I recently stumbled across this article Time Travel Machine Outlinedwhich provides food for thought for those who deride the stories in the puranas about “Vimanas” as mere myths.

The report talks about recent research at Haifa’s Israel Instt. of Technology that “could possibly enable distant future generations to travel into the past”

The hypothesis is – if space-time is bent far enough, so that time lines actually turn back on themselves to form a loop, such a manipulation could essentially get objects/people “back in time”.

Physicist Amos Ori whose findings are detailed in the Aug. 3 issue of the journal “Physical Review D” is quoted in the article as saying “We know that bending does happen all the time, but we want the bending to be strong enough and to take a special form where the lines of time make closed loops “We are trying to find out if it is possible to manipulate space-time to develop in such a way.”

Vimana drawing courtesy: D Hatcher Childress

Now there is still a very way to go before any of this becomes a reality. Nevertheless, it is a fascinating idea.

This reminded me of something I wrote more than two years ago about Vimanas but never got around to circulating widely. In an article titled, “Vimanas – Science Fiction or Unexplained Mystery?, I explored the idea of whether there might be something more to the stories about Vimanas in our sacred texts than pure fantasy.

As many of you know, there are numerous descriptions of “vimanas” – or flying machines – in ancient Indian literature and epics also mention their use in warfare. It is tempting to dismiss these accounts as pure fantasy. But even if they are just “stories” – would they not count amongst the earliest known works of science fiction?

And is there any possibility that these accounts may actually be real and describe events and civilisations without any extant traces? I dont know – it does seem to be highly unlikely.

Here is the fascinating excerpt describing the training of a pilot:

“The pilot should have had training in maantrica and taantrica, kritaka and antaraalaka, goodha or hidden, drishya and adrishya or seen and unseen, paroksha and aparoksha, contraction and expansion, changing shape, look frightening, look pleasing, become luminous or enveloped in darkness, deluge or pralaya, vimukha, taara, stun by thunderstorm din, jump, move zig-zag like serpent, chaapala, face all sides, hear distant sounds, take pictures, know enemy maneuver, know direction of enemy approach, stabdhaka or paralyse, and karshana or exercise magnetic pull.”

Although this was fascinating enough, it was hard to consider as clinching evidence. So I decided to do some more digging which led me to Peter Thomson’s website.

Peter Thomson is a Physics Tutor and an “originator” of the charged sheath vortex theories. His focus of work has been “the development of ideas for the charged sheath vortex”.
Although his initial interest started with tornadoes, he realised that the theory could be extended to a number of areas. As he says on his website, “It was only later that I considered how it might apply to a containment vessel for fusion power, and for a flying vehicle.”

His hypothesis was that if such a flying vehicle did indeed exist, it should demonstrate several common features cited in UFO sightings. The mechanism (that explains the science of the flight itself) as well as of the characteristics, should be “based on simple physics – with no factor X that answers everything and explains nothing.”

He concluded that it was possible to explain and justify all the design features, mechanisms and characteristics of such objects by the theory behind a “fusion vortex engine”

As Peter delved deeper into existing literature around conventional fusion research, “..to see if anyone had considered this”. or whether anything anomalous had been reported when working with mercury or mercury vapour in conditions where a charged sheath might develop.what did appear were some ancient Indo/European stories translated from Sanskrit.”

Read on in his own words:

“I could dismiss stories of flying people and chariots as being the stuff of story tellers and legends, but it was the incidental detail that caught my attention. Detail that made coherent sense if the vehicles described were powered by a charged sheath fusion engine. Too many technologically consistent details for the stories to have been created by an agricultural culture moving out of the stone age!

These flying vehicles are described as being powered by a vortex of mercury. In order for the mercury vortex to work it needs an iron box. If you open the iron box, radiation from the contents of the box will burn your skin, like bad sunburn. These vehicles fly with a musical hum. They don’t have a powerful rear exhaust, and they only fly within the atmosphere. There are other vehicles that fly with a powerful rear exhaust, and a roar like thunder that can be used to fly into space. The stories make a very clear distinction between the capabilities of these two types of vehicles.

We also learn that over time this knowledge was lost, and the mercury vortex ceased to work when the contents of the iron box no longer burnt. The stories also describe complete flying cities, which if this technology were real would not be a problem.

What makes me guess that the technology was real is the way the story describes the way the inhabitants of the city behaved after their city was shot down in a battle. Not as people with their roots in agriculture would behave, but as we might expect people whose only experience of life is a modern technological civilisation might behave on losing their technology.

Unfortunately the weapons described in these stories could also be made using fusion power from a charged sheath vortex. When you know how the technology works it is very difficult to see these writings as pure stories from the distant past. There is simply too much consistent and working technology in them.
These stories can only be fragments of history from the distant past. Twisted, altered, misremembered, but still enough technology remains in these accounts to say with a lot of certainty, we are not the first technological civilisation on this planet.

Such a civilisation may have been very local, not a world-wide global civilisation like our own. Somewhere it must have left its traces. Many of those traces may remain on the continental shelf exposed for the duration of the ice age and now submerged, but there is another vast depository of technological activity on this planet – the ice fields of Greenland and Antarctica that have collected the atmospheric dust year by year since the last ice age started. The ice that formed at the time of the Roman empire stores the lead and copper dust of its smelters and mines, but what of the many centuries and millennia before that?..”

Unfortunately though, I have yet to come across any other/alternative scientific interpretation and analysis of these texts and if any of you is aware of more work in this area, please do let me know.
Another interesting book in this context is “Vimana Aircraft of Ancient India and Atlantis” by David Hatcher Childress, Ivan T. Sanderson which apparently has extensive translations from the Vyamanic Shastra (I have not read the book yet, so cannot comment on it)

If you are “really curious, read this, this and finally this.

As usual, comments and counter-views welcome.