The ships of the prophet. Another story in the Bible has, oddly enough, directly related to … UFOs, as well as the spread of aeronautics and aviation in antiquity. Prophet Ezekiel, according to history, is a very real person. The son of a priest was a priest in the temple of Yahweh (the name of God is the father in the Bible) in Jerusalem. He was highly revered among the people; this is evidenced by at least the fact that for some time among his students there was the great ancient Greek philosopher and scientist Pythagoras.
When Ezekiel was still young, an important event took place in the history of his people - the Jewish king Joachim decided to throw off the yoke of the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar II. But the uprising was not crowned with success; soon Jerusalem was besieged, Joachim was captured and executed. And Habuchadnezzar took 10 thousand people with him to Babylonia as hostages. Ezekiel was among them. Those taken prisoner were settled at a tributary of the Euphrates - Khabuura (or Khovar) in Chaldea. In the fifth year of captivity, as the Bible tells us, Ezekiel was called to the prophet, witnessing an unprecedented event, which will be discussed below.
In total, he prophesied from 592 to 570 BC. Having written a book about what he had experienced and seen, he was soon killed by the son of the Jewish king, whom Ezekiel accused of idolatry.
In the book of the prophet Ezekiel, which is one of the parts of the Old Testament, we read: “… And it happened: in the thirtieth year in the fourth month, on the fifth day of the month, when I was among the immigrants at the river Chebar, the heavens were opened, and I saw the knowledge of God … And I saw: and behold a stormy wind was coming from the north, a great cloud and swirling fire, and radiance around it. And from the middle of it, as it were, the light of a flame … And … there was the likeness of four animals - and what was their appearance; their appearance was like that of a man; And each has four faces, and each of them has four wings; And their legs - legs straight, and the feet of their feet - like the feet of a calf, and sparkled like shiny copper …”.
These "animals" could move here and there with the speed of lightning, and they moved without turning, and besides, there were also wheels. "And by their appearance and by their constitution it seemed as if a wheel was in a wheel." “And there was a voice from the vault over their heads; there was a semblance of a table, as if made of a sapphire stone; and above the semblance of a dock there was a semblance of a man on top of it. And I saw a kind of flaming metal, a kind of fire inside it around; from the sight of his loins and above, and from the sight of his loins and below, I saw a kind of fire, and the radiance was around it. In what form is a rainbow on the clouds in the rain, such was the appearance of this radiance all around."
Understandably, the future prophet is shocked, he finds it difficult to find words to at least somehow describe what he saw. With what can he compare the “carriage of God” if not with a chariot? But not simple, but flying … By the way, in the ancient Indian literature - "Mahabharata", "Ramayana" - it also tells about "heavenly flying chariots."
But what is behind such picturesque descriptions?
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The head of the design department of NASA USA, Yosev F. Bloomrich, tried to understand this. “If a wheel is in a wheel,” he writes. - to associate with the helicopter rotor, as an auxiliary device that helps the rocket hover above the ground, and the calf's hooves with the landing gear, then the text of Ezekiel is filled with specific applied content. “According to the story of the prophet, the researcher believes, it is possible to reconstruct the general appearance of the spacecraft and even calculate its characteristics. In the book "Spaceships of Ezekiel" he gives a detailed basis for his hypothesis and finally comes to the conclusion that the "divine chariot", rather, was the descent shuttle of an interplanetary spacecraft. Its mass, according to Bloomrich's calculations, was about 63 tons, and the engine power was 70 thousand liters. from.
The parameters are not only quite possible from a technical point of view, but also very expedient constructively. The only thing that seems fantastic in this case is that such a ship could have existed more than 2500 years ago!
Not rags, but a rotor …
In fairness, I must say that something in Bloomrich's calculations is still surprising. In order to lift such a mass from the surface of the Earth, power is needed about two orders of magnitude more than that obtained by Bloomrich. For a helicopter, such enormous power is simply not needed. Helicopters can get by to lift such a mass four times less.
The only problem is that you can't go into space on such a device. Nevertheless, there is undoubtedly a sound grain in Bloomrich's reasoning. This is what the combined design is proposed, for example, by German engineers. They recently developed LAReC, a large returnable capsule for Areana. This vehicle, designed to return people and cargo from orbit to Earth, consists of 3 main compartments. Orbital maneuvering engines will be placed in the aggregate, which is separated before entering the atmosphere. The reentry vehicle itself, in the form of a truncated cone, includes a crew compartment, in which 4 people can live for 12 days, and a cargo compartment, which can be depressurized and then loaded through a side hatch. Finally, the structure is crowned with a compartment, which in this case is the most interesting for us. In addition to the docking station and radio-technical systems, it also contains … a folding helicopter rotor!
It is with its help, and not with traditional parachutes, that foreign specialists now intend to land. In addition, there are also soft-landing rocket engines, retractable shock absorbers. In other words, this design contains all those parts that Ezekiel mentions: both the rockets that give “fire and radiance”, and the “wheel in the wheel” - the helicopter rotor, and “legs with hooves” - the landing shock absorbers.
However, spaceplanes built by aliens are not the only flying machines that Ezekiel could see. It turns out that our fellow countrymen were not bastards too….
Over the land of the Incas
They say it was a spectacular sight! The balloon, which cannot even be called a balloon - a giant tetrahedron looked like a carton of milk for Gulliver, with a gondola in the shape of a cane boat suspended from it, swiftly went up.
So a few years ago an experiment began in Peru, the main purpose of which was to test whether a person could rise into the air more than 2 thousand years ago? According to some researchers, the ancient Peruvians could well have flown, say, over the Hasca desert - the location of mysterious land lines and patterns, which, due to their enormity, can only be seen from a bird's eye view.
And now, having reached a height of 200 m, the ball suddenly went down. The two hundred-kilogram bags of ballast thrown out by experienced aeronautics - the Englishman J. Nott and the American J. Woodman - did not help either. The gondola-boat pushed into the sand with such force that the balloonists literally "shot" out of it. The lightweight ball soared into the skies again and landed only 12 minutes later, flying about 3 km more during this time.
How to evaluate the results of an experiment? The flight was not completely unsuccessful: no one was hurt; the balloonists got off with what is called a slight fright and bruises. And you cannot call it completely useless: the balloon, built according to the drawings found on the walls of the ancient tomb of the Indians, nevertheless took off.
Hott is far from a newcomer to the world of aeronautics (he, for example, holds the record for altitude in a balloon and many other achievements) - with the humor characteristic of the British, he declared after a high-speed landing that “it was a really fantastic flight”. However, he did not fail to add that only from under the clouds the balloonists were able to “enjoy the spectacle of the bizarre figures and lines of the Nasca desert”.
Therefore, let's still consider this experiment to the assets of researchers and focus our attention on its technical subtleties.
Glider pilots of antiquity
Guzman's apparatus is far from the only possible repetition of ancient designs. Let us recall at least the "Parakassk candelabrum" - one of the images found in the vicinity of the same city of Naska. According to experts, the drawing resembles a silhouette … of a two-keel aircraft of the modern glider type. Moreover, the sign is located exactly in that place of the desert, where powerful updrafts almost constantly arise. Therefore, he, like a lighthouse fire, could indicate to a pilot losing altitude: "Fly here, here you can again soar into the sky …".
Further from the "candelabra" into the interior of the mainland goes a straight white line, clearly visible from a height of several hundred meters. It goes through mountains and valleys and ends on the way to the mountain plateau. It can be assumed that this line once served as an indicator of the direction in which ancient pilots flew quite often, using the updrafts prevailing here.
And the "airfield" itself in the desert has many more "signposts" that could reveal a lot to the attentive eye. So, modern glider pilots who surveyed these places found out that not only the most convenient landing approaches are indicated here, but also there is a drawing called the "delta wing", which quite accurately indicates the wind rose. “Triangles” inform the glider pilot of a possible crosswind, and “squares” inform the glider about the best place to land. The stylized figures of birds, according to the researchers, can mean campsites. It is near them that large boulders come across, in shape and mass suitable for mooring gliders.
Recently, archaeologists began to notice similar images in other parts of the coast - where there are good conditions for gliders and similar aircraft soaring. It is most often possible to notice these images exactly as they saw the drawings in the Haska desert - from a bird's eye view, from the cockpit of an aircraft. On the ground, they are almost invisible.