A review of Forbidden History:
Extraterrestrial Intervention, Prehistoric
Technologies, and the Suppressed Origin of
Civilization, edited by J. Douglas Kenyon. Bear and
Co.
By Colin Wilson
FORBIDDEN HISTORY is available from Amazon US and
UK.
This is a book that provoked waves of nostalgia in
me, for a dozen years ago, when the tremors of the ‘forbidden
history’ revolution were just beginning to
upset the world of academic archaeology, I happened
to be close to its seismic center. For all practical
purposes, this consisted of two men: the subversive
Egyptologist John Anthony West, and the Boston
geologist Robert Schoch.
One day in the autumn of 1993, I received out of the
blue a letter from John West, containing a magazine
article describing how he had persuaded the police
sketch artist Frank Domingo to go with him to Cairo
with a view to studying the face of the Sphinx, and
giving his opinion on whether it could be the
pharaoh Chefren, the builder of the second pyramid.
Domingo, said the article, had compared the face of
the Sphinx with the bust of Chefren in the Cairo
Museum, and concluded that the answer was no. The
chin of the Sphinx is bigger than Chefren’s,
and the angle from the ear to the mouth is quite
different. And this, said the article, seemed to
demonstrate Schoch’s conclusion that the
weathering of the Sphinx was caused by rain, not by
wind-blown sand, and that the monument is probably
around five thousand years older than it is
generally supposed to be.
All this delighted me, for I had been impressed by
West’s 1979 book Serpent in the Sky, which
summarized the views of that extraordinary
philosopher and Egyptologist Schwaller de Lubicz,
and concluded by citing his conviction that Ancient
Egypt was colonized around 9,000 BC by survivors
from the destruction of Atlantis, and that this
explained the amazingly high level of its culture in
pharaonic times.
I did not know West and had never contacted him. But
his letter was a marvelous piece of synchronicity,
for I was planning to write a book arguing that
Egypt was the heir to Atlantis, and was even then
working on a film script for the producer Dino de
Laurentis, based on the same idea.
It was not long after this that I met John West in
New York, and learned from him that a fellow
Englishman named Graham Hancock was writing a book
arguing that civilization is thousands of years
older than we assume. And John also told me about
the Canadian librarian, Rand Flem-Ath, who was
writing a book that theorized that the site of
Atlantis had been at the South Pole. The result was
that when I got back to England, I wrote to Graham
Hancock and Rand Flem-Ath, and was soon in friendly
correspondence with both. Graham allowed me to read
his book Fingerprints of the Gods in its original
typescript, and when he and his family drove to our
house one Sunday, he and his wife Santha were
severely broke, having spent the advance on travel
and research. and were praying that his book would
keep their bank manager at bay.
It did more, of course — made him a
millionaire, and made every literate person familiar
with his conviction that civilization probably dates
back at least twelve thousand years, to the end of
the last Ice Age. My own book Before the Sphinx
(whose title my publisher insisted on changing to
From Atlantis to the Sphinx, to get ‘Atlantis’
in) came out in May 1996, and managed to clamber on
to the best seller list for few weeks, inducing
euphoria in my publisher and bank manager.
I also became acquainted with Rand Flem-Ath, was
excited by his theory that Atlantis was in
Antarctica, and wrote an introduction to his first
book When the Sky Fell. It was Rand who introduced
me to Atlantis Rising when, in 1998, he sent me a
copy of the magazine with his article ‘Blueprint
from Atlantis’, arguing that the regular,
grid-like pattern of the placement of hundreds of
the earth’s sacred sites indicates that they
were laid out by a proto-Atlantean civilization. He
also suggested that he and I should collaborate on a
book about the theory, and I agreed instantly,
resulting in a two year collaboration that resulted
in The Atlantis Blueprint.
Forbidden History, edited by J. Douglas Kenyon,
tells the whole story, and far more, for Doug Kenyon
happened to be one of those editors of genius whose
finger was on the pulse of the intellectual
revolution of the period, and who commissioned
articles that covered the whole story from the
explosive debut of Immanuel Velikovsky to Graham
Hancock’s exploration of the underwater
architecture of Yonaguni. The result is a
fascinating chronicle of history in the process of
happening. It feels at times like being in the Place
de la Bastille on the day the French Revolution
broke out.
Before launching into its major contentions,
Forbidden History fires a few opening salvos with
Will Hart’s review of The Facts of Life:
Shattering the Myth of Darwinism, by Richard Milton.
Milton is a science journalist, whose book
Alternative Science sits by my bedside. It considers
some of the notions the modern science has
condemned, like cold fusion, telepathy and
bioenergy, and mounts a vigorous defense. His other
book The Facts of Life is not anti-Darwin, but it is
anti the kind of rigid modern Darwinism that reduces
nature to a mindless machine. Milton does an
excellent destructive job on Richard Dawkins, and
offers an interesting analysis of the half-forgotten
‘vitalist’ Hans Dreisch, whose ideas turn
out to be much sounder than the Neo-Darwinists
allow. Like Goethe, Milton sees nature as a living
force, capable of self-repair and evolution. And as
someone who acquired his first notion of evolution
from Bernard Shaw (a name I hardly dare breathe
outside the pages of Atlantis Rising), I am
delighted to see Milton taken as seriously as he
deserves.
The argument against the dead hand of scientific
reductionism continues in David Lewis’s piece
on ‘Evolution versus Creationism’, which
discusses the 2-videotape set of The Mysterious
Origins of Man, the NBC documentary (with commentary
by Charlton Heston) which covers some of the
staggering evidence for the ancient past unearthed
by Michael Cremo and Richard Thompson in their book
Forbidden Archaeology. I have to admit that my first
reaction to the book, when I read it in 1996, was
suspicion, since the authors were members of the
Bhaktivedanta Institute in Florida, which taught a
form of Hinduism. But I was soon convinced of their
scientific credentials, as they went on to cite
dozens of geological anomalies that were suppressed
by the scientific establishment in the 19th century—for
example, the skeleton of a kind of prehistoric horse
called the Hippocamparion, dating back five million
years, whose bones looked as if they were broken by
the hand of man. And in 1874, archaeologist Frank
Calvert found the bone of a dinotherium engraved
with the picture of a ‘horned quadruped’.
All this is certainly breath-taking, and I am still
not sure how I feel about the evidence of how, after
the great California gold rush of 1849, miners found
themselves unearthing baffling artifacts — such
as a stone pestle wedged tightly in a
9-million-year-old level of rock, or an iron nail
embedded in a chunk of gold-bearing quartz that was
known to be 38 million years old. This is the kind
of thing that makes me want to say ‘I pass’.
I do not disbelieve this evidence; I simply clutch
my head in despair. Yet, as Doug Kenyon points out
in the following chapter, which includes an
interview with Michael Cremo, Forbidden Archaeology
is a work of ‘irrefutable scientific facts’.
No wonder orthodox archaeologists cringe when they
are asked to give their opinion. I share their
angst.
In the following section, we move into the
mainstream of the forbidden history revolution.
Velikovsky gets a well-deserved reconsideration in
no less than four chapters, and Schwaller de Lubicz,
John West and Robert Schoch hove into view. So does
that eccentric and brilliant mind Paul LaViolette,
who believes that some of the catastrophes our solar
system has encountered are due to cosmic shock waves
caused by an explosion in the galaxy’s center—an
explosion that he believes will be repeated every
26,000 years. A less disturbing, but equally
compelling, view held by two British scientists, D.
S. Allan and J. B. Delair, in a vast and
impressively researched book called Cataclysm!
Compelling Evidence of a Cosmic Catastrophe in 9500
BC, presents the case for some huge cosmic body,
which they call Phaeton, hurtling through the solar
system and causing the catastrophe that took place
at the time Plato claims Atlantic was submerged.
Like Rand and Rose Flem-Ath and Graham Hancock, they
speak about the catastrophe myths that point to a
day ‘when the earth nearly died’ (which is
the title of Allan and Delair’s book in the
UK).
There follows a lengthy (ten chapter) section on
Atlantology, which opens with an interview with the
father of modern Atlantology, John Michell, who has
made discoveries about the science that went into
the building of Stonehenge and other megaliths,
which leave him in no doubt that ancient man had a
far more sophisticated technology than we assume,
and argues that their intimate mathematical
knowledge of the sun and planets reveals the
existence of a tradition that seems to extend back
far earlier than our present estimates of the age of
civilization. Michell has always seemed to me to be
a figure of immense significance.
The chapters that follow include two by Rand
Flem-Ath, one outlining his theory that Atlantis was
in Antarctica, and the other on the notion that the
grid-pattern of ancient monuments proves that they
were laid out by an ancient worldwide civilization,
such as that posited by the great Charles Hapgood in
Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings. And since I worked so
closely with Rand, it behooves me to explain my own
present estimates of these theories.
The notion of Atlantis in Antarctica, which
originally struck me as highly plausible (for
reasons explained at length in our collaboration The
Atlantis Blueprint), I have finally come to reject.
My reason is simple. Plato talked about some
long-standing conflict between Atlantis and the
Athenians, and I think long and hard before
rejecting any of Plato’s central theses. But
how on earth could there be a war between Atlantis
and Athens if they were separated by more than five
thousand miles? And what of Schwaller’s view
that survivors from Atlantis created Egyptian
civilization? That would not make sense either.
All this suddenly took on new meaning last year when
an American explorer named Robert Sarmast set out on
an expedition to the south-east of the island of
Cyprus, and found a mile beneath the sea some
interesting sonar evidence that Plato’s
Atlantis was, in fact, on a plain that was submerged
when the Mediterranean came into being. (He believes
this happened over a long period, in several
inundations.) Originally dismissive of this notion
of ‘Atlantis in Cyprus’, Sarmast’s
discoveries have made me more open minded. And,
after all, if Atlantis was Cyprus, Plato’s
story of the war with Athens, and Schwaller’s
belief that survivors of the Atlantis Flood fled to
Egypt, would suddenly make sense.
Rand’s theory about the grid-alignments of
sacred sites still seems to me convincing. But I
have never agreed with his notion that the sites
were ‘laid out’ by Atlantean scientists
trying to forecast future movements of the earth’s
crust, and I said so in Blueprint. Of the importance
of his discovery about alignment of religious sites
I have never had any doubt.
The fifth section of Forbidden History contains no
less than five chapters by the excellent Christopher
Dunn, the engineer who started from the irrefutable
fact that the cutting of the vast stone blocks of
Ancient Egypt could simply not be explained in terms
of copper chisels and wooden mallets. How, he asked,
were the Egyptians able to produce basalt surfaces
machined to an accuracy of a thousandth of an inch?
His notion that the Egyptians could make use of
sound in ultrasonic drills sounds absurd, but it is
hard to think of other plausible solutions. Any
amateur archaeologist who wants to test out his
powers of creating plausible theories could not to
better than to start with Dunn’s five chapters
on Egyptian technology.
Forbidden History ends as controversially as it
began with a section called ‘New Paradigms to
Ponder’, which moves into the realm of UFOs and
possible influences from other planets—something
I have never doubted since reading Robert Temple’s
tour de force The Sirius Mystery, which shows that
the Dogon tribe of Mali knew that Sirius B was a
white dwarf. And I think that no one who is
intimately acquainted with the work of the late
Professor John Mack on the abduction phenomenon can
doubt that something very odd is going on. (It is
interesting to note that towards the end, Mack also
became increasingly interested in the evidence for
survival after death, and was in London to research
it at the time he was knocked down by a car.) But
there is obviously not enough space left in the book
to go into the vast field of UFOs, and the possible
influence of extraterrestrials on human
civilization. Doug Kenyon offers an informative
chapter on Zecharia Sitchin, and acknowledges the
breadth of his scholarship, while adding: ‘While
Sitchin’s ‘facts’ may be beyond
challenge, many of his conclusions are another
matter,’ and cites John West as feeling that ‘there
are subtleties in the high wisdom of the ancients
that have completely eluded him.’
A piece on Richard Hoagland and the Face on Mars is
equally informative and equally balanced. And a
chapter on Paul LaViolette by Len Kasten places that
bold and difficult thinker where he should be—among
the most interesting theorists in the field. But
LaViolette’s theory that pulsars could be some
kind of beacon created by ETs left me in the same
state of mind that I feel after reading his books—fascinated
but troubled scepticism.
He appears again, together with David Bohm and the
Holographic Universe theory, in the book’s
final chapter on ‘The Physicist as Mystic,’
in which David Lewis argues that the old materialist
paradigm is now gasping its last breath. And as if
setting out to upset anybody who still clings to
reductionism, he quotes at some length the words of
Yogananda from The Autobiography of a Yogi,
declaring that ‘My sense of identity was no
longer confined to a body, but embraced the
circumambient atoms.’ And he points out that
while, in the jargon of modern physics, this would
be described as Non-Locality in the electron sea,
Yogis call it ‘Oneness with Supreme
Consciousness, Ultimate Being, or God’.
This makes a fitting conclusion, like the last bars
of a symphony, and underlines that this book, which
covers such an immense range of topics, is really
about one thing: a basic change in the nature of
human consciousness. |
