Suppressed Inventions and Other Discoveries (36 page)

Climatic changes, ice cover, mountain building and the reverse magnetic orientation of rocks are explained by Velikovsky's theory of cosmic catastrophe. However, the accepted view of the Earth's geological history is known as uniformitarianism; where the gradual workings of natural forces has produced the world as we know it. Needless to say, Velikovsky aroused as great a controversy in geology as he had previously in archaeology and astronomy. The defenders of uniformitarianism disliked Velikovsky's ideas at least as much as their follow scientists its had. VELIKOVSKY ATTACKED

Publication of Worlds in Collision caused a violent reaction; astronomers everywhere denounced and decried the book. They threatened to boycott Macmillan, the publisher, who was forced to withdraw the book from circulation. Under pressure, Macmillan transferred publication rights to Doubleday, who did not have a textbook department and burned their unsold copies.

In reviews in reputable journals and public statements, academics and scientists even criticised some of Velikovsky's works before anyone had read the manuscript. Conferences were held to show Velikovsky's theories were wrong.

Velikovsky died on November 17, 1979 at the age of 84. As more is learned about our solar system, some scientists have realized that his theories might conflict with accepted ideas but not actually conflict with the facts.

RISING FROM AMNESIA

Velikovsky theorised that humanity suffered a collective amnesia on the subject of catastrophes. As a reaction to the repeated near-destruction of human civilisation, a deep scar has been left on the human psyche. Although the solar system has been settled for 2,700 years, he notes a 700 year cycle in the human collective consciousness. Christianity in the first century
A
.
D
. and Islam in the seventh [century] were both founded on apocalyptic visions of the transformation of the world by fire. The fourteenth century was the time of the Black Death and the Hundred Years War which reduced the population of Western Europe by two-thirds.

Velikovsky's fear was that in the twenty-first century this trauma would be re-enacted by humanity, who is now in possession of the means of its own destruction.

An examination of the facts may help the recall of our memory, the suppression of which could be the cause of great violence in our history.

THE BOOKS OF VELIKOVSKY:

Worlds in Collision, 1950
Ages in Chaos, 1952
Earth in Upheaval, 1955
Oedipus and Akhnaton, 1960
Peoples of the Sea, 1977
Ramses II and His Time, 1978
Mankind in Amnesia, 1982

The design pictured at the top is from Assyria and is several thousand years old. That at the bottom is from the Dogon tribe and is contemporary. The Dogon say their fishtailed figure is from Sirius, and astronomer Temple claims that the Assyrian design shows the same extraterrestrial with a fishtail.

Archaeological
Cover-Ups?

David Hatcher Childress

Who controls the past, controls the future. Who controls the present, controls the past.
George Orwell, 1984

Most of us are familiar with the last scene in the popular Indiana Jones archaeological adventure film Raiders of the Lost Ark, in which an important historical artifact, the Ark of the Covenant from the Temple in Jerusalem, is locked in a crate and put in a giant warehouse, never to be seen again, thus ensuring that no history books will have to be rewritten and no history professor will have to revise the lecture that he has been giving for the last forty years.

While the film was fiction, the scene in which an important ancient relic is buried in a warehouse is uncomfortably close to reality for many researchers. To those who investigate allegations of archaeological cover-ups, there are disturbing indications that the most important archaeological institute in the United States, the Smithsonian Institution, an independent federal agency, has been actively suppressing some of the most interesting and important archaeological discoveries made in the Americas.

The Vatican has been long accused of keeping artifacts and ancient books in their vast cellars, without allowing the outside world access to them. These secret treasures, often of a controversial historical or religious nature, are allegedly suppressed by the Catholic Church because they might damage the church's credibility, or perhaps cast their official texts in doubt. Sadly, there is overwhelming evidence that something very similar is happening with the Smithsonian Institution.

The Smithsonian Institution was started in 1829 when an eccentric British millionaire, by the name of James Smithson, died and left $515,169 to create an institution "for the increase and diffusion of knowledge among men." Unfortunately, there is evidence the Smithsonian has been more active in the suppression of knowledge . . . than the diffusion of it for the last hundred years.

The cover-up and alleged suppression of archaeological evidence began in late 1881 when John Wesley Powell, the geologist famous for exploring the Grand Canyon, appointed Cyrus Thomas as the director of the Eastern Mound Division of the Smithsonian Institution's Bureau of Ethnology.

When Thomas came to the Bureau of Ethnology he was a "pronounced believer in the existence of a race of Mound Builders, distinct from the American Indians." However, John Wesley Powell, the director of the Bureau of Ethnology, a very sympathetic man toward the American Indians, had lived with the peaceful Winnebago Indians of Wisconsin for many years as a youth and felt that American Indians were unfairly thought of as primitive and savage.

The Smithsonian began to promote the idea that Native Americans, at that time being exterminated in the Indian wars, were descended from advanced civilizations and were worthy of respect and protection. They also began a program of suppressing any archaeological evidence that lent credence to the school of thought known as Diffusionism, a school which believes that throughout history there has been widespread dispersion of culture and civilization via contact by ship and major trade routes.

The Smithsonian opted for the opposite school, known as Isolationism. Isolationism holds that most civilizations are isolated from each other and that there has been very little contact between them, especially those that are separated by bodies of water. In this intellectual war that started in the 1880s, it was held that even contact between the civilizations of the Ohio and Mississippi Valleys was rare, and certainly these civilizations did not have any contact with such advanced cultures as the Mayas, Toltecs, or Aztecs in Mexico and Central America. By Old World standards this is an extreme, and even ridiculous idea, considering that the river system reached to the Gulf of Mexico and these civilizations were as close as the opposite shore of the gulf. It was like saying that cultures in the Black Sea area could not have had contact with the Mediterranean.

When the contents of many ancient mounds and pyramids of the Midwest were examined it was shown that the history of the Mississippi River Valleys was that of an ancient and sophisticated culture that had been in contact with Europe and other areas. Not only that, the contents of many mounds revealed burials of huge men, sometimes seven or eight feet tall, in full armour with swords and sometimes huge treasures.

For instance, when Spiro Mound in Oklahoma was excavated in the 1930s, a tall man in full armour was discovered along with a pot of thousands of pearls and other artifacts, t he largest such treasure so far documented. The whereabouts of the man in armour is unknown and it is quite likely that it eventually was taken to the Smithsonian Institution.

In a private conversation with a well-known historical researcher (who shall remain nameless), I was told that a former employee of the Smithsonian, who was dismissed for defending the view of Diffusionism in the Americas (i.e., the heresy that other ancient civilizations may have visited the shores of North and South America during the many millennia before Columbus), alleged that the Smithsonian at one time had actually taken a barge full of unusual artifacts out into the Atlantic and dumped them in the ocean.

Though the idea of the Smithsonian's covering up a valuable archaeological find is difficult to accept for some, there is, sadly, a great deal of evidence to suggest that the Smithsonian Institution has knowingly covered up and "lost" important archaeological relics. The Stonewatch Newsletter of the Gungywamp Society in Connecticut, which researches megalithic sites in New England, had a curious story in their Winter 1992 issue about stone coffins discovered in 1892 in Alabama which were sent to the Smithsonian Institution and then "lost." According to the newsletter, researcher Frederick J. Pohl wrote an intriguing letter in 1950 to the late Dr. T. C. Lethbridge, a British archaeologist.

The letter from Pohl stated:

A professor of geology sent me a reprint (of the) Smithsonian Institution, The Crumf Burial Cave by Frank Burns, U.S. Geological Survey, from the report of the U.S. National Museum for 1892, pp. 451-454,1984. In the Crumf Cave, southern branch of the Warrior River, in Murphy's Valley, Blount County Alabama, accessible from Mobile Bay by river, were coffins of wood hollowed out by fire, aided by stone or copper chissels. Eight of these coffins were taken to the Smithsonian. They were about 7.5' long, 14" to 18" wide, 6" to 7" deep. Lids open.

I wrote recently to the Smithsonian, and received reply March 11th from F. M. Setzler, Head Curator of Department of Anthropology. (He said) We have not been able to find the specimens in our collections, though records show that they were received.

David Barron, President of the Gungywamp Society was eventually told by the Smithsonian in 1992 that the coffins were actually wooden troughs and that they could not be viewed anyway because they were housed in an asbestos-contaminated warehouse. This warehouse was to be closed for the next Smithsonian personnel!

Ivan T. Sanderson, a Johnny Carson's Tonight Show in the 1960s (usually with an exotic aniten years and no one was allowed in except

well-known zoologist and frequent guest on mal like a pangolin or a lemur), once related a curious story about a letter he received regarding an engineer who was stationed on the Aleutian island of Shemya during World War II. While building an airstrip, his crew bulldozed a group of hills and discovered under several sedimentary layers what appeared to be human remains. The Alaskan mound was in fact a graveyard of gigantic human remains, consisting of crania and long leg bones.

The crania measured from 22 to 24 inches from base to crown. Since an adult skull normally measures about eight inches from back to front such a large crania would imply an immense size for a normally proportioned human. Furthermore, every skull was said to have been neatly trepanned (a process of cutting a hole in the upper portion of the skull).

In fact, the habit of flattening the skull of an infant and forcing it to grow in an elongated shape was a practice used by ancient Peruvians, the Mayas, and the Flathead Indians of Montana. Sanderson tried to gather further proof, eventually receiving a letter from another member of the unit who continued the report. The letters both indicated that the Smithsonian Institution had collected the remains, yet nothing else was heard. Sanderson seemed convinced that the Smithsonian Institution had received the bizarre relics, but wondered why they would not release the data. He asks, ". .. is it that these people cannot face rewriting all the text books?"

In 1944 an accidental discovery of an even more controversial nature was made by Waldemar Julsrud at Acambaro, Mexico. Acambaro is in the state of Guanajuato, 175 miles northwest of Mexico City. The strange archaeological site there yielded over 33,500 objects of ceramic [and] stone, including jade, and knives of obsidian (sharper than steel and still used today in heart surgery). Jalsrud, a prominent local German merchant, also found statues ranging from less than an inch to six feet in length depicting great reptiles, some of them in active association with humans—generally eating them, but in some bizarre statuettes an erotic association was indicated. To observers many of these creatures resembled dinosaurs.

Jalsrud crammed this collection into twelve rooms of his expanded house. There, startling representations of Negroes, Orientals, and bearded Caucasians were included as were motifs of Egyptian, Sumerian and other ancient non-hemispheric civilisations, as well as portrayals of Bigfoot and aquatic monsterlike creatures, weird human-animal mixtures, and a host of other inexplicable creations. Teeth from an extinct Ice Age horse, the skeleton of a mammoth, and a number of human skulls were found at the same site as the ceramic artifacts.

Radiocarbon dating in the laboratories of the University of Pennsylvania and additional tests using the thermoluminescence method of dating pottery were performed to determine the age of the objects. Results indicated the objects were made about 6,500 years ago, around 4,500 B.C. A team of experts at another university, shown Jalsrud's half-dozen samples but unaware of their origin, ruled out the possibility that they could have been modern reproductions. However, they fell silent when told of their controversial source.