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

prominent giants Atlan (Atlas) and Theitani (Titan).
     
    Just like our 'flying gods', giants haunt the world of sagas, legends and sacred books, but they are never put on the same footing as the gods in any of these sources. One serious handicap kept the giants on the earth; they could not fly. Only when a giant is clearly defined as the offspring of a god is he taken along on a heavenly journey. The giants usually appear as the gods' humble and obedient servants, who carry out their tasks, until they are finally described as stupid brutish creatures and their traces in literature are lost.
     
    A scholar as serious as Professor Denis Saurat, Director of the Centre International d'Etudes Francaise in Nice, has made a serious study of giants. He definitely confirms that they once existed, and even those scholars who raise doubts sooner or later stumble over giants' graves, over menhirs, those vertical, roughly dressed stone blocks, which range up to 65ft in height, over dolmens, burial chambers built of massive stones, or other megalithic monuments, and last but not least over the impossibility of explaining technical achievements such as the working and transport of gigantic stone blocks. The number of gigantic architectonic edifices and the number of artistically dressed boulders we can still marvel at today can only be plausibly explained if we assume the primitive erectors of these works to have been giants or beings with techniques unknown to us.
     
    Whenever I stand in front of a prehistoric monument on my travels, I always ask myself whether we ought to be satisfied with the previous explanations of its origin and purpose. Surely we ought to band together and have the courage to find out if novel and fantastic interpretations have any validity.
     
    During my last journey in Peru in 1968 my friend Hans Neuner and I revisited the megalithic buildings above Sacsayhuaman (Falcon Rock), which is situated at a height of 3,450 to 3,780 ft near the limits of the former Inca fortress of Cuzco.
     
    Tape measure and camera in hand, we approached these ruins, which are not ruins at all in the ordinary sense of the word. This is no heap of crumbled stone, remains of some historical building that have become unrecognisable. The rock labyrinth above Sacsayhuaman gives the impression of a super-edifice constructed with the last word in technical refinement. Anyone who has spent days in the thin air of this plateau clambering about among stone giants, caves and rock monstrosities, will find it hard to accept the explanation that all this was created ages ago by human hands using damp wooden wedges and crude stone mallets.
     
    Here is only one of the examples we measured: a rectangle 7 ft 1 in high, 1 ft 2 ins wide and 2 ft 8 ins deep had been cut out of a granite block 36 ft high and 59 ft wide that appeared to have been torn from the cliff face. A first-class piece of work! There is nothing botched or crude about the way it has been extracted, there is no uneven or clumsy dressing. Even if we are prepared to admit the possibility that extremely skilled stonemasons managed to free the four lateral incisions of the colossus from the rock face after many years of work, we are still left with the riddle of how they freed the rear side of the rectangle. In those days the stonemasons certainly did not have cutting jibs of the kind used today when excavating the stone for underground submarine shelters. And presumably they did not possess the chemical knowledge to free the stone block from the rock face with the help of acids.
     
    Or did they?
     
    We climbed down into some caves in the rock that were 180 to 240 ft deep. As if shaken by some primaeval force, the caves' course has been interrupted and they are partially destroyed or telescoped together. Large sections of the ceilings and walls have been preserved. They are so perfect that they could compete with any present-day piece of pre-cast concrete. Nothing has been joined together;