- An enigma with which I dealt extensively in Worlds Before
Our Own has to do with what appear to be humanoid footprints which are
found widely scattered in the geologic strata suggestive of a quarter
of a billion years ago. This "What's-it That Walked Like a Human"
left shoe prints, sandal prints, and barefoot prints on sands of time
that have long since hardened into rock. An early ancestor of our own
species is supposed to have evolved only in the late Tertiary period and
is therefore only about one million years old, but fossilized humanlike
footprints have been found in rocks from the Carboniferous period to the
Cambrian period, thus offering mute, but dramatic, testimony that some
bipedal creatures were walking about from 250 million to 500 million years
ago.
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- The fossil tracks of both bare and shod feet of a decidedly
humanoid impression have been found in sites ranging from Virginia and
Pennsylvania, through Kentucky, Illinois, Missouri, Utah, Oklahoma, and
Texas. The prints give every evidence of having been made by human feet
at a time when the rocks were soft mud or pliant sand.
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- Although the discovery of these footprints in the stones
of time are hardly rare or recent occurrences, geologists, archaeologists,
and anthropologists by and large refuse to accept such fossil evidence
at face value because to do so would be to acknowledge that humans or
some other bipedal humanoid or hominid creature lived in the earliest
years of hypothetical evolutionary history.
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- This bipedal creature with humanlike stride presents
a riddle which has scientists scratching their heads. By any stretch of
the evolutionary timeline, the footprints simply could not have been
made by humans.
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- As early as January, 1940, Albert C. Ingalls, wrote of
such enigmatic footprints and described them as the "carboniferous
mystery" in an issue of Scientific American, As he postulated, "If
man, or even his ape ancestor, or even that ape ancestor's early mammalian
ancestor, existed as far back as in the Carboniferous Period in any shape,
then the whole science of geology is so completely wrong that all the
geologists will resign their jobs and take up truck driving. Hence, for
the present, science rejects the attractive explanation that man made
those mysterious prints in the mud of the Carboniferous Period with his
feet."
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- Perhaps the evolutionists have been looking up the wrong
family tree when they conduct their endless search for the Missing Link.
Why could we not have had two or more Genesis stories on this planet?
Maybe our first "Adam" was a bi-pedal amphibian that emerged
from the Paleozoic swamps and pressed a foot that bore a heel and five
toes on the pliant mud and sand. The shoeprints? Well, our Amphibious
Eve would not have wanted to walk around barefooted forever.
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- These footprints, shoeprints, and sandal prints were
made more than 250 million years ago. That is a great deal of time for
evolutionary trial and error. If our own species has evolved in a little
over a million years, there has certainly been more than enough time to
have had more than Creation Story on this planet.
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- If an intelligent species of amphibian had evolved, they
would, indeed, have been remarkably effective creatures. They could have
the best of two worlds, land and sea. They could hibernate for long periods
of time, whenever necessary; and, of course, they would be naturally long-lived
and might well have survived into the Age of Reptiles, thereby becoming
responsible for those mysterious footprints in the same strata as the
dinosaur tracks.
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- In the early 1980s, Dale Russell and Ron Seguin of Canada's
National Museum of Natural Sciences at Ottawa, created an imaginative
model of a humanoid dinosaur. The February 1982 issue of Discover told
how Russell's and Seguin's project had begun as a life-sized reconstruction
of Stenonychosaurus inequalis, a small, meat-eating dinosaur that had
lived near the close of the Age of Reptiles. Russell and Seguin decided
to take the exercise a few steps farther. Using Stenonychosaurus as the
model, they fashioned a creature that might have evolved, rather than
dying out with the rest of the dinosaurs, sixty-five million years ago.
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- The result was a strikingly manlike four-and-a-half-foot
creature that Russell called a "dinosauroid." It has a large
brain, green skin, and yellow, reptilian eyes, and is said by its creators
to be based on scientific speculation, not pure fantasy.
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- Nature has a way of filling unoccupied ecological niches
with whatever evolutionary lines are available, and Russell reasons that
if the mammals had not been around to evolve into intelligent beings
through the primate line, the reptiles might have done it instead.
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- "There is a trend in evolution toward increasing
brain size," Russell said, and the trend includes dinosaurs as well
as mammals. Stenonychosaurus had a good start, Russell believes, because
it had a relatively large brain and eyes with overlapping visual fields.
It also walked on two legs, and it may have had a partially opposable
"thumb" on its three-clawed hand.
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- If we entertain my thesis that there has been more than
enough time on this planet for intelligent amphibians or reptiles to evolve
then it was those entities who were responsible for all those footprints
and shoe prints in strata indicative of 250 million years old and older.
And perhaps it was also they who evolved into the highly advanced prehistoric
cultures and civilizations that created a science capable of turning desert
sand into patches of fused green glass or of vitrifying hill forts and
stone walls. They may have developed nuclear power or some other deadly
abuse of natural energy that could destroy ancient cities by what appeared
to have been extreme heat--far beyond that which could have been scorched
by the torches of primitive armies or caused by volcanoes, by lightning,
or by crashing comets.
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- The old traditions of nearly every culture speak of a
war between the forces of light and darkness which raged in humankind's
prehistory. Whether such a conflict occurred in the destruction of that
world before our own that we remember in our species' collective unconscious
as some ideal civilization such as Atlantis or whether the struggle took
place between rival forces, there exists awesome evidence throughout our
planet that someone was exercising power of formidable energy.
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- It has seemed to me for years now that many of the UFO
occupants that have been reported by contactees or abductees are reptilian
or amphibian humanoids. Beginning in the 1960s, I participated in the
hypnotic regression of a number of men and women who claimed to have
been abducted for brief periods of time by crew members from UFOs. These
contactees claimed to have been given some kind of medical examination;
and in some instances, we were able to observe peculiar punctures and
markings in their flesh.
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- From 1966 to the present day, I have interviewed large
numbers of witnesses who claimed to have seen UFO occupants in the vicinity
of mysterious craft that had been set down in pastures, meadows, and
forest lands. These men and women said that they had been able to get
a good look at the entities, who were often engaged in such tasks as digging
in the soil, clipping leaves from bushes, or taking samples of water.
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- In the greatest number of these encounters, the entities
being observed were described as standing about five feet tall and dressed
in one-piece, tight-fitting jumpsuits.
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- Their skin was gray or grayish green, and hairless.
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- Their faces were dominated by large eyes, very often
with snakelike, slit pupils.
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- They had no discernable lips, just straight lines for
mouths. They seldom were described as having noses, just little snubs
if at all; but usually the witness saw only nostrils nearly flush against
the smooth face.
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- Sometimes a percipient mentioned pointed ears, but on
many occasions commented on the absence of noticeable ears on the large,
round head. And, repeatedly, the witnesses described an insignia of a
flying serpent on a shoulder patch, a badge, a medallion, or a helmet.
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- Almost without exception, those men and women who have
encountered entities associated with UFOs have said that the sounds the
entities made were suggestive of whistles, humming, chirps, musical notes--all
uttered in a birdlike, singsong manner.
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- For the May 1982 issue of Omni magazine, paleontologist
Dale Russell made a few additional speculations about their "dinosaur
man." For example, Russell stated that they could have given the
dinosauroid ears, since they are proven useful for directionality. He
did not, he admitted, because it made the creature look too human.
-
- Interestingly, regarding the question of language, Russell
theorized that the sounds that the dinosaur man would make would be "avian
rather than mammalian .... Their voices would be more birdlike than grunting."
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- While many researchers have agreed with me that the entities
associated with the UFO mystery seem reptilian or amphibian in nature,
the majority of them attribute these traits to visitors from an extraterrestrial
world. While this must be considered a viable hypothesis, as an alternate
theory, I present the scenario that we need not travel beyond our own
planet to discover that the evolved beings from Genesis I have never left
us.
- Many ancient cultures have perpetuated traditions of
wise serpentine beings who retreated into an underworld of massive caves.
Let us suppose that some of these technologically advanced entities from
Genesis I made a decision, after allowing the world to "cool down"
for several thousand years after a prehistoric nuclear war, to begin interacting
with new developing lifeforms on Earth. Let us suppose, further, that,
upon the emergence of humankind's earliest ancestral relative, they made
a decision to guide the gradual evolutionary process of Homo sapiens and
to initiate a program of genetic engineering whereby they would accelerate
the physical and intellectual development of certain of the bipedal creatures.
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- Exceedingly patient, detached, almost emotionless in
its approach to scientific projects, the reptilian race experimented with
skin pigmentation, facial and body hair, height, weight, and intelligence
in their efforts to improve developing humankind.
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- The serpent is almost universally recognized as a symbol
of the waveform of energy, a sperm-symbol representative of life. Nearly
every ancient culture has its legends of wise Serpent Kings who came
from the sky to advance the beneficent and civilizing rule of the Sons
of Heaven. upon Earth-e.g., Quetzalcoatl, the "feathered serpent"
of the Incas, who descended from heaven in a silver egg. The awesome respect
that our ancestors had for these wise serpentlike humanoids could surely
have been retained in our collective unconscious today.
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- Almost "overnight" the primitive human tribes
that for centuries had been contented to fight and club their way around
the Mesopotamian valley became skilled in the arts of civilized living.
They left the risky rewards of hunting and gathering to become farmers,
tending the soil and irrigating the land. They became experts in metals,
ceramics, and hundreds of other skills. They constructed permanent homes,
temples, towers, and pyramids where scant decades before there had been
only crude tents and huts.
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- Berossus, the Babylonian priest-historian, credits Oannes,
an amphibious half-man creature that emerged from the Persian Gulf as
the teacher of enlightenment who nursed the once primitive Sumerians
into creating the cradle of civilization and who guided them in writing
the first love song, formulating the first school system, compiling the
first directory of pharmaceutical concoctions, fashioning a balanced law
code, and instituting the first parliament. Sumerian astronomers became
so accurate in their science that their measurements on the rotation of
the Moon is off only 0.4 from modern, computerized figures. Before the
advent of Oannes, Berossus stated, the Sumerians "lived like beasts
in the field, with no order or rule."
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- Was the mysterious Oannes simply the symbol of the advent
of sudden civilization--or was he among the survivors of a strange and
alien world that existed on this planet for hundreds of thousands, if
not millions, of years before Sumer? And does his kind retain an interest
in our continuing evolutionary saga?
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