Vimana: Ancient Hindu Flying Machines Hidden in Plain Sight?

Those who go looking for evidence of UFOs will often end up finding what they are looking for. In a world filled with recording devices anyone with an inbuild bias towards the presence of unknown flying objects will find plenty of shaky footage which cannot be easily explained, and so therefore must be aliens.

In truth there is certainly enough of such footage to keep anyone going for a lifetime, and that is before the legion of fakes are taken into account, both increasingly sophisticated and increasingly easy to generate through modern computer wizardry. But those who go looking for UFOs in history have an even easier time of it.

There are countless records of unknown encounters throughout history, as might reasonably be expected from a less cohesive world without many of our modern understandings of meteorology, astronomy, or technology. Modern UFOlogists will often gloss “technology [they] didn’t understand” as “technology we moderners don’t understand” and point to their bafflement as evidence that what they were seeing was not Earthly technology.

Are there UFOs? A dispassionate assessment of the situation would suggest the answer to be “no”: the time and effort required for interstellar travel, the complete and unbroken secrecy, the weird clustering of almost all UFO sightings in rural North America: these all but rul out the possibility.

So then, how then to explain those things from history which observers at the time could not understand. True, many such things have been explained away as exotic lightning, or natural phenomena, or even in very rare cases anachronistic technology which forced a reassessment of the sophistication of the ancients. The Antikythera Mechanism would be an example of the latter, or the Nebra Sky Disk, or even potentially the Baghdad Battery.

But in order to be entirely fair to UFOlogists some things remain which are baffling both to the ancients and modern science. This is generally because what documentation we have is limited and primitive in its description, but there is no getting away from the thing being described and the impossibility of what was witnessed.

Such things are generally called myth. The walls of Jericho were destroyed by the Ark of the Covenant, and while we are told in detail how this was done the impossibility of what we are hearing (and the lack of confirmatory archaeology to support this around ancient Jericho) leads us to conclude that this is a legend.

But perhaps in doing so we are falling into the same trap as the UFOlogists, finding what we expect rather than objectively looking at what we are told. And sometimes the evidence, although old, is so detailed and so extensive that the idea that it is all legend becomes challenging.

Such an accusation might be levelled as the Vimana. It seems the ancient Hindu had flying machines, and a lot of detail about their construction survives.

Temples in the Sky

Firstly, let us be clear. The information regarding these flying machines called “vimana” comes, at least in part, from the oldest Hindu teachings, the Vedas which were written millennia ago. And these texts are filled with lurid stories which, themselves, are undoubtedly mythological.

Gods fight demons in a civilization some 15,000 years old. At this time the great Empire of Rama rules much of what is now northern India and Pakistan, comprised of seven great Rishi cities.

This civilization has many wonders, but what it has more than anything else is some kind of advanced technology which allows for great machines to take to the skies in flight to attack enemies. These vimana are everywhere, and described in much detail.

There are vimana which only travel across the ocean, those that fly in the air, those that travel underwater, and those capable of leaving Earth and flying to the moon. There are personal vimana, twin-engine agnihotra-vimana, and vast multi-engine “elephant” vimana, to name but a few. There are indestructible vimana, invisible vimana, luxury vimana.

What then could these ancient attack craft be? The technology they display certainly does not allow them to be included in our current chronology of the development of humanity: they are simply too much. 

And it is not just the flying tech that causes problems, as these craft were often kitted out with similarly exotic equipment. Vimana are described as stunning enemy combatants which would allow for them being taken prisoner, or firing highly destructive explosive weaponry.

One vimana, called “Saubha” in the Hindu epic Mahabharata, was said to be truly extraterrestrial. Acquired by the ancient Indian king Salva from the planet Taltala, it could maneuver effortlessly, float on water, and even become invisible. It was used to kill several Vrishni (dynasty heroes of the text).

Elsewhere in the Mahabharata we hear of the weaponry of the vimana piloted by the hero Bhima, said to be a spherical craft from the planet Mercury. This vimana is described as being able to generate huge rays of light accompanied with the sound of thunder, destroying all its enemies effortlessly. We even have (relatively) contemporary texts like the Vaimanika-Shastra which offer an analysis of this craft, along with a proto-scientific explanation of their function.

Different vimana have different equipment. Chaapala has advanced engines, able to achieve a high speed and controlled from a central panel in the craft. Roopakarshana has a viewscreen able to show the pilot his enemies, and Stabdhak attacks the crew of enemy vimana, rendering them unconscious and causing their craft to crash.

The ancient sage Maharshi Bharadwaj in his texts which survive as the Yantra Sarvasva even leads a detailed guide to these flying machines. According to the sage there are three kinds of vimana: short range local craft, long range continental craft, and fully interplanetary vimana.

Elsewhere we have surviving guides on vimana construction, how they work, and even how to fly them. The fact that even flying lessons survive for these craft, alongside their ubiquity, makes it difficult to dismiss all this as some collective fiction.

There are 32 lessons to be mastered in order to pilot a vimana successfully. These involve the obvious tasks such as take off and landing and maneuvering without crashing, but also things like “adrishya” and “drishya”  (how to be seen and unseen), “paroksha” and “aparoksha” (how to manage contraction and expansion) and “stabdhaka” (how to paralyze).

Nowhere else in all of recorded history do we have such detailed instructions for the use of a mythological item. How them do we address this, how do we square our modern viewpoint that no such craft ever existed with all this detailed information on how to use them?

Perhaps there is more to this than meets the eye.

Top Image: A smaller example of a vimana known as “Pushpaka” (Tej Kumar Book Depo / Public Domain)