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The evidence reviewed thus far does indicate that this planet was once occupied by a single great
culture or a series of intertwining cultures which possessed secrets of engineering and stone
building beyond anything known by the ancient Minoans, Romans, had Britons. They
constructed their monuments in isolated places, such as the islands of northern Scotland, the
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Our anthropologists and archaeologists have been struggling to uncover and understand the
history of the past four thousand years. They have steadfastly refused to consider the possibility
that mankind may be only the latest race to infest the Earth, that other races and other
civilizations may have thrived here and died here. One of the increasingly popular themes in
science fiction is the notion that an earlier super-race built space ships and sent their members off
to visit the stars. Now those space travellers are returning to home base in their flying saucers,
and they're looking around in unhappy confusion, asking, "Where did everybody go? Who are all
these pitiful little ants shooting at each other?’
Alfred Wegener, an obscure German meteorologist, died in 1930 after suffering fifteen years of
ridicule, slander, and contempt at the hands of his peers and colleagues. He was branded a fool
because he believed that the earth once contained two large land masses which had gradually
split up and drifted apart to form the six continents. Every schoolboy who has ever studied a map
of the globe has reached the same tentative conclusion, for the great land masses do seem to
conform like the pieces of a massive jigsaw puzzle. Wege-ner's evidence was a bit more
complicated than that, however. He considered fossils from different continents, climatic
changes, and specific geological formations, such as mountains which seem to display marked
similarities on the different continents. But science was not ready to consider the theory of
continental drift in 1915. It was easier to denounce Wegener, dissect his ideas with more popular
theories, and consign Ms books to the scrap heap. When Wegener died in 1930, his theory
seemed to die with him.
In the late 1950s, the Wegener controversy long forgotten, a new crop of scientists began to
explore the oceans, and new data were fed into computers. Mountain ranges were discovered
under the oceans, laid out in ways which confirmed Wegener's earlier speculations. Almost
overnight the continental drift theory became a new scientific fact. The National Science
Foundation has now committed $5.4 million for new tests and studies. Alfred Wegener may soon
have the last laugh.”
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