The Atlantis Blueprint (8 page)

These movements of the Pole were not gentle and steady, and as far as human beings were concerned this shift from Hudson Bay to its present position probably involved many shocks, some of them cataclysmic, such as the crustal movement in the La Brea area of California around 11,000
BC,
which killed off a dozen species in twenty-five years.

For the next four months, Rand read and reread
The Path of the Pole,
thrilled at the wealth of corroboration that Antarctica might have been Atlantis. Then he co-wrote with Rose a paper on his discoveries, in which they stated:

In July 1977, they sent this paper to Hapgood. The response they received was enthusiastic: ‘I am astonished and delighted by your article which arrived here today. Believe it or not, it is the
first
truly scientific exploration of my work that has ever been done. You have found evidence for crustal displacement that I did not find.’
⁵

They were thrilled, not only by Hapgood’s typical warmth and generosity, but by his acknowledgement that they were doing important work. Rand’s new evidence concerned the fact that in Antarctica the ice was thickest where there was least snowfall, which seemed absurd, since snow turns into ice. Equally odd was the fact that the ice was thinnest in areas with the heaviest snowfall. The most obvious explanation was that the areas with the thickest ice had been within the Antarctic Circle thousands of years longer than the areas with the thinnest ice. In other words, Antarctica had slipped lower, and a part that had once been outside the Antarctic Circle was now located inside it.

Rand had uncovered evidence of a massive floating ice sheet that once extended from the Antarctic to the southern Indian Ocean. If such an ice sheet melted quickly because it suddenly entered a warmer zone, the bottom would be severely disturbed; in fact there was evidence in the scientific literature that that was just what had happened. When the continent of Antarctica, which had once been free of ice, slipped into the Antarctic Circle, it pushed a giant ice sheet – of the type that now covers the North Pole – up towards India on the other side of the globe. Rand found references to this ice sheet in two obscure papers tucked away in the journal
Science,6
published since Hapgood’s
Path of the Pole.

Rand had made another important discovery that had eluded Hapgood: the work of a forgotten writer named William Fairfield Warren, the founder of Boston University,
who had first conjectured that worldwide myths of a falling sky and a lost paradise were memories of a great geological upheaval, although he suggested that this original paradise was at the North Pole.
Paradise Found: The Cradle of the Human Race at the North Pole
(1885)7 is an immensely erudite work, obviously inspired by Donnelly’s
Atlantis,
citing evidence from Japanese and Chinese literature and a vast array of ancient cultures: Persian, Egyptian, Akkadian, Assyrian, Babylonian and Greek.

Rand also discovered the work of another forgotten scholar, the Indian Bal Gangadhar Tilak, who published studies of the earliest Indian sacred texts, the Vedas. Tilak, inspired by Warren, wrote
The Arctic Home in the Vedas
(1903).
⁸
He had found evidence for Warren’s arctic paradise in the scriptures of ancient India, as well as in the Persian
Zendavesta,
especially in the fact that the ancient scriptures contain evidence of knowledge of polar conditions, including the length of the polar day and night. The unknown authors of the Vedic hymns appeared to be familiar with the geography of the polar regions.

Rand pointed out that if Tilak had not been so influenced by Warren’s interpretation of Vedic literature, which placed north at the centre of the earth, he would have seen that the Antarctic was a far likelier home for his island paradise. Hapgood had pointed out, in any case, that the North Pole ice cap dated back at least 50,000 years, which was an unlikely time for the island paradise to have evolved, whereas the Antarctic ice sheet dates back only 10,000 or 15,000 years. (Rand was mildly irritated when Hapgood used his arguments about Warren and Tilak in the second edition of
Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings
in 1979 without acknowledgement.)
⁹

As delighted as they were with Hapgood’s warm encouragement, the Flem-Aths were puzzled that he failed to react to the suggestion that Atlantis
was
Antarctica. If someone had taken the trouble to map the interior of Antarctica when it was
divided into two islands, the people most likely to be responsible were, surely, its inhabitants? It was not until 1995, when Rand was investigating the Hapgood archives at Yale, that he realised that Hapgood thought he had already discovered Atlantis much further north, in the Rocks of St Peter and St Paul. Rand’s own view, however, was that Hapgood was mistaken. It was true that the mysterious island on the Piri Reis map looked about 250 by 350 miles, and that according to Plato the plain behind the city of Atlantis was about 229 by 343 miles,
*
but Plato also explained that the continent of Atlantis was as big as Libya and Asia (approximately North Africa and the Middle East) put together, the mountainous part of Atlantis being far greater than the plain. There is no sign of a continent as large as that beneath the Atlantic.

Encouraged by Hapgood as Hapgood had been by Einstein, Rand and Rose began work on a book called
Atlantis At Last!,
which summarised the results of his research. It was finished in 1980. They began to look for a publisher and Rand continued to develop his own theories about ‘when the sky fell’.

In 1981 Rand and Rose (who had been born in England) moved to London, where Rand was able to use the facilities of the British Museum Reading Room to continue his research on Atlantis. To support themselves, Rose found work as a temp, while he found work at the Conoco oil company.

The job suited Rand; he was in daily contact with geologists and geophysicists, for it was his responsibility to provide them with maps of the North Sea bed, along with available geological evidence, in preparation for a government announcement about North Sea oil exploration. The information Rand was gathering would enable the company to decide which areas to bid for. He led a team of five people, and his skills in map-reading served him well. He also enjoyed discussing Hapgood’s shifting crust theory with professional geologists,
and was pleased to find that so many were open-minded about it. All his spare time was spent in the British Museum. They found a publisher for
Atlantis at Last!,
but unfortunately it went out of business before publication. However, Rand’s days in the Reading Room were providing so much fascinating information that publication undoubtedly would have been premature and would have led to a sense of anticlimax. He worked on with an increasing excitement as new discoveries strengthened his certainty that Hapgood’s theory of earth’s shifting crust was sound.

What continued to puzzle him was why Hapgood continued to be ignored by earth scientists, even though his arguments for ‘the path of the pole’ were backed with such a mass of scientific evidence and scientific acceptance of the theory of plate teton-ics had made his crust displacement theory far less controversial. While following up some remarks by Hapgood on the origins of agriculture, he stumbled upon a possible explanation in a book called
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
by Thomas S. Kuhn. Its arguments had made Kuhn famous – or infamous – in the scientific community when it appeared in 1962: Kuhn had proposed that scientists are mistaken to think of the pursuit of science as a detached and unemotional activity. Once they have become comfortably settled with a certain theory – Kuhn preferred to use the word ‘paradigm’ – they develop an emotional attachment to it, like a mother with a baby, and if anyone challenges it they become defensive, remaining totally convinced that their irritation is the annoyance of a reasonable man in the face of time-wasting absurdities. This is why the great scientific revolutions – of Copernicus, Newton, Einstein and quantum theory – encountered such furious resistance. Even into the 1960s, the eminent British geophysicist Sir Harold Jeffreys maintained that the earth’s crust is immovable in spite of the evidence of plate tetonics. Kuhn pointed out that the proof required to budge such entrenched opinion is enormous – facts stand no chance in the face of a lifetime of believing in the same theory.

Now working for a group called Business International, a consulting firm specialising in providing research for corporate executives, Rand encountered an instructive – and amusing example – of this. He became a friend of one of Kuhn’s graduate students, and on many occasions the two of them discussed Hapgood’s shifting crust theory, with Rand explaining how it could account for the origins of agriculture, extinctions and glaciation patterns. After several months, Kuhn’s student was in total agreement that Hapgood’s crust displacement was a good example of Kuhn’s ‘paradigm shifts’ and the kind of hostility they encounter, until one day, when Rand admitted that his interest in the subject had been triggered by Plato’s account of Atlantis. Suddenly Kuhn’s student refused to discuss earth crust displacement any more.

Concerned that increasing commitments to their careers might prevent them from dedicating their energies to developing their ideas about Atlantis, Rand and Rose decided to return to Victoria to work on the book. The four years in London had been of immense importance to the development of Rand’s theory. After Hapgood’s death in 1982 – which shook Rand badly – Rand felt that he had inherited the problems that Hapgood had left unsolved.

The main one, of course, was what actually caused the crust to shift. In
The Path of the Pole
Hapgood had come to agree with Einstein that the answer was
not
the ‘washing machine’ effect, whereby an irregular polar ice cap caused the earth to ‘judder’, but he had accumulated a vast amount of other evidence that the crust does shift. Rand was inclined to believe that Milankovich’s hypothesis about ice ages was right, agreeing that they occur when three factors – tilt, perihelion and eccentricity – coincide. He concluded that the main factor was the earth’s 41,000-year tilt cycle.
¹¹

Rand and Rose wrote
When the Sky Fell,
and began to submit it to publishers. Perhaps he might have been better off retaining the old
title Atlantis at Last!.
If Rand had suggested
that the ancient maps proved that the earth had been visited by extraterrestrials from another galaxy, the book would probably have been accepted by the first publisher who read it, but a sober study on earth crust displacement, with an appendix on the origins of agriculture, seemed to lack bestseller potential, even if it did argue that Atlantis was in Antarctica. Hapgood was forgotten and his works had fallen out of print; why bother to revive them? One publisher found it ‘fascinating but too academic’, and another ‘intriguing but too academic’, while a third said it left him breathless but he couldn’t figure out what audience they had in mind. Finally, the Flem-Aths accepted that the book would never be published.

A decade passed, during which Rand and Rose moved to Vancouver Island. A publisher had not been found for the Atlantis book, but Rand continued to read the scientific literature on archaeology, mammal extinctions and anything else that had a bearing on his quest for Atlantis. Although he was unaware of it, the climate was gradually becoming more favourable for his book. The breakthrough came when John Anthony West read the manuscript and agreed to write an afterword.

West was an Egyptologist, although he would certainly not have been recognised as such by the archaeological establishment. To begin with, he was fascinated by the work of a man who was unmentionable in Egyptological circles: René Schwaller de Lubicz. Schwaller (the ‘de Lubicz’ was bestowed later by a Lithuanian prince of his acquaintance) was the son of a well-to-do Alsatian pharmacist; he went to Paris in his twenties to study painting under Matisse, but soon moved into the study of theosophy and alchemy. He founded an ‘esoteric school’ called Suhalia near St Moritz, in Switzerland; after it broke up in 1929, he and his wife Isha moved to a large country mansion in Grasse, in the south of France, then in 1937 to Egypt, where he became fascinated by the temple of Luxor.

Schwaller came to believe that the Egyptians possessed a mode of thought that the modern world is almost incapable of grasping. In Alexandria he visited the tomb of Rameses IX,
where he was fascinated by a painting that showed a right-angled triangle in which the hypotenuse was formed by the body of the pharaoh. The sides of the triangle formed the ratio 3:4:5, in other words, the triangle with which every schoolchild is taught Pythagoras’s theorem that the square on the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the square of the other two sides. Schwaller was intrigued, since Rameses IX ruled around 1,100
BC,
more than 500 years before Pythagoras. Since Schwaller had spent many years studying the architecture of the cathedrals of the Middle Ages, he was familiar with the story that the knowledge of the medieval masons came from ancient Egypt. He began a systematic study of Egyptian temples, and of Luxor in particular.

The first thing that strikes the tourist who looks at his map of Luxor is that the temple is ‘bent’, as if the courtyard that lies inside the entrance has been knocked slightly sideways by a blow from a giant mallet. Since the Egyptians were master builders, who could place blocks together so precisely that a razor blade cannot be inserted between them, there is obviously a reason for this anomaly. The marvellous harmony of the architecture leaves little doubt that it is part of some geometrical plan.