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Mathematician Richard L. Thompson discovered evidence for extremely early astronomical observations in India. Six traditional Indian astronomical texts (the Surya-siddhanta, the Paitamahasiddhanta of the Visnudharmottara Purana, the Brahmagupta-siddhanta, the Lalla Tantra, the Damodariya B. Tulya, and the Graha-laghava) provide polar longitudinal and latitudinal coordinates for 35 stars. But these coordinates differ from modern coordinates for these stars by a significant amount. Dr. Thompson wrote: “Many stars are observed to move slowly with respect to the celestial sphere. These motions, called proper motions, vary from star to star. For a typical star, the proper motion amounts to a small fraction of a second of arc per year…” By using the equations of modern astronomy to calculate where the stars were in the past, Dr. Thompson discovered that the difference vectors “pointing from the modern star positions to the corresponding jyotisa [ancient Indian] star positions are strongly correlated with the reversed proper motion vectors of the stars. Once precession is taken into account, the modern star positions show a tendency to move towards the jyotisa star positions as we go back in time.” The jyotisa coordinates for a group of stars appear to have been measured around fifty thousand years ago. The idea that astronomers were making observations of star positions fifty thousand years ago in India conflicts with the modern historian’s scenario of early history, according to which civilized human beings capable of making such observations did not appear until only a few thousand years ago. But Vedic texts consistently maintain that there was an advanced civilization in India going back many thousands of years. Dr. Thompson made further significant discoveries in this regard. Traditional Indian scholars maintain that the ancient Vedic text Srimad-Bhagavatam is 5,000 years old. According to Western scholars, it is between 1,000 and 1,500 years old. Dr. Thompson discovered that the Fifth Canto of Srimad-Bhagavatam contains accurate values for the distances from the sun to the planets of our solar system out to Saturn. These values differ from modern values by only a few percent. This level of accuracy was not achieved until 300 years ago, when telescopes and Kepler’s and Newton’s laws were used. In medieval times, when Western scholars would have us believe the Bhagavatam was written, values for planetary distances were horribly inaccurate, being many times too small, both in India and in the West. Hence, the level of accuracy of planetary distances found in the Bhagavatam could not have been a product of medieval astronomy. It could not have been a product of the astronomy of the Greeks, since Greek astronomers from Aristarchus to Ptolemy severely underestimated planetary distances. The known astronomy in the several millennia before the Greeks was even cruder. Thus, the level of sophistication of astronomical knowledge in the Bhagavatam provides evidence for the existence of an advanced civilization at least several millennia before the birth of Christ. It is important to note that in ancient India the science of astronomy was viewed as a servant of a more important science, which is the process of realizing the superhuman capabilities of the conscious self.