If you do not go into the depths of millennia, then the first of the classics of "fantastic science" must be recognized as Charles Fort himself. The world of prehistoric high technologies described by Fort turned out to be very attractive for many. At least this hypothesis made it possible to explain many of the facts of museum storage facilities, to which official science preferred to simply turn a blind eye. But if these technologies really were, then where to look for their source?
Listening to talk about modern "alternative science", we distinguish between two dominant intonations. One - highly emotional, sometimes loud and abusive - explains that there is no "alternative science", that science is one and indestructible, like a granite statue, while attempts to revise it are equally unscientific and inappropriate, no matter what considerations they may be based on. Here they set up "Commissions for the fight …", write lanky petitions, talk in kitchens over tea and cognac, and then spoil themselves from time to time with forays into very scientific meetings looking for pseudoscience wherever you can find it.
Another melody sounds much quieter. This is not a shout or a curse, this is just an attempt to look differently, try, reconsider. In general, to distance oneself from the surrogate, which was given in Soviet or Western ideological canteens, tucking into slogans of egalitarianism, freedom and inevitable progress. But, we know this well, to distance ourselves from one thing means to rely on something else.
But what is this - "something else"? The ideas of Thomas Kuhn and Paul Feyerabend have become such an “Archimedean lever” in alternative science. The idea that no such unified science (perhaps only for now, but still) does not exist, but there are only many paradigms around which scientific worlds begin to form, from which they receive the necessary nutrition and heat, light up their light and carry him further, provoking the formation of new paradigms and new scientific communities. At the same time, one point of view is by no means a grave for another, not the “Commission for the struggle of fathers against their own illegitimate children,” no, this is just a launching pad, a testing ground on which the scientific community is being formed.
At the same time, one of the communities may utterly dislike the other, rejecting it in its very last foundations - the essence of the matter does not change from this. Each of the communities is moving in its own direction, and the mistake here will be only to betray the rules of the game that are set within the community itself. Proceeding from such a Kuhn's “paradigmatic” understanding of science, no “parascience” exists at all, it is just a myth invented by one of the communities, a cunning defamatory trick that works only for those who have not really grasped the idea of paradigms. For those who have learned and understood Kuhn, it becomes clear that concepts like “speculative literature” or “parascience” defile only the community that allows itself to use them. This is nothing more than a receipt for one's own weakness, in a paranoid-monologue inability to hear another,to recognize the beauty of the game - even if the game of your temporary opponent.
Over the centuries, science has nurtured rigor. Appeals to imaginary data - which are actually at the heart of any scientific discovery - were thought to be the source of the shift away from science into the realm of "science fiction." But this is just one genre.
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Another genre, which is now accepted to be judged much more strictly, is "fantastic science" - a fashionable expletive word applied indiscriminately both to the occult sciences (atlantology, graphology, labyrinthology, etc.) and to the "revisionist" sciences, that is, those who intend to revise the achievements of conventional sciences without straying too much from their own substantive foundations.
Fantastic science
The number of subjects of interest to science is limited only by its paradigm. This is about the same as in any self-respecting museum collection, where there is always a storehouse that is at least several times larger than the main fund, which is exposed to the public. This storehouse contains, as a rule, exactly those exhibits, which are considered "bad" to get out for public viewing: if you pull them out all at once, then the foundations of those sciences, for the sake of formal confirmation of which these museums exist, will "crumble". But when revisionist scientists like Erich von Daniken, Ken Wilber, Vladimir Shemschuk, Ernst Beta or Johannes von Buttler refer to this data of the vaults, they are inevitably accused of "betraying the norms of scientific rationality", "false parascientific inventions" and other sins before the dominant now scientific community.
Taken together, these accusations are summed up in the thesis of Marcus Pessel's book Fantastic Science, extremely concerned about the failure of orthodox science and the success of the “heretical” science: heretics, deprived of any impressive scientific degrees, gain popularity, their books are rapidly selling out, and therefore one should fight against them by arranging "Ecumenical councils of scientific rationality".
The very idea of "fantastic science" is by no means new: this concept was formulated by Stephen Williams, who was engaged in the same "witch-hunt", but only in a separate area of archeology. As for the "witches" themselves, Pessel considers the moment of their birth to be the end of the 1910s, when the famous book by American Charles Fort, who collected many scientifically inexplicable facts (a kind of "scientific storehouse" - in our terminology), was published under one cover Book of the Damned (1919). The book was pivotal, "heretical rays" spread from it at once in different directions: inappropriate facts snatched out by the tenacious Fort searchlight began to rock the boat of official science, threatening to overturn it upside down. Astronaut protective masks made of iron and silver, prehistoric copper mines, astronomical objects,which could well be the spaceships of some alien aliens who visited our planet several millennia ago, etc. - all these images are too well recognizable, they all revived after the publication of Fort's book, and therefore he appears almost "the filth of all filth", if, of course, you believe Pessel, Williams and others and really consider "fantastic science" as something- then unclean and unclean.
In any case, today it is already a special established genre, with its own laws and methods, with its own non-standard factual history, with a huge library of program texts, favorite authorities and at least a century of history. Before proceeding directly to the subject of interest to us, we briefly outline this story itself.
Paleocontact theory
If you do not go into the depths of millennia, then the first of the classics of "fantastic science" must be recognized as Charles Fort himself. The world of prehistoric high technologies described by Fort turned out to be very attractive for many. At least this hypothesis made it possible to explain many of the facts of museum storage facilities, to which official science preferred to simply turn a blind eye. But if these technologies really were, then where to look for their source?
In answering this question, Fort turned to the idea of extraterrestrial civilizations that came into contact with our ancestors many millennia ago and founded a kind of colony on planet Earth. People who lived then received unusually high technologies from space aliens. Their still existing monuments are, for example, the Mayan calendars, the cyclopean megaliths and the Egyptian pyramids. This theory of Charles Fort was later called the "theory of paleocontact", or the most ancient interaction between representatives of the earth and cosmic levels. The first of its vivid supporters was the writer of the "black genre" Howard Philips Lovecraft, who described the world of the slumbering monster Cthulhu.
It was Lovecraft who methodically told in his stories "about the coming kingdom of the Masters of Antiquity who descended from the stars, about their loyalty to their cult and about their ability to conjure up dreams." And although in our time these "Other Gods", as Lovecraft calls them, rule only over the world of dreams, and in the damp algae-green underwater crypts the hordes of the great Cthulhu's close associates are still dozing, the moment will come one day when Cthulhu will wake up from its eternal slumber, will perch on a stone monolith, come out of R'leich and … However, no employee of the museum in Hyde Park, where Howard Lovecraft made his inquiries, will never tell you about this. In the best case, he will take from the storerooms a small figurine of a winged dragon with the head of an octopus and whisper in an undertone: "They came down to earth from the stars and brought these very idols with them."
Pearls of the Sky
After 1945, a significant change took place in the history of alternative science. A new thematic block is added to the general register of used topics (paleocontact with extraterrestrial civilizations, the theory of Atlantis, megaliths, etc.), which now becomes almost a sign of belonging to the "alternative". We mean ufology, that is, an attempt to comprehend the fact of the appearance of unknown aircraft, traditionally attributed to the first post-war years (1947 or 1948). Having organically supplemented the theory of paleocontact, this theory began to offer different options for understanding UFO, which soon developed into three main hypotheses: flying vehicles (depending on the amount of skepticism, level of awareness and a number of other reasons) were recognized as a manifestation:
- transcendental, usually divine or demonic, worlds, - shattered consciousness of observers, a consequence of banal mental "failures", - or a form of self-detection of real-life extraterrestrial civilizations that have existed for thousands of years in a kind of "parallel dimension".
It goes without saying that the main assumption of the alternative science of interest to us was precisely the third of the hypotheses presented, representing the solution to the ufological mystery with the simplest and most affirmative answer to the key question: "Do other worlds exist?" These worlds began to appear as a highly developed extraterrestrial civilization, interacting with the world of earthlings through "flying saucers", and these saucers themselves were immediately discovered in the most ancient religious images. Aircraft known in ancient India, namely, all kinds of "vimanas" and "vihans", became a subject for discussion not only of classical atlantologists (at the level of the fact that "the methods of communication between Apollo and Hyperborea have not yet been solved"), but also supporters of paleocontact, for whom the cymbals became almost his only instrument. It was on the Vimanas that the Gods of Ancient India traveled, each Vimana had its own divine name and was intended for a certain type of galactic travel.
Erich von Daniken, a Swiss journalist and extremely prolific writer, was the first of the authors to describe in detail the primitive aircraft, linking them with the theory of paleocontact coming from Charles Fort. He was the first serious systematizer of UFOlogy, the first prophet of the forgotten past. Born in the Swiss province of Aargau in 1935, he was born the same year as the Ahnenerbe - this strange coincidence was not at all a mere coincidence. The range of topics and questions chosen by this author strikingly coincides with everything that the theorists of the "Legacy of the Ancestors" wrote and said. Already the first of his works, the sensational book "Memories of the Future" (1968), begins with a discussion of the famous Piri Reis map, which shows Antarctica - the site of one of the appearance of flying saucers of the Third Reich (expedition of Admiral Byrd). This is followed by an examination of the mystery of Tiahuanaco - the famous plateau in Bolivia, which Hans Gerbiger and his closest student Hans Bellamy were studying in detail.
Further, von Daniken deduces from the texts of the Bible, as well as from the Sumerian "Epic of Gilgamesh", that in ancient times our planet was visited by the Deities of Antiquity, who immediately equate with "representatives of alien intelligence", or, more specifically, with "aliens from outer space." We have already seen these ideas from all representatives of the "paleocontact" - in another, perhaps, a thematic edging. Indra flies across the sky (at Daniken's) "in his jet chariot," while the Mahabharata speaks only of "vimana." The ancient Tibetan books "Ganchzhur" and "Danchzhur" tell about prehistoric aircraft ("pearls of the Sky") - under Daniken's pen these aircraft are transformed into ultramodern vehicles, which were also a formidable weapon. Duty talk about "magic technologies of the Third Reich" comes to mind here by itself.
Electric God and Paleo-NETWORK
If the future can be remembered ("Recollection of the Future" is the main idea of everything created by von Daniken), then it not only resembles the past, but is already rooted in it in some form. A thousand-year failure will be followed by a sharp rise again, technology will reach the once surrendered frontiers, all the achievements of the sunken Atlantis will reappear in our circulation. The Assyrian rulers will again whip the disobedient beast-men, and the super-cunning thought of God Indra will be anew, from the vimaana or vihana, and in the form of a laser beam hew the walls of some pyramidal new building.
All this will be. But let's think: what does this whole plot most resemble? A movie, of course! All scientific mythology of von Daniken is extremely cinematic, and therefore the ideal form for the implementation of his project was precisely a series of serial films, the most famous of which ("In the Footsteps of the Almighty", of 25 episodes) was released in 1993. And although there is not much new in these films (everything new is a well-forgotten old, Daniken himself does not cease to repeat), many of the discoveries of Ahnenerbe employees, not to mention the Ariosophists of Vienna who wrote half a century before them, it is thanks to Daniken that they get almost massive ("Popular science") distribution. If we seriously talk about his innovations, then, as it should be in the science of the postmodern era, they are reduced only to words. Daniken can be considered the inventor of two verbal neologisms.
The first of them is pre-astronautics, meaning that the science of the ancients was no worse, and in many respects even better than the science of our time. Another, more recent term by von Daniken is paleocontact: it means the interaction with space aliens that took place in distant times, for the sake of studying the structure and results of which Daniken created a special organization Palaeo-SETI (SETI - Search for extraterrestrial intelligence). The Greek philosopher Xenophanes of Colophon said that the Ethiopians depict their Gods snub-nosed and black, and the Thracians blue-eyed and light. Thanks to von Daniken and his Palaeo-SETI, people with a scientific and technical mind were able to literally see (on TV) their engineering Gods in the form of bizarre alien cyborgs with high technology and a light bulb on their heads. Here the dreams of cyber-futurists come true and the pages of Jules Verne's novels rustle.
Stretching and squeezing
The philosophy of history described above, with an indispensable return to the technical frontiers already achieved in antiquity, is dominant in alternative science, but far from the only one. If we speak schematically, then we see a serious confrontation between two trends, each of which has accumulated many arguments and factual evidence over the years.
On the one hand (within the framework of the same theory of "paleocontact") history develops as a constant rehearsal, with an inevitable return to the very refrains from which everything once began. Here millennial gaps are dissolved with the trivial question: "What's new?" Since the negative answers of "paleocontacts" are confirmed by the data of "pre-astronautics", we begin to think that nothing new is happening at all, and on this we calm down.
In another version, tranquility comes in a different way. First, they explain to us that all history is a substitution, that the lies of official science are easily exposed, but then, after these usual “alternative” phrases, they reveal the absence of antiquity as such. Due to the similarity of events and ruling dynasties, the hypothesis arises that these dynasties and events of antiquity are just a projection of what took place in the recent past. So, for example, having abandoned Scaliger, Nikolai Morozov and Academician Fomenko read the whole story. According to the latter, where in medieval Latin manuscripts it is written "III century from Christ" (in the form of "X. III"), one should read not "III century from Christ", but "XIII century", and therefore the whole world history follows reduce it by at least one millennium, not to mention the fact that the modern chronology is based on a deliberately false chronology,invented by the authors of the 16th century - Scaliger and Petavius. According to Fomenko's version, even New Testament events took place in the 11th century, the Mother of God lived in the Italian city of Loretto, and the reason for the first Crusade in Europe (1095) was the natural desire of the knights to punish the real executioners of Christ. We will not go into further details of this theory - it is more important for us to show that among the “alternative” models it looks like a “black sheep”, forcing history to dissolve not through cyclical returns to cyber-gods and aircraft, but through banal subtraction of millennia.and the reason for the first Crusade in Europe (1095) was the natural desire of the knights to punish the real executioners of Christ. We will not go into further details of this theory - it is more important for us to show that among the “alternative” models it looks like a “black sheep”, forcing history to dissolve not through cyclical returns to cyber-gods and aircraft, but through banal subtraction of millennia.and the reason for the first Crusade in Europe (1095) was the natural desire of the knights to punish the real executioners of Christ. We will not go into further details of this theory - it is more important for us to show that among the “alternative” models it looks like a “black sheep”, forcing history to dissolve not through cyclical returns to cyber-gods and aircraft, but through banal subtraction of millennia.
These two key approaches contradict each other both in the methods of proof (gazing at the Assyrian bas-reliefs in the case of “paleocontacts” and logical calculus in the case of Scaliger's enemies), and in the very style of presentation. In the first case, it is almost poetic visionary with rehash of all possible scriptures (up to the Book of Mormon) and the doctrine of the Eternal Return, in the second - severe cutting of historical layers, the operation of numbers with degrees, trepanation of chronicles and documents. However, in both cases, we have approximately the same result - history suddenly shrinks and disappears, dissolving either in the endless cyclism of the "ancient future", or in the surgical mathematics of those who like to cut off whole millennia.
