land area at least a couple of thousand miles across. This is a landmass as big as
the Gulf of Mexico, or twice the size of Madagascar. It would have had major
mountain ranges, huge river systems and a Mediterranean to sub-tropical climate
which was buffered by its latitude from the adverse effects of short-term climatic
cooling. It would have needed this relatively undisturbed climate to last for around
ten thousand years ... Then the population of several hundred thousand
sophisticated people, we are to believe, suddenly vanished, together with their
homeland, leaving very little physical trace, with only a few surviving individuals
who were shrewd enough to see the end coming, wealthy enough and in the right
place, with the resources they needed to be able to do something about escaping
the cataclysm.
So there I was without a researcher. My proposition was a priori
impossible. There could be no lost advanced civilization because a
landmass big enough to support such a civilization was too big to lose.
Geophysical impossibilities
The problem was a serious one and it continued to nag at the back of my
mind all the way through my own research and travels. It was, indeed,
this exact problem, more than any other, which had scuppered Plato’s
Atlantis as a serious proposition for scholars. As one critic of the lost
continent theory put it:
There never was an Atlantic landbridge since the arrival of man in the world; there
is no sunken landmass in the Atlantic: the Atlantic Ocean must have existed in its
present form for at least a million years. In fact it is a geophysical impossibility for
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an Atlantis of Plato’s dimensions to have existed in the Atlantic ...1
The adamant and assertive tone, I had long ago learnt, was entirely
justified. Modern oceanographers had thoroughly mapped the floor of
the Atlantic Ocean and there was definitely no lost continent lurking
there.
But if the evidence that I was gathering did represent the fingerprints of
a vanished civilization, a continent had to have got lost somewhere,
So where? For a while I used the obvious working hypothesis that it
might be under some other ocean. The Pacific was very big but the Indian
Ocean looked more promising because it was located relatively close to
the Middle East’s Fertile Crescent, where several of the earliest known
historical civilizations had emerged with extreme suddenness at around
3000 BC. I had plans to go chasing rumours of ancient pyramids in the
Maldive Islands and along the Somali coast of East Africa to see if I could
pick up any clues of a lost paradise of antiquity. I thought I might even
work in a trip to the Seychelles.
The problem was the oceanographers again. The floor of the Indian
Ocean, too, had been mapped and it didn’t conceal any lost continents.
Ditto every other ocean and every other sea. There seemed to be nowhere
now under water into which a landmass big enough to have nurtured a
high civilization could have vanished.
Yet, as my research continued, the evidence kept mounting that
precisely such a civilization had once existed. I began to suspect that it
must have been a maritime civilization: a nation of navigators. In support
of this hypothesis, among other anomalies, were the remarkable ancient
maps of the world, the ‘Pyramid Boats’ of Egypt, the traces of advanced
astronomical knowledge in the astonishing calendar system of the Maya,
and the legends of seafaring gods like Quetzalcoatl and Viracocha.
A nation of navigators, then. And a nation of builders, too: Tiahuanaco
builders, Teotihuacan builders, pyramid builders, Sphinx builders,
builders who could lift and position 200-ton blocks of limestone with
apparent ease, builders who could align vast monuments to the cardinal
points with uncanny accuracy. Whoever they were, these builders
appeared to have left their characteristic fingerprints all over the world in
the form of cyclopean polygonal masonry, site layouts involving
astronomical alignments, mathematical and geodetic puzzles, and myths
about gods in human form. But a civilization advanced enough to build
like that—rich enough, sufficiently well organized and mature to have
explored and mapped the world from pole to pole, a civilization smart
enough to have calculated the dimensions of the earth—simply could not
have evolved on an insignificant landmass. Its homeland, as my
researcher had rightly pointed out, must have been blessed with major
mountain ranges, huge river systems and a congenial climate, and with
1 Galanopoulos and Bacon, Lost Atlantis, p. 75.
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many other obvious environmental prerequisites for the development of
an advanced and prosperous economy: good agricultural lands, mineral
resources, forests, and so on.
So where could such a landmass have been located, if not under any of
the world’s oceans?
Library angels
Where could it have been located and when might it have disappeared?
And if it had disappeared (and no other explanation would do) then how,
why, and under what circumstances?
Seriously, how do you lose a continent?
Commonsense suggested that the answer had to lie in a cataclysm of
some kind, a planetary disaster capable of wiping out almost all physical
traces of a large civilization. But if so, why were there no records of such
a cataclysm? Or perhaps there were.
As my research progressed I studied many of the great myths of flood,
fire, earthquakes and ice handed down from generation to generation
around the world. We saw in Part IV that it was difficult to resist the
conclusion that the myths were describing real geological and climatic
events, quite possibly the different local effects of the same events in all
cases.
During the short history of mankind’s presence on this planet, I found
that there was only one known and documented catastrophe that fitted
the bill: the dramatic and deadly meltdown of the last Ice Age between
15000 and 8000 BC. Moreover, as was more obviously the case with
architectural relics like Teotihuacan and the Egyptian pyramids, many of
the relevant myths appeared to have been designed to serve as vehicles
for encrypted scientific information, again an indication of what I was
coming to think of as ‘the fingerprints of the gods’.
What I had become sensitized to, although I did not properly realize its
implications at the time, was the possibility that a strong connection
might exist between the collapsing chaos of the Ice Age and the
disappearance of an archaic civilization which had been the stuff of
legend for millennia.
It was at this moment exactly that the library angels intervened ...
The missing piece of the puzzle
The novelist Arthur Koestler, who had a great interest in synchronicity,
coined the term ‘library angel’ to describe the unknown agency
responsible for the lucky breaks researchers sometimes get whic
h lead to
exactly the right information being placed in their hands at exactly the
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right moment.2
At exactly the right moment, one of those lucky breaks came my way.
The moment was the summer of 1993. I was at a low ebb physically and
spiritually after months of hard travel, and the geophysical impossibility
of actually losing a continent-sized landmass was beginning to undermine
my confidence in the strength of my findings. It was then that I received a
letter from the town of Nanaimo in British Columbia, Canada. The letter
referred to my previous book The Sign and the Seal, in which I had made
passing mention of the Atlantis theory and of traditions of civilizing
heroes who had been ‘saved from water’:
19 July 1993
Dear Mr. Hancock,
After 17 years of research into the fate of Atlantis, my wife and I have finished a
manuscript entitled When the Sky Fell. Our frustration is that despite positive feedback
about the book’s approach from the few publishers who have seen it, the mere mention
of Atlantis closes minds.3 In The Sign and the Seal you write of ‘a tradition of secret
wisdom started by the survivors of a flood ...’ Our work explores sites where some
survivors might have relocated. High altitude, fresh-water lakes made ideal post-deluge
bases for the survivors of Atlantis. Lake Titicaca and Lake Tana [in Ethiopia, where much
of The Sign and the Seal was set] fit the climatic criteria. Their stable environment
provided the raw materials for restarting agriculture.
We have taken the liberty of enclosing an outline of When the Sky Fell. If you are
interested we will be pleased to send you a copy of the manuscript.
Sincerely,
Rand Flem-Ath
I turned to the enclosure and there, in the first few paragraphs, found the
missing piece of the jigsaw puzzle I had been looking for. It meshed
perfectly with the ancient global maps I had studied—maps which
accurately depicted the subglacial topography of the continent of
Antarctica (see Part I). It made perfect sense of all the great worldwide
myths of cataclysm and planetary disaster, with their differing climatic
effects. It explained the enigma of the huge numbers of apparently ‘flashfrozen’ mammoths in northern Siberia and Alaska, and the 90-foot tall
fruit trees locked in the permafrost deep inside the Arctic Circle at a
latitude where nothing now grows. It provided a solution to the problem
of the extreme suddenness with which the last Ice Age in the northern
hemisphere melted down after 15,000 BC. It also solved the mystery of
the exceptional worldwide volcanic activity that accompanied the
meltdown. It answered the question, ‘How do you lose a continent?’ And
it was solidly based in Charles Hapgood’s theory of ‘earth-crust
displacement’—a radical geological hypothesis with which I was already
familiar:
2 See, for example, Brian Inglis, Coincidence, Hutchinson, London, 1990, p. 48ff.
3 When the Sky Fell, with an Introduction by Colin Wilson and Afterword by John Anthony
West, is published by Stoddart, Canada, 1995.
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Antarctica is our least understood continent [wrote the Flem-Aths in their outline].
Most of us assume that this immense island has been ice-bound for millions of
years. But new discoveries prove that parts of Antarctica were free of ice
thousands of years ago, recent history by the geological clock. The theory of
‘earth-crust displacement’ explains the mysterious surge and ebb of Antarctica’s
vast ice sheet.
What the Canadian researchers were referring to was Hapgood’s
suggestion that until the end of the last Ice Age—say the eleventh
millennium BC—the landmass of Antarctica had been positioned some
2000 miles further north (at a congenial and temperate latitude) and that
it had been moved to its present position inside the Antarctic Circle as a
result of a massive displacement of the earth’s crust.4 This displacement,
the Flem-Aths continued, had
also left other evidence of its deadly visit in a ring of death around the globe. All
the continents that experienced rapid and massive extinctions of animal species
(notably the Americas and Siberia) underwent a massive change in their latitudes
...
The consequences of a displacement are monumental. The earth’s crust ripples
over its interior and the world is shaken by incredible quakes and floods. The sky
appears to fall as continents groan and shift position. Deep in the ocean,
earthquakes generate massive tidal waves which crash against coastlines, flooding
them. Some lands shift to warmer climes, while others, propelled into polar zones,
suffer the direst of winters. Melting ice caps raise the ocean’s level higher and
higher. All living things must adapt, migrate or die ...
If the horror of an earth-crust displacement were to be visited upon today’s
interdependent world the progress of thousands of years of civilization would be
torn away from our planet like a fine cobweb. Those who live near high mountains
might escape the global tidal waves, but they would be forced to leave behind, in
the lowlands, the slowly constructed fruits of civilization. Only among the
merchant marine and navies of the world might some evidence of civilization
remain. The rusting hulls of ships and submarines would eventually perish but the
valuable maps that are housed in them would be saved by survivors, perhaps for
hundreds, even thousands of years. Until once again mankind could use them to
sail the World Ocean in search of lost lands ...
As I read these words I remembered Charles Hapgood’s account of how
the layer of the earth that geologists call the lithosphere—the thin but
rigid outer crust of the planet—could at times be displaced, moving in
one piece ‘over the soft inner body, much as the skin of an orange, if it
were loose, might shift over the inner part of the orange all in one piece.’5
Thus far, I felt I was on familiar ground. But then the Canadian
researchers made two vital connections which I had missed.
4 See Part I.
5 Ibid.
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Section through the earth. The crustal displacement theory envisages
the possibility of periodic displacements of the entire crust in one
piece. Often less than 30 miles thick, the crust rests on a lubricating
layer known as the asthenosphere.
Gravitational influences
The first of these was the possibility that gravitational influences (as well
as the variations in the earth’s orbital geometry discussed in Part V)
might, through the mechanism of earth-crust displacement, play a role in
the onset and decline of Ice Ages:
When the naturalist and geologist Louis Agassiz presented the idea of ice ages to
the scientific community in 1837 he was met with great skepticism. However, as
evidence slowly gathered in his favour, the skeptics were forced to accept that the
earth had indeed been gripped by deadly winters. But t
he trigger of these
paralysing ice ages remained a puzzle. It was not until 1976 that solid evidence
existed to establish the timing of ice ages. The explanation was found in various
astronomical features of the earth’s orbit and the tilt of the axis. Astronomical
factors have clearly played a role in the timing of glacial epochs. But this is only
part of the problem. Of equal importance is the geography of glaciation. It is here
that the theory of earth-crust displacement plays its role in unravelling the
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mystery.
Albert Einstein investigated the possibility that the weight of the ice-caps, which
are not symmetrically distributed about the pole, might cause such a
displacement. Einstein wrote: ‘The earth’s rotation acts on these unsymmetrically
deposited masses, and produces centrifugal momentum that is transmitted to the
rigid crust of the earth. The constantly increasing centrifugal momentum
produced this way will, when it reaches a certain point, produce a movement of
the earth’s crust over the earth’s body, and this will displace the polar regions
towards the equator.
When Einstein wrote these words [1953] the astronomical causes of ice ages were
not fully appreciated. When the shape of the earth’s orbit deviates from a perfect
circle by more than one per cent, the gravitational influence of the sun increases,
exercising more pull on the planet and its massive ice sheets. Their ponderous
weight pushes against the crust and this immense pressure, combined with the
greater incline in the earth’s tilt [another changing factor of the orbital geometry]
forces the crust to shift ...
The connection with the onset and decline of ice ages?
Very straightforward.
In a displacement, those parts of the earth’s crust which are situated at
the North and South Poles (and which are therefore as completely
glaciated as Antarctica is today) shift suddenly into warmer latitudes and
begin to melt with extraordinary rapidity. Conversely, land that has
hitherto been located at warmer latitudes is shifted equally suddenly into
the polar zones, suffers a devastating climate change, and begins to
vanish under a rapidly expanding ice-cap.
In other words, when huge parts of northern Europe and north America
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