EARTHQUEST NEWS

A Newsletter from Andrew Collins. Vol. 5, No. 2, Autumn 2002

 

The Questing Conference is coming and everyone is invited! The programme remains exactly as per the flyer; all the speakers are appearing and all the details are the same. See the Eden website for the very latest on speakers, lectures, hotel reservations, venue, ticket applications and much more. Remember, tickets are GBP 25 in advance, GBP 26 on the day, with a ten percent discount for block bookings of four or more people.

Remember, the conference will bring you a whole second room of lectures on psychic questing, and this we shall be monitoring carefully to see what the current interest is in this subject. In other words, if you are into questing, or are a budding psychic, and want to learn more, come along and give us your support.

Tutankhamun - The Exodus Conspiracy

This is the title of the new book by Chris Ogilvie-Herald and myself, published on Thursday, 5 September. It has already been serialised by THE DAILY MAIL, and is lightly to be very popular indeed. Copies are available from me signed by myself (and NOT necessarily by Chris) at a UK price of GBP20 including post and package (Europe price GBP 24 and rest of the world GBP28). Just send the required amount as a sterling cheque made out to 'Andrew Collins' to me at PO Box 3242, Marlborough, Wiltshire SN8 1UZ .For a full run down of the book's contents see the separate flyer, or check out the introduction blurb, sample chapter, three appendices and Tut-Zionist timeline available for download on the website. For those of you living in Essex, I shall be giving a free lecture to help launch the book at Leigh Library, Broadway West, Leigh-on-Sea, at 7.30pm on Tuesday, 17 September. Come early, as space will be limited. If you are not local, then remember that Chris and I shall be speaking on the subject of the book at this year's Questing Conference.

The ARE Ancient Mysteries Conference 2002

This August I attended, along with my wife Sue, the 'Ancient Mysteries and Modern Discoveries 2002' conference held at the headquarters of the Association of Research and Enlightenment (ARE) at Virginia Beach, Virginia. This is the active arm of the Edgar Cayce Foundation, established to preserve, promote and further confirm the extraordinary readings of America's most famous psychic, Edgar Cayce (1877-1945). I had been invited to deliver the key-note lecture on the evening of Saturday, 17 August. The subject would be Plato's Atlantis, its association with Cuba and the Bahamas, and its relationship to the work of Edgar Cayce. He believed that the Bahamas and Caribbean were fragments of a much larger landmass known as 'Poseidia', which in turn was a surviving remnant of a sunken continent identified as lost Atlantis.

 

The Venue

The venue was spacious, taking up much of the ARE building's ground (first) floor, alongside a bookshop and side hall with stalls selling jewellery, gifts and replica artefacts from all over the world. Upstairs, on the first (second) floor, was the ARE's marvellous library, which has tens of thousands of books as well as hundreds of volumes containing type-written copies of all 14,000 of Cayce's psychic readings, complete with notes, references and associated correspondence. All of them are cross-referenced, and included also in the so-called 'circulating files', which catalogue Cayce's psychic's readings on specific subjects, such as health, healing, Ancient Egypt and Atlantis. All of these are available to members of the ARE for viewing, and can be read by the general public by arrangement.

A stairwell leads you to the building's top floor where you find a tranquil meditation area with an outdoor balcony and view of the Atlantic Ocean (slightly marred today by a rusty water tower erected by the US Navy). Contemporary designs in colourful stained glass fill the high windows in both the ante-chamber and main room, while fabulous paintings adorn the walls (one showing the Giza Pyramids in green pastures, another of the Holy Family's flight into Egypt).

 

Behind the modern building is the hospital founded in 1928 in order that Cayce's unique forms of treatment, prescribed whilst in trance, could be implemented in full. Today it is the offices of the ARE, as well as a health clinic offering everything from massage to acupressure, manual lymph drainage (sounds painful) and colon hydrotherapy. As soon as Sue and I were shown around the hospital building, we booked massage sessions, which turned out to be the most relaxing and exhilarating we had ever had! Arriving early, we spent the first few days supping up the sun and attempting to swim with the dolphins that gather in shoals just yards from the beach.

The conference opened on the Thursday evening with a lecture entitled 'Edgar Cayce's Vision of the Ancient World' by ARE co-ordinator John van Auken. As can be expected, it introduced the audience, which already numbered around 200, to their founder's readings which spoke of incarnation of the soul, the mysteries of Ancient Egypt and the many so-called 'life readings' which related the patient's past life experiences. Amid the more mystical elements of the Friday's itinerary, author and editor of the ARE journal ANCIENT MYSTERIES, Greg Little, unveiled a new video on the advances being made in understanding the prehistory of North and South America against a backdrop of the Cayce readings.

 

Edgar Evans Cayce

To end the day, Edgar Cayce's surviving son, Edgar Evans Cayce, who is now 84-years old, took the stage with Greg Little to answer questions posed in advance from the audience; others were taken from the floor. It was certainly an honour to meet him, especially as, although he stills lives in Virginia Beach, he rarely attends such functions these days. He made reference to the recent underwater discoveries off the west coast of Cuba and was aware that my book GATEWAY TO ATLANTIS zeroed in on Cuba as the flagship of ancient Atlantis, with the Bahamas and submerged areas of the Caribbean being seen as its sunken kingdom. Indeed, he believed that his father had predicted that remnants of Atlantis would be found off Cuba when he had stated in one reading that portions of this once-great continent would be found 'to the south and east' of the Bimini islands. Go south and west from Bimini beyond the Florida keys and it brings you to nowhere else but Cuba.

Mitochondrial DNA

Saturday started with a compelling, and highly thought-provoking lecture by Greg Little on how genetical research can help to determine global human migration over the past 200,000 years. We all know of the virtues of human DNA, but few of us are aware that also present in the body is a bacteria called mitochondria that has been inside us since the beginning and helped enable our transition from single-celled life to more complex life forms. It acts as an energy producer and each cell contains hundreds if not thousands of bacteria, which work in harmony with the body by ingesting molecules of glucose and after a complex process produce molecules of ATP adenosine triphosphate. This is an energy that enables the body to keep alive by maintaining all activity going on inside the cells. More significantly, each individual mitochondrion, as it is known, has its own distinctive DNA, the sequence for which was published for the first time only in 1981.

Since the early 1990s the study of mitochondrial DNA, or mtDNA, has revolutionised our knowledge of human evolution. Because it is passed on from mother to daughter (males, although they possess mtDNA, play no role in passing it on to the next generation), and also undergoes recognisable, and regular mutations, geneticists are able to retrace the spread across the world of present-day strains, or haplogroups, beginning with a hypothetical first female known as 'Mitochondrial Eve', who is thought to have lived in Africa some time around 200,000 years ago. This has been achieved not only by testing humans alive today, but also human remains which retain traces of mtDNA (analysis of mitochondira is usually achieved by examining bone and tooth samples). The existence of extinct types of mtDNA indicate variations that stretch back much earlier than 200,000 BC, although very little knowledge is known currently about their rate of mutation or of human ethnology, or migration, during this earlier epoch.

Orthodox scientists have used the findings regarding the spread of mtDNA to demonstrate that the human species derived from just seven women, known as the Seven Eves, the earliest of whom lived in Africa. They see the gradual spread of peoples into Europe and Asia, before finally mankind crossed from Siberia over the Bering Straits (known to geologists as Beringia) to enter the American continent. Yet the evidence of mtDNA, even from an orthodox standpoint seems seriously to contradict the orthodox view, for instead of confirming that man first entered the Americas around 9500 BC, as was previously thought, it suggests that he was present on the continent much earlier, plausibly as early as 30,000 BC, with other migrations occurring in around 28,000 BC and 10,000 BC. A much earlier date for the arrival of man in the Americas is now being confirmed at sites throughout South and Central America, many of which are yielding dates in the region of 60,000 Before Present (BP), with some even going back as far as 200,000 to 300,000 BP. Unfortunately, archaeologists in North America want to stick with the idea of Clovis culture being the first peoples to inhabit the continent via Beringia, and dismiss all earlier dates as simply the result of contaminated samples, incorrect analysis of results or just plain poor workmanship.

Evidence of European Migrations?

I cannot hope to do justice to Greg's remarkable findings regarding the global spread of mtDNA haplogroups. However, suffice to say that the detection of one variation known as haplogroup X is helping to break down the idea that the first Americans came from Siberia. It has long been noted that the Clovis culture of America bore distinct similarities to the Solutrean, Late Palaeolithic peoples who inhabited parts of Spain, France and Portugal. This is particularly so with respect to the tool making processes and styles of stone tools used. The discovery of hapogroup X among indigenous peoples of North America, mostly modern-day Iroquois living in the northeast, and also in human remains over 8,000 years old found in Florida, has led ethnologists to speculate that the Solutrean and Clovis culture are linked. It could be that the former migrated northwards and crossed a now vanished land bridge which once linked northern Europe with Iceland, Greenland and Nova Scotia (palaeontologists can't conceive of Palaeolithic peoples having ocean-going vessels at their disposal).

MtDNA in Atlantis and Mu?

Yet since haplogroup X has been found in regions which Edgar Cayce spoke of as outposts of Atlantean migrations - the Iroquois lands, the American south-west, the Pyrenees, Middle East and Gobi region of central Asia - Greg is looking towards the possibility that this particular type might have originated in Atlantis. He is also focusing his investigations on another type of mtDNA known as haplogroup B. It seems to originate from an unknown region of the Pacific Ocean, since it appears most frequently in China, Southeast Asia, the South Pacific and also along the Pacific coast of South America. It is found, for instance, in the Peruvian Andes, in Bolivia, and also in Brazil. Even more interesting is that it is found among the Hopi Indians in the American Southwest, whose creation myths speak of their first ancestors having arrived here from unknown islands in the west.

Support for this theory comes from the fact that the Pacific regions of Polynesia, Micronesia and Melanesia are known to have been occupied as early as 28,000 BC, although where exactly their inhabitants came from, and how they came to be there is a complete mystery. The only theory proposed to explain their presence is that they came from Taiwan, where advanced Palaeolithic peoples existed during this early epoch, and thus they island hopped in some way. Yet in 2002 a new study of human DNA from 17 different South Pacific Ocean locations, as well as from Taiwan, showed conclusively that a significant portion of the Pacific islanders were not related to the peoples of Taiwan. Instead, it was suspected that they originated from an unknown region in the vicinity of 'Melanesia and/or eastern Indonesia', showing that their current location is their place of origin. Such a conclusion seems nonsensical, for it begs the question of how they might have got there in the first place. Since these findings seem to confirm a common origin for mtDNA haplogroup B in the same region, Greg feels it is strong evidence for the presence in the region of a former landmass, supporting Cayce's readings which spoke of a Pacific continent of Mu in the Pacific Ocean. For further reading on this fascinating subject I recommend you read Greg's contribution to a new book entitled ANCIENT SOUTH AMERICA, co-written with John Van Auken and Greg's wife, Lora Little, and published by Eagle Wing Books.

Gateway to Atlantis

My own lecture that evening lasted, with a break and question time, for a full two and a half-hours (Adrian, please note)! I opened the proceedings by giving an account of how I came to learn of the recent discovery of a lost city in deep water off the west coast of Cuba, close to the district of Guanahacabibes, by Canadian firm Advanced Digital Communications (ADC). I shared my slight disappointment at the resulting video taken at a depth of 2,200 feet by a remote operated video (ROV) sent down from the vessel 'Ulises' in July 2001 to investigate the several-mile area of possible roads, avenues and rectilinear structures. Yet I emphasised that the sonar images obtained on site by ADC one year earlier were much more impressive. Indeed, British electronics engineer Rodney Hale, who is a veteran of scientific projects of this nature with a keen-eye for detecting anomalies on satellite and sonar-produced maps, has concluded that a single sonar image released by ADC earlier this year does indeed bear a striking resemblance to a rectilinear construction.

It was reported recently in ATLANTIS RISING magazine that I have 'expressed doubt about the human origins of the Guanahacabibes site, stating that things look pretty natural to him'. However, this is completely untrue. I have simply called for better evidence of artificial manufacture, such as video sequences of stones laid one on top of another, linear or curvilinear walls, stairs and unquestionable foundations.

ADC claim that blocks of granite have been detected at the Guanahacabibes site, and that this is further evidence of artificial constructs present there. However, if granite has been found, and this I feel needs to be clarified in some manner, then it doesn't necessarily constitute evidence of the proximity of a lost city. When a large quantity of granite was found on the sea-bottom between the Lesser Antilles island of Trinidad and Venezuela in the 1970s, it was seen as geological evidence that a larger landmass once existed in the region, and not evidence of a lost civilisation. Another possibility is that any granite present off the west coast of Cuba might simply be ballast disgorged from wrecked colonial sea-vessels, which often carried granite off-cuts obtained from quarries. Similar deposits are found in the shallow waters of the Bahamas, and have often been mistaken for evidence of underwater archaeological ruins.

Obviously, I want to see the ADC discoveries as evidence of artificial constructions in the deep waters off western Cuba. It would confirm much of what I have proposed in my book GATEWAY TO ATLANTIS, published in 2000. Yet we must not be too hasty. If what ADC has got is genuine, then we will know soon enough. In the meantime, we must offer them encouragement in their work, and just hope they their on-site research continues. Any further developments in this area will be reported as and when I come to hear of them.

Deconstructing Plato

After outlining the ADC discoveries, I went on to deconstruct Plato's Atlantis story as found in his works the TIMAEUS and CRITIAS. I emphasised to the audience that we must never forget that Plato wrote around 350 BC, and based his stories on political issues of the day as well as rumours reaching the Mediterranean world in which he moved. These would unquestionably have spoken of islands existing beyond the Pillars of Hercules in the outer ocean. His description of Atlantis could easily have been based on inhabited islands of the Atlantic colonised by Phoenician and Carthaginian mariners, who kept quiet about them in case of drawing undue interest from foreign nations. Yet the evidence is there that these same voyagers crossed over the ocean and were aware of not only the Sargasso Sea, but also the islands of the Bahamas and Caribbean. Indeed, there is every indication that they entered the Gulf of Mexico and made landfall on the Gulf coast, where they could have traded goods such as tobacco and coca leaves with cultures such as the Olmec and proto-Maya.

Rumours of Cataclysm

I spoke of how early Spanish explorers heard stories from the indigenous peoples of the Caribbean and Bahamas which spoke of a flood that once devastated the two archipelagos, splitting apart a much larger landmass, killing the inhabitants and leaving the islands as they appear today. Some of these stories included clues which hinted at a much greater catastrophe. One from Tobago spoke of 'the ole moon breaking', while others from Venezuela and the Yucatan spoke of a period of darkness, fire falling from the sky and the presence overhead of a fiery snake. Had some cosmic impact caused a massive cataclysm that devastated the Bahamas and Caribbean?

An event seemingly responsible for the appearance of around 500,000 elliptical craters, ranging in size from a few hundred metres to 11 kilometres in size, across the entire eastern seaboard of the United States, from New Jersey down to Miami, is perhaps the greatest clue. Modern theories are that these so-called Carolina Bays (after the states in which they were first noted during aerial surveys in the 1920s) were caused by a comet which entered the earth's atmosphere from the north-west over Alaska and disintegrated into millions of pieces that detonated above the ground, very much in the manner of the small comet which caused the Tunguska event in Siberia in June 1908.

The effects of the catastrophe, some time around the end of the last Ice Age, were extreme. Not only would it have caused a wall of fire and wind, which would have laid flat large areas of Tundra forest and decimated flora and fauna, but the resulting dust clouds might have created a 'nuclear winter' which seems to have resulted in a temporary re-advance of the ice fields that had covered much of North America, Europe and Asia for the past 40,000 years. Moreover, hundreds and thousands of fragments of the comet falling in the western Atlantic basin would have produced tsunami waves of immense proportions which temporarily drowned both the eastern seaboard of the United States and the islands of the Bahamas and Caribbean, wiping out entire populations (a few must have got away to tell the tale, as it told in the creation myths of the indigenous peoples of Central and North America).

Could memories of this cataclysmic event have been preserved across millennia until they were recounted eventually to Spanish explorers that reached in the Bahamas and Caribbean in the wake of 1492? If so, were these same tales told to Phoenician and Carthaginian voyagers who visited these same islands prior to Plato's age? Did Plato come to hear not only of the islands which existed in the outer ocean, but also of the cataclysm which once devastated this self same region? Did these cause the landmass to be inundated by flood waters - temporarily at first, but then more permanently when at the end of the Ice Age the ice fields of North America, Europe and Asia finally began to melt, causing the sea-level to rise by as much as 100 metres? Thus was the sinking of Atlantis a memory of the submergence of both the former Bahaman landmass and the low-lying regions of the Caribbean? Certainly we can say that all this took place around the very same time that Plato tells us Atlantis was destroyed by 'one terrible day and night of earthquakes and floods', sometime around 9000 BC.

Focusing on Cuba

I continued my lecture by pointing out that Cuba, more than any other island, fitted the description of Plato's Atlantean island, both in geography and topography. Moreover, Cuba has been identified by geographers as a mysterious island paradise known as Antillia, or the island of the Seven Cities, said to have laid in the outer ocean according to Moorish, and later Portuguese medieval tradition (and unquestionably borrowed from much earlier Phoenician and Carthaginian sources). More than this, the name Antillia can be shown to derive from the Semitic word root ATL, 'to elevate', which was also the root behind the name Atlas, from which we derive the name Atlantis, 'daughter of Atlas', the term used for an Atlantic island (Atlantides, 'daughters of Atlas', was the plural used to describe Atlantic islands in general). In other words, if Antillia was merely a medieval form of Atlantis, then it further confirms Cuba's association with Plato's Atlantic paradise.

The Seven Caves

For more evidence of the part Cuba played in the foundation of the Atlantis myth, we must turn our attentions to the creation myths of the Mesoamerican peoples, such as the Aztec, Toltec and Maya. They spoke variously of their earliest ancestors coming from an island paradise located in the east, known variously as Aztlan or Tulan, following a period of darkness when the sun would not appear. On this island the first humans emerged from somewhere called Chichomoztoc, the Seven Caves. From these individuals came seven tribes, or clans, and by their hands rose Seven Cities. I believe that some semblance of knowledge regarding the creation of the seven cities in Mesoamerican myth led to Antillia, or Cuba, becoming known as the Island of the Seven Cities. Furthermore, just ten years after Christopher Columbus's famous landfall in the Bahamas in 1492, the main islands of the Caribbean - Puerto Rico, Hispaniola and Cuba - had been named 'the Isles of Antillia of the King of Aragon', showing how the early Spanish explorers likewise came to identity them with ancient Antillia and its accompanying islands.

The only site in the whole of the Caribbean which bears any resemblance to Chicomoztoc, the Seven Caves, is the Punta del Este cave complex at the extreme eastern end of a peninsular on the Isla de Juventud (Isle of Youth), divided from the southern coast of the Cuban mainland by the Bay of Batabano. Ceuva # Uno has been described as a veritable Sistine chapel of the prehistoric world, and is filled with beautiful petroglyphs of concentric circles, rectilinear shapes and other abstract forms many thousands of years old. I interpreted the symbolism of these designs as perhaps embodying the memory of some kind of comet impact suffered by the Caribbean in a distant epoch. Such thoughts came entirely from intuitive feelings experienced during a personal visit to the cave in September 1998 - feelings that led me to explore the possibility of a comet impact having devastated the region. More curiously, Paulina Zelitsky, the director of the ADC team working out of Cuba, visited the Punta del Este caves for the first time only shortly before the discovery of the Guanahacabibes site, off the west coast of Cuba in July 2002. She has since claimed that an unconfirmed carving of a cross detected on a large, roughly rectangular block videoed at the underwater site, bears some similarity to an abstract cross design found inside Punta del Este's Ceuva # Uno.

The 1951 ECOS Article

However, a dramatic new discovery regarding the Punta del Este cave complex was revealed to the ARE audience at the conference. For it now appears that Cuban archaeologists were working on the theory that Ceuva # Uno's petroglyphs reflected some kind of cosmic catastrophe which devastated the region in prehistoric times as early as 1951, a full decade before the country came under Communist control.

A two-page article that appeared in the February 1952 edition of the magazine ECOS entitled 'Formó Cuba Parte de la Atlándida?' by Francisco Garcia-Juarez, the press secretary of the Instituto Cubano de Arqueologia (Institute of Cuban Archaeology, or ICA) posed the question: did Cuba once form part of Atlantis? He explained how members of the Institute were investigating the idea that traces of an Atlantean culture might be found in Cuba and Hispaniola, a view offered to them by Egerton Sykes, a world renowned authority on Atlantis. In 1949 he had written an introduction for a revised edition of ATLANTIS: THE ANTEDILUVIAN WORLD, the all-time classic on the subject written by former US congressman Ignatius Donnelly and published for the first time in 1882 (and still available as a re-print by Dover Publications). Sykes was also the editor of a journal propounding Hans Hoerbinger's Cosmic Ice theory entitled, simply, ATLANTIS, in which appeared a partial translation of the above-mentioned ECOS article.

 

According to Syke's translation, the ICA concluded that the most likely location where traces of the Atlantean culture might be found was the Punta del Este cave complex. In one cave was found steps that led up to an alcove which might possibly have been used by priests to observe the movement of the stars. Moreover, petroglyphs inside the caves (presumably those in Cueva # Uno) displayed astronomical information which linked them with the origins of the Maya calendrical system, thus the possibility that Cuba had been a 'staging post' for the migrations of the Maya into Central America should not be overlooked. More than this, the translation stated:

On the South coast of Cuba, at Camaguey, there are many partially submerged mounds called "caneyes", which may have been places of refuge for primitive man. There are numerous artifacts here which have never been adequately investigated. Numerous skeleton remains found here give evidence of a sudden and violent death due to some catastrophe. The artifacts include stone balls, spherical stones, elongated stones, and rods with forked ends resembling snakes. The absence of large monuments may merely mean they have not yet been seriously looked for.

The existence of the article by Sykes regarding the earlier feature in Cuba's ECOS magazine was brought to my attention by Dean Clarke of Atlantisite.com. He studied under Egerton Sykes and had been given permission by Syke's niece to quotes sections from some of the articles to be found in Sykes' ATLANTIS journal.

Such was the situation when on arriving at Virginia Beach I was informed that, following Sykes death in Brighton, England, in 1983, the ARE inherited his library of books, files and correspondence, which are today housed in a special room attached to its own library. With the help of Greg and Lora Little, I was able to find the original Sykes' translation of the ECOS article, as well as the original 1952 Cuban article written in Spanish. Unfortunately, my Spanish is non-existent, yet after I came off stage I spoke to Humberto Martinez, MD, a pharmacist from Miami who is one of the trustees of the ARE. He was born in Cuba and speaks and writes Spanish fluently. I showed him the article and overnight he was able to make a rough translation.

Apparently, Sykes had told the ICA that if Cuba did form part of Atlantis then its archaeologists would find evidence on the island of artificial deformation of the cranium among its ancient inhabitants, as well as step monuments or ziggurats and methods of cutting and orientating large rocks. Why exactly is not made clear in the article, although I would suspect that these ideas were based on Donnelly's concept of a diffusion of shared ideas among cultures on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean, due to the proposed migration of peoples from Atlantis following its destruction. Whatever the reasons, the Cuban archaeologists confirmed that they had found all of these things on Cuba, but, as the article stated, there would have to be a revolution of the established ways of thinking before their presence would be seen as evidence for the existence of Atlantis.

Remember, all this was taking place just six years after the end of the Second World War, when Nazis are known to have been searching for evidence of Atlantis in nearby Venezuela, including the excavation and retrieval of skeletons bearing elongated skulls. Moreover, there are unconfirmed reports that Nazis were also searching for evidence of Atlantis in Haiti (on the island of Hispaniola), which they linked with the creation myths attached to the Afro-Caribbean religion of voodoo. Confirmation of this story would be very much appreciated!

What was infinitely more important, however, were the interpretations of the petroglyphs found in the Punta del Este caves (again, seemingly those in Cueva # Uno) by the Cuban archaeologists of the ICA. Captions to two examples shown as line illustrations, explained that the symbols showed a comet with a tail hitting an astral, or celestial, body, and breaking up. I was simply stunned when Humberto began translating the text there and then. He agreed to send me a more fuller translation in due course, and this I will post on the website, complete with the original article in Spanish. I was thus able to return to the stage at the conference on the Sunday morning and show the overheads of the two-page ECOS article as Humberto read aloud extracts of his translation, which confirmed my own theory that the petroglyphs of Cueva # Uno embodied a memory of a comet impact having occurred during some distant epoch.

Cayce's Psychic Quest

I was pleased, and even a little nervous, when I realised that among the audience on the Saturday night was Edgar Evans Cayce, who came up to congratulate me after part one of the lecture. That I then had to go on to detail his father's interest in Bimini after he had agreed to use his psychic talents to find buried treasure on the islands back in 1926 and 1927 was quite a nerve-racking experience. The wealthy businessmen involved had asked Cayce to join them in Miami following some initial readings (all mostly missing now from the Cayce archives). However, Cayce had said that he could not easily shut up shop and take up temporary residence in Miami because of his practice at Virginia Beach. Moreover, in one letter he pointed out that his son was seriously ill and that he could not possibly make any long journeys until the boy had regained his health in full. It was only after I mentioned these facts that Edgar Evans said, 'Well, you realise that was me!' I, of course, hadn't realised this at all!

 

Edgar Cayce and his business associates never did find any buried treasure on Bimini, even though the psychic paid his only ever visit to the island in February 1927. However, both during the psychic investigations and afterwards Cayce now began to refer to Bimini as a surviving fragment of what was once a great continent called Poseidia. He predicted that parts of it would start to rise in 'sixty-eight and sixty-nine, not so far away'. This led to a concentration of effort by the Association of Research and Enlightenment (ARE), the active arm of the Edgar Cayce Foundation, to find evidence of Atlantis in the shallow waters around Bimini, and in the summer of 1968 this culminated in the discovery of rectangular foundations (the so-called 'temple site') in the metre-deep waters off Andros, the largest island in the Bahamas, as well as the so-called Bimini Road site, off Paradise Point, North Island.

Thus began a relationship between Atlantis and the Bahamas which has continued now for nearly 35 years, with as many of 60 sites of possible archaeological interest being noted in its shallow waters. By far the greatest concentration are to be found on the south-western corner of the horseshoe-shaped Great Bahama bank which, although almost entirely submerged today, was still being swallowed up by the ocean as late as 3000-2000 BC. They face out across the extremely deep Old Bahama Channel towards Cuba, and their presence seems to hint at a connection in prehistory between these two enormous landmasses. As early as the 1950s light aircraft pilots flying in and out of Cuba from Miami reported seeing what appeared to be walls and buildings in the waters north of the Cuban mainland.

There is no question that if the Bahaman landmass did once support a prehistoric culture, then it was also present on Cuba as well. Carved petroglyphs, with skylights in their ceilings to let in sunlight, stone cairns and age-old human bones have been found in submerged caves not only on the Great Bahama Bank, but also on its more northerly neighbour, the Little Bahama Bank. They bear striking similarities to the decorated caves of Cuba which are at least several thousand years old, and plausibly much older still. Whoever inhabited these sites were the descendants of those who survived the cataclysm, and those who went on to become the ruling class of the Mesoamerican peoples such as the Olmec, Maya, Quiche, Toltecs and Aztecs. Here somewhere is the origins of the Atlantis myth, and Cuba holds the key to its re-discovery, and one day we will have all the answers. Whether the stone structures discovered by ADC in the Yucatan Channel do turn out to be remnants of lost Atlantis remains to be seen. All we can hope is that the full extent of the finds is researched and documented, allowing people to make up their own minds on whether the greatest enigma of the ancient world has finally been solved.

The Final Day

Also on the final day of the ARE conference, Lora Little summed up the very latest archaeological discoveries worldwide, with particular reference to the Cayce readings. Afterwards there was a memorial service for the much loved Egyptian guide and ARE member Ahmed Fayed. He had died just a few days earlier at the age of 48, following complications during the treatment of an illness in an Egyptian hospital. What made the announcement of his death even more poignant is that he had been due to give a lecture at the conference that weekend, and I had been looking forward to meeting him. Ever since the 1920s his family has been integrally involved in exploration of the Giza plateau, and even today Ahmed's immediate family still run gift shops in the village of Nazlet el-Samman, east of the Great Sphinx. Ahmed will be sadly missed by all members of the ARE, some of whom stood up during the service to deliver moving stories of his kindness, generosity and good humour.

Gantenbrink's Door to be Opened

Moving away now from the conference, I am reliably informed by my friend and colleague Nigel Skinner-Simpson that Gantenbrinks' Door at the end of the southern air-shaft in the Great Pyramid's Queen's Chamber is to be opened live on television. Apparently, Zahi Hawass and Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities have agreed a deal with National Geographic Channel for the broadcast to go out at 1am British Summer Time on Tuesday, 17 September; it will be repeated at 21.00 BST that same evening. The show is two hours long and aside from the grand opening, which will be the finale of the show, we are told that viewers are to be treated to the opening of a fourth-dynasty sarcophagus belonging to one of the overseers in the Tombs of the Workers, south of the Giza Plateau. For further details see the National Geographic website.

Nigel was able to have a brief conversation with Mansour Radwan, Chief Inspector of the Giza Pyramid Area about the opening of the 'door', following a lecture at the Egyptian Educational and Cultural Bureau in London on 8 August. On being asked how a remote robot would be able to see beyond the 'door', Mr Radwan said that the team of engineers involved would attempt to feed a small fibre-optic camera through what looks to be a small gap at its bottom right-hand corner. If unsuccessful, a 'very small' hole would be drilled through the 'door' and the fibre-optic camera passed through to the other side. Not withstanding any mishaps, it sounds like we do not have long to wait before we find out what lies beyond the 'door'. Guesses please, on a post-card. Personally, I feel that if a chamber is to be found behind the 'door', then, like the rest of the pyramid, it will be found to be empty and devoid of any carvings. For even more information on this whole subject, go to Robert Bauval's website. Undoubtedly, he will have something to say on the subject when he speaks at this year's Questing Conference on 16 November (book your places now!).

Egyptian Hall of Records

During the ARE conference in August, Sue and I were able to meet and have lunch with Joe Jahoda and his wife Sherry. Working alongside Joseph Schor, Thomas Dobecki and the Florida State University, he has been deeply involved in attempts by scientific teams to find underground chambers on the Giza plateau. In the past this has led to the discovery of hollow areas, referred to as 'anomalies', beneath the limestone bedrock of the Sphinx enclosure. Joe has also conducted pioneering work into sonic technology, and has even used sound to raise small stones into the air. He was greatly disappointed when the team's project to continue their work at Giza was pulled at the last minute by Zahi Hawass just before the millennium. However, the team was able to return, quietly, to the plateau in 2001 with 2 radar groups, and Joe tells me that the results were 'encouraging'. He says that they hope to resume their work in the vicinity of the Sphinx enclosure, and elsewhere between here and the Second Pyramid, in the not too distant future. I was able to explain to him that ancient Egyptian texts, such as the Edfu Building Texts, bear out the existence of deep underground chambers somewhere in the vicinity of the Giza plateau, with an entrance via a structure on an island surrounded by water, named as the Place of the Well. I told him I suspected that it was now somewhere beneath the village of Nazlet el-Samman, although we both agreed that there might be other entrances in the vicinity of the Sphinx.

I was also able to explain how I became interested in the subject of the so-called Egyptian Hall of Records (the Crystal Chambers or Chambers of Creation as we call them). In 1985 I was working with a medieval historian named Bernard, who began experiencing dreams and visions relating to an underground complex built beneath the Giza plateau. I described exactly what Bernard had seen done there, and Joe expressed an interest in learning more about our past work in this area. It's just unfortunate that Bernard, whom you will know from my books such as THE BLACK ALCHEMIST and THE SECOND COMING, has now retired from the psychic scene.

Ian Lawton

Ian lawton's new book GENESIS UNVEILED has been placed on-line, and is now available for download by pressing here. It is a real shame that he was unable to obtain a UK publisher, but this is a sign of the general apathy of publishers towards the ancient mysteries book market at this time. All I can say is that it does not reflect the interest of the general public, and is simply not the case in the USA. Over there the ancient mysteries market is booming, with huge sections of books on the subject in new age stores, which more resemble your local superstore. . If you're book is taken on over there Ian, then it can always be imported back into Britain. So much more is happening at the moment, but I have run out of space to tell you. All I can say is stay tuned to www.andrewcollins.com, and all will be revealed in due course …