by Colin Wilson
On his expedition — funded by the National Science
Foundation — Barnes was using maps drawn in the 1930s by an English colonel, Patrick Andrew Clayton, who worked for the Egyptian Desert Survey. (In due course, these same maps would play an important part in defeating General Rommel in the Second World War.) Barnes was in the Libyan Desert to follow up a discovery that had been made by Clayton and his friend Professor Leonard Spencer, who had been the Keeper of Minerals in the British Museum for forty years.
As they were driving along the sand-free corridor in December 1932, Clayton and Spencer had noticed the glitter of shining objects lying on the surface. They stopped and discovered that they were looking at beautiful pieces of glass, which ranged from the size of a pea to that of an egg. Spencer, who had seen many tektites, began to look around for a meteorite impact crater that would explain them, but there did not seem to be one nearby. Another puzzle was that the tektites were found on the surface; since tektites hit the earth with the speed of bullets, they might be expected to be embedded in the ground.
The two scientists filled the car with about a hundredweight of the shining yellow fragments — they might have collected many times that amount if they had had the space — and turned back towards Cairo. During the next few days, as they examined their find, Clayton and Spencer began to realise just how strange it was. To begin with, some of the pieces had fractures that looked as if they had been produced by deliberate blows; in fact, they resembled the pieces of flint found near prehistoric hand axes. But if they were flakes, not a single tektite resembled a Stone Age tool. A further oddity was their sheer quantity. Tektites are fairly rare; they are not found by the hundredweight.
Chemical analysis threw an unexpected light on the matter, but only to leave another mystery. It seemed these were not tektites after all — they were made of the same silicon as the desert sand. The only obvious solution was that they were fragments that had been instantly fused by the impact of a white-hot meteorite, and were hurled through the air like shrapnel.
Further examinations of the site in the following years failed to locate any kind of crater. Moreover, one particular piece of evidence suggested that the glass had not been created by a meteor impact. One fragment about the size of a lemon had a neat hole running right through it – it looked as if someone had poked it with a metal rod while it was still molten. Two other ‘bore holes’ penetrated the glass for only a short distance. The evidence suggested that this glass had been manufactured by human beings. Further signs suggested that the glass had been handled by human hands: for example, the few bubbles in it were elongated, as if the glass had been turned or lifted while it was still molten.
In 1933, Clayton and Spencer2 presented their evidence to the Royal Geographical Society in a paper. The audience included a distinguished member named Francis James Rennell, later Lord Rennell of Rodd, who had been a staff officer in Egypt during the First World War and had later been involved in explorations in the Sahara. Rennell, who would become President of the Royal Geographical Society in 1945, became fascinated by the mystery of the Libyan Desert glass.
Archaeologists had dated rock carvings in the area to about 5,500 BC. It had generally been assumed that they were carved by illiterate nomads, but if they were made by the producers of the glass, it suggested that a fairly sophisticated level of civilisation had been achieved in the area by the sixth millennium BC.
Whenever archaeologists stumble upon such anomalies, they are inclined to keep quiet about them, in case their colleagues accuse them of being too imaginative. Such was the case, for example, in the 1890s, when the great Flinders Petrie excavated a village called Naqada, on the Nile, and found pottery and vases of such sophistication that he assumed they must date from the Eleventh Dynasty, around 2,000 BC; he even coined the term ‘the New Race’ to describe this unknown people, whose artifacts seemed oddly unlike those of the Egyptians. But when he found more of their typical pottery in tombs dating from 1,000 years earlier, he decided to drop Naqada from his chronology rather than face the embarrassment of explaining how ‘primitives’ of an earlier civilisation could produce work of such excellence.
Equally problematic were the long-necked vases found in the Step Pyramid at Saqqara,3 which dates from 2,650 BC. Clay vessels can be made in any shape, because the potter can mould the inside with his hand, but what can explain a vessel carved out of hard materials such as basalt, quartz or diorite? How does the potter carve out the inside of the vessel when the neck is too narrow to admit even the smallest hand? We are forced back on the improbable hypothesis that the craftsmen had some method of melting the hard rock, just as it was once melted in the furnace of the earth’s interior, before they blew it into shape like glass.
Lord Rennell, who had spent many years in Egypt, was intrigued by such mysteries. He was still brooding on the Libyan Desert glass when, in the late fifties, he met Dr John R.V. Dolphin, the chief engineer of the British Atomic Energy Authority. When Rennell told Dolphin about the glass, Dolphin replied that he had also seen something similar in the Australian desert, and knew just how it had been created – by the detonation of an atomic bomb.4
Dolphin gave Rennell a sample of his glass from the test site, and Rennell in turn showed Dolphin some of the Libyan Desert glass. They looked amazingly similar. Like the Libyan Desert glass, Dolphin’s Australian specimens contained virtually no water, because of the tremendously high temperature at which they had been formed. Dolphin’s estimate was that they were produced at about 6,000 degrees Celsius.
It had the makings of a first-class mystery. Sherlock Holmes might have reasoned thus: Glass fragments are found over a fairly wide area even to parallel corridors to the east and west. Since their silicon content is the same as that of the desert sand, we know they are not tektites. We are left with the notion of a meteorite impact — yet there is no crater. The making of coloured glass was one of the preoccupations of the alchemists, and we know that alchemy was studied in Graeco-Roman Egypt as well as ancient India and China. Could this be alchemical glass? Since the glass shows signs of being handled by humans, the only possible explanation is that it is the leftover or by-product of some industrial process. But if Dolphin was correct about the temperature at which the glass was made, then we seem to be assuming that the ancient Egyptians — or other men in the region — possessed something like atomic power.
At that point Watson would have asked Holmes if he was feeling feverish, but this apparently preposterous conclusion was nevertheless proposed by Dolphin and taken seriously by Lord Rennell. After studying the Libyan Desert glass, Dolphin suggested that for the ancient Phoenicians to have worked with temperatures equivalent to 6,000 degrees Celsius they may have known the secret of atomic power. He went on to suggest that the desert glass may have been formed when the atomic power got out of hand and caused an explosion.
Another reason why Lord Rennell took the mystery seriously is that he himself was in possession of a necklace from ancient Egypt, made of virtually pure gold.5 It is impossible to make pure gold by any normal metallurgical process, because of the problems of removing various impurities present in the ore. Nowadays, it can be done through a chemical process that was unknown in the ancient world, although another method involves heating gold until it vaporises, like liquor in a still, then allowing it to cool, leaving behind the impurities. This again requires an immensely high temperature.
If indeed the ancients had been working with some form of atomic energy, they would have been able to produce the necessary temperature, but they would have needed lots of water. The same could be true if the Libyan Desert glass was simply the by-product of some industrial process.
Had the Libyan Desert always been waterless? To answer that question, Dolphin contacted another member of the Royal Geographical Society who was an expert on the geography of the ancient world. His name was Charles Hapgood.
Dolphin wrote to Hapgood early in 1957, telling him about the Libyan Desert glass
and his theory that it must have been produced by some kind of atomic fission; he asked whether there had ever been any water in the Libyan Desert. In reply, Hapgood assured him that there had been plenty of water in 6,000 BC in what is now the Sahara Desert. For several thousand years after the pole displacement the Sahara was green and there were many lakes in the area where the Libyan Desert glass was found. Some of the Saharan rock carvings and paintings depict cattle and herdsmen.
Soon Hapgood was corresponding with Lord Rennell, too, but he expressed his doubts about Dolphin’s notion of atomic power. To Charles B. Hitchcock, a fellow member of the American Geographical Society, Hapgood wrote on 1 January 1959: ‘These two [Rennell and Dolphin] have provided me with practically indisputable evidence that some very ancient race (before 6,000 BC perhaps) could control temperature at 6,000 degrees C in the refining of metals and silicates. The very statement is enough to blow the head off the average archaeologist, but I see no way to explain away the evidence they sent me.’6
Rennell and Dolphin’s observations fitted very comfortably with the conclusions that Hapgood was reaching through the study of the ‘maps of the ancient sea kings’: that civilisation was thousands of years older than historians assume. The generally accepted view is expressed in the article on metallurgy in the most recent Encyclopaedia Britannica – man began to smelt ore to obtain metals around 4,000 BC. If, as Hapgood believed, man was building oceangoing ships at least 3,000 years before that, then he was certainly technically accomplished enough to have learned how to use metals.
It so happened that Hapgood himself had seen a necklace made of pure gold, but this had come from Mexico rather than Egypt. Moreover, Captain Arlington Mallery, who had been the first to study the Piri Reis map, had also made some extraordinary claims about metal technology, speaking about it in the broadcast of August 1956 that had introduced Hapgood to the study of ancient maps.
Mallery had excavated a number of furnaces in Ohio and Virginia, and was convinced that iron-smelting techniques were in use long before 4,000 BC. During the Georgetown broadcast,7 Mallery made the even more astonishing claim that the British Museum had sent some iron tools from Egypt to a metallurgist and was ‘astounded to find out that the ancient Egyptians were using powdered metallurgy’, a process that involves heating the metal to a temperature where it vaporises, after which it condenses in the form of a powder. The Egyptians obtained these temperatures, Mallery contended, by ‘the same processes that made our atomic bomb possible’ – atomic fission – ‘so 5,000 years ago the Egyptians were using the same processes that we thought we had discovered today to make the atom bomb’. Mallery added that ‘the timing of the process agrees with the timing of the ancient maps’ – in other words, perhaps 6,000–7,000 BC. Mallery was also convinced that he had found gold that was 100 per cent pure.
So Hapgood was already familiar with the claim, now made by Dolphin, that prehistoric men he described as ‘Phoenicians’ had learned to create and sustain temperatures of 6,000 degrees Celsius (which is only 2,000 degrees cooler than the surface of the sun). He was not prepared to concede that the answer lay in atomic power, though. Hapgood had his own theory, which came from a comment he found in a book called Mysteries of Ancient South America (1956) by Harold Wilkins, who had written:
Again, in the same country of Ecuador, on the sea-shore, close to a place called Esmeraldas, queer relics have been found which are not only pre-Incaic, but seem even to have preceded the old European stone age… The artifacts of this unknown nation, whose city is below the sea off Ecuador’s shores, are singular. Beside fine obsidian mirrors, carved like lenses in a way to suggest that the race had a knowledge of optics, there are queer, oblong-shaped prisms, on whose facets are carved animals, hieroglyphics, or symbols…8
Concave mirrors can, of course, be used to concentrate the sun’s rays – Archimedes devised huge metal mirrors to hold the Romans besieging Syracuse at bay in 211 BC, setting their ships ablaze. Hapgood told his correspondent Charles Hitchcock: ‘On the other hand, I am loath to accept the explanation to which Lord Rennell finds himself pushed: that these ancient people (unidentified) had atomic power. I see another possible explanation: that they used solar power through a system of lenses like those reportedly found off the coast of Ecuador.’9
Rennell himself was disinclined to accept the atomic power hypothesis, but he and Dolphin had no doubt that the Libyan Desert glass demonstrated the existence of a civilisation that possessed the technology to create high temperatures in at least 6,000 BC.
In November 1958, Hapgood wrote to Ion Edwards, Professor of Egyptology at the British Museum, to check Mallery’s claim that the ancient Egyptians possessed powdered metallurgy; Edwards replied that there was no evidence that the Egyptians possessed anything but the simplest forms of metallurgy. Reluctantly, Hapgood was forced to abandon his hope that he had found proof for ancient technology, but like Rennell and Dolphin he was totally convinced that it had existed. Less than a year later, his discovery of the portolans in the Library of Congress left him in no doubt of the existence of a civilisation that predated even the ‘Phoenicians’ of Dolphin and Rennell.
In the summer of 1995 Rand visited the Hapgood Archives at Yale University. He and his friend Martin Schnell – who had drawn Rand’s attention to the article on the Sphinx by Paul Roberts – arrived on the deserted campus and took rooms in an empty hall of residence. For three weeks they made their way across to the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Collection immediately after breakfast, only leaving when it closed. It was there they found and made extensive notes on the file on Lord Rennell and the Libyan Desert glass, as well as the correspondence that revealed Hapgood’s ‘secret quest for Atlantis’.
The following summer, another piece of the jigsaw puzzle fell into place. Rand and Rose were visited by a friend named Shawn Montgomery, whom they had met earlier in the year when they went to launch When the Sky Fell in Toronto. Montgomery was making a research trip across Canada and America, talking to people who shared his interest in ‘scientific anomalies’.10 As the three of them were sitting at breakfast on the day he was about to leave, he began to tell them about his visit to a scientist called Yull Brown, who was working on a new technology that certainly qualified as anomalous. Brown had learned how to make a mixture of hydrogen and oxygen whose properties had baffled every scientist who had examined it. He called it Brown’s Gas. As he talked, Montgomery pulled out one of Brown’s brochures and laid it on the table, and Rand glanced through it idly as his friend went on talking. Suddenly he stopped and stared. He was looking at a page with a picture of a sun emitting rays, and in the centre of the sun was the phrase ‘6,000 degrees Celsius’.11 Rand was convinced that he had taken a major step towards solving the mystery of the Libyan Desert glass.
Montgomery had been working with Graham Smith, who was involved in the Marshall McLuhan Research Program at the University of Toronto, and the two had made a series of
A September 1979 Sydney, Australia, press release about Brown’s Gas puts the figure 6,000 degrees Celsius at the centre of the page.
television programmes about forgotten – or suppressed – knowledge. Brown’s Gas came high on the list of the things they wanted to investigate, so Montgomery rang Brown in California. He found it extremely difficult to understand his accent, which was a curious mixture of Bulgarian and Australian, but eventually he became an expert on the subject. What he learned sounded so incredible that when Brown told him that there was a Brown’s Gas generator in Ottawa, he and Smith lost no time in paying a call on its owner, Professor Andrew Michrowski of the Planetary Association for Clean Energy (PACE).
Professor Michrowski led them up to the roof, where the generator stood on a table. As the generator could sublimate metals into gases, and the smell tended to linger in closed environments, open air was necessary. Michrowski used a spark to light the flame, which came from a small nozzle like a welding torch, and the demonstration began.
Brown ha
d told Montgomery that the flame could instantaneously poke a hole in wood or metal. Montgomery held out a large wooden spoon. There was a flurry of yellow flame, and a small, clean hole appeared through half an inch of wood.
On seeing such a demonstration, most people would assume that the flame was as hot as an oxyacetylene burner, so Montgomery was startled when Professor Michrowski handed him the torch and told him to feel the temperature of the nozzle a fraction of an inch from where the flame was emanating. His instinct told him not to risk it, but he did. The nozzle was merely warm.
Montgomery picked up a rod of welder’s tungsten, and applied the flame to it. It looked as if he had lit a piece of magnesium ribbon. There was a blinding white flame, and the rod proceeded to vanish. It should have become too hot to hold; instead it remained at the same temperature. Even when the white flame was within an inch and a half of his fingers, there was no heat. He tried playing the flame over his arm, moving it back and forth. It was hot, and would have burned him if he had kept it still; as it was, it merely felt warm again. The flame of a gas stove would have burned the tissue. Brown’s Gas could apparently burn tungsten, at somewhere around 6,000 degrees Celsius, but did little damage to flesh.
During the next hour, Michrowski put the generator through its paces. He played the flame on a piece of brick, and the brick first of all glazed then began to melt. They welded a piece of glass to a piece of brick, then a piece of copper to the brick, then a piece of glass to the copper, then cut holes in a fire brick – designed to withstand high temperatures – and also welded copper to it. They turned a fistful of sand into a glass ball, then welded together samples of dissimilar metals, such as copper and bronze, and nickel and iron. Finally, they turned various metals into molten pools.