The Atlantis Blueprint (18 page)

Soon Hapgood was corresponding with Lord Rennell, too, but he expressed his doubts about Dolphin’s notion of atomic power. To Charles B. Hitchcock, a fellow member of the American Geographical Society, Hapgood wrote on 1 January 1959: ‘These two [Rennell and Dolphin] have provided me with practically indisputable evidence that some very ancient race (before 6,000
BC
perhaps) could control temperature at 6,000 degrees C in the refining of metals and silicates. The very statement is enough to blow the head off the average archaeologist, but I see no way to explain away the evidence they sent me.’
⁶

Rennell and Dolphin’s observations fitted very comfortably with the conclusions that Hapgood was reaching through the study of the ‘maps of the ancient sea kings’: that civilisation was thousands of years older than historians assume. The generally accepted view is expressed in the article on metallurgy in the most recent
Encyclopaedia Britannica
– man began to smelt ore to obtain metals around 4,000
BC.
If, as Hapgood believed, man was building oceangoing ships at least 3,000 years before that, then he was certainly technically accomplished enough to have learned
how to use metals.

It so happened that Hapgood himself had seen a necklace made of pure gold, but this had come from Mexico rather than Egypt. Moreover, Captain Arlington Mallery, who had been the first to study the Piri Reis map, had also made some extraordinary claims about metal technology, speaking about it in the broadcast of August 1956 that had introduced Hapgood to the study of ancient maps.

Mallery had excavated a number of furnaces in Ohio and Virginia, and was convinced that iron-smelting techniques were in use long before 4,000
BC.
During the Georgetown broadcast,7 Mallery made the even more astonishing claim that the British Museum had sent some iron tools from Egypt to a metallurgist and was ‘astounded to find out that the ancient Egyptians were using powdered metallurgy’, a process that involves heating the metal to a temperature where it vaporises, after which it condenses in the form of a powder. The Egyptians obtained these temperatures, Mallery contended, by ‘the same processes that made our atomic bomb possible’ – atomic fission – ‘so 5,000 years ago the Egyptians were using the same processes that we thought we had discovered today to make the atom bomb’. Mallery added that ‘the timing of the process agrees with the timing of the ancient maps’ – in other words, perhaps 6,000–7,000
BC.
Mallery was also convinced that he had found gold that was 100 per cent pure.

So Hapgood was already familiar with the claim, now made by Dolphin, that prehistoric men he described as ‘Phoenicians’ had learned to create and sustain temperatures of 6,000 degrees Celsius (which is only 2,000 degrees cooler than the surface of the sun). He was not prepared to concede that the answer lay in atomic power, though. Hapgood had his own theory, which came from a comment he found in a book called
Mysteries of Ancient South America
(1956) by Harold Wilkins, who had written:

Concave mirrors can, of course, be used to concentrate the sun’s rays – Archimedes devised huge metal mirrors to hold the Romans besieging Syracuse at bay in 211
BC,
setting their ships ablaze. Hapgood told his correspondent Charles Hitchcock: ‘On the other hand, I am loath to accept the explanation to which Lord Rennell finds himself pushed: that these ancient people (unidentified) had atomic power. I see another possible explanation: that they used solar power through a system of lenses like those reportedly found off the coast of Ecuador.’
⁹

Rennell himself was disinclined to accept the atomic power hypothesis, but he and Dolphin had no doubt that the Libyan Desert glass demonstrated the existence of a civilisation that possessed the technology to create high temperatures in at least 6,000
BC.

In November 1958, Hapgood wrote to Ion Edwards, Professor of Egyptology at the British Museum, to check Mallery’s claim that the ancient Egyptians possessed powdered metallurgy; Edwards replied that there was no evidence that the Egyptians possessed anything but the simplest forms of metallurgy. Reluctantly, Hapgood was forced to abandon his hope that he had found proof for ancient technology, but like Rennell and Dolphin he was totally convinced that it had existed. Less than a year later, his discovery of the portolans in the Library of Congress left him in no doubt of the existence
of a civilisation that predated even the ‘Phoenicians’ of Dolphin and Rennell.

In the summer of 1995 Rand visited the Hapgood Archives at Yale University. He and his friend Martin Schnell – who had drawn Rand’s attention to the article on the Sphinx by Paul Roberts – arrived on the deserted campus and took rooms in an empty hall of residence. For three weeks they made their way across to the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Collection immediately after breakfast, only leaving when it closed. It was there they found and made extensive notes on the file on Lord Rennell and the Libyan Desert glass, as well as the correspondence that revealed Hapgood’s ‘secret quest for Atlantis’.

The following summer, another piece of the jigsaw puzzle fell into place. Rand and Rose were visited by a friend named Shawn Montgomery, whom they had met earlier in the year when they went to launch
When the Sky Fell
in Toronto. Montgomery was making a research trip across Canada and America, talking to people who shared his interest in ‘scientific anomalies’.
¹⁰
As the three of them were sitting at breakfast on the day he was about to leave, he began to tell them about his visit to a scientist called Yull Brown, who was working on a new technology that certainly qualified as anomalous. Brown had learned how to make a mixture of hydrogen and oxygen whose properties had baffled every scientist who had examined it. He called it Brown’s Gas. As he talked, Montgomery pulled out one of Brown’s brochures and laid it on the table, and Rand glanced through it idly as his friend went on talking. Suddenly he stopped and stared. He was looking at a page with a picture of a sun emitting rays, and in the centre of the sun was the phrase ‘6,000 degrees Celsius’.
¹¹
Rand was convinced that he had taken a major step towards solving the mystery of the Libyan Desert glass.

Montgomery had been working with Graham Smith, who was involved in the Marshall McLuhan Research Program at the University of Toronto, and the two had made a series of

A September 1979 Sydney, Australia, press release about Brown’s Gas puts the figure 6,000 degrees Celsius at the centre of the page.

television programmes about forgotten – or suppressed – knowledge. Brown’s Gas came high on the list of the things they wanted to investigate, so Montgomery rang Brown in California. He found it extremely difficult to understand his accent, which was a curious mixture of Bulgarian and Australian, but eventually he became an expert on the subject. What he learned sounded so incredible that when Brown told him that there was a Brown’s Gas generator in Ottawa, he and Smith lost no time in paying a call on its owner, Professor Andrew Michrowski of the Planetary Association for Clean Energy (PACE).

Professor Michrowski led them up to the roof, where the generator stood on a table. As the generator could sublimate metals into gases, and the smell tended to linger in closed
environments, open air was necessary. Michrowski used a spark to light the flame, which came from a small nozzle like a welding torch, and the demonstration began.

Brown had told Montgomery that the flame could instantaneously poke a hole in wood or metal. Montgomery held out a large wooden spoon. There was a flurry of yellow flame, and a small, clean hole appeared through half an inch of wood.

On seeing such a demonstration, most people would assume that the flame was as hot as an oxyacetylene burner, so Montgomery was startled when Professor Michrowski handed him the torch and told him to feel the temperature of the nozzle a fraction of an inch from where the flame was emanating. His instinct told him not to risk it, but he did. The nozzle was merely warm.

Montgomery picked up a rod of welder’s tungsten, and applied the flame to it. It looked as if he had lit a piece of magnesium ribbon. There was a blinding white flame, and the rod proceeded to vanish. It should have become too hot to hold; instead it remained at the same temperature. Even when the white flame was within an inch and a half of his fingers, there was no heat. He tried playing the flame over his arm, moving it back and forth. It was hot, and would have burned him if he had kept it still; as it was, it merely felt warm again. The flame of a gas stove would have burned the tissue. Brown’s Gas could apparently burn tungsten, at somewhere around 6,000 degrees Celsius, but did little damage to flesh.

During the next hour, Michrowski put the generator through its paces. He played the flame on a piece of brick, and the brick first of all glazed then began to melt. They welded a piece of glass to a piece of brick, then a piece of copper to the brick, then a piece of glass to the copper, then cut holes in a fire brick – designed to withstand high temperatures – and also welded copper to it. They turned a fistful of sand into a glass ball, then welded together samples of dissimilar metals, such as copper and bronze, and nickel and iron. Finally, they turned various metals into molten pools.

How could the flame do this without enough heat to burn flesh? Michrowski had no idea. Neither did anyone else. And that was why science had determinedly ignored Brown’s Gas.

Back in Toronto, Montgomery and Smith bought themselves a small Brown’s Gas generator from China, the only country that manufactured them. There were three sizes, and they could only afford the smallest – like the one they had seen at Dr Michrowski’s. This was frustrating, because its flame was only the size of the tip of a pencil, and the operations it would carry out necessarily took place on a smaller scale. But it was obvious that it worked – even if it did seem to contradict the laws of nature.

Who was the Bulgarian magician who had created this extraordinary machine? Yull Brown’s real name was Ilya Velbov, and he was born on the stroke of midnight on Easter Eve in 1922. His disposition was religious, and he became a student in a seminary, destined for the priesthood. The question that would lead to the creation of Brown’s Gas occurred to him when he was reading the Bible at the age of seventeen. The Second Epistle of St Peter declares that one day the earth will be consumed by fire. How, the young Velbov found himself wondering, could a planet whose surface has far more sea than land be consumed by fire? Perhaps water could somehow be turned into flames?

The student was also fond of the works of Jules Verne. A few weeks later he happened to be reading one of his finest works,
The Mysterious Island,
written in 1874. And here Velbov again came upon the interesting suggestion that water might be used as a fuel. It is a modern version of
Robinson Crusoe,
except it has five main characters (six if you count Captain Nemo of
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea,
who appears at the end and whose death concludes volume three with a dramatic flourish). They are wrecked on a remote island when their balloon crashes into the sea. Verne’s aim was to show how such a group could not only survive, but, with the help of nineteenth-century science and common
sense, create themselves a small but comfortable version of civilisation.

Halfway through volume two, the castaways sit around the fire on a winter evening, sipping coffee made from elderberries and discussing the problem of what will happen when the world runs out of coal. ‘What will they burn instead of coal?’ asks one of the characters. Cyrus Harding – the novel’s scientific genius – answers, ‘Water.’ He goes on to explain:

Even the remark about electricity was an astonishing piece of prophetic anticipation. We have to remember that Verne composed his novel by gaslight. Edison did not invent the electric light bulb until 1879, five years later, and it was not until 1883 that Nicola Tesla invented alternating current and made it practicable to transmit electric current over long distances.