Our Occulted History: Do the Global Elite Conceal Ancient Aliens? (15 page)
Menzies wrote of ingots of nearly pure copper found in a sunken Minoan ship near Thera. Because copper of this quality is found only near Lake Superior in North America, the Minoans clearly had amazing range with their fleet of ships. Menzies also noted that the tobacco beetle,
Lasioderma serricorne,
was found in volcanic ash in the Minoan town of Akrotiri. This beetle is only indigenous to the Americas.
Because Menzies has equated the Minoan civilization with the Atlantean Empire, he believes that the great volcanic eruption on Santorini helped create the legend of Atlantis. Much like the myth of Atlantis’s destruction taken from Plato, the resulting tidal waves, deadly gaseous clouds, famine due to destroyed crops, and opportunistic pirate clans finished off the great Minoan Empire, leaving remarkably little behind.
Yet there are others who disagree with Menzies’s position. R. Cedric Leonard said that Menzies and others who believe Minoan Empire and Atlantis were one and the same have mistakenly traced Atlantis back to the Bronze Age instead of the Ice Age as described by Plato, who placed the time of Atlantis at about 9600 BC. “By thus ‘miniaturizing’ it (both size-wise and time-wise), it has been made more palatable for modern scientists and scholars to accept,” said Leonard. “Plato describes Atlantis as having ‘subjected the parts of Libya within the columns of Heracles as far as Egypt, and of Europe as far as Tyrrhenia.’ The Minoan kings never conquered neither Europe nor North Africa. But archeological evidence is abundant indicating that a cohesive ‘megalithic culture’ occupied those very same areas of Europe and North Africa in Mesolithic times (5,000–6,000 years before the Minoan empire began).” Moreover, the area of Atlantis as described by Plato was far larger than that ascribed to the Minoan culture.
Physicist James M. McCanney, who has studied exotic energy sources reaching back to antiquity, placed Atlantis at the opposite end of the Earth. He came to believe that Atlantis was located in the South China Sea prior to a shifting of the poles: “The South China Sea, before the rotation of the pole shift, was about five degrees south of the Equator. If you take a globe and you put your finger where the old North Pole used to be—north of the state of Michigan—and you put your other finger on the globe in the South Indian Ocean—diametrically opposed—and you rotate this Earth, you’ll find that the South China Sea, where Atlantis was, ends-up just a few degrees south of the old Equator.” McCanney was heavily influenced by the Brazilian professor Arysio Nunes dos Santos, author of
Atlantis: The Lost Continent Finally Found
. Explaining their theories, McCanney stated, “In ancient times, there was no Pacific Ocean by name, and the waterways were quite a bit different than they are now because of the tilt of the Earth. It was before a pole shift. What we call the Laurentian Ice Shield was actually the old North Pole. At the time, Siberia had a tropical climate with large herds of Mastodons and vast tropical plains and forests. … Basically, the mantle, the layer beneath the Earth’s crust, shifted by about 40 degrees.” He claimed that Plato’s reference to a “real sea” was to the Ocean of the Atlanteans, or the Atlantic Ocean, which, in precataclysmic times, stretched unimpeded by northern ice from the South China Sea eastward across the Pacific to the present Atlantic. And the Pillars of Hercules did not refer to the Strait of Gibraltar but to the island of Krakatoa and its sister volcano that sits now in the Strait of Sunda, between Sumatra and Java, the entrance into the channel leading to the main continent of Atlantis. “The ancient Greeks didn’t know that there was all of this—the North American continent and what we now call the Pacific, which was, in ancient days, simply one vast ocean called the Atlantic Ocean,” explained McCanney.
But McCanney went much further than simply naming a location for Atlantis. He added spaceflight to the puzzle by describing Atlantis as
… a very advanced culture that we hear about in legends that had directed energy beams, big mirrors, big lasers, had the ability to fly, and I believe, space flight. I believe that they were landing on Mars. They had regular movement between Earth and Mars, when Mars was a water planet. When Mars came very close in its orbit to Earth, it was a very simple shuttle trip to go to Mars, and you did not have to take any provisions with you because Mars was a water planet, just like Earth. So, basically, there were civilizations on Mars, on Earth, and once every 5 years or so, when the planets aligned, you could make a trip back and forth, which was quite commonplace at that time. … They knew about atmospheric electricity. They were able to tap into it. They had unlimited electrical power. They had been around for thousands of years, as opposed to, say, our civilization of modern, Western man in the United States, of the last 100 years. In a 10,000-year period they would have been quite advanced, and learned how to live with the environment without destroying themselves and the environment.
Austrian-born researcher and writer Rich Anders had an even stranger take on the story of Atlantis. Noting that Solon stated that Atlantis “disappeared” rather than sank into the sea, Anders postulated that Atlantis vanished into a parallel world, another dimension, thus explaining the lack of evidence for its existence.
“Greek paintings show the sun in different positions. For thousands of years this planet has been revolving around an axis. Clearly, this is an indication that in the world before the planet did not revolve around an axis,” explained Anders. “Furthermore, the predecessors of the Greek, the Hellenic people, knew of a place in the Atlantic called Aea. According to legend, its inhabitants were technologically very advanced and they did not fear death. Either they were immortals or they knew enough about death not to fear it. Most importantly, though, it was told that over Aea the sun was always in the midday position. This is yet another indication that as long as the parallel world, the paradise, existed, this planet did not revolve around an axis.”
Much like Ignatius Donnelly, Anders believed the Atlanteans were gods, except that they “did not make it into the present world. … Atlantis and everything that belonged to it remained in the parallel world, the paradise, which disappeared about 3,500 years ago.”
The pole shift described by James McCanney may explain some of the world’s mysterious history. The 1513 maps of Admiral Piri Reis depicted an ancient Earth because the map’s coastlines had been handed down from the Phoenicians, who had obtained them from even older maps. Reportedly, Columbus carried these maps on his expeditions, and made notes indicating what is now Queen Maudland in Antarctica. Columbus had expected the shoreline to help guide him to India, but he had instead run into a continent buried in ice. Today, through satellite ice-penetrating imaging, the shoreline has been shown to be identical with the Piri Reis map. So now Antarctica has been added to the many locations thought to be the actual site of Atlantis. Could it be that this is where Atlantis was located? Some researchers today are suggesting that Atlantis exists under the ice of Antarctica as the result of a pole shift.
Though conventional science has brushed aside the idea that Earth’s poles may have shifted long ago, the public has become increasingly interested in the concept of catastrophism, which is the idea that Earth has actually changed quickly and dramatically due to large-scale catastrophes, including pole shifts, earthquakes, floods, and meteor strikes from space, all of which could have wiped out civilizations like Atlantis. Much of this interest stems from the work of Charles Hapgood and Immanuel Velikovsky, who each observed different sets of evidence indicating the earth’s quick changes. For instance, Velikovsky examined the electromagnetic effects of Earth’s shifts and close encounters with space objects, specifically the planet Venus, while Hapgood has examined evidence from shifts in plate tectonics or Earth-crust displacement.
These men and their followers point to the fact that prehistoric animals have been found flash-frozen so quickly that their meat was still edible and undigested vegetation was still in their mouths. Tales of woolly mammoths abound, but one of the best documented of such accounts appeared in the 1990 book of Alaska zoology by Dale Guthrie entitled
Frozen Fauna of the Mammoth Steppe
. Guthrie described how his team of researchers discovered a thirty-six-thousand-year-old bison near Fairbanks, Alaska, in 1979. They proceeded to cook some of the meat in a pot of stock and vegetables. Guthrie said that “the meat was well aged but still a little tough, and it gave the stew a strong Pleistocene aroma.”
Stories like Guthrie’s support the idea that the Earth’s freezing happened almost instantaneously, as well as the catastrophism argument that a once-great civilization disappeared virtually overnight.
Maurice Chatelain, who made a detailed mathematical study of ancient sites and legends, wrote, “Personally I am convinced that the story of Atlantis, as Solon heard it from Sonchis and as Plato has given it to us, is true from beginning to end and that someday the ruins of Atlantis will be found, just as one after another we found the once legendary Troy, Mycenae, Tiryns, and Knossos.”
With Antarctica added to the list of places posited as the source of the Atlantis legend, the debate continued. It appears clear, however, that regardless of where it was located, the evidence indicates that a widespread and advanced civilization did indeed exist in prehistory. The evidence of Atlantis lies all about us, unrecognized for what it is because of narrow-minded thinking and conditioning.
In 1910, Oxford professor and Nobel laureate Frederick Soddy stated, “Some of the beliefs and legends bequeathed to us by antiquity are so universally and firmly established that we have become accustomed to consider them as being almost as ancient as humanity itself. Nevertheless we are tempted to inquire how far the fact that some of these beliefs and legends have so many features in common is due to chance, and whether the similarity between them may not point to the existence of an ancient, totally unknown and unsuspected civilization of which all other traces have disappeared.”
Some have suggested that the search for this ancient civilization, whether it was called Atlantis, Mu, Lemuria, or anything else, can be compared to the Hindu fable of the blind men and the elephant. The basic story is that a group of blind men went to a zoo to experience an elephant. When asked to describe the elephant, each had a different version. The blind man who felt the elephant’s head said it was like a large pot. The man who touched the elephant’s ear said it was like a fan. One who touched the tusk said it was like a plowshare; the one touching its trunk described it as a hose, while the one touching the tail said it was like a rope. One who pushed against the elephant’s side said it was like a wall, while the one who put his arms around the elephant’s leg said it was like a pillar.
The point is that like the blind men and the elephant, none of the Atlantis researchers are right—but then again, none are wrong. They all have a piece of the truth, which is that at one time, long before our recorded history, there existed on Earth a global, highly technological civilization that fell into ruin due to natural catastrophes, war, or both.
Many, including Professor Hapgood, have reached this same conclusion. He wrote, “The evidence presented by ancient maps appears to suggest the existence in remote times, before the rise of any known cultures, of a true civilization, of an advanced kind, which either was localized in one area but had worldwide commerce, or was, in a real sense, a worldwide culture. This culture, at least in some respects, was more advanced than the civilizations of Greece and Rome.”
Early in the twentieth century, Charles Fort extended this hypothesis to include speculation that this vanished culture was the product of extraterrestrials. Maurice Chatelain, who noted how the scientific knowledge of astronomy by ancient peoples, such as the Sumerians, was “far superior” to that of astronomers only three hundred years ago, went so far as to state that all terrestrial civilizations evolved from the same source and this was “some extraterrestrial source in human affairs many thousands of years ago.” He added, “This theory is already generally accepted by the public and also is considered a possibility by part of the scientific establishment, but it is difficult to get the official scientific establishment to accept this theory because it would turn upside down all traditional scientific beliefs. Nevertheless, this theory is true and accurate, because there is none other that would better explain the sudden appearance of intelligent man and his very advanced scientific knowledge so long ago.”
SUMER: THE FIRST KNOWN CIVILIZATION
W
HILE THE VERY EXISTENCE OF
A
TLANTIS IS STILL BEING DEBATED,
we find the first of the great recorded civilizations was ancient Sumer. Also known as Shinar and Chaldea, this civilization arose between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in the area known today as Iraq, which derived its name from the ancient Sumerian city of Uruk. From Sumer came an amazing and fully evolved civilization that handed down the basics for all ensuing Western cultures, from written language and law to mathematics, agriculture, and astronomy.
According to conventional history, Sumer grew out of a collection of hunter-gatherer clans who banded together to form the first human civilization within the Tigris-Euphrates Valley about 4000 BC. Yet by 3300 BC, archaeological studies have shown that Sumerians had drained marshes, dug canals, constructed dams and dikes, and built a large-scale irrigation system next to gleaming cities containing huge pyramidal structures called ziggurats. What prompted this sudden spurt of civilization?
About 2400 BC, Sumer was invaded from the west and north by Semitic tribes, and by about 2350 BC was captive to the warrior king Sargon the Great, who founded the Semite Akkadian Dynasty, whose empire stretched from the Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean. After years of wars and population displacements, the lands of Sumer were united under Hammurabi of Babylon, who’s famous code of laws may have been instituted to discipline the mass migrations of people taking place at that time due to wars and geophysical catastrophes. It is now clear that the Code of Hammurabi was drawn from laws set down by the Sumerians centuries earlier, particularly the earliest law code yet discovered, issued by the Sumerian king Ur-Nammu.
Virtually nothing was known about the Sumerians until about 150 years ago, when archaeologists, spurred by the seventeenth-century writings of Italian traveler Pietro della Valle, began to dig into the strange mounds that dotted the countryside in southern Iraq. In 1843, the Frenchman Paul-Émile Botta discovered Sargon II’s palace near modern-day Khorsabad, and soon after, archaeologists found buried cities, broken palaces, artifacts, and thousands of clay tablets detailing every facet of Sumerian life. By the late 1800s, Sumerian was considered an original language and was being translated. Despite today’s knowledge, the general public still has been taught little about this first great human civilization, which suddenly materialized in Mesopotamia.
Before it strangely vanished, it had greatly influenced life as far east as the Indus River and as far west as Palestine and Egypt. In fact, it would appear that civilizations such as those of the Akkadians, Phoenicians, Minoans, Assyrians, Babylonians, and even the Egyptians were merely devolved versions of ancient Sumer. Yet the public has long believed them to be separate entities, an assumption which has hindered a truthful understanding of human history.
Despite our superficial knowledge of the Sumerians, we have already been able to credit them with many world “firsts.” Samuel Noah Kramer, author of
History Begins at Sumer
and
The Sumerians
, noted that these people developed the wheel, schools, medical science, the first written proverbs, history, the first bicameral congress, taxation, laws, social reforms, the first cosmogony and cosmology, and the first money (a weighed silver shekel), as well as the first writing system, cuneiform.
Sumerian cuneiform writing may reveal more to us about Sumerian culture than we know about the ancient Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans. The papyrus papers of other elder empires disintegrated over time or were destroyed by the fires of war, but cuneiform was etched onto wet clay tablets with a wedge-shaped stylus. These tablets were then dried, baked, and kept in large libraries. About five hundred thousand of these clay tablets have now been found, providing invaluable knowledge of ancient Sumer (which is not to be confused with the Biblical Samaria, the name of a mountain, city, and region north of Jerusalem).
The Sumerian tablets went undeciphered until 1802, when a German high school teacher named Georg Grotefend began systematically translating the trilingual Persian inscription of Darius the Great on the Behistun Rock, which included a version in Babylonian cuneiform. Today nearly eighty percent of cuneiform tablets have not yet been translated into English because the sheer quantity has overwhelmed the world’s handful of translators.
The Sumerian alphabet was essentially shorthand for a much older original language made up of logograms (symbols representing concepts rather than words) similar to antique Chinese characters. Because this older language was not as detailed as English, many different translations may stem from a Sumerian sentence.
One ancient Sumerian document, known as the King List, described not their “gods” but the earliest Sumerian rulers and the lengths of their reigns. At first glance, the list seems preposterous, as it states, “After the kingship descended from heaven, the kingship was in Eridu. In Eridu, Alulim became king; he ruled for 28,800 years.” Other kings served even longer, according to the list. For example, Alalngar reigned for 36,000 years, while En-men-lu-ana ruled for an amazing 43,200 years.
Such longevity is also recorded in the Bible, wherein Methuseleh, Noah, Seth, Enos, and others are reported to have lived more than nine hundred years. In China, rulers of the first dynasties each ruled more than seven hundred years, while the Hindu Vedas state that prior to 3000 BC, the life span was about a thousand years.
After the Great Flood, these numbers began to decrease until Gilgamesh ruled for a mere 126 years, followed by others whose reigns were in only the double-digit range. Either there was something very wrong with the ancient counting systems or there was something very unearthly about their rulers. Could extraterrestrial intervention in human evolution account for such longevity? Could the promise of a much longer life be used today to gain the allegiance of ranking politicians who otherwise would disdain bribes or other enticements?
Sumerians traveled frequently and widely and are thought to have brought their advanced shipbuilding technology and mapping abilities to the early Phoenicians, who settled along the eastern Mediterranean coast in what is now Lebanon and later traveled the world.
Sumerian knowledge of the heavens was both amazing and puzzling. “The whole concept of spherical astronomy, including the 360-degree circle, the zenith, the horizon, the celestial axis, the poles, the ecliptic, the equinoxes, etc., all arose suddenly in Sumer,” noted Alan Alford. Sumerian knowledge of the movements of the sun and moon resulted in the world’s first calendar, used for centuries afterward by the Semites, Egyptians, and Greeks.
Few people realize that we also owe our geometry and modern timekeeping systems to the Sumerians. “The origin of 60 minutes in an hour and 60 seconds in a minute is not arbitrary, but designed around a sexagesimal (based on the number 60) system,” Alford reported. He added that the modern zodiac was a Sumerian creation based on their twelve “gods.” They used it to chart a great precessional cycle that would take 25,920 years to fully complete, a period known as the Platonic year. “The uncomfortable question which the scientists have avoided is this: how could the Sumerians, whose civilization only lasted 2,000 years, possibly have observed and recorded a celestial cycle that took 25,920 years to complete? And why did their civilization begin in the middle of a zodiac period? Is this a clue that their astronomy was a legacy from the gods?” asked Alford.
His question could be enlarged to question how the early primitive humans of almost six thousand years ago suddenly transformed from small packs of hunter-gatherers into a full-blown—advanced even by today’s standards—civilization?
It is difficult to believe that primitive humans acquired so much knowledge on their own overnight. Through thousands of translated Sumerian tablets along with their inscribed cylinder seals, perhaps we should allow the Sumerians themselves to explain.
The answer, echoing claims from many other ancient peoples, is that all their knowledge came from their “gods.” Scholars in the past believed the Sumerians were talking about ethereal and imaginary beings in the sky. Today a growing number of researchers suspect they might well have been referring to physical beings who would descend to earth, much like the gods of ancient Greece, such as Zeus and Athena.
“All the ancient peoples believed in gods who had descended to Earth from the heavens and who could at will soar heavenwards,” explained Zecharia Sitchin in the prologue to the first book of a series detailing his translations and interpretations of Sumerian accounts of their origin and history. “But these tales were never given credibility, having been branded by scholars from the very beginning as myths.”
Yet Sitchin and many others have questioned why ancient scribes would have taken the time and energy to painstakingly write down fables of absolute dreamlike fantasy. Wouldn’t it be more reasonable to conclude that they wrote such tales as fables to recount dimly remembered history?
Understanding the Sumerian version of the human origin requires only a slight shift in mind-set. Sitchin and others simply believe that the ancient Sumerians may have just been putting down on their clay tablets history as they understood it rather than fanciful myths.
The Sumerian descriptions of many ancient cities were believed to be mere fables until their ruins were discovered and excavated. In 2003, scientists claimed to have found the tomb of Gilgamesh, previously thought by most to have been merely a mythological character. Why not also consider their written history as reality?
Regarding the ancient texts, author Paul Von Ward stated, “To accept them only as fantasy or metaphor, we must first be able to demonstrate that they do not refer to actual events. Until we have proven their claims are false, we have no defensible justification for not interpreting them as plausible scenarios in our still-evolving knowledge.” Ward added that while it is easy to find data on nonhuman beings in the historical record, “you will find—as I did—that the toughest challenge lies in overcoming our institutionally implanted assumptions.”
We also must remember that before the twentieth century and the advent of heavier-than-air flight, scholars would not have thought of spaceflight as possible. Thus, Sitchin reasoned, “Now that astronauts have landed on the Moon, and unmanned spacecraft explore other planets, it is no longer impossible to believe that a civilization on another planet more advanced than ours was capable of landing its astronauts on the planet Earth sometime in the past.” Nor is it impossible now to consider the biological manipulation of a species in light of the modern sciences of cloning and in vitro fertilization.
The belief in ancient gods from the sky was not the sole province of Middle Eastern cults. In North America, the Blackfoot tribe awaited the promised return of Napi, said to be the son of the sun and the moon. In legend, Napi, also known as the Old Man, created humans from clay and taught them the skills to survive. Other Algonquians watched for Glooscap, the legendary figure who created humans and brought them knowledge. In Central America, when the Spanish conquistadors arrived, the Aztecs welcomed them as the return of their ancient god, Quetzalcoatl.
After researching numerous American legends of creation, Von Ward noted,
Quetzalcoatl … reportedly sprinkled his blood with the bones of earlier creatures to create humans. In the American West, the Selish tribes’ creator … Amotken used hair from his head to create the first five women. The Quinaults of the Pacific Northwest believe their “changer god Kwatee” created humans from his own sweat. All these methods could imply a contribution of the gods’ DNA. And these gods, as did the Anunnaki, came from the sky.
In fact, mythologies from around the world appear to tell the same essential story—that in ancient times individuals with “godlike” powers arrived to restore civilization following a period of catastrophes.
Quetzalcoatl, the great teacher of the Mayans, was known as Viracocha to the Incas and as the sun god Ra to the Egyptians. Sargon, the first great leader of the Akkadian dynasty, which succeeded the Sumerians, attributed his knowledge to the god Anu, while the Babylonian king Hammurabi was said to have gained power through Marduk, again a reference to the accounts of the Anunnaki.
In India, it is believed that man is descended from gods who flew in fiery craft called
vimanas
. The Teutons point to ancestors in flying craft called
Wanen
. The ancient Mayans thought their predecessors came from the Pleiades, while the Incas said simply that they were the “sons of the sun.” Chinese texts tell of long-lived rulers from the heavens who sailed through the skies in “fire-breathing dragons.” The Dogon tribe in Mali, West Africa, tells of space travelers called Nommos, who came to Earth thousands of years ago from the Sirius star system and gave them detailed information about their world and our solar system. The Dogon described Sirius as having dual or binary suns, a fact not known until recent years. Debunkers, including the late Carl Sagan, tried to argue that recent Western visitors had given them such information, perhaps inadvertently. However, this theory failed to explain a four-hundred-year-old Dogon artifact that apparently correctly depicts the Sirius configuration or ceremonies conducted by the Dogons since the thirteenth century celebrating the cycle of Sirius A and B.
Most of these accounts lack any physical evidence to support them. However, at least one account of ancient visitors did provide such evidence, though the case ended tragically. In 1938, archaeologist Chi Pu Tei discovered regularly aligned rows of graves in the Baian Kara Ula Mountains near the Sino-Tibetan border. Beneath cave drawings of beings wearing helmets along with depictions of the stars, sun, and moon, small frail skeletons with unusually large skulls were found. Chi Pu Tei theorized that the skeletons belonged to an extinct species of mountain ape and that the drawings were left in the caves later by human tribes. Since the graves were in systematic rows, his theory was laughed at and forgotten until 1962, when stone plates found among the graves were translated by Professor Tsum Um Nui of the Academy of Prehistoric Research in Beijing.