Nexus - 0402 - New Times Magazine-pages

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THE TWILIGHT ZONE 13,000-YEAR-OLD MESSAGE FROM ORBITING SPACESHIP? The big star, Alpha Bootis, or Arcturus, is one of the fastest moving stars in our skies. It has an angular motion of 2.29 seconds of arc per year in a south-west direction, and its position in the sky moves by an apparent diameter of the Moon in only 800 years. According to Lunan, Arcturus now appears to us about seven degrees apart from where it appears on the chart, which means that the map could have been established and transmitted 11,000 years They started retransmitting the Earth signals, with various intervals represent- ing a code and the code representing a map of the constellation of Bootes with the star Izar at the centre. For me, however, the most extraordi- nary and the most controversial part of the story is not so much the constellation map as the intervals between the different signals from the alien spacecraft. These intervals are always an exact number of seconds of time—and, as you know, our second of time is supposed to be a human invention. Up to now, the Sumerians have been credited with the fantastic idea of dividing the solar day into 86,400 equal parts they called sec- onds. In other words, these alien astronauts from a distant planet in outer space, who had been orbiting our planet in a space- craft for 13,000 years, knew from the very beginning that the human race divid- ed the solar day into 86,400 seconds of time. And how could they know it unless they made the division themselves, and landed on the Earth to teach the humans how to use the second to measure the passing of time? (Extracted with permission from Our Cosmic Ancestors, by Maurice Chatelain, published by Temple Golden Publications, Sedona, Arizona, USA, 1988.) France, Germany, Norway and Holland noticed a strange phenome- non. When they transmitted a series of signals in all directions, they received two series of echoes instead of one. Normal echoes, after circling the Earth by bounc- ing several times on the ionosphere, always came back after a normal delay of one-seventh of one second. On the contrary, abnormal echoes always came back after an interval vary- ing from three to 15 seconds, as if they had bounced from some object located at a distance from Earth of 450,000 to 2,250,000 kilometres, but always a little bit farther than the Moon. As usual, this discovery was kept as secret as possible, and after several years it was even completely forgotten. Then a few years ago, a young Scottish astronomer by the name of Duncan Lunan had a bright idea. He thought that these signals could very well have come from an alien spaceship orbiting the Earth at about the same distance as the Moon, and that the variable intervals between the transmission of signals and reception of echoes might represent an intelligent, coded message representing geometric figures or even the map of a constellation, as Bracewell had already suggested in 1968. With the usual television technique of so many dots per line and so many lines per frame, Lunan transferred the various intervals on a chart as he would have done on a television screen. He then suc- cessively obtained several different draw- ings of the same constellation, with dif- ferent orientations but with the same star always at the centre. As Lunan says in his book, Man and the Stars (Souvenir Press, London, 1974), as an astronomer it did not take him long to recognise the constellation as that of Bootes, and the star as Epsilon Bootis— which our ancestors called Izar, and which is located at about 103 light-years or 975 million million km from the Earth. One of Lunan's important discoveries was that the configuration of the Bootes constellation shown on his charts was not exactly the same as that which we can see today from the Earth, and he found an explanation. [ 1928, European radio operators in ago. However, Arcturus does not move with a constant apparent velocity, and, taking an average of only two seconds of arc per year, we obtain a date of 12,600 years ago—which corresponds to those of the other stars of the same constellation. As a consequence, assuming there is an alien spacecraft presently orbiting the Earth, it arrived in its present position about 13,000 years ago; and, after observ - ing the configuration of their native con- stellation of Bootes as they saw it from their orbit around the Earth at that time, the astronauts on board have been contin- uously transmitting signals since then, waiting for human astronomers to become intelligent enough to understand them. Finally, around 1900, the first radio sig- nals were transmitted from Earth by Marconi, Tesla and others—and the Izarian astronauts knew they were now in business. HUNTER~GATHERER Don'T MAKE A SOUND j AND HAND ME MY SALE | | ES NUMBER SIX CAN-OfEMER " fae TaN ie ere "eH re ce cS roa E NEXUS - 75 FEBRUARY - MARCH 1997