It is only from our materialist worldview that New Age thought seems an irruptive and irrational force. It would be closer to the truth to say organized materialist science, 300 years old at most in a continuum of at least 13,000 years, is the aberration in human history.  Aside from pure curiosity, the motive for science has always been the betterment of mankind’s lot—a sentiment preached directly in the Rosicrucian tracts of 1614. But ideas have unpredictable consequences and thoughts quite literally can create realities; the latter is a quintessential New Age truism. Science gives us a method of testing ideas and imagining alternate realities; in this it is indispensable. But as Rudolf Steiner, Sri Aurobindo, Jean Gebser and others have pointed out, absolute materialism is a necessary step in the evolution of mankind. Perhaps it is a collective path at whose end lie painful truths from which true spiritual growth shall occur.

On September 16, 1994 at the Ariel School in Zimbabwe, at mid-morning break, several children saw two silvery disk-shaped objects skitter erratically across the sky. They vanished, then reappeared elsewhere in the sky, then descended into the trees and brush about 100 yards from the school, in an area consider “off-limits” (due to snakes and wildlife). The children were amazed and curious. Some 62 eventually watched the object over a fifteen-minute period. Two beings appeared, one "floating" across the top of the object, the other gliding towards them just above the ground. The younger children became terrified at the sight of their faces; the entities' features matched descriptions of the classic grey “aliens.” One girl locked eyes with one of the beings and said she’d received a feeling or vision from those shiny black almonds: that the planet was suffering due to human environmental activities, and there would be a cataclysm.

This particular “vision” has been reported hundreds of times in encounter reports going back to the 1940s. In the 1950s and 60s it had to do mostly with atomic bomb tests. Since the abandonment of that abhorrent practice, these beings' messages to "contactees" or "experiencers" have concentrated on environmental degradation.

Now, we would think that these kids wouldn't be immune to conscious or unconscious cultural influences that conditioned them into perceiving these things as "aliens", but for the fact that these children were, while having heard about UFOs, unaware of the very particular stereotyped beings and the associated catastrophic visions so-called experiencers have undergone. Their relative isolation from Western media is strong evidence that something real happened.

For the past 40 years, comparative mythologist David Talbott has amassed thousands of pieces of evidence towards an entirely novel theory about the origin of humanity’s earliest mythology and prehistoric art.

Inspired by implications of Immanuel Velikovsky’s much-maligned theory of gravitational instability in the early solar system, Talbott came to believe that Mars and Saturn were once much closer to the earth, within our band of the ecliptic, close together, visibly, in the sky.

Following Velikovsky, he maintains that at one time within the past 10,000 years Venus entered the solar system as a comet with a long, streaming trail; the gravitational fields of earth, Mars and Saturn disrupted its plunge towards the sun and “captured” it. During this period, there was instability in the earth’s geosphere due to the gravitational fluctuations—massive earthquakes and floods.

But the chain of planets eventually stabilized into alignment, producing a period of calm that would later come to be known in myth as a “Golden Age.” Then the stable configuration “fell apart” and a period of geological catastrophe again ensued. The electro-gravitational fields between the planets clashed and produced bolts of plasma energy that passed between all four “characters” in the drama. The planet Mars was scarred by the worst discharges, which rent the great Valles Marineris trenches still visible on its surface.

Talbott believes that this cycle of events was witnessed by the human population across the entire earth, and recorded in the earliest rock art. Regardless of location on the planet’s face, the story of the great battle told was the same.