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130 - OUR ANCESTORS CAME FROM OUTER SPACE<br />
and weight than gold, probably some alloy of copper and aluminum<br />
like the aluminum-bronze coins of small denominations that<br />
are used in France today. These alxmninimi-bronze coins oxidize<br />
easily, and this is probably why none of the Atlantis Hghtweight<br />
money has ever been found. It must have disintegrated long ago<br />
without leaving a trace. However, we still have a few electium<br />
coins from King Croesus.<br />
After I had compiled my list of most ancient coins known to<br />
numismatists and archaeologists, I had to make up another one<br />
for all measurement units of antiquity, translating these various<br />
units into feet and cubic feet. It took some time to get all this<br />
done but it was time well spent. Then I started to compare the<br />
two lists and try to find the feet whose cubes represented the<br />
weight of a round number of coins.<br />
In most cases, quite naturally, the weight of the coin divided<br />
neatly into the local unit of weight for the corresponding country<br />
and the time in history when this money was in use, but there<br />
were quite a few surprising exceptions. In some instances, relationships<br />
showed up between vastly separated geographical locations<br />
and even greater differences in time. Coins of exactly the<br />
same weight had been found in geographical locations thousands<br />
of miles apart and in different cultures separated by thousands of<br />
years.<br />
This is where my interest became really aroused and my work<br />
became exciting. Once more I was certain I had struck upon a<br />
mystery of the past worthy of exploration. But to make this<br />
clearer, let me first explain how our ancestors arrived at their<br />
basic units of measurement, now known as the inch, the hand,<br />
the foot, the cubit and the yard.<br />
All units of measure in the distant past of our civilization had<br />
the same basic system in their foundations—all were determined<br />
from the true and exact dimensions of our planet earth. Incredible<br />
as this may sound to the uninitiated, our ancestors derived<br />
their feet and inches from the length of one degree of latitude or<br />
longitude.<br />
Quite naturally they used the longitude and latitude<br />
at which they lived and that explains why there were so many<br />
different feet and other units of measurement derived from the<br />
local degrees.<br />
The length of 1 degree of latitude varies from 110,567 m at the
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