The Lost World of Agharti- the Mystery of Vril Power

by Alec MacLellan

  The newly landed astronauts went underground. They dug themselves in, created subterranean communication routes over great distances and built strongpoints deep under the earth that afforded them safety, although they could emerge from them to cultivate areas of their new homeland and include them in the plans for a carefully thought out infrastructure. I can refute the objection that the tunnelbuilders must have ‘betrayed’ themselves by enormous quantities of debris excavated while making the tunnels. As I credit them with an advanced technology, they were presumably equipped with a thermal drill of the kind described in Der Spiegel for 3 April 1972, which reported it as the latest discovery.

  Von Daniken describes how the drill was developed at the US Laboratory for Atomic Research at Los Alamos. It is made of wolfram and heated by a graphite heating element. There is no waste material from the drill, as it melts the rock through which it drills and presses this waste against the walls, where it cools down. He also believes that the ancient tunnellers had an electron ray machine at their disposal. Von Daniken then adds:

  I was stimulated to make these speculations by the tunnel system in Ecuador. Juan Moricz (my guide) thinks that the long straight galleries in particular have glazed walls and that the large rooms were made by blasting. Neatly blasted layers of rock are clearly recognisable at the tunnel entrance, as is the right-angled door blown out of the rock face. The technical care with which the tunnel system was planned is proved by the ventilation shafts that recur at regular intervals. These shafts are all accurately worked and on average are between 5ft 10 ins and 10ft long and 2ft 7 ins wide … It was here, in the impenetrable depths, that the ‘gods’ decided to create men ‘in their image’, many years later, when they were no longer afraid of being discovered.

  Whether or not we can accept that the tunnel system was made by men from space, there can be no disputing the skill of its original builders. Peter Kolosimo, who is also fascinated by the origins of the tunnels, says that one old Tibetan lama who was questioned about them replied: ‘Yes, they exist; they were made by giants who gave us the benefit of their knowledge when the world was young.’

  There are, indeed, several theories as to who were the original creators of the tunnels, and by association the kingdom of Agharti, and these are worth looking at individually.

  The earliest of our speculators, Louis Jacolliot, the Marquis Saint-Yves d’Alveydre, and Madame Blavatsky, were, as we have seen, convinced that the people of the lost world were the remnants of one of the original ‘root’ races of the world. They had remained in their secret kingdom hidden from the eyes of later men, content with just the occasional contact with surface humanity. With the destruction of Atlantis, their tunnel network was broken and then evidently much less used than in previous ages.

  Ferdinand Ossendowski and Nicholas Roerich both incline to the Oriental view of Agharti, that it was founded some 60,000 years ago by a holy man and a tribe of his people who disappeared under the surface of the earth, creating the tunnel system to allow them access to other points of the Earth. As Ossendowski wrote in Beasts, Men and Gods:

  All the people there are protected against Evil and crimes do not exist within its bournes. Science has there developed calmly and nothing is threatened with destruction. The subterranean people have reached the highest knowledge. Now it is a large kingdom, millions of men, with ‘The King of the World’ as their ruler. He knows all the forces of the world and reads all the souls of humankind and the great book of their destiny.

  Dr Lewis Spence, Harold Wilkins and their contemporaries, who have devoted so much time to the legend of Atlantis, are convinced that the tunnels were built by the Atlanteans and used by them to escape the holocaust that overwhelmed their continent. The survivors then re-established themselves in various parts of the world, although a group of them chose to remain below ground and create a secret kingdom where they felt they would be safe from any future catastrophe.*

  The theories of the modern writers are even more grandiose. The Buddhist, Robert Dickhoff, says categorically:

  The early builders of these tunnels were not of earth, but visitors, colonisers from a world now called Mars. These alien settlers here envisioned competition, and in anticipation of a battle for the possession of the earth the defensive tunnel systems and underground gathering centres or cities were set up, which included Agharti.

  In his book, Agharta, he also explains how the tunnels were built:

  I envision that the straight line is indeed the shortest distance between two given points and also believe the ancient builders were aware of this universal rule, thus incorporating this fundamental idea when boring their tunnels in straight lines from one continent to another in order to accomplish swift communication, transportation, and at the same time enjoy mining this earth for precious metals and for matter which could be converted into fuel for their hungry space crafts, space ships, or whatever you may call these fire-spitting dragons, remembered by all the ancient races of earth, as having descended from the heavens with a cargo of alien creatures from another world.

  Dickhoff believes that the actual builders of the tunnels were men of huge stature, and that they are referred to in the Biblical quotation found in Genesis: ‘There were giants in the earth in those days.’

  Since Genesis mentions these giants or Titans were in the earth and not on the earth, this must account for their being the actual tunnel diggers, living by necessity in the bowels of the earth, groundhog fashion. Fossils of such giants have been found in Java as being the most primitive man who lived some 500,000 years ago.

  He also claims that the Martians themselves went underground permanently after the sinking of Atlantis, and there began the creation of the human race:

  The synthetic ones created by their scientific father from Mars soon mingled and interbred with the product of natural evolution on the earth, and the human race was well on its way … The human and subhuman race of earth is old, much older than most of us are led to believe.

  The Frenchman, Robert Charroux, on the other hand, has written about a claim that the tunnel builders were Venusians! It is not his own theory, he says, but one deduced from the Indian Vedas and Tibetan Bardo Thodol. Apparently the Venusians came to this planet in the year 701,969 of the era of Lucifer – the name is here used in its literal sense of ‘Light Bringer’ – and it was they who created the great initiatory centre of Shamballah. Charroux then quotes Paul Gregor, whom he describes as an expert on the subterranean people. Gregor says:

  For obscure reasons, they are said to have built tremendous altars, and to have excavated shafts by which to go down into the bowels of the earth, to the core where all the fire and all the water of the earth have their origin, from whence all the streams of lava of all the volcanoes erupt. Down below, among the sombre foundations of the whole universe, the bulk of a people called the Mysterious Builders are believed to have settled.

  Charroux says the Theosophists also believe in the Venus theory:

  Theosophical Teachers say that the Lords of Venus founded the Grand Lodge of Initiation as soon as they reached the earth; their present dwelling is symbolically called by the ancient name, Shamballah … The legend of the subterranean realm where the Masters and the secret archives of the world are kept in security is a glorious reality.

  Dr Raymond Bernard shares the more Earthbound ideas of Ossendowski and Roerich that a kind of ‘Atlantean Noah’ founded the underground kingdom. ‘Most of the human population of Agharti,’he says, ‘as distinct from the superhuman inhabitants of Hyperborean, Lemurian and Atlantean origin, consist of Hindu Yogis and Tibetan lamas who gained admission as a result of lifelong persevering effort.’

  In his book, The Subterranean World, Dr Bernard quotes what he calls ‘a number of rumours circulating in Brazil’. He says several Brazilians have told him that the kingdom is a kind of Garden of Eden, illuminated by a strange glow, where the men, women and children live almost exclusively on a diet of different kinds of fruits. T
hese people enjoy excellent health, live free from worry, and crime is unheard of. ‘They live in a state of perfect continence,’ says Dr Bernard, ‘with no marriage. The women not only live apart from the men but produce children without need of male fertilization. These people compose a super race whose members never grow old and never die, but live for centuries in a state of youth, in fact for thousands of years.’

  By way of example, he paraphrases two accounts that were given to him:

  A man came to us and said he entered a subterranean city some distance from Paranagua in South Brazil. It was illuminated and had much fruit – including huge clusters of grapes, a strange fruit not known on the surface, apples and other fruits, which compose the sole diet of the people. He said he entered a subterranean vehicle operated by a strange motive power, which spiralled down until it brought him to the hollow interior of the world, where he beheld the central sun and tall godlike beings (Atlanteans). After visiting this ‘New World’ he returned to the city. Later he travelled through a tunnel to another subterranean city over a hundred miles away. The entrance of the tunnel had a waterfall of warm water falling in front of it. This was near Iguassu Falls, on the Paraguay border.

  In the second account, another Brazilian describes how he travelled through a ‘smooth-cut, illuminated tunnel’ for three days, twenty hours a day, until he came to an immense illuminated space filled with buildings and a fruit orchard. ‘The people who lived there were all an exact copy of each other, with no individual variation,’ the narrator told Dr Bernard. ‘The sexes lived apart and the women all looked as if in their teens, even though they were centuries old. These women produced children by parthenogenesis, and were all virgin mothers.’ The man later returned to the surface world by an exit tunnel, apparently none the worse for his remarkable encounter!

  Dr Bernard is quick to point out that he has no proof that such stories are true, ‘since the persons who made them were, in most cases, impelled by monetary motives1. ‘But,’ he adds, ‘in the main they agree with each other regarding (1) these subterraneans cities being illuminated (2) being inhabited by a super race, and (3) connected with each other by a network of tunnels.’

  Charles A. Marcoux, the director of the Subsurface Research Center in Phoenix, Arizona, who has been researching the legend of Agharti for twenty years, also believes the inhabitants are of Atlantean stock: fair-skinned, with blue eyes and blonde hair. Despite dwelling underground, they enjoy a subtropical climate, and ventilation is provided by means of the tunnel system and disguised air shafts. He says they also have air purifying machines resembling rotating radar detectors which clear the atmosphere of all impurities:

  This is a ‘sweep ray’ which literally ‘sweeps’ the atmosphere of all radio-active elements. Most of them are mobile and have a fan-like antenna, and are designed like a spider web, which draws in the radioactive particles from the air and processes them through filters, which remove all substances harmful to life.

  Marcoux claims that these machines not only remove poisons from the air but add to it health-giving substances that have a beneficial effect on both vegetable and human life. The people live mostly on fruit, having a number of varieties unknown on the surface world. ‘A white and red grape is common there and is purer than the blue,’ he says. ‘Melon meats are made into a juice which helps stimulate the mind and makes it more receptive to beneficial thought currents. Bathing is done in natural stream waters which exist there.’

  The claims of this remarkable American researcher, which he says are mainly based on ‘mind messages’ he has received, seem to coincide very much with our idea of a utopian, vegetarian society much concerned with radioactivity and atmospheric pollution.

  Perhaps, though, Marcoux’s most remarkable claim concerns the method by which the people of the underground kingdom travel along their tunnels. For according to his report, they are the creators of what we commonly call Unidentified Flying Objects or ‘Flying Saucers’. And not only do these mysterious craft utilize the tunnel system, but occasionally they appear in our skies, too! If this theory is true – and there are other supporters of the idea – then it offers one of the most fascinating solutions to the riddle of the Flying Saucers that has baffled mankind for many years now. And it also explains the strange enigmas of Ossendowski’s ‘cars of a type unknown to Western races’ which rush through the subterranean world and Roerich’s ‘spheroid form with shiny surface’ in the sky over Mongolia; and adds weight to the conviction of writers like Erich von Daniken that the creators of Agharti might originally have been space people.

  Flying Saucers are certainly one of the strangest and most persistent mysteries of the twentieth century – although researchers have shown that reports of strange ‘lights’ and ‘shapes’ in the skies corresponding to their description have been reported since the days of the Ancient Greeks. Until this century, however, it has always been assumed that they were of extraterrestrial origin, appearing above the Earth on scouting missions from some civilization elsewhere in the galaxy.* The man who actually first proposed the idea that they might come from much nearer home – from planet Earth itself – was a Brazilian Professor, Dr Henrique Jose de Souza.

  Professor de Souza, who lived in Sao Lourenço, and was President of the Brazilian Theosophical Society, developed the theory with a close friend, Commander Paulo Strauss, a member of the Brazilian navy. Their conclusions were first published in a series of articles which appeared in the Brazilian magazine, O Cruzeiro in February 1955. In three issues, Professor de Souza and Commander Strauss argued that while it was evident that no nation on Earth had created the flying machines – certainly not the Russians or the Americans for they would have taken great propaganda advantages from the fact, the two men suggested – it was also equally clear from space research that it was inconceivable such craft could have travelled from the very far distant planets where it was just possible, though not proven, that life of some kind might exist. This only left the possibility that the UFOs had originated from Earth – and from the interior of the Earth, according to de Souza and Strauss.

  Professor de Souza, in his capacity as leader of the Brazilian Theosophists, had for years been interested in the Agharti legend, and the more he pondered over the underground kingdom and its network of tunnels, and how it was conceivable that anyone might utilize them without a very special form of transport, the more he came to the conclusion that the Flying Saucers were the answer. That the subterranean dwellers were an advanced people seemed beyond doubt, so if they were capable of living and thriving beneath the Earth’s surface there was surely no reason why they should not have developed a form of transport far more sophisticated than anything known on Earth. And the very shape, manoeuvrability and speed with which these craft were credited seemed to make them ideally suited for traversing the network of tunnels that lead to and from the underground kingdom.

  In 1957, the ideas of de Souza and Strauss were carefully examined by a writer named O. C. Huguenin in a book called From The Subterranean World To The Sky: Flying Saucers. After declaring that ‘the hypothesis of the extra-terrestrial origin of the flying saucers does not seem acceptable’, Huguenin wrote:

  We must consider the most recent and interesting theory that has been offered to account for the origin of flying saucers: the existence of a great Subterranean World with innumerable cities in which live millions of inhabitants. This other humanity must have reached a very high degree of civilization, economic organization and social, cultural and spiritual development, together with an extraordinary scientific progress, in comparison with whom the humanity that lives in the Earth’s surface may be considered as a race of barbarians. According to the information supplied by Commander Paulo Strauss, the Subterranean World is not restricted to caverns, but is more or less extensive and located in a hollow inside the Earth large enough to contain cities and fields, where live human beings and animals, whose physical structure resembles those on the surface.

  Hugue
nin then describes how these people, far in advance of the rest of humanity in terms of scientific development, devised machines called Vimanas that ‘flew in the skies and the tunnels like aircraft, utilising a form of energy obtained directly from the atmosphere’. They were, he says, ‘identical with what we know as Flying Saucers’.

  He continues:

  Prior to the catastrophe that destroyed Atlantis, the Atlanteans found refuge in the Subterranean World, to which they travelled in their Vimanas, or Flying Saucers … ever since then, their Flying Saucers have remained in the Earth’s interior, and were used for purposes of transportation from one point to another.

  In the intervening years since 1957, this theory has been argued again on several occasions, more than once by the American, Ray Palmer, who declared in 1959 that: ‘there is a tremendous mass of evidence to show that there is an unknown location of vast dimensions below the earth’s surface where the Flying Saucers can, and most probably do, originate.’ Dr Raymond Bernard believes the UFOs from Agharti may actually be driven by Vril Power:

  The tragic death and disappearance of Captain Mandell, who pursued a fleeing flying saucer until the latter lost patience and caused him to vanish by being disintegrated into atoms, would indicate that the race have at their command a superior form of energy referred to by Bulwer Lytton by the name of ‘ Vril, which is the power that operates their craft and which they only use for destructive purposes when driven to do so in self defence.

  And John A. Keel has made the intriguing observation that as strange people of Oriental appearance have been associated with a number of Flying Saucer sightings this may be another clue to tie them in with Agharti and its centre beneath Tibet. Interestingly, all these writers believe that the UFOs have a ‘mission’ to prevent the world destroying itself through a radioactive catastrophe.