Cuba’s
Atlantis
An October
2002 poll among cult archeologists revealed the majority today, believe that if
Atlantis is not a fictional account by Plato (as historians and archeologists
worldwide claim) it should in the Bahama Banks area.
Second in line
are those who believe, Atlantis is Antarctica. But the popular assumption
during the Renaissance that Atlantis is the current USA (see Nuovo Atlantis by
Francis Bacon, John Dee, and others) has come down considerable.
So also recent
believes that Atlantis is identical with Africa, various islands of the coast
of Africa, Peru, Indonesia, that it is England one of the islands of the
English coast, or is somewhere to be found among the rocks on the bottom of the
North See.
New candidates
turn up almost every day and seem as unlimited as human imagination, fueled by
a psychological search for the noble savage/golden age.
Three years
ago a popular place for Atlantis was the coast of Japan. This started to change
after “Der Spiegel” 23.08.1999 in “Japanische Unterwasser-Pyramide begeistert
die Esoteriker” revealed the results of extensive
Geological research including a computer diagram of the whole layered rock that
left no doubt that it is a natural formation.
So attention
returned back to the Bahama Banks area. A search financed by Fidel Castro two
years ago (1) spotted, what most specialists say is a natural rock
formation that happens to be triangular shaped.
However what
probably gave the Bahamas its modern Atlantis aura is former psychic Edgar
Cayce. Most Cayce biographers will deny Cayce read any of the popular books at
the time like Phylos the Tibetan: Dweller on Two
Planets by Frederik S. Oliver published 1886. Ore Blavatsky’s 1888 The Secret
Doctrine (allegedly also inspired by Masters in Tibet), however most agree that
Cayce did work in a bookstore.
According to
Cayce, Atlanteans had gas balloons, airplanes, submarines, elevators, X-ray
devices, “photographing at a distance machines” and yes, television. But what
became a modern myth, is Cayce’s claim Atlantis would “rise again - expect it
in 1968-‘69” (Reading 958-3,1940).
Looking for
this, two members of Edgar Cayce’s organization the Association of Research and
Enlightenment, spotted from an airplane a rectangular structure near Andros in
the Bahamas. This was 1967, and in 1968 based on this sighting, zoologist Dr.
Manson Valentine, who had been exploring the Bahamas for many years in search
of lost civilizations examined the Andros and found a building, some 100 by 75
feet, overgrown with seaweed.
In an
interview published in 1984, Valentine made it clear that he saw the finds as
confirmation of Cayce’s prediction of Atlantis “rising.” The claim has been
repeated in literally dozens of books and magazine articles. Meanwhile diving
for further traces of Atlantis has continued apace since the first discoveries
and there has been an almost continuous stream of incredible claims.
At the same
time, many other psychics have picked up where Cayce left off and elaborated
his case. After Valentine, the leading proponent of the Bimini-Atlantis link
became Dr. David Zink, an English literature professor and accomplished diver
whose expeditions regularly included psychics to perform readings on the spot.
His main
clairvoyant, Carol Huffstickler, revealed that the
Bimini Road was actually part of a labyrinth, built by advanced beings from the
Pleiades star cluster -on a kind of galactic missionary service. They
constructed the labyrinth at the Bahamas as a sacred site that could utilize
the Earth’s magnetic field, “to raise consciousness and heal,” as reported in a
book The Stones of Atlantis (1978).
The Bimini
Road became the subject of a protracted controversy soon after its discovery.
In 1971, a professional geologist pronounced it to be naturally formed
limestone “beachrock.” fractured and eroded to give
the appearance of large, rounded budding blocks. Undismayed, Atlantis
enthusiasts insisted that the joints between the stones were far too straight
to be the result of natural cracking, and that no beach rock formations are
known that are as regular or as elegant as the J shape of the “Bimini
Road.”
The dispute
promised to run for perpetuity until, in 1980, Eugene Shinn of the U.S.
Geological Survey published a summary of conclusive evidence he had collected
from the stones. If the “Road” had been man-made we would not expect the grains
and microstructure within the stones to be consistent from one “block” to
another. Yet they proved to be so, in every conceivable test that Shinn
applied, showing that they must have been laid by natural means. Further,
radiocarbon tests on shells included in the stones gave dates that show the
“Road” was formed between only about two to three thousand years ago-hardly the
10,000 years required by Cayce (or the 28,000 by Huffstickler).
The “Bimini
Road” was clearly formed in the shallows of an old coastline only a couple of
thousand year, ago. As for the underwater “temple” near Andro,
that started the whole thing, Atlantologist David
Zink correctly identified it as a sponge storage area built in the 1930s.
Were it not
for Cayce’s predictions, it is doubtful that anyone would have associated the
Bahama Banks findings with Atlantis in the first place. The shallow waters, of
the world’s coastlines abound with curiosities, from geological features to
sunken forests and towns. Perhaps the real surprise is that despite all the intensive
diving that has been done in the Bahama Banks area over the last thirty years,
no evidence at all seems to have turned up of pre-Columbian activity.
To often every anomalous rock becomes a “lost
civilization,” and every square stone becomes the Gateway to Atlantis.
Like with the
Bimini wall, the Cuban underwater formation will very likely be investigated.
Investigating claims is different from “incorporating” claims into the
historical record as cult archeologists seem to be to
eager to do in what seems sometimes hastily produced books.
Another
example that might be looked at in a somewhat different context is the recent
claim that Hindus built what would be the longest bridge in the known world,
one million seven hundred and fifty thousand years ago. (2)
(1) http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/1697038.stm
(2) The Hindustan
Times 10-10-2 claiming NASA photos as evidence
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