Page Content (OCR)
Foreword The desire for peace, the search for immortality, hankering for the stars—all these are deeply rooted in the human consciousness and have been ceaselessly pressing for realisation from time immemorial. Is this urge for realisation that is so deeply implanted in human beings something to be taken for granted? Is it really only a question of human 'desires'? Or does this striving for fulfilment, this nostalgia for the stars, conceal something quite different? I am convinced that our longing for the stars is kept alive by a legacy bequeathed by the ‘gods’. Memories of our terrestrial ancestors and memories of our cosmic teachers are both at work in us. Man's acquisition of intelligence does not seem to me to have been the product of a long and tedious development. The process took place too suddenly for that. I think that our ancestors received their intelligence from the 'gods', who must have possessed knowledge that made the whole process a rapid one. Obviously we shall not find proofs of my assertion on the earth if we stick to the existing methods of archaeological investigation. If we do, we shall simply and inexorably increase the existing collections of human and animal remains. Each find will be given its catalogue number, put in a glass case in a museum and kept clean by the museum staff. But we cannot approach the heart of the matter with such methods alone. For the heart of the matter, I am convinced, lies in the important questions This book is an attempt to provide new arguments for my theory. It is meant to be another peaceful incentive to reflection about the past and future of mankind. For too long we have failed to investigate our remote past with daring and imagination. It will not be possible to produce the last conclusive proofs in one generation, but the walls which still separate fantasy from reality will have more and more breaches in them. I shall try to do my best to keep on breaking through them with new aggressive questions. Perhaps I shall be lucky. Perhaps questions of the kind that are also asked by Louis Pauwels, Jacques Bergier and Robert Charroux will be answered in my lifetime. I should like to thank the countless readers of my Chariots of the Gods? for their letters and suggestions. I want them to accept this book as the response to their encouragement. I should like to thank everyone who helped me to write this new book. I wrote it during my imprisonment on remand in the Remand Prison of the Canton of Graubunden in Chur. Return to the stars? Return? Does that mean that we came from the stars? of when and how our ancestors became intelligent. Erich Von Daniken