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‘monoliths’ weighing up to fifty tons with our modern lifting appliances and loaders. Only now have cranes which can handle hundreds of tons been developed. But our ancestors could do so. How? It even seems as if the ancient peoples took a special pleasure in juggling with stone giants over hill and dale. The Egyptians fetched their obelisks from Asswan, the architects of Stonehenge brought their stone blocks from south-west Wales and Marlborough, the stonemasons of Easter Island took their ready-made monster statues from a distant quarry to their present sites and no one can say where some of the monoliths at Tiahuanaco come from. Our remote ancestors must have been queer people; they liked making things difficult for themselves and always built their statues in the most impossible places. Was it just because they liked a hard life? I refuse to think that the artists of our great past were as stupid as that. They could just as easily have erected their statues and temples in the immediate vicinity of the quarries if an old tradition had not laid down where their works ought to be sited. I am convinced that the Inca fortress of Sacsayhuaman was not built above Cuzco by chance, but rather because a tradition indicated the place as A holy spot. I am also convinced that in all the places where the most ancient monumental buildings of mankind were found the most interesting and important relics of our past lie still untouched in the ground, relics, moreover, which could be of tremendous importance for the further development of present- The unknown space travellers who visited our planet many thousands of years ago can hardly have been less farsighted than we think we are today. They were convinced that one day man would make the move out into the universe on his own initiative and using his own skills. It is a well-known historical fact that the intelligences of our planet have constantly sought for kindred spirits, for life, for corresponding intelligences in the cosmos. Present-day antennae and transmitters have broadcast the first radio impulses to unknown intelligences. When we shall receive an answer—in ten, fifteen or a hundred years—we do not know. We do not even know which star we should beam our message at, because we have no idea which planet should interest us most. Where do our signals reach unknown intelligences similar to human beings? We do not know. Yet there is much to support the belief that the information needed to reach our goal is deposited in our earth for us. We are trying hard to neutralise the force of gravity; we are experimenting with elementary particles and anti-matter. Are we also doing enough to find the data which are hidden in our earth, so that we can at last ascertain our original home? If we take things literally, much that was once fitted into the mosaic of our past with great difficulty becomes quite plausible: not only the relevant clues in ancient texts, but also the ‘hard facts' which offer themselves to our critical gaze all over the globe. Lastly we have our reason to think with. So it will be man's ultimate insight to realise that his justification for existence to date and all his struggles to advance really consisted in learning from the past in order to make himself ready for contact with the existence in space. Once that happens, the shrewdest, most die-hard individualist must see that the whole human task consists in colonising the universe and that man's whole spiritual duty lies in perpetuating all his efforts and practical experience. Then the promise of the 'gods' of day space travel.