Chapter 7
Ancient Enigmas

 


Dinosaurs


It is assumed that man is the product of slow and orderly evolution and his present hope for three-score and ten years is a great advancement, since recorded history indicates to us that during other periods of history, when more hostile conditions prevailed, man had a much reduced life-span. I would like to conjecture, however, that a fundamental reordering of things during several episodes in the earth’s past might have appreciably altered conditions so that an original “Edenic condition” was lost. Must we assume that the ancients did not understand time as we know it when they claimed to live hundreds of years? Or must we assume that Time is always and forever the same thing? Obviously many creatures have lived upon the earth that no longer live here.

 

When they disappear or are all killed off, we say that they are “extinct”. It occurred to me at some point that, perhaps, “extinction” is a symptom of the fact that the cosmos in which that species was able to flourish has lost its vigor. It doesn’t matter how the species becomes extinct, because, in the end, it is only a symbol. What is more, the fact that a certain species does not reassert itself after such losses suggests that certain conditions have changed, and those changes are lethal.


When we begin to look at the South American cultures, the first thing we are told is how “recent” they are. Polish archaeologist Arthur Posnansky dated the Kalasasaya palace court at Tiahuanaco, near Lake Titicaca in Bolivia, to 15,000 to 10,000 BC. Mainstream experts assure us that this evidence simply cannot be considered because radiometric dating says otherwise.

 

Well, we already know that radiometric dating is a lost cause, so we can set that aside for the moment and consider other factors.


This brings us back to the subject of Atlantis. According to Plato,

“In those days the Atlantic was navigable; and there was an island situated in front of the straits which are by you called the Pillars of Hercules”.

We might want to ask what Plato could have meant by this remark since, based on all knowledge of the sea floor of the Atlantic, it has always been navigable. However, there is something about this that was pointed out to me by an individual in the shipping industry who wrote:

I am intrigued by Plato’s remarks that the Atlantic was “navigable” before. As ship equipment suppliers, when we say the water is navigable, it means not only that the water is deep enough (the Atlantic was deep when the Critias story was reconstructed, so how could it have been any more convenient before?), but “navigable” also means, today, that on land there are sufficient radio direction or lit indicators and, that once a ship is out of sight of land, he has gyros, or echo sounders which, together with accurate charts means he can safely increment his way forward avoiding shipwreck. So “Navigable“ on a deep ocean really means instruments are on land and on the ships and that accurate charts exist (with soundings) - all three.111

Since Ignatius Donnelly, scholars have produced a veritable shipload of books speculating on the location of Atlantis. I have a couple of shelves full of these books, and the theories range from the destruction of the island of Santorini by the eruption of Thera around 1600 BC112 to Indonesia, to the Black Sea. More recently, Rand and Rose Flem-Ath have proposed that Antarctica was the “island of Atlantis” and that it “shifted” or “moved” South as a function of crustal displacement.

 

111 Matthew Walker, private correspondence with the author.

112 This approximate date is pretty well confirmed by Sturt Manning’s A Test of Time which is devoted to the dating of the eruption of Thera which has been tree-ring calibrated.


Plato described Atlantis as an “island empire” that, “in a single day… disappeared in the depths of the sea”. But he also tells us that this “island” was bigger than Libya and Asia Minor combined. Right away we perceive that his terms are a bit different from what we would use. We might think that his term “island”, meant simply that this body of land was not connected to Eurasia or Africa - that it was a distinct body of land surrounded by water - except for something else he added: Plato also told us that Atlantis was “the way to other islands, and from these you might pass to the whole of the opposite continent”. This suggests to us an unusual land formation - an isthmus.


His expression that it “disappeared into the depths of the sea” may have been meant to suggest that it was swept by vast tsunamis as the result of some cataclysmic event. So, considering these clues - its vast size, the definition of the term “navigable”, and the idea that “disappearing into the depths of the sea” very likely meant swept by terrifying walls of water, let take a peek through the Pillars of Hercules.

 

What do we see? Well, we see the Americas. We see North and South America connected by an isthmus. We also see a lot of little islands in the Caribbean.


Another clue that Plato gives us is that Atlantis had a lot of elephants. Something catastrophic happened to the large mammals roaming the world during the Pleistocene Epoch. Woolly mammoths, mastodons, toxodons, saber-toothed tigers, woolly rhinos, giant ground sloths, and many other large Pleistocene animals are simply no longer with us. The fact is, more than 200 species of animals completely disappeared at the end of the Pleistocene approximately 12,000 years ago in what is known to Paleontologists as the “Pleistocene Extinction”.

 

At the same time that the paleontologists are dealing with the unsettling notion of such a recent mass death, geologists are confronted with the evidence of terrifying geological changes which took place: extensive volcanism and earthquakes, tidal waves, glacial melting, rising sea levels, and so on. The Pleistocene Epoch didn’t end with a whimper, for sure. It went out roaring and thundering.


We already know that Geologists and Paleontologists don’t like catastrophism - it keeps them up at night. They fought long and hard against the Catastrophists. But in the present day, scientists in both fields have to face the fact that the Catastrophists were mostly right from the beginning - even if they might have gone overboard and explained everything in terms of catastrophe. It is evident that there are “gradual” changes, but that most of what happens on the Big Blue Marble in terms of significant changes is catastrophic.


One of the major facts that paleontologists and geologists and archaeologists have had to face is the stupendous number of frozen carcasses in Canada and Alaska in the western areas, and in Northern Russian and Siberia in the eastern areas - all dated to about 12000 years ago. This suggests, of course, that something dreadful happened on the planet, and its effect on the Northern hemisphere was more severe than on the Southern hemisphere.


Back in the 1940s Dr. Frank C. Hibben, Prof. of Archeology at the University of New Mexico led an expedition to Alaska to look for human remains. He didn’t find human remains; he found miles and miles of icy muck just packed with mammoths, mastodons, and several kinds of bison, horses, wolves, bears and lions. Just north of Fairbanks, Alaska, the members of the expedition watched in horror as bulldozers pushed the half-melted muck into sluice boxes for the extraction of gold. Animal tusks and bones rolled up in front of the blades “like shavings before a giant plane”.

 

The carcasses were found in all attitudes of death, most of them “pulled apart by some unexplainable prehistoric catastrophic disturbance”.113 The evident violence of the deaths of these masses of animals, combined with the stench of rotting flesh, was almost unendurable both in seeing it, and in considering what might have caused it. The killing fields stretched for literally hundreds of miles in every direction.114

 

113 Hibben, Frank, The Lost Americans (New York: Thomas & Crowell Co. 1946).

114 Ibid.
 

There were trees and animals, layers of peat and moss, twisted and tangled and mangled together as though some Cosmic mixmaster sucked them all in 12000 years ago, and then froze them instantly into a solid mass.115 Just north of Siberia entire islands are formed of the bones of Pleistocene animals swept northward from the continent into the freezing Arctic Ocean. One estimate suggests that some ten million animals may be buried along the rivers of northern Siberia. Thousands upon thousands of tusks created a massive ivory trade for the master carvers of China, all from the frozen mammoths and mastodons of Siberia.

 

The famous Beresovka mammoth first drew attention to the preserving properties of being quick-frozen when buttercups were found in its mouth. What kind of terrible event overtook these millions of creatures in a single day? Well, the evidence suggests an enormous tsunami raging across the land, tumbling animals and vegetation together, to be finally quick-frozen for the next 12000 years. But the extinction was not limited to the Arctic, even if the freezing at colder locations preserved the evidence of Nature’s rage.


Paleontologist George G. Simpson considers the extinction of the Pleistocene horse in North America to be one of the most mysterious episodes in zoological history, confessing, “no one knows the answer”. He is also honest enough to admit that there is the larger problem of the extinction of many other species in America at the same time.116

 

The horse, giant tortoises living in the Caribbean, the giant sloth, the saber-toothed tiger, the glyptodont and toxodon. These were all tropical animals. These creatures didn’t die because of the “gradual onset” of an ice age, “unless one is willing to postulate freezing temperatures across the equator, such an explanation clearly begs the question”.117 Massive piles of mastodon and saber-toothed tiger bones were discovered in Florida.118

 

115 Sanderson, Ivan T., “Riddle of the Frozen Giants”, Saturday Evening Post, No. 39, January 16, 1960.
116 Simpson, George G., Horses, New York: Oxford University Press) 1961.

117 Martin, P. S. & Guilday, J. E., “Bestiary for Pleistocene Biologists”, Pleistocene Extinction, Yale University, 1967.
118 Valentine, quoted by Berlitz, Charles, The Mystery of Atlantis (New York, 1969).

 

Mastodons, toxodons, giant sloths and other animals were found in Venezuela quick-frozen in mountain glaciers. Woolly rhinoceros, giant armadillos, giant beavers, giant jaguars, ground sloths, antelopes and scores of other entire species were all totally wiped out at the same time, at the end of the Pleistocene, approximately 12000 years ago.


This event was global. The mammoths of Siberia became extinct at the same time as the giant rhinoceros of Europe; the mastodons of Alaska, the bison of Siberia, the Asian elephants and the American camels. It is obvious that the cause of these extinctions must be common to both hemispheres, and that it was not gradual.

 

A “uniformitarian glaciation” would not have caused extinctions because the various animals would have simply migrated to better pasture. What is seen is a surprising event of uncontrolled violence.119 In other words, 12000 years ago, a time we have met before and will come across again and again, something terrible happened - so terrible that life on earth was nearly wiped out in a single day.

 

Harold P. Lippman admits that the magnitude of fossils and tusks encased in the Siberian permafrost present an “insuperable difficulty” to the theory of uniformitarianism, since no gradual process can result in the preservation of tens of thousands of tusks and whole individuals, “even if they died in winter”.120

 

Especially when many of these individuals have undigested grasses and leaves in their belly. Pleistocene geologist William R. Farrand of the Lamont-Doherty Geological Observatory, who is opposed to catastrophism in any form, states,

“Sudden death is indicated by the robust condition of the animals and their full stomachs … the animals were robust and healthy when they died”.121

Unfortunately, in spite of this admission, this poor guy seems to have been incapable of facing the reality of worldwide catastrophe represented by the millions of bones deposited all over this planet right at the end of the Pleistocene.

 

Hibben sums up the situation in a single statement:

“The Pleistocene period ended in death. This was no ordinary extinction of a vague geological period, which fizzled to an uncertain end. This death was catastrophic and all inclusive.”122

119 Leonard, R. Cedric, Appendix A in “A Geological Study of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge”, Special Paper No. 1 ( Bethany: Cowen Publishing 1979).
120 Lippman, Harold E., “Frozen Mammoths”, Physical Geology, (New York 1969).

121 Farrand, William R., “Frozen Mammoths and Modern Geology”, Science, Vol.133, No. 3455, March 17, 1961.
122 Hibben, op. cit.

 

The conclusion is, again, that the end of the Ice Age, the Pleistocene extinction, the end of the Upper Paleolithic, Magdalenian, Perigordian, and so on, and the end of the “reign of the Gods”, all came to a global, catastrophic conclusion about 12,000 years ago. And, as it happens, even before this evidence was brought to light, this is the same approximate date that Plato gave for the sinking of Atlantis.

 

In recent years, a cartographer named J. M. Allen published a book entitled Atlantis: The Andes Solution. Allen focused on South America as Atlantis. He points to the fact that the Indian name for South America - before Columbus arrived - was “Atlanta”. He informs us that this is related to the Quechua word for copper, “antis.” Allen believes he has found the plain of canals on the Altiplano of southern Peru and northern Bolivia.

 

He suggests that the plain was very smooth and level, was surrounded by mountains on all sides, and was high above ocean level. This is, indeed, a close description of the Altiplano, supposedly the largest level plain in the world, containing the inland seas of Lake Titicaca and Lake Poopo. Allen found the remains of a channel of enormous dimensions in Bolivia, and was certain he had found the ancient city of Atlantis. Unfortunately, like William Farrand above, Allen is unable to let go of certain assumptions - such as reliance upon the chronologies established by uniformitarian believers. He suggests that the Andean/Atlantean civilization ended at the time of the eruption of Thera.


We already noted that Arthur Posnansky dated the Kalasasaya palace court at Tiahuanaco, near Lake Titicaca, in Bolivia to 15,000 to 10,000 BC. And Allen mentions that Lake Poopo is known to have flooded around 12000 years ago. There are ancient terraced cornfields on the sides of the mountains rising above Lake Titicaca where corn no longer grows. Corn only grows at lower altitudes. The lower altitude terraces where corn still grows are still above Lake Titicaca.

 

What this suggests is that peoples who constructed the terraces, and who were growing corn there, must have been doing so at a time when the land was lower. There is a stone causeway leading “out” of Lake Titicaca to nowhere. This causeway is built like an ancient wharf, which has suggested that it was built when the lake and the city were at sea level.


The remains of Tiahuanaco, the site of a technologically advanced culture considered by many archaeologists (romantic, not orthodox) to be the oldest ruins in the world.

 

Although some misguided scholars have attributed the buildings of Tiahuanaco to the Incas, it has now been established that the city was already in ruins when the first Incas came upon the scene.

In 1540 the Spanish chronicler, Pedro Cieza de Leon, visited the area and his description of the statues and monoliths compares very closely to what we see today. The site is at an altitude of 13,300 feet, which places it some 800 feet above the present level of Lake Titicaca. Most archaeologists agree that in the distant past Tiahuanaco was a flourishing port at the edge of the lake, which means that the water has receded almost 12 miles and has dropped about 800 feet since then.

All concur that the lake is shrinking, due mainly to evaporation, since no rivers flow from it In November 1980, the well known Bolivian author and scholar of pre-Columbian cultures, Hugo Boero Rojo, announced the finding of archaeological ruins beneath Lake Titicaca about 15 to 20 meters below the surface off the coast of Puerto Acosta, a Bolivian port village near the Peruvian frontier on the northeast edge of the lake.


If, over the past 3 or 4000 years, Lake Titicaca has slowly receded, as appears to be the case - as all scientists agree, then how can we explain the existence of stone temples, stairways, and roads still under water’? The only answer is that they were built before the lake materialized. We must go back, then, to the remnants of Tiahuanaco and reexamine the more than 400 acres of ruins, only 10 percent of which have been excavated. We have pointed out that dirt covers the ancient civilization to a depth of at least 6 feet. The only explanation for this accumulation is water.


A large amount of water had to have inundated the city; when it receded it left the silt covering all evidence of an advanced civilization, leaving only the largest statues and monoliths still exposed. It is logical to conclude, therefore, that Tiahuanaco was built before the lake was created, and not as a port on its shore. As the waters today continue to recede, we should be able to find more evidence of the city’s remote peoples. Scientists theorize that the area at Lake Titicaca was at one time at sea level, because of the profusion of fossilized marine life that can be found in the region.

 

The area then lifted with the Andean upheaval and a basin was created which filled in to form the lake. No one has suggested the marine life might have been brought to the altiplano by seawaters that were at flood stage. The Tiahuanacans could have been victims of worldwide flood, their civilization all but wiped out when their homes and structures were covered with seawater.

Because of the basin-like geography of the area the floodwaters that became Lake Titicaca could not run off and have only gradually evaporated over the centuries.

 

[…]

Professor Schindler-Bellamy as a disciple of Posnansky and Horbiger (who created the world famous Glacial-Cosmogony theory in the 1930’s) has worked dozens of years in the Tiahuanaco area and has written books on the subject. According to him the large monolithic Sun Gate of Tiahuanaco was evidently originally the centerpiece of the most important part of the so-called Kalasasaya, the huge chief temple of Tiahuanaco. Its upper part is covered with a stupendously intricate sculpture in flat bas-relief. This has been described as a “calendar” almost as long as the monolithic gateway has been known to exist; thus the Sun Gate has also been called the Calendar Gate. This calendar sculpture, though it undoubtedly depicts a “solar year”, cannot however be made to fit into the solar year as we divide it at present.


The “solar year” of the calendar’s time had very practically the same length as our own, but, as shown symbolically by the sculpture, the earth revolved more quickly then, making the Tiahuanacan year only 290 days, divided into 12 “twelfths” of 24 days each, plus 2 intercalary days. These groupings (290, 24, 12, 2) are clearly and unmistakably shown in the sculpture.[…]


[According to Schindler-Bellamy], at the time Tiahuanaco flourished the present moon was not yet the companion of our earth but was still an independent exterior planet. There was another satellite moving around our earth then, rather close... Because of its closeness it moved around the earth more quickly than our planet rotated. Therefore it rose in the west and set in the east (like Mars’ satellite Phobos), and so caused a great number of solar eclipses, 37 in one “twelfth,” or 447 in one “solar year.”

 

These groupings (37, 447) are shown in the sculpture, with many Corroborating cross-references. Different symbols show when these solar eclipses, which were of some duration, occurred: at sunrise, at noon, at sunset. These are only a small sample of the exact astronomical information the calendar gives. It also gives the beginning of the year, the days of the equinoxes and solstices, the incidence of the two intercalary days, information on the obliquity of the elliptic (then about 16.5 degrees; now 23.5) and on Tiahuanaco’s latitude (then about 10 degrees; now 16.27), and many other astronomical and geographical references from which interesting and important data may be calculated or inferred by us. […]

 

A few more facts revealed in the calendar are both interesting and surprising. As indicated by an arrangement of “geometrical” elements we can ascertain that the Tiahuanacans divided the circle factually astronomically, (but certainly mathematically) into 264 degrees (rather than 360). Also, they determined (ages before Archimedes and the Egyptians) the ratio of pi, the most important ratio between the circumference of the circle and its diameter, as 22/7, or, in our notation, 3.14+. They could calculate squares (and hence, square roots). They knew trigonometry and the measuring of angles (30, 60, 90 degrees) and their functions.

They could calculate and indicate fractions, but do not seem to have known the decimal system nor did they apparently ever employ the duodecimal system though they were aware of it. (For a still unknown reason, however, the number 11 and its multiples occur often.)


The most tantalizing fact of all is that the Tiahuanaco culture has no roots in that area. It did not grow there from humbler beginnings, nor is any other place of origin known. It seems to have appeared practically full-blown suddenly. Only a few “older” monuments, as can be inferred from the “calendrical inscriptions” they bear, have been found, but the difference in time cannot have been very great. The different, much lower cultures discovered at considerable distances from Tiahuanaco proper, addressed as “Decadent Tiahuacan” or as “Coastal Tiahuanaco”, are only very indirectly related to the culture revealed by the Calendar Gate. […]


When the satellite (the former moon) approached within a few thousand miles gravitational forces broke it up; according to the Roche formula each planetoid or asteroid disintegrates when approaching the critical distance of 50 to 60,000 kms. The fragments shattered down on earth; the oceans, released from the satellite’s gravity, flowed back toward the continents, exposing tropical lands and submerging polar territories. […]

 

Thus the approach of the “moon” caused a world-wide deluge, effecting changes of climate and provoking earthquakes accompanied by volcanic eruptions. The “ring” left by the satellite after breaking into fragments caused a sudden drop in temperature of at least 20 degrees… It is evident, for example, in the discovery of frozen mammoths in the Siberian tundra.

 

Possibly gravity - and therefore physical weight - was also changed on earth, and with it biological growth: this would explain the widespread construction of huge megalithic monuments as well as the presence of giants - man and animal - in fossil strata, tombs, and myths. According to Horbiger four moons fell on earth, producing four Ice Ages; our present moon, the fifth one, will similarly be drawn into the critical configuration of one-fifth of its present distance (380,000 kms.) and will cause the fifth cataclysm.

 

Tiahuanaco apparently remained for only a very short period at its acme of perfection (evidenced by the Calendar Gate) and perished suddenly, perhaps through the cataclysmic happenings connected with the breakdown of the former “moon.”


We have at present no means of determining when Tiahuanaco rose to supreme height, or when its culture was obliterated, as naturally, the calendar itself can tell us nothing about that. It will certainly not have been in the historical past but well back in the prehistoric. It must indeed have occurred before the planet Luna was captured as the earth’s present moon, about 12,000 years ago. 123

123 Zettl, Helmut, Catastrophism and Ancient History, Volume VI, Part 2, A Journal Of Interdisciplinary Study, July 1984, Marvin Arnold Luckerman Executive Editor.


There are several fascinating items in the above material.

 

One that interests me particularly is the speculation that the year was different prior to the deluge, and that the number 11 was significant in some mysterious way. The ideas about the capture of the moon, and a previous satellite which broke apart and rained destruction on the earth are interesting, but my guess is that this might just be interpretation of a swarm of comets or asteroids.


The theory of a falling moon has been discussed by Dr. John O’Keefe, a scientist at the Goddard Laboratory for Astronomy in Maryland. O’Keefe claims that the fragments of a moon’s collision formed a ring around our planet that blocked the sun’s rays, thus causing world-wide decline of temperatures. After a while the fragments disintegrated even further and showered down on earth, as tectites.

 

These tectites O’Keefe suggests, were fragments of a fallen moon. What is evident is that this world-wide cataclysm of 12,000 years ago appears in myths from every corner of the globe. The Egyptian Papyrus Ipuwer tells us that “The sun set where it rose” and an Egyptian tomb, (Senmut) shows Orion and Sirius painted in reverse position. The Finnish Kalevala says “the earth turned round like a potter’s wheel” and the Popol Vuh describes a showering of fiery hail from heaven.


On the outskirts of Brno, Moravia, there is a quarry where workers uncovered the bones of a wooly mammoth. There, in the quarry, was discovered a 160 foot deep sequence of multiple soil cycles. Each climate cycle from warm to cold was expressed as a sequence of gradational soil types reflecting the change from a moist, deciduous forest to an arid, frozen tundra, cracked by deeply penetrating permafrost. Midway through each cycle, there are numerous bands of fine windblown dust delivered in what must have been monstrous storms of continental scale.

 

Expert speculations suggest that this dust must have shrouded the earth for weeks or months at a time and must have produced a refrigerating effect on Europe’s climate. In the colder part of each cycle, the environment had become so dry that even large rivers dried up.


It seems that the ice sheets that repeatedly advanced southward were accompanied by the development of vast, but temporary deserts throughout Russia and Ukraine, even extending into southeast Europe and to the shores of the Black Sea. Every passage back from freezing cold to warm was abrupt in every cycle. Oceanographers from Turkey, Russia, Bulgaria and the United States teamed up to explore the Black Sea. Using sound waves and coring devices, they discovered that the Black Sea was once a vast freshwater lake.

 

Glenn Jones of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution dated the samples from the bottom of the Black Sea and confirmed that around 7,500 years ago, the seas had burst through the Bosporus valley and the salt water of the Mediterranean poured into the lake with unimaginable force. What was evident was that it had happened suddenly and almost instantaneously. What was also noted was that the massive amounts of salt water pouring into the Black Sea had been deficient in Oxygen.124

 

While searching for the answers to this mysterious event, cores of coral were drilled from the ocean in order to determine the rates of growth on a year by year basis going back 20 thousand years. Apparently, ice melt affects the rate of coral growth. The results of these cores showed that there was a huge spurt of ice-melt around 12,000 years ago. The meltwater from this event was enormous. It filled up dozens of lakes that no longer exist - lakes formed by the sag in the Earth’s crust caused by the weight of the huge ice dome.

 

Immediately following this melt, the ice age returned for a brief period called the Younger Dryas.

At 8 p.m. on June 5th, 8498 BC, the core parts of Asteroid A punched the first decisive hole in the fracture zone of the Atlantic Ridge. The forces of hell were let loose. Through these two newly formed vents the glowing red-hot magma shot up at terrific speed and mixed with the liquid above it - the waters of the Atlantic. This created all the conditions for a submarine volcanic eruption of the greatest possible violence. The fracture seam was torn apart. The bottom of the sea burst open.

 

All existing volcanoes were activated and new vents formed. Terrestrial fire and ocean water became embroiled in ever-increasing volume. Magma mixed with steam. The chain of fire ran all the way between the two continents from the Beerenberg volcano on Jan Mayen in the north to Tristan de Cunha in the south.125

124 Ryan, William, Pitman, Walter, Noah’s Flood (New York: Simon and Schuster 1998).
125 Muck, Otto, The Secret of Atlantis (New York: New York Times Books 1976) back cover blurb.

 

This rather dramatic description from the back of Otto Muck’s book - The Secret of Atlantis - is based on his ideas about the causal relationship between isotherms and favorable climate in northwestern Europe, and the unobstructed flow of the Gulf Stream across the Atlantic.

 

Muck attempts to use this flow to make a case for the prior existence of a large body of land in the Atlantic whose subsidence changed the ocean currents and warmed the British Isles about 10,500 years ago, give or take a day or two. Based on a varied and interesting collection of hard data, Muck suggests that the submarine massif of the Azores was once above water and could have blocked and deflected the Gulf Stream, preventing the circulation of the warmer waters, and thus contributing to the freezing temperatures of the British Isles.

 

Muck writes:

If we then date the transition from the Quaternary to the Quinternary Age at 12,000 years ago, or around 10,000 BC, we are doing so on the authority of contemporary geologists and paleontologists. We are at the same time fixing the date when Barrier Island X, which had hitherto prevented the Gulf Stream from reaching the coasts of Europe, sank beneath the Atlantic … a point in time … when the warm water and rain-bearing winds brought by the Gulf Stream were no longer deflected back to the west by the Atlantic island barrier, but flowed freely eastward because the barrier had sunk beneath the waves.

We have uncovered the traces of the greatest cataclysm on Earth that has been experienced by man. For there can be no doubt that this catastrophe of 12,000 years ago is the most terrible event that has ever taken place in all the dramatic history of mankind.126

126 Ibid., p. 84-85.

 

Essentially, what Muck did was to note that the geologically recorded isotherms moved significantly at this point in time. I still think his book is one of the better ones on the subject because he assembles a lot of interesting hard data, even if I don’t necessarily agree that there was a big island that “sank beneath the Atlantic”.

 

There are other solutions to the problem of the isotherms, including current day research showing that this can result from global warming. While we don’t deny that it’s possible for such severe lithosphere disruption as Muck suggests to occur, and we aren’t playing soft with the idea of mass destruction of species, it just seems that an event that would produce the sinking of so vast a body of land so completely would be an event from which absolutely nothing on the earth would survive.

 

Nevertheless, Otto Muck draws our attention to the meteor craters in the Carolinas. The Carolina bays are mysterious land features often filled with bay trees and other wetland vegetation. Because of their oval shape and consistent orientation, they are considered by some authorities to be the result of a vast meteor shower that occurred approximately 12,000 thousand years ago. What is most astonishing is the number of them. There are over 500,000 of these shallow basins dotting the coastal plain from Georgia to Delaware.

 

That is a frightening figure.

Unlike virtually any other bodies of water or changes in elevation, these topographical features follow a reliable and unmistakable pattern. Carolina Bays are circular, typically stretched, elliptical depressions in the ground, oriented along their long axis from the Northwest to the Southeast. [T]hey are further characterized by an elevated rim of fine sand surrounding the perimeter. […]


The last twenty years have seen an explosion of evidence that earth has often encountered objects that profoundly alter our environment. For instance, it is now commonly accepted that an impact with a large object in the Gulf of Mexico caused the extinction of large dinosaurs - a theory considered bizarre and irresponsible at the time Kacrowski studied the Bays.


Robert Kobres, an independent researcher in Athens, Georgia, has studied Carolina Bays for nearly 20 years in conjunction with his larger interest in impact threats from space. His recent, self-published, investigations have profound consequences for Carolina Bay study and demand research by academia as serious, relevant and previously unexamined new information. The essence of Kobres’ theory is that the search for “debris”, and the comparison of Bays with “traditional” impact craters, falsely and naively assumes that circular craters with extraterrestrial material in them are the only terrestrial evidence of past encounters with objects entering earth’s atmosphere.


Kobres goes a logical step further by assuming that forces associated with incoming bodies, principally intense heat, should also leave visible signatures on the earth. And, finally, that physics does not demand that a “collision” of the bodies need necessarily occur to produce enormous change on earth. To verify that such encounters are possible outside of the physics lab, we need look no further than the so-called “Tunguska event”.


On June 30, 1908, in the vicinity of the Tunguska River deep in Siberia, a tremendous explosion instantly leveled 2000 sq. km. of tundra, felling trees by the millions, all left pointing outward from a central area. News accounts of the day told of Londoners being able to read newspapers from the glow of the night sky for days afterward.

 

Seismographs worldwide recorded an apparent cataclysm in Siberia. Unfortunately (or fortunately as the case may be) the explosion had occurred in an area so remote, and during a time of such political turmoil, that no researcher pinpointed or even managed to travel to the suspected impact site for more than two decades. Not until pioneer Russian meteoritic researcher Leonard Kulik managed to gain entry to the inhospitable area in 1927, did anyone but local tribesmen view the devastation and its peculiar nature.


At the epicenter of the explosion lay not a large crater with a “rock” in it, as might be expected, but nothing more than a number of “neat oval bogs”. The Tunguska literature generally mentions the bogs only in passing, since Kulik failed in digs there to locate any evidence of a meteorite and went on to examine other aspects of the explosion.127

What do we have so far? We have an event that seems to have affected Eastern Siberia and Northern North America more severely than other places, though whatever it was certainly amounted to a global event.

 

We have already talked about the evidence of “nuclear bombardment” in the Great Lakes region provided by Firestone and Topping that tells us:

Radiocarbon dates for Pleistocene remains in northeastern North America are as much as 10,000 years younger than for those in the western part of the country.[…] Materials from the Gainey Paleoindian site in Michigan, radiocarbon dated at 2880 yr BC, are given an age by TL dating of 12,400 BC. It seems that there are so many anomalies reported in the upper US and in Canada of this type, that they cannot be explained by ancient aberrations in the atmosphere or other radiocarbon reservoirs, nor by contamination of data samples. […]


Our research indicates that the entire Great Lakes region (and beyond) was subjected to particle bombardment and a catastrophic nuclear irradiation that produced secondary thermal neutrons from cosmic ray interactions. The neutrons produced unusually large quantities of Pu239 and substantially altered the natural uranium abundance ratios […]


Sharp increases in C14 are apparent in the marine data at 4,000, 32,000-34,000, and 12,500 BC. These increases are coincident with geomagnetic excursions. […] The enormous energy released by the catastrophe at 12,500 BC could have heated the atmosphere to over 1000 C over Michigan, and the neutron flux at more northern locations would have melted considerable glacial ice. Radiation effects on plants and animals exposed to the cosmic rays would have been lethal, comparable to being irradiated in a 5 megawatt reactor more than 100 seconds. The overall pattern of the catastrophe matches the pattern of mass extinction before Holocene times.

 

The Western Hemisphere was more affected than the Eastern, North America more than South America, and eastern North America more than western North America. Extinction in the Great lakes area was more rapid and pronounced than elsewhere. Larger animals were more affected than smaller ones, a pattern that conforms to the expectation that radiation exposure affects large bodies more than smaller ones.128

127 Howard, George A., The Carolina Bays: http://www.georgehoward.net/cbays.htm

128 Firestone, Richard B., Topping, William, Terrestrial Evidence of a Nuclear Catastrophe in Paleoindian Times, dissertation research, 1990 - 2001.

 

Firestone and Topping propose that this evidence of nuclear radiation is a result of “cosmic ray bombardment” from, perhaps, a supernova. D.S. Allan, a biologist at Cambridge, and J. B. Delair, coauthor of Cataclysm!, published in 1995 in the U.K, also like the supernova hypothesis. Evidence of a supernova explosion, in the form of aluminium 22 (along with other scientific and mythological evidence), found in concentration at the edge of our solar system, helped Allan and Delair conclude that a stellar blast probably caused the massive destruction. Iron ore in the earth from about 11,000 years ago shows that its magnetic polarity violently reversed.

 

This certainly suggests an extraterrestrial encounter with a magnetically powerful agent at that period. The supernova explanation, however, does not account for all the evidence, most particularly the mythic and geological evidence of massive bombardments of comets.


Dr. Paul LaViolette, author of Earth Under Fire, claims that he has discovered evidence of a different sort of cataclysm, a volley of cosmic waves resulting from an explosion in the galactic core. Entering our solar system, this galactic super wave (the most powerful energetic phenomenon in the galaxy) would have interrupted the solar wind’s ability to repel most intruding cosmic dust particles.

 

LaViolette builds a mythological foundation for his scientific theory, the shakiest part of which is that he suggests that galactic core explosions are a cyclical event, recurring every 26,000-year cycles, a period that relates to the precession of the equinoxes. He claims that this is a great clock, and that the precessional cycle is the duration of one Great Year recognized by the ancient Greeks, Zoroastrians, and Chinese.

 

La Violette’s theory is weak because galactic core explosions, like other nuclear phenomena, are only statistically probable.

 

Further, the record shows a frequency greater than every 26,000 years, and his attempts to introduce “mini-explosions” to account for this come across as so much prestidigitation of the data. Also his theory does not account for all of the evidence, most particularly the geological evidence of massive bombardments of cometary bodies. What is more, La Violette’s claim that the precessional cycle is the “great clock”, assumes that the current polar orientation has remained stable for eons, and the very mythic evidence he tries to use as his foundation contradicts this, most especially the decoded information from the Gate of the Sun at Tiahuanaco reported above.


In all of this searching high and low for Atlantis, and comparing the paleontogical records and geological records and archaeological records with the story of Plato, the one major thing that everybody seems to be forgetting is this:

Plato’s tale was about a WAR followed by cataclysm.

According to Plato’s story, Atlantis was the center of a country of extreme economic wealth and military power that sought to enslave all of Europe. The Atlanteans were quite successful in defeating many European countries; however, the great civilization of Athens repelled their attacks and eventually succeeded in driving them back out of Europe.

 

Unfortunately, almost all records of this great achievement were lost due to a very powerful flood that wiped out most of Athens and the whole continent of Atlantis in one day and one night.


Over and over again, what we see is the fact that something terrible happened on the earth around 12,000 years ago. This time period comes up over and over again in many disciplines having to do with the study of the past. And it just happens to be the period designated by Plato’s characters as the time of the destruction of Atlantis, following a terrible war in which Atlantis was defeated after attempting to conquer the entire world, at the time of what is remembered as the greatest deluge in human history: The Flood of Noah.


In terms of human beings, the Bible tells us that after the Flood of Noah, man was no longer able to live the same lifespan that had originally been allotted to him. Symbolically, this suggests that something significant about the cosmos or the state of matter itself, had changed. Modern science, of course, completely dismisses such ideas with seeming good reason.

 

But, we should like to ask:

  • What if the shortening of man’s lifespan actually happened?

  • What if it happened more than once?

  • What if such an event represents a loss of vigor or exhaustion of cosmic resources?

  • Or, what if it represents the fact that mankind originally evolved in a different environment and the present one is no longer conducive to such long lives?

In this regard, some observations about dinosaurs are pertinent.

 

There have been found dinosaur remains in “bone-yards” which had shoulder blades eleven feet long! The towering Brachiosaurus, an herbivore, stood up to fifty feet tall and weighed perhaps a hundred tons! How could it have sustained itself? One hundred tons is about fifteen times the weight of an adult African bull elephant - an animal that consumes 300 to 600 pounds of fodder every 24 hours and spends up to eighteen hours a day foraging for food! It seems totally out of the question to imagine this “Supersaurus” feeding itself.


If Brachiosaurus was warm-blooded like an elephant, it might have been unable to eat enough to keep itself alive! But, even as a cold-blooded animal, there is doubt that this gargantuan creature could have eaten enough with its small mouth and teeth. There is just no real solution to this problem if we assume that the earth has always been the same since life evolved on its surface.


We are taught by orthodox science that the dinosaurs were failures - colossal failures. There is a litany of “couldn’ts” recited about them. They couldn’t walk on land because they were too heavy. They couldn’t eat anything but mush because their heads were too small. They couldn’t run fast because their joints were imperfect. They couldn’t be warm-blooded because their brains were too small. They couldn’t compete with smaller, warm-blooded animals.


Yet, when dinosaurs began to emerge as the dominant group, there were many other species which had equal opportunity to dominate, to win the race for king of the mountain. For five million years, the dinosaurs were on equal footing with the other inhabitants of the ecosystem. But then, the dinosaurs showed that they were the fittest and survived into absolute domination of the globe. During their rule, it is claimed that there was no non-dinosaur larger than a turkey! They don’t call it the “age of reptiles” for no reason!

 

The dinosaurs monopolized the planet for 130 million years. As they spread into every area of dominance, they drove out or destroyed other advanced clans which had also been evolving and adapting for tens of millions of years. During their long reign, there were other clans that could have threatened their survival, and each time the dinosaurs showed they were “firstest with the mostest” in terms of adaptive vigor.


It is posited that the class Mammalia emerged fully defined just as the dinosaurs began their expansion. But, obviously, for some reason, being a mammal wasn’t such an advantage during that time. Dinosaurs evolved quickly, changed repeatedly, and maintained their dominance until some terrible event brought their rule to an abrupt end.

 

Robert T. Bakker, author of The Dinosaur Heresies, writes:

The sudden extinction of dinosaurs is one of the most popularized topics in paleontology. Why, after all, did the last dynasties finally end in total extinction? In reality, however, the dinosaurs’ history contains the drama of much more than a single death. They suffered three or four major catastrophes during their long predominance, each one thinning the ranks of the entire clan. And after each such fall, they recouped their evolutionary fortunes, rising again to fill the terrestrial system with yet another wave of new species and families of species.

 

The final complete extermination did not come until sixty-five million years ago, at what geologists label the ‘Time of Great Dying,’ the greatest evolutionary disaster of all time... Our view of evolution must take into account the profoundly disorienting blows struck by the environment during these world-wide extinctions.129

There are many theories put forth to explain these problems but, as is the usual case with Darwinian thought, they are highly unsatisfactory and leave too many questions that require fantastic cerebral gymnastics to answer.


Using Occam’s razor, might it not be more reasonable to assume that the earth was a different place at the time the dinosaurs walked? Just to speculate here, it might be that they obtained a portion of their nourishment from the act of breathing itself. Additionally, a different level of gravity would have greatly reduced the energy needs, and a more salubrious climate would have further eliminated the energy expenditure for heat regulation.

 

At the same time, a soupier atmosphere would have shielded the inhabitants of the earth from the harmful radiation of the sun and would have been more conducive to extensive life spans, which may have been the means by which the dinosaurs grew to such fantastic sizes.

 

Bakker also makes an excellent case for the warm-bloodedness of dinosaurs:

No one, either in the nineteenth century or the twentieth, has ever built a persuasive case proving that dinosaurs as a whole were more like reptilian crocodiles than warm-blooded birds. No one has done this because it can’t be done... So hundred year-old dinosaur theories live on without being questioned, and too often they are assumed to be totally correct. Even when such a theory is caught in an error, it’s likely to be excused. […]

 

Any attempt to analyze the events of the extinction of the dinosaurs runs into the fundamental difficulties that hinder the investigation of any of these mass murders of species. Most fossil bones owe their preservation to quick burial by sediment right after the death of their owner. But generally most spots in the terrestrial biosphere suffer erosion, not deposition.130

129 Bakker, Robert T., The Dinosaur Heresies (New York: William Morrow and Company 1986).

130 Ibid.

 

 


The Mystery of Malta


I have on my desk a slim archaeological guidebook to Malta which proclaims on its first page that the first humans on the island arrived around seven thousand
years ago131 from Sicily. The last page of the book mentions, in one paragraph, the enigmatic “cart ruts” that are “too obvious in the Maltese rocky landscape to be ignored”.

 

Well, a brief paragraph at the end of the book is about as close to being ignored as something can get that is declared to be so obvious in the landscape of the area under discussion. The author of the little guidebook informs us he believes they were intended for the transportation of construction blocks from the quarry in ancient times. He then makes a point of saying that he does not mean “prehistoric”.


The temples of Malta are its main attraction.

 

Anthony Bonanno132, the author of the above mentioned booklet, declares in a news article133 that the temples of Malta are,

“very reliably carbon-dated to the period 3,600 to 2,500 BC. In that space of time we have traced a regular evolution in style, from the small and rudimentary to the large and complex”.

131 Curiously, this is the same time that the Black Sea was filled with water from the Mediterranean by overflowing the Bosporus valley. Connection?

132 Museums Department, Department of Classics and Archaeology at the University of Malta.
133 Old Temples Society, Second issue, November 1999.


The first of these “Temples” was discovered in 1902 by a workman digging a trench for the foundations of a house. His digging activities broke through to a huge subterranean temple and cemetery, cut from solid rock. Twelve years later, a farmer kept hitting stones in his field as he ploughed, and this turned out to be a complex of temples. As time went by, more and more structures were revealed, and they have become known as the world’s most impressive prehistoric monuments.


The first thing that I notice about this is that all of these things were buried for a very long time - so long that they were completely unknown to the inhabitants of the region. But uniformitarian science tells us that the surface of the earth is constantly being subjected to the processes of erosion unless, of course, we are talking about a river delta or a landslide or something.

 

Apparently on Malta, things work backward.

 

They get covered up by some conditions unknown to uniformitarian science, and then require millennia to be uncovered again. As fascinating as they are, I don’t want to discuss the “temples”. There are numerous layers of them, and many of them are actually built on top of the thing that has my attention, the “cart ruts” which are so evident everywhere that they cannot be ignored. Yet, these “cart ruts” only receive a brief paragraph and most certainly are not being protected by the Maltese government, since they are of so little importance!


It’s difficult to find a good set of photographs of the ruts, but with persistence, a photo here and another there, enough can be assembled to make some observations.

 

The facts are that, for cart ruts, they follow strange rules. Very often, indeed, there are two parallel furrows; but they differ not only from rut to rut, but a single parallel expanse can vary in width and depth from one end to the other. That’s a strange cart that has an axle that expands and contracts. The ruts run through the valleys, up the hills, down the dales, and sometimes more than one set run side by side for awhile until they suddenly merge into a single set of ruts.

 

What is more amazing is that they often just keep going - right into the Mediterranean - or right off the edge of a cliff.


Erich von Daniken paid a visit to the island to examine them and thoughtfully took his tape measure. It seems that the distance between a parallel series of ruts can range from 65 to 123 cm. What is more amazing is that some of them are up to 70 cm deep, going around sharp curves. Anyone who has ever played with toy cars and trucks in the sandbox, or driven a sulky, has some idea of the problem here.

 

A wheel large enough to make a rut that deep could not possibly make such a curve. At one point near San Pawl-Tat-Targa, four pairs of ruts, with four different gauges, join up to make a single pair of ruts. Nearby, one set crosses another, each with different rut depths. Another rut that extends up to 60 cm deep is only 11 cm wide at its deepest point and 20 cm wide at its shallowest point.134

 

134 Von Daniken, Signs of the Gods. pp. 82-135.

 

The ruts that run into the Mediterranean are most interesting. Divers have discovered that the ruts continue a long way below the sea level. What is more fascinating is that in July of 1999, amateur German archaeologist Hubert Zeitlmair discovered a megalithic temple on the sea-bed in Malta’s territorial waters about 3 kilometers off the eastern coast. The problem with this is, in order for a temple to lie on the bed of the Mediterranean, it would have to date to the last ice age. The implication is that the Maltese temples are at least six thousand years older than Bonnano and his colleagues propose.

 

Naturally, Bonnano was called upon to pronounce sage words regarding this discovery.

If the underwater temple does prove authentic, it would have to be a contemporary of those built on the mainland. The only possibility that springs to mind is that of a separate island, or even part of the mainland, which sank because of a fault in the rock. It is highly unlikely, but it does remain a possibility. There are after all no written records of any kind dating back to that period.135

135 Old Temples Society, Second Issue, November 1999.

 

It, “sank because of a fault in the rock”. It absolutely could NOT have been covered by rising water levels!


Malta’s temples and tombs are unique in their construction: the massive piling of stone upon stone, and the deep excavations. According to the experts, they are a tremendous engineering feat, and they must have been the sole focus of the society that built them. All the people of Malta worked to build “temples” to the exclusion of all else, except for subsistence.

 

According to the experts, the people of Malta neither built houses of stone nor learned how to write. They evolved all of their techniques for one reason and one reason only: to build “temples” to house their cult activities. How these people created a society that was ready, willing, and able to spend all their efforts and energy to labor incessantly in the work of tunneling and building, remains a great mystery.


The distribution of the “temples”, plotted on a map, fall into clusters which command a major area of territory. The island seems to be divided into six major areas of this type. The problem arises when we consider the fact that the island, at its best, could never support more than 11,000 people divided up into these six areas, at no more than 2000 people per section.

 

So, how could a group of about 2000 people at most, mobilize the labor to excavate all those caverns and build all those “temples” in each of the sections, particularly when you consider the fact that the evidence shows that the area could not have supported so many people in terms of food production. That leads to the problem of where they were getting their food and how were they getting their food, if all they were doing was building “temples” and performing cult activities?

 

Colin Renfrew136 has proposed the “Big Chief Theory” whereby the building of “temples” was instigated to awe the howling savages and keep them in line.

 

136 Read his book Before Civilization for the details. The ideas are too puerile for me to waste any time on recounting them.


Why do I keep putting the word “temples” in quotes? Well, when I looked at the photographs of these structures, the ground plans drawn to scale, and the plaster models made of them, the only thing they reminded me of was simply houses - places where people lived. After all, why would there be so many “temples”? Of course!

 

Because the natives devoted their energies to building temples while they, themselves, lived in grass or bearskin huts! That’s it.

 

Megalithic stone structures MUST be temples because what other reason could there be for such Herculean efforts to create them?

 

That is, of course, assuming that the ability to manage large blocks of stone were unusual when they were built. It certainly would be for us today. So we cannot imagine that the ancient peoples might have done it as easily as we nail gypsum board on cheap two-by-fours to build our houses. As noted, archaeologists explain the cart ruts by saying that they are evidence of the transporting of the blocks used to build the “temples”. But, we see from our descriptions of the cart ruts above, that the idea that these grooves in the ground are really cart ruts runs into serious problems.

 

Any effort to explain them in this way falls apart if an engineer instead of an archaeologist looks at them. In fact, in my humble opinion, archaeologists ought to be required to have a degree in engineering before they are allowed to say a word about anything. In the end, no one seems to have a single rational explanation for these “cart ruts”. One of the great mysteries on the planet, and nobody seems to care.

 

What a waste.

 

Do I have an idea to propose? I would like to suggest that these “ruts” look an awful lot like places where lightning has struck, and the electricity has blasted away the dirt and rock as it shoots along some sort of natural earth power grid conductor.

 

The only difference is that the cart ruts are not random.

  • Were the cart ruts some sort of networked energy conduction system?

  • Could some sort of element have been placed in the ground by an ancient civilization; something that conducted power to their homes the way our vulgar power poles and lines crisscross the landscape?

  • And then, at some point in time, was the earth hit by such a surge of energy from some unknown source that these power “lines” melted the rock in which they were “strung”?

  • Perhaps a surge of some kind of cosmic energy source?

  • Maybe even the electromagnetic pulse of a nuclear explosion?

  • Maybe it was neither of these, but merely a massive overheating of the surface of the earth so that the conduction element and its insulating covering melted and was swept away?

Among the artifacts discovered at Malta are a number of truly extraordinary “Goddess” images. They are, without exception, extremely corpulent by today’s standards. There are many representations of spirals and other “Goddess” motifs, including waves of water. According to the experts, the very oldest form of religion that can be archaeologically identified anywhere was the worship of the Mother Goddess by wandering “hunter gatherers”.

 

It was thought, for a very long time, that such cultures were very primitive and narrow, but it has now been discovered that this is not the case. New archaeological sites are being excavated at the present time that show very advanced levels of art and culture among these “husbandmen” of the Earth.

 

An example is the Japanese Jomon culture.

 

 


The Jomon Puzzle


The incipient Jomon culture is said to date between 11,000 and 7,500 BC. It is described as “one of the most affluent forager cultures to ever exist”. Although the Japanese did not settle Japan until the third century BC, it seems that human beings have occupied the area from about 30,000 BC. During the Ice Ages, Japan was connected to the Korean peninsula by means of a land bridge. Additionally, all four main Japanese islands were connected, and the southern island of Kyushu was connected to the Korean peninsula while the northern island of Hokkaido was connected to Siberia.


As with all preliterate people, the only things we know about the Jomon is based on fragments of artifacts and the imaginative guessing of anthropologists and archaeologists. “Jomon” means “cord pattern”, for these people put cord patterns on their pottery.

 

Pottery is a characteristic of Neolithic peoples; the Jomon, however, were Mesolithic peoples (Middle Stone Age).

 

The standard anthropological line on the development of human arts asserts that pottery-making developed after agriculture and is characteristic of a more sedentary culture. The Incipient Jomon, however, were hunter-gatherers who made pottery long before agriculture was introduced into Japan. In fact, the Incipient Jomon pottery-making dated to long before any human was introduced to agriculture. So, who were they? As in Malta, we have to go underwater again to find out.


In 1987, Kihachiro Arataka, a scuba instructor and diving guide, was exploring the southeast coast of Yonaguni Island, the last island of the Ryukyu chain. This string of islands in the East China Sea curves from Japan south and west toward China.

 

Aratake was looking for interesting dive sites for tourist expeditions when he came across a submarine cliff that appeared to be cut in a series of immense geometric terraces.

Masaaki Kimura, a marine seismologist at the University of the Ryukyus in Okinawa, heard about the ruins in 1990 and went to check it out. For the next seven years, Kimura dived on the site repeatedly, taking his students with him on many occasions, and assembling a portfolio of drawings, maps and models. He became convinced that the Yonaguni formation was fashioned by human hands. Based on well-established studies of rises in the East China Sea during and after the last ice age, the Yonaguni Monument was last above sea level at around 6,000 to 8,000 BC. This means that it could represent an early, unknown civilization.

 

Geologist Dr. Robert Schoch went to investigate, made six dives, and noted several interesting things about the site. Superficially the monument has the appearance of a platform or part of a step pyramid, something like the ancient Temple of the Sun near Trujillo in northern Peru. The top of the monument lies sixteen feet under the surface, the bottom at an approximate depth of eighty feet. Extending over 160 feet north to south, the asymmetrical monument has uneven stone steps ranging in height from a foot and a half to several feet, on its southern face. It looks like a great staircase up which only a giant could stride. The surfaces have a regular smooth surface, like dressed stone.[…]


Much of the regularity of the surface was due not to a tooled smoothness of the rock but to a thick even coating of algae, corals, sponges, and similar organisms. […] In a number of spots I scraped the coating away, both to determine what kind of stone lay beneath and to look for tool scars or quarry marks. I found none. Even more telling, I couldn’t find any evidence that Yonaguni consisted of separate pieces of stone. Stone blocks carved, set in place, and arranged in an order would clearly indicate a human-made structure. Rather, the monument is essentially a single piece of solid, “living” bedrock that is less precise than it appears at first. […]

 

Still, Yonaguni posed a problem. If the monument was the result of a natural process, this natural process was unlike any I had seen before. What could it be?137

137 Schoch, Robert, Ph.D., The Voices of the Rocks, (New York: Harmony Books 1999).

 

Dr. Schoch was faced with an interesting problem in his examination of the Japanese underwater “city”. Since the sea level sequences were so well established, to state unequivocally that the structure was man-made would have been a terrible blow to the currently accepted chronology of human history. It would have been far worse than his claims that the Sphinx is older than Egyptologist claim because that issue can be debated from now until the cows come home with no absolute resolution. Here, a declaration of human origin for these structures would be undeniable proof of an ancient civilization which built the monuments before the sea level rose.


I have a great deal of sympathy for Dr. Schoch’s position. What did Dr. Schoch determine about the Underwater city?

 

Well, after having noted that he had never before, as a trained geologist, seen anything like this in “natural structures”, he went looking and found a “tentative answer”.

 

He noted that:

The monument is composed predominantly of very fine sandstones and mudstones of the type we geologists call the Lower Miocene Yaeyama Group. Rocks of this type contain numerous, well-defined, parallel bedding planes that allow easy separation of the layers, and they are crisscrossed by many joints and fractures running parallel to one another and vertical to the bedding planes. Yaeyama Group sandstones lie exposed along the southeast and northeast coasts of Yonaguni Island, and I went there to see how the weather under current conditions above water. […] I became convinced that the steplike and terrace like features of the underwater monument resulted from natural processes working on the stone, not from the activity of humans long ago.

 

Possibly the choice between natural and human-made isn’t simply either/or. Yonaguni Island contains a number of old tombs whose exact age is uncertain, but that are clearly very old. Curiously, the architecture of the tombs is much like that of the monument. It is possible that humans were imitating the monument in designing the tombs, and it is equally possible that the monument was itself somehow modified by human hands. […] It is also possible that the monument served as a quarry from which blocks were cut, following the natural bedding, joint, and fracture planes of the rock, then removed to construct buildings that are now long gone. […]138

138 Ibid.

 

Thus Dr. Schoch determined that, even if the underwater structure can be explained by natural forces, he leaves the door open to an ancient civilization that existed on Yonaguni Island 12,000 years ago.

 

Coming at the problem from another direction, we discover that about ten thousand years ago, a group of people lived in the northern part of Japan who were ethnically distinct from the rest of the Japanese population. They were named “Ainu”, meaning human being or male in their own language. This word is remarkably similar to the words “Manu” and “Anu”, which we will encounter more than once.

 

The Ainu were generally assumed to be descendants of an ancient people referred to as Emishi in the famous Japanese chronicles called “Kojiki” and “Nihon-syoki”. Today, the term Ainu is used to denote the indigenous people of Hokkaido, Japan’s northernmost island, as a single, integrated population who are the descendants of the Ainu of ten thousand years ago.

The traditional Ainu lifestyle was hunting, fishing and gathering. Ainu religious beliefs center around the existence of another world of spirit essences subject to the same forces that control the visible world. The people worship animal Gods, especially the bear, with ritual, song and dance. Even the Ainu language is unusual in its Asian environment. Although they possessed no system of writing, they created a rich oral tradition of stories and poems expressed in formal prose and verse. We, of course, immediately think of the Bear cults of Europe, and the bear skulls found in the caves of France dating back in the tens of thousands of years.


The Ainu are a morphological problem.

 

The characteristics that differentiate them from Asians are their hairiness and their hair “form”. The explanation is that there is a strong admixture of Caucasoid genetics in the Ainu. Some experts consider them to be related to the Australian aborigines, and others think that they represent an independent grouping altogether. More recent studies have connected them genetically to Turkic populations of Central Asia, a combination of caucasoid and mongoloid genes.


So how are we to relate this “archaeology” of a “preliterate” culture to the fact that there is evidence of nearby remains of a former civilization far more advanced than the Jomon? I think that noting the dates might be important.

 

It is as though the Jomon were survivors of a cataclysm.

 

The infrastructure of their society may have been destroyed, along with many of the artifacts that might have been discovered by archaeologists of our day, and they began anew on a planet that had been swept clean - except for stone structures that survived the maelstrom.

 

 


Global Evidence of Ancient, Pre-Historic High Civilizations


Over and over again we find these odd clues that point to an ancient civilization that existed something over 12,000 years ago. There has been a raging controversy for generations between pro-Atlanteans and anti-Atlanteans about this. There seem to be sufficient archaeological remains to justify a serious scientific study based on such a hypothesis but so far, there are no “takers” in the mainstream scientific community.

 

Archaeology and ethnology, being observational sciences, and not experimental sciences, have built their entire framework upon the study of those remains. And when we look closely at the array of discoveries in those fields, we note bits and pieces of cultures of almost unspeakable age. The fact that uniformitarian science barely allows the idea of cataclysmic destruction to be part of the hypothesis cripples archaeologists and, in the end, may make fools of them all.


Without the algorithm of cyclic cataclysm, archaeologists cannot fully understand what they observe, nor can they explain the anomalies here and there, and the lack of other evidence that ought to be here and there (if one assumes great antiquity of civilization with no cataclysms). The fact seems to be that, what does continue to exist in terms of archaeological remains from times before 7,000 or more years ago, have been subjected to geological and cosmic cataclysms of almost incomprehensible violence and few major relics remain for perusal. Those few, however, are cast aside as the anomalies of archaeology and ethnology, and their very existence is buried or denied in efforts to avoid toppling the house of cards so laboriously established by those sciences.


Nevertheless, we find that all over the globe, with few exceptions, these studies break down almost completely right around 7,000 to 10,000 BC, at which point they meet with what mathematicians call a “discontinuity”.

 

Immediately after this discontinuity, all of the hot-spots of ancient civilization that archaeologists accept as valid suddenly appear with no indication of gradual, uniformitarian development. What is more, there seems to be considerable indication that these developments were degenerate remnants of something already lost in the mists of antiquity.


Entire libraries of books have been written demonstrating this antiquity of man and his civilizations, but it has not yet been accepted, even in principle, by any branch of modern science. The scientific thought police oppose any type of cataclysmic change in the structure of the earth and will go to any extremes to avoid coming to grips with its evidence.

 

And yet, as we will see, science breaks down again when it is forced to contemplate the origin of man’s intellectual development.

 

 


Ancient Flight?


Is there any “hard” evidence for this ancient, worldwide, high civilization?

 

I don’t want to spend too much time going over all of it and attempting to reproduce the fine efforts of other writers. But, just to cover the subject briefly, one of the most telling pieces of hard evidence is included in Charles Hapgood’s book, Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings.

 

Hapgood, a Professor of Anthropology, included in his book a most interesting letter from a group of cartographers in the United States Air Force. The statements in this letter, to my knowledge, have never been challenged. In fact, the letter itself doesn’t receive much attention, though Hapgood is certainly referred to as a crank often enough. The letter refers to a series of highly technical analyses of several maps that Dr. Hapgood presented to the cartographers.

 

After their study, they wrote:

It is not very often that we have the opportunity to evaluate maps of ancient origin. The Piri Reis (AD 1513) and the Oronteus Fineaus [sic] (AD 1531) maps sent to us by you, presented a delightful challenge for it was not readily conceivable that they could be so accurate without being forged. With added enthusiasm we accepted this challenge and have expended many off duty hours evaluating your manuscript and the above maps. I am sure you will be pleased to know that we have concluded that both of these maps were compiled from accurate original source maps, irrespective of dates.

 

The following is a brief summary of our findings:


The solution of the portolano projection used by Admiral Piri Reis, developed by your class in Anthropology must be very nearly correct; for when known geographical locations are checked in relationship to the grid computed by Mr. Richard W. Strachan (MIT), there, is remarkably close agreement. Piri Reis’ use of the Portolano projection (centered on Syene, Egypt) is an excellent choice, for it is a developable surface that would permit the relative size and shape of the earth at that (latitude) to be retained. It is our opinion that those who compiled the original map had an excellent knowledge of the continents covered by this map.


As stated by Colonel Harold Z. Ohlmeyer in his letter (July 6, 1960) to you, the Princess Martha Coast of Queen Maud Land, Antarctica, appears to be truly represented on the southern sector of the Piri Reis Map. The agreement of the Piri Reis map with the seismic profile