mch

44 OUR ANCESTORS CAME FROM OUTER SPACE
endar was not solved. As we will see later on, the real winner
was the Thompson team that came very close to the right answer
—the year 739 or two years less than 741, as they had projected.
The most amusing aspect was that this astonishingly precise
prediction was obtained from a wrong starting date and a wrong
short cycle. A similar case in history is the precise calculation by
Eratosthenes of Alexandria who 2,200 years ago established the
circumference of our planet by using two wrong values which
cancelled each other and thus yielded the right answer.
I had long been intrigued by the mysteries of the Mayan calendar
but never had the time to take a closer look. Then, after a
dinner date in Paris with a French specialist in Mayan culture, I
decided to try the impossible. I knew that the Mayas, like the
Sumerians, were great astronomers and I had long suspected the
two cultures had something in common. The Mayas also knew of
the precession of the equinoxes and the existence of Uranus and
Neptune. They had calculated the periods of revolution and the
conjunctions of different planets and discovered, as I aheady
mentioned, the equivalent astronomical cycles—such as 65 revolutions
of Venus which are equal to 104 solar years, or 327 revolutions,
of Mercury. They also used the cycle of 33,968 days to
predict eclipses, and this cycle was equal to 5 lunar precessions,
93 solar years, 196 eclipses, and 1,150 lunar months. We will look
at these figures later once more. Meanwhile, the Mayas had also
discovered a cycle of 1,886,040 days that represented exactly 260
conjunctions of Jupiter and Saturn, 2,310 of Mars and Jupiter,
2,418 of earth and Mars, and 3,230 of earth and Venus.
This particular cycle was the key to the mystery of the Mayan
calendar. It was based on the conjunctions of Jupiter and Saturn,
something nobody had cared to consider. All other periods of
sidereal or synodic revolution of all planets had been tried, but
somehow nobody had tested the conjunctions between the
planets.
The conjunction period of Jupiter and Saturn is in reality
7,253.445 days, but the rounded-out Mayan value of 7,254 days is
valid because they did not use decimal parts and counted in
whole days only. So the Great Cycle of the 260 Mayan conjunctions
was 1,886,040 days, or 5,163.8 of our years.
I finally discovered that all Mayan chronology was based on