ATLANTIS RISING INAUGURATES ANNUAL EGYPT TOUR

The first annual Atlantis Rising trip to Egypt is history now. Under the leadership of John Anthony West, the travelers spent an unforgettable last week of September and first week in October exploring the ruins along the Nile. Organized by Georgia-based travel company Mystical Journeys, the event provided a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to hear directly from West, winner of the 1993 Emmy award for research ("The Mystery of the Sphinx on NBC), about the mysterious wisdom of the ancients.

See page five for details on future journeys to the world's most interesting ancient sites.

MACK GETS A BREAK, SORT OF...

Harvard Medical School won't clamp down on John Mack. The Pulitzer Prize-winning psychiatrist will be able to continue his studies of people who claim to have been abducted. However, the dean has warned him not to let his enthusiasm for UFO research take him from the path of professionalism.

The decision follows an unusual one-year special committee investigation of the tenured professor which had been demanded by peers who felt Mack should not be lending the prestige of the Harvard medical school to the claims of abductees. Others among Mack's colleagues thought the inquiry was a threat to academic freedom. Prominent attorney and Harvard professor Allen Dershowitz publicly opined in a nationally syndicated column: Unless challenged now, the precedent-setting effect of the appointment of this committee will act as a sword of Damocles, hanging over the head of every professor who drifts outside the mainstream...

NBC TO TAKE A NEW LOOK AT FORBIDDEN ARCHEOLOGY

From the folks who brought you The Mystery of the Sphinx comes a new prime time examination of the case for an alternative explanation of our forgotten past. The Mysterious Origins of Man should air on NBC by the end of the year, or soon thereafter. Origins is written, produced and directed by Bill Cote, who also directed the Sphinx show. Interviewed will be a number of authorities familiar to Atlantis Rising readers, including David Hatcher Childress and Graham Hancock.

SETI GAZING YET

Though congressional funding for the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) may have dried up, private funding has filled the gap.

According to the Christian Science Monitor, Planetary society members, for example, have just matched a $100,000 challenge gift from Micron Technology, Inc. to upgrade the SETI observatory managed by Harvard University Prof. Paul Horowitz. As for results so far for the mammoth project, Horowitz says, We've definitely had a signal from an intelligent civilization. But we can't tell if it's from this world or from out of this world.

But, so far no one on the Harvard faculty, that we know of, is clamoring for peer investigation of Horowitz.

STORM SPRITES

Another unusual U.S. Air Force investigation is underway. This one seeks to identify something called thunderstorm sprites. According to the San Francisco Examiner, scientists are scratching their heads over what some call the weirdest atmospheric discovery since cosmic rays: blood-red apparitions with bluish tentacles that flash briefly far above Earth, sometimes at the edge of space.

Thunderstorms appear to trigger sprites, yet they flicker and flash far higher than ordinary lightning, dancing in the void tens of miles above thunderclouds, with no obvious connection. The biggest sprites fill thousands of cubic miles of air.

This past summer scientists from Lawrence Livermore National laboratory have been trying to photograph the phenomenon high in the night sky over Colorado.