The Atlantis Blueprint (42 page)

We know that Hapgood was keeping something back: his belief that Plato’s Atlantis was a true story, and that therefore a maritime civilisation had existed since well before 10,000
BC.
This notion accords with the views of Neil Steede and Oswaldo Rivera, the Director of Bolivian Archaeology, that

Tiahuanaco may be as much as 12,000 years old. (Steede has since revised his estimate downward to 9,000
BC
– which would be, of course, after the flood.)

We may also recall Robert Bauval’s view that the ancient Egyptians regarded the Nile as a reflection of the Milky Way, and placed the pyramids accordingly. And in
The Sacred Valley of the Incas: Myths and Symbols,
Fernando Salazar explains in detail how the valley of the Vilcanota River, which includes Machu Picchu and Ollentaytambo, was carefully landscaped to reflect the Milky Way, and that the astronomical knowledge encoded in it extends back to the building of Tiahuanaco. Whenever we look into the distant past, we seem to discover that ancient peoples possessed a sophisticated astronomy.

Rand’s Atlantis blueprint – particularly the fact that a series of American sites are linked to a Giza prime meridian – carries Hapgood’s argument one step further. If Tiahuanaco was built – as Steede now believes – around 9,000
BC,
then we must suppose the Giza meridian was also in use at that time. It is, in fact, Rand’s view that the Giza meridian must be ‘post-flood’ because all the meridians link to the North Pole.

Rand’s blueprint obviously goes further than Hapgood for, if he is correct, Tiahuanaco was only one of a worldwide web of religious sites. It also seems to emerge that whoever did the ‘siting’ was aware of the earlier crust movements that preceded the Hudson Bay Pole. Rand’s blueprint shows that many sites can be aligned on the two earlier poles, suggesting some tradition that extends back at least 100,000 years.

Let me try to give an overall picture of the theory that is beginning to emerge. The notion that our ancestors were ignorant cavemen is a misconception – they were far more intelligent than we give them credit for. Our mistake lies in identifying intelligence with the left brain. There is a deeper, more intuitive kind of intelligence, which is almost beyond our comprehension.

Compared to the intelligence of early man, the intelligence
of modern man is like a microscope compared to a telescope. Modern man
narrows
his senses to study minutiae. Our remote ancestors widened their perceptions to try to understand the cosmos. This explains, for example, why the precession of the equinoxes has been known for hundreds of generations.

Enormous and catastrophic crust movements also gave ancient man an urgent reason for studying the earth under his feet. A fairly simple ‘predicter’ built of posts, a ‘Uriel’s machine’, would have served his purpose.

The ‘blueprint’ recognises that, while there are more than sixty sacred sites related to the Hudson Bay Pole, there are eight that are related to the Hudson Bay Pole and, at the same time, to the Yukon Pole: Byblos, Jericho, Nazca, Cuzco, Xi’an, Aguni, Pyongyang and Rosslyn Chapel.

We believe that the ‘great catastrophe’ took place about 9,600
BC,
and that the North Pole then moved to its present position. Which implies, of course, that Atlantis (or whatever we choose to call this earlier civilisation) existed for some time before 9,600
BC.
H ow long before? It must surely have been a long time, since the Atlanteans established more than sixty sacred sites all over the world.

Looking through the sacred sites, Rand noted that Avebury, Abydos and Nippur represented a special case. Most people are familiar with Avebury because it is ‘next door’ to Stonehenge, but not all of us are aware of the significance of Nippur and Abydos.

Nippur was the religious capital of the Sumerians and is where the epic of
Gilgamesh
was discovered at the end of the nineteenth century by the Babylonian Expedition from the University of Pennsylvania. Christian and Barbara Joy O’Brien, whom we met in Chapter 7, base much of their research on their translation of the Kharsag Epic, another remarkable piece of Sumerian mythology discovered at the holy city of Nippur.

The ‘Osireion’, a key building at Abydos (the birthplace of Osiris), was discovered in 1903 and excavated in 1913–14.

Like the Temple in front of the Great Sphinx, it was built using massive stones, many weighing 100 tons. Professor Naville, of the 1914 Egypt Exploration Fund that undertook the excavation, wrote: ‘I should even say that we may call it the most ancient stone building in Egypt.’

Like the eight sites listed above, Avebury, Abydos and Nippur were linked to the Yukon Pole, but they were also, Rand observed, all slightly misaligned to the Hudson Bay Pole.

Was it possible, he wondered idly, that these three had been the ‘original’ sacred sites? He had already told me he suspected that the time of the Yukon Pole was regarded by later generations as a kind of Golden Age, so it would be natural that the original ‘markers’ should have been related to it.

He had another reason for believing these three sites to be unique. When he studied their latitudes, he realised they were all one degree ‘out’ when compared with the other seven earlier sites mentioned above. According to Rand’s calculation, for example, in order to match the pattern of the other seven sites, Avebury should have been at 45 degrees north, but was actually at 46. Abydos and Nippur should both have been at 10, but were actually at 11.

Supposing that, during the time when Avebury, Abydos and Nippur were the only sacred sites, something extraordinary happened; some cosmic event, like a close encounter with a comet, that caused a one-degree shift in the earth’s crust. We must bear in mind that one degree on the surface of the earth is about seventy miles. And if it happened fairly quickly, the result must have been fairly traumatic – although, of course, nothing like the 30-degree slide of 9,600
BC.

Such an ‘earlier shift’, which Rand refers to as the ‘X-event’, could explain why Avebury, Abydos and Nippur were misaligned by one degree. The X-event would have acted, as he put it, as a ‘kick in the ass’, and sixty-six more ‘catastrophe-predictors’ were hastily established to supplement the initial three at Avebury, Abydos and Nippur. I asked Rand: ‘When
do you think this X-event occurred?’ His answer was: ‘I don’t know. All I know is that it was before 9,600
BC
’

Without a date and physical evidence to substantiate the X-event, Rand admits that this idea of ‘early-warning’ bases must remain pure speculation. But he points out that Enoch seemed to have foreknowledge of the coming flood when he spoke to Noah. That knowledge could plausibly have come from changes in the position of Avebury, Abydos and/or Nippur following a one-degree ‘mini-displacement’.

Rand also believes that his blueprint theory can find the lost city of Atlantis.

In the second half of the 1980s the study of ‘mitochondrial DNA’ (DNA inherited only from females) led to the discovery that modern humans all sprang from one ‘mitochondrial Eve’ about 200,000 years ago. The footprints of an anatomically modern woman were discovered in South Africa in 1997; she had walked across the Langebaan Lagoon 117,000 years ago. In short, there is now a consensus that modern humans emerged before 100,000 years ago.

100,000 years ago the Arctic Circle was centred upon the Yukon Pole.

The usual date given for the emergence of Cromagnons is about 40,000 years ago, when they appeared in Europe. Where were they between 100,000 years and 40,000 years ago?

Rand’s suggested answer is Lesser Antarctica. According to Hapgood’s
The Path to the Pole,
the North Pole was in the Yukon 100,000 years ago. Note that the Antarctic Circle extended towards southern Africa where, we know, the remains of anatomically modern humans were found. The presence there of seashells, along with the human fossils dating to 92,000 years ago, means our ancestors knew how to exploit the ocean from an early date. But how could they have travelled from southern Africa to South America and Antarctica?

Thor Heyerdahl demonstrated that the ocean currents act as silent conveyor belts, like the moving sidewalks in airports. If modern humans were exploiting sea resources on the shores of South Africa during the Yukon Pole, then it is entirely predictable what would happen to them when
—
as was bound to

100,000 years ago, the ocean currents in the South Atlantic would have carried people from South Africa to America and Lesser Antarctica

The ‘Atlantis Channel’ separated mainland Antarctica from the islands lying towards South America.

happen – some were swept out to sea. We know that Japanese sailors made their way across the wider Pacific Ocean, landing in California and eventually finding their way to Arizona.
¹⁴
In 1999 fossils discovered in Brazil proved to belong to an Australian Aborigine.
¹⁵

Ocean currents in the southern hemisphere move in a counter-clockwise direction. The following map shows the ocean and wind patterns prior to 91,600
BC:
People on boats or rafts could have been carried from South Africa, up the west coast of the continent, and across the South Atlantic, to Brazil or Argentina – and to the ice-free regions of Lesser Antarctica. At this time there would have been a channel between the mainland and Antarctica’s chain of islands, which Rand calls the ‘Atlantis Channel’. This would have had an impact upon the ocean and wind currents because it would have allowed passage into the Pacific side of Lesser Antarctica.

Now we have a scenario whereby modern humans were transported by ocean currents to Lesser Antarctica before the
crust displacement of 91,600 years ago. With the Greenland displacement of 50,600 years ago, humans suddenly reappeared in Africa, Asia and Australia. After each displacement, people spread across the world, which may not be a coincidence. Around 91,600
BC,
after a crust displacement, we find the fossil remains of humans in South Africa. The 50,600
BC
displacement brought a sudden influx of people into Asia and even Australia. With the last displacement of 9,600
BC
a flood of humans arrived in both North and South America, as well as (if Schwaller de Lubicz is right) Egypt. The last wave of refugees carried rich tales of a lost island paradise in the south that was destroyed by a flood.

Is it not possible, Rand asks, that modern humans evolved on Lesser Antarctica during the 40,000 years of silence in the fossil record? If so, then we should find there the remains of modern humans dating back 50,000 or possibly 125,000 years or more.

Lomas and Knight have constructed ‘Uriel’s machine’ for studying the heavens, and they also deduced, from the words of the prophet Enoch, at what latitude the machine must have been located in ‘paradise’. Their analysis of this data shows, they believe, that Enoch was taken to a place between the range of latitudes 51 and 59 degrees north.
¹⁶
They rule out the southern hemisphere because ‘the first thing we could be reasonably certain of was that his latitude must be north of the equator, because the only land at these latitudes to the south would place him in Chile, Argentina, Tasmania or New Zealand, which all seemed equally improbable’.
¹⁷