284 The Atlantis Encyclopedia
[sometimes spelled Vimanika Shastra or Vymaanika-Shaastra],
perhaps the most important ancient text on Vimanas, was first
reported to have been found in 1918 in the Baroda Royal San-
skrit Library. Swami Dayananda Saraswati in his comprehensive
treatise on the Rig veda, dated 1875, references the Vaimanaik
Sastra in his commentary, as well as other manuscripts on
Vimanas. The Vaimanaik Sastra refers to about ninety seven past
works and authorities, of which twenty works deal with the
mechanism of aerial flying machines.
None of these sources claim Indian origins for the Vimana, but assign its
creation to a remote period of earlier civilization before the Great Flood. From
descriptions such as these, Childress and other researchers conclude the device
was invented in Atlantis.
Hopi accounts of the flood hero, Kuskurza, tell how a pre-deluge, Atlantean-
like people “made a Pauwvota, and in their creative power made it fly through the
air. On this many of the people flew to a big city, attacked it, and returned so fast
no one knew where they came from. Soon the people of many cities and countries
were making Patuwvotas and flying in them to attack one another.”
In the Boen religion of pre-Buddhist Tibet, monarchs during ancient times
were said to have had a power that enabled them to fly through the sky from one
kingdom to the next. They called it the dmu dag,rmu thag, or “The Cord of Mu.”
Remarkably, here is preserved not only the memory of prehistoric aviation, but
an Atlantean contemporary, the lost Pacific civilization of Mu.
Edgar Cayce, who was presumably unfamiliar with Tibetan traditions, Hopi
myth, or Hindu literature describing Vimanas, often spoke of aircraft in Atlantis.
He said the Atlanteans possessed “things of transportation, the aeroplane, as called
today, but then as ships of the air, for they sailed not only in the air but in other
elements also” (Cayce 2437-1 1/23/41).
Many Atlantologists regard Indian and Hopi stories of Vimanas as early science
fiction. To them, Cayce’s statements about airships in Atlantis were influenced by
contemporary fantasy writers. Others point out his more convincing description
of Atlantis in so many additional details, arguing that he may have been accurate
here, too. And they find it difficult to dismiss the surprisingly large number of
admittedly authentic ancient Indian texts which mostly depict Vimanas in un-
adorned, straightforward language.
There were certainly no aircraft in the Late Bronze Age, when Atlantis reached
the zenith of its material greatness. During their life-and-death struggle in the eastern
Mediterranean, the Atlanteans could have certainly used a squadron of Vimanas to
stave off defeat. If such machines ever existed during ancient times (which is un-
likely in the extreme), they were utterly forgotten by subsequent ages, except in
Indian literature and Hopi and Tibetan myth. The earliest suggested period for
Atlantis, and out of which it appears to have evolved, was the Neolithic. It is difficult
to imagine any relationship between megalithic and aeronautical technologies.
(See Cayce, Mu)