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existed. Dr. Thomas Gold, Professor of Astronomy at Cornell University, was quoted recently as saying: "Life may have been initiated and spread by space travelers who visited earth a billion years ago. From their abandoned microbiological garbage, forms of life proliferated into intelligent beings." It has also been hypothesized that the famed "missing-link" which lies between the highest anthropoid and the lowest human being will never be found because it has never existed. Mankind's first parents, according to this theory, might have been a marooned party of space travelers. This may sound like the old science-fiction chestnut, but sober scientists have begun to talk very seriously about that oft-used plot as being a very real possibility worthy of intelligent discussion. As an alternate theory, some scientists have enlivened another familiar fictional gimmick, that of the earlier, advanced civilization that fled this planet for another to escape some impending disaster, such as the sinking of their continent or the advent of an ice age. The legends of Atlantis and other lost continents have lingered in man's collective store of myths for centuries. Perhaps, some scientists are suggesting, there is more than a little truth in the legends that an ultra-sophisticated civilization flourished on this planet thousands of years ago. Dr. Sagan told his fellow astronomers at the meeting of the American Astronautical Society that the best place to look for evidence of other technical civilizations on other planets in this or other galaxies would be right here on earth. As a physical substantiation to the theories espoused by Dr. Sagan and other exiobiologists and astronomers, consider the gold thread that was found embedded in eight feet of rock near Rutherford Mills, England on June 22, 1844 or the iron nail that was discovered in a block of stone in the Kingoodie Quarry in North Britain the same year. Geological formations, in which the hand- or machine-crafted artifacts were found, date from the Paleocene epoch - 50,000,000 years before man, as we know him, A length of gold thread and an iron nail - are they clues to visitors from outer space who arrived and settled or explored the earth millions of years before civilized man appeared on this planet? Archeologists insist that there are no traces of man with any rudiments of sophistication before 7000 B.C. Man had not perfected the fashioning of elementary tools until 4000 B.C. How then does anyone explain the thread and the nail (and there have been other such "artifacts") found in rock strata at least 60,000,000 years old?