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These speculations require confirmation from contemporary sources. In a few hundred years mankind will have a mastery of space travel that is inconceivable today. Travel agencies will offer trips to the planets, with precise departure and return dates, in their brochures. Obviously a prerequisite for this mastery is that all branches of science keep pace with the development of space travel. Electronics and cybernetics alone will not do the trick. Medicine and biology will make their contribution by finding out ways of lengthening the vital functions of human beings. Today this department of space research is also working in top gear. Here we must ask ourselves: did space travellers in prehistory already possess knowledge that we must win anew? Did unknown intelligences already know the methods with which to treat bodies so that they could be revived in X thousand years? Perhaps the ‘gods’ being shrewd, had an interest in ‘preserving’ at least one dead man with all the knowledge of his time so that some day he could be questioned about the history of his generation? Who can tell? Is it not possible that such an interrogation by 'gods' who came back has already taken place? In the course of the centuries, mummification, originally a solemn matter, became the fashion. Suddenly everyone wanted to be reawakened; suddenly everyone thought that they would come to new life so long as they did the same as their forefathers. The high priests, who actually did possess some knowledge of such re-awakenings, did a great deal to encourage this cult, for their class did I have already mentioned the physically impossible ages of the Sumerian kings and the biblical figures. I asked whether these people could not have been space travellers who prolonged their life- span through the effect of the time shift on interstellar flights just below the speed of light. Are we perhaps getting a clue to the incredible age of the men named in the texts if we assume that they were mummified or frozen? If we follow this theory then the unknown space travellers would have frozen leading personalities in antiquity—put them into an artificial deep sleep, as legends tell us—and taken them out of the drawer, and thawed them out and conversed with them during subsequent visits. At the end of each visit it would have been the task of the priestly class appointed and instructed by the space travellers to prepare the living dead again and preserve them once more in giant temples until the 'gods' returned. Impossible? Ridiculous? It is mostly those people who feel that they are absolutely bound by the laws of nature who make the most stupid objections. Does not nature herself display brilliant examples of ‘hibernation’ and reawakening? There are species of fish which, after being frozen stiff, thaw out at milder temperatures and swim around again in the water. Flowers, larvae and grubs not only go into hibernation, but also reappear in the spring in lovely new garb. Let me be my own devil's advocate. Did the Egyptians learn the possibility of mummification from nature? If that were the case, there ought to have been a cult of butterflies or cockchafers or at least a trace of such a cult. There is nothing of the kind. Underground tombs do contain gigantic sarcophagi with mummified animals, but given their climate the Egyptians could not have copied hibernation from animals. good business out of it.