All this business of connecting various dots, then using selected patterns to establish that Julius Caesar and Jesus are the same person got me to pondering.

What do we really want to accept as evidence?

Erich Von Daniken told us that the lines in the Nazca desert were attempts to communicate with the beings from the stars who came and went frequently in times past. In fact the Nazca lines marked out a landing field for the visiting star ships. Von Daniken even pointed out what appeared to be a knee in the long, straight leg of an immense bird image. This, he said, was a turn-out for a space ship, so it could get out of the way for other ships landing. [Later, a researcher pointed out a small problem with this:   that oval shaped "knee" turn-out was about five feet across. So the star ships must have been very small. Flown by little green men, perhaps?]

The pyramids were impossible to build with human labor at the time they were constructed (says Von Daniken and a few others). They had to have been built by advanced races from the stars. You want proof? The three primary pyramids at Giza form a line exactly like the three stars in Orion's belt—even to one of them not being exactly on a straight line with the other two, as is the case with the stars in Orion's belt. Obviously, the pyramids were built by beings visiting the earth from some advanced civilization out among the stars.

And Stonehenge. . . .   Well, you get the idea.

All of these constructions appear to be, and in some cases, indeed are lined up according to astronomical data. And we know, don't we, that the hairy, drooling, belly-scratching ancestors from whom modern humans sprang were too stupid and ignorant to have been able to observe the heavens, draw conclusions from their observations regarding relationships between the periodic repetitions they saw and the seasons, when certain crops should be planted, etc., and build any of these things by themselves either as calendars or for ritualistic purposes.

And then sometimes a coincidence is just that   a coincidence.

A fellow named Henry Lincoln did a lot of heavy-duty research some decades ago and provided much "data" that Dan Brown may very well have drawn on for his writing of The Da Vinci Code. He spend hours, days, months pouring over maps of areas in southern France, to where (he tells us) Mary Magdalene, pregnant with Jesus's third child escaped for refuge after the execution of Jesus. The pentangle, Lincoln said, was a symbol for womanhood (I'd always been told it was a symbol used to call forth the Devil). Lincoln, playing "connect the dots" between various castles and cathedrals, managed to draw lines all over maps of, first in southern France, then in Europe in general. He found pentangles everywhere! Blithely telescoping a few centuries here and there, he tells us that the Knights Templars and the Freemasons were in on the plot, so it was the Freemasons (literally masons at the time) who built these castles cathedrals in these pentangle patterns. He even found several churches on an island between Denmark and Sweden that formed a pentangle.

Well, that's pretty interesting. I'm not sure that it actually proves what Henry Lincoln was trying to prove, but it is interesting. I wonder what it all means.

If anything.

I'm reminded of the story about a fellow who didn't know what he wanted to do with his life, so he decided to wait for a sign from God. Several years went by, and then one night when he was out on his back porch drinking a beer and enjoying the night air, a meteorite landed in his back yard. It dug a 200 foot crater, shattered all the windows in the guy's house, cracked the concrete foundation in several places, and blew him back into the kitchen.

He was certain that had to be the sign he'd been waiting for. Problem was, he couldn't figure out what God was trying to tell him to do, but he was pretty sure it was something fairly important.

Don Firth