by Colin Wilson
As a result, none of these professors were going to enter into discussion of a book that claimed to have discovered evidence for a civilisation predating anything known to history. It was easier to ignore Hapgood.
There was another reason that no one was prepared to take Hapgood seriously. In 1960, a book called Le Matin des Magiciens, by Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier, broke all bestseller records in France, and was translated into dozens of languages. Pauwels was a journalist, while Bergier was a physicist who was also interested in alchemy. Their book was a flamboyant and dazzling hotchpotch of alchemy, archaeology, magic, hermeticism and literary speculation, with chapters on Lovecraft, the Great Pyramid, Gurdjieff and Nazi occultism. One of its major exhibits was the Piri Reis map, among other portolans. ‘Had they been traced,’ asked the authors, ‘from observations made on board a flying machine or space vessel of some kind? Notes taken by visitors from Beyond?’ As The Morning of the Magicians made its triumphal progress all over the world, the Piri Reis map became more widely associated with evidence for ‘ancient astronauts’.22 Hapgood, who had spent ten years working on Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings, could hardly have had worse luck.
In 1966, a Swiss hotel manager named Erich von Däniken, whose passion for travel had been satisfied mainly in the world of books, devoted his nights to writing a work arguing that our earth has been visited by spacemen in the remote past. The idea had been suggested four years earlier by a Russian astronomer called Joseph Shklovkii, in a book entitled Universe, Life, Mind, which was issued in America in 1966, with additional material by astronomer Carl Sagan, under the title Intelligent Life in the Universe.23 Däniken’s book consisted mainly of assertions that monuments such as the pyramids, the statues of Easter Island and the Mayan temples of Mexico were built by – or with the aid of – ancient astronauts.
Published in Switzerland under the title Erinnerungen an die Zukunft (Memories of the Future) in March 1968, it quickly became a bestseller, as did the English and American editions, entitled Chariots of the Gods?.
Scholars pointed out that the book was full of absurdities and inaccuracies. Däniken had managed to multiply the weight of the Great Pyramid by five, and his assertion that the Egyptians did not possess ropes or wood for rollers was easily contradicted by paintings on the walls of tombs and pyramids. His claim that the statues of Easter Island could not have been carved out of ‘steel-hard volcanic rock’ by stone tools was also disputed – Thor Heyerdahl did it in the 1950s with a few natives of the island, using stone tools found in the quarries. Däniken asserted that Easter Island also lacked wood for rollers, apparently unaware that trees once grew there, before all the timber was used up. Of the Nazca lines in Peru, Däniken claimed they were intended as runways for spaceships, ignoring the fact that they are merely scratched in the loose rocks of the surface. Whole books – and television documentaries – have been devoted to attacks on Däniken’s ‘evidence’, demonstrating that most of it is based on ignorance of what the inhabitants of Egypt, Easter Island, Peru and other lands could actually have achieved.
Early in the book, Däniken (like Pauwels and Bergier) introduced the Piri Reis map: ‘The latest studies of Professor Charles H. Hapgood… give us some more shattering information. Comparisons with modern photographs of our globe taken from satellites showed that the originals of Piri Reis’s maps must have been aerial photographs taken from a very great height. How can that be explained?’
Hapgood, of course, had never said anything of the sort. The fact that Piri Reis failed to feature a 900-mile stretch of South American coastline and repeated another stretch suggests that the map was not taken from an aerial photograph. Nevertheless, millions of people were left with the impression that Hapgood was a supporter of von Däniken, and that he also believed the maps had been drawn by ‘ancient astronauts’.
Hapgood was less concerned than he might have been – he had more important things to occupy his mind. For several years he had been convinced that he had found the actual whereabouts of Atlantis, and that this might even lead him to abandon the academic world for the more active life of an explorer. On 5 December 1958, he had written to his friend Ivan Sanderson to announce what he termed ‘the most sensational discovery of our time’.
In studying the Piri Reis map, Hapgood had, as we have seen, noted a mysterious island about 1,000 miles off the coast of Venezuela and the mouth of the Orinoco River. Hapgood had also found two more ancient maps showing the island24 and testifying to its existence. There is no such land mass now, only two very small islands known as the Rocks of St Peter and St Paul. Each about a quarter of a mile long, they are located above the Mid-Atlantic Ridge and are the tips of mountains that are now submerged. This, Hapgood was convinced, was all that remained above the surface of Plato’s Atlantis – just where Plato hinted it was, in the mid-Atlantic. The size of this mysterious island – about 350 by 250 miles – sounded about correct. Plato also claimed that Atlantis had a great central mountain, a holy mountain, which Hapgood was convinced was now the Rocks of St Peter and St Paul.
Sanderson had advised Hapgood to avoid mentioning the word Atlantis’ in Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings in case he was labelled a crank, but the warning was hardly necessary – Hapgood was too aware of the hostility of his critics to lay his head on the chopping block. Besides, the evidence should soon be available for everyone to see. All that was now needed, Hapgood assured Sanderson, was a rich benefactor who would lend them a yacht and pay for underwater cameras that would survey the slopes of the mountain – where, according to Plato, there should be about $500 million worth of gold.
In Atlantis: The Eighth Continent (1984),25 Charles Berlitz says that in 1963 Hapgood approached the White House, hoping he could persuade President Kennedy to lend him an aircraft carrier to investigate the seabed under the Rocks of St Peter and St Paul. He quotes from Hapgood’s unpublished memoirs: ‘It was fortunate that I had had previous contacts with the White House when I did some errands for President Roosevelt during World War II… It was no problem to find someone close to the Kennedys in Massachusetts who could arrange a meeting for me with the President… We had mutual friends in the Democratic Party in Boston.’ Hapgood worked out a scheme whereby planes would fly in increasingly wide circles over the Rocks of St Peter and St Paul; if anything was seen on the sea bottom, it would be investigated with underwater cameras. He recognised the danger: if the newspapers got hold of the story, it would become front-page news and his own reputation would suffer; he therefore suggested that the search should be disguised as ‘just another oceanographic expedition’.
By October 1963 the meeting with Kennedy was arranged – only to be frustrated by Kennedy’s assassination in November. Undeterred, Hapgood went on to suggest that Nelson Rockefeller – who was a friend of Sanderson – might be interested. Since Sanderson had once met Walt Disney at a party, he might also be worth approaching; the search for Atlantis would have made a marvellous live-action film.
But again, Hapgood was to be disappointed. For a decade he continued to concentrate on writing and teaching. His friend Sanderson died in 1973, and in that year Hapgood told a correspondent named Henriette Mertz that although he knew that the site of Atlantis ‘lay around the Rocks of St Peter and St Paul’, he was abandoning the quest and could only hope that others would follow up the trail he had so laboriously laid.
In October 1982, Hapgood wrote to a young correspondent called Rand Flem-Ath,26 adding an amazing postscript to his life’s work on ancient civilisations. After telling him that he was now preparing a third edition of Earth’s Shifting Crust, to be published in 1983, he went on to speak of his latest discoveries: ‘Furthermore, there is evidence that the last displacement of the crust moved both American continents southward about 30 degrees, and absolutely devastated life and civilisation on them, while climatic change was much less drastic in the Old World, and more avenues of escape existed.’
A shift of 30 degrees represented about 2,000 miles, a vas
t distance. If there had been a great catastrophe that devastated life and civilisation, then surely it must have happened more quickly than in the 5,000 years that Hapgood had previously supposed?
The next paragraph of the letter offered an even greater revelation: ‘Furthermore, in recent exciting discoveries I believe I have convincing evidence of a whole cycle of civilisation in America and in Antarctica, suggesting advanced levels of science that may go back 100,000 years…’
One hundred thousand years? Could that have been a mistake for 10,000 years? No – the rest of the long letter was typed immaculately, without even a minor error. Hapgood obviously read it through carefully before putting it in the envelope. But at that time the ancestor of modern man, Cro-Magnon man, was not believed to have appeared on earth until about 40,000 years ago (although the date has since been pushed back beyond 200,000 years). Besides, Hapgood was not talking about cavemen with clubs, but a ‘whole cycle’ of civilisation, which included ‘advanced levels of science’.
And in the next sentence he told Rand: A good deal of the evidence I have on this will be included in the new edition of ESC [Earth’s Shifting Crust].’ Hapgood was, admittedly, a maverick, but he would not have placed his whole reputation in jeopardy with some crank theory. He evidently felt that he had found evidence of science dating back 100,000 years, at a time when, according to 1982 palaeontology,* the most advanced human being on earth was Neanderthal man.
Rand Flem-Ath replied immediately, asking for some hint of Hapgood’s reasons for this amazing assertion. For weeks there was no reply, then his letter was returned, stamped ‘Deceased’.
Hapgood’s last letter led Rand to his own quest for the origin of science and civilisation, of which this book tells the story.
*In 1982 anatomically modern humans were thought to be no older than 65,000 years. Today many palaeontologists believe that modern humans may have originated 200,000 years ago.
2
The Blueprint
IN THE SUMMER of 1976 a twenty-seven-year-old Canadian named Rand Flem-Ath (he had changed his name from Fleming when he married Rose De’ath and they combined their names) went for a job interview at the Greater Victoria public library in Victoria, which is at the southern tip of Vancouver Island, in British Columbia. He would not hear the result until the following Monday, so to take his mind off the waiting over the weekend he decided to sketch out a screenplay. It was about a group of aliens, marooned on the earth, who decide to hibernate. While he was thinking about a suitable location, he heard a song by Donovan on the radio called ‘Hail Atlantis’. An idea came into his head, and he scrawled on his writing pad: Atlantis = Antarctica’. Since he knew nothing about Atlantis, he spent the rest of the day at the public library reading up on Plato’s lost continent beyond the Pillars of Hercules.
By the time he heard that he had the job, he was so fascinated by his research that there was no question of giving it up. And one reason, oddly enough, was his name. When he was at school, the class had been given an assignment to write an essay on a famous person who shared their name. Doing research on his famous namesake, Sir Alexander Fleming, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for medicine, he learned how in 1924 Fleming had returned to his lab after a period away. He found that an unwashed culture dish in the sink was sprouting a mould that had killed off bacteria in the area around it. He tested the mould and discovered that it would destroy most bacteria – he had stumbled upon penicillin. Reading of his namesake’s breakthrough, Rand Fleming decided there and then that he would never allow a coincidence to go uninvesti-gated – it could be the doorway to discovery.
Soon after beginning his job with the Greater Victoria public library, Rand stumbled upon his own coincidence. In book after book about Atlantis, he came across the same map. It was drawn by the seventeenth-century Jesuit priest Athanasius Kircher, a polymath who was as famous in his own time as Albert Einstein. In his Mundus Subterraneus (Subterranean World) of 1665, Kircher stated that it showed Atlantis, and that it was based on a map stolen from ancient Egypt by Roman invaders and found in the cellars of the Vatican. For some odd reason, Kircher put north at the bottom.
Rand had been an enthusiastic map reader ever since he was seven, when his father, who was in the air force, drove him from Nova Scotia to Arizona and then on to Los Angeles to see Disneyland. Rand was assigned the task of reading the road maps; he enjoyed this job so much that, from then on, he always took over the navigation on car journeys.
The Athanasius Kircher map led him on to the study of ancient charts, and he soon found Hapgood’s Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings, with its subtitle Evidence of Advanced Civilisation in the Ice Age, in the catalogue of his library. Hapgood’s book took his breath away. Here was a combination of his current obsessions, ancient maps and ice.
Flipping through the pages, he suddenly stumbled upon another significant coincidence. He was looking at a map of Antarctica without the ice, and it looked remarkably similar to
In 1665 Athanasius Kircher published a map of Atlantis which he claimed originated in Egypt. The Latin scroll reads: ‘Site of Atlantis now beneath the sea according to the Egyptians and the description of Plato.’
Kircher’s map with his labels removed.
Kircher’s Egyptian map of Atlantis versus a modern map of ice-free Antarctica.
Kircher’s map of Atlantis. He turned the library’s globe upside-down, and compared what he saw with Kircher’s map. There was certainly a close resemblance. In a pamphlet called Introduction to Antarctica,1 issued by the Naval Support Force in Antarctica, he came upon a map of the world as seen from Antarctica. Again, it was a revelation. It showed Antarctica as the navel of the world, so to speak. Suddenly Plato’s words ‘the whole opposite continent’ took on new meaning. For Antarctica was in the centre, and the continents were all around it, looking like one land mass.
In the West we naturally think of the map of the world from our point of view, with the Atlantic Ocean in the middle, as in the maps of our schooldays, divided off from the other
Oceanographers believe that the earth has only one ocean. The unity of the ‘World Ocean’ can be seen in this US naval projection with Antarctica in the centre. Plato’s account of Atlantis tells of a lost island continent in the ‘real ocean’.
great ocean, the Pacific, by the American continent. Seen from Antarctica, the world has only one great ocean, the ‘true ocean’, just as Plato said.
Rand was so excited by his discovery that he wrote a paper about it, entitled ‘Atlantis of the True Ocean’, and had it notarised. Its opening paragraph contained the comment: ‘Viewed from a satellite perspective, the Earth has but one true ocean, and Antarctica is in its centre… The priest described the location of Atlantis from Atlantis.’
Rand became obsessed by Atlantis; he now wonders how Rose could tolerate him. He comments: ‘I was a fanatic, as defined by Winston Churchill as someone who can’t change his mind and won’t change the subject.’
There was still one major obstacle to his identification of Atlantis with Antarctica. Every encyclopaedia he consulted said that Antarctica had been under the ice for millions of years. Like Hapgood before him, Rand turned his attention to the problem of what sort of catastrophe could destroy a whole continent in a day and a night.
In the Laws,2 Plato had remarked that world agriculture had originated in highland regions after some catastrophic flood had devastated all the lowland areas. Rand noted that the Soviet botanist Nikolai Ivanovich Vavilov (1887–1943) concluded that the world’s wild plants had eight centres of origin,3 all in mountain ranges, including Lake Titicaca, in the Andes. Another site is in Thailand, exactly opposite Lake Titicaca, on the other side of the globe.
Rand went on to study the catastrophe myths of many Native American tribes – the Ute, the Kutenai, the Okanagan, the A’a’tam, the Cahto and the Cherokee, as well as the Araucanians of Peru. All have legends of violent earthquakes, followed by floods. Many declare that a change in the face of the sun
made it look as if it was splitting apart; there were dozens of flood myths too. It began to look to Rand as if their sheer number pointed to some primeval catastrophe, ‘when the sky fell’.
In April 1977 Rose gave Rand the National Atlas of Canada for his twenty-eighth birthday. Here he encountered another anomaly that appeared to offer a clue. A map of Ice Age North America showed that many islands in the far north, where Rand’s father had been stationed when Rand was twelve, had been ice-free during the Ice Age. How could that be?
Rand tracked down a copy of Hapgood’s Earth’s Shifting Crust at the University of Victoria, in fact the second edition, retitled The Path of the Pole. And when Rand opened it, he found himself looking at the end paper with a map labelled ‘Path of the North Pole’, showing no fewer than three different positions of the pole over the past 80,000 years – the Yukon, the Greenland Sea and Hudson Bay, the latter being the position it occupied until around 9,600 BC.Hapgood’s vast accumulation of geological and geomagnetic evidence supported his views.
The geographic or what are known as the true North and South Poles are measured by the earth’s axis. However, the magnetic North and South Poles are measured by the location of the highest intensity of the earth’s magnetic field. This is usually within the proximity of the true pole. Using the fact of this proximity, Hapgood had been able to calculate the position of the former poles by examining their magnetic signatures written in cooling lava and rock in the past. As it flowed from the inner earth, the lava and the metals within it (especially iron) hardened into a position that pointed directly towards the magnetic pole. This provided Hapgood with the data he needed to determine the location of the previous poles.