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Fly the Friendly skies in Air India Vimanas (excerpts)
By David Hatcher Childress


Nearly every Hindu and Buddhist in the world  - hundreds of millions of people has heard of the ancient flying machines referred to in the Ramayana and other texts as vimanas. Vimanas are mentioned even today in standard Indian literature and media reports. An article called “Flight Path” by the Indian journalist Mukul Sharma appeared in the major newspaper The Times of India on April 8, 1999 which talked about vimanas and ancient warfare: 

According to some interpretations of surviving texts, India’s future it seems happened way back in the past. Take the case of the Yantra Sarvasva, said to have been written by the sage Maharshi Bhardwaj.  

This consists of as many as 40 sections of which one, the Vaimanika Prakarana dealing with aeronautics, has 8 chapters, a hundred topics and 500 sutras.  

In it Bhardwaj describes vimana, or aerial aircrafts, as being of three classes: 

  1. those that travel from place to place;

  2. those that travel from one country to another;

  3. those that travel between planets. 

Of special concern among these were the military planes whose functions were delineated in some very considerable detail and which read today like something clean out of science fiction. For instance, they had to be: 

Impregnable, unbreakable, non-combustible and indestructible capable of coming to a dead stop in the twinkling of an eye; invisible to enemies; capable of listening to the conversations and sounds in hostile planes; technically proficient to see and record things, persons, incidents and situations going on inside enemy planes; know at every stage the direction of the movement of other aircraft in the vicinity; capable of rendering the enemy crew into a state of suspended animation, intellectual torpor or complete loss of consciousness; capable of destruction; manned by pilots and co-travelers who could adapt in accordance with the climate in which they moved; temperature regulated inside; constructed of very light and heat absorbing metals; provided with mechanisms that could enlarge or reduce images and enhance or diminish sounds. 

Notwithstanding the fact that such contraption would resemble a cross between an American state-of-the-art Stealth Fighter and a flying saucer, does it mean that air and space travel was well known to ancient Indians and aeroplanes flourished in India when the rest of the world was just learning the rudiments of agriculture?  Aerial battles and chases are common in ancient Hindu literature.  

What did these airships look like? The ancient Mahabharata speaks of a vimana as “an aerial chariot with the sides of iron and clad with wings.” The Ramayana describes a vimana as a double-deck, circular (cylindrical) aircraft with portholes and a dome. It flew with the “ speed of the wind”, and gave forth a “melodious sound” 

The ancient Indians themselves wrote entire flight manuals on the care and control of various types of vimanas. The Samara Sutradhara is a scientific treatises dealing with every possible facet of air travel in a vimana. There are 230 stanzas dealing with construction, take-off, cruising for thousands of miles, normal and forced landings, and even possible collusions with birds!  

Would these texts exist (they do) without there being something to actually write about? Traditional historians and archaeologists simply ignore such writings as the imaginative ramblings of a bunch of stoned, ancient writers.  

Says Andrew Tomas, " The Samara Sutradhara, which is a factual type of record, treats air travel from every angle…If this is the science fiction of antiquity, then it is the best that has ever been written.” 

In 1875, the Vaimanika Shastra, a fourth century BC text written by Maharshi Bhardwaj, was discovered in a temple in India. The book dealt with the operation of ancient vimanas and included information on steering, precautions for long flights, protection of the airships from storms and lightning, and how to switch the drive to solar energy, or some other “free energy” source, possibly some sort of “gravity drive.” Vimanas were said to take off vertically or dirigible. Bharadwaj the Wise refers to no less than 70 authorities and 10 experts of air travel in antiquity. These sources are now lost.

Vimanas were kept in Vimana Griha, or hanger, were said to be propelled by a yellowish-white-liquid, and were used for various purposes. Airships were present all over the world. The plain of Nazca in Peru is very famous for appearing from the high altitude to be a rather elaborate, if confusing airfield. Some researchers have theorized that this was some sort of Atlantean outpost.  It is worth nothing that Rama Empire had its outposts: Easter Island, almost diametrically opposite to Mohenjo-daro on the globe, astonishingly developed its own written language, an obscure script lost to the present inhabitants, but found on tablets and other carvings. This odd script is found in only one other place in the world: Mohenjo-Daro and Harappa.  

Aerial Warfare in Ancient India 

The ancient Indian epics go into considerable detail about aerial warfare over 10,000 years ago. So much detail that a famous Oxford professor included a chapter on the subject in a book on ancient warfare! 

According to the Sanskrit scholar V.R.Ramachandran Dikshitar, the Oxford Professor who wrote “War in Ancient India in 1944, “ No question can be more interesting in the present circumstances of the world than India’s contribution to the science of aeronautics. There are numerous illustrations in our vast Puranic and epic literature to show how well and wonderfully the ancient Indians conquered the air. To glibly characterized everything found in this literature as imaginary and summarily dismiss it as unreal has been the practice of both Western and Eastern scholars until very recently. The very idea indeed was ridiculed and people went so far as to assert that it was physically impossible for man to use flying machines. But today what with balloons, aeroplanes and other flying machines, a great change has come over our ideas on the subject.” 

Says Dr. Dikshitar, “ …the flying vimana of Rama or Ravana was set down as but a dream of the mythographer till aeroplanes and zeppelins of the present century saw the light of day. The mohanastra or the “arrow of unconsciousness” of old was until very recently a creature of legend till we heard the other day of bombs discharging Poisonous gases.  We owe much to the energetic scientists and researchers who plod persistently and carry their torches deep down into the caves and excavations of old and dig out valid testimonials pointing to the misty antiquity of the wonderful creations of humanity.” 

Dikshitar mentions that in Vedic literature, in one of the Brahmanas, occurs the concept of a ship that sails heavenwards. “The ship is the Agniliotra of which the Ahavaniya and Garhapatya fires represent the two sides bound heavenward, and the steersman is the Agnihotrin who offers milk to the three Agnis. Again, in the still earlier Rg Veda Samhita we read that the Asvins conveyed the rescued Bhujya safely by means of winged ships. The latter may refer to the aerial navigation in the earliest times.” 

Commenting on the famous vimana text the Vimanika Shastra, he says: 

“ In the recently published Samarangana Sutradhara of Bhoja, a whole chapter of about 230 stanzas is devoted to the principles of construction underlying the various flying machines and other engines used for military and other purposes. The various advantages of using machines, especially flying ones, are given elaborately. Special mention is made for their attacking visible as well as invisible objects, of their use at one’s will and pleasure, of their uninterrupted movements, of their strength and durability, in short of their capability to do in the air all that is done on earth. After enumerating and explaining a number of other advantages, the author concludes that even impossible things could be effected through them. Three movements are usually ascribed to these machines, ascending, cruising, thousands of miles in the atmosphere  and lastly descending. It is said that in an aerial car one can mount to the Surya-mandala, travel throughout the regions of air above the sea and the earth. These cars are said to move so fast as to make a noise that could be heard faintly from the ground. Still some writers have expressed a doubt and asked “Was that true?” But the evidence in its favor is overwhelming. 

(source: Technology of the Gods: The Incredible Sciences of the Ancients  p 147 - 209). For more refer to chapter on Sacred Angkor

***

Has the World Ended Before?

Charles Berlitz (1914 - 2003) author of several books, including The Bermuda Triangle, was the grandson of the founder of the world-famous Berlitz schools, wrote:

"If atomic warfare were actually used in the distant past and not just imagined, there must still exist some indications of a civilization advanced enough to develop or even to know about atomic power. One does find in some of the ancient writings of India some descriptions of advanced scientific thinking which seemed anachronistic to the age from which they come. 

The Jyotish (400 B. C) echoes the modern concept of the earth's place in the universe, the law of gravity, the kinetic nature of energy, and the theory of cosmic rays and also deals, in specialized but unmistakable vocabulary, with the theory of atomic rays. And what was thousands of years before the medieval theologians of Europe argued about the number of angels that could fit on the head of a pin. Indian philosophers of the Vaisesika school were discussing atomic theory, speculating about heat being the cause of molecular change, and calculating the period of time taken by an atom to traverse its own space. Readers of the Buddhist pali sutra and commentaries, who studied them before modern times, were frequently mystified by reference to the "tying together" of minute component parts of matter; although nowadays it is easy for a model reader to recognize an understandable description of molecular composition."

(source: Doomsday 1999 - By Charles Berlitz p. 123-124).

 

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