Whitley Strieber - The Omega Point

Around twelve thousand years ago, the last Ice Age ended. And, as is not uncommon on planet Earth, this was a violent event. As the Laurentide glacier melted, sea levels around the world rose precipitately, and other upheavals caused further chaos.

There is enigmatic evidence—necessarily ignored by modern science—that a much more potent human presence existed then, probably hugging coastlines which are now submerged to a depth of hundreds of feet, and in some cases actually swept into the abyssal deep.

At the same time that this civilization was flourishing in the lowlands of the late Pleistocene, in the highlands of that world, human life was primitive. But go into a mountainous region today. Almost everywhere, you will find there the poorest people in the world. And where are our greatest cities? Hugging the coasts. If the future had only the remains of life in the Himalayas and the Andes to tell us about this world, it would not realize that our civilization had even existed.

Many books have been published about the evidence of a lost civilization, but I would like to mention here just one telling piece of it that is rarely referred to, but which I find fascinating. It is that there are seventeen ancient ritual sites and cities around the world, all situated on the same great circle, with a southern axis point that falls about five hundred miles from the coast of Antarctica, and a northern axis in British Columbia roughly fifteen hundred miles from the present geographic North Pole.

In itself, it is remarkable that places as diverse as the first Sumerian city, Ur, the Giza Plateau, Easter Island, Nazca, and the ancient Indian city of Mohenjo Daro would all be on the same great circle, but they are.

Modern science has no real explanation for this, except that it must have been just random happenstance. But surely that isn’t enough of an answer. It’s satisfactory only if you want to cling to cherished theories and ignore evidence.

I no longer ignore evidence. The last time I did that, I ended up being dragged out of my house by aliens. The evidence that such things could happen was abundant, but I assumed that it was absurd. So what might have been a fascinating meeting turned into a screaming confusion for me. It could have been more civilized, surely, but I will never forget the ghastly shock that coursed through me a few days later when my doctor said, “You’ve been raped.” It was so humiliating that it took me twenty years to actually utter those words. To this day, I suffer pain from the injury I sustained on that night, which I mentioned only in passing in Communion as the “rectal probe” that has made me such a laughingstock. Rape and laughter don’t actually go together all that well, though, at least not to the victim.

Had I been aware that such things could happen, I would certainly have been more calm, and perhaps the experience would have been less chaotic. Over the eleven years of contact that followed, I ended up in a sort of school, the lessons of which were glimpses into the greater reality in which we actually live. In short, what started out pretty badly became the most precious of treasures. Even the fear became entertaining and profoundly instructive, especially when I realized that the outré little beings I have called “the visitors” found me every bit as terrifying as I did them.

It’s too bad that science has not acknowledged their presence, because, even without direct contact with them, there is a wealth of physical evidence available for study. But they don’t fit our theories of the cosmos. According to modern theory, it is impossible for there to be physical travel across the universe because the distances are too great. But there is also no evidence of where they are from. Maybe they are far stranger even than aliens from another planet.

As our rational culture has matured, it has also become, as is inevitable, more decadent. In science, this decadence finds expression in the fact that we’ve slipped into the trap of putting theory before evidence, which is the core reason that we are missing so much of what is real all around us.

Given the evidence of all the sites along that great circle, for example, it is also likely that, in very ancient times, somebody knew that the Earth was round, had an awareness of its size, was in planetwide communication, and intentionally built these sites on a great circle measured from the physical North and South poles, which, during the cataclysm, moved when the earth’s crust shifted on its mantle.

If such a movement were to have taken place, as Charles Hapgood first postulated and Rand Flem-Ath developed in his book When the Sky Fell, the consequences would have been fantastic destruction, a catastrophe beyond imagining.

But what’s so unusual about that? This is planet Earth, where catastrophes beyond imagining happen pretty darned frequently.

An earth movement that great and that sudden would have changed the planet’s coastlines—as, in fact, it did. But underwater archaeology is in its infancy. We have barely explored the ancient coastlines of the planet, but what we have explored, as Graham Hancock demonstrates in his book Underworld, seems to be populated with enigmatic ruins.

Great catastrophes are ordinary events on Earth, and even mass extinctions are relatively common. Much more common are the smaller disasters that are not classifiable as mass extinctions, and there have been at least two of these just in the past fifteen thousand years.

My story refers to the infamous upheaval that ended the Ice Age 12,600 years ago.

Whether or not a sequel to that disaster is building now is unknown, but certainly something is causing persistent changes in our solar system, and has been for about forty years, and possibly longer.

A Dr. Alexey Dimitriev allegedly published an article in 1997 suggesting that charged particles were entering the solar system from the outside, resulting in changes to all bodies within the solar system. I say “allegedly” because I have been unable to contact Dr. Dimitriev, and there is some evidence that the paper may be a fabrication.

But, in this case, that isn’t important. The Omega Point is fiction and, frankly, I would be flabbergasted if the world in 2020 was anything like what appears in the book. At the same time, though, more than one ancient calendar points to the immediate future as being a time of great change.

Whether Dimitriev’s paper is real or not, there is evidence of increased planetary heating not only on Earth, but also on Mars and Jupiter. Planetologists observed an approximate 1 degree Fahrenheit warming on Mars between 1970 and 1990, and in recent years the Martian polar cap has retreated. An increase in the number of red spots of Jupiter, and other signs on various planetary bodies and moons in our solar system, point to the widespread presence of this phenomenon.

As of this writing, the sun is also acting in an unusual manner, but rather than increasing solar activity, which would be expected if it was being bombarded from the outside, it has become unexpectedly quiet.

At the same time, the amount of observed cometary and asteroid activity in the solar system may have been increasing. Because the amount of observation and the sensitivity of instruments is also increasing, it’s difficult to be certain. But when the Shoemaker-Levy comet struck Jupiter in 1994, it was thought to be a thousand-year event. Just fifteen years later, though, another large object struck Jupiter, surprising astronomers. It would never have been noticed, except that the scar it left was photographed by an amateur astronomer. A day before the object’s scar was seen on Jupiter on July 20, 2009, a similar scar appeared on Venus. Whether this was the result of an impact is not known, but if it was, then the object that produced it was a large one. Had it struck Earth on July 20 instead of Venus, it would have resulted in a massive planetary catastrophe very much like the one that overtook us 12,600 years ago.