part0018

I n the Vedic literature of India, there are many descriptions of flying machines called vimānas . These fall into two categories: (1) manmade craft that resemble airplanes and fly with the aid of birdlike wings, and (2) unstreamlined structures that fly in a mysterious manner and are generally not made by human beings. The machines in category (1) are described mainly in medieval, secular Sanskrit works dealing with architecture, automata, military siege engines, and other mechanical contrivances. Those in category (2) are described in ancient works such as the Ṛg Veda, the Mahābhārata, the Rāmāyaṇa, and the Purāṇas, and they have many features reminiscent of UFOs. In addition, there is one book entitled Vaimānika-śāstra that was dictated in trance during this century and purports to be a transcription of an ancient work preserved in the akashic record. This book gives an elaborate description of vimānas of both categories.

In this chapter, I will survey some of the available literature on vimānas, beginning with the texts dating from late antiquity and the medieval period. The latter material is described in some detail by V. Raghavan in an article entitled “Yantras or Mechanical Contrivances in Ancient India.” I will begin by discussing the Indian lore regarding machines in general and then turn to flying machines.

In Sanskrit, a machine is called a yantra . The word yantra is defined in the Samarāṅgana-sūtradhāra of King Bhoja to be a device that “controls and directs, according to a plan, the motions of things that act each according to its own nature.” 1 There are many varieties of yantras . A simple example would be the taila-yantra, a wheel that is pulled by oxen around a circular track to crush seeds and extract their oil. Other examples are military machines of the kind described in the Artha-śāstra of Kauṭilya, written in the 3rd century B.C . These include the sarvato-bhadra, a rotating wheel that hurls stones, the śara-yantra, an arrow-throwing machine, the udghāṭimā, a machine that demolishes walls using iron bars, and many more.

These machines are all quite understandable and believable, but there are other machines that seem less plausible from the point of view of modern historical thinking. Thus Raghavan mentions a device that could create a tempest to demoralize enemy ranks. 2 Such a weapon is also mentioned by the third-century Roman writer Flavius Philostratus, who described sages in India who “do not fight an invader, but repel him with celestial artillery of thunder and lightning, for they are holy and saintly men.” 3 Philostratus said that this kind of fire or wind weapon was used to repel an invasion of India by the Egyptian Hercules, and there is an apocryphal letter in which Alexander the Great tells his tutor Aristotle that he also encountered such weapons. 4

Modern scholars tend to regard Philostratus’s work as fictitious, but it does demonstrate that some people in Roman times were circulating stories about unusual fire or wind weapons in India. In ancient epics such as the Mahābhārata, there are many references to remarkable wind weapons such as the vāyavya-astra and fire weapons such as the śataghnī (or “100 killer”). In general, the weapons described in older works tend to be more powerful and remarkable than those described in more recent works. Some ascribe this to the fantastic imagination of ancient writers or their modern redactors. But it could also be explained by a progressive loss of knowledge as ancient Indian civilization became weakened by corruption and was repeatedly overrun by foreign invaders.

It has been argued that guns, cannons, and other firearms were known in ancient India and that the knowledge gradually declined and passed away toward the beginning of the Christian era. This is discussed extensively in a book by Gustav Oppert. 5

There are many stories in medieval Indian literature about flying machines. Thus in Bāṇa’s Harṣa-carita there is the story of a Yavana who manufactured an aerial machine that was used to kidnap a king. Likewise, Daṇḍī’s Avanti-sundarī tells of an architect named Māndhātā who used an aerial car for such casual purposes as traveling from a distance to see if his young son was hungry. His son, by the way, was said to have created mechanical men that fought a mock duel and an artificial cloud that produced heavy showers. Both of these works date from about the 7th century A.D . 6

In the ninth to tenth centuries, Buddhasvāmin wrote a version of the Bṛhat-kathā, a massive collection of popular stories. Buddhasvāmin spoke of aerial vehicles as ākāśa-yantras, or sky-machines, and he attributed them to the Yavanas—a name often used for barbaric foreigners. It was quite common for flying machines and yantras in general to be attributed to the Yavanas in Sanskrit texts. 7

Some scholars take the Yavanas to be the Greeks, and they attribute Indian stories of machines to a Greek origin. For example, Penzer thought that the Greek philosopher Archytas (c. 428–347 B.C .) may have been the “first scientific inventor” of devices resembling the Indian yantras, and he pointed out that Archytas “constructed a kind of flying machine, consisting of a wooden figure balanced by a weight suspended from a pulley, and set in motion by hidden and enclosed air.” 8

No doubt there was much exchange of ideas in the ancient world, and today it is hard to know for sure where a given idea was invented and how highly developed it became. We do know, however, that fairly detailed ideas concerning airplanelike flying machines were known in medieval India.

Bhoja’s Samarāṅgana-sūtradhāra states that the main material of a flying machine’s body is light wood, or laghu-dāru . The craft has the shape of a large bird with a wing on each side. The motive force is provided by a fire-chamber with mercury placed over a flame. The power generated by the heated mercury, helped by the flapping of the wings by a rider inside, causes the machine to fly through the air. Since the craft was equipped with an engine, we can speculate that the flapping of the wings was intended to control the direction of flight rather than provide the motive power.

A heavier ( alaghu ) dāru-vimāna is also described. It contains four pitchers of mercury over iron ovens. “The boiling mercury ovens produce a terrific noise which is put to use in battle to scare away elephants. By strengthening the mercury chambers, the roar could be increased so that by it elephants are thrown completely out of control.” 9

There has been a great deal of speculation about just how power generated by heating mercury might be used to drive the vimāna through the air. This was discussed in an early book on UFOs by Desmond Leslie and George Adamski. 10 Leslie proposed that the heated mercury mentioned in the Samarāṅgana-sūtradhāra may have something to do with the flight of UFOs.

I would suggest that the vimānas described by Bhoja are much more similar to conventional airplanes than to UFOs. Thus they are made of ordinary materials like wood, they have wings, and they fly like birds. Raghavan suggested that the mercury engine was intended to be a source of mechanical power for flapping the wings as in bird flight. He supported this by noting that Roger Bacon described a flying machine in which some kind of revolving engine caused wings to flap through a mechanical linkage. 11

Ramachandra Dikshitar, however, said that according to the Samarāṅgana-sūtradhāra , the vimāna “has two resplendent wings, and is propelled by air.” 12 This suggests that some kind of jet propulsion was used.

However these vimānas were actually powered, it seems likely that they relied on some conventional mechanical method that extracted energy from burning fuel and used it to produce a flow of air over wings. We can contrast this with the flight characteristics of UFOs, which don’t have wings, jets, or propellers, and seem to fly in a manner that contradicts known physical principles.

Were the vimānas mentioned in Samarāṅgana-sūtradhāra ever actually built, or were they just products of imagination? I don’t know. However, the elaborate descriptions of yantras found in medieval Indian texts suggest that many sophisticated machines were made in India long ago. If sophisticated mechanical technology was known in remote times, then it is quite possible that airplanes of some kind were also built.

It is interesting that the Sanskrit astronomical text entitled Sūrya-siddhānta mentions a mercury engine used to provide rotary motion for a gola-yantra, a mechanical model of the planetary system. 13 This suggests that at least one kind of mercury engine was used to produce rotary power. The text also says that the design for the mercury engine is to be kept secret. It was standard practice in ancient India for technical knowledge to be passed down only from teacher to trusted disciple. An unfortunate consequence of this is that knowledge tended to be lost whenever oral traditions depending on teachers and disciples were broken. It is thus quite possible that many arts and sciences known in ancient times have been lost to us, practically without a trace.

Additional Sanskrit works referring to flying machines are listed in a book by Dileep Kanjilal. 14 These are: the Yukti-kalpataru by Bhoja (twelfth century A.D .); the Mayamatam attributed to Maya Dānava but probably dating to the twelfth century A.D.; the Kathāsaritsāgara (tenth century A.D .); the Avadāna literature (first–third centuries A.D .); the Raghuvaṁśam and Abhijñāna-śakuntalam of Kālidāsa (first century B.C .); the Abhimāraka of Bhāsa (second century B.C .); and the Jātakas (third century B.C .). These dates are often approximate, and the material in the various works is often taken from older works and traditions.

The Vaimānika-śāstra is a highly detailed description of vimānas, and it is given great credence in a number of books and articles. These include the writings of Kanjilal, 15 Nathan, 16 and Childress. 17 In particular, the Indian ufologist Kanishk Nathan wrote that the Vaimānika-śāstra is an ancient Sanskrit text that “describes a technology that is not only far beyond the science of the times but is even way beyond the possible conceptual scientific imagination of an ancient Indian, including concepts such as solar energy and photography.” 18

It is indeed true that this book contains many interesting ideas about aerial technology. But it is important to note that it was written in the early 20th century by a psychic process similar to channeling or automatic writing.

The story behind this is briefly presented in the introduction to G. R. Josyer’s translation of the Vaimānika-śāstra . There Josyer explained that knowledge in India used to be transmitted orally, but as this tradition died out, writing on palm leaves was used. Unfortunately, palm leaf manuscripts do not last very long in the Indian climate, and large volumes of old written material have been lost due to not being regularly recopied.

Josyer went on to say that the lost texts “remain embedded in the ether of the sky, to be revealed—like television—to gifted mediums of occult perception.” The medium in this case was Subbaraya Sastry, a “walking lexicon gifted with occult perception,” who began to dictate the Vaimānika-śāstra to Mr. Venkatachala Sarma on August 1, 1918. The complete work was taken down in 23 exercise books up to August 23, 1923. In 1923, Subbaraya Sastry also had a draftsman prepare some drawings of the vimānas according to his instructions. 19

According to Subbaraya Sastry, the Vaimānika-śāstra is a section of a vast treatise by the sage Mahārṣi Bharadvāja entitled Yantra-sarvasva or the Encyclopedia of Machines . Mahārṣi Bharadvāja is an ancient ṛṣi mentioned in the Mahābhārata and other Vedic works, but I do not know of any reference indicating that he was concerned with machines. The Yantra-sarvasva is no longer extant in physical form, but it is said to be existing in the akashic record, where it was read and recited by Subbaraya Sastry. As far as I am aware, there are no references to this work in existing literature. This is discussed in Kanjilal’s book on vimānas. 20

Additional information about Subbaraya Sastry has been supplied by C. S. R. Prabhu, a technical director and project coordinator at the National Informics Center in Hyderabad, India. Prabhu traces Sastry’s story back to 1875, when he was a young man of 20 living near the city of Bangalore in South India. Sastry had been abandoned to die of smallpox during a severe smallpox epidemic and had wandered into a forest region. He was about to commit suicide by drowning himself in a lake when he was saved by a yogī from the Himalayas named Bhāskarānanda. The yogī reportedly cured him of smallpox and kept him in his cave in the forest for about one year.

The yogī is said to have asked Sastry, “What do you want in life?” Sastry replied that he wanted to be renowned as a expert in śāstras (Sanskrit texts), and he specifically mentioned physical śāstras, since the standard religious śāstras are known by many people. The yogī granted his wish by transmitting to Sastry in an unknown way the texts of some 20 different śāstras. According to Prabhu, Sastry had been quite ordinary before meeting Bhāskarānanda.

After returning from the cave, Sastry was able to go into a trance state by closing his eyes and performing certain yogic mudrās. In that state he would recite elaborate Sanskrit texts on religion, science, or politics continuously, without pausing to think. One of these texts was the Vaimānika-śāstra.

Although the Vaimānika-śāstra could be a hoax, I have no reason to suppose that it was not dictated by Subbaraya Sastry in the manner described by Josyer and C. S. R. Prabhu. But is the work authentic? Even if it was existing as a vibrational pattern in the ether, during the process of psychic transmission and dictation it might have been distorted or adulterated by material from the unconscious mind of the medium.

There are good reasons for thinking this might be so, and there are also good reasons for thinking that the text might contain authentic material. I will first give the evidence suggesting that the text of the Vaimānika-śāstra may have been adulterated by modern material.

The text is illustrated by several of the drawings made under Subbaraya Sastry’s supervision. These include cross sections of the rukma-vimāna, the tripura-vimāna, and the śakuna-vimāna . These cross sections show the kind of crude mechanical and electrical technology that existed in the period just following World War I. There are large electromagnets, cranks, shafts, worm gears, pistons, heating coils, and electric motors turning propellers. The rukma-vimāna is supposedly lifted into the air by “lifting fans” that are powered by electric motors and that are very small compared with the size of the vimāna as a whole. It definitely does not look as though it could fly.

These mechanical devices may well have been inspired by the technology of the early 20th century. However, C. S. R. Prabhu has reported on research showing that the text of the Vaimānika-śāstra contains technological information that Subbaraya Sastry is not likely to have acquired through ordinary means of communication. 21 This information consists of formulas for a number of metal alloys, ceramics, and glasses that are used in the construction of vimānas.

The formulas are expressed in obscure Sanskrit words, many of which cannot be found in standard Sanskrit dictionaries. Prabhu found through extensive research that some of these words can be found in rare dictionaries of Ayurveda, the ancient Indian system of medicine and chemistry. Through extensive consultation with Ayurvedic physicians and chemists, he was able to identify the actual substances referred to by some of these words. It was then possible to synthesize some of the materials mentioned in the Vaimānika-śāstra in the laboratory, using the instructions for mixing, heating, and cooling given in the text.

The results were remarkable. Several materials were synthesized, such as tamogarbha loha, a lead alloy, arāra tamra, a copper alloy, and ravi śakti apakarṣana darpana, a glass. These materials turned out to have useful properties matching the description given in the text of the Vaimānika-śāstra. For example, the text said that tamogarbha loha was a light absorbing material, and laboratory tests showed that the synthesized tamogarbha loha displayed a high level of absorption of laser light. 22 The synthesized materials were found to have unique properties that are new and patentable.

The formulas in the Vaimānika-śāstra seem to represent a science of chemistry and metallurgy that is expressed in archaic language. From what we know of the life of Subbaraya Sastry, it seems unlikely that he could have generated such formulas from readily available modern information. Perhaps these formulas do come from an ancient source.

Due to the presence of many untranslatable Sanskrit words, the Vaimānika-śāstra is not very intelligible. Nonetheless, this text does contain information about vimānas showing interesting parallels with the observed features of UFOs. To illustrate this, here are ten examples taken from a list in the Vaimānika-śāstra of 32 secrets that a vimāna pilot should know. 23 I will comment on relations between these items and common features of the UFO phenomenon.

1. Goodha: As explained in “Vaayutatva-Prakarana,” by harnessing the powers, Yaasaa, Viyaasaa, Prayaasaa in the 8th atmospheric layer covering the earth, to attract the dark content of the solar ray, and use it to hide the Vimaana from the enemy.

2. Drishya: By collision of the electric power and wind power in the atmosphere, a glow is created, whose reflection is to be caught in the Vishwa-Kriyaa-darapana or mirror at the front of the Vimana, and by its manipulation produce a Maaya-Vimaana or camouflaged Vimana.

3. Adrishya: According to “Shaktitantra,” by means of the Vynara thya Vikarana and other powers in the heart centre of the solar mass, attract the force of the ethereal flow in the sky, and mingle it with the balaahaa-vikarana shakti in the aerial globe, producing thereby a white cover, which will make the Vimana invisible.

Here three methods are described for hiding a vimāna from the enemy. They sound fanciful, but it is interesting to note that vimānas described in the Purāṇas and the Mahābhārata have the ability to become invisible. This is also a characteristic feature of UFOs, but this was certainly not well known in 1923.

The idea that a glow is created by the collision of electrical power and the wind is interesting. UFOs are well known for glowing in the dark, and this may be due to an electrical effect that ionizes the air surrounding the UFO. The word “shakti” ( śakti ) means power or energy.

4. Paroksha: According to “Meghotpatthi-prakarana,” or the science of the birth of clouds, by entering the second of the summer cloud layers, and attracting the power therein with the shaktyaakarshana darpana or force-attraction mirror in the Vimana, and applying it to the parivesha or halo of the Vimana, a paralyzing force is generated, and opposing Vimanas are paralyzed and put out of action.

Beams of paralyzing force are often mentioned in UFO accounts, as well as beams of light. The mention of a halo around the vimāna may be significant, since UFOs are often said to be surrounded by some kind of energy field.

6. Viroopa Karena: As stated in “Dhooma Prakarana,” by producing the 32nd kind of smoke through the mechanism, and charging it with the light of the heat waves in the sky, and projecting it through the padmaka chakra tube to the bhyravee oil-smeared Vyroopya-darpana at the top of the Vimana, and whirling with 132nd type of speed, a very fierce and terrifying shape of the Vimana will emerge, causing utter fright to onlookers.

7. Roopaantara: As stated in “Tylaprakarana,” by preparing griddhra jihwaa, kumbhinee, and kaakajangha oils and anointing the distorting mirror in the Vimana with them, applying to it the 19th kind of smoke and charging with the kuntinee shakti in the Vimana, shapes like lion, tiger, rhinoceros, serpent, mountain, river will appear and amaze observers and confuse them.

Although these descriptions seem completely wild, it is interesting that UFOs have been known to change shape in mysterious ways, and monstrous creatures have been known to emerge from landed UFOs and frighten people (see pages 303–5 ). Many of the items in this list of secrets have to do with creating illusions that bewilder enemies, and it seems that UFOs also create such illusions.

8. Saarpa-Gamana: By attracting the dandavaktra and other sevenforces of air, and joining with solar rays, passing it through the zig-zagging centre of the Vimana, and turning the switch, the Vimana will have a zig-zagging motion like a serpent.

10. Kriyaagrahana: By turning the key at the bottom of the Vimana, a white cloth is made to appear. By electrifying the three acids in the north-east part of the Vimana, and subjecting them to the 7 kinds of solar rays, and passing the resultant force into the tube of the Thrisheersha mirror . . . all activities going on down below on the ground, will be projected on the screen.

The word “television” in item (9) was employed in the English translation of Vaimānika-śāstra that came out in 1973. The original Sanskrit text was written in 1923 before television was developed.

It turns out that there are many references to TV-like screens inside UFOs. For example, they show up in the following abduction cases described in this book: the Buff Ledge, Vermont, case ( pages 118–24 ), the case of Filiberto Cardenas ( pages 176–78 ), the case of William Herrmann ( pages 175–76 and 180–85 ), and the Cimarron, New Mexico, case ( pages 315–20 ). William Herrmann, in particular, said he was shown a screen on board a UFO that would produce close-up views of objects at ground level. With it he got a clear view of the astonished faces of onlookers who were watching the UFO from the ground. 24

All in all, the descriptions in the Vaimānika-śāstra seem luridly fantastic. But there are many parallels between these descriptions and equally strange-sounding features of UFO accounts. I do not know if these parallels are significant, but it is curious that they should be there in a book written down between 1918 and 1923, before the UFO phenomenon was widely known.

It seems clear that the illustrations in the Vaimānika-śāstra are contaminated by twentieth century material from the medium’s unconscious mind. Yet the passages I have just quoted mainly contain non-twentieth-century material, and this is expressed in terms of Vedic words and ideas. It may be largely a product of Subbaraya Sastry’s imagination as applied to his extensive Vedic knowledge, or it may be a reasonably faithful rendition of an ancient Vedic text preserved as an etheric pattern.

The only way to find out about this is to obtain other obscure Sanskrit texts and see whether or not they confirm some of the material in the Vaimānika-śāstra. Repeated confirmations would at least indicate that Subbaraya Sastry was presenting material from a genuine tradition, and further investigations would be needed to see whether or not that tradition had a basis in actual fact. The discovery of genuine metallurgical formulas in the Vaimānika-śāstra is certainly a step in this direction.

The Bhāgavata Purāṇa, the Mahābhārata, and the Rāmāyaṇa are three important works in the Vedic tradition of India. I pointed out in Chapter 6 that these three texts contain a great deal of interesting material involving the aerial vehicles called vimānas . They also describe different races of humanlike beings who operate these vehicles, and they discuss the social and political relationships existing in ancient times between these beings and humans of this earth.

To some, this material is of no value because it seems fantastic and mythological. Thus the Indian ufologist Kanishk Nathan rejected the old Hindu religious texts because they attribute exaggerated feats to gods. He felt that they are simply poetry in which “a writer who is not reporting an actual event can let his imagination move in any direction it wishes to take him.” 25 He also pointed out that these texts belong to a prescientific age, and therefore, “Given the cultural, technological and scientific knowledge of that historical period, a writer can, while enjoying generality and avoiding detail, create inventions and combinations that do not actually exist.” 26

One can reply that it has not been established that ancient writers were simply indulging in poetic imagination, with no regard for facts. There is a modern prejudice to the effect that anyone who has spiritual interests must be unscientific, and whatever he writes must be imaginary. This viewpoint makes sense as long as all observable data seem to support a mechanistic world model that excludes old religious ideas as exploded fallacies.

But if we carefully examine the UFO phenomenon, we find extensive empirical observations that completely contradict our comfortable mechanistic world view. It is noteworthy that this anomalous material—ranging from physically impossible flight patterns to beings that float through walls—fits quite naturally into the spiritually oriented cosmologies of the old Vedic texts. It is therefore worth considering that the writers of these texts may have been presenting a sound description of reality as they experienced it, rather than simply indulging in wild imagination.

The preceding chapter presented the story of Śālva’s vimāna, which is found in the Mahābhārata and the Bhāgavata Purāṇa . This was a large military vehicle that could carry troops and weapons, and it had been acquired by Śālva from a nonhuman technological expert named Maya Dānava. The Purāṇas and the Mahābhārata also contain many accounts of smaller vimānas, including pleasure craft that seem to be designed for a single passenger. These were generally used by Devas and Upadevas but not by human beings.

In this section, I will give a series of examples, showing how vimānas figure as common elements in many different stories from these texts. Each example is extracted from the midst of a larger story, and it is not feasible to present these stories fully in this book. My purpose in presenting the examples is to show that vimānas are frequently mentioned in the Purāṇas and the Mahābhārata . Apparently, they were as commonplace to people of the old Vedic culture as airplanes are to us today.

In the first account, Kṛṣṇa killed a pythonlike serpent who was trying to swallow his father, King Nanda. By Kṛṣṇa’s arrangement, the soul of the serpent was transferred to a new body of a type possessed by the celestial beings called Vidyādharas. That soul had possessed such a celestial body before being placed in the body of the serpent, and so Kṛṣṇa asked him why he had been degraded to the serpent form:

The serpent replied: I am the well-known Vidyādhara named Sudarśana. I was very opulent and beautiful, and I used to wander freely in all directions in my airplane. Once I saw some homely sages of the lineage of Aṅgirā Muni. Proud of my beauty, I ridiculed them, and because of my sin they made me assume this lowly form. 27

The next story is similar. Kṛṣṇa had relieved the soul of one King Nṛga from imprisonment in the body of a lizard and had awarded him a celestial body. When the time came for the king to depart, a vimāna from another world came to get him:

Having spoken thus, Mahārāja Nṛga circumambulated Lord Kṛṣṇa and touched his crown to the Lord’s feet. Granted permission to depart, King Nṛga then boarded a wonderful celestial airplane as all the people present looked on. 28

In the next case, we see the effect of a beautiful woman on the pilot of a vimāna . Here the sage Kardama Muni is describing the beauty of his future wife, Devahūti, to her father, Svāyambhuva Manu:

I have heard that Viśvāvasu, the great Gandharva, his mind stupefied with infatuation, fell from his airplane after seeing your daughter playing with a ball on the roof of the palace, for she was indeed beautiful with her tinkling ankle bells and her eyes moving to and fro. 29

After Kardama Muni married Devahūti, he decided at a certain point to take her on a tour of the universe. To do this, he manifested an aerial mansion (called, as usual, a vimāna ) that was lavishly equipped as a pleasure palace. Here the sage Maitreya relates the story of this mansion to his disciple Vidura:

Maitreya continued: O Vidura, seeking to please his beloved wife, the sage Kardama exercised his yogic power and instantly produced an aerial mansion that could travel at his will.

It was a wonderful structure, bedecked with all sorts of jewels, adorned with pillars of precious stones, and capable of yielding whatever one desired. It was equipped with every form of furniture and wealth, which tended to increase in the course of time. . . .

Here and there in that palace were multitudes of live swans and pigeons, as well as artificial swans and pigeons so lifelike that the real swans rose above them again and again, thinking them live birds like themselves. Thus the palace vibrated with the sounds of these birds.

The sage was astonished because he had not actually designed the aerial palace or imagined it in detail. In effect, what he did was mentally put in an order for a flying palace, and he received it from a kind of universal supply system because he had earned good karmic credit through his austerities and practice of yoga . To understand what was happening here, it is necessary to consider some basic features of the Vedic conception of the universe.

Over the years, many analogies have been used to describe the universe. Thus the Aristotelians compared the universe to a living organism, and the early mechanistic philosophers compared it to a gigantic clock. To understand the Vedic conception of the universe, the modern idea of a computer with a multilevel operating system is useful. On the hard disk of such a computer, there are programs that can be set into action by typing in appropriate code words. When a code word is typed, the corresponding program will execute—if the computer user has a suitable status. If he does not, then to him the code word is simply a useless name.

Typically, the user’s status is indicated by the password he types when he begins to use the computer. Different users will have passwords indicating different status levels. Above all other users is a person called (in the Unix operating system) the superuser, who has full control over all programs on the system. Often this person is responsible for creating the total system by loading various pieces of software into the computer.

According to the Vedic conception, the universe has a similar organization. The superuser corresponds to the Supreme Being, who manifests the total universal system. Within that system there is a hierarchy of living beings having different statuses. A being at the ordinary human level has many remarkable powers, such as the power of speech, and a being at a higher level, such as Kardama Muni, can manifest even greater powers. When we grow up using a certain power, we tend to take it for granted, and when we completely lack access to a power, we tend to regard it as impossible or mythological. But all of the powers— including the power to call up flying palaces—are simply programs built into the universal system by the superuser.

The parallel between the Vedic conception of the universe and a computer can be made more explicit by introducing the concept of a virtual reality system. It is possible to create an artificial world by computer calculation and equip human participants with sensory interfaces that give them the impression of entering into that world. For example, a participant will have small TV screens placed in front of his eyes that enable him to see from the vantage point of the virtual eyes of a virtual body within the artificial world. Likewise, he may be equipped with touch sensors that enable him to experience the feel of virtual objects held in that body’s virtual hands. Sensors that pick up his muscle contractions or his nerve impulses can be used to direct the motion of the virtual body.

Many people can simultaneously enter into a virtual world in this way, and they can interact with one another through their virtual bodies, even though their real bodies may be widely separated. Depending on their status, as recognized by the computer’s superuser, the different virtual bodies may have different powers, and some of these powers might be invoked by uttering code words, or mantras.

An extremely powerful virtual reality system provides a metaphor for the Vedic universe of māyā , or illusion, in which conscious souls falsely identify themselves with material bodies. Of course, this metaphor should not be taken literally. The universe is not actually running on a digital computer. Rather, it is a system of interacting energies which, according to the Vedic conception, has features of intelligent design and organization reminiscent of certain manmade computer systems.

Satisfied by his wife, he enjoyed in that aerial mansion not only on Mount Meru but in different gardens known as Vaiśrambhaka, Surasana, Nandana, Puṣpabhadraka, and Caitrarathya, and by the Mānasa-sarovara lake.

He traveled in that way through the various planets, as the air passes uncontrolled in every direction. Coursing through the air in that great and splendid aerial mansion, which could fly at his will, he surpassed even the demigods. 31

In the Sanskrit, the Devas are referred to here as vaimānikān, which means the “travelers in vimānas. ” Thus the verse literally says that Kardama Muni’s vimāna excelled the vaimānikān. The Sanskrit word for planets is loka, which can refer to other physical globes and to higher-dimensional worlds not accessible to ordinary human senses.

An example of a vimāna used for military purposes comes up in the story of Bali, a king of the Daityas. Bali’s vehicle is very similar to the one obtained by Śālva, and it was also built by Maya Dānava. It was used in a great battle between the Daityas and the Devas:

For that battle the most celebrated commander in chief, Mahārāja Bali, son of Virocana, was seated on a wonderful airplane named Vaihāyasa. O King, this beautifully decorated airplane had been manufactured by the demon Maya and was equipped with weapons for all types of combat. It was inconceivable and indescribable. Indeed, it was sometimes visible and sometimes not. Seated in this airplane under a beautiful protective umbrella and being fanned by the best of cāmaras, Mahārāja Bali, surrounded by his captains and commanders, appeared just like the moon rising in the evening, illuminating all directions. 32

My final example of a vimāna is taken from the story of the sacrifice of Dakṣa. It seems that Satī, the wife of Lord Śiva, wanted to attend a sacrifice arranged by her father Dakṣa, but Śiva did not want her to attend because of Dakṣa’s offensive attitude toward him. Here we see Satī entreating her husband to let her go to the sacrifice after seeing her relatives traveling there in vimānas:

O never-born, O blue-throated one, not only my relatives but also other women, dressed in nice clothes and decorated with ornaments, are going there with their husbands and friends. Just see how their flocks of white airplanes have made the entire sky very beautiful. 33

Wendelle Stevens mentioned a study on the origin of UFOs carried out by a think tank in Brussels called Laboratoire de Recherche A. Kraainem. This study concluded that after reaching a certain stage of technology, a civilization will leave its home planet and “live in huge ‘mother-ships,’ artificial worlds, of their own creation perfectly adapted to their own needs and constantly maintained and perfected by them. . . . The artificial worlds are entirely self-sufficient and depend on no other planet or physical body for support. They are maintained and cruise [in] space indefinitely.” 34

The Vedic literature also has the idea of self-sustaining flying cities that travel indefinitely in outer space. An example is the set of three flying cities built by Maya Dānava for the sons of the Asura Tāraka. These are described as follows in the Śiva Purāṇa:

Then the highly intelligent Maya built the cities by means of his penance: the golden one for Tārakākṣa, the silver one for Kamalākṣa, and the steel one for Vidyunmālī. The three fortlike excellent cities were in order in heaven, sky and on the earth. . . . Entering the three cities thus, the sons of Tāraka, of great strength and valour, experienced all enjoyments. They had many Kalpa trees there. Elephants and horses were in plenty. There were many palaces with gems. Aerial chariots shining like the solar sphere, set with Padmarāga stones, moving in all directions and looking like moonshine, illuminated the cities. 35

It is interesting to note that shining vimānas were flying around the aerial cities. Here I am reminded of the many accounts in which smaller UFOs were seen in the vicinity of a large “mother-ship.”

Turning to another example, the Mahābhārata tells the story of the flying city of Hiraṇyapura. This city was seen floating in space by Arjuna while he was traveling through the celestial regions after defeating the Nivātakavacas in a great battle. Arjuna was accompanied in his celestial journey by a Deva named Mātali, and he asked him about the city. Mātali replied:

There once were a Daitya woman called Pulomā and a great Asurī Kālakā, who observed extreme austerities for a millennium of years of the Gods. At the end of their mortifications the self-existent God gave them a boon. They chose as their boon that their progeny should suffer little, Indra of kings, and be inviolable by Gods, Rākṣasas and Snakes. This lovely airborne city, with the splendor of good works, piled with all precious stones and impregnable even to the Immortals, the bands of Yakṣas and Gandharvas, and Snakes, Asuras, and Rākṣasas, filled with all desires and virtues, free from sorrow and disease, was created for the Kālakeyas by Brahmā, O best of the Bhāratas. The Immortals shun this celestial, sky-going city, O hero, which is peopled by Pauloma and Kālakeya Asuras. This great city is called Hiraṇyapura, the City-of-Gold. 36

Here the inhabitants of the city, the Paulomas and Kālakeyas, are identified as the descendants of two rebellious relatives of the Devas named Pulomā and Kālakā. The “Snakes” are a race of mystical beings, called Nāgas, that can assume humanlike or serpentine form (see pages 289–93 ). The “self-existent God” is Brahmā, who is understood to be the original progenitor of all living beings within the material universe. Since Brahmā’s origin is transcendental, and he has no material parents, he is said to be self-existent. The immortals are the Devas. They are referred to as immortal because they live for millions of our years. However, according to the Vedas, all embodied beings in the material universe have a finite life span and must die after some time.

With his superior powers, Brahmā arranged for the Paulomas and Kālakeyas to have a flying city that could not be successfully attacked by various powerful groups of beings within the universe, including the Devas. However, he left open a loophole for the Devas by declaring that the flying city could be successfully attacked by a human being.

Arjuna was half human, half Deva. His mother was an earthly woman, and his father was Indra, the king of the Devas. Indra had equipped Arjuna with celestial weapons just for the purpose of defeating enemies of the Devas who had obtained protective benedictions from Brahmā that didn’t apply to humans. Thus Arjuna decided that it was part of his mission to attack Hiraṇyapura. Here is Arjuna’s account of what happened after his initial attack:

When the Daityas were being slaughtered they again took to their city and, employing their Dānava wizardry, flew up into the sky, city and all. I stopped them with a mighty volley of arrows, and blocking their road I halted the Daityas in their course. But because of the boon given them, the Daityas easily held their celestial, divinely effulgent, airborne city, which could move about at will. Now it would go underground, then hover high in the sky, go diagonally with speed, or submerge in the ocean. I assaulted the mobile city, which resembled Amarāvatī, with many kinds of missiles, overlord of men. Then I subdued both city and Daityas with a mass of arrows, which were sped by divine missiles. Wounded by the iron, straight-traveling arrows I shot off, the Asura city fell broken on the earth, O king. The Asuras, struck by my lightning-fast iron shafts, milled around, O king, prompted by Time. Mātali swiftly descended on earth, as in a headlong fall, on our divinely effulgent chariot. 37

The battle between Arjuna and the Daityas began on the surface of a planet (perhaps the earth). On being strongly attacked by Arjuna, the Daityas took off in their flying city. It is noteworthy that the city could move underground and under the water, as well as through air or outer space. Many accounts describe UFOs entering and leaving bodies of water, 38 and some stories associate UFOs with underground or undersea bases. For example, Betty Andreasson’s story of the Phoenix apparently took place in a subterranean realm, 39 and Filiberto Cardenas told of being taken to an undersea base. 40

According to the Mahābhārata, just as the Daityas have flying cities such as Hiraṇyapura, the Devas have flying assembly houses, which are used as centers for their administrative activities. Here are two examples, beginning with the assembly hall of Indra, or Śakra, the king of the Devas. In this passage, a league is a Sanskrit yojana, which ranges from 5 to 8 miles:

Śakra’s celestial and splendid hall, which he won with his feats, was built by himself, Kaurava, with the resplendence of fire. It is a hundred leagues wide and a hundred and fifty long, aerial, freely moving, and five leagues high. Dispelling old age, grief, and fatigue, free from diseases, benign, beautiful, filled with chambers and seats, lovely and embellished with celestial trees is that hall where, O Pārtha, the lord of the Gods sits with Śacī. 41

It is standard for descriptions of vimānas to say that they are brilliantly glowing or fiery. We find the same feature in the following description of Yama’s hall, which was built by Viśvakarmā, the architect of the Devas:

This fair hall, which can move at will, is never crowded—Viśvakarmā built it after accumulating over a long time the power of austerities, and it is luminous as though on fire with its own radiance, Bhārata. To it go ascetics of dread austerities, of good vows and truthful words, who are tranquil, renouncing, successful, purified by their holy acts, all wearing effulgent bodies and spotless robes; . . . and so go greats-pirited Gandharvas and hosts of Apsarās by the hundreds. . . . A hundred hundred of thousands of law-abiding persons of wisdom attend in bodily form on the lord of the creatures. 42

An interesting feature of Yama’s hall is that it is populated by beings of many different types. This is reminiscent of the UFO phenomenon, since it is often reported that several different types of beings will be seen on a UFO, apparently working in cooperation. In Yama’s hall, in addition to Gandharvas, Apsarās, and various kinds of ascetics, there are Siddhas, those who have a yogic body, Pitās, men of evil deeds, and “those familiars of Yama who are charged with the conduction of time.”

The latter are functionaries equipped with mystic powers that enable them to regulate the process of transmigration of souls. Yama is the Vedic lord of death, who supervises the process of transmigration. Strangely enough, even here we find a parallel with reported UFO phenomena. There are many reports indicating that some UFO entities can induce people to have out-of-body experiences and then exert control over their subtle bodies (see Chapter 10 ). This also happens to be one of the powers of the familiars of Yama.

It is clear that there are extensive Vedic traditions about humanlike races of beings that can fly freely throughout the universe using vehicles called vimānas . But one might object that there are also Vedic stories about horse-drawn chariots that fly through the sky. Surely these stories are utterly absurd, since it makes no sense to say that an animal could run through air or outer space using its legs. Because of this absurdity, some claim, we should not take anything in the Vedic literature very seriously.

The answer to this objection is that there are indeed accounts of horse-drawn flying chariots in Vedic literatures, but these stories are not necessarily absurd. To understand them properly, it is necessary to fill in various details that will place them in context within the overall Vedic world picture. When seen in this way, both the horse-drawn chariots and the self-powered vimānas make sense.

I will try to fill in the needed details by referring to a number of stories from the Mahābhārata about the Pāṇḍava hero, Arjuna. In the first story, Arjuna is traveling through space in a literal chariot drawn by horses. This description has a number of important features, including travel through space on some kind of roadway:

And on this sunlike, divine, wonder-working chariot the wise scion of Kuru flew joyously upward. While becoming invisible to the mortals who walk on earth, he saw wondrous airborne chariots by the thousands. No sun shone there, or moon, or fire, but they shone with a light of their own acquired by their merits. Those lights that are seen as the stars look tiny like oil flames because of the distance, but they are very large. The Pāṇḍava saw them bright and beautiful, burning on their own hearths with a fire of their own. There are the perfected royal seers, the heroes cut down in war, who, having won heaven with their austerities, gather in hundreds of groups. So do thousands of Gandharvas with a glow like the sun’s or the fire’s, and of Guhyakas and seers and the hosts of Apsarās.

Beholding those self-luminous worlds, Phalguna, astonished, questioned Mātali in a friendly manner, and the other said to him, “Those are men of saintly deeds, ablaze on their own hearths, whom you saw there, my lord, looking like stars from earth below.” Then he saw standing at the gateway the victorious white elephant, four-tusked Airāvata, towering like peaked Kailāsa. Driving on the roadway of the Siddhas, that most excellent Kuru Pāṇḍava shone forth as of old the great king Māndhātar. The lotus-eyed prince passed by the worlds of the kings, then looked upon Amarāvatī, the city of Indra. 43

As I pointed out in Chapter 6 (pages 202–3 ), one important thing to notice about this passage is that Arjuna entered a region of stars where there was no light from the sun, the moon, or fire. This is what we would expect to find if we did travel among the stars. It is also stated that the stars are very large, but they seem small due to distance when seen from the earth, and this also agrees with modern ideas.

In that region, Arjuna saw that the stars were self-luminous worlds, and that they were hearths of Gandharvas, Guhyakas, and others, including “men of saintly deeds” who had been promoted to heaven. The stars themselves are spoken of as aerial chariots in this passage, and this is clearly a poetic description. They are also spoken of as persons, and this refers to the predominating persons living on them.

The next point to notice is that Arjuna was “driving on the roadway of the Siddhas,” and that this roadway went past the worlds of the kings to the city of Indra. Later on, this road is spoken of as the “road of the stars” and the “path of the gods.” 44 Thus it seems that Arjuna’s chariot was traveling on some kind of road through outer space.

The Viṣṇu Purāṇa sheds some light on the actual route followed by Arjuna. It states that the Path of the Gods ( deva-yāna ) lies to the north of the orbit of the sun (the ecliptic), north of Nāgavīthī (the nakṣatras Aśvinī, Bharaṇī, and Kṛttikā), and south of the stars of the seven ṛṣis. 45 Aśvinī and Bharaṇī are constellations in Aries, north of the ecliptic, and Kṛttikā is the adjacent constellation in Taurus known as the Pleiades. Aśvinī, Bharaṇī, and Kṛttikā belong to a group of 28 constellations called nakṣatras in Sanskrit, and asterisms or lunar mansions in English. The seven ṛṣis are the stars of the Big Dipper in Ursa Major. From this information, we can form a general idea of the Path of the Gods as a roadway extending through the stars in the northern celestial hemisphere.

Another important celestial roadway is the Path of the Pitās (or pitṛ-yāna ). According to the Viṣṇu Purāṇa, this roadway lies to the north of the star Agastya, and south of Ajavīthī (the three nakṣatras Mūla, Pūrvāṣāḍhā, and Uttarāṣāḍhā), outside of the Vaiśvānara path. 46 The region of the Pitās, or Pitṛloka, is said in Vedic literature to be the headquarters of Yama, the Deva who awards punishments to sinful human beings and whose aerial assembly house was described above. This region, along with the hellish planets, is said in the Bhāgavata Purāṇa to lie on the southern side of the universe, to the south of Bhū-maṇḍala, the earthly planetary system. 47

The nakṣatras Mūla, Pūrvāṣāḍhā, and Uttarāṣāḍhā correspond to parts of the constellations Scorpio and Sagittarius, and it is thought that Agastya is the southern-hemisphere star called Canopus. Thus from the description in the Viṣṇu Purāṇa we can gain an idea of the location of Pitṛloka and the road leading to it in terms of familiar celestial landmarks.

Such celestial roadways involve large distances, and if they go through outer space, then there is the problem of the lack of a breathable atmosphere. What sort of horses could follow such roads? We can answer this question by recounting a Mahābhārata story in which Arjuna was offered a benediction by the Gandharva named Citraratha. Although Citraratha owned a vimāna, here he is concerned with horses:

O best of men, I now wish to offer each of you five brothers a hundred horses of the type bred by the Gandharvas. The mounts of the gods and Gandharvas exude a celestial fragrance, and they move at the speed of the mind. Even when their energy is spent, they do not diminish their speed. . . .

These Gandharva horses change color at will and fly at the speed they desire. And simply by your desire, they will appear before you, ready to serve. Indeed, these horses will always honor your wish. 48

It seems that these are mystical horses that function according to laws governing subtle categories of material energy. The roadway on which they travel is presumably of a similar nature, and the fact that they can travel vast distances on this road in a short time is due to the fact that they obey the laws governing subtle energy rather than the laws governing ordinary, gross matter.

The fact that a gross human body can be carried along such a road can be understood in terms of the mystic siddhis called prāpti and mano-java discussed in Chapter 6 . The basic idea is that the subtle laws include and supersede the gross laws. Gross matter obeying the familiar physical laws is also obeying the subtle laws. But the same subtle laws can be applied to cause gross matter to act in a way that violates the ordinary laws of physics.

The chariot had all necessary equipment. It could not be conquered by gods or demons, and it radiated light and reverberated with a deep rumbling sound. Its beauty captivated the minds of all who beheld it. Viśvakarmā, the lord of design and construction, had created it by the power of his austerities, and its form, like that of the sun, could not be precisely discerned. 49

My tentative conclusion from this material is as follows: The technology involved in the vimānas and the flying horse-drawn chariots is essentially The same. It depends upon mystic powers and higher-dimensional aspects of material energy that are unknown to present-day science but are commonplace to the Devas. The vimānas are essentially architectural constructions that can fly, both in three dimensions and in higher dimensions, by virtue of powers that to us seem mystical. The Gandharva horses operate on the same mystical level, and the same is true of the chariots they draw.

If this is true, one might ask why the Devas and other related beings would bother with horse-drawn vehicles when vimānas that move by their own power are available. Judging from the Mahābhārata as a whole, the answer is that these beings use horses because they like them. They make use of flying architecture when that suits their purposes, but they also have a fondness for equestrian activities. Likewise, they have powerful weapons, like the brahmāstra, based on radiant energy, but they also have elaborate rules governing hand-to-hand fighting with maces. The general impression is that the Devas and Upadevas emphasize life and personal prowess over machines.

Are there any parallels between the celestial roadways of the Devas and information revealed in UFO accounts? There is a possible parallel in stories of people walking through space along beams of light. One example of this is in the report of Sara Shaw’s abduction from a cabin in Tujunga Canyon, near Los Angeles, in March of 1953 (see page 179 ). After being hypnotized by Dr. William McCall, Sara told the following story of how she was taken on board a UFO:

McCall: Do you stand near the ship?

Sara: No, I’m starting to float. I’m starting to float toward it.

McCall: What do you mean you’re starting to float toward it?

Sara: Well . . . they’re walking with me, but my feet aren’t on the ground.

McCall: They were on the ground when you came out of the house. How come they’re not on the ground now?

Sara: Well, there’s a beam of light. I’m like—it’s almost like a—

McCall: Now you see a beam of light?

Sara: I’m on the beam of light. I’m standing on it, and it’s angled. It’s like an escala—no! It’s about the same angle as an escalator would be, except it doesn’t have ridges or steps. It’s just a very smooth, solid beam, and you just kinda stand on it. . . .

McCall: What’s happening with your friends?

Sara: They’re all around me.

McCall: They’re on the beam of light also?

Sara: But they’re kind of—now I’m walking. All of us are walking, but in addition, the beam is conveying us. The beam is moving. In addition to that, we’re kind of walking on it, too. But yet, like I don’t feel anything under me. For example, it doesn’t feel solid as if it were ground. 50

If this story can be taken literally, it seems that the light beam not only nullified Sara’s weight but also enabled her to balance herself in an upright stance and walk normally. Similar beam walking was apparently done by the beings in the Masse case (see page 219 ), who were said to “slide along bands of light.”

A second example involves swimming up a beam of light. This phenomenon was reported by William Curtis, who experienced an abduction into a UFO in September of 1974 and recalled it in December of 1987. He had been abducted from his bedroom. At the point of being returned, he recalled being asked by his captors to jump through an opening in the bottom of the UFO, through which he could see down into his room. Here is how he described this experience:

When I fell, it felt like . . . have you ever been on a roller-coaster? That’s what it felt like. It took my breath away. But I was cushioned about two feet from the roof. I could see the distortion of the shingles. And then something picked me up, straightened me out and spun me around, and it dropped me down right through the roof! They laid me back on the bed, grabbed my arms and pulled me up. . . .

A white light is coming through the roof and this little being is going up this light. I heard a whirring sound, like a generator coming from above. This little being as he went up was kicking his legs real fast. . . . He went up into a grey UFO. It seemed as if they had pressed a button and wanted me to see this. What I saw—the “AFM” [Alien Flying Machine] had duct work underneath it. The light went up, the ceiling went into place and that was it. 51

In the first of these two accounts, there is an angled beam of light that a person can walk on. In the second, there is a vertical beam and a being who travels up the beam in what seems like a swimming motion. In both stories, the events, as described, seem completely bizarre from the point of view of accepted physical principles. This is especially true in the second story, where the beam of light is apparently used to transfer the man’s body through the roof of his house. But in the case of Sara Shaw, the intruding beings entered her cabin by passing through the panes of a window (see page 224 ), and this is a similar phenomenon.

The parallel between these examples and the Vedic celestial roads is that the beam seems to define a pathway through space that a person can move along by using his legs. The beings that use these pathways have powers that enable them to pass through walls, and they can carry human bodies through walls also. The Vedic celestial road is also a pathway through space that one can walk on. The horses and chariots that move on it have mystical properties, and the horses can appear and disappear at will. A human being like Arjuna can also be conveyed along such a road. The point where the analogy of celestial road to light-beam path may break down is that the celestial road is cosmic in scale and seems to be relatively permanent, whereas the light beam is small and is deployed temporarily when needed.

It turns out, curiously enough, that the celestial pathways mentioned in Vedic literature are beams of light of a peculiar nature. Thus the Bhāgavata Purāṇa gives the following description of the travels of a mystic along the Path of the Gods:

O King, when such a mystic passes over the Milky Way by the illuminating Suṣumṇa to reach the highest planet, Brahmaloka, he goes first to Vaiśvānara, the planet of the deity of fire, wherein he becomes completely cleansed of all contaminations, and thereafter he still goes higher, to the circle of Śiśūmāra, to relate with Lord Hari, the Personality of Godhead. 52

The path followed by the mystic is the deva-yāna path, and it is referred to here as the illuminating Suṣumṇā. According to the Sanskrit dictionary, Suṣumṇā is the name of one of the principal rays of the sun. Thus the Suṣumṇā must be some kind of light beam. Clearly, however, its position in space indicates that it is not an ordinary sunbeam.

In his commentary on the Bhāgavata Purāṇa, A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupāda described three processes for moving in outer space. The first involves mechanical spaceships, and it is called kapota-vāyu . Here ka means ether, or space, and pota means ship. The phrase ka-pota-vāyu can also be used in a play on words, since kapota also means “pigeon.”

The second process is called ākāśa-patana . “Just as the mind can fly anywhere one likes without mechanical arrangement, so the ākāśa-patana airplane can fly at the speed of mind.” 53 Many of the vimānas that we have been discussing seem to use the ākāśa-patana process, and it may be that many UFOs also operate by mind action. Other vimānas and UFOs may operate by more mechanical processes that manipulate the ether, or in modern terms, the fabric of space-time.

According to the Bhāgavata Purāṇa, ether is the fabric of space, and all gross matter is generated by transformations of ether. 54 This is an idea reminiscent of John Wheeler’s theory of geometrodynamics, which holds that all material particles are simply twists or deformations of space-time. 55 Both the Bhāgavata Purāṇa and Wheeler’s theory imply that matter is directly connected to ether. Thus it should be possible to manipulate ether by manipulating gross matter. From this, we can see that it might be possible to build a physical machine that can manipulate space-time and provide for unusual modes of travel.

The Bhāgavata Purāṇa also states that the ether is the field of action of the subtle mind. 56 This suggests that it may be possible to manipulate the ether by mind action, thus allowing for the ākāśa-patana system of travel. Note that ākāśa means “ether” and patana means “flying.”

The ākāśa-patana system makes use of subtle mind-energy, but it is still material. Beyond it is the Vaikuṇṭha process, which is completely spiritual. In the Vedic system, Vaikuṇṭha is the spiritual world. Whereas the material world is characterized by a duality between insentient matter and sentient spirit, in the world of Vaikuṇṭha, everything is conscious and self-effulgent. Objects in Vaikuṇṭha are made of a sentient substance called cintāmaṇi, which could be translated as “consciousness gem.”

The Vedic literature contains many references to purely spiritual vimānas that originate in Vaikuṇṭha, and these should be mentioned in any account of Vedic vimānas . The Vaikuṇṭha vimānas are often compared with swans, or are said to be swanlike in shape, but they are not swans. They are flying structures that are made of cintāmaṇi and travel by the power of pure consciousness.

A Vaikuṇṭha vimāna is featured in the story of the liberation of a king named Dhruva from material bondage. Here is a description of how this vehicle appeared before Dhruva at the time of his death:

As soon as the symptoms of his liberation were manifest, he saw a very beautiful airplane [vimāna ] coming down from the sky, as if the brilliant full moon were coming down, illuminating all the ten directions.

Dhruva Mahārāja saw two very beautiful associates of Lord Viṣṇu in the plane. They had four hands and a blackish bodily luster, they were very youthful, and their eyes were just like reddish lotus flowers. They held clubs in their hands, and they were dressed in very attractive garments with helmets and were decorated with necklaces, bracelets and earrings. 57

Before boarding the vimāna, the king acquired his spiritual body, or siddha-deha . This is an imperishable bodily form made of spiritual energy and suitable for life in the Vaikuṇṭha atmosphere. Dhruva’s travels in the vimāna are described as follows:

While Dhruva Mahārāja was passing through space, he gradually saw all the planets of the solar system, and on the path he saw all the demigods in their airplanes showering flowers upon him like rain.

Dhruva Mahārāja thus surpassed the seven planetary systems of the great sages who are known as saptarṣi. Beyond that region, he achieved the transcendental situation of permanent life in the planet where Lord Viṣṇu lives. 58

In Vedic accounts, it is frequently mentioned that the Devas will shower down flowers on great personalities, especially at the time of great victories or other glorious events. This involves moving flower petals by the same kind of mystical transport that is typical of the Devas. A possible parallel to this is the mysterious appearance of showers of flower petals near Fatima, Portugal, at the time of visitations by an effulgent being taken by many to be the Virgin Mary. This is discussed in Chapter 8 (pages 293–301 ).