Graham Hancock, in his book Underworld: The Mysterious Origins of Civilization, visits the remains of a prehistoric, worldwide civilization using the monuments it left behind. He posits that this worldwide culture was brought to an end by superfloods. Robert M. Schoch, Ph.D. contends in Voyages of the Pyramid Builders: The True Origins of the Pyramids from Lost Egypt to Ancient America that the geological, linguistic, and geographical evidence associated with the worldwide megalithic monuments demonstrates the actual existence of such a prototype civilization, a civilization that was dispersed around the globe by rising sea levels caused by a flurry of comets.
While the edges of evidence appear to support the notion of Atlantis as a worldwide civilization lost in a catastrophic flood, many authors have sought out Atlantis in specific locales because the scientific establishment unknowingly cast its lot against a prehistorical civilization before the evidence began showing up. It did so by enforcing the eighteenth-century rule of reason which stipulated that God could not be used as an explanation for physical reality, thereby rejecting out of hand the possible validity of all biblical accounts and, in the case of a worldwide prehistoric society, the possibility that a flood of biblical proportions destroyed all but the megalithic evidence for that civilization.
Making the world of science safe against Bible-thumpers became the overriding goal of nineteenth-century science. Pierre-Simon de Laplace had barely finished banishing God as the source of Newton’s perpetual motion of the solar system (by creating his swirling mass of gas out of whole cloth) before evidence for the worldwide flood described in the Bible began to accumulate. Science, at this time, was unaware that accounts of a universal flood appear around the globe, the universal flood being a part of the myths and traditions of more than five hundred widely separated cultures.
As explorers started to bring home descriptions of the world from afar, science was horrified to see a picture emerging of a planet scarred by massive movements of water, generally from the northwest to the southeast, over its surface. The northwestern sides of whole mountains were scored as if they had been subjected to fast-moving waters containing gravel and boulders. Floodwater was unmistakably the source of the scoring because science could see the same effect from fast-moving rivers. Furthermore, those same sides of the mountains were also home to massive buildups of drift materials, detritus presumably left behind by receding waters. Again, this was an effect that mimicked natural actions in the real world. These drift deposits even contained the remains of animals, including the woolly mammoth.
More horrifying to nineteenth-century scientists than the evidence of water damage and silting were the gigantic boulders exposed to public view all over the European countryside in places where they clearly didn’t belong. These oversized rocks, many weighing thousands of tons, could have been moved only by massive floodwaters carrying them along and then depositing them when the waters receded. The movement of these rocks by the floodwaters would have been, in part, responsible for the aforementioned mountainside scouring.
What to do with these discoveries that constituted irrefutable evidence of a worldwide flood? If science had been true to the evidence and concluded that the evidence had, in fact, resulted from a worldwide flood, religious crazies would have filled the pulpits and newspapers with cries that the biblical story of the flood, and thus the entire Bible, had been scientifically confirmed: not a desirable result.
The only thing science had going for it was the lack of an apparent source for the floodwaters. Arguments that its waters had originated from the visible seabeds and ocean floors of the moon were easily squelched by referring to Newton’s theory of gravitation, which holds that gravity is proportional to matter. All the matter in the Moon that has ever been there appears still to be there. Thus, there could have been no lessening of the gravity and thus no way for the Moon’s apparent seas and oceans to have escaped its gravity and move the quarter of a million miles across space, in response to the earth’s stronger gravity, and produce a worldwide flood.
Science, however, is an enterprise that turns beliefs into facts, and it accomplishes this feat so well that its myths become more real than actual facts. It takes hypotheses, mere notions, and crafts a methodology designed to do the impossible—to turn those notions into facts. Science holds that hypotheses that predict facts that are later found are as good as fact.
The scientific landscape is littered with hypotheses that have been accepted as scientific fact even though the term scientific fact is an admission that proven hypotheses are not facts. There is nothing that can be done to turn an idea into a fact. The scientific process merely accepts theories as scientific fact so long as they have not been disproved. Of course, what we have when we accept as fact ideas that have never been disproved are a bunch of ideas that have never been disproved. Laplace’s swirling mass of gas, light as water waves, the oxygen/carbon dioxide cycle, the electron, even Newton’s mass/gravity are scientific facts, ideas capable of neither proof nor disproof.
The task that faced science when it was confronted with the incontrovertible evidence of a worldwide flood was to create a scientific fact that would provide a substitute for the already existing evidence left behind by the actual flood. In the early 1820s, a Swiss engineer, Ignaz Venetz, focused on the remains of woolly mammoths found in the drifts, pointing out that as the same animals were being found in the frozen Siberian wastes, the area in which the drifts were found must have at one time been covered with ice. A chorus of experts joined in, positing the slow descent of glaciers from the north, a process that, because it visualized the inexorable creep of ice over eons, deftly captured the spirit of uniformitarianism, Charles Lyell’s theory, published in the 1830s, which maintains that geologic processes occur gradually rather than catastrophically. Lyell’s own reconstruction of the earth’s history, focusing on the layers of sediment left as the floodwaters receded, pictured the sediments as deposited over eons so they could be used to produce a fictitious dating system for the earth to counter the biblical creation story.
A decade later, the Swiss naturalist Louis Agassiz consolidated the speculations of Venetz and his chorus of approving voices by enthroning himself as the inventor of the ice age. Agassiz’s creation, for scientific and public consumption, was a distinct reversal of the scientific process. Instead of taking an idea and using unknown facts to prove it to be a scientific fact, Agassiz took disparate facts that led inexorably to an uncomfortable conclusion—a worldwide flood—and then created an idea—the ice age—that could be used in place of the uncomfortable (flood) idea. And then he exclaimed his ice age theory to be scientific fact!
Because no methodology can prove an idea, ideas have to be accepted or rejected on the basis of the evidence they explain. The glacier theory did not explain why the scoring, labeled striations that supported glacier theory appeared only on one side of the mountains or why the drifts, called moraines to tie them to glacier theory, contained the remains of animals that were found only in equatorial regions, insects that were found only in the southern hemisphere, and birds that were native to Asia. The glacier theory did not explain why the giant boulders, named erratics to accommodate glacier theory, were found in desert regions where no glacier could possibly go.
But these discrepancies were small potatoes compared to the scientific reality of glaciers themselves. Glacier theory simply ignored the basic facts of glacier movement. Glaciers are flows of ice that, like rivers, respond to gravity. Glaciers do not climb hills and they do not travel across level land. However, because scientific facts are merely notions, ideas that cannot be disproved, those who present strong visual confirmation of their truthfulness are always both widely and wildly accepted. Even though glaciers could not have carried the erratics the thousands of miles required to reach (and cover) the European countryside, the fact that the North Pole was north, which was “up there” on the globe, was more than ample scientific proof that gravity could cause the glaciers to inch “down” ov
er the sides of the globe.
No one proposed that ice fields covered the southern half of the planet because that would require the glaciers to defy gravity and travel “up” the sides of the globe from the South Pole.
Such is the stuff upon which empirical science bases its notions of reality.
Like Laplace’s swirling mass of gas, which was proposed four decades before Agassiz’s ice age and provided the template for turning theories about existing facts into scientific facts, the ice age is no more than a proposition, a possible explanation for the reality that we see. Science saw the evidence of the flood described in the Bible and created the ice age to avoid the appearance of verifying an event described in the Bible.
Once the ice age was accepted as a reality, the only problem that science encountered was its need to produce a model that would explain how the earth could undergo vast temperature variations, a task at which it has failed so far. In the meantime, subsequent discoveries continued to verify the existence of a worldwide flood and mirrored the hundreds of newly encountered myths and traditions attesting to the flood’s actuality. The very drifts that contained the bones of the woolly mammoths that gave rise to the idea of the ice age contained, along with the remains of exotic animals, insects and birds that had never lived in the same location and vegetation that could never have been local to where the drifts were found. There was no way to explain this admixture of life by glacial movements.
It was as if all the creatures, all the trees, all the vegetation of the earth had been caught up in flowing whirlpools, mixed together, and then deposited wherever the water settled. In addition to the drifts at the northwest bases of mountain chains, these jumbles of diverse life-forms were also found in drifts that filled isolated valleys and made up entire islands in the Arctic whose boneyards contained not only the remains of animals from warmer climes, but also uncountable tree trunks extirpated with their roots intact—trees that could have grown only below the Arctic treeline.
Science did not rush to proclaim the existence of a warm age!
Instead, as soon as the ice age became a scientific fact, the fossil remains of life that had been found in the drifts, including the woolly mammoth that gave rise to the myth of the ice age, disappeared from scientific discourse and the newly named moraines became a simple admixture of sand and rock. When the same admixture of bones and plant life was found stuffed deep in caves, a process that could have occurred only if it had been carried into the small cracks and crevices by the recession of massive floodwaters, the caves were deemed an anomaly that explained nothing, and the evidence was allowed to be mined into nonexistence.
Then came evidence that the scattered islands of the Pacific had once been home to a civilization that had stretched from the shores of Asia to the coast of South America. Plato’s accounts of a lost civilization in the Timaeus and Critias had always been the subject of debate, but the debate had not arisen because of physical evidence on the face of the earth. The pyramids, impossible structures, had always existed, but there was never a context in which to place them until the discoveries of ancient cities in the Pacific and then in Central and South America started coming to light.
Similarities among the various megalithic societies being uncovered led to the application of the word diffusion to describe the way culture passed from one group of people to another. With cultural diffusion again pointing clearly to an antediluvian civilization, the scientific establishment reacted with archeology’s first rule: the ironclad law that cultural transfers could not extend beyond the shores of the oceans. At the same time, a social movement was forged that was designed to preserve the dignity of indigenous populations in the face of the encroachment of modern technology.
In the United States, the late-nineteenth-century job of establishing that native populations had never been influenced by foreign contact fell to Major John Wesley Powell, who was the creator and director of the Bureau of Ethnology at the Smithsonian; a founder and president of the politically influential Cosmos Club; a founder and president of the Anthropological Society of Washington; one of the earliest members of the Biological Society of Washington; an organizer of the Geological Society of Washington; a founder of both the National Geographic Society and the Geological Society of America; and president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
During the nineteenth century, evidence of both European presence and the existence of a prehistoric civilization was being uncovered all over North America, primarily in the mounds that dotted the countryside east of the Rockies. Powell sent out his ethnology emissaries to systematically destroy the mounds and any evidence they contained that pointed to nonnative origins, thereby successfully eradicating the history of the North American continent.
Powell’s prestige and fanaticism, together with the law against cultural diffusionism, translated into a worldwide rule of science that megalithic structures, no matter where found, were the product of whatever local inhabitants happened to live around the megaliths at the time of their discovery. Thus the world was taught that the pyramids sprang from the hands of hunter-gatherers who had discovered farming on the shores of the Nile, the massive megalithic complexes in the Americas were the product of the ancestors of the natives Cortez had quickly defeated, and the megalithic monuments dotting the islands of the Pacific were built by the natives’ ancestors who had set aside their fishing spears long enough to craft cities out of fitted slabs of fifty-ton rocks!
There was no room in the past for a megalithic society, a worldwide, antediluvian civilization that would easily explain both the physical remains of such a civilization and the flood that brought that civilization to an end. The past was dominated by an ice age created to explain the evidence for the flood that destroyed the worldwide civilization.
Today, we are stuck with the scientific fact, the myth, that ice can creep down from the North Pole and cover Europe and North America. Once the scientific community has accepted a theory as fact, any evidence is acceptable so long as it is cast to support the theory and no evidence is sufficient to disprove the theory. Without opposition, the theory becomes part of the founding principles of whole new fields of inquiry. There can, then, be no Agassiz speaking into a void created by an overwhelming desire to discredit an event described in the Bible, nor a Powell powerful enough to undo the damage done by Powell.
This is because there is no longer a steward overseeing the entire field, given that the field itself is now fractured into dozens of disciplines whose disciples can all take responsibility for claiming the theory to be wrong. If and when people in the individual fields who have adopted the scientific fact of the ice age attempt to challenge the theory, they are charged with operating out of their area of competence.
The ice age is more real than the striated rock, the moraine-buried mountains, and the erratics it was crafted to explain, a nonexistent vision that is more a visible fixture of the landscape than the landscape itself.
But the discoveries of flood evidence keep coming. The breathtaking ruins of a submerged city off Yonaguni Island in Japan have produced a storm of controversy, which has been drowned out by the cries of rage against the later discovery of the remains of a huge underwater city lying off the western tip of Cuba just east of the Yucatán. Before critics could scream themselves hoarse at this discovery, another startling find, of a sunken city in India’s Bay of Cambay, sent establishment delusionists like the Harvard archeologist Richard Meadows scrambling for an international commission to gain control of the nature of the knowledge permitted to come out of these finds.
Any researcher attempting to come to grips with the emerging facts of the past is faced with the scientifically unassailable reality of the ice age in trying to explain the facts and, by acknowledging the ice age, ends up further distorting our view of reality. Some seize on the “crustal displacement” theory suggested by Charles Hapgood and fleshed out by the Flem-Aths, the notion that parts of the earth that are now at the pol
es were farther toward the equator, speculating that such an event would have caused massive movements of the world’s oceans. Others favor the idea that giant comets or meteors caused the earth to tilt on its axis, thus displacing the oceans. Still others believe the encroachment of black holes caused the oceans to heave. The most effective proponent of a worldwide civilization, Graham Hancock, perceives that the melting ice sheets created massive water dams in accordance with ice age theory proposed by the late professor Cesare Emiliani. These dams, Hancock posits, broke and produced the superfloods that inundated what became the underwater cities.
Because these explanations accord reality to the scientific myth of the ice age and do not explain where the waters of the flood came from—the waters whose weight submerged the landmasses of the Pacific and the Atlantic, forcing up mountain peaks at their margins—I prefer to look elsewhere than the earth for the source of the floodwaters. The most obvious source, of course, would be the Moon, whose seabeds, outlined on its surface, have long been recognized by their names as being the remnants of seas and oceans.
Let us speculate for a moment and say that the scientific fact of gravity, rather than being the static result of mass, is the dynamic product of what the matter is doing—that is, cooling. This is a conclusion that is supported by the fact that the measurement of the product of cooling, the electromagnetic emissions such as light, is identical to the measurement of gravity, and both diminish inversely with the square of their distance. Given this, the Moon, being smaller than Earth, would have cooled off first, lessening its gravitational field and allowing the still-hot Earth, with its still-strong gravitational field, to attract the Moon’s oceans across space.
Forbidden History: Prehistoric Technologies, Extraterrestrial Intervention, and the Suppressed Origins of Civilization Page 7
