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originate as early as the beginning of the Egyptian culture? Who gave them their incredible knowledge of mathematics and a ready-made writing? Where did the narrators of The Thousand and One Nights get their staggering wealth of ideas? How did anyone come to describe a lamp from which a magician spoke when the owner wished? thieves? Of course, such ideas no longer astonish us today, for the television set shows us talking pictures at the turn of a switch. And as the doors of most large department stores open by photocells, even the ‘Open Sesame’ incident no longer conceals any special mystery. Nevertheless the imaginative power of the old story-tellers was so incredible that the books of contemporary writers of science-fiction seem banal in comparison. So it must be that the ancient story-tellers had a store of things already seen, known and experienced ready at hand to spark off their imagination! In the legendary and saga-like world of intangible cultures which as yet offer to us no fixed points of reference, we are on shakier ground still and things become even more confusing. Naturally the Icelandic and Old Norwegian traditions also mention 'gods' who travel in the sky. The goddess Frigg has a maid-servant called Gna. The goddess sends her handmaid to different worlds on a steed which rises in the air above land and sea. The steed is called 'Hoof thrower' and once, says the Saga, Gna met some strange creatures high in the air. In the Alwislied different names are given to the Earth, the Sun, the Moon and the Universe depending on whether they are seen from the point of view of men, 'gods', giants or dwarfs. How on earth could people in the dim past arrive at different perceptions of one and the same thing, when the horizon was very limited? Although the scholar Sturluson did not write down the Nordic and Old Germanic legends, sagas and songs until about A.D. 1200, they are known to be some thousands of years old. In these writings the symbol of the world is often described as a disc or a ball—remarkably enough—and Thor, the leader of the gods, is always shown with a hammer, the destroyer. Professor Kuhn supports the view that the word 'hammer' means ‘stone’, dates from the Stone Age and was only transferred to bronze and iron hammers later. Consequently Thor and his hammer symbol must have been very ancient and probably do go back to the Stone Age. Moreover, the word 'Thor' in the Indian (Sancrit) legends is "Tanayitnu'; this could be more or less rendered as The Thunderer'. The Nordic Thor, god of gods, is the lord of the When arguing about the entirely new aspects that I introduce into investigation of the past, the objection might be made that it is not possible to compile everything in the ancient traditions that points to heavenly apparitions into a sequence of proofs of prehistoric space travel. But that is not what Iam doing. I am simply referring to passages in very ancient texts that have no place in the working hypothesis in use up to the present. I am drilling away at those admittedly awkward spots, where Before we deal with some monumental buildings which raise innumerable questions, let us take another brief glance at the old texts. What daring imagination invented the 'Open Sesame" incident in the tale of Ali Baba and the forty Germanic Wanen, who make the skies unsafe.