The Atlantis Blueprint (7 page)

^*
In 1982 anatomically modern humans were thought to be no older than 65,000 years. Today many palaeontologists believe that modern humans may have originated 200,000 years ago.

I
N THE SUMMER
of 1976 a twenty-seven-year-old Canadian named Rand Flem-Ath (he had changed his name from Fleming when he married Rose De’ath and they combined their names) went for a job interview at the Greater Victoria public library in Victoria, which is at the southern tip of Vancouver Island, in British Columbia. He would not hear the result until the following Monday, so to take his mind off the waiting over the weekend he decided to sketch out a screenplay. It was about a group of aliens, marooned on the earth, who decide to hibernate. While he was thinking about a suitable location, he heard a song by Donovan on the radio called ‘Hail Atlantis’. An idea came into his head, and he scrawled on his writing pad: Atlantis = Antarctica’. Since he knew nothing about Atlantis, he spent the rest of the day at the public library reading up on Plato’s lost continent beyond the Pillars of Hercules.

By the time he heard that he had the job, he was so fascinated by his research that there was no question of giving it up. And one reason, oddly enough, was his name. When he was at school, the class had been given an assignment to write
an essay on a famous person who shared their name. Doing research on his famous namesake, Sir Alexander Fleming, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for medicine, he learned how in 1924 Fleming had returned to his lab after a period away. He found that an unwashed culture dish in the sink was sprouting a mould that had killed off bacteria in the area around it. He tested the mould and discovered that it would destroy most bacteria – he had stumbled upon penicillin. Reading of his namesake’s breakthrough, Rand Fleming decided there and then that he would never allow a coincidence to go uninvesti-gated – it could be the doorway to discovery.

Soon after beginning his job with the Greater Victoria public library, Rand stumbled upon his own coincidence. In book after book about Atlantis, he came across the same map. It was drawn by the seventeenth-century Jesuit priest Athanasius Kircher, a polymath who was as famous in his own time as Albert Einstein. In his
Mundus Subterraneus (Subterranean World)
of 1665, Kircher stated that it showed Atlantis, and that it was based on a map stolen from ancient Egypt by Roman invaders and found in the cellars of the Vatican. For some odd reason, Kircher put north at the bottom.

Rand had been an enthusiastic map reader ever since he was seven, when his father, who was in the air force, drove him from Nova Scotia to Arizona and then on to Los Angeles to see Disneyland. Rand was assigned the task of reading the road maps; he enjoyed this job so much that, from then on, he always took over the navigation on car journeys.

The Athanasius Kircher map led him on to the study of ancient charts, and he soon found Hapgood’s
Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings,
with its subtitle
Evidence of Advanced Civilisation in the Ice Age,
in the catalogue of his library. Hapgood’s book took his breath away. Here was a combination of his current obsessions, ancient maps and ice.

Flipping through the pages, he suddenly stumbled upon another significant coincidence. He was looking at a map of Antarctica without the ice, and it looked remarkably similar to

In 1665 Athanasius Kircher published a map of Atlantis which he claimed originated in Egypt. The Latin scroll reads: ‘Site of Atlantis now beneath the sea according to the Egyptians and the description of Plato.’

Kircher’s map with his labels removed.

Kircher’s Egyptian map of Atlantis versus a modern map of ice-free Antarctica.

Kircher’s map of Atlantis. He turned the library’s globe upside-down, and compared what he saw with Kircher’s map. There was certainly a close resemblance. In a pamphlet called
Introduction to Antarctica,1
issued by the Naval Support Force in Antarctica, he came upon a map of the world as
seen
from Antarctica. Again, it was a revelation. It showed Antarctica as the navel of the world, so to speak. Suddenly Plato’s words ‘the whole opposite continent’ took on new meaning. For Antarctica was in the centre, and the continents were all around it, looking like one land mass.

In the West we naturally think of the map of the world from our point of view, with the Atlantic Ocean in the middle, as in the maps of our schooldays, divided off from the other

Oceanographers believe that the earth has only one ocean. The unity of the ‘World Ocean’ can be seen in this US naval projection with Antarctica in the centre. Plato’s account of Atlantis tells of a lost island continent in the ‘real ocean’.

great ocean, the Pacific, by the American continent. Seen from Antarctica, the world has only one great ocean, the ‘true ocean’, just as Plato said.

Rand was so excited by his discovery that he wrote a paper about it, entitled ‘Atlantis of the True Ocean’, and had it notarised. Its opening paragraph contained the comment: ‘Viewed from a satellite perspective, the Earth has but one true ocean, and Antarctica is in its centre… The priest described the location of Atlantis
from Atlantis.’

Rand became obsessed by Atlantis; he now wonders how Rose could tolerate him. He comments: ‘I was a fanatic, as defined by Winston Churchill as someone who can’t change his mind and won’t change the subject.’

There was still one major obstacle to his identification of Atlantis with Antarctica. Every encyclopaedia he consulted said that Antarctica had been under the ice for millions of years. Like Hapgood before him, Rand turned his attention to the problem of what sort of catastrophe could destroy a whole continent in a day and a night.

In the
Laws
,
²
Plato had remarked that world agriculture had originated in highland regions after some catastrophic flood had devastated all the lowland areas. Rand noted that the Soviet botanist Nikolai Ivanovich Vavilov (1887–1943) concluded that the world’s wild plants had eight centres of origin,
³
all in mountain ranges, including Lake Titicaca, in the Andes. Another site is in Thailand, exactly opposite Lake Titicaca, on the other side of the globe.

Rand went on to study the catastrophe myths of many Native American tribes – the Ute, the Kutenai, the Okanagan, the A’a’tam, the Cahto and the Cherokee, as well as the Araucanians of Peru. All have legends of violent earthquakes, followed by floods. Many declare that a change in the face of the sun made it look as if it was splitting apart; there were dozens of flood myths too. It began to look to Rand as if their sheer number pointed to some primeval catastrophe, ‘when the sky fell’.

In April 1977 Rose gave Rand the
National Atlas of Canada
for his twenty-eighth birthday. Here he encountered another anomaly that appeared to offer a clue. A map of Ice Age North America showed that many islands in the far north, where Rand’s father had been stationed when Rand was twelve, had been ice-free during the Ice Age. How could that be?

Rand tracked down a copy of Hapgood’s
Earth’s Shifting Crust
at the University of Victoria, in fact the second edition, retitled
The Path of the Pole.
And when Rand opened it, he found himself looking at the end paper with a map labelled ‘Path of the North Pole’, showing no fewer than three different positions of the pole over the past 80,000 years – the Yukon, the Greenland Sea and Hudson Bay, the latter being the position it occupied until around 9,600
BC.
Hapgood’s vast accumulation of geological and geomagnetic evidence supported his views.

The geographic or what are known as the true North and South Poles are measured by the earth’s axis. However, the magnetic North and South Poles are measured by the location of the highest intensity of the earth’s magnetic field. This is
usually within the proximity of the true pole. Using the fact of this proximity, Hapgood had been able to calculate the position of the former poles by examining their magnetic signatures written in cooling lava and rock in the past. As it flowed from the inner earth, the lava and the metals within it (especially iron) hardened into a position that pointed directly towards the magnetic pole. This provided Hapgood with the data he needed to determine the location of the previous poles.

The main piece of data was very simple. Geologists could trace the extent of the previous ice sheet by the marks it left behind, such as valleys carved by glaciers. We can picture the Arctic Circle as a circular piece of adhesive plaster, with the

Prior to 9,600
BC,
the Arctic Circle was centred on Hudson Bay (60N 83W) and the Antarctic Circle was in the South Indian Ocean (60S 97E).

North Pole as its centre. Before 10,000
BC,
that plaster apparently reached further down, so that its centre was in Hudson Bay and its southernmost edge was as far south as Ohio. As Rand had noticed, the western edge of the plaster did not extend to the west coast of Canada. Hapgood concluded: ‘Thus we are able to say that warm conditions of the Arctic Archipelago of Canada persisted for the entire duration of the Wisconsin glaciation, from 40,000 years ago to the establishment of modern conditions.’

Hapgood presented evidence to demonstrate, in the same way, that the North Pole moved from the Yukon district to the Greenland Sea about 80,000 years ago, then from the Greenland Sea to Hudson Bay about 50,000 years ago, and from Hudson Bay to its present position about 17,000 to 12,000 years ago. In other words, the most recent crustal movement began about 15,000
BC,
and ended about 10,000
BC.