Earth Before Man Read online

  She was also determined to understand why the Tribe of the Great Grays tampered with the human DNA code. That hunger became her prime research project. Thanks to Zak’s discovery of different alien tribes coming here before the time of man on Earth, she was determined to catalog alien DNA and image them through her new and powerful computers. However, it did not take long to realize how difficult that task was. Zak had also proven that in the Fourth Dynasty, Egyptian pharaoh Khufu, also referred to as Cheops, like most pharaohs, was an alien or at least demi-alien. Cheops did not build the pyramid, but simply for the sake of his god, repaired it. However, without DNA, it was impossible for Maria to identify or computer-grow their image and prove who the ancient gods of Egypt really were. It was the same for the Rama aliens in India and the war they had with the Anunnaki in Mesopotamia. All she could identify for sure was the DNA of the aliens she had been personally involved with, the Sky People and the Great Grays.

  Maria had in her computer files unidentified DNA strands from two other alien species discovered in the Grand Canyon treasury that Greg Red Cloud, a Navajo spiritual Elder showed her last year. They were the two DNA strands that she was currently trying to develop an algorithm for, allowing her to image them. When attempting to identify alien species, she was saddened when remembering that before the Duchess destroyed the House of the Nazarene, Gustav had a DNA depository of all aliens who came to Earth. Now, with that depository gone the way of the island, she had to start all over again.

  Chapter 5

  It was late at night but Kirk knew where Zak was going to be. While there was no obvious animosity among any of the surviving members of the House of the Nazarene, if the truth were known, Kirk was afraid of Zak. His cantankerous antisocial behavior greatly advertised his desire to be left alone with his research. When disturbed, he had a propensity to express his displeasure in rather colorful inappropriate language. At least to him, living far back in history among the ancient civilizations was a far better place to be than in the hectic present. Zak Zanders dreamt of living a more serene uncomplicated life in the past and objected to being jolted back into the chaotic present.

  Maria once told Kirk that Zak was actually a pushover if one only knew how to handle him. It seemed that coffee and compliments was the key to getting onto his good side. In addition and most important of all, when he was talking, never interrupt him. Maria laid heavy emphases on the word ‘never’. Acting on Maria’s advice, Kirk stopped by the mess hall that thankfully never closed and walked out with a mug of steaming fresh coffee.

  When Kirk approached Zak’s desk, he saw him bent over an ancient manuscript. He knew this was a bad time to approach somebody enjoying a vicarious existence in another time and place. However, needing to understand the mystery of the note, it had to be risked. Accepting his cruel fate, realizing that there was never a good time, he advanced and gently tapped him on the shoulder. With a jolt, Zak was rudely brought back to this reality and in frustration snapped a pencil in half. Stern eyes bolted over to meet the intruder. Before a barrage of angry salty expressions could spew forth, Kirk quickly presented the sacrificial appeasement to the altar, the coffee. Without invited to do so, he swallowed hard and quickly sat next to him.

  Although Kirk did not expect a friendly greeting, Zak’s piercing eyes and scowl wrote a whole book on the meaning of displeasure. It sent chills through him. In a pacifying tone, Kirk tried his best to sound brave. It did not work. He meekly said,

  “As an expert on alien history on ancient Earth, I need your help on an enigma.”

  The attempt did nothing to dim the harsh glare of aggravation piercing into him. He pointed to the coffee on the desk and tried to sound appeasing.

  “I brought you a fresh coffee.”

  Slow eyes broke the stare, drifted to the coffee and then back to Kirk. Zak snorted,

  “What do you want?”

  Greatly relieved that he had at least gotten some words from Zak, he began,

  “Because you are a world authority on ancient mysteries -----”

  Zak rudely stopped the false praise,

  “That only works on me when Maria says it. What do you want?”

  Composure was not easy but Kirk tried his best and pressed on.

  “It’s this letter.”

  He held it high for Zak to see.

  “It came to us through proper coded channels generally only reserved for very secretive messages. Yet, it is a letter containing a common message. I can’t shake the feeling that an important communication is hidden in it.”

  A mystery? There was nothing more enticing to Zak than a mystery. Slowly his hand reached out for the letter. Zak read,

  ‘I have been in Turkey looking for lost civilizations this past month with no luck. I was so disappointed that in anger, I picked up a vitrified rock and threw it as far as I could. I will stay in the ancient mountain village of Alakati for a few more days and then move on. Contact you soon.’

  Putting the letter down he looked sharply at Kirk and snapped,

  “Did you want me to explain to you what a vitrified rock is?”

  Although Kirk already knew, it was the reason he suspected there was a hidden message in the note. He was wise enough to say,

  “Yes please.”

  In keeping with his foul mood Zak snapped,

  “Of course a vitrified rock is important to the message you fool. It’s the whole intent of the letter.”

  Kirk tried his best to sound commanding but in the face of a greater force failed miserably. Instead, it was a weak reply.

  “Please explain that reasoning to me.”

  After guzzling fresh coffee, Zak seemed slightly pacified and his reply was not quite as terse this time.

  “Simplistically, vitrified refers to stone that through intense heat has turned to glass. As a contemporary interpreter of biblical and antediluvian legends, I have come across this phenomenon many times. It is something that cannot happen by natural occurrence. For it to happen, stone has to be heated in excess of 1,000 C and kept at that temperature for hours. As far as I am concerned and many scientists agree with my theory, in those days there was only one way ancient stone could be subjected to such extreme heat and that is by a nuclear explosion.”

  Of all the years Kirk had been with the House of the Nazarene, he had learned not to shun such outrageous statements. He had seen aliens, specifically the Great Grays. Although he does not understand it, he had experienced time dilation. He was there when Santo and Maria disappeared for two years in what to them were merely a few minutes. However, the possibility of a nuclear war thousands of years ago was enough to cause a look of skepticism nonetheless.

  Certainly Zak noticed it, indeed, expected it and continued,

  “Ancient human history on this planet is full of stories pertaining to the Great Earth War between two alien tribes before the Time of Man. I have translated Great Gray chronicles attesting to it. It is a well-known fact, at least to us unburdened by traditional convention that the Mahabharata and other sacred writings are not legends but rather a detailed chronicled history of the Great Earth War between the Rama tribe in India and the Anunnaki tribe in Mesopotamia. They tell of a terrible nuclear war.”

  Kirk sat stunned and Zak seemed to revel in his look of amazement. After another gulp of coffee, he paraphrased examples of the nuclear war to the stunned Kirk. He said,

  “See if your technical mind can understand what people of lesser technical knowledge saw and why they described it that way.”

  Kirk understood what was asked of him. He had often wondered how ancient people would have described a UFO in those times. Perhaps fiery globes, flying shields, sky boats, or however they could relate it to their cultural knowledge.

  Zak again swallowed coffee and said,

  “It said in the Mahabharata, that a powerful Vimana ---,”

  He closed one eye, looked at Kirk and added,

  “That is to say, a great destructive force that they referred to as t
he Iron Thunderbolt was hurled against the cities of Vrishis and Andhakas. It was a single projectile charged with all the power of the Universe. An incandescent column of smoke and fire as brilliant as ten thousand suns rose in its entire splendor. The gigantic messenger of death reduced to ashes the entire race of the Vrishnis and Andhakas.”

  He again paused and said,

  “Did you get it?”

  “Yes,” replied Kirk. “It was an atomic bomb dropped on two cities. It’s almost like describing how Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed.”

  “No,” said Zak, “it is exactly how each city was destroyed. Many of the writings in the Mahabharata, in the language of the time, describe the weapons used in that war. There are phrases such as; charged with all the power of the Universe, an incandescent column of smoke and flame as bright as the thousand suns rose in its entire splendor. An iron thunderbolt was a gigantic messenger of death to the victims that reduced them to ashes. The entire race was now corpses so burned as to be unrecognizable and hair and nails fell out. Pottery broke without apparent cause and the birds turned white. To escape from this fire the soldiers threw themselves into streams to wash themselves and their equipment.”

  Zak turned his attention back to the coffee cup but for some reason did not indulge in its nectar. Instead, he turned back to Kirk and said,

  “Those are examples of the Great Earth War as witnessed by the humans at that time. Radiocarbon dates at that time are chaotic but studies of layered deposits near those war zones prove something atomic occurred at that time. Of course, the war was not localized to that area alone. Desert sands turned to glass have been found in the Egyptian desert. Thermal neutrons fifty times greater than natural radiation have been found in ancient fortifications all over the world. India, France, Ireland, Scotland, China, Turkey, and all the Americas have evidence of an ancient nuclear war. My research led me to believe it was this war that destroyed Atlantis, rather than a natural cataclysm like tidal wave or earthquakes or whatever else current convention believes.

  Zak flipped the paper back at Kirk and said,

  “So, you wanted to know if there was a hidden message in the note?”

  He looked over top of his thick glasses and continued,

  “The answer is yes. Whoever wrote this is telling you that he found something to do with an ancient mystery. Because he coded it I suspect that he wanted to keep the discovery away from prying eyes.”

  Kirk went into deep thought, started nodding and said,

  “I’ll need to talk to Maria about this.”

  While returning to his ancient manuscript Zak added,

  “I would wait until morning if I were you. She tends to get a bit cantankerous if woken in the middle of the night.”

  At that, Kirk thanked him for his time, apologized for interrupting him and returned to his cottage. Once in the bedroom he tried his best to be quiet and not disturb a sleeping Jessika. It was a needless task for she lay awake waiting for his return. As he gently slid in beside her, she quickly pounced on him and said,

  “It’s my turn now?”

  Chapter 6

  That morning, Maria was rudely reminded that she had consumed too much wine at last night’s festivities. It just seemed that the older she got, the less wine she could drink without getting a pounding headache in the morning. The intrusion of a clanging alarm clock was a painful reminder that it was time to get up and get Belle ready for school. The other side of the bed was cold and she understood that Santo got up a long time ago for his security duties.

  Thankfully, Belle had forgiven her mother for pulling her away from the festivities last night. She was unusually pleasant this morning, eating her breakfast and getting dressed without a word or objection. Not being a morning person, she was usually a tad bit difficult to get ready for school. When pushing Belle out of the kitchen to meet Robert who was already downstairs at the front door waiting for her, Belle turned and asked what might have been a kind question, except for the smirk.

  “Does your head hurt mommy?”

  Breakfast for Maria consisted of three coffees and multiple promises never to drink that much again. However, as she sat at the table reflecting on the consequences, the pleasure of excessive imbibing came to mind. For the first time in a long time, Marie and Santo were finally able to glean a private moment in the bedroom. If the truth were known, it was actually a couple of hours of pleasurable desire. That and the wine combined to make her sluggish of both mind and body this morning.

  Just as she was trying to convince herself to get to work in the lab, the cleaning crew entered the kitchen. Radka was a young lady who resisted an ancient Bulgarian adage, ‘Wisdom of the Elders’. Despite her youth, she was the custodian of the older cleaning crew as well as the upstairs maids. Maria admitted that she was hired for her pleasant demeanor but also because she was fluent in English, the official language of the House of the Nazarene. Maria, not wanting the cleaners to see the Lady of the House suffering the effects of inebriation, as gracefully as possible got up from the table.

  On her way out of the room she said to Radka,

  “Sorry for the mess Radka. We had a bit of a party here last night.”

  Ever eager to please, and thankful for the job, Radka said,

  “Not a problem Madam of the house. Pleased to clean up.”

  Maria knew that the locals and help referred to her as Madam of the House and that on occasion sent a tickle to her ego. However, there was a stigma to the title, ‘Madam of the House’. She tried to forget that in another culture, it was a roguish title for the owner of a brothel.

  Under normal circumstances, there was a slight bounce in her step when navigating the great staircase down to her laboratory in the solarium. This time she was careful of every step. When turning lights on in the lab, super computers operating on quantum harmonic vibrations started to hum. She understood that scientists and theorists would sell their soul to acquire just a fraction of this unheard of power. On her way to the desk, she spoke to them.

  “Well my beauties, are you going to be nice to me today?”

  As she sat, she added,

  “You certainly haven’t been nice to me yet.”

  As if human, the computers remained stubborn. They were programed to recreate and computer re-generate the nucleotides obtained from the alien DNA of giant skeletons found in a secret cave in the Grand Canyon.

  Sitting at the keyboard and feverously pounding the keys, she hoped to understand the complex alien strands. Because humans only use a very small percentage of their total DNA codes, surprisingly, so it was with the alien codes she had examined. This discovery drove Maria to the mind that no DNA, no matter alien or human species, could have developed by random chance. The odds against such an almost impossibility would be far beyond even her super computers to calculate. She understood that if she was right, that DNA was programed to create intelligence, it would take a computer as complex and as big as the Universe to figure out.

  Therein lay the foundation of her faith, her belief in God. She had always believed that there was a divine design in the spirals. They were just too complex and self-replicating to be a random design driven by chance. The human genetic code uses 64 letters or identified molecules to function. The Great Gray gene code consists of 124 letters. Compare that to the English alphabet. How many stories can be written using only 26 letters in various combinations?

  With the help of her super computers, she managed to reverse the human genome back to the ‘Eve Gene’ in humans. Approximately 100,000 years ago DNA started to function as a cohesive program. Past that time, the DNA strands in her computer program started to disintegrate, unable to maintain a cohesive code. Her most beguiling question about the many mysteries of the human genome was that, we as humans only make up two percent of the total genome. As she saw it, we function within only two percent of the total program. She wanted to know what the other ninety-eight percent of the program was created to do.

  The Neuro-sci
entists on the Estate will often tell her the same thing. They cannot believe that a simple chance of evolution was capable of evolving the brain into such a complex organ. Our brain can function better than any known transistor computer. It is self-correcting and therefore has a minimal error rate. Of the millions of synaptic pathways in our brain, just one strand is capable processing millions of bits of information. Along with the complexities and mysteries of our DNA and almost impossible function of a living computer in our heads, no wonder the world’s top genetic scientists believe the programmer was divine. Her belief was that when probing into the spirals, all she was doing was trying to figure out how God did it and what was in the future for humans.

  As she sat lost to the mysterious world of genetics and programming her computers for answers, she understood how Zak could so easily get lost in research. She often fell into the same trap. She understood his temper when distracted and rudely pulled away from such a deep abyss of concentration, greatly objecting to be reminded of the real world.