The message of the Sphinx: a quest for the hidden legacy of mankind (38 page)

Interviewed on South African radio in July 1996 Hawass responded to an earlier interview given by ourselves in which we had mentioned his apparent connections with the Edgar Cayce Foundation. He accused us of lying, stated that we were merely claiming these things to make ourselves famous, and insisted that he discredited Edgar Cayce, adding emphatically: ‘The Edgar Cayce theory is wrong.’ The interviewer (John Robbie of Radio 702, Johannesburg) then read out on the air the passage quoted above from Hugh Lynn Cayce’s biography in which the former ARE President claims to have been instrumental in obtaining a Fulbright scholarship for Hawass. Hawass replied: ‘That’s not true. I met him, I lectured to the Edgar Cayce Foundation many times. He was such a nice man. I never believed his theories. He never supported a fellowship for me to study outside at all. He just once attended a dinner that I invited him to in Cairo with one of the Fulbrights ... but he did not support any study. The Egyptian government supported my studies for five years and the Fulbright supported my studies at the University of Pennsylvania for two years. It had no support from such an organization like that.’

Hawass was then asked about
Secret Chamber,
the short video referred to above made by Boris Said in November and December 1995 and financed by Joseph Schor. The interviewer pointed out that this video makes positive reference to Edgar Cayce and his prophecies and includes an appearance by Zahi Hawass in which the Egyptian official stated that a tunnel under the Sphinx is about to be opened. ‘How come you’re involved with that?’ asked the interviewer.

Hawass:
This is not true! I’m a public figure and I get interviews every day! Every day if you come to my office you will see almost three TVs from all over the world. I ... my interviews always explain my discoveries. This video is talking about the tunnel that I found inside the Sphinx based on my work. It is not by the work that is done here, it’s by Florida University. It is not by Cayce or anything! And we found even that Florida University are not following the scientist’s steps therefore I wrote a letter two months ago that those type ... even the universities, the universities are not following the exact steps that they supposed to do.

Interviewer:
It seems a coincidence ... it seems a coincidence, Dr. Zahi, that the Cayce prophecy talks about tunnels under the Sphinx. You’ve discredited it. You’ve banned various researchers according to
The Message of the Sphinx
—people like John West who are trying to do work on this theory—and now you seem to be taking it over yourself. Is that true?

Hawass:
No! I’m not taking over myself.. . If there is evidence, actual evidence from an institution, to tell us there is something under the Sphinx we’ll excavate it. But all of it is just hallucination! We cannot run after hallucinations at all.

Interviewer:
But in that video, where you are actually filmed in a tunnel under the Sphinx, you indicated that this might lead to something very, very exciting ... I saw that myself, Zahi!

Hawass:
If I did found ... I told you! I excavated this tunnel. And I did excavate it and I’m excavating it. If it leads to something important, we’ll announce it. You know what I’m saying? I’m not denying that ... Maybe it will lead to something exciting.

The interviewer asked Dr. Hawass why he had not taken legal action against us, the authors of
The Message of the Sphinx,
‘because they make some serious accusations against you.’ Hawass replied: ‘You know, if I make legal action against them I will make them famous. But I will never, err, make them famous.’
[731]

On 15 August 1996, in an interview with the
Egyptian Gazette
in Cairo, Dr. Hawass made an oddly similar remark concerning the Japanese team from Waseda University, led by Professor Sakuji Yoshimura, who in 1988 had used advanced technology to identify a hidden chamber inside the Great Pyramid and another beneath the left forepaw of the Great Sphinx. ‘I believe these teams were not serious enough,’ stated Dr. Hawass, ‘and their equipment was not well tooled. The members of these teams were merely interested in acquiring fame.’
[732]

Mars and Giza:

Strange connections and synchronicity

In our research we have stumbled across a tangled web of clues, connections and overlapping interests appearing to suggest that American scientists with links to NASA may have quietly involved themselves, since at least the 1970s, in covert ‘expeditions’ to unveil the secrets of the great pyramids and the Great Sphinx of Giza. The story, oddly enough, appears to be running in parallel with research stemming from the existence of curious pyramidial structures (and a gigantic Sphinx-like ‘Face’) that were photographed on Mars by NASA spacecraft during the 1970s.

In 1971 NASA’s Mariner 9 probe took the first ever photographs of strange ‘pyramid’ structures on Mars on a region of the planet known to astronomers as Elysium. Dr. James Hurtak, a graduate in remote sensing technology (and an acquaintance of Mark Lehner’s) was one of the earliest researchers to show interest in the Elysium ‘pyramids’—which were officially dismissed by NASA as ‘tricks of light’. In 1975, despite NASA’s apparent indifference, Hurtak predicted that further finds of similar structures, including a Sphinx-like monument, would be made on Mars and that they would all prove to be connected in a great cosmic blueprint to the Giza monuments in Egypt.
[733]

Hurtak is an active campaigner against the secrecy of the United States military and related agencies with regard to UFO ‘cover-ups’ and other similar issues. He also claims to have had close links with researchers at California’s prestigious Stanford Research Institute, America’s second largest scientific think-tank (which has an annual budget from the United States government of over three hundred million dollars). The SRI’s projects have included the ‘Remote Viewing Program’ (started in 1972), funded by the CIA as an intelligence-gathering exercise, which recruited top psychics to ‘remote view’ enemy military installations and other sites.

In 1973, as we saw in Chapter 5, the Egyptian Antiquities Organization (EAO) granted an official license to the SRI, permitting it to conduct surveys around the Great Sphinx at Giza using ground-penetrating radar and seismographs. The local sponsor of this project was Cairo’s
Ain Shams
University. We recall that in the same year Hugh Lynn Cayce sent Mark Lehner to the American University in Cairo with funds raised by ARE members.

In 1976 a second NASA probe, Viking I, went into Mars orbit. In the region known as Cydonia it photographed several more pyramidial structures (including the five-sided ‘D&M Pyramid’) and the famous ‘Face’. Complete with its distinctive Sphinx-like headdress, this latter feature has been calculated from the NASA images to be 1.6 miles in length from crown to chin, 1.2 miles wide, and just under 2,600 feet high. NASA has argued officially that it is nothing more than a small mountain, naturally weathered. But how many mountains have their left and right sides so intricately similar? Image analysts say that the ‘bilateral symmetry’ of the Face, mimicking a natural, almost human appearance, is most unlikely to have come about by chance. And this impression is confirmed by other characteristics that have subsequently been identified under computer enhancement. These include ‘teeth’ in the mouth, bilaterally crossed lines above the eyes, and regular lateral stripes in the headpiece—suggestive, to some researchers at least, of the
nemes
headdress of ancient Egyptian pharaohs.
[734]

Back in Egypt in 1977, a year after the Viking images had first reached the Earth, Mark Lehner made contact with NASA’s Dr. Lambert T. Dolphin, leader of the Stanford Research Institute project at the Sphinx. The reader will recall from Chapter 5 that Lehner was by then already well acquainted with Zahi Hawass.

Later in 1977 Lambert Dolphin traveled to Virginia Beach to negotiate funding from the Edgar Cayce organization for a proposed new SRI project at Giza. The purpose of this project was to use the latest remote sensing technology to search for hidden chambers around and under the Sphinx—with Lehner again ‘participating as the Edgar Cayce Foundation’s “man in Cairo”.’ Several underground ‘cavities’ were detected by this Sphinx Exploration Project.

In 1978 Mark Lehner proposed a project on the Sphinx to the American Research Centre in Egypt. The project, again partially financed by the Edgar Cayce group, was approved and went ahead with Lehner as its Field Director. Soon afterwards a United States registered company called Recovery Systems International (RSI) appeared on the scene. As we saw in Chapter 5, it undertook core drillings in front of the Sphinx to investigate the promising underground cavities previously pinpointed by SRI.

In 1983 Hugh Lynn Cayce died and the management of the Edgar Cayce group was handed to his son, Charles Thomas Cayce. In the same year ‘The Independent Mars Project’ was set up in the United States by Richard Hoagland, a former NASA consultant, and Lambert Dolphin. Meanwhile in 1987 Dr. Zahi Hawass completed his education in the United States and returned to Egypt to be appointed as the EAO’s Director-General of the Giza Plateau.

In March 1996 Dr. Hawass announced that the Egyptian scientist Farouk El Baz (whose name, meaning Hawk, translates into ancient Egyptian as Horus) had been chosen to lead a team to open the secret door inside the Great Pyramid at the end of the southern shaft of the Queen’s Chamber. The reader will recall that Amtex, the Canadian company participating in the project, claim to be ‘working with Spar Aerospace’ to devise a tool to open or ‘go straight through’ the door. Spar Aerospace are better known for manufacturing hydraulic arms used in NASA Space Shuttles. As we noted at the beginning of this appendix, Dr. El Baz, a graduate of Cairo’s
Ain Shams
university, is a NASA consultant. He has been involved for many years with studies of geological formations on the Moon and on Mars and he is a one-time personal friend of astronauts Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong. It was El Baz, nicknamed the King by his NASA colleagues, who in 1969 chose the spot for the Apollo 11 Moon landing. El Baz is the founder of the Centre of Remote Sensing at Boston University and presently serves as its Director.
[735]

Also in March 1996 the EAO granted a one-year renewable license for the project at die Sphinx—see above—financed by Joseph Schor. Project members include Boris Said, Thomas Dobecki, and four senior geologists from Florida State University, who began work with a million dollars worth of ground-penetrating radar and seismic equipment at their disposal. It was reported to us that team members had consulted with Dr. James Hurtak and Richard Hoagland in August 1996.

Selected Bibliography

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——
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——
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——
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——
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——
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——
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——
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——
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——
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——
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[1]
Selim Hassan,
Excavations at Giza,
Government Press, Cairo, 1946, Vol. VI, Part I, pp. 34-5

[2]
Ibid.

[3]
E. A. Wallis Budge,
An Egyptian Hieroglyphic Dictionary,
Dover Publications Inc., New York, 1978, Vol. I, p. 469.

[4]
Selim Hassan,
The Sphinx: Its History in the Light of Recent Excavations,
Government Press, Cairo, 1949, p. 76. See also Veronica Seton-Williams and Peter Stock,
Blue Guide Egypt,
A. & C. Black, London, 1988, p. 432.

[5]
Zahi Hawass and Mark Lehner, ‘The Sphinx: Who Built It and Why’,
Archaeology,
September-October 1994, p. 34. See also E. A. Wallis Budge,
Hieroglyphic Dictionary,
op. cit., Vol. II, p. 752.

[6]
We have many surprising survivals from the ancient Egyptian language in the English language. For example the small species of greyhound that we know as the ‘Whippet’ derives its name from the ancient Egyptian canine deity
Upuaut,
the ‘Opener of the Ways’. Normandi Ellis in her excellent
Awakening Osiris,
Phanes Press, Grand Rapids, 1988, cites other examples:
‘armen/
arm;
heku
(magic utterance)/hex;
neb
(spiralling force of the universe)/nebulous;
Satis
(goddess of the flood, or meaning enough)/satisfy;
aor
(magic light)/aura’.