"We, like dwarves on the shoulders of giants, can see more and farther—not because we are keener or taller, but because of the greatness by which we are carried…"
~from the Metalogicus of John of Salisbury, quoting Bernard of Chartres, 1159.
The Lost Millennium
by
Walt and Leigh Richmond
To Grackin—who refused to compromise the integrity of his intelligence;
To Dea—who schooled her young in the courage to look for themselves and to credit their own sense;
And to Pops—who knew that the preconceived notion is a subtle blinder in man's search for the truth.
I
The engineer had ducked under the canopy for a coffee break and a five minute taste of what the breeze could feel like when you were out from under the sun, so he didn't see the army-style jeep drive up. The first he knew of the archaeologist, the man was coming under the canopy to join him.
The engineer recognized the name immediately, paid it the respect that was its due, then asked the mission.
"You're putting up a solar tap." The archaeologist made it a statement, not a question, which surprised the engineer. Most people asked what the hell he thought he and his crew were up to.
"That's right. I'm planning to tap into the electrical current that exists as a potential between the Earth-ground and the ionosphere. I expect to get lots of power. It's experimental, though."
"It's a primitive tap," said the archaeologist. "It will explode. It will probably blow up several kilometers around your base here."
The engineer looked at him, startled; but, "That's why we're here in the desert," he said. "We've checked. We won't be blowing up any people, and we've paid for the rights otherwise."
"What are you trying to prove?"
"That the power's there. That there's a tremendous electrical potential between Earth-ground and the ionosphere. That the Earth and the ionosphere form a sort of sphere-in-sphere capacitor fed by the solar wind, with the dense part of the atmosphere acting as a leady dielectric between them. I'm planning to short out the 'capacitor' and prove the power's there. Lots of it. Thousands of times more power than all the generating stations in the world produce today. Once I prove the power's there, there'll be plenty of money to put up a sophisticated tap system to make the power available in a controlled manner."
"I gather that for this 'short circuit' you're just using regular surplus field wire, floated up to the twenty-five kilometer level on weather balloons?"
"That's right. The wire will explode down its entire length when the power avalanches, but it will leave a hot, ionized pathway for the electricity to ride in on. That pathway—the whole 'short circuit'—will blow out in about a quarter of a second."
"What will a real solar tap look like? One that gives you a continuous flow of controlled power?"
The archaeologist didn't sound like a man just asking questions. The engineer was puzzled, but also pleased. He pulled a pencil from his pocket, hooked a packing crate over with his toe, and reached down a clipboard of paper from its hook on one of the canopy poles.
"Here, I'll show you," he said, squatting on his heels beside the crate and sketching rapidly. The archaeologist squatted beside him so naturally that the engineer's respect went up a notch.
"This is the insulator," he said, sketching a slightly truncated pyramidal form. "The proportions—about like the pyramids of Egypt. The main one will look—well, like the Cheops pyramid. The pyramid's the insulator, to insulate the electric current from the ground. On top of the pyramid—here—will be a laser system, a coherent light beam that switches on and off in microseconds, giving a surge of power each time it's on. The power collector and transformer and the control apparatus will be at the top of the pyramid."
"The control station will be burrowed into the center of the insulator," he said, sketching now in dotted lines over the pyramid. "It'll be reached through angled tunnels from beneath the base; and there'll be resonance chambers built along the entrance tunnels—something like the silencer for a gun. That's to protect the personnel from the constant pulse of the tap, and from the effects of shock wave from any arc-over or electrical avalanche. This sketch is rough, but it gives you the idea."
The archeologist nodded and pulled the sketch from under the clip, then rose. "I thought so," he said. "I thought that's what a solar tap would look like."
The engineer looked at him quizzically. "You're the first person that could even recognize that the power's there to be tapped. If I could get other people to listen and understand the theory behind what I'm doing, I wouldn't have to put up this fool twenty-five kilometer wire on balloons."
"The power's there all right." There was no question in the voice or manner. "The power's there. Enough to blow up Earth."
"Nope." The engineer rose slowly, then put his foot on the packing case and leaned on his knee. "I estimate about three times ten to the twentieth watts of continuous energy, with the sun acting as the power supply and constantly re-supplying it. The power will avalanche, of course, when I put the 'short circuit' across the dielectric. But the avalanche will create a magnetic field that will react with the magnetic field of Earth, and will blow itself out with magnetic winds as soon as it reaches resonance. About that quarter of a second. It'll be an explosion about the size of Hiroshima, I estimate; but not enough to blow up anything more substantial around here than, like you said, a few kilometers of desert. It's self-extinguishing."
"What would that amount of power do if it avalanched in a continuous flow?"
"Burn hell out of the spot where it touched Earth. Empty the capacitor that's the ionosphere and feed directly from the solar wind. The Earth's an electric motor, you know, with obvious secondary generating characteristics. When the motor began to run wild it would increase its rotational speed, though this would be fought by the generator mechanism in the core. If the avalanche continued, the rotation would continue to speed up, and eventually the Earth would explode from increased centrifugal stress. But it won't happen. The tap's self-extinguishing in these latitudes—as long as it's inside Earth's magnetic field. A tap at the magnetic pole might create a continuous avalanche."
"They knew that then too." The archaeologist looked at the engineer solemnly. "They knew that eighty-six hundred years ago. You're not the first, you know."
"I don't think I follow you?"
"Pull up a chair. Offer me a cigarette and a seat. Get out the beer if you have any. Call off your men or let 'em keep on without supervision. I've got a story to tell you, and I think you'll be interested."
It was a compliment to the archaeologist's reputation that the engineer obeyed his instructions implicitly. He sent the men along home—it was quartering through the afternoon anyhow.
The seats were canvas chairs, but nearby packing crates made easy foot-props. The engineer tossed his guest a pack of cigarettes and stuffed a pipe for himself after he'd opened the beer. Then he leaned back and waited.
"You published your theory of the solar tap about a month ago. When I read it I finally had the clue to an event in history that makes everything else fit. Once I knew of the solar tap, all the fictions of history fell out, and the facts began to fit into place; all the anomalies that show that what we know as history is myth; and that what we think of as myth is history."
The archaeologist paused for a long minute, lighting a cigarette, but the engineer made no comment, so he continued.
"It's a long and complicated pattern that shows when you look at the evidence instead of the rationalizations that have been used to explain the inexplicable by a race of children that couldn't understand what they saw. Somewhat like the myth of Santa Claus—and ev
en when he recognizes the truth, a child has trouble facing that truth when the evidence overrules his childish beliefs; has trouble not only in accepting the truth, but in accepting the fact that the truth is finer than the fiction, and in no way belittles the fiction.
"The facts behind our Santa Claus myths of history couldn't be understood until we reached the technologically adult stage where we found out that Earth is an electric motor in space; and until we developed for ourselves the solar tap that uses the power of that motor."
The engineer laughed. "Your Santa Claus myths will last a while longer then," he said. "Not even the average scientist accepts The Earth as an electric motor yet. Not even in the face of the discovery of the Van Allen belts which prove it. Not even in view of anomalies in the Earth's magnetic field which indicate vertical current flowing through the atmosphere. The discrepancies shown are more than one percent; and their instruments are capable of measuring to parts per million—yet they ascribe these measurements to 'experimental error' rather than face up to the fact that there is an armature current continuously flowing in at the poles and out near the equator. Most of it's at an altitude that makes measurement difficult, of course; but the measurements are there, if they'll only read them. I've butted my head against a stone wall on that subject."
The archaeologist returned his smile. "As one stone-wall-head-butter to another then," he said, "perhaps you'll listen to my story with more of an open mind than the average."
"Perhaps," said the engineer. "Though the fact that the human animal stubbornly refuses to accept the evidence of his senses in one area does not prove that every time he refuses a new postulate it's because he's stubborn."
"Fair enough," said the archaeologist. "But let me point out a few of the anomalies that dispute history's fictions and point towards the truth. First, some archaeological remains: The pyramids—geometrical perfections that appeared on five different continents relatively overnight; and that appeared in the middle of mud-hut civilizations that could not possibly have built them. The advanced civilization at Crete that appeared and disappeared so inexplicably. The records and artifacts that show that beryllium copper was used by the ancients of Egypt—an alloy that can be manufactured only with electricity. There are the jungle-covered buildings and artifacts on the east slope of the Andes and in Cambodia, possible only with technological equipment. Those are only a few."
"Or take the mythologies from any part of the planet—Greek, Norse, Sumerian, Incan, Mayan, Aztec, Samoan, Chinese, Indian … they all tell the same story of creation and the early history of the human race. So does the Bible and most histories. The details vary, but the patterns of those details are consistent. They are all, obviously, records of painstaking accuracy—and impossible. As impossible, perhaps, as the record a younger child of one of the aboriginal tribes might have made of the first visit of members of a technological civilization who arrived by helicopter."
"Or take the Piri Reis maps, aerial surveys estimated to be about 7,000 years old. They contain information about the geography of the polar regions that we did not possess until we checked their accuracy with soundings. They were made when the poles were unglaciated. Or the outline of a jet airfield that is still visible—though only from a height—in South America. There are the coastlines of the continents of Earth that fit together so exactly that it's obvious Earth once had only one continent, centered around her pole. There are the rock records of shifts in the magnetic poles…"
"I'll grant your anomalies." The engineer was frankly baffled. "I could probably add a few myself. Now what are you going to do with them? Prove the 'aliens are among us' theme?"
The archaeologist laughed. "Not exactly," he said. "No, I'm going to outline the five major catastrophes that geological evidence indicates, exactly as I think they happened."
"The first catastrophe—the one that destroyed an advanced civilization here eighty-six hundred years ago—was a solar tap avalanche at the pole. That avalanche short-circuited your sphere-in-sphere capacitor, and increased the rotation of this planet until the land mass split and unbalanced its gyroscopic stability so that it was thrown onto a new axis, and the avalanche was brought within the new magnetic field, and damped. That avalanche put floods of carbon 14 into the atmosphere. I think little survived this catastrophe; the animals that survived mutated into earlier evolutionary forms until there prowled over the Earth mammoths and mastodons and sabre-toothed tigers …"
He paused, and then went on quickly before the engineer could interrupt. "The second catastrophe was man-made too, but this one was intentional. About 4400 BC. A melting of the polar caps to cause a flood and torrents of rain, done to wash the atmosphere clear of the carbon 14 remaining from the first catastrophe. During this, because of less-than-perfect planetary engineering, a one thousand foot high tidal wave was caused that swept the animal life from one end of the Earth to the other and deposited crushed bones of animals and humans from cold climates and from equatorial regions alike into piles and caves where they were immediately covered with sand and rubble. There are piles of these crushed bones found in caves one thousand feet up in mountains; and there are hill-high piles of them frozen into the tundra in all the arctic regions—flesh undecayed and still edible when they were found.
"Then there were the catastrophes of near-historic times. The blow-up of Sodom and Gomorrah about 2200 BC that created the Dead Sea. And the catastrophe around 1450 BC, when Earth had become the base of operations on the fifth planet, and the fifth planet blew. In the resulting blast Earth was thrown from her axis again, and from her normal orbit; there is evidence of the planetary engineering done to right her. It took fifty-two years.
"Then, after a long interim, there was the renewed grid-system and the catastrophe of 776 BC when the entire grid blew; when the electrostatic effect of the remaining installations on Mars caused recurring catastrophes for the next two conjunctions with Mars."
The engineer stared at his guest in some dismay. "You sure don't dream small," he said quietly. Then, "Just how do you deduce a series of events like that from the mere existence of the solar tap?"
The archaeologist shook his head. "The solar tap was one of the missing factors. Without it, the pattern didn't make sense. What we call 'flying saucers' is the other, but they come later."
"You have to have the technological factors before the evidence makes sense. Others have seen that the catastrophes occurred; others have noted that the 'primitives' of antiquity could not have done the things they had obviously done. But there was no explanation that fitted all the facts.
"But once you know that planetary power exists as an induced current through the molten silicon layer between the core of Earth and its crust, and as a driving current through the ionosphere; and that it can be tapped and controlled; and what a tap will look like when it is set up—why then the pattern begins to come clear. Then you know that the power has been tapped here before, because the insulators for the taps are standing right there proving it. You know that for it to have been tapped, there had to be a civilization here that had gotten out as far as the Van Allen belts and knew their meaning."
He paused, then went on thoughtfully. "The catastrophes and their dating have been deduced before, but it's taken courage to publish the findings. For instance, Velikovsky outlined the historic and geologic evidence that prove and date the last two catastrophes—the ones in 1450 and 776 BC—in great detail in 1950. He took a terrific beating from the self-styled 'scientific community' for doing it. It upset their preconceived notions of physics, geology, history … But the catastrophes and the rest of the anomalies are facts, though you have to have the technological know-how that explains them before you can deduce the pattern.
"Once you know the basic factors that were at work, you merely have to postulate a civilization here eighty-six hundred years ago that had reached almost exactly the point that our civilization has reached today. Then give it the solar tap. Then take that civilization forward a few doz
en years, put a tap at the pole and avalanche it. That's all."
"That's all?"
The engineer's tone was sarcastic, but the archaeologist ignored that. "They called the Earth 'Atalama' in those days," he said softly. It's come down as Atlantis. But it wasn't a continent. It was the planet itself. And in those days—about 6600 BC by our reckoning—there was only one land mass, a huge single continent centered around the pole and stretching down towards the equator. It was a Baron Sivos who discovered the solar tap back then, and they called the taps Siva generators."
The engineer shook his head. "It won't wash," he said. "Of course, Atlantis has been postulated before. But there's one great argument that refutes Atlantis—or your Atalama. A civilization of that high a technological level—or this high—would leave artifacts and lots of them. They'd still be here after eight thousand years—or sixteen thousand for that matter. Kitchen middens of gigantic proportions, if nothing else."
"The artifacts are there." The archaeologist was undaunted. "They don't appear as artifacts until you know the story. Then you begin seeing them for what they are. Will you listen? I think it may be important."
The engineer grinned wryly. This was hardly what he'd expected from a man of the archaeologist's reputation, and he remembered ruefully the men he'd sent along home. Then he relaxed. He'd been working hard, and an hour or so spent listening to—well, science fiction—wouldn't hurt him. Probably do the men good, too, to have an unexpected break in the tight schedule they'd been keeping.
"I'll listen," he said.
"I'll start with some detail, then." The archaeologist settled back in his camp chair. "Even after Atalama got the solar tap, it took a while for the economy to adjust to that much power. But they adjusted, and within a dozen years they had switched to broadcast power. With power to waste, you can transmit by broadcast, you know, and simply tune in to it as a power source, the way you tune a radio. Nikola Tesla showed that could be done, back in 1911.
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