ANCIENT FLYING MACHINES OR AEROPLANES !!

ANCIENT AEROPLANES

Flight has been the dream of mankind since they watched in awe as birds flew effortlessly through the sky.  But it was not until 1780 that two Frenchmen achieved lighter-than-air flight when they were lifted into the air in a hot air balloon near Paris.  It was not until the Wright brothers made their first successful manned flights at Kitty Hawk in 1903 that powered flight became a reality with the invention of manned aeroplane.

Some researchers believe there are evidences to suggest that humans achieved flight earlier in history - much earlier... so early, they say, that the knowledge of this technology has been lost and ancient stories that recount adventures of human flight have been relegated only to myth.

Is it possible that humans developed the technology to fly in early civilizations - or in civilizations that are now lost to history?

The Wright brothers demonstrated on December 17, 1903, that it was possible for a ‘manned heavier than air machine' to fly. But, in 1895, eight years earlier, the Sanskrit scholar, Shivkar Bapuji Talpade, had designed a basic aircraft called Marutsakthi (meaning Power of Air) based on Vedic technology and had it take off unmanned before a large audience in the Chowpathy beach of Bombay.  The importance of the Wright brothers lies in the fact, that it was a manned flight for a distance of 120 feet and Orville Wright became the first man to fly.  But Talpade’s unmanned aircraft flew to a height of 1500 feet before crashing down and the historian Evan Koshtka has described Talpade as the ‘first creator of an aircraft.’  We, the Indians, forgot this great Indian, the first creator of an aircraft.

Shivkar Bapuji Talpade was a scholar of Sanskrit and from his young age and was attracted by the Vaimanika Sastra (Aeronautical Science) expounded by the great Indian sage Maharishi Bhardwaja.  One western scholar of Indology, Stephen-Knapp, has put in simple words or rather has tried to explain what Talpade did and succeeded!

According to Stephen Knapp, the controversial text known as Vimaanika Shastra, said to be written by Maharshi Bharadwaja, also describes in detail the construction of what is called the mercury vortex engine, which is the forerunner of the ion engines being made today by NASA.  This is the Vedic Ion engine that is propelled by the use of mercury. Such an engine was built by Shivkar Bapuji Talpade, based on descriptions in the Rig-veda, which he demonstrated in Mumbai (Bombay), India in 1895.  Stephen Knapp adds that additional information on the mercury engines used in the vimanas can be found in the ancient Vedic text called the Samarangana Sutradhara. This text also devotes 230 verses to the use of these machines in peace and war.  The Indologist William Clarendon, who has written down a detailed description of the mercury vortex engine in his translation of Samaranga Sutradhara quotes thus "Inside the circular air frame, place the mercury-engine with its electric/ultrasonic mercury boiler at the bottom center. By means of the power latent in the mercury which sets the driving whirlwind in motion, a man sitting inside may travel a great distance in the sky in a most marvelous manner. Four strong mercury containers must be built into the interior structure. When those have been heated by controlled fire from iron containers, the vimana develops thunder-power through the mercury. At once it becomes like a pearl in the sky."

Not only do these texts contain directions on how to make such engines, but they also have been found to contain flight manuals, aerial routes, procedures for normal and forced landings, instructions regarding the condition of the pilots, clothes to wear while flying, the food to bring and eat, spare parts to have, metals of which the craft needs to be made, power supplies, and so on.  Other texts also provide instructions on avoiding enemy craft, how to see and hear what occupants are saying in enemy craft, how to become invisible, and even what tactics to use in case of collisions with birds. Some of these vimanas not only fly in the sky, but can also maneuver on land and fly into the sea and travel underwater.

There are many ancient Vedic texts that describe or contain references to these vimanas, including the Ramayana, Mahabharata, Rig-veda, Yajur-veda, Atharva-veda, the Yuktilkalpataru of Bhoja (12^th century A.D.), the Mayamatam (attributed to the architect Maya), plus other classic Vedic texts like the Satapathya Brahmana, Markandeya Purana, Vishnu Purana, Bhagavata Purana, the Harivamsa, the Uttararamcarita, the Harsacarita, the Tamil text Jivakacintamani, and others. From the various descriptions in these writings, we find vimanas in many different shapes, including that of long cigars, blimp-like, saucer-shapes, triangular, and even double-decked with portholes and a dome on top of a circular craft.  Some are silent, some belch fire and make noise, some have a humming noise, and some disappear completely.

However, many of the Vedic texts do describe interplanetary travel.  So even if these space machines are from some other planet, they may be using the same principles of propulsion that have already been described in the universal Vedic literature.

Egyptian Aeroplane:

There are lots and lots of evidences that the ancient man knew about flying objects.  In 1898, in Saqquara, Egypt, archeologists have found an object which looks like a bird, but is not a bird.  It is estimated from about 200 BCE.  As aeroplane was not known at that time, it was marked as "wooden bird model."  It was rediscovered by Dr. Khalil Messiha.  The striking thing that makes it different from a bird is the tail, which is vertical instead of horizontal.  Since Egyptians were so well in carvings that it is impossible to make such a mistake (vertical tail of a bird).  The tipping of wings is downward, a reversedihedral wing.  A similar type of curving wings are implemented on the Concorde airplane, giving the plane a maximum lift without detracting from its speed.

In that context, it seems rather incredible that someone, more than 2,000 years ago, for any reason, devised a model of a flying device with such advanced features, requiring quite extensive knowledge of aerodynamics.  It is also necessary to point out that Egyptians are known to have nearly always made scale-models of projects and objects which they planned to create or build.

Precolombian Aeroplane:

Gold trinkets were found in an area covering Central America and coastal areas of South America, estimated to belong to a period between 500 and 800 CE, but since they are made from gold, accurate dating is impossible and based essentially on stratigraphy which may be deceptive. However, we can safely say that these gold objects are more than 1000 years old.  These are not made up of wood but of gold, which meant that they were sacred objects -- possibly connected with "the gods."  Some archaeologists have repeatedly found these small trinkets which they termed "insects," buried with their former owners in a variety of Central and South American tombs.  In truth, the objects far more resemble the wooden Egyptian model found at Saqqara.

Erich von Daniken  -- author of the 70's best seller, "Chariots of the Gods?" -- who first suggested that these "gold insects" (some with delta-shaped wings) did not resemble true insects at all; I mean, what insects come with an unmistakable vertical stabilizer?!

These "insects," in fact, do look far more like some kind of manufactured, technological artifacts -- like, in fact, "miniature jet fighters!" -- than anything from the zoological kingdom here on Earth.

The structures just in front of the tail are strongly reminiscent of elevons (a combination of ailerons and elevators) with a slight forward curve, but they are attached to the fuselage, rather than the wings. In any case, they look more like airplane parts than like the claspers of a fish. If the two prominent spirals on the wings are supposed to be a stylized version of the eyes of a ray, then what are the two globular objects positioned on the head supposed to represent?

To complicate the identification even more, the spirals on the wings have their copies positioned on the nose of the object, in the opposite direction. When the object is viewed in profile, the dissimilarity to anything from the animal kingdom is even more pronounced. If the zoomorphic explanation is supposed to hold, then why did the artist cut the head off almost three quarters from the body? And why is the nose is practically rectangular and the cut tilted forward, with eyes positioned at either side, when fish eyes are usually more near the center of bodyline and far forward on the head?

What we can make of the semicircular grooves on the inside of the cut? What is it supposed to be—fishwise? And what about the scoop, forward and under the cut? It is a scoop, not just a ridge for drilling a hole through to place the object on a necklace chain. Then there is another rectangular feature, positioned further back at the approximate center of gravity under the fuselage.

The wings when viewed from the side are perfectly horizontal, but when seen from the front, they curve slightly downward. The elevators, which are right behind the wings, are positioned on a slightly higher horizontal level and are square-ended, thus a definite geometric shape. Above them is another rectangular shape, with a relief which may be reminiscent of knobs. The tail is equally intriguing. No fish has only a single, upright and perpendicular flange. But this tail fin has an exact shape of fins on modern airplanes. There are also some markings on the tail which are hard to identify, but it does not seem to be anything related to animals, either.

When all the features are taken into an account, the object does not look like a representation of any known animal at all, but does look astonishingly like an airplane.

Peter Belting approached the problem from a "hands on" point of view: he actually built scaled-up (but otherwise precise) models of the ostensibly "miniature aircraft"  - and then attached propellers and jet engines, and they flew.

Therefore, flying like a bird is something that the ancient people knew of; however, knowledge of this technology has been lost and ancient stories that recount adventures of human flight have been relegated only to myth.  Maybe, it is not that the ancient people knew how to build an aeroplane, it may be that they have seen some flying objects which they just tried to copy or make models of.

The mystery remains…..