The Atlantis Blueprint (11 page)

It is worth noting that the Sphinx Temple and the Valley Temple, both standing in front of the Sphinx (and on either side), were built in a ‘megalithic’ style from gigantic blocks, and that West, Hancock and Bauval have all argued that they date from a more remote early period. The same is true of the mortuary temple of the Great Pyramid, which is why Rand looked for a connection.

Concerned to verify the methods of his approach and to be sure his results were not just the outcome of chance calculations, Rand looked carefully at other sites, concentrating on locations on the far side of the Atlantic, in the Middle East. Here he had no Professor Aveni to summarise the evidence conveniently, so he had to piece together the evidence from site to site. It was slow work, but proved to be worthwhile. Just

1. Ur of the Chaldees. Its famous ziggurat and shrine to the moon goddess Nanna are oriented west of north.
   

2. Nippur, south of Baghdad, where the tablets of
   Gilgamesh
   were found, relating how the island paradise Dilmun was destroyed in a great flood.
   

3. The ziggurat and ‘White Temple’ of the Sumerian city of Uruk.
   

4. The Wailing Wall of Herod’s temple in Jerusalem, which pointed straight at the old North Pole.
   

As in the case of Giza, what Rand also began to look for were the latitudes of the sacred sites. He soon came to note what he called ‘sacred latitudes’ occurring again and again: any latitude that would divide neatly into 360 degrees – such as the 30 degrees of Giza. Quito, the northern capital of the Inca Empire, and Carthage, the Phoenician city, had both been at 30 degrees north during the Hudson Bay Pole. Others, such as Easter Island, Mohenjo-Daro and the Tibetan holy city of Lhasa, were located on the equator.

When he had identified forty sites on ‘sacred latitudes’ Rand was fairly certain that this was not just a game with numbers.

Sacred latitudes when the Pole was at Hudson Bay (60N/83W). All of these sites are within half a degree (
³⁰
nautical miles) of a sacred latitude. Raiatea and Tahiti, in the South Pacific, are the closest land to the sacred latitude.

• 50º Rosslyn/Loanhead/Kilwinning,Tara/Newgrange/Knowth, Dunecht, Uxmal, Chichen Itza
  

• 45º Copan/Quirigua, Canterbury
  

• 30º Carthage, Quito
  

• 25º Troy, Constantinople
  

• 15º Giza Pyramids, Jericho/Jerusalem, Ashur, Nazca,Gilgal, Heliopolis
  

• 12º Babylon, Pyongyang
  

• 10º Ur/Uruk/Eridu, Thebes/Luxor, Susa, Ise, Nara,Kyoto Heian, Kumasi, Naqada, Lagash
  

• 5º Byblos, Xi’an, Lalibala, Elephantine, Raiatea, Tahiti
  

• 0º Lhasa, Aguni, Mohenjo-Daro, Easter Island
  

Note: Sites connected by ‘/’ are located so close together that they yield the same results.

When the Sky Fell
was published in Canada in January 1995, and was soon translated into several languages. Graham Hancock’s
Fingerprints of the Gods
came out in April 1995, and its immense success made it clear that there was now a worldwide audience for seriously researched books about ancient civilisations. My own
From Atlantis to the Sphinx,
dedicated to John West, Graham Hancock and Robert Bauval, appeared in May 1996, and sold out its first impression on the day of publication.
Keeper of Genesis,
by Robert Bauval and Graham Hancock, appeared in 1996, and was soon at the top of the bestseller list.
The Hiram Key28
by Christopher Knight and Robert Lomas was equally successful.

In due course, the television programme I had made with Rand was shown on the Discovery Channel – it was called
The Flood.
While watching it early in 1998 I wondered if Rand and Rose had seen it. The answer proved to be no – they had not even known that it had been transmitted – so I made them a copy and airmailed it to Vancouver Island.

Its arrival was again serendipitous. Rand had written an article about his sacred alignment theory, which was being published in a magazine called
Atlantis Rising.
It concluded:

I never thought to find another adventure to compare with my eighteen-year search for Atlantis. But the unique placement of the earth’s most sacred sites has emerged as a mystery that compels me with the same kind of fascination as that journey. I hope to share this quest within the pages of a new book,
Finding the Future: Blueprints from Atlantis,
which will lift the veil from these ancient sites to reveal concealed time capsules – messages, records and even blueprints – from Atlantis.
²⁹

But he had a problem. Rose was busy working on her second novel and, as a full-time librarian, Rand had even less free time. As they watched the tape of
The Flood,
Rand said, ‘I wonder if Colin might be interested?’ They both thought it unlikely, since they knew I was working on
Alien Dawn,30
but Rand decided to fax me anyway, also sending the article he had written for
Atlantis Rising.

As I read it, I felt my scalp prickling. If his theory of sacred alignments was correct, then he had stumbled on the most powerful proof so far of a pre-Atlantean civilisation. I lost no time in faxing back my acceptance. After that, we transferred our correspondence to email, for it soon became clear that the vast amount of information he had accumulated would have to be sent in files of a dozen or so pages at a time. Within less than two months I had more than 200 pages.

Most of this material was about sacred alignments. However, another line of investigation produced some astonishing and almost unbelievable evidence of Hapgood’s ‘advanced levels of science’ long before the earliest known civilisations.

I
N OCTOBER
1884, Professor Charles Piazzi Smyth, the Astronomer Royal for Scotland, was involved in a controversy on a matter dear to his heart: persuading a committee of experts from twenty-five countries of the world to make the north–south line that ran through the Great Pyramid the prime meridian of the world, 0 degrees longitude.

It may sound odd that, towards the end of the nineteenth century, when great steamships had been plying the oceans for decades, such a question should remain undecided. There had been numerous prime meridians – virtually one for every country that used the sea. Pope Alexander
VI
had decreed in 1493 that it should run 100 leagues west of the Azores. Louis
XIII
of France supported a line through Fero in the Canaries. That was enough to make Charles
II
of England decide to build the Greenwich Observatory, with the intention of designating Greenwich as the prime meridian. The French disagreed, and then said it should run through Paris. As other countries built observatories, most of them declared their own capital the site of the prime meridian, which is why, in

October 1884, twenty-five European countries gathered in Washington, DC, to make a final decision.

Greenwich was high on the list of candidates because so many ships used the port of London, but Smyth was passionately opposed to it. In the
Report of the Committee on Standard Time and Prime Meridian,1
published in Cleveland, Ohio, in June 1884, he argued that the Pyramid was the ideal choice because such a meridian would pass over more land than any other.

The Great Pyramid, he pointed out, was acknowledged to be the grandest monument ever erected. As a further argument, he drew attention to its closeness to Jerusalem, evoked the Second Coming of Christ, and asked whether every good Christian would not agree that a Giza meridian would be ideal.

The answer was no. The delegates were not at the conference as Christians but as scientists. Twenty-two of the twenty-five candidates voted for Greenwich – the French, of

Astronomer Charles Piazzi Smyth recognised that the Great Pyramid was located at the centre of the earth’s land mass.

course, abstaining. And so a thoroughly sensible and logical proposal was rejected.

In 1997, Rand was approached by a friend of John West, an airline pilot, who wanted to know if he had any information to suggest that Giza was the prime meridian – the pilot wanted to organise a Millennium rock concert at Giza, which could claim to have entered the new century two hours before London. When Rand sent him the reference to Smyth it struck him that, since he had the latitude and longitude of so many sacred sites, it would be a simple matter to add or subtract Giza’s longitude (31 degrees, 8 minutes east) to see what would happen if Giza
was
the prime meridian instead of Greenwich. Suddenly dozens of sacred sites began to fit into a vast global pattern.

Quite simply, sites whose latitude and longitude looked unpromising because they seemed ‘too complicated’ (with too many decimals) now began to fall into simple round figures.

For example, Tiahuanaco, whose longitude is 69 degrees west of Greenwich, is also 100 degrees west of the Great Pyramid. The former Inca capital at Quito is at 110 degrees west of Giza and other very significant sites, including Teotihuacan and Easter Island, are found at 120, 130 and 140 degrees west of the Great Pyramid. This pattern also extends eastward. Ur of the Chaldees is exactly 15 degrees east of Giza and the Tibetan capital of Lhasa is 60 degrees east of the Great Pyramid.

What was even more significant was the fact that many of these round figures were phi numbers. Tiahuanaco, for example, was 10 phi; so was the ancient Polynesian spiritual centre Raiatea (this is also at 180 degrees latitude from the Giza meridian). Since I had described so many of them in
my Atlas of Sacred Sites
,
²
I was as astounded and excited as Rand when he told me of his breakthrough.

One of Rand’s most startling discoveries came shortly afterwards. He had discovered that there were no fewer than eight sacred sites at the 10 phi north latitude during the Hudson Bay Pole.

Pyramids and megaliths in America and Easter Island are linked to a Giza prime meridian.

10 phi sites during the Hudson Bay Pole. 10 phi is 4429.2 nautical miles from the Pole, which is equal to 16:11N.

Rand reasoned that there should be a current sacred site at 10 phi north to match Tiahuanaco’s 10 phi south, and that it should also be linked to the Great Pyramid. He had looked in his atlas for a very specific spot: 10 phi north of the equator, and 120 degrees west. There was nothing obvious – just three little red dots, and a name that was so tiny that he had to take off his glasses to read it. He had never heard of it: Labaantum, in Belize in central America. Via the Internet he had found out that ‘Lubaantum (Place of Fallen Stones)’ was an ancient Mayan ceremonial centre with three pyramids and terraces made of dressed stone blocks.

It turns out I could have told Rand about Lubaantum immediately, for I had written an article about it in a book called
Unsolved Mysteries Past and Present
.
³
Lubaantum will always be associated with the famous Crystal Skull, better known as the Skull of Doom, dating to about
AD
700 and discovered in a Mayan temple by the adopted daughter of the explorer F. A. ‘Mike’ Mitchell-Hedges, Anna Mitchell-Hedges, on her seventeenth birthday in 1927.

According to Anna, she had called her father after seeing something shining under an altar. With the help of locals (descendants of the Maya), they moved the stones and saw
that the shining object was the top part of a skull. It proved to be a beautifully carved death’s head. Three months later, Anna found the missing lower jaw buried in rubble. The local Maya told Mitchell-Hedges that the skull had been an object of worship, and had been used for healing and dealing death to enemies. Mitchell-Hedges gave it back to the locals, but when he finally left, at the end of the rainy season, they returned it to him as a mark of appreciation.

There are two other rock crystal skulls in existence, but the ‘Skull of Doom’ is by far the most beautiful and perfect. With the rise of New Age thinking in the 1960s, it became legendary, and many books have been devoted to it.

Oddly enough, Mitchell-Hedges was curiously reticent about the skull in his autobiography
Danger My Ally.4
After claiming that it is at least 3,600 years old and took about 150 years to be polished, Mitchell-Hedges went on to say: ‘How it came into my possession I have reason for not revealing.’

Sadly, the reason was almost certainly that the Skull did not actually originate in Lubaantum. In the 1980s, an American investigator named Joe Nickell unearthed an article about crystal skulls in a journal called
Man,
which dated from 1936, including a description of a skull with a moving jaw that sounded very much like the Skull of Doom. But it stated that this skull was in the possession of an art dealer named Sidney Burney, who had put it up for auction at Sotheby’s in 1943, but it had been withdrawn when the bids reached only £340. The records of the British Museum state that the skull was sold to Mitchell-Hedges for £400 in 1944. Mitchell-Hedges, who died in 1959, at the age of seventy-one, was an adventurer rather than an explorer, and his books – with titles like
Land of Wonder
and
Battles With Giant Fish –
reflect the character of a man who was in some respects an overgrown schoolboy. His character was not above reproach – in 1928 he lost a libel battle against the
Daily Express,
which had accused him of having staged a fake robbery for the sake of publicity – so the Crystal Skull was most likely not found in Lubaantum.

In spite of the uncertainty that surrounds the events of its appearance in the twentieth century, the skull is undoubtedly genuine. The rock crystal from which it is carved probably came from Calaveras County, in California. A Californian art conservator named Frank Dorland, who was allowed to examine the skull for a period of six years, concluded that it might well have been over 12,000 years old. Nickell had objected that mechanical grinding of the teeth proved that it was more recent, but a far less perfect crystal skull in the British Museum, also genuine, displays mechanical grinding of the teeth too. The laboratory of the Hewlett-Packard Company, which manufactures crystal oscillators, subjected the skull to laser-beam tests and concluded that it had been manufactured from a single large crystal and polished over about 300 years, doubling Mitchell-Hedges’s estimate. It had peculiar optical qualities, as if lenses had been inserted inside it, although this is obviously impossible. Dorland claimed that, when he kept it in his house overnight instead of returning it to the bank, there were poltergeist disturbances.

If the skull was
not
found at Lubaantum, why should all this be relevant? Because Frank Dorland concluded that the skull originated in Mexico, and went on to point out that the native peoples there used a grinding wheel driven by a string stretched across a bow.

An altogether more credible figure in South American exploration was Lieutenant-Colonel Percy Harrison Fawcett, whose disappearance was one of the most widely publicised mysteries of the 1920s.

During the last decade of his life, Fawcett was searching for a lost city in the jungles of Brazil. There is strong evidence that this mysterious city really existed. In the National Library in Rio de Janeiro, Manuscript No. 512 gives an account of how, in 1753, a band of Portuguese treasure hunters spent ten years wandering in the vast interior of Brazil, an area that is almost the size of Europe.
⁵
Coming
upon a deserted city built of huge blocks of stone, they decided to return to civilisation for reinforcements and sent an account of the city by native runner to the Viceroy in Bahia. What happened to them then is unknown, and the manuscript lay forgotten in the archives for almost eighty years.

This story actually goes back further, to 1516, twenty-four years after Columbus discovered America, when a Portuguese sailor named Diego Alvarez was the sole survivor of a shipwreck close to the place where Bahia now stands. He was taken captive by a cannibal tribe, the Tupinambas, but for some reason they spared his life and allowed him to live among them. This may have been because of the influence of a local girl named Paraguassu, who became his wife (Fawcett refers to her as ‘the Pocahontas of South America’). More Portuguese arrived, and, through the good offices of Alvarez, they established a colony. Paraguassu’s sister also married a Portuguese, and it was her child, Melchior Dias Moreyra, who became known to the locals as Muribeca. He discovered silver mines and became a wealthy man, but he kept their location in the interior a secret.

Regrettably his son, Roberio Dias, born to wealth, cherished an ambition to become a member of the aristocracy. In about 1610, Roberio approached the King of Portugal, Dom Pedro II, and offered to sell him the mines of Muribeca in exchange for a title of nobility – the Marquis of the Mines.
⁶
The king agreed, but first he wanted to lay his hands on the silver mines.