Ancient Face

The face in this photo was carved in stone over 11,000 years ago. It was discovered by archaeologists during excavations at Gobekli-Tepe in the Southeastern Anatolia Region of Turkey. When I saw it in a National Geographic article from 2011, the face reminded me of something and I couldn’t get it out of my mind.  Suddenly, I knew what. It held a startling resemblance to the alien in the first episode of The Outer Limits, First Series.

Alien Entity

That first episode of The Outer Limits has stayed with me for such a long time, the haunting image and theme it had. The similarity to the stone monument is mesmerizing! What accounts for the convergence of like-entities so many thousands of years apart?

The Gobekli-Tepe dig site was discovered in 1994. It is awesome…beyond awesome. See the National Geographic article on it, with photos that seem to enter an alternate reality, HERE.

One quote from the article speaks of the surprise to the archaeologists that such a place exists, like finding Stonehenge itself for the first time: “Discovering that hunter-gatherers had constructed Göbekli Tepe was like finding that someone had built a 747 in a basement with an X-Acto knife.”

What we don’t know about what has occurred on this planet surpasses what we do know…every other decade we have to rewrite ancient history–and our own future–because of another discovery “unearthed.”

How many other civilizations are still hidden from us?

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In the summer of 2006 I visited Stonehenge in Wiltshire, England. Before heading overseas, I arranged with the English Heritage Society to have a pre-dawn hour at Stonehenge, which cost just 25£. It was dark when I arrived before 5 a.m., after the 39-mile drive down from Somerset, where I had been staying. I found myself in a small parking lot that lay on the other side of a highway running past the ancient megalith. A park ranger was in an office that lay beneath the road, but for a while I thought no one was there and that I’d not get in at all. To this day I don’t know if he was there just for me or if he was on the night shift, guarding the place. He directed me through a tunnel that ran under the highway and under a fence. I went up some stairs in the dark and stepped out into Stonehenge.

I had the hour to myself. The person who had driven me down had been there, done that, he said, and so he stayed outside the circle, though he took several photos, like the ones shown here.

I moved among the stones, touching each one, aware of nothing else. It was a time of no thought. I felt an energy and power I absorbed but had no words to explain, nor wanted any.

I left England a week later and did not return for two years. I’ll write of that 2008 visit in another post, for then I visited other ancient stones, including Avebury, and that set in motion a major shift in perception. But the experience in Stonehenge was the catalyst that drew me back.

Stonehenge and Prehistoric Britain

Over six thousand years ago the people in Britain created massive monuments and stone circles and dolmens and passage graves, all to honor their dead. We don’t know how they did it without technology and with only stone tools. What did they use to lift tons of stone blocks and lay them upon other stones in the circle? What ceremonies did they perform then, and why? Such mystery rises out of that time. It is a wonder with the many invasions of Britain by the Romans, by marauders like the Vikings, by Germanic tribes, by the Normans–the endless trail of men seeking to own other men and land–yet these monuments stayed far more intact than seems possible.

They are magnificent. They are more than signs from the past. In their presence, we change.

The Atacama Desert of Chile is a vast, empty plain, as barren as the surface of Mars, and as mesmerizing. Anything can be imagined in that landscape. Going there would bring to the senses something primal and whole that exists for the most part free of the influence of humankind. Like going back to the beginning. And so will I go there, if time and fate allow.

This desert has figured in two things I’ve written, a screenplay titled “Masquerade, Anyone?” and a novel, Gene Pool. The screenplay is a caper about a private detective and thieves; the novel is about genetic engineering. In both, the Atacama Desert, the most arid desert in the world, is just a backdrop in short sequences, but in the backstory, it was a place that I couldn’t get out of my mind. It is in truth in a few locations the center of astonishing discoveries and research in astronomy and unmanned space exploration.

(Photos courtesy of Danielle Pereira)