I often find myself wondering about my eyesight and the quality of my perception. I mean, how much of what I see is actually ‘real’ versus an illusion. Technically we have blind spots in our vision where our optic nerve joins the back of our eye, yet our brains interpret and fill that space so we don’t actually have a blind spot in our vision. We monkeys are easily tricked by even the simplest of illusions.

Yet there is one visual mystery  I just can’t believe is a trick. The ancient flyer.

The Ancient Flyer is a sculpture and carving that has been found all over the world. Said to be  thousands of years old and yet, upon looking at it, appears to be an aircraft. No, really!

This post has been on my list for some time, but it wasn’t until my son poked my necklace  and said ‘plane,’ that I remembered. That reaction, the ‘point and plane’ is exactly why I  wanted to write this post in the first place.

The ancient flyer (the image in the title photo) was first found in Colombia and is believed to have been from the Quimbayan civilisation 300-1550CE. The reason it caused so much controversy is because it was originally thought to be an insect – much like the other golden sculptures from that era. However, no insect has its wings attached to the bottom of its body, nor do they have upright tail fins or stabilisers as the sculpture does. Weird, right?!

Here’s a three minute video giving you some more info from experts including a snippet where some German engineers made a large scale replica in 1994 and flew it…

The ancient flyer isn’t the only example of mysterious aircraft. There are plenty of other examples of ancient aircraft no one can explain. Like the Petroglyphs first found in Egypt in 1848, before we (or the Wright brothers) had even invented flight! The Petroglyphs became popular in the 90’s after a bunch of photos of Seti’s tomb were taken and posted on the net.

I’m not being funny, but even my two year old can see that there’s a helicopter, two ships and on another petroglyph a speed boat. But of course, there’s a totally scientific, evidence based reason that these aren’t in fact exactly what they seem…

Supposedly these carvings were used over more than one farohs reign, so the first ones were carved over again. Chuck in a splash of erosion (in a perfectly sealed tomb in which everything else was immaculately preserve) and you get these ‘double-carved-eroded’ images. God I feel sarcastic today… my eyeballs are already aching from rolling. Anyway for the sake of a well rounded argument, the skeptics came up with a name for this erosion bollocks, it’s called ‘palimpsests’

I’d have bought the erosion story if the above carvings were one offs. It’s almost believable that a freak occurrence causing the perfect erosion and re carving conditions would have bought about an illusion of a helicopter. But they weren’t the only case. Not even close. These petroglyphs have been found in various other locations including a temple in Karnak HUNDREDS of miles away.

There are also countless paintings of spaceships throughout history. I’d be here all day if I showed you all of them. But this post, by Crystalinks has a huge selection of examples, including several paintings that depict space craft linked to religious things in our past.

My fave example is this one, Crystalinks states:

“This painting is called “The Madonna with Saint Giovannino”. It was painted in the 15th century by Domenico Ghirlandaio (1449-1494) and hangs as part of the Loeser collection in the Palazzo Vecchio. Above Mary’s right shoulder is a disk shaped object. Below is a blow up of this section and a man and his dog can clearly be seen looking up at the object.”

Sure, it could be coincidence – just like the dozens of other examples in that post could all be coincidences too, but maybe not.

What I love about this weekly wonder, is the opportunity it gave me to investigate different types of aircraft. The beauty of fiction is that we get to make shit up. Just because science says you need a dihedral wing angle to fly a craft, doesn’t mean you need that in my story. I have been thinking about transport a lot and whether my ‘steam trains’ are really cutting the mustard.

Investigating this gave me loads of ideas too, what if time travel was actually easy to achieve you just needed the right aerodynamics, or what if you needed to use sound to move, or crafts the shape of animals, or even artificially intelligent craft the shape of animals…

If you’re interested in reading more on this topic, I’m reading this book (on the left) which you can buy here.

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The post Ancient Flyer – The Mystery of Ancient Aircraft appeared first on Sacha Black.

As a Fantasy and Sci-Fi writer whilst my own imagination is useful, it sometimes needs a little help. Which is why I spend a lot of time researching the strange, unusual or controversial – I find it provokes lots more story ideas than the mundane.

It’s at this point I want to add a little disclaimer: any information put into these weekly wonder posts do not represent my opinion. They are merely a collation of facts, proposed theories and interesting concepts I have collated here because I found them interesting enough to be inspired by them.

Sound.

The properties of sound are usually thought of as musical, and entertaining. But sound propulsion and the ability to move objects using sound waves is fast becoming a tangible concept.

It is said that the mystery of Coral Castle can be explained through sound. Coral Castle a 1100 ton stone structure, built single handedly by Edward Leedskalnin, a 5ft, 100 pound Latvian gentleman between 1923 and 1951 in Florida USA.

Now, granted levitating a foam cup with sound waves is quite different to levitating a 28 tonne rock. But this is the mystery that surrounds the sculptures. Leedskalnin worked alone and at night shrouded in mystery so that no one knew how he had done it. Crystalinks website explains the wonder of the entrance to the castle:

“it’s made through a gate fashioned from a single coral block weighing nine tons. This miraculous monolith is approximately 80 inches wide, 92 inches tall, and 21 inches thick. It fits within a quarter of an inch of the walls on either side and pivots through an iron rod resting on an automobile gear. The enormous block balances so perfectly on its center of gravity that a visitor can easily push it open with one finger. People who are sensitive to electromagnetic energies fields will sometimes report headaches while standing inside the archway of the nine-ton swinging gate – door – thought to be over a vortex – and a major grid point of the planet.” 

So how DID he do it? There were rumours Leedskalnin used strange cone shaped objects which emanated sound to levitate the enormous stone objects.

Cone like objects similar to the one on the left. This particular one however, is rather more ancient. It’s thousands of years old and covered in cuneiform scripture. An extremely ancient language developed by the Sumerians 3000-3500 BC.

I visited my favourite museum recently the British Museum in London. I was aware of a theory of sound propulsion to build the Egyptian pyramids, but I hadn’t seen any evidence suggesting it.

It wasn’t until I was in the museum that I found some evidence of these cones from in and around that era. The cone highlighted in the red circle, wasn’t just on one or two of the carved statues, but on dozens of them across various different sculptures, and interestingly from different cultures, Egyptian, Sumerian, Babylonian…The other interesting thing in the photo, is the bracelets the creature is wearing. Two identical bracelets with a circular plate. Kind of like a watch… I wonder what they did, and why there are two of them.

There is a debate that rages, about how 3-5000 years ago this sound technology was invented. Could it have been invented then? Some outright refute the claims, supporters of the ancient astronaut theory suggest an alien race gave the technology to humans.

There are similar theories around many of the ancient stone structures like the Pyramids or the stone of the pregnant woman in Baalbek, Lebanon. Which is a 1650 tonne monolith block that was partly moved, and then abandoned. No one knows why it was abandoned but it was meant to be used in a Roman temple close by. There are alternative, and possibly more plausible theories that suggest, this, and various other buildings like the Pyramids were built using ropes and pulleys and round wooden-bobbin like structures to roll the stones. I always thought that a little odd though, stone being heavier and denser than wood, surely it would immediately crush the bobbins?

Which theory is true? And what does it all mean? I don’t know. Maybe we never will. But I certainly found it interesting and it made my mind race with ideas about technologies for future or past races other things sound could do and lots of other stories. What do you think? Did you find this interesting?

I’ll leave you with a quote Leedskalnin is famed for saying repeatedly:

“I have discovered the secrets of the pyramids, and have found out how the Egyptians and the ancient builders in Peru, Yucatan, and Asia, with only primitive tools, raised and set in place blocks of stone weighing many tons.” 

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I made a point recently about the lack of ‘actual’ writing I do. You know, with my hand and a real life pen. The post discussed Distributed Cognition, a concept that debates where the boundaries of thought are and one example is the use of a pen. Does the physicality of using a pen change your thought process through the action of writing? Where do your thoughts end, and the pen and ink begin, and what is the reciprocal effect of the thought, hand and pen interacting.

Why am I talking about this again? Well, in my author interviews, I ask a provocative question making a point that the publishing industry is in decline (I don’t actually think it is, but it tends to provoke an interesting answer). That question got me thinking, is penmanship in decline?

When I was a kid I used to have a pen pal, in fact, I had two. Didn’t everyone?

My mum still has her from childhood, a fact I love. When I went to school, I had a friend who liked reading and writing as much as I did. We used to hand write each other letters. I still have them. Dozens of them. I would painstakingly scribe words, colour and decorate pieces of paper in order to swap post with her, and more often than not we would stick a stamp on them (because back then you didn’t need a mortgage to buy a stamp) and pop them in a post box. I love nothing better than receiving post. I can’t remember the last time I received a letter.

I used to write a journal, I’ve said before I have a box of them in the loft, thousands hundreds of thousands of words scribed by hand, poured out in a labour of love for the written word. Then I started writing journals electronically. I don’t even know where they are now. Probably on a floppy disk somewhere *cringe* yes, I know what a floppy disk is. My wife’s students don’t. That’s depressing. We are only a decade older than them. But for them, the concept of ‘dial up’ is alien. They just don’t ‘get it’ and blank stares and sniggers follow her when she talks about floppy disks. I used an encyclopaedia – they use wikipedia.

That’s just ten years of development. TEN.

Is this evolution? Are we really developing? Or is this actually regression in disguise?

We apes evolved hands for a reason, to craft tools, feed ourselves, rear babies. I’m not interested in the argument that typing counts because you type with fingers. It doesn’t count. Not in my mind anyway. Theres no physicality. It’s mindless tapping learnt through rote memory.

The physicality of writing comes from having to push the pen around, forcing ink to curve to make shapes and markings. The mental process of deciding feeling where the next dot and cross has to go. I find it satisfying marking the page, leaving an imprint, knowing I created that design, story or letter. It’s gratifying.

Evolution is about progression, right? the ‘gradual development of something.’

Well penmanship is a skill and evolutionarily speaking, skills are things we had to learn too. If typing was just the next evolution, then why does its loss feel like such a sacrilege?

Is the loss of a skill not regression?

We are living in a technological black hole. Anthropologically speaking, in five hundred years how many people are going to be able to understand our culture? My guess is not many. The number of physical records is dropping, we are publishing books electronically rather than physically. Egyptians use to carve writings and explanations into granite, forever left as a guide to their culture. The internet records our culture. But, one day, the oil is going to run out and the electricity switch off. Then it’s all gone. Every record, every piece of information will disappear in a poof of smoke from the last drop burnt oil.

I’m troubled, I don’t know whether it’s my obsession with apocalyptic/dystopian fiction, or a worry founded in philosophical thought, but I am deeply concerned. Look at my wife’s students. Ten years is all it took for them to not understand a concept that to me (and I’m really not old),  is completely normal. I mean what about the words going into the dictionary that originate from text messages for goodness sake. In 2011 the Oxford English Dictionary added OMG, LOL and FYI into the dictionary. What does that mean?

I can’t shift this nagging thought that one day, kids won’t even be taught how to write any more. How long is it going to be? Thirty years? Fifty? Two hundred? It’s going to happen. The pen, and hand written scripture is becoming redundant, typing is faster and more efficient. You can erase your mistakes and no one will ever know. But aren’t mistakes part of what makes us fallible humans? Are we heading for a dystopian future where no one knows how to write?

Penmanship will become a lost art. 

There’s one more point I want to leave you with. My wife is dyslexic. She spells better on a computer. For her, the rote patterns of movement from tapping words is more kinesthetic and memorable than the closed hand structure of holding a pen. Her brain remembers how to spell patterns on a keyboard, but can’t remember the physicality of holding a pen to spell. Something I find truly fascinating. For her, although she believes the lost art of penmanship is regression, there is no doubting that for her, computers and typing are evolution. For me, a lover of pen and ink it’s regression.

What do you think?

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