Apparently, the Atlanteans operated two types of flying vehicles: gas-filled dirigible-like craft and heavier-than-air vimanas directed from a central power source on the ground. While the latter represented an aeronautical technology beyond any known aircraft, the balloons Cayce describes featured a detail that suggests their authenticity.
He said their skin was made of elephant hides. They probably would have been too heavy to serve as envelopes for the containment of any lighter-thanair gas. But lighter, expandable, and non-leaking elephant bladders might have worked. In any case, Cayce says that the Atlanteans used the animals, which were native to their kingdom, for a variety of purposes.
The Critias also mentions that elephants abounded on the island of Atlantis. Skeptics long faulted Plato for including this out-of-place pachyderm until the 1960s, when oceanographers dredging the sea bottom of the Atlantic Ocean some two hundred miles west of the Portuguese coast unexpectedly hauled up hundreds of elephant bones at several different locations. The scientists concluded that the animals had anciently wandered across a now submerged land bridge extending from the Atlantic shores of North Africa into formerly dry land long since sunk beneath the sea. Their discovery gave special credence not only to Plato, but to Cayce as well.
No less surprising are the submarines known to the early-fifth-century-B.C.E. Greek historian Herodotus and the first-century-C.E. Roman naturalist Pliny the Elder. Even Aristotle wrote about submarines. His most famous pupil, Alexander the Great, was said to have been on board a glass-covered undersea vessel during an extended shake-down cruise beneath the eastern Mediterranean Sea, around 320 B.C.E.
While these submersibles may have gone back twenty-three centuries or so, Atlantis had already vanished about one thousand years earlier. Even so, if such inventions took place in Classical times, they might just as well have operated during the Bronze Age, which was not much different technologically.
Ancient aeronautics paled in comparison to even greater technological achievements, as Atlantean scientists succeeded “in the breaking up of the atomic forces to produce impelling force to those means and modes of transportation, or of travel, or of lifting large weights or of changing the faces or forces of nature itself,” said Edgar Cayce. The same life-reading explains that explosives were invented by the Atlanteans. Seven years earlier, he mentioned what he called “the Atlantean period, when those first of the explosives were made.” Ignatius Donnelly, the father of modern Atlantology, wrote even earlier that explosives were developed in Atlantis.
Cayce explained that the Atlanteans were able to create such an advanced society because their civilization developed over a more or less continuous history until the final catastrophe. Their cultural evolution had been graced with many centuries of growth in which to develop and perfect the scientific arts. The basis of this ancient technology was an understanding and application of crystal power. Through it, the motive forces of nature were somehow directed to serve human needs. Transportation on, above, and under the sea became possible, and long-distance communication bound together the world of Atlantis.
We find such a high level of material progress set in prehistoric times incomprehensible and beyond belief. Yet many better-known civilizations achieved technological breakthroughs that were forgotten when their societies fell, only to be rediscovered sometimes thousands of years later. In Middle America, for example, Mayan accomplishments in celestial mechanics were not matched until the last century. Incan agricultural techniques, abandoned with the Spanish Conquest, yielded three times more produce than farming methods employed in Peru today.
At the same time Plato was writing about Atlantis, his fellow Greeks were sailing the Alexandris. More than four hundred feet long, she was a colossal ship, the likes of which would not be seen again for another two thousand years. A pregnancy test in use among eighteenth-dynasty Egyptians was not discovered until the 1920s. As for Egypt, our modern world’s top engineers lack the knowhow capable of reproducing the Great Pyramid in all its details. Certainly, far more was lost with the fall of ancient civilization than has yet been found.
Moreover, our times do not have a monopoly on human beings of great genius and inventiveness. That they were able to create complex technologies in other times and societies long since forgotten should not overtax our credulity. And if one of those lost epochs belonged to a place known as Atlantis, we have it on the authority of Western civilization’s most influential philosopher and the foremost psychic our country has yet produced.
However they may disagree in their interpretations of the lost civilization, both metaphysical and worldwide mythological sources are almost unanimous in describing a central role for the sophisticated technology of Atlantis in its ultimate destruction. Cayce said that the Atlanteans grew intoxicated with the material wonders made possible through quartz crystal technology. The riches and luxuries it generated inspired them with an insatiable desire for abundance.
They turned the beams of their power crystals into the very bowels of the planet, excavating for even greater mineral wealth. Prodigious amounts of high-grade copper, which fueled the bronze weapons industries of the pre-Classical world, and gold enough to sheet the walls of their city poured forth from Earth’s violated cornucopia.
The copper-mining operations of prehistoric Michigan still bear the scars of Atlantean technology. For example, some unknown device enabled the ancient miners of the Upper Peninsula to sink pits vertically through sixty feet of solid rock. Another piece of lost instrumentation directed them to all the richest veins of copper hidden under the hillsides of Isle Royale and the Kewanee Peninsula.
These and similar achievements of the late fourth millennium B.C.E., which allowed the prehistoric miners to remove a minimum of half a billion pounds of raw copper, are no speculation; they have been known to archeologists for more than a century. Perhaps in overreaching themselves through their mining operations, the Atlanteans excavated too deeply into the already seismically unstable Mid-Atlantic Ridge on which their capital perched. They were blind to the geologic consequences of their ecological selfishness, and regarded our living planet as an inexhaustible fount of mineral wealth. Parallels with our times are uncomfortably close.
The Atlanteans reveled in an orgy of self-indulgent materialism. But at some indefinable point, long-suffering Nature rebelled. The threshold of her forbearance had been crossed, and she chastised her sinful children with a terrible punishment. Her fires of hell opened to engulf opulent Atlantis in a volcanic event so cataclysmic that it destroyed the entire island. The crumbling, incinerated city with its screaming inhabitants was dragged to the bottom of the sea and into myth. The “great, terrible crystal”—the source of the Atlanteans’ unexampled prosperity—had become the instrument of their doom.
29 Archeology and the Law of Gravity
Orthodox Theory of Ancient Capability Tends to Cave In under Its Own Weight
Will Hart
The massive earthmover makes the average street pickup look like a Tonka truck. Rated to about 350 tons, it is restricted to mining operations, as the federal highway load limit is forty tons and the truck weighs more than that without a load. I was watching it being put through its paces in the local open-pit copper mine in Bisbee, Arizona. A bone-jarring flash suddenly struck me that snapped into place things that I had long been trying to get a perspective on.
The earthmover is the heaviest truck that we have in modern civilization and it can haul the heaviest loads we find littering the landscapes in Egypt, Bolivia, and Peru. At one point in my life, as I was learning the ropes of the literary world, I worked on a cement construction crew in a logging town, where I came to know about handling heavy loads and what a front-end loader could lift and a double flatbed logging truck could haul.
During the course of my thirty years of investigations into the mysteries of ancient civilizations, I have often been puzzled by the way people react to cyclopean blocks of stone being moved long distances or hoisted up int
o the air. These reactions were either a blank look or a shrug that said “Okay, what’s the big deal?” This response frustrated me and made me feel as if I was not communicating adequately the scope and difficulty of the problem. But I have since realized that the reason most people do not grasp the magnitude of the problem—and what the “real” enigmas of our planet are—has to do with simple, direct experience.
One hundred and fifty years ago most people lived on farms in rural areas and were commonly faced with having to haul loads of hay, logs, or whatever. They knew what it took to bale a ton of hay and lift a three-hundred-pound log or chunk of rock. But today machines handle all of these heavy-lifting and moving jobs and we have lost our perspective. I recently had a conversation with a friend about these issues wherein I was trying to explain why the Egyptians could not have built the Great Pyramid with primitive tools and techniques.
He was skeptical, until he recalled an event that quickly shifted his attitude. I was telling him that I would be willing to concede that the builders could handle the millions of 2.5-ton blocks if he would deal with the problem of the seventy-ton megaliths over the King’s Chamber. The light went on in his head. He suddenly became animated as he told me how he and a group of friends were faced with moving a heavy pool table. They positioned themselves about it, shoulder to shoulder, and gave the old heave-ho.
It came as a great surprise when the pool table remained rooted to the floor; they had not been able to lift it even one inch. My point sank in. You cannot use manpower to lift a seventy-ton block of granite up and out of a quarry and onto a sledge. The task increases exponentially when we consider how one-hundred-ton blocks were hoisted up and positioned more than twenty feet off the ground in the Sphinx Temple. This is an engineering and physics problem that cannot be overcome by numbers, which is how Egyptologists try to solve it. Granite is very dense, and a twenty-foot-long block can weigh seventy tons. How many men can physically fit around it to attempt a lift? Maybe fifty, which is not even enough manpower to hoist ten tons.
This is an intractable problem. As long as Egyptologists insist that men lifted up the cyclopean blocks of stone with nothing but brute force and ropes, this problem will need to be overcome. The rest of the construction formula of the Egyptologists is moot until this primary obstacle is dealt with. If they cannot or will not prove that it was accomplished as they claim, then it is time to go beyond challenging the rest of their baseless theories. We need to discard the whole orthodox house of cards and walk away from the so-called debate.
Returning to the 350-ton cyclopean monsters, our highest-rated commercial cranes are near their limit with this load. If anyone thinks that men, ropes, and sledges lifted and hauled loads that our heaviest equipment can barely handle, I will argue that this belief is a sign of technological illiteracy. Recently I was watching a documentary about a bridge that collapsed while a train was traveling over it. I went through a mental process similar to the copper mine example.
Locomotives, diesel or steam, weigh about two hundred tons. They are rugged, hardworking, heavy-duty pieces of machinery. There are many cyclopean blocks in Egypt and Peru that weigh as much as a locomotive. A monstrous crane was brought in to fish the locomotive out of the river. Imagine placing a locomotive on bare earth or sand. What would happen? It would immediately sink into the ground. There is a good reason that train tracks are built on a gravel bed that has railroad ties laid down crosswise beneath the steel tracks.
Could several thousand men pull a locomotive across the sand? That is extremely doubtful. Some kind of hard-packed road would have to be constructed to take the weight and lessen the tremendous drag. As we saw above, our modern highways hold up only under loads less than forty tons.
The average eighteen-wheel tractor-trailer hauls about twenty tons, so it is obvious that loads exceeding twenty tons are indeed very heavy. Those kinds of loads were hauled all over Egypt. Where is the evidence that the necessary roads were installed? They would not have disappeared, as they would have been made out of stones and brick masonry.
Assuming a few of the ancient stone-block transport roads have been uncovered, they are perfect to test the orthodox sledge-hauling theory. The problem of how the ancients moved the heaviest loads is quite enough to crush the orthodox building theories and time lines into dust, in my estimation. Academics are not known for being mechanically inclined, nor are they the ones doing the sweat labor during excavations out in the field. It is extraordinarily easy to put pen to paper and make a one-hundred-ton block of stone move from the quarry onto a temple wall. It is impossible to meet that challenge in the real world using manpower unaided by modern equipment.
The fact is that the Egyptologist Mark Lehner discovered this years ago when he put together an expert team to try and raise a thirty-five-ton obelisk using ancient tools and techniques. It was filmed by “NOVA.” A master stonemason was brought in to quarry the granite block from the bedrock. Unfortunately, he gave up after trying every trick he knew. They called a bulldozer in, which cut it away from the bedrock and lifted it onto a waiting truck. That was really the end of the experiment, and it proved that it was not possible to quarry and lift a block one-tenth the size of the heaviest obelisk still standing in Egypt.
WHAT MORE PROOF IS NEEDED?
Lehner never again tried to use the ancient tools to prove how the pyramids were constructed. In a later experiment aimed at showing that a twenty-foot-tall scale model of the Great Pyramid could be constructed, he brought in barefoot locals with modern chisels, hammers, and a truck with a steel winch to hoist the blocks out of the quarry.
That compromised the entire test, which was silly anyway, as the blocks were less than half the size of the average ones used to build the pyramid. How could that prove that seventy-ton blocks were hoisted up 150 vertical feet to the King’s Chamber? His use of the twenty-foot-tall scale model is analogous to the comparison between the plastic Tonka truck and a real earth-mover cited earlier in this article. The whole fiasco proved only that he had become intimidated by the magnitude of the construction problems.
We encounter very similar, intractable problems when we examine the precision engineering that went into building the Great Pyramid. We have another example of just how precise and demanding this massive project was in a demonstration that took place in the late 1970s. At that point in time, Japan was the global economic miracle, and riding high. A Japanese team funded by Nissan set out to prove they had the wherewithal to build a sixty-foot scale model of the Great Pyramid using traditional tools and methods.
The Egyptian government approved the project. Their first embarrassment came at the quarry when they discovered they could not cut the stones from the bedrock. They called in jackhammers. The next embarrassing situation came when they tried to ferry the blocks across the river on a primitive barge. They could not control it and had to call for a modern one.
Then they ran into more grief on the opposite bank when they discovered that the sledges sank into the sand and they could not budge them. They called for a bulldozer and a truck. The coup de grâce was delivered when they tried to assemble the pyramid and found they could not position the stones with any accuracy, and had to request the aid of helicopters.
National pride and saving face are very important to the Japanese, and this was a shameful episode. They were utterly humiliated when they ultimately discovered that they were not able to bring the four walls together into an apex and their mini-pyramid experiment was a disaster. They left Giza sadder and wiser. Imagine the inconceivably exact planning that went into building the Great Pyramid in order to bring the 481-foot-high walls to a point!
How long did it take the ancient Egyptians to build it? That is the wrong question. The right one is, Could the ancient Egyptians have built the Great Pyramid? The answer is: not with the tools and techniques that Egyptologists claim they used.
These issues have been raised and debated for decades. It is time to bring them to a head and move on. A
lternative historians have pointed to the enigmas and orthodoxy has pooh-poohed them. Quite frankly, this gridlock is unproductive. Orthodox historians have shown a disdain for applying the rules and guidelines of scientific methodology to the matter.
Chris Dunn has addressed this issue and pointed out that Egyptologists apply a double standard when it comes to evaluating their soft “evidence” versus the hard facts as outlined above. They set the bar about one foot off the ground for themselves and about eight feet high for alternative historians.
The repeated live TV and canned video programs that have been churned out quite regularly since the mid-1990s, by Zahi Hawass and Mark Lehner, have been aimed at shoring up the party line. In the Fox-TV special broadcast live from the Giza plateau in September 2002, I watched the robot explore the shaft. While most observers have focused on analyzing the “payoff,” the most important parts of the program slipped by virtually unnoticed. These were “the filler” segments that recited and added new support for the traditional version of history. It was very deftly layered into the program; in fact, it was “the programming” part of the show.
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