Forgotten Ages Research

Traditions of Prehistoric Flight in Ancient Art, Literature and Psychic Visions

Product ID: LK9

Report Topics:

• Historic accounts of gliders in the Andes and the Himalayas
• Chinese records of flying machines—leftovers from a pre-cataclysmic race?
• Ancient flight in Europe, Nepal, Mesopotamia and during the reign of Solomon of Israel
• Traditions of visitations from the air among the Polynesians
• Native American folklore of “flying canoes” and aerial warfare by the Hopis
• Psychic visions of the Vailx and Telta Aeta airborne crafts of Atlantis
• Edgar Cayce on Atlantean airships and James Churchward on flying vehicles from the sunken Pacific land of Mw

Full Report:

In 1540, the Church fathers in Lima recorded that the Incas had constructed sophisticated gliders made from wood and textiles which they used to soar down from the high Andean peaks to the desert valleys below. It was said that a lookout could transport a message to the Incan army warning of the approach of an enemy force by flying in just a few minutes over a route through the mountain passes that would otherwise have taken fifteen days of constant running to deliver.

The Inca more than likely inherited this ability from an older Andean culture, the Moche, who built the magnificent city of Chan Chan and the Mochica Pyramids of the Sun and Moon. The National Aeronautical Museum near Lima exhibit’s a Moche vase dated to A.D. 800 that shows a man wearing large wings strapped to his torso and sailing on the winds. Other artistic renditions of gliders with similar wings and straps can be seen in the Moche artifact collection in Peru’s National Museum of Anthropology and Archaeology.

Earlier still by several centuries lived the people of Nazca, the creators of the world-famous Nazca lines and gigantic animal figures etched into the desert valley floor. These images cannot be distinguished at ground level, but instead appear in their full form only from a very high altitude. A number of researchers are convinced the ancient Nazcans must have possessed some form of flying craft in order to design, construct and view these complex figures.

The contemporary cousins of the Nazcans who were located half a world away, the Taoist monks of China, were also said to have built gliders which they launched from their secluded mountain retreats and successfully navigated the sourrounding valley updrafts. The fourth century Taoist author Ko Hung, who Joseph Needham called “the greatest alchemist of his age,” wrote concerning the remarkable knowledge of flight known during his lifetime:

“Some have made flying cars with wood, and use leather straps fastened to rotating blades so as to set the machine in motion. Others meet the hard wind and ride on it, not stopping until they rise to a height of forty li (65,000 feet). When they first rise they go up using the clouds as steps, and after they have attained their heights then they rush forward, gliding.”

In an earlier work, a third century Chinese treatise called the Record of the Investigations of Things, the following historical footnote was recorded:

“The Chi-Kung people were good at making mechanical devices, including aerial carriages which, with a fair wind, traveled great distances. In the time of Emperor Thang, a westerly wind carried such a car as far as Yuchow. Ten years later there came an easterly wind of sufficient strength, and the visitors flew back to their own country.”

A later ruler, Emperor Wu of the first century B.C.E., was said to have also flown in a flying vehicle to the southern peaks of the Tian Lu Mountains.

Another Oriental writer, Yi-Kyu-Gyong, in his book A Compilation of Previously Uncollected Texts from Throughout the World, discussed the existence of prehistoric machines in the shape of “wooden birds” that had come from an unknown region far to the North. The craft had four large wheels as landing gear, and was said to be able to travel the equivalent of 1,600 miles in a single day. The author noted further:

“For those watching on the ground and those who fly this machine, it will seem like a skilled swimmer swimming, and as natural as a moth stretching forth its wings.”

In a second article entitled A Discriminating Look at the Possibilities of Flying Machines, the same author offered other legends that told of the people of Xi Wu having once produced a flying machine which was able to float in the air and move freely and without obstacle over water as well as above land.

Other flying “wooden birds” were once manufactured in Ganshu Province that were able to “ascend high into the sky.” An early engineer, Zhi He, constructed a variety of different sized and shaped craft that were all powered by a “mechanical shaft” that ran the length of the body. In very similar terms, the first century astronomer and engineer Chang Hong possessed a “wooden bird” which contained “a unique mechanism” inside that allowed it to travel very far through the atmosphere.

According to Chinese records, the Emperor Hwang-ti and seventy of his subjects made flights through the air by means of the energies of a “celestial dragon.” The instrument they used to attract the “dragon” was a tripod made of copper cast in a peculiar way, set upon a mountaintop where “dragon currents” in the Earth met favorably. The tripod, it was said, was attuned to the specific harmony of the movements of the planet Venus.

Yet long before these events, the Chinese chronicler Chuang Tzu, writing in the fourth century B.C.E., spoke of unknown aeronauts who flew about in craft having the wings of a giant bird “being airborne upon the density of the wind beneath“—one of the earliest references to the aerodynamic properties of air-lift.

In his poem entitled Li Sao, the poet Chu Yuan (340-278 B.C.E.) told of traveling in a fei che or “chariot of jade” that flew through the air by the power of the “four dragons,” and by its means accurately observed the Chinese landscape from a great height, including the fact that at a high altitude his flying craft was unaffected by storms near the surface. Author Andrew Tomas, commenting on the Chu Yuan text, said:

“The flying machines of ancient China were either the product of scientific experimentation of the time, or were a memory from a pre-cataclysmic race. As the Chinese had no comparable technology at the time, there is no other alternative but to accept the second possibility.”

Going a step beyond, during the early 1990’s, Chinese scholars discovered a number of Sanskrit documents in Lhasa, Tibet and sent them for translation to the University of Chandigarh in northern India, where they came to the attention of Professor Ruth Reyna. After careful analysis of the texts, which in her opinion dated back in their original form several thousands of years, Professor Reyna concluded that the documents contain directions for building sophisticated flying machines. The crafts were called astras and had an unknown power source called laghima, “a centrifugal force strong enough to counteract all gravitational pull.”

The art of flying was also once practiced in ancient Europe, but appears to have been mostly forgotten. The medieval English alchemist-philosopher Roger Bacon, who was known to have had access to secret books considered “forbidden” by the Church, wrote in 1256 concerning, “flying vehicles (instrumenta volandi) that were once built long, long ago, and it is certain that they were in possession of flight mechanisms.”

A century before, a Nepali document called the Budhasvamin Brihat Katha Slokasamgraha told the story of Rumanvit, the servant of a ruler of the Himalayan region who greatedly desired to know the secret of flying. When he was ordered to build his master a flying machine, Rumanvit informed the king that the technology was known only to a mysterious people called the Yavanas. Other Sanskrit texts identify the Yavanas as an intelligent lighter-skinned race who inhabited the eastern Mediterranean—the Greeks. Yavana is a name related to Javan, listed in the Book of Genesis as one of the grandsons of Noah and considered to be the progenitor of the Greeks. Luckily for Rumanvit, the story ends when a Yavana arrived at the court of the Nepali ruler, and fulfilled his desire by construction a flying craft.

We already know that the classical Greeks at Alexandria had been experimenting with aerodynamics and compressed air, plus the Hellenic experimenters on Rhodes developed complex geared machines like the Antikythera computer. Had their technical studies also included aeronautics?

According to the Kebra Nagast, sacred book of the Ethiopians, their ancient sovereign the Queen of Sheba was once given a gift of a flying machine by King Solomon of Israel in the first millennium B.C.E.:

“He gave her the most glorious of glories, a chariot which could ride in the air, which he had built according to the teachings received from the gods of old.”

In this vehicle Solomon was able to travel in one day over a distance that would have taken three months to walk. It would appear the Hebrew ruler put his flying craft to good use, emplying it to observe and map the world, for ninth century Arab historian Al Masudi recorded that Solomon made charts that “showed the constellations, the stars, the earth with her continents and oceans, the inhabited landmasses, her plants and animals, and many other wondrous things.”

The Chaldean work called the Sifr’ala, which dates back more than five thousand years, though fragmentary, is a lengthy work filling almost a hundred pages of English translation.

Archaeologist and ethnologist Y. N. Ibn A’haraon, who worked on its decipherment, found that the Sifr’ala is a detailed account of how to build a flying craft called a marvid, and operate it. The text speaks of three spheres which vibrated on the underside. A copper coil was wound around the main sphere, attached to an insulated steering wheel, while graphite rods touching the two rear spheres activated forward levitation n some unknown manner. A turn in the steering wheel changed the number of coil turns around the main sphere as well as the degree of contact between the rods and the other spheres, allowing for controlled take-off and directed destination, which was recorded for the pilot on a crystal. The texts also comment on wind resistance, gliding and stability.

Unfortunately, many key lines of the text are missing, making any attempt at reconstructing the craft impossible.

Another Mesopotamian text, the Hakatha or Laws of the Babylonians, stated:

“The privilege of operating a flying machine is great. The knowledge of flight is among the most ancient of our inheritances. It is a gift from those gift-bearers who came from elsewhere. We received it from them as a means of saving many lives.”

The Torajda people of the mountains of Celebes island in Indonesia recount that they were once ruled by benevolent kings who came to them on ships which “followed the line of the rainbow’s arc across the sky, powered by the lightning’s fork.”

The Torajda, in memory of these past events, still construct their homes or sagos in the shape of the prehistoric airships in great crescent arcs with bows pointing upward, painted with spiral designs representing the energy and vibration once powering the craft.

Today the natives are replacing their old building materials of woven bamboo and rattan with corrugated iron sheets, with the result that their homes now look even more curious, like giant grounded flying craft from some bygone era.

Legends very similar to those of the Torajda are found among the Polynesians of the South Pacific Islands. On Pohnpei the natives tell of learned men who long ago came from the west ages before the first Europeans arrived. These former teachers came in “shining boats” that “flew above the sea.” Their stay was very brief, but the natives still speak of the “magical works” the ancient westerners performed.

In similar terms, the native inhabitants of the Mangareva islands have a tradition of flight which dates back from an unknown period in the distant past. They recount how a “flying canoe” with “great wings clasped tightly to the sides” appeared before them, and by magical means the “priests” who operated it were able to fly great distances, as far as the Hawaiian islands nearly 2,500 miles away. Robert Lee Eskridge, a collector of Polynesian folklore, found a native on the Mangarevan island of Tara-Vai who gave him a detailed description of the ancient flying canoe and showed him a small model. It has wings similar in design of an Australian boomerang and reminded Eskridge most of the winged solar disc pictured in ancient Egyptian art.

The New World too has many legends and stories preserving the memory of a time when the Ancients knew the secrets of flying by “magic energies” and sound. Robert Charroux in Lost Worlds noted one legend from St. Vincent Island that wise men in the past flew through the air merely by striking a “golden tray” and producing certain vibrations. A second Caribbean story also told that once long ago people had no need of stairs, for they simply struck a cymbal, sang a song and rose in the air where they wanted to.

Lewis Spence, in his Myths and Legends of the North American Indians, retells the Algonquin tradition of the hero Algon and his encounter with a people who knew how to fly.

One day while hunting, Algon discovered a circle formed on the earth, and looking up saw a strange craft descending into the circle, accompanied by a sound of music. Algon fell in love with the young aviatrix who eventually returned to him and married him.

But she became homesick for her own land, and the story ends with the maiden making a basket large enough for her to get into, singing a song and sailing away into the sky.

Several First Peoples in their folklore repeatedly mention either having possessed or being visited by some form of aerial craft. The Chippewas speak of once owning gin-gwin or “flying boats;” the Pimas remember the coming of “tall fair-haried ones” who arrived in “sky craft;” the Navajo describe “golden strangers” traveling in “flying canoes;” the Yucatan Maya in their sacred book Popul Vuh honored their ancestors’ journeying by air to far locations; and tribes of Equador tell the story of their founder, Naymlap, being “taken up heavenward” by their gods who flew inside a “speaking (roaring) stone vessel.”

Among the Hopis are similar tales that in the World Age previous to the present one, the inhabitants of the planet rode about in patuwvotas, described as “shields of hide” that traveled from place to place with lightning speed, utilizing the “creative forces” within the Earth. The legends say that these prehistoric peoples built huge cities across the surface of the planet, but after a period of peace began using the patuwvotas for aerial warfare.

They would take off, travel swiftly to another city, destroy it from on high, then return swiftly to their own urban center before anyone knew what had happened. Because of their neglect of the Creator and the harmony among humankind, these inhabitants of the former World Age and their technology were eventually destroyed amid global cataclysms.

The Hopis record further that their ancestors were among the survivors who crossed over from islands to the west of North America. The deity Sotuknang, however, gave them a prophecy that may one day be fulfilled:

“Down on the bottom of the seas lie all the proud cities, the flying potuwvotas and the worldly treasures corrupted by evil, and those people who found no time to sing praises to the Creator from the tops of their hills. But the day will come, if you preserve the memory and meaning of your rescue, when these stepping-stones will emerge to prove the truth I speak.”

Will this be the discovery of a Hall of Records somewhere in the Pacific region, from lost Lemuria and Mw?

These legends of flying craft bear some resemblance to the Central American hero Quetzalcoatl, also remembered as Kukulcan, portrayed wearing a long beard (which the Native Americans do not have), who one day arrived from the east on flying burnished wings powered by “fiery serpents.” He brought gifts of an advanced civilization to the people, and then departed as mysteriously as he had come.

Did Quetzalcoatl come to the Americas from lost Atlantis, in another Former Age?

In 1886, Frederick S. Oliver became a channel for an entity who identified himself as Phylos the Thibetan, dictating a full discourse entitled Dweller of Two Planets, a classic of paranormal communications.

In these writings, Phylos revealed that in Atlantis, destroyed 12,000 years ago, the people traveled about in great airships called Vailxi. These Vailxi varied in size from passenger liners as large as 350 feet long (a modern Boeing 747 is 232 feet by comparison), to as small as 25 feet in length, for commuting short distances.

The Vailxi had aerodynamic fuselages, with small protruding wings. It was constructed of an aluminum “shell” inside and out; it made use of crystals to “tap into the radiant energy of the Sun;” it could attain speeds over 1,000 miles per hour and an altitude of 13 miles; it could dive beneath the ocean as well as fly through the air; and the craft “ran on currents that encircle the earth,” many of which “parallel the Equator.” These mysterious currents were further described as being controlled within the Vailxi by means of a series of “repulsion keys” in order to both levitate and propel the craft, and the specific energies were called “Navaz,” referring to (as Phylos observed), the “nightside force of nature.”

As the channeler further described them:

“This is a range of material forces called ’earth currents,’ but also including those of a higher ether. It is by these Navaz currents that the circulation of the universe is kept up, as blood in a man’s arteries.

“The planets receive all these currents, and must return their equivalent. All phenomena point to the return of these currents—the positive; all exhibit the venous currents of our universe, back to its heart.”

This description is strikingly similar in tone to what is found recounted in the Hermetic Virgin of the World, in which Thoth-Hermes is said to have hid away in Egypt secret knowledge of the energies of the “Night,” the web-force which keeps the solar system balanced, revealed only in the Black Rite of Osiris.

A second psychic insight into the flying craft of the ancients was given by R. Leslie, in his 1883 work, Atlantis. Leslie told the story of the entity Yer-mah, who piloted a “Telta Aeta,” or Atlantean machine. It too was pictured as made of aluminum, shaped like an eagle with outstretched wings, and was “powered by electricity drawn from the atmosphere.” Though high-powered, the Telta Aeta vehicles only flew at speeds up to 150 m.p.h., yet carried a large payload.

Similarly, Scott Elliott, in his early twentieth century work, The Story of Atlantis and Lemuria, recorded his meditation excursions into the collective soul consciousness, a reservoir of humanity’s ancestral memories preserved on another level of the mind, to gather information concerning the technology of forgotten civilizations. He too witnessed in vision the sight of great prehistoric airships, cylinder-shaped, made of wood and metal, powered by an energy he called Vril. This energy flowed through a large metal container in the middle of the ship’s center, with outlets through a generator by way of two tubes on either end of the craft. There were two main shafts, either one of which could be opened or closed, creating “pressures” in the energy flows for levitation and for directing the craft. The ship traversed great “routes” about the planet, coinciding with “lines of current” at specific levels above the Earth’s surface.

It was by such means of travel, according to Elliott, that the Atlanteans brought rudiments of their civilization to backward cultures, which after Atlantis’ demise became great civilizations themselves—Egypt, Peru and beyond.

Between 1898 and his death in 1945, renowned psychic Edgar Cayce gave a number of trance readings to various individuals concerning their past life experiences. Some of these readings dealt with former lifetimes in Atlantis, where in their previous incarnations they had been familiar with various forms of flying machines.

The “sleeping prophet” made many references to “ships of the air” that “sailed not only in the air but in other elements also,” powered by “motivative forces as carried people into other lands” and “guided crafts of that period” by “applying the universal forces as understood in that period.” In one reading, given in 1938, Cayce spoke about a person’s Atlantean past life in these terms:

“The entity was what would be in the present an electrical engineer—applied those forces or influences for airplanes, ships, and what you would today call radio for constructive or destructive purposes.”

In another reading given earlier to another patient, in 1935, the psychic hinted at prehistoric Atlantean power sources:

“In Poseidia (Atlantis) the entity dwelt among those what had charge of the storage of the motivative forces from the great crystals that so condensed the lights, the forms of the activities, as to guide the ships in the sea and in the air.”

Cayce further described how the energies broadcast from certain Fire Stones or Great Crystals would power the aerial vehicles “that they might pass along close to the earth, or on the water or under the water.”

Long before Atlantis came into existence, another lost civilization once flourished in the Pacific Ocean, variously called Lemuria or Mw. According to Colonel James Churchward, the prehistoric Lemurians also had flying craft, the evidence for which he found in India while stationed there from 1868 to 1880.

Given access to a Rishi Temple School Monastery in northern India, Churchward discovered extremely old Naacal tablets depicting life on the forgotten sunken Pacific continent. In one of his many books on the subject, The Children of Mu, published in 1931, the Colonel gave this description of a lost age of aerial travel:

“These are the most detailed accounts I have found about the airships, one which is a drawing and instructions for the construction of the airship and her machinery, power, engine, etc. The power is taken from the atmosphere in a very simple inexpensive manner. The engine is somewhat like our present-day turbine in that it works from one chamber into another until finally exhausted. When the engine is once started it never stops until turned off. It will continue on if allowed to do so until the bearings are worn out. These ships could keep circling around the earth without ever coming down until the machinery wore out. The power is unlimited, or rather limited only by what metals can stand. I found various flights spoken of which according to our maps would run from 1,000 to 3,000 miles.”

[Copyright 2009. Joseph Robert Jochmans. All Rights Reserved.]