You must read what follows twice to grasp the fantastic implications of the result of the next piece of scientific research. In March 1963 biologists of the University of Oklahoma confirmed that the skin cells of the Egyptian Princess Mene were capable of living. And Princess Mene has been dead for several thousand years!

There have been finds in many places of mummies which are preserved so completely and intact that they seem to be alive. Glacier mummies left by the Incas survived the ages and theoretically they are capable of living. Utopia? In the summer of 1965 Russian television showed two dogs which had been deep-frozen for a week. On the seventh day they were thawed out again and—hey presto I—they went on living as cheerfully as ever!

The Americans—and this is no secret—are seriously concerned, as part of their space programme, with the problem of how to freeze astronauts of the future for their long journeys to distant stars.

Professor Ettinger, often scoffed at today, prophesies a remote future in which men will not be consumed by fire or eaten by worms—a future in which bodies, frozen in deep-freeze cemeteries or deep-freeze bunkers, await the day when advances in medical science can remove the cause of their death and bring their bodies to new life. Following up the implications of this Utopian idea one can see the terrifying vision of an army of deep-frozen soldiers who will be thawed out as necessary in case of war. A really horrifying idea.

But what connexion have mummies with our theory of space travellers in the remote past? Am I dragging proofs in willy-nilly?

I ask: how did the ancients know that the body cells continue to live slowed down a billionfold after special treatment?

I ask: where did the idea of immortality come from and how did people get the concept of corporeal reawakening in the first place?

The majority of ancient peoples knew the technique of mummification and the rich peoples actually practised it. I am not concerned here with this demonstrable fact, but with solving the problem of where the idea of a reawakening, a return to life, originated. Did the idea occur to some king or tribal prince purely by chance or did some prosperous citizen watch 'gods' treating their corpses with a complicated process and preserving them in bomb-proof sarcophagi? Or did some gods (= space travellers) transmit their knowledge of how corpses can be reawakened after a special treatment to a quick-witted prince of royal blood?

These speculations require confirmation from contemporary sources. In a few hundred years mankind will have a mastery of space travel that is inconceivable today. Travel agencies will offer trips to the planets, with precise departure and return dates, in their brochures. Obviously a prerequisite for this mastery is that all branches of science keep pace with the development of space travel. Electronics and cybernetics alone will not do the trick. Medicine and biology will make their contribution by finding out ways of lengthening the vital functions of human beings. Today this department of space research is also working in top gear. Here we must ask ourselves: did space travellers in prehistory already possess knowledge that we must win anew? Did unknown intelligences already know the methods with which to treat bodies so that they could be revived in X thousand years? Perhaps the 'gods' being shrewd, had an interest in 'preserving' at least one dead man with all the knowledge of his time so that some day he could be questioned about the history of his generation? Who can tell? Is it not possible that such an interrogation by 'gods' who came back has already taken place?

In the course of the centuries, mummification, originally a solemn matter, became the fashion. Suddenly everyone wanted to be reawakened; suddenly everyone thought that they would come to new life so long as they did the same as their forefathers. The high priests, who actually did possess some knowledge of such re-awakenings, did a great deal to encourage this cult, for their class did good business out of it.

I have already mentioned the physically impossible ages of the Sumerian kings and the biblical figures. I asked whether these people could not have been space travellers who prolonged their life-span through the effect of the time shift on interstellar flights just below the speed of light.

Are we perhaps getting a clue to the incredible age of the men named in the texts if we assume that they were mummified or frozen? If we follow this theory then the unknown space travellers would have frozen leading personalities in antiquity—put them into an artificial deep sleep, as legends tell us—and taken them out of the drawer, and thawed them out and conversed with them during subsequent visits. At the end of each visit it would have been the task of the priestly class appointed and instructed by the space travellers to prepare the living dead again and preserve them once more in giant temples until the 'gods' returned.

Impossible? Ridiculous? It is mostly those people who feel that they are absolutely bound by the laws of nature who make the most stupid objections. Does not nature herself display brilliant examples of 'hibernation' and reawakening?

There are species of fish which, after being frozen stiff, thaw out at milder temperatures and swim around again in the water. Flowers, larvae and grubs not only go into hibernation, but also reappear in the spring in lovely new garb.

Let me be my own devil's advocate. Did the Egyptians learn the possibility of mummification from nature? If that were the case, there ought to have been a cult of butterflies or cockchafers or at least a trace of such a cult. There is nothing of the kind. Underground tombs do contain gigantic sarcophagi with mummified animals, but given their climate the Egyptians could not have copied hibernation from animals.

Five miles from Helwan lie more than 5,000 tombs of different sizes and all date to the time of the 1st and 2nd dynasties. These tombs show that the art of mummification is more than 6,000 years old.

In 1953 Professor Emery discovered a large tomb in the archaic cemetery of North Sakkara that is attributed to a Pharaoh of the 1st dynasty (probably Uadyis). Apart from the main tomb there were 72 other tombs, arranged in 3 rows, in which lay the bodies of the servants who wanted to accompany their king in the new world. No trace of violence is visible on the bodies of the 64 young men and 8 young women. Why did these 72 allow themselves to be walled up and killed?

Belief in a second life beyond the grave is the best known and also the simplest explanation of this phenomenon. In addition to gold and jewellery the Pharaoh was provided with grain, oil and spices in the tomb, which were obviously intended as provisions for the life to come. Apart from grave robbers, the tombs were also opened by later Pharaohs. In such cases the Pharaoh found the provisions in the tomb of his ancestor well preserved. In other words the dead man had neither eaten them nor taken them into another world. And when the tomb was closed again, fresh supplies were placed in the vault, which was shut up, protected against thieves and sealed with many traps. It seems obvious that the Egyptians believed in a reawakening in the distant future and not in an immediate reawakening in the hereafter.

In June 1954, also at Sakkara, a tomb was discovered that had not been robbed, for a chest containing jewels and gold lay in the burial chamber. The sarcophagus was closed with a sliding lid, instead of a removable one. On the 9th June Dr Goneim ceremonially opened the sarcophagus. It contained nothing. Absolutely nothing. Did the mummy decamp, leaving its jewels behind?

The Russian Rodenko discovered a grave, known as Kurgan V, 50 miles from the frontier of Outer Mongolia.

This grave takes the form of a rocky hill that is faced internally with wood. All the burial chambers are packed with eternal ice, and as a result the contents of the grave were preserved in a state of deep-freeze. One of these chambers contained an embalmed man and a similarly treated woman. Both of them were provided with everything that they might have needed for a life to come: foodstuffs in dishes, clothes, jewels and musical instruments. Everything was deep-frozen and in an excellent state of preservation, including the naked mummies. In one burial chamber scholars identified a rectangle containing four rows of six squares, each of which had a drawing inside it. The whole could be a copy of the stone carpet in the Assyrian palace at Nineveh! Strange sphinx-like figures with complicated horns on their heads and wings on their backs are clearly visible and their posture shows them to be aspiring skywards.