In Colony: Earth, Richard Mooney suggested that neither the theory of evolution nor the doctrine of divine creation accounts for the origins of humankind on this planet. He compiled masses of remarkable evidence, and theorized that earth was colonized by visitors from elsewhere in the universe who came to this planet with longer lifespans, greater intelligence, and a civilization far more sophisticated than anything earth has seen since. In Gods of Air and Darkness, Mooney asks: What happened to these colonizers? As he probes long dormant information, we learn that: * Thousands of years before the advent of quantum physics, ancient Indians, Phoenicians, and Greeks wrote about atomic particles and electron orbits and had measurements that could pinpoint half- lives of atomic particles. * Canadian and South American Indian tribes, Siberian shamans, and Chinese legends all refer to wars fought by celestial visitors using blinding rays, dragons of fire, and lightening - all of which sound remarkably like modern weapons: the laser, missiles, bombs, aircraft. * Ancient Indian texts describe "flying spears" that could ruin whole cities and detail the effects of radiation sickness - which until the Second World War, had never been observed. Mooney examines this and other persuasive evidence of "lost" civilizations and the catastrophe that engulfed them all, and suggests that a nuclear holocaust of global proportions may not only have destroyed whole peoples, but may also have changes the very climate of our planet.