The message of the Sphinx: a quest for the hidden legacy of mankind (13 page)

Two other ‘anomalies’ were noted, deep in the bedrock ‘in front of the paws of the Sphinx’.
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According to ECF/ARE historians the 1973-4 and 1977 projects ‘paved the way for work ... that would succeed in discovering hidden chambers’.
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Exactly how and where is not made clear. At any rate in 1978 the ECF/ARE collaborated with the SRI and provided funds (to the tune of about US$50,000
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) for a more detailed survey of the Sphinx enclosure and the nearby Sphinx Temple. The survey was recorded in the SRI’s own records as ‘The Sphinx Exploration Project’. It entailed an extensive resistivity scan of the entire floor of the Sphinx and Sphinx Temple enclosures. Should any ‘anomalies’ be found, it was agreed that the SRI was to confirm them with acoustic sounding techniques. The next step was to have holes cut into the bedrock with precision drills through which borescope cameras could then be inserted.

Several anomalies beneath the bedrock were indeed identified and inspected in this way but proved to be just natural cavities.

A falling out

Also in 1978, US drilling experts from a company called Recovery Systems International (RSI) arrived at Giza with a telescopic diesel-powered drill and official permits, under the direction of an American named Kent Wakefield, to bore a number of holes deep beneath the Sphinx.
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There was more of a connection between the SRI and the RSI than the anagram formed by their initials. Recovery Systems International, like the Edgar Cayce Foundation, apparently funded some of the SRI’s programme at Giza, and made use of the SRI’s resistivity readings to guide the placement of their drill holes. According to Mark Lehner, who was there at the time, Recovery Systems International was probably organized ‘just for this project’.
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The equipment for RSI’s work was air-freighted to Egypt and brought to the site where it was positioned in the Sphinx Temple, directly in front of the paws of the Sphinx itself. One hole was bored, uneventfully. A second hole was then drilled. Mark Lehner and Kent Wakefield examined this hole with a borescope and saw only ‘Swiss-cheese-like solution cavities’ which form naturally in limestone. The solid bottom of the hole was tapped with a plumb-bob by Lehner who concluded that there was nothing unusual about it.
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Immediately afterwards the project was stopped. According to Mark Lehner this abrupt halt was ‘due to lack of time [and] funds’.
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Also it seems that Recovery Systems International ‘did not appreciate at all the Cayce component of the project’ and that this eventually led to a ‘serious falling out between RSI and SRI’.
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Granite structures

Shortly after this episode, in 1979, as we shall see in further detail below, Mark Lehner got involved with the American Research Center in Egypt (ARCE for short)—which is the officially registered American Egyptological mission in Egypt.
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At about the same time, Zahi Hawass, today the Director-General of the Giza Pyramids, was supervising excavations 165 feet to the east of the Sphinx Temple and hit bedrock at a depth of only six feet. A few months later, however—in 1980—Egyptian irrigation specialists checking for groundwater drilled in the same area, less than 100 feet away from the Hawass dig, and were able to go down more than 50 feet without impediment before their drill-bit suddenly collided with something hard and massive. After freeing the drill, much to their surprise, they found that they had brought to the surface a large lump of Aswan granite.
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No granite occurs naturally anywhere in the Nile Delta area where Giza is located, and Aswan—the source of all the granite used by the ancients at Giza—is located 500 miles to the south. The discovery of what appears to be a substantial granite obstacle—or perhaps several obstacles—50 feet below ground level in the vicinity of the Sphinx is therefore intriguing to say the least.

Adding to the intrigue were further discoveries that the SRI made around the Sphinx in 1982 as a result of yet another project financed by the Edgar Cayce Foundation.
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Mark Lehner, who was once again present throughout, described what the SRI did as follows:

They brought a very powerful acoustical sounder, which is a long pencil-shaped thing. They put it down a drill hole. This is called Immersion Downhole Acoustics. You have to be in water. So they put it down into the water table and it sent out sound waves in all directions. Then they put down a listener, like a stethoscope, and you get a signal on an oscilloscope if sound waves are coming through; if they’re not, you don’t. You discover fissures this way—on one side of the fissure there’s no signal and on the other side there is.

They put the sounder underneath the paw [of the Sphinx] and always got a good, clear signal—there’s no underground cavity blocking it. And they put it along the paw between the elbow and that box on the side, around the outside of the box and into the corner, and there was always a good signal.

But, at my prompting, they put it on the bedrock floor inside the box—and it was dead three places where they put it down, as though there is some kind of opening or empty space underneath that was blocking the signal. That was the very last day of the SRI project, and they never checked that out.
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Since 1982, we were surprised to learn, almost no further research has been officially authorized to investigate the numerous tantalizing hints of deeply buried structures and chambers in the vicinity of the Sphinx. The single exception was Thomas Dobecki’s seismic work in the early 1990s. As reported in Part I, this resulted in the discovery of what appears to be a large, rectangular chamber beneath the forepaws of the Sphinx. Dobecki’s investigations were part of the wider geological survey of the Sphinx led by Professor Robert Schoch of Boston University—a survey, as the reader will recall, that was brought abruptly to a halt in 1993 by Dr. Zahi Hawass of the Egyptian Antiquities Organization.

The mapping surveys

The American Research Center in Egypt (ARCE) has several times received ECF-ARE financing for its programme of investigations at Giza.
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In 1979, for example, a proposal was made to the ARCE for a full-scale mapping survey involving the Great Sphinx and its enclosure in which use would be made of modern photogrammetric techniques to record every detail, crack, fissure, contour and outline of the monument. When the survey went ahead, Mark Lehner was appointed as its Field Director. Funders were the Edgar Cayce Foundation, the Chase National Bank of Egypt and the Franzhein Synergy group.
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Mark Lehner completed the mapping survey in 1983 and by 1984 his reputation was sealed as America’s leading expert on the Sphinx. He was then appointed Director of the newly established and much more extensive and ambitious Giza Mapping Project, again under the auspices of the ARCE, and with some funding—again—coming from the Edgar Cayce Foundation and ARE. The major financial contributors were the Yale Endowment for Egyptology, General Dynamics, the multimillionaire David Koch, and a Los Angeles real-estate tycoon named Bruce Ludwig.
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More recently the Giza Mapping Project has been superseded by the Giza Plateau Project which also numbers David Koch and Bruce Ludwig amongst its funders and which is also directed by Mark Lehner.
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Pulling away

When, exactly, Professor Lehner began to pull away from the influence of the Edgar Cayce Foundation and cross over into the mainstream of professional Egyptology and its orthodoxy is not especially clear. However, some light may be shed on the matter by an interview that he gave in August 1984 to Robert Smith, editor of the ARE magazine
Venture Inward.
The interview was published in two parts in the January-February issues of 1985. Asked about his work at Giza, Lehner explained:

The history of my involvement began in 1972 when I went on an ARE tour. We stopped in Egypt for a week and I went out to the Giza plateau with a group, and then I went out to the Giza Pyramids again by myself and sat for awhile in the King’s Chamber of the Great Pyramid. I wandered around the cemeteries that are outside the Pyramid, and something plugged into me about this place. I vowed that I would be back in a year, and so I was. I went back to study at the American University in Cairo. During that year before returning to Cairo, I enthusiastically researched the Cayce readings on Egypt and put together the book,
The Egyptian Heritage.
The readings describe not only a civilization in Egypt in 10,500 BC, but also, preceding that, the lost civilization of Atlantis, which was in its final days, according to the Cayce information, when the Sphinx and the Pyramids were built ...
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Lehner then explained how he had come to realize that ‘there’s a great disparity between the dating of the monuments by professional scholars and that given in the Cayce readings’. He added that for him investigating the Sphinx was ‘just a focus of a general metaphysical and spiritual quest’. This had led him to work, he elaborated, ‘with the bedrock realities [and] ground truth’—realities that had made him bracket all his expectations and ideas and ‘just deal with what the site has to offer’.
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In
Venture Inward
magazine of May-June 1986, Robert Smith published an illuminating report about a meeting that took place at the Edgar Cayce Foundation attended by Mark Lehner, Charles Thomas Cayce (President of the ARE), James C. Windsor (President of the Edgar Cayce Foundation), Edgar Evans Cayce, and other ARE officials. On the agenda was the evaluation of future ECF/ARE activities at Giza. Setbacks and mounting scientific evidence against the Cayce prophesies had caused some to question whether it was still worthwhile funding projects there. Ironically, much of the adverse evidence was being turned up by Lehner’s research.
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Robert Smith recounts the discussion that took place:

‘What do we do next?’ asked Edgar Evans Cayce, the younger son of Edgar Cayce and a member of the Board of Trustees.

‘Should we drill more holes?’ asked Charles Thomas Cayce, president of the ARE, and grandson of Edgar Cayce.

Neither has given up the search for Ra-Ta. Lehner, the young archaeologist who has led the search at Giza for the past decade, wants to press on with it too.

‘You are not as optimistic now about the prospects of vindicating some of the things that were said about this area in the readings,’ noted James C. Windsor, President of the Edgar Cayce Foundation. ‘Do you have any interest in the Hall of Records? Is it worth looking for?’

‘Oh, absolutely,’ replied Lehner. ‘I think it is, but not in as tangible a way as I used to think.’
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Lehner went on to explain at length why various archaeological and scientific tests had frustrated his hopes that the Cayce readings might be linked to a suitably ‘tangible’ reality. ‘Why then continue the search?’ wondered Robert Smith.

‘I have a sort of gut feeling that something is under the Sphinx and that something is out there at the pyramids in the way of a mystery,’ said Lehner. ‘I like to think of it as something kind of pulsating.’
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During the meeting at the Edgar Cayce Foundation, Charles Thomas Cayce reportedly asked Lehner whether it would be possible to drill holes at regular intervals in order to locate underground passages near the Sphinx, but Lehner felt that the Egyptians would ‘balk’ at this idea. He suggested in passing, however, that a certain American oil company official, who at that time was apparently working for an American museum might be interested in using his ‘crack geophysical prospecting team’ for explorations beneath the Sphinx.
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Since making these statements and proposals—because, he says, of what the site has taught him—Lehner has veered further and further away from the Edgar Cayce influence. Today he repudiates any notion of an earlier civilisation in 10,500 BC. Indeed, so complete does his conversion appear to have been that in a recent denunication of John West’s geological theories concerning the Sphinx he felt compelled to state: ‘I believe we have a professional responsibility to respond to notions—like those of Cayce and West—that would rob the Egyptians of their own heritage by assigning the origins and genius of Nile Valley civilization to some long-lost agent like Atlantis.’
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Lehner does not attempt to deny his own former involvement with the Edgar Cayce Foundation, or with ideas about Atlantis, but seeks instead to find ways to reconcile the origins of his former interests in ‘mystical interpretations of the Pyramids and the Sphinx’ with his present hardcore commitment to ‘bedrock realities’. Lehner compares his situation to that of Sir W. M. Flinders Petrie, who had come to Egypt in the 1880s ‘to test the mystical “pyramid inch” against the stone of Khufu’s pyramid’—and found the ‘pyramid inch’ wanting.
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Petrie, as we shall see in the next chapter, had followed in the footsteps of his father, William, and the notorious Astronomer Royal of Scotland, Piazzi Smyth—both of whom passionately believed that the Great Pyramid had been built under divine inspiration by the Israelites during their bondage in Egypt.
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Lunch with Mr. Cayce

In May 1994 we flew to New York and made our way by car to Virginia Beach in Norfolk, Virginia, where the headquarters of the Edgar Cayce Foundation, and its partner organization the Association for Research and Enlightenment, are located. We wanted to explore the unexpected connections that this organization had at one time enjoyed with Mark Lehner, and were curious to know how—if at all—the Egyptian Antiquities Organization and Zahi Hawass, Lehner’s colleague at Giza, fitted into all this.

Mutual friends arranged a meeting for us with the current President of the ARE and the Edgar Cayce Foundation, Mr. Charles Thomas Cayce, the grandson of Edgar Cayce. We were also to meet two prominent ARE members who, we were informed, had contributed to various projects at Giza in the 1970s and 1980s and to the more recent geological investigations carried out by John West and Robert Schoch.