FT267

I have recently been plodding through the 78 episodes of The Ramayana, produced by the Sagar family in 1986. This serialisation of the story of Lord Ram, his brothers, and their war against the demon king of Lanka who has abducted Ram’s bride, the princess Sita, became a sensation when it was first broadcast on Indian TV, with an estimated audience of 100 million at its peak.

What particularly struck me was the first appearance of a vimana (a ‘flying chariot’ powered by ‘divine science’) in episode 28. The scene instantly evoked the wonderful illustration of a ‘floating platform’ by Alex Tomlinson for Peter Hassall’s FT article on time-travellers.

I took some screenshots of the Ramayana scene (example above); unfort­unately my viewing copy was pretty bad, but I hope you can make out the ‘flying platform’ and its four occup­ants (two seated and two standing).

Let me describe the scene. During their 14-year exile in the Dandaka Forest, Ram, Lakshman and Sita maintain a patrol to protect the ashrams of the many great sages encamped there from attacks by demons. In this instance, they come to a clearing occupied by the elderly sage Sarabhanga. He is near death and holding on because he knows Ram will come to visit him. The party has just entered the clearing, when Laksh­man notices something in the sky. The others look where he points and watch a ‘divine chariot’ swoop down through the trees and land near the hut. The celestial platform holds the god Indra and three female companions. No one seems to be piloting the craft (perhaps it ‘knows’ where to go?) and, as in so many UFO accounts, these aviators seem quite unaffected by the changes in direction and speed of their transport.

After the vimana has landed, Indra steps out, entering the hut where Sara­bhanga is meditating. Indra offers the sage a unique reward for his life of devotion: bodily assumption into the realm of the gods (presumably via the vimana). Sarabhanga declines, saying he is not ready to give up his body until he has seen Lord Ram. Indra returns to his vimana, which takes off and vanishes into the distance. Ram and his companions make their way to Sarabhanga’s hut. After swapping blessings, the sage says he can now depart this life and, rather gracefully, spontaneously combusts. His glowing blob of a soul, depicted like a candle flame, follows the trajectory of Indra’s UFO.

The ancient literature differs from this filmic version by having Sarabhanga build a yagna (sacrificial fire) into which he deliberately steps to burn himself alive. It is said his soul bypassed the realm of the gods and went straight to Brahma’s heaven.

The correspondence between the ‘manned’ platforms plying time and space, as described by Hassall, and this particular depiction of vimanas is strong, but it would be difficult to argue the latter inspired the former. In the wake of von Däniken’s Chariots of the Gods, the British fortean author W Raymond Drake (1913–1989) cornered the market in suggesting that modern UFOs might be returning Hindu vimanas in such books as Gods and Spacemen in the Ancient East (1968); a seam that has since been mined by David Hatcher Childress in Vimana Aircraft Of Ancient India And Atlantis (1991) and The Ancient Indian Vimanas (1997), and by Richard L Thompson in Alien Identities (1993) and others.

As a postscript, FT regular Gordon Rutter and his librarian brother, some years back, rescued a major part of Drake’s papers and books, which have now been donated to the Charles Fort Institute. [1]



Note
1 Yes, the spirit of the CFI is still around, haunting its founders and well-wishers, until it has a suitable time and place to materialise, more splendid than before.