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46 OUR ANCESTORS CAME FROM OUTER SPACE
several Great Cycles of 5,163 years, or 260 conjunctions, each,
counted in succession, and once the duration and the rhythm of
the Great Cycle was established, it was not diflBcult to find the
starting point of the Mayan calendar. I presumed that at the
start of the last Great Cycle some remarkable astronomic phenomenon
must have occurred. The joint arrival of four planets in
the same corner of the sky, the meeting of Jupiter, Saturn,
Uranus, and Neptune takes place every 4,627 years after each of
the planets has finished an exact number of conjunctions and is
again lined up with the others. And the last time such a phenomenon
took place was the year 1484 of the Christian era.
Stepping now 4,627 years back I marked the year 3144 B.C.
and took three more times the same amount of time passed to arrive
at the date 18,633 B.C., a date only three years oflF the year
18,630 B.C. mentioned as an important date in a sacred Mayan
codex preserved in the Vatican. For me that constitutes proof.
And also, if my calculations are reasonably accurate, some other
quite rare astronomical occurrence took place in the skies over
the Mayan temples in that year—a double eclipse of the sun and
of the moon during the same year. The exact dates were November
23 for the eclipse of the sun and June 3 for the moon.
When I also discovered that the count of days in each sacred
year was 260, the same number as katuns in the Great Cycle, all
the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle began to fall into place. For the
Mayas the katun of 7,254 days was not only a measure of time
but also an astronomical unit to express the synodic periods of
revolution of planets, or the count of days needed for each
planet to be realigned with the sun and the earth. For example, 5
katuns were equal to 313 revolutions of Mercury, 13 katuns were
equal to 121 revolutions of Mars, or 27 katuns were equal to 7 returns
of Halley's comet.
It seems that, like the Sumerians, the Mayas were familiar
with the Constant of Nineveh—but in another form. Their time
was counted in days, not seconds. For years the professional archaeologists
searching the ruins of the Mayan temples had found
fantastically high numbers engraved in stone. These numbers
correspond to millions of years and billions of days, while the
oflBcially recognized age of mankind, according to scientists of
that day, was only 6,000 years—one reason why the gigantic
numbers meant nothing to those early archaeologists and were
simply dismissed. Many years later a courageous author sug-