Abstract

Michaela Magi Griffiths, Bloomsbury, September, 1993
© Copyright AskWhy! Publications 1997. Quote by all means but credit this source.

Michaela Magi Griffiths

Publisher’s note: Sadly Michaela died of an insect bite in Venezuela in 1994. She left us this manuscript, apparently a short novel of unusual format, which she seemed to think was important but insisted it was not for publication sooner than a year after she had left for S America. In fact we thought it unsuitable for paper publication being far too dull and indebted to Who Lies Sleeping? but are happy to put it on the internet. If readers like it we will consider publication as a pulp paperback or by arrangement with a magazine.

Albert K Bender

Within a short time of the start of the post-War UFO stir a new and frightening feature emerged. Albert K Bender of Bridgeport, Connecticut, ran an organisation he called the International Flying Saucer Bureau (IFSB). The mouthpiece of the organisation was a magazine called Space Review, and in October 1953 Bender wrote to his startled readers that he knew the answer to the UFO mystery but could not publish it because of orders from a higher source He also urged those working on flying saucer investigations to be very cautious. That was the last issue of Space Review. Bender closed the magazine and closed down the IFSB.

Bender remained mainly tight lipped but eventually revealed a little more to UFOlogist, Gray Barker, who got some publicity out of it for a while. Bender had developed a theory of the origin of flying saucers and wrote to a trusted friend outlining his idea. In September 1953 Bender received some visitors, three men dressed in black suits, members of the United States Government. They had a copy of the letter Bender had sent and told him he had correctly arrived at the answer to the mystery of the UFOs. They confirmed his theory in essence and threatened him with imprisonment if he ever revealed any of it. Bender was amazed but inclined to stand his ground, but they used the old psychological techniques of the third degree on him, one threatening, one cajoling and sympathetic and a third one mainly watching intently and with menace.

Friends of Bender said the experience seriously affected him. He was manifestly scared out of his wits, became ill, claimed he was being controlled and eventually wrote an account of the whole business that was plainly fantastic—evidently an attempt to muddy the water. He gave up all contact with UFOs and UFOlogists and became a motel owner.

In earlier more lucid accounts Bender had kept tight-lipped but had explained that the world would change dramatically when the secret of the UFOs came out. Scientific and political beliefs would be ruined. The implication seemed to be that the very foundations of human society would be shattered.

Since the original experience of Albert Bender, which we have no reason to doubt, the Men-in-Black (MIBs) have become part of American folklore, with all the abilities of ghosts and goblins, largely generated by one or two unscrupulous journalists, keen to make a buck or two. The truth seems to be that these men are some sort of secret-service men intent on keeping something quiet, or if exposure is inevitable, providing plenty of counter information and misinformation to cloud the picture.

If this is the case then the US and perhaps other governments are in a conspiracy to cover up certain facts that they imagine might be distasteful to the general public. These facts are explicable by an unknown theory of UFOs and presumably concern these UFOs. Their consequences are nothing short of the end of human civilisation.

S Tino Nikos

One autumn a few years ago I had cause to take a short holiday in Greece. Most of the summer I had been in the reading rooms of various London museums and, though it had been a fine summer, I emerged in October white and exhausted. Friends recommended I take a break so I booked eight days on the Greek mainland, touring the antiquities of that splendid ancient civilisation.

Admiring the lion gate at Mycenae, a strange looking gaunt and angular man, tall but with a pronounced stoop or protrusion of the head forward on his shoulders, who had been standing nearby looking intently at the lions, turned to me and said:

"Peace is in the grave."

I smiled, but looked puzzled, and he continued in a friendly manner, somewhat countered by his failure to smile.

"Sorry", said he. "It made me think of Shelley, Prometheus Unbound."

"Peace is in the grave.
The grave hides all things beautiful and good:
I am a God and cannot find it there."

It was a strange introduction, especially for anyone as prosaic as I am, but I remember saying something on the lines of: "The Greeks had gods indeed but no doubt the human builders of these ancient edifices have found their peace."

"I expect so, he rejoined, "but it is to gods that I refer."

Intrigued by this I asked him what he meant and he explained that he had murmured the quotation from Shelley because he had reason to believe that gods had existed on earth and in truth had failed to find peace in their graves.

I have the failing of making quick and not always considered judgements, and on this occasion, regrettably, I immediately pooh-poohed him, saying the ideas of von Daniken—which I took him to mean—were thoroughly discredited. He scowled and gave me a piercing sidelong look, but did not pursue my disbelief, simply contenting himself with some musings on the remarkable things that ancient people had discovered.

This was my introduction to S T ("Please. Call me Tino") Nikos, a man who proved to be a dour but agreeable and certainly erudite companion, and who introduced me to the remarkable ideas in this notebook.

Nikos was doing much the same as I was, looking around the ancient monuments, but he seemed to have an expert’s knowledge of them all. I rather got the impression that he was a professional historian or archaeologist but he claimed he was a palaeontologist.

He was, he said, born a Greek, although not in Greece, and his parents had returned to Greece after the War so that their son could be brought up as a Greek. Unfortunately, although Nikos had proved an outstanding pupil, the family had to leave Greece under the junta and moved to the United States. There Nikos completed his education, taking a first degree and a higher degree and settling to an academic life based in California, but with frequent field trips abroad. So it was that I met him on a working holiday visit to his homeland.

Curiously there was a minor UFO flap in Greece at the time. Several glowing lights had been reported mainly of a red colour. A glowing, pulsating object had apparently landed in a lightly wooded dell on a mountainside and some dead sheep had been found. Subsequently several peasants claimed they had met the Great God Pan at crossroads and bridges, at or near the lonely site of the UFO landing, but the journalists put it all down to retsina.

I was surprised to find that the dour academic Nikos took a keen interest in these reports which he, of course, could read and understand in the newspapers, but I could not. He would translate them for me and ask my views. I replied that there were bound to be aerial phenomena which were rare and of which we knew little. Some of them might be associated with faulting or stresses in the rocks of the earth. Greece was at the boundary of the European plate and the African plate moving north, and was therefore subject to intense geoplogical stress as the two huge landmasses ground together. Like the piezo-electric effect in crystals the energy of the collision could emerge as electrical or even light energy causing the aerial lights. Though Nikos did not refute the idea, he seemed less than impressed.

Nikos was certainly odd in many ways. A remarkable thing no one could fail to notice about him were his hands. Even in the heat of Greece at the end of the summer his handshake was cold and deathly. Another of our group, who happened to shake him by the hand, unkindly commented to me afterwards that he thought he must be a vampire. His bony angularity and sallow olive coloured cheeks added to the impression, it must be said, but through his unsmiling demeanour he always seemed well disposed towards people he considered intelligent.

I discovered later, in a letter, that Nikos suffered from the rare disease poikilothermism—he was cold blooded! Not fully so, of course, but his body temperature was only partially regulated internally. In the hottest weather, when everyone else wilted, Nikos was at his best, bouncing with energy. But even at 70 degrees Fahrenheit (20 degrees Celsius) he was beginning to lose his zest and in the cold he could hardly move from his room. When he did venture forth in cold weather he sometimes passed out.

One night we had a long evening together in the bar of the hotel. Nikos drank very little but would slowly sip a couple of glasses of wine whilst eating two or three plates of olives. I began to realise what his interests were and how passionately he held them. I had begun by asking him a few basic questions about palaeontology, and I had mused about the mystery of the extinction of the dinosaurs.

"That, Miss Griffiths, is no mystery. Or, I should say it is no mystery to me. But the late Cretaceous extinction pales before the mass extinction we are in the midst of today. The processes of evolution are being altered more drastically now than since the time of the dinosaurs—possibly more even than since the emergence of life’s diversity. In the future, our descendants or another intelligent species will wonder about the mass extinctions at the end of the Tertiary. Would they realize that the extinctions had been caused by just one species, either deliberately or through carelessness? Our record proves that we are mass killers. Perhaps the dinosaurs were also.

"Mankind began killing other species a long time ago—and not just for food. About two million years ago mammalian evolution went into overdrive and the number of genera of mammals trebled in the next million years. The diversity of mammals peaked about one million years ago. Since then it has continuously declined. At the same time mankind became increasingly dominant. Mammoths, mastodons and woolly rhinoceroses had survived several periods of intense cold in previous cold phases of the present ice age, but only at the end of the last one did they go extinct. The simple explanation that they were hunted down by man. Most mammals other than domestic animals will be extinct within decades.

"Compare it with the Cretaceous. It took no more than two million years—maybe much less—to exterminate all the dinosaurs.

"The Miocene period of about 20 million years ago was the age of the apes. There might have been more apes than monkeys. Today only five species, including man, remain. Only man is populous. He is responsible for the disasters that have overtaken the other modern apes. He has exterminated any other primates to display signs of intelligence. In suppressing the intellectual competition, we have confined the gorilla, the chimpanzee, the orang-utan and the gibbon to narrow areas, and, within our lifetime, they could be extinct. We will have murdered our intellectual rivals.

"The prehistory of mankind has many examples of apparently unnecessary killing. Were men even in those early days as insensitive to other species as they appear to be today? At the foot of a limestone cliff at Solutre, France, was a 50 feet deep mound of horse bones, killed by prehistoric man. Elsewhere, only seven of 3000 bones, mainly reindeer, had cut marks on them caused by butchery. Evidently these prehistoric men had not killed the animals primarily for meat. Maybe they just killed for fun! Maybe they got pleasure from the smell of death. The slaughter continued for 25,000 years. The same happened in North America. Mass carnage was widespread and effective.

"Civilisation does not seem to alter us. Quite the opposite! Humans have savagely hunted down the animals with which they share the globe since they discovered technical ways of compensating for their puny bodies. In historic times humans have exterminated many varieties of animals and birds, though some of them, like the bison, existed in vast numbers. The rate of destruction increased as technology improved. From the year 1600 AD he became able, through advancing technology, to hunt animals to extinction in just a few years. The rate of extinction of species of mammals and birds (not counting lesser creatures and plants) increased from one every four years from 1600 to 1900 AD to one every year in most of the present century. By 1974 Science Magazine considered that 1000 species of all kinds were becoming extinct every year. If the tropical forests are substantially cleared we shall have lost one million species, possibly many more. Except for the barest handful, they will have been eliminated by the hand of man.

"This compares with estimates of one species every 1000 years during the mass extinction of the dinosaurs, though the latter must be a serious underestimation because very many species existed—and died—without leaving any remains. Millions of bugs must have died without trace—and plants. And, for those we do know about, there must also be some degree of averaging over a long time period of much more sudden extinction events because of the generally poor resolution of time in old rocks. When the time resolution is better because deposition was copious, we find that extinction in the Cretaceous could occur extraordinarily rapidly—for some species at least. For millions of years there were no significant changes in the deposits of foraminifera species up to the Cretaceous boundary layer, but they disappeared in about 200 years. Mankind’s ability to kill off marine and aquatic species in bulk has developed since the start of the industrial revolution about 200 years ago.

"A large predator will not hunt mice. The reward is not worth the effort. Nor would men be expected to bother with small prey. The pattern of extinctions of mammals in the last million years shows that so far 50 per cent of large mammals have gone but only two per cent of small mammals have. This too is similar to the extinctions at the time of the dinosaurs. But if mankind did not hunt them, why have some small mammals died out? The answer is the knock-on effect. Over hunting, which caused the extinction of the larger herbivores, led also to the loss of open ground. The lack of the herds allowed the bush to grow in to the grasslands again. Since the smaller herbivores, which lacked the size to keep the forests at bay, were also disadvantaged by the spreading bush, they also lost ground and became extinct. Thus although mankind did not hunt the smaller animals his over hunting of the larger ones indirectly caused the downfall of some of the others.

"But some opportunistic small species like the sparrow and the rat make a virtue of the environment created by man. The same thing happened in the Cretaceous when birds and some inconspicuous rat-like creatures thrived in the disruption of the environment created by the Anthroposaurs, and then survived their demise to colonise the world—the birds and our ancestors, the primitive mammals."

Nikos was clearly incensed that mankind seemed to be antagonistic to the rest of the earth. He was also eager to show the parallels which existed between the Cretaceous extinctions and the ones which have occurred latterly at the hand of man. What I did not know at that time was that Nikos was getting involved in campaigns that would cross from the academic into the political.

Before my eight days were over Nikos had to depart, having come to the end of his stay. We separated on good terms and he promised to write, indeed seemed eager to do it, and we began a period of mutual correspondence. Curiously though, he first placed a condition. I had to set up a poste restante. He said he would occasionally be despatching important documents and did not want them to go astray. He therefore refused to send anything of significance to my home address or to work.

Even more mysterious is that in February 1992 I had a postcard from Nikos sent from New England—it was the last I ever received from him! Nikos has apparently disappeared!

The Ideas of S T Nikos

The reason why I began this account with the story of Albert Bender is that I think that the case of S T Nikos is similar, except that Nikos has disappeared whereas Bender survived. Bender had an important theory about UFOs and it turns out that Nikos also had such a theory—perhaps the same one!—and he too was threatened by men-in-black before he vanished.

Bender sent his theory to a trusted companion only to find it turning up in someone else’s hands. I can vouch for the fact that I placed Nikos’s papers and tape, and his letters and postcards to me in a large manilla envelope labelled Insurance Policies and deposited them in a safe deposit box at my suburban bank. When I learnt of the Nikos’s disappearance, I went to the bank to check the safe deposit box and found it contained only the empty envelope. There was little I could do. I had deposited an envelope and the safe contained the same envelope.

Fortunately, I had taken notes and have a good memory anyway, and so can reconstruct much of my correspondence with Nikos. The trouble is that I no longer have the proof—Nikos’s letters in his characteristic green ink and florid style of writing.

I should perhaps emphasise that, until I started corresponding with Tino Nikos, I was completely sceptical that UFOs were anything other than natural phenomena, usually misidentified. It wasn’t that I was closed-minded about them—you will have noted that I was aware of Persinger’s ideas. I pride myself on being ready to consider anything, but having examined the evidence, its quality, the reliability of the witnesses and the precision taken in recording the details of the sightings, I had come to the conclusion that unidentified aerial objects were rare natural phenomena, when they were not complete misidentifications of common objects.

With all the light pollution in these modern times from street lights, car headlights, aeroplane landing lights, and even firework displays and laser shows, it is hardly surprising that people can be surprised when they actually notice a natural object in the heavens. There are confirmed reports of even a rising full moon being described as a UFO. So you will see that I was a sceptic, but only because, on the basis of the evidence, I considered people gullible, and the so-called proof to warrant nothing other than a sceptical attitude to UFOs.

Nikos changed my views slowly. Not that we spent our time discussing such controversial matters. I am giving it undue attention with the benefit of hindsight. We did talk about such matters but spent far more time talking about history, and particularly antiquity. At first we would simply exchange ideas about our mutual interest in old civilisations. I had forgotten his original comment about gods not finding peace in their graves, or perhaps I dismissed it as a his deliberate tease. However in about his third letter he began an essay on the antiquity of man and the miserliness of Old Man Time in keeping his secrets so secure.

Nikos pointed out that "the sinking of the Titanic in 1912 was sensational but no one knew where the huge ship had come to rest until seventy years later when salvagers with modern detection equipment finally located the wreck. The Titanic was an enormous ship but five hundred years before, the Mary Rose, had capsized in shallow water off Spithead within sight of the cheering multitudes on shore. Though thousands witnessed the tragedy, the site was lost until underwater archaeologists rediscovered it only a few years ago.

"For 500 years a shallow estuary concealed the Mary Rose, a wonder of its day. What greater secrets, do you suppose, Miss Griffiths, are hidden in Old Man Time’s vast domain?" It was a rhetorical question for Nikos went on to write about the Hittites, mankind and the dinosaurs, each one spanning a greater distance in time from the present.

"Though the Hittites were a superpower of their day, sharing the domination of the known world with the Egyptians and the Assyrians, they almost disappeared from history. Only the Bible, in references thought to be mythical, preserved their name until modern archaeologists uncovered and identified their ruined cities. And they lived only 3000 years ago," Nikos explained.

"Poor scurvy mankind has been evolving from a common ancestor with the modern apes for several million years, Nikos went on, but scholars know little about it. The history of early man and his precursors is still secure in Father Time’s coffer. Human knowledge stems from a scant collection of pieces of bone and fragments of skulls, together with chippings and artifacts that a layman cannot distinguish from natural pebbles and flints. We have scarcely uncovered any of our prehistory though we are a geologically recent animal."

Coming to the dinosaurs Nikos wrote: "Vast families of huge creatures lived on this earth for hundreds of millions of years until they died out about 65 million years ago, but they remained unknown to mankind until the end of the 18th century. The Old Miser Time’s safe was prised open, only by a chink, but enough for us to know that dinosaurs existed. Since then we have done a little more prising, but the interior of Father Time’s secret chest hides much more about those astonishing beasts than mankind has imagined."

Nikos concluded this letter saying: "Miss Griffiths—it is incumbent upon us all to come to terms with one humbling truth. We are not the first!"

I suppose that at this stage I was beginning to get a little uncomfortable about Nikos. I knew him to be a man of, perhaps, excessive gravitas, and no little eccentricity but he had proved he was an extremely well informed man, and capable of a certain degree of old fashioned charm. But now I wondered whether I read him correctly. Was he suggesting that the dinosaurs preceded us as God’s intelligent creation on earth?

"Grasp the nettle," I thought. If the man’s mad then it is better to find out now and not waste a lot of effort trying to penetrate the tortured labyrinth of a maniac’s mind. So I directly posed the question to him in my next letter.

Ancient Myths

It was typical of Nikos not to answer directly. In his reply he gave me a brief tutorial on certain unusual aspects of ancient mythology, picking up on my phrase God’s intelligent creation.

Nikos informed me that the serpent of The Garden of Eden which led to Adam’s fall in the Jewish Scriptures, was not a snake.

"God punished the creature, for tempting Eve, with the command crawl on your belly. Previously it must have had limbs to support it, but thenceforth it became a snake. The Scriptures described the tempter of Eden as the most cunning animal God had made! Thus even before the Garden of Eden there had been men on earth. On the sixth day of creation God created human beings, making them like himself—note the plural, Miss Griffiths. The human ancestor, Adam, the first true man, was only made in the Biblical creation story after God had created men!

"What then were these men? Perhaps we can get clues from other myths.

"In Greek mythology, Gaia, the great mother goddess, an earth goddess of the primitive Greeks was represented by a serpent. They believed she was the mother of the Gods by Uranus, but she also gave birth to serpents and dragons by Tartarus, the god of the Underworld. When the gods of Olympus defeated her favourite offspring, the Titans, she sent a terrible snaky monster, one of her brood by Tartarus, the Typhon, against them. Typhon was a veritable nest of snakes, with multiple heads, vipers sprouting everywhere and darting tongues. It scared off the Olympians anyway, until Zeus subdued it with his thunderbolts and imprisoned it beneath Etna where it still rages, giving vent to eruptions and earthquakes. Typhon’s sister was Echidna who had incestuously mated with her brother to produce Cerberus, the hydra, the serpent, Ladon and the chimaera, amongst others. Echidna had a serpent’s body; Typhon (as I have said) had a hundred serpents’ heads; Cerberus was a three headed dog but had a snake’s tale and a row of serpents’ heads along his back; the Chimaera had a snake’s tale; Hydra was a water serpent.

"Observe, Miss Griffiths, the many snake-like characteristics of all these creatures. Do you imagine it must mean something?"

He continued: "In Mesopotamia, the role of Gaia was played by Tiamat. Her first brood were gods but they became rather delinquent and their father determined to get rid of them. Tiamat favoured the children until they, hearing of their father’s displeasure, pre-empted his actions by killing him. This upset mother Tiamat who had a second brood of dragons and serpents to punish her former favorites. The strongest and cleverest of the gods, Marduk, slew the dragons (and his mother for good measure) thus making the world safe for him to create his servant man.

"Note that in this legend—the equivalent of the Greek one—there is a clear implication that a race of dragons and serpents had to be destroyed before the earth was safe for mankind. Do you imagine there might be something in this, Miss Griffiths?"

Nikos could be quite patronising, but it was really the nearest he got to humour. He proceeded.

"In Norse mythology three monsters fathered by Loki, a sort of fallen angel, are shut away by Thor, but the legend has it that, in time, the three will escape and return to the earth. Cataclysmic earthquakes, volcanoes, poisonous gases, tidal waves and even an ice age are predicted, as a result of which mankind will become extinct until they are restored in a new Garden of Eden and the cycle continues.

"This myth suggests the prospect that these monsters will re-emerge amidst cataclysm and pollution, destroying mankind and reclaiming the earth. There is food for thought here, Miss Griffiths. Have we created the conditions for the primordial captives to escape Thor’s prison?

Nikos was effectively explaining his opening gambit—his quotation from Prometheus Unbound. He believed these legends suggested that men had been preceded on earth by other intelligent creatures, dragons or serpents, one the most cunning animals God had made and evidently sufficiently human in appearance to merit being called ‘men’ in the Scriptures. They lived upon earth before mankind but fell from grace allowing men to become the supreme animal of the world.

In most ways it sounded crazy but in other ways convincing. I was not yet ready to write Nikos off. And in any case he did not speak only of snakes and gods. He generally related some anecdote or fact with which I was not familiar about some strange occurrence he had seen reported, or had read about in some book or other. He it was who told me the story about Albert Bender.

Serpents and Dragons

In a subsequent letter Nikos developed for me his ideas about serpents and dragons.

"There is more to this mythology than you imagine. It is so widespread it must have some deep psychological—one might say elemental—basis. The snake has always been widely revered as a supernatural power supposedly because of its habit of renewing itself by sloughing off its skin. It was also considered to be immortal because it was believed it could devour itself and thereby become reborn. It was the Ouroboros—the snake devouring its own tale which symbolises eternity and the cosmos. The prevalence of snake and dragon imagery, I maintain, is more elemental than the mere sloughing off of a skin. Something is out there, eternal but unborn, giving human beings images of immortality, represented as snakes!

"Python worship was common from the east to the west coasts of Africa. In India the preferred snake was the cobra, the hooded snake. Snake worship seems to have been the original religion of most of India before the Vedas with its priestly caste of Brahmins nominally replaced it. Nevertheless every village continued to have its Naga, or snake god, to whom the villagers turned to first in times of famine or strife. The cobra was the phallic symbol and the phallic god, Siva, was always associated with snakes and often worshipped as one. He was the King of the Serpents. Siva’s consort, Kali, a fertility goddess was also adorned with snakes. Another snake in Hindu religion supported Vishnu when he slept, and helped in the creation. he is therefore regarded as symbolising the eternal rather like Ouroboros. Nagas, though snake gods, can take human form. They live beneath the sea or beneath the earth in magnificent cities ruled by snake kings. They have a passion for precious stones and pretty girls, and, though unpredictable, will reward those who help them with healing or visionary powers, or riches.

"The Aztecs, Toltecs and Mayas were fond of snake motifs in their religious decorations. The earth goddess, Coatlicue, a monster with large fangs, is dressed in a garment of woven snakes and has a necklace of human hands and hearts. Her head is made up of two snakes’ heads. The supreme god of the Aztecs was Huitzilopochtli who was also enrobed in snakes. Their rain god, Tlaloc, was similarly associated with snakes. Snakes often seem associated with rain. Quetzalcoatl was a peculiar creature, half snake and half bird; a feathered serpent, who was a wind god. As a god of heaven (feathers) and earth (scales) he represented opposites like light and dark, life and death and good and evil. Like Orpheus he was a god of civilisation, of agriculture, the arts and the smithy. He helped the downfall of the Indian empires by sailing over the Eastern Sea, the Atlantic, promising to return. When the Spanish arrived they believed their god had returned and offered little resistance.

"The Egyptians regarded snakes as survivors from older times of the earth, alien but wise, to be treated with respect if distrust, and they kept asps as pets, or household gods. The Egyptian creator was a serpent which emerged from the Abyss, and at the end of time the serpent would again emerge as supreme. Present at beginning and end, the serpent therefore again represents eternity. The primeval serpent is the god which named all characteristics and is the protector of the earth against cosmic forces which threaten it. The Nile was a snake god. Apopis was a serpent which represented the powers of darkness and sometimes swallowed up the sun god in his daily journey by barge across the firmament (an eclipse). Fortunately the priests could always find a quick way of getting the sun god regurgitated.

"In Mesopotamia, the love goddess Ishtar, the biblical Ashtaroth (Venus), was symbolised as a snake. Clay statuettes show snake headed women breast feeding human children. The Babylonians signified their god of healing by a double headed snake, coiled around a staff, a symbol of medicine which has come down to us via Asklepios to today. The Euphrates, like the Nile, was a snake but the sea was a dragon, the mother of life, Tiamat.

"The primitive religion of the Greeks was a snake religion and many Greek gods remain associated with snakes—Hercules, Apollo, Hermes. Zeus Meilichios was shown as a bearded snake. Snakes were commonly symbols of the underworld and the dead. Dead heroes were originally worshipped as snakes before they became anthropomorphic gods.

"Dionysus was symbolised by a snake carried in a casket. Originally in the depths of time Bacchanalian rites were gory and licentious. The Bacchoi ate human flesh and thereby took communion with the god which they celebrated by drunkenness and ritual sex. By the time of the Christian era, human sacrifice had been illegal for hundreds of years and the Romans were seeking spiritual ways of attaining communion with their gods. That is an important reason why Christianity succeeded. But it did not prevent Clement of Rome claiming to his flock that the Bacchoi, ate human victims, worshipped the snake which was the Christian Devil, and honoured Eve, who like Pandora had admitted evil into the world. Christians were always incensed at any suggestion of snake worship. The snake had become the very incarnation of evil.

"In Persian religion, Ahriman, the Devil. was depicted as a snake, and so he was too in Mithraism which came from Persia. In fact the depiction of the evil spirit as a snake also came into Christianity from Persian religion, during the exile of the Jews in Babylon.

"The obvious interpretation of the story of the Garden of Eden is that an ancient Hebrew snake god is replaced by a new omniscient but hidden god: the old god and his human followers are both punished by the new god. Old gods have one of two fates; they become an aspect of the new god or they become a demon. Here the old god became a demon.

"As further evidence of this we can see elsewhere in the Jewish Scriptures that snakes were worshipped by the Hebrews. Moses, leading the Israelites out of Egypt, was fond of tricks with snakes, acting just like a snake shaman. He could make a snake into a rigid pole just like the Egyptian wise men but his snake recovered and ate those of the Egyptians. When the Israelites murmur against Moses, God sends a plague of snakes to punish them. Moses intercedes with God who instructs him to build a brass serpent to cure those who had been bitten. The monotheistic Israelites thereafter burnt incense to, in short, worshipped this brass snake, the Nehushtan, for five centuries until the messianic king Hezekiah destroyed the snake god’s brazen image and his power. When the exiles returned from Babylonia, the snake was the evil spirit, Ahriman, and so he was depicted in the rewriting of the legends that the exiles undertook.

"Australian aboriginals knew of a man-eating snake called Mindi which could vary its size up to a length of ten miles. To even see the monster meant death but he always betrayed his presence with a sickening smell. He was sent by the god of nature, a sort of conservation god, to punish those who acted contrary to his wishes.

"There seems an obvious connection between serpents and with some mythical beasts, most particularly dragons. In China dragons had similar characteristics in many ways to the Nagas of India, even starting out life as little snakes when they first hatched from their eggs. After 2000 years they became adult dragons. Like the Nagas they were associated with good fortune and with life. The Emperors were considered descended from dragons.

"Dragons are in the West depicted as the mysterious and evil forces that mythological heroes like St George, Siegfried and Beowulf have to do battle with.

"Such thoughts must be elemental, deeply embedded in the psyche, because they are especially strong in children, whose primeval thought patterns are still unspoiled by experience and tuition. There is even a link with that other legend with which we are fascinated—the vampire—the monster that lies dead by day but comes by night to suck our blood. The root of the word Dracula is the Latin for dragon!"

Racial Memory

Notwithstanding the popular films of cavemen fighting dinosaurs, most people realise that the two varieties of animal were separated by tens of millions of years. Mankind could never have had any direct experience of the terror of the conqueror beasts of so many millennia before. If, then, there is some connection between our fears of snakes and monsters and the dinosaurs, how does it arise? S Tino Nikos had reason to believe the basis was deep in our subconscious. As Jung would say: it is an archetype.

Nikos wrote: "Some psychologists are bold enough to attribute the similarities between the dragons and the dinosaurs to racial memory. Perhaps this is the source of our elemental fears of serpents and monsters. A young chimp will become terrified if it catches sight of a python. A more mature one will find a weapon and malignantly hit any snake on its neck, or, when no weapon it at hand, they will try to flick the snake as far away as possible. This behaviour develops even when the chimps have had no contact with snakes, and even when they have been brought up without a mother. The behaviour is instinctive.

"Instincts are fundamental behaviour patterns coded in the genes. If a baby chimp has an instinctive hatred of snakes, even when it has never seen one before in its life, then why shouldn’t other mammals have an instinctive fear—a racial memory—of the dinosaurs? Plainly there was sufficient time and evolutionary pressure in the 140 million years that the dinosaurs dominated the mammals. Nonetheless, most experts deny it. Even if memories could be coded in the genes, they argue that, in the 65 million years since the dinosaurs ceased to be a threat to the mammals, any previous advantage would have disappeared.

"But is that necessarily true? The point surely about racial memories is that it takes countless years for them to become instilled because such effects are much more subtle and indirect than selection for physical traits. By the same token, they might not be easy to erase. The mammals had faced up to the dangers of the dinosaurs for so long and the experience was so terrifying that natural selection saw to it that those creatures which developed an intrinsic image and fear of the dinosaur were more fitted for survival. The caution that such a primordial fear instilled in a creature might have given it a lasting advantage—a fear and suspicion that was of benefit even in the world of mammals—the lingering remnants of which we still possess deep in our subconscious minds.

"Part of our brain gives us this archaic memory of the dinosaurs. Our brains consist of three parts that developed at different times. The advanced part is the neocortex controlling active thinking, then there is the limbic system which controls emotions, and finally the oldest part is the reptilian complex. The latter is little more than a pronounced nodule at the top of the spine which has survived essentially unchanged since before the age of the reptiles. This very primitive area of the brain is the source of primeval, subconscious ideas.

"Images of dragons are still recorded here and give rise to myths and legends in which the dragon represents inhuman power which has to be tamed or vanquished."

If Nikos is correct in this speculation then it has to be considered that some people might have the ability to recall these racial memories more highly developed than others. Some people have particularly vivid dreams and have irrational night terrors which often require some trouble to allay. We have some reason to believe that Nikos was one of these sensitive people.

The Reptile House at the Crypto-Zoo

It was reasoning like this that led S Tino Nikos into an interest in Forteana. Forteana are odd occurrences, inexplicable in our present state of knowledge. The word comes from Charles Hoy Fort, the strange American who made a hobby of collecting reports of events which were beyond the bounds of known science, and has now become a cult figure. He avidly sought out information on unusual occurrences, UFO sightings, reports of close enounters, the crypto-zoo, and so on, classified them and published them in wonderfully eccentric books.

Nikos was similar. Though he was as logical and rational as anyone could be, and as disciplined and well trained as any orthodox scientist, Nikos seemed to take pleasure in those inexplicable events that had his scientific colleagues spluttering or turning away with a nose in the air muttering: "I don’t believe it".

He eventually convinced me that they were often manifestations of the Other Ones, his term for intelligent beings that had once ruled the world. Not all such sightings were—he readily discounted most UFOs as perfectly normal celestial appearances misread by the hoi polloi. Similarly many of the reports of elemental creatures he discounted as bats, owls, moggies, etc, or even genuine sightings of rare but otherwise normal mammals. Many of the oddest sightings were, he believed, hoaxes often perpetrated by journalists short of copy in the silly season.

"It is not," he explained, "a sign of otherworldliness that investigators cannot substantiate a well publicised UFO report afterwards. It is a sign that the story was made up by an editor who loses interest when he gets some real news. The really interesting ones are those where, on investigation, witnesses can be found, and one wonders why they were not found when the report was fresh. Sometimes the witnesses themselves are astonished that nobody seemed interested in their testimony. Why are genuinely interesting sightings ignored when obvious fakes fill the columns of newspapers?"

The ones which could be well documented but unexplained were the ones which interested Nikos. He was sure many of the sightings of strange animals had the stamp of reptilian on them despite aspects of the report apparently contradicting such an interpretation. In one letter he seemed quite impressed by accounts he had read of a series of apparently related events in Florida a few years ago.

On a clear January night, teenagers petting in a car in a wooded area after a high school dance became aware of a foul smell drifting in through the window. Then they were astonished to see a greenish, chimpanzee-like creature with glowing green eyes bound on to the car bonnet. The driver started the engine as quickly as he could and drove off leaving the green chimp darting back into the woods. Later the local sheriff, to whom they reported the incident, found a green residue on the car where the chimp had landed.

There followed a spate of reports of smelly green hairy creatures, or creatures which gave the impression of being hairy, with long arms and legs like large gorillas. The odour was described as putrid and rancid, like stale urine. Footprints found were described as humanoid except that they had a splayed out toe at each side, rather like thumbs. Others described the tracks as three toed. Bear tracks were discounted. A UFO landing had been reported shortly before the outbreak in the previous December.

"These accounts seem odd enough, Miss Griffiths, but perhaps they were a local phenomenon, some unknown but natural entity of the swamps. Well, if so they were mobile animals or have cousins, if not brothers, elsewhere, because only a few years later a similar spate of sightings of a similar, smelly, hairy biped startled people in the state of Missouri. These too were associated with sightings of UFOs or fireballs. This is important to know, to distinguish the sightings from what are possibly genuine rare creatures of a hairy and bipedal nature. These shy animals might be seen in remote woods or by woodland roads but usually retreat from humans and, of course, do not require nearby flying saucers.

"The note about the tracks is possibly important. Apes have five toed feet and at least four toes should be distinguishable, unless the tracks are hopelessly poor quality. The description of humanoid with prominently splayed toes is likely to be a rationalisation from their ape-like description. It seems clear to me that these creatures have three toes like a bird."

Nikos concluded his letter with his usual question: "What do you make of all this, Miss Griffiths? Chimpanzees and gorillas are not green. Indeed it is unnatural for any mammal to be green. When green mammals are seen it is because they have something green on their fur, or occasionally in it—they have gotten coated with an alga or have been eating a diet excessively rich in some element like copper. Creatures which are green are reptiles, serpents or birds. Three toed prints are made by reptiles."

Of course, I was not willing to accept this suggestion too easily and in my reply, suggested to him that if green mammals are rare then hairy reptiles and birds are non-existent. Even if these creatures are real they cannot be reptiles as Nikos thought.

Nikos responded to my question about hairy reptiles. "You say hairy mammals and birds are non-existent. The ancestors of the hunter gatherers of South West Africa were, like their modern day descendants, familiar with the large rock python which they sometimes killed and ate. For 4000 years they illustrated a reptilian creature in their rock shelters. Perhaps naturally the experts considered them to be rock pythons. However the drawings always had horns and hair!

"Could a layman, surprised and possibly shocked, often at night, tell the difference between down or the plumage of a bird like a kiwi and hair. We tend to think of feathers as flight feathers, but most of a bird’s feathers are for insulation and are of quite a different nature. If a bird has given up flight for quite a different lifestyle from ordinary birds of the air, it might have an insulating covering which is much more akin to fur than to feathers. Both fur and feathers are, in any case, simply modified reptilian scales.

"Now if a scaly creature never took up flight but nevertheless became warm blooded, what would it develop in order to keep warm when the external temperature fell? The answer is fur! Whether it is fur like a mammal’s or fur like the down of a bird, it will look hairy. So there you are, Miss Griffiths! If our elemental creatures of the night are really hairy, it merely proves that they , unlike me, are warm blooded! They could be of a superficially reptilian nature like a dinosaur, but yet be capable of intelligence."

That puts me in my place!

And, Nikos continued: "You will appreciate, Miss Griffiths, that many of the animals at loose from the crypto-zoo are plainly reptilian. We find reports of sea serpents, lake serpents, sky serpents, reptile men, living dinosaurs, living pterosaurs, tatzelwurms, lindorms, and so on. This propensity, if it can be so called, to see serpents reflects the curious respect primitive people pay to serpents, as we have noted in earlier correspondence."

The Dreams of S T Nikos

I have mentioned several times the peculiarities of S T Nikos, but there was more to it than even the oddnesses I have already spoken of.

Nikos confessed to me that he had had bizarre dreams ever since he was a child. From the time he was able to think rationally about it, he had assumed they were caused, or somehow connected with, his poikilothermism. He dreamt of a hot misty world with white skies and frequent torrential rains. Large fields were drained by sinuous ditches and grazed by unicorn-like cattle making high pitched noises like coo-loo-woo, loo-hoo-hoo. Here and there were strange trees, some of them broken, but across a broad shallow river he could see dense woodland. Here and there stood groups of large rocks but in the distant mist was a city—for that is what he was certain it was though he did not know its name—of cyclopean stones.

The nameless city had been built in distant times by a race of grey-green reptilian beings depicted in sculptured reliefs on the monumental stones of the ancient city. These creatures were of a generally human shape but seemed to have the power of magic for they maintained a distinct culture and civilisation apparently without making use of technology. Nikos tried to explain that he felt they were technological but in a different way from ourselves. They abhored rectilinear structures much preferring organic shapes and had somehow learnt to grow whatever they needed. Their very technology was organic.

But then the scene altered as the mist got thicker and the sky darker and the sun fainter until it could only be seen occasionally through the smoky black clouds above. The distant city blackened until it was covered in soot and the reliefs could no longer be seen. The grazing creatures fell dead on the sward and the ditches putrefied in an oily stinking mass of decaying matter. He could barely see across the broad river which was now silted up completely leaving a morass of black bubbling sewage. When he could pierce the gloom he could see the trees of the forest standing like stick insects at strange angles, charred and quite dead, while elsewhere some seemed to be still aflame.

Nikos would dream this dream or variations of it often. But he had other strange dreams too. He would dream that he was laying on a large slab of cold stone in a sepulchral grotto or cavern. The light whch illuminated the scene was faint and green as if it had travelled through sea water. The cave was made of huge stones cut with the low reliefs typical of his dream world. though the stone was hard and cold, Nikos felt himself warm and peaceful in his dream. He felt sure he was asleep. Then the green colour began to darken. Like the previous dream he was overwhelmed with a strong sense of decay. Great gobs of mud or tar began to drip from the cyclopean rocks which became streaked with corruption. He felt uncomfortable and scared as if he were having a nightmare. Then echoing through the cavern, gradually getting louder from the total silence, he could hear the repeated word: Awake! Awake! Needless to say, he would awake at this point in his dream.

Another one that Nikos related to me was that he was floating as if on a magic carpet, lying there in the sun, warm and secure. All he had to do was imagine something and it would appear. He could create rainbows and firework displays, floating billiard balls dancing before him and kalaidoscopic patterns, at will. Then he turned over and found he was just above the earth which was grey and sooty. Buildings stood derelict and decaying around him, and at his feet were oily puddles full of trash and rusting cans. Suddenly a distorted rat-like biped scurried from behind a broken down building, to stop in its tracks when it saw him. It opened its eyes wide in terror, and jabbered horrifically, stumbling backwards. Nikos in his dream felt revulsion for the stunted little monster and its disgusting world. He feels he wants to kill it, and then he wakes up.

In yet another he is moving through vast canyons of monumental stones. Unrecognised friends pass him with a friendly greeting. The air is warm and clear, with beautiful scents of flowers drifting in from the nearby forests. Suddenly he is startled by a rat scurrying behind a stone. It seems unimportant and he continues to walk joyfully through his familiar pathways. But again he is surprised by a scurrying creature, then another and another. They start to emerge from everywhere—loathsome, skinny, rat-like dribbling things. Like locusts or like soldier ants, they run beneath him, they begin to scramble over him they begin to inundate him. They bite him, they tear off his flesh, they stare into his face malignantly, and he falls down consumed by them.

Perhaps a psychiatrist would have his own views about Nikos’s dreams but Nikos had certainly developed his own. At one time he had felt he might be able to turn his dreams to some use by writing fantasies based on them, but had decided that others would do it better.

Nikos explained: "The dreams affected my way of thinking because I became certain that they were based on the fundamental truth that this world was inhabited at one time by another race who, in practising laissez faire technology, lost their foothold and were expelled, yet live on the outside, ever ready to take possession of the earth again."

These dreams had conditioned Tino Nikos’s career and particularly his interests in antiquity and palaeontology—effectively his whole life.

S T Nikos himself summarised his dream theory in one of his letters as: "There have been ages when other things ruled on the earth, and they had great stone cities. Remains are rarely, but still to be, found as cyclopean stones scarcely recognisable as constructions. Their builders all died vast epochs of time before man came, but there were conditions which could revive them when the cycle of being turned once more into the correct quadrant, when their successors proved to their makers that they had forsaken all responsibility for their tenancy as guardians of the earth.

"And so it is not to be thought, that man is either the oldest or the last of earth’s masters. His predecessors wait—not in the world we know but at its edges. They rest asleep—tranquil, elemental and—except when they stir—unseen. For the serpent is yet poised, motionless but alert, awaiting the moment to strike."

Dinosaur Aptitudes

Scientists today consider that just because the development of human life happened in our case, it does not mean anything comparable could happen for others. They say it is a ‘quirky evolutionary accident’ that human beings have developed consciousness, and intelligence has no prospects of evolving again if mankind were to be destroyed. They claim mankind is unique.

"We are no more aware," Nikos writes, "than the medieval churchmen who placed us in the center of the universe; nor than post-Darwinian Victorians who considered us to be at the apex of the tree of progress. Men believe mankind to be the pinnacle of creation, indeed created in God’s own image. No other animal could have that divine image, no other animal could occupy that unique position, since otherwise man would simply be another beast, another of God’s experiments in creation.

"The prejudices of our scientists stop them from asking: Has intelligence arisen before mankind? or Could the mass extinction of the dinosaurs be self-inflicted? They do not ask these questions because the answer might be the wrong one. To avoid answers you do not like, do not ask questions!"

He said that besides mankind’s ego, the obstacle to the idea of intelligence in dinosaurs was that dinosaurs were believed to be reptiles. But reptiles and lizards are cold-blooded, whereas warm-blood seems necessary for a high capacity brain. In fact dinosaurs were not reptiles— they were a more advanced evolutionary group and they were warm-blooded! They were closer relatives to modern birds, which have hotter blood than mammals than to reptiles.

Nikos wrote: "Not only were the dinosaurs warm blooded, they also had every characteristic necessary for the development of intelligence. Intelligent beings must walk upright, freeing their forelimbs to develop hands instead of paws; be sociable, because intelligence arises out of the need to communicate; have complicated social relationships, especially in connection with the rearing of young; have binocular vision so that they can see and think three dimensionally, and be able to transform their environment.

"Bipedalism was the very basis of dinosaurs’ evolutionary emergence. Like the hominids, having discovered that they could run on their hind legs, they must eventually have realised that their forelimbs were freed for the manipulation of objects. To do this one of the digits of the hand, the thumb, should be opposed enabling its tip to touch the tip of the other digits. Opposed digits were very common in dinosaurs. Large carnivores had an opposed toe rather like perching birds. The feathered dinosaur, the archaeopteryx, had grasping hands as did its near relatives the coelurosaurs, and surely used them for grasping insects and climbing trees.

"A related but later dinosaur, the deinonychus, evolved a high degree of coordination of hands and arms, its hands being better adapted for grasping and holding than those of any other dinosaur. It also had wrist joints that rotated so that the hands could turn towards each other enabling the animal to grasp its prey in both hands. The human is only one of the few mammals which can do this.

"Of the descendants of deinonychus, the dromaeosaurs—all of which had opposable, manipulating fingers and were capable of a high degree of coordination—the stenonychosaurus also had many other advanced features, including binocular vision. Its eyes were large and well developed like the eyes of the ostrich (which has the largest eyes of any terrestrial creature alive today). This suggests that they had evolved from a nocturnal form, further evidence that the dinosaurs were warm-blooded, because cold-blooded animals must be inactive at night. What would they be hunting at night time that needed speed, agility, keen vision and grasping hands? Mammals! Mammals were hounded into the night, terrorised by creatures with keen senses, nimble and agile enough to hunt, by night, the supposedly superior mammals! All mammals at this time were small, but these dinosaurs were also small—stenonychosaurus was only about five feet long including its long tail.

The popular idea that the dinosaurs were dim-witted is not true of the ones noted above with the grasping hands and binocular vision, the smaller, agile coelurosaurs and dromaeosaurs that lived late into the Cretaceous period. Dromaeosaurs were skilful predators which had evolved large brains to coordinate their sophisticated movements and vision. Few good fossils have been found but they were more common, and more successful, than the fossil record suggests, their habitats and light frames not being conducive to fossilisation—just like the apes and hominids, mankind’s ancestors!

"Meat, being concentrated protein is an important factor in the development of intelligence. The predator needs less bulky food and needs less time eating, so it has more thinking time—time free to become cultural and inventive. Some dinosaurs were predatory, some were herbivorous, and we can deduce that some must have been scavenging omnivores. Plainly, meat was available to them and the predatory dinosaurs were aggressive enough, if that were an important attribute for technological success.

"The skulls of the dinosaurs show that many had very well developed senses. Crocodiles and birds, both of which are related to the dinosaurs, have acute hearing so it is not surprising that dinosaurs also had. All dinosaurs had sensitive middle ear bones and a notch in their skull where the tight ear drum stretched. The structure of their ears, indicates excellent hearing and the ability to hear high pitched noises, possibly initially the calls of their young and later the sounds of communication.

"Would they then make sounds? Birds do. And present day crocodiles do. There seems no reason to doubt that dinosaurs also did. They had no larynx to enable them to speak as we do. But they had other ways of making noises, based on a host of sounds not made in the human way. Many of the hadrosaurs had distinctive crests protecting their elaborately long nasal passages allowing them to make sounds rather like a French horn. The edmontosaurus had an inflatable sac on its snout, like an elephant seal’s, that acted as a resonator enabling calls and signals to be made to other members of the herd.

"Brain casts show highly developed olfactory bulbs showing the sense of smell was often good. Large orbits and pronounced optic lobes tell of excellent vision. Many were caring parents possibly having live young, had stereoscopic vision and manipulating hands. Many walked upright and some later dinosaurs had large and growing brains. Some also were fierce hunters and presumably correspondingly aggressive. Some dinosaurs somewhere had each of the attributes considered necessary for man to evolve. The only conclusion is that some dinosaur somewhere could have had them all and become intelligent before Adam."

Anthroposaurus Sapiens

Did the dinosaurs develop intelligence before Adam? Several people have dared to ask this question, but though they believe that dinosaurs would have become intelligent if they had survived the terminal Cretaceous events, they all agree that they did not because they died out first. One expert writes: "The potential in dromaeosaurs and coelurosaurs for an explosive evolution as the Tertiary dawned cannot be doubted—who knows what new peaks the sophisticated bird-mimics would have attained had they survived into the Age of Mammals." Only Nikos has been bold enough to believe that they did exactly that.

Some dinosaur did develop intelligence and by so doing caused the Cretaceous terminal extinction, just as an insensitive ape developed intelligence at the end of the Tertiary and caused the mass extinction that marks the end of that geological era. The circumstantial evidence is compelling. We find ourselves realising simultaneously that Nikos’s anthroposaur preceded us, and that we have just stumbled over the precipice of our own extinction.

Nikos wrote: "The thesis is not self-evidently false, as, say, the idea of a flat earth is. Today we consider it evident that the earth is round and revolves round the Sun—but these ideas have only become accepted in the last few hundred years. The movement of the continents, continental drift, noted by Wegener seventy years ago seems obvious to us all now, indeed it was probably obvious to any child studying a map of the world decades before Wegener, but because continents were so massive and the experts could not think of a mechanism by which they could move, no one was willing to ask the question ‘Must not South America and Africa once have been joined?’

"Mankind has adopted its position of global domination in just five million years. The dinosaurs were warm-blooded, active creatures and usurped the rule of their forebears, the thecodonts, in only five million years. Mechanisms exist for species to evolve at astonishingly fast rates. On average a species of dinosaur did not last for more than two or three million years before becoming extinct or evolving into a new species. There is no reason why one of the dinosaurs should not have evolved intelligence during the last five million years or so of the Cretaceous Period. Dinosaurs evolved quickly and there was a spate of dinosaur evolution just prior to their final decline. Bakker [Robert Bakker, a noted expert on dinosaurs—Michaela Magi Griffiths] says that the stenonychosaurs were evolving quickly in many of their adaptive compartments and with their bulky pair of mid-brain lobes they were probably every bit as endowed as the Late Cretaceous mammals.

"Fossil dinosaurs have been found with quite remarkably large brains. Struthiomimus had a brain to body ratio similar to that of a modern day ostrich—1:1000. And, though brain size is obviously a general measure of intelligence, there is no way of telling whether the brain of an extinct class of animals functioned in quite the same way as those of animals with which we are familiar. A higher metabolic rate, more active brains, faster synapses, sharper nerve impulses could all contribute to greater efficiency of the brain even though it were smaller than ours. The abilities of dinosaurs might have developed rather differently from mammals and we cannot be certain that modern creatures with larger brains are more intelligent than the smaller brained dinosaurs. In mammals the brain grew by expansion of the cerebral lobes but in birds it was the corpus striatum that expanded. A great deal of visual information processing in reptiles is done in the retina rather than being passed on to the brain. The ostrich mimic dinosaur had enormous eyes protected by bony plates. That is usually attributed to a nocturnal lifestyle but it could indicate that the parts of the brain of the dinosauroid that were to develop were associated with vision.

"Size is presumably directly related to memory capacity but, for humans, much of the brain seems redundant, evolution looks to have overshot. It might not have done for dinosaurs whose memory capacity could have been better adjusted to the capabilities of their brains overall. But even if dinosaur and mammalian evolution were truly parallel and dinosaurs had to evolve big brains to become intelligent, fast evolution could have done it in a relatively short time. Mankind has evolved from being a user of crude rock tools to our present level of civilisation in just one million years. It must be possible that these alert creatures did the same. How would that have looked in the fossil record, especially bearing in mind that the chosen habitat of these dinosaurs made their remains scarce, just as remains of early man are scarce and, of modern chimpanzees, non-existent?

"What of the niche later occupied by the primates. Was it occupied in the Cretaceous by primosaurs, dinosaur equivalents of the primates, and only when they died was the mammalian version able to develop? If convergent evolution is anything to go by, perhaps the intelligent dinosaur had to descend, like the intelligent mammal, from the trees or, perhaps, emerge from the water. What was in the trees when the dinosaurs were on the ground? From the fossil record there seem to be no dinosaurs adapted for tree dwelling in the sense that such creatures as monkeys, apes or even squirrels are today. Yet, if there were no dinosaurs in the trees, the mammals would have had a perfectly safe niche, would surely have evolved into it and, if they merely had to find a place free of dinosaurs to realise their destiny, developed brains much earlier.

"Fossils of predatory dinosaurs are rare but fossils of forest species are rarer. Fossil chimpanzees, from much closer times, are totally non-existent. We have only five fossil skeletons of Archaeopteryx which presumably spent some of its time in trees. Fossils of pterosaurs are mainly of marine species which swooped around the edges of the sea. The problem with tree dwellers is that their dead bodies drop to the forest floor where they are most unlikely to leave a fossil record. The forest is rich in fungi and bacteria that thrive in the damp and the shade and the little that is not eaten by scavengers decays in a short time. And the bones?—the forest floor is acidic so that even the bones do not survive long enough to leave a trace.

"So there is no fossil evidence to suggest what was in the trees when dinosaurs roamed the ground. Experts tell us that, since mammals, like tree shrews, were there, dinosaurs were not—otherwise trees would not have been safe for them. But, if the dinosaurs were afraid of heights, how did the pterosaurs and archaeopteryx learn to fly? It is absurd that dinosaurs should not have adapted to life in the trees and the pterosaurs and archaeopteryx prove it. Lagosuchus, thought to be an ancestor of the pterodactyls, was a primitive dinosaur that must have climbed trees. Today, Komodo dragon hatchlings live in trees to avoid predators. Many other cold-blooded animals climb trees, the many species of tree frog for instance. Why should there not have been hosts of dinosaur monkeys and dinosaur apes? Perhaps there were but, as we have seen, because of their habitat they did not fossilize easily: a whole fauna of advanced dinosaurs about which we know nothing. Is it so stupid then to guess that one of them might have followed a pathway to intelligence just as we did?

"Indeed there is a parallel between the explosive radiation of dinosaurian grazers like hadrosaurs and ceratopsians from the middle Cretaceous and the explosion of mammalian grazers about 11 million years ago. The mid-Cretaceous explosion was a result of the breakthrough of the flowering plants about 117 million years ago just as the more recent case was due to the emergence of the grasses 24 million years ago. Along with the antelopes, horses, cows and elephants of the latter period, taking advantage of the new food stuff, came the intelligent mammal, man. Lucy walked by that East African lakeside just as cattle and horses were evolving 3.7 million years ago. Since then, man has continued to evolve rapidly, though the animals that originally shared the savannah with him, such as the antelopes, have not.

"Can the parallel be extended? Did an intelligent dinosaur emerge from the Cretaceous forests, a part of the explosive radiation of dinosaurs resulting from the earlier emergence of the flowering plants as a new source of food, and, like man, evolve exceedingly rapidly? If an aquatic phase gave man many useful features during his development, is it possible that some dinosaurs lived aquatically for awhile and developed a comparable streamlined shape and upright stance as well as other useful features?

"With the plucking of the hadrosaurs from the experts’ approved place in the swamps, to be placed in herds on mossy plains, there seemed to be no semi-aquatic dinosaurs remaining at the end of the Cretaceous. Animals such as the ichthyosaurs and the plesiosaurs, which the experts do not classify as dinosaurs, were fully aquatic, and the ichthyosaurs might have died out before then anyway. Yet, for 20 million years, sea-levels had been higher than at any time in the last 200 million years. There were vast areas of shallow continental seas. Surely a lot of species must have dipped their toes in the water and some of them must have tarried awhile. Lots of shallow seas imply lots of small, perhaps transient, islands ideal for evolutionary experiments like those described by Elaine Morgan [an author and exponent of the idea of the aquatic ape—Michaela Magi Griffiths] but 65 million years earlier. Suggestive also is Bakker’s idea that the archaeopteryx was possibly able to use its primitive wings to swim rather as a hoatzin fledgling does. Both archaeopteryx and deinonychus had wrists with a semicircular joint which permitted accurate movement of the fingers and exceptional ability to flex them. It is conceivable that, while the archaeopteryx was evolving into birds that some other members of the family turned to brachiating and developed along the lines of first the modern primates, and then the aquatic ape, to yield Anthroposaurus sapiens.

"The growth of intelligence in man has been attributed to the succession of ice ages over the last few million years. This sequence of glacials and interglacials subjected the hominid apes to repeated intense selective pressure putting a premium on adaptability, versatility and intelligence. Though there were no ice ages at the end of the Cretaceous period, we noted that the sea level was high. It fell considerably and quickly 95 million years ago and again 67 million years ago, but over several million years, about 80 million years ago, there was a shallower dip. With large amounts of the continental shelves covered in water, fluctuations of only a few meters could successively expose then inundate large areas of land. The normal tidal range today can make the sea disappear over the horizon at low tide in those places where the beach shelves at only a slight angle. The slow shallow dip observed in the sea level when it was at its height possibly signifies thousands of such incursions of the ocean. Imagine a Spring tide that went out for ten thousand years before it returned. Then it stayed in for ten thousand years. This would put strong selection pressure on the species living on the flat coastal lowlands or on low islands.

"Possible confirmation is the formation of oil bearing rocks at that time. Half of our present oil reserves stem from that period, the result of organic matter settling to the bottom of shallow stagnant seas. Incursions of the ocean would have trapped the organic layers between thin layers of mud eventually giving rise to oil shales from which oil was squeezed under pressure. Further evidence of such cycles comes from the striated appearance of Cretaceous chalk cliffs. Is it possible that fluctuations in sea level provided the evolutionary stimulus for the Anthroposaurs that was provided by ice ages in the evolution of mankind? Did the same fluctuations force a brachiating dromaeosaur to turn to the water temporarily, giving it a range of advantages just as Morgan argues for mankind’s predecessor?

"Stenonychosaurus had an opposable thumb, stood upright about three feet tall and had binocular vision. It had all the ingredients of success that we see later in the development of the apes. Stenonychosaurs were the chief predators on Cretaceous mammals and that there must have been quite a lot of them because, by the end of the Cretaceous, there were a lot of mammals, though they were small. Nevertheless few have been found as fossils, just as complete fossil mammals from that period are also rare. The fossil record is a poor indicator of past life.

"By extrapolating trends observable in the dinosaurs like stenonychosaurus to beyond their extinction, an idea of what the intelligent dinosaur might have become can be deduced. A model of such a ‘dinosauroid’ is on display in Ottawa. They are assumed to have had scaly skin, large oval eyes with vertically slit pupils, a three fingered hand, one digit of which would be opposed, three toed feet and no external sex organs. Communication would have sounded similar to birdsong.

"But 65 million years, even in a thought experiment, seems too long for an active, warm-blooded creature already up and running to need to develop what mammals did in the same period of time from a standing start. With the mechanisms for rapid change at the disposal of evolution such a long time scale seems unnecessary if not silly. It is more likely that intelligence evolved before the whole dinosaurian dynasty came to an end.

"Perhaps only seven million years ago, the ancestors of human beings were the creatures from which also descended present day chimpanzees. From that time a line branched off the common stock that became human. Mankind apparently reached the threshold of intelligence within perhaps the last five million years. Sixty of the sixty five million years of domination of the earth by mammals elapsed before the intelligent model went into the prototype stage, but then in only about five million years technological society evolved.

"Sixty million years of mammalian evolution to arrive at the threshold of intelligence, yet the dinosaurs had 140 million years at the top—more than twice as long as the mammals. Could animals that succeeded so well for so long fail to develop an intelligent version of their own? There must be a possibility that dinosaurs too achieved thinking status. 65 million years before humans!

"The Ottawa model is a model, not of the impossible but of the possible. Not of the hypothetical dinosauroid today but the actual anthroposaur of 65 million years ago."

We give some credit to Tino Nikos and use his term for the intelligent dinosaurs. Anthroposaur is the better term: it is more descriptive than dinosauroid. And the hypothetical vision of dinosauroid evolution is vastly different from that of Tino Nikos.

Defenceless Hadrosaurs

The intelligent dinosaur is likely to have been a meat eater just as the intelligent mammal is. The upright dinosaurs and the best developed ones all seemed to be predators and, on basics, predators would be expected to be more intelligent than herbivores. Like mankind the Anthroposaurs must therefore have herded suitable animals for butchery. What were they? I put this question to Nikos and received the following reply.

"The hadrosaurs! Hadrosaurs showed explosive diversification shortly after descending from the iguanodonts towards the end of the Cretaceous. Extreme diversification depends on genetic variation. The greater the extremes, the more variation is implied and vice versa. Dinosaur extremes indicated great genetic variation which accounted for their ability to adapt and to radiate into vacated niches.

The reason they could not cope with the events of 65 million years ago whereas they had successively coped splendidly with previous mass extinctions of 145 million years ago, of 117 million years ago and of 95 million years ago, was that in the few million years before the final act they had lost variation and had become inflexibly standardized.

The last few million years of the Cretaceous showed a marked reduction in diversity of dinosaur species: the earlier vigorous adaptive radiation of the hadrosaurs and the ceratopsians similarly gave way to a yielding of variety. For the last two million years of the Period, a single genus of each—saurolophus and triceratops respectively—dominated the landscape, although they did so in vast numbers.

No gradual environmental change is going to eliminate genetic variation in genus after genus of dinosaurs. That very variation will guarantee adaptation to the changes by natural selection before genetic variation has been significantly pruned. The motive power of evolution is expansion of diversity with environmental change. The dinosaurs’ loss of variety is much more characteristic of the loss of variety in species we are seeing today—by unnatural selection—at the hand of man.

Though the average Brazilian consumes less meat each year than a domestic cat in the United States, he has to slash and burn forests to satisfy our demand for steaks and hamburgers. A habitat which harbours perhaps 50 per cent of all species is destroyed to make pastures for one species, cattle, and food for one other, man. The fall in variation of the hadrosaurs at the end of the Cretaceous might indicate they were herded. Could the Anthroposaurs have burnt their own forests to provide more nutritious browsing for their ‘cattle’?

Human proliferation has created a huge imbalance in faunal variety illustrated by the huge human biomass of 250 million tons—probably greater than that of any other animal species. And, besides the six billion human animals, there are domesticated animals—three billion domestic herbivores. What we see is a reduction of species variety together with an increase in actual numbers of some animals. That is just what happened at the end of the Cretaceous.

Caches of bones of a single species are regarded by paleoanthropologists as suggesting husbandry. In the development of man, various cultures seemed to concentrate on ibex, horses, reindeer and so on. Could it be that ceratopsians and hadrosaurs were actually domestic animals like cows and sheep kept for food? Is it possible that hadrosaurs were the cattle of the Cretaceous period, herded on the great plains before being shipped to a Cretaceous Chicago for making into meat pies and hamburgers? Is it impossible?

Defenceless Hadrosaurs

The intelligent dinosaur is likely to have been a meat eater just as the intelligent mammal is. The upright dinosaurs and the best developed ones all seemed to be predators and, on basics, predators would be expected to be more intelligent than herbivores. Like mankind the Anthroposaurs must therefore have herded suitable animals for butchery. What were they? I put this question to Nikos and received the following reply.

"The hadrosaurs! Hadrosaurs showed explosive diversification shortly after descending from the iguanodonts towards the end of the Cretaceous. Extreme diversification depends on genetic variation. The greater the extremes, the more variation is implied and vice versa. Dinosaur extremes indicated great genetic variation which accounted for their ability to adapt and to radiate into vacated niches.

The reason they could not cope with the events of 65 million years ago whereas they had successively coped splendidly with previous mass extinctions of 145 million years ago, of 117 million years ago and of 95 million years ago, was that in the few million years before the final act they had lost variation and had become inflexibly standardized.

The last few million years of the Cretaceous showed a marked reduction in diversity of dinosaur species: the earlier vigorous adaptive radiation of the hadrosaurs and the ceratopsians similarly gave way to a yielding of variety. For the last two million years of the Period, a single genus of each—saurolophus and triceratops respectively—dominated the landscape, although they did so in vast numbers.

No gradual environmental change is going to eliminate genetic variation in genus after genus of dinosaurs. That very variation will guarantee adaptation to the changes by natural selection before genetic variation has been significantly pruned. The motive power of evolution is expansion of diversity with environmental change. The dinosaurs’ loss of variety is much more characteristic of the loss of variety in species we are seeing today—by unnatural selection—at the hand of man.

Though the average Brazilian consumes less meat each year than a domestic cat in the United States, he has to slash and burn forests to satisfy our demand for steaks and hamburgers. A habitat which harbours perhaps 50 per cent of all species is destroyed to make pastures for one species, cattle, and food for one other, man. The fall in variation of the hadrosaurs at the end of the Cretaceous might indicate they were herded. Could the Anthroposaurs have burnt their own forests to provide more nutritious browsing for their ‘cattle’?

Human proliferation has created a huge imbalance in faunal variety illustrated by the huge human biomass of 250 million tons—probably greater than that of any other animal species. And, besides the six billion human animals, there are domesticated animals—three billion domestic herbivores. What we see is a reduction of species variety together with an increase in actual numbers of some animals. That is just what happened at the end of the Cretaceous.

Caches of bones of a single species are regarded by paleoanthropologists as suggesting husbandry. In the development of man, various cultures seemed to concentrate on ibex, horses, reindeer and so on. Could it be that ceratopsians and hadrosaurs were actually domestic animals like cows and sheep kept for food? Is it possible that hadrosaurs were the cattle of the Cretaceous period, herded on the great plains before being shipped to a Cretaceous Chicago for making into meat pies and hamburgers? Is it impossible?

Where are their Ruins?

I could not believe that modern day palaeontologists had failed to notice the remains of the Anthroposaurs’ ships, and aeroplanes and factories and housing estates, and so on in the rocks, if indeed the dinosaurs had reached intelligence. In my next letter to Nikos I wrote: "If intelligent dinosaurs existed, they must have made a big impression on their world, just as we have. Where then are their ruins, their relics and their kitchen middens?"

His reply duly came, with an answer to my question of where the ruins of the Other Ones were. "What could we know of an intelligent race of beings that briefly inhabited the world 65 million years ago? If creatures are sufficiently intelligent they must discover ways of changing their world, but none of our experts admit to any signs of such changes in Cretaceous times. Yet such a race did inhabit the earth, it evolved to a similar level of technology to our own and, as we threaten to do, it destroyed itself in selfish and thoughtless excesses that carried into oblivion the last of its own and many other species of the day, including every other remaining dinosaur.

"Can a major civilisation vanish with hardly a trace? Consider the following. Out of an estimated 80 million species of living organisms on the earth today how many will be classified before they become extinct? How many will leave any fossil remains? How many of the millions of insect species? How many of the 8600 bird species? Of the 4000 mammal species? Hardly any! Out of about 12 billion human people that have ever lived on the earth, how many have left any mark? What remains of their accumulated experience? Most living things, intelligent or otherwise do not leave a trace. Species that are constructed mainly of soft tissues, which decay quickly, effectively leave no fossils. Species that live in environments unconducive to fossilisation leave few fossils. Species that evolve and die off quickly leave few remains. Technological civilisation only began two hundred years ago and might end in the next hundred. Human civilisation, hugely impressive to us, is only an oily smear in the geological record.

"In the millions of years that the dinosaurs dominated the earth, thousands of dinosaur species, billions of individuals, have left no trace. If just one of those species came to prominence very rapidly in evolutionary terms, as mankind has, perhaps making no significant mark until its last few centuries, would much be seen in the rocks 65 million years later? I think not, even if anyone were looking for signs of intelligence. And who’s looking? Not the paleontologists!

"Dinosaurs are not just one species like man but a vast group of creatures which lived for millions of years—the modern equivalent is the whole of the mammals. Like the mammals only one dinosaur was likely to achieve intelligence. Just as remains of the intelligent mammal are scarce, one can expect the remains of the intelligent dinosaur to be scarce. It has been said that the chances of finding fossils of an evolutionary variation that lasts only a few tens of thousands of years are small.

"It has also been pointed out that we are builders in wood and metal. Our most majestic stone buildings are little more than facades supported by thin tendons of steel. In a thousand years, even without flood, fire or nuclear warfare, our major cities would be little more than rubble. But if we were to enter another ice age and enormous glaciers should creep down from the north, as they have several times in the past million years, everything in their inexorable path would be pulverised.

"And that is a fraction of the time that has elapsed since the demise of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. In that time more than 60,000 feet of deposits would have been laid over our fallen cities. Without the continual folding of the earth the remnants of our civilisation would be ten miles under the surface of the earth. But folding and erosion can expose these ancient rocks. They are then weathered and eroded anew. Even the most substantial of our engineering efforts like the Panama Canal might well have been worn away and redeposited as sediments several times in that time scale. Much of our works would have disappeared entirely, subducted under the fringes of continents by movement of crustal plates to be recrystallized millennia hence as new igneous rocks. It is not surprising therefore that only the most vestigial traces of the Anthroposaurs remain today—and they may be deep in undisturbed strata. They might also be severely distorted, oxidised or mineralised, and might not be recognisable for what they originally were. Velikovsky wrote, ‘prior civilisations are buried so deeply within the lower strata of the earth that we simply do not have any archaeological evidence of their existence.’

"Yet traces of the very substance of dinosaurs’ bodies have been found. Carbon dust is found with some fossil dinosaur finds—the remains of the soft tissues, the skin, flesh and blood vessels. One wonders whether among it are any undecomposed molecules of the original protein or even DNA. Will we soon isolate DNA from the remains of dinosaurs to enable us to decide how advanced they were and even regenerate the creatures by gene culture? We might, but, meanwhile, such evidence as there is must be gleaned by raking through ancient rubble. But no one has been looking for traces of civilisation in ancient rocks. Why should they? Convention tells them that only mankind is intelligent!

"Nevertheless some distinctly anachronistic findings have been reported. Objects found where they shouldn’t be, boulders miles away from their parent rocks or fossils embedded in solid rock, or in apparently undisturbed strata, are called erratics. Unless they have an obvious explanation, such as glacial transportation or burial, they are put away unlabelled in the cellars of museums. There are many thousands of them waiting to be rediscovered. Some of them are clues to the civilisation of the dinosaurs."

Oddities in the Rocks

Nikos must have now turned to his shoeboxes filled with palaeontological Forteana to describe some of the strange discoveries that have allegedly been made in very old strata. He was at his favourite interface—between the unnatural and the natural; between fantasy and science; between nightmare and reality.

"An apparently human molar was found in coal deposits described as laid down in the Eocene epoch but apparently bearing many dinosaur fossils as well as sharks’ teeth and fish scales. Although the enamel had carbonised and the roots had mineralised into an iron compound, local dentists felt sure it was a human second lower molar.

"Labourers discovered a fossil shoe print in solid rock. The imprint was that of a shoe with a high narrow heel and a broad flat sole. It was so clear, in the fine grained shale in which it was found, that it looked as though it was only a couple of days old. In Nevada a fossilised shoe print impressed in limestone laid down at the time of the great reptiles was found. The double stitches in the seams were distinct, microphotographs showing them very clearly. ‘At one place it was double stitched and the twist of the thread could be clearly seen.’ Minute crystalline deposits of mercuric sulphide long ago deposited by leaching action in the impression and which can not realistically be imitated prove that the imprint was not faked. Sandal or moccasin prints have been seen in the gypsum of the White Sands in New Mexico. The White Sands were laid down as an ancient inland sea gradually dried up around the time of the demise of the dinosaurs.

"Oil workers have recovered carved bones and decorated coins from deep rocks brought up during well drilling. A gold necklace was found in a piece of coal. What appeared to be an iron tool was found in a Scottish coal seam. Two workmen signed affidavits to their amazing discovery in 1912 of an iron pot inside a large piece of coal that they were breaking up to be used in the furnace of a power plant. The pot left a clear fossil impression in the remaining pieces of coal.

"Coal miners noticed a curious slab in an Iowa coal mine. Found 130 feet below ground just below the sandstone which capped the seam, it was approximately two feet long by one foot wide and was four inches deep. Its surface was inscribed with diamond shapes having the face of what seemed to be an old man in the middle of each. The features of the faces were said to be all similar, inclined to the right except for two of them, and, interestingly, all had a strange dent in the middle of their forehead. Was this the third eye (our pineal gland) which is most pronounced in some types of modern lizard—and possibly some dinosaurs too? Was the slab deliberately buried by a later race? Does it carries a message meant to be decipherable by future beings?

"While shot blasting a seam two miles below ground, the miner in 1928 found, among the dislodged coal, blocks of concrete about a foot across. Although the broken edges showed that they were made of what passed as an ordinary sand and cement mixture, the faces of the blocks were highly polished. The remainder of the wall disappeared into the coal seam. Another miner working a coal face about 100 yards away struck what seemed to be the same wall. Mysteriously the coal owners pulled the men out of the coal faces and ordered them to keep quiet about their discoveries. The same gang, a few years earlier, had found a similar wall in a nearby pit. They had also found a cylinder of silver with staves imprinted on it, and a large bone ‘like an elephant’s’. Wouldn’t a layman mistake a dinosaur bone for an elephant’s?

"Coal miners in West Virginia found a well constructed concrete building, and a perfectly formed human leg made of coal. Though the leg could not have been human, it was human-like, implying that human-like creatures existed millions of years ago.

"Workmen excavating in Dorchester, Massachusetts blasted a metallic object out of solid rock. The object consisted of a bell-shaped vessel, 4.5 inches high, 6.5 inches at the base, 2.5 inches at the top, and an eighth of an inch in thickness. There is no doubt that this curiosity was blown out of the rock. Though reported as made of a silver alloy the colour of zinc, more recently it has been described as made of an alloy of copper, zinc, iron and lead. It was inlaid in pure silver with six flowers and the base was also inlaid with what looks like a vine. The chasing, carving and inlaying was exquisite. Yet the vessel had been blown out of solid pudding stone fifteen feet below the surface. The origins of the vessel remain a mystery but man-made objects do not get embedded in rock so solid that dynamite is needed to shatter it.

"Animal remains are rarely found in coal deposits because the conditions in the steamy jungles that gave rise to them promoted rapid decomposition. An apparently human skull was found in the coal collection of the Mining Academy in Freiberg. He does not mention the age of the coal deposits but says the skull is composed of brown coal and manganiferous and phosphatic limonite. Brown coal is usually young coal from the Mesozoic era or the Tertiary period, the former of which covered the age of the reptiles!

"In 1971 bulldozers moving earth for mine exploration revealed traces of human remains in soft sandstone said to be 100 million years old. The remains were 15 feet down beneath five or six feet of solid rock and yet there appeared to be no caves or crevices in the overlying strata. Bits of bone and teeth were first found but then the excavators noted a more significant bone embedded in the rock. Local experts from the University of Utah were brought in and under their direction parts of two skeletons and a mixture of teeth and bone shards were uncovered. They described the skeletons as Homo sapiens. One of the bodies seemed to conform with the burial pattern of some Indian tribes. Oddly, the academics lost interest and never wrote up the find formally. Some reports said the bones were the same age as the rock matrix. If the remains really had fossilised and were of an age comparable with the surrounding rocks then this find would have been highly valuable in placing man-like beings in distant geological times. One wonders whether a close examination was made of the remains to determine whether the description of them as Homo sapiens would have held up. Or were the fossils assumed to be Homo sapiens because they looked human. Had the local experts only made a cursory examination, lost interest and moved on before rigorous anatomical studies had been carried out?

"In 1898 in Death Valley two brothers, making a living selling fossils, found the fossilised remains of a seven and a half feet tall female in the same stratum as fossils of prehistoric camels, and an elephant-like creature with four tusks. Fossils of palm trees, ferns and fish were also found. The curious thing (besides her height) about these human remains was that she had a tail, having several extra vertebrae at the end of her spine. The spot where the fossils had been found had once been on the continental shelf of the Pacific Ocean, and the fossilised bones had been laid down then. Death Valley, like White Sands, lies in the Rocky mountains which were thrust up in a series of gigantic pulses through the Mesozoic and early Cenozoic eras, the very time when the earth was roamed by dinosaurs—until their extinction marked the boundary between the two geological ages. Could the large female with the tail be the best described specimen yet found of the man-like super-dinosaurs?

"What though of the camels and four tusked elephant found with her? It is unlikely that any single specimen was complete, the remains were 65 million years old and, although fossil hunters, the finders were not professional paleontologists. Bones of small dinosaurs could be mistaken for those of camels and bones of larger dinosaurs with horns or tusks could be mistaken for the more familiar elephants. The thumb spike of the iguanodon was thought even by professionals to be a horn like a rhinoceros’s. The evidence may be better explained by the thesis of the intelligent dinosaur.

"A fragment of bone, probably belonging to a dinotherium and engraved with a picture of a horned quadruped and traces of several other figures, was discovered in apparently miocene strata. This implies the existence of an intelligent creature capable of art work some 25 million years ago. Clearly, there must have been some misdating here. It is far too old to be done by men and far too young to be done by Anthroposaurs. If a dinotherium bone, the artwork was of a rhinoceros and was by early man but it would require the find to have been in recent strata not Miocene. The alternative would be that the artwork was of a horned dinosaur and the relic was from the late Cretaceous rather than the Miocene. The bone cannot then have been that of a dinotherium. If the latter explanation prevailed, who could have been the artist in the age of dinosaurs other than our anthroposaur?

"Independent minded researchers in the last couple of decades have put together sufficient to begin to challenge the paleontological dogmatists. Unorthodox proposals deserve attention if only to provoke the experts to justify their conventional arguments and thus periodically to force them into an honest reappraisal. My speculations might stimulate a more open-minded look at past events. Anomalies in old rock strata might be taken seriously and accurately dated rather than ignored. Curious artefacts and impressions in very ancient rocks, of the Cretaceous Period particularly, might be studied systematically to see whether an adequate theory can be constructed to explain them.

"More importantly we should examine the parallels between the present time and mass extinctions of the Cretaceous. Tens of millions of years hence, geologists will simply see a sudden reduction in diversity terminating the Tertiary epoch. Will they notice that a couple of inches of sediment contain traces of one species of ape which briefly exploded in numbers prior to the mass extinction? It is doubtful. Is the mass extinction of species the only legacy we wish to leave, as our sapient dinosaurian antecedents did? If my probe into time’s vaults motivates enough people to disown our dinosaur heritage and to stop our assault on the planet, we might yet, unlike the dinosaurs, survive. I am not optimistic!"

Nasa Experts

It was about this time that Nikos had his first visits from men in black suits, from Nasa or from Washington—the Govvy Men as he called them.

Nikos presented a paper on his views to a conference dedicated to the impact of the asteroid which supposedly terminated the life of the dinosaurs. He had to give his paper a non-committal title, Factors Predisposing Late Cretaceous Life to Extinction, to be able to get a slot on the programme. When Nikos wrote me about the experience he said he was amazed at the anger in the orthodox community of science. His presentation almost from the outset was accompanied by boos and cat-calls, heckling and abuse. He was accused of talking nonsense, being non-scientific and a disgrace to his calling, of speaking under false pretences because he did not agree with the impact theory, and being a madman.

"Fortunately," he wrote, "all of this did not take very long because three quarters of the audience left after calling me a suitable name."

He therefore made his presentation to a few who remained, most of whom were also hostile but demonstrated it by sitting in stony silence rather than raising their voices. The presentation was scheduled for twenty minutes and at the end of it his remaining audience left him in the auditorium alone except for the cleaner and a technician.

Scientifically one could not expect Nikos’s views to be popular, especially at such a gathering, but here he was also treading on political toes—the conference was sponsored by Nasa. Nikos’s speech was as follows.

"Something unusual happened at the end of the Cretaceous Period. It is marked by an oily smear in the rocks full of soot and heavy metals, including the unusual element, iridium. Many genera of all kinds died off. Any terrestrial creature weighing more than 50 pounds as an adult became extinct; sea organisms of all sizes were devastated, including many minute sea creatures like the foraminifera; many of the sea bottom filter feeders such as bivalves disappeared; only about 30 per cent of sponges remained.

"The modern explanation is a cosmic collision. But can the meteorite impact explain the mass extinction. After all many genera and individual species did survive showing that, despite darkness, dust and poison gases, conditions could be tolerated. Many species were not seriously affected—and many others, we know, had been suffering decline before the hypothetical collision. 75 per cent of marine organisms had been on the wane for two to five million years, and few species seem to have died off at exactly the same time.

"Dinosaurs were similarly on the wane. Half of the 36 genera of dinosaurs alive about ten million years before the end of the Cretaceous had died out by the time the final million years was entered. Only twelve species are estimated to remain when the supposed meteorite hit. Dinosaurs were already virtually extinct. They did not die out in a geological instant but petered out over thousands of years. They had shown themselves to be adaptable in many previous crises yet were failing to cope with this one. Plainly life had been under stress for some time. Why?

"Though the asteroid impact did not happen, many of its supposed effects sound uncomfortably close to what we see about us today, the result of high technology and too many human beings demanding too much of the earth’s resources with no thought of the consequences. Today we see these effects caused by the intelligent mammal. I have argued that the dinosaurs had the wherewithal to become intelligent. Maybe the truth was more mundane than the impact of an asteroid—the Anthroposaurs drowned themselves and their planet in their own waste, just as we are doing! Did one species of dinosaur gradually kill off the others and finally itself?

"Pollution is a symptom of increasing entropy, a scientific measure of disorder. Life forms reduce entropy in themselves and their immediate surroundings but in so doing they vastly increase entropy in the wider world. Entropy is waste. Organisms trapped in a sealed environment with plenty of food quite often poison themselves to death on their own waste. A ferment of home brew will stop working even though there is plenty of sugar and nutrient left. The yeast is poisoned by the alcohol that it makes as waste. The Anthroposaurs poisoned themselves on their waste. We are doing the same. The earth is effectively a sealed environment and if we fill it with waste products we shall die.

"Entropy is acid rain. The final Cretaceous atmosphere was acidic. The source of the acidity, we are told, was nitrogen oxides formed as the death star burned through the air. Dramatic! Reality was as stupid as it is today. Anthroposaurs pouring acid into their environment, as we are doing, would not have survived long. Greenland core analysis shows that the air today is four times more acid than it was in the 16th century. Local levels close to the source of the acidity must be much higher. Moreover a change in pH of one unit from say 6 to 5 represents an increase in acidity of ten times. Rain which has fallen in the industrial parts of the world tested to be pH 4 is a thousand times more acidic than pure water which is pH 7.

"But it is not only the acidity itself that causes damage. The main danger to higher animals comes from the acid leaching out the salts of heavy metals, which then poison the ground water. Entropy is pollution by heavy metals. Each metal has a threshold level of acidity below which it remains bound in the soil but beyond which its salts dissolve into the water. Aluminium ions begin to be released from the soil into the water when the pH reaches 4.2. Aluminium is linked with Altzheimer’s disease. Did the dinosaurs suffer from premature senile dementia caused by acid rain?

"If Anthroposaurs reached an advanced society they must have added acids to the air and thence to the groundwater. It takes 5000 years for the world’s groundwater to replenish. If it became a poisonous soup of acid and heavy metal ions, it would be 5000 years before it became usable again. Even in the Cretaceous, with its higher rainfall, it could have remained polluted for 1000 years. The poisoning of the earth’s groundwater could be a very effective way of initiating a mass extinction.

"Plenty of heavy metals are associated with the death of the dinosaurs. The experts say they came from a metal bearing asteroid. But human beings have easily produced enough heavy metals to pollute the environment without having to resort to crashing asteroids. Humanity annually extracts 7.5 million tons of copper, 20 times more than leaches out naturally, and most of it will finish up as waste. The figure is increasing.

"Cores from the Arctic ice cap show that lead in the air is 500 times higher than it should be. Lead is a cumulative poison—it is accumulated in the body. Our own bodies contain more than 1000 times more lead than our recent ancestors. Lead poisons the nervous system and the brain. Young minds are particularly affected. The symptoms are distractibility, impatience, frustration, restlessness, impulsiveness, destructiveness and violence—symptoms typical of the behaviour of much of our urban youth!

"The iridium anomaly can be explained by pollution. Careful testing of it showed that the iridium concentration built up slowly over a few thousand years not just a few months as a cosmic collision demanded. The oceans were polluted with heavy metals gradually. If the decline of the dinosaurs was associated with the iridium deposits, it was certainly not a sudden event but one which matches a gradual build up of industry.

"Metals in the boundary layer besides iridium at abundances higher than normal are osmium, palladium, arsenic, chromium, cobalt, selenium, nickel and tin. These metals are not only found in extra-terrestrial sources. Terrestrial sources such as copper-nickel ores and molybdenum sulphide ores also contain many of these unusual metals. If these metal ores had been mined, smelted and processed to get at the copper, nickel or molybdenum, the flue gases would have carried off the remaining metals to pollute the environment widely.

"The concentration of the metals in the boundary layer varies from place to place just as one would expect from sites that might have been close to, or distant from, an industrial area. Furthermore ores from different sources, processed in different places, would have had different compositions so the analysis of the boundary layer in different places would be expected to vary as researchers have found. A death star would have a fixed composition and would distribute its components fairly uniformly. Death stars may be more romantic but common industrial pollution fits the description better.

"Entropy is chemical pollution. For every human being on earth, the world’s farmers apply a pound of pesticides to their crops every year. The eggshells of a species of dinosaur got thinner in more recent deposits. Pesticides like DDT and PCBs absorb into body fats and accumulate in the predator as it eats its prey. At some point in the food chain, the pesticide causes physiological damage and death. The eggs of predatory birds, like eagles, become so thin they break in the nest. Birds are living dinosaurs!

"PCBs are never found in nature but are found in the bodies of 99 per cent of Americans. The sperm count of the American male is only half its value in 1940. In the same period increasing amounts of organochlorine compounds have been found in sperm. Organochlorine chemicals kill pests so why shouldn’t they kill sperm? An expert tells us that dinosaurs died out because mammals killed and ate their young: another tells us that their young were all born the same sex. What if their young were not born at all because pesticides had sterilised all the males? Do our manufacturers and governments care if pesticides sterilise the human race? PCBs are still widely used and, though advanced countries have banned DDT, they still export it to Third World countries!

"Because of overuse of fertilisers our lakes and rivers suffer from eutrophication. Algae thriving on the excess nutrients washed out of the soil, suffocate everything as they decompose. Organic deposits forms thick layers on the bottom, eventually metamorphosed by anaerobic bacteria and then pressure to yield hydrocarbons. Our main oil deposits today were laid down in the Late Cretaceous. Oil was originally formed in shallow, stagnant lakes or seas on continental shelves. The conditions were those of eutrophication. Did the stagnant waters of the lakes and shallow seas polluted by the Anthroposaurs provide the conditions for the formation of the Cretaceous oil deposits? Our farmers and industrialists are setting up suitable conditions. Could we, in such places as the Great Lakes and the Baltic Sea be initiating the next phase of petroleum formation?

"At the beginning of the last five to ten million years of the Cretaceous vegetation was prolific and typically tropical or sub-tropical: towards the end of the period the climate had become typically temperate with cool woodlands. This is just what atmospheric pollution might cause by cutting out sunlight, cooling the earth. Dinosaurs thrived in the warmer climate but in the cooler one mammals had the advantage.

"If the atmosphere in the late Cretaceous were gradually polluted its effects should show up in the fossil record as an adaptation of species to the pollution. Poisonous fumes or particles of dust in the air would induce the development of unusual nasal arrangements to attempt to prevent the pollutants from penetrating to the lungs.

"Ankylosaurs were armoured dinosaurs living at the end of the Cretaceous. They were related to a similar group called the nodosaurs which lived principally in the middle of the Cretaceous period. The earlier group had nasal passages consisting of a simple paired tube leading from the nostrils to the back of the throat. The ankylosaurs however had nasal passages stretched out into the shape of a letter S on either side of which there were additional passages forming almost a honeycomb. Their purpose was to filter and moisten the air before it entered the lungs. Yet why should elaborate filtering systems have been necessary at the end of the Cretaceous but not apparently beforehand, even in closely related species, unless something was happening to the air? Other species from distant parts were equally affected.

"Crested and non-crested hadrosaurs were contemporaneous about 75 million years ago. By the end of the dinosaurs’ reign 65 million years ago the crested hadrosaurs were particularly successful. The crests were either enormous plates or long projections having no ostensible use. The odd thing about the crests however was that they consisted of enormously extended nasal passages protected by the bone of the skull. There must have been evolutionary pressure to extend the nasal passages, and the skull had solved the problem of where to accommodate the resulting labyrinth by developing the crests. The evolutionary pressure was pollution.

"The external shape of the crest did not always match the internal convolutions of the nasal passages suggesting that the external appearance was as important as the elaborate nasal extensions. Were they also visual signalling devices for courtship and mating? Hadrosaurs had acute vision judging by their well developed eye sockets and the presence of a bony ring (the sclerotic ring) to support the large eye. Several species of hadrosaurs seemed to inhabit the same territory and the visual signals could have served to distinguish them. They could have served to signal their position in the social hierarchy and probably the sex of the animal. But why did the nasal passages extend to serve these purposes unless some other cause had stimulated their development? Having started to develop a feature for one reason it is characteristic of sexual selection to make a virtue of necessity and use it for another.

"The cavities could have also acted as resonance chambers for audible displays or communication. Other hadrosaurs without crests probably had inflatable sacs over their nostrils which served the same purpose and could have also served as a visual display. And such sacs would have developed as a protection against pollution in the air. Thus two distinct groups of hadrosaurs had different solutions to the same problem but one solution left obvious fossil records whereas the other has to be inferred. The development of nasal flaps and convoluted nasal passages is best explained as an evolutionary response to increasing atmospheric pollution. Once the protective measures had began to evolve these dinosaurs found that they had other uses too. That is typical of the way evolution works.

"I have tried to convince you that an intelligent dinosaur could have destroyed much of the life on earth at the end of the Cretaceous. Many facts support the hypothesis. Moreover we can see the intelligent species with which we are familiar—ourselves—creating conditions that seem to mirror those that were so destructive then. Needless to say, experts often find it hard to see.

"Experts on the biosphere of the earth, sound like public relations executives for the polluters. They insist they do not wish to ridicule legitimate concern about the state of the terrestrial environment, but simply to place in perspective the puny attempts of industrialists and farmers in polluting the environment. They compare them with what nature has done in the past through glaciations, volcanic eruptions and meteoric collisions. Despite all of these natural disasters, whose scale dwarfs the attempts of man, life continues. There is no need to worry about human pollution—the earth has been able to cope with far worse. All species modify their environment just by being alive. Mankind is no different and cannot degrade his surroundings to the point of extinction. They reassure us that our power to destroy the world, or even ourselves, is quite imaginary, a product of our vainglory.

"Yet elsewhere these friends of the earth argue that the earth’s control systems would break down if the human population were to reach ten billion. Mankind would then desperately have to artificially maintain what formerly were self regulatory feedback systems. We would no longer have a natural environment that sustained life but a ‘spaceship earth’ with life support systems provided by the occupants. Unless, that is, we succumb to gigadeath, in which case mankind will have done—simply through procreating—what these same experts claimed was quite imaginary, a product of our vainglory. And why chose ten billion as the danger level? What if they have overlooked some factor and the figure is five billion? Then the threshold has already been crossed and we are passengers of spaceship earth without realising it. Experts have unquestioning faith in their own pronouncements no matter how arbitrary they may be. Yet we accept them.

"The Nasa experts seem genuinely full of concern when they say that each time we significantly alter part of some natural process of regulation or introduce some new source of energy or information, we are increasing the probability that one of these changes will weaken the stability of the entire system, by cutting down the variety of response. Bravo! They admit it! Urgent action must be merited to make sure we do not increase the probability that some danger point is exceeded. Then what do the Nasa experts recommend? They tell us there is no need to panic. There is ample time and every inclination on the part of scientists to investigate and prove or disprove allegations, and then leave it to the law-makers to decide rationally what should be done. They want to involve a cabal of experts. Not only are the scientific experts to mull and ponder over the diagnosis but the political experts are then to debate it in the legislature and legal experts are to test it in courtrooms. Too bad if the patient is in terminal decline.

"Others are less sanguine, saying: we do not have time to develop our skills. We are presented with a curriculum which includes primary and secondary school, university courses and graduate studies simultaneously. We are staring into a murky crystal ball and cannot clearly foresee the future; if we waited five years hoping the ball would clear, the vision awaiting us would be all the more horrific. Their message is evident. We have no time to study, no time to understand the cybernetics of our environment. There is no time to decide what we can safely do. Deterioration continues daily. We must call a halt to the damage now. But we may already be too late!

"None of this vainglory about our powers of destruction worries men from Nasa and the Pentagon but something else does. They tell us: The credible threats must come from outside the earth and the impact of a large planetismal is the most immediate of them. We have a moral obligation to take such modest, inexpensive steps as we can to avert them. An asteroid impact that occurs perhaps once every 26 million years, if their interpretation of the fossil record is correct (and the next is not due for some 13 million years), is far more worrying than the destruction being wreaked every second by mankind!

The impact of a large planetismal which might threaten us, they hope, will be on the President’s nerves and his response will be in dollars. They have their own lunatic agenda of keeping themselves in sinecures while the real work is left neglected and decaying. Was it like that before—for the Anthroposaurs? Can you picture Professor Expertosaur and Professor Nasasaur, 65 million years ago, saying exactly the same thing? And worse, convincing their compatriots that they should examine the skies and muse on the best ways of saving life on earth by deflecting planetismals while everything died about them. The meteor never came but the Anthroposaurs fooled observers 65 million years later into believing it had, by simulating all its symptoms."

Nikos said that he arrived at his office in his faculty one morning to find a well dressed man waiting for him. He was polite, claiming he came from The Office of Public Relations at Nasa. He said he had read his speech to the ecological pressure group and wondered whether he had got his perspectives right. Nasa had only the best interests of the US as a whole at it heart, and the Department of Public Relations felt it was not doing its duty properly when respected men gave uninformed speeches to gullible campaigners. He said it would be in the best interests of all concerned if Nikos took a fresh tack and sailed with the wind instead of into it. He would be only too happy to introduce Nikos to some of the Nasa family, which was not monolithic—some in it would readily agree with him—to prove they were ultimately all pulling together. Nikos thanked him, saying he would think about it, and led him out.

The visit from the Govvy Man did not seem sinister to me, and, although I thought that Nikos was being unwise in pursuing his campaign, it did not worry me unduly. I was convinced that mostly he was regarded as a one off and not to be taken too seriously.

But this was the point at which Nikos asked me to arrange for the publication of a monograph for him. He wanted it publishing inconspicuously, because he feared what might happen to everyone concerned if he made a large splash—but he had an idea for rapidly building awareness once the book was in print. In this way he hoped to bypass the attentions of the powerful groups that might aim to prevent publication, or to harass anyone concerned with the book. He knew that the Govvy Men would not be concerned as long as the book attracted no attention, which was why he considered it vital that it should initially be published with no fanfares.

He sent me the manuscript and I arranged for publication by a tiny nondescript British publisher, AskWhy! Publications Selwyn. Nikos intended coming to Britain a few weeks later to visit the British Museum. He promised he would check the proofs at the same time and leave the rest with me. He called the book Who Lies Sleeping? a double reference to the Anthroposaurs and the human race.

UFOs, Nightmares and the Apocalypse

The next platform Nikos sought was at a well known UFO convention. Because he had not spent a whole career as a UFOlogist he was not invited to speak despite his offer to do so. He therefore booked a side room for his own meeting in the hotel where the convention was being held and circulated his own posters advertising the event. He called his talk, UFOs, Nightmares and the Apocalypse and succeeded in attracting a small but generally appreciative audience, mainly of the kooky fringe which attends such gatherings.

There is no need for me to rehearse many of the ideas Nikos put over in his talk. They have been outlined above. Essentially he reviewed his idea of the hastening end to the tenure of the king mammal on earth then turned to some of the symptoms of the earth in distress and his explanation for odd events.

"Only a few scientists have ever thought of the earth as living. And even those few people think of it as living only in the sense that it is a complicated feedback system. The intricate cybernetics that make up the biosphere of the earth are able, they say, to react in such a way that the earth remains favourable to life. What these clever people never do is consider the earth itself to be conscious. Yet complicated networks lead of their own volition, through a process of learning, to consciousness. A conscious species upon the earth shows that the earth itself is conscious. Once consciousness has developed on the earth, it remains even when that conscious species dies out. The consciousness of the earth wills consciousness on to another species. Consciousness is a propensity, a morphogenetic field. It has happened and it will happen again. The consciousness of the earth is our local God—or rather Goddess, for the earth is always considered a mother. Doubtless in the wider universe there is a God but he is too remote to bother us—his cybernets are too large to impact upon us except in the longest of time scales. Our times cales are controlled by Mother Gaia.

"Now mothers are attentive to their children except when they turn against them. In mythology Mother Earth turns against her children because of their waywardness. She sends dragons after them, and traditionally dragons appear in the sky, and they are considered bad omens. Earthlights is an excellent name for these dragons. They signify that the earth is under stress, and indeed she is. Worse though, she is signalling and calling through the megaphone: Come in Number Two. Your time is up. We experience these as psychological happenings. That is why they are so defiant of the laws of nature. In your worst dreams anything can happen.

"We experience these warnings in dreams, if we are sensitive enough. Regrettably most people are not. They are simply not attuned to nature. They have become foreign to the earth. That is what many have failed to notice in the continuing UFO flaps in the last forty years. It is not the UFOs that are aliens but the conscious inhabitants of the earth—human beings. And it is the sensitive human beings who are getting the signals.

"Some people might, under certain frightening stimuli, revert to fearful hallucinations which are simply their racial memories triggered by the stimulus. In describing their experiences however those suffering the experience necessarily rationalise what they believe they have seen and express it in modern day terms. So an instinctive fear of dinosaurs might appear as a sighting of alien beings in spacesuits, or monsters from the crypto-zoo. As Jung said: The gigantic catastrophes that threaten us are not elemental happenings of a physical or biological kind, but are psychic events. Man is exposed to the elemental forces of his own psyche.

"Increasingly there are stories of people being abducted by aliens. Some estimates consider that more than a million Americans believe they have been abducted. And during the abductions they are peered at by gaggles of the abductors, probed, examined, cut, operated on, sexually abused, and so on. In their situation the victims are paralysed or powerless to do anything. They feel like a victim—a victim of rape, or Satanic ritual, or perverted surgeons. All of this is caused by the loss of control of the intelligent mammal. The deepest instincts of human psyche are reminding them of what it is like to be victims, to be prey. What people are sensing are the last sights and sounds of a captured quarry in its death throws. We are reverting to prey.

Nikos then answered questions.

Q. If UFOs are hallucinations how can they leave behind bits of metal, or residues?

A. I did not mean to imply that everything seen in the sky is elemental. I have explained elsewhere that most are not. Some are wrongly identified celestial objects, some are wrongly identified terrestrial objects. You can be sure if inorganic traces remain it is terrestrial.

Q. Why does the Air Force show such a keen interest in them if they are manifestations of the earth’s energy?

A. The Government in general is interested in them for two reasons. One is that they have technological things to hide. They are testing advanced technologies and want to keep their trail hidden with a stream of misinformation. The other reason is that the high echelons of the administration know about the Anthroposaurs and that the earth is reacting, and they know they have gone too far and there is nothing to be done. They desperately want to keep this hidden so that there is no general panic or irrational pressure to react even though it is too late. It might be another fifty or a hundred years before Mother earth kills off he last brood. In that time the ruling elite can live happily until they die and leave the apocalypse to another generation.

Q. What happened at Roswell?

A. The Government seems more interested in me than I am in its secrets. Roswell, yes. I am sure the Anthroposaurs are not yet ready to emerge. But the Government have deliberately sought them out in their undersea arks and their deep freezes. Evidently they succeeded and as many as thrity were held at Wright-Patterson AFB. One of the hidden purposes of the International Geophysical Year in 1957/58 was to trace the Great Arks of the Anthroposaurs. Perhaps they did so because they had already come across the frozen creatures which were transported to Roswell. As to the supposed crash, it was not a UFO but a light aircraft which was transporting the frozen bodies to Roswell Army AFB. The unnatural material which was found was an insulating foil because the bodies were kept in dry ice.

Q. Who are the Deros?

A. Not who you might think. For those of you unfamiliar with the idea, the Deros are said to be evil degenerate subterranean creatures waiting to retake the earth from humans, and meanwhile sending telepathic messages to cause them trouble. In fact, human beings are the Deros. It is human beings who are degenerating, evil and multiplying. The Deros are said to be maliciously making humans have disasters, environmental calamities and global wars, but, seriously, who causes them other than humans themselves. What seems to have happened is that someone has had a vivid dream message from the Anthroposaurs but one which was garbled or misunderstood in the waking state. I know this because I often have similar dreams. The Teros, good creatures, are the Sleepers, the Anthroposaurs in their underground Arks.

The Necrophilia Speech

Nikos was getting increasingly political and the secret service men—the Govvy men—were giving him more and more attention. He attracted it because he believed current economic and technological policies were leading the human race towards extinction, and he was utterly disdainful for those who could not see it. Politicians and academics both found it easy to label him as a madman, especially because the consequence of the destruction of the human race was the re-emergence of a reptilian race to succeed us.

Nikos sent me a transcript of another speech he made, this time to a non-scientific audience of green campaigners, with whom Nikos’s credibility was rising. After some preliminaries, it continued.

"The plain fact is that civilised societies and technology are paradoxically incompatible. It is like eating—you have to do it to live, but if you overdo it you die. It is impossible for societies to live and prosper with advanced technology.

"Man + Technology = Extinction.

"Intelligent dinosaurs, the Anthroposaurs, destroyed their world 65 million years ago. And the omens are that we too are heading for extinction.

"At the end of the Cretaceous the vertebrate biomass concentrated into a few highly populous species. Today the same thing is happening. Now, mankind, the new intelligent life form, breeds the few species at the expense of the many. Then, it was the intelligent dinosaur. Genetic variation was narrowed by breeding and environmental destruction until it virtually did not exist. It was literally genocide—without the genes to cope with the slightest stresses, the remaining species died off too. History is repeating itself.

"Why do things tend to repeat themselves? Popper [Karl Popper, the philosopher—Michaela Magi Griffiths] speaks of the propensity that some event will occur. Propensity is probability with intent—it exerts an influence on events as if it were a physical field like an electric or gravitational field. It is reminiscent of Sheldrake’s morphogenetic fields. Controversial though they are, these hypotheses imply that when something occurs, it has more chance of happening again. If true, and the Anthroposaurs have already destroyed themselves, we might be locked into an outcome that will be nigh on impossible—might be impossible—to alter. It might be a propensity that extends throughout the universe. It might explain why we have not been visited by extra-solar intelligences. None of them get beyond the stage that we are at!

"If not, why is it so hard to change our behaviour? Where is the will to change it? Where is the mechanism to do it? Do we suffer from the same affliction as the Anthroposaurs and perhaps all intelligent life forms—a self-destructive syndrome that is a sine qua non of intelligence? If the answer is yes we are doomed. Even if we can see the fault in ourselves, we are powerless to change it. I believe we have a legacy from the dinosaurs. It is part of our psyche. We cannot reject it. It is our dinosaur heritage!

"What is this syndrome? Why have warnings of doom had no effect? Why do people not want to know? There have been many prophets of the forthcoming catastrophe but they are not hailed and praised for their forethought—they are ignored or condemned. The human race persists in its willingness to destroy itself and most other higher organisms for selfish economic and ideological reasons, all of them short term.

"There is something strange about the way we perceive things. We are heartbroken at the death of a pet dog but scorn those people who die in their millions in poverty—human beings! And besides the millions who die every year of disease, starvation and suicide, in the last 200 years perhaps 100 million people have died in warfare. Yet we are totally indifferent to it. We are indifferent to the deaths of our own species as well as to others. Why?

"Why are we so perverse? Why are we apathetic about our destruction of the environment and the threats to life we are creating? Why do we allow rapacious industrialists whether of the blue or the red variety to contaminate the earth? Why do we accept the rule of governments that allow them to do it and, through accumulating dangerous armaments and adopting threatening postures, endanger the world in their own way?

"Erich Fromm [the social philosopher—Michaela Magi Griffiths] wrote: the Falangist motto Long live death threatens to become the secret principle of a society in which the conquest of nature by the machine constitutes the very meaning of progress, and where the living person becomes an appendix to the machine. In our mechanized, urban societies we have lost the knowledge of our relationships with the rest of the biosphere. Instead we are obsessed with mechanical devices, our cars, TVs, computers and washing machines, and mechanical analysis of the interrelationships between ourselves, our hierarchies, social symbols and selfishness. Not only are we unaware of the stench of death around us, in some unconscious way we revel in it.

"Why do we retain such an obtuse optimism that we revile those who do warn us of the dangers. Why is it so much more virile to accept the status quo rather than criticise it? Why do we do what we are told even when we know it is wrong? Why don’t we recognise our dinosaur heritage?

"There are human characteristics that once were valuable to survival but which, through the speed of the evolution of advanced society, have become so ill-fitted to the needs of technological man that they now threaten us. The key characteristic of modern man, as it would have been for Anthoposaurus, is the remarkable speed at which technological society emerged, creating conditions quite different from those in which instincts evolved.

"It happens in nature. When their migratory instinct switches on, swallows that have had a late brood simply abandon them to die. Two instincts conflict—their parental instinct and their migratory instinct. There is a maladaptation—at one time they could raise a late brood but now they cannot. Darwin thought that such animals could feel no remorse, had no conscience, indeed no memory of their action. The swallows do not even recognise what they are doing. Are we similar?

"So instincts sometimes conflict. When intelligence evolves these conflicts become conscious posing the creature moral dilemmas. It resolves them by inventing rules, laws and morals. With the growth of society the rules themselves condition our behaviour. So far so good. But the original code of ethics, made in primitive societies, might not be forever correct. If we have built on behaviour maladapted for modern conditions, we shall find that our mores, rules, norms and habits—our very ways of thinking—are leading us to disaster instead of giving us guidelines for a better existence.

"Selfishness might be one characteristic that was valuable in some evolutionary contexts but is no longer. Selfishness is not excessive self-love, but indifference to others. Other instincts which developed in evolution to balance against excessive selfishness have failed in our coddled environment. Obsessions seem to overwhelm all other feelings— and so too does obsessive selfishness. Ultimately the obsession destroys even the obsessive. Initially selfish, the behaviour eventually contradicts self regard by being self destructive! It becomes a death wish. Necrophilia! Long live death! And our society depends upon highly specialised people—experts—who have to be obsessive in their field to succeed. Our society selects for obsessiveness. Entrepreneurs, Presidents, Prime Ministers, Generals, Scientists—successful people must be obsessive! They must be necrophiles!"

It is easy to see why Nikos was visited by the Govvy Men, the government’s black suited threateners. You can hardly go around saying they are all obsessives and necrophiles and expect them to love you.

But is there yet more to it? The Govvy Men might have regarded Nikos as a dangerous communist or ecologist but usually they are experts at sidelining people like this. Nikos was already sidelined. He was not creating a noticeable stir except perhaps in some fringe conservationist groups. Mostly he was considered—even by those who knew him to be an intelligent and educated man—as a harmless crank. Why did Nikos have to disappear? Why was Albert Bender frightened into submission to their threats?

A man can be a crank, but if he is a crank who has hit upon the truth then he becomes a dangerous man. Nikos considered that the Govvy Men already knew everything that he thought he had discovered. They knew because he was not the first or the only man to have had strange dreams. He was not the first or the only man to have pondered the origins of the oddities in the rocks. He was obviously not the only man to have pondered the significance of UFO sightings. Governments had been buying silence or threatening retaliation when anyone rediscovered their secret. They know the human race is doomed and there is absolutely nothing they can do about it!

The Tape

The next I got from Nikos was a parcel addressed to my official position at my place of work. It contained a tape recording with no covering letter. I played it and was so astonished that I transcribed it for safe keeping. Unfortunately the tape and the transcription went the way of the other S T Nikos papers but what follows is my recollections of its contents. It is perhaps shortened somewhat but the essence of it is there. Remember, I had written it out anyway, so its contents were well impressed on me.

Nikos: Testing. [Pause].

Nikos: I have agreed to meet the Govvy men this evening and the door bell has just rang. It must be them. I am placing this in my desk drawer to record the conversation. [Pause. Scuffling noises. Pause].

Nikos:...so you sit there, Mr er.

Ames: Ames. And this is Mr Beaney and this is Mr Case. Greetings follow.

Nikos: Gentlemen, what can I do for you?

Ames: Dr Nikos, this could be uncomfortable for all of us. I do hope you will be helpful and we can conclude our business amicably.

Nikos: I am not known for being unhelpful, Mr Ames. Please tell me what you want.

Ames: Dr Nikos, you are a man of some reputation in your own field, are you not?

Nikos: You are flattering, Mr Ames, but I do not feel that I have yet achieved anything.

Ames: Dr Nikos, the Government is concerned that some of your statements might attract the wrong sort of attention. They are statements which can broadly be considered potentially embarrassing to the administration. We feel you should restrict your statements purely to your own specialisms and then there can be no trouble.

Nikos: Trouble, Mr Ames? I cannot imagine why there should be any trouble.

Case: Look here, Nikos. We are trying to be polite. We all want to be polite. Why don’t you do as you’re told?

Ames: Relax, Case. Dr Nikos understands us fully and wants to co-operate, don’t you, Dr Nikos?

Nikos: Well I am not sure that I do understand you, Mr Ames. I am not aware that I have done anything that is undemocratic.

Case: That’s rich, Nikos. You’ve been undermining public confidence in the administration, and encouraging commies. You’re a traitor and a foreigner, Nikos!

Ames: Please, Case. There is not need for this, is there, Dr Nikos.

Nikos: I don’t care much for his attitude. I repeat, I am doing nothing unconstitutional, I am a US citizen and I do not have to be spoken to in this way.

Ames: Quite, Dr Nikos. So say you will help us. I said we do not want any unpleasantness, and we too are only doing our jobs.

Beaney: There’s something in it for you if you are co-operative, Nikos.

Nikos: No doubt you will tell me what you mean, but I still do not understand what I have done that you think is harmful.

Case: You know exactly wh...

Ames: Leave it to me, Case. Alright Dr Nikos, let me be perfectly clear. The government can allow criticism but it cannot allow morale to fall. If the electorate have a cause to believe that they have no future, you will stir up trouble. We don’t care what you say about UFOs as long as it isn’t true. We don’t care what you say about dinosaurs, as long as you do not prove them to be linked with UFOs. You can even go around telling everyone that you know that the administration is involved in a cover-up about UFOs, as long, Dr Nikos, as long as you do not say what is being covered up.

Beaney: You are a clever man, Dr Nikos, there are many things you could find to amuse yourself in your scholarly fields. Let us help you.

Ames: Exactly, Dr Nikos. Apply for Federal funding. We can ensure that your application is viewed with considerable favour. What do you say? It’s far better than shooting off and getting into trouble.

Nikos: And what if I refuse?

Ames: Well, it’s not a nice thing to contemplate, but we cannot always keep hotheads in the service, like Case, under control. There are always wildmen who haven’t the patience for dealing diplomatically, Dr Nikos.

Nikos: I am being warned off with menaces.

Ames: We don’t see it that way, Nikos. We have made you an irrefusable offer. The government doesn’t often fund your kind of research. [Shuffling of chairs]. And now we have said enough, Nik.. Dr Nikos. We’ll give you a few weeks to think it over. Then we’ll be in touch again. Be sure you make the right choice.

Voices: [Grunt. Murmers in the distance. Pause. Scuffle.]

Nikos: Those pleasant creatures have departed. Hope it all recorded. Signing off. Tino Nikos.

Nikos loses tenure then disappears!

It was getting worse. Nikos could be irritatingly arrogant but he could also be remarkably patient. One was often conscious of being patronised but in just that kind way that the word grew up—as a father would patronise a child. He could be much worse to people he did not respect. Politically he seemed to be extremely right-wing in his attitude to the ordinary man-in-the-street who he usually disdainfully dismissed as the hoi polloi. In his ideas of class and racial superiority, he felt himself to be of a higher breed. He described the poor and the immigrants as retarded, pock-marked jabberers with vulgar manners and crude beliefs whom his innermost being despises and detests as the mammal has instinctively despised and detested the reptile since time immemorial. It is ironic therefore that the Govvy Men should brand him a communist.

The establishment was closing in. Tino Nikos, a doctor and qualified research worker with degrees in anatomy and physiology, and in palaeontology, who joined a US university as a lecturer and became its director of Extinct Physiology, whose credentials were admirable, and who for ten years was highly respected in his field, was sacked. Then Tino Nikos began to criticise openly the scientific community for their attitude to the earth as the fountain of life, and his scientific peers for ignoring the possibility that he had privately advocated that the dinosaurs had evolved intelligence. Nikos also began to question Nasa and the US government for their policies on space and the environment.

Nikos was removed from teaching—even of topics unconnected with his criticisms. He was told that his work was unorthodox and of little general merit, that there were insufficient funds to support it and that he should retire, or find the funds himself. Nikos protested but found an independent source of funds for a year. Not enough, said the authorities—he had to find funding for three to five years. He could not do it. He was too unfashionable for wealthy sponsors.

Tino Nikos’s views might be thought damaging by those whose profits depend upon a rapacious exploitation of mother earth or whose interests are vested in a nice set of comfortable theories funded by the exploiters, but that is not the point. The UK Sloman report, which was published in response to a different case of academic disagreement, said quite forcefully, academic staff must not be inhibited by any tradition of accepted views. They have the right to be unorthodox.

I shall add, for the record, that his views were more complicated than at first they might seem. Three points in particular should be understood. First, that so soon as any one of these pock-marked jaberrers that he despised proved his intellectual worth, Nikos had nothing but respect for them. Essentially he seemed to hate the whole human race, unless they were able to prove themselves intellectually his equal or superior. Second, that he was not selective in his distaste for people except on the grounds of intellect—he was no racist. Third, that though he despised them for their squalor and underachievement, he above all realised that they were a vital pool of genetic material that was essential for human survival in adverse circumstances. So, however disdainful he might have been of the lower classes, he was no Nazi.

Though no one can agree with his general sentiments, his choice of simile seems curiously significant, as though he was distancing himself from the reptilian creatures that he thought preceded us as masters of the world. And yet the mammal’s despising and detesting of the reptile reflects the equal or greater despising and detesting of the mammal by the reptile. I wondered whether S T Nikos could have been voicing the views of his sleeping inheritors, but subconsciously expressed in the sense appropriate to his situation as a mammal. I began to consider again that perhaps he was not quite sane, despite the sense that his letters made generally. I asked myself: Is it possible that he is allowing himself to become obsessive about his ideas? Or are his dreams and ideas symptomatic of an underlying insanity? Or was it worse still: Was he in reality being influenced psychicly by the sleepers? Indeed was it affecting his own physiology?

I wrote immediately to Nikos concerned for his wellbeing and enquiring about the role of the Govvy men. In his reply he made no reference to it, unless it be: "Regarding our other interests, we must be patient for the time being. When the results are available, I shall let you know." I took him to mean the business of the Govvy men.

Nikos apologised for not being able to continue, saying he had just had an important telephone call and would have to abandon letter writing for the time being, but would write again in a few days. He had been called to an important meeting at Arlington but before that he was taking a few days holiday in New England where he had to research vital matters in the Lovecraft archive in Cambridge.

We know Nikos went to Cambridge and spent three days diligently inspecting the dusty shelves of the Lovecraft Bequest in the Literary Curiosities Room of Harvard University. He checked out of his hotel and…

There is no record of any meeting with Pentagon officials or with any government servants in Washington. Had Nikos found something in the archives, something that completed the jigsaw puzzle? Or had he been set up by the Govvy men?

A week after his disappearance, a man fishing off Cape Cod caught a shark which promptly coughed up the contents of its stomach. Among the stuff it couldn’t digest was a bony human arm, with no fingers! Was this the last the world was to see of S Tino Nikos, a scholar who learned too much?

Morris K Jessup

In April 1959 Morris K Jessup, who had become a prominent UFO investigator, was found dead in his estate car, apparently a successful suicide. The police of Dade County, Florida, found him near a park in the locked vehicle with a hose leading from his exhaust to the interior. Jessup had personal problems that might have pushed some people to suicide but most of his acquaintances claimed he was made of sterner stuff, and were amazed to hear of his death.

Jessup and Tino Nikos had some things in common. Both were interested in UFOs. Jessup was a mathematician and astronomer who had spent part of his career in practical, hands on astronomy, setting up observatories and making celestial discoveries. This had stimulated his interest in unusual aerial phenomena. However he also had a deep interest in antiquities and spent some time researching the cultures of the Central American Indian civilisations, all of whom revered the serpent in many forms.

Moreover he had been engaged by the US government to examine the resources of the Amazon jungle, and had become aware of the accelerating degree of exploitation of resources which were irreplaceable. In his book The Case for the UFO he curiously called for political pressure on the administration to fund research into the four fundamental forces of nature as a means of permitting mankind to conquer space. At the time people would have thought he meant humans to get on the same terms as the invaders—the UFOs. The discoveries of S Tino Nikos throw fresh light on this. The reason must surely be that he had realised that the human race had no future on earth. The serpents were a ready to reclaim their own. Jessup must have thought the only chance we had was out there!

In 1956 Jessup was apparently threatened by unknown correspondents and was investigated by the US Navy. The Navy’s efforts seemed to peter out and Jessup continued with his own pursuits, until his unfortunate death.

Since that event in 1959, because Jessup was not believed to be the suicidal type, UFOlogists have generally been convinced that the death was not what it seemed.

Finale

In almost the last letter he wrote to me Nikos said: "We are all, let alone the experts, indifferent to our own fate and the fate of the earth—evidently the Anthroposaurs were too. Like the Anthroposaurs, we do not seem to have grasped that we are also on the list of endangered species, and as more go, so we get nearer to the top. The Anthroposaurs were limited; they were incapable of foreseeing or preventing their own extinction. We are no different! Is any one of us able to use our intelligence for the broader good when selfish motives intervene? Why do we accept what the experts tell us? Why are we optimistic about the future but apathetic about destroying the planet? Have we inherited fatal flaws from our predecessors, the dinosaurs?

"Are we willing to yield up the earth, whether to the dragon or to the worm? Will we succeed in throwing off the shadow of the serpent and disown the dinosaur heritage? Or are we caught in a morphogenetic field and are destined to self destruct as surely as common salt has always crystallized as cubes and not hexagons?

"Are we locked into ritual ways of behaving—helpless resignation, mechanical left brain thinking, purblind optimism and obedience to the authority of dictatorial experts and governments? The only way we can find out is to make an effort: we have to reject behaviors and rituals that are plainly leading us and the world to destruction. Time is running out.

"The earth, like mother Tiamat, can replace us with monsters. The obligatory principle of our lives should be not to offend the earth mother whether directly or indirectly. All other laws follow from this one."

Few people would disagree but someone had found out about the documents I left with Barclay’s Bank and I have had an uncomfortable feeling of being watched ever since I was informed of Nikos’s disappearance. I have considered it wiser to give up my post and to take a job with an oil company. Moving about in foreign climes I should be free of the feeling of being in a goldfish bowl.

Meanwhile I have done what my friend required of me. Who Lies Sleeping? is published and is on the net for everyone to read. It seems quite innocuous. Is there some clue in it? Did Nikos did find something important in Cambridge? I wonder if he did? I wonder if that shark coughed up any notebooks. Is there a puzzled fishing enthusiast out there somewhere with a gory memento—a note book of a man eaten by a shark?

If you know, don’t write to me. I shall be as far away as possible.

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