Pyramids and pyramidal structures are a worldwide phenomena, found in Egypt, Peru, Central America, America's Mississippi Valley, France, Polynesia. Now we can add two more locations, China and Japan.

For decades, one of the few clues that China has pyramids was a grainy, black and white photo of a huge, shadowy, pyramidal form. It is an aerial shot, taken by WWII USAF pilot James Gaussman, as he flew over China delivering supplies from India to Chungking, in the spring of 1945.

Today, thanks to German researcher and author Hartwig Hausdorf, we have many more photos, plus videotape and his eyewitness report of at least a hundred pyramids in China's Shensi Province. An e-mail message hooked me up with Hausdorf. By telephone and fax, we've been corresponding, and he was kind enough to send me two of his books in German. (Will someone please publish his books in English so I can read them?) My friend Jo Curran, fluent in German, read me selected portions of Satellites of the Gods for this article. Hausdorf's other book is entitled The White Pyramid. Hausdorf will be a guest on The Laura Lee Show, the Saturday Night radio show I host, on August 2nd. (See see ad on opposite page on how to tune in.) Here's what I can say thus far.

Hausdorf came by his invitation to Xian, China, and the Chinese pyramids, when he attended a lecture by Erich von Daniken. A personal friend who wrote the foreword to one of his books, von Daniken was the first to bring the ancient astronaut theory to worldwide prominence through a series of popular books. It was at this lecture that he met Chen Jianli. They talked about Hausdorf's research dealing with mysterious artifacts in China, including pyramids. Mr. Chen was born in Xian, and so, despite the official party line, did not consider pyramids in China to be nonsense; as a young boy, he had heard people talk of them. Through his connections in the Chinese capitol, Mr. Chen obtained a special permit for Hausdorf to travel in Xian's forbidden zones. Not once, but twice; in March and October of 1994.

The Chinese don't like to talk about their pyramids. Hausdorf couldn't help but notice that, in talking with high ranking archeologists at the Beijing Academy of Sciences about these pyramids, the reaction was one of panic. Only when shown the Gaussman photo would they reluctantly confirm the existence of just a few pyramidal structures, near Xian. That's where Hausdorf found, not a few pyramids, but ninety to one hundred such structures. There are signs that that attitude is changing. The October 1996 issue of China Today, an official periodical issued in Chinese, German, English, Arabic and French, contains an article about Hausdorf's second expedition through the Shensi pyramids.

It was there that Hausdorf found pyramids either made of, or covered with, clay that has become nearly stone-hard over the centuries. They are undecorated, and partly damaged by erosion and farming. A few have carved stones standing in front of them. What of stone pyramids? That is found in Shandong. It has no steps. It is 50 feet tall, with a small temple at its apex, designed along the golden proportion.

How old are these pyramids? Prof. Wang Shiping of Xian estimates they are 4,500 years old. Hausdorf believes they are older, and tells of the diaries of two Australian traders. They were there in 1910 or 1912 and came across some of the pyramids, writes Hausdorf. When asking an old Buddhist monk, they were told, that the pyramids are not just mentioned in the 5,000-year-old records of his monastery, but said to be very old. That means, they are at least more than 5,000 years old!

In investigating what the Chinese authorities will reveal about the pyramids, Hausdorf was told the story of an emperor, Qin Shi Huangdi, who lived between 259 and 210 B.C. Prior to his reign, bitter feuding between rival states for dominance over a splintered China went on from 475 to 221 B.C. It was Emperor Huangdi who ended the fighting. And thanks to the commentaries of historian Sima Qian, who lived from 145 to 86 B.C., we know the existence and location of the emperor's grave, beneath a hill 150 feet tall, planted with grass and trees. The hill, apparently, is man-made. According to Sima, beneath this hill is a 140-foot-tall pyramid with five terraces. The historian's chronicles state that almost 700,000 workers worked on this tomb. The earth was removed down to ground water level. This floor was then poured with molten bronze. On this platform a stone sarcophagus was laid. When the structure was completed, those who knew where the entrance was were silenced; they were entombed alive. To further disguise it, the pyramid was carefully covered with earth and grass to give the impression of a natural hill.

The pyramid's interior was quite elaborate. Sima wrote of an artificial universe painted with stars impressed upon the ceiling of the chamber in which the emperor lies. There was an entire landscape with rivers made out of mercury, somehow held in constant motion. The tomb is well protected against grave robbers, utilizing quite an ingenious security system. Crossbows with mechanical triggers make up an automatic shooting gallery, with a hail of arrows targeting intruders. For a long time, these historical commentaries were considered as mere legends. But new excavations around the outer perimeter of this hill seemed to confirm Sima's chronicles, an analysis of the earth from the immediate area of the great pyramid revealed an exceptionally high concentration of mercury. It would seem the archeologists are taking the stories seriously, as they are reticent to work around this ancient emperor's high-security tomb. We are leaving this tomb under the hill to the future, so the next generation has something to work on, says one of the leading archeologists.

Still, this emperor lived two thousand, not five thousand years ago, so such stories of elaborate tombs cannot explain all of China's pyramids. This is the only one that they can pin with a date and a purpose. The others are complete mysteries.

Wang Shiping is one of the Chinese archeologists looking beyond the standard issue explanations. He has found that one of the newly discovered pyramids is very nearly located at the exact geographical middle point of the country, and concludes that the ancient Chinese must have had astounding methods of measuring. He has also found that on the whole, the pyramids are oriented towards the stars. Which makes sense, after all, some of the oldest records of astronomical observations are Chinese. They were also wise to the ancient knowledge of Feng Shui, geomancy, still practiced today. Wang notes that the orientation of the pyramids up to the time of the Han dynasty, is with their main axis east-west. After that, they were all oriented north-south. Why that is, he cannot say, but is sure it must have a meaning, because the Chinese didn't do anything without consulting the Feng Shui.

Hausdorf also tells the story of how our astronauts saw these pyramids from space. On one of the Apollo Missions, an astronaut, while in orbit over China, saw nine unusual dots on the surface, and took several photos. When developed and enlarged, the photos revealed nine very high pyramids, evenly spaced, in the form of a fan. The location, 170 degrees, 39 minutes East longitude, and 34 degrees, 9 minutes North latitude, is the Taibai Shan Mountain, just over 10,000 feet above sea level, the highest point in the Quin-Ling Mountains, a fair distance southwest of Xian.

In the 1970s, when communication between the U.S. and China improved, the astronaut went to China. He was interested in seeing those pyramids up close. He succeeded. Chinese authorities told him the pyramids were the graves of nine of the eleven emperors of the western Han era, and dated from 206 to 8 B.C. The height of these graves, according to Chinese sources, can be compared to a 40-story building, around 300 feet. This is comparable to Egypt's Giza pyramids.

I'll wager that when mapped, those Chinese pyramids are bound to show a correlation of constellations important to the Chinese, similar to that demonstrated by Robert Bauval in Egypt, the three pyramids of Giza are aligned to one another and to the Nile, in imitation of the three belt stars of the constellation Orion, and historically, as they were aligned to the Milky Way.

Hausdorf's work in the travel industry allows him to move around the world three months of every year, chasing down evidence in support of the ancient astronaut theory. He has turned up evidence for an ancient, alien influence on several Far-East cultures, Chinese, Japanese, Tibetan, and Mongolian. He believes that alien influence can be traced to the present, to modern-day UFO cases. In both his books, he has a chapter on UFO cases in China, including abductions. (Nice to know the UFOnauts aren't just harassing Americans.)

One of the most controversial stories is what Hausdorf calls the Chinese Roswell. It involves a UFO crash, not in 1947, but, according to estimates, 12,000 years ago! At least that's the translation, as read by Prof. Tsum Umnui, of the strange heiroglyph on artifacts found in 1938 by Chinese archeologist Chi Pu Tei. The heiroglyphs wind from center to rim on some of the large granite stone disks, 716 of them, found in graves in the Bayan-Kara-Ula mountains. The skeletons in the graves measure at most four feet four inches tall, with heads too big for the frail looking bones. Legends in the area tell of strange yellowish, skinny humanoid beings with big heads that came from the heavens a long, long time ago. For the rest of this story, and there's plenty more to it, tune in to the interview with Hausdorf on August 2.

Then there are the structures found recently off the coast of Japan. In the spring of 1995, divers looking for clear water heard about a remote island in Okinawa. There they came across huge stone terraces, cut in right angles, punctuated by perfect staircases, precisely cut lanes, and hexagonal columns. So far, five separate sites on three different islands have been found, all 60 to 75 feet under the sea.

Frank Joseph, author of Lost Pyramids of Rock Lake and editor of Ancient American magazine, went to Japan to investigate, and reports that the most accessible site is 170 meters from the southwest end of Okinawa, off the shore near Chatan. Other sites are just off the shore of Aguni Island and Yonaguni island, where a pyramidal platform 80 meters long and 20 meters high, with its tip only 5 meters before the sea's surface, was found. The structures, spread over a 500 kilometer area, seem to be oriented due south.

Joseph likens the sites to the pre-Inca city of Pachacamac, a huge, sacred city with multi-stepped pyramids build at right angles, located just outside of Lima, Peru, and the architecture of the Moches ceremonial center near Trujillo, Peru.

Joseph also points out that James Churchward, who wrote extensively about Mu or Lemuria, predicted that remnants of a powerful civilization centered in the Pacific Ocean would eventually be discovered. The Japanese are quite open to theories involving Mu; it is compatible with their own ancient traditions. And Joseph believes it is not mere coincidence that the names of Japan's first emperors contain a mu,; Jimmu, Timmu, Kammu, are but a few. Mu translates to that which does not exist in Japanese.

Edgar Cayce talks more about Atlantis than Mu, says Joseph, but he did say that at one time, a land mass, and he never referred to Mu or Lemuria as a continent, always a land mass, was physically connected to South America. We now have scientific verification of this. Scripps Oceanographic has just put out a map of the topography of the ocean, and there, off the coast of Peru, is a sunken archipelago, called the Nasca Rise, that was once above water. Today it is less than a hundred feet below the ocean's surface, and extends for several hundred miles.

The ancient Chinese also seemed to know about Mu. In 1900 a Taoist monk came across a cave containing a library, hidden away to avoid the Imperial edict given in 212 B.C. to destroy all texts dealing with the ancient past, which made reference to the Motherland, Mu, and which contained a fragment of an ancient map depicting a continent in the Pacific Ocean.

Television and magazines in Japan have had a field day with their underwater cities. Ancient mysteries researcher and translator Shun Daichi sent me a videotape with serious and extensive TV coverage that included a large, beautifully executed scale model of one of the most impressive structures, with a toy boat suspended by a wire to illustrate the height of the sea's surface. Shun reports that you can draw a straight line connecting the underwater sites with on-land sites of similar design, ancient castles of unknown origin. Some geologists are surmising that the last time this area was above water was a minimum of 12,000 years ago, when the Ice Age ice sheets melted, raising the ocean levels.

Which leads me to two of the most puzzling questions I have about these extraordinary archeological wonders: Why, in the age of instantaneous global communication, did it take two years for the news to reach us, and why haven't American news reports or archeological institutes reported on these newsworthy finds?

Thanks to Hartwig Hausdorf for generously allowing the publication of photos of the Chinese pyramids from his collection. He will speak at the Ancient Astronaut World Conference, along with many other speakers, several imported from afar, in Orlando in August. Call 847-295-8899 for a brochure. And don't miss the chance to hear and talk with Hausdorf live, on The Laura Lee Show, on August 2. Call 1-800-243-1438 for a station near you and the time of broadcast in your area. To view photos of the Japanese underwater structures, visit www.lauralee.com, click on recent guests, then Japan's Underwater Cities Thanks also to Jo Curran for translating selected segments of Hausdorf's book, Satellites of the Gods.