currents in the Bahamas.
“At least two more distinctive, quite discernible structures have been seen in recent weeks,” he said in the spring of 1969. The findings have been confirmed by photographs. The archaeologist and his colleagues applied for clearance from the Bahamian government to begin excavations at the first site near Andros Island. But North American Rockwell Corporation gained exclusive rights.
New finds are a circular structure near Abaco and the pentagon near Andros. “And there are other buildings out there,” he says: A pyramid, road, stone wheels, statuary.
Dr. Valentine, who brings impeccable scientific credentials to the venture, places credence in the lost continent theory of Atlantis. He believes the Bahamas finds may be man’s first conclusive evidence of a sunken civilization. Yet, confusing these discoveries is the fact that a sponge farm was built in one area in the 1920’s and later abandoned.
Other researchers have been working in the region of the Bimini Islands. Two of them, Robert Ferro and Michael Grumley, who have also worked with Dr. Valentine, reported their experiences in the recent volume, Atlantis, The Autobiography of a Search. “It was Wednesday, February 26 (1969), that we found what we found,” they write, “whether . . . sea wall or roadbed . . . whatever . . . it had been built by man, and not as an underwater structure . . . We had been pleased to stand and look down through twenty-five feet of bright clear water and see the monumentally unnatural evidence of a very ancient civilization.”
Underwater investigation revealed that the stones were aligned forming a wall, usually covered by tidal sands. It has been dated to around 10,000 B.C. by carbon-14 tests.
Another researcher, Count Pino Turolla, found the remains of 40 to 50 stone pillars in a circular formation, some standing, some toppled over. They vary from three to six feet in length and two to four feet in width, of white marble not naturally found in the area. He has photographs of his finds in Ferro’s and Grumley’s book.
Although as yet no irrefutable hard evidence of the existence of Atlantis has been brought to light, circumstantial evidence continues to accumulate, along with new scholarly adherents. Professor Denis Saurat, a French philosopher, has staunchly defended a theory advanced earlier by an Austrian cosmogonist that Atlantis may have rested in part at least in the Andes Mountains of South America. Ruins of a strange lost city have been found on the banks of Lake Titicaca, located between Peru and Bolivia, and a mysterious 450-mile-long line of fossilized ocean creatures exist high up in the Andes.
In 1952, a German pastor with a historian and a Swiss archaeologist spent four days anchored in the North Sea a few miles off the coast of Heligoland. Over a carefully selected site, a diver brought back reports of a series of man-made walls and ditches just twenty-five feet below the surface but six miles out to sea. The pastor, Jurgen Spanuth, summed up his claim: “During my studies of Egyptian antiquities, I found in the Temple Medinet Habu of Pharaoh Rameses III, the old Egyptian writings and documents which the Egyptian priest used as proof of Atlantis’ existence when talking to Solon so long ago. These old Egyptian originals are documents of the highest historical value. They alone contain the key to the solution of the Atlantis mystery . . . The documents contain the exact information of the location of the island country, and also of the king’s island which sank during the natural catastrophes. With the help of this information I found the ruins of the sunken fort exactly on the indicated spot—and in three different expeditions thoroughly examined it. In upper Egypt, I photographed the inscriptions and wall pictures (one showing a sea battle between the invading Atlanteans and the Egyptian defenders) which served as proof for Solon’s Atlantis story.”
In 1966, a Greek-American scientific expedition spent two weeks on the Aegean Island of Santorini. They returned to Athens full of hope. Dr. James Mavor, of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts, who headed the team, reported: “Although we have not discovered Atlantis, there are shreds of evidence, which, if put together, point towards a confirmation of the theory that the lost continent should be identified with the Minoan Empire which ruled the Aegean Archipelago and Crete about 1500 B.C.” The group continued its search and uncovered what some believe to be Atlantis, although the date is much too recent.
Other scientists have recently begun to give weight to the Atlantean theory. Maurice Ewing, of LaMont Observatory and a leading authority on the Atlantic Ocean bottom, is one. His expedition found that an abrupt change took place about 11,000 years ago in the Caribbean Sea from cold-water-type plants to warm-water types, and 17,000 years before that there were widespread earth changes. Other U.S. oceanographers, Walter Sproil and Robert S. Dietz of the Environmental Science Services Administration, have theorized that Australia and Antarctica are parts of a once super-continent. They constitute the lands of the continental drift theory—broken off chunks of the present continents, they believe.
Recent discoveries reveal the exclusive presence of fresh water plants in the sedimentary material along the mid-Atlantic submarine ridge, indicating it was once above water. In the Azores, a prominent Russian geologist, Dr. Maria Klionova, reported to the Academy of Sciences of the USSR that rocks dredged up from depths of 6,600 feet showed evidence of having been exposed to the atmosphere about 15,000 B.C. Simlar evidence came to light as long ago as 1898, when pieces of lava were found to have a glassy structure, meaning it could only have solidified in the open air.
The ocean bed is known to be unstable, rising and falling unpredictably. Volcanic islands have suddenly appeared, disappeared, and reappeared. Depth soundings in the Straits of Florida show a series of bumps intriguingly about the size of houses, two thousand feet below the surface. And recent research reveals the sinking of large land areas near Florida and the Bahamas at least eight thousand years ago.
So the circumstantial evidence in favor of the Atlantean theory continues to accumulate. Men of science are beginning to give more credence to the idea. There is every reason to believe that modern technology can eventually resolve the problems and questions that to date have proved insoluble.
We can therefore look forward to some exciting revelations in the years immediately ahead. For the Atlanteans were a unique people, and they may be influencing American life today in unexpected ways.
But let us begin at the beginning.
2
Creation
When man first began to think, he began to ask questions. Among his first questions were these: “Who am I? . . . Where did I come from? . . . What is the purpose and meaning of life? . . . Why do we die—where do we go?” But man’s capacity for asking questions has always been greater than his ability to answer them, and this has served as an intellectual prod—having its role in mental development. Man has not yet satisfied his thirst for knowledge, although deep within himself—unknowingly—lie the answers.
Over the centuries the mystery of man’s origin and that of the universe has provoked the imagination, and the world’s greatest thinkers have devoted themselves to such questions, each building his theories from the work of those who have gone before. The nature of man and the origin of the universe are therefore two of the principal problems of philosophy. Did the earth come into begin through an act of divine creation? Or is it the result of an accidental evolution and growth? Of what basic substance is it made and why is it so diverse? What role does man play in the universe? Is he a mere speck of unimportant matter in an ungoverned, unlimited expanse of space? Or is he the crowning achievement of a Supreme Intelligence?
The first known philosopher to attack these problems was Thales, who lived in Ancient Greece about 600 B.C. He decided that water must be the original stuff of which man and the world were made. For when it was frozen it was solid, and when heated it was mist and air. Therefore, he reasoned,
