The world before ours
It is speculated that civilizations tens or hundreds of millions of years before the appearance of Homo Sapiens may have existed on our own planet. It would therefore have been real alien creatures, perhaps coming from space, perhaps indigenous to the Earth.
We know anything about their appearance: it may be that they were not even based on carbon and water like us, but on silicon and ammonia.
The writer and expert on unusual archaeological finds Joseph R. Jochmans wrote that
"If we take as an average our own physical evolution over the last 18 million years, and our flowering cultural of the last 10,000 years as another average, we find ourselves contemplating the possibility that 250 previous evolutions of intelligent beings have produced 450,000 cycles of pre-existing civilizations, which extend to the bottom of the current geological strata".
In an essay published in the International Journal of Astrobiology Adam Frank, astrophysicist at the University of Rochester, and Gavin Schmidt, director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies pointed out that it would not be possible to find fossils of previous civilizations, just as it would be a difficult task to find ours, despite the abundance of cemeteries and ossuaries.
"The fraction of life that remains fossilized is always extremely small. For example, of all the dinosaurs that ever lived, we have only a few thousand nearly complete specimens left, equivalent to a handful of individual animals every 100,000 years. It is therefore clear that short-lived (so far) species such as Homo Sapiens may not be represented at all in the sample of existing fossils."
The Great Road
In the past, such speculations belonged to the realm of science fiction, and HP Lovecraft was the first narrator to imagine the existence in the very distant past of real aliens, the Great Old Ones, totally unrelated to any other creature. In the short story The Call of Cthulhu (1928), Lovecraft wrote that they were not composed of flesh and blood, nor even made of common matter. Clearly, immaterial beings would not leave fossils.
Likewise, the remains of silicon creatures may appear indistinguishable from ordinary rocks!
If fossils couldn't even be found, all that would remain of eons-old civilizations would be their artifacts, and Frank and Schmidt think it's unlikely to find those, too.
A few years ago, a series of documentaries with the Italian title The Earth after Man was broadcast, which showed how little would be left of us after our disappearance.
The Liberty's Statue and the Empire State Building disintegrate, Los Angeles burns, destroyed by an earthquake, Miami disappears among the waves of the ocean, the sands bury Las Vegas. Animals would return to the wild, setting off on a new evolutionary path, while nuclear, oil and gas plants would spontaneously explode in a planetary holocaust. Yet, some evidence manages to survive deep underground, buried under hundreds of meters or even kilometers of rock, beyond the reach of archaeologists and reachable only by mining companies.
There is even the fascinating hypothesis that certain artificial structures, or even entire cities, were deliberately buried, like today's anti-atomic bunkers or the weapons factories dug into the mountain sides by the Nazis. One of the most surprising statements in this regard is certainly contained in Mary Sutherland's book In Search of Shambhala (available, apparently, only on the Web), which asserts:
"Seismic sonar instruments have identified what we now call “The Great Road”, located many miles below the surface of the Earth. It is a gigantic "ribbon" around the globe, made up of a series of caves. Thousands of meters wide and hundreds thick. This ribbon encircles the Earth horizontally at the Equator and vertically around the Poles. Mobil Oil geologists have found gargantuan underground cities at the two intersections, located beneath the jungles of Ecuador and in an ocean trench off the southern coast of Malaysia. These highly advanced cities, complete with hieroglyphics and pictographs, predate not only dinosaurs but also vertebrates."
This story must be taken with caution, since I confess that I have not been able to find any other information on the matter.
The wall in the mine
But in addition to the multinationals of the extractive industry, even the workers of small mines, assisted by luck, may be able to come across relics of unknown civilizations... and perhaps even machinery that is still in working order. In the book Worlds Before Our Own (1978), mystery writer Brad Steiger recounts that men discovered an artificial wall in a coal mine, two miles underground. One of the miners left a written oath:
"In the year 1928, I, Atlas Almon Mathis, was working in Mine No. 5 located 2 miles north of Heavener, Oklahoma. It was a well, and we were told it went down 2 miles. They lowered us into an elevator, and pumped the air down, it was so deep. The morning after an explosion in room 24, we found some concrete blocks lying on the floor. These blocks were 30 centimeter cubes, and were so smooth and shiny on the outside that all six sides could serve as mirrors. Yet they were full of gravel, because I chipped one with my pickaxe, and it was ordinary concrete inside. As I began to shore up the room, it collapsed; and I barely got by. When I returned after the collapse, I saw that a solid wall of those lustrous blocks was left exposed. About 100 or 150 meters further down our air duct, another miner hit that same wall, or one very similar."
It is not known what was behind the wall. The mine owners ordered everyone to keep their mouths shut. Mathis learned, however, that other miners had found a solid, barrel-shaped block of silver. He also said that in the area of the wall one could hear furious roars, as if an express train was passing a few meters away, and that in those moments the wall shone and became transparent!
In the same year, the mine was inexplicably closed, completely flooded, and today a recycling plant is built on top of it.
The aforementioned Joseph R. Jochmans attributes an age of 325 million years to the wall.
The Soldier's Tale
Atlas Mathis may not have been the only one to stumble upon enigmatic architecture buried at enormous depths. In October 1944, in the midst of World War II, the Czechoslovakian soldier Antonin D. Horak, who had taken refuge in a wounded cave in the Tatra Mountains, wrote in his diary about the discovery of something else that could very well date back to the Great Ancients. His story was first published in the US, in the National Speleological Society News, in March 1965. The cave, he said, was located between the villages of Plavince and Lubocna, in an area about 49.2 degrees north, 20.7 degrees east. Horak was a mining engineer, also graduated in philosophy, and the husband of a geologist; he had managed some mines and traveled all over the world. He was therefore the most suitable person to investigate the mysteries of the underground. The one who dragged him into the cave with other wounded people was a shepherd named Slavek, who had spent his whole life there.
"On the point of leaving us, the man begged us not to go any further into his cave. I accompanied him to collect branches, and he told me that only he had been inside; there was an enormous labyrinth, full of wells he had never wanted to probe, pockets of poisonous air, and even ghosts."
But the wounded desperately needed food.
"The shepherd himself only knew part of the cave. It could have had more than one entrance, or contained hibernating animals. I ruminated on these possibilities while a companion of mine chewed pine bark, imploring me to go find something. And I was not only hungry, but also curious to find out what scared Slavek. I began my journey with a rifle, lantern, torches and ice axe. After about 1 1/2 hours of walking down a long tunnel, I crawled into a hole the size of a barrel. Still on my knees, I was stunned in amazement... there was something like a huge black bullet, embedded in white limestone formations. Catching my breath, I thought it was a bizarre natural wall or curtain of black salt, or ice, or lava. But I was dismayed when I saw that it was the side, smooth as glass, of an apparently artificial structure, set in the rocks on all sides. Its beautiful cylindrical curvature indicated that it was an enormous body, about 25 meters in diameter. Where that structure and the rocks met, great stalagmites and stalactites formed a shimmering frame. The wall was a uniform bluish-black, its material seeming to combine the properties of steel and rubber... the ice ax left no marks and bounced off vigorously. The simple thought of having discovered an artifact the size of a tower, embedded in the rock in the middle of a dark mountain, in a wilderness where there were not even legends of ruins, mines, industries, and covered in ancient rock deposits... was enough to leave you dismayed. Not immediately distinguishable in the 2 to 5 cm thick wall, a fissure 20 to 25 centimeters wide appeared from below, which tapered off and disappeared into the ceiling of the cave. Its edges, left and right, were pitch black and had sharp serrations the size of a fist. I threw a lighted torch into it; it fell and went out with loud pops and hisses. Once I got out and caught my breath, I was fascinated by the whole puzzle and determined to get to the bottom of it. For that day I had had enough, and I had to think of new tactics."
I don't find anything edible, but luckily the shepherd returns with some supplies. Subsequently, by stripping himself and smearing himself with fat, Horak managed to get inside the object through the crack.
"I got away with only a few cuts, I rolled downhill and was stopped by a wall that felt familiar, perfectly smooth and silky like the one outside. My lamp still burned near me, but confused sounds could be heard. Having lit some torches, I saw that I was in a spacious, curved, black cave formed by walls as high as cliffs that intersected to form a tunnel, or rather well, almost vertical, in the shape of a crescent. I cannot describe how dark and eerie that place was, and the endless whispers, and the roaring sounds, the abnormal echoes of my breathing and my movements. The sloping floor I had rolled across was made of solid lime. All those lights together did not reach the point where those walls ended or met. The horizontal distance between the apexes of the concave anterior wall and the convex posterior wall was approximately 8 metres; the curve of the rear wall measured approximately 25 metres. To continue the exploration I needed more light and an ice axe. I left jubilant, in a sort of enchantment mixed with the determination to explore that great, unique, singular structure."
Returning inside the next day, Horak wrote:
"I went directly towards the wall, and slipped my things through the crack. By holding the lamp above a pole, with four torches burning, the upper ends of the structure remained equally dark. I fired two bullets up, parallel to the walls. The detonations caused rumbles like those of an express train, but no impact was visible. Then I fired a projectile at each wall, aiming about 50 feet above, and made great blue-green sparks and explosions so loud that I had to hold my ears between my knees as flames danced wildly. I probed the "floor" with the ice axe, and began digging where the limestone was thinnest, in the horns of the crescent. To the right was dry clay; on the left I came across the teeth of some large animal; I took a canine and a molar, and put the rest back. Digging nearby, I found that the rear wall had, about 1.5 meters below the floor, a vertical, finely grooved, wavy structure. It felt warmer than the smooth surface. I put my lips and my ear to it, and the impression seemed right. I could feel a faint, distant pulsation, like that of a gigantic piston. In between, the floor was too thick for my ice axe."
Again the following day
"I entered the artifact to continue the experiments. Even by joining one pole to another, the lamp failed to shed light on the upper end of those walls. I fired over the illuminated areas; once again, the projectiles sent out huge sparks, with deafening echoes. I shot the back wall with similar effects... sparks, thunder, no shrapnel, but a scar half a finger long, giving off a pungent odor. Then I continued digging into the left moonhorn and saw that the wavy structure extended downward; but in the right horn I found no such surface. I left the well to examine the front wall and its surroundings. Next to the stalactites there were some enamel-like patches which, when scratched, produced a dust too fine to collect without glue. I wanted to obtain a sample of the material of the walls, but even by shooting two bullets into the crack, on the indentations, and hitting them, I only obtained ricochets, a roar of thunder, scars, and the same pungent smell."
The next day
"I sat by the fire to meditate. What was that structure, with walls two meters thick and a shape that did not fit any purpose known today? How far did it sink into the rock? Was there anything else behind the well? What or who had placed it in the mountain? Was there truth in legends about civilizations with magical technologies that rationality could not grasp? I was a practical person, with an academic education, but I had to admit that down there, among those black and velvety cliffs with mathematical curves, I felt in the grip of a strange and sinister power. I could understand that simple but intelligent and practical men like Slavek would sense witchcraft in it, conceal it, and fear that if the thing's existence were ever made known, it would attract armies of tourists, and all the fuss, the galleries and the explosions, the hotels and the commerce, would probably have ruined their honest life in nature."
On the last day in the cave
“I engraved my name on a strip of leather, rolled it over the gold case of my watch, and placed both in a glass bottle. I blocked it with a stone and some clay and deposited the testimony in the artifact. It could have remained there for a long time, perhaps until the structure remained completely hidden behind the curtain of stalactites and stalagmites. Slavek had no children to tell of the mystery of his cave. Within a few decades no one would have known if I hadn't gone back to explore the structure. In that case, I would have brought a group of experts sworn to secrecy: geologists, metallurgists, speleologists. On the way back to my companions, I hid the tunnels that led to the wall; the cave might have entrances that Slavek did not know about, and some accidental discoverer might have dug for “treasures” before he could get a scientific expedition there. Without the detailed diagram of the cave, no one would have been able to find the path to the structure. After the end, I took the animal teeth I had collected from the artifact to a paleontologist in Uzhorod, between Slovakia and Ukraine, and he classified them as belonging to an adult cave bear, Ursus speleus. So I reasoned… the crack was too small; that bear appeared to have fallen into the artifact, which could therefore have a connection to the surface. In the very last days of World War II, on my way to Bohemia, I revisited the place for the last time. I examined the mountainside above the cave and found neither tunnels nor shafts, the supposed links to the artifact. But on those very steep slopes of the Tatra Mountains, landslides could have filled every passage."
After escaping the Nazis, Horak escaped from the Russians, initially taking refuge in Paris, and from 1952 in the United States, where together with his wife he opened a restaurant and taught music and languages. His fantastic story was taken more seriously when Horak confided in a neighbor, a UFO enthusiast, and he got in touch with the most famous ufologist of the time, J. Allen Hynek. «Dr. Hynek and I», says another ufologist and speleologist named Ted Phillips
"copied Horak's diary from 1944. It contained diagrams of the artifact, a map of the cave, a sketch of the mouth, the mountains where it was located the entrance and a drawing of the area in front of the cave entrance, with easily identifiable landmarks. Horak, now in his seventies, even gave us the latitude and longitude of the cave, although without the accuracy of the GPS readings."
Despite funding from the actor Jackie Gleason (who claimed, incidentally, to have seen alien corpses in a military base), the political conditions of the time made it impossible to organize a research expedition, indeed four Czechoslovaks hired as guides were shot by the Russians as spies! Antonin Horak died in 1976.
Finally, in 1998, after the fall of the communist regime, Phillips was able to personally travel to Slovakia and meet local ufologist Robert Lesniakiewicz, who told him an equally formidable story.
"The entire region between Krakow and Zakopane, on what is now the border between Poland and Slovakia, fell to the Nazis on September 6, 1939”
says Phillips.
"Within a week, for reasons never explained, the area was placed under the direct control of the SS, who searched for the entrance to the Crescent Cave in the Tatras, but did not find it. The question is: how did the SS of the Crescent Cave know, a few years before Antonin Horak hid in it? Interestingly, the Russians also initiated an attempt to discover the cave in 1981."
The Nazis were known to trust "esoteric" informants: is it possible that some hint had already been occultly passed down over the millennia? However, in 2001 Phillips seemed to have had better luck: he claimed, after two failed expeditions, that he had located the cave but was unable to go deeper. Until the experts hoped for by Horak arrive on site, the mystery will remain a mystery.
The Death Valley
According to what Russian researcher Valery Uvarov told Nexus Magazine in December 2003-January 2004, other metal structures half-buried in the frozen ground, called "cauldrons", are also scattered in Siberian Yakutia, which could be connected to further underground installations.
The name that the indigenous people gave to the area, of over 100,000 square kilometers, is... Death Valley, just like that of the USA.
"As early as 1853, the explorer R. Maak wrote about “a gigantic cauldron made of copper. Its dimensions are unknown and only the edge is visible above the ground, but trees grow in it...”
In 1936, a merchant named Savvinov discovered a spiral corridor, which led into a number of metal chambers in which spent the night. Even in the harshest frost, the rooms were as warm as summer.
In 1996 another person who visited Death Valley, Mikhail Koretsky from Vladivostok, wrote in the newspaper Trud:
“I have been there three times, the first in 1933, and in all I have seen seven of these cauldrons. All of them left me totally perplexed: first of all, due to their size... between 6 and 9 meters in diameter. Secondly, they were made of some strange metal. Everyone wrote that they were made of copper, but I'm sure it wasn't copper. The metal does not crack or give in to hammering, and it was covered in a layer of some unknown material that resembles sandpaper. We did not come across any shafts leading down into underground chambers. But six of us also spent the night in one of the cauldrons."
Koretsky also noted that when he visited a “cauldron” a second time, in the intervening few years it had perceptibly sunk into the ground.
According to local legends, the "cauldrons" were surrounded by strange and abnormally lush vegetation. Those who stayed in a "cauldron" for too long lost their hair and contracted a lethal disease... all symptoms that today would be said to be caused by exposure to radioactivity.
Finally, in December 2007, the Fortean Times magazine published an article by a certain Ivan Mackerle, who, with some adventure companions, had personally gone to the site to investigate. Unlike his predecessors, Mackerle did an aerial reconnaissance, and I claim he actually found something unusual.
"In the middle of a monotonous landscape there was a strange circle. With the help of a computer and images from Google Earth, we determined the exact coordinates of the bizarre circle. It was not the smooth protruding hemisphere we had expected, but a round lagoon about 50 meters wide. At its center was a circular patch of land, approximately 30 meters in diameter. It didn't feel natural; it was a ring with a central opening, also flooded with water. Under snow and a thin layer of slush, a rod struck something solid. It could have been an enormous "cauldron", now almost sunk into the frozen ground? The snow melted and we were lucky once again. A few kilometers further downstream, we found another similar place. In a perfectly circular pool, this time only 10 meters in diameter, stood a smooth, solid, gigantic and slightly curved dome, covered by a layer of mud. Again with the help of a rod, we probed its shape, but we lacked the equipment to expose it. We would have had to drain the water and remove the mud... and for that we would have needed a better equipped and financed expedition. Then, unexpectedly, after spending the night near the submerged "cauldron", we were struck by unusual health problems. The next day, I was suddenly overcome with dizziness, faintness, complete loss of balance, coughing and chills… just as the old legends of Yakutia warned. I could not stand, my vision went blurry, and I became unable to eat or drink anything. When my condition did not improve the next day, we fled Death Valley as fast as we could."
To date, there is no news of further findings.
