Forbidden History: Prehistoric Technologies, Extraterrestrial Intervention, and the Suppressed Origins of Civilization (17 page)

Hancock believes we are a species with amnesia. “I think we show all the signs that there’s a traumatic episode in our past that is so horrible that we cannot somehow bring ourselves to recognize it. Just as the victim suffering from amnesia as a result of some terrible episode fears awakening memory of that trauma and tries to avoid it, so we have done collectively.” The amnesia victim is, of course, forced to return to the source of his pain and “if you wish to move forward and continue to develop as an individual, you have to overcome it. You have to confront it, deal with it, see it face-to-face, realize what it means, get over it, and get on with your life,” he says. “That is what society needs to be doing.”

In the institutional resistance to considering ancient achievement, Hancock sees a subconscious pattern based on fear: “There’s a huge impulse to deny all of this, because suddenly all the foundations get knocked out from under you and you find yourself swimming loosely in space without any points of reference anymore.” The process needn’t be so threatening, though. “If we can go through that difficult experience and come out on the other side,” he says. “I think we’ll all emerge better from it. I’m more and more convinced that the reason we are so messed up and confused and totally disturbed as a species at the end of the twentieth century is because of this—because we’ve forgotten our past.”

If it is true that those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it, then there are lessons in our past that can be ignored only at our peril. Clearly written into the mythology of many societies are stories of cataclysmic destruction. Hancock cites the work of Giorgio de Santillana, of M.I.T., an authority on the history of science who is the coauthor, along with Hertha von Dechend, of the book
Hamlet’s Mill: An Essay Investigating the Origins of Human Knowledge and Its Transmission through Myth,
in which the authors hypothesize that an advanced scientific knowledge was encoded into ancient myth.

Hancock points out, “Once you accept that mythology may have originated with highly advanced people, then you have to start listening to what the myths are saying.” What the myths are saying, he believes, is that a great cataclysm struck the world and destroyed an advanced civilization and a golden age of mankind. And cataclysm is a recurrent feature in the life of the earth and will return.

The messages from many ancient sources, including the Bible, point to a recurrence of such a cataclysm in our lifetime. Notwithstanding such views, Hancock insists he is not a prophet of doom. His point is, he says, “We’ve received a legacy of extraordinary knowledge from the past, and the time has come for us to stop dismissing it. Rather, we must recapture that heritage and learn what we can from it, because there is vitally important information in it.”

The stakes couldn’t be higher. “I’m convinced that we’re locked today in a battle of ideas,” he says. “I think it’s desperately important that the ideas that will lead to a recovery of our memory as a species triumph. And therefore we have to be strong, we have to be eloquent and argue clearly and coherently. We have to see what our opponents are going to do, how they are going to try to get at us, and the dirty tricks that they are going to try and play. We have to fight them on their own ground.”

15
The Central American Mystery

What Could Explain the Failure of Mainstream Science to Unravel the Origins of Mesoamerica’s Advanced Ancient Cultures?

Will Hart

I
t has been twenty-three years, yet I remember the morning like it was yesterday. A mist shrouded the jungle above the Temple of the Inscriptions. A series of roaring sounds suddenly split the silence as a band of howler monkeys made their way through the trees. It startled me. I thought the sounds might be those of a jaguar, but the cacophony added to the sense of mystery.

My head was exploding. By the time I had reached Palenque, we had already visited dozens of archeological sites, from the northernmost part of Mexico down to the Yucatán Peninsula and Quintana Roo. I was steeped in questions and mysteries. Several things had become clear to me: The cultures that built the pyramids and other buildings had been advanced in the arts and sciences. I had seen many beautiful things, as well as mind-tugging enigmas.

The Olmec civilization surprised me the most. I had read about the Maya and knew of the Aztecs, but I was unprepared for what I found in Villahermosa: large stone heads with Negroid features and stone stelae carved with depictions of curious ambassadors. The figures clearly were not from any Mexican culture.

These artifacts were more than just a fascinating puzzle; they represented a headache for science. They were an anomaly. Who had carved the heads? Who had created the stelae? Where did they get the models for these heads and figures? These were questions that arose because of the way scientists have reconstructed the human history of Mesoamerica. Africans don’t fit, nor do the cloaked Caucasian figures carved on the stelae. They shouldn’t be there; however, they are surely there.

Scientists do not claim to have solved this enigma. Anthropologists and archeologists admit they do not know much of anything about Olmec culture. Thus, we don’t know the ethnic group or the language and we know nothing of the Olmecs’ social organization, beliefs, or traditions. No one has any idea why they carved the helmeted heads and then buried them. It doesn’t make a lot of sense. We don’t usually bury monuments (if that is what they are).

The only records we have are the monuments they left behind, which are impressive. But how do we understand them? Where do they fit into the mosaic of human history? There are no direct clues in Mexico. The Olmecs didn’t leave us any written records. However, we do have a clue.

The Bible is an extremely important document. It doesn’t matter whether or not you are a believer. It contains a very ancient accounting of human history compiled from a variety of early sources. At least, this is true of the Book of Genesis. But it is not always easy to decode. Do we find any reference in the Bible that might help us solve the Olmec enigma?

Turning to Genesis, chapter 11, we read: “Now the whole Earth used the same language and the same words.” This indicates that there was a period in man’s history when a global human civilization existed. We learn that during that epoch, men wanted to build a tower: “Come, let us build for ourselves a city, and a tower whose top will reach into heaven; and let us make for ourselves a name; lest we be scattered abroad over the face of the whole Earth.”

The fact that the Olmec civilization presents science with an anomaly indicates something quite profound: The data does not fit the current model. Scientists can’t change the observable data; it is as hard as data can get. But they could change the
model
to conform to the data. There is the rub. Anthropologists and archeologists have a huge investment in that model, an intellectual edifice that has been built up over generations.

Scientists would rather ignore the tough questions and leave the Olmecs alone in the dim mists of forgotten antiquity. That is not a very scientific approach. Where is the pursuit of truth? What happened to the scientific method? It is just not acceptable. Why?

Some ancient society built the huge mound, dragged the basalt heads about sixty miles from the quarry to the burial site (those heads weighed from five to twenty-five tons), and carved the figures into the stelae. They wouldn’t have gone to all that trouble unless the people the monuments represented were important to them. This is a logical assumption to make and we can only hope that scientists in the distant future will reach the same conclusion when they study Mount Rushmore.

Since we have the artifacts, we know that there has to be an
explanation
for who the builders were. As with any other mystery, you search for clues. You begin in the most likely places and work your way down the list: Mexico. The problem is that the Olmecs disappeared from the scene long before Cortez arrived. None of the cultures contemporary with the Aztecs made any references to the Olmecs; they seemed to know nothing about them. And no other Negroid heads have been found in Mesoamerica. Another curious fact is that the developmental period that must have preceded the mound building and head carving is nowhere in evidence.

The Olmecs just suddenly appeared, then disappeared!

It took me years of investigation to finally realize that the most probable answer was in the Bible, and ironically, the Bible was just about the last place I had thought to look. Did the Olmecs come from outer space, as some researchers have proposed? Not necessarily. For one thing, there is no evidence to support this theory. Second, the Negroid heads and the people depicted on the stelae are obviously human.

The idea that there was a global civilization in ancient times does not conform to the current model of science. However, it is corroborated by the reference in the Bible. The problem with the scientific model is that it can’t explain the available data, and that is a
serious
issue that has many consequences. If the problem was limited to the Olmec civilization, we might just let it go. But there are artifacts in Egypt, South America, and other parts of Mexico that also don’t fit the orthodox scheme.

Scientists have often shown a willful blindness regarding artifacts and developments that they can’t explain using their belief system. Worse, they have either ignored key questions or discredited the facts. Many other hard facts, the remains of lost civilizations, and the cultural records of numerous peoples corroborate the Olmec enigma and the Bible.

References to a cataclysmic flood occur in 230 different cultures. Mayan history includes the story of how the Maya came from a land to the east that had been destroyed. Herodotus’s
History
recounted of the tale of lost Atlantis. Accounts such as these may sound like romantic myths spun out of early imaginations; however, when you stand at an ancient site surrounded by strange ruins . . . you begin to wonder if they just might contain more than a grain of truth.

I climbed the steps of the Temple of Inscriptions and visited the tomb of Pacal. Then I decided to take a long trip down to the Rio Usamacinta, to Bonampak and Yaxchilan. It was one hundred miles of bad dirt road, heavily rutted in places. It finally became so muddy that we mired the van up to the axles. We had nearly reached the destination; Bonampak was a short walk. I visited Bonampak.

My next destination was Yaxchilan, a ruin secreted in the jungle about eight miles from Bonampak. I decided to try and hack my way there with a machete, against the advice of the natives, who had warned me: “La selva está cerrado!” They were right. I gave up after a grueling four-hour stint in which I traveled less than a quarter of a mile, spent mostly on my belly trying to avoid razor-sharp thorn shrubs. The insects were ravaging my body.

Yaxchilan is situated on the river and is alleged to have been the center of the flourishing Mayan civilization in this region. In February 1989, James O’Kon did manage to make it to this site, one that archeologists had been studying for a century. A particular mound of rocks caught O’Kon’s trained eye. Scientists had dismissed it as a minor mystery but the amateur archeologist was also a forensic engineer, and he immediately knew what this mound really was: part of a bridge.

He turned to modern technology to help prove a bridge had once existed at the site. O’Kon, a former chairman of the forensic council of the American Society of Civil Engineers, had used similar techniques during routine investigations. He compiled field information at the Mayan site and used computers to integrate archeological studies, aerial photos, and maps; to develop a three-dimensional model of the site; and to determine the exact positioning and dimensions of the bridge.

O’Kon ended up making a startling discovery: The Maya had constructed the longest bridge span in the ancient world. When he finished his calculations and computer models, the bridge turned out to be a six-hundred-foot span, a hemp-rope suspension structure with two piers and three spans. It connected Yaxchilan, in Mexico, with its agricultural domain in the Peten (now Guatemala), where Tikal is situated.

What archeologists had assumed was an insignificant rock pile turned out to be part of a crucial finding: a pier twelve feet high and thirty-five feet in diameter. Aerial photos located a second support pier on the opposite side of the river. Both piers were constructed of cast-in-place concrete with an exterior of stone masonry, which is exactly how the Mayan pyramids were made.

In interviews O’Kon, who has been studying the ancient Maya for thirty years, said, “The Maya were very sophisticated mathematically and scientifically.” He claimed that the design requirements of the Mayan bridge paralleled twentieth-century bridge-design criteria.

Today we marvel at the ruins and speculate on how and why the Maya built the ceremonial sites. We shouldn’t forget that they were an advanced race. They understood astronomy. They had an accurate calendar. They understood the concept of “zero” at least seven hundred years before the Europeans did. The Maya built paved roads and, as we have now learned, the longest suspension bridge in the ancient world.

What occurred to me while standing atop another pyramid, at Coba in Quintana Roo, surveying a trackless jungle was the fact that the Maya had achieved all this
in a jungle
. No other advanced civilization I could think of had emerged from a jungle environment. It deepens the mystery of this lost race.

The
sacbe
are a system of roads that interconnect the sites. This is another feature that has long puzzled scientists and independent investigators alike. The roads were built up with rocks, leveled, and paved over with limestone cement. They vary in width from eight feet to thirty feet. The mystery is simple: Why would a “Stone Age” people without wheeled vehicles or dray animals need such an elaborate and sophisticated road network?

O’Kon turned his attention to the sacbe after finishing his work on the bridge and discussed the fact that he had found the sixty-mile road that extended from Coba to Yaxuna to be as straight as an arrow with a negligible deviation. His studies have revealed the Maya were not Stone Age (he refers to them as “technolithic”). They didn’t use iron, because the nearest mines were 1,500 miles away. O’Kon claims, “They used jade tools and they were harder than steel.”

You almost have to stand at a site and imagine the scene as it was during the peak of Mayan civilization to really grasp the magnitude and appreciate what this culture achieved. Today we see ruins and jungle and pyramids that are little more than bare stone, crumbling buildings surrounded by wilderness. However, in that day, the pyramids were coated with stucco. They were smooth and they gleamed in the sun. The walls of the structures were painted in various designs of bright colors. The courtyards were paved. The flat white roads radiated out in all directions, connecting the centers.