by Freddy Silva
A THOUSAND MISSING HEADS
I need little excuse to spend time in medieval Valletta, a limestone city of steps worn smooth by the feet of the Knights of Malta, numerous Arab traders, ancient Phoenician voyagers, and the odd pirate or two. When opposing cultures collide, like asteroids, the result is often messy, but here they blend into a warm, romantic and sensual urban paradise.
After the obligatory two-hour outdoor lunch, I made my way to the Museum of Archaeology to get a sense of who the megalithic builders might have been and when they might have lived. Two carved limestone slabs grace the entrance hall, removed from the temple of Tarxien for their own protection. Visitors walk by, pose for selfies, and move on, oblivious to an extraordinary connection. The four spirals on each slab reflect the essence of life: the solstices, the equinox, and a central circle referencing the force holding this recurring rhythm of life in perpetual balance. The first time I saw the panels they had a familiarity about them. Indeed I had seen them before, in the museum at Tiwanaku and, except for a slight artistic difference, they may as well have been carved by the same ancient artist.
It is by no means the only link between Malta and the Andes. In 1902, workers digging a cistern accidentally broke through the ceiling of a well-preserved subterranean ritual temple that became known as the Hypogeum of Hal Salflieni. Sometime in the distant past the bedrock was hollowed into thirty-three contiguous halls and chambers on three floors with a footprint of a quarter of a square mile, and may have served as the underground component of the nearby temple of Tarxien.
Like many of its kind, the Hypogeum was intended as a place of ritual, an environment where one can connect with another level of reality, and recent acoustic research proves it was deliberately tuned to a resonant frequency known to shut down mental processing in the brain and induce altered states, a frequency similarly detected in the Kings Chamber of the Great Pyramid.18 Red ocher paintings were daubed on several walls, one featuring a bull reminiscent of Palaeolithic cave art from 8000-30,000 BC. But something less artistic lay concealed in layers of dirt: over seven thousand human remains violently mixed with those of animals and sundry debris as though dumped into the caverns by a wall of water. What made the find significant were the hundreds of skeletons with elongated skulls identical to those in Paracas, on the coast of Peru.
Inundation map of the Mediterranean around Malta.
Back at the museum, I'd arranged to meet with the director to see these dolichocephalic skulls. I had been forewarned by my colleague, the investigative journalist Graham Hancock, to expect a less-than-warm reception when inquiring about matters of discomfort to archaeologists. He'd been there earlier only to find that, of the hundreds of unusual skulls removed from the Hypogeum, only six could be accounted for. Even so, Hancock still had to press the staff to show him the paltry collection.19
I was to be presented with even fewer: none. In fact the director palmed me off with a box of typical Homo sapiens skulls while stating there never was evidence of dolichocephalic skulls found in Malta.
There was no avoiding the drop in barometric pressure in the room. I pressed that the skulls are a matter of record rather than a figment of imagination.20 And in case such a trap popped up, I presented photographs that Graham had lent me from his visit which clearly show said skulls — held by a member of her staff no less — including that of an adult's with a missing fossa median, a seam common in human skulls that allows the plates to expand during childbirth. We are definitely looking at a very different species of person living on Malta — a whole tribe, according to the original find — and given the outlandish concentration of temples on such a small piece of land, they may have formed a reclusive culture, a special society set apart from ordinary humans, precisely as I've speculated all along with regard to the antediluvian gods.
At this point in my brief meeting, the director of the Museum of Archaeology of Malta left the room and my visit was terminated.
The abrupt shutting down of uncomfortable evidence follows the topic of ancient civilizations wherever one travels, whether it's the archaeological cabal of Indonesia seeking to discredit Danny Hilman Natawidjaja at Gunung Padang, or Graham Hancock and myself in Malta — or another fellow by the name of Silva who lives on the remote Atlantic archipelago.
THE UNDERWATER MOUNT THAT IS A PYRAMID
While on my way to Portugal to research potential antediluvian sites, I landed on the island of São Miguel in the Açores to stretch my legs and work my way through a plate of pasteis de nata, those addictive little custard pastries. An article in the morning newspaper announced an exceptional discovery proving the Açores was indeed the location of the lost continent of Atlantis. Sometimes the universe has impeccable timing.
Diocleciano Silva is a veterinarian by day and a sport fisherman by the weekend. He was on his boat casing the fertile fishing banks between the islands of São Miguel and Terceira when his sonar picked up something that ought not be there: a 180-foot tall, perfectly square structure with several diminishing levels, oriented to the cardinal points — a step pyramid, larger than a football stadium and, according to the bathymetric reading, 120 feet below sea level. A long experience of the sea had given Diocleciano many surprises but none quite like this.
Sonar image of underwater pyramid.
This was not entirely fresh news. Mr. Silva had made the discovery eight months earlier but hesitated to divulge it. Given the ferocity of personal attacks and slander by the academic mafia that follow such explosive discoveries, I can’t blame him, and yet, just for a change, the discrediting on this occasion came from the Portuguese Navy, who claimed the lucky fisherman found nothing more anomalous than an underwater sea mount, one of many in the region. How the ocean is capable of sculpting such a perfect structure, they could not explain. Nor could they explain why the pyramid they claim to be a mount lies in a totally different location to the GPS coordinates provided by Diocleciano.
Unperturbed, the Commander of the Açores Maritime Zone insisted the GPS reading was an error. One wonders, given such shoddy equipment, how Diocleciano has managed to sail to and fro for years in the middle of the ocean and still return home safely each time! Nevertheless the Portuguese Navy quickly dismissed the find as a natural feature on the basis of older charts of their own while never investigating the specified site.
The alleged pyramid appears on the slope of a large submarine volcano that makes up much of the João de Castro sea bank, a treacherous area filled with perilous undersea volcanoes. One eruption sank two ships in 1718 before building up to a circular island one mile long and eight hundred feet high. Ravaged by the Atlantic Ocean, the island finally disappeared within four years. Strong seismic activity afflicts this region and the entire archipelago, it is a highly volatile part of the Earth's crust, the kind of place where a landmass could quickly and violently vanish. Still, marine life loves it here and it has been an important fishing ground for centuries, perhaps longer.
Eight years after the discovery nothing has moved forward.
Or has it? In my book The Divine Blueprint I presented a hypothesis that many of the world's oldest sacred sites were placed on a grid. Most might have even been in place before the flood. By extraordinary coincidence Graham Hancock found the same grid using a different computation.
To paraphrase the hypothesis, if an ancient civilization wished to build temples as markers around the world they would have based the plan on a mathematical or geometric grid reflecting the host planet. The ancients recognized the Earth as a living organism, and living organisms are formed on cellular bonds using pentagonal geometry. The base angle of the pentagram is 72º; its divisors are 18, 36, 54, 108, 144. If one locates a declared Navel of the Earth, such as Iwnw in Egypt, and converts those numerical values to longitudes, the vertical lines hit notable sacred places with remarkable accuracy. Graham's version uses the numbers inherent in the Earth's processional cycle, whose main divisor is 72. Predictably, we reached similar conclusions albeit
independently.
Incidentally, the same series of numbers are hard-wired in the fabric and features of major temples, sacred texts and myths.
One of the things that vexed me during this research was the lack of longitudinal markers in the Atlantic. Not surprisingly I was excited by Diocleciano's discovery, even if it came after the book went to press. I still had to wait a couple of weeks before returning home to locate his underwater pyramid on my map, and as much as I would have loved a happy ending, Silva's discovery is 3.5º west of the mark, close but not close enough. I suspect Diocleciano was given a taste of things to come, and should an underwater search be conducted slightly to the east it might yet yield something more provocative.
11,000 years ago all this would have been another matter. Even discounting a major subsidence in the mid-Atlantic Ridge due to damage from comet impacts and rising sea levels, the Açores still formed a formidable island chain. In 1963 the Russian physicist Dr. Maria Klionova recovered rocks sixty miles north of the Açores at a depth of 6600 feet bearing signs of exposure to oxygen c.15,000 BC, while sediment taken from the Mid-Atlantic Ridge revealed the remains of freshwater plants as well as beach sand created along an ancient shoreline. Even rainwater was found trapped in fossils and limestone deposits. These are indications that this part of the Atlantic was above sea level just before the onset of the Oldest Dryas. A similar situation was observed in 1898 by the crew of a ship laying underwater cable in the archipelago. As grappling hooks scraped the ocean bottom two miles below, they turned up unfamiliar particles of lava whose peculiar glassy structure could only have solidified in the open air.21
Plenty of discussion has taken place since Plato's time establishing this as the most likely area of Atitlán/Atlantis so I need not revisit this scenario. What is worth pointing out is that, in myths, Atitlán is said to have collapsed in three stages, in conjunction with the three Dryas events that took place over a 3000-year period. It is therefore feasible that in 13,000 BC the archipelago still formed a considerable landmass, and bathometric maps of the region offer a glimpse of the roughly triangular format of the original island continent, just as depicted on ancient maps.
Bathometric map of the Açores reveals a shape not unlike that of Atlantis in medieval maps. X marks the underwater pyramid.
Coincidentally, Plato's dialogue in Critias describes a sunken Atlantis much in the same way navigators in the Pacific did when looking for other missing lands in the 19th century, "...when afterward sunk by an earthquake, became an impassable barrier of mud to voyagers sailing from hence to any part of the ocean.”22
Underwater pyramid aside, there exist 140 step pyramids on the island of Pico itself, built with small basalt stones locally referred to as biscuits. They reach up to forty feet in height, contain hidden chambers, many of which are astronomically aligned.23 Deposits of ancient artefacts unearthed by archaeologists Nuno Ribeiro and Anabela Joãquinito point to the structures being much older than the accepted date of the discovery of the Açores by the Portuguese in 1427. In Nuno's words: “We have found a rock art site with representations we believe can be dated back to the Bronze Age... we have an epigraph from Roman times, according to two scientists who were invited to interpret the inscription... megalithic structures, and an important set of structures scattered throughout the islands that need to be interpreted in new ways.”24 Phoenician coins from the 2nd century BC have also been discovered on the adjacent island of Corvo.25
As exciting as these discoveries are, none of the above are proof of remote antiquity, they merely show that life continued to thrive in the middle of the Atlantic in spite of unimaginable forces that once afflicted the region. The ferocity of seismic events past and present preclude that little if any conclusive evidence of Atitlán may ever be found. Yet, like sonar images, there are other signs pointing to an antediluvian presence in the Açores: a series of cart ruts on the island of Terceira that, like those on Malta and Easter Island, run to the edge of cliffs and into the sea.
A KIND OF CUBAN REVOLUTION
If parts of the Açores dropped two miles to the bottom of the Atlantic, and five megaliths stand 6000 feet off the coast of Peru, then a submerged city at 2300 feet should be relatively easy to explain.
"It is stunning. What we see in our high-resolution sonar images are clear man-made, large-size architectural designs. It looks like when you fly over an urban development in a plane and you see highways, tunnels and buildings," announced offshore engineer Paulina Zelitsky who, with her husband Paul Weinzweig and their son Ernesto, discovered megaliths "of a kind you'd find at Stonehenge or Easter Island... Some structures within the complex may be as long as 400 metres wide and as high as 40 metres... They show very distinct shapes and symmetrical designs of a non-natural kind. We've shown them to scientists in Cuba, the U.S. and elsewhere, and nobody has suggested they are natural."26
The team had originally been scheduled to locate shipwrecks off Cuba's western coast, where hundreds of vessels are believed to have sunk over the centuries, but they became understandably sidetracked. And who can blame them. The structures they stumbled upon while scanning the seabed with side-scan sonar and videotape equipment bear a remarkable resemblance to Mayan pyramids in nearby Yucatan. Invited scientists saw what appear to be streets, bays and structures similar to wharves in a port.27 Stone blocks up to fifteen feet long, cut in perpendicular and circular shapes, were recovered from the ocean floor. "The stone is very polished granite. All of this peninsula is limestone, very fractured limestone. So, geologically, it [megalithic granite blocks] is totally foreign to Cuba. But it's also not known in Yucatan because Yucatan is also limestone, not granite."28 An anthropologist at the Cuban Academy of Sciences analyzed stills taken from the videotape and claimed some of the stones appear to contain symbols and inscriptions.29
Like Malta, this submerged metropolis lies on what used to be a land bridge connecting the island with Yucatan, a plateau adjacent to a deep fault line.30 Vestiges of the site might still exist above water because, three decades earlier, archaeologists excavated a megalithic structure along Cuba’s western shore, a few miles from the underwater discovery.
The geologist affiliated with the underwater project, Manuel Iturralde, made a valuable observation: the volcanic glass covering the ocean floor could only have been formed on the surface while it was in contact with oxygen, suggesting the land upon which the city once stood must have been above water, and the last time a shift in both sea level and seismic activity of such magnitude took place in the region was around 11,000 years ago. A secondary indication that a severe cataclysm collapsed the entire surface lies in stones extracted from the ocean floor that show concentrations of fossilized escaramujos, a crustacean that lives at a depth of only six feet.31
"You would not think that a reasonable woman of my age would fall for an idea like this,"32 Zelitsky remarked, yet the team returned to reconnoiter the site with a remotely operated vehicle controlled from the mother ship via fibre-optic cable. Its cameras confirmed the earlier findings, including vast granite-like blocks between six and fifteen feet that were cut in perpendicular and circular designs.33
Amid the piles of sonar-enhanced maps spread over Zelitky's desk lay a well-worn copy of Comentarios Reales de las Incas, the account of Inka and pre-Inka history by Garcilaso de la Vega, the same tome that describes the great flood in the Andes and the arrival of Viracocha and his seven Shining Ones. Zelitsky was particularly fascinated by the account of ancient ruins at the bottom of Lake Titicaca — which have since been confirmed — and the sense of irony they present.34
Predictably, like other discoveries that would alter the history of civilization, this story has been buried very deep ever since.
VENICE OF THE PACIFIC
Temptation draws me magnetically back to the Pacific. No other place on Earth reflects such an absence of terrain, only the outstretched tips of drowned lands and submerged volcanoes peek above water like lips daring to be heard. A spaceman c
ould look at the Pacific Rim — the most volcanically active region on Earth — and recognize, with detachment, how this ring of fire exists due to an impact of such magnitude it dislodged a roughly elliptical section of the Earth's crust.
One of the first Europeans to search the Pacific in the 16th century, the Portuguese navigator Pedro de Quierós, proposed the theory that its islands were the remains of a now submerged continent, a view accepted by his peers at the time. It may not be the most scientific hypothesis but it is nevertheless an accurate observation based on folklore collected directly from island people by such explorers. Soviet scientist V.V. Belousov discovered that in the recent geologic period, and certainly during the age of Homo sapiens, "the Pacific ocean grew considerably at the expense of great chunks of continents which, together with their young ranges of mountains, were inundated by it. The summits of these mountains are to be seen in the island garlands of East Asia." His findings were supported by another scientist, George H. Cronwell, in a paper delivered to the Tenth World Pacific Congress, in which he reported the discovery of such anomalies as coal on Rapa Island, irrefutably proving that there once existed a continent in that part of the Pacific.35
As we have already seen, many islands such as Tahiti retain standing stones, moai, ahu and other fragments of a lost megalithic culture. Others like Pohnpei tried to rebuild in the image of what once was. Unique to Pohnpei (Upon a Stone Altar) is the ka tree, an odd choice of name because it is the Egyptian word for soul. Even more unique is a roughly pentagonal temple city by the name of Nan Madol, consisting of a group of small artificial islands linked by a network of canals. Its core features some one hundred artificial islets contained within a mile-long perimeter wall, up to thirty feet high, built in alternating layers of large columnar basalt blocks and infill, all of which had to be laboriously transported from the opposite side of the island.