Category: May/June 2009 – #75

Transcendentalist philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson—a philosophical visionary more complete than any other this nation has produced—identified two components to attaining…

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Washington (AP) April 27, 2004: An expedition is being planned for this summer to the upper reaches of Turkey’s Mount Ararat where organizers hope to prove an object nestled amid the snow and ice is Noah’s Ark.

“A joint U.S. and Turkish team of ten explorers plans to make the arduous trek up Turkey’s tallest mountain, at 17,820 feet (5,430 meters), from July 15 to August 15, subject to the approval of the Turkish government,” said Daniel P. McGivern, President of Shamrock–The Trinity Corporation, of Honolulu, Hawaii

So read the first two paragraphs of a news release distributed worldwide by the Associated Press on April 27, 2004. The release went on to say that the expedition would be led by Ahmet Ali Arslan, a mountaineer, photographer, artist, writer, and holder of a doctorate from Erzurum University who, out of a total of perhaps fifty climbs that have been made up the mountain, has made nearly half of them himself. McGivern and Arslan told reporters at the Washington Press Club news conference announcing the expedition that they had been greatly helped in their reconnaissance by satellite photos commissioned by McGivern that, taken in the summer of 2003 during the greatest thaw of mountain icecap snow in 200 years, enabled them to target a promising region toward which the expedition should head.

Appearing almost immediately in every major newspaper in the world, the news release reminded us all once again that, though several millennia old, the story of Noah and his Ark still retains the power to captivate.

We all know the story. Despairing of His creation, God brought forty days of flood and downpour to the Earth but allowed one unusually righteous man, Noah, to ride out the tempest with his family in an Ark containing male and female representatives of every species on Earth. The divinely sanctioned vessel—a pitch-lined wooden box the size of an ocean liner—finally came to rest on Mount Ararat, now in Turkey. As the waters receded, Noah and his sons and their wives began the slow process, eventually successful, of re-populating the planet.

But Did It Really Happen?

On the basis of archaeological evidence, we know today that a huge flood did take place in Noah’s time. Taking inventory in 1965, researchers at London’s British Museum stumbled on two cuneiform tablets mentioning the Flood. Written in the Babylonian city of Sippar in 1640-1626, B.C., they told of how a water-god named Enki revealed God’s awful plan to a priest-king named Ziusudra. Ziusudra really existed; he was the king of the southern Babylonian city of Shuruppak, around 2900 B.C., and he is listed as such in the earliest column of the Sumerian king-list. The priest-king built a boat and survived, and there is actual evidence of a gigantic flood at the site of Shuruppak itself.

So apparently there was a flood, but it was confined to a fairly small area. Moreover, the date 2900 B.C. conflicts with geological evidence uncovered by the archaeologist Sir Leonard Woolley who, while excavating the Sumerian city of Ur in the 1920s, came across strong evidence that a flood had occurred in the region sometime between 4000 and 3500 B.C. “Still,” says author-researcher Paul Johnson, “The savior-figure of Ziusudra, presented in the Bible as Noah, thus provides the first independent confirmation of the actual existence of a Biblical personage.”

But this is only a small bit of historical evidence. And modern science has raised countless valid objections to the story of the Ark: How could an entire planet be flooded? How could two of every species on Earth have fit inside one Ark? These cavils notwithstanding, though, the story of Noah has never ceased to beguile us, and Mount Ararat has continued to sing its siren song. Why? Sir Isaac Newton thought he had the answer, and it is an astonishing one (See the companion article, Sir Isaac Newton’s Case for Why Noah’s Story Matters, in this issue, also by John Chambers.) But, Newton’s brilliant theories aside, there has never been a single corroborated sighting of the Noah’s Ark, and while there are people who have descended from the mountain sure that they were grasping in their hands a piece of the true Ark, not a single one of these pieces has ever turned out to be authentic.

With its twin peaks separated by a 25-mile expanse, and 17,011 feet high, Mount Ararat rears up suddenly, sometimes blindingly, from the arid eastern plain of Turkey 10 miles from Iran and 20 miles from Armenia (formerly the U.S.S.R.). So powerful is the mystique of the Ark, which may or may not rest there, that not until the 19th century did anyone dares to climb Mount Ararat. The scuttlebutt of ancient times had it that local residents sometimes scraped pitch from the sides of the Ark and brought back pieces of bitumen to use as amulets, but there is no proof that anything like this happened. From the Byzantine Empire on (4th century A.D.), Christians and Moslems alike were certain that a divine interdiction existed against scaling the mountain and profaning the holy vessel. They were convinced that God would reveal the Ark only on Judgment Day. The travelers Marco Polo and Sir John Mandeville passed by the mountain in wonder, noting in their diaries its splendors but not even dreaming of attempting its heights. Not until 1829, as far as we know, was Mount Ararat first successfully climbed, by a German professor of natural philosophy then living in Estonia. But was the divine interdiction still in force? The professor had started off from St. Jacob’s Monastery in the little town of Ahora on the northwest side of the mountain. In 1840, Mount Ararat erupted for the final time, completely destroying Ahora and leaving a precipitous gorge where the monastery had stood. A second climb in 1845, by another German professor, was successful and apparently not followed by catastrophe. In 1856, a team of British, mostly ex-soldiers, scaled the mountain. They did not find the Ark, but they persuaded their skittish Kurdish guides that British aplomb had finally broken the divine interdiction of Mount Ararat.

So now, to a degree, the spell was broken. But the many ascents of Mount Ararat that would follow would mostly bring hoaxes, false hope inflated by Christian piety, and broken dreams. In the latter part of the 19th century fraud abounded, while the 20th century has brought no trace of the Ark. For years the rumor persisted that a military expedition sent up Mount Ararat by the Tsar during World War One had come back with photographs of the enormous, barn-like interior of the Ark. None of these photos has ever materialized, even though author-researcher Charles Belts was able to interview very old inhabitants of the area who, 60 years after, remembered soldiers talking about seeing the Ark. In the 1950s, the Frenchman Fernand Navarra was the center of an ongoing saga that saw him again and again produce pieces of the Ark that proved to be almost, but not quite, authentic.

In 1957, Turkish air force pilots claimed they had spotted a boat-shaped formation near the mountain. The government did not pursue the sighting, however. For much of the time, the entire area, including Mount Ararat, was off limits to foreigners because of Soviet complaints that most of the explorers were U.S. spies. The expeditions of the American astronaut Colonel James Irwin, who had walked on the moon, gave the feat of climbing Mount Ararat a certain cachet. But this fundamentalist Christian space cadet got little for his efforts excepting a fall down the mountainside that nearly killed him. These are only some of the stories of adventurous modern-day climbs that now attach to Mount Ararat—but of all the stories none has ever ended with proof that the Ark exists. Will the McGivern-Arslan expedition succeed where all others have failed? By the early autumn we should know. Perhaps the divine interdiction is stronger than we think. Or perhaps Noah has a surprise in store for us.

CAPTIONS:

(Above) Researchers say this satellite view shows Noah’s Ark jutting out from the snow on Mount Ararat.

(Upper right) Mount Ararat.

(Middle right) Filtered close-up believed to show beams jutting through snow.

(Lower right) Said to be the best ground photo of Noah’s Ark sitting on the mountain ledge. Note: Proponents say the windows at the top of the Ark are evenly spaced for ventilation.

            At the end of every summer, glacial meltback flows beneath the Ark’s believed location. Snow summer 1973. Turkish photo of suspected Ark, 1989. The same location was found last September by satellite after the greatest glacial meltback since the year 1500.

 

(Photos © 2004 Shamrock–The Trinity Corporation)

Ancient Mysteries

Sept/Oct 2004 – #47

Near the leading edge of well-known energy technology, the landscape is increasingly dotted with inventions—from solar-electric breakthroughs to new hydrogen-generating alternatives. I’m pleased that Doug Kenyon asked me to write this column regularly, to bring you some of the exciting news from that landscape. And beyond.

The “beyond” is even more interesting. Out on the bleeding edge where new-paradigm scientists struggle, the stakes are higher and issues larger. Those issues or questions affect the future of humankind. Will powerful breakthroughs be monopolized by weapons-makers, or will we-the-people have empowering tools for creating a more enlightened civilization? Will countries continue to fight over supposedly scarce energy resources, or will planetary citizens enjoy energy-abundance from harmonic technologies that could clean up some of our environmental messes? Will we get it that humankind can work in harmony with nature?

On the bleeding edge of energy research, frontier scientists and other self-funders are making progress, sometimes in quantum leaps. But it seems that the establishment is committed to allowing only incremental improvements on existing technologies, despite the fact that some people within the corridors of power know about breakthrough energy possibilities.

Dr. Tom Valone, in a conversation at a conference in Salt Lake City this summer, gave additional insights. He noted that the mandate for NASA’s Breakthrough Propulsion Physics (BPP) research program spells out its commitment to “incremental” improvements. Doesn’t that mean just small steps along a familiar path, instead of a quantum leap to a different path? Meanwhile, the familiar fossil-fueled or nuke path is harming ecosystems. BPP’s grants to cautious theoreticians to study little facets of “zero-point energy” theories have been too little and too spineless—lacking in the courage to fund heretics who actually build prototypes of new energy generators that could do useful work.

Valone had tried to introduce, into the NASA “breakthrough” program, two Russian scientists who had built a generator patterned after the legendary flying Space Energy Generator of John Searl of England. The Russians’ prototype worked dramatically as a more-output-than-input generator, and even lost weight while operating. But the NASA representative told Valone, in effect, that such quantum leaps are not wanted by the program.

However, at least two brave individuals from within the U.S. Department of Energy attended Valone’s energy 1999 Conference on Future Energy. Back at the DoE they had started a program similar to NASA’s, but aiming for ground-based new energy technology. Their proposed Breakthrough Energy Physics Research (BEPR) program withered away after the federal change in administration in 2000. Recently even their Internet talk-group was kicked off the DoE radar screen.

So don’t look to the federal government for quantum leaps to a carbon-free energy economy. When pressured, the feds will give grants to certain physicists to study zero-point energy (free energy from the vacuum of space), but those studies will be safely remote from actual working hardware that could be easily replicated. In other words, they don’t seem too serious about freeing us from fossil fuel dynasties.

The Utah conference was small in attendance but big on freedom-of-thinking. It was co-sponsored by Steven Elswick’s Tesla-Tech business and the small Utah-based Institute for New Energy, represented by journal editor Hal Fox.

It was an opportunity to speak with respected authors such as Valone, Moray King and others. The international community of New Energy proponents is still grieving the brutal loss of our friend and inspiration, Dr. Eugene Mallove, and will for some time. As readers of Atlantis Rising know, he published Infinite Energy magazine, brilliantly argued New Energy concepts on national radio and other venues, wrote a column for this magazine, had the courage to seriously investigate bleeding-edge developments in new-paradigm science, and was also a witty colleague with a superluminal sense of humor. I can’t write about him without tears.

However, the shock of loss is bringing the beleaguered community of researchers together in determination to accomplish their goals—and in the process to honor Gene Mallove’s memory. At the Utah meeting, several speakers stressed the need to cooperate more closely even where there have been differences of opinion. I photographed one such pair of researchers—Al Francoeur of Canada and Sonne Ward of Idaho—shaking hands on that sentiment.

At the converence, Francoeur presented his several areas of works-in-progress—a magnetic generator of his own design, a rebuild of a vintage free-energy motor from the late Ed Gray, which you’ll hear more about in a future column, and Francoeur’s fuel vaporizer—an interim technology to reduce the use of fossil fuels until New Energy generators are on the market.

Ward actually had revolutionary hardware for sale at the meeting. His novel battery-chargers quickly sold out. He said his discovery was built on a foundation including what he’d learned from innovators such as John Bedini (interviewed for a past issue of Atlantis Rising) and the late Nikola Tesla. Similar to Bedini’s, the effects of Ward’s battery chargers seem different from conventional battery charging in quality (rejuvenation of batteries) and not just quantity (speed of charging). Ward’s chargers are not self-running; they must be plugged in to a source of electricity. However, they are apparently super-efficient. I spoke with him a month after the conference, and he doubted whether he could continue to fill orders for the $150 chargers. He did, however, plan to sell a larger model for $500.

Sonne Ward makes it easy for academics to dismiss his claims. At the end of his presentation, an engineer stepped up to the microphone to present the standard viewpoint of what is possible or not in electrical engineering. Ward, a self-taught inventor who describes himself as obnoxious and arrogant, just laughed and said “Why should I care?”

He may have developed attitude in response to decades of incidents such as federal bureaucrats hitting him with dismissive comments such as, “We make the energy policy, kid. Who do you think you are?”

Other presenters such as Valone and King, however, did take pains to place their research in relation to accepted science, citing many references, in peer-reviewed scientific literature, to zero-point energy.

Dale Pond’s presentation was somewhere in the middle, neither disregarding standard science nor trying to stay on the same page. His research is into the “sympathetic vibratory physics” of 19th-century inventor John W. Keely. Dale brought an example of that science—a Keely Musical Dynasphere. An energy science-of-the-future that works with resonating vibrations? Sounds like the ultimate in harmony-with-the-universe.

Pond says the biggest gap between the orthodox viewpoint and sympathetic vibratory physics is their views about cause and effect. Orthodoxy sees vibration as a moving-back-and-forth caused by outside physical forces, while SVP views vibration as caused by primary laws of the universe that create and govern rhythmic exchanges, acting from within. That view of “vibration” sees rotation—spin—instead of the standard view of oscillations. For more information, see http://www.svpvril.com.

You can easily spot the pioneers—by the arrows in their backs. That saying is doubly apt for New Energy pioneers. Most of them struggle without funding and are often pierced by the criticisms and barbed wit of armchair skeptics. A few inventors of new energy devices have been physically pummeled by paid thugs, or hauled into court on false charges. Some were targets of unscrupulous promoters and found themselves involved in business dealings that ruined the inventor financially.

An Internet news service reporting on the Utah conference criticized inventors who complain about needing money to continue their work. Yet how many of us have single-mindedly worked for decades and spent all our savings on something we believe can save humankind from smothering in polluted air? Only the rare individual can maintain that level of effort for many years without falling out of step with polite society in some way. It’s easy to criticize.

One of those lone researchers is Robert Patterson. He and his friends drove to the conference in a vehicle equipped with an invention that he says triples his gas mileage. He calls it RAM—Ram Implosion Wing. He claims the shape causes vortices of air in front of the vehicle pulling it forward, and vortices behind adding a push.

The fortunate inventors are those with a support group, even if that group has also emptied their wallets for the cause. In the case of a Bulgarian-American scientist living near Salt Lake City who plumbs the secrets of ball lightning, a three-generation extended family offers morale support. Dr. Kiril Chukanov’s daughter, Laura Chukanov, translates his science writings into English and his wife Angelina seems fully committed to encouraging his work.

Chukanov creates ball lightning in a quartz sphere within an industrial microwave oven in his laboratory. He found the phenomenon has unusual electrical features and enormous possibilities for generating usable energy. In his book, General Quantum Mechanics: The Great Reform of Science, Chukanov says he has sacrificed the best years of his life to “exhausting and ungrateful scientific research,” but hasn’t tried to get the attention of either science writers or the public, nor does he want fame. “God gave me this knowledge, not to use it for my own needs, but to share…for all of people on earth.”

CAPTIONS:

Bulgarian-American scientist Dr. Kiril Chukanov plumbs the secrets of ball lightning.

Robert Patterson’s RAM Implosion Wing

Dale Pond’s Version of Keely’s Musical Dynasphere.

Jeane Manning

Nov/Dec 2004 – #48