Return to the Stars: Evidence for the Impossible by Erich von Däniken Read Free Book Online

sound waves with deadly low hertz frequencies would have been perfectly capable of bringing down the walls of Jericho.
     
    When Dr Mottier, an archaeologist at Berne University, and I were taking part in a debate on the Swiss Radio, she told me that giants had never existed because there were no fossil finds from which we could infer the existence of such a race.
     
    However, Dr Lovis Burkhalter, former French delegate to the Prehistoric Society, holds a quite different opinion. In 1950, he wrote in the Revue du Musee de Beyrouth: 'I want to make it clear that the existence of gigantic men in the Acheulian age must be considered a scientifically proven fact.'
     
    Which side is right? At all events, tools of abnormal size have been found that could not have been handled by men of normal stature.
     
    Archaeologists excavated flint implements weighing nearly 8 1/2 lb near Sasnych (four miles from Safita in Syria). The flint tools found at Ain Fritissa (Eastern Morocco) are not to be sneezed at either. They were 12 1/2 ins long, 8 1/2 ins wide and weighed 9 1/4 lb. If we make a calculation based on the normal human stature and constitution, the beings who were able to handle these clumsy implements must have been about 12 ft tall.
     
    Apart from finds of tools, at least three scientifically accepted finds point to the existence of giants in the past:
     
    1. The Java giant.
    2. The South China giant.
    3. The South African (Transvaal) giant.
     
    What race did they represent?
    Were they lone-wolves?
    Were they the wrongly programmed products of mutations?
    Were they the direct descendants of gigantic cosmonauts from another world?
    Were they especially intelligent beings with advanced technical know-how who had originated according to the genetic code?
     
    The fossil finds give no conclusive answers to my questions. They are too meagre to form the stones for building up a proper genealogy. Will such a family tree ever be systematically investigated in some specially chosen region? Sensational discoveries are reported from time to time, but they nearly always turn out to be chance finds.
     
    But documents—and we ought to take the old sources literally—clearly confirm the former existence of giants. Moses tells us in Genesis, 6:4:
     
    'There were giants in the earth in those days; and also after that, when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bare children to them, the same became mighty men which were of old, men of renown.'
     
    We get a graphic account in Numbers, 13:33:
     
    'And there we saw the giants, the sons of Anak, which come of the giants: and we were in our own sight as grasshoppers, and so we were in their sight.'
     
    Deuteronomy, 3:11, even gives us details that allow us to make rough estimate of their physical stature:
     
    'For only Og king of Bashan remained of the remnant of giants; behold, his bedstead was a bedstead of iron; is it not in Rabbath of the children of Ammon? nine cubits was the length thereof, and four cubits the breadth of it...'
     
    (The Hebraic cubit is about 1 ft 9 ins!)
     
    But the Pentateuch is not the only part of the Bible that speaks clearly and unequivocally about giants, the later books of the Old Testament also give descriptions of these supermen. Their authors lived at different times and in different places, so they could not have communicated with each other. Nor could the giants, as theologists sometimes claim, have been interpolated into the texts later in order to symbolise evil. If these apologists looked at the texts more closely, they could see that the giants always appear when performing perfectly practical tasks—waging war and single combat, for example—but never when moral concepts or moral behaviour are under discussion.
     
    Besides, the documentation of giants is not confined to the Bible. The myths of the Mayas and Incas also recount that the first race created by the 'gods' before the Flood was a race of giants. They called two