AUGUST ASSEMBLAGE OF ANCIENT ASTRONAUT AFICIONADOS

For those who believe that the origins of civilization on earth are in the stars, the place to be on this planet in early August is probably Orlando, Florida. The 24th Anniversary conference of the Ancient Astronaut Society is gathering at the Adam's Mark Hotel (formerly the Sheraton Plaza) from August 3-8 to hear from over 20 top writers and researchers in the field, including featured speaker Eric von Daniken, author of Chariots of the Gods, and Michael Cremo, co-author of Forbidden Archeology.

Also on the program are field trips to Disney World and the Kennedy space center, but most attention is likely to be on a demonstration (weather permitting) of ancient flight technology by Dr. Algund Eenboom and Peter Belting. The pair has produced a number of actual flying replicas of a mysterious gold artifact found in Colombia, South America, more than a century ago, which is believed to depict an ancient flying machine. Belting, a German Air Force Officer, has built and successfully flown by remote control both propeller and jet versions of the artifact.

For more information, call 407-859-1500 or 800-231-7883.

IS EL NINO LIFTING VEIL ON PREHISTORIC SECRETS?

El Nino is back and we will see the effects on the U.S. climate this winter, but some areas are already experiencing the consequences of a warmup in Pacific currents. Among them is Peru's Lake Titicaca, the keeper of many ancient secrets pertaining to the origins of civilization.

In late June the surface of the lake had dropped eight inches. Eusebio Sanchez, the head of Peru's national weather service, attributed the drop to a lack of rain since April 24 and increased sun, wind and dryness caused by El Nino.

Some have suggested that El Nino may have played a role in ancient migrations away from the once highly civilized areas. Others suggest causes even more ancient and catastrophic which could also account for clear fossil evidence that Tiahuanaco on the shores of Lake Titicaca, the highest navigable lake in the world, was once a seaport.

As the waters recede, researchers will be watching to see if new clues to the mystery are brought to light, giving even deeper meaning to the term El Nino (Christ child).

NEW ENERGY PIONEERS TALK TECHNOLOGY IN DENVER

From May 23-26, 1997, the Academy for New Energy (ANE) sponsored its Fourth International Symposium on New Energy in Denver, Colorado. The three-day symposium hosted a lineup of speakers and exhibitors that featured such pioneers as Joseph Newman, Stanley Meyer, Dale Pond, Paul Pantone, and H.E. Chip Ransford, as well as noted researchers Dr. Eugene Mallove, Hal Fox, Moray King, Thomas Bearden (see interview on page 18), and Dr. Edmund Storms in the field of alternative or advanced energy technology and theory.

King and Mallove provided overviews of non-conventional energy technologies and the status of cold fusion research. Prominent among the presenters was H.E. Chip Ransford, whose work in cold fusion reactors has resulted in the imminent commercial availability of an integrated desk-top cold fusion laboratory offering dual 250 watt thermal capacity. Ransford's offering is designed to provide serious researchers with a standardized apparatus for replicatable experimentation and, ultimately, a possible pathway for the rapid commercial development of cold fusion power. Lectures and workshops by others spanned a myriad of new energy topics, including the transmutation of elements and generation of thermal energy through the use of high-density electron charge clusters, the generation and safe storage of hydrogen gas as fuel, the extraction from water of intermolecular bond energy, and the formulation of a viable theory of energy collection and use in overunity electromagnetic systems that tap the random energy of space.

Exhibitors included Dale Pond, whose burnished model of the Keely Musical Dynasphere represents his continuing attempts (so far unsuccessful) to emulate the alleged ability of 19th-century inventor John Keely to power a rotating machine using only the vibratory energy of blended acoustical tones. Paul Pantone, featured in the new video Free Energy: The Race to Zero Point, demonstrated to an intrigued crowd of onlookers his GEET fuel processor, an adaptive device that is claimed to enable an internal combustion engine to run on varying mixtures of gasoline, kerosene, and water with super high efficiency, low heat exhaust, and negligible harmful emissions. Pantone claims his device works by electromagnetically cracking the fuels into separate molecules before being consumed, so that no hydrocarbons are burned in the combustion process.

A consensus of the symposium's participants emerged that major funding to sustain the work of dedicated researchers and inventors is the key to the development of working models (and ultimately, commercially salable units) of overunity and alternative energy devices, followed by the independent validation of their bona fide operation by conventional, accepted scientific testing techniques.

ANE, the sponsor of the symposium, is a non-profit organization founded to encourage scientific research, education, and promotion relating to the development of new energy technologies that demonstrate higher than current levels of operational efficiency and might reduce dependence on nuclear fission and non-renewable fossil fuels as power sources. For information on membership, resources, and future activities, ANE may be contacted at 216 Commerce Dr., #4, Fort Collins, Colorado 80524, (970) 482-3731, fax: (970) 482-3120. Its website address is www.acad4newenergy.com. ANE's parent organization, the International Association for New Science (IANS), will hold its annual forum in Denver on October 9-12, 1997. Featured speakers expected include Patrick Flanagan, Fred Alan Wolf, and Steven Greer. IANS may also be reached at (970)482-3731 or science@ians.org.

PREJUDICE STILL REIGNS OVER THE HALL OF RECORDS

The current efforts of the group led by Dr. Joseph Schor to unearth recently discovered anomalies beneath the great Sphinx, including possibly a Hall of Records purported since antiquity to exist somewhere in the vicinity, have apparently reached an impasse. Plans to follow up on the investigations of John Anthony West and others by working closely with Egyptian authorities, namely Zahi Hawass, the director of research on the Giza plateau, have yet to come to fruition, and hopes that they may any time soon are fading. The situation has recently led at least one Schor group insider to express frustration and to worry aloud if the Egyptians will ever cooperate with such an endeavor.

The state of affairs will come as no surprise to those, including West, Graham Hancock and Robert Bauval, who have warned for years that Hawass and his allies in the Egyptian Antiquities bureaucracy could not be trusted to deal with the question fairly.

Prejudice and resistance to change on such matters, however, are not confined to Egyptian shores. Anyone doubting the bias of the establishment press in the U.S. regarding challenges to Hawass-style Egyptology need only refer to the article by Douglas Jehl syndicated by the New York Times News Service in late May.

Jehl complains that what could have been the year of the Sphinx, what with its new protective limestone coat and other fixups, has been spoiled by all the feuding over new exploration of the site. So far so good. But it soon becomes clear that Jehl is spinning the story on behalf of Hawass. Referring to comments by John Anthony West as vitriol, Jehl reports Hawass description of the opposing side as pyramidiots without blinking and goes on to brand anyone who would argue that the Sphinx is older than the 4,600 years attributed by orthodoxy as unscientific or worse. The author seems completely ignorant of the work of eminent Boston University geologist Dr. Robert Schoch in demonstrating that water weathering of the Sphinx clearly makes it at least thousands of years older, a view, by the way, which has been accepted by Schoch's fellow professional geologists. Jehl's ignorance, if not his motives, are demonstrated throughout the piece, which seems bent on defending the Hawass version of events at all costs. The only reason, to hear Jehl tell it, for questioning the Hawass position springs from a desire to vindicate the prophecies of Edgar Cayce (referred to in the article as Edgar Allen Cayce).

That such publications as the New York Times, and the New Yorker (see Atlantis Rising #11) have suddenly taken up the banner of the besieged Egyptological establishment, at a time when its most cherished assumptions are being thoroughly discredited, cannot fail to raise doubts regarding the intention of such journalistic elite to uncover the actual facts of the matter.

So, what else is new?

TEOTIHUACAN DISCOVERY ADVANCES THE APPRECIATION OF ANCIENT ACHIEVEMENT

If the current trends in archeological discovery continue, the day when ancient civilization will be recognized at last for the true magnitude of its accomplishment and the great antiquity of its origins may not be far away.

In a recent development, orthodox archeologists in Mexico's Teotihuacan Valley have unearthed evidence that a large planned city existed at the site as far back as the first century.

The discovery of a large stone platform is forcing archeologists to extend the city's supposed boundaries by at least a mile. A broad avenue, now visible, leads through suburbs to pyramids at the dig, implying a more complex city than originally thought by mainstream experts'.

This would seem to confirm an urban plan in the pre-Hispanic era, archeologist Luis Alberto Lopez concedes, a very well-defined city that grew according to a careful plan.

Orthodox archeologists have been excavating the immense ruins of Teotihuacan (the place of the gods) for almost 100 years and have, throughout, had difficulty coming to grips with the full meaning and magnitude of its achievement. Though the culture that built the city has been lost to history, many scholars, including Gerald Hawkins, Stansbury Hagar and others outside established academic circles, have produced extensive evidence that the precise arrangement, proportion and alignment of its many monuments expresses, at the very least, advanced and detailed astronomical knowledge well beyond that with which they have been credited.

WILL THE REAL DUMMIES PLEASE STAND UP?

The fiftieth anniversary of the Roswell Incident has not gone unnoticed by the establishment. On the contrary, the July event seems to have prompted a kind of full court press aimed once again at debunking long-standing accounts of alien accident victims in New Mexico in 1947. However, things do not appear to be going well for the keepers of the paradigm.

It is clear the Air Force, at least, felt compelled to address the matter. Why else would release of its new report entitled The Roswell Report: Case Closed be timed to coincide with the Roswell anniversary? Unfortunately for the Air Force, this latest in a long line of attempts to silence persistent stories of crashed saucers and alien corpses appears destined to enjoy no more credibility than its predecessors. Despite extensive pictures and other impressive documentation, the report succeeded mostly in raising new questions without satisfactorily answering old ones.

While the report represents at least the third official Air Force theory of events, its authors have managed to keep their faces, if not their facts, straight while suggesting that several eyewitness accounts of alien bodies at the scene can be explained as sightings of crash dummies. Never mind that the Air Force did not use such dummies in aerial experimentation till almost a decade after the Roswell incident. Other theoretical demonstrations offered in the report included pictures of saucer-like instrumentation pods which were suspended from weather balloons, and which, it is suggested, could have been mistaken for a crashed saucer. The problem is, such pods were not deployed until the sixties.

In the meantime, the national media appeared taken by reports of huge boomerang-shaped light formations over Phoenix in March. Hundreds of eyewitness reports poured into police switchboards at the time and video footage of enormous rows of lights appeared on most of the national broadcast news media in June. The massive publicity prompted Arizona governor Fife Symington to call publicly for a state investigation. Later, he said he was only joking, leaving some to wonder what kind of manifestation it would take to prompt a serious investigation of the subject.

Any who doubt that politicians still view the entire UFO arena as something to shun should consider the case of South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond, who recently wrote the foreword to The Day After Roswell by retired Army intelligence officer Phillip J. Corso. Thurman apparently had not realized that the book was going to be about UFOs or include allegations that the government had confiscated the crashed vehicle at Roswell and used clues obtained for such advances as laser technology, fiber optics, night-vision capabilities and the microchip. The 92-year-old senator, who says he does not believe in UFOs or that the government got any of its technology from alien sources, is now repudiating the book. Nevertheless, polls continue to show that most Americans do believe that UFOs are real and even more believe there is some kind of government cover-up.

By the way, the fiftieth anniversary celebrations at Roswell attracted more than 40,000.