He was the first technologist in the history of mankind. In his book of patterns of mechanical elements he described problems of hydraulics, dynamics and static's.

He was the first inspector of fortresses under Cesare Borgia: he drew maps which are the earliest examples of modern cartography.

He was asked for advice as 'war engineer' and produced plans for diverting the Arno in order to deprive Pisa, which was waging war with Florence, with its main artery of communication.

He dissected corpses and wrote a treatise on human anatomy.

He investigated the flight of birds and the laws governing air currents, and drew plans for constructing an aircraft.

His sketches contain a doctrine of the original mechanical forces in nature, a whole cosmology.

Through geological observations, he was led to investigate the origin of fossils. His biological studies made him the first scientific illustrator.

He realized that there would never be a perpetuum mobile because of the laws of gravity.

For Sultan Bayazid II he conceived a bridge over the Bosphorus - '12,000 ft over the sea, 600 over the land'. Such a bridge has been in service - since 1973.

He invented a two-stage rocket which could fly 'more than three miles'.

He devised a machine-tool for cutting cylindrical bore holes, of the kind that has long been indispensable for manufacturing ball-bearings.

He developed a gyroscopic system, like the one invented for blind flying by Speery Rand, but not until

1920.

The multi-barrelled machine gun in modern jet-fighters can be found on da Vinci's drawing paper.

Leonardo da Vinci.

He lived to the age of 67.

He was painter, sculptor and architect. Brilliantly endowed.

My notes on his fields of study are far from complete.

Each individual branch of knowledge he mastered would normally have needed years of study; each individual result would have been the issue of a whole lifetime's work.

Surely an enormous, almost inconceivable amount of knowledge, must have been stored in Leonardo's brain? After all, his artistic production and his scientific researches and plans are worlds apart!

Genius is not just diligence or the intelligent use of reason. I suspect that genius is mainly the ability to open a highly 'rained brain to extraterrestrial energies. The extraterrestrial beings know what primordial knowledge is stored in the grey cells. If they did not know it, they could not make the fuel of genius spark.

That's it.

The communication medium was and is the 'beast-brain'. From the conveyor belt of modern research flow scientific proofs that man possesses parapsychological faculties which are against 'natural' laws.

Only now, on the threshold of the third millennium, are we mentally capable of discovering the brain's unknown potentialities and perhaps of using them usefully and sensibly in future. We are taking our first hesitant steps towards mutual communication.

A few 'initiates' - I am not speaking of religious figures -have always had access to the wonderful unconscious, from which they summoned up great discoveries in visionary form. The Danish physicist Niels Bohr (1885-1962), who laid down the foundations of atomic theory, has described how he finally hit on the idea of his atomic model after years of vain re-search [26].

Neils Bohr dreamt he was sitting on a sun of burning gas. Hissing, spitting planets rushed by him and they all seemed to be attached to the sun they were circling by fine threads. Suddenly gas, sun and planets contracted and solidified. At this moment, said Niels Bohr, he awoke. He knew at once that what he had seen in his dream was the atom model.

Neils Bohr was canonized for this vision in 1922 - I beg your pardon - awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics!

To me this 'dream' has the value of a vision. Hissing and spitting before the event, gas which solidifies and forms an image ... I have heard all that before in another connection. Physicists have their world: they live daily and hourly with their formulae, diagrams and plans. Those are visual signals, which accompany them everywhere they go. Dialogues and discussions with colleagues, assistants and students revolve round their physical problems - acoustic signals which are ever present. The stress of their work causes a 'psycho feedback' which they cannot escape. Consequently physicists can only have visions of images from their, working world, like Niels Bohr who had been fixated on the search for 'his' atom model for years. It appeared to him in a vision. We know whence religious enthusiasts draw their visual and acoustic signals.

In my opinion the physicist's 'dream' was caused by extraterrestrial impulses. They recalled the 'image'

programmed in the unconscious - owing to psycho-feedback the atom model was present. Bohr's brain was trained for this exceptional case! We must liberate ourselves from the absurd idea that visions are a religious privilege. That is only true if we accept religion's claim to exclusiveness. The great men of the intellectual world are not clever enough to make capital out of their visions. They suddenly had an idea ... they suddenly 'saw' the solution of a long-posed question clearly before their eyes ... the unconscious whispered something to them and it was an 'inner voice' which spoke to them. They describe the syndrome of many visions simply as a 'brilliant idea'. What sort of a saint would an ecclesiastical organization have made out of Albert Einstein if he had his brilliant ideas suddenly and by inspiration as one of their sheep!

The great Niels Bohr was not the only scientist who frankly admitted that ideas that changed the world came to him in dreams.

For example, there was the chemist Professor August Kekule' von Stradowitz (1829-1896) - and what would the world be without his flash of genius? - who made vitally important advances in the theoretical bases of organic chemistry in the nineteenth century. Kekule discovered the quadrivalence of carbon and said that the truly revolutionary image of the 'closed-chain' structure of benzene (1865)

had appeared to him suddenly as if in a dream. This visionary image became the basis of what is now the most important basic material for chemical manufacturing.

There was also, to name just one example from our own day, the physiologist and pharmacologist Professor Otto Loewi (1873-1961), who taught at Graz and emigrated to New York. His fields of research were the physiology of the metabolism and the physiology and pharmacology of the vegetative nervous system. Once again we must ask what would have become of mankind without the visionary dream that helped Loewi to become the first man to demonstrate the chemical transference of nervous impulses in the nervous system (previously scholars had assumed that the transference was electrical). In 1936 Otto Loewi was awarded the Nobel Prize for Medicine (for his dream). Just imagine our stress-ridden world without a single tranquillizer or any of the neuropsychological medicaments, and you will realize the epoch-making significance of Loewi's vision. When he

'received' it, he was ready for the impulses which, so I believe, extraterrestrial beings transmit when they think X day has come.

There is one more comment I want to make.

In 1968 I was spellbound and absorbed by The Double Helix, unquestionably a unique book in its description of a scientific discovery that took place gradually. The book was (and is) all the more stimulating because the author, Harvard Professor James D. Watson, and his colleagues Francis H.C.

Crick and Maurice H.F. Wilkins, solved one of the greatest mysteries of life: the make-up of the DNA

molecule which contains all the hereditary information and cell-building plans of a living creature. In

1962 the team received the Nobel Prize for Medicine.