Ancient Secrets of Mysterious America

There is a buzzing, a stirring in the air. It's all around us and people are feeling it in every part of the world. You can tell something is going to happen. But when? Where? And who will be involved?

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Excerpt:

Some people see significance and a link to the last month of 2012 and the closing of the Mayan calendar. They point to the return of the mysterious Planet X hurtling toward Earth from the far reaches of the cosmos. Or they turn the pages of the Holy Bible, quoting chapter and verse out of the Book Of Revelation, as well as awaiting the appearance of the antichrist and the Great Tribulation, before which the true believer will be lifted up into heavenly realms facilitated by the return of Jesus of Nazareth.

Many of today's visionaries speak of the homecoming of the Star Gods, a theory involving "Divine Kings" who descended from the heavens to Earth in ages past, long ago establishing contact and openly communicating and passing on their sophisticated technological skills and arts to a humankind that was still attempting to work its way up the ladder of civilization from a primitive intelligence.

Swiss author Erich von Daniken is generally credited with having popularized the notion that extraterrestrials sent their craft here eons ago and left behind numerous clues to their existence while on Earth. TV shows such as Ancient Aliens on the History Channel currently probe this concept. Numerous other researchers have expanded on von Daniken's ideas and thoughts, creating an entire intellectual cottage industry.

Two authors from the United Kingdom, Brinsley Le Poer Trench and W. R. Drake, actually beat von Daniken to the punch, hammering out the astronauts of antiquity concept several years prior to Erich's then very controversial pronouncements in what was to become the number one best seller Chariots of the Gods? Trench, who later in life became a member of the House of Lords due to his lineage as the 8th Earl of Clancarty, pioneered the trend with the publication of The Sky People in 1960, a book that postulated that space visitors from Atlantean and Biblical times remain with us today.

But most impressive is the massive investigative work of the late British historian W. Raymond Drake. Drake spent many years digging through huge archives of material, looking in his case for supposed anomalies that could support his scenarios of space aliens impacting human history. As Drake himself said, "I aspired to collect as many facts as possible from ancient literature to chronicle for the past what Charles Fort has so brilliantly done for the present century."

In the 1970s, several American paperback publishers issued works by Drake with such scintillating titles as "Gods and Spacemen In The Ancient Past," "Gods and Spacemen Throughout History," and his most notable book, "Gods or Spacemen?" Not to toot my own horn, but it's more than likely that I was the one to publish Drake's material earlier than anyone else in my mimographed zine "The Interplanetary News Service Report" sometime during the mid to late 1960s. In short, I have always felt that "Sir" Drake is doubtlessly the most credible reseacher of the "ancient astronaut" theory who has utilized dozens of writers of antiquity to fortify his findings, scrutinizing their most important works through a high powered literary "lens."

Somewhere buried deep within over 40 file cabinets are rough carbon copies of several full length manuscripts Drake gave me first dibs on publishing. Unfortunately, in those "early days" our printing methods were crude and we engaged no professional staff who could properly edit and retype the material that had been submitted for publication. Nor did we possess a distribution network that would allow for disseminating these works widely. Thus, we suggested W. Raymond Drake contact our comrade-in-UFOlogical-arms, Raymond A. Palmer, who was both a printer (Tomorrow River Press) and publisher (Amherst Press) for authors, including Brinsley Le Poer Trench and the highly controversial George Hunt Williamson (a/k/a Brother Philips) whose works "Other Tongues - Other Flesh" and "Secrets of the Andes" were getting a fair share of attention due to RAP's having garnered their exclusive North American Rights.

Among the literary works Drake passed on to Palmer was the "lost manuscript" you are now about to dig into. I won't reveal how it was recently returned to my hands, nor how only a few copies of the work were ever printed and then with the incorrect title unfortunatley "switched" with another manuscript that Drake had mailed to Palmer at around the same time. It's one of those "coincidences" I like to write about but its meaning is clouded and anyway what's important is that this material has finally managed to reach its rightful audience even if it's a couple of decades later than the deceased researcher might have desired.