The Atlantis Blueprint (17 page)

T
HE LIBYAN DESERT
is one of the most godforsaken wildernesses on earth. Its white sand dunes tower like cliffs, often 600 feet high, and there is no sign of a living thing. Its desolate nature was underlined on 3 June 1971, when three scientists discovered an Egyptian plane in the desert near the Gilf Kebir Plateau. The plane had vanished three years earlier and aerial searches had failed to locate it. It had crash-landed for some unknown reason, and all that remained inside were the nine skeletons of the crew. The airmen had obviously died of thirst.
¹

The area in which they were found was a broad sand-free corridor of hard rock between the giant dunes. The three explorers, Virgil
E
. Barnes, James Underwood and Ali Sbeta, were investigating a mystery that had intrigued scientists for almost forty years: the enigma of the Libyan Desert ‘glass’.

Pieces of this ‘glass’, found on the surface of the Libyan Desert
—
which, in spite of its name, is in Egypt, 500 miles south-west of Cairo
—
were originally identified as ‘tektites’. Often very beautiful, their colour varies from pale yellow to

The Libyan Desert glass deposits are located in the desert near latitude 25 degrees north and the border between Egypt and Libya.

dark yellow and yellow-green, and can be worked by a jeweller into semi-precious stones. No one really knows where they come from. Most scientists are inclined to believe that they have originated in space and have melted as they came hurtling down through the atmosphere.

For Barnes and his companions, the finding of the crashed plane was a stroke of luck, for within a hundred yards or so they also found more than two dozen tektites lying on the sandstone. They lost no time in returning to their Land Rover and setting out on the long drive back to civilisation.

On his expedition
—
funded by the National Science

Foundation
—
Barnes was using maps drawn in the 1930s by an English colonel, Patrick Andrew Clayton, who worked for the Egyptian Desert Survey. (In due course, these same maps would play an important part in defeating General Rommel in the Second World War.) Barnes was in the Libyan Desert to follow up a discovery that had been made by Clayton and his friend Professor Leonard Spencer, who had been the Keeper of Minerals in the British Museum for forty years.

As they were driving along the sand-free corridor in December 1932, Clayton and Spencer had noticed the glitter of shining objects lying on the surface. They stopped and discovered that they were looking at beautiful pieces of glass, which ranged from the size of a pea to that of an egg. Spencer, who had seen many tektites, began to look around for a meteorite impact crater that would explain them, but there did not seem to be one nearby. Another puzzle was that the tektites were found on the surface; since tektites hit the earth with the speed of bullets, they might be expected to be embedded in the ground.

The two scientists filled the car with about a hundredweight of the shining yellow fragments
—
they might have collected many times that amount if they had had the space
—
and turned back towards Cairo. During the next few days, as they examined their find, Clayton and Spencer began to realise just how strange it was. To begin with, some of the pieces had fractures that looked as if they had been produced by deliberate blows; in fact, they resembled the pieces of flint found near prehistoric hand axes. But if they were flakes, not a single tektite resembled a Stone Age tool. A further oddity was their sheer quantity. Tektites are fairly rare; they are not found by the hundredweight.

Chemical analysis threw an unexpected light on the matter, but only to leave another mystery. It seemed these were not tektites after all
—
they were made of the same silicon as the desert sand. The only obvious solution was that they were fragments that had been instantly fused by the impact of a
white-hot meteorite, and were hurled through the air like shrapnel.

Further examinations of the site in the following years failed to locate any kind of crater. Moreover, one particular piece of evidence suggested that the glass had not been created by a meteor impact. One fragment about the size of a lemon had a neat hole running right through it – it looked as if someone had poked it with a metal rod while it was still molten. Two other ‘bore holes’ penetrated the glass for only a short distance. The evidence suggested that this glass had been manufactured by human beings. Further signs suggested that the glass had been handled by human hands: for example, the few bubbles in it were elongated, as if the glass had been turned or lifted while it was still molten.

In 1933, Clayton and Spencer2 presented their evidence to the Royal Geographical Society in a paper. The audience included a distinguished member named Francis James Rennell, later Lord Rennell of Rodd, who had been a staff officer in Egypt during the First World War and had later been involved in explorations in the Sahara. Rennell, who would become President of the Royal Geographical Society in 1945, became fascinated by the mystery of the Libyan Desert glass.

Archaeologists had dated rock carvings in the area to about 5,500
BC.
It had generally been assumed that they were carved by illiterate nomads, but if they were made by the producers of the glass, it suggested that a fairly sophisticated level of civilisation had been achieved in the area by the sixth millennium BC.

Whenever archaeologists stumble upon such anomalies, they are inclined to keep quiet about them, in case their colleagues accuse them of being too imaginative. Such was the case, for example, in the 1890s, when the great Flinders Petrie excavated a village called Naqada, on the Nile, and found pottery and vases of such sophistication that he assumed they must date from the Eleventh Dynasty, around 2,000
BC;
he
even coined the term ‘the New Race’ to describe this unknown people, whose artifacts seemed oddly unlike those of the Egyptians. But when he found more of their typical pottery in tombs dating from 1,000 years earlier, he decided to drop Naqada from his chronology rather than face the embarrassment of explaining how ‘primitives’ of an earlier civilisation could produce work of such excellence.

Equally problematic were the long-necked vases found in the Step Pyramid at Saqqara,
³
which dates from 2,650
BC.
Clay vessels can be made in any shape, because the potter can mould the inside with his hand, but what can explain a vessel carved out of hard materials such as basalt, quartz or diorite? How does the potter carve out the inside of the vessel when the neck is too narrow to admit even the smallest hand? We are forced back on the improbable hypothesis that the craftsmen had some method of melting the hard rock, just as it was once melted in the furnace of the earth’s interior, before they blew it into shape like glass.

Lord Rennell, who had spent many years in Egypt, was intrigued by such mysteries. He was still brooding on the Libyan Desert glass when, in the late fifties, he met Dr John R.V. Dolphin, the chief engineer of the British Atomic Energy Authority. When Rennell told Dolphin about the glass, Dolphin replied that he had also seen something similar in the Australian desert, and knew just how it had been created – by the detonation of an atomic bomb.
⁴

Dolphin gave Rennell a sample of his glass from the test site, and Rennell in turn showed Dolphin some of the Libyan Desert glass. They looked amazingly similar. Like the Libyan Desert glass, Dolphin’s Australian specimens contained virtually no water, because of the tremendously high temperature at which they had been formed. Dolphin’s estimate was that they were produced at about 6,000 degrees Celsius.

It had the makings of a first-class mystery. Sherlock Holmes might have reasoned thus: Glass fragments are found over a fairly wide area even to parallel corridors to the east and
west. Since their silicon content is the same as that of the desert sand, we know they are not tektites. We are left with the notion of a meteorite impact
—
yet there is no crater. The making of coloured glass was one of the preoccupations of the alchemists, and we know that alchemy was studied in Graeco-Roman Egypt as well as ancient India and China. Could this be alchemical glass? Since the glass shows signs of being handled by humans, the only possible explanation is that it is the leftover or by-product of some industrial process. But if Dolphin was correct about the temperature at which the glass was made, then we seem to be assuming that the ancient Egyptians
—
or other men in the region
—
possessed something like atomic power.

At that point Watson would have asked Holmes if he was feeling feverish, but this apparently preposterous conclusion was nevertheless proposed by Dolphin and taken seriously by Lord Rennell. After studying the Libyan Desert glass, Dolphin suggested that for the ancient Phoenicians to have worked with temperatures equivalent to 6,000 degrees Celsius they may have known the secret of atomic power. He went on to suggest that the desert glass may have been formed when the atomic power got out of hand and caused an explosion.

Another reason why Lord Rennell took the mystery seriously is that he himself was in possession of a necklace from ancient Egypt, made of virtually pure gold.
⁵
It is impossible to make pure gold by any normal metallurgical process, because of the problems of removing various impurities present in the ore. Nowadays, it can be done through a chemical process that was unknown in the ancient world, although another method involves heating gold until it vaporises, like liquor in a still, then allowing it to cool, leaving behind the impurities. This again requires an immensely high temperature.

If indeed the ancients had been working with some form of atomic energy, they would have been able to produce the necessary temperature, but they would have needed lots of water. The same could be true if the Libyan Desert glass was simply
the by-product of some industrial process.

Had the Libyan Desert always been waterless? To answer that question, Dolphin contacted another member of the Royal Geographical Society who was an expert on the geography of the ancient world. His name was Charles Hapgood.

Dolphin wrote to Hapgood early in 1957, telling him about the Libyan Desert glass and his theory that it must have been produced by some kind of atomic fission; he asked whether there had ever been any water in the Libyan Desert. In reply, Hapgood assured him that there had been plenty of water in 6,000
BC
in what is now the Sahara Desert. For several thousand years after the pole displacement the Sahara was green and there were many lakes in the area where the Libyan Desert glass was found. Some of the Saharan rock carvings and paintings depict cattle and herdsmen.