Forbidden History: Prehistoric Technologies, Extraterrestrial Intervention, and the Suppressed Origins of Civilization

by J. Douglas Kenyon

  It is well known that Egypt’s ancients had the ability to deal with such mathematics. So considering religion and astronomy, the precision in design of the descending chamber as an observatory seems more credible than the idea that it had been designed to carry a body through it once, and attributing such precision to happenstance.

  Another purpose for the Khufu pyramid (it is the largest and thereby might well epitomize the ancients’ technology) could be to serve as a monument to preserve knowledge—something of a time capsule. A large number of scholars outside of Egyptology believe it preserves dimensions of our planet, whereby the base perimeter is equal to one half of a degree of equatorial longitude. Does it?

  Perimeter 3,023.14 ft. = ½ minute

  6,046.28 ft. = 1 minute

  362,776.8 ft. = 1 degree

  so 68.7077 miles = 1 degree

  360 degrees = 24,734.78 miles

  If you stand on the equator and walk due north for 3,023.14 feet, the theory is that you’ve walked one half of one minute of longitude. The earth’s longitude would then equal 24,735 miles. Satellite measurement is 24,860 miles, or a difference of 125 miles. This is accuracy of 99.5 percent. Egyptology calls this coincidence, and that is certainly possible. But if the theory has merit, then the only other dimension of a sphere, its radius, would have, as its counterpart, the pyramid’s height. If such proves out, the theory would indeed have merit. But does it?

  The height of the Khufu pyramid was 480.7 feet. Various measurements differ minutely, but not enough to affect the theory. Using the formula above, 480.7 feet × 2 × 60 × 360 = 3,933 miles. This computes to a polar radius of the earth of 3,933 miles, which, compared to the satellite’s measure of 3,960 miles, yields a difference of 27 miles or an accuracy of 99.3 percent. Ninety-nine point five percent . . . 99.3%. The mathematics of engineering does not allow such accuracy to be dismissed as coincidence.

  How could the ancient Egyptians have derived these measurements? Again, look to astronomy (The Secrets of the Great Pyramid, Peter Tompkins). There are many other features of the pyramid for which we have no explanations, so this knowledge is but one example of what they knew and what we’ve only known for a few hundred years. But there stands the pyramid.

  Then comes the question of the pyramid as a scale of the earth’s dimensions: Why such a big scale? Why not a pyramid half the size—a dramatic reduction of work to attain and preserve the same information?

  A hint comes from an unexpected discipline—mythology. The highly esteemed scholar Joseph Campbell, writing about myths of disparate cultures (Icelandic, Babylonian, Sumerian, Egyptian, and others, including biblical scripture) in his book The Masks of God—Occidental Mythology, found the number 43,200 or its direct multiple or derivative. In fact, he traced this number back to Neolithic times. This engendered in him what he called “ecstatic panic” in that the supposed independent reoccurrence of this number, he reasoned, represented some relationship to cosmic rhythm, perhaps even a universal constant. Remember the Khufu pyramid’s scale: 2 × 60 × 360 = 43,200! Professor Campbell’s ecstatic panic might have been too much for him had he known this. Could this number in some way have been used by the builders to determine the pyramid’s dimensions?

  Bottom line: (1) The notion that the pyramids were only tombs is disproved. That they were tombs at all has never been proved, even though the younger ones, not the older ones, had funerary characteristics. (2) The ancients demonstrated technology far exceeding what’s been credited to them, far exceeding a simple mausoleum, reaching out with accuracy and methodology unexplained today.

  Where did this technology come from? We don’t know. But they had it and then they lost it. And rising above the Giza plateau is the most massive monument to that loss, the great Khufu pyramid, the oldest and only survivor of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World.

  PART SIX

  * * *

  NEW MODELS TO PONDER

  39 Visitors from Beyond

  Our Civilization Is a Legacy from Space Travelers, Says Zecharia Sitchin, and His New Book Offers to Unveil New Secrets of Divine Encounters

  J. Douglas Kenyon

  From a Human Potentials conference in Washington, D.C., to a Whole Life Exposition in Seattle, from campus bull sessions in Berkeley to cocktail party discussions in Boston, no talk of the hot alternative explorations into the mysterious wellsprings of civilization gets very far these days without at least a passing reference to the work of Zecharia Sitchin. And there are no signs that interest in the author of the five volumes of The Earth Chronicles and Divine Encounters: A Guide to Visions, Angels and Other Emissaries is cooling.

  In fact, “Sitchinites,” as his true believers unabashedly call themselves, have managed to proclaim, in nearly every available forum from talk shows to the Internet, their gospel according to Sitchin—namely, that mankind owes most of its ancient legacy to visiting extraterrestrials. Moreover, Sitchinist “evangelism” has—with some help from the movie Stargate—achieved a not insignificant foothold in the public imagination. And while many may quarrel with Sitchin’s conclusions, very few will dispute that the Russian-born Israeli resident and ancient language expert has indeed come up with some very intriguing, if not compelling, data.

  Indeed, few can match Sitchin’s scholarly credentials. One of a handful of linguists who can read Sumerian cuneiform text, he is also a recognized authority on ancient Hebrew as well as Egyptian hieroglyphics. Not a little controversy, though, surrounds his unusual method of interpreting the ancient texts. Whether biblical, Sumerian, Egyptian, or otherwise, Sitchin insists they should be read not as myths but rather quite literally, essentially as journalism.

  Forget about Jungian archetypes and metaphysical/spiritual analysis. “If somebody says a group of fifty people splashed down in the Persian Gulf,” he argues, “under the leadership of Enki and waded ashore and established a settlement, why should I say that this never happened, and this is a metaphor, and this is a myth, and this is imagination, and somebody just made it all up, and not say [instead] this tells us what happened.”

  Beginning with The 12th Planet, Sitchin has expanded his unique explanation of the ancient texts into a vast and detailed history of what he believes were the actual events surrounding mankind’s origins. Presented is extensive six-thousand-year-old evidence that there is one more planet in the solar system from which “astronauts”—the biblical “giants,” or Annunaki—came to Earth in antiquity.

  Subsequent titles in The Earth Chronicles series are The Stairway to Heaven, The Wars of Gods and Men, The Lost Realms, and When Time Began. (A companion book to the series, Genesis Revisited, was also published.) Sitchin describes in detail the evolving love-hate relationship between men and the “gods” and his belief that this relationship shaped the early days of man on Earth.

  Whatever the Annunaki may have thought of their new creation, the literary critics have found Sitchin’s work impressive. “A dazzling performance,” raved Kirkus Reviews. The Library Journal found it “exciting . . . credible.”

  Divine Encounters relates many stories from biblical, Sumerian, and Egyptian sources. From the Garden of Eden to Gilgamesh, Sitchin believes all references to deity, or deities, are actually indicating the Annunaki, but he does distinguish between the current so-called UFO abduction experience as studied by the Harvard professor John Mack and the ancient encounters. Stressing that he personally has never been abducted, he points out that whereas the current experience is usually viewed as a negative phenomenon with needles and other forms of unwelcome intrusion, “in ancient times, to join the deities was a great and unique privilege. Only a few were entitled to such an encounter.”

  Many of the encounters were sexual. The Bible clearly states, he points out, “that they [the Anunnaki] ‘chose as wives the daughters of men and had children by them, men of renown,’ et cetera, the so-called demi-gods regarding which there are more explicit tales both in Mesopotamian literature and Egyptian so-called mythology, and Greek to
some extent—Alexander the Great believed that these sons of the gods were mated with his mother.”

  The Epic of Gilgamesh tells how one goddess tried to entice the hero into her bed and how he suspected that if she succeeded, he would end up dead. Other encounters involved “virtual reality” and experiences “akin to the Twilight Zone.” Also up for analysis are the experiences of the prophets Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Isaiah. Finally, Sitchin claims to have unraveled the secret identity of the being named YHWH, and to have come to a “conclusion that is mind-boggling even for me.” Nothing further could be elicited on the subject. “Buy the book,” he suggests.

  In the nearly twenty years since The 12th Planet first appeared, Sitchin has seen a considerable change in attitudes toward his work. Still, unlike von Dannikin’s and others’, Sitchin’s study has not been lambasted by other scientists, a fact that he attributes to the soundness of his research. “The only difference between me and the scientific community—I’m talking about Asyriologists, Sumeriaologists, et cetera—is that they refer to all these texts which I read [literally] as mythology.” Today, he says many researchers have come to follow his line of reasoning. By his latest reckoning, there are nearly thirty books by other writers that have “been spawned,” he says, by his writings.

  While Sitchin’s “facts” may be beyond challenge, many of his conclusions are another matter, even among today’s most avant-garde thinkers. The Mars researcher Richard Hoagland complains that Sitchin is trying to “treat the Sumerian cuneiform text like some kind of ancient New York Times,” while others, like the symbolist scholar John Anthony West, believe subtleties in the high wisdom of the ancients have eluded Sitchin.

  For those, his views are essentially simplistic and materialistic. He is a mechanistic reductionist and a throwback to nineteenth-century positivism. Still others are reminded of the efforts of fundamentalist preachers to pin the mystical visions of Saint John the Revelator on specific historical personages (e.g., Napoleon, or Hitler, or Saddam Hussein as the anti-Christ).

  Sitchin, though, remains unrepentant, with little use for what he calls “the established view,” which he says is that “the texts deal with mythology and that it all is imagination, and—whether metaphor or not—that these things never happened. Someone just imagined them.” In contrast, he has “no doubt that these things really happened.”

  The argument that the Sumerian and Egyptian civilizations got their impetus from extraterrestrials, nevertheless, does not rule out the notion that there could have been earlier and perhaps even more-advanced civilizations on Earth. “There’s no denial of that,” he says, citing Sumerian and Assyrian writings. Ashurbanipal, for instance, said he could read writing from before the flood, and describes cities and civilizations that existed before the deluge, but which were wiped out by it. So, on any question of whether there could have been an earlier civilization before the Sumerians or even before the flood—which Sitchin places at seven thousand to eight thousand years prior, “the answer is absolutely yes.” No matter how far back he goes, though, Sitchin sees behind human achievement only the hand of Annunaki.

  Plato should be taken literally too, though Sitchin says he has some difficulty placing the location of Atlantis, “whether it was in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, whether it was in the Pacific in what was known later as Mu, or whether it was in Antarctica, I don’t know what actually [Plato] was talking about, but the notion that once upon a time there was a civilization that was destroyed or came to an end through a major catastrophe, a great flood or something similar, I have absolutely no problem with that.”

  Sitchin is among those who believe that the Great Pyramid is much older than is maintained by orthodox Egyptology. In his second book, The Stairway to Heaven, he took considerable pains to establish that the famous cartouche cited as evidence that the structure was built by Khufu was, in fact, a forgery. Sitchin meticulously makes the case that Colonel Howard-Vyse actually faked the marks in the spaces above the King’s Chamber where he claimed to have discovered them. Since publication, additional corroboration has come from the great-grandson of the master mason who assisted Howard-Vyse. It seems that Colonel Howard-Vyse was seen entering the pyramid on the night in question with brush and paint pot in hand and was heard to say that he intended to reinforce some of the marks he had found, ostensibly to render them more legible. Upon failing to dissuade Howard-Vyse from his plan, the mason quit. The story, however, was kept alive and handed down through the family until it eventually came to Sitchin, further reinforcing his unshakable conviction of the true antiquity of the Great Pyramid.

  Regarding the “Face on Mars,” Sitchin is ambivalent. Whether or not the “face” is real or a product of light and sand, he is more impressed by other photographed structures. Citing his own training at Jerusalem’s Hebrew University in the 1940s, he argues, “One of the rules you learn [in archeology] is if you see a straight line, it means an artificial structure, because there are no straight lines in nature. Yet there are quite a number of such structures recorded by the cameras.”

  According to Sitchin, it all corroborates the Sumerian statement to be found in his first book. “Mars served as a way station,” he says, citing a five-thousand-year-old Sumerian depiction and other texts. “They say that the turn was made at Mars.” He believes an ancient Mars base may have been recently reactivated, which could account for the disappearance of the Russian Phobos Mars Mission as well as the U.S. Mars Observer two years ago. He also speculates that such a site may prove to be where many UFOs are now originating.

  When the reporter inquired as to just what Sitchin might think of Hamlet’s Mill: An Essay Investigating the Origins of Human Knowledge and Its Transmission through Myth, the work of Giorgio de Santillana and Hertha von Dechend, Sitchin offered to kiss him on both cheeks. It seems that the two M.I.T. professors, in their great investigation of the origins of human knowledge and its transmission through myth, had raised the question: “But now, is Nibiru as important as all that?” and had gone on to answer it, “We think so. Or, to say it the other way around: once this astronomical term and two or three more are reliably settled, one can begin in earnest to get wise to and to translate Mesopotamian code.”

  Sitchin does not hesitate to stake his claim: “I think that I achieved it.” For him it is clear, Nibiru is and remains the twelfth planet.

  40 Artifacts in Space

  For Author Richard Hoagland, the Trail of Ancient ETs Is Getting Much Warmer

  J. Douglas Kenyon

  Since its discovery in 1981, a gigantic and enigmatic face gazing upward from the Cydonia region of Mars has held out the tantalizing promise of scientific proof that intelligent life in the universe is not unique to Earth. Though photographed from a satellite five years earlier, the face had gone officially unnoticed, so the space expert Richard Hoagland (author of The Monuments of Mars) and his associates, including many top scientists and engineers who felt anything but optimistic about the chances for an effective official follow-up, proceeded to launch their own investigation.

  The photos of the “Face on Mars” and an apparent complex of ruins nearby were subjected to years of exhaustive research. Utilizing the most advanced tools of scientific analysis, The Mars Mission, as the group terms itself, has produced more than enough evidence to argue plausibly that the objects of Cydonia are the remains not only of an ancient civilization, but also of one possessed of a science and technology well beyond our own.

  The startling possibility that such artifacts exist has created considerable public pressure to return to the Red Planet and was cause for more than a little consternation in the summer of 1993, when NASA lost contact with its Mars Observer probe just as it was about to begin a detailed photographic survey that could have proved the issue, one way or the other.

  How long must we now wait until the argument can be tested? Well, perhaps not too long after all. As it turns out, the cherished, concrete evidence that man is not alone in the universe may well
exist in our own backyard—relatively speaking, as the Hoagland group claims to have discovered, in numerous NASA photographs, evidence of an ancient civilization on our closest neighbor, the Moon. And in this case, if NASA isn’t up to the verification job, Hoagland insists that he and his backers are. The result could be the first privately funded mission to the Moon.

  If anybody can pull it off, Hoagland may be the man. For more than twenty-five years a recognized authority on astronomy and space exploration, Hoagland has served as a consultant for all of the major broadcast networks. Among his many valued contributions to history and science, the best remembered is probably his conception, along with Eric Burgess, of Mankind’s First Interstellar Message in 1971: an engraved plaque carried beyond the solar system by the first man-made object to escape from the Sun’s influence, Pioneer 10.

  Hoagland and Burgess originally took the idea to Carl Sagan, who successfully executed it aboard the spacecraft, and subsequently acknowledged their creation in the prestigious journal Science. It was Hoagland who proposed the Apollo 15 experiment in which astronaut David Scott, before a worldwide TV audience, simultaneously dropped a hammer and a falcon feather to see if it was true—as Galileo had predicted—that both would land at the same time. Once again, Galileo was vindicated. Since the 1981 discovery of the Face on Mars, Hoagland had devoted most of his time to the pursuit of scientific evidence for extraterrestrial intelligence.