Part 7: Atlantean Geodesy

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U.S. GOVERNMENT CLASSIFIED DOCUMENT

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Memorandum: Atlantean Geodesy

To: Bartholomew Peoples, Executive Director

From: R. Cinza Brown, Director SP/BD   

Date: May 7, 2008

Background: To find the lost gold of antiquity, first one needs to know where to look.  If the Earth was flat, as the scholars of antiquity believed, then the two simple linear coordinates X and Y would have been sufficient to describe the locations of points on its surface.  However, being a sphere with no sides, a special frame of reference had to be invented which became geodesy – the science dealing with the Earth’s shape and the interrelationship of key locations on its surface.  On land, applying geodetic application can be a very complicated, highly mathematical undertaking requiring a keen knowledge of surveying.  To many that study land surveying, whether in its own right or as part of civil engineering, geography, or topographic science, they understand the need to think three dimensionally, in abstruse quantities such as nutation and aberration.

The satellite-reliant age has meant that teaching and learning the art has changed, with less understanding of the basic mathematics principles involved as taught by the ancient Greek and Arab masters to their pupils millennia ago. The area of satellite research and Global Positioning System (GPS) technology of electronic surveying is changing so rapidly that it is difficult even for modern-day experts to keep pace with new developments.  Prior to the 1950s no one involved with geodesy was interested in more than the first few hundred meters of the atmosphere or in the characteristics of electromagnetic wave propagation.  Our regional surveying stations were not intervisible and they were of no practical use, thus hilltops were a priority; this is no longer the case.

Geodesy is a word originating in Greece, literally meaning dividing Earth, and as a first objective the practice of geodesy provided an accurate framework for the control of national topographical surveys, which in the U.S. are officially performed by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS).  Thus geodesy is the science that determines the figure of the Earth and the interrelation of selected points on its surfaces by either direct or indirect techniques based on work done by geodetic surveyors. 

These characteristics further make it a branch of applied mathematics, one that must include observations that can be used to determine the size and shape of the Earth and the definition of coordinate systems for three-dimensional positioning; the variation of phenomena near to or on the surface, such as gravity, tides, Earth’s rotation, crustal shifts, and deflection of the plumb line; together with units of measurement and methods of representing the curved Earth surface on a flat sheet of paper.

From the last quarter of the 20th century up to present day, so much human activity now revolves around very accurate positioning and national boundaries as landmasses “shrink” from denser and denser human populations.  Geodetic surveyors are involved in an almost unlimited range of applications, some of which include placing correctly offshore oil rigs in their exact position; targeting for intercontinental ballistic missiles; geologic and mineralogy map making; directing shuttle missions into space; monitoring crustal movements; laser bathymetry; open sea

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navigation; seismic surveys; archaeological digs; gravity observations; planet deformation measurements; and all forms of military positioning on small-scale grid mapping from space.

Thousands of years before satellites and GPS, from the flat Earth to the sphere, from the spheroid to the geoid; from the knotted rope for measurement to suspended telegraph wires; the discovery of electromagnetic systems to laser ranging to the Moon and Mars; and orbiting satellites – men have pondered the conundrum of measuring the land they walked on.  As he tilled his fields, the farmer noticed the changing lengths of daylight and the changes in the maximum height of the Sun as the year progressed.  If he happened to be a fisherman or simply a watcher of seaborne activity, he could well have realized that when a distant vessel disappears from the view the lower part goes first and the top of the mast is the last to vanish. 

Not that he knew at the time, but standing on the beach with his eyes six feet above the water level looking at an ocean-going ship with a thirty-foot mast, the vessel would first begin disappearing when three miles from the shore, and finally vanish altogether – mast included – thirteen miles out.  As early navigators became more adventurous and traveled farther from their homeland, they would have appreciated that if they went in an easterly or westerly direction, the star now recognized as the Pole Star (Polaris) and around which the signs of the zodiac revolved, would stay more or less at the same altitude, whereas if they went in a northerly or southerly direction the altitude would change. 

In addition, the navigator may well have noticed that under the heat of the midday Sun the length of his shadow changed as he traveled north and south, whereas, for east or west travel over periods of a few days, the shadow remained sensibly constant in length.  Whether or not these phenomena gave him any early ideas as to the shape of the Earth he was standing on is unknown.  One might even question whether the shape of the Earth was of any interest at all since travel was very limited and adventurers few and far between.  However, thoughts on shape gradually progressed from flat to cube; through disk to sphere; then to cylinder, cone, and ellipsoid.

By the end of the 16th and early 17th century, several conflicting measurements and calculations as to the shape of the Earth were made in Europe, thereby creating different so-called accurate measurements of the planet’s size.  Expeditions of exploration and colonial settlement to the New World were increasing exponentially each year so two important societies in Europe were founded at about the same time – The Royal Society of London and l’Académie Royale des Sciences  in Paris.  Both were developing new theories involving observations of the oscillations of a pendulum at different elevations and in different latitudes, and of changes in the velocity of sound and of atmospheric pressure with elevation.  These observations, together with the theories of Isaac Newton, suggested the Earth must be flattened at the poles.

Almost in parallel with these activities, several long arcs were being measured in France under the guidance of the famous Cassini family, who occupied posts in the Paris Observatory for over four generations.  All of the French arc measurements suggested equatorial flattening, and not flattening at the poles believed by Newton – a classic case of Anglo-French intellectual rivalry.  The press dubbed the scientific controversy as the battle between the pumpkin and the egg, and new technical names were invented to describe each shape – the oblate spheroid for Newton’s theory and the prolate spheroid supporting the Cassinis.  For any given angular value, the equivalent arc length will increase toward the Equator for a prolate spheroid and increase toward the poles for an oblate one.

The controversy over shape needed urgent resolution, since it had critical implications for the growing number of intrepid Explorers and navigators, as witnessed earlier in the case of Christopher Columbus.  To resolve the debate, in the early 1730s it was suggested to the Academy in Paris that an expedition be sent to as near the Equator as possible to measure a long arc and a second expedition should go as near to the North Pole as was technologically feasible at the time.  Two such widely separated arcs should prove conclusive: if the length of one degree of arc was greater near the North Pole than it was near the Equator, then Newton would be proved correct; if the opposite, then the Cassinis would be right.

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So two separate groups of academicians went to the wilds of Peru (a region now actually part of Ecuador) and to the north of Sweden and Finland in the region called Lapland, including the famed scientist Anders Celsius.  The results finally proved convincingly that Sir Isaac Newton’s oblate spheroid theory was correct and the Cassinis’ theory wrong, and such was the spirit of patriotic pride then no less than the Bank of England asked Newton to next determine the price of gold per troy ounce, which he did – a price used by international money markets for 200 hundred years thereafter.  And the radius of the Earth was established at 14 miles longer running east or West as opposed to north or south, providing more precise measurements of the planet and navigational routes.

Once early man had figured out the Earth was round (but not perfectly so) and the accurate size in radius and circumference a few hundred years later, the next question involved figuring out exactly where we humans were located on this planet, so one of the main functions of geodesy was to determine the exact position of points on or near the Earth’s surface.  That led to measurements beneath the planet’s surface as well as for application by the mining industry, tunneling, navigating beneath the sea in the ocean’s depths, and above the surface for rocketry or radio telescope positioning.  Thus eons ago the concepts of latitude lines circling the globe east to west and longitude lines running north and south were born, that modern-day navigators measure more accurately today than ever before, but still designating coordinates in the exact opposite orientation when referring to a particular point. 

Therefore, latitude (also called a parallel) is measured referring to degrees marked as north and south, and longitude is measured in degrees in terms of east and west orientation, although the planet’s grid lines run in opposite directions.  The two sets of lines make up what is called a grid system; they crisscross each other around the globe.  The two starting points of the grid system are the two Poles, North and South – the points where the Earth’s axis meets the Earth’s surface.  Halfway in between lies the Equator, dividing the globe into two equal parts – the Southern and Northern Hemispheres.  One set of the grid system is drawn around the globe parallel to the Equator as the lines of latitude, which in the basic grid pattern of modern navigational shows 89 lines running east to west above the Equator and 89 lines below the Equator – the 19th “line” in each hemisphere is actually a map point at each of the two poles.

Latitude lines that circle the globe east to west get shorter and shorter as they depart the globe’s maximum girth at the Equator of zero-degrees and approach the pole points of 90° north and south latitude respectively.  But since there are many places on the globe occupying the same measure of east-west latitude lines, to be more precise, north-south lines are needed to pinpoint exact locations.  The degree of latitude is determined by measuring the angle between the plane of the Equator and lines projected from the center.

The second set of lines in the Earth’s grid system is drawn length-wise (this assumes the paradigm of the globe as we are accustomed to seeing it since grade school; in fact, as a free-floating sphere in three-dimensional outer space, linear orientation does not apply) from pole to pole and these north-south lines are called longitude.  One north-south line was chosen by international agreement (see below) as the zero-degree line or base line, passing through Greenwich, England, a borough of London.  In the basic grid there are 180 such equally spaced lines to the east of Greenwich and 180 lines to the west – but unlike lines of latitude, these north-south longitude lines all have the same length.  Again, this cuts the globe in two halves divided between the Western and Eastern Hemispheres.  Longitude is determined as the measure of the angle between the planes of two circles caused by the grid lines running north and south, which historically have been much more difficult for early seafarers to measure.

The navigator of a ship, or pilot of an airplane, can determine the latitude very easily by using an instrument called a sextant, which in rudimentary design has been around perhaps for millennia; they simply measure the altitude or angle of the Sun above the horizon as it crosses north-south grid lines.  The problem was that the sextant alone did not reveal enough information to determine longitude as well, since the missing element of measuring the exact time of day was also needed – a timing accuracy not achievable until the early chronometers of the 18th century were invented.

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The geographical grid used on the globe is based on the division of a circle, therefore, in 360° with each degree further subdivided into 60 equal parts called minutes, and each minute subdivided into 60 more equal parts to obtain seconds.  In navigational terms, the spherical Earth has a circumference of 21,600 nautical (sea) miles or approximately 24,860 statute (land or air) miles (this difference is due to the Earth not being a perfect sphere but slightly flattened at the poles as Newton proved with his oblate spheroid theory).  One minute of latitude and longitude at the Equator are each equal to one nautical mile, but longitude becomes more difficult to calculate since it decreases in length as it runs in ever-narrowing north-south lines towards the poles due to the curvature of the Earth meeting at a singular point. 

For example, at a position of 30° north-south latitude, one minute of latitude is one nautical mile, but the longitude measurement has shrunk to .87 nautical miles.  At a position of 89°59’ north-south latitude, one minute of latitude is still one nautical mile, but in longitude it’s almost zero nautical miles.  Once the latitude and longitude coordinates of two locations are known, the distance between these two points on the Earth’s surface can be calculated using simple mathematical principles coupled with the knowledge of the radius of the planet.  For example, the coordinates of Recife, Brazil are, to use a common annotation method 8°08’ S Latitude and 34°56’ W Longitude – meaning 8-degrees 8-minutes south of the Equator and 34-degrees 56-minutes west of Greenwich Prime Meridian.  In West Africa, the coordinates of Freetown, Sierra Leone are 8°29’ N Latitude and 13°14’ W Longitude. 

The computation of the distance as the crow flies between these two locations uses the following formula:

(x,y,z)=(Rsin[theta longitude]cos[90°-phi latitude], Rsin[theta]sin[90°-phi], Rcos[theta]) which calculates the distance between Recife and Freetown to be about 1,635 nautical miles or 1,882 statute miles.  Another shorthand way to annotate latitude and longitude location is to simply show coordinates, say for example Recife, as 8:08S / 34:56W.

It was the famous cheese country of Holland where a scientist in the 1620s first developed another interesting measurement technique called triangulation.  Between Bergen-op-Zoom and Alkmaar, Willibord Snellius observed a triangulation scheme with five baselines in the vicinity of the old university city of Leiden.  This technique deviated from all previous arc measures in that the distance between the terminal points could now be determined indirectly rather than directly.  This technique further developed extensively throughout the world and formed the basis upon which most national land and boundary surveys have been based.  It linked together a series of triangles and quadrilaterals formed between many pertinent points over the area to be mapped.  These points, because of requirements of the observational methods, tended to be prominent positions such as pillars, hilltops, church towers, and similar high points.

At the same time, as the name implies, triangulation requires the measurement of three angles in each triangle, and at least one accurately measured line is needed.  Positioning the whole chain correctly on the surface of the Earth requires finding the coordinates (latitude, longitude) of at least one point and the azimuth (the arc of the horizon measured clockwise from the south point in astronomy or the north point in navigation, to the point where a vertical circle through a given heavenly body intersects the horizon) of at least one line.

The whole of surveying is involved with determining the relationship between points on the Earth’s surface.  For large areas where there is reasonable intervisibility over great distances, then triangulation or its cousin trilateration (with the advent of electromagnetic distance measuring, it became quicker to record land distances rather than angles) is used to form a skeleton of known points.  Where the terrain is heavy jungle or bush land or very flat, another technique may be preferable – traversing.  This is basically getting out into the wild and physically measuring by visual surveying and tape measurement; something difficult to do in hilly, dense vegetation since the surveyor is easily distracted and disoriented.

The next geodesic controversy of note involving the British and French occurred in October 1884 when the American President Chester A. Arthur organized a meeting of 41 delegates from

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25 nations that took place in Washington, D.C. and was called the International Meridian Conference. 

The U.S. Geological Survey’s agenda called for voting on various resolutions thought necessary to facilitate international shipping and commerce, including: the adoption of a single world meridian to replace numerous ones in existence at the time (proposed by Great Britain to be a zero degree longitudinal line running through the Royal Observatory at Greenwich); all other longitudinal lines would be 180° calculated east and west, meeting at a jagged International Date Line; and all countries would adopt a mean solar day called a 24-Hour Universal Day, beginning at midnight in Greenwich.

The Prime Meridian had many previous homes, some running concurrently while others had been discarded over the centuries, such as north to south lines running through El Hierro, Canary Islands (favored at the time of the conference by the French, after Paris’ very own Le Meridien of course, since it was exactly 20° west of Paris); and from one time or another Madrid, Philadelphia, Jerusalem, St. Petersburg, ‘s-Hertogenbosch, and even Washington, D.C. itself.  The Greenwich observatory location, built by King Charles II expressly for that purpose, actually made the most sense because at the time it was still the center of international shipping and commerce, so it was no surprise that when the vote was taken, Greenwich won by 22 votes.  Abstaining were France and Brazil, while the Dominican Republic voted against.

Totally out in left field all by himself was Professor Charles Piazzi Smyth, Royal Astronomer for Scotland – he proposed as the conference began that the only logical choice for the Prime Meridian was a north to south line running precisely through the Great Pyramid of Egypt, a line he named the Giza Meridian.  The Great Pyramid of Giza, he pointed out to the assembled delegates, was acknowledged since time immemorial as the greatest monument ever erected by man, and furthermore, it was close to the Holy City of Jerusalem so its selection was sure to be embraced by God-Fearing Christians everywhere.  He was told that the delegates had attended the conference as scientists and not as Christians so his proposal was unanimously rejected outright and never made the list of possible serious choices.

But Smyth’s idea was not completely without merit: a Giza Prime Meridian would pass through more landmass than any of the other alternatives presented at the conference, and there was much ancient history and tradition involving the Great Pyramid and its utilization as a practical geodesic measuring tool.  Although we attribute much of the origin of science, mathematics, and astronomy to Greece, the fact is that many of her ancient scholars first learned about things from the Egyptians.  In many cases, Greek academic giants such as Pythagoras, Archimedes, Erasthosthenes, Poseidonius, and Ptolemy traveled from their homeland to Egypt to study at Alexandria’s university, which possessed perhaps the greatest collection of knowledge the world has ever known within its library – home to manuscripts, tablets, and scrolls written hundreds if not thousands of years previously, with origins not only from Egypt, but from Babylonia, Mesopotamia, Persia, Central Asia, India, and China as well. 

Once the code of the Rosetta Stone was broken allowing for the deciphering of hieroglyphics in the 19th century, it became apparent to the scientific community just how advanced early Egyptian science had been, as wall after wall of uncovered temples and tombs displayed texts depicting stars, the mapping of the sequence of constellations, and the fixing of city boundaries by geodesic measurement going back at least 6,000 years.  Tombs and pyramids may have been built for demigods on Earth, but they still were known to have had more practical applications, such as the Great Pyramid of Giza.

The Great Pyramid is located at the extreme northern edge of a limestone plateau at the edge of the Nile flood plain where the river meets the delta, and has itself been surveyed and studied by scientific experts over many centuries who determined the large stone structure used many phi measurements, and proportions which mirrored the measurements of the globe – including circumference, radius, and alignment with the stars.  Napoleon’s engineers noticed when they arrived in 1798 that the Great Pyramid was situated at the exact apex of the Nile Delta such that an arc centered on the Pyramid defined the extent of the Delta, perfectly enclosing its outer

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perimeter within the azimuth.  The northern promontory of the Delta was due north of the Pyramid while the extended northwest and northeast edges defined the Delta within a perfect sector, or quadrant of 90° exactly centered on the Pyramid. 

Therefore, its placement would have allowed the residents of the Nile Delta to easily resurvey their fields every year after annual flooding using a simple plumb line by sighting on the apex of the Great Pyramid – becoming even more accurate if the sighting was done in combination using all three of the Giza Pyramids.  The north to south line bisecting the Great Pyramid and the Nile Delta became the central meridian of ancient Egypt, and by extension, the central meridian of the known civilized world 4,500 years ago, but it is even more likely that the meridian predated the Pyramid and may go back 10,000 years or more.  The Giza Meridian is located in relation to the Greenwich Prime Meridian at 31°8’ east longitude. 

The seemingly eternal mystery, then, became who could have possibly needed to use a Giza Meridian for geodesy surveying and quite possibly an early navigational point of reference, if ten millennia ago humankind was still living in the Stone Age?  And when the Great Pyramid was built bisecting the Meridian, how did the builders know to encode exceedingly accurate geodetic information along with profound geometric insight and amazing aesthetic beauty?  While it’s disorienting to recognize that so early in the chronology of human civilization there stands such a discontinuous alpha point, the fact is, it does indeed exist and attempting to dismiss its applications is no substitute for grappling honestly and objectively with them.

If the construction of the Giza Pyramids and the original placement of the Giza Meridian did spring from a society of primitives who lived in caves only a scant few hundred years previously, it raises serious questions about the nature of the evolution of consciousness and the anthropological evolution timeline of human development.  When presented with unexplained phenomena, it is usually the case that the simplest explanation amongst a variety of more complicated possibilities is the correct one (The Principle of Parsimony aka Occam’s Razor).  Following that logic, the most obvious explanation would be that the Great Pyramid, and perhaps the entire Giza Plateau, was the culmination of a long lineage of observational astronomy, geodesy, and applied mathematics which had developed over a much longer time period – many thousands of years and not a few hundred years. 

This theory may address the question of the time needed to acquire and evolve knowledge, but it still leaves open two questions that have puzzled scholars since the Greek Herodotus set foot in Egypt and chronicled for the West, for the first time, this amazing culture – where did the people come from who created the advanced society of ancient Egypt, and perhaps even more perplexing, where did they go?

What educated person amongst us has not wondered why there is so much similarly between the pyramids of Egypt to those found in the Americas; to the Ziggurats of old Mesopotamia; to the temples of Angkor Wat; to the earthen pyramids of Xi’an, China and Pyongyang, North Korea; to pyramids found along the east and west coasts of Africa; the black stone pyramids of the Canary Islands; the carved stone heads of Easter Island; the thousands of cone-shaped burial mounds found throughout the United States; the mysterious burial tombs of the Scythians; and on and on – so that historians and scholars who say these building practices happened spontaneously and in isolation of each other are surely being irrational.

The Vatican has long been the target of conspiracy writers and fantastic tales concerning long held secrets buried deep inside its vast catacombs and libraries, secrets so stunning that they would bring the Christian world to the brink of destruction because of their controversial or religious nature, and so are suppressed by the Catholic Church.  Yet it was with our own very conservative Smithsonian Institute in Washington that was involved in a bizarre archaeological cover-up in 1909 where we start to begin to understand a little more about how to answer a few age-old questions.  Within the institute at the time, two schools of thought existed as to the ethnology of American Indians – one believed in diffusion and the other isolationism. 

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The diffusionists were the anti-establishment rebels who believed the evidence uncovered by the many mounds found on former Indian lands – from Maine to Florida, Ohio, along the Mississippi River, crisscrossing the Plain States, in the Pacific Northwest and Alaska, throughout California, and in many locations inside the Grand Canyon – were evidence of an advanced race of people that were not native American Indians.  They alleged the volume of culturally advanced artifacts, and disintegrating manuscripts showing a cuneiform-hieroglyphic style script, could not have been produced by native peoples, and furthermore, they said that similar mounds had been found all the way down to Mexico, Central America, and even South America, particularly along tributaries of the Amazon River basin. 

And then there was the nagging problem of why in various Indian cultures of the Americas there were persistent Old Testament-like myths of a great flood such as found in the folklore of New World tribes like the Cherokees, A’a’tan, Utes, Okanaguas, Cahtos, Araucanians, and Katenais.  Although the isolationist eventually won the day and portrayed many American tribes as not savage or primitive at all, but demonstrating many advanced civilization traits, the Smithsonian has had problems explaining over the years certain finds from ancient Indian mounds.

Like the clay jars found buried deep inside a cave of the Grand Canyon in 1881, showing cuneiform script and hieroglyphics; the many mounds of the Mississippi River Valley containing bodies wrapped like Egyptian mummies, along with weapons and jewelry fashioned like those found along the Nile River thousands of years ago; the bones found in the Spiro Mound of Oklahoma containing gold-plated headdress similar to that worn by Giza priests; the Crumf Cave of Alabama; the Acambaro, Mexico find of cave drawings showing motifs of Egyptian demigods; and the Egyptian tomb found in the Arizona Grand Canyon in 1909.

So exciting was the discovery of the Canyon Egyptian tomb that the Phoenix Gazette ran a front-page article of the find and gave a highly detailed report of the excavation of a rock-cut vault 1,480 feet below ground, following a route of tunnel caves to arrive.  The Smithsonian declared the whole thing a hoax, including the hieroglyphic etching in the great hall of the vault, that highly-skilled archaeologists later determined to be a flawlessly carved story about a journey made by a lost tribe of a people from the land of the pyramids.  There were literally hundreds of mummies stacked like cords of Wood.  Many engraved tablets with hieroglyphics were also found, as were solid gold statues of Egyptian gods and goddesses, flat elongated headwear, and a large carving of an a tau (19th letter of the Greek alphabet) ☥ cross with a loop at the top as if representing a small hand mirror, used ubiquitously in ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics as a symbol for the enduring breath of life. 

The Vatican’s Papal Tiara, called the Triregnum, is also eerily reminiscent of ancient Egyptian headgear.  Perhaps no other symbol used by pharaohs was more important than this royal headdress, the crown of gold which represented their ascension to god-being status, even in death when mummified remains of the royal family was paid much attention by the priesthood regarding headgear and death mask.  The headgear became associated with different gods based on design, so various shapes and sizes were used, some with plumes, horns, snakes, flowers, and Sun discs painted in bright colors and plated with gold.  The Atef-crown was worn out of respect to Osiris, while similarly designed crown with horns and disc paid homage to Re-Horakhte.  The blue-enamel-over-gold crown, called the Khepresh, was worn by pharaohs to honor the god Amon; while the ubiquitous Deshret, Hedjet, and Peshent crowns have the familiar elongated design we see in museums and pictures in history books.

There has long been speculation by archaeologists that the habit of flattening the skull of an infant and forcing it to grow in an elongated shape – a practice used by ancient Incans in Peru and Bolivia; the Mayans of Mesoamerica; and the Flathead Indians of the Pacific Northwest and Alaska – was a custom undertaken during the period when possibly Egyptian royals and priests wandered the land of the Americas using headdresses made of gold.  The local indigenous populace took up the custom flattening and elongating the skull out of respect and emulation of their masters.

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Working with federal marshals brought in from Washington, under direct orders of President “Big Bill” Taft (it was April 1909 and Taft had big shoes to fill, having just taken office a month previously and replacing his legendary mentor Theodore Roosevelt.  The only President to have served also as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, he wanted to act decisively regarding the Grand Canyon Egyptian “hoax.”), the Smithsonian ordered every artifact found at the site to be crated and sent back to Washington, stenciled as “Top Secret.”  Hieroglyphic engravings found along cave and tomb walls were eradicated with sledgehammers and a majority of the mummies (too many to take all back east) were doused with kerosene and burnt to ashes.  The Smithsonian Institute denies to this day that they have any American-Egyptian artifacts stored in their cellars.

Coincidentally, at about the same time during the early 1900s, Egyptian hieroglyphics were found on cliffs in New South Wales, Australia made by ancient explorers who became shipwrecked and stranded in the aboriginal outback of the vast and desolate continent.  The discovery centered around a very unusual set of rock carvings found in the national park Forest of the Hunter Valley 60 miles north of Sydney, and of regional folklore telling of many other sites.  The carvings were made in a rock cleft, a large block of split sandstone on a cliff-face that created a small chamber of two flat stone walls facing each other and that when widened out formed a six to twelve foot cavity, all covered by a huge flat rock.  On one of the cliffs was a three-foot high carving of the ancient Egyptian god of the dead, Anubis.  The carving has also been declared a hoax, despite the fact that radiometric aging dated the engraving to be more than 6,000 years old.

Perhaps one of the most bizarre findings of evidence that Egyptians once roamed the New World was found by none other than Theodore Roosevelt himself during his famous trip down the Amazon’s River of Doubt in March 1914; an expedition that almost cost the former president his life.  It was along the upper part of the river, down an off-shooting tributary that he saw from his dugout and sketched two drawings of Celtic-style spiral carvings on a rock face of a gorge – and next to these the unmistakable carving of the Egyptian symbol ☥ also called the ankh. 

Although he wrote of these findings after his very grueling adventure upon returning home to Long Island, experts think his failing health and strenuous experience (including blood poisoning and severe bouts of jungle fever) had him conjure up delirious images he thought he saw, confusing them from a trip he took to Egypt before traveling to Brazil.

Then there was the discovery of the oldest known mummy in North America, which became known as the Spirit Cave Man, and currently resides on the shelves of the Nevada State Museum.  Found in the namesake cave in 1940, the victim was originally thought to have died about 2,000 years ago until radiocarbon dating in the early 1990s placed its age back to almost 10,000 years ago.  The mummy was wearing moccasins and shrouds of woven marsh plants showing a weave pattern made from a loom, supposedly unknown in America until just a few hundred years ago, but known to Egyptians long before the completion of the Great Pyramid. 

But perhaps the strangest incident occurred in 1976 when the mummy of Ramses II, the last of the great Egyptian pharaohs who died in 1213 B.C. after a life of battling the Hittites, arrived in Paris for an exhibition.  A routine examination by French scientists concerned with deterioration due to exposure to air, light, and humidity produced an astounding find.  A piece of mummy bandage was placed under an electron microscope and it showed grains of tobacco, a plant that supposedly didn’t reach Europe for another 2,500 years until after the discovery voyages of Columbus, since tobacco is only indigenous to the Americas. 

Scientists examining the mummy were blamed for contaminating it with careless smoking of cigarettes or pipes nearby, thus explaining the tobacco grain find, something the same scientists vehemently denied.  Fifteen years later another group, this time of German scientists in Munich, decided to perform a test on various mummified remains sent by the Cairo Museum, who wanted the Germans to study chemical residues or minerals used during the ancient embalming ritual.  They used a forensic approach for the scientific analysis on one of the mummies, a mere priestess named Henut Taui who died around 1000 B.C. in Thebes.  Her

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remains were found to contain not only nicotine, but traces of cocaine as well, a product native to the Andean region of South America made from coca leaves. 

None other than Thor Heyerdahl had by then shown that Peruvian Indians had used mummification techniques amazingly similar to those used in ancient Egypt when he did his research in Peru, Bolivia, and Ecuador.  Although these forensic scientists found nicotine and cocaine traces in over 30 mummies examined, the scientific community dismissed these discoveries as fakes and forgeries since what they suggested was an historic impossibility.  There is the mystery of Salem, New Hampshire where an ancient complex of buildings and stones forming a circular pattern was found, dubbed America’s Stonehenge and dated from buried wood and other latent materials to be at least 5,000 years old. 

Found written on many of the circle-forming stones arranged oriented to afford astronomical sightings, are inscriptions that were only recently deciphered and determined to be an ancient language called Iberian Punic and other symbols thought to have originated in ancient Phoenicia.  There exist artifacts and stones found in mounds throughout the central part of the U.S. with ancient languages scrawled on them – in Wisconsin, New Mexico, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Iowa, New York, and Oklahoma.  No one knows who these mound builders were or why they used a matrix producing geometric patterns in the shape of five pointed stars when they laid out their construction grids.

These are but a few examples of hundreds of reported findings over the years, all of which have been debunked and called hoaxes by the scientific community, and believers in these finds are lumped with those fringe elements of society who believe in the genre of unanswered bizarre mysteries of long lost civilizations and UFOs.  If the Studebaker Institute intends to finalize its project paper for Operation GERDA and in turn sell the project concept to its client – the United States Federal Government (and in the process generate large sums of revenue for itself from non-compete contracts, plus accompanying profits from consulting, royalties, and success fees) – then the Institute will need to present a feasibility plan that identifies where the better part of approximately 130,000 metric tons of gold mined since man first stood upright, and up to the present day, may be possibly located.   But in my opinion, this estimate is far too low.

Allowing for the whereabouts of known quantities, such as monetary gold reserves kept by the Federal Reserve Banks and in Fort Knox; gold artifacts owned by the Vatican; monetary gold stored by foreign countries’ central banks; private hoarders and personal jewelry owners; and commercial gold stocks used by jewelers and industry; there still exists thousands of tons of mined and processed gold still unaccounted for.  Indeed, “experts” estimate that 90% of all gold ever found has been mined since the California Gold Rush was touched off in 1848, meaning that only 13,000 metric tons of gold were supposedly mined during the thousands of years man roamed the Earth before then.  But I am sure, from my extensive research, there was vastly more gold mined during the age of antiquity.  That said, where’s the rest of it? 

The purpose of this White Paper is to present a completely unorthodox approach to finding the lost gold of antiquity, thinking “out of the box” as it were, and taking advantage of modern technologies to mount a treasure hunt on a scale never before undertaken.  The foundation of this new approach must be built on the science of geodesy, but with an eye to and a mindset that embraces fringe theories and outlandish beliefs such as the Egyptian Civilization Theory.

As strange as this theory for worldwide settlements may sound in explaining the highly developed and similar cultures found in the Americas, with practices and architecture eerily similar to that found at Giza, it still only explains where the advance culture came from vis-à-vis the Americas – but it doesn’t explain where the advanced society came from after arriving in Egypt in the first place.  For that explanation, we may have to go further out on the limb and consider the legend of the lost continent of Atlantis.

The Scythian Crossroads: The Scythian soldier scrapes the scalp clean of flesh and softening it by rubbing between the hands, uses it thenceforth as a napkin.  The Scyth is proud of these scalps and hangs them from his bridle rein; the greater the number of such napkins that a man

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can show, the more highly he is esteemed among them.  Many make themselves cloaks by sewing a quantity of these scalps together.  Herodotus, 450 B.C.

The Scythians were a fierce warrior race of nomadic peoples that traveled far and wide in Central Asia – from Siberia in the east across 5,000 miles of mountains, forests, and plains of the Black Sea region in the west from northern Novaya Zemlya of the Polar Sea to the deserts of the “Lands of Stans” in the south.  They were not related to Mongols, either racially or culturally, although they did share many similar cultural traits and customs.  They were the first to domesticate the horse and use them in battle, becoming perhaps the greatest light cavalry the world has ever seen and the scourge of enemy tribes who feared their fighting ability and bloodthirsty practices on the battlefield.  They used iron swords and double-curved bows from which they fired barbed arrows while at full gallop without the use of stirrup or saddle – they used elaborate bridles and saddle clothes only and relied on an uncanny sense of balance. 

They were the earliest race to wear trousers, reflecting their horseback lifestyle; they wore pliable boots with heels, and they liked to cover themselves with elaborate tattoos.  They didn’t clean themselves with water, but with a paste made from pounded cypress, cedar, and frankincense that was applied to the face and body, allowed to dry, and was scrubbed off leaving a sweet and pleasant odor.  Warriors not only cut off the heads of slain enemies after taking their scalps, but also made leather-bound drinking cups from the fallen foes’ skulls.  They lined these grisly trophies with gold and proudly displayed them to impress guests.  Scythians had no temples, or altars, or religious images, and evidently no priests or holy men with the exception of castrated shamans, who interpreted signs of the spirit world and gave advice to kings and chiefs. 

Being superstitious, they believed in witchcraft, magic, and the power of the amulet, and shamans spoke in high-pitched voices and wore women’s clothing.  It was also their job to provide a spoken history of the Scythian folklore, which they later wrote down.  Archaeologists once believed that they had no written language, but later revised their theory since recent finds suggest they had a very sophisticated alphabet, but virtually undecipherable – although somewhat similar to Basque.  Drawings and carvings found in mound-like tombs (sixty-feet high when originally constructed from wood and sandstone, then buried) across the Steppes suggest they believed themselves to be a lost tribe of a continent lost at sea, who came from as far east as China and migrated increasingly westward – but they were a race of Caucasians and not Orientals so their origin is still a mystery, although historians label them the Indo-Aryans, or like their descendants the Sarmatians, as belonging to the Iranian branch of Indo-European peoples.

Perhaps the most striking feature of the Scythian culture was the enormous amount of gold they wore, used, and apparently cult-worshipped as a life-giving spirit – apparently they did not use gold for barter or monetary purposes.  They wore golden ornaments and belts, they ate off gold plates, and they used the soft metal to even adorn their weapons.  Gold has been found in the stomachs of mummified royalty (wives were sacrificed with prior deceased husbands in the Egyptian tradition) suggesting they swallowed the yellow metal for reasons not exactly known.  Scholars are always amazed at the quantities of gold found in kurgans, Scythian burial mounds throughout Central Asia, and are still uncertain as to the quantity of gold still buried beneath the plains of Russia in the former U.S.S.R.’s Islamic satellite states – recent estimates are in the thousands of tons. 

They were originally thought to have appeared on the scene – seemingly out of nowhere – some 3,000 years ago, but historians have revised this timeframe based on new carbon-dating of recent archaeological finds and believe they could have been around at least twice that long.  Initially thought to be a primitive society, that paradigm too has shifted based on stunning artwork and gold sculptures recently unearthed – the goldsmithing etched by Scythians appears to have been done yesterday and the precision of the engraving rivals anything purchased on the market today carved by the most skilled craftsmen.

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The art pattern carved in their ornaments used naturalistic motifs and animals – favorites like the horse (of course) as well as boar, bear, wolf, cougar, eagle, and fish.  Later cultures adopted these designs such as the Mongol and Chinese 2,500 years ago, then the Greeks and finally the Europeans.  Where they came from is a complete mystery and experts suggest they moved into the Volga-Ural Steppes from Eastern Asia and eventually reached the Black Sea and Assyria (which gave rise to Phoenician records of the Scythians) about 500 B.C.  Herodotus described in his written accounts of Central Asia that Darius, the third of the Persian great kings decided to invade Scythia about then, placing himself in command of a mammoth 700,000 man army that marched all the way across the Danube to the Russian Steppes.  As the Persians advanced, the Scythians steadily retreated since they had no cities or temples they were fearful of losing, so all Darius was conquering was air. 

With his army finally exhausted from the long march and lack of food, he decided to withdraw back to Persia, harassed by Scythians all the way; so terrified he became of these “barbarians” that he vowed never again to invade the northern territories.  Scythian migration westward eventually brought them into the territory of another mysterious and ancient culture – the Cimmerians, who controlled the region of the Caucasus and the plains north of the Black Sea.  In a war that lasted 30 years, the Scythians destroyed or enslaved the Cimmerians and the two peoples eventually interbred to rule an empire that stretched from Persia to present-day Syria, Israel, and Egypt. 

The Medes, who took over Persian rule, attacked Scythian armies repeatedly until they were finally forced out of Anatolia (Turkey) and migrated north to Russia.  Their class of chieftains grew and became called the Royal Scyths, firmly establishing themselves as rulers of southern Russia and the Crimean territories, and by the time of Herodotus, they had already started marrying into Greek high society.

They (Amazons) have no right breasts for while they are yet babies their mothers make red-hot a bronze instrument constructed for this very purpose and apply it to the right breast and cauterize it, so that its growth is arrested, and all strength and bulk are diverted to the right shoulder and right arm for wielding sword, bow, and ax.  Hippocrates, 400 B.C.

Herodotus further writes of a race of fair-haired and fair-skinned women warriors from an unknown land who were fighters more fierce then men, and were unparalleled with bow and arrow for accuracy and speed of shot.  He called these women Amazons and when they mated with Scythian men, produced a new race of people called Sarmatians – and the women held great positions of power in society.  They developed an armored cavalry capable of resisting either a phalanx of Macedonians or Roman legion in pitched battle, and settled present-day lands of most of Western Europe, from Hungary and the Baltic States all the way west to Spain and Portugal. 

Scytho-Sarmatian mythology eventually entered into Celtic and Germanic-Scandinavian folklore, giving birth to stories of the Norse god Odin, and other strange twists that involved the lost ten tribes of ancient Israel.  Stories from the Old Testament tell of the lost tribes of Israel who disappeared almost 3,000 years ago after the death of King Solomon.  The ten tribes were exiled by the powerful Assyrians who gained control of Jerusalem and were never heard from again, although legend has it they will one day return to the Holy Land.  But the Good Lord punishes the tribes to this day for their lust for gold by cutting off their return home using the great river called the Sambatyon which seethes with raging rapids churning over sharp rocks.  Even though the river itself rested on the Sabbath, the ten tribes could not cross back over because of their great piety and reverence for the day of prayer and rest. 

The tribes therefore scattered – some went as far east as China and Japan, some to India, some even to the Iberian Peninsula and Ireland, some to West Africa and Abyssinia, and even South America; and some joined up with the nomads of Scythia.  There is a branch of Hungarian-Magyar legend that links the Sarmatians to a story full of characters very similar to King Arthur (of the Õstörök Nation and the Etruscans) and his Round Table, and even to a legend of a Holy Grail that came not from Jerusalem, but from old Scythia, in a geographic region which approximates today Southeast Asia.  Another strange twist of the Scythian legend

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is their supposedly shared ancestry with the Celts, via the Cimmerians of Europe, or the Keltoi as the Greeks called them.

Anthropology: About five to ten million years ago, a primate species diverged from the chimpanzee line and this was the forerunner of humanity, as well as a host of other beings who were almost, but not quite human.  For a long time, a throng of hominid species shared the planet and at least four even co-existed in the same geographical region of Africa.  Paleo-anthropologists have trouble defining exactly what a hominid is, but most do agree that it was the physical characteristic of bipedalism – walking in an upright position – that first set early human ancestors apart from other apes.  Other subtler changes such as the metamorphosis of the canine teeth may have preceded the shift to bipedalism, which leads one school of thought in another direction regarding hominids. 

We do know from radiometric dating (the process of determining the age of rock fossils from the decay of their radioactive elements) that about 3.9 million years ago our “southern ape” progenitors (Australopithecus) and others had mastered the art of walking upright, and some 1.8 million years later they strode out of Africa and colonized entirely new lands.  Certain groups learned to make sophisticated tools, artworks, and musical instruments, but then inevitably, the species clashed.  Cro-Magnon became the conqueror species and may have slaughted (or a remote possibility, interbred) with the Neanderthal species and their descendants became literally the last man standing – Homo Sapiens.  

Reading the cracked brown fragments found embedded in rocks and sequences of fossilized DNA usually creates more questions than answers, as more and more scientists find clues that the story of human origins has had many haphazard convolutions.  It seems that every year new accounts of shared human heritage with yet another extinct species creates another plot twist or gives rise to another new mystery.  A 7-million-year-old skull found in Chad may first appear to be our earliest bipedal ancestor and later turn out to be a distant dead-end cousin, as was the case in real life.

A century-old belief by the scientific community that modern humans originated in Africa 200,000 years ago is these days being overturned by new evidence that now supports a spontaneous, multiple-location theory.  Neanderthals, once thought to be crude and brutish cave dwellers with monkey-level IQ, have been determined by further investigation to have been a refined and artistic culture that was able to copy and improve tool-making technologies of Cro-Magnon humans.  If anything, we’ve learned that the biological history of early humans is marked by complex diversity rather than by linear progression, by nature’s tinkering and chaos theory rather than by applied mathematics – “the flap of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil sets off a tornado in Texas” as the MIT Dr. Edward Lorenz once said. 

But what we do know is this: that despite all the evolutionary combinations and permutations flowing in the universe of mankind’s gene pool, the DNA inside people with different skin complexions and hair texture is 99.9% alike – genetically speaking therefore, race doesn’t exist.  Whether or not the Scythians, Sarmatians, and/or Cimmerians can trace their origins to a different culture and place such as Atlantis is a matter of pure speculation, as is the theory that the gene pool of Atlantis is an offshoot of Homo Ergaster in a similar fashion to Homo Erectus and Homo Heidelbergensis, or that the Homo Atlanteans sprang from Heidelbergensis as did Homo Sapiens; as did the dead-end strain of man we call Homo Neanderthalensis originate with the Heidelbergensis. 

Interestingly enough, it was a French Jesuit priest, a philosopher and paleontologist – working for the U.S. Geological Survey in China – who helped in the 1929 discovery of Homo Erectus, called Peking Man.  The controversial Pierre Teilhard de Chardin believed that the study of biological evolution did not mean per se that a rejection of Christianity was necessary.  He saw evolution to be a process involving all matter and not just biological material, as part of a cosmic plan undergoing progressively more complex stages that would lead eventually to what he called the “Omega Point” – the integration of all human consciousness at which moment there’s a second coming of Christ. 

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His supporters today believe he had predicted the coming of the Internet and that mankind is now on the threshold of a renewed spiritual and religious enlightenment, when we will cast aside material wealth and greed and become one with the cosmos.  Needless to say, back in 1929 Chardin’s views were neither popular with the scientific establishment nor kosher with the Church since he happened to publish his philosophical views concurrent with the Stock Market Crash and onset of the Great Depression.

The Atlanteans’ split with Ergaster occurred almost 1.8 million years ago, and with Erectus or Heidelbergensis about 500,000 years ago; their development would have paralleled that of the Sapiens until Atlantis catastrophically sank, with no warning, beneath the sea almost 10,000 years ago.  These were the people who had during thousands of years developed their own highly advance civilization and society and, like the mysterious Neanderthals of Northern Europe, did not fit into nice neat family tree evolutionary theories proposed by expert anthropologists and so stuck out like a sore thumb.  Not knowing what to do with them or how to explain their place in the evolutionary scheme of things, Homo Atlanteans were simply called Cro-Magnons and labeled early Homo Sapiens, who crowded out of the evolutionary chain the dimwitted Neanderthals about 10,000 years ago. 

But the Cro-Magnon didn’t just parachute into Europe at the time: four skeleton remains and artifacts (finely crafted stone and bone tools, shell and ivory jewelry, polychrome paintings on cave walls) of his culture were found in 1868 for the first time in Les Eyzies, France with subsequent discoveries in Spain, Germany, and Central Europe – and most recently in the ancient marshes of Southern Chile.  As a people, they were tall and lanky, living well into their sixties, and developed fortified campsites; an advanced society complete with underground burial tombs, the practice of pagan rituals, and burying gold amulets with their dead.

The French find was dated to some 40,000 years ago, while the one in Chile to almost 75,000 years ago. This shattered a commonly held theory going back all the way to 1589, when another Jesuit missionary by the name of José de Acosta suggested the original Americans had somehow migrated from Siberia many thousands of years ago over a Bering Straight land bridge – a theory honed in the early 20th century and named the “Clovis Hypothesis” (after Clovis, New Mexico where specialized spear points were first found and then later showed up all over the Americas).  About the only thing clear about evolutionary science and the emergence of Homo Sapiens is that the process of change from hominid to modern human has not been a single linear transformation of one species into another, but rather a meandering, multifaceted evolution which every year brings new discoveries and requires the scientific community to revise previous time lines and prior theories. 

There will no doubt be more discoveries of Cro-Magnon sites throughout Europe, and the rest of the world in years and centuries to come – after all, we’re just here for a blink of an eye considering how long the ancient fossils and artifacts of early man lay buried out there somewhere – and we may indeed one day learn that Cro-Magnon lived 100,000 years ago or 200,000 years ago or a number even older.  I am of the firm belief, although born an African American, that Cro-Magnon Egyptians did indeed exist and expounding such a theory automatically puts this author in the category of a racist bigot in some quarters, since there are those in the scientific community who take great umbrage to any question that black men were not capable of building pyramids or organizing advanced societies. 

However, also having a Ph.D. in Anthropology besides Economics, I must follow the scientific and forensic evidence, which invariably leads me to my conclusions.  History will also be revised one day to show that the Homo Atlanteans did indeed exist as Cro-Magnons, and developed on the evolutionary scale long before their small “continent” sank 10,000 years ago – and eventually got to Egypt where they set up housekeeping.  This date marks the period of their incursion into Central Asia on a large scale, but their sunken homeland, somewhere in the Indian Ocean west of Indonesia, was not their original place of embarkation.  The lost continent was not called Atlantis; that was the name they gave to their new island home that eventually sank.  

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Their original home was, however, a large “full-size” continent that still exists today although it’s pretty much covered with trillions of tons of ice and snow, and is the most inhospitable and uninhabitable place on the face of the planet.  The Atlantean forefathers had to abandon this place and seek refuge on a new warm tropical island far away because of continental drift and shifting of the Earth’s crust; their continent was being frozen by the encroaching Ice Age and slowly the citizens were dying out from lack of nourishment.

The elders, learned scientists who knew almost as much about geodesy, meteorology, and astronomy as we know today, knew the end was coming at least 75,000 years ago, so sent scouting parties far and wide to search for a new home; some never returned and, becoming stranded themselves, took up new primitive lives in places like present day Chile, or France, or Germany.  Eventually, as the ancient elders knew it would, the continent became completely frozen over 12,000 years ago, but by then all the peoples had either died off or left to settle their new island home where they lived in comfort for 2,000 years and developed the most advanced society the world has ever known. 

We don’t know for sure what the Atlanteans called their ancient homeland, but today we know it as the continent of Antarctica.  Look today at a map of the world from a birds-eye view perspective, staring down at the South Pole and imagine how it was thousands of years ago before the last Ice Age – only partially frozen over but with easy access to the sea and favorable currents for navigation.  As an island continent, Antarctica is surrounded by landmasses from the tip of South America, Africa, and the Pacific Islands and one huge coterminous ocean (not three oceans called the Atlantic, Indian, or Pacific) which Plato called “the true ocean.” 

The frozen continent is centrally located with natural harbors that could have been the home to fleets of ships that plied the seas of the world in search of gold and other minerals.  In earlier warmer days, with an advanced society, it would have been a paradise on Earth, but then along came the Ice Age.  Driven out by a changing climate, people migrated to an island in the Indian Ocean which became known as Atlantis, and when it sank, the surviving Atlanteans wandered from their newly established colony in Southeastern Asia, across the plains of Central Asia, to Europe, and the Middle East, and eventually to the Americas.

The Ice Age: No discussion of primitive man can be complete without studying his early development in parallel with the climatic conditions prevailing during the later stages of evolutionary cycle, which played a crucial role in his migratory patterns, diet, social development, and acquisition of cognitive skills needed by intelligent Homo Sapiens for survival in harsh environments – especially those prevalent during what scientists call the Pleistocene Epoch, or what is commonly referred to today as the Ice Age.

The Pleistocene was part of the Quaternary Period, which was the shortest and most recent period of the Cenozoic Era (the one we’re still in that followed the Tertiary Period).  It began about 1.8 million years ago, ending the Holocene Epoch just 10,000 years ago (about the time the last Ice Age ended which we call the Neolithic or New Stone Age).  Anthropologists divide the Pleistocene between the younger Middle Paleolithic and the older Lower Paleolithic, while the Upper Paleolithic was called the Old Stone Age.  The Pleistocene was known for its ice ages, when glaciers covered many parts of the Earth because of global cooling.  Much of the world’s temperate zones were alternatively covered by glaciers during cold periods and uncovered during the warmer interglacial (sometimes tropical) periods when ice retreated. 

There were animal extinctions during these shifts, but the large hardy mammals of the Pleistocene (including early man) weathered several climatic shifts.  The woolly mammoth that roamed Siberia and North America 20,000 years ago was one of the largest land mammals of the Pleistocene – back then a thick sheet of ice covered part of the United States and Canada.  Massachusetts, the Great Lakes, Michigan, and Illinois were carved up by the advancing and receding colossal glaciers and debris weighing billions of tons (including vast quantities of placer gold deposited along the way), which invaded south all the way down to the Great Plains.  Also prevalent were the mammoth’s cousins, the mastodon; long-horned bison, saber-tooth

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cats, and giant ground sloths characterized Pleistocene habitats in North America, Asia, and Europe. 

Native horses and camels galloped across the plains of Oklahoma, Nebraska, and Kansas; great teratorn birds with 25-foot wingspans stalked prey (the mythical Indian Thunderbird), yet by the end of the Pleistocene all these animals became extinct, with the exception of man (horses living in North America today were brought over by European Conquistadores a few hundred years ago, their native American ancestors extinct thousands of year before then).  Historians believe that with the expansion of Homo Sapiens, wild game hunting by humans at the close of the Pleistocene caused or contributed to the extinction of many of the large land mammals, as more food was required for an ever-increasing population base.

Paleoclimatologists have come up various reasons for the cause(s) of the ice ages.  One theory is that during past ice ages the Earth was not at a 23.5° axial tilt as it is now, so sunlight could not reach the poles and allowed snow and ice to accumulate.  The Milankovitch “wobble” (or precession) named after the namesake Serbian scientist, occurs during the Earth’s orbital cycles roughly every 20,000, 40,000, and 100,000 years and is felt by many experts to play a major role in the planet’s climate.  Once enough snow accumulated, the pressure of the glacier caused a thin, slippery layer to form underneath the colossal ice sheet and as it moved southward, the Sun melted the glacier, creating an even thicker water layer. 

A second theory is that there have been intermittent periods of heavy volcanic activity during the Pleistocene which caused a substantial amount of dust and particles to fly into the air, or that the Earth was struck periodically by meteorites or comets.  Scientists of this school, many who are associated with the U.S. Geological Survey who’s responsible for keeping track of global eruptions, point to examples from the last 200 years to illustrate their point.  The explosion of Indonesia’s Krakatoa Volcano of August 1883 had the explosive force of a 150-megaton nuclear bomb and obliterated the entire northern portion of the island it inhabited, throwing 11-cubic miles of ash and debris into the Earth’s atmosphere.  Krakatoa was 10 times as powerful as the Mount St. Helens 1981 volcanic eruption and categorized a six on the VEI (Volcanic Explosivity Index) scale.  Krakatoa’s explosion created earthquakes and tsunami waves 120 feet high along with the volcanic ejecta, and heat from the pyroclastic cloud killed 36,000 people in nearby coastal towns and villages.

The giant waves made it all the way to the west coast of California and east as far as the English Channel; the explosion was heard nearly 2,000 miles away.  Volcanic ash and pumice was so thick in the Earth’s atmosphere it blotted out the Sun almost completely as far away as 250 miles for almost three days, and plant and animal life within a 50-mile blast zone did not begin to reestablish itself in nearby islands for five years.  The atmospheric pressure shockwaves from the secondary explosions of Krakatoa circled the globe seven times and ash reached 50 miles into the upper atmosphere; after 13 days, ash was still circulating the planet via air currents.  Unusual and spectacular blue, green, and red sunsets occurred for almost three years as far away as America and Europe due to lingering atmospheric effects of the ash. 

In the year following the eruption, the ash acted as a solar radiation filter and reduced the amount of sunlight reaching the surface of the Earth, resulting in a reduction on the average of 10° Fahrenheit of global temperatures.  Weather patterns continued chaotic during subsequent years and there were major climatic changes until patterns returned to normal again in 1888.  Yet as powerful as Krakatoa was, another volcanic eruption in Indonesia 68 years previously was 10 times more powerful and is termed a VEI seven Mega Colossal (the last known prior eruption to the Tambora and Atlantis events of so much explosive force occurred in Yellowstone National Park two million years ago). 

The Tambora Volcano on the Indonesian island of Sumbawa exploded so violently in 1815 that it hurled an estimated 175-cubic kilometers of volcanic ash into the Earth’s atmosphere, killing 90,000 people.  By the end of 1816 global temperatures on the whole had dropped an astonishing 20° Fahrenheit and that year became known as “the year without summer.”  Even more powerful than Tambora was the volcanic explosion and earthquake that destroyed Atlantis

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10,000 years ago, and like Sumbawa the island of Atlantis completely vanished beneath the waves of the Indian Ocean.

An example of a non-volcanic event often pointed to is the Tunguska impact of 1908, when a comet fell from outer space in the Siberian Forest and caused a tremendous explosion equaling a 15-megaton blast, leveling 750 square miles of trees like toothpicks and scorching the land in a five-mile radius outward from the impact crater.  Londoners were able to read their newspapers out in the night air from the glow made by the intense heat of the explosion.  During the early 1970s, geologists of the U.S. Geological Survey hunting for meteorite fragments stumbled on a fissure in the ice crust of the Antarctic and found a thin layer of dust they believe was deposited there as a result of Tunguska.  Climatologists at the USGS later reached the conclusion that the Earth cooled by as much as 5° degrees Fahrenheit for over a year as a result of the comet’s impact and subsequent release of dust and debris into the planet’s atmosphere.

Still another theory holds that the ice ages had to do with the cosmic orbit of the Earth around the Sun – that although today more circular, during the Pleistocene the planet’s eccentricity was more elliptical and as it strayed further from the Sun, ice caps enlarged and glaciers formed.  There are geologists who think continental drift and the shifting Earth’s crust caused the first of the ice ages.  The latest theory holds that the ice ages were caused by the Solar System’s passage through the Milky Way Galaxy’s spiral arms during Earth’s orbit around the center of the galaxy every few hundreds of thousands of years.  The truth is no one knows for sure what really causes ice ages, but we do know with absolute certainty that sooner or later another ice age will arrive.

During the last 10 million years, Earth has had ten major ice ages and numerous smaller glaciations such as the Little Ice Age that occurred during medieval times, which froze the Thames River in England, caused snow blizzards in Spain, and forced Church bishops in France to visit the edge of approaching glaciers to halt their advance with prayer.  Ice ages tend to last roughly 100,000 years, while interglacial periods usually last 8,000 to 12,000 years – the Earth is currently in a post-glacial time frame and inevitably it will experience another ice age sometime in the future.  Ironically, it may be global warming beginning with the Industrial Revolution which has slowed the coming of the next ice age; each year it seems more climatic changes are occurring due to emissions of hydrocarbons into the atmosphere as witnessed by El Niño during the past few decades, and increased numbers of high-intensity hurricanes striking the southern United States.

Scientists of the British Antarctic Survey working in the Antarctica said in a recently issued press statement that parts of that continent have recently been warming much faster than the rest of the globe, on average, and the rise in temperature has been gradually accelerating for the past 200 years.  They cite three possible reasons not necessarily pointing to human interference with climatic changes: changing ocean currents may have brought warmer deep water onto the continental shelf of the Antarctic, reducing sea-ice; warmer air may have come into the region from changing atmospheric conditions due to Sun spots; or a unique sea-ice-atmosphere feedback may be at work, all of which are phenomena which occur naturally and periodically over the millennia. 

What they can conclude from this, is that not all of Antarctica was too cold for human habitation some 20,000 years ago as originally thought – the dry valleys of the continent could have had sustained human habitation through agricultural production until as recently as 15,000 to 12,000 years ago before eventually succumbing to the numbing cold.

Critias: Then listen Socrates, to a tale which though strange is certainly true, having been attested by Solon, who was the wisest of the seven sages.  He was a relative and dear friend of my great-grandfather, Dropides, as he himself says in many passages of his poems; and he told the story to Critias the Elder, my grandfather, who remembered and repeated it to us ...  Now in this island of Atlantis there was a great and wonderful empire which had rule over the whole island and several others...  The kings of Atlantis ruled an island greater in extent than Libya

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and Asia, and when afterwards sunk by fire and earthquake, became an impassable barrier of mud to voyagers sailing from hence to any part of the ocean.

Hail Atlantis: The Western version of the legend of a lost continent of Atlantis was actually born in 360 B.C. when Plato wrote his two dialogues called Timaeus and Critias, which are the only known authentic written records that specifically refer to a lost civilization called Atlantis.  The stories involving the Tabula Smaragdina or Emerald Tablet of Hermes was concocted much later by spiritualists and alchemists looking to link ancient Egypt with Atlantis, and even Biblical characters from the Old Testament.  The legend suggests that there once lived around 10,000 years ago a demigod in Egypt - a place then called Khem – by the name of Thoth Hermes Trismegistus who invented hieroglyphics, and was the father of medicine, astrological, and chemical doctrines; and then later he became worshipped as the god Thoth, whose symbol became the baboon and ibis. 

Greeks called him Hermes the Thrice Greatest and they subsumed Egyptian legend into their own mythological accounts of history.  Historians and scholars have equaled Thoth to the Prophet Enoch (given his proclivity towards apocryphal accounts of Biblical creation), to Moses, and even to Noah since according to the Greeks of Alexandria, the man-being Hermes said civilization had been reborn after a great flood, and it was Hermes as architect who had made designs for pyramids long before the Great Pyramid of Giza was constructed. 

It was said Thoth encoded the history of human origin and science on a single piece of green crystal called the Emerald Tablet and buried it somewhere in the Egyptian desert along with a scroll, then it was later actually seen and examined by scholars in Alexandria 200 years before the birth of Christ, which said Thoth had been an Atlantean of noble birth who migrated to present-day Egypt where he became a god-being.  Fearing persecution by Christian religious zealots, those ignoble adventurers seeking the secret of gold transmutation (the so-called Philosopher’s Stone) 500 years later, Alexandrian historians ordered the artifacts taken back to the Giza plateau and buried deep inside a cave, its exact location since lost to mankind.

The dialogues written down by Plato were conversations between Socrates, Hermocrates, Timaeus, and Critias concerning their thoughts on what constituted an ideal society.  The story centered around a conflict between the ancient Athenians and a race of people called Atlanteans that took place more than 9,000 years before Plato’s time.  Historically there is nothing known of Timaeus, but Critias was Plato’s great-grandfather alive during the era of Socrates, Plato’s mentor.  Hermocrates was a well-known statesman and soldier from old Syracuse, Critias the Elder was the grandfather of Critias, and Dropides was the great-grandfather of Critias – close friend and distant relative of the even older Solon who first brought the story of Atlantis to Greece. 

Solon had visited Egypt as a young man and while sailing home his ship was taken over by pirates off the coast of a small fishing village that would one day become the fabulous city of Alexandria.  Imprisoned and later enslaved, after escaping and returning to Greece, Solon told how he had heard from others a story of a long lost culture who had spawned the wondrous society of the pharaohs; who taught the local natives how to build marvelous pyramids and temples, and secrets of navigation, medicine, and the stars; and how to use the compass and square to achieve perfect stone block fittings.  Solon said the forgotten place had been called Atlantis and before being swallowed by the sea, was located many thousands of miles east of Giza. 

Over the centuries since, no other place has stirred the fantasy of unsolved mystery conspirators and pseudo-archaeologists more, giving rise to countless theories of the lost island continent and its highly advanced civilization; the birthplace of pure pagan religion, science, and sacred geometry.  There are those who believe the tale of Atlantis to be complete fiction, no more than an allegory of how greed and avarice can lead to the destruction of society no matter how advanced culturally.  But more and more the scientific view is that Atlantis did indeed exist and for some reason fell beneath the sea about 7600 B.C.

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The island nation was populated by a noble and powerful race of people who possessed great wealth in gold; advanced knowledge of navigation which allowed them to travel far and wide; the establishment of centers of trade from Europe to Asia; and a highly advanced knowledge of science and geodesy.  As stated already, according to the Greek Plato, the story of Atlantis was first chronicled many hundreds of years previously by a priest, who in turn claimed the homeland of Atlantis to have originated not anywhere near Egypt, but due east many thousands of miles, and was called by the priesthood of Egypt, Keftiu. 

Plato also wrote that his teacher, Socrates, had heard of such a place but did not believe it ever existed, nor did Plato’s student Aristotle.  Nevertheless, during the travels of Herodotus throughout the Middle East a hundred years before Plato, he wrote of an ancient Egyptian legend telling of the original homeland inundated by great floods and destroyed by fire – a place far, far to the east.  As more and more Greek scholars visited the land of the pharaohs, they began learning and teaching at the University of Alexandria about the lost continent and, had not the library there been sacked and burnt to the ground on several occasions, we might know much more about the ancient Egyptian homeland the priests called Keftiu.

Over the centuries much “evidence” supporting the Atlantis theory has been uncovered.  Supposedly ancient writings found in Aztec and Mayan ruins tell of a similar legend involving a large island which sank in the Caribbean Sea killing all fair-skinned and blue-eyed inhabitants.  This in turn fostered a theory that Atlantis was actually Ireland, since its dimensions of 300-miles long and 200-miles wide roughly equated to the size of the Atlantis described by Plato.  There is some scientific basis to this theory, but what actually sank was a Celtic shelf called Dogger Bank after being hit by a huge flood wave about 6100 B.C.  Like Atlantis, Ireland has a central plain surrounded by mountains and its ancient Temples of Newgrange, Knowth north of Dublin predated the Egyptian pyramids, so could be a match for the legendary temples of Atlantis. 

Other theories as to the original whereabouts of Atlantis include the Mediterranean islands of Crete or Thera, the Azores, the Canary Islands (inhabited to this day by the Guanches, the mysterious tall blue-eyed blond natives who descended from the Cro-Magnon), or near the Bermuda island of Bimini.  The Scilian historian Diodorus Siculus wrote in the 1st century B.C. that thousands of years previously Phoenicians had visited South America and found ruins containing Egyptian hieroglyphics telling of war a between surviving Atlanteans and Amazonian Indians, whom he believes wiped out the last of the species. 

The Antioch historian Marcellinus wrote in the 4th century A.D. about Atlantis, as did the Greek Plutarch write about the mysterious figure Solon, purveyor of the tale 300 years before.  About the same time, another Greek historian by the name of Timagenus wrote about an ancient war fought between Atlanteans and primitive Stone Age tribes in the Pyrenees Mountain region between Spain and France, and they made that area their new home.  This story and archaeological findings in French caves gave rise to speculation that somehow the Basque people of the Pyrenees were related to the ancient Atlanteans, as were the fair-haired race of people found on the Canary Islands.  But speculations did not stop there and indeed, have not stopped to this day. 

There are tales of Atlantean ruins found in Andean Mountain temples by descendants of Incas; contained within the folklore of Hopi Indians in North America; in tablets found in Lhasa, Tibet; the Yonaguni ruins beneath the East China Sea; and links to the lost civilization of the Easter Islands.  Even the German and Nordic Scandinavian folklore developed a twist on Atlantis and called the vanished continent Thule, a place eventually covered by ice and snow where there once lived a pure race of Aryan supermen.

Professors in Alexandria, Egypt taught students that Atlantis was the domain of Poseidon, god of the seas, and when he fell in love with a mortal woman, Cleito, he created a dwelling at the top of a hill near the middle of the island and surrounded the city with six concentric rings of water-filled canals interspersed with rings of land to protect her.  The main city had a diameter

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of two miles and had temples, hanging gardens, and solid gold statues dedicated to the gods who they believed granted the ruling class and priests immortality.  The city’s smaller canals were connected to the ocean by a large canal hundreds of mile long, thus allowing oceangoing vessels to sail to the bottom of the hill. 

Surrounding the hill was a huge plain 330-miles long and 110-miles wide (meaning it wasn’t much of a continent at all, but just a big island about the size of Wisconsin); surrounding the plain on three sides were mountains – the fourth side to the south being open to the ocean.  To the north towering over the foothills was the giant Mount Atlas, an active volcano that eventually erupted with an explosive force so violent that massive earthquakes and fire destroyed the island – and this mountain shape was used by the surviving diaspora as a pattern for design of man made structures shaped like pyramids.

It was also considered a holy mountain with rifts and crevices filled with gold nuggets and gold dust, walls of it embedded in the cliff faces, but to which mortals were too afraid to travel so stayed away.  The climate was lush and tropical allowing for three annual harvests of fruit, herbs, and nuts to feed the populace of two million people who lived in villages and hamlets throughout the island.  Livestock was also raised for food while wild animals like elephants and unicorns roamed freely.  Atlanteans developed a very advanced society but over the centuries, their lust for gold and immortality corrupted their virtuous ways to the point that only greed and power prevailed, and then they invaded the sacred lands of Mount Atlas in search of more gold, so to teach them the lesson that only gods were immortal, Zeus consulted with the other lesser gods and determined the punishment was to be the sea should swallow Atlantis.

The sea frequented by the Greeks, that beyond the Pillars of Hercules (Straight of Gibraltar), which is called the Atlantic or also, the Erythraean Sea (Indian Ocean) are all one and the same. Herodotus, 450 B.C.

Action Plan: The Department of Strategic Planning and Business Development at the Studebaker Institute, after examining countless navigational charts, maps, documents, and hieroglyphic drawings; researching tall tales; consulting experts in the field; talking to many academicians, and hearing from clairvoyants concerning untestable metaphysical notions; has reached the conclusion that there does indeed exist sufficient evidence to support a lost continent of Atlantis that we think existed off the west coast of Sumatra, Indonesia in the Indian Ocean. 

We believe that a cataclysmic event, more than likely a series of tremendous volcanic explosions and ensuing earthquakes, with a combined total magnitude in the neighborhood of 1,000 megatons of TNT devastated the large island without warning, causing it to sink beneath the sea, and killing all but a few thousand survivors who were able to reach Sumatra.  From there, over the centuries, the migrated up the Malay Peninsula, through Southeast Asia (where a smaller band split off and traveled to China, Korea, and Japan), across India, and into the endless landmass of Central Asia, eventually becoming the many tribes of Scythia.

The Atlantean descendants split again, with one group traveling southward through Persia, Mesopotamia, Assyria, and eventually Egypt, where they founded a very advanced society that showed native dwellers how to build the great wonders of the ancient world like the Great Pyramid of Giza.  The other group went northward, across the Steppes, into Europe and Iberia, and eventually settled Ireland and the Nordic countries so becoming Celts.  These descendants of Atlantis were expert seamen and sailed the oceans of the world with ease in search of the one commodity that they craved more than life itself - gold - and this craving even led them to the Americas.

The yellow metal formed the basis of ancient beliefs, first in a spiritual sense to acquire immortality, and then later as a bartering agent to acquire land, slaves, and tangible wealth.  And so sprang forth the countless stories through the ages of the famed ancient lands of the Middle East and the long lost civilizations that thousands of years ago built temples and structures which conventional wisdom says they were not sufficiently developed to build, yet which sprang up almost simultaneously throughout all parts of the world.

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The famed American 19th century A.D. clairvoyant Edgar Cayce claimed to have been an Atlantean in a prior life and thinks this is exactly what happened – furthermore, that a record of Atlantis’ history is buried within the ruble of the sunken island making it not a metaphysical allegory of a paradise lost, but a very real place indeed. 

Since the Studebaker Institute has no way of ever finding said record, which we think shows the locations of hundreds if not thousands of caches of gold stashed around the globe – many thousands of tons already processed mind you – then the next best approach is to study ancient texts, such as hieroglyphic engravings from ancient tombs and temples, the Kebra Nagast of Ethiopia, the Rig –Vedas of India (the ancient Aryan hymns going back many millennia upon which Hinduism is based), the Old Testament, the Koran, and the Torah to cite just a few sources, for clues on the most likely burial locations.

Furthermore, by plotting these locations using coordinates of latitude and longitude and applying the Giza Prime Meridian baseline rather than the Greenwich Meridian to within a margin of error plus or minus five degrees longitude (to allow for continental drift and geological crust displacement occurring over the millennia), the gold mining sites excavated by the bands of Atlanteans who eventually settled Egypt, Ireland, and the Americas will in all probability produce discoveries of staggering quantities of gold.

Modern-day scholars would have us believe that sacred sites and world renown archaeological locations were built by local, indigenous peoples and that they somehow developed almost identical building techniques and scientific methodology in complete isolation of each other – expecting us to accept the ludicrous theory of an infinite degree of separation.  The premise of the “Atlantean Geodesy” is that a single global pattern exists that ties all of these man-made monuments together in a logical and rational six-degrees-of separation theory: that everyone on the globe today is separated by no more than six friends of friends of friends (now in the 21st century more than ever with the Internet and social media making the world a truly global village).

The idea that civilizations, separated by vast geographical distances, somehow developed coincidentally on their own, but in parallel to each other, its societies possessing striking similarities in architecture, art, science, religion, metallurgy, and culture is just plain wrong – there is too much evidence showing obvious commonalities between ancient societies showing the classic isolation theory to be an incorrect, but strongly entrenched paradigm.  The one common link throughout all applicable theories, however, happens to be gold.

Never mind just grandiose pyramids and monuments; there exists in humble pottery fragments found all along the Pacific Coast of South America designs almost identical to those used during the Japanese Jomon period on the island of Kyushu by natives there almost 14,000 years ago.  Very little is known of the mysterious Jomon although they were a very advanced civilization, whose spiritual beliefs in gods found in nature, called Kami (as in Kamikaze or Divine Wind), provided the foundation for the religion of Shintoism – “the way of the gods.”

There are incredible similarities between astronomical calendars used by Mayan-Olmecs (Toltecs and Aztecs), Greeks, Egyptians, and Sumerians which are far superior in accuracy to the one the Romans invented hundreds of years later.  There is a school of radical thought that even thinks the Mayan calendar originated in the ancient Pakistani city of Taxila, along the Silk Road that Marco Polo once walked, a learning site once important to Central Asian scholars as was the university at Alexandria in the West.

The Aztecs and Hindus used identical zodiac symbols and in both cultures’ mythologies, it was a rabbit (and not a little green man) that lived on the Moon.  Likewise, the Greek and Hebrew alphabets are derived from Chinese lunar zodiacs, whose symbols have also been found carved on stelae found in ancient Mayan ruins of Central America.  And suggesting an even stronger Trans-Pacific connection, if not a universal connection of civilizations around the globe, are ubiquitous symbols commonly associated with Egyptian hieroglyphics such as the ankh, the ancient Indian counter-clockwise non-Nazi swastika (from the Sanskrit word svastikah meaning

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“good luck”), and the all-seeing eye cartouche of the Middle East called the Eye of Horus (wedjat).  The Eye of Horus is used today on United States Federal Reserve currency.

It is my firm belief that ancient Atlantean surveyors used their intimate knowledge of world geography and geodesy (and without question the ability to measure longitude accurately something which the West was only able to accomplish in the 18th century A.D.) to position markers denoting gold mining and/or storage locations for already-processed pure gold ingots and relics – gold was the lifeblood of their pagan religious beliefs in immortality and was coveted more than any other material on Earth.

Ley lines and measuring stones can be found from Costa Rica to Canada, China, and across the English countryside – often passing through spiritual sites like the pyramids, temples, mounds, ancient churches, and megalithic monuments.  It is also my belief that the symbols known as the Egyptian ankh and Celtic spiral (an even earlier iteration of the svastikah), which scholars associate with everlasting life throughout the folklore of both of these cultures, were euphemisms of ancient Atlantean alchemic symbols for gold.

As the centuries advanced and the last of the Atlantean surviving explorers died out, the original use of these sites was long forgotten, but their locations morphed into sacred sites when subsequent indigenous civilizations eventually organized and ruled themselves.  It was modern civilizations that created the cultural rifts of religion, race, bigotry, socio-economical, geopolitical, and ideological differences that we have come to associate today with the broad gulf described in the three-word description of “East versus West.”

Furthermore, the Egyptian-Atlanteans and more than likely their cousins the Celtic-Atlanteans, used their benchmark for measuring longitude, none other than the Giza Meridian to geodetically log gold-discovery locations.  Although there are hundreds, if not thousands of such locations around the planet, I have constructed a simplistic model of but a few sites below to illustrate my theory’s rationale to within plus or minus five degrees east or west longitude (allowing for crustal displacement of the Earth’s surface during the last ten millennia). 

I refer to these sites by combining the two words “spiral” and “ankh” to denote extremely likely gold discovery locations as “spankh” sites.  From left to right are the “spankh” site name, the geographical location, the Greenwich latitude and longitude coordinates, and the longitude coordinate, only, for the same location but using the Giza Prime Meridian instead of the Greenwich Prime Meridian as the basis for measurement.  Notice the final number to the right, the longitude reading using the Giza Prime Meridian, is a precise whole number coordinate.  This is not a coincidence:

ΔGreat Pyramid/Giza, Egypt/29:59N and 31:08E/00:00E

ΔAngor Wat/Cambodia/14:41N and 107:08E/76:00E

ΔAshur-Nimrud/Syria-Iraq/35:29N and 43:08E/12:00E

ΔBaalbek/Beqaa, Lebanon/34:00N and 36:08E/05:00E

ΔChichén Itzá Uxmal/Yucatán, Mexico/20:40N and 88:52W/120:00W

ΔCopán/Quiriguá, Honduras/14:52N and 88:52W/120:00W

ΔCuzco/Inca Capital, Peru/13:32S and 71:52W/103:00W

ΔDahlgren Chapel/Georgetown, Washington D.C./35:53N and 76:52W/108:00W

ΔEaster Island/West Pacific/27:05S and 109:52W/141:00W

ΔGlastonbury/Southwest England/51:08N and 2:52W/34:00W

ΔHeian-Jomon Temples/Kyoto, Japan/35:00N and 135:08E/104:00E

ΔJericho-Shiloh/Jerusalem/31:50N and 35:08E/04:00E

ΔKailasa Temple/Shiva Caves, India/20:01N and 75:08E/44:00E

ΔLhasa/Himalayas, Tibet/29:41N and 91:08E/60:00E

ΔLubaantum/Fallen Stones, Belize/16:17N and 88:52W/120:00W

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ΔInca Quito/Sacred City, Ecuador/00:00S and 78:52W/110:00W

ΔOllantaytambo/Machu Picchu, Peru/13:14S and 71:52W/103:00W

ΔPuma-Punka/Tiahuanaco, Bolivia/16:51S and 68:52W/100:00W

ΔQuiriguá Stelae/Guatemala City/15:18N and 88:52W/120:00W

ΔRio Juruena/Amazonas, Brazil/8:30S and 58:52W/90:00W

ΔRoosevelt’s Find/Mato Grosso, Brazil/11:00S and 59:52W/91:00W

ΔRosslyn Chapel/Celtic Site, Scotland/55:52N and 02:52W/34:00W

ΔSerra Pelada/Pará, Brazil/05:45S and 49:52W/81:00W

ΔStonehenge/Geodetic Site, Southwest England/51:11N and 01:52W/33:00W

ΔTapajós-Itaituba/Pará, Brazil/04:22S and 55:52W/87:00W

ΔTeotihuacan-Tula/Mexico City/19:43N and 98:52W/130:00W

ΔTlingit Mounds/Homer, Alaska/59:64N and 151:52W/183:00W

ΔTopa-Topa Ojai/Los Angeles, California/34:27N and 118:52W/150:00W

ΔUr Chaldea/Old Mesopotamia (Iraq)/30:56N and 46:08E/15:00E

ΔValley of Qaha/Lake Tana-Gonda, Ethiopia/11:40N and 37:08E/06:00E

ΔXi’an/Central China/34:26N and 109:08E/78:00E

ΔYangon Caves/Old Burma (Myanmar)/16:47N and 96:08E/65:00E

Many of the handful of 32 "spankh" sites indicated above are no doubt already well known to the Board of Directors at the Studebaker Institute from their readings and travels, while some of the sites are perhaps not so well known.  One of the best known, of course, is the Rosslyn Chapel, built on an ancient Celtic spiritual site long after the official demise of the Knights Templar – they of Holy Grail fame – although the brotherhood’s secrets of long-lost gold persist in being associated with this place.

Essentially, sites shown with an easterly longitude heading tend to be those where large megaliths were used for construction (e.g. precisely honed pyramid stones) or have a strong spiritual significance.  The incredibly large 1,000-ton stones used at Baalbek were as finely cut as the 100 to 500-ton stones used in the Great Pyramid, as were those used to build the Ziggurats of Ur of the Chaldea (birthplace of the Biblical Abraham).  Yet, as is the case of Angor Wat, these Stones were cut from quarries many miles away and somehow transported by architects and engineers to construction sites, then hoisted into place by means not fully understood to this day.

Precisely cut stone requiring long-distance travel is a trait shared with sites indicated as having westerly longitude, but some of these require some further explanation.  No place on Earth has yielded more alluvial or semi-alluvial gold finds in tonnage than the southern Amazon River basin of Brazil.  It was in the latter half of the 20th century that huge gold finds – so plentiful in fact that pure gold nuggets were scooped from crystalline streambeds in plain sight of prospectors – in Serra Pelada and the Tapajós Valley caused a massive migration of hundreds of thousands of peasants to goldfields in search of fame and fortune. 

Along the Juruena River in the same general vicinity, one of the most famous explorers in South American history disappeared – Lt. Colonel Percy Fawcett – in 1925 after allegedly stumbling upon the mother lode of gold finds, even bigger than those of Serra Pelada and Tapajós combined.  And perhaps the strangest story of all is the aforementioned discovery by former President Theodore Roosevelt in 1914 of Egyptian and Celtic symbology in the same general area, which some fringe-scholars think was associated with yet another large gold cache from antiquity.

The Tiahuanaco Empire ruins of the Bolivian Andes, lying 12,000 feet above sea level and just a few miles from Lake Titicaca, remain an enigma to archaeologists and scholars even now.  Although their civilization, and one much older who preceded them left many clues about their cultures – like many other similar sites around the globe – no one has made the definitive connection between the peoples who settled the highlands of Bolivia, Peru, and Ecuador with

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other ancient civilizations of Egypt, Central Asia, China, or Japan.  This despite the abundance of clues involving gods, temples, idols, artwork, amulets and metaphors – some even say that the Tiahuanaco complex was the cradle of civilization when built 17,000 years ago, when Cro-Magnon was still living in European caves. 

Structures at Tiahuanaco were built from 150-ton stone blocks and transported from miles away, but were so perfectly cut, hewn, squared, and dressed by expert stonemasons that they fit together so tightly a leaf of paper or blade of grass cannot pass between them.  This was an imperial city, so important it had a portal to immortality that the rulers called the Gateway of the Sun, built from perfectly hewn 10-ton slabs of granite.  Carved in the gate is a likeness of the Sun-God Viracocha – the creator god whose physical features appear more European than Indian – with rays shooting from the face in all directions and once covered long ago in gold leaf to enhance the effects as the gate was struck by the Sun.

The Kalasaya Mound and Sunken Courtyard show evidence of a culture that worshipped gold, and the courtyard is walled with sculptured heads inset into the wall which are fully bearded and have the appearance of early Celtic explorers and not the indigenous people of the region.  There are large stepped pyramids in the ruined city (similar to the Saqqara Pyramid of Egypt), the largest one called Akapana, and many smaller temples.  Just south of Akapana is the truly eerie temple site known as Puma-Punka; strange because not only are there so many 400-ton finely cut stone blocks strewn about, but of the flat slabs of stone and blocks present which are clearly the remains of a giant wharf. 

Lake Titicaca’s waves used to lap upon the shore of Puma-Punka and legend has it that barges filled the giant lake loaded with icons of solid gold for ceremonial use by members of the royal families and the priesthood.  Although well known throughout the world, only a few miles from Machu Pichu is a citadel called Ollantaytambo, which served as temple, gold depository, and fortress for a pre-Inca civilization that occupied the area many thousands of years previously.  The giant megalithic blocks of stone used in its construction, weighing up to 500 tons, were cut 50 miles away and somehow transported to the Sacred Valley and citadel built on the face of a 9,000-foot mountain that is almost sheer cliff. 

So perfectly cut are the stones that they interlock to withstand earthquakes, common in the region, yet appear on the surface to be a jigsaw pattern rather than a regular geometric grid design.  So precise are the cuts that nothing constructed by stonemasons of Europe could surpass them until the 19th century, and questions as to how the titanic stones were hoisted to the mountain top have ever been answered.  Neither can archaeologists explain that with only crude bronze tools (which is all they were thought to have had since iron alloys and the wheel’s invention were theoretically still unknown), how they could cut the hard andesite rock surfaces because soft bronze was totally inadequate for such purposes.

Besides sharing precisely cut-rock characteristics, transportation obstacles, and multi-layer construction problems, the magnificent monuments of Egypt, Mesopotamia, Asia, and South America have another very unique and simple trait in common – the “stapling” or joining of large stone blocks to each other in order to add structural stability during the construction process.  Keystone-shaped cuts were chiseled into the stone where one block corner met the other, and then a molten liquid was poured into the groove, cooling, and hardening into an I-shaped or X-shaped ingot-like clamp weighing several pounds each. 

At one point, there must have been thousands of these 10- to 12-inch long by 3- to 4-inch wide metal clamps strewn about the debris fields from the fallen temples and dilapidated pyramids, but none of these can be found around the ancient sites today – many were collected by treasure hunters and looters over the centuries and although not worth much money as metal ingots, they are still considered to be good luck charms by indigenous peoples around the globe.  Those clamps in the possession of archaeologists have gone through various metallurgical tests and interesting facts have been learned.  The fact that they were poured hot into the furrows indicates that high-temperature portable forges must have been available on-

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site to melt the alloys from which the clamps were made in order to be poured in a molten state; wood-only fires would not have been hot enough to make these clamps.

Alloys used for these staple-like clamps, technically called “tenents,” vary in individual metal content between different parts of the world for the sites shown above (as well as the thousands of sites not shown above), but consist of copper and bronze in the highest levels of content, with smaller quantities of arsenic, iron, silicon, nickel, platinum, aluminum, and tin also present.  Pottery kilns and copper smelters were in existence by the year 1000 B.C. which could attain maximum temperatures of 1,400° Fahrenheit, but the forging and pouring of more complex alloys required much higher temperatures above 3,000°.  The metallurgy and metal working needed to make similarly alloyed tenents did not exist in the West until well into the Middle Ages which ended in the 15th century A.D.

Summary: It is the contention of this author that the development of a much longer list of “spankh” sites should not be done extemporaneously, but only after careful thought and analysis to find the lost gold of antiquity.  That being said, however, we should move forward quickly in cataloging such a comprehensive listing of potential gold sources and additionally, use the extensive resources of the United States intelligence community to aid the Studebaker Institute with our very important project, since ultimately we are dealing with a matter of national security – Operation GERDA (Gold Extraction and Relocation for Defense of America). 

Obviously, many of the sites will be located in countries both friendly and unfriendly to America, so leaders of those unfriendly countries will have to be dealt with, harshly if necessary.  This should not present a problem to the Institute since the U.S. Military is already engaged in a many of these countries, fighting terrorism and protecting the world’s oil supply, and has troops and intelligence assets already on the ground.  Other problems we should expect to encounter are the displacement and resettlement of indigenous citizens on or near sites where excavations must take place, which by definition may mean the modification of river flows and/or the use of high-explosive ordnance. 

Unfortunately, irreparable destruction of some temples and constructions will occur, but should be considered collateral damage in pursuit of our goals.  Religious beliefs of simple-minded peasants, believing in their version of god, can be overcome with education, job training, and relocation to camps featuring all the modern conveniences technology has to offer.  Working through the U.S. State Department and the United Nations’ nefarious UNESCO, Washington can provide foreign assistance on the scale necessary to transition displaced persons into new homes and settlements while at the same time maintaining our country’s positive image abroad. 

We can also take from lessons-learned the experiences gained by Egypt and China when they disassembled and transported entire temples, monuments, and archaic structures away from flooded areas along the Nile and Yangtze Rivers respectively, when the Aswan Dam and Three Gorges Dam was built.  This is a very important consideration given cultural and religious sensitivities.  Ramses II built the Abu Simbel Temple in about 1250 B.C. along the Nile in ancient Nubia to demonstrate his power and divinity, carved from sandstone cliffs.  The Temple was built with four colossal statues of him almost 70-feet high flanking the entrance, facing east to the rising Sun, out of respect for the Sun god so that twice a year the innermost sanctuary was illuminated. 

The Temple was threatened by submersion from the Aswan Dam some 150 miles away and the resulting large man-made lake, so a salvage operation was begun in 1964 raising the Temple over 100 feet higher to save it.  The 3,000-year-old structures had to be completely dismantled and reassembled, stone by stone, preserving their exact locations in relation to each other and to the Sun’s rays.

The National Security Agency and USGS will need to supply us with satellite mapping intelligence and ground penetrating radar technology, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture will need to share with us their satellite surveillance of the southern Amazon River basin region

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of Brazil where citrus, soybean, cotton, coffee, and tobacco per-acre crop production is monitored by them (Brazil now ranks number one in the world in total production of these commodities).  The immense deforestation of this region in recent years will greatly assist with our intelligence gathering activities, so to the extent possible, independent third-party NGOs and PVOs should be provided with increased funding to assist farmers, and to monetarily incentivate local and federal politicians in clearing even more land of worthless rainforest and jungle vegetation to assist our efforts.

But perhaps the most important contribution will have to come from the Central Intelligence Agency, who will need to put human assets on the ground because many of the ancient, potential gold-bearing historical sites are in very geographically remote locations, overgrown by dense tropical forests or partially covered by sand and soil.  The Studebaker Institute should begin immediately to work with the CIA to identify the personality-profile of U.S. citizens for this psychologically and physically strenuous work and start crash-course training (after thorough background checks) at prestigious American universities, for the best and brightest young people selected who show special skills in the key disciplines of archaeology, foreign languages, geodesy, geology, and information technology.  We might also need assistance with nation building in environments where regime change may be required to ensure a successful outcome.

Conclusion: I look forward to approval by Chairman Greese and the distinguished Board of Directors of the Studebaker Institute for including this “Atlantean Geodesy Memorandum” as the foundation for strategic consideration, when these gentlemen present our new and crucially important Operation GERDA project to the senior leadership of the Federal Government of the United States of America.

[Note: U.S. Government Classified: The unauthorized reproduction or distribution of this document in whole or in part is illegal under U.S. Code:Title 50. Infringement of this law is investigated by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and is punishable by up to ten years in federal prison and fine of $500,000]

(This is a work of fiction.  Although some real-world names, organizations, historical settings, and situations are used to enhance the authenticity of the story, any similarities to actual persons, organizations, or situations are coincidental and all portrayals are purely the product of the author’s imagination.  This is the second edition abridged version 2019.  First edition Copyright © 2006.  All rights reserved)