Misi Manusia Menyelamatkan Bumi

Author: Ahmad Makki. http://www.penulislepas.com/v2/?p=695#more-695

Peringatan Hari Ozon Internasional yang jatuh pada tanggal 16 September 2007 lalu terkesan adem ayem. Tidak ada satu kegiatan apapun yang mengingatkan akan ketergatungan hidup manusia pada lapisan ozon. Padahal banyak masyarakat umum yang tidak mengetahui bahwa penipisan lapisan ozon terus berjalan dan sudah diluar batas toleransi lagi. Ibaratnya makhluk hidup, bumi secara perlahan-lahan segera akan hancur lebih dini (awal). Pemakaian zat-zat kimiawi seperti gas karbon dioksida dan maraknya “rumah kaca” serta pembalakan hutan secara besar-besaran adalah bagian dari pengrusakan ekologi lingkungan. Bentuk-bentuk yang berakibat terjadinya pemanasan global yang memiliki kontribusi sangat besar dalam penipisan lapisan ozon.

Perhelatan internasional dalam pertemuan PBB (Perserikatan Bangsa-bangsa) pada selasa (25/9) dengan agenda puncak membahas permanasan global kembali mengingatkan masyarakat dunia untuk turut andil mengatasi masalah ini. Dunia seakan dihentak dalam beberapa hari terakhir ini. Perhelatan yang dilaksanakan di New York AS pada selasa (25/9) lalu dihadiri oleh utusan dari berbagai negara. Hal ini mengingatkan seluruh lapisan masyarakat dunia akan kerusakan lingkungan kini telah terakumulasi dalam udara yang dihirup dan air yang diminum dalam setiap harinya oleh manusia.

Pakar ekologi dari Universitas Cornell, David Pimentel memperikaran dalam tiap tahunnya sekitar 62 juta kematian atau 40 persen dari total kematian di dunia saat ini disebabkan oleh faktor kerusakan lingkungan (Surya,26/9/07). Hal ini tidak lain akibat dari terjadinya penipisan lapisan ozon yang akan meningkatkan intensitas sinar ultra violet. Pelindung yang sejatinya akan mengurangi jumlah radiasi matahari ke bumi. Bila tidak hal ini akan menyebabkan banyak kasus kanker kulit, katarak, dan pelemahan sistem daya tahan tubuh. Dan yang paling membahayakan adalah kerusakan lingkungan akan semakin parah di permukaan bumi. Kalau memang begini realitanya, hasil penelitian di atas sungguh bukanlah hal yang mengada-ada.

Selain itu juga, dampak dari penipisan lapisan ozon secara global sungguh jauh mengerikan bila dibandingkan dengan bencana-bencana yang terjadi diseluruh penjuru dunia saat ini. Ketika bencana akibat meluasnya lubang ozon benar-benar terjadi, hal ini tidak hanya akan menghancurkan infrastruktur, tetapi juga dapat memusnahkan seluruh kehidupan di bumi. Jika penipisan lapisan ozon ini tetap berlanjut tanpa adanya berbagai antisipasi, suatu bentuk bencana global yang menghancurkan kehidupan manusia bahkan seluruh makhluk hidup di Bumi hanyalah tinggal menunggu waktu saja.

Isu penipisan lubang ozon itu sendiri sesungguhnya telah menjadi salah satu isu internasional terutama di PBB dalam hal Lingkungan Hidup, United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), sejak tahun 1987. Organisasi yang terbentuk dalam sebuah protokol konvensi, dikenal dengan Montreal Protocol, mengajak kepada seluruh negara yang telah menandatangani konvensi tersebut untuk menghapus produksi CFC (Chlorofluorocarbon) secara bertahap pada 1 Januari 1996. Jika upaya ini berhasil maka lapisan ozon akan kembali normal pada tahun 2050.

Produksi dan pemakaian CFC memang telah dikurangi bahkan nyaris tidak ada lagi, namum muncul lagi sekian aktivitas dan bahan yang kembali turut memberikan andil terjadinya penipisan lapisan ozon. Terbukti dengan meningkatnya pemanasan global sebagai mata rantai dampak penipisan pada lapisan ozon abad ini. Adalah pemakaian emisi karbon dioksida dan efek rumah kaca. Sepanjang abad ke-20, telah terjadi 10 kasus tahun terpanas hanya dalam kurun waktu 15 tahun terakhir. Tahun 1998 tercatat sebagai tahun terpanas di abad ke-20, yang berdampak terjadinya kebakaran hutan di Indonesia, Brasil, Australia atau negara lainnya dan kemarau panjang yang memusnahkan panen seperti di Afrika, serta bencana iklim lainnya akibat fenomena El-Nino (Kompas,27/9/02).

Persoalan serius akan berlanjutnya penipisan pada lapisan ozon adalah tanggungjawab bersama masyarakat dunia. Dan bukan hanya tanggungjawab negara-negara maju maupun negara-negara berkembang saja. Seluruh manusia di muka bumi ini harus saling mengoreksi diri masing-masing sebelum menemui pintu dari ambang kemusnahan. Mengingat dampak dari bencana yang disebabkan oleh menipisnya lapisan ozon tentu tidak hanyak akan dialami oleh bangsa atau negara yang menyumbang paling besar akan terjadinya penipisan lapisan ozon ini. Sesungguhnya ada banyak cara dalam mengatasi pemasalahan bersama ini sepanjang seluruh masyarakat dunia memiliki i’tikad baik. Tidak lain adalah guna kelangsungan hidup manusia dan seluruh makluk hidup di muka bumi itu sendiri.

Melestarikan hutan serta menyelamatkannya dari proses eksploitasi secara rakus oleh orang-orang yang tidak bertanggung jawab, pengurangan pemakaian emisi yang mengandung karbon dioksida yang sangat besar serta menghindari pembangunan “rumah kaca” adalah cara yang sangat mudah untuk mengurangi laju dari proses penipisan lapisan ozon secara global. Selain pemahaman masyarakat umum yang harus terus dipupuk untuk dapat mengetahui akan ketergantungan kelangsungan kehidupan di dunia adalah lapisan ozon yang selama ini menyelimuti permukaan bumi.

Selain itu juga turut mengkampanyekan boikot pada barang-barang yang diproduksi dengan menggunakan BPO (bahan perusak ozon) antara lain seperti kulkas, AC mobil, kasur busa, jok kursi, accesories kendaraan, produk kosmetik yang berbentuk spray, dan sebagainya. Sebagai bagian dari upaya kepedulian masyarakat secara umum terhadap perlindungan lapisan ozon juga dapat diwujudkan dengan cara memilih produk yang sudah tidak menggunakan BPO. Sehingga diantara seluruh masyarakat dunia ada rasa kebersamaan dan semangat yang tinggi untuk sama-sama memiliki visi dan misi untuk menyelamatkan bumi ini dari kehancuran “lebih dini” dapat terlaksana dan realistis. Terlepas dari ketidak-kekalan bumi itu sendiri. Semoga!

*) Ahmad Makki Hasan,
(Mahasiswa Pascasarjana UIN Malang & Alumnus PP. Zainul Hasan Genggong Probolinggo)

massa es yang dahsyat di kutub selatan bisa mengakibatkan perpindahan sumbu bumi

[envorum] KUTUB SELATAN

http://www.mail-archive.com/envorum@ypb.or.id/msg00035.html

Dodi Suwardi
Thu, 14 Jan 1999 21:35:36 -0500

Halo rekan-rekan berikut ini teory yang bikin kita merinding... saya kutip dari majalah Intisari edisi January 1999 ....selamat menyimak

BENARKAH DUNIA AKAN BERAKHIR MEI 2000? Sebuah teori mengatakan, pertumbuhan massa es yang dahsyat di kutub selatan bisa mengakibatkan perpindahan sumbu bumi. Dalam Egyptian Magical Papyrus Harris dituliskan, selatan menjadi utara, bumi pun terjungkir. Mungkinkah bumi terjungkir secara mendadak? Amankah kita yang tinggal di wilayah ekuator?

Serangan gelombang Kutub Selatan

Sebenarnya perubahan posisi bumi sudah terjadi sejak lama. Barangkali tidak seorang pun pernah membayangkan, bumi mulai miring sekitar 530 juta tahun lalu. Malah, pada 15 juta tahun berikutnya, poros bumi bergeser lebih dari 90o. Akibat dari pergeseran ini, kawasan kutub pernah pindah ke khatulistiwa. Awalnya, berbagai penemuan dataran di bawah permukaan air atau peradaban kuno di bawah lumpur cuma dijawab sebagai akibat letusan gunung dan gempa hebat. Namun Hugh Auchincloss Brown, penulis Cataclysms of the Earth (1967), berpendapat lain. Menurut Hugh, fenomena ini terjadi kemungkinan karena adanya perubahan geologi global di masa lampau. Pendapat itu dibangun dari berbagai pertanyaan atas penemuan risetnya selama 50 tahun. Di antaranya, kekuatan apa yang mampu dengan cepat membekukan dan membatukan binatang dengan perut masih berisi rumput di Siberia, seluruh hutan tropis dan titik hujan yang mudah menguap, juga pohon dengan buah dan daun yang menempel di ranting ataupun ubur-ubur yang lunak, kerang, remis, kepiting, dan bintang laut lainnya? Begitu pula, mengapa di bumi hanya ada sedikit air terjun yang berusia lebih dari 6000 tahun? Jawaban dari beberapa pertanyaan ini cukup meyakinkan Brown, yakni pada zaman dulu telah terjadi perubahan sumbu bumi yang radikal dan mendadak akibat massa es di kutub yang "tumbuh" melewati batas. Perubahan itu menata kembali benua dan lautan. Wilayah tropis menjadi penuh es dan salju. Sebaliknya, daerah bersalju menjadi tropika. Analisa Brown didukung oleh Tom Valentine dalam buku The Life and Death of Planet Earth (1977), yang menyebutnya perubahan posisi sumbu rotasi bumi yang berakibat pergantian tempat. "Bumi seperti bola yang berputar - juga terhuyung-huyung - di satu ruangan. Saat massa es di kutub selatan makin banyak, wilayah itu menjadi makin berat, sehingga terjadi ketidakseimbangan. Hal itu berlangsung selama ribuan tahun, sampai kemiringan bumi tidak lagi sanggup mengatasi daya sentrifugal yang berotasi. Saat itulah massa es di kutub terlempar dengan kecepatan tinggi menuju ke titik yang paling cepat berputarnya, yaitu ekuator," jelas Valentine. Dua belas tahun sebelum buku Brown terbit, Albert Einstein menulis prakata untuk buku Earth's Shifting Crust, karya Prof. Charles H. Hapgood, tentang perubahan kutub yang terjadi 6000 tahun silam. Di dalamnya dipaparkan data empiris tiap titik permukaan bumi akibat perubahan mendadak iklim bumi. Menurut Hapgood, "Kerak bumi yang relatif tipis (+ 32 - 64 km) tersusun atas materi yang keras, tapi tidak cukup kuat karena retak di banyak tempat. Tepat di bawahnya ada lapisan yang sangat panas sehingga batuan di sana tidak sempat mengkristal. Kondisi yang lembek dan plastis itu, yang berfungsi mirip pelumas, menyebabkan kerak bumi mudah bergerak akibat tekanan meski ringan sekalipun, apalagi oleh tekanan mendadak, seperti gempa bumi atau desakan horisontal yang lama." Selama perubahan kutub, miliaran ton air dan es dari kutub Selatan akan bergerak cepat ke utara menuju ekuator. Di kutub Utara pun demikian hanya arahnya berlawanan, berpacu ke selatan ke ekuator. Massa es itu meluncur dengan kecepatan + 2.500 km/jam, dengan kata lain massa es di Antartika akan mencapai wilayah subtropika hanya dalam 3 - 4 jam!

Kerak bumi bergeser, teori Hapgood

Akibatnya, muncullah gelombang setinggi ribuan meter menyapu daratan, gunung berapi meletus, badai raksasa berpusar di berbagai tempat, serta gempa besar. Permukaan laut akan naik cepat, garis pantai tiap benua pun berubah. Ketinggian air menyapu kota-kota dan dataran berpantai. Yang terjadi kemudian adalah perubahan garis lintang. Jarak tiap tempat terhadap ekuator berubah. Meski tidak semua tempat berpindah sejauh jarak yang sama, maka ada yang makin dekat, tapi ada yang makin jauh. Seiring dengan perpindahan itu, muncul perubahan iklim, mulai dari yang drastis, sedang, hingga yang tetap. Peristiwa hebat yang mendadak itulah yang diduga melenyapkan peradaban kuno, termasuk mammot di zaman prasejarah. Tepatnya 5 Mei 2000 Dalam beberapa dekade terakhir telah pula muncul pendapat, akan terjadi bencana alam hebat serupa. Pendapat itu didukung hasil penelitian atas sampel sedimen dari dasar Laut Rose yang diambil oleh Ekspedisi Antartika Admiral Byrd tahun 1949. Setelah diteliti usianya, menurut Dr. Harold D. Urey, masa hangat terakhir di benua antartika berakhir 6000 tahun silam, atau +4000 SM. Sementara Brown mendukung sinyalemen ini dengan memaparkan bukti bahwa massa es di kutub Selatan telah tumbuh sebesar ukuran 6000 tahun silam - saat pergantian kutub terakhir terjadi! Tidak heran bila Valentine - berdasarkan teori pergantian kutub akibat pertumbuhan massa es - yakin perpindahan kutub akan terjadi lagi setelah 6000 tahun. Tepatnya, pada 5 Mei 2000! Pertanyaan yang muncul kemudian adalah, seberapa besar massa es di kutub bertambah? Colin Bull, direktur Institute of Polar Studies di Ohio State University, memiliki jawabannya. Dalam bukunya Snow Accumulation in Antarctica (1971), yang dibuat berdasarkan riset Giovinetto dan Robinson tahun 1966, didapat fakta bahwa, selama 14 tahun (1966 - 1980) pertumbuhan massa es di kutub Selatan berjumlah sekitar 6 triliun ton es. Jumlah itu diprakirakan sudah mampu mengakibatkan perpindahan sumbu. Tapi, menurut Lowell Ponte, mantan konsultan Pentagon mengenai perubahan alam dan penulis The Cooling, karena temperatur bumi makin rendah, pertambahan es pasti jauh lebih besar dari angka 6 triliun. Penambahan massa es sebenarnya telah terdeteksi jauh sebelumnya. Acuannya adalah pengalaman Admiral Byrd yang mendirikan dua menara radio yang menjulang setinggi + 20 m di kampnya di Little America. Tahun 1934, lima tahun kemudian, menara itu hanya setinggi 10 m. Karena kian tebalnya tumpukan es dan salju, batang antena yang terlihat makin pendek, tinggal 6 m di tahun 1947. Pada 1955 satu menara hanya terlihat 2,6 m, sedangkan yang lain 3,3 m. Akhirnya di tahun 1982, batang antena itu tidak lagi ditemukan jejaknya karena area tempat ditancapkannya telah pecah dan hanyut ke laut lepas. Dalam artikel di Scientific American (1970) John A. Eddy menyinggung tentang makin panjangnya periode minimum bintik matahari.

Pergantian kutub versi Brown

Dari teori yang masih banyak dianut orang, siklus kemunculan bintik matahari adalah 11 tahun. Menurut Eddy, matahari mencapai titik tertingginya tahun 1969. Fase titik minimum terjadi tahun 1975, yang herannya berlangsung dua tahun lebih dari yang normal. Akibatnya, bumi akan menghadapi musim yang sangat dingin. Ini berkaitan dengan makin panjangnya musim dingin di Antartica dan makin tebalnya es di benua itu. Sedangkan laporan CIA dalam USSR: The Impact of Recent Climate Change on Grain Production menyebut, perubahan iklim dimulai tahun 1960, tapi baru terdeteksi tahun 1970-an. Temperatur bumi makin turun, kembali pada kondisi antara 1600 dan 1850. Lowell Ponte pun sependapat, setelah meneliti perubahan iklim di bumi dan analisis pengaruh polusi ledakan gunung dan polusi industri terhadap iklim bumi. Ia menemukan, dua tahun setelah ledakan Krakatau (1883), temperatur global turun + 1o) Pendapat bumi makin dingin itu bertentangan dengan penelitian Worldwatch Institute di Washington D.C. Mereka menyebut, akan terjadi pencairan besar-besaran karena temperatur bumi di atas normal pada akhir tahun 2000. Menurut ilmuwan Amerika dan Kanada, bumi makin hangat oleh kumpulan panas yang ditimbulkan oleh polutan yang terjebak di atmosfir. Temperatur di Kutub Utara abad ini meningkat pada tingkat tertinggi selama 400 tahun. Penelitian mengenai pemanasan global menunjukkan, antara tahun 1840 dan 1940 - 1950, temperatur Kutub Utara meningkat 1,5o C. Itulah tingkat kenaikan tertinggi di belahan bumi Utara. Selanjutnya, akumulasi kenaikan tingkat panas itu sudah cukup untuk mencairkan gletser dan lapisan beku es di bawah tanah. Penelitian setelah tahun 1840 menunjukkan setengah dari pemanasan temperatur bumi terjadi tahun 1920, sebelum lapisan gas karbon terbentuk. Manifestasi penyebabnya adalah meningkatnya intensitas sorot sinar matahari. Namun setelah tahun 1920, meningkatnya konsentrasi gas diduga sebagai penyebab dominan, yang memuncak tahun 1945. Antara 1950 - 1970 terjadi periode pendinginan, mungkin akibat dihapuskannya pemakaian produk aerosol - yang berpengaruh dalam menipiskan lapisan ozon pelindung bumi. Proses itu berakhir dengan adanya efek pemanasan dari karbon gas. Konsentrasi gas karbon yang diduga meningkat lebih dari dua kali lipat sejak masa praindustri hingga pertengahan abad depan. Inilah bukti, peran penggunaan bahan bakar dari fosil yang melepaskan gas karbon penjebak panas dalam mengubah iklim dunia. Modul silinder atau bahtera? Brown mengakhiri Bab I bukunya dengan peringatan untuk berhati-hati dan terus melakukan kontrol terhadap alam. Jika tidak ingin peradaban yang sekarang lenyap oleh bencana dahsyat itu. Padahal, tanpa mengalami pergantian kutub pun, pendinginan bumi sebenarnya sudah menimbulkan bencana yang menyengsarakan. Antara lain, berupa makin panjangnya musim dingin pada areal pertanian di satu tempat, namun pada saat bersamaan menimbulkan kekeringan di wilayah lain. Misalnya, bila belahan bumi Utara turun 1o, India akan mengalami kekeringan setiap empat tahun dan hanya mampu menyediakan makanan untuk 75% dari populasinya. Itu dibenarkan, DR. Reid A. Bryson, klimatolog di Universitas Wisconsin, dalam buku Climates of Hunger, tentang ancaman kelaparan bila bumi menjadi makin dingin. Namun, sebagai insinyur yang dikenal praktis dan optimistis Hugh Auchincloss Brown mencoba mencari jalan keluar pencegahan terjadinya pergantian sumbu bumi. Menurutnya, pencegahannya adalah dengan, "Secara bertahap memecah daratan es di kutub dan mengalirkan melalui terowongan-terowongan khusus menuju daerah pantai. Pencairan bertahap ini mengurangi akibat fatal serbuan gelombang air dingin menyerbu ekuator". Lain lagi dengan kelompok Stelle yang berencana "mengudarakan" rombongannya (entah dengan pesawat jenis apa) hingga ketinggian 22,4 km selama + 2 minggu. Hal itu mempertimbangkan perhitungan hanya orang yang di angkasa atau di titik poros yang selamat. Ada lagi Dr. Gerard K. O'Neill, profesor bidang ilmu fisika Universitas Princeton dan pimpinan Institut Studi Angkasa, berencana untuk menempatkan orang-orangnya di angkasa dalam modul silinder bertingkat tujuh. Silinder ini akan berotasi agar menimbulkan gaya tarik sebesar gravitasi normal bumi. Banjir bah, identik dengan peristiwa hebat di masa Nabi Nuh. Mungkinkah banjir bah akibat pergantian kutub mendatang akan mengulang kembali malapetaka alam itu? Sampai sekarang tak seorang pun manusia yang mampu secara pasti memberikan jawabannya. (The Ultimate Disaster/Sht)

Venus and the pentagram

http://fenris. ca/~paul/ theabysmal/ aztecsunstonemap .jpg
http://freemasonry.bcy.ca/anti-masonry/venus.html

The pentagram (pentacle or pentalpha) is considered by some western occultists to trace its esoteric significance to an astronomical observance of the pattern of Venus' conjunctions with the Sun. This is not possible. A superior conjunction occurs when Venus is behind the Sun and the inferior conjunction is when Venus is between Earth and the Sun; in both cases Venus is not visible. But it is true that plotting the recurrence of Venus' westward elongation from the Sun, over five consecutive synodic periods, will create the points of a pentagram. This period is approximately 584 days long, each period determining a different point of the observed pentagram—taking approximately eight years, five days to complete the figure. One would get a pentagram by picking any sunrise date on which the morning star is prominent and then repeating the observation at 584 day intervals following that date. The synodic period of Venus, the time required for it to return to the same position relative to the Sun as seen by an observer on Earth, is 583.9211 days. There is a 0.0789 day slippage every 584 days, totalling a one day slippage each 12.67 synodic periods. This means that the pentagram figure is slowly revolving within an oval in a clockwise direction, alternating either one or two points ascendant roughly every 160 years. There is no observation point on Earth that would present a regular pentagram. Moving further north elongates the figure while on the equator the figure is an irregular pentagon. Compiled by Trevor W. McKeown. Calculations and text reviewed by Dr. Leigh Hunt Palmer.		Above: Plotting the apparent position of Venus in altitude and azimuth as observed from Uruk (Lat. 31°19'00") at the moment of sunrise for consecutive apparitions separated by intervals of 584 days, starting at sunrise, 06:12:07 am, March 23, 716BCE, during the reign of Tiglath-pileser III, near the times of greatest westward elongation of the planet (46.070° - 46.3620°). The Julian Period is noted. The moving light on the horizon is the sun as east is fixed and the seasons vary. A plotting taken for similar periods running from, or to, January 13, 2003 would show a pentagram with one point down. These figures are not readily available in published form but can be created using software applications such as Starry Night. Note that Venus is not travelling in a straight line from point to point. The lines are a construct determined by the observer. Any running set of observation times other than those tied to the synodic period of Venus would create a recursive pattern such as that shown below.

Hercolubus, planet merah

“Mari kita memperbincangkan tentang Hercolubus, planet merah, yang mana saat ini sedang mendekati Bumi. Ilmuwan, menurut beberapa versi, bahkan telah menimbangnya dan mengukur garis tengahnya, seolah-olah adalah suatu mainan anak, tetapi nyatanya tidak seperti itu. Hercolubus, atau planet merah, adalah lima atau enam kali lebih besar dari Jupiter. Ini merupakan raksasa sangat besar dan tidak ada yang dapat mengalihkannya”.

V.M.Rabolu

“Ada celah dalam yang sangat besar di dasar laut, yang mana telah berhubungan dangan api di bumi. Ini tiba secara langsung ke ekperimen atom yang dilaksanakan oleh ilmuwan dan kekuasaan-kekuasaan yang percaya bahwa diri mereka sendiri yang maha kuasa. Mereka belum mempertimbangkan konsekuensi kekejaman atau kekejian yang telah mereka lakukan, dan bahkan terus mereka lakukan, melawan planet maupun umat manusia”.

V.M.Rabolu

“Oleh karena keretakan-keretakan menjadi makn besar, gelombang sunami, gempa Bumi dan berbagai hal lain yang mengerikan akan terjadi di air dan di atas daratan. Tidak ada kota pesisir yang tidak akan dihanyutkan dan daratan akan mulai karam ke dalam samudera karena poros Bumi mulai bergeser sebagai suatu hasil dari semua eksperimen yang dilaksanakan”.

V.M.Rabolu

“Posisi Bumi tidak pada posisi yang benar dan ini berkombinasi dengan guncangan, gempa bumi dan ombak pasang surut, akan menyebabkan pergeseran sepenuhnya dan penggelamannya akan mulai. Jangan pergi dan berpikir, pembacaku yang terhormat, bahwa planet akan karam mendadak. Ini adalah peristiwa yang lama, lambat dan…”.

V.M.Rabolu

http://indonesia.hercolubus.net/kutipan.html

Kutub Utara Magnet Bumi Bergeser

San Fransisco, Jumat
http://www.kompas.com/teknologi/news/0512/09/140046.htm

ist

Bumi adalah magnet raksasa yang memiliki dua kutub sehingga kompas dapat selalu menunjuk arah utara dan selatan. Meskipun demikian letak kutub-kutubnya tidak selalu tetap. Menurut para ilmuwan, kutub utara magnet Bumi bergerak dari Kanada ke Siberia secara signifikan.

Kutub utara magnet Bumi tidak berada tepat pada poros dan bergeser dari Kanada bagian utara ke Siberia.

Kutub-kutub magnet adalah bagian Bumi yang dibentuk oleh besi cair dalam inti Bumi. Letak dan arahnya berbeda dengan kutub geografis yang merupakan sumbu putaran Bumi.

Para ilmuwan telah lama mengetahui bahwa kutub magnet Bumi bergerak ke lokasi yang berbeda. Meskipun demikian, mengapa pergerakan ini terjadi masih belum diketahui. "Ini mungkin bagian dari pergerakan normal dan secara bertahap akan kembali ke Kanada," kata Joseph Stoner, seorang ahli paleomagnetik dari Oregon State University dalam pertemuan American Geophysical Union, Kamis (8/12).

Penelitian sebelumnya menunjukkan bahwa kekuatan magnet Bumi menurun 10 persen dalam 150 tahun terakhir. Sedangkan analisis terbaru Stone menunjukkan bahwa selama periode tersebut, kutub utara magnet juga bergerak sejauh 1.100 kilometer dari Kutub Utara. Meskipun demikian, kemungkinan hilangnya sifat magnetik sangatlah kecil.

Kutub utara magnet Bumi pertama kali ditemukan pada 1831 dan ketika diukur kembali pada 1904, para peneliti menemukan bahwa letaknya telah bergerak sejauh 50 kilometer. Menurut para peneliti Oregon, tingkat pergerakan kutub magnet itu meningkat seabad terakhir dibandingkan abad-abad sebelumnya.

Selama berabad-abad, pemandu arah yang menggunakan kompas harus belajar untuk menyesuaikan perbedaan antara arah utara magnet dengan arah utara geografis Bumi. Sebab, sebuah kompas akan menunjuk arah utara magnetik bukannya arah Kutub Utara. Sebuah kompas yang membaca arah utara di Oregon, misalnya, menunjukkan arah 17 derajat sebelah timur Kutub Utara.

Untuk mengetahui pergerakan kutub magnet Bumi, Stoner dan para ilmuwan lainnya mempelajari endapan yang direkam dari beberapa danau di Arktik. Endapan-endapan tersebut merekam medan magnetik Bumi pada waktu tertentu. Para ilmuwan menggunakan detektor karbon untuk melacak perubahan medan magnetnya.

Dengan cara itulah mereka menemukan bahwa arah utara magnet berubah secara signifikan dalam 1.000 tahun terakhir. Perubahannya bergerak antara Kanada bagian utara dan Siberia, tapi kadang-kadang ke arah yang berbeda.

Mystery of the Sphinx

with John Anthony West, narrated by Charlton Heston

http://www.legendarytimesbooks.com/product.php?productid=273&cat=0&page=1

John Anthony West explores new, exciting theories and discoveries about the most famous monument of all time, the Great Sphinx of Egypt. Discover new evidence of water erosion that proves that the Sphinx is at least 10,000 years old. How were huge, 200 ton stone blocks lifted into place to build the incredibly complex Sphinx temples? Famous American psychic Edgar Cayce predicted a hidden room beneath the Sphinx; the seismograph detectors found it. What can it tell us? Is there a vanished civilization? Can the legend of Atlantis be true? Is there an extraterrestrial Sphinx on Mars as revealed in official NASA photographs? All these questions and more are answered in this program.

Pole Shift Revisited

by Len Kasten
http://www.atlantisrising.com/issue9/ar9poleshift.html

With a rumble so low as to be inaudible, growing, throbbing, then fuming into a thundering roar, the earthquake starts...only it's not like any earthquake in recorded history. In California, the mountains shake like ferns in a breeze, the mighty Pacific rears back and piles up into a mountain of water more than two miles high, then starts its race eastward.

With the force of a thousand armies the wind attacks, ripping, shredding everything in its supersonic bombardment. The unbelievable mountain of Pacific sea water follows the wind eastward, burying Los Angeles and San Francisco as if they were but grains of sand. Nothing, but nothing, stops the relentless, overwhelming onslaught of wind and ocean. Across the continent the thousand-mile-per-hour wind wreaks its unholy vengeance, everywhere, mercilessly, unceasingly.

Within three hours, the fantastic wall of water moves across the continent, burying the wind-ravaged land under two miles of seething water coast-to-coast. In a fraction of a day all vestiges of civilization are gone, and the great cities ...are nothing but legends. Barely a stone is left where millions walked just a few hours before...

...Antarctica and Greenland, with their ice caps, now rotate around the earth in the Torrid Zone; and the fury of wind and inundation marches on for six days and nights. During the sixth day, the oceans start to settle in their new homes, running off the high ground. On the seventh day, the horrendous rampage is over. The Arctic ice age is ended, and a new stone age begins.

The Bay of Bengal basin, just east of India is now at the North Pole. The Pacific Ocean, just west of Peru, is at the South Pole. Greenland and Antarctica, now rotating equatorially in the Torrid Zone find their ice caps dissolving madly in the tropical heat. ..New ice caps begin to form in the new polar areas. Greenland and Antarctica emerge with verdant, tropical foliage.

A new era! Yes, the cataclysm has done its work well.. .Once more the earth has shifted its 60-mile thick shell, with poles moving almost to the equator in a fraction of a day. Again the atmosphere and oceans, refusing to change direction with the Earth's shell, have wiped out almost all life.

Thus does Chan Thomas describe the much-heralded, greatly-feared coming catastrophe which supposedly will ring down the curtain on the greatest uninterrupted advance of human civilization in speculative history, a six-thousand-year march up from the grunting, fire-worshipping cave-man to the laptop computer girded, cellular-phone wielding corporate road-warrior. The foregoing, horrific account of the next pole shift is given by Thomas in his 55-page booklet, The Adam and Eve Story published in 1963, and updated in 1971. Thomas, a geologist-engineer with degrees from Dartmouth and Columbia, is one of the pole-shift prognosticators of interest to John White in his now classic book, Pole Shift. In the book, written in 1980 and still in print, White discusses the conclusions of the most prominent pole-shift theorists, including Hugh Auchincloss Brown, Immanuael Velikovsky, Charles Hapgood and others.

Pole Shift is a complete compendium of all of the mostly modern predictors of a pole-shift, including famous psychics and clairvoyants. It has emerged as the most thorough treatment of this subject in print, and has become the source book for students and investigators of the subject, both scientific and otherwise, all over the world. Originally published by Doubleday, and then by Berkeley Books, it is now in print by A.R.E. Press in Virginia Beach, with more than 50,000 copies of that edition alone in print.

In the original 1980 edition, White does not express certainty of belief in a coming pole-shift, but attaches enough merit to the possibility to have included a chapter in the book entitled How to Prepare for a Pole Shift. His conclusions are carefully worded, but definitely leaning towards preparing for the possibility that it will occur around the end of the century. However he does state in several places in the book that he is not yet convinced, and would not be willing to render a final judgment until certain precursor events have occurred. By 1991, White was satisfied that these selected events were not going to happen, and he therefore added an Epilogue to the 1995 A.R.E. edition in which he states his conviction that there will not be a geographic pole-shift. White concludes in this edition that most of Cayce's earth-change prognostications are in error, especially the pole-shift prediction. It is undeniable that almost all of the cataclysm dates pinpointed by Cayce have come and gone without incident.

John White has degrees from Dartmouth and Yale, and has been writing, teaching and lecturing on diverse subjects that basically come under the New Age umbrella since the 60s, with deeper involvement in the field since 1972 when he joined with Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell to found The Institute of Noetic Science in California. His main focus has been research in the area of higher consciousness. He has written many books on this and related subjects, and has edited several well-known anthologies including Frontiers of Consciousness, Future Science, and Kundalini, Evolution and Enlightenment. His most recent book, The Meeting of Science and Spirit, takes up the Herculean challenge of reconciling these two poles of the human experience, a daunting task first tackled by Madame Blavatsky in 1890 in her monumental and massive work Isis Unveiled.

White has long been involved with UFO investigation and research. He has organized and hosted an annual conference called The UFO Experience in North Haven, Connecticut since 1983, whereat have appeared such luminaries of the UFO universe as Stanton Friedman, Erich Von Daniken, Jacques Vallee, Budd Hopkins, Brad Steiger and many others. John has recently retired from his corporate public relations job, and now devotes his efforts completely to his writing, lecturing and literary agent activities.

We reached him at his home office recently in Cheshire, Connecticut, to seek clarification and his most recent thinking about the Pole Shift. We wondered particularly if he had any new thoughts about the crustal displacement theory of Charles Hapgood in the light of a recent revival of interest in Hapgood's ideas sparked by the new book, When the Sky Fell, by Rand and Rose Flem-Ath. The Flem-Aths theorize, in the book, that the watery demise of Atlantis was not really due to submergence, but; rather to crustal displacement, and they claim that the present continent of Antarctica is really Atlantis under ice, the end product of a sudden pole shift around 9,500 B.C.

White is still firm in his conviction that there will not be a geographic pole shift around the year 2000, calling it nonsense and fantasy, and furthermore that there probably has never been one, although he does not rule out the possibility that it could occur someday in the distant future. He was, however, careful to distinguish between a magnetic and geographic pole shift. He acknowledged that there have been many magnetic shifts. He says there have been at least 181 occasions recognized by science when the magnetic field of the earth has completely collapsed, and reestablished itself in the opposite polarity. So that the north magnetic pole becomes the south magnetic pole, and vice-versa. We asked if they are ever accompanied by catastrophes. His reply: No. Certainly not catastrophes of the sort predicted by the pole shift theorists and predictors. White says that, as far as he knows, such magnetic shifts do not occur on any cyclical basis, nor are they triggered by outer-space events a la Velikovsky in his famous work, Worlds in Collision.

The strength of White's conviction was surprising, and we sought to understand how he had arrived at such an inelastic position on such a controversial subject, essentially flying in the face of innumerable previsions of millennial polar catastrophe by psychics and clairvoyants such as Scallion, Cayce and Nostradamus. Primarily, it was the fact that the predicted precursor events never happened.

One of the most important discoveries that argues for pole shifts in the past was a Renaissance map found in the Library of Congress in 1959 by Charles Hapgood, that shows the continent of Antarctica in an ice-free state. This was, in addition to the famous Piri Re-is map, a map drawn by Oronteus Finaeus in 1531 from much more ancient maps. After several years of research, Hapgood was able to identify more than fifty accurately represented features of Antarctica on the map. Since Antarctica wasn't really charted until about 1920, Finaeus had no way of knowing anything about it. But obviously those ancient mariners knew it in precise cartographic terms. Hapgood estimated the source to be about 17,000 years old, and therefore speculated that the pole shift which buried the continent in ice must have occurred about 14,000 years ago. In 1961, the Cartographic Section of the U.S.A.F. Strategic Air Command, after studying the Finaeus map, entirely confirmed Hapgood's analysis. They said that the map was indeed made when Antarctica was free of ice, and that furthermore, the ancient mapmakers must have understood advanced mathematics, especially spherical trigonometry! To some, this suggests an ancient astronaut hypothesis, which Hapgood considered and dismissed as unlikely. The treatment of Hapgood was largely sympathetic in the book, but in his Epilogue to the l995 edition, White claims that Hapgood's conclusions about the Finaeus map were effectively demolished by an article in a magazine called The Skeptical Inquirer in the Fall of 1986 by one David Jolly, who publishes a rare map trade handbook. It was our naive belief that on the face of it, the Air Force opinion should weigh heavier than a single article by a non-scientist in an obscure magazine, but White told us that he continues to rely largely on the Jolly article as a refutation of the Hapgood ancient map evidence.

Hapgood's theory of crustal displacement also explains one of the great mysteries of geology. How did it happen that temperate and equatorial parts of the planet came to be covered with ice during the so-called various ice-ages? It is known, for example, that a glacier originated in southern India about 280 million years ago, and pushed northwards 1100 miles. How can this be, since India has always been where it is now? Hapgood says in The Path of the Pole, ...ice ages existed in the tropics and...great ice caps covered vast areas on and near the equator. This happened not once, but several times. Shifting poles due to slippage of the earth's crust could account for this phenomenon very neatly. In his 1991 Epilogue, White discusses this at length, and ultimately concludes that recent research in land-water distribution indicates that this factor may account for the rapid onset and recession of glaciation. When asked for his current opinion on this, White said that new information about Continental Drift may explain some of the apparent polar re-locations to tropical areas.

Then there is the problem of the Woolly Mammoths. White devotes an entire chapter in the book to this riddle. What caused them all to die so suddenly? It is one thing for a species to die out slowly over thousands of years and become extinct. It is quite another to find their bones, and in many cases, perfectly preserved bodies, in heaps in various parts of the world, mostly in northern Siberia. Most certainly, they did not die of old age. The famed Beresovka Mammoth uncovered in Siberia in 1900, had unchewed grass and buttercups in his mouth, and undigested vegetation in his stomach, indicating clearly that he had died in the summer. How then, did he become frozen, and remain perfectly preserved? A sudden pole shift plunging the Siberian plains into numbing cold and transforming them into frozen tundra would be one very acceptable explanation. Even if the Mammoths did not all die immediately, they would perish over a short period thereafter, because their food supply would be cut off. This is the hypothesis championed by the well-known naturalist Ivan T. Sanderson, who made numerous television appearances in the '60s. In the Epilogue, White relies almost completely on a critique refuting the pole shift theory, written by one William White of England. John White believes that William White is able to counter almost all of the very convincing points made by Sanderson, to his satisfaction, thus neutralizing the Woolly Mammoth evidence. However, we are never given any of White's credentials. Both sides are in agreement that the Mammoths apparently died mostly of asphyxiation before they froze, but W. White concludes that this could have been caused by drowning or suffocation, rather than a sudden icy tempest. John White claimed that the extended period over which the Mammoths died, he estimates it to be between 30,000 and 10,000 B.C., argues against a sudden catastrophic event. In the case of the Beresovska Mammoth he says all the indications are that he fell into an icy crevasse, broke his leg, and froze to death.

White's ultimate conclusion that there has never been and will not be a pole shift after such a laborious treatment of the subject, prompted us to ask, what motivated him to write the book in the first place. He told us that living in Virginia Beach and California brought the earth changes and pole shift predictions to his attention. I felt that it was a subject worthy of further investigation. If there was any truth to the pole shift concept, then the human race was facing a gigantic cataclysm in the very near future. I felt that people should be aware of it, and a great effort should be made to prepare for it.... As we pondered this reply, we considered how strange it was that, with this initial motivation and with White's consequent identification with the whole subject, that the book turned out to be a refutation! One thing was very clear, White apparently placed more reliance on scientific or pseudo-scientific evidence than on the psychic/clairvoyant prophecies. We asked him about that. I'm not a scientist. I'm only a student of science. But. . . l have enormous respect for the scientific method as a way of probing reality and ascertaining the truth of something. Science has its limits, and spiritual truths will not be proven definitively by science. On the other hand, science does have a lot to say that can help us to assess the validity of reported spiritual truths....In the world of spirituality, there's a strong tendency for people to cross over the line from having an open mind to having a hole in the head....

From his concluding statement we understood that he seeks answers from a higher source, and is possessed of a more idealistic sort of spirituality. The conversation had turned to alien abductions, which White connects with demonic forces. From his view of this situation, we understood why he is not concerned about a possible pole shift. ...it's very clear that the human race is being supported by vast metaphysical forces concerned with our health and safety and welfare and spiritual unfoldment. It's evident, especially, in the Near Death Experience where people come in contact with beings of light who wordlessly radiate a sense of compassion and forgiveness. A person's materialistic values, in that situation, are radically re-oriented in the direction of spirituality. . .the human species has strong allies who are working behind the scenes to counter those forces of darkness who seek to enslave us and capture our souls. Now, the important thing is this, to learn to love all beings unconditionally...Unconditional love is the way God loves, and we are here on earth to learn to love as God loves.

Bermuda Triangle Stargate?

Do Newly Mapped Magnetic Anomalies Point to the Stars

by Dr. Michael Preisinger
http://www.atlantisrising.com/issue18/18bermuda.html

A German historian/scuba diver has recorded the exact location and value of deviations in magnetic fields off the Bahamas coast. Scientists to whom he has shown the figures do not dismiss the possibility that they are caused by micro-wormholes. His researches have also led him to wonder whether the American AUTEC naval base on Andros Island is not-perhaps on account of these same wormholes-an "Underwater Area 51 of the Caribbean." And he has reached some new conclusions concerning Atlantis and the Bahamas.

Oceans of ink have been spilt over the subject of the Bermuda Triangle, that apparent paranormal grab-bag of missing vessels (hundreds of ships and scores of planes), deviations in the magnetic field, abrupt outpourings of fog, UFO sightings far above the national average-and much, much more. A vast amount of pure speculation has accompanied these reports, the most controversial being that the Bahamas archipelago is comprised of the mountaintops and higher areas of the lost continent of Atlantis, sunk beneath these waters millennia ago.

As a practicing historian, with a doctorate in history and sociology from the German Sports University in Cologne-and therefore with a vigorous training in avoiding speculation-I certainly never expected to have anything to contribute to this controversy, which I tended to entirely dismiss.

Pure happenstance changed all that. I am also a trained scuba diving instructor; and, in 1995, I was sent by my company on a six-month stint to Nassau, Bahamas, with my wife and children. My German customers were the travel companies Inter Airlines and Aeroplan. My task was to develop tourist programs for scuba divers and help customers who were already there.

In the course of my work, I heard persistent reports of persons on boats who had experienced sudden deviations in their compass readings which had put them right off course. My curiosity as a historian got the better of me (and, besides, it would make for an unusual diving experience): I decided to look for magnetic field anomalies in the places where the deviations had been noted, and try to bring back exact figures for those deviations.

Based on the stories I'd heard, I chose more than half-a-dozen points at which to dive: Fish Hotel, Lyford Cay, and White Hole, near Nassau; Lost Blue Hole, about an hour by boat from Nassau; Dogleg Reef, an hour by boat from Marathon, in the Florida Keys; the "Atlantis Wall," near Bimini; and Sunken Train, near Eluthera.

Fellow scuba divers Al Miller, an American, and Joel Green, a Jamaican, accompanied me on these expeditions. Over the course of several weeks, we carried out one to seven dives a week, depending on the time we had available. Dressed in our scuba gear, and singly or in pairs, we dove at each location several times, usually descending to a depth of no more than a few dozen feet. The dives lasted 60 to 75 minutes; sometimes we made them from cheap inflatables, other times from rented boats.

We found clear evidence of deviations at four locations: Fish Hotel, Lyford Cay, White Hole, near Nassau; and Dogleg Reef, near Marathon, in South Florida. In the course of our dives, we recorded precise figures for what the compass readings were as compared to what they normally should have been.

Over the next few months, I communicated these figures to a number of physicists around the world. To a one, they told me that such magnetic field anomalies could be caused by briefly-appearing micro-wormholes. They could think of no other explanation for the deviations. Prof. John Wheeler, of Princeton University, in Princeton, NJ, has given the name of "wormhole" to what he believes may be "transit tunnels" between different dimensions of reality. According to Wheeler, these wormholes may be only a giga-fraction of a square inch in size-the number one preceded by 33 zeroes, preceded by a decimal point. Wheeler says these mini-black holes, constantly blinking in and out of the geometry of space, are thought to be bits of "virtual matter;" that is, they can exist for a limited time only. Their counterparts-so-called mini-white holes-are virtual anti-matter. Whenever these two kinds of virtual matter build up to any extent, they immediately destroy themselves. Wheeler can offer no explanation as to why mini-holes appear, disappear, then reappear.

Regarding my magnetic field anomaly readings, here are some typical responses, from some of the scientists-usually quantum physicists-to whom I spoke:

Dr. Werner Muller, physicist, Karlruhe, Germany, in a 1995 phone interview: "According to the figures you provided and the fact that no natural source was found in the bottom of the sea, there are just the quantum physical theories left to explain the phenomenon."

Professor Tsung-Min Gung, physicist, Tokyo, Japan, 1995; phone interviews: "If the theories of inter-dimensional connections are not completely wrong and can develop in the way I am expecting them to, the strong interdependencies with gravitation and the earth's magnetic field may be a way to track them down."

Grazyna Fosar, physicist, Berlin, Germany, in a radio discussion together with myself, in 1997: "From the physicist's point of view, gates to hyperspace can be the only reasonable explanation for these mysterious deviation fields."

These startling results led me to investigate, tentatively at first, then with growing interest, some of the other "Bermuda Triangle" phenomena associated with the Bahamas area. I knew that the theory of compass deviations as being caused by "stargates" went back some way (though, as far as I knew, I was the first to come up with any figures); I was now told that the extremely high incidence of UFO sightings in the Bahamas archipelago had been associated by some researchers with these stargates.

I was further told that many of the sightings took place near the Atlantic Undersea Test and Evaluation Center (AUTEC), the American naval base on the Bahamas island of Andros, and that some researchers believed AUTEC might be an underwater "Area 51"- a place where secret research was being carried out on UFOs by the American government, and which, from time to time, was even visited by UFOs.

I decided, as a historian, to try to get to the bottom of these extraordinary speculations. The Atlantic Undersea Test and Evaluation Center (AUTEC) possesses unique resources, including an underwater range for testing and research on acoustic equipment. It is located 177 miles southeast of West Palm Beach, Florida, at Andros Island and the Tongue of the Ocean, in Bahamas. The Andros Island AUTEC test facility-access to which must be obtained beforehand - covers only one square mile on land, but actually comprises 1,670 square miles of the surrounding Caribbean. This ocean area is a steep-sided deep-water embayment 100 miles long and 20 miles wide, with depths varying from 700 fathoms at the "rim" to 1,100 fathoms (more than a mile) at the northern end. By any reckoning, this is a huge amount of underwater space.

I learned from more than one source that the Andros base has an ultra-top secret caliber of security. Here is an illustration. In 1997, a group of duck-hunters-who, admittedly, had walked right by a PROHIBITED AREA sign less than a mile from the base-suddenly found themselves confronting an unusually thick wall of foliage. At that very moment, they were knocked off their feet and their faces thrust into the ground.

The hapless duck-hunters quickly discovered that the foliage contained sailors in heavy camouflage, and that other sailors, leaping out of the foliage behind them, had hurled them to the ground. Taken to a nearby tent, they were grilled by a colonel for hours, until they were certain they would be thrown into prison. Then, abruptly, the officer released them, declaring, "I believe your story."

In the waters off Andros island, strange craft have been seen from time to time which not only resemble UFOs, but which display the same unbelievable swiftness of motion and execute the same incredibly sharp turns. A Viennese businessman told me that, once, when he was yachting off the coast of Andros, he glimpsed, two miles away (it was a very clear day), in waters over a mile-and-a-half deep, a motionless object he thought was a whale. Coming to within almost half-a-mile of the object-which was now gleaming oddly-the yachter observed that it was some kind of man-made craft of ultramodern design.

Suddenly, the craft took off in a southerly direction at what my informant described as a "lunatic speed." It sped along the surface of the water. Then, abruptly, it disappeared beneath the waves, not to be seen again.

I have been told of conspiracy and suppression theories of a very dark nature which have been burgeoning around the subject of AUTEC as an "underwater Area 51," just as they have been around the subject of the real "Area 51." Here is an example, passed along to me by an informant whom I interviewed in November, 1998, at NASA headquarters at Cape Kennedy, Florida.

I was told that highly respected and world-class British scuba diver Rob Palmer, who had been director of a "blue holes" research center in Bahamas for a number of years, had failed to surface after a dive in the Red Sea, in Israel, in mid-July, 1997, and was presumed dead. Blue holes are small underwater caves, apparently formed from within, which are found predominately in the area of the Bahamas archipelago. I think it possible that blue holes may, perhaps, have been formed by the popping in and out of existence of micro-wormholes.

Rob Palmer, apparently, had entertained a roughly analogous theory. In addition, he believed blue holes might be the transit points for UFOs arriving here from other dimensions-and his investigations were taking him closer and closer to the AUTEC base on Andros Island, where there is a very great proliferation of blue holes. My informant told me there was a rumor that Palmer might have been murdered by officials at AUTEC, probably because he knew too much, and possibly by a post-hypnotic suggestion which caused him to take his own life while he was under the waters of the Red Sea.

As a professional historian, I don't care to indulge in such lurid speculations. But their existence suggests there might well be significant clandestine activity taking place at the Andros island AUTEC facility.

Since so much of the far-fetched material I had investigated had turned out to have some basis in reality, however indirect, I now decided to investigate the story that the area of the Bahamas is the site of the (not completely sunken) continent of Atlantis.

Many have long believed that Bimini is a remnant of Atlantis. The idea was first mooted by trance-medium Edgar Cayce, who claimed that many of the people to whom he gave readings had lived past lives on Atlantis. Using the latest technology, scientists from the British Government's Building Research Establishment have even discovered tiny amounts of coal and gold in apparently man-made stone found on the seabed at Bimini.

As a historian interested in primary rather than secondary sources, I decided to read the single text upon which all of the thousands of books on Atlantis are based: the dialogue called the Critias, by the Greek philosopher Plato. Moreover, I decided to read the dialogue, not, as so many have, as myth or metaphor, but as historical fact. And I bypassed most of Plato"s detailed account of the splendors of this ancient kingdom, concentrating instead on its dimensions as reported by Plato: What shape did Atlantis have? How long and wide was it?

I learned something intriguing: that if you were to take the present-day Bahamas archipelago and raise the entire land-mass by 300 feet-or, to put it another way, lower the water level surrounding Bahamas by 300 feet (its level during the last Ice Age)-you would end up with a country that closely matched, in shape and size, the ancient Atlantis of Plato: The philosopher wrote in the Critias that the continent was larger than Egypt (as it was then known); that the center of the island, not far from the sea, was formed by a plain surrounded by shallow mountains to a distance of six miles; and that these mountains themselves were located in a large plain, surrounded by high mountains to a distance of 200 miles.

My conclusions regarding the so-called Bimini Wall, thought by many to be a remnant of Atlantis, were not nearly so "New Age." I believe that some of the stones making up the wall appear to be man-made, not because they came from Atlantis, but because they were left there during the American Civil War.

In those days, a great many ships ran the Union blockade to bring trade to Confederate harbors. Pursued by Union ships, these vessels often escaped into the shallow Bahamas waters where the big man-o-wars couldn"t follow. To navigate over the reefs that filled these waters, they frequently had to jettison weight so as to ride higher in the water. What easier way to do this than by dumping granite stones from the ship"s ballast? That, I think, may account for a good many of the granite stones now found at such places as Bimini.

I pursued my investigations in a number of other areas. I found out, for instance, that Bahamas has its own legends of mysterious little monkey-like creatures that are almost never seen: the "chickcharnies". I discovered there are numerous "ghost stories" associated with Bahamas, and that the shamans of the area are reputed to have almost godlike-powers. I came away with the impression-one that can scarcely be proven scientifically-that there is high degree of psychic, even "interdimensional," energy in the Bahamas archipelago.

My attention, though, keeps returning to the "underwater stargates of the Caribbean," which I discovered with my friends Al Miller and Joel Green. I continue to wonder what might be the next step in researching these "stargates." I have a proposal. It would be interesting to actually try to enter one of these "stargates"-except that they are usually microscopic to an extreme degree, and they tend to fluctuate in and out of existence. Therefore, I would like to suggest that one or a number of psychics descend to the sites of some of these underwater anomalies, perhaps those near Nassau, which are shallow, and not far from shore-and not far from the Bahamas capitol, which could make an excellent host to a world press tempted to attend this unusual "Underwater Splashdown to the Stargates of the Caribbean." Jeanne Dixon may be too old for such a venture; but there must be many youngish, athletic and gifted psychics who could be persuaded to don scuba diving gear and venture to the bottom of the ocean to see what telepathic feelings and messages they might be able to pick up, filtering ever so briefly through these on-again, off-again, underwater micro-wormholes.

My proposal may seem outlandish. But I and my scuba diving colleagues would be glad to train as divers any prospective psychics, and descend with them to the ocean bottom off Bahamas. We could do it during the coolest month of the year in Bahamas-January. January 1, 2000, seems like a propitious date.

SECRETS OF A LOST CIVILIZATION

Was Atlantis an Exploded Planet?

by Alan Alford

http://www.atlantisrising.com/issue17/secretoflostcivilizations.html

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In an Atlantis Rising Exclusive the Author of Gods of the New Millennium Offers a Startling New Take on Our Ancient Origins

For the last two hundred years, ancient Egypt has captured the imagination of scholars and laymen alike, resulting in a deluge of books on this most mysterious of civilizations. But despite these intensive investigations, scholars have failed to recreate the mind-set of this ancient people, and arguments continue to rage concerning the exact purposes of the Egyptian pyramids and temples. At the heart of this stalemate lies a failure to comprehend what possible religious motivation could have compelled the Egyptians to build such enormous pyramids, the largest comprising several million tons of stone. Hence Kurt Mendelssohn's recent reference to the pyramids as "magnificent madness" is little different from the puzzlement felt in Roman times, when Pliny dismissed the pyramids as "that idle and foolish exhibition of royal wealth".

Might the experts have taken a wrong turn and overlooked the essence of the ancient Egyptian mystery? I believe that they have indeed missed a deeper level of significance, for which signposts are everywhere to be found. In this article, I will draw on some of this evidence to present a radical new interpretation of the Pyramid Texts and other Egyptian myths.

Regular readers of Atlantis Rising will know that the background to my interest in Egypt lies in my fascination with the "gods" of ancient civilizations, largely inspired by the works of Zecharia Sitchin (see interview in AR Number 13). Having written my first book Gods of the New Millennium in support of Sitchin's thesis of flesh-and-blood "gods", it was to ancient Egypt that I turned to seek further confirmation of this theory. If Sitchin was right, the Egyptians had lived alongside the "Anunnaki"—a race with space-faring technology, who had built an underground space center in the Sinai and two pyramids as navigation beacons at Giza. I was thus confident of finding numerous eye-witness accounts of aircraft and rockets scattered throughout the ancient Egyptian texts. To my great disappointment, however, I could find no such references in the Pyramid Texts, nor in any other Egyptian texts.

But as I plunged deeper and deeper into the Egyptian religious beliefs, the veil began to lift on a cosmology which reminded me of Sitchin's planetary battle theory in "The Twelfth Planet". In a similar style to the appearance of the god Marduk in the Babylonian epic "Enuma Elish", so did the Egyptian god Seth appear as a "spear from the abyss", an intruder planet which emerged from the depths of space and proceeded to encounter one of the inner planets (equivalent to the Babylonian "Tiamat").

According to Sitchin's interpretation of the Enuma Elish, the vanquished planet Tiamat was split into two parts, with one part becoming the asteroid belt, and the other part becoming the Earth, in a new orbit much closer to the Sun. The Egyptians, however, had a very different understanding of this cosmic event. The god Osiris, for example (a Sky-god until his murder by Seth) was said to have fallen from the Sky and "split open the Earth", indicating that the Earth was already in its existing position before the catastrophe. Similarly, when the god Geb was forcefully separated from Nut and fell to the Earth, he did not become the Earth, but lay upon its surface and, according to one legend, carried out construction and renovation work to the Earth in "thousands of foundations and millions of places".

During 1997, by one of those strange twists of fate that often happens, I was contacted by Tom Van Flandern, one of the few astronomers to embrace the evidence that an intruder planet had disrupted our solar system. Van Flandern is better known, however, for his theory that the asteroid belt and comets are the remains of two planets and a moon which suffered catastrophic explosions. And it was this theory, generally known as the "exploded planet hypothesis", which was to prove vital in my decoding of the ancient Egyptian belief system.

One of the most prominent deities in Egyptian religion was Osiris, a Sky-god who had been murdered by Seth, and fallen to Earth. According to the Pyramid Texts, Osiris was "laid low" or "drowned" (in the watery abyss of space), but there is another famous legend which alleges that he was dismembered, with his body parts being buried all over Egypt. This legend of the dismemberment of Osiris has always confounded the experts, but it makes perfect sense if Osiris was an exploded planet, fragments from which impacted the Earth. Numerous details support this interpretation, such as the legend that Osiris fell with fire and "split open" the Earth, coming to rest in deep, dark subterranean caverns. Many texts also speak of the Earth becoming an "Island of Fire" in this primeval time. Another remarkable detail, in the light of evidence that the exploded planets were watery, is the statement in the Pyramid Texts that Osiris brought forth a flood of cold waters to the Earth. This is confirmed by the Book of Genesis which states that the waters of the Deluge fell to Earth from an aperture in the heavens.

The idea that Osiris was an exploded planet is backed up by this god's well-known association with meteorites. Spell 1080 of the Coffin Texts states that: "This is the sealed thing which is in darkness, with fire about it, which contains the efflux of Osiris, and it is put in Rostau; it has been hidden since it fell from him, and it is what came down from him on to the desert of sand." A similar legend spoke of a "stone from heaven" kept at Abydos. Both of these descriptions are evocative of meteorites (i.e., fallen asteroids), an identification which is supported by evidence relating to the cult of the Benben Stone at Heliopolis. Egyptologists are fairly certain that the Benben was a conical meteorite, which was raised atop a pillar symbolizing its resurrection to the heavens whence it came.

The example of the Benben Stone illustrates very clearly the concept of death and rebirth, which was the fundamental cornerstone of Egyptian beliefs. Egyptologists insist that these beliefs were inspired by mundane forces of nature, such as the rising and setting Sun, or the rise and fall of the River Nile. The cult of the Benben Stone, however, points to a cosmic death and rebirth, since the meteorite was an asteroid which had fallen to Earth in a fiery death, and was then raised back towards heaven for its future resurrection. The same symbolism can be seen in the obelisks and pyramids, which were similarly raised to the heavens, with the latter representing an ascension vehicle ("mer") for the soul and body-double of the deceased king.

This cosmic solution might seem fairly obvious, but Egyptologists have failed to conclude the obvious as a result of their poor understanding of Egyptian architecture, religion and mythology. For example, some of the religious myths, such as the battles of Horus and Seth, are seen as a historical record of warfare in the Nile valley, whilst other myths, such as the "primeval mound" creation myths, are thought to have been inspired by the receding floodwaters of the Nile. And those religious beliefs which are recognized as essentially cosmic in nature are undermined by an apparently confusing mixture of references to the Sun, the Moon, certain stars and meteorites.

Now the problem with all these orthodox interpretations is that they simply do not fit together by any stretch of the imagination. One might draw an analogy to a cocktail of substances that won't mix together, but settle into distinct and irreconcilable layers. Such is the position advocated by Egyptologists today, who dismiss the Egyptians as having a confused set of contradictory beliefs.

But was this really the case? In The Phoenix Solution I have added one simple magic ingredient to the cocktail, which enables all of the layers to intermingle into one coherent and meaningful religious potion. This magic ingredient is the exploded planet hypothesis. My proposition, in a nutshell, is that the Egyptians were obsessed with a planetary death and rebirth, but since this planet could no longer be seen in the real heavens, they adopted the Sun and certain stars as visible symbols of the invisible. The Sun in particular served as a powerful daily reminder of this planetary death and rebirth.

Egyptologists say that Ra was a Sun-god, and nothing more than a Sun-god, but this is simply not true. In the Book Am Duat, the Book of Gates and the Book of Caverns, Ra was described undertaking a subterranean journey in which he reunited with the body of Osiris, the chief god of the underworld. Egyptologists turn a blind eye to this, nor are they able to explain the intimacy between Ra, the alleged Sun-god, and Osiris, the god of the dead. But the texts clearly state that Ra was the soul and Osiris the body, and that the divine combination of body and soul, Ra-Osiris, would ascend into the Sky and be reborn "in the body of Nut". This has nothing to do with the Sun, but sounds very much like a planetary rebirth, with Ra and Osiris being the body and soul of the exploded planet. Indeed the body of Nut was depicted as an island and described as "Osiris, whose circuit is the Duat".

The resurrection of Osiris to his heavenly aspect began with a descent and ended with an ascent - an exact reverse of the "act of creation" which had caused his fragments to penetrate the Earth's crust in primeval times. But what was this "act of creation"? The Egyptians described it with many different metaphors, such as the Sky-goddess Nut giving birth to her "children of chaos", or Geb laying a Great Egg from which the Phoenix (the Light-Bird) emerged at the beginning of time. More generally, this catastrophic act was known as "the Day of Slaying the Oldest Ones", a day when numerous gods were "decapitated" and "ascended to the Sky", which became "choked and stifled", a day when "the Sky was separated from the Earth", a day when there was a loud shriek and a flash of light. All of these metaphors are evocative of the exploding planet(s) envisaged by Tom Van Flandern, which would date the Egyptian "First Time" (zep tepi) to tens of millions of years ago.

Many of these creation myths involve primeval "mounds" or "islands" which appeared in the primeval ocean. If these mounds and waters were inspired by the River Nile, as Egyptologists propose, why is it that the Egyptians described the primeval ocean as everywhere, endless and without limit, with no up, no down and no surface? Why is it that Nut, a Sky-goddess, claimed in the Pyramid Texts that "I am the primeval hill of the land in the midst of the sea" - a statement in keeping with the Egyptian belief that a "Field of Reeds" existed in the Sky? What could have inspired these countless references to a planetary homeland in the eastern side of the Sky, where the ascended king would rule the Ennead of Nine Gods from a throne made of iron?

The answer would appear to lie in the legendary battle between Seth and Elder Horus (alias Osiris), which Egyptologists assume is a record of warfare in the Nile valley. On the contrary, these battles took place in the Sky or in the waters of space, and were identified as occurring in primeval times.

These legends, moreover, bear amazing correlations with Van Flandern's "intruder planet hypothesis". For example, the result of the battle is that Seth and Horus captured from each other an "eye" and "two testicles", a plausible description of a 2:1 satellite exchange between two planets, in full accord with the laws of celestial dynamics. This is one of sixteen extraordinary parallels which prompted Van Flandern to comment on my thesis: "The convergence of the latest astronomical data and the ancient Egyptian writings make it considerably more difficult to ignore these writings as anything less than an actual recording of our solar system's history."

Such a conclusion will seem "impossible" to many people, but so does the precision engineering of the Great Pyramid, and its existence at Giza cannot be denied. In fact, the anomalies of both the Pyramid and the exploded planet cult lend support to one another, and strengthen considerably the hypothesis for a lost race with a fantastic scientific capability.

In fairness, it must be stated that Van Flandern's theory remains controversial, and is not accepted by the majority of modern astronomers, who run for the hills at the mention of catastrophism. But dogma must yield to new scientific data sooner or later. Within the next decade, space probes will enable us to assess whether the exploded planet theory is correct or not, and this will afford the opportunity to test our 20th-century scientific consensus against the knowledge of astronomers from at least 6,000 years ago. A most exciting prospect.

But even if the ancient astronomers turn out to be wrong, the Egyptians' belief in an exploded planet still provide us with valuable insights into modern-day legends and myths. A classic example of this is Plato's account of Atlantis, which originated from Egypt. Until recently, I had assumed that Plato was describing a terrestrial cataclysm whereby an "island" literally sank into the "sea" following an "earthquake" and a "flood". But once I began to think like an Egyptian, I immediately recognized "island" as a common metaphor for "planet" (hence the belief that Planet Earth became an "Island of Fire"). This metaphor was strengthened by the idea that space was an ocean of water, in which primeval mounds emerged at the beginning of time. Hence the Egyptians imagined planets as "islands" floating in the cosmic waters, the latter surely being the "true ocean" described by Plato.

Is the legend of Atlantis being destroyed by earthquake and flood simply a repeat of the tales of Osiris being dismembered or drowned? Was Atlantis an exploded planet? Support for this theory is found in the etymology of "Atlas", the first of the ten kings whom Poseidon appointed in charge of this fabled island. It is a common misconception that Atlas supported the world on his shoulders. In fact he supported the Sky. Hence the name Atlas, in Greek, meant "the one who could not withstand" (referring to the Sky). Atlas was regarded as a "pillar" which reached to the heavens but then collapsed, allowing the Sky to fall. This collapse supposedly buried Atlantis - an identical idea to the Egyptian god Osiris falling to Earth, splitting it open, and becoming buried in the underworld. In other words, Atlantis fell from the Sky.

This example of Atlantis illustrates how the implications of an exploded planet cult in ancient Egypt extend well beyond the boundaries of Egyptology itself, leading to a radical reappraisal of the so-called "gods" which came down from heaven to Earth. The identification of these gods (the Anunnaki, the Nephilim, the Builder Gods of Edfu, for example) as meteoric planetary fragments inevitably begs the question of whether God, the son of God and the angels of God are also echoes of this ancient and profound inter-planetary creation cult.

From ATLANTIS to the SPHINX

by J. Douglas Kenyon

http://www.atlantisrising.com/issue9/ar9atlan2.html

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For the first time since his massive volume The Occult (1971) Colin Wilson has another bestseller, at least in England. And, with any luck, come spring, that achievement will be repeated here when the fledgling New York publishing house Fromm International unveils the U.S. edition of Wilson's From Atlantis to the Sphinx (though not necessarily with that title).

While bestsellers may not be an everyday achievement for Wilson, though he's had more than his share, distinguished books apparently are. In the forty years since originally bursting on the scene with his much acclaimed The Outsider he's averaged about two books a year, enough to earn him mentions in Who's Who and the Encyclopedia Britanica along with various other honors including visiting professorships at several American colleges.

Especially interested in the supernatural he wrote The Occult as an investigation of unexplained phenomena. Initially, something of a skeptic, he recalls, I became absolutely convinced of the reality of the paranormal. Many subsequent related works earned him a considerable reputation in the field. A fascination with the invisible dimensions of human experience has also prompted works on the psychology of crime, human sexuality and his own unique form of existential philosophy, making him something of an authority on those areas as well.

In the new book he argues that thousands of years before ancient Egypt and Greece held sway there was a great civilization whose ships traveled the world from China to the South Pole (which was then free of ice), and whose advanced knowledge of science, mathematics and astronomy was passed on to descendants who escaped to, among other places, Egypt and South America. Wilson believes the ancients possessed a completely different knowledge system from our own, which he believes was at the root of the achievements which so puzzle our modern minds. At the heart of his argument is the current research, especially surrounding the Giza plateau in Egypt, which threatens to overturn conventional theories of the origins of civilization.

Since reading in 1979 Serpent in the Sky, John Anthony West's interpretation of the work of renowned Egyptologist R.A. Schwaller de Lubicz, Wilson has actively followed the most important developments in the field. He reports on the ensuing geological studies redating the Sphinx to as old as 12,500 years, as much as 8,000 years older than conservative Egyptologists believe, and the evidence developed by Graham Hancock and Robert Bauval of astronomical keys indicating advanced ancient knowledge (discussed in their new book The Message of the Sphinx, Keeper of Genesis in U.K.). A close friend and virtual neighbor, Wilson has followed Hancock's work closely since well before his monumental Fingerprints of the Gods (see Atlantis Rising #4) as well as that of Bauval, Rand and Rose Flem-Ath (Wilson wrote the introduction for their When the Sky Fell) and, of course, West. In From Atlantis to the Sphinx, Wilson sets out to chronicle the unfolding story and the implications of the new discoveries, and goes on to attempt something of a reconstruction of the lost wisdom of ancients.

In September Wilson presented some of his research at the University of Deleware for the Return to the Source conference sponsored by the Society for Scientific Exploration. A few weeks prior, however, Atlantis Rising had spoken with him early one morning at his Cornwall home. Fortunately, seven a.m. was not too early for clear thinking. In fact, he assured us, every day of hard writing for him begins about the same time.

Staying in touch with West, Hancock and Bauval remains part of his routine. Within days he had been to Hancock's for lunch with Bauval and West, and is fully abreast of developments in the ongoing controversies over new research at the Sphinx which is apparently going forward without the participation of the group despite their contributions to the new discoveries (as reported in London's Daily Mail as well as Atlantis Rising #8). Apparently following up on the earlier researches of West and geologist Robert Schoch, the current investigation is said to be seeking a chamber beneath the Sphinx to be opened on live worldwide television later this year. The chamber is believed by some to be the celebrated Hall of Records, the discovery of which was prophesied by Edgar Cayce. However, Wilson reports, his friends aren't really concerned about being excluded, as long as the entire situation comes out in the open. The present somewhat arbitrary behavior of Egyptian antiquities authorities, though, is taken as grounds for suspecting the integrity of any ultimate outcome. Wilson believes the authorities have recognized the tremendous potential for profit in the entire situation, and have moved to capitalize.

As he explains in From Atlantis to the Sphinx, the machinations of official Egyptology have often been something other than exemplary. Despite overwhelming evidence of sophisticated engineering in the construction of the monuments of the Giza plateau and throughout Egypt, the establishment has persisted in claims that only primitive methods were employed, thus ruling out any suggestion that some kind of superior science inherited from a more sophisticated period, albeit a forgotten one, was involved. Most of Wilson's speculation concerns just how sophisticated the ancients may have actually been, not only in matters of engineering, but in many other areas as well.

He is especially interested in the capacities of mind which the ancients must have possessed. In the book he argues that they must have had superior development of the left hemisphere of the brain, the intuitive side. Examples of such development have remained till the present but have been relegated to the domain of shamans and prophets. He cites the case of Gilbert Islanders who in dream states are able to summon porpoises who then appear in great numbers to be killed and eaten. Citing vast contemporary research confirming the reality of telepathy and other so-called paranormal phenomena, Wilson suggests that the modern right-brain dominated society which we have created has forced us to unlearn many things we once knew. It seems to me we've deliberately got rid of jungle sensitivities. The reason, he believes, is clear, we don't really need them. What we've done is to plunge into this sort of narrow rational consciousness, which has brought us to the point that we don't know who we are. In Wilson's mind there's no doubt that the ancients knew who they were.

However, while some have suggested that the ancient Egyptians possessed nothing less than a science of immortality, Wilson sees things a little differently. Obviously they didn't have real immortality or they'd be around now, he points out, but adds, I suspect their whole aim was immortality. That was the aim of their religion...The Egyptians believed absolutely totally in life after death, as all ancient people did, but as to a real science of immortality? No.

Despite his demurs, though, he wants to expand on the topic which has interested him since his teens when he saw Bernard Shaw's play Back to Methuseleh. The idea of living to be 300 absolutely obsessed me. His own novel The Philosoper's Stone played around with the idea and he's become convinced that even today human beings possess a certain power which switches on at certain moments.

His idea is that we possess a kind of robot which has the purpose of performing certain tasks for us. You learn to type slowly and consciously and then the robot takes over and does it quicker than you could, and you learn to drive or whatever. The robot, he explains, is what makes humans the most advanced creatures on earth but it is also the source of most of our problems, because we are always being taken over by the robot, and when we don't want to be. We listen to a symphony and it moves us deeply. The third time we listen to it, it's the robot listening instead of us. The normal person, he believes, is about 50% robot and about 50% real person. In curious moments of happiness, in great moments of intensity, what happens is you suddenly become 51% real you and 49% robot. And I'm sure that in mystical experience you become something like 55% real and only about 45% robot. That's what mystical experiences are. If we could only switch into such moods, he thinks they are what psychiatrist Abraham Maslow called peak experiences, all the time, he believes we would be capable of amazing things. I've got a feeling that all these so-called psychic faculties take over in those moments when we are non-robotic.

As for the notion of surviving the death of the physical body, Wilson accepts that it's probably true but doesn't think it is particularly relevant or important. Unlike Dostoevesky who thought that the truth of life after death could be the most important thing that we could know, Wilson believes the most important questions are how to live now we're here, how to escape the robot, how to live on a sort of higher level? If we become preoccupied with life after death, he thinks we're wasting our time.

To Wilson the present world with all it's difficulties offers special challenges which have the potential to strengthen our hidden capacities. Human suffering he sees as, in large measure, due to the fact that we've forgotten who we are and that we are trying to recover what we have lost. That recovery, though, shouldn't be so difficult.

If we could get the right point of view, so to speak, suddenly these latent powers would become accessible to us all the time. Certain that he's on to something big, he expands, It really does seem to me that one of the basic problems with human beings is that they experience wonderful moments of insight, for example, children at Christmas, when they feel the whole universe is absolutely glorious, and they feel that surely no one would ever want to die, but the trouble is, you know perfectly well at Christmas that within a couple months in the middle of February you'll be grimly bored and begin to long for the coming of the holidays around August. The need is to sustain the drive and purpose of the high moments during the low ones. The highs, it seems to him, amount to a kind of three-dimensional consciousness, contrasting with the ordinary two-dimensional humdrum consciousness. And he sees modern nihilistic existential pessimists like Samuel Beckett and Jean Paul Sartre as trapped in the 2D experience. In contrast, the thoroughly optimistic Wilson believes that we are on the threshold of a time when we will be able to find the kind of balance between modern rational thought and ancient intuitive knowledge that will enable us to become masters of the peak experience. Simply learning the true antiquity of ancient civilization may do much to help us on our way, as he reminded us, when we tried to probe an intellectual riddle which puzzled us.

In his book, Wilson relates the Giza construction scenario proposed by Hancock and Bauval which has the Sphinx built around 10,500 BC as indicated by geological evidence and corroborated by the precessional time of the Age of Leo, and then approximately 8,000 years later the completion of the Great Pyramid as indicated by the astronomical alignment of air-shafts within the pyramid. Wilson also cites Rand Flem-Ath and Charles Hapgood's research on Earth Crust Displacement which places the destruction of Atlantis at about 9,500 BC, or about 1000 years after construction of the sphinx, as reported by Plato and confirmed by evidence of animal extinctions such as the mammoths in Siberia. Earth Crust Displacement would have dramatically altered all astronomical observational phenomena and since the Hancock/Bauval timetable relies on a predictable path for celestial objects, which have remained constant to the present day, we couldn't help wondering how the apparent conflict could be resolved rationally. Wilson agrees that it is all very puzzling and points to other destruction scenarios for Atlantis including collisions with meteors. It seems to me, he says, that Atlantis did in fact go down in a number of catastrophes... But, in any event, he thinks the question is really unimportant at this stage. The most important thing he believes about the research of Hancock, Bauval, Flem-Ath and others is, what it does seem to indicate is that knowledge of the heavens and so on is far older than we thought, and that man really knew an enormous amount, maybe as long as 30,000 BC...and if we can actually begin to grasp this, really feel that this is what happened, I think that simply that perspective on human history is going to cause a change of consciousness and a different way of looking at history.

Nevertheless, he does not see a wholesale rewriting of the history books any time soon, What I do think will happen, he chuckles, is that this kind of thing will gradually snowball, and a certain point will come when quite suddenly it's accepted knowledge. And then, and only then, will you get the academics who have this kind of vested interest to go along.

Since Wilson has focused many times in his career on forensics (he's written in depth about Jack the Ripper and other notorious criminals) we wondered if he ever thought of Atlantis as perhaps the victim of a great murder, a crime which we might live to see reenacted, and that our problem is amnesia resulting from the trauma of the first enactment. I would agree completely, he declares, it seems to me that Plato was right. Something almost certainly had gone wrong with Atlantis, spiritually speaking, before its destruction, which makes me feel that people like Graham and Robert and John West and myself are doing our best, as it were, to sound the alarm before it actually happens. We're like someone digging frantically to raise some kind of barrier before the flood comes. I've no doubt whatever from my studies of crime that we are moving into an age in which mass murder and this kind of thing is going to become more and more commonplace, things like that affair in Belgium which at the moment seems to me to be a horrific example of the kind of thing that is beginning to happen and which inevitably happens as a civilization becomes more and more free, more and more liberal and so on. We can't put back the clock. There's no way of doing that. What we can do, and with a little luck, is really understand the implications of all this. It seems to me that there's a great counterweight to these problems and that counterweight is this kind of knowledge that we're speaking about. If this kind of knowledge could be established for everyone to understand, then suddenly we would begin to see our civilization back on the rails, no longer in danger of meeting the same kind of fate as Atlantis.