Passage taken from "The Bermuda Triangle" by Charles Berlitz (1974):
(translated from the Italian edition)

Among ancient written documents about airplans, perhaps the more complete ones are those of Mahabharata that, even if it's believed to be written in its actual form in 1500 BC, it was evidently copied many times since the remote past. The poem is about the deeds of  the gods and of the ancient people of India, but it contais also a so great richness of scientific details that, when it was translated in nineteenth century, translators weren't be able to understand the meaning of reference to airplanes and rockets, because mechanisms described thousands of years before will appear, in modern times, only a hundred and fifty years later. Many lines of the Mahabharata,dedicated to flying machines called vimanas, contain detailed informations on principles used to build them; this fact created a great confusion among translators.
In another ancient Indian book, the Samarangana Sutradhara, the advantages and disadvantages of various types of ariplanes are discussed, with their relative ability of ascending, descending and their cruising speed; and, in addition to a description of the source of power, the mercury, the book contains raccomandations about the kind of wood and light-weight and absorbing-heat metals, adapt for building airplanes. There are also details on how to photograph enemy plans, on methods for determining his approaching systems, on means to make his pilots unconscious, and, finally, on how to destroy the enemy vimanas.
In another ancient Indian classic, the Ramayana, there are curious descriptions of  travels by airplane, thousands of years ago. The details of the landscapes over Ceylon and over parts of the Indian shores are described with a so great naturalness and are so similar to those we can see today, the beach reeves, the curve of the Earth, the slopes of the hills, the appearance of the cities and of the forests, to almost convince the reader of the fact that some aerial travellers of the ancient past have really seen the Earth from the sky, instead of imagining it. In a contemporary epitome of the Ramayana, the Mahavira Charita, the good hero Rama, returned from Lanka, where he just saved his wife Sita, receives as a gift a special vimana, described in this way: "Without obstacles at the motion, capable to maintain the desired speed, perfect in controls, always obedient the will (of who drives it) supplied with little sitting-rooms with windows and excellent seats...", a case in which an ancient classic seems a modern advertisement for the Air India. In the same text we find a very amazing dialogue, if we consider that it precedes of several thousands of years the reality of the space flights, and also the observation on how things look from space.

Rama: "It seems that the motion of this excellent vehicle has changed ".
Vishishara: " Now this vehicle is going away from the closeness of the center of the world ".
Sita: " Why this circle of stars is visible... even at daylight? "
Rama: " Queen! It's really a circle of stars, but because of the huge distance we can't see it at daylight, because our eyes are darkened by the sunlight. But now, with the ascent of the vehicle, it happens no more... ( and so we can see the stars)".

These descriptions could be memories of a very ancient technically advanced civilization , or only fantasies similar to those ones of some actual science-fiction writers endowed with a great imagination: in every case, some of these reports seem strangely contemporary, except the material used as power source for the airplane (that however could be a misinterpretation of the original text): "In the inside there must be placed the mercury engine, and below it it has to be placed its heating device made of iron. By means of the potential energy of mercury, who starts the propelling air whirl, a man sitting in the inside can travel great distances in the sky... because the mercury containers must be built in the internal structure. When they are heated by a controlled fire, the vimana generates, thanks to mercury, the power of a thunder... If this iron machine with opportunely welded joints is filled with mercury and the fire is canalized in the higher part, it develops a lion-roaring energy... and suddenly it becomes like a pearl in the sky".

A Mayan plate of the Troanus Codex: there is a being (with a not very human appearance) who is operating on an apparent "flying machine". According to the French researcher Robert Charroux the device containing the X is interpretable as "engine", whereas in the higher part there is a device similar to the nozzles of a rocket. The being is turning on, or heating, the "machine" with a sort of torch, while with the other hand he holds an unknown thing. Note the surprising analogy between this Mayan picture and the description of  vimanas in ancient Indian holy texts.
 
 
 
 

The funerary tumulus of Sce Huang-ti (or Ts'in Sce Huang-ti), the « yellow emperor », 48 meters high when it was discovered by the Segalen expedition, has five storeys and its side is 350 meters long, with a volume of  1,960,000 cubic meters; these dimensions make it, for  its bigness, the fourth monument of the world, after the Mexican pyramid of Cholula and the egyptian pyramids of Cheops and of Khephren. «The very serious chronicles of the historian Sseu-ma Ts'ien (135-85 B.C.), cided abundantly and very appreciated by Sinologists », Patrick Ferryn writes, « left us more than curious informations about this monumento ». Here there is an excerpt.
« Sce Huang-ti had all the empire into his hands. Workers who were sent to build the sepulchre were over 700,000. They dug the ground until they found water, then they casted the bronze into the hole and took the sarcophagus there. Buildings, palaces for all the administrations, wonderful tools, jewels and rare objects were carried and buried. Some craftsmen received the order to make crossbows and automatic arrows: if someone would dig a hole to enter the tomb, they would shot him. A true subterranean building rised there, where brooks of mercury drew eternal rivers: some machines made them pour and transmit them one another. On high there were all the signs of the sky, on the floor all the geographical dispositions. They made torches with seal fat, made to last for a lot of time. [...]. Then they put vegetation on the tumulus, in a way to make it seem a mountain ». [...]
Apart from tombs, in the desert of Gobi some objects were discovered, which testify the existance of an ancient civilization. We shall confine ourselves to cite, among these, perfect celestial maps of 20,000 years ago, and pictures representing unequivocally indians of South America, brought to light by the British archaeologist Aurel Stein together with some vases made by clay containing mercury.
We mentioned the mercury several times in this chapter. But which use could have had the one found in Gobi desert? The writer Jacques Bergier doesn't exclude that they could start from that metal to produce nuclear energy and he proposes the possibility that the very ancient culture of Gobi was destroyed by one of those tremendous wars waged with aircrafts and  incredible powerful explosives described by Hindu Holy Scriptures. We don't want to walk with the fantasy, but we have to note that in the desert we can meet (as observed also by Soviet researchers) wide regions of literally vitrified ground. The painter Nicolas Roerich, who explored these regions from 1920 to 1925, tells he saw a metallic airship to take off from a valley. And this happened long before people talked about UFO.
« Started from Darjeeling, in India », Jacques Bergier e Paul Chwat write, « his expedition went through the Himalaya, the Tibetan plateau and the mountain chain of  Kun-Lu, then it entered the Gobi. In the caravan a pony carried a chest containing a mysterious stone " which radiationis stronger of the one of the radium, but of another frequency" (?). It was a fragment fallen from the sky and kept, according to Andrew Tomas, in a temple of Shambhala».

Alchemists applied themselves to their art with great effort. Many laboratory techniques and instruments, used even today, certainly derive from them. The specialistic equipment they used are about eighty, among which there are furnaces of various types, ceramic dishes and crucibles, vials and Erlenmeyer flasks made of glass, files, spatules, pincers, hammers, baths of water and sand, cotton and flax filters, funnels, pestles and mortars, alembics and many other instruments and recipes, many of which are in use still today.
One of the practices more used was to warm objects, and the methods used were two: the first one, more gentle, consisted in plunging the object in horse excrement or in baths of water; the other method, more violent, provided the use of a furnace which temperature was continuously increased by sweating assistants who handled great bellows of  leather or blew into pipes.The temperature reached was so high that solid bodies became powder or evaporated. Alchemists also invented the distillation, that caused  the birth of an intense activity for produce perfumes; for example, they produced rose-water (very appreciated in the Islamic world of the Midlle-Ages) warming gently the petals until they obtained a distillate of aromatic oils. And, as a logic consequence, alchemists of XII century discovered that, distilling wine, they obtained a sort of medicine which favoured the conviviality: the alcool.
Usually, the same product was warmed, distilled and re-distilled hundredths of times, for months or for years, with the only purpose to reach a quite vague objective, that was to produce the quintessence of every thing, the red philosopher's stone.Alchimists believed that the powder obtained from this stone had the power to transform poor metals in gold.
The Arabian alchemist Geber described a process in which, for obtaining desired changes, one had to pass through seven hundreds progrssive phases of distillation. Modern chemists never tried to repeat these so long processes, and so we don't know if they're effective or not. But, as we'll see going forward, they could be effective.
Even if there wasn't unanimity about the process that had to be followed to obtain the philosopher's stone, the major part of texts describes seven passages, beginning from mercury or from a misture of mercury and sulphur. Every passage lasted for a lot of  time, from seven months to a year, and for all the time the temperature of the furnace had to be maintained constant. John Dastin, a monk alchemist lived in XIV century, wrote that  mercury, when transformed in the red elixir, had to be warmed on a slow fire for a hundred days. If the liquid evaporated, one had to start over again all the procedure.
Even the astrological period had its importance. They say that the alchemist Nicholas Flamel obtained for the first time the "stone" in January, 17th (Monday) 1432, at noon; then, from about "two hundred grams of mercury", he got the same quantity of silver. Again, using the  "red stone" on April, 20th of the same year, at 5 pm, he transformed in gold an equal quantity of  mercury (Flamel, His Exposition of the Hyeroglyphical Figures, page13). Whatever is the interpretation we can give of this, when flamel died in 1517, he and his wife made to build fourteen hospitals, three chapels and seven churches in Paris, and they financed other works in  Boulogne.
When the experimental science began to develop, in XVII  century, it rejected its alchemical roots. One of the first scientists, Robert Boyle, later well known for his "law of Boyle", was a firm supporter of the new experimental methods and commented with disdain that «the writings and the furnaces» of alchemists «were not only a source of light, but also of smoke».And, evidently annoyed by the difficulties and by the complexity of the alchemical works that he fatigued to understand, he added sarcastically that if their authors truly wished to maintain their art a secret,  «ther could, with less disrepute fot themselves and less problems for their readers, hide it better avoiding completely to write books, instead of write so bad ones.».
Nevertheless, in the last twenty years, it was proved that alchemy continued to charm Boyle so that he never ceased to make experiments of transmutation in secret. For hiding this interest he had, he began to write the results of the experiments using a very complicate secret code based on the letters of the Latin, Greek and Hebrew alphabets. Coded texts, hundredths of pages, were discovered in 1992. Now the question is: to whom did he hide these texts? And why? However their existance gives the measure of the seriousness with which Boyle took the alchemy. By now we can demonstrate that the famous scientist not only believed in the power of a powder to transform a chemical substance into another, but he was also convinced that the adepts, wise initiates to the alchemical arts, knew well the secret to produce and use it. He made great efforts to contact them and to have access to their secrets, but we don't know if he succeeded in his attempt; certainly he made rather curious declarations on the argument. In a dialog never published, nowadays kept at the Royal Society of London, Boyle states that initiates had the "red powder" deriving from the philosopher's stone, and that they knew how to use it, not only to make medicines and to transform poor metals in gold, but also to get in contact with spirits. The scientist also discovered a type of mercury for alchemic use that he defined "fine", but of which he never revealed the origin and he produced, or had as a gift, an alchemic powder he called "red earth". When he died, in 1691, he left a part of this "red earth" to his friend John Locke, philosopher and member of the Royal Society, which later gave it to another friend, Isaac Newton, president of the Royal Society since 1703. Then the "red earth" came into possession of the cheam of the scientific establishment scientifico of the time.
Newton, really a true monument in the science history, shared with Boyle the great interest for the alchemy, and they met secretly with various alchemists, even if they derided their work in public.The interest of Newton for the alchemy remained undiscovred for many years.When he died, in 1727, many of his papers were burnt, and many others were declared «not suitable for the publication» and kept by his family. His great interest for the alchemical arts didn't become known until these documents were sold by auction in London in 1936, when researchers discovered not only the predominant part that the alchemy had in his life, but also that the great scientist believed firmly that «ancient people knew all the secrets at the same time». Dr. Betty Dobbs, who studied these papers, concluded that «it could be stated with certainty that Newton believed so firmly in the fundamental principles of alchemy that he never came to deny the general validity...». One can doubt that Flamel and Dastin really succeeded in creating the philosopher's stone and in transforming metals in gold. Certainly it's a thing happened a lot of time ago and it's probable that reports made afterward contained some exaggeration. But, considering the scientifical rigour with which Boyle and Newton conducted their experiments, and that they left a series of writings on the argument, it's right to wonder what occupied so much their time? Which conclusion do we have to draw from the fact they devoted themselves for so much time to the treatment of the mercury, hoping to succeed in producing a red substance, stone or elixir?
In their case, the alchemical process couldn't have been only a symbolic one, because the two scientists were perfectly aware of the difference; and anyway, if it was only a symbolic thing, Boyle shouldn't have to use a code and Newton wouldn't have kept his papers in secret. Perhaps alchemists discovered techniques that the orthodox science didn't still develop, but that Boyle and Newton came to know.
Is it really possible that the repeated distillation or the heating of an object for a long period of time can produce such changes in an element or in a compound as to literally transform it in a product with extraordinary powers? And did the modern science ever succeeded in proving the existance of such a thing? The answer, even if it's bashfully given, it's yes.
After the slump of the Soviet Union and the weakening if its strict centralized power, Russian criminal organization assumed an ever-growing control on the country, also trying to contact foreign organizations. Since 1991 there were high-level meetings with the godfathers of the mafia, the camorra and the 'ndrangheta. The ties that the Russian criminality established with the Italian one made more simple the recycling of black money and the traffic of drugs and of illegal nuclear materials, "easily to find on the market thanks to the amministrative chaos and to the lack of funds that occur in the nuclear industry and in Soviet armed forces". Funds that, contrarily, certainly didn't lack to regimes interested to the purchase of these materials.
At the end of 1993 a rather worrying new element came into the scene. Russian criminal groups began to put on the market a substance unknown in Western countries until that moment and known simply as "red mercury". It was said that it was a secret product of  the Soviet nuclear industry. On December, 23th 1993, five Moldavian citizens tried to take in Rumania a certain quantity of pure uranium, together with a substanced called, exactly, red mercury, and that was destined for the nuclear black market (The Times, December, 24th 1993, page 9). West scientists, worried about this fact, tried to discover if the substance really existed and to establish what it was. But in 1994, the Ministry of the Energy of the United States and the International Agency for the atomic energy declared that the red mercury was an "invention", another fraud perpetrated by the mafia at the expenses of probable purchasers of illecit nuclear material. But some west nuclear physicists had good reasons to think the countrary, and they suspected that the accusations of fraud were motivated by the desire to hide a troublesome truth.
In June 1994, in an article appeared on the International Defense Review, the nuclear physicist  Frank Barnaby reported the conversation he had with a Russian physicist who remained anonymous. According to the scientist, the red mercury was a fundamental component of a new type of a Russian nuclear warhead; the substance showed itself to be a very effective catalyst in the detonation, so much that it was possible to produce nuclear bombs smaller and lighter than the west ones". Dr. Barnaby explained that thanks to this red mercury they could produce nuclear warheads that weighted from two to three kilograms, that could easily be placed in the center of a city and then explode. His major fear was that this very dangerous substance could fall in the hands of some terrorist. Moreover, he was informed that Israel, Iran, Iraq, Libya and Pakistan had obtained it through illegal ways and intended to begin the production of weapons. It's known that some of these countries support terroristic groups of various kinds, and they could give them either the raw substance or the finished product. The method of production of the red mercury has evident similarities with alchemical processes. If an alchemist worked inside a Russian military complex, and if he had access to modern equipment, certainly he could succeed in inventing something similar to this substance. Basing on informations supplied by the Russian scientist, the substance is produced in this way:

The antimony sesquioxide and the mercury oxide are warmed together to a temperature of  500 degrees centigrade and  to a pressure of 1 atmosphere of oxigen. The heating must continue at a costant temperature for two days. The final product it's a substance called mercury and antimony oxide. This process hasn't been reported by the official press until 1968.
The oxide obtained in this way is dissolved in pure mercury; oxde and mercury must be present in the same quantity. The mixture is then sealed in a container and put in a nuclear reactor, where it is irradiated for about twenty days at a temperature of 500 degrees centigrade.
Having done this, the mercury in excess is eliminated and what remains is a "cherry-red" substance with a consistance similar to liquid honey. Capsules containing this liquid are put in nuclear bombs."

It's strange that the production process described here provides the use of mercury and so long reaction times. And it's also strange that, together with the mercury, they use the antimony. The alchimist of the XII century Artefio talks about a special tincture containing antimony and sublimate mercury which would have had spectacular effects (The secret book of Artephius, page 6). Scientists admitted only in 1968 that a compound called mercury and antimony oxide could be realized; the red mercury, instead, isn't still accepted. The question we have is how many substances considered impossible can instead be realized thanks to the modern chemistry and technology, and having a lot of time at our disposal? Perhaps, in addition to the patience, experiments of ancient alchemists can teach us a lot".

Mercury Vortex Experiment

 
1) Build a "beaker capacitor" using the beaker base as the dielectric between two copper plates
2) Fill the "beaker capacitor" about 5% with mercury
3) Stir mercury with a wooden stick to initiate vortex motion
4) Charge the "beaker capacitor" via a DC power source. Mercury should continue to rotate and increase in speed as charge is applied.

WARNING : THIS EXPERIMENT COULD BE VERY DANGEROUS!

Note : This is based upon the Thomson Tornado Theory by Peter Thomson
 

Passage taken from Sanskrit Samarangana Sutradhara:

"Strong and durable must the body of the Vimana be made, like a great flying bird of light material. Inside one must put the mercury engine with its iron heating apparatus underneath. By means of the power latent in the mercury which sets the driving whirlwind in motion, a man sitting inside may travel a great distance in the sky. The movements of the Vimana are such that it can vertically ascend, vertically descend, move slanting forwards and backwards. With the help of the machines human beings can fly in the air and heavenly beings can come down to earth."

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