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EARLY RAYS

I

ocated south of Sicily, the islands ofMalta and Gozo are home to megalithic

structures created by a highly developedpeople more than a thousand years ahead ofStonehenge and the pyramids. The monu-ments, including ancient temples, representfree-standing architecture in its purest andmost original form. Design features, in-cluding corbeled ceilings, are mirrored insubterranean mortuary shrines that havebeen carved out of solid limestone. (In archi-tecture, corbeling is a system of a row ofstones oversailing the one below it, reducingthe area of the ceiling with each row upwardand distributing its weight.) Malta’s Hal Sa-flieni Hypogeum provides the most extraordi-nary example. A multileveled complex ofcaves and ritual chambers, it is a gem of ar-chaeology that lay undisturbed until workersbroke into it accidentally in 1902.

As anyone who sings in the showerknows, sound echoing back and amplifyingitself from hard walls can do unusual things.That effect is magnified several times over inthe stone chambers. “Standing in the Hypo-geum is like being inside a giant bell,” saysLinda Eneix, President of the Old TemplesStudy Foundation (OTSF). “You feel thesound in your bones as much as you hear itwith your ears. It’s really thrilling!”

A consortium called The PEAR Proposi-tion, Princeton Engineering Anomalies Re-search, are pioneers in the field of archaeo-acoustics, merging archaeology and soundscience. Directed by Physicist Dr. RobertJahn, the PEAR group set out in 1994 to testacoustic behavior in megalithic sites such asNewgrange and Wayland’s Smithy in the UK.They found that the ancient chambers allsustained a strong resonance at a sound fre-quency between 95 and 120 hertz: wellwithin the range of a low male voice.

In subsequent OTSF testing, stone roomsin ancient temples in Malta were found to

L

Shifting ofbrain activity

when exposedto sound at afrequency of

110 hz.

ANCIENT TEMPLES USEDACOUSTIC TECHNOLOGIES

Corbelingin Mnajdra

Temple

match the same pattern of resonance, regis-tering at the frequency of 110 or 111 hz.This turns out to be a significant level forthe human brain. Whether it was deliberateor not, the people who spent time in such anenvironment were exposing themselves tovibrations that impacted their minds.

Sound scientist, Prof. Daniel Talma ofthe University of Malta explains: “At certainfrequencies you have standing waves thatemphasize each and other waves that de-emphasize each other. The idea that it wasused thousands of years ago to create a cer-tain trance—that’s what fascinates me.”

Dr. Ian A. Cook of UCLA and colleaguespublished findings in 2008 of an experimentin which regional brain activity in a numberof healthy volunteers was monitored by EEGthrough different resonance frequencies.Findings indicated that at 110 hz the pat-terns of activity over the prefrontal cortexabruptly shifted, resulting in a relative deac-tivation of the language center and a tempo-rary switching from left- to right-sided dom-inance related to emotional processing.People regularly exposed to resonant soundin the frequency of 110 or 111 hz wouldhave been “turning on” an area of the brainthat bio-behavioral scientists believe relatesto mood, empathy, and social behavior.

Research about Malta’s Temple Culture isdocumented on a DVD from the foundationat http://www.otsf.org/Legacy.htm.


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years earlier thanpreviously thought.

Meanwhile, recentgenetic studies inChina show thatthe ancestors oftoday’s Tibetans

had settled theTibetan plateau as

much as 21,000years ago—once

believed to be about10,000 years ago.

Similar findings arepushing back the frontier of human habita-tion in America many thousands of years be-yond the so-called Clovis horizon of 12,000years. In the Middle East, advanced humanactivity has been clearly documented at Go-beckli Tepe in Turkey to 10,000 years B.C.,thousands of years before we are told we hadgraduated from the hunter-gatherer stage.There are many other examples.

All of this serves to widen the already im-mense time window of possibilities whichwould seem essential for the rise and fall ofancient civilizations, advanced and other-wise. While, at this stage, the ruins of suchdevelopments may remain undiscovered, thefact is that the main area where such re-mains might be found—beneath the sea—isstill 97% unexplored.

nother controversial report for thefinding of Atlantis has made the news;

though, in fairness, it should be pointed outthat no Atlantis claim was made by the newdiscoverers. The story which first appearedthe Herald of Paris in December reportedthat anonymous researchers had found, inthe caribbean, the underwater ruins of a city.Accompanying the statement were severalgrainy satellite photos which appeared toshow a vast grid structure complete with apyramid and other large structures beneaththe water. The actual location was kept se-cret. Other media, including MSNBC, theHuffington Post, and Britain’s Daily Tele-graph quickly jumped to the Atlantis conclu-sion. And though the Herald protested, theA-word remains linked to the report.

At this point it is difficult to either con-firm or reject the validity of the claim. Otherresearchers who have pursued the possibilityof lost antediluvian civilization in the region,when contacted by Atlantis Rising, expressedskepticism over the reality behind the latestreport.

According to the Herald of Paris, the dis-coverers are trying to raise money to financefurther explorations, which they say is notconnected with the find reported a few yearsago off the northwest coast of Cuba. Thatsite, still not fully investigated, was said to beat a depth of over 2200 feet. This one appearsto be in much shallower water.

Although some distance from the Ba-hamas, where recent discoveries by Drs. Greg

ANew Claims Made for Atlantis in the Caribbean

and Laura Little and their associates havepinpointed ruins in locations which havebeen underwater since 10,000 B.C., the newsite, said to be older than the pyramids, alsoseems to fall into a persistent pattern ofclaims for lost ancient civilization in the wa-ters in the vicinity of the so-called BermudaTriangle. Edgar Cayce, Virginia Beach’sfamed sleeping prophet, famously said theruins of Atlantis were located in the area andpredicted they would soon come to light.

MSNBC image

Caribbeanregion

Human OriginsPushed Back

DeadSea

tools

espite long-standingrumors of ancient civil-

ization in the Amazonbasin, mainstream sciencehas long insisted that therewere no complex societiesthere before the arrival ofPortuguese and Spanish ex-plorers in the fifteenth century. Now, how-ever, as large areas of the region are being de-forested, signs of a vast ancient civilizationare coming to light.

According to New Scientist.com some 260giant avenues, ditches, and enclosures havebeen spotted from air in the border regionbetween Bolivia and Brazil. Such discoverieshave become commonplace as developmentrapidly expands.

The legendary British archaeologist andexplorer Colonel Percy Fawcett disappeared,along with his son, under mysterious circum-stances in 1925 during an expedition to findwhat he believed to be an ancient lost city inthe uncharted jungles of Brazil. Mainstreamarchaeology considered Fawcett a fool, butwherever he is now, he may be having achuckle.

Deadlines concerning discoveries inancient human development very

often seem to include the phrase“much earlier than we thought.”Whether the discussion is about thelast 20,000 years or the last couplemillion, new research pushes back thefrontiers of theoretical ancient time-lines. The latest examples come from theMiddle East as well as Europe and Tibet.

Evidence of sophisticated, human be-havior as early as 750,000 years ago—somehalf a million years earlier than has previ-ously been estimated by archaeologists hasbeen discovered by Hebrew University of Je-rusalem researchers. The discovery was madein excavations at the prehistoric GesherBenot Ya’aqov site, located along the DeadSea rift in northern Israel. Analysis of thespatial distribution of the findings there re-veals a pattern of specific areas in which var-ious activities were carried out. Such skillsare thought to be unique to modern humans.

Researchers in the Languedoc region ofFrance, after investigating a recently discov-ered cache of bones and tools, are now de-claring that human ancestors were in Europeover one and half million years ago, 200,000

H

Ancient AmazonCivilizationAgainAgain FoundFound



s regular readers of Atlantis Risingknow, I have found myself buttingheads with mainstream academicsmore than once. Perhaps most fa-

mously, or infamously, for two decades Ihave advocated the position that the GreatSphinx of Egypt traces its origins back thou-sands of years earlier than the standardEgyptological date of circa 2500 BC(as re-counted in various issues of Atlantis Rising,including most recently AR #s 76 and 78). Anolder Sphinx overturns the classical view ofwhen and where civilization and high cul-ture arose. Not only is the Great Sphinxolder than conventional wisdoms holds, butso too is the oldest portion of the Great Pyr-amid (see my 2005 book Pyramid Quest).

Further enraging my traditional col-leagues, I contend that climatic changes,earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, and bom-bardments by comets may have destroyedsome ancient civilizations catastrophically(Voices of the Rocks, 1999). Still furthercountering establishment views, I believe an-cient peoples were not totally isolated fromone another but were in contact across thecontinents and across the oceans, with theconcomitant exchange of ideas and even ma-terial goods, thousands of years before Co-lumbus (Voyages of the Pyramid Builders,2003). In my opinion, the evidence points toa primordial civilization, which arose towardthe end of the last ice age (with earlier pre-cursors) and subsequently spread around theglobe.

My unconventional thinking on ancienthistory is bad enough, but much to the cha-grin of some of my academic colleagues, Ihave delved into various “esoteric” and “oc-cult” studies, seriously researching suchtaboo subjects as parapsychology and psy-chical research (The Parapsychology Revolu-tion, 2008, as well as my articles in AR #s 66,67, 68, 71, 73).

Schooled to be a mainstream academicscientist (Ph.D. in geology and geophysics,1983), I am now a full-time tenured facultymember at Boston University. I started outwith a conventional career, studying fossilsand rocks from the period of about 65 to 40million years ago, so how did I become side-tracked? Where did I “go wrong”? Why chal-lenge orthodoxy? Why make life difficult formyself?

I never set out to question traditional no-tions. Trained as a natural historian, my de-sire is to make sense of the world as a whole.I am not satisfied with simply understandinga little piece in detail (many scientists are ex-treme specialists, and even I have my special-ties). Between my theosophist grandmother(she taught me to question everything, in-cluding the things she taught me) and agraduate education that encouraged true in-quiry, open-minded consideration of the un-conventional comes naturally to me. I re-

A

Continued on Page 62

• BY ROBERT M. SCHOCH, Ph.D.

speculative or unusual ideas, do not dismissanomalous data, and end up questioning thereigning paradigm. The stakes are high. Ifthe dissident succeeds in having a new ideaor theory accepted by the mainstream, therewards in terms of prestige (which may re-sult in funding, jobs, or other material bene-fits) can be enormous. However, the odds arestacked against the true innovator, and sucha path is difficult, to say the least. Not only,one can argue, is there a high probabilitythat the theory or ideas espoused by the in-novator are false in an absolute sense, buteven if there is something to them, there isan incredible prejudice against new ideasamong status quo scientists. As the NobelPrize winning physicist Max Planck (1858-1947), one of the founders of quantum me-chanics, famously asserted, “A new scientifictruth does not triumph by convincing its op-ponents and making them see the light, butrather because its opponents eventually dieand a new generation grows up that is fa-miliar with it.”

Among my academic colleagues, at in-formal university gatherings for instance, Ioften find that I must be extremely careful asto how much I reveal concerning my interestin either paranormal phenomena or anoma-lies of ancient history. A scientist or scholarwho seriously studies the idea of a primordialcivilization in the deep recesses of the past(before civilization is supposed to have origi-nated) or researches paranormal phenomenalike telepathy may be branded as a crank,

member well the private advice I was givenby a senior Yale professor while still a fledg-ling graduate student: If you want a satis-fying intellectual career with the potential todiscover something significant, then studyimportant, cutting-edge, possibly unconven-tional, subjects, even if such a path is diffi-cult and controversial. Of course, he warned,such a strategy is a genuine gamble, poten-tially risking one’s career and with it one’smental, emotional, and physical health andwell-being!

As science historians Juan Miguel Cam-panario and Brian Martin (in the 2008 bookedited by M. L. Corredoira and C. C. Per-elman, Against the Tide) have pointed out,there are different strategies one can pursueas a scientist (or academic scholar more gen-erally). Most scientists build their career byaccepting, and working within, the existingparadigm of the time, adding to the overallpicture with carefully sifted bits of data andperhaps elaborating and tweaking slightly ex-isting theories. The work they do is neitherhighly original nor spectacular, but in termsof peer acceptance and likelihood of success(whether measured in terms of contributionsto the paradigm, or more honestly, promo-tion and upward mobility in terms of jobsand salaries), it is a good, conservative, ap-proach. Such a path, herding with the scien-tific pack, generally results in a stable career,moderate prestige, and the material benefitsthat go with being a well-paid industrial oracademic scientist.

On the other hand, we can consider the“scientific risk-takers,” those who pursue

ALTERNATIVE THOUGHT

Independent Thinkingin the Academic WorldIndependent Thinkingin the Academic WorldIndependent Thinkingin the Academic WorldIndependent Thinkingin the Academic World

Reflecting on the Professional Perils ofChallenging Conventional Wisdom

Reflecting on the Professional Perils ofChallenging Conventional Wisdom


n his first night at Lubyanka Prisonin Moscow, the lean, frightenedarmy captain was subjected tosubtle cruelties he never knew ex-

isted. And this despite the fact that he hadbeen battling the Nazi invaders across thesteppes of Russia for four years, first as a sol-dier, then as an officer, in the Soviet Union’sRed Army.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn, 26, had been ar-rested at the battlefront on February 9, 1945,for making derogatory remarks about Sovietleader Joseph Stalin in letters to a friend. Hehad been stripped of his rank and quicklytransported from East Prussia to the Russiancapital by train.

On that first, sleepless, night in prison, hewas taken to one cell after another and madeto strip three times. The first time was tosearch his body cavities and rip his shoes andclothes apart to see if he was hiding aweapon. The second time was to make himshower, then clip off all his body hair. Thethird time was to subject him to a rigorousmedical examination. He was forced to givehis name and birthplace over and over again.Solzhenitsyn ended up in a cell without abed, continuously lit by a 200-watt bulb, sosmall he could rest on the floor only perpen-dicularly. He wasn’t allowed to sleep.

Then came three days of interrogation.Sometimes he was beaten. He passed thistime in solitary confinement.

Late on the fourth night, he was trans-ferred to a cell containing three other pris-

O

The Baptism ofJesus, Leonardo

da Vinci

GREATER DIMENSIONS

• BY JOHN CHAMBERS

me, and it had closed him off from me forgood and all. I would not bother to recallthis event if it had been the only one of itskind. But soon, with astonishment, andalarm, I became aware of the work of this in-ternal sensor relay as a constant, inborntrait. The years passed and I lay on the samebunks, marched in the same formations, andworked in the same work brigades with hun-dreds of others. And always that secretsensor relay, for whose creation I deservednot the least bit of credit, worked even be-fore I remembered it was there, worked atthe first sight of a human face and eyes, atthe first sound of a voice—so that I openedmy heart to that person either fully or justthe width of a crack, or else shut myself offfrom him completely . . . On the other hand,the sensor relay helped me distinguish thoseto whom I could from the very beginning ofour acquaintance completely disclose mymost precious depths and secrets—secretsfor which heads roll . . . During all those sev-enteen years [of imprisonment, exile, andunderground authorship] I recklessly re-vealed myself to dozens of people—anddidn’t make a misstep even once. (I havenever read about this trait anywhere, and Imention it here for those interested in psy-chology. It seems to me that such spiritualsensors exist in many of us, but because welive in too technological and rational an age,we neglect this miracle and don’t allow it todevelop.)”

For Solzhenitsyn, who had excelled in

Was the GreatRussian Writer

Aided bySupernatural

Powers?

oners. This made him happy. Other humanbeings were here, in the same predicamentas himself, with whom he could talk.

Solzhenitsyn didn’t meet these fellowprisoners until everyone woke up the nextmorning. He liked and trusted two of them.He completely mistrusted the third.

Twenty-nine years later, he wrote in TheGulag Archipelago (Vol. I), “I sensed some-thing alien in this front-line soldier who wasmy contemporary, and, as far as he was con-cerned, I clammed up immediately and for-ever.

“I had not yet even heard the word ‘na-sedka’—‘stool pigeon’—nor learned thatthere had to be one such ‘stool pigeon’ ineach cell. And I had not yet had time to thinkthings over and conclude that I did not likethis fellow, Georgi Kramarenko. But a spiri-tual relay, a sensor relay, had clicked inside

Prisoners brought to Lubyanka prison in 1928

Solzhenitsyn inVermont




o you believe in psychic phe-nomena or are you skeptical? Haveyou had an experience not explain-able by materialistic science? If you

have and you’re curious about your experi-ences, you may have already delved into therealm of parapsychology. This field of anom-alous leftovers is what the early psychologistand philosopher William James called the“unclassified residuum,” a field which hasbeen labeled pseudoscience by many main-stream scientists.

If you explore with an open mind, youwill find a large amount of scientifically validresearch showing that phenomena like telep-athy, remote viewing, distant intention, andgut feelings are real. In terms of science, theevidence is important but not sufficient. Anexplanatory framework is required to ac-count for the data and bridge to our existingscientific understanding of reality.

That’s what Dean Radin, the author ofthe book, Entangled Minds has attempted toprovide. He has demonstrated how the con-cept of quantum-entangled minds can becompatible with the concept of quantum-entangled particles, an already establishedscientific fact. His theory suggests that yourmind may be linked with other minds andperhaps other things as well. Informationfrom that connection comes into your con-scious awareness through intuitions, gutfeelings, or other subtle perceptions. This in-formation is not transmitted by normal

Dmeans. You are interconnected at a placewhere consciousness and matter interact.

Physicist Erwin Schrödinger first coinedthe term Verschrankung in German. Vers-chrankung is translated into English as en-tanglement. Some argue that this transla-tion is misleading. It might be better to talkabout this concept as a “folding of arms” oran “orderly folding.” Entanglement refers tohow pairs of subatomic particles behave as ifthey are connected even when separated by alarge physical distance. A change in one par-ticle is instantaneously reflected in theother. The change is too fast to be caused byany kind of cause-and-effect connection thatwe know.

Entanglement is one phenomena fromthe realm of quantum physics that New Agethinkers take as confirmation that there is aspiritual or energetic connection betweeneverything. If subatomic particles can be-come entangled, why not larger bits ofmatter? Why not people? Maybe entangle-ment is what causes a person to feel anxietyin his gut and to think of his brother at theexact moment that his brother has an auto-mobile accident.

Let’s take a brief look at some of thetrends in quantum physics and parapsycho-logical research and see how these two fieldsmay be pointing towards a partnership and anew theory of reality. Physics has come along way since Max Planck dubbed packetsof light ‘quanta’ around the turn of the lastcentury. Since its inception, quantumphysics has moved further out from main-

THE OTHER SIDE

• BY PATRICK MARSOLEK

PuttingOrthodoxThinkingto the Test

stream science into the realm of extraordi-nary possibilities, consciousness, and belief.There are now scientific conferences whichcombine quantum mechanics, conscious-ness, and quantum computing.

Yet skeptics and many scientists arguethat quantum entanglement can’t be an ex-planation for things like intuition and telep-athy because these quantum events onlyoccur in simple forms between pairs of suba-tomic particles in the very small, cold andfast quantum world. They believe there is noevidence of any quantum effect in our everyday lives and that there isn’t even any proofthat there is a psychic connection betweenpeople.

With the push to develop quantum com-puting, current research is revealing howthere might be much more quantum phe-nomena in our daily world. It seems that al-most every week there is a new study,showing that quantum effects have been ob-served in much more “sexy” environmentsthat are hot, wet, lasting, and much larger.In a 2004 article in New Scientist, MichaelBrooks says: “Physicists now believe that en-tanglement between particles exists every-where, all the time, and have recently foundshocking evidence that it affects the wider,‘macroscopic’ world that we inhabit.”Quantum entanglement has been shown inpaired neurons, in physical particles that arelarge—the current record is now up to 108atoms—and even in super conducting chips.

and theQuantum

Factor

and theQuantum

Factor



he winter of 1534 was particularlycruel to the first French adventurersin the New World led by Jacques Car-tier. In their camp on the coast of the

St. Lawrence River, near what would becomeMontreal, scurvy broke out.

The hideous disease had taken the lives oftwenty-five men whose bodies were piledunder snowdrifts. The ground was too frozento properly bury the dead. Among the re-maining one hundred and twenty-five, onlyten men were healthy. Those ten attemptedto make enough noise to prevent the nearbyAlgonquin tribe from finding out just howweak they were.

When their neighbors did findout, is was just in time to savetheir lives. The medicine manboiled the bark of a certain treeto make a brew they called “an-nedda,” and had the men drinkthis strange brew. To a man, allwere saved, their scurvy cured bythe concoction.

The British navy would not“discover” the cure for scurvyuntil 1795, which was based on

T• BY STEVEN SORA the same foundation the native seagoing

peoples of Canada had understood from cen-turies before.

The discussion of the ability of pre-Columbian North American peoples hasnever amounted to anything more than iso-lated accidents, in part because of the needto paint a picture of American peoples assavages. With ships as large or greater thanthat of Columbus, cities certainly greaterthan those of Europe, and more exacting sci-ence of mathematics and timekeeping, theAmericas clearly transcended our own pre-vious understanding.

That the Native Americans had a cure forthe greatest plight of long distance sailors

was not the last surprise for theFrench. What would grow to be-come Montreal was Hochlaga, aplanned village with streets em-anating from a central square.They were simply not the sav-ages that they would become inthe histories of the New World.Just as the Spanish would findthe Aztec City of Tenochtitlanto be greater than their owngreat city of Seville, the Euro-peans would also encounter

many surprises from the native Americans ofthe North.

One of the greatest surprises was from abranch of Algonquin language tribes calledthe Micmac. Upon entering the mouth of theSt. Lawrence, the French met this tribe whosurrounded their own ship with two separatefleets of fifty canoes each. The ability of thenative population to mass a large number ofpeople on the river was surprise enough, andthe French were soon to discover they couldnavigate great distances as well, possiblymaking numerous voyages to Scotland andthe northern isles.

Europeans would find that the native pop-ulations of the northeast actually did engagein a vast trade that brought both goods andknowledge from far flung corners of the con-tinent. From Mexico came the ability to farmbeans and corn. From the southeast cameconch shells, from the northeast came ob-sidian, and from the Great Lakes camecopper. Much of the trade was conducted bywater routes.

The ability to sail great distances by seawas made known to Columbus as well. Weknow that the Carib people who Columbusencountered had canoes, complete withmasts, that held twenty-five to seventypeople. Columbus seized a ship of the PutunMayans larger than his own. It could hold asmany or more sailors than his own shipsheld. The Mayans had fleets of a hundredships and more and built wharves in Tulumand on the island of Cozumel for trade. Onthe other side of the continent, the Kwakiutlin the Northwest would have had ocean-going “canoes” that held 70-100 individuals.Clearly trade was well established in theAmericas before the Europeans arrived.

Could AmericanIndians have crossedthe Atlantic?

Actually, we knowthat they did cross theocean, and long beforeColumbus. After Caesarhad conquered Gaul, acanoe with three survi-vors landed in Germany.A chieftain of a Germanicfrontier tribe handed themen over to the governorQuintus Meltellus, who recognized that theywere not Europeans. The incident was re-corded by the Roman historian Pliny. Otherinstances were mentioned in other works ofthe same period. Inuit people had beenknown to cross the icy North Atlantic inkayaks and one such kayak decorated the ca-thedral at Nidaros in Norway.

When Columbus was still a mapmaker hesailed to Galway in Ireland. Here a powerfulcurrent reaches the British Isles all the wayfrom the Gulf of Mexico. When Columbuswas there it washed ashore with two brown

ANCIENT MYSTERIES

The DISCOVERY ofthe OLD WORLD byNATIVE AMERICANS

Traditional Micmac Wigwam. Non traditional garb.. (1873)

Before the White Man Came West, Did the Red Man Go East?

Jacques Cartier

Pliny


Undergroundworkers in theGiza environs

ANCIENT MYSTERIES

n recent months, rumors and evidenceof excavations and underground pas-sages on and under the Giza Plateauhave surfaced. But why are the local au-

thorities mocking and downplaying these?

The Giza Plateau hosts the only survivingwonder of the ancient world: the Great Pyr-amid. The site as a whole continues to in-trigue many, and at one time every archaeo-logical discovery there received massivepublicity. But in recent years, the excava-tions and discoveries at Giza are receiving al-most no media attention. Why?

The central figure in all the goings-on onthe Plateau since the early 1990s is ZahiHawass, the controversial poster boy of Egyp-tology. In June 2009, in front of hundreds ofcameras, he welcomed American presidentBarack Obama to the Giza Plateau. Heseemed far less pleased, though, with thevisit in November of American pop star Bey-once, whom he labeled a “stupid person.”The comment made international headlines,as does most of what Hawass says. He is, inshort, able to generate massive exposure foranything Egyptological, whether it is an ar-chaeological discovery or a campaign to re-turn artifacts from the Louvre or other Euro-pean museums.

One might therefore think that Egypt ispleased with its son. But the Egyptian news-

I• BY PHILIP COPPENS papers are not. In reporting on the Beyonce

incident, they highlighted that this was typi-cally Hawass, a man known for his outbursts,adding that he often uses Arabic to insultguests at dinner events and gatherings, be-lieving that they will not understand his Ar-abic. The Bikya Masr newspaper even re-ported that “The incident has leftarchaeologists angered. They say it is time toshow the world the real Hawass. ‘He insultsand is so controlling that it has become ex-tremely difficult to work in this country,’ onearchaeologist [who requested anonymity]said.” So, who is the real Hawass?

As reports have it, Egypt would like to get

rid of Hawass, but can’t. Indeed, Hawass, ap-parently, has more lives than a cat. Set formandatory retirement in May 2010, in Oc-tober 2009, the President of Egypt signed adecree naming Hawass Vice Minister of Cul-ture for life. It is a remarkable move, inas-much as Hawass’ career has always been sur-rounded by scandal.

Just a year before, on October 8, 2008,the former Head of Restoration in IslamicCairo and two other Egyptian Culture Min-istry officials were jailed for ten years for re-ceiving bribes from contractors. The Cairocourt ordered Ayman Abdel Monem, HusseinAhmed Hussein and Abdel Hamid Qutb to

42 ATLANTIS RISING • Number 80

The UnknownCatacombs

of GizaThe Unknown

Catacombsof GizaIs There a Secret Seige

Beneath the Pyramids?Is There a Secret SeigeBeneath the Pyramids?Is There a Secret SeigeBeneath the Pyramids?Is There a Secret SeigeBeneath the Pyramids?Is There a Secret SeigeBeneath the Pyramids?



one cavity, roughly the size of a small swim-ming pool, which could fill up continuouslywith water—in short, an underground lake.Which brings us to the next question: Whyare they emptying an underground lake? Forstability, or for something else? One mightargue that removing the water will reducethe stability of the Sphinx, which was an ob-vious concern since this is why the stabilityof the Sphinx area was being monitored. Butapparently, based on a month-long observa-tion, emptying this underground cavity doesnot endanger the stability of the surfacestructures. But why empty it in the firstplace? To keep the Sphinx’s paws dry?

One source, when confronted withHawass’s reports and my observation, hasgone so far as to argue that Hawass—accompanied by Egyptologist Mark Lehner—had actually found this lake several yearsago. The lake is under the entire plateau, thearea contained within the concrete wall (con-struction of which began in 2002). He addedthat, in his opinion, these projects were prep-aration for an exploration of the Giza under-world.

In August 2009, British author AndrewCollins and Nigel Skinner-Simpson an-nounced they had made a fortuitous dis-covery on the Giza Plateau: a cave system ex-plored by Henry Salt and Giovanni Cavigliain 1817, but whose existence was subse-quently forgotten.

As far back as 2003, Nigel Skinner-Simpson had realized that Henry Salt, theBritish consul general to Egypt, workingalongside the Italian explorer and sea captainGiovanni Caviglia, had entered unknown“catacombs” at Giza, somewhere west of thepyramid field. When Salt’s memoires werepublished, the two men learned that theycontained a better account of the explorationof the catacombs. The explorers had appar-ently penetrated “several hundred yards” into

Andrew Collins Explores Giza’s “Catacombs”

pay fines of between LE 200,000 and LE550,000. Abdel Hamid Qutb was actually thehead of the technical department at the Su-preme Council of Antiquities (SCA) and re-ported to Hawass. The contracts under suspi-cion were worth millions of dollars andinvolved the restoration of some of Egypt’smost famous monuments.

At the time of his arrest in September2007, Hawass was quick to defend Qutb,claiming that the accused was not in a posi-tion to give out contracts. Hawass told theBBC’s Arabic Service that contracts are onlyhanded out after a “rigorous procedure,” andQutb had no decision-making power. Thecourt obviously ruled differently. Hawass, itseemed, never commented…

Despite personally loving the limelight,most of the excavations at Giza in recentmonths seem intended to shun the daylight.There are even allegations that Hawass is ex-ploring the Giza underworld in almost totalsecrecy, with some Egyptian newspapersgoing as far as to use the word “illegal.”

When Hawass does announce his en-deavors, he seems to distort the truth. InApril 2009, Hawass reported: “Under my di-rection, the Supreme Council of Antiquitiesis working to reduce the groundwater levelaround antiquities sites throughout Egypt.We have completed a USAID-funded effort tode-water Karnak and Luxor temples, andwork is underway in many other places. Oneof our greatest recent successes has been thedevelopment of a system to prevent the Great

Sphinx at Giza from getting its paws wet!”It reads like the most mundane of re-

search, but it is anything but. When onelooks at Hawass’s reports rather than at hisstatements to the press, an interesting pic-ture emerges. We learn that in early 2008,the Supreme Council of Antiquities co-operated with Cairo University’s EngineeringCenter for Archaeology and Environment todrill four boreholes, each four inches in di-ameter and about twenty meters deep, intothe bedrock at the base of the Sphinx. Acamera was lowered into each borehole toallow examination of the plateau’s geology. Aseparate scientific update states that 260cubic meters of water are being pumped outevery hour through these drainage tubes.That’s 6,240 cubic meters or 6,240,000 litersof water per day. An Olympic swimming poolhas 2,500,000 liters. In short, water of aquantity equal to almost three Olympicswimming pools is pumped away on a dailybasis from underneath the Sphinx. Indeed,the Sphinx itself could roughly fit inside anOlympic swimming pool. The report con-tinues that, as such, the water in front of theSphinx has been reduced to 70 per cent of itsoriginal volume. But wait: no fewer than 33monitoring points were established to in-spect the movement of the body of theSphinx and the surrounding bedrock, thisover a period of a month, and this moni-toring proved that they were steady.

Now, unless I am seriously mistaken, forsuch significant amounts of water to bemoved hourly there would need to be at least

A Cairo newspaper describes recent Giza excavations



• BY J. ALLAN DANELEK

• BY STEVEN SORA

ALTERNATIVE SCIENCE

e normally assume that themodern era of ufology began withKenneth Arnold’s sighting ofmysterious objects—later dubbed

“flying saucers” by the press—over MountRainier, Washington, in 1947. Many, though,are surprised to learn that it actually beganmuch earlier—during the time of JulesVerne and H.G. Wells to be exact—with the“great airship flap” of 1896-97, an eventwhich remains as great a mystery today as itwas over a century ago.

For those unfamiliar with this event, it allstarted on the evening of November 17, 1896,when a bright light suddenly appeared overSacramento, California, silently making itsway over the city (and against the wind) be-fore disappearing into the dark rain clouds assuddenly as it had first appeared. It was seenby literally hundreds of witnesses; andthough most described it as simply a bright,slow moving light, some maintained that thelight was suspended beneath a massive,“cigar shaped” vessel of considerable size. Afew even claimed to spot what appeared to beoversized propellers and rudders on its un-dercarriage, with one man describing it ashaving wheels on its side like those on“Fulton’s old steam boat.”

After several repeat appearances over bothSacramento and San Francisco (onceshowing over both cities on the same eve-ning), after a few weeks the reports abruptlyceased, suggesting that the mysterious vis-itor had departed as mysteriously as it hadfirst arrived. Its absence was to prove short-lived, however. In early February the samemysterious light/craft was sighted across theprairie states of the Midwest, apparentlymaking its way eastward at a slow but steadypace. Reports of the craft continued withsome regularity throughout the spring of1897 before once again abruptly vanishing—this time apparently for good.

What was the strange light seen over Cali-fornia that autumn and over much of theMidwest the next spring? No one knows. De-bunkers, of course, maintain that the wholeincident was nothing more than a hoax—aproduct of the “yellow journalism” of the eradesigned to boost newspaper sales—mixedwith naiveté and a type of mass hysteria inwhich people imagined any light in the skyto be the rogue “airship.” Indeed, some spec-ulation had it that the object was an espe-cially bright appearance of the planet Venus.Such a premise, though, seems highly pre-sumptuous. First, there is no evidence thatthose living a century ago were any morelikely to mistake the planet Venus for an air-ship than we are today; in fact, it could evenbe maintained that those living in final yearsof the nineteenth century saw a considerablydarker night sky, often superior to that of thecasual star gazer of today. Second, it fails toexplain why reports have the ship tending to

W

pellers, wings, rudders, and undercarriages—all such appendages unlikely, it seems, to beseen on an extraterrestrial vehicle? And whydid it move in a slow, ponderous fashion soin contrast to the stunning aerial feats ofwhich modern UFOs seem capable today?The craft sounds a bit too prosaic to be evi-dence of alien technology, even by nine-teenth century standards.

But if we assume the craft to be neitherimaginary nor extraterrestrial, what is left?Only one possibility remains, and that is thatthe vessel seen in the skies over much of theUnited States in the winter of 1896-97 was apowered balloon or, more accurately, a diri-gible, possibly being put through its paces bysome intrepid inventor intent on bringinglighter-than-air flight to humanity.

It’s an intriguing possibility that is rarelyconsidered by most skeptics today, who tendto dismiss the notion outright, confident intheir assumption that such an explanation isinconsistent with the technological capabil-ities of the time. The world was still in its in-dustrial infancy, they argue, and while manyremarkable inventions had been introducedby then, most people still lived much as theirforefathers did, using candles and kerosenelamps to light their homes and making theirway about via carriages or on horseback. Yes,there were trains transiting the continentand steamships capable of crossing the At-lantic in a week; but in 1896 the Wrightbrothers were still seven years away fromlaunching their tiny airplane, and practical,reliable travel by air was still decades in thefuture. Even Von Zeppelin had not yet begun

move from west to east or why they wouldbegin and cease so abruptly. Even if we as-sume the majority of reports were spuriousor mistaken, it is curious how “mass hys-teria” is capable of effecting only peopleliving along a particular path. Further, it isuncertain how many midwesterners wouldhave been aware of the earlier Californiasightings and thus be inclined to imaginethe mysterious “airship” was headed theirway; newspapers rarely picked up general in-terest stories from other parts of thecountry, preferring instead to stick with na-tional headlines and stories of local interest.In this case, however, media coverage of thesightings tended to follow the appearances,not precede them as would be the expectednorm if the media was simply priming thecountry for more stories. And, finally, wouldsome of the largest and most influential pa-pers of the day be so willing to compromisetheir journalistic integrity—and with it,their political clout—all in some feeble effortto sell a few more papers? Clearly, the masshysteria/yellow journalism theory leaves uswith as many questions as it answers.

Then there is the extraterrestrial theoryso popular in some quarters today. Could thelights have been evidence of alien visitation,as some maintain? Obviously, in the era be-fore manned flight, any light travelingthrough the sky was significant, making theprospect that they were not something fromthis world plausible. But if we are to take themany eyewitness accounts seriously (or, atleast, the most reliable among them), howdo we account for the fact that many wit-nesses described the craft as possessing pro-

Hoax, UFO, orCutting EdgeTechnology?


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