'Vimanas' or flying crafts of Ancient India

There is a lot to gather about 'Vimanas' or aerial crafts and trace back to the origins of where they've left a mark in history. Something that is not easy to digest and is not universally accepted is that we possessed advanced technology dating back thousands of years before people assumed our Indian civilization even began. 

What is a Vimana? 

A vimana is an ancient aircraft our ancestors or early Indian civilizations possessed, as scriptures go. Many other civilizations talk about these same crafts, as seen in Egyptian and Sumerian heiroglyphs, Atlantean and Lemurian depictions of civilization and as sometimes described in the Bible on numerous occasions as well! How Vimanas have been rediscovered is amazing. We went through the scriptures again, mysteriously being able to connect the dots when the UFO phenomenon started gaining prominence in the late 1940s. Till then, no one gave a damn!  This article is definitely not going to cover all there is about Vimanas and India.

There is a possibility that there were way more intelligent beings inhabiting the planet before us, or who happen to be our ancestors, but because of the barrier religion has created, all it does is makes us think man and woman began from a simple Adam and Eve, 'created' by 'God' . The story of the first man and woman is also controversial by revisionist theory standards, but that is a discussion for another day. I am not going to change anyone's opinion about religion, their concept of life, our origins, or anything of the sort. Although, I am going to state a few facts that I've found out about these Ancient Indian UFOs.

An illustration of a Rukma vimana

I'm calling them UFOs because they are described to be like the crafts spotted in UFO sightings in the sky in recent times - working mysteriously on anti-gravity, advanced propulsion systems - and at the same time they're said to have worked purely by the will of the mind, 'piloted' like modern-day crafts. UFOs DO NOT necessarily mean 'aliens'. They could just have been people with advanced technology, in a different age of the planet's lifetime.  

I visited Omkareshwar in December 2013 and spoke to baba Mangaldas Tyagi, President of the Omkareshwar baba Association. He spoke to me about a LOT of things and my main purpose of the visit was the Omkareshwar jyotrlinga and interviewing him regarding a project a friend and I were documenting based on 'Women and Superstition'. Vimanas was interestingly a highlight for me, because I was aware of the concept all along, but hearing it from someone else in person is a whole new experience! I happened to be recording our conversation as part of my project work and decided to use this data here. 

If you do not understand Hindi, the translation is under the video on YouTube (sorry for the inconvenience, I couldn't create subtitles)

Vimanika Shastra: The Science of Aeronautics

As told by John Bruno Hare in the preface of the published translated version by G. R. Josyer;

Sometime in the period just before World War I, a Brahmin named Pandit Subbaraya Sastry began to dictate previously unknown texts in Sanskrit which purported to contain ancient Indian technological knowledge. He in turn, credited a Vedic sage named Maharshi Bharadwaja, as well as other Rishis who appear in legitimate Hindu texts.One of these 'channeled' texts was, on its face, a technical manual for the construction and use of 'vimanas,' the flying machines of the Vedic sagas. It is unclear as to whether any part of the present work was actually published in print at that time, even though it is implied in the introduction, so it is unclear whether it was published (in the legal sense) prior to 1923. The Sanskrit manuscript of the VS lay unpublished for over fifty years. In 1973, this text was published in a very limited edition by G.R. Josyer, along with a translation which he had produced over a twenty year period.

The Vimanika Shastra basically explains the working and construction of ancient Indian aircrafts and detailed diagrams to describe the working of these crafts. The best gist of the book is explained by the table of contents:

FIRST CHAPTER
 1. Definition
 2. The Pilot
 3. Aerial Routes
 4. Aeroplane Parts
 5. On Clothing
 6. On Food
 7. On Metals
SECOND CHAPTER
 8. Heat Absorbing Metals
9. Melting
THIRD CHAPTER
 10. Mirrors
FOURTH CHAPTER
 11. Power
FIFTH CHAPTER
 12. Yantras or Machinery
 13. Parts of Yantras
SIXTH CHAPTER
 14. Varieties of Aeroplanes
 15. Shakuna Vimana
 16. Sundara Vimana
 17. Rukma Vimana
 18. Tripura Vimana

According to a research paper by Mary Sutherland (2010), many things were gathered in terms of the origins of these crafts as part of our ancient Indian sacred texts.

In the Yantra Sarvasva, part of the Vimanika Shastra, sage Maharshi Bhardwaj describes 'Vimana', or aerial aircrafts, as being of three classes:
1. Those that travel from place to place;
2. Those that travel from one country to another;
3. Those that travel between planets.

Of special concern among these were the military planes whose functions were delineated in some very considerable detail and which read today like something clean out of science fiction. For instance, they had to be: Impregnable, unbreakable, non-combustible and indestructible capable of coming to a dead stop in the twinkling of an eye; invisible to enemies; capable of listening to the conversations and sounds in hostile planes; technically proficient to see and record things, persons, incidents and situations going on inside enemy planes; know at every stage the direction of the movement of other aircraft in the vicinity; capable of rendering the enemy crew into a state of suspended animation, intellectual torpor or complete loss of consciousness; capable of destruction; manned by pilots and co-travellers who could adapt in accordance with the climate in which they moved; temperature regulated inside; constructed of very light and heat absorbing metals; provided with mechanisms that could enlarge or reduce images and enhance or diminish sounds.

Things like anti-gravity and stealth mode were somewhat a regular phenomenon. You can see movies like Avengers show aircrafts changing their outer walls to a reflective layer of glass so as to be seen as a normal part of the sky (go into stealth), reflecting the surrounding clouds and sky. This is something that you can say, is a subtle rendition of the stealth mechanism described in the Vimanika Shastra!

 Here are images of craft diagrams from the translated book:

There's everything! From what mantras a pilot needs to know, which powers need to be harnessed for the working of the craft, to, well, EVERYTHING is explained.

Here's a 14-minute documentary created explaining more or less what the Vimanika Shastra is, by History Channel.

Mythology, ancient Indian scripts and Vimanas

It's strange how for so many years, our attention was not drawn to the so called 'aerial aircrafts' during wars in the Mahabharata, and so many more texts. Sanskrit texts are filled with references to Gods who fought battles in the sky using Vimanas equipped with weapons as deadly as any we can deploy in these more enlightened times.

However, one of the great Indian epics, the Ramayana, does have a highly detailed story in it of a trip to the moon in a Vimana (or "Astra"), and in fact details a battle on the moon with an "Asvin" (or Atlantean) airship.

The most popular story is of King Ravana in the Ramayana, the often titled antagonist of the book, who was said to have magical powers and a wide range of objects that indicated his use of advanced technology. He was the king of Lanka and is depicted as a negative character (in many versions), who kidnapped Rama's wife Sita. One of many objects that he possessed was the Pushpak Vimana (chariot) which is mentioned when Ravana kidnaps Sita and takes here into this flying chariot!
Pushpak was originally made by Vishwakarma for Brahma, the Hindu god of creation. Later on, Brahma gifted it to Kubera, the God of wealth, but later, with Ravana's capture of  Lanka, his half-brother, it automatically became Ravana's prized possession.

As mentioned in the video above, there has been evidence found of the destroyed city of 'Dwarka' from the Mahabharata, part of which was destroyed during Krishna's reign, by a demon named Shalva who attacked the city from flying crafts using ancient advanced weaponry. There are an endless amount of Vedic texts talking about this concept of flying crafts as well (gods like Indra), practically every story based on travel in the skies and people descending from the heavens. 

The recent hype of UFOs in India began all over again with the Nayagarh incident in Orissa, a month before the phenomenal Roswell UFO crash. 

The story of Nayagarh district, Orissa's UFO landing (1947)

“The Pattachitra” drawn way back in 1947 has themes that revolve around the alien's visit and the UFO ( Unidentified Flying Objects).

Just two months before India’s independence, a UFO sighting was reported in Nayagarh district, Orissa. As the local story goes, two young men from the village were granted full access to this craft that landed from above. After the departure of the spacecraft, these two sat with a well-known “Tala- Pattachitra” ( palm leaf engraver) artist and gave him a thorough description of the beings they had met – a variety of anthropomorphic robots, or perhaps creatures in metal suits.

Depicting the forgotten stories of thes “Yantra Purusha”, pieces of these rare engravings have now been published in the “The Obliterary Journal”, by Blaft Publications. Award-winning Pattachitra artist Panchanana Moharana, who runs a workshop in Puri, made the sketches of the aliens and their craft, which was claimed to have landed in a hilly tract of Nayagarh on the 31st of May, 1947, by going through the original Pattachitra. One of the palm leaf engravings that Panchanana has, show the “Yantra Purusha” wearing a spacesuit with pincer-like hands rising as if offering a blessing! Hemispherical devices protruding from the heads of the aliens are a recurring feature in many of the engravings. Some depictions have aliens having ball-shaped hands. Although, there is still a mention in local press about the incident that happened in a Berhampur daily, two weeks after the event, in which a reporter drew flak on the villagers, calling them 'highly imaginative'.

What is amazing about this is that this event took place exactly a month before the UFO crash in Roswell!

Man in a spacesuit, IN 1947! 

These are two images from the Pattachitra UFOs in Nayagarh District, Orissa

That's a lot to take in already. I'm sure there are some more interesting mythological and old references to UFOs and ancient Indian technology, but again, that's for another day. 

Thank you for reading. Spread the word. :)