For the many who date their personal discovery of the wisdom of the ancients and the power of unseen forces with the late 1960s and early '70s, two books enjoyed nearly unequaled influence. The Secret Life of Plants and Secrets of the Great Pyramid were both runaway best sellers, which, if nothing else, put the orthodox establishment to considerable trouble defending itself. While today, notions such as the preference of plants for good music and the miraculous measurements of the Great Pyramid may have become somewhat passe, 25 years ago they caused quite a stir, and in the process earned not a little notoriety for author Peter Tompkins. For one who had dared to challenge so flagrantly the titans of the scientific establishment, Tompkins achieved not only celebrity, but also, for a time, an unprecedented measure of credibility.

Both books remain in print but Tompkins, though scrupulous in his research, came to be dismissed by the conventional as something of a crank. More recent books (i.e., Secrets of the Mexico Pyramids, and Secrets of the Soil) have done little to change his undeserved reputation; nevertheless he remains today busy and unrepentant. Nor have advancing years quenched his fire. At 75, Tompkins has just delivered to his publisher Harper's his latest manuscript, offering concrete proof of the existence of elemental creatures. The book should be forthcoming in the next few months.

Just back from a trip to Colombia, the author, at his home in Washington, D.C., took time recently to share his secrets on many mysteries, ancient and otherwise.

Originally from Georgia, Tompkins grew up in Europe, but returned to the U.S. to study at Harvard. College, though, was interrupted by World War II. Initially employed by the New York Herald Tribune, Tompkins began the war as a correspondent. Soon he was broadcasting for Mutual and NBC. By the end of the war he was working with Edward R. Murrow and CBS. In 1941, his reporting career was interrupted by a stint in the TOI (a precursor of OSS, which ultimately became the CIA). Five months were spent behind enemy lines. At the Anzio landing, he recalls, General Donovan and General Park sent me into Rome ahead of the landing, and had they not failed to arrive, we would have had a big victory. But as it was, we got stuck. Then I had to send out radio messages four or five times a day of what the Germans were doing, where they were going to attack and in what strength and so on. During the mission, Tompkins recruited numerous agents which were sent north to link up with the partisans and help clear the way for the planned allied advance. Eventually he went to Berlin. When, at the close of the war, Truman abolished the OSS, Tompkins found he had no desire to join the newly organized CIA and went his own way. The years following the war were spent in Italy learning moviemaking and scriptwriting and developing a healthy distaste for censorship. I realized the only way I could say what I wanted to say was by writing books. They don't get censored.

Even then, he was finding his views made him anathema to many. I got thrown out of more dinner parties, he chuckles, for talking about metaphysical, or what were considered crazy, notions at the time, so I learned to be quiet.

Being quiet in print, though, has not been his wont. Nor has censorship of a sort been entirely escaped. Tompkins believes his most recent book Secrets of the Soils which he describes as A cry to save the planet from the chemical killers was virtually squashed by the publisher afraid of scaring the public. A followup on the Secret Life of Plants, the book spelled out alternatives to the use of chemical fertilizers which Tompkins says are absolutely useless and only lead to killing the soil and the microorganisms, poisoning the plants and ultimately animals and humans. Tompkins believes such fertilizers to be primary contributors to the spread of cancer.

The writer has found his plans thwarted, not only by publishers. One idea to use a promising technology he had chanced upon, to virtually X-Ray the Great Pyramid, was apparently blocked by Zahi Hawass and the Egyptian Antiquities Authority. It would have cost about fifty grand to X-Ray the whole pyramid and find out what the hell really is in there, he says. It seemed to me that it would make an interesting television program, but no one was interested. It was very strange.

On the recent highly publicized work of Belgian astronomer Robert Bauval purporting to show an alignment between the pyramids and the constellation Orion, he shrugs. It's a hypothesis, but it's not provable. I'm only interested in those things about the great pyramid which are solid, which are indisputable. Tompkins wants more than endless theories, of which he claims to have a room full. But he concedes, If you think of the Dogon and the Sirius connection, it's obvious that on this planet, that people knew a great deal more about astronomy and may have been linked in one way or another with the stars. But I'm only interested when someone comes along with fairly hard proof.

Proof of advanced ancient astronomical knowledge, Tompkins believes, is abundant in much of the ancient architecture. It's obvious that all the great temples in Egypt were astronomically oriented and geodetically placed, he says. He is especially interested in Tel el-Amarna which he sees as the subject of a possible future book. The astronomical knowledge incorporated into the city built by Akhenaton, Tompkins believes to be mind blowing. Unfortunately for his plans though, Livio Catullo Stecchini, the Italian scholar and authority on ancient measurement, upon whom Tompkins relied for much of his work in Secrets of the Great Pyramid, is dead.

Interestingly, Tompkins never permitted Secrets of the Great Pyramid to be published in Italy because the publisher wanted to cut out Stecchini's appendix (not the organ, but the text). The injustice still angers Tompkins. Here's an unrecognized Italian genius, but the Italians said if you print it you can't have the book.

His subsequent book on the Mexican Pyramids further reinforced Tompkins view that the ancients were possessed of advanced astronomical knowledge. Though not convinced that the similarities between Egypt and Mexico prove the existence of a mother culture like Atlantis, as some have suggested, he does believe it's obvious that people went back and forth across the Atlantic. And he believes the Mexico builders used the same system of measurements as the Egyptians. I should write another whole book on the subject of what was known on both sides of the Atlantic.

During his Mexico experience, Tompkins succeeded, at great expense and difficulty, in filming the effect of the rising and setting sun at equinox on the temple at Chichen Itza. It's absolutely staggering, he relates, but you can see that snake come alive, just on that one day. It goes up and down the steps. We filmed it and it's just beautiful. How did they orient that pyramid so that would happen only on the equinox?

Answering that question led Tompkins to New Zealand and Geoffrey Hodgeson, who gained fame in the 1920s by clairvoyantly pinpointing the precise position of the planets at a given time. Convinced by Hodgeson's demonstration, Tompkins concluded that he knew the secret by which the ancients were able to achieve their precise astronomical alignments without access to modern instruments. They didn't need the instruments, because the instruments were built into them. Clairvoyantly they could tell exactly where the planets were and understand their motion. Such understanding, while available to the ancients, has been largely forgotten by alienated high-tech Western society. We've closed ourselves in, he says. We've pulled down the shades on our second sight.

Fascinated by clairvoyance and the potential it represents, Tompkins has tried to deploy it as a resource for his more scientific investigation. When his own search for concrete proof for the existence of Atlantis took him to the Bahamas he used every tool at his disposal. When one site appeared to be littered with ancient marble columns and pediments, it was a psychic who told him that the spot was nothing more than the final resting place of a nineteenth-century ship bound for New Orleans with a marble mausoleum on board. On the more scientific side, clandestine core sampling of the celebrated Bimini Road convinced him the pavement was not manmade but only beach rock. It took a University of Miami geologist to give him what he wanted.

Dr. Cesare Emiliani showed Tompkins the result of his own core sampling over the years in the Gulf of Mexico. Here was conclusive proof of a great inundation of water in about 9,000 BC. Tompkins remembers, Emiliani said, they say that Atlantis has been found in the Azores and found off the coast of Spain and off the East Coast of the United States. All of these places, he said, could have been part of the Atlantean empire that was submerged at exactly the date when Plato said it was.

Several years earlier he had written the foreword for the English translation of Otto Muck's book, The Secret of Atlantis. Muck's hypothesis that Atlantis had been sunk by an asteroid Tompkins thought very plausible, and he still thinks so, though it remains to be proven. In Emiliani's work, though, Tompkins believes he has found the only geological proof on the subject.

Of course, proved or not, Atlantis, like many other controversial notions, is not likely to be readily accepted by the intellectual establishment. The reasons for which seem clear to Tompkins. They would have to rewrite all their archeological schoolbooks if some of this is proved. If John West's theory about the Sphinx is correct (that it's over 10,000 years old) it's going to change a lot of stuff. By way of analogy he describes a man he knows in Canada who has developed a cure for cancer and points out what a threat such a discovery is to the billion-dollar-a-year cancer industry. All of which leads him to another one of his favorite subjects, though acknowledging that it may cost him credibility with some people: Who really wrote Shakespeare?

It was written like Hollywood scripts are written today, he explains. Written by members of the privy council, which could have been at the time, not only Bacon and Southhampton, but all of them who were involved, one way or another, in trying to save the country from civil war, and realized that neither the Catholics nor the Protestants had the answer, and you had to look deeper somewhere. So you had to go back to the Egyptians, hence the presence of Giordano Bruno involved in some of the plays. He sighs, The whole subject is absolutely riveting and fascinating.

A lifetime of searching the hidden byways has made Tompkins philosophical about his own inevitable physical transition. While acknowledging that he is getting on, he says, I'm infinitely more peaceful about the prospect of death. Like time, it's sort of an illusion. I mean you lose the body but what's that. You've had many before and you'll probably have more after. Maybe you'll do better without them. At any rate, his productivity has yet to suffer. His next book promises to prove the existence of elemental creatures.

The project was inspired by the recent scientific validation of the work of Annie Besant and C.W. Leadbeater in mapping sub-atomic structure. Before the turn of the century the two leaders of the theosophical society had decided to used their yogic powers to analyze the elements. Leadbeater saw and Besant drew. When their work was published, no one paid any attention. After all, not only was it impossible to do what they were doing but their results contradicted conventional science. Then in the 1970s an English physicist discovered their work and realized that they were accurately describing quarks and other features of the atom which had only recently been discovered. With such powerful vindication established, Tompkins now goes into the detailed work which the two produced on elemental spirits, as well as the work of the renowned clairvoyant Rudolf Steiner. If you put it all together and realize these people could actually, many years ahead of the discovery of atoms and isotopes, accurately describe and draw them, and then look at their description of the nature spirits, their function on the planet, their connection with human beings and why it is that we should reconnect with them, you have to listen. I mean it's black and white. You can't escape it.

What will the new book be named? I don't know because I hate to give names to my books. They'll probably call it the Secret Life of something or other....