In March 1997 — several months after Danley’s report — Hawass stated categorically: ‘There is no secret work at Giza!’.17 The only conclusion was, in our view, that someone was, to say the least, being economical with the truth about a major archaeological irregularity.
In February 1998 our colleague Simon Cox had seen unambiguous evidence of the existence of an unofficial tunnel. In fact, Simon, using the well-known Egyptian lubricant of baksheesh to grease relevant palms, had actually managed to enter Davison’s Chamber itself. There he saw - and photographed - final confirmation that there is indeed a tunnel being dug into the southern wall of the chamber. From Simon’s account it appears that Caviglia’s tunnel has been reopened and extended further into the heart of the pyramid. Excitingly, if it continues in a straight line and on the same level, it will intersect the southern shaft from the Queen’s Chamber. In other words it will strike approximately at the level of Gantenbrink’s Door. Is this what ‘they’ are up to — covertly investigating the mysterious door and what lies behind it? It is very suggestive, considering that the Egyptian authorities have officially dismissed Gantenbrink’s Door as unworthy of examination, pointing out that it is very small — about the size of an A4 piece of paper - and even, curiously, suggesting that nothing lies behind it. But do they, in fact, protest too much?
Secrets in the sand
While we were at Giza we found out for ourselves the difficulty of making public any exciting discoveries. We heard — from particularly reputable sources - that three new chambers had already been discovered in the Great Pyramid, around the King’s Chamber.18 Yet because for various reasons we could not reveal those sources, the news was technically worthless. And in any case, there is always a need for caution when dealing with activity at Giza. Wild rumours spring up like mushrooms overnight, describing exotic secret finds by the authorities that will — by now a standard implication of all such tales - somehow trigger miraculous changes in the world.
It seems that a search for hidden chambers in the Giza complex has been continuing for at least twenty-five years. One of the first twentieth-century attempts to find undiscovered chambers took place in Khafra’s Pyramid in 1968, with a project led by Nobel prizewinning physicist Luis Alvarez, who tried to locate chambers by measuring the passage of cosmic waves through the stone structure. (Alvarez was also the originator of the ‘deep impact’ theory of dinosaur extinction, and in the early 1950s, part of a CIA-backed study into Unidentified Flying Objects.19) The 1968 Giza project involved twelve US and Egyptian agencies, including the US Atomic Energy Commission, the Smithsonian Institute and Cairo’s Ain Shams University. Initial computer analysis of the resulting data at Ain Shams led their project leader, Dr Amr Goneid, to state (as reported in The Times) that the results ‘defy all known laws of physics’ and that ‘there is some force that defies the laws of science at work in the pyramid’. 20 But once again the confusion machine seems to have gone into overdrive: Alvarez subsequently announced from America that nothing untoward had happened, and that no new chambers had been detected.
The next phase of this project concerned the Sphinx. The idea that something highly significant is under the Sphinx has been around for centuries. During Napoleon’s expedition to Egypt - which included scholars as well as soldiers - it is said that they actually found a doorway in the Sphinx’s chest in 1801, but, because of the imminent arrival of the enemy, had to beat a hasty retreat before it could be explored. We know about the story of the French finding the door in the Sphinx because Arabs who were present described it to the nineteenth-century French Egyptologist Auguste Mariette. It has been argued that this door was actually the Sphinx Stela, but this is unlikely as the stone plaque is not flush with the surface of the Sphinx like a door.21
Many of the most noted Egyptologists of the nineteenth century firmly believed in the existence of chambers underneath the Sphinx. Mariette himself believed that a tomb lay beneath it. This was largely based on the observation that every time the ancient Egyptians depicted the Sphinx in stone carvings or on papyrus, they showed it lying on a plinth above what appears to be a tomblike chamber.22
Interest in the possibility of the existence of such a chamber revived in the early twentieth century. In 1926 the French archaeologist Emile Baraize undertook excavations in both the body of the Sphinx and the surrounding enclosure. The rough-and-ready haste of his excavations suggests that he may have been specifically looking for something, not merely excavating for its own sake in the normal cautious manner. Indeed, he appears to have succeeded at least partly in his aim, finding a tunnel accessed by a hole in the Sphinx’s rump. He explored it, then sealed it up, but, incredibly, kept the news of this amazing discovery to himself. This particular location, as we have seen, interested both psychic H.C. Randall-Stevens and AMORC. They — and, later, Robert Bauval and Graham Hancock — pin-pointed the area immediately beneath the Sphinx’s hindquarters as the location of one of the putative secret chambers. What is peculiar about Baraize’s work is that, although he excavated that site extensively for eleven years, not one of his many detailed reports or papers has ever been published.23
Following Baraize, there was a long gap until 1973 when the lead was taken by an intriguing organisation called SRI International (formerly the Stanford Research Institute) from California. One of the world’s largest scientific research organisations, SRI has always enjoyed close links with the US Department of Defense and the intelligence community. It made three expeditions to Giza in the 1970s, two led by a physicist, the wonderfully named Dr Lambert Dolphin Jr, primarily to search for hidden chambers beneath the Sphinx. Why this idea suddenly resurfaced after fifty years of inactivity is unknown. According to Dolphin, the first SRI expedition in 1973 was, in fact, a continuation of Luis Alvarez’s project of five years before.24
Dolphin himself is a particularly interesting character. A graduate of San Diego State University and Stanford University, he joined SRI in 1956, becoming one of their most senior physicists. But there is more to Dolphin and his interest in ancient sites than meets the eye. He is a devout Christian with a decidedly fundamentalist leaning, who left SRI in 1987 to, in his own words, ‘devote the bulk of my time to Bible teaching, writing and Christian counseling’.25 However, Dolphin’s website perhaps reveals another dimension to his religious beliefs; its links include material by pro-Life, anti-gay and zealously anti-Muslim groups and individuals. He has written that he believes both Old and New Testaments to be ‘historically accurate, divinely inspired and fully authoritative in all areas of faith and life’.26
Like most Christian fundamentalists, Dolphin seems to have, paradoxically, a greater fascination with the Old than with the New, Testament because — apart from the Book of Revelation — it contains all the truly apocalyptic material. Christian fundamentalists love the excitement of hellfire and damnation, one of many traits they share, surprisingly perhaps, with Jewish extremists, creating once again an apparently paradoxical alliance. At the same time that Dolphin was leading the SRI team in Giza, he was also using identical remote-sensing techniques in controversial investigations beneath the Temple Mount in Jerusalem.27
Working with a right-wing Jewish organisation, the Jerusalem Temple Foundation led by Stanley Goldfoot, which believes that now is the time for the Third Temple to be built in Jerusalem, Dolphin used his expertise in a search for the foundations of the original building. This is an extremely sensitive area - literally and figuratively - as the Temple Mount is now under Muslim control, so they worked at night. Even so, Israeli authorities stopped their activities because of the risk of riots. The Jerusalem Post described the event:
There are significant and to some minds worrisome links between a handful of American Evangelical leaders and right-wing Israelis like Goldfoot. Some of the personalities on his board are important men. Lambert Dolphin heads a key section of the world’s most massive research conglomerate, the Stanford Research Institute, a $200 million-a-year concern whose main cli
ents are the US government and corporations like Bechtel.28
In 1976, according to Dolphin, SRI undertook remote-sensing investigations at Saqqara, looking for the tomb of the great scribe Imhotep; Alexandria, where they tried to locate the lost Library; and Giza, where seismographic tests indicated the possible presence of chambers beneath Khafra’s Pyramid.29 In 1977 Dolphin and SRI were back at Giza, initially funded by the US National Science Foundation.30 Then in 1978 Edgar Cayce’s followers - ARE — popped up, contributing funds to SRI’s project whose official name was the Sphinx Exploration Project.31
Someone who will emerge as the single most influential — but largely unknown - individual in this book’s investigation now enters the frame. This is Dr James J. Hurtak, the American polymath and mystical philosopher, and founder of a California-based organisation called the Academy for Future Sciences (AFFS), at whose feet many of the movers and shakers in this story are happy to sit. Hurtak holds degrees in Oriental Studies and History, Social Sciences, Linguistics, Patristics and Greek Texts and speaks and writes seven languages, being currently described as a ‘Silicon Valley-based consultant in higher technology’. 32 In 1986 he presented a paper on the use of air- and satellite-borne radar to detect archaeological features to a conference on remote sensing in Brazil.33
Hurtak carried out work at Giza in the late 1970s, which seems to be have been in some way connected with SRI’s presence there at that time. While he has never been officially employed by them, he has always maintained close contact with its senior figures. 34 In particular, he has a close friendship with Lambert Dolphin Jr, who – according to Hurtak – ‘shared private insights’ about Giza with him in 1976.35 (Hurtak also knows Mark Lehner.36) In 1977 and 1978 Hurtak and some unnamed colleagues undertook a private expedition to Giza. They were there primarily to use lasers to measure the angles of the shafts from the King’s and Queen’s Chambers, specifically to test their hypothesis that the shafts aligned with certain stars and constellations, namely Orion and Draco - and the star Sirius.37 The results of this investigation have never been made public.
What is interesting about this work is that the possibility of correlations with Orion and Draco had been proposed as early as the 1960s. But - outside of the Masonic literature, as we have already seen - the idea of an alignment with Sirius did not apparently surface until Bauval and Gilbert’s The Orion Mystery in 1994. Interestingly, Hurtak was exploring a possible correlation between the Giza pyramids and Orion’s Belt in 1973.38 We found that this was not the only time he has been ahead of the game.
SRI International also plays a major part in the official history of investigations at Giza in the 1970s. Its team used various techniques, including aerial photography, thermal imaging and measurements of the electrical resistance and fluctuations in the magnetic field around the Sphinx and its enclosure, to remote sense any underground anomalies. Some were found, although they mostly proved to be natural cavities in the bedrock (as would be expected in limestone). A few suggested the presence of a tunnel running north-west to south-west behind the rear of the Sphinx, as well as some kind of cavity in front of its paws.39
In 1978, a company called Recovery Systems International joined the project to undertake drilling work to examine these anomalies. According to Mark Lehner, this company had ‘probably’ been formed specifically in order to take part in this project.40
Recovery Systems International began to sink a drill in the Giza plateau close to the Sphinx. At a depth of 60 feet they drilled up fragments of granite, which, as we have established, is not naturally found in that area. It is even rumoured that the Egyptian Army then stepped in and stopped the project. In 1980 pieces of granite were also raised from 50 feet beneath the plateau by an Egyptian team surveying the depth of the watertable in the area.41 Clearly granite is, in that limestone country, anomalous — unless the drills had hit underground chambers lined with it. (If such chambers do exist, it would make sense for them to be lined with granite, because the watertable in that area is quite close to the surface, and porous limestone chambers would have become completely waterlogged. Granite, on the other hand, is made of sterner stuff, and is an excellent water repellent.) Then in 1980 Zahi Hawass reopened the Baraize tunnel at the back of the Sphinx, which had been forgotten by all except those with access to his unpublished field notes and reports. This band included Mark Lehner and an Egyptian named Mohammed Adb al-Mawgud Fayed, who was the son of a man who assisted Baraize in the 1920s and had actually worked on the clearing of the Sphinx enclosure as a boy. Hawass relates that, after fifty-four years, Fayed could still point successfully to the small stone at the back of the Sphinx that concealed the entrance to the tunnel.42 Fayed’s son subsequently became ARE’s representative in Cairo.
SRI and ARE, with Mark Lehner, also collaborated on another remote-sensing project at the Sphinx in 1982, called the Sphinx Mapping Project, this time using acoustic techniques to look for hidden cavities. This appeared to negate the existence of any chambers beneath the paws, though it did find possible indications of some beneath the enclosure floor.43
In 1990, Hawass granted a licence to the now famous project of John Anthony West and Robert Schoch: the Sphinx Project, which was backed by Boston University, where Schoch was a professor. (The Egyptian authorities have an eminently sensible rule that any project must have the support or involvement of a recognised academic institution.) The project director — and the man who applied for the licence, possibly because of West’s own reputation as a maverick — was the American film producer Boris Said, whose Emmy award-winning documentary on the work, Mystery of the Sphinx, was broadcast on NBC in 1993. Investors in the project included two leading ARE members, Dr Joseph Jahoda and Dr Joseph M. Schor, who was also present as ARE’s official observer.44
Dr Jahoda who, as a senior member of ARE, has played an important role in their involvement at Giza, is also president of the Astron Corporation, a major contractor of the US Department of Defense and NASA that specialises in producing radio communication systems.
We now know that the project’s main find was the telling water erosion of the Sphinx, but it also undertook seismographic work to try to detect chambers underneath the Sphinx, conducted by seismographer Dr Thomas Dobecki. He detected what appeared to be a large rectangular cavity (9 metres by 12 metres), about 5 metres beneath the paws. Once again promising work came to an abrupt end: Hawass (then the director-general of the Giza Pyramids) suddenly terminated the Sphinx Project’s licence, accusing the team of being ‘unscientific’.
In 1995 a new project arrived at Giza to explore the area using seismography and ground-penetrating radar. Officially the purpose of this project was to locate underground faults that might cause subsidence around the monuments and thus endanger the public,45 but a side effect of such ‘remote-sensing’ work would have been the discovery of subterranean anomalies, such as chambers. This was a joint mission by Florida State University and the Schor Foundation, founded by Dr Joseph Schor, who had attended the 1990 project. He is the (now retired) director and vice-president of Forest Laboratories Inc., a pharmaceutical company that produces vitamins. In Robert Bauval’s words, the Schor Foundation is ‘a non-profit organization dedicated to finding evidence of the lost “Atlantean” civilization and “Hall of Records” predicted by the sleeping prophet, Edgar Cayce.’46 Multimillionaire Schor is a life member of ARE and one of its principal donors. By teaming up with Florida State University, the Schor Foundation ensured that the Giza project would have the necessary academic credentials in order to be licensed by the Egyptian authorities.
This team included Thomas Dobecki and, again, Joseph Jahoda (who was also a member of the Schor Foundation), with Boris Said filming the events. While the official purpose of the project was to locate potentially dangerous pockets of subsidence, this was apparently not its real aim. Said has since claimed that he had been recruited specifically to film the search for the lost Atlantean Hall of Records, which had been the real intenti
on of Schor’s team from the first.
Said now claims that the whole expedition was deliberately cloaked in secrecy by Schor, saying:
Now, finally, I’m convinced that Dr Schor never wanted to go public with this information at all. I believe that it was always his intention to keep news of the secret chamber and its contents from the public. I believe he used me. I believe he used my ability to get a permit, my ability to get things done in Egypt, to further his own private purposes. I think he intended to keep this from the world from the very beginning.47
This project’s licence would be abruptly terminated in December 1996 through the intervention of Robert Bauval and Graham Hancock (see pages 96-7).48
Schor’s team also carried out work inside the Great Pyramid, which seemed to indicate the presence of a narrow corridor behind the west wall of the King’s Chamber. This was confirmed by Zahi Hawass at an ARE conference in August 1997.49
After this, leaked information claimed that the team had detected not one but nine chambers beneath the Sphinx, some of which contained metal objects. This story originated with none other than Graham Hancock, who, speaking on Art Bell’s radio show in the United States in July 1996, quite specifically claimed that his information had come, off the record, from members of Joseph Schor’s team. Hancock stated categorically that they had found nine chambers, and that this momentous discovery was being kept secret. He also added that he was confident about the reliability of his source, implying strongly that it was true. Around the time Robert Bauval was saying the same in lectures - for example, at ‘The Incident’ conference in London in October 1996. Incredibly, Hancock and Bauval are now indignantly repudiating such rumours, saying that there are no hidden finds at Giza. And they reinforce their breathtaking volte-face by pouring scorn on those who, in their view, spread such irresponsible rumours.
The Stargate Conspiracy Page 10