The Stargate Conspiracy
Page 12
With all these astonishing back-track and changes of heart, it is difficult to know who belongs to which camp, or even what the various groups stand for. While Bauval and Hancock may simply be exercising their right to change their minds, certain provocative underlying affiliations may be discerned. For example, Alan Alford has referred to Graham Hancock ‘wittingly or unwittingly, following a masonic agenda ...’71
The words and actions of the representative of orthodox Egyptology, Zahi Hawass, only add to the problem. It seems that his many, often quite glaring, contradictions, appear to be part of some elaborate game. We have already noted his connection with ARE, who helped arrange his training as an Egyptologist. Although, in his official capacity, he maintained a dismissive attitude to the ‘fringe element’, it was not surprising to find him appearing in a short promotional video about the search for the Hall of Records made by Boris Said and the Schor Foundation in late 1995.72 In this, Hawass appears in the tunnel beneath the rear of the Sphinx, declaring: ‘This tunnel has never been opened before. No one really knows what is inside this tunnel. But we are going to open it for the first time.’ (When the existence of this sequence was leaked to the public in 1996 it caused much excitement among followers of the Giza drama, who wondered what the rest of the film might reveal. However, it appears that it was made as a ‘screen test’ for a future film if the chambers were ever found.)
It is hard to know the nature of anyone’s true affiliation in this story, but we have already seen that Zahi Hawass is closely associated with ARE. He also has connections with another esoteric organisation that sets great store by the existence of hidden chambers at Giza, having been in the 1980s a consultant to and frequent lecturer at AMORC’s Museum of Egyptology in San José, California.73
Such confusion encourages the spread of some of the wilder rumours, of which there are many. One particularly lurid story was recently posted on the Internet by the independent American researcher Larry Dean Hunter who, as we have seen, investigated claims of tunnelling in Davison’s Chamber on behalf of Richard Hoagland, together with Amargi Hillier, who lives in Nazlet-al-Samman, the village in front of the Sphinx. (Hunter is a former officer with US Navy Intelligence.) It claimed that a massive, 250-foot high chamber had been found inside the Great Pyramid. This they call the Hall of Osiris, which they claim leads to another chamber in which lies the body of the god Osiris himself. This is astonishing, not least because of the idea of a god having a physical reality outside of myth and legend. This is typical of Hunter and Hillier’s overheated apocalyptic output:
For the first time in many thousands of years, the mass world population will start to receive an inside glimpse concerning something truly powerful, hidden from humankind by God, regarding the Great Pyramid. We are sure these revelations will accelerate the ‘quickening’ into high gear. God is quietly whispering to everyone, letting them know they are getting close to the fulfilment of the words of Isaiah 19.19: ‘In that day there shall be an altar to the Lord in the midst of the land of Egypt, and a pillar at the border thereof to the Lord.’74
This quotation is a notable favourite among those who blend a fervent Christian fundamentalism with a passion for ancient Egypt. Superficially, this seems to offer an almost haphazard mix of the Old Testament (the Lord) and ancient Egyptian myths (the god Osiris) - a strange blend indeed. Believers in the God of the Old Testament - Yahweh - do not, as a rule, attach any significance to pagan deities. One would be very hard pressed, for example, to find a rabbi — a supreme example of a Yahweh-worshipper - eagerly awaiting the discovery of the body of Osiris or taking seriously the idea that his God planned global changes involving the deity of the nation that. according to the Bible, enslaved his own race. Furthermore, Hunter and Hillier link all this to Cayce’s prophecy of the opening of the Hall of Records in 1998. Ironically, they are attempting to evoke Cayce’s prophecies to support the idea of secret chambers within the Great Pyramid, though Cayce himself categorically stated that there are no such chambers to be found.75
Given the accessibility provided by the internet, it is hardly surprising that incredible rumours spread like wildfire these days. But there are also signs that some are circulated deliberately to accord with specific agendas, and that they originate from official circles.
Late in 1997, our friend Georgina Bruni. a columnist for Sightings magazine, was introduced to a leading Egyptian political journalist at a reception in London. During their conversation, Georgina brought up the subject of the rumoured secret search for the Hall of Records. To her surprise, the journalist told her that the chambers beneath the Sphinx had already been opened a few months before by a team from the Schor Foundation, but that the Egyptian government had placed an official embargo on the story, going so far as to call in journalists to impress upon them the seriousness of the official ban on publishing the story.76 This Egyptian journalist went much further. He claimed that the chamber under the Sphinx contained the body and treasure of an Egyptian queen, perhaps Akhenaten’s wife, Nefertiti, as well as a statue of the lioness-headed goddess Sekhmet. He also said there were many other finds, including another chamber containing ancient texts, written or inscribed in both hieroglyphics and another language that was described, significantly, as ‘Altean’. Some of these writings have, he claimed, already been deciphered, and tell how Atum descended from the sky, and describe how an earlier civilisation came to Egypt and built the pyramids.
There seems little doubt that this story was told in good faith, by a London-based correspondent who specialised in political, rather than archaeological, stories. He was simply telling Georgina Bruni what he had heard in political circles in Cairo. The story may well have originated from within Egyptian governmental circles, but much of it is, frankly, incredible. For example, how could records in an unknown language be translated at all, let alone so soon after they were discovered?
So what is going on at Giza? It seems as if a game is being played out, though only the players themselves know the rules and the goal. The rest of us can only watch and wonder. Some of the evidence certainly suggests that clandestine searches are being made at Giza, as suggested by the testimony of Thomas Danley and Simon Cox about secret tunnelling in the Great Pyramid. On the other hand, highly publicised ventures, such as the filming of the water shaft, turn out to be insubstantial and hardly worth our attention. Where Giza is concerned there is a strange tendency to mix persuasive, academic evidence with rumour and inflated claims with downright nonsense. So how can the objective researcher make sense of it all?
One starting point is to ask what various people have to gain from focusing their attention so avidly on Giza? Clearly they perceive some benefit from all their digging and skulduggery. The most obvious possibility is that they really believe there is something to be found that is of value or use, anything from treasure to religious artefacts or some kind of ancient technology. Most theories about Giza incline to take that line, but much less attention has been paid to another aspect that could be turned to advantage — the potency of Giza as a symbol for disparate creeds. This in itself is something of inestimable value, especially for those whose business it is to exploit the power of belief systems. Is Giza itself, rather than something found there, the goal?
Of all the players in the Giza game, most can be seen to have definite and easily discernible motivations; for example, Hawass wants to be the world’s leading Egyptologist, Joseph Schor and ARE want to find the Hall of Records, and so on. The motivations of certain individuals and organisations who have played key roles are not so easy to define, such as the enigmatic Dr James J. Hurtak and SRI International, who seem to be have been working together at Giza in the 1970s. Far from lading from lading from the picture, Hurtak has recently gone into partnership with Boris Said in his Magical Eye production company, being listed as their scientific adviser.
Inside the seer’s circle
As we have seen, one name frequently cited in connection with Giza is that of the Americ
an ‘prophet’ Edgar Cayce. His prediction of the discovery of the Hall of Records in 1998 explains why his organisation, ARE, repeatedly appear in this story. They are obviously looking for the Hall of Records, although why they need to pour money into the search when presumably they believe it will be found eventually anyway is mystery.
Edgar Cayce, we discovered, warrants closer scrutiny. What emerges is a very different image from the well-worn, accepted picture. We see him as a simple Joe, relatively uneducated but eager to learn, who remained in humble circumstances for most of his life. The very first headline mentioning him — in the New York Times in 1910 - emphasised this image, reading: ‘Illiterate Man Becomes Doctor When Hypnotized’.77 This is very strange; not only was he not illiterate, but he also had a long-standing job as a sales assistant in a bookstore. In fact. he spent most of the first seven years of his working life in bookshops.78 He was also famed for his prodigious memory: over thirty years later he was proud of the fact that he could still quote from the publishers’ catalogues he had to study in his job.79
There was another more secret side to Edgar Cayce, which we have never seen mentioned in any of the mainstream books that currently feature him, although some of the writers must certainly be aware of it simply because they share the same private affiliations as him. His entranced alter ego predicted that Masonic ideals would become the governing principles of the future American Golden Age. This is a concept of which the conscious Edgar Cayce would have approved. He left his job in the book trade at the age of twenty-two to join his father, Leslie B. Cayce (known locally as ‘the Squire’), in his job as a travelling insurance salesman for the Fraternal Insurance Company.80 As its name suggests, this company sold insurance to Freemasons, so all its employees would have also been members of the Brotherhood. Presumably the reason Edgar only joined his father in this work at the age of twenty-two was the fact that young men must reach twenty-one to enter a lodge. We have not identified the Masonic rank of either father or son, but we know that Cayce Senior was authorised to found new lodges and Edgar used to help him do so, implying no insignificant status on their part.81 (In fact, Cayce only worked with his father for a few months, being struck down with the first of his attacks of aphasia — psychosomatic loss of voice. It was the treatment for this - hypnosis - that seemingly unlocked Cayce’s famous psychic powers.)
As his psychic career developed, Edgar Cayce became known in the very highest echelons of American society. In a memoir written in 1932 (though not published until 1997), he wrote that, in 1918 or 1919: ‘I was called to Washington to give information for one high in authority. This, I am sure, must have been at least interesting, as I was called a year or so later.’82 Although Cayce is being discreet here, it is not difficult to work out to whom he was referring — almost certainly President Woodrow Wilson himself, possibly because he had a stroke in 1919, and Cayce could have been brought in for his healing talents.83 (According to two Cayce biographers, he was summoned to give advice about the formation of the League of Nations.84)
A link with Woodrow Wilson is entirely plausible: one of Cayce’s friends, and earliest promoters of his powers, was David E. Kahn, who had served with one of Wilson’s cousins in the First World War.85 Afterwards, Cayce, Kahn and Major Wilson went into business together to form the Cayce Petroleum Company to locate oil in Texas using Cayce’s psychic abilities. In its short four-year life, the company was a disaster. As Cayce wrote: ‘Nothing came of our efforts to produce oil except a financial loss to many people.’86 Even without Cayce’s vaunted psychic powers, surely they must be among the few prospectors not to have found oil in Texas! Hardly a good advertisement for his abilities.
It was Kahn who propelled Cayce Inie the li nelight, fixing up contacts with the great and the good. He had first met Cayce in Alabama in 1912 and was deeply interested in his diagnostic readings. When he went into the US Army in 1917, Kahn sang Cayce’s praises to his superior officers, with the result that a request for a reading was sent by an unidentified member of the Italian royal family.87 This was hardly the humble milieu in which we have been led to believe Cayce moved. Indeed, he said of Kahn: ‘Through him I made the acquaintance of some most prominent people - bankers, businessmen, lawyers, journalists, people in almost every walk of life.’88 In 1924 Kahn also introduced him to a circle of businessmen headed by New York stockbroker Morton Blumenthal, who agreed to finance a hospital and research institute at Virginia Beach in return for Cayce’s advice on their investments. This was the prototype ARE, although it only lasted for at most two years, when funding was withdrawn after a disagreement with Cayce. Blumenthal and his circle then transferred their allegiance to another psychic.89
In the mid-1920s three members of this group had acquired property on Bimini, and for some reason they had an idea that some treasure was buried there, so they flew Cayce and his family over to find it for them.90 Unsurprisingly, he failed to do so, but the sequel is perhaps more significant: only after his return from that trip did Bimini and Atlantis begin to feature in his readings.
Cayce’s influence had reached the Army, Italian royalty and the President, but he also had contacts in the world of intelligence. According to David Kahn, interviewed in 1965, the meeting between Cayce and President Wilson was arranged by Colonel Edmond Starling, head of the Secret Service.91 Kahn also described Starling as ‘a lifelong friend’ of Cayce, although the former’s name never appears in Cayce’s memoirs; the prophet was characteristically very discreet. Like Cayce, Starling came from Hopkinsville in Kentucky, which is perhaps why they were lifelong friends, although the latter belonged to an older generation and so it is more likely that they met through Cayce’s father. It is tempting to speculate that Starling and Cayce Senior were fellow members of the Hopkinsville lodge.
These associations can be seen as a microcosm of a much wider picture. As our investigation proceeded, an initially unlikely pattern began to form: strange alliances that surface time and time again among psychics, politicians, Freemasons, the world of big business and the intelligence agencies. Whether or not Cayce’s predictions were accurate is largely irrelevant. What really matters is that many highly influential people believed he possessed genuine powers. If they followed him then, do the same categories of people also believe in him now? Is this a motivating force behind what is currently going on at Giza, especially around the crucial last years of the twentieth century, when the Hall of Records will, according to Cayce, finally be found?
Although it may seem far-fetched that modern political movers and shakers may be influenced by the prophecies of Edgar Cayce, it is known that leading members of the Egyptian government — and members of the presidential family — firmly believe in the reality of the Hall of Records.92 Cayce himself drew together a chain of associations that included the Masons, intelligence agencies, politicians and other influential personages, but others besides Cayce - individuals and organisations - embrace a similar chain of associations.
The mind’s eye
The connections between psychic phenomena, technology and the world of intelligence and defence are embodied in another organisation with a key role in events at Giza, especially in the 1970s - SRI International. As Mark Lehner said: ‘SRI was in the business of looking for hidden chambers at Giza well before I or the Edgar Cayce Foundation met up with them’.93 Perhaps this is a little odd: ARE’s involvement with ( 3 i < <3 : perfectly understandable, given Cayce’s prophecies, but why was SRI searching for hidden chambers?
Founded by Stanford University in California as the Stanford Research Institute in 1946, SRI was originally planned as a means of attracting commercial business research to bring extra revenue to the university. This was not a success, and the parent body had to subsidise it for several years.94 SRI’s fortunes changed dramatically when it began to take on military and intelligence contracts, much of it classified. This included weapons testing for the Atomic Energy Commission and research into chemical warfare. It also developed other, cons
iderably weirder, weaponry for both the Pentagon and the CIA. (Stanford University’s own metamorphosis from regional to national academic centre resulted from its acceptance of Department of Defense contracts, although the majority of this work was actually carried out by SRI.)
By 1968, SRI rivalled the university itself in size, and even employed more staff. But by then Stanford’s students had discovered the extent of the university’s involvement with defence and intelligence agencies, and over the next three years the administrators were forced to reveal that many departments - but particularly the Research Institute - were heavily involved in classified projects, including work on electronic surveillance for the CIA. Predictably, this horrified the students. As Stuart W. Leslie says in The Cold War and American Science (1993): ‘The extent of Stanford’s classified research program, although common knowledge among the engineers. shocked an academic community still coming to terms with the Vietnam War.’95 The students, appalled, started a campaign against the university’s links with the military, with a series of demonstrations and sit-ins specifically targeting the Research Institute. As a result, the university stopped taking on research on behalf of classified projects, and divested itself of the embarrassment of the main recipient of such favours. Stanford Research Institute became a private company, changing its name to SRI International.
Now on its own, SRI came to rely on defence contracts even more, the revenue enabling it to become one of the largest independent research institutes in the world. In 1993, approximately 75 per cent of SRI’s income came from the Department of Defense.96 It now has offices in ten countries outside the United States - including the United Kingdom — and operates an Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at Cambridge University. It has a National Security Advisory Council, made up of former Department of Defense ‘decision-makers’, and carries out research for NASA.