Reading Room

MK-CHIRON

CONTROL: / ONLY

5 December 1955

SUBJECT: Preliminary Index of Anomalous Records in the Antique Corpus, Considered with Reference to the Operations of the Program

TO: W. Seaton, Director, MK-CHIRON

The undersigned was retained by the Western Europe Division of the Central Intelligence Agency in May 1954 as historical consultant to the program then known as Operation BRAVO-CHARLIE. The terms of the retention were the provision of such historical advice as the Division and the technical group might require in connection with the temporal coordinates of any operational trial undertaken by the program, the said advice being limited to matters of fact in the historical record and not extending to advice upon the propriety or conduct of the operations themselves. The undersigned has discharged that retention to the best of his ability over the period since.

The undersigned was asked, in the course of the Second Field Trial of September 1955, whether he had begun to compile a list of records in the ancient corpus that might bear upon the operations of the program. The undersigned acknowledged the existence of such a list, in informal form, and undertook to bring it forward in such state as it should be when he was prepared to share it. The Director thereafter required the list. The undersigned has, in the intervening period, worked further upon the compilation. He forwards it under the present cover in such state as it stands.

The undersigned wishes, in submitting the index, to offer certain observations as to its scope and as to the use to which it may properly be put.

First, the index is preliminary. It is the product of approximately seven months of work conducted in the intervals afforded by the undersigned’s principal duties to the program and to his academic position. A definitive compilation, were such a thing possible, would require the labor of years and would draw upon a body of scholarly resource that is not at present available to a single investigator. The present index represents what the undersigned has been able to assemble. It is the more striking, in the undersigned’s view, for its incompleteness.

Second, the index distinguishes among three categories of record. The first category comprises those records which the undersigned considers consistent in their particulars with operations conducted by the present program. The Livy passage on the prodigies of 218 B.C., the Tulli papyrus, and certain further entries here noted, fall within this category. The second category comprises those records which the undersigned considers consistent with operations of a temporal-displacement character but which cannot be assigned to the present program, by reason that the program has not conducted operations at the coordinates described or against the targets described. The third category comprises those records which the undersigned considers anomalous in respect of the historical or material context in which they appear, but for which a temporal-displacement explanation is one among several explanations the undersigned is presently able to advance. The undersigned wishes to be precise upon the matter that the assignment of any given record to one or another category is provisional and rests upon the undersigned’s present understanding, which is itself provisional.

Third, the undersigned wishes to draw the Director’s particular attention to the records of the second category. The undersigned, in compiling the index, did not expect to encounter records of that category in any number. The program had not, when the undersigned commenced the work, conducted operations to coordinates other than those discussed within the program. The undersigned anticipated that any records of agency activity in the ancient corpus would be records of the program’s own operations, with such alterations or redirections as the agency described in the program’s documents might effect. The undersigned has, however, encountered records that cannot be so accounted for. These are tabulated in the second part of the present index. The undersigned does not in the present index offer an account of those records. He offers them as the principal finding of the work and reserves his account for such consultation as the Director may direct.

The index proper is set forth below in summary form. A fuller exposition, including the textual references, the manuscript traditions, the bibliographical particulars, and such illustrative material as the undersigned has been able to procure, is held by the undersigned at his office and is available to the Director upon application.

I. RECORDS CONSISTENT WITH OPERATIONS OF THE PRESENT PROGRAM

The Livy passage on the prodigies of the year 218 B.C., recording the sighting of phantom ships gleaming in the sky over Italy in the period preceding the campaigns of the Second Punic War, consistent with the First Field Trial of May 1955. The passage and its bearing upon the program are addressed in the documents of the program and require no further notice in the present index.

The Tulli papyrus, of the reign of Thutmose III, recording the appearance in the sky of a circle of fire, the multiplication of similar circles in the days following, and the meditation of the King thereon, consistent with the Second Field Trial of September 1955. The passage and its bearing upon the program are addressed in the documents of the program and require no further notice.

Records of further character which the undersigned has identified as consistent with the rearward operations of the program at coordinates other than those of the two field trials, including phenomena recorded by Plutarch in his life of Marcellus bearing upon the siege of Syracuse, certain marginal entries in the Anglo-Saxon chronicle for the year 793, and a passage in the Conquest of Mexico of Diaz del Castillo bearing upon a portent seen by the Tlaxcalans in the year preceding the arrival of Cortés. The undersigned is uncertain whether these records bear upon trials conducted by the program of which the undersigned has not been informed, or whether they bear upon operations the program has not undertaken but of which the undersigned should be apprised. The matter is reserved for the Director’s consideration.

II. RECORDS CONSISTENT WITH OPERATIONS OF UNDETERMINED ORIGIN

The undersigned tabulates in this section those records which, in his judgment, bear upon temporal-displacement operations not conducted by the present program. The records are heterogeneous and resist easy summary. The undersigned offers them in approximate chronological order of their apparent date.

The megalithic stone of the Great Pyramid at Giza. The blocks of the principal chamber are of granite quarried at Aswan, some 800 kilometers up the Nile. They weigh in excess of 70 tonnes each. They are fitted to a tolerance, attested by the modern survey, of approximately 0.5 millimeters. The means by which the granite was extracted, transported, raised, and dressed to the observed tolerance are not within the technological capabilities of the dynastic period as those capabilities are otherwise attested. The undersigned has consulted with specialists in the engineering of antiquity who have confirmed that no method of dynastic Egyptian engineering can account for the construction. The pyramid is conventionally dated to the reign of Khufu, 26th century B.C. The undersigned offers the construction as anomalous in its material context.

The Easter Island statuary, the moai. The figures, of which approximately 900 are catalogued, were carved from the volcanic tuff of the Rano Raraku crater and transported across the island to their final positions. Their average mass is approximately 14 tonnes. The largest exceeds 80 tonnes. The island had at its peak population, by the demographic estimate, fewer than 12,000 inhabitants. The transport of the figures across distances of up to 18 kilometers without wheeled vehicles, draft animals, or substantial timber, is not within the demonstrable capacities of the Rapa Nui culture. The figures are conventionally dated to the period 1250-1500 A.D. The undersigned offers them as anomalous in their material context.

The Saqsaywaman wall above Cuzco. The wall is constructed of stones of irregular polygonal shape, some weighing over 100 tonnes, fitted without mortar to a tolerance that does not admit the insertion of a knife blade between the stones. The Inca, conventionally credited with the construction, are not otherwise attested as having possessed metallurgy adequate to the dressing of such stone. The construction is conventionally dated to the 15th century. The undersigned offers it as anomalous in its material context.

The Sumerian temple platforms — the ziggurats — and the broader architectural achievement of the Akkadian and Sumerian civilizations of the third and fourth millennia B.C. The hydraulic management of the Tigris-Euphrates valley, attested by the canal systems and by the dam constructions of the period, presupposes a body of engineering knowledge for which no antecedent development is attested in the archaeological record. The civilization appears, in the archaeological record, to emerge fully formed. The undersigned offers the appearance as anomalous in its chronological context.

The Antikythera mechanism. The device, recovered from a Roman shipwreck of approximately the first century B.C., is a geared astronomical computer of a sophistication not paralleled in the surviving record until approximately the 14th century A.D. No antecedent device, and no successor device of the ancient period, is attested. The undersigned offers it as anomalous in its chronological context.

The Baghdad battery, so called, of the Parthian period. The vessel is of a configuration consistent with the production of a low-voltage electric current by galvanic action. No use of electric current is attested for the period. The undersigned offers it as anomalous in its material context.

The Iron Pillar of Delhi. The pillar, dated to the 4th century A.D., is of a metallurgical purity that has resisted corrosion in the open air for sixteen centuries. The metallurgy required for its production is not otherwise attested for the period. The undersigned offers it as anomalous in its material context.

The undersigned wishes to draw the Director’s particular attention to the following observation. The records here tabulated, considered together, suggest a pattern. They are not random. They cluster in periods and in regions. They are predominantly architectural or material in character. They predominantly improve upon, rather than disturb, the cultures in which they appear. They are not, in their tenor, the work of an agency hostile to those cultures. They are, if anything, the work of a benefactor.

The undersigned offers, with the diffidence appropriate to the magnitude of the proposition, the following hypothesis. The records of the second category are consistent with the operations of a temporal-displacement program of considerable maturity, conducted by parties other than the present program, with the object of the deliberate enrichment of the cultures upon which the operations were conducted. The undersigned does not advance the hypothesis as established. He advances it as the most economical account presently consistent with the records he has been able to identify. He invites the Director’s consideration of whether the United States Government is in a position to advise the undersigned of the existence of such a program, of its conductors, or of its purposes.

III. RECORDS OF AMBIGUOUS CHARACTER

In the present section the undersigned tabulates records that he has been unable to assign with confidence to either of the foregoing categories. These include the Nazca lines of southern Peru; the megalithic constructions of Göbekli Tepe in southeastern Anatolia; the Olmec colossal heads; the Dogu figurines of Jōmon Japan; the Piri Reis map of 1513; the geographic accuracy of certain medieval portolan charts; the chronological irregularities of the Mahabharata; the Voynich manuscript; and a number of further records of similar character, tabulated more fully in the fuller exposition. The undersigned offers them without commentary and without assignment.

CONCLUDING OBSERVATION

The undersigned closes the present index with the observation that he had not, when he commenced the work, anticipated the form which the work has taken. He undertook the compilation in the expectation that it would document the program’s footprint in the ancient corpus. It has done so. It has done more. It has identified a body of further record consistent with operations the program has not conducted. The undersigned is not in a position to characterize those operations. He is in a position to observe that they appear to have been undertaken in a different spirit from the program’s own operations, and that the difference is one which the undersigned considers ought to be the subject of reflection within the program.

The undersigned is at the disposal of the Director to address such questions as the present index may raise.

Professor of

Historical Consultant, MK-CHIRON