Skeptics, archaeologists, geologists, and anthropologists may rant and rave, but the myth of Atlantis endures. In every generation, someone emerges to champion the cause and to embroider the story. None of this disputation, though, might be happening if it hadn't been for one very critical and unfortunate event. The burning of the Great Library of Alexandria was a stunning blow to the advancement of knowledge. If any single event could be said to have ushered in the Dark Ages, it was the destruction of the Great Library, and the decimation of Alexandria as a world repository of learning and enlightenment. At its height, around 200 A.D., the library is said to have contained about 700,000 scrolls and codices.

According to Edgar Cayce, the Atlanteans migrated to Egypt prior to 10,500 B.C. and brought with them the chronicles of 40,000 years of history of Atlantean civilization. And according to Plato, Egyptian priests told Solon, the Greek philosopher, the story of Atlantis around 500 B.C. If the Egyptian priests knew about it then, there is a distinct possibility that some of their knowledge could have wound up in the Great Library 300 years later. Given the indefatigable scouring of the world for scrolls by all the Ptolemies, they certainly wouldn't have missed those under their collective noses, in Egypt. Whatever scarce records of ancient Egypt existed, probably looted from tombs and temples, surely must have been in that library.

Edgar Cayce said that the chronicles themselves would eventually be found in what he called The Hall of Records, in another pyramid that is wholly underground and not yet discovered, somewhere near the Sphinx. That discovery, of course, would settle the matter once and for all. But without such absolute proof, it is necessary to rely on whatever clues we can get our hands on.

SCHOLARS AND PSYCHICS

The stakes are high. Discovery of the proof of existence of an advanced, high-tech civilization 50,000 years ago will have tremendous ramifications in the scientific, religious and social arenas. It will drastically alter almost all of our cherished, long-held beliefs, including many so-called scientific dogmas, and will throw an entirely new light on the origins of the human race. Darwinian evolution would have to go the way of the dinosaur. Science would have to take a totally new turn to study all of the marvelous scientific achievements of the Atlanteans. Major religions would have great difficulty trying to fit this new body of information into their teachings.

In the absence of ancient records about, and/or archaeological evidence for, the existence of Atlantis, two sources of information have rushed in to fill the vacuum. First, a new breed of scholar has emerged, highly intuitive and no longer bound to rigid, archaic academic research traditions. These have been bold investigative pioneers who have painstakingly brought together information from hundreds of unlikely sources to piece together the Atlantis scenario. Then, psychics, clairvoyants and channelers have picked up where the archaeologists and anthropologists leave off.

CAYCE'S ATLANTIS

But indisputably, the most prolific figure in either category in terms of sheer volume of Atlantis information was Edgar Cayce, the Sleeping Prophet of Virginia Beach. Cayce, who died in 1945, left behind a massive body of literature consisting of every reading he ever gave, all dutifully recorded verbatim by his long-time secretary, Gladys Turner. In giving Life readings for questioners, Cayce frequently made reference to previous lives lived on Atlantis. So, over the 20-year period of active Cayce readings from 1923 to 1944, a large body of Atlantis information was accumulated and subsequently archived by the organization which Cayce founded in Virginia Beach, the Association for Research and Enlightenment (A.R.E.). Remarkably, readings given by Cayce about Atlantis as much as twenty years apart, agreed completely! Much of it provided new details of Atlantean life, from the viewpoint of those who lived it.

Over the years, as the A.R.E. grew larger, interest in Atlantis data gathered steam. More and more, believers in Cayce, especially those in his own family, came to realize that if the existence of Atlantis could be proven, Cayce would be largely validated, and a lot of skeptics would come into the fold. Consequently, the Cayce organization under the leadership of his oldest son, Hugh Lynn, became actively involved in archaeological research in the two parts of the world most likely to produce evidence of Atlantis according to Cayce himself, Egypt and Bimini in the Bahamas. Starting in 1957, and continuing through the eighties, A.R.E. funded limited programs of exploration in both places under the aegis of the Edgar Cayce Foundation (ECF), and several A.R.E.-connected investigators have participated at their own expense.

Then, in the mid eighties, Edgar Cayce's youngest son, Edgar Evans Cayce, realized that it was time to write a book about the state of Atlantis-related research in general, covering the results of all of the ECF programs. His book, Mysteries of Atlantis (Harper & Rowe), was coauthored by his daughter Gail Cayce Schwartzer and Douglas G. Richards, and was published in 1988. The book sold steadily in small numbers all over the world out of the original printing up until 1997, when the same authors added an update covering research developments up to the present, and now this new version has also been released by St. Martin's Paperbacks. Recently, Atlantis Rising met with Edgar Evans Cayce and his daughter at the A.R.E in Virginia Beach.

Edgar Evans told us that he spent a year studying every one of his father's readings, to find all references to Atlantis. Statistically, it turned out that almost one-third of the life readings mention Atlantis.

THE SEARCH IN EGYPT

The main purpose of the book was to correlate recent research with Cayce's story of Atlantis to see if any new discoveries tend to validate Cayce's claims, some of which were rather fantastic. The book presents the good with the bad. Ironically, it was an ECF sponsored project that refuted one of the most controversial of Cayce's statements. He said that the Great Pyramid was built in 10,500 B.C. If true, this would tend to support the premise that it was built using Atlantean technology, since there is no official history of Egypt predating 3,500 B.C. In 1983 the ECF obtained permission from the Egyptian Antiquities Organization (EAO) to use carbon 14 dating to determine the true age of the monuments at Giza.

The study was carried out by Dr. Robert J. Wenke, a prehistorian at the University of Washington, who was also, at that time, the director of The American Research Center in Egypt (ARCE). The ARCE was formed in 1948 and has now become the preeminent organizer of American Egyptology research representing as it does, a consortium of American universities and museums, and is funded both publicly and privately. Presumably, it was the involvement of the ARCE that convinced the EAO to approve the project.

Dr. Wenke employed the Radiocarbon Laboratory at Southern Methodist University under the supervision of Dr. Herbert Haas to do the carbon dating. They used the new, more accurate, system of tree ring dating for calibration. The results, based on a collection of 72 samples, were somewhat surprising although not agreeing with Cayce's date. The Great Pyramid was dated about 374 years earlier than expected, about 3000 B.C., which places it well before the reign of Chephren (Khufu) and his predecessor, Sneferu. According to Cayce, it took 100 years to build, which pushes the date back even further. So, the question of who built it, and why, still remains a mystery, since it was definitely not Chephren's tomb.

Edgar Evans and Gail Schwarzer told us that the EAO was not at all pleased with the results, and shortly after they were presented in Egypt, prohibited any such material from leaving the country in the future. AR readers will recall (Issue No. 5) that Robert Bauval's theory may explain Cayce's apparent error. He believes that the planning for the Giza pyramid complex began in 10,500 B.C., but the priests had to wait for the right conditions before beginning construction. Perhap some of the underground work was actually commenced at that time. Then again, there is a distinct possibility of a fundamental error in the premise of carbon 14 dating. According to Chris Dunn (AR Issue #11), tree ring dating has revealed that there was a much higher concentration of C14 in the atmosphere before 10,000 B.C., possibly because an industrial civilization existed in that remote time frame.

On the other side of the ledger, there is growing scientific support for Cayce's contention that the Sphinx was built in 10,500 B.C. AR readers are by now well aware of the research of John Anthony West, so it shouldn't be necessary to repeat the details here. The authors include this information in the 1997 update to the book, and also discuss the revelations of Robert Schoch, a Yale-trained geologist whose work basically supports West's conclusions that much of the erosion at the base of the Sphinx was from water, and not from wind and sand.

Edgar Cayce also made mention of The Hall of Records. He claimed that the Atlantean emigres decided to carry their records to two places, Egypt and the Yucatan. On the face of it, given today's technology, if a concerted effort were mounted, we should be able to find out if such a chamber is buried where Cayce said it is, i.e., near the right paw of the Sphinx between the Sphinx and the Nile. However, the EAO is a very conservative organization, and justifiably very protective of their national archaeological treasures.

In the early 1970s the National Science Foundation sponsored a joint effort mounted by the Ain Shams University in Egypt, and the Stanford Research Institute to use ground-penetrating radar on the Giza Plateau. This technique was non-productive because of the nature of the rock and the terrain. However, it led to an expanded project in 1977, again sponsored by the NSF, this time using very sophisticated methods, including resistivity probing, magnetometry, aerial photography, and thermal infrared imagery. They discovered five anomalies, two of which were in front of the paws of the Sphinx, one of which they claimed was 10 meters deep, and the strong possibility of a tunnel aligned northwest to southeast behind the Sphinx. These same techniques later detected the boat chamber at the base of the Great Pyramid. These encouraging results, which seemed to support the Cayce statements, prompted the ECF to continue the research. In 1978, they funded a joint project with SRI for an exhaustive remote-sensing survey of the Sphinx sanctuary and the Sphinx Temple. Using a new technique called immersion acoustics they did detect some significant shadow zones or blind spots, not previously discovered. But they were not able to go any further due to internal problems and the expense of the project.

UNDERWATER ROADS

The Bimini research was equally frustrating, with similar exciting discoveries leading to blind alleys, discreditation, or ultimately left unexplored. The authors discuss the famous discovery of the underwater road in 1968, precisely when Cayce said Atlantis would rise again. Zoologist and amateur archaeologist J. Manson Valentine, and noted underwater explorer Dmitri Rebikoff found the site one-half mile off Bimini. Huge rectangular stone blocks under 15 feet of water appeared to have been placed intelligently to form a distinct road stretching for hundreds of feet, and ending in a sharp right-angle turn. It was ultimately concluded that it was a natural formation. However one of the investigators that so pronounced it, a geology student named John Gifford, continued the exploration in the early 70s with two amateur archeologists, Talbot Lindstrom and Steven Proctor, and found another similar formation not far away, which they named Proctor's Road. This one ran in a straight line for over a mile. This discovery was written up in the March 1982 issue of Explorer's Journal by Lindstrom.

Then, in 1974, Valentine succeeded in arousing the interest of Dr. David Zink, an English professor at Lamar University in Texas. An expert blue-water sailor, scuba diver, and underwater photographer, Zink had previously taught military communications at the Air Force Academy. Zink was sufficiently impressed by both road sites to mount a serious expedition, which he christened Poseidia '75. He assembled a team of divers, archaeologists and geologists, and produced detail mappings of the entire site. He also found some blocks that were clearly not natural formations, which led him to believe that it was not a road, but rather a megalithic site similar to Stonehenge. Then, in the summer of 1975, Zink's team discovered a 300-pound marble sculpture that resembled a head, and a tongue-in-groove building block, near the road site. This breakthrough brought worldwide interest and won him the Explorer of the Year award in 1976, given by the International Explorers Society of Florida. But Zink's work was apparently debunked by government geologists, although not acting in an official capacity. Consequently Zink's work was not taken seriously by conventional archaeologists who viewed the whole thing as a publicity stunt. Their view was reinforced when Zink brought in psychics who claimed that the site was constructed by extraterrestrials from the Pleiades.

The verdict isn't in yet, folks. Stay tuned!