By Thomas Horn

When news came across the wire recently that police officers in several Illinois counties witnessed an unidentified flying object the size of a three-story house, and that one of them had snapped a Polaroid of the triangular object, I sat up an took notice. Unlike many UFO buffs, law enforcement personnel are credible, trained observers. The FBI and the National Institute for Discovery Science are following up on the as yet undetermined phenomenon. As a Christian researcher and author of two books on the New Age, I find the increasing regularity of UFO sightings prophetically intriguing. This is because a growing doctrine within the New Age Movement claims that the gods of mythology and the human race as we know it today, is the direct result of extra-terrestrial "UFO" activity.

In the introduction to his best selling book, Chariots of the Gods, Erich von Daniken, who, it might be argued, is one of the fathers of the New Age Movement as it relates to ufology, said: I claim that our forefathers received visits from the universe in the remote past, even though I do not yet know who these extra-terrestrial intelligences were or from which planet they came. I nevertheless proclaim that these "strangers" annihilated part of mankind existing at the time and produced a new, perhaps the first, homo sapiens.

As was illustrated in the Hollywood films Contact, and Close Encounters Of The Third Kind, Erich von Daniken's hypothesis took America by storm in the 1960's with the proposition that mankind was possibly the offspring of an ancient, perhaps ongoing, extra-terrestrial experiment. New Age ufologists like Daniken also see the gods of mythology as evidence of, and a reaction to, an encounter with other worldly beings. They claim that ancient men would have considered space travelers as gods and would have recorded their arrival, their experiments, and their departure, in hieroglyphs, megaliths, and stone tablets, as a "supernatural" encounter between gods and men...

Ancient Astronauts Flaming Shields, Chariots of the Gods Flying Saucers, Spacesuits, Delta Wing Jets and Ray Guns depicted on everything from cave walls to ancient Egyptian temples - all surviving eyewitness accounts of UFO sightings in our most ancient past. Reports of unidentified flying objects appear even in our most ancient historical records. For anyone looking at the most ancient primitive cave drawings and petraglyphs.  it seems impossible now to take them for anything other than technology. Could travelers from outer space have visited this planet long ago? Could our ancestors have settled this planet as space colonists? Will our neighbors reveal themselves, when we are ready?

Carved in Stone: The ancient world occasionally speaks to us of strange things that the primitive people of the time attributed to The Gods. From the Nazca Lines of Peru to ancient aircraft of Egypt and India known as Vimanas; from the enigmatic and symbolic petraglyphs of Ancient America to the pantheons of European and Mediterranean gods; nearly every ancient culture, on every continent yet explored - it seems that every civilization in the world was at one time or another touched by beings from above. As mankind evolves and advances in technology, we are now becoming somewhat familiar with many of the things that obviously impressed our ancestors.

 We know that we are not gods, but what would ancient peoples think of most of the things we take for granted today? Would your ability to read evoke jealousy from their most revered scholars? Would a disposable lighter or ball point pen get you burned as a witch? And what would they make of your palm pilot - or for that matter, a harmonica? The two figures depicted in rock-art at Val Comonica, in Northern Italy (above right) easily appear to modern observers to be a literal and accurate representation of modern astronauts. Their bulky suits come complete with space helmets, and each are holding decives of some sort; one of their tools even looking remarkably like a sextant...

By. Prashant Solomon

While the UFO phenomenon may have gained popularity in the second half of the 20th Century, there have been many cases documented that indicate that the phenomenon may actually have occured often over the centuries. While one of the more famous ancient UFO sightings could have been the possible sighting in the first chapter of Ezekiel, that was certainly not the only reference to strange flying objects. There have been many references to flying objects or vehicles in the Mahabharata and also various historical paintings over the centuries that clearly indicate that people of that time had either seen or heard of some kind of saucer-shaped craft. In many cases, the depictions in the paintings even suggest some kind of deep-rooted relationship between UFOs and religion.

Ezekiel Chapter 1 says "Behold, a whirlwind came out of the north, a great cloud, and a fire infolding itself, and a brightness was about it, and out of the midst thereof as the color of amber, out of the midst of the fire. Also out of the midst thereof came the likeness of four living creatures. And this was their appearance; the had the likeness of a man. And every one had four faces, and every one had four wings." It also speaks of how these living creatures had wheels and how when they "were lifted up from Earth, the wheels were lifted up also." This account was written six hundred years before Christ. The Greeks and Romans have also written about such things like phantom chariots appearing in the night sky. During the reign of Charlemagne, there were many accounts of "tyrants of the air, and their aerial ships." Charlemagne was so concerned at these reports that those reporting these phenomenon were put to death. There is another case reported in the year 1270 from Bristol, England. A spaceship was seen, which landed and an occupant came down from a ladder and was suffocated in the Earth's atmosphere. No account however, of what happened to the occupant's body, or the spaceship...

On July 11, 1991, an unidentified flying object was sighted by thousands of people in Mexico City during a solar eclipse. Labeled as the largest mass UFO sighting in history, the event was captured by hundreds of people who pointed their camcorders at the eclipse. The event, which gained extensive media coverage in Mexico, was even used for the top story of Mexico's version of "60 Minutes." Since so many people had seen the strange aircraft hovering in the sky and hundreds of hours of film footage of the craft was recorded, there is an extremely high chance that advanced alien cultures are really visiting the earth. Therefore, if advanced alien civilizations are visiting us now, is there a possibility that they could have visited the earth thousands of years ago? According to a few clues scattered throughout the world, alien beings could have very likely visited the earth long ago. One clue of an ancient alien visitation is found in paintings from ancient cultures that depict strange humanoid creatures. In addition, physical evidence of an ancient alien vistation is seen in artifacts from around the world that show a use of modern technology. Furthermore, ancient markings made on fields, which indicate the use of air travel, are another set of clues that show the earth could have been visited by aliens long ago.

The most obvious clues to an extraterrestrial visit long ago are found in the drawings of ancient cultures. One such drawing is located inside a cave in Kimberly Mountain, a peak on the western side of Australia. Haunting the surface of the cave walls are paintings of several beings with round heads and huge black eyes. Calling the figures in the paintings the Wondjina, the Aborigines consider the beings extremely sacred. The Wondjina, originally drawn in some period between ten thousand to thirty thousand years ago, bear little resemblance to any known earth creature. However, the Wondjina slightly resemble the gray type of aliens reported today by alleged alien abductees. The Wondjina and the Grays look similiar because they both have large, black eyes and a pear-shaped head. Therefore, it is possible that the Wondjina are actually aliens seen by the Aborigines a long time ago. In the Sahara desert, another strange figure painted on the wall of a cave, the "Great Martian God", is located in the Tassili mountains. It was called the "Great Martian God" because it resembled Martians found in comic books. Discovered by Henri Lhote on an expedition after World War II into the mountains, the Martian, along with similiar nearby drawings depicting space men are drawn in a much larger scale than the nearby drawings of people, animals, and ones of Egyptian influence.

John Michell writes in his book, The Flying Saucer Vision: The Holy Grail Restored, that the most striking feature of the Martian and the similiar figures were their round, inhuman heads. Michell describes the beings' heads as if "they are wearing some sort of globular helmet like a diver's." A helmet, a necessity for human space explorers to walk in space, would come in handy for an alien space traveler. Space travel, by the way, is a part of a Hopi legend; the Hopi are a once pueblo-building Native American culture living in Arizona and New Mexico. One of their petroglyphs, called the "Star- blower", tells a story of how the Hopi's ancestors had visited various worlds and traveled through endless space before reaching Earth. The petroglyph, containing several strange, unearthly figures, are very inexplicable to understand for people outside the tribe. Although the Hopi leaders are reluctant to share the details of the legend, the petroglyphs, nevertheless, show strange, possibly alien, beings performing an extraordinary ritual. The paintings of ancient cultures are not the only evidence of a potential extraterrestrial visit in the past; artifacts also give clues about a possible ancient visit by aliens...