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used the vast stone platforms at Baalbek as launching areas. Apparently he did not know that vitrified ruins are a common phenomenon all over the world. Forts and towers so old that there are no legends to account for them can be found throughout northern Europe and the British Isles and the walls of many of these are vitrified. At some point in the distant past these structures must have been subjected to tremendous heat, though not necessarily from the blast of some nuclear powered rocket. Lightning is the explanation most frequently offered by science. But there is no evidence to indicate that lightning bolts vitrify stone or even sand, although we really know very little about lightning and its effects. It would take dozens of lightning bolts all striking the same spot to produce these vitrified monuments. In some parts of the world, such as an area of eighteen thousand square yards outside of Cuzco, Peru, whole hillsides have been vitrified. Theories of volcanic activity and glacial movements have been offered to account for these, but none of these theories really wo*. fire. Maybe more than once. So this vitrification could be the product of some nearly forgotten natural catastrophe. On October 8th, 1871, a gigantic fireball or meteor roared over the Midwest, causing a rash of disastrous fires in several states, including the famous Chicago fire. Thousands of people were killed in Illinois and Wisconsin, and vast areas were ravaged by flames that night, A similar fiery visitor from space could have caused the vitrifications.” Another strange phenomenon could be to blame. From time to time overpowering waves of heat from an unknown source are concentrated in specific areas. Figueira, Portugal, suffered one of these mysterious blasts of'heat for two minutes on July 6th, 1949. The temperature soared to 158 degrees. Hundreds of people collapsed in the streets, while thousands of chickens and ducks keeled over dead, and the Mondego River dried up suddenly in several places, killing countless fish, We don't understand this phenomenon at all, and it is possible that even more intense heat waves of this type have occurred in the past. The followers of Agrest were not about to accept such mundane explanations for the vitrification of Baalbek, however. A young astronomer, Dr Carl Sagan, presented a paper before the American Rocket Society on November 15th 1962, in which he repeated Professor Agrest's speculations and urged that ancient myths and legends be re-examined for possible clues to an early visit by an extraterrestrial -civilization. Other researchers scoured the ancient records of India and found things such as the Mahabharata, a document dating back more than three thousand years, which describes a ‘blazing missile* that hurtled out of the sky into the midst of an attacking army, producing 'a radiance of smokeless fire' which flattened chariots, ignited forests, boiled rivers, and produced dark clouds of death. All of this sounded uneasily like an atomic attack. In the Mausala Parva, another ancient historical account, there is a vivid description of some kind of death-dealing ray which began as a small, bright glow, grew into a shaft of brilliant light, and then consumed its target. This phenomenon was accompanied by violent winds, peals of thunder in cloudless skies, and earth tremors. Terrible rakshasas, shaped There are legends describing how the planet was once bathed in