Exposed, Uncovered, & Declassified: Lost Civilizations & Secrets of the Past

223 Pages·2012·3.63 MB·English

by  Michael Pye

EXPOSED, UNCOVERED, AND DECLASSIFIED:
LOST CIVILIZATIONS & SECRETS OF THE PAST
Edited by
Michael Pye and Kirsten Dalley
Copyright © 2012 by Michael Pye and Kirsten Dalley All rights reserved under
the Pan-American and International Copyright Conventions. This book may not
be reproduced, in whole or in part, in any form or by any means electronic or
mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage
and retrieval system now known or hereafter invented, without written
permission from the publisher, The Career Press.
EXPOSED, UNCOVERED, AND DECLASSIFIED:
LOST CIVILIZATIONS & SECRETS OF THE PAST
EDITED BY KIRSTEN DALLEY
TYPESET BY DIANA GHAZZAWI
Cover design by Ian Shimkoviak/theBookDesigners
Printed in the U.S.A.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Exposed, uncovered, and declassified : lost civilizations & secrets of the past
/ edited by Michael Pye and Kirsten Dalley.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-60163196-1 -- ISBN 978-1-60163-630-0 (ebook) 1.
Parapsychology and archaeology. 2. Geographical myths. 3. Lost continents.
4. Antiquities, Prehistoric. 5. Atlantis (Legendary place) 6. Parapsychology.
7. Occultism. I. Pye, Michael. II. Dalley, Kirsten.
BF1045.A74E97 2012
001.94--dc23
2011042615
2011042615
Contents
Preface
Archaeological Scandals
By Frank Joseph
Paradises Lost
By Oberon Zell
The Cosmology of the Afterlife: Hamlet’s Mill,
the Star-Strewn Path, and the End of Days
By Adrian G. Gilbert
Atlantis: The Lost Walhalla
By Philip Coppens
Temples, Creator-Gods, and the Transfiguration of the Soul
By Freddy Silva
Our Sonic Past: The Role of Sound and Resonance in
Ancient Civilizations
By Marie D. Jones and Larry Flaxman
Oppenheimer’s Iron Thunderbolt:
Evidence of Ancient Nuclear Weapons
By Micah A. Hanks
From the Pyramids to the Pentagon:
The U.S. Government and Ancient Mysteries
By Nick Redfern
Race, Interrupted: Ancient Aliens and
the Evolution of Humanity
By Scott Alan Roberts
Clash of the Giants: The Untold Story of
the Lost Atlantean Race
By Pat Chouinard
The AB Intervention Hypothesis:
The Truth Behind the Myths
By Paul Von Ward
The Micmac and the Picts: Distant Cousins?
By Steven Sora
UFO Cults: A Brief History of Religion
By William Bramley
A Symbolic Landscape: The Mystery of
Nabta Playa and Our Ancient Past
By Thomas A. Brophy
The Time Machines
By Erich von Däniken
Index
About the Contributors
Preface
Atlantis. Lemuria. Mu. Eden. These famous names always bring to mind
fantastic images of sprawling, flourishing civilizations and idyllic, utopian
climes. But did they exist? The established archeological community would be
quick to respond with an emphatic no. But more and more experts are coming
forward now—in addition to those who have been fighting to make their voices
heard for decades—declaring that, yes, these places did, in fact, exist in some
form.
The world is forever and always changing. Ocean levels have risen and fallen
innumerable times over the millennia. We are just now realizing how even a
seemingly miniscule change in sea level can completely alter the way we live.
So why is it so difficult to believe that there once existed vast and glorious
cultures that, along with their knowledge and histories, were lost to the sands of
time or the depthless waters of a great flood? Most people cite a lack of any
tangible evidence to support this idea, but what they don’t know (or refuse to
know) is that there is evidence.
This collection delves into many questions concerning these lost
civilizations, including their sometimes gigantic and otherworldly inhabitants,
their possible contact with advanced beings and aliens, their religions, and other
lost knowledge from a past we all share.
With no past, we can have no future. There is more to history if you know
how to look at it and where to look. Let these experts show you the way.
—Michael Pye and Kirsten Dalley
October 2011
Archaeological Scandals
By Frank Joseph
Cultural diffusionists believe that seafarers from the ancient Old World
visited North America and influenced its prehistory millennia prior to 1492.
They contradict official versions of the past upheld by cultural isolationists—
mainstream archaeologists who insist that such contact never took place because
no credible evidence supporting it exists.
Scott F. Wolter is a university-trained geologist and president of American
Petrographic Services in St. Paul, Minnesota. His firm is tasked to analyze
construction materials, and has been cited for professional excellence by the
American Association for Laboratory Accreditation. The object of Wolter’s
scrutiny with which we are concerned was a 200-pound sandstone found in
September of 1898 by Swedish immigrant farmer Olof Öhman while clearing
his land in the largely rural township of Solem, Minnesota. Lying flat and
entwined in the roots of a stunted 30-year-old aspen tree, the 30 × 16 × 6-inch
slab was covered on its face and one side with what resembled runic writing.
Öhman brought his find to the nearest town, Kensington, where it was displayed
at the local bank. Interested in finding out the truth concerning the stone, Wolter
subjected it to rigorous scientific examination in 2000.
Translated from Medieval Swedish, the front of the object reads:
Eight Götalanders and twenty two Norwegians on [this]
reclaiming/acquisition journey far west from Vinland. We had a camp by
two [shelters?] one day’s journey north from this stone. We were fishing one
day. After we came home we found ten men red with blood and death. Ave
Maria. Save from evil.
Inscribed on the side of the stone are the words, “There are ten men by the
sea to look after our ships fourteen day’s journey from this island. Year 1362.1
Although archaeologists dismissed it as a transparent hoax, further
independent testing by Newton Horace Winchell, a geologist at the Minnesota
Historical Society, confirmed that the weathering on the stone’s exterior
indicated that its inscription was approximately 500 years old. “There was
strong support for an authentic Runestone date of 1362,” he concluded, “and
little reason to suspect fraud.”2 Unfortunately, his 1910 report was obscured by
the denunciations of skeptics, who loudly proclaimed that the stone was a
ludicrous forgery. More advanced technological methods of examination to
either confirm the inscription’s medieval authenticity or conclusively debunk it
were not developed until the turn of the 21st century, when the object was
entrusted to Scott Wolter for analysis. He had actually never heard of the
Kensington Rune Stone and was therefore indifferent to the squabbles
concerning its provenance.
He began by using photography with a reflected light microscope, core
sampling, and a scanning electron microscope. These tools revealed
unmistakable signs of sub-surface erosion requiring a minimum of 200 years to
develop. In other words, the Kensington Rune Stone was buried for at least a
century before Olof Öhman excavated it. Further examination of each individual
rune through a scanning electron microscope revealed a series of dots engraved
inside three runes for the letter “R.” These dotted runes, never before noticed on
the stone by anyone, have only been found in one other place: 14th-century
headstones in church cemeteries on the island of Götland, off the coast of
Sweden. The Kensington Rune Stone is inscribed with a 14th century date, and
its text cites eight crewmen from Götland. No less crucially, Wolter pointed out,
“the rare, medieval rune called ‘the dotted R’ was not known to modern scholars
until 1935, yet it occurs on the Kensington Rune Stone, found in 1898.
Interpretation: The presence of ‘the dotted R’ indicates the Kensington Rune
Stone inscription could only have been carved during medieval times.”3
The Kensington Rune Stone on display at the Rune Stone Museum, in
Alexandria, Minnesota. Photograph courtesy of Ancient American magazine,
used with permission.
State-of-the-art testing at an award-winning laboratory in a controlled,
scientific environment by a university-trained geologist confirmed Olof
Öhman’s discovery of an authentic 14th-century memorial. One might imagine
that Wolter’s unequivocal proof of Norse explorers in the Midwest 130 years
before the official discovery of America would have provoked newspaper
headlines everywhere and been applauded by archaeologists. On the contrary,
he received mixed reviews in the local press, while Scott Anfinson, the
Minnesota state archaeologist, and Russell Fridley, former head of the
Minnesota Historical Society, snubbed his meticulous research, dismissing the
Kensington Rune Stone as “a monument to Scandinavian frontier humor.”4
His pleas for peer review ignored, Wolter turned his attention to another,
although entirely different object equally deprecated by the likes of Anfinson
and Fridley, in an effort to show that the Kensington Rune Stone was not
anomalous, but part of wider evidence for the presence of overseas visitors in
pre-Columbian America. The item he selected had been discovered on February
14, 1889, along the Little Tennessee River, near the mouth of Bat Creek, about
40 miles south of Knoxville. At the time, members of the Smithsonian
Institution’s Bureau of Ethnology’s Mound Survey Project were excavating
three undisturbed Native American burial structures at the site, dated to circa AD
100. One of them, 28 feet across and 5 feet high, yielded nine human skeletons,
together with a small, congealed mass of metal objects resembling bracelets.
Partially hidden under the back part of a male skull, a relatively flat, thin piece
of ferruginous (containing iron oxides), reddish-brown siltstone, 4.49 inches
long by 2.01 inches wide, and engraved with an eight-letter inscription, was
removed by archaeologist John W. Emmert.
Because it was found and handled under unimpeachably professional
circumstances, the Bat Creek Stone was not dismissed or discarded as a fake,
the typical fate of such discoveries. Even so, it could not be admitted as
evidence of archaeological heresy—that is, evidence of foreign contact in pre-
Columbian times—so the Smithsonian archaeologists presumed, once again
without proof, that the inscription had been copied from a Cherokee alphabet
invented in 1821 by Sequoyah, a métis (person of mixed heritage—usually half
European, half Amerindian) silversmith. As such, the Bat Creek Stone was
featured at the Smithsonian Institution Museum in Washington, D.C., for the
next 80 years, until Henriette Mertz, a former code-breaker for the U.S.