Secrets of the Lost Races #5
FROM A BOOK BY THE SAME NAME
Nuclear Warfare among the Primitives
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CHAPTER 5 |
The world was the scene of great confusion after the
breakdown of unity at the world center. Maps reproduced by the
Renaissance cartographers show that the survey expeditions that
roamed the globe recorded ominous changes in the northern and
southern polar icecaps. Every one of the sacred historical
manuscripts seems to indicate that Job lived during this time
period, for certain areas of his story tell of a significant drop
in temperature, of freezing conditions, of ice formations
advancing from the north, of lowered ocean levels, of pronounced
evaporation and excessive flooding and melting of snow.
He experienced these phenomena while living in Uz, a town located
in northern Arabia. Today the climate in this area is extremely
arid and hot, yet he alluded to overflowing rivers and to rain
and even snow.
Puzzling? No, not to the climatologists, anyway, for to them
it is a fact that those weather conditions were once considered
normal in the Middle East, during the Ice Age!
The advent of climatic changes and glaciation certainly must
have had a dramatic effect on the progressive life-style and
development of the civilization centers and may have been
instrumental in the destruction of at least three of them.
Antarctica was one of the centers that were destroyed by the
expanding walls of ice. We will probably never know all the
details of the tragedy that struck both civilization and human
life in the Antarctic continent. History is frightfully silent on
matters relating to the coldest regions of the globe, yet there
are several indications from primitive sources that Antarctica
was indeed inhabited at a very remote period.
Francis Maziere, who has done extensive research into the
legends and folklore of the central Pacific island natives,
discovered that the Polynesians possessed a very sophisticated
knowledge of navigation and geography. They knew about such
far-removed locations as New Zealand, Hawaii, Easter Island, and
even the southwest coast of South America, with the treacherous
waters of Drake Passage beyond the southern extremity of Cape
Horn. The Polynesians were also very familiar with the existence
of the Antarctic continent. According to their traditions, there
was a time when the land was not covered with ice, and several
nations of people inhabited it. The Australian aborigines talk of
Antarctica as a "land of the gods" which at an unknown time
became covered with "cool water and quartz crystals," a good
description of ice and snow by natives who had never seen such
substances in their native desert home.
Maziere found a Polynesian elder from Easter Island named
Veriveri who related that in the midst of the southern land was a
great cliff of red rock. Remarkably enough, an identical landmark
was discovered recently by an American expedition that ventured
into the heart of Antarctica. The red cliff, however, is situated
several hundred miles inland, so that it could not have been
observed from the coast. It would have been impossible for a
Polynesian to have traversed Antarctica in its present frozen
state to see the red cliff and live to tell about it. If an
ancestor of the Polynesians did observe the red escarpment, as
the legend would indicate someone did, this must have been when
the climatic conditions on Antarctica were radically different.
Another area that was overwhelmed by glaciation during the Ice
Age was the Arctic region, in particular the island of Greenland.
One Renaissance map showing Greenland free of ice is the Zeno
brothers' map of 1380.
This map was the result of a voyage made by the two Zeno
brothers from Venice in the early fourteenth century. Their
explorations supposedly took them to Iceland, Greenland and
perhaps as far as Nova Scotia. They drew a map of the North
Atlantic which was subsequently lost for two centuries before it
was rediscovered by a descendant of the Zenos.
A study of the chart reveals that the Zeno brothers could
not have been the original map makers. The brothers supposedly
touched land in Iceland and Greenland, yet their chart very
accurately shows longitude and latitude not only for these
locations, but also for Norway, Sweden, Denmark, the German
Baltic coast, Scotland, and even such little-known landfalls as
the Shetland and Faroe islands. The map also shows evidence of
having been based on a polar projection, which was beyond the
abilities of the fourteenth-century geographers. The original map
makers likewise knew the correct lengths of degrees of longitude
for the entire North Atlantic; thus, it is very possible that the
map, instead of being a product after the fact, was drawn up by
the Zeno brothers before their voyage and was used to guide them
in their exploration of the northern lands.
Just how ancient the original source maps may have been is
indicated by the fact that the Zeno map shows Greenland
completely free of ice. Mountains in the interior are depicted,
and rivers are drawn flowing to the sea, where in many cases
glaciers are found today. Captain A. H. Mallery, whose initial
work on the Piri Reis map (Chapter 3) led him to study other
Renaissance charts such as the Zeno brothers', took special note
of the flat plain shown stretching the length of the Greenland
interior on this map, intersected midway by mountains. The
Paul-Emile Victor French Polar Expedition of 194749 found
precisely such topography from seismic profiles.
As with the revelation that Antarctica at one time was free
of ice and perhaps inhabited, we find similar legends of a
civilized people who once lived in northern lands which are now
buried under thousands of feet of ice. The legends tell of Thule,
Numinor and the Hyperboreans, inhabitants of the Arctic in
centuries past. Egerton Sykes, in his Dictionary of Nonclassical
Mythology, page 20, states his belief that the Norse legend of
Fimbelvetr, the "Terrible Winter" that launched the epic
disasters of Ragnarok and the destruction of the gods of
Valhalla, may reflect a historical fact: the obliteration of a
prehistoric civilization in the boreal regions by the Ice Age
catastrophe.
The remains of these civilized northern people have, of
course, disintegrated under the weight of millions of tons of
moving ice, but some evidence of their historical successors has
miraculously survived, for there are extensive ruins of a
sophisticated prehistoric culture that once existed in the Arctic
region. At Ipiutak on Point Hope, northern Alaska, there are the
ruins of a large settlement of 800 structures laid out in
carefully planned blocks and avenues-a community large enough to
have supported several thousand individuals. Unfortunately there
are very few artifacts that can tell us anything about the
Ipiutak settlement. What we do know is that the ancient
settlement was far from being a simple hunting community. There
are indications that these people had a knowledge of mathematics
and astronomy comparable to that of the ancient Mayas.
Archaeologists are astonished that a community the size of
Ipiutak could have existed at all, for it is situated on the
permafrost, far north of the Arctic Circle, where today small
bands of Eskimo hunters scratch out a meager livelihood. Ipiutak
could have supported so large and sophisticated a population only
if the climate of Alaska was decidedly different from the
present, and the only time when this region was considerably
warmer was before and at the beginning of the Ice Age.
Ipiutak was very probably settled by those people of the
Arctic high civilization center who escaped the first onslaught
of the polar glaciation but were overwhelmed as the freezing
conditions advanced farther south. The Ipiutak cemetery reveals
that the inhabitants were tall, blond individuals, similar to the
Cro-Magnons of Europe.
Not long ago Russian archaeologists discovered the remains
of a number of prehistoric settlements very similar to Ipiutak in
the midst of the frozen taiga in northeastern Siberia. Here too
the climate is very hostile to all forms of life, yet the
archaeologists found evidence of large Paleolithic, Neolithic and
even Bronze Age populations that appear to have lived
simultaneously in the same area. In Yakutia, Paleolithic rock
drawings have been discovered that are much like the cave
paintings of Magdalenian France and Spain. Between Yakutia and
western Europe, the land and the prehistoric cultures it
supported are completely devoid of evidence of any similar
artistic development. The only possible link between Siberia and
the European Cro-Magnon civilization is through the north, in the
direction of a common homeland and origin in the Arctic.
Historian Will Durant, in his Story of Civilization, made a
statement which may contain more truth than previously realized:
"Immense volumes have been written to expound our knowledge, and
conceal our ignorance, of primitive man. . . . Primitive cultures
were not necessarily the ancestors of our own; for all we know
they may be the degenerate remnants of higher cultures that
decayed when human leadership moved in in the wake of the ice.
A third post-Babel high civilization center to be destroyed
by the Ice Age was located in the Caribbean. Since 1968, strange
finds have been made in coastal waters around the Caribbean,
notably in the Bahama Banks. At depths ranging from 6 to 100 feet
there are numerous giant stone constructions-walls, great
squares, crosses and other geometric shapes, even archways and
pyramids-all encrusted with fossilized shells and petrified
mangrove roots, indicating their great age. Among the first finds
made were stretches of a wall composed of blocks measuring as
much as 18 by 20 by 10 feet and weighing approximately 25 tons
each. The wall appears to have encircled the islands of North and
South Bimini to form a dike. Along with the sea wall, 3- to
5-foot sections of fluted columns were also discovered, some
still fixed in their original positions, while others were found
lying in a jumble on the sea floor, covered with sand. Since the
pillars appear at regular intervals along the sunken wall, it is
believed they may have formed one continuous portico. Both the
wall and the pillars reveal a high level of engineering skill in
their construction.
Not far from the Bimini sea wall, divers have uncovered a
stone archway at a depth of 12 feet, a pyramid with a flattened
top and a base 140 by 180 feet, plus a huge circular stone
construction, made of 20-foot blocks, that appears to have been a
well-designed water reservoir when it existed above sea level.
Andros Island, near Pine Key, possesses its share of submarine
structures as well. In 1969 airline pilots photographed a 60 by
100-foot rectangular shape, clearly visible through the calm
waters. The eastern side and the western corners were partitioned
off. What is amazing is that this submerged rectangle is an
almost exact copy in size and design of the Temple of the
Turtles, an ancient Mayan sanctuary found at Uxmal in Yucatan,
indicating that the survivors of this Caribbean civilization
center may have influenced the development of the early Central
American cultures and the culture of the Mound Builders.
Other sunken ruins in the Caribbean area include a sea wall 30
feet high, running in a straight line for miles off Venezuela,
near the mouth of the Orinoco River; an acropolitan complex,
complete with streets, covering 5 acres in 6 feet of water off
the Cuban coast; remains of sunken buildings off Hispaniola, one
measuring 240 by 80 feet; several stone causeways, 30 to 100 feet
below the surface, which leave the shores of Quintana Roo,
Mexico, and Belize, British Honduras, and continue out to sea for
miles toward an unknown destination; a sea wall running along a
submarine cliff near Cay Lobos; and huge stone squares,
rectangles and crosses clearly of human design off the windward
and leeward sides of all the keys down to Orange Key.
These Caribbean ruins are perplexing to the archaeologists
and to orthodox historians, for the architecture is far beyond
the capabilities of either the Amerinds or the Spanish
conquistadors. It is even more disturbing that the most recent
period, when the present Caribbean sea floor was above sea level
and the mystery walls, pyramids and temples therefore could have
been built, was during the Ice Age. Apparently the Caribbean
civilization evolved during the time the ocean levels were at
their lowest, and it eventually was submerged when the Bahama
shelf was inundated by the rising of the sea caused by the
melting of the northern glaciers. The flooding in all probability
was very gradual, for many of the gargantuan submerged walls
appear to have been dikes built in an attempt to protect certain
areas from the rising sea. But the walls were not enough. The
ocean waters eventually rolled over the land, and the Caribbean
civilization disappeared.
While three of the post-Babel centers of high civilization
succumbed to natural disaster, the ruins of the remaining five
centers show evidence of man-made destruction-destruction of such
terrifying magnitude that we could not have imagined the like of
it prior to the end of World War II.
Evidence of the holocaust is found in the most notable of
the Hindu literary works, the Mahabharata, an epic poem of
200,000 lines, dating back in its present form to 500 B.c.
Textual evidence, however, indicates that the events depicted in
the Mahabharata took place 1,000 to 2,000 years earlier. Repeated
references are made to great godkings riding about in Vimanas or
"celestial cars," described as "aerial chariots with sides of
iron clad with wings."
Used for transportation in peaceful times, the Vimanas were
also employed during battle. The Mahabharata describes an 18-day
war between the Kauravas and the Pandavas, who inhabited the
upper regions of the Ganges. Not long after this war, a second
battle was waged against the Vrishnis and Andhakas in the same
region. In both battles Vimanas were used to launch a weapon of
terrible destructive power. The Mahabharata relates, "The valiant
Adwattan, remaining steadfast in his Vimana, landed upon the
water and from there unleashed the Agneya weapon, incapable of
being resisted by the very gods. Taking careful aim against his
foes, the preceptor's son let loose the blazing missile of
smokeless fire with tremendous force. Dense arrows of flame, like
a great shower, issued forth upon creation, encompassing the
enemy. Meteors flashed down from the sky. A thick gloom swiftly
settled upon the Pandava hosts. All points of the compass were
lost in darkness. Fierce winds began to blow. Clouds roared
upward, showering dust and gravel.
"Birds croaked madly, and beasts shuddered from the destruction.
The very elements seemed disturbed. The sun seemed to waver in
the heavens. The earth shook, scorched by the terrible violent
heat of this weapon. Elephants burst into flame and ran to and
fro in a frenzy, seeking protection from the terror. Over a vast
area, other animals crumpled to the ground and died. The waters
boiled, and the creatures residing therein also died. From all
points of the compass the arrows of flame rained continuously and
fiercely. The missile of Adwattan burst with the power of
thunder, and the hostile warriors collapsed like trees burnt in a
raging fire. Thousands of war vehicles fell down on all sides."
The description of the second battle is as frightening as
that of the first: "Gurkha, flying in his swift and powerful
Vimana, hurled against the three cities of the Vrishnis and
Andhakas a single projectile charged with all the power of the
Universe. An incandescent column of smoke and fire, as brilliant
as ten thousand suns, rose in all its splendor. It was the
unknown weapon, the iron thunderbolt, a gigantic messenger of
death which reduced to ashes the entire race of the Vrishnis and
Andhakas.
"The corpses were so burnt that they were no longer recognizable.
Hair and nails fell out. Pottery broke without cause. Birds,
disturbed, circled in the air and were turned white. Foodstuffs
were poisoned. To escape, the warriors threw themselves in
streams to wash themselves and their equipment. With the
destruction ended, the Kuru king, Yudistthira, was informed of
the power of the iron thunderbolt and the slaughter of the
Vrishnis."
We could attribute these descriptions to the overactive
imagination of some unknown Hindu sage of long ago, but there are
too many details that make this unnervingly similar to an
eyewitness report of an atomic bomb explosion: the brightness of
the blast; the column of rising smoke and fire; the fallout,
intense heat and shock waves; the appearance of the victims; and
the effects of radiation poisoning.
Hindu scholars believe the ancient atomic explosions
occurred in either 3102 or 2449 B.C., with the latter as the more
probable date, because of the detailed astronomical configuration
given in connection with the battles in the Mahabharata. If the
latter date is correct, this means, in terms of Biblical
chronology, that atomic weapons must have been used about a
millennium after the Flood. According to traditional Hindu
history, the Bharata War took place not many generations after
the reign of Manu, who escaped a world-destroying Deluge with his
family in a boat-the Hindu equivalent of Noah and the ark.
When European scholars began their first examination of the
Mahabharata in the nineteenth century during the British imperial
rule of India, the many references to flying craft and weapons of
fearful fiery destruction were considered nothing more than
poetic hyperbole. In the words of one Victorian commentator, V.
R. Dikshitar, "Everything in this literature is imagination and
should be summarily dismissed as unreal." But with the initial
research into radiation and nuclear physics at the turn of the
century, there were already those who saw in the Mahabharata and
other ancient legends an indication of energies that were just
beginning to be understood by modern man. Physicist Frederick
Soddy, in his Interpretation of Radium, published in 1909,
remarked concerning the ancient accounts, "Can we not read in
them some justification for the belief that some former forgotten
race of men attained not only to the knowledge we have so
recently won, but also to the power that is not yet ours? ... I
believe that there have been civilizations in the past that were
familiar with atomic energy, and that by misusing it they were
totally destroyed."
Since 1945, of course, we have learned what the effects of
the destructive power of the atomic bomb are-and the descriptions
given in the Mahabharata have suddenly become very real.
The use of atomic weapons in India 4,400 years ago
presupposes a knowledge of nuclear physics rivaling our own.
There is evidence of such a knowledge preserved among the ancient
Hindu records. Several Sanskrit books, for example, contain
references to divisions of time that cover a very wide range. At
one extreme, according to Hindu texts dealing with cosmology, is
the kalpa or "Day of Brahma," a period of 4.32 billion years. At
the other, as described in the Bihath Sathaka, we find reference
to the kashta, equivalent to three onehundred-millionths
(0.00000003) of a second. Modern Sanskrit scholars have no idea
why such large and such miniscule time divisions were necessary
in antiquity. All they know is that they were used in the past,
and they are obliged to preserve the tradition.
Time divisions of any kind, however, imply that the duration
of something has been measured. The only phenomena in nature that
can be measured in billions of years or in millionths of a second
are the disintegration rates of radioisotopes. These rates range
from those of elements like uranium 238, with a half-life of 4.51
billion years, to subatomic particles such as K mesons and
hyperons, with mean halflives measured in the hundred-millionths,
billionths, trillionths, and even smaller fractions of a second.
The ranges of ancient Hindu time division and of radioisotope
disintegration thus partially coincide, and the former could have
been used to measure the latter.
If the ancient Hindus - or an earlier civilization from
which the Hindus inherited their time divisions-had a technology
that could study and measure nuclear and subnuclear matter, means
for using atomic energy was also accessible to them.
There are remains that strongly suggest that an atomic war
was indeed waged in the distant past. According to the
Mahabharata, the Bharata War, in which Vimanas and atomic weapons
were used, involved prehistoric inhabitants along the upper
Ganges River in northern India. Precisely in this region, between
the Ganges and the mountains of Rajamahal, there are numerous
charred ruins which have yet to be explored or excavated. What
observations have been made thus far indicate that the ruins were
not burned by ordinary fire. In many instances, they appear as
huge masses fused together, with deeply pitted surfaces,
described as looking like tin struck by a stream of molten steel.
Farther south, among the dense forests of the Deccan, are more
such ruins which may be of earlier origin, pointing to a war
antedating that of the Mahabharata and encompassing a far greater
area. The walls have been glazed, corroded and split by
tremendous heat. Within several of the buildings that remain
standing, even the surfaces of the stone furniture have been
vitrified: melted and then crystallized. No natural burning flame
or volcanic eruption could have produced a heat intense enough to
cause this phenomenon. Only the heat released through atomic
energy could have done this damage.
In the same region as this second group of ruins, Russian
researcher A. Gorbovsky reported, in his Riddles of the Ancient
Past, the discovery of a human skeleton the radioactivity of
which was fifty times above the normal level.
Outside India, similar remains of a nuclear holocaust have
been found. Researcher Erich von Fange describes the melted ruins
of a ziggurat structure situated not far from ancient Babylon:
"It appeared that fire had struck the tower and split it down to
the very foundation. . . . In different parts of the ruins,
immense brown and black masses of brickwork had [been] changed to
a vitrified state . . . subjected to some kind of fierce heat,
and completely molten. The whole ruin has the appearance of a
burnt mountain."
In 1952 archaeologists excavating in Israel unearthed at the
16-foot level a layer of fused green glass a quarter of an inch
thick and covering an area of several hundred square feet. It is
made of fused quartz sand with green discolorations, similar in
appearance to the layers of vitrified sand that were left after
the atomic tests in Nevada in the 1950s. Another such sheet of
glass was uncovered five years earlier in southern Iraq, near
Babylon, spread in a thin layer some distance below Babylonian,
Sumerian and Neolithic cultural levels. To the south, the western
Arabian desert is strewn with black rocks which show evidence of
having been subjected to intense radiation. There are 28 fields
of these scorched stones, called harras, covering an area of
7,000 square miles. In the southern Sahara Desert, engineer
Albion W. Hart discovered another expanse of green glass and
noted that the fused silica there was similar in appearance to
that found at the White Sands atomic test site. Still other
examples of vitrified soil have been discovered among remains in
the most desolate areas of the Gobi Desert of Mongolia. Most
surprising of all are layers at Lop Nor in Sinkiang, near the
present Chinese atomic test site, where it is reported that there
is little difference between the patches of fused quartz left
after the modem nuclear detonations and those that had been there
ages before the Chinese became a nuclear power.
Elsewhere prehistoric forts and towers in Europe as far
north as the British Isles and the Lofoten Islands off Norway
have had their walls vitrified and stones fused by an unknown
energy, usually along their western sides. Many of the towers of
Scotland and the granite fortresses along the coast of Ireland
show evidence of having been melted to a depth of one foot.
One of the most amazing literary testimonies to man-made
destruction among the ancient advanced civilizations is found in
the Tibetan Stanzas of Dzyan, translated within the past century,
the original dating back several millennia. Like the Mahabharata,
the Stanzas of Dzyan depict a holocaust engulfing two warring
nations who utilize flying vehicles and fiery weapons.
"The great King of the Dazzling Face, the chief of all the
Yellowfaced, was sad, seeing the evil intentions of the
Dark-faced. He sent his air vehicles to all his brother chiefs
with pious men within, saying, Prepare, arise, men of the good
law, and escape while the land has not yet been overwhelmed by
the waters.
"The Lords of the Storm are also approaching. Their war vehicles
are nearing the land. One night and two days only shall the Lords
of the Dark-faced arrive on this patient land. She is doomed when
the waters descend on her. The Lords of the Dark-eyed have
prepared their magic Agneyastra [the Hindu 'Agneya weapon' - a
nuclear missile]. . . . They are also versed in Ashtar [the
highest magical knowledge]. Come, and use yours.
"Let every Lord of the Dazzling Face ensnare the air vehicle of
every Lord of the Dark-faced, lest any of them escape. . . .
"The great King fell upon his Dazzling Face and wept. When the
kings were assembled, the waters of the earth had already been
disturbed. The nations crossed the dry lands. They went beyond
the water mark. The kings reached then the safe lands in their
air vehicles, and arrived in the lands of fire and metal. . . .
"Stars [nuclear missiles?] showered on the lands of the
Dark-faced while they slept. The speaking beasts [radios?]
remained quiet. The Lords waited for orders, but they came not,
for their masters slept. The waters rose and covered the valleys.
. . . In the high lands there dwelt those who escaped, the men of
the yellow faces and of the straight eye."
Even though the translation of this text was made almost a
century ago, it describes forms of destruction we have become
familiar with only in the last thirty-two years. It is also
significant that the manmade destruction depicted in the text is
coupled with cataclysmic movements of ocean waters. This massive
flooding may have been touched off by the nuclear holocaust, but
more likely the inundation was a result of a sudden sea-level
change caused by the melting Ice Age glaciers. If the "Lords of
the Yellow-faced" were the Mongolian inhabitants of the ancient
Gobi high civilization center, the flooding may have been the
great tidal wave that swept across eastern Asia and into Siberia
at the end of the Ice Age. According to the Stanzas, another high
civilization center, described only as the "Lords of the
Dark-faced," had advance knowledge of the imminent deluge that
was about to weaken the Gobi center, and so decided to take
advantage of the situation and destroy the survivors with a
nuclear barrage and conventional air attack. The "Yellow-faced"
seem to have retaliated with a nuclear counterattack of their
own, and while a few of the Yellow-faced escaped the flooding and
nuclear destruction, the Darkfaced and their civilization appear
to have been annihilated. The final line of the text mentions
that among the survivors were also those of "the straight eye,"
the peoples of Europe and the Middle East. This would suggest
that these people also were involved in the nuclear conflict; the
remains of nuclear destruction in these areas bear testimony to
this.
One of the most interesting pieces of evidence of nuclear
devastation in the past is found on Easter Island, in the Pacific
Ocean. Apart from its huge monolithic statues and its curious
form of writing, the island is also famous for a unique form of
wood carving called moaikavakava. The carving invariably
represents a shrunken man, with certain grotesque anatomical
features depicted in remarkable detail. The first Europeans to
visit Easter Island reported that the natives were often willing
to part with these little statues, as if the figures did not
belong to them. Even today the miniature men are regarded by the
Easter Islanders as fearful and alien-a reminder of something
that was not of their experience, yet which remains horrifying
nonetheless.
Native legend attributes these statues to King Tu'ukoiho.
One night the king caught a glimpse of two misshapen dwarfish
beings who he believed were the spirits of the last members of a
race that had inhabited the island before the present native
population. Even though they were never seen again after his one
fleeting glance, the impression these wretched men made on the
king was so strong that he immediately set out to sculpt a
replica of them. The modern kavakava statues are believed to be
faithful copies of the king's original.
The style of these carvings is not in the least Polynesian,
and the sculpted facial features-hooked nose, staring eyes and
small squared beard - appear to be Semitic. The most interesting
peculiarity, however, is the appearance of the body. It is
emaciated, showing goiters, tumors, clenched mouth, collapsed
cervical vertebrae, and a distinct break between the lumbar and
the dorsal vertebrae. All these are medical indications of
exposure to a severe dosage of radiation.
Perhaps related to the kavakava carvings and the unfortunate
victims they represent are the remains of fiery destruction
discovered on the island. At the foot of the slopes of Mount
Rano-Kao there exists an immense furrow, half a mile in length
and approximately 200 yards wide. The furrow is sharply defined
on the landscape, because it is composed of obsidian, a vitrified
black rock which is not found anywhere else on the island.
Directly aligned with this trail of melted rock is a small crater
on a hill a mile away. The crater is perfectly circular and is
distinguished by a vegetation cover different from that growing
around it. The furrow and crater imply that in the unrecorded
past something landed here with tremendous force. Whether that
something was natural or man-made, of course, is open to
speculation. The kavakava statues and their indication of intense
irradiation of the island at some time in prehistory, however,
might possibly favor the latter possibility.
The continents of the New World also possess several
examples of prehistoric cultures destroyed by a great
conflagration. Not far from Cuzco, Peru, near the pre-Inca
fortress of Sacsahuaman, an area of 18,000 square yards of
mountain rock has been fused and crystallized. Not only the
mountainside, but a number of the dressed granite blocks of the
fortress itself show signs of similar vitrification through
extremely high radiated heat.
In Brazil there is a series of ruins called Sete Cidades,
situated south of Teresina between Piripiri and the Rio Longe.
The stones of these ruins have been melted by apocalyptic
energies, and squashed between the layers of rock protrude bits
of rusting metal that leave streaks like the traces of red tears
down the crystallized wall surface.
The most numerous vitrified remains in the New World are
located in the western United States. In 1850 the American
explorer Captain Ives William Walker was the first to view some
of these ruins, situated in Death Valley. He discovered a city
about a mile long, with the lines of the streets and the
positions of the buildings still visible. At the center he found
a huge rock, between 20 and 30 feet high, with the remains of an
enormous structure atop it. The southern side of both the rock
and the building was melted and vitrified. Walker assumed that a
volcano had been responsible for this phenomenon, but there is no
volcano in the area. In addition, tectonic heat could not have
caused such a liquefaction of the rock surface.
An associate of Captain Walker who followed up his initial
exploration commented, "The whole region between the rivers Gila
and San Juan is covered with remains. The ruins of cities are to
be found there which must be most extensive, and they are burnt
out and vitrified in part, full of fused stones and craters
caused by fires which were hot enough to liquefy rock or metal.
There are paving stones and houses torn with monstrous cracks ...
[as though they had] been attacked by a giant's fire-plough."
Other vitrified ruins have been found in parts of Southern
California, Arizona and Colorado. The Mohave Desert is reported
to contain several circular patches of fused glass.
If an unknown post-Flood civilization was indeed destroyed
by fire in western North America, we would expect that such a
holocaust would have been imprinted on the memory of those who
survived, to be told and repeated to the successive generations.
While studying Canadian Indian tribal folklore, ethnologist R.
Baker was told the following legend by a wise ram of a dying
totemic cult of northern Canada near the tundra region. The
legend tells of a time "before the cold descended from the
north," when the now-bleak tundra was instead rich in vegetation.
"In the days when great forests and flowering meadows were here,
demons came and made slaves of our people and sent the young to
die among the rocks and below the ground [mining?]. But then
arrived the thunderbird, and our people were freed. We learned
about the marvelous cities of the thunderbird, which were beyond
the big lakes and rivers to the south.
"Many of our people left us and saw these shining cities and
witnessed the grand homes and the mystery of men who flew upon
the skies. But then the demons returned, and there was terrible
destruction. Those of our people who had gone southward returned
to declare that all life in the cities was gone-nothing but
silence remained."
This is all the totemic Indians know of the matter, and they
cannot furnish any additional details about these events. This is
the story that has been repeated to them by their fathers and
forefathers.
The Hopi Indians of the Southwest have a very similar
tradition which offers yet another glimpse of otherwise
unrecorded events. The story is called "Kuskurza," the "Third
World Epoch," and is preserved in Frank Water's "Book of the
Hopi."
"Some of these of the Third World made a patuwvota and with their
magical powers made it soar through the sky. On this many of them
flew to a great city, attacked it and returned so quickly that
the inhabitants did not know where their attackers came from.
Soon others from many nations were making patuwvotas, and [they]
flew to attack one another. So corruption and destruction came to
the Third World people, as it had come to those who were before."
The ruins in the western United States show signs of having
been destroyed by radiated heat, mute testimony to an element of
fact that may underlie these legends. In addition, the
association of the annihilation of prehistoric cities with men
who flew through the air is disturbingly similar to the Hindu and
Tibetan records of air vehicles armed with nuclear weapons.
With the collapse of the post-Babel centers between 2900 and 2800
B.C., the world once again entered a brief period of confusion
and adjustment. To those inhabitants of the high civilization
centers who managed to survive, two choices were left. Either
they could begin again by reestablishing their own cultures, or
they could migrate and become members of those inferior cultures,
the Stone Age civilizations or the emerging civilizations of the
Mediterranean and Middle East, areas which for the most part were
unaffected by the natural and man-made catastrophes. Of those who
chose the first alternative, many survived only as simple
farmers. Richard Mooney comments in his book Colony Earth:
"The collapse of a technologically superior civilization would
have left little time for salvaging anything but essentials. The
survivors may have salvaged certain needed devices, among them a
few aircraft, which would have been required to maintain contact
with other survivors. In the course of time, it would have become
more and more difficult to keep such machines in working order.
Parts would wear out, sources of fuel and power would fail. If
the technology is destroyed, the capacity for manufacturing
machine parts or even making the right metals will no longer
exist. . . . In the end, all that would be left would be a memory
of strange dart-shaped flying things in which people once
traveled through the sky. Ages later, who would believe such
fantastic stories?"
When Noah and his family escaped the destruction of the
antediluvian civilization, they had passed through 120 years of
preparation, during which they had time to gather the knowledge
necessary to live and to begin a new culture in the post-Flood
era. But the destruction of the post-Babel centers must have come
swiftly and without warning, allowing no time to preserve much of
the knowledge. With the extinction of the technological
environment-the technical resources, and the coordination and
specialization of labor by both men and machines-the degree of
civilization that survived must have been very limited indeed.
Without industry, the survivors had to concentrate all their
efforts on producing their own essentials, and the establishment
of agricultural self-sufficiency must have been the first
priority. The tragedy is that once the knowledge possessed by the
high civilization diminished, the descendants of these surviving
farmers remained farmers and nothing more.
It is now evident that the survivors' offspring did in fact
establish a number of important agricultural centers. Up until
two decades ago, archaeologists were certain that agriculture was
first practiced in the Middle East's "fertile crescent," and that
from there it eventually spread throughout the entire world. But
new excavations in various sections of the globe have
considerably changed this erroneous concept. The new evidence now
points to the existence of major agricultural centers in
northeastern China, southeastern Asia, Mexico and Peru that are
just as old as that in the Middle East. These findings have
caused noticeable consternation among orthodox historians, for
they provide more questions than answers. The most disturbing
question of all is why these agricultural centers suddenly
appeared in different parts of the world at approximately the
same time. A probable answer may be found in their locations.
Middle East agriculture blossomed not far from those areas in
present-day Israel, Iraq and Arabia which were destroyed by
nuclear fire; the Chinese and Asian agricultural centers are only
a short distance from the Gobi and Indian civilization centers,
respectively; the Mexican agricultural sites are just south of
the Death Valley ruins; and the Peruvian agricultural center is
in the same locale as the melted facade of Sacsahuaman. More
recently, an additional agricultural center was discovered in
Venezuela, not far from the vitrified ruins in the Brazilian
jungle. Because almost total destruction hit the centers almost
simultaneously, it is only reasonable to assume that the
survivors would have developed their individual farming
communities within a short time of each other. The same
development can be seen in the history of pottery. Historians
thought for many years that the Middle East was the home of the
world's first pottery industry, just as it had been for
agriculture. Since then, however, pottery as old as the earliest
examples in the Middle East has been found in Japan.
Anthropologist J. Edmonson constructed a theoretical
framework in which he attempted to trace the first pottery in the
Middle East and Japan, as well as later finds in Asia and Africa,
back to a common origin. The theoretical center he discovered was
Ulan Bator, in Mongolia, precisely in the middle of the former
Gobi high civilization site!
The second choice open to the remnants of the races was to
migrate to and share what knowledge they still possessed with the
inferior civilizations of Europe and the Middle East that were
unaffected by the nuclear and Ice Age catastrophes. The impact of
a higher civilization on a lower one, of course, would have
produced profound results. This is exactly what we find to be
true in the histories of the known cultures. Paleolithic
civilization in Europe did not originate from Europe, but came in
successive influxes from the north and west. Similarly, in the
myth-histories of the ancient civilizations, we invariably find
the following order of events:
1. An initial period of rulership by god-kings of great knowledge
[corresponding to the pre-Babel period]
2. A period of confusion and regression, during which primitive
cultures briefly flourished [post-Babel]
3. The advent of culture-bearing foreigners and a sudden
explosion of architecture, social organization and religion,
which remained relatively unchanged in the succeeding millennia.
Orthodox historians unfortunately do not recognize the
existence of these mythical culture bearers, insisting instead
that the ancient civilizations were the result of slow but steady
development from Stone Age beginnings. But what these historians
have found impossible to explain is why the archaeological
evidence points to no transition whatsoever between the ancient
civilizations and their primitive forebears. Van der Veer makes
the most of this in his book Hidden Worlds, where he writes:
"Let us take the Egyptians as an example. The ability to build
pyramids demands at the least a knowledge of arithmetic,
architectural techniques and skill in transporting materials-all
of which suggests a long preliminary period, the existence of
which is unfortunately not supported by archaeology.
Archaeologists admit there is a problem here, but won't
investigate the reasons for it; they simply accept the idea of
the other civilizations; little is ever said about the
prehistoric background to these civilizations, as a result of
which they attempt to condense almost into insignificance a
period which must have covered thousands of years between the
Stone Age and the dynastic periods.
"It is impossible to accept these arguments; we believe-and
perhaps science, too, will come to believe-that at some stage in
the very earliest periods of prehistory, contact was made between
the ancient peoples and a still older race in possession of an
advanced civilization and a history stretching a long way back
indeed. It may be that there is a grain of truth in all
mythological stories and legends, and that somewhere on our
planet there once existed a race with a very sophisticated
civilization which perished because of one or more natural
disasters. The only really satisfactory theory is that the
survivors of this civilization were responsible for both the
technical skills and the art of writing possessed by the old
cultures, who brought knowledge to the people then living in the
Stone Age.
"What we think happened was this. Somewhere on earth a
civilization arose, or perhaps several civilizations, which
because of extremely favorable conditions flowered earlier than
any others. . . . We believe that one or more natural disasters
destroyed this original civilization, and that its survivors
found refuge among the inhabitants of those favored areas which
later gave rise to the ancient civilizations we now know about.
This is the only theory which virtually meets all the objections
and fills even the gaps we are reminded of in old myths and
legends."
......................
To be continued
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