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have escaped the attention of the evolutionary theoreticians.’ That is precisely what I suspect. There is a decisive factor that has not been taken into account in all the theorising on the subject. I doubt if we shall be able to supply the missing link without investigating the theory of visits to our planet by extraterrestrial intelligences and checking whether these beings should not be held responsible for an artificial transformation of hereditary factors, for a manipulation of the genetic code and for the sudden appearance of intelligence. I have something to say along these lines that strengthens my theory that man is a creation of extraterrestrial 'gods'. In 1847 Justus von Liebig wrote in the 23rd of his Chemical Letters: 'Anyone who has observed ammonium carbonate, phosphate of lime or potash will obviously consider it quite impossible that an organic germ capable of reproduction and higher development can ever be formed from these materials by the action of heat, electricity or other natural forces...' The great chemist also claimed that only a dilettante could imagine that life had originated from dead matter. Today we know that this did happen. Modern research assumes that the first life on earth originated one and a half milliard years ago. Professor Hans Vogel writes: 'In those days the barren land and the vast primordial ocean were enveloped in an atmosphere that was still without oxygen. Methane, hydrogen, ammonia, steam and perhaps acetylene and cyanide of hydrogen as well, formed a covering around the earth, which was still devoid of life. That is the kind of environment in which the first life must have originated.’ In their efforts to get on the track of the origin of life, scientists tried to make organic matter originate from inorganic matter in the conditions of the primitive atmosphere. The American Nobel Prize winner Professor Harold Clayton Urey surmised that the primitive atmosphere had a composition far more susceptible to penetration by ultraviolet rays than our own. So he encouraged his colleague, Dr Stanley Miller, to check experimentally whether the amino acids necessary for the existence of all life would be formed in a primitive atmosphere created in a retort and subjected to radiation. Stanley Miller began his experiments in 1953. He built a glass container in which he produced an artificial primitive atmosphere made up of ammonia, hydrogen, methane and steam. So that the experiment might take place in sterile conditions he had the Miller apparatus, as it is now known in scientific literature, heated to a temperature of 180° Centigrade for eighteen hours. In the upper half of the glass sphere he fixed two electrodes, between which electrical discharges were constantly flying. In this way, using a high frequency current of 60,000 volts, a permanent miniature storm was produced in the primitive atmosphere. In a smaller glass sphere sterile water was heated and its steam was conducted via a tube to the large sphere containing the primitive atmosphere. The cooled off matter flowed back into the sphere containing sterile water, to be reheated there and so climb up again to the sphere containing the primitive atmosphere. In this way Miller had created in his laboratory a cycle of the kind that had gone on on earth in the beginning of time. This experiment continued for a whole week without stopping. What came out of the primitive atmosphere that was subjected to the steady lightning flashes of the miniature storm? The ‘primitive soup' Miller had cooked up contained asparagine, alanine and glycine—in other words amino acids necessary for the building up of biological systems. In Miller's