The message of the Sphinx: a quest for the hidden legacy of mankind (37 page)

That such untapped abilities to perceive dilated time-fields might be an intrinsic part of human mental machinery was very seriously investigated by one of America’s most prestigious scientific foundations, the Stanford Research Institute in California—better known as SRI International. In 1972 SRI International was recruited as main consultant for the so-called remote viewing programmes run by the CIA and other government agencies including the US navy, the US army and the US Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA). These programmes were managed by a highly respected physicist, Dr. Hal Puthoff, who sought out and employed renowned psychics (called ‘remote viewers’ in SRI jargon) to ‘locate’ enemy military targets and installations using extrasensory capabilities.

The reader will recall that SRI International (which has been described as ‘America’s second largest think-tank’) was also, in 1973, involved in high-tech archaeological projects in Egypt and, at least on one occasion, worked in participation with the Edgar Cayce Foundation (ECF) in a series of remote sensing projects at Giza (see Chapter 5).

Many ‘remote viewers’ involved in the remote viewing programmes, such as the psychic Ingo Swann and Nel Riley, the latter a sergeant in the US army, openly claimed to have the inner abilities to undertake a form of ‘time travel’ into any remote locations on the globe. Such claims are in many ways reminiscent of those made by the Edgar Cayce adepts who maintain that, when in an altered state of consciousness such as deep trance or hypnosis, they can ‘remember’ past lives, i.e. ‘time travel’ mentally to remote locations. Cayce himself, who is dubbed America’s best-known medium and psychic, claimed to have had a previous life in Egypt in 10,500 BC—a claim which at one time, as we have seen in Chapter 5, was considered worthy of investigation by Egyptologist Mark Lehner in the early 1970s within the framework of his scientific research at Giza.

Appendix 4

Carbon-dating the Great Pyramid:

Implications of a little-known Study

The evidence presented in this book concerning the origins and antiquity of the monuments of the Giza necropolis suggests that the genesis and original planning and layout of the site may be dated, using the tools of modern computer-aided archaeoastronomy, to the epoch of 10,500 BC. We have also argued, on the basis of a combination of geological, architectural and archaeoastronomical indicators, that the Great Sphinx, its associated megalithic ‘temples’, and at least the lower courses of the so-called ‘Pyramid of Khafre’, may in fact have been built at that exceedingly remote date.

It is important to note that we do not date the construction of the Great Pyramid to 10,500 BC. On the contrary, we point out that its internal astronomical alignments—the star-shafts of the King’s and Queen’s Chambers—are consistent with a
completion
date during ancient Egypt’s ‘Old Kingdom’, somewhere around 2500 BC. Such a date should, in itself, be uncontroversial since it in no way contradicts the scholarly consensus that the monument was built by Khufu, the second Pharaoh of the Fourth Dynasty, who ruled from 2551-2528 BC.
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What places our theory in sharp contradiction to the orthodox view, however, is our suggestion that the mysterious structures of the Giza necropolis may all be the result of an enormously long-drawn-out period of architectural elaboration and development—a period that had its genesis in 10,500 BC, that came to an end with the completion of the Great Pyramid come 8000 years later in 2500 BC, and that was guided throughout by a unified master-plan.

According to orthodox Egyptologists, the Great Pyramid is the result of only just over 100 years of architectural development, beginning with the construction of the step-pyramid of Zoser at Saqqara not earlier than 2630 BC, passing through a number of ‘experimental’ models of true Pyramids (one at Meidum and at two Dashour, all attributed to Khufu’s father Sneferu) and leading inexorably to the technological mastery of the Great Pyramid not earlier than 2551 BC (the date of Khufu’s own ascension to the throne). An evolutionary ‘sequence’ in pyramid-construction thus lies at the heart of the orthodox Egyptological theory—a sequence in which the Great Pyramid is seen as having evolved from (and thus having been preceded by) the four earlier pyramids.
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But suppose those four pyramids were proved to be not earlier but
later
structures? Suppose, for example, that objective and unambiguous archaeological evidence were to emerge—say, reliable carbon-dated samples—which indicated that work on the Great Pyramid had in fact begun some 1300 years
before
the birth of Khufu and that the monument had stood substantially complete some 300 years before his accession to the throne? Such evidence, if it existed, would render obsolete the orthodox Egyptological theory about the origins, function and dating of the Great Pyramid since it would destroy the Saqqaraà Meidumà Dashourà Giza ‘sequence’ by making the technologically-advanced Great Pyramid far older than its supposed oldest ‘ancestor’, the far more rudimentary step-pyramid of Zoser. With the sequence no longer valid, it would then be even more difficult than it, is at present for scholars to explain the immense architectural competence and precision of the Great Pyramid (since it defies reason to suppose that such advanced and sophisticated work could have been undertaken by builders with no prior knowledge of monumental architecture).

Curiously, objective evidence
does
exist which casts serious doubt on the orthodox archaeological sequence. This evidence was procured and published in 1986 by the Pyramids Carbon-dating Project, directed by Mark Lehner (and referred to in passing in his correspondence with us, see Appendix III above). With funding from the Edgar Cayce Foundation, Lehner collected fifteen samples of ancient mortar from the masonry of the Great Pyramid. These samples of mortar were chosen because they contained fragments of organic material which, unlike natural stone, would be susceptible to carbon-dating. Two of the samples were tested in the Radiocarbon Laboratory of the Southern Methodist University in Dallas Texas and the other thirteen were taken to laboratories in Zurich, Switzerland, for dating by the more sophisticated accelerator method. According to proper procedure, the results were then calibrated and confirmed with respect to tree-ring samples.
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The outcome was surprising. As Mark Lehner commented at the time:

The dates run from 3809 BC to 2869 BC. So generally the dates are ... significantly earlier than the best Egyptological date for Khufu ... In short, the radiocarbon dates, depending on which sample you note, suggest that the Egyptological chronology is anything from 200 to 1200 years off. You can look at this almost like a bell curve, and when you cut it down the middle you can summarize the results by saying our dates are 400 to 450 years too early for the Old Kingdom Pyramids, especially those of the Fourth Dynasty ... Now this is really radical ... I mean it’ll make a big stink. The Giza pyramid is 400 years older than Egyptologists believe.
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Despite Lehner’s insistence that the carbon-dating was conducted according to rigorous scientific procedures
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(enough, normally, to qualify these dates for full acceptance by scholars) it is a strange fact that almost no ‘stink’ at all has been caused by his study. On the contrary, its implications have been and continue to be universally ignored by Egyptologists and have not been widely published or considered in either the academic or the popular press. We are at a loss to explain this apparent failure of scholarship and are equally unable to understand why there has been no move to extract and carbon-date further samples of the Great Pyramid’s mortar in order to test Lehner’s potentially revolutionary results.

What has to be considered, however, is the unsettling possibility that some kind of pattern may underlie these strange oversights.

As we reported in Chapter 6, a piece of wood that had been sealed inside the shafts of the Queen’s Chamber since completion of construction work on that room, was amongst the unique collection of relics brought out of the Great Pyramid in 1872 by the British engineer Waynman Dixon. The other two ‘Dixon relics’—the small metal hook and the stone sphere—have been located after having been ‘misplaced’ by the British Museum for a very long while. The whereabouts of the piece of wood, however, is today unknown.
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This is very frustrating. Being organic, wood can be accurately carbon-dated. Since this particular piece of wood is known to have been sealed inside the Pyramid at the time of construction of the monument, radiocarbon results from it could, theoretically, confirm the date when that construction took place.

A missing piece of wood cannot be tested. Fortunately, however, as we also reported in Chapter 6, it is probable that another such piece of wood is still
in situ
at some depth inside the northern shaft of the Queen’s Chamber. This piece was clearly visible in film, taken by Rudolf Gantenbrink’s robot-camera
Upuaut,
that was shown to a gathering of senior Egyptologists at the British Museum on 22 November 1993.
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We are informed that it would be a relatively simple and inexpensive task to extract the piece of wood from the northern shaft. More than two and a half years after that screening at the British Museum, however, no attempt has been made to take advantage of this opportunity. The piece of wood still sits there, its age unknown, and Rudolf Gantenbrink, as we saw in Chapter 6, has not been permitted to complete his exploration of the shafts.

Appendix 5

The Door Inside the Great Pyramid;

Tunnels and Chambers

Under the Great Sphinx

Further developments

Since the first English-language edition of this book went to press in February 1996 there have been a number of significant developments concerning the opening of the door in the Great Pyramid at the end of the southern shaft of the Queen’s Chamber (see in particular Chapter 7) and the search for tunnels and chambers under the Great Sphinx (see in particular Chapter 2 and Chapter 5). We anticipate that there will be further developments—quite possibly of major historical significance—which we will cover in a future book. It is our intention, meanwhile, to monitor this ‘running story’ and to update our readers in a series of appendices that will be published in future editions of
The Message of the Sphinx.

The update presented herewith covers the period from March to end-August 1996.

The Great Pyramid

At the end of 1995, as reported in Chapter 6 and Chapter 7, the position of the Egyptian Antiquities Organization regarding the ‘door’ at the end of the southern shaft of the Queen’s Chamber was apparently one of official disinterest. The reader will recall that Dr. Nur El Din, Chairman of the EAO (now renamed the Supreme Council of Antiquities) had declined Rudolf Gantenbrink’s offer to donate the robot to the Egyptian government and to train an Egyptian technician to operate it: ‘Thank you for your offer to train the Egyptian technician ... Unfortunately we are very busy for the time being, therefore we will postpone the matter ...
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Similarly Dr. Zahi Hawass had declared: ‘I do not think this is a door and nothing is behind it.’
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In March 1996, however, Dr. Hawass changed his mind, declaring in the
Egyptian Gazette
that Gantenbrink’s find was of huge interest and that the door would be opened in September 1996 by a multinational team led by the Egyptian geologist (and NASA consultant) Dr. Farouk El Baz. Rudolf Gantenbrink would not be involved and ‘another robot’—not
Upuaut
—would be used to explore the shaft. Participating in the exploration would be a ‘Canadian’ contingent.
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The Canadian element, ‘Amtex’, is headed by Peter Zuuring, a wealthy Dutch-Canadian businessman, who told us that he had shown the Egyptians how the door could be opened ‘relatively inexpensively ... We’re working with Spar Aerospace to design a miniature arm with tools that could first tap the door, knock it and try to lever things a little bit to see if there’s anything loose. But I think ultimately we’ll go straight through.’

In two conversations, Souring told us that he thought it unlikely that the project could start as early as September 1996: the following year, he said, 1997, was far more likely. The objective, which might take some time, was to raise the huge sum of ten million dollars to promote a staged ‘live opening’ of the door on international television networks. ‘I’m working with a private guy who is a personal friend of Hawass and we are absolutely going to drum this thing to death. Whatever the event we are going to stage, it will be televised live.’
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The Great Sphinx

In 1993-4 (see Chapter 2 and Chapter 5) Dr. Zahi Hawass appeared to be adamantly opposed to the notion that the Sphinx might be far older than ancient Egypt—and thus the work of a lost civilization. The reader will recall that the EAO official was particularly incensed by the NBC television film,
The Mystery of the Sphinx,
that was made about the work of John Anthony West. In addition Hawass had been personally responsible for expelling John West and his research team from the Sphinx enclosure. The team included the geologist Robert Schoch, a Professor at Boston University, and the seismologist Thomas Dobecki (who was to identify a large rectangular chamber concealed in the bedrock at a depth of about twenty feet beneath the front paws of the Sphinx).

The NBC documentary linked the Sphinx to Atlantis and suggested that the chamber that Thomas Dobecki’s seismograph had detected beneath its paws might contain some sort of ‘time capsule’ of Atlantean wisdom and history. Hawass called these claims: ‘American hallucinations. West is an amateur. There is absolutely no scientific base for any of this. We have older monuments in the same area. They definitely weren’t built by men from Atlantis. It’s nonsense and we won’t allow our monuments to be exploited for personal enrichment. The Sphinx is the soul of Egypt.’
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An article in the Egyptian press responding to the NBC film quoted Dr. Hawass on his further reasons for expelling John West and his team from the Sphinx enclosure: ‘I have found that their work is carried out by installing endoscopes in the Sphinx’s body and shooting films for all phases of the work in a propaganda ... but not in a scientific manner. I therefore suspended the work of this unscientific mission and made a report which was presented to the permanent commission who rejected the mission’s work in the future.’
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The NBC film was produced by Boris Said (see Chapter 2) and partially financed by investments from members of the Association for Research and Enlightenment (ARE). Headquartered in Virginia Beach in the United States (see Chapter 5), the ARE is a multimillion dollar organization that exists to promulgate the teachings and prophecies of the American psychic Edgar Cayce, who died in 1945. Prominent amongst Cayce’s pronouncements were many statements—some of which were reported in the NBC film—to the effect that the Sphinx had been built in 10,500 BC by the survivors of Atlantis who had concealed beneath it a ‘Hall of Records’ containing all the wisdom of their lost civilization and the true history of the human race. Cayce prophesied that this Hall of Records would be rediscovered and opened between 1996 and 1998. He connected the opening to the second coming of Christ and asserted that the contents of the Hall would not be shared with the general public until many years after it had first been entered by ‘three who would make of the perfect way of life.’
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In 1995 John West and Professor Robert Schoch of Boston University (in cooperation with the prestigious Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research Laboratory, better known as PEAR) put in an application to the Egyptian authorities to resume their research. Their application was ignored.

At the end of March 1996 the Egyptian authorities granted a one-year license to a new team to conduct surveys around the Sphinx and the Giza necropolis using seismic equipment and ground-penetrating radar. This team, which claimed academic sponsorship from Florida State University (and reportedly involved the participation of four geologists from that university), was largely financed, through the Schor Foundation of New York, by Dr. Joseph Schor, an American multimillionaire. Dr. Schor is a life-member of the ARE and was one of the two ARE members who met us at Virginia Beach with Charles Thomas Cayce in May 1994 (see Chapter 5). Later that month he wrote to us of his great personal interest in corroborating ‘the Cayce records which indicated that the culture which led to the building of the Pyramids dates from 10,500 BC.’ He also stated his wish ‘to further delineate that civilization.’
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On 11 April 1996, when we informed Joseph Schor that we intended to write about these matters in the London
Daily Mail,
he threatened us with a libel action and stated: ‘We do not work for the Edgar Cayce group ... The major purpose of the Schor Foundation and the Florida State University is to aid in the preservation and restoration of the Pyramids and Sphinx. In addition we are surveying the underground of the Giza Plateau to find faults and chasms that might collapse. This will increase the safety of the plateau because chasms and faults can be collapsed or roped off for the protection of tourists and plateau personnel.’
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On 14 April 1996 Dr. Zahi Hawass gave a rather different account, mentioning hidden tunnels around the Pyramids and the Sphinx. He made no mention of the question of public safety but hinted that ‘excavation of the tunnels would reveal many clues regarding the establishment of the Giza pyramids.’
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Nor did that question appear to be the main thrust of a short video,
Secret Chamber,
in which Dr. Hawass took part. Filmed on location in Cairo in November and December 1995, the video was produced and written by Boris Said and, according to him, financed to the tune of one hundred thousand dollars by Joseph Schor. In this video, as we reported at the end of Chapter 5, Dr. Hawass is shown scrambling into a tunnel under the Sphinx. When he reaches the bottom he turns to face the camera and whispers to the viewer: ‘Even Indiana Jones will never dream to be here. Can you believe it? We are now inside the Sphinx, in this tunnel. This tunnel has never been opened before. No one really knows what’s inside this tunnel but we are going to open it for the first time.’
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The narrator of the video drives home an interesting point: ‘Edgar Cayce, America’s famous “Sleeping Prophet”, predicted that a chamber would be discovered beneath the Sphinx—a chamber containing the recorded history of human civilization. For the first time ever we’ll show you what lies beneath this great statue—a chamber which will be opened, live, for our television cameras.’
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In July 1996, after worldwide protest over the activities of the Schor Foundation and Florida State University at the Sphinx, Dr. Hawass claimed on South African radio that he had halted the project: ‘I found that their work is not following the correct steps ... I wrote a letter to them saying that they cannot do work again because they are not really following the correct work.’
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That same month, however, rumors began to circulate that the team had identified nine further tunnels or chambers under the Giza Plateau. In all of them, apparently, their remote-sensing equipment had identified objects made of metal.

By the end of August 1996, despite Hawass’s statement, team members still appeared confident that their project would go ahead and Boris Said was reputed to be negotiating with major television networks in the United States for an exclusive documentary on the Sphinx.

The Edgar Cayce legacy

As we saw in Chapter 5, Edgar Cayce (known in America as the ‘Sleeping Prophet’ because he gave his psychic ‘readings’ in a trance-like state) believed himself to be a reincarnated priest called Ra-Ta, a survivor of Atlantis who had settled in Egypt in 10,500 BC. Throughout the 1930s, until his death in 1945, he used the contacts made through his ‘readings’ to ‘pick up players’—artists, bankers, businessmen, university professors and even politicians—who were all convinced that in their ‘past lives’ they too had played a role in the unfolding drama of Atlantis.
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One of these players, perhaps the most active the ARE would know, was Cayce’s eldest son, Hugh Lynn (1907-1983), a graduate of Harvard University who took over the management of the newly founded ARE in 1931 when he was just twenty-four years old. With youthful enthusiasm, he vowed that one day an ‘ARE sponsored expedition’ to Giza would vindicate his father’s prophecies concerning the Hall of Records.
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Perhaps Hugh Lynn had been inspired by the so-called ‘Baraize Expedition’ to the Sphinx which was already well underway in 1930 when the ARE was founded. Led by the then Director of the Egyptian Antiquities Department, a French archaeologist named Emile Baraize, this expedition stripped off the ancient skin of ‘repair blocks’ from the lower parts of the body of the Sphinx. While removing some of the blocks from the rump of the statue, Baraize came across the entrance to a tunnel. Then, for some extraordinary reason, he resealed the mouth of the tunnel with rock and cement and never reported the matter. With Baraize at the time was a young Arab boy called Mohamad Abdel Mawgud—whose descendants still live at Giza.
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The Baraize expedition ran from 1926 to 1936. But it was not until 1972 that Hugh Lynn Cayce, by then in his sixties, finally set in motion the plan that he had long ago conceived for getting the ARE into mainstream archaeology at Giza. His first move was to recruit a ‘college dropout named Mark Lehner’ (the ARE President thought he recognized the young man from a past life), and then arrange for him to take a post-graduate degree at the American University in Cairo. Today the Visiting Professor of Egyptology at the University of Chicago’s prestigious Oriental Institute, we saw in Chapter 5 how Lehner became the ARE’s ‘man’ at Giza, participating during the 1970s and 1980s in almost every important project undertaken around the Pyramids and the Sphinx.

Despite a number of setbacks experienced by the ARE as a result of these projects, an official biography reports that Hugh Lynn Cayce ‘had no sense of defeat ... He would stay with the search as long as it took, building alliances with other groups and individuals. One of the latter was the Egyptian Chief Inspector at Giza, Hawass, who he had met through Lehner in 1975. In 1980, Hawass accommodated the ARE by conducting an excavation in front of the Sphinx temple ...’
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In October 1980 Mark Lehner made contact with Mohamad Abdel Mawgud, the ‘young Arab boy’ (by now in his sixties) who had seen Emile Baraize seal up the tunnel under the Sphinx in 1926. Together with Ahmed Al Fayed, Abdel Mawgud’s son, Lehner was permitted by Zahi Hawass to remove the seal and enter the tunnel. But again, apparently, nothing was found. The tunnel reached a ‘dead end’ in the bedrock underneath the Sphinx.
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Soon afterwards Ahmed Al Fayed went to settle in Virginia Beach and in due course joined the staff of the ARE. Hawass also traveled to the United States at about this time to expand his formal education in Egyptology. As Hugh Lynn Cayce’s biographer reports: ‘If Zahi Hawass was to advance within the [Egyptian] government to further his own career and open doors for Hugh Lynn’s project, he could do it best on the wings of higher education at an American Ivy League college.’ Just before he died Hugh Lynn Cayce was to explain how: ‘I got him [Zahi Hawass] a scholarship at the University of Pennsylvania in Egyptology, to get his Ph.D. I got the scholarship through an ARE person who happens to be on the Fulbright scholarship board. He [Hawass] had aided Mark [Lehner] to work on the Sphinx and I am very appreciative.’
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