Forbidden History: Prehistoric Technologies, Extraterrestrial Intervention, and the Suppressed Origins of Civilization (29 page)

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

T
he 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 into 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.