Paleovisitology: Still at the Crossroads...

EDITORIAL

PALEOVISITOLOGY: STILL AT THE CROSSROADS...

Unlike the two preceding RB issues, this one is oriented not so much towards the history of anomalistics as towards historical anomalistics.

What is a “historical anomaly”? Generally, it is any find contradicting the commonly accepted “historical picture of the world” (or the “scientific picture of the past”)—such as, for example, Phoenician inscriptions in America, or the ancient wooden model of a glider found in Egypt in 1898, or the “calculating machine” of Antikythera. But more specifically, it is a historical object or piece of information about the past, whose content disagrees not only with what we are aware (or supposing to be aware) of about human history, but also, if not primarily, with our principal view of what was possible and what was impossible in the past. (For example, airplanes, helicopters, or nuclear weaponry could never exist on the Earth prior to the 20th century, whereas, say, hot-air balloons and hang-gliders of a sort, generally speaking, could have been built by the ancients.)

In practice, the anomalous character of a strange find (and even more so—that of “strange information” from an ancient written source) only rarely may be self-evident. Rather it emerges during the process of examination of the find or interpretation of the information of the source. On the whole, however, problems arising when we are studying “historical anomalies” are quite close to “usual” problems of a “normal” historical investigation: is the source authentic?; has it been dated correctly?; how convincingly has its original state been restored?; is the proposed interpretation of its function and construction reliable enough?; etc.

“Ideally” any noticeable anomaly should have been immediately “intercepted” by science and studied in laboratories and research institutes. But as a rule, nothing of this sort occurs. Why? There is no particular enigma in this situation.

The “weight” of any anomalies depends, first of all, on the attitude of specialists to them. Any serious theoretical scheme (in this case—the “scientific picture of the past”) is no trifle at all: it is based on a large set of data and a lot of work and effort by historians and archaeologists has been put into it. It is no mere chance that anomalies are interesting mainly to dilettantes, whereas specialists prize established knowledge above all else.

In other words, the “inner conflict” between history and “historical anomalistics” is a sad reality (even if historians, like any other specialists, are inclined not to pay attention to “amateurs” trespassing on their ground and pointing a finger in the direction of—sometimes imaginary, sometimes real—anomalies) and it is mainly caused by the contrast of the cognitive interests of historians and anomalists.

The more rational must be the anomalistic view of history. Being much more attentive to anomalies, it should at the same time lean upon “normal” scientific knowledge about the human past, rather than flatly contradict it.

In this respect, it would be of interest and importance to understand by whom, how, and why attention has ever been paid to historical anomalies. In particular, it was, of course, paleovisitologists who became interested in them, proceeding from theoretical considerations: ancient visits from space cannot be ruled out a priori, and the traces of such visits must “by definition” be some anomalies (or “historical enigmas”). But the proponents of the conception of a “preceding civilization”, first of all atlantologists, discussed many of these enigmas much earlier.

An essential contribution to the revelation of anomalies of the past was also made by the “historical ufology” of the 1950s (publications of D. Leslie, H. Wilkins, M. Jessup, et al.). It was a sort of “proto-paleovisitology” aiming at a narrower purpose—to find out if the UFO phenomenon had existed in antiquity, but anticipating at the same time some traits of the future Ancient Astronaut theory that originated some ten years later. Despite all errors, fantastic statements, and strained interpretations, rather typical for historico-ufological works, these authors did bring to light much interesting data.

Now, there exists a number of historical anomalies discovered either in the process of professional historical and archaeological studies (such as “Baghdad electric batteries”, for example), or accidentally (in particular, many “unidentified fossil objects”). After discovery, they can be either forced by the specialists into the framework of “historical normalcy” (more or less in a Procrustean way), or be interpreted from the viewpoint of the “anomalistic picture of the past”. The latter involves, together with scientifically-acceptable components, also some concepts that science is still denying: the hypothesis of a preceding civilization, the paleovisit hypothesis (in its “classically historical” or “historico-ufological” form), and also rather a vague idea of an extreme antiquity of man’s existence on the Earth (down to the Carboniferous period, even if in an “uncivilized” state). Somewhat peripherally, there is also “creation science” which tries to reinterpret scientific knowledge in accord with belief in the literal truth of the Bible.

It is understandable that even the “extreme” version of the paleovisit hypothesis—the concept of the creation of homo sapiens and/or human civilization by extraterrestrial astronauts (not to mention “normal” paleovisits—that is “brief” research expeditions to this planet) much better correlates with the scientific picture of the world and general principles of science than the creationist model. At the same time, when supposing that there existed a highly developed technological civilization on the Earth prior to recorded history, we meet with at least two difficult questions: why then are the historical anomalies so rare, and why did we inherit the ecological system of our planet in an intact state? To answer these questions, one can, of course, resort to ad hoc assumptions, believing, for example, that the former civilization was a strictly local and/or non-technological one—but such assumptions do seem to be very artificial.

On the other hand, it is hardly reasonable to deny absolutely the possibility of existence of local civilizations, more ancient than Egypt and Sumer, that perished due to some natural disasters—such as the legendary Atlantis. Atlantology had for a long time been a natural dumping-ground for information about historical anomalies; lately its popularity noticeably dropped—but not to zero. The paper “The Bimini Enigma”, authored by the Swedish researcher Talbot Shaw Lindstrom and published in this RB issue, testifies that the search for ancient artifacts on the bed of the Atlantic Ocean is not senseless at all.

Probably, the most essential feature of historical anomalies, making them an attractive object for investigation, is their tangibility. Although, say, the existing set of UFO reports is definitely far larger, there are in it very few tangible objects. Also, the number of traces potentially available for a real study of hypothetical paleovisits exceeds considerably the number of “enigmatic radio signals” in (radio-) SETI.

The “dark side” of this situation is, however, the “objectively contradictory” position of paleovisitology that must be at the same time both a historical discipline and a branch of SETI. Historians are, as a rule, indifferent to extraterrestrial civilizations, and radio astronomers to the history of the terrestrial one. That is why the paleovisit idea has in practice fallen down a crack between history and SETI.

Nevertheless, being expelled from science, it did not perish, but formed its own para- (or rather pre-) scientific field of cognitive interest—namely, preastronautics, based on the Ancient Astronaut theory (AAT). Partly it may be considered as another “field of entertainment”, but in this case this division is not so definite as in ufology. However skeptical is the attitude of “true scientists” to the AAT-amateurs, the latter are far less oriented towards entertainment than are their ufological counterparts. “Tabloid ufology” is, alas, a reality; “tabloid preastronautics” is virtually non-existent.

What is more, as distinct from the current situation in world ufology, paleovisitology has its own paradigm. It originated in the late 1950s—early 1960s, when Dr. Matest Agrest, an eminent mathematician and participant of the Soviet Nuclear Project, put forward his hypothesis about past contacts with extraterrestrials, basing his arguments mainly on Biblical texts. Some special details of this story are revealed in Dr. Agrest’s paper “On the Development of the Idea of Paleocontacts in the USSR at the Beginning of the 1960s” published in this RB issue. In particular, it turns out that Academician Igor Kurchatov, an outstanding Soviet physicist and the Head of the Nuclear Project, was going to recommend Dr. Agrest’s work for publication in the Reports of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR. If this plan had been accomplished, this work might have played a part similar to that of the famous paper by G. Cocconi and P. Morrison that laid the foundation of the whole SETI field. Unfortunately, the reality proved to be different.

Nevertheless, even having been published in the geographical yearbook Na Sushe i na More, Dr. Agrest’s paper “The Cosmonauts of Yore” did lay the groundwork for the paleovisitological paradigm (in the “classical” sense of this term—as a model for posing and solving the research tasks): trying to find evidence of paleovisits and paleocontacts, we should look for historical enigmas, traces of “anomalously advanced” knowledge and technologies of the ancients, as well as for information (textual and pictorial) about “extraterrestrial astronauts”.

Of course, the history of anomalistic studies is significant, but their further progress is even more important. In the current RB issue the historical aspect of paleovisitology (the paper by Dr. Agrest) meets with its “futurological” aspect. I mean here the paper “Search for Paleovisit Traces: General Principles and Some Problems”, authored by Dr. Yuriy Morozov. It is directed to those professionals who understand that the paleovisit problem is serious, meaningful and truly important for science, being at the same time embarrassed both by the futility of some arguments of the Ancient Astronaut theory proponents, and by their opponents' accusations of the sharp discrepancy between this theory and the standards of scientific research. Dr. Morozov convincingly demonstrates that paleovisitological investigation may be conducted on quite rational and strictly scientific foundations. The only objection I could raise in this connection is that science itself is in reality not so rational—but it seems that Dr. Morozov is not ignorant of this fact (see his replies to RB questions on p. 13). But I would like to repeat again what I wrote more than once in former RB issues: where science diverges in its practice from its own ideal of objective cognition, we anomalists must maintain this ideal in our own work.

— Vladimir V. Rubtsov

To download RB, Vol. 8, No. 3-4, containing this paper, please click here:
http://www.geocities.com/riap777/EPRB-834.pdf (194 KB)

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