The Atlantis Blueprint Read online

  What about the other forty-nine ‘misaligned’ Mexican sites?

  Rand examined four – Tula, Tenayucan, Xochicalco and Copan – and the results were always the same. The layout of all of the sites seemed to point within a degree of the old North Pole, as if they pointed at the old North Pole like signposts.

  Aveni made one extremely interesting comment: ‘Many persist in believing that what we’re really looking at are the remains of a mega-land survey undertaken by a vanished civilisation of Atlanteans.’ He obviously had in mind writers such as Peter Tompkins (author of Secrets of the Great Pyramid25 and Mysteries of the Mexican Pyramids)26 and the British writer John Michell,27 who popularised the concept of ‘ley lines’ – lines of earth-force – in the 1970s, but he had only mentioned this idea to dismiss it. Like all academics Aveni would have regarded Atlantis as purely mythical, a happy hunting ground for cranks. Since both Hapgood and Rand were fairly certain that Atlantis – or some civilisation like it – had actually existed, Aveni’s comment was certainly thought-provoking.

  Let us assume, for the sake of argument, that there had been some kind of sacred temple at Teotihuacan before 10,000 BC,and that it was aligned on the old North Pole. And let us also assume that the forty-nine other ‘misaligned’ sites in Mexico were also aligned on the Hudson Bay Pole. If Hapgood is correct, Antarctica would have been perhaps 2,000 miles further north than it is today, and would have had a pleasant, temperate climate.

  The different locations under scrutiny suggest a civilisation that is spread over a fairly wide area. Professor Posnansky thought that Tiahuanaco, in the Andes, had been a flourishing city around 10,000 BCand that it had been so since 15,000 BC.We also seem to be looking at something like Hapgood’s notion of a worldwide maritime civilisation (he dated this around 7,000 BC,but we also know that he believed that Atlantis was destroyed in 9,600 BC).If such a civilisation existed, then the idea of a ‘mega-land survey’ ceases to look absurd. Hapgood’s ‘maps of the ancient sea kings’ implied something of the sort – maps that showed the present Antarctica when it was free of ice.

  At this point, a website called ‘How Far Is It?’ enabled Rand to calculate the exact distance from any place on earth to any other spot. More importantly, it also showed the exact bearings from one to the other. Sadly the first result of this new tool was a major disappointment. When Rand used it to calculate the position of Teotihuacan relative to the Hudson Bay Pole, he discovered that it did not, after all, point at it like a signpost – it was at an angle of 11.6 degrees rather than the 15.5 degrees he had been assuming. Rand pressed on with his studies. The idea that the Mexican sites pointed to the old North Pole like different signposts had not been proved, even though so many were aligned east of north, but the website had given him another, and equally useful, tool – distance.

  All over the earth, 1 degree of latitude is equal to roughly 70 miles. (Degrees of longitude, by contrast, vary from 66 miles at the equator to inches at the poles. Indeed, at the North or South Pole you can walk around all the earth’s longitudes in seconds.)

  Rand knew that the Great Pyramid revealed an extraordinary knowledge of mathematics and geography. Its four sides are aligned exactly to the four points of the compass, and its site is exactly 30 degrees north of the equator – precisely one-third of the distance from the equator to the pole. Evidence that the Egyptians knew the length of the equator and its distance from the poles and that the Pyramid itself is intended to represent half of the earth, from the equator to the North pole, indicates that the Egyptians of 2,500 BChad knowledge of worldwide geography.

  Would the Great Pyramid, probably the most famous sacred site in the world, yield any evidence to support the theory that sacred sites were aligned on the old North Pole?

  Rand fed the Giza co-ordinates into the website, and discovered that, at the time of the Hudson Bay Pole, Giza would have been 15 degrees further south (naturally, because the pole itself was further south). Rand now imagined drawing a line from the Great Pyramid to the old North Pole, and another from the Great Pyramid to the present pole. He discovered that the angle between the two lines was 28 degrees – the number 28 seems to play a basic part in the Giza site: there are 28 steps in the Grand Gallery that leads up to the King’s Chamber, and the Sphinx Temple had 28 pillars. Moreover, in Keeper of Genesis, Bauval and Hancock had pointed out that, as seen from Giza, the solstice points (the positions where the sun comes up over the horizon during the longest day of the year and the shortest day of the year) are 56 degrees apart – that is, 28 degrees between each solstice* and the equinox point.

  Rand’s most exciting discovery was that the Sphinx Temple had a 28-degree bearing from the mortuary temple of the Great Pyramid, and that if this bearing is extended it points literally like a signpost to the Hudson Bay Pole.

  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

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

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

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

  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 Hanco
ck, 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.

  *The figures Plato gives are 3,000 by 2,000 stadia (or stade), and a stadia (or stade) is roughly equivalent to an English furlong, about an eighth of a mile.

  *Solstices occur on the dates (22 December and 21 June) when the sun stops rising further north or south every day, and turns back (at the Tropic of Cancer or Capricorn) to retrace its route. as the Mexican sites are misaligned to the east of the present North Pole (i.e., towards the old Hudson Bay Pole), so the Middle Eastern sites were oriented to the west of it, again towards the Hudson Bay Pole. These included:

  3

  The Giza Prime Meridian

  IN 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.

  Sacred Distance to HBP Former

  Site Co-ordinates (nautical miles) latitude

  Baalbek 34:00N/36:12E 4,431 16:09N

  Paracas 13:50S/76:11W 4,431 16:09N

  Cuzco 13:32S/71:57W 4,433 16:07N

  Sidon 33:32N/35:22E 4,437 16.03N

  Machu Picchu 13:08S/72:30W 4,407 16:33N

  Ehdin 34:19N/35:57E 4,408 16:32N

  Ollantaytambo 13:14S/72:17W 4,414 16:26N

  Nineveh 36:24N/43:08E 4,451 15:49N

  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.