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34 tions (starting with the pictograph for GIR) and other depic- tions from the ancient Near East in the post-Diluvial era. We are talking about actual depictions—drawing, paintings—from an era preceding the Deluge (that had occurred, by our calcu- lations, some 13,000 years ago), and preceding it not by a short time but by thousands and tens of thousands of years! The existence of pictorial depictions from that far back in prehistory is no secret. What is virtually a secret is the fact that besides animals, and some human figures, those drawings and paintings also depicted what we nowadays call UFOs. We refer to what is known as Cave Art, the many drawings found in caves in Europe where Cro-Magnon Man made his home. Such "decorated caves" as scholars call them have been found especially in the southwest of France and the north of Spain. More than seventy such decorated caves have been found (one, whose entrance is now under the waters of the Mediterranean sea, as recently as 1993); there. Stone Age artists used the cave walls as giant canvases, sometimes. tal- entedly using the natural contours and protrusions of the walls to attain tridimensional effects. Sometimes using sharp stones to engrave the images, sometimes clay to mold and_ shape, but mostly a limited assortment of pigments—black, red, yel- low, and a dull brown—they created astoundingly beautiful works of art. Occasionally depicting humans as hunters, and sometimes their hunting weapons (arrows, lances), the depic- tions by and large are those of Ice Age animals: bison, rein- deer, ibexes, horses, oxen, cows, felines, and here and there also fish and birds (Fig. 9). The drawings, engravings, and paintings are sometimes life-size, always naturalistic. There is no doubt that the anonymous artists painted what they had actually seen. Timewise they span millennia, from about 30,000 to 13,000 years ago. In many instances the more complex, more vividly colored, more lifelike depictions are in the deeper parts of the caves, which were, of course, also the darkest parts. What means the artists used to light the inner recesses of the caves so that they could paint, no one knows, for no remains of charcoal or torches or the like have been found. Nor, to judge by the absence of remains, were these caves habitats. Many scholars, therefore, tend to view these decorated caves as shrines, DIVINE ENCOUNTERS