Hart’s essential theory was not new but some of his
associated ideas and theories to support his argument were. He
alleged that Darwin’s theory of Evolution could not be correct, as
there wasn’t one missing link, there were hundreds if not
thousands, and that there must be another explanation as to how
Mankind got here and developed.
At the same time, he pointed out that somewhat strangely, there
were six areas of population scattered across the globe that
almost out of nowhere, and starting 10,000 years ago, suddenly
erupted into developed civilization. They went, almost overnight
historically speaking, from being hunter/gatherers to
sophisticated farmers. They sowed crops, the crops we still grow
today, which seemed to appear from nowhere and whose original wild
variants we have still not identified. They started reading,
writing, mathematics, astronomy and science. They built cities and
those strange pointy pyramids, edifices that modern man still does
not understand or comprehend as to how they were built. Quarrying,
cutting and lifting 400 ton of solid rock would still be an
immense challenge to us today, yet somehow that lot managed it.
They also managed, despite being thousands of miles apart on
different continents, to build these things with a connecting
synchronicity of alignment and astronomical meaning. How could
these under developed, mud hut dwelling dudes manage all this? Who
taught them all this nonsense?
-- STUART MILLER, Phenomena
News Editor
Guest Articles by Will Hart
About the Author
Will Hart is a freelance journalist, book author, nature photographer and
documentary filmmaker. He has been
investigating ancient mysteries and evidence of extraterrestrial
intervention on Earth since 1969. He lives in Arizona.
Copyright Information
All articles on this page are
© 2004-2007 by Will Hart.
Reprinted with permission.
Mysterious Origins of Crop Plants
Alien Gardens
By Will Hart

Today modern plant geneticists are performing what would have been deemed
impossible -- a century ago -- by creating new, hybrid plants that have never
existed before in nature. As incredible as it may seem, a new type of corn
(Btcorn), actually the combination of a bacteria and normal corn is already in
the fields. Why was a bacteria injected into the genes of corn? Because Bacillus
thuringiensis helps the new hybrid ‘planteria’ fight off worms.
How is a designer plant like Btcorn created? Technicians carefully take
genetic material from the bacteria, isolate specific parts of its DNA, and
insert it into the DNA of corn. Then the desired transformation is achieved in a
tissue culture. Technically referred to as transgenetic plants, designer
vegetables involve the transfer of DNA from one organism to another. The
hybridization seeks to improve the plant, at least from a human perspective.
We are already creating plantanimals. Why is it then so farfetched to
envision an advanced race -- hundreds of millions of years more sophisticated
than we are -- genetically engineering life on Earth? In fact, it is a plausible
scenario as Sir Francis Crick showed in his book Life Itself and this author
will attempt to prove in The Genesis Race series.
Most soybean plants grown in the U.S. now have been genetically altered to
survive the application of powerful herbicides. Btcorn is widely grown and as
shown above was engineered to produce its own organic pesticide thereby
rendering the plants poisonous to earworms. Growth hormone has been isolated in
bovine DNA and inserted into pigs to increase their weight rapidly and to reduce
fat. Dolly, the first genetically cloned sheep, has already paved the way for
other biogenetic experiments with animal cloning.
This combination ‘alien garden’ and Twilight Zone barnyard is not all
that lurks on our hi-tech farms of today. Just beyond the perfect rows of
uniformly green, identical corn plants is a patch of ground in the Mid-West
enclosed by an electric fence. The small, 10-acre plot has been planted with a
test crop, or rather a genetically engineered “pharmacrop”, of corn that has
been created to make a human enzyme. It is hoped that the new hybrid corn will
produce lipase, an enzyme used in treating cystic fibrosis.
“Pharming,” the practice of altering corn, tobacco, and other plans to
make drugs for humans and animals, has been getting a lot attention in the
biotech industry- and attracting plenty of controversy,” reporter Lucinda
Fleeson wrote earlier this year. The article was titled ‘A Cure for the common
farm?’ It was published in Mother Jones in April 2003. However, bizarre and
potentially risky these bio-gen farming experiments are, Genitcally Modified
Foods (GMOs) and pharming are sources of controversy and bitter debate in
Europe. However, they have not received the press coverage in America where
their presence is much greater.
It may seem that I am writing this article to either raise awareness of GMOs,
to alert you to their potential dangers, or to sing the “gee whiz” praises
of our newest industry. However, none of the above is my actual intent. My
concern is altogether different. I want to know exactly how we got here so
quickly? I recall the days when horses were harnessed to pull ploughs and manure
fertilized fields. In fact, that form of agriculture was developed in Sumer and
lasted some 4500 years. What happened since the 1950s? How did we get here -- in
the broadest sense from the wild grasses, the ancestors of modern cereal crops
-- to these Frankenplants?
If you think that our modern geneticists and plant scientists know the
answers and can point to the evidence showing how our primitive Stone Age
ancestors domesticated wild plants, you are a victim of a scientific shell game.
That is what you are supposed to assume. However, the history of plant
domestication is fuzzy, full of ‘missing links’ and logical inconsistencies
though the public is given the impression that the history of agriculture holds
no real mysteries.
We are told in our history and anthropological textbooks that our fist
civilizations were spawned on the heels of the ‘agricultural revolution, which
occurred in major river valleys. What the textbooks fail to tell us is that our
Stone Age predecessors did not harvest and eat the seeds of wild grasses during
their long sojourn through the Paleolithic era. They were hunter-gathers who
subsisted on leafy greens and lean muscle meats. How come they suddenly figured
out how to domesticate and turn into major food sources circa 5,000 BC?
This raises some obvious and very sticky questions concerning the period of
trial and error experimentation and development that must have gone into
domesticating wild wheat into bread wheat and wild corn into the domesticated
variety.
Let us begin with the enigma of the modern corn plant. The humble origin of
corn remains mysterious because the ancestral wild plant has never been located.
It is an established, scientific fact that corn is a cultigen, a plant
engineered by humans. This means that it has become so altered by humans that it
cannot reproduce naturally and is entirely dependent upon man’s continued
cultivation. In short, it is now a manmade plant and has been for some time.
Scientists have not been able to trace the lineage of corn to the ancestral wild
plant. How can this be if the ‘agricultural revolution’ only occurred
7-8,000 years ago?
Corn is a form of wild grass, as are the majority of the other major crop
plants, there is no good reason for the ancestral variety to have vanished
and/or become extinct. 10,000 years may seem like a long time in human terms yet
it is a very short time in terms of the evolution and life span of a plant
species. There are ancient plants that have existed continuously for hundreds of
millions of years.
If you believe that our ancestors domesticated crop plants, you have to start
by assuming that people without any agricultural experience were brilliant
enough to select and breed the best wild seed candidates to turn into major
cereal crops. It is a historical fact that in spite of 5,000 years of continuous
agricultural development we have not genetically bred a new major crop from a
wild species. Just how ingenious were out Stone Age predecessors who performed
this agronomic feat without any agricultural or genetic knowledge?
Basing the agricultural revolution on the notion that people who lacked any
understanding of the scientific basis of plant breeding created seems a very
shaky premise. Skepticism is warranted due to the fact that, if it actually
occurred, this was the riskiest of gambles, since it represented a complete
departure from the only way of life and only food sources that Stone Age people
knew.
But first let’s step back to an earlier point and ask how we know that
100,000 generations of Stone Age humans did not eat wild grass seeds. Our guts
are still not adapted to digest uncooked grains. After all we are not birds. In
addition, our Paleolithic ancestors lacked the technology to harvest, thresh,
process and cook wild grass seeds. The seeds of wild species are miniscule and
they are attached to the seed heads making them difficult to harvest and hardly
worth the effort.
These are little known facts that raise deeper issues. Our hunter-gatherer
ancestors mainly subsisted on leafy greens and lean muscle meats. If they lacked
an extended experience with wild grasses how did they know which ones to select
to turn into wheat, rye, corn, barely and rice? In other words these are still
the principal food crops that our civilizations are based upon. After at least
5,000 years of continuous agriculture we do not seem to have improved upon the
first selections of our ‘scientifically ignorant’ ancestors. That hardly
seems logical.
This amazingly prescient selection of wild seeds seems not only more than a
little surprising it looks to border on being a minor miracle. There are an
estimated 195,000 flowering plants that they could have turned into food sources
and primitive man chose less than .01 to base agriculture upon. This happened at
a point in time when people had no concept of domesticating plants or animals,
which means no experience with artificial selection.
To further appreciate the paradox that this situation imposes upon us we have
to understand, domesticated crop plants are nothing like their wild ancestors.
Farmers have long known this fact. The differences are so great that most of the
specific ancestral locations of our cereal crops remain a mystery. We must
ponder what this really means. What are the implications of our scientists not
being able to trace the specific wild ancestors of modern corn, wheat, rye,
barely and rice?
When we look at the problem of how our ancestors, lacking in both tools and
knowledge, domesticated wild plants it is really tantamount to pondering how the
Great Pyramid was conceived, designed, engineered and constructed with stone
tools and primitive methods. There is something out of focus in the picture we
have of the history of civilization on this planet, how and when agriculture and
precision-engineered architecture were developed and by whom.
It is as if our ancestors were gathered around the campfire inside a cave and
one was using his hands and fingers to tell stories by throwing shadows against
the wall one minute; the next minute they are watching satellite TV and giddily
channel surfing. That is how great the gaps are between the late Stone Age and
the birth of agriculture and civilization.
How were these quantum leaps made and where is the evidence to support the
orthodox theory that humans engineered them? The real problem with the orthodox
scenario is the lack of a long incubation period during which early humans
experimented with selective breeding and with constructing megalithic stone
monuments. Agriculture should -- and not doubt actually does-- extend back tens
of thousands of years and not the 9,000 that modern science contends. The
creation of dogs from wild wolves, a true genetic engineering feat, is proof of
this.
A more thorough examination of these issues, including evidence that human
beings could not have domesticated wild wolves 15,000 years ago and turned them
into man’s best friend appears in The Genesis Race.
© 2004 by Will Hart
Related Links:


Directed Panspermia
The Case for Extraterrestrial Intervention
By Will Hart
What is Directed Panspermia?
It has been more than three decades since Eric von Daniken had the first of
his best selling books published. In the initial three of the series he
tirelessly and enthusiastically examined the archaeological and cultural
historical records of the world’s ancient cultures trying to show that ‘ancient
astronauts’ had visited our planet. His controversial ideas and the
fascinating information he presented about our planet’s mysterious past were a
smashing success. In fact, he has since become the most popular nonfiction
writer of all time.
That said -- and credit given to Mr. Van Daniken for pointing out the enigmas
of human history -- some very important scientific work was published in this
field by several eminent scientists 20 years ago. Nobel Prize winner Sir Francis
Crick and astronomer Sir Fred Hoyle weighed in with their theories of the
origins of life in the early 1980s.
Their books never made it into public consciousness the way the ‘Chariots
of the Gods’ did and they seldom get mentioned in ‘ancient astronaut’
literature. However, these works deserve a reappraisal and I highly recommend
them to any serious student of cosmology, UFOs or evolution. Crick proposed that
an advanced civilization seeded life on earth in the remote past, a theory
called Directed Panspermia.
We shall postulate that on some distant planet, some four billion years or so
ago, there had evolved a form of higher creature who, like ourselves, had
discovered science and technology, developing them far beyond anything we have
accomplished…
[Life Itself, Francis Crick, 1981, pg. 117]
This may seem a wide departure from the mainstream for a man who is credited
with being the co-discoverer of the shape of the DNA molecule, however Crick’s
treatment of this topic was mostly from a rigorous, scientific perspective. He
did not delve into history’s mysteries but into a variety of scientific topics
including the nature of DNA and RNA as well as what was then known about when
life originated on earth. “The earliest traces of life we can detect at the
present time are found associated with rocks dated to about 3.6 billion yeas ago…but
the fossil record, formed by simple animals whose hard parts have been
preserved, is only 0.6 billion years old.” (1)
In his book Crick pointed out that it took the simplest, single cell
organisms about 1.4 billion years to evolve. The next decisive step up in
complexity to multicellular organisms took almost 2 billion years more. Mammals
appeared on the scene about 200 million years ago and complexity took a quantum
leap. It would seem that the process of biological evolution on the earth is
counter-intuitive. We would expect that it should have taken a shorter time
period for the simplest life forms to evolve and much longer for the most
complex organisms yet mammals took only a fraction of the time to develop
compared to the earliest and simplest organisms.
We have to keep in mind that the book was published more than 20 years ago,
decades before the Human Genome Project (HGP) finished decoding the DNA
blueprint. However, at the time one of the central mysteries that puzzled Crick
was “Such an astonishing degree of uniformity was hardly suspected as little
as forty years ago.” (2) He was referring to findings that showed that all
living things use the same four-letter DNA language to transmit genetic
information. This seemed to point to the probability that all life on earth
arose from one very primitive population, which developed the singular, genetic
code.
At that time it was believed that the human gene count, and that of other
higher animals, would naturally be greater than the lower plant and animal
species. It was also assumed that humans had branched of from the great apes but
no one specifically singled out the chimp. Both of those assumptions were based
upon a Darwinian view. However, the HGP and other more recent studies have shown
those predictions were incorrect. The human gene count turned out to be less
than the rice genome and only double that of the lowly roundworm and Homo
sapiens DNA is 98.5 percent the same as the chimpanzee. These results surprised
and mystified mainstream scientists.
The HGP did confirm that all of life is very closely related on the genetic
level and we can accurately refer to earth’s biological system as the ‘Genetic
Tree of Life’. Crick alluded to the underlying issue raised by this finding
with the following statement: “We see, then, that one way to approach the
origin of life is to try to imagine how this remarkable uniformity first arose.”
(3) The question is how could the primordial earth have randomly synthesized the
first nucleic acids or proteins from the chemical soup that existed billions of
years ago?
It might appear that the recent genetic findings support Darwinism, the
theory that life originated on earth through blind chance. On the surface it
would seem that the very uniformity that the genetic code displays argues for
life originating on this planet on its own. However, that is not necessarily the
case; the scenario poses problems. For starters, if Nature was operating via a
long series of random events that eventually clicked and produced simple
one-celled organisms, why weren’t there a variety of these random combinations
that resulted in numerous DNA codes instead of a single branching genetic tree?
It can be argued that the very uniformity of the genetic language seems to
imply that this process had been tested and packaged before on some other planet
and then transplanted to the earth. The one-pass-through success of life on our
planet would seem to indicate that a high degree of intelligence and
bio-engineering was involved because whoever conducted it bet everything on one
roll of the dice, a single genetic pathway as if on a sure thing. A purely
random process should have produced at least several genetic lines with varying
bases and languages in order to insure that one would succeed.
Crick later posed the following question:
“ Can we marshal any convincing evidence which might support or refute
Directed Panspermia? One possible line of evidence is contained within the
organisms we have today. In spite of the great variety of molecules and chemical
reactions produced by evolution, there are certain features, which appear common
to all living things. We can begin to piece together the family trees of certain
molecules – transfer RNA molecules, for example -…the one feature, which is
so invariant that it immediately attracts attention. This is the genetic code…
This would not be surprising if there were an obvious structural reason for
the details of the code; if certain amino acids had necessarily to go with
certain codons because, for example, their shapes neatly fitted together. It
seems most improbable…that all the details of the code were decided by purely
chemical reasons…One is mildly surprised that several versions of the code did
not emerge.” (4)
He later summed up his interpretation of the evidence: “the fact that the
code is so uniform lends a small measure of support for Directed Panspermia.”
(5) Crick also pointed to the element molybdenum, which is more abundant in
living things than it is in rocks, as another support for extraterrestrial
intervention. Stronger evidence in support for Directed Panspermia came in the
fossil record. According to Crick his theory predicted that microorganisms
should appear suddenly, “without any evidence of prebiotic systems or very
primitive organisms.” (6) This, in fact, is what the fossil record shows and
we would suspect if an advance civilization had suddenly decided it was time to
‘seed’ the earth.
Directed Panspermia offers a better explanation for the gaps in the fossil
record since ‘missing links’ could have existed solely on the ‘sender’
planet and never on earth. Darwinism is actually crushed by the ‘missing links’
problem. Crick raised another very good point about the sudden emergence of a
type of blue-green algae dated to a very early time in the life of the earth.
The problem for mainstream evolutionists is explaining how this primitive plant
evolved to a fully formed stage so quickly. This would suggest that the plant
went through an earlier evolution on a planet similar to earth and was
transplanted here by a technically advanced civilization.
Crick’s theory could also explain the abrupt appearance of flowering plants
(angiosperms) and the lack of transitional species in the fossil record between
the primitive non-flowering plants (gymnosperms) and the angiosperms. Darwin
referred to this gap as the “abominable problem”. From the above we can see
that the mechanisms of Directed Panspermia pass some basic scientific criteria
in several regards, the available evidence conforms to its predictions and it
appears to explain some phenomena better than currently accepted theories.
Much stronger support for this theory has actually been collected in recent
years, long after the book was published so Crick was unable to present it in
his arguments. Mainstream scientists long believed (some still do) that life
could not survive the rigors of outer space because it was either too hold or
too cold. However, that belief has been challenged by a number of recent
findings.
On December 20, 2001 NASA announced that a research team had discovered sugar
(carbohydrate molecules) and several related organic compounds on two
meteorites. This provided the first solid physical evidence that another
fundamental building block of life on Earth could have originated in outer
space. It also pointed to the likelihood that life has formed on other planets.
Carbon based compounds and amino acids like carboxlyic acid had been found on
meteorites previously but this was the first time carbohydrates had been
identified. The recovery of one of the early Lunar-landing modules has also
dispelled the notion that life could not survive the radical conditions of
space. When the module was recovered a form of streptococcus bacteria was found
on the craft; and it had survived for more than a year on the lunar surface! So
life has adapted to the extreme conditions of space, which also tends to support
the theory that it evolved in and has traveled through space.
Obviously, the theory of Directed Panspermia predicts that life exists
elsewhere in the cosmos, actually began somewhere else and was deposited here,
so these findings are very important. Now, we turn to Hoyle’s book Lifecloud:
The Origin of Life in the Universe where we find a simpler version of Crick’s
theory, which is simply Panspermia. Like the biologist, the astronomer did not
think that the evidence supported the notion that life originated on earth via
Darwinian mechanisms but out in the cosmos instead; Hoyle envisioned the basic
molecules arriving on comets or being pushed here by light waves without the aid
of an extraterrestrial civilization.
The late astronomer presented a wealth of astronomical data in support of the
idea that life did not have enough time to evolve on earth and that it probably
developed in the cosmos. In 2002 Space.com reported, “a controversial finding
last year of microbes high in Earth’s atmosphere and thought to have come from
space gained another scientists support this week.” (7) Hoyle’s co-author
and fellow proponent of the panspermia theory, Chandra Wickramasinghe was the
first to study these organisms, which he claimed, rained down on the earth every
day.
Clearly all these recent findings tend to support the theory of panspermia
whether directed or not. Most leading researchers now widely accept the idea
that life could travel between planets embedded inside rocks, kicked up by
asteroids or comet collisions. The sciences of astrobiology and exobiology are
still in their infancy and yet they are showing that life is out there and it is
very hardy!
What we have embodied in these two panspermia theories are the embryonic
formulations of a valid scientific theory about the cosmic origins of life on
earth. As the author has shown in prior articles, we have a wealth of historical
enigmas, pointing to ‘missing links’ in the archaeological and agricultural
records that cast doubt on the theories of mainstream anthropologists and
historians. It would appear that an advanced civilization has intervened in
earth’s evolution; and through a series of transplants, implants and genetic
insertions initiated, altered and controlled the course of biological and
cultural life.
In fact, all ancient civilizations tell of a time when ‘gods’ descended
to earth to bring the gifts of agriculture, tools and law to primitive humanity.
So our own cultural records also support the theory of Directed Panspermia, as
do the mysterious artifacts that dot the landscape in Egypt, Mexico and Peru.
Yet the clincher is our own development as a species along technical lines that
have led us to embrace the twin technologies of space exploration and genetic
engineering. How do we explain our 98.5% identical genetic makeup with
chimpanzees as our astronauts travel in space and chimps still swing from limb
to limb? All of this goes on while our geneticists insert the genetic materials
from bacteria into the genes of a corn plant to create a new hybrid species.
I would explain it this way, we have inherited the genes from the advanced
race that seeded life on our planet and genetically engineered our species ‘in
their image’ and we are recapitulating that genetic heritage.
Book References
-
Chariots of the Gods? Von Daniken, Eric
-
Life Itself, Crick, Francis
-
Lifecloud: The Origin of Life, Hoyle, Fred & Wickramasinghe, Chandra
Quotations
-
Life Itself, pg. 108
-
Ibid. pg. 47
-
Ibid. pg. 47
-
Ibid. pg. 142-43
-
Ibid. pg. 143
-
Ibid. pg. 144
-
Report: Microbes rain down from Space?
More Support for Controversial Theory,
Britt, Robert, 2002
© 2004 by Will Hart