Our Occulted History: Do the Global Elite Conceal Ancient Aliens? (14 page)
Yet there is another non-Egyptian pyramid, dated to more than ten thousand years ago by scientists in China, found in the western province of Qinghai. It has been compared to pyramids photographed on Mars. The Xianyang pyramid rises almost two hundred feet above the surrounding countryside and has a flat top thought by some to accommodate landing craft. “Local villagers claim their distant ancestors spoke of great sky ships that navigated the heavens and used the pyramid as a landing, refueling and resupply site. The hypothesis regarding extra-terrestrials is ‘understandable and worth looking into’ Yang Ji, one of the scientists and a researcher at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, explained to reporters,” wrote retired major George Filer of the National UFO Center, which published photos of the pyramid and strange pipelike tubes found there.
According to a Chinese news agency report, the pyramid has three caves with openings shaped like triangles on its facade and is filled with red-hued pipes leading into the mountain and the nearby saltwater lake. Above the caves are dozens of pipes of various diameters running into the mountainside beneath the towering pyramid. Filer suggested that the pipes, more than simply carrying water, may have been used to channel and transport energy from the earth.
The Toltec Mounds near Scott, Arkansas, are similar to the mysterious Indian mounds in Ohio and have been compared to the Egyptian pyramids by the state’s Department of Parks and Tourism. One of the largest and most complex sites in the Lower Mississippi Valley, the numerous Toltec Mounds have been a National Historic Landmark since 1978. They are thought to have been built by the Plum Bayou culture as early as AD 700. According to state literature, “The mound locations were apparently planned using principles based on alignment with important solar positions. … This alignment can still be witnessed at the site on the spring and fall equinoxes.”
Another large North American pyramid is located near St. Louis. Called the City of Cahokia, the pyramid and surrounding mounds are described as one of the greatest cities of the world, for in AD 1250 it was home to more people than London at that time. Built by Native Americans along the Mississippi, its creators were craftsmen who erected palisaded villages, a wide variety of structures, and a social hierarchy led by the Great Sun.
“De t’ings dat yo’ li’ble / To read in de Bible, / It ain’t necessarily so.”
—“I
T
A
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ECESSARILY
S
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,”
P
ORGY AND
B
ESS
,
LYRICS BY
I
RA
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ERSHWIN
F
ROM THE GEOLOGICAL AND ARCHAEOLOGICAL DATA, IT WOULD
seem that Earth has been home to several civilizations—human or otherwise—long before recorded history.
In a book little known in America entitled
Gods of the New Millennium: Scientific Proof of Flesh & Blood Gods
, British author Alan F. Alford wrote, “A shadowy pre-history seems to exist as a legacy in the form of stone, maps and mythology, which our 20th century technology has only just allowed us to recognize.”
Scholars have always faced at least two choices in dealing with ancient texts and legends—to either assume that the texts are allegorical fantasy or to take them literally. For too long, they wrote off the old stories as fables. But in the modern world, with recent advances in geology, archaeology, and even spaceflight, a whole new view of our past is taking shape, one that ties together the stories of our path to reveal an underlying truth about our heritage.
It was once thought that the Greek poet Homer’s account of the Trojan War was sheer fiction until Troy’s ruins were located by Charles Maclaren in 1822. Even then, it was not until the extensive excavations of Heinrich Schliemann in 1870 that the reality of Troy was accepted. Likewise, the ancient Mesopotamian city of Ur was thought to be largely myth until it was discovered and excavated by Leonard Woolley following World War I.
Much of the Bible simply recasts narratives from ancient Sumer, which, for example, include a nearly identical account of the Great Flood. Sumerian culture was the wellspring for much of ancient Middle Eastern mythology.
The very foundation of Egyptian culture may well have been passed down by immigrants from devastated lands of Sumer. One of these later migrants was the Biblical patriarch Abraham, a ranking Sumerian who came from the city of Ur to Egypt with the “Tables of Destiny.” These objects were thought by many to be the original “tables of testimony” mentioned in Exodus 31:18. According to genealogical expert and author Laurence Gardner, the name Abraham actually was a title (like the name David) and could have referred to any number of persons. Ab-ram—or Av-ram—which means “exalted father” in Hebrew, can also be translated as “he who possesses Ram,” an expression used in India, Tibet, Egypt, and in the Celtic world to denote a high degree of universal knowledge.
Abraham crossed the whole of the Near East and built an army, all the while guided by his god, who had provided weapons that allowed him to defeat much larger forces. Abraham arrived in Egypt carrying the wisdom of Sumer in cleverly worded codes found within the Torah and other old Hebraic texts such as the
Sefer Yezirah
(Book of Creation), the
Sefer ha-Zohar
(Book of Light), and the
Ha Qabala.
Paracelsus, the Swiss-German Renaissance alchemist who reflected his family’s knowledge of Greco-Roman history, gave an account of how Adam predicted the destruction of the world by water and how his successors engraved ancient knowledge on two tablets of stone, which were found by Noah following the Great Flood. “At length this universal knowledge was divided into several parts, and lessened in its vigor and power,” wrote Paracelsus. “Abraham … a consummate astrologer and arithmetician, carried the Ark [containing the tablets] out of the land of Canaan into Egypt, whereupon the Egyptians rose to so great a height and dignity that this wisdom was derived from them by other nations.”
Evidence of flooding around the world lends credence to tales of the Great Flood. The same time frame encompassing the flood is also cited as the time that fabled Atlantis sank into the waters.
Our planet looked much different 250 million years ago. Instead of a world of seven distinct continents, Earth was two things—a mass of ocean and a mass of land. This giant landmass was a supercontinent called Pangaea. But some researchers believe Pangaea was not the first, and that other supercontinents had existed before Pangaea but simply broke apart and then recombined.
There are also many tales of fabulous cities, nations, and cultures lost to cataclysm. Mu, Lemuria, Agartha, Thule, Shambhala, Shangri-La, and Cibola are just a few of the names tossed out referring to ancient lost civilizations.
But the most famous of these is Atlantis, a name revered by students of the metaphysical and reviled by those predisposed to conventional science. The two men most connected to the legend of Atlantis are the Greek philosopher Plato, a student of Socrates who lived four hundred years before Christ, and Ignatius Donnelly, a populist congressman and a student of catastrophism in general and Atlantis in particular.
The story of Atlantis has continued to fire the imagination for centuries. Sir Francis Bacon, a leading member of England’s Invisible College, which claimed access to the “Underground Stream of Knowledge,” referred to newly found America as the New Atlantis. In recent years, theorists have devised all sorts of hypotheses as to how Atlantis came to be and where it ended up, but the famous philosopher Plato was the first to introduce the concept of the lost city. He claimed to have obtained his knowledge passed down through his family from his ancestor Solon, who in turn had obtained it while living in Egypt. In the dialogue
Timaeus
in 360 BC
,
Plato wrote of a great war between ancient Greeks and Atlantis, “a mighty power” spanning the globe “which was aggressing wantonly against the whole of Europe and Asia. …”
This power had landed on the Atlantic coast, for in those days the Atlantic was navigable from an island situated to the west of the straits which you call Pillars of Hercules: the island was larger than Libya and Asia [Asia meaning the Middle East] put together, and from it could be reached other islands, and from the islands you might pass through to the opposite continent, which surrounded the true ocean; for this sea which is within the columns of Hercules is only a harbour, having a narrow entrance, but that other is a real sea, and the surrounding land may be most truly called a continent. Now, the island was called Atlantis and was the heart of a great and wonderful empire, which had rule over the whole island and several others, as well as over parts of the continent; and besides these, they subjected the parts of Libya as far as Egypt and of Europe as far as Tyrrhenia [an ancient kingdom centered in the Alps above Italy]. … But afterward there occurred violent earthquakes and floods, and in a single day and night of rain all your warlike men in a body sank into the earth, and the island of Atlantis in like manner disappeared beneath the sea. And that is the reason why the sea in those parts is impassable and impenetrable, because there is such a quantity of shallow mud in the way; and this was caused by the subsidence of the island.
Notice that Plato referred to a continent opposite Africa and Europe. This is clear evidence that the American continents were known as far back as Plato’s time, four centuries before the birth of Jesus and way before conventional history has stated that they were discovered by Leif Eriksson and Christopher Columbus.
How did Atlantis come to be? Plato, writing through the words of Critias, offered this explanation, “I have before remarked in speaking of the allotments of the gods, that they distributed the whole earth into portions differing in extent, and made for themselves temples and instituted sacrifices. And Poseidon [comparable to the Anunnaki Enki, known as the lord of waters], receiving for his lot the island of Atlantis, begat children by a mortal woman, and settled them in a part of the island, which I will describe.”
While most people today still consider Atlantis a myth, others, including nineteenth-century American congressman Ignatius Donnelly, took Plato’s words as “veritable history,” claiming Atlantis was the place where humankind first rose from barbarism to civilization. Donnelly considered that the “gods and goddesses of the ancient Greeks, the Phoenicians, the Hindus, and the Scandinavians were simply the kings, queens, and heroes of Atlantis, and the acts attributed to them in mythology, a confused recollection of real historical events.” He also said Egypt was the oldest colony of Atlantis and its civilization, which along with that of the Mayans of Central America represented a primitive reproduction of the Atlantean culture. Both in Atlantis and in Central and South America, gold was extensively mined and treasured, not for any intrinsic value, but for its association with elder “gods.”
But many even today dismiss Atlantis as mere myth and legend sparked by Plato’s writings. Apparently, they failed to notice that many authors of classical literature, such as Proclus, Diodorus, Plutarch, Posidonius, Strabo, and Pliny, all made references to Atlantis.
In recent years, a variety of other theories as to the location of Atlantis have been advanced. Based on Plato’s description, and assuming the “Pillars of Heracles” refers to the Strait of Gibraltar, most researchers believe Atlantis was located in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean between Africa and the Americas. In the 1920s, the “sleeping prophet,” Edgar Cayce, saw Atlantis as a continent-size region extending from the Azores to the Bahamas, with ships and aircraft powered by a mysterious form of energy crystal. Cayce predicted that portions of Atlantis would be found in modern times.
In 2010, geologists working with seismic data collected by oil companies discovered buried deep beneath the sediment of the North Atlantic Ocean west of the Orkney and Shetland islands an ancient landscape with furrows cut by rivers and mountain peaks. Researchers traced eight major rivers and took core samples from the rock beneath the ocean floor, which revealed pollen and coal, evidence of land-dwelling life.
“It looks for all the world like a map of a bit of a country onshore,” said Nicky White, the senior researcher. The submerged landscape, described as “reminiscent of the mythical lost Atlantis,” covers about 3,861 square miles, could have held a population of tens of thousands, and may be part of a larger region that merged with present-day Scotland and may have extended toward Norway in a world before recorded history.
It was in 1969, within prophet Cayce’s predicted time frame, that researchers Robert Ferro and Michael Grumley set out from Rome to the Caribbean and claimed to have discovered underwater formations off the Bimini Islands in the Bahamas that are now known as the Bimini Road. In 1970, they published a book entitled
Atlantis: The Autobiography of a Search
concerning their adventure aboard their boat, the
Tana
.
Initial investigations indicated that the huge stone blocks and pavement stones were man-made, but as the name Atlantis began to be batted about in the media and corporate America became involved, the tone changed to disbelief.
R. Cedric Leonard, author of
Quest for Atlantis
, along with J. Manson Valentine of the Science Museum of Miami, in 1970 studied a structure near the Bahamas island of Andros called the Andros Temple. This structure measured approximately sixty feet wide and a hundred feet in length with crumbling stone walls roughly three feet thick. “This is clearly an edifice of importance built by a mathematically sophisticated civilization,” he wrote. Leonard soon learned that the North American Rockwell Corporation, which had substantial land holdings on Bimini, had been granted exclusive excavation rights on all the underwater ruins in the area of Bimini Island. “Soon after, they hired a geologist with previous experience in the area. …” According to Leonard, [journalist Robert Marx reported] “that the investigation was ‘brief,’ and that the geologist didn’t even go into the water for the ‘scientific’ inspection. … The hired geologist announced shortly after that the walls were not man-made and that the columns were nothing more than ‘ballast’ from a shipwreck.”
The National Geographic Society eventually entered the picture, sponsoring an investigation by University of Miami geologist John Gifford, who carbon-dated the age of the giant stones as fifteen thousand years old. Marine engineer Dimitri Rebikoff, as far back as 1969, had stated that the Bimini Road is identical to numerous ancient man-made harbors discovered throughout the Mediterranean. Rebikoff, who spent much time and energy diving at the site, firmly disagreed with the skeptics who claimed that the site was all natural formations because there were no leveling stones underneath the large stone blocks at Bimini.
Could these Caribbean ruins be the site of Atlantis? It’s hard to tell, mainly because so many professional archaeologists and geologists have backed away from the project. “Once speculation concerning Atlantis enters the picture, professionals begin to back away (and the way they were treated by their own colleagues, who could blame them),” Leonard stated. Those who involved themselves with projects related to the site were ostracized, and due to the reluctance of qualified scientists within this academic environment, “the scientific community is overlooking significant and sound evidence.”
THE MINOAN EMPIRE AND SANTORINI
More recent theories have placed Atlantis at various Mediterranean locations, including Crete, Cyprus, and the island of Santorini (ancient Thera). In his 2011 book,
The Lost Empire of Atlantis
, author Gavin Menzies presented a cogent argument for the legend of Atlantis being simply a vague and garbled recollection of the Minoan Empire, a Bronze Age seafaring civilization centered on the island of Crete and named for its line of kings, collectively named Minos. According to Menzies’s studies, Minoan ships ranged from the Americas to India. Their empire ended about 1500 BC with the gigantic eruption of the volcano on the island of Santorini, which sent millions of tons of volcanic ash into the atmosphere, produced intense atmospheric shock waves, and generated disastrous tsunamis.