenario for the dawn of civilization on Earth.

After all, it is argued, if there had been an earlier, advanced civilization we would have discovered unmistakable evidence of its existence. Presumably, we would have seen the remains of its highways, and bridges, and electrical wiring. We would have found its plastic bottles, its city dumps, and its CD-ROMs. Those are, after all, the things we will leave behind for future archeologists to puzzle over.

But could an ancient civilization have risen to heights similar to our own, yet have traveled a different road? What would we understand of a world that might have employed fundamentally different—though no less effective—techniques to harness the forces of nature? Would we, or could we, comprehend a world capable of, for example, creating and transmitting energy by means other than a power grid, traveling great distances without internal combustion engines, or making highly complex calculations involving earth science and astronomy without electronic computers?

Do we have the grace to recognize and respect achievements other than our own, or must we take the easy way out and resort to crude stereotyping of our mysterious primitive ancestors, dismissing out of hand anything we don’t immediately understand? Indeed there are some, including many contributors to this book, who would argue that the evidence of a great but forgotten fountainhead of civilization is overwhelming and needs, at last, to be given its proper due.

Forbidden History, a compilation of essays gathered over time from the magazine Atlantis Rising, aims to put forward such evidence, and to propose ideas and theories with regard to the origins of life and the human race itself that may very well be more in accordance with reality than currently prevailing orthodoxy. In proposing these ideas, we hope to pose some interesting and provocative questions.