Gods of Air and Darkness
by Richard E. Mooney
Here are some interesting excerpts from the out-of-print book Gods of Air and Darkness which was copyrighted in 1975 by Richard E. Mooney.
To give you an idea of what this book is about:
In the Introduction it states:
"This work is a sequel to Colony:Earth, wherein we attempted to show, primarily, three things:
1. It is possible that man neither evolved nor was divinely created, but arrived here as a colonist from worlds elsewhere in space.
2. The civilization these colonists created, which was destroyed in a vast catastrophe that passed into legend as the "Deluge" or "Flood" was remembered as a time of gods and a Golden Age.
3. This catastrophe was responsible for the great extinction of life at the end of what we call the Pleistocene, giving rise to the Ice Age theory. We suggested that the Ice Age was not in the past but rather in the present.
These ideas were advanced to suggest possible explanations for many mysteries in the past; the lack of fossil evidence for evolution; the extermination of the mammoth and other species of animals of the Pleistocene; the existence of areas of knowledge in the past which do not fit with the concept of mankind emerging for the first time from a state of barbarism. They also offered a rationale for the building of structures such as Stonehenge and the pyramids, for which no completely believable explanations had been forthcoming.
pages 11-12:
What is the underlying significance of all the world's religions? Why do they all follow the same pattern, and whence came all our varied gods of the past? Why did they appear to have come into existence at a certain point in time and at no other? Why have not primitive peoples today created new religions like the old?
Why is there always, at the back of men's minds, the vague remembrance of a Golden Age on earth? What is the true significance behind many of our deep subconscious images: the idea of the Great Sacred Egg or the sensation, experienced in dreams of levitation? Why do many people experience strange happenings in the mind-telepathy, precognition? Are there powers of the mind that are real but hidden, lying dormant?
Flying saucers are not new, reports of them exist as far back as written records go. The first is mentioned on a papyrus in the reign of Pharaoh Thutmosis III, four thousand years ago, and many references in the Biblical Old Testament can be equated with UFO reports. Are UFOs real, and if so, what are they?
All ancient religions speak of a great disaster in the past and disaster to come. In Eastern religions world ages are mentioned - cyclic destructions - and the Aztecs in the New World, together with the Maya, were obsessed with the idea of future destructions. Has this significance,and,if so,what could it be?
We shall try to avoid anything which seems mystical or magical. We shall extrapolate from facts and evidence and interpret religion and mythology in the light of modern scientific discoveries. No matter how bizarre our extrapolations may seem, they are not beyond the bounds of the possibilities inherent in our present scientific knowledge or theories.
Excerpts from Chapter One - Life and Intelligence
At the present time most reasoning people belive in evolution: the idea postulated by Charles Darwin that life had evolved over many ages. Darwin's theories have been modified somewhat in the light of discoveries made since his monumental The Origin of the Species was published, but basically the concepts of "evolution by natural selection" and "survival of the fittest" are the keys of modern thought on the origin and development of life. There are others who believe in a "divine act of creation," and many who believe in evolution feel that behind the workings of life's ceaseless change and growth is a mastermind, a "supreme creator".
There are also persons who are unable to believe in either a transition from the inorganic in the misty past of earth's beginnings or in divine creation, and who seek answers elsewhere. Alternatively then, we have the Panspermia Hypothesis, first postulated by Svante Arrhenius in the seventeenth century, which suggested that spores, or seeds of life, drifted from the reaches of space and came to life on the sun-warmed surface of the earth.
A later variant on this idea was that the spores had accidentally, or perhaps deliberately, been seeded here by a spaceship from another world.
Divine creation and evolution both suggest a strictly terrestrial origin, which leads to the assumption that there is something special about the earth as the place where life developed. In recent years, however, it has been suggested that as far as evolution is concerned this pattern could be repeated on many worlds where the conditions are suitable for its development. Going further, alternative biochemistries have been suggested for planets that do not meet the requirements for the development of terrestrial forms of life.
On the other hand, the divine creation theory generally assumes that the earth was picked especially by the creator to be the only abode of life in the universe. This gives the earth special meaning to which it scarcely seems entitled when we consider that our planetary system does not occupy any particularly significant place in the galaxy, and is probably one of many millions of such systems.
For spores to have reached the earth from the neighborhood of other stars, the only conceivable way they could have been carried here, whether accidentally or deliberately, is by an object of artificial origin entering this solar system.
Could it be that the great saurians did not die naturally, but were killed off deliberately? This would mean an intelligently directed policy of destruction, presumably undertaken by human beings. The objection would be immediately raised that human beings were not contemporary with the dinosaurs, which died out some 60 million years ago, whereas Homo sapiens only appeared, according to our anthropologists, some 35,000 years ago.
Are we sure, however? We do not know how long mankind has been on the earth, although the general opinion is that true man, Homo sapiens, has not been here for more than thirty or forty thousand years in his present form. There are, nevertheless, some peculiarities. Consider:
Dr. Chow Ming Chen, in the Gobi Desert in 1959, found the impression of a ribbed sole on sandstone, reckoned to be millions of years old. Dinosaur footprints have been found in similar sandstone beds.
A rock carving in the American Southwest, at Havasupai Canyon, Arizona, shows a Mesozoic Brontosaurus. A rock drawing, also from North America, shows a clearly recognizable Stegosaurus, also a Mesozoic saurian.
A design on pottery discovered at an ancient site at Cocle, in Panama bears a striking resemblance to a pterodactyl, also stemming from the Age of Reptiles.
Shoeprints, drawings of dinosaurs - the artifacts of man - which could be contemporary with the dinosaurs. What are we to make of this? Were the drawings made from life, on the spot? Was someone walking around in shoes at the same time the dinosaurs were living on the earth?
Either mankind was living here at the same time as the dinosaurs - 60 or more million years ago - or the dinosaurs did not live as long ago as we have thought. Perhaps our dating is all wrong.
Or perhaps man was not living here at this remote period, but was visiting this world by spacecraft from other planets
Were there perhaps visitors from a highly advanced civilization elsewhere in space who came here and killed off the dinosaurs? We have not been able to find a natural cause for the extinction of the dinosaurs.
If man was living here at this remote period, then it is understandable that he destroyed the great reptiles. They would constitutea menace, particularly the large carnivorous varieties, and even the vegetarians would consume an enormous quantity of vegetable foodstuffs useful to man.
If, however, he was a visitor from elsewhere in the universe, why go to such trouble? It would be perfectly understandable only if this world had been selected for colonization by civilized people from elsewhere in space. Under these circumstances it would be logical to eliminate any large and dangerous forms of life.
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