AR14 - BLUEPRINT FROM ATLANTIS By Rand Flem-Ath

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	BLUEPRINT FROM ATLANTIS by Rand Flem-Ath
Index of Issue 14

In November of 1993 I received a fax from John Anthony West that started me on a four-year quest. The article that slipped through the fax machine that day had been written by an Egyptian-born construction engineer by the name of Robert Bauval. Little did I suspect that Bauval would soon become known for his revolutionary theory that the pyramids of Egypt were a mirror image of the constellation of Orion (see The Orion Mystery). However, in the article I read that day Robert had taken his idea even further. He revealed that not only the pyramids but also that most famous of all sculptures, the Sphinx, was oriented to the constellation of Orion as it appeared in 10,500 B.C. (see The Message of the Sphinx).

John followed up his fax with a telephone call one of our earliest conversations. He had read the original manuscript of our book When the Sky Fell (see issue #7 of Atlantis Rising) and had volunteered to write an afterword. Our theory that Antarctica could hold the remains of Atlantis was framed by the concept of a geological phenomenon known as earth crust displacement, about which I had spent years corresponding with Charles Hapgood. I had concluded, based on extensive research into the origins of agriculture and the late Pleistocene extinctions, that 9,600 B.C. was the most probable date of the last displacement.

After discussing details about the afterword for When the Sky Fell, John, in his usual direct manner, asked me: If Bauval is right that the Sphinx points to a date of 10,500 B.C., how do you reconcile that date with your time period of 9,600 B.C. for the last displacement of the earth's crust?

John had put his finger on a very important point. If the Sphinx had been built before the crustal displacement, as Bauval's data indicated, then the monument's orientation would have been changed as the earth's crust shifted, resulting in a misalignment. But the fact remains that the Sphinx indeed the whole Giza complex is precisely aligned with the earth's cardinal points. Either Bauval's calculations of the astroarchaeology are incorrect or your date of 9,600 B.C. is wrong, John said. How sure are you of that date? Could you be wrong by nine hundred years?

John, I replied, a host of archaeological and geological radiocarbon dates indicate unequivocally that the last catastrophe occurred in 9,600 B.C. I'm sticking with that. Perhaps the ancient Egyptians were memorializing an earlier date that was tremendously significant to them, not necessarily the date that the Sphinx was carved.

In October of 1996 Robert Bauval and I continued the friendly debate at a conference in Boulder, Colorado. I was convinced that the Sphinx was constructed immediately after 9600 B.C. and explained why. Imagine, I began, that an asteroid or giant comet hit the United States today, utterly destroying the entire continent and throwing the whole culture back to the most primitive of living conditions. Then imagine that a team of scientists, perhaps safely under the ocean in a submarine, survived the cataclysm and decided to commemorate their nation and leave a message for the future by constructing a monument aligned to the heavens. What date would they choose to mark the memory of the United States of America? Would it be 1996, the year that their world ended? I don't think so. I believe that they would orient their monument to 1776 the date that the nation was born. And, in the same way, I think that although the Sphinx was created around 9,600 B.C. it is oriented to 10,500 B.C., because that date was significant to their culture.

Now it happens that inconsistencies and puzzles in science are like oxygen to my blood! My entire philosophy of science is predicated on the motto that anomalies are gateways to discovery. I usually conduct my research in a methodical and painstaking (some might say obsessive) manner. However, over the past twenty years of investigating the problem of Atlantis and the earth's shifting crust, I have discovered again and again that chance plays a critical role in discovery.

Between writing novels, Rose works part-time at the local university library, and her serendipitous approach to research ideally balances my own meticulous methods. I can't begin to count the number of times that she has brought home a book that turned out to be exactly what I needed. So when she presented me with Archaeoastronomy in Pre-Columbian America, I eagerly flipped it open.

Written in 1975 by Dr. Anthony F. Aveni, one of the leading astroarchaeologists in the world, the book dropped a critical piece of the puzzle that I was trying to solve right into my lap. It appears that almost all of the major megalithic monuments of Mesoamerica are oriented east of true north. Aveni wrote that the people of Mesoamerica did tend to lay out many of their cities...oriented slightly east of true north... Fifty of the fifty-six sites examined align east of north.

However, I found Aveni's explanation for this alignment wanting. He believes that the Street of the Dead, the famous avenue at Teotihuacan (near Mexico City) is the key to the whole mystery of why the monuments are strangely misaligned. This street, which runs directly toward the Pyramid of the Moon, is misaligned 15-1/2 degrees east of north. Because it points within one degree to the Pleiades constellation (a set of stars important to Mesoamerican mythology) Aveni views this skewed alignment as a kind of template, a master plan, for the rest of the megaliths throughout Mesoamerica. While this is true for Teotihuacan's Street of the Dead, it is not true for the other sites that Aveni lists in his book. His argument that the other forty-nine sites are merely inadequate copies of the holy alignment of Teotihuacan rang hollow.

I had a different idea a theory based on the science of geodesy, the study of the measurement of the shape and size of the earth.

In addition to astronomical observatories, what if these Mesoamerican sites were also part of a vast geographical survey? My study of ancient maps had convinced me that the Atlanteans had mapped the world. What if the orientations of the most ancient cities of Mexico were remnants of a lost science the science of geography? What if the alignment of the ancient cities were a stone stencil a precise blueprint of a prediluvian Earth?

Teotihuacan lies upon the longitude of 98:53 West. If we subtract the 15:28 degrees that it is misaligned we get a location of 83:25 West less than half a degree off Charles Hapgood's location of the North Pole prior to 9,600 B.C.

In other words, the Street of the Dead was 15-1/2 degrees west of the longitude that Hapgood had calibrated for the old Pole.

When I made this discovery I was naturally very excited. Could it be that the ancient monuments of Mexico were orientated to the Pole before the last earth crust displacement? The implications were profound. Such an orientation would point to the existence of a civilization which must have held scientific knowledge of the earth's geography. They also must have possessed sophisticated surveying methods that they put to use in America before the earth's crust shifted.

I soon discovered that several important Mesoamerican sites (Tula, Tenayucan, Copan, and Xochicalco, for instance) matched my geodetic theory. Each of their misalignments when subtracted from their current longitude yielded the longitude of the North Pole before the last earth crust displacement (83 degree West). What if, I wondered, there were other sites in the Old World that were orientated to the old Pole?

I began to research sites in Iraq, cradle of the most ancient civilizations.

Unlike Mesoamerica, these sites had not been studied in relation to their misalignment to the earth's cardinal points. I had to piece together the evidence from site to site, from author to author. But the tedious task was worth it to obtain the startling result. I soon discovered that many of the oldest sites in the Middle East are west of today's North Pole. Like the ancient sites of Mesoamerica, they were oriented to the old Pole.

The ancient city of Ur, its ziggurat (a stepped pyramid symbolizing a sacred mountain) and its shrine to the Moon god, Nanna are oriented west of north (toward the Old Pole in the Hudson Bay).

Without control of the holy city of Nippur, no ruler could rightfully claim to be the King of Sumeria. The remains of the city lie south of Baghdad, where some of the most famous tablets in archaeology were unearthed at the turn of the century. The tablets disclosed the Sumerian belief in the existence of a long lost island paradise called Dilmun. The myth of Dilmun, which we show in When the Sky Fell is remarkably similar to the mythology of the Haida people of British Columbia, relates how the island paradise was destroyed by the god Enlil in a Great Flood. Enlil's incredible power is honored at Nippur with a temple and a ziggurat which is skewed west of north.

The ziggurat and White Temple of the Sumerian city of Uruk also points to Hudson Bay rather than true north. The more I looked, the more ancient sites I found in the Middle East that pointed to the North Pole before the last earth crust displacement. Perhaps the most poignant is Jerusalem's Wailing Wall, the only remains of Herod's Temple, built upon the site of Solomon's Temple.

I now knew that I was looking at a unique geodesic phenomenon that demanded exploration. My next step was to calculate the former latitudes of the key megalithic and sacred sites of the world. If the latitudes were located at significant numbers, then I could be sure that I really was onto something.

The first site I measured was, of course, the eternally compelling Great Pyramid at Giza. I calculated its coordinates against 60 degreeN 83 degreeW (Hudson Bay Pole). Giza had been 4524 nautical miles from the Hudson Bay Pole which meant its latitude was at 15 degree North prior to 9,600 B.C. I found it odd that Giza, which today lies at 30 degree North (one third of the distance from the equator to the pole) should have been so neatly at 15 degree North (one sixth the distance) before the last earth crust displacement. So I decided to study Lhasha, the religious center of Tibet, because I knew that this city, like Giza, lies at 30 degree North today.

Lhasha's coordinates are 29:41N 91:10E which calculated at 5,427 nautical miles from the Hudson Bay Pole. The distance from the equator to the pole is 5400 nautical miles (90 degrees times 60 seconds = 5,400) so Lhasha had rested just 27 nautical miles (less than half a degree) off the equator during the reign of Atlantis. This was getting spooky. The earth crust displacement had shoved Giza from 15 degree to 30 degree while moving Lhasha from 0 degree to 30 degree. Was this coincidence?

The coincidence started to become extreme when I compared the location of Giza and Lhasa (and a host of other ancient sites) with the position of the crust over three earth crust displacements. I was amazed to discover that latitudes like 0 degree, 12 degree, 15 degree, 30 degree, and 45 degree came up again and again. Each of these numbers divides the earth's geography by whole numbers. This seemed way beyond chance, so I christened them sacred latitudes. Most of these sites will be familiar to anyone who takes an interest in archaeology or the sacred sites of the world's major religions. All of these places are within thirty nautical miles (a day's walk) from sacred latitudes and are thus more accurately aligned geodesically than Aveni's astronomical calculations.

The careful reader will note that several of these sites show up in more than one table. They are actually situated at the crossing points of two (even three) sacred latitudes. For example, Giza lies at the intersection of 15 degree (Hudson Bay Pole) and 45 degree North (Greenland Sea Pole) and today is at 30 degree North. Lhasa, which today is near 30 degree North, was at the equator during the Hudson Bay Pole and only 32 nautical miles from 30 degree North during the Greenland Sea Pole.

So what was going here?

I believe that sometime before the devastating earth crust displacement, scientists in Atlantis recognized that the increasing earthquakes and rising ocean level that they were experiencing were a warning of a coming geological catastrophe. Trying to preserve their civilization from this unavoidable disaster, they became obsessed with discovering exactly what had overtaken the globe in the remote past.

Teams of geologists fanned across the planet with a mission to gauge the former positions of the earth's crust. If they could determine exactly how far the crust had shifted in the past they might have some idea of what they could expect to face in the future. In the process of their investigations they left geodesic markers at the points they considered critical to their calculations.

After the earth crust displacement that destroyed Atlantis, the old calibrations were rediscovered by survivors who knew nothing of that forgotten and desperate geographic survey. They naturally believed that these marvelous geodesic markers from those who had gone before were messages from the gods. The sites became sacred cities were built around them (it's no accident that Teotihuacan is an Aztec term for Place of the Gods) and their very practical purpose was lost.

Further generations continued to worship at these huge shrines, but eventually the winds of time began to erode the original structures. New altars were built on top of the remnants of the artifacts left by the surveyors from Atlantis. But during each reconstruction whispers from the past compelled the new architects to preserve the original orientations orientations that pointed to the Hudson Bay Pole to the time when Atlantis thrived.

The secrets buried beneath the slowly crumbling cities remained hidden for thousands of years. Eventually some intrepid souls in Egypt, Mesopotamia, India, China, and America had the courage to begin excavations. The story of the remarkable discoveries uncovered by those who dared to dig under holy sites is only now emerging. The secret mission of the Knights Templar in Jerusalem and the sophisticated devices that Moses took from Egypt are but two of these fascinating accounts.

I believe we can explain the enigmatic location of the ancient megaliths in a way that finally makes sense of their puzzling misalignments. These sacred sites, which we sense contain clues to our true history, continue to draw visitors who marvel over their awesome construction feats and wonder at the intelligence and vision of our anonymous ancestors. But my explanation covers only the tip of a very deep iceberg. There are many more sites that can be discovered using simple calculations derived from latitude changes after crustal displacements, not the least of which are sites on Atlantis itself, the island continent of Antarctica.

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 did. 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.