The Ancient Alien Question (16 page)

The granite of the King’s Chamber contains siliconquartz crystals; aswan granite contains 55 or more percent quartz crystals. Dee Jay Nelson and David H. Coville write that this “would allow a ‘piezotension’ upon these parallel surfaces and cause an electromotive flow. The great mass of stone above the pyramid chambers presses downward by gravitational force upon the granite walls thereby converting them into perpetual electric generators.... A man within the King’s Chamber would thus come within a weak but definite induction field.”
⁹

Traditionalists might argue that these phenomena are unintentional, but what if they
were
intentional? What if someone was meant to put himself in this sarcophagus and lay there? Might something truly special happen? It is a question that takes us beyond the analysis of the building of the Great Pyramid, which has shown us that aliens are unlikely to have built it, but that it was clearly built with technology far ahead of its time, in the possession of Imhotep. So did he discover it, or was he given this knowledge?

Baalbek

The temple of Baalbek lies only 50 miles northeast of the Lebanese capital of Beirut. It was once the greatest Roman temple in the world, and people came from all over the Roman Empire to visit it. Today, because of three decades of warfare and terrorism in the region, hardly anyone makes it to Baalbek.

In Roman times, the city was known as Heliopolis, The City of the Sun. The temple complex is situated in the fertile Bekaa valley, but historians have long wondered why the largest Roman temple was built here. There was clearly some attraction to Baalbek, and the answer seems to be that the area had long been deemed to be sacred and the Romans were only the latest in a long line of powers that incorporated it into their heritage.

The complex is dedicated to the worship of a triad: Jupiter, Mercury, and Venus, the former of which the Romans associated with Ba’al, after whom the site was named.
Ba’al
is a Semitic word, meaning “lord,” and it therefore has covered a number of deities; in this case, the Lord of the Bekaa valley—Ba’al-bek, who is generally identified with Hadad, a storm and rain god.

The temple complex of Baalbek in Lebanon became the home of the largest Roman temple. But it is the platform below the Roman complex that is one of the great enigmas of the ancient world, as it holds stones that weigh hundreds of tons. No one knows how they were transported.

The Arabs believe that Baalbek was the place where Nimrod rebelled against God and constructed the Tower of Babel, but there are other traditions that link the construction of the complex with Cain, who built it after Jahweh had cursed him. All of these legends share one common component, which is that the temple of Baalbek is considered to be the oldest building in the world. Apart from being old, it is also huge. The Acropolis of Baalbek is much bigger than the Acropolis in Athens. In fact, even the second-largest temple in Baalbek is bigger than the Parthenon in Athens.

It is the megalithic ruins between the temple that have attracted speculation as to how our ancestors could have created Baalbek. Most interesting is the stone platform on which the Romans built the Temple of Jupiter. Its walls consist of about 24 monoliths at their lowest level, each weighing 300 tons. There is a trilithon (a grouping of three blocks, two vertical with a horizontal block atop them) in the southwest wall of the platform, known as the “Marvel of the Three Stones,” each more than 62 feet high and weighing an estimated 800 tons! A fourth stone nearby is 80 feet in length and weighs 1,100 tons! They are thought to be the world’s biggest blocks of cut stone. As in so many other places, the stones are precisely cut and were somehow transported from a quarry several miles away from the temple complex. Michel Alouf, the former curator of the site, observed that, “In spite of their immense size, they are so accurately placed in position and so carefully joined, that it is almost impossible to insert a needle between them. No description will give an exact idea of the bewildering and stupefying effect of these tremendous blocks on the spectator.”
¹⁰

The so-called Stone of the South, which lies in the quarry, is 69 feet long, and is estimated to weigh 1,200 tons; another stone in the quarry, The Stone of the Pregnant Woman, weighs 1,000 tons. With the technology that science has accredited to the builders, it would take 40,000 men to move this single block! This is logistically impossible, as a 69-foot-long block does not offer sufficient holds and spaces for 40,000 men to put their hands on it. So clearly
some
form of technology was used in moving this stone; it is the only possible conclusion. Not only were the stones moved from the quarry to the platform, but they were also lifted up 30 feet in the air.

Roger Hopkins, a stone mason, has suggested that the trilithon stones and 300-ton blocks were all moved with wooden rollers, and he has been invited to demonstrate his suggestion in a number of television programs. However, Hopkins was using 10 people for a 2-ton stone in his demonstration, which was done on a concrete platform—a very smooth surface compared to the landscape around Baalbek. For a stone weighing more than 10 tons, Hopkins agrees he requires more than 100 people to move it.

The Stone of the South, still in the quarry of the Baalbek complex. It is 69 feet long, and is estimated to weigh 1,200 tons. It is among the most gigantic stones ever to have been carved. How these and similar stones were ever meant to be transported is unknown, and poses challenges even to our modern equipment.

Archaeologists already have difficulty explaining how the Romans built the temple itself. The Temple of Jupiter consisted of 54 columns, though only six now remain after millennia of earthquakes. It is believed that the platform was actually constructed to make the entire temple complex more resistant to earthquakes, but this is faulty logic, as the temple complex was clearly
not
resistant to earthquakes, whereas the platform itself has withstood the test of time. A more logical scenario is that the platform was chosen by the Romans to build their temple, as they knew that it would offer a better chance for their temple to remain intact.

The architrave and frieze blocks of the Temple of Jupiter weigh up to 60 tons each, with one corner block weighing more than 100 tons, and all of them raised to a height of more than 60 feet above the ground. Though archaeologists argue this was done using Roman cranes, these cranes were not capable of lifting such weights. They therefore suggest that combining multiple cranes may have allowed the builders to lift these stones, but in the truth, this is speculation. Archaeologists do not even speculate as to how the 800-ton stones were moved, for there is no evidence from any known civilization that such technology was available to our ancestors—but someone clearly accomplished it, somehow!

British author Alan Alford, in
Gods of the New Millennium
, contacted Bob MacGrain, the technical director of Baldwins construction company, who confirmed that modern technology was just about able to lift and place 1,000-ton stones on a support structure that was 20 feet high, but this technology had just come about in the 1990s, when Alford wrote the book.

Because of its location, Baalbek is largely off-limits, so the ability to understand our ancient past has become one of the victims of the warfare that has typified this region. Is it a coincidence that the Romans all of a sudden excelled in their building techniques in a location where humankind had excelled before? Or is it possible that when the Romans erected their temple, there was still a body of knowledge locally available that they made full use of? That could more easily explain the enigma of the largest temple of the Roman Empire, though it does not explain the mystery of the platform itself.

For that mystery, we need to go back to the beginnings of civilization. With stories of the Tower of Babel and folklore that this was the oldest building in the world (which, in biblical terms, the Tower of Babel obviously is), Baalbek presents some of the best evidence from the ancient world to demonstrate that at a point in time before the Roman Empire, someone in the Bekaa valley was far more advanced than anyone else, and constructed a stone platform that truly defies belief. Whoever built it possessed technology and/or knowledge that cannot be accredited in a normal manner to our ancestors, as Baalbek’s platform is truly extraordinary—out of the ordinary. No wonder, therefore, that the Russian scientist Matest Agrest in 1959 proposed that Baalbek was used as a launch platform for extraterrestrial spaceships. Indeed, until NASA moved the gigantic Saturn V rocket to its launch pad on a huge tracked vehicle, no one had transported such a weight as the stones of Baalbek.

Carnac

In Brittany, France, Carnac and its neighboring villages still contain about 4,000 megalithic stones. Archaeologists believe that the original amount was probably closer to 10,000 stones. Carnac is especially famous for the thousands of stones that have been grouped into so-called alignments—stone rows. Though the stone rows of Carnac are not unique—they are found elsewhere in France and abroad—Carnac does have the most impressive and most gigantic stone alignments in the world.

The French town of Carnac is primarily famous for its stone rows. More than 4,000 remain. But the area once also had the tallest standing stone in the world, weighing 340 tons and measuring 60 feet high. This incredibly large stone has since fallen and broken into various parts.

Archaeologists date the stone rows as being 5,000 to 6,000 years old, making them approximately 1,000 years older than the Great Pyramid of Giza, in Egypt. It should therefore come as no surprise that, locally, the stone rows are compared to a “Neolithic cathedral.”

It is known that the largest stones on display here weigh more than 20 tons. Modern reconstructions, using tools and techniques that were known to our Neolithic ancestors, have shown that a group of approximately 20 people were able to create a stone of such size. But this is not the real enigma of Carnac. The enigma is that the stones are still standing. The surface of the Neolithic Age is barely 10 inches below the present ground level, and a further 10 inches below is granite—one of the hardest rocks on the planet. This means that the stones were placed on soil with a maximum depth of 10 inches, before they hit solid rock. In this tiny hole, the builders had to create all the required balance to keep the stone upright. Despite the long odds, they
managed to succeed in this, as is evidenced by the thousands of
standing
stones that make up the stone rows.