The Olmec Enigma - Part 1 of 2 - Astronaut Corroborates Sitchin

The unexpected corroboration is tucked away in the recently published book A Leap of Faith by the Mercury-7 astronaut Gordon Cooper, in which his story as a test pilot and astronaut is peppered with (to quote from the dust jacket),

Once it was conceded (very grudgingly!) that the ‘Olmecs’ did indeed represent the earliest or even Mother Civilization of Mesoamerica, the date of their arrival was at first set at about 250 B.C.; then at about 500 B.C.; then farther back and back, until 1500 B.C. was acknowledged.

But I have argued for a date twice as old!

A God and His Secret Number

My conclusion that the Olmec presence in the New World went back at least 5,000 years, to circa 3000 B.C., was reached by many paths. The first one was an attempt to identify the great god of Mesoamerica, the Winged Serpent (Quetzalcoatl to the Aztecs, Kukulkan to the Mayas), and the significance of his promise to return to those lands on the first day of a 52-year cycle, (AD 1519, when the Aztec king Montezuma believed that the appearance of the Spanish conquistador Cortez was such a Return, coincided with the anticipated sacred date).

The peoples of Mesoamerica employed in addition to a practical calendar of 365 days, called the Haab, also a Sacred Calendar (called Tzolkin) of 260 days. The two cyclical calendars were conceived as two wheels with meshing teeth that turned and returned to the same spot once in 52 years; and 52 was the Sacred Number of the Winged Serpent god?

Accordingly, I said, Olmec presence goes back to at least 3000 B.C. — a date twice as old as that conceded by established archaeologists.

The Mysterious “Day One”


By the time I was writing The Lost Realms, the book devoted to the prehistory of the Americas, I was sure that the arrival of the Olmecs with Thoth/Quetzalcoatl could be established with astounding precision. The key to unlocking the enigma was the Olmec Calendar.

In addition to the Haab and the Tzolkin, there was in Mesoamerica a third calendar, used to inscribe dates on monuments. Given the name the Long Count, it was not cyclical as the other two, but linear — a continuous one, counting the total number of days that had passed since the counting began on a mysterious Day One.

By means of glyphs denoting groups of days (1, 20, 360, 7,200 or even 144,000) and dots and bars giving the number for each group-glyph, monuments were dated by saying: A total of so many days from Day One have passed when this Monument was erected.

But what was that Day One, when did it occur, and what was its significance?

It has been established beyond doubt that this Long Count calendar was the original Olmec calendar; and it is now generally agreed that Day One was equivalent to August 13, 3113 B.C.

But what does that date signify? As far as I know, the only plausible answer was provided by me: It was the date of Thoth/Quetzalcoatl’s arrival, with his followers in Mesoamerica!

The Unexpected Corroboration

All official publications continue, however, to remain at 1250 B.C. — 1500 B.C. at most — as the date of the start of the Olmec presence.

Imagine my pleasant surprise to come across an eye-witness report by the astronaut Gordon Cooper in chapter 11 of his book A Leap of Faith.