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THE CONTROVERSY Over "THE MysTERIOUS ORIGINS OF MAN' CONTROVERSY OVER THE "THE MYSTERIOUS ORIGINS OF MaN' Archaeological evidence for humanity having an extremely ancient history on this planet has been condemned as being dangerous to established scientific belief. The following is the text of a talk given by Michael Cremo at the Ancient Astronaut Society World Conference in Orlando, Florida, USA, on 8 August 1997. n February 1996 my book, Forbidden Archeology, was featured in an NBC television special called The Mysterious Origins of Man. It was produced and directed by Bill Cote and his associates. This television program was seen by tens of millions of peo- ple in the United States, and it inspired an extremely emotional, negative response from the scientific world which was shocked by the program's documentation of evidence for extreme human antiquity. The nature of this response says a lot about mainstream science. We are normally taught that scientists are not attached to any particular theory and are always ready to change their ideas when confronted with new evidence. But the reaction of mainstream science to The Mysterious Origins of Man demonstrates this is not always true. Before analysing the scientific responses to The Mysterious Origins of Man, | want to place all of this in context, showing the relationship of the show's archaeological evidence to the ancient astronaut hypothe According to standard scientific ideas, humans like ourselves appeared fairly recently on this planet, about 100,000 years ago. Before that, there would have been only more ape-like human ancestors which came into existence four to five million years ago. The first primitive apes and monkeys would have come into existence about 40 or 50 million years ago, and life itself arose two or three billion years ago. We are told that all of the physical evidence ever discovered by scientists supports this scenario. But in my book, Forbidden Archeology (co-authored with Richard Thompson), I docu- ment hundreds of cases showing that human beings like ourselves have existed on this planet for two or three billion years. This is consistent with the historical accounts found in the ancient Sanskrit writings of India. As a member of the Bhaktivedanta Institute (the science studies branch of the International Society for Krishna Consciousness), I have carefully studied these texts for over 20 years and have found they provide many accurate clues to the true story of human origins and antiquity. I will not give a detailed account of the archaeological evidence presented in Forbidden Archeology. 1 talked about that at the last world conference in Berne, Switzerland. Today I want to focus on how this evidence relates to the ancient astronaut hypothesis. If, as the evidence indicates, human beings have existed on this planet for over two bil- lion years, this rules out any Darwinian evolutionary explanation for human origins that is current today. In my opinion, this means we have to look toward an extraterrestrial expla- nation for our presence here on Earth. The ancient Sanskrit writings of India speak not only about an ancient human presence on this planet. They also speak about humanoid creatures from other parts of the universe who travelled in spacecraft known as vimana. In the Bhagavata Purana, also known as the Shrimad Bhagavatam, we are told that once Shiva and Parvati were sitting in an assembly of sages when King Chitraketu flew overhead in his vimana, on a voyage from another planet. It is interesting to note that Shiva and his consort Parvati are considered gods, whereas King Chitraketu, who was engaged in interplanetary travel in his vimana, was a human, originally from Earth. In other words, the ancient Sanskrit texts make a clear distinction between space-travelling humans and gods. This is relevant to the ancient astronaut hypothesis, which in one form suggests that all accounts of gods in ancient writings represent the attempts of ancient peoples to translate by Michael A. Cremo © 1997 Research Associate in History and Philosophy of Science Bhaktivedanta Institute 9701 Venice Blvd #5 Los Angeles, CA 90034, USA Telephone: (310) 837 5283 Fax: (310) 837 1056 E-mail: mcremo@compuserve.com JUNE - JULY 1998 NEXUS - 67