The Mammoth Encyclopedia of Unsolved Mysteries

by Colin Wilson

  Other students of the Atlantis myth preferred to believe that it was to be found on the other side of the Atlantic ocean. A group of German archaeologists named Schulten, Herman, Jessen and Hennig began searching for another lost city, Tartessos, in 1905; it was supposed to be on the Atlantic coast of Spain near the mouth of the Guadalquivir, and had been captured by the Carthaginians in 533 BC. They believed that the lost Tartessos had been Plato’s Atlantis – it was certainly on the right side of the Straits of Gibraltar. Another archaeologist, Elena Maria Whishaw, also spent twenty-five years studying the same area – around the ancient fortress of Niebla – and was led by evidence of masonry and skilled hydraulic engineering in the Rio Tinto mines to the conclusion that Andalusia had once been colonized by people from North Africa who had fled from Atlantis. This explains the title of her book, Atlantis in Andalusia (1930).

  By the 1930s another interesting theory of the destruction of Atlantis had gained millions of followers; it was the work of a Viennese mining engineer named Hans Hoerbiger (1860–1931). As a child Hoerbiger had been an amateur astronomer, and while he was looking at the moon and the planets through a telescope he was suddenly struck by the certainty that the way they reflect the sunlight indicates that they are covered in ice. Later he saw waterlogged soil exploding with puffs of steam, as molten iron ran over it, and thought he saw the answer to the explosive energies of the universe. Space, according to Hoerbiger, is full of hydrogen and oxygen, although in an extremely rarified state. (This is certainly true of hydrogen!) This condenses around small stars as ice, and when these balls of ice fall into a hot star there is a tremendous explosion – the same kind of explosion that formed our solar system. Most of the planets, Hoerbiger insisted, are covered with a layer of ice hundreds of miles thick, while our present moon has an ice-covering 125 miles thick. It is necessary to speak of our present moon (Luna) because it is only the latest of a considerable number, perhaps as many as six. The natural movement of all planetary bodies, says Hoerbiger, is a spiral, and the planets are spiralling in towards the sun like the needle on a gramaphone record. Small objects move faster than large ones, so as they spiral past larger planets they are likely to be captured and become “moons”. A quarter of a million years ago our earth had another moon – a captured comet. When this approached close to the earth it was moving so fast that it caused the seas to bunch together into a ridge of water that had not time to retreat. The rest of the earth became covered with ice; human beings were forced to move to the tops of mountains, like those of Ethiopia and Peru. (Colonel Fawcett also believed that Tiahuanaco, in the Peruvian Andes, contained evidence of some mysterious lost civilization.) The lighter gravity at these heights turned men into giants – hence the comment in the Bible that there were “giants in the earth” in those days. When the moon finally exploded the result was a great flood, like the one recorded in the Bible and in many other sacred books. When the earth captured our present moon (about twelve thousand years ago) the result was again a tremendous flood, together with earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, and this destroyed Atlantis and Lemuria.

  Hoerbiger died in 1931, but his work was continued by one of his foremost disciples, Hans Schindler Bellamy. Bellamy was an Austrian, whose book Moon, Myths and Man – published in the year of Hoerbiger’s death – made thousands of converts in England and America. Hoerbiger’s German converts included Hitler, who proposed to build an observatory dedicated to the three greatest astronomers of all time, Ptolemy, Copernicus and Hoerbiger. Hitler’s belief in Hoerbiger may have cost him the war. A weather bureau based on Hoerbiger’s principles forecast a mild winter for 1941–2, and Hitler sent his troops into Russia in light summer uniforms . . . Hoerbiger continued to have hosts of disciples until the 1960s, when space exploration finally made it clear that his belief that the moon and planets were covered in thick ice was erroneous.

  The chief problem with “crank” books like Hoerbiger’s Glacial Cosmogony (1913) is that they often contain more than a grain of truth. This is certainly the case with that astonishing bestseller of the 1950s, Worlds in Collision, by Immanuel Velikovsky. Velikovsky, a Russian Jew born in 1895, was startled and impressed by Freud’s book Moses and Monotheism, which suggested that Moses was not a Jew but an Egyptian, and that he was a follower of the “sun-worshipping” pharaoh Akhnaton. Velikovsky reached the even more startling conclusion that Akhnaton was the Greek king Oedipus. In 1939, the year he moved from Palestine to the United States, Velikovsky was much preoccupied with Hoerbiger’s theory, but finally decided against it. But he was impressed by the theory of W. Whiston, Newton’s successor at Cambridge, that the comet of 1680 had caused the Biblical deluge on an earlier encounter. He also encountered Donnelly’s Ragnarok, The Age of Fire and Ice (1883), successor to Atlantis, in which Donnelly concludes that the “drift”, the vast deposit of sand, gravel and clay which lies in irregular patches over much of the earth’s surface, was the result of a tremendous explosion that occurred when a comet struck the earth. Whiston and Donnelly were seminal influences on the book Velikovsky now went on to write, Worlds in Collision (see Chapter 40), in which a close brush with a comet is blamed for the destruction of Atlantis, as well as for various Biblical catastrophes.

  A rather more credible theory of Atlantis was propounded in the late 1960s by a Greek archaeologist, Professor Angelos Galanopoulos, based on the discoveries of Professor Spyridon Marinatos on the island of Santorini or Thera, in the Mediterranean. Around the year 1500 BC a tremendous volcanic explosion ripped apart Santorini, and probably destroyed most of the civilization of the Greek islands, the coastal regions of eastern Greece, and of northern Crete. This, Galanopoulos suggests, was the catastrophe that destroyed Atlantis. But surely the date is wrong? – the destruction of Santorini took place a mere nine hundred years before Solon, not nine thousand. This is the essence of Galanopoulos’s argument – he believes that a scribe accidentally multiplied all the figures by ten. He points out that all Plato’s figures seem far too large. The 10,000 stadia (1,150 mile) ditch around the plain would stretch around modern London twenty times. The width and depth of the canal 300 feet wide and 100 feet deep seems absurd; surely 30 feet wide by 10 feet would be more likely? As to the plain behind the city, 23 by 34 miles would be a more reasonable size than 230 by 340 miles. If all Plato’s figures are reduced in this way, then Santorini begins to sound altogether more like Atlantis although Galanopoulos suggests that the Atlantian civilization stretched all over the Mediterranean, and that Crete itself was probably the Royal City. And how could such a mistake come about? Galanopoulos suggests that the Greek copyist mistook the Egyptian symbol for 100 – a coiled rope – for the symbol for 1,000 – a lotus flower.

  There is only one major objection to all this: Plato states clearly that Atlantis was beyond the Pillars of Hercules. Galanopoulos argues that Hercules performed most of his labours in the Peloponnese, and that the Pillars of Hercules could well refer to the two extreme southern promontories of Greece, Cape Matapan and Cape Maleas. But Plato says clearly: “They [the Atlantians] held sway . . . over the country within the pillars as far as Egypt and Tyrrhenia”. And no amount of revisionary geography can place Egypt and Etruria within the promontories of Greece. So another fascinating theory must be reluctantly abandoned. But the notion that Santorini was the legendary Atlantis has brought thousands of tourists to the island and greatly improved its economy . . .

  In 1975 a symposium held at the University of Indiana discussed the question: Atlantis, fact or fiction? Various experts stated their views, and reached the predictable conclusion that Atlantis was a myth. And it must be admitted that, apart from the kind of “cultural” evidence adduced by Donnelly, Spence and Whishaw, there is not one grain of solid proof of the existence of the sunken continent. And the kind of “proof” that convinced Colonel Fawcett – the evidence of a psychometrist – is understandably dismissed by geologists, archaeologists and classical scholars alike. Yet anyone who has studied such evidenc
e will agree that, while it is far from convincing, it still leaves a great deal to explain. How did Fawcett’s psychometrist come to think of Atlantis? For the evidence to be of any value, we would need to know a great deal more about the psychometrist – whether, for example, he had read Donnelly or Spence. And if he could convince us that his unconscious mind was not playing him tricks, there would still remain the possibility that he was somehow reading Fawcett’s mind. Yet anyone who is willing to study the evidence for psychometry with an open mind will end by agreeing that there are many cases that cannot be explained as unconscious self-deception or telepathy.

  Similar questions are raised by the detailed descriptions of Atlantian civilization produced by the “psychic healer” Edgar Cayce (pronounced Casey). When Cayce was twenty-two (in 1899) he suffered from psychosomatic paralysis of the vocal cords, which was cured by hypnosis. The hypnotist then asked Cayce some questions about his own medical problems, and Cayce’s replies revealed a medical knowledge that consciously he did not possess. Cayce’s ability to produce “trance diagnosis” soon made him a minor celebrity. In 1923 Cayce was questioned as to whether there is life after death; when he woke from his trance he was shocked to learn that he had been preaching the doctrine of reincarnation – as an orthodox Christian, he rejected the idea. Eventually he came to accept it. In 1927, giving a “life reading” on a fourteen-year-old boy, Cayce described his previous lives under Louis XIV, Alexander the Great, in ancient Egypt, and in Atlantis. For the remainder of his life Cayce continued to add fragments to his account of Atlantis.

  According to Cayce, Atlantis extended from the Sargasso Sea to the Azores, and was about the size of Europe. It had experienced two periods of destruction, in the first of which the mainland had divided into islands. The final break-up occurred, as Plato said, about 10,000 BC, and the last place to sink was near the Bahamas. What he says echoes Steiner to a remarkable extent: “. . . man brought in the destructive forces that combined with the natural resources of the gases, of the electrical forces, that made the first of the eruptions that awoke from the depth of the slow-cooling earth . . .” He claimed that archives dealing with Atlantis now exist in three places in the world, one of these in Egypt. In June 1940 Cayce predicted that the island called Poseidia would rise again, “expect it in ’68 or ’69”. It would happen in the area of the Bahamas.

  Early in 1968 a fishing guide called Bonefish Sam took the archaeologist Dr J. Manson Valentine to see a line of rectangular stones under twenty feet of water in North Bimini, in the Bahamas. Valentine was startled to find two parallel lines of stones about 2,000 feet long. They became known as the Bimini Road. But scientists disagreed from the beginning. John Hall, a professor of archaeology from Miami, said they were natural formations; John Gifford, a marine biologist, thought that if the stones were produced by “geological stress”, then there would be far more of them over a wider area; he concluded that “none of the evidence conclusively disproves human intervention”. One of the investigators, Dr David Zink, wrote a book called The Stones of Atlantis, and had no doubt whatsoever that some of the stones were hand-made – in fact, one object was a stone head. But even if the Bimini Road could be shown to be part of a temple, this would still not prove that it was built more than ten thousand years ago; it could be the product of a much more recent culture.

  Obviously, Cayce’s prediction that Atlantis would “rise again” has not been fulfilled. This in itself does not prove the prediction to have been pure imagination; parapsychologists who have studied precognition have often noted that the time scale is seldom correct. But it does mean that for the time being Cayce must be classified with Scott-Elliott, Steiner and Madame Blavatsky as a highly suspect witness.

  Of all the theories of the destruction of Atlantis, a recent one by an English geologist, Ralph Franklin Walworth, is in some ways one of the most convincing. Walworth’s book Subdue the Earth is only incidentally concerned with Atlantis; it is basically an attempt to explain the problem of the ice ages. So far no geologist has produced a convincing theory to account for the tremendous variations in climate that have periodically covered the earth with immense sheets of ice. Robert Ardrey’s African Genesis contains several fascinating pages in which the various theories are outlined. A “wandering north pole” could not explain why the ice sheets extended down to Africa. A near-brush with a comet could not explain why there have been so many ice ages, and why they are at irregular intervals (the same comet would return regularly). A Jugoslav, M. Milankovitch, produced a marvellously convincing theory based on the known fact that our planet goes through minor cyclical variations in the weather, and argued that when such variations happen to coincide – like lightning striking twice in the same place – the result is an ice age. Ardrey points out that even Milankovitch’s simultaneous variations cannot account for twenty million cubic miles of ice. Sir George Simpson produced a highly convincing theory to the effect that ice ages are due to a rise in solar temperature, which causes more rain to fall on highlands in the form of snow. Eventually, there is so much snow that it cannot melt away during the summers, and an ice age begins. But if Simpson’s theory is correct, then the seas should become a great deal warmer during ice ages; in fact, studies of sea-bottom deposits during the Pleistocene – the last great ice age – show that there was a variation in temperature of only a few degrees. Ardrey’s own theory is that the earth passes periodically through some vast intergalactic gas cloud, and that the earth’s magnetic field sucks murky gas into our atmosphere, thus excluding the sunlight. But he admits that his theory fails to explain why, in that case, ice ages do not occur at regular intervals . . .

  Walworth sets out to explain some of the problems already noted by Donnelly and Velikovsky: the evidence for great upheavals that buried whole forests. Most geologists, he points out, are now “Uniformitarians”; they propose that the earth has evolved very slowly over vast epochs of time, and that the great catastrophes (floods, earthquakes and so on) that were posited by scientists in the eighteenth century, when the earth was thought to be only a few thousand years old, are unnecessary to explain earth’s evolution. Walworth points out that, be that as it may, there is still a great deal of evidence for giant catastrophes. And he asks some simple but very puzzling questions. How, for example, can we account for fossils? The standard explanation is that fossilized fishes, animals, etc, became stuck in mud, which hardened around them and “preserved” them. But if a fish dies in a river it quickly decays, or is eaten by predators; even if it sinks into a few inches of mud, it still decays. Walworth believes that fossils are best formed in the presence of the “activated dust which a volcano ejects”.

  His theory is that ice ages are caused by tremendous volcanic eruptions, great enough to eject gas, magma and dust far out into space. The air that was hurtled out into space would lose all its heat; when gravity pulled it back to earth it would be “an icy, lethal gas” that would extinguish life in vast areas, and plunge even large creatures like mammoths into an instantaneous deepfreeze. The volcanic dust would cause an ice age. Snow would fall on high ground, until the oceans were hardly more than puddles. “The evidence from the sea floors indicates that sea level has, for long periods of time, been three miles lower than it is now”. Human settlements would move to the shores of these seas, since the temperature close to the sea is always slightly higher than inland. The ice sheets would raise soft sediments and magmas to high altitudes, where they would set like concrete, forming mountains and the “drift” that so puzzled Donnelly. Then, as the ice age gradually ended, the settlements would be forced to retreat higher and higher as their former homes were submerged. Some people would even move to mountain-tops like the civilization of Tiahuanaco. And great civilizations would disappear beneath the waves . . .

  But if this is true, then why do we not have such tremendous explosions nowadays? Krakatoa, which erupted in 1883, and sent a giant tidal wave across the Pacific, devastating whole islands, only hurled its vapou
rs seventeen miles into the atmosphere. Walworth points to the planet Jupiter, which produces tremendous eruptions of energy every ten years, and he suggests that this is basically an electromagnetic phenomenon: “eddy currents developed by Jupiter’s motion through the electrified solar wind cause a buildup of heat under the planet’s surface”. Because earth is so much smaller, the same mechanism could cause such eruptions at far longer intervals, accounting for the ice ages.

  Perhaps the most controversial aspect of Walworth’s theory is his suggestion that the earth’s core may not be a mass of molten iron, as geologists believe. If volcanic activity is caused by the “electrified solar wind” acting upon the earth’s magnetic field and setting up tremendous stresses just below the surface, then presumably the centre of the earth is relatively cool and solid. Presumably science should one day be able to develop “depth sounders” that could prove or disprove this unorthodox notion. As far as the human race is concerned, it would probably be a relief if Walworth proved to be mistaken, since his theory also involves another catastrophic eruption over the next thousand years or so, followed by an ice age that would re-create the conditions that destroyed Atlantis.

  3

  The Baader-Meinhof Gang

  Suicide or Murder?

  On the afternoon of Thursday, 13 October 1977, four Palestinians seized control of Lufthansa Flight LH181 as it flew from Majorca to Frankfurt. Two men and two women held the passengers and crew at gunpoint and forced the pilot to change course for Rome’s Leonardo da Vinci Airport. After wiring the aircraft with explosive charges, they issued their demands in the name of the Struggle Against World Imperialism Organization.