Source by Dr. Srikumar V. Gopalakrishna

There are many stories in medieval Indian literature about flying machines. Thus in Bana's Harsa-carita there is the story of a Yavana who manufactured an aerial machine that was used to kidnap a king.

Likewise, Dandl's Avanti-sundar tells of an architect named Mandhata who used an aerial car for such casual purposes as traveling from a distance to see if his young son was hungry. His son, by the way, was said to have created mechanical men that fought a mock duel and an artificial cloud that produced heavy showers. Both of these works date from about the 7th century A.D.

In the ninth to tenth centuries, Buddhasvamin wrote a version of the Brhat-kathd, a massive collection of popular stories. Buddhasvamin spoke of aerial vehicles as dkdsa-yantras, or sky-machines, and he attributed them to the Yavanas?a name often used for barbaric foreigners. It was quite common for flying machines and yantras in general to be attributed to the Yavanas in Sanskrit texts.

Some scholars take the Yavanas to be the Greeks, and they attribute Indian stories of machines to a Greek origin. For example, Penzer thought that the Greek philosopher Archytas (c. 42347 B.C.) may have been the “first scientific inventor” of devices resembling the Indian yantras, and he pointed out that Archytas “constructed a kind of flying machine, consisting of a wooden figure balanced by a weight suspended from a pulley, and set in motion by hidden and enclosed air.”

No doubt there was much exchange of ideas in the ancient world, and today it is hard to know for sure where a given idea was invented and how highly developed it became. We do know, however, that fairly detailed ideas concerning airplanelike flying machines were known in medieval India.

Bhoja’s Samardngana-sutradhdra states that the main material of a flying machine’s body is light wood, or laghu-ddru. The craft has the shape of a large bird with a wing on each side. The motive force is

Mothines in Antient ond Medievol Indio provided by a fire-chamber with mercury placed over a flame. The power generated by the heated mercury, helped by the flapping of the - wings by a rider inside, causes the machine to fly through the air. Since the craft was equipped with an engine, we can speculate that the flap- ? ping of the wings was intended to control the direction of flight rather than provide the motive power.

A heavier (alaghu) da-ru-vimdna is also described. It contains four pitchers of mercury over iron ovens. “The boiling mercury ovens pro- duce a terrific noise which is put to use in battle to scare away elephants. By strengthening the mercury chambers, the roar could be increased so that by it elephants are thrown completely out of control.”

There has been a great deal of speculation about just how power generated by heating mercury might be used to drive the vimdna through the air. This was discussed in an early book on UFOs by Desmond Leslie and George Adamski.ls Leslie proposed that the heated mercury mentioned in the Samardngana-sutradhdra may have something to do with the flight of UFOs.

I would suggest that the vimdnas described by Bhoja are much more similar to conventional airplanes than to UFOs. Thus they are made of ordinary materials like wood, they have wings, and they fly like birds. Raghavan suggested that the mercury engine was intended to be a source of mechanical power for flapping the wings as in bird flight. He supported this by noting that Roger Bacon described a flying machine in which some kind of revolving engine caused wings to flap through a mechanical linkage.

Ramachandra Dikshitar, however, said that according to the Sama- rdngana-sutradhdra, the vimdna “has two resplendent wings, and is pro- pelled by air.” This suggests that some kind of jet propulsion was used.

However these vimdnas were actually powered, it seems likely that they relied on some conventional mechanical method that extracted energy from burning fuel and used it to produce a flow of air over wings. We can contrast this with the flight characteristics of UFOs, which don’t have wings, jets, or propellers, and seem to fly in a manner that contradicts known physical principles. 1 Were the vimdnas mentioned in Samardrigana-sutradhdra ever actually built, or were they just products of imagination? I don’t know. However, the elaborate descriptions of yantras found in medieval Indian texts suggest that many sophisticated machines were made in India long ago.

If sophisticated mechanical technology was known in remote times, then it is quite possible that airplanes of some kind were a,so bui,t. It is interesting that the Sanskrit astronomical text entitled Surya- siddhdnta mentions a mercury engine used to provide rotary motion for a gola-yantra, a mechanical model of the planetary system.’8 This suggests that at least one kind of mercury engine was used to produce rotary power. The text also says that the design for the mercury en- gine is to be kept secret. It was standard practice in ancient India for technical knowledge to be passed down only from teacher to trusted disciple.

An unfortunate consequence of this is that knowledge tended to be lost whenever oral traditions depending on teachers and disciples were broken. It is thus quite possible that many arts and sciences known in ancient times have been lost to us, practically without a trace.

Additional Sanskrit works referring to flying machines are listed in a book by Dileep Kanjilal.9 These are: the Yukti-kalpataru by Bhoja (twelth century A.D.); the Mayamatam attributed to Maya Dfinava but probably dating to the twelth century A.D.; the Kathdsaritsdgara (tenth century A.D.); the Avaddna literature (first-third centuries A.D.); the Raghuvamsam and Abhijndna-sakuntalam of Kalidasa (first century B.C.); the Abhimdraka of Bhasa (second century B.C.); and the Jdtakas (third century B.C.). These dates are often approximate, and the material in the various works is often taken from older works and traditions.