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After a lecture which I had given to a small circle in Zurich in 1963, an Indian student came up to me and said with disarming candour: 'Do you really find anything new or shocking about what you have told us? Every half-educated Indian knows the main sections of the Vedas and so knows that the gods in ancient times moved about in flying machines and possessed terrible weapons. Really, every child Basically, the nice young man only wanted to confirm my theory, and perhaps to calm me down as well, for I easily get excited about my pet subject. He achieved exactly the opposite effect. In the years that followed I carried on a rather one-sided correspondence with Indian Sanskrit scholars. They answered my specific questions very politely and sent me photostats of Sanskrit texts that I could not read. The only people who profited by my obsession were my stamp-collecting friends. There was no peace left for me. I had to go to India—because of the texts. In the autumn of 1968 I flew to Bangalore, the capital of the southern state of Mysore. Bangalore is the educational centre of Southern India. Yet at first I did not notice this at all. On the first day of my arrival a kaleidoscope of bewildering impressions passed before my eyes. Beggars and starvation existence—ox carts and moped taxis—women with diamonds in their noses and a red spot on their foreheads—dilapidated wooden huts and white palaces in the English colonial style—bustle in the streets and gaunt holy cows with red eyes—soldiers in bluish-green uniforms and dirty yellow water at the edges of the streets and above all the peculiar smell which seemed to penetrate right into my brain. The University of Bangalore, which benefits from overseas aid, is magnificently equipped and full of forward-looking intellects. Professors and students work together on solving new scientific problems. Specialist professors of Sanskrit such as Ramesh J. Patel from the Cultural Centre at Kochrab and T. S. Nandi from the University of Ahmedabad gave me their valuable time. Generally a single phone- call was enough to fix the time and place for a conversation. I asked about the age of Vedas and epics. Scholars were unanimous in telling me that the Mahabharata, the national epic of the Indians with more than 80,000 couplets, must have originated in its first established form about 1500 B.C. But when I inquired about the original core of the epic, the answers were either 7016 or 2604 B.C. The unusual precision for datings lying so far back in the past was due to specific astronomic constellations mentioned in connection with a battle described in the Mahabharata. In spite of these astronomical data, the specialists have not yet agreed on the age of the epic. As with the Old Testament, the original author of the Mahabharata is unknown. It is suspected that a legendary figure, Vyasa, was the original creator, but it is said with considerable assurance that the last oral narrator, Sauti, also prepared the first complete written version. For the benefit of the mathematicians who will have to feed their computers with data to find out the time dilation on interstellar flights, I may mention two numbers that I noted in Bangalore. In the Mahabharata 1,200 divine years equal 360,800 human years! in India knows that!' How furious I was that I could not read Sanskrit! Everyone was most helpful; I was told exactly in