from AndrewCollins Website
Hi-tech sonar equipment aboard the ’Ulises’, a vessel owned by Canadian firm Advanced Digital Communications (ADC), detected a several-kilometer square area of what appear to be roads, pyramids and other building structures at a depth of 2,200 feet.
Yet it was not until July 2001
that Paulina Zelitsky, the Russian-born leader of the
expedition, got a chance to view the site first-hand.
What had ADC found, and was it connected in some way with the legend of lost Atlantis, as described by the Athenian philosopher Plato more than 2,350 years ago?
One man’s interpretation of Cuba’s
underwater pyramid located in the Yucatan Channel. This 3D image
was created by Dean Clarke of Atlantisite.com after he
studied the deep-sea sonar image released to the world.
It was at this point that the fair race of Athens rose up against the Atlantean aggressor and in a decisive naval battle defeated its enemy.
Some time afterwards the god Zeus unleashed ’earthquakes and
floods’ that drowned the Athenian navy and submerged the island of
Atlantis in one ’terrible day and night’. The date given for this
catastrophe is post 8570 BC in Plato’s dialogue the Timaeus and 9421
BC in its sequel the Critias.
Unquestionably, they would have included whether or not there
existed in the sea of Atlas, the modern Atlantic ocean, inhabitable
islands reached by ocean-going mariners. Other contemporary writers
spoke of islands to the west that had been discovered and occupied
by Phoenician and Carthaginian mariners, who kept quiet about their
existence in case of drawing undue interest from foreign nations.
Indeed, there is every
indication that the Phoenicians and Carthaginians entered the Gulf
of Mexico and made landfall on the Gulf coast, where they could have
traded goods such as tobacco and coca leaves with cultures such as
the Olmec and Maya of the Yucatan.
It was said to have split apart a much larger landmass, killing the inhabitants and leaving the many thousands and islands and cays that remain today. Some of these stories include clues which hint at a much greater catastrophe.
One from Tobago speaks of ’the ole moon breaking’, while others from Venezuela and the Yucatan allude to a period of darkness, fire falling from the sky and the presence overhead of a fiery snake.
Had some cosmic impact caused a massive
cataclysm that devastated the Bahamas and Caribbean?
Modern theories are that these
so-called Carolina Bays (after the states in which they were first
noted during aerial surveys in the 1920s) were caused by a comet
which entered the earth’s atmosphere from the north-west over Alaska
and disintegrated into millions of pieces that detonated above the
ground, very much in the manner of the small comet which caused the
Tunguska event in Siberia in June 1908.
Not only would it have caused a wall of fire and wind, which would have laid flat large areas of Tundra forest and decimated flora and fauna, but the resulting dust clouds would have created a ’nuclear winter’ which seems to have resulted in a temporary re-advance of the ice fields that had covered much of North America, Europe and Asia for the previous 40,000 years.
Moreover, hundreds and thousands of fragments of the comet falling in the western Atlantic basin would have produced tsunami waves of immense proportions which would have temporarily drowned both the eastern seaboard of the United States and the islands of the Bahamas and Caribbean, wiping out entire populations (a few must have got away to tell the tale, as it told in the creation myths of the indigenous peoples of both Central and North America, and also those of the Caribbean).
Certainly we can say that all this took place around the very same time that Plato tells us Atlantis was destroyed by ’one terrible day and night of earthquakes and floods’.
Moreover, if the Caribbean islands did once form part of Atlantis,
then it would mean that part of the landmass was still above water
today.
Certainly, it can be shown that the landmass was considerably smaller than Plato would have us believe. At one point he says that it was the size of ’Libya and Asia’ put together. Yet later he reports that the island possessed a vast irrigated plain that ’stretched for three thousand stadia [552 kilometers] in one direction, and at its centre, for two thousand [stadia, i.e. 368 kilometers] inland from the coast’.
Beyond it to the north, west and east
were ’mountain ranges’ that came right down to the sea as
precipitous cliffs, while the southern end of the plain, on which
the city was situated, was at sea-level. It does not take a
geographer to realize that Plato was describing an east-west
orientated island perhaps as little as 600 by 400 kilometers in
size.
This is verified in the knowledge
that the Atlantean empire was said to consist of a whole series of
islands that lay in front of an ’opposite continent’, plausibly the
American continent, reached by ’voyagers’ using a series of ’other
islands’, plausibly the Bahamas or Lesser Antilles, which in early
colonial times acted as stepping stones for ocean-going vessels
attempting to reach the mainland.
We also know that until around 9,000 years ago the
plain extended southwards, across what is today the Bay of Batabanó,
to the Isle of Youth. Here then is evidence of a vast plain,
originally 540 by 160 kilometers in extent, drowned, in part at
least, during the time-frame suggested by Plato.
More than this, the name Antillia can be shown to derive from the Semitic word root ATL, ’to elevate’, which was also the root behind the name Atlas, from which we derive the name Atlantis, ’daughter of Atlas’, the term used for an Atlantic island (Atlantides, ’daughters of Atlas’, was the plural used in ancient times to denote Atlantic islands in general).
In other
words, if Antillia was merely a medieval form of Atlantis, then it
further confirms
Cuba’s association with Plato’s Atlantic paradise.
They spoke variously of their earliest ancestors coming from an island paradise located in the east, known variously as Aztlan or Tulan, following a period of darkness when the sun would not appear.
On this island the first humans are said to have emerged from somewhere called Chichomoztoc, the Seven Caves.
From these individuals came seven tribes, or clans, and by their hands rose Seven Cities.
I believe that some semblance of knowledge regarding the creation of the seven cities in Mesoamerican myth led to Antillia, or Cuba, becoming known as the Island of the Seven Cities.
Furthermore, just ten years after Christopher
Columbus’s famous landfall in the Bahamas in 1492, the main islands
of the Caribbean - Puerto Rico, Hispaniola and Cuba - were named on
maps as ’the Isles of Antillia of the King of Aragon’, showing how
the early Spanish explorers likewise came to identify them with ancient Antillia and its accompanying islands.
Cueva # Uno (Cave No. 1) has been described as a veritable Sistine chapel of the prehistoric world, and is filled with beautiful petroglyphs of concentric circles, rectilinear shapes and other abstract forms many thousands of years old.
I interpreted the symbolism of these designs as perhaps embodying the memory of some kind of comet impact suffered by the Caribbean in a distant epoch.
Such thoughts came entirely from intuitive feelings experienced during a personal visit to the cave in September 1998 - feelings that led me to explore the possibility of a comet impact having devastated the region.
More curiously, Paulina Zelitsky, the director of the ADC team working out of Cuba, visited the Punta del Este caves for the first time only shortly before the discovery of the Guanahacabibes site, off the west coast of Cuba in July 2002.
She has since claimed that an unconfirmed carving of a cross detected on a large, roughly rectangular block videoed at the underwater site, bears some similarity to an abstract cross design found inside Punta del Este’s Cueva # Uno.
The 1951 ECOS Article
He explained how members of the Institute were investigating the idea that traces of an Atlantean culture might be found in Cuba and Hispaniola, a view offered to them by Egerton Sykes, then a world renowned authority on Atlantis.
In 1949 he had written an introduction
for a revised edition of
ATLANTIS: THE ANTEDILUVIAN WORLD,
the all-time classic on the subject, written by former US
congressman Ignatius Donnelly and published for the first time in
1882.
Sykes was also the editor of a journal propounding Hans Hoerbinger’s
Cosmic Ice theory entitled, simply, ATLANTIS, in which appeared a
partial translation of the above-mentioned ECOS article.
Moreover, petroglyphs inside the caves (presumably those in Cueva # Uno)
displayed astronomical information which linked them with the
origins of the Maya calendrical system, thus the possibility that
Cuba had been a ’staging post’ for the migrations of the Maya into
Central America should not be overlooked. More than this, the
translation stated:
The artifacts include stone balls, spherical stones,
elongated stones, and rods with forked ends resembling snakes. The
absence of large monuments may merely mean they have not yet been
seriously looked for.
Why exactly he felt they would find these things is not made clear, although I suspect that his theories were based on Donnelly’s concept of a diffusion of shared ideas among ancient cultures on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean, due to the suggested migration of peoples from Atlantis following its destruction.
Whatever the reasons, the archaeologists
confirmed that all of these things had been found on Cuba, but, as
the article stated, there would have to be a revolution of the
established ways of thinking before their presence would be seen as
evidence for the existence of Atlantis.
Captions accompanying two examples shown as line illustrations, explained that the symbols showed a comet with a tail hitting an astral, or celestial, body, and breaking up, confirming my own theory that the petroglyphs of Cueva # Uno embodied a memory of a catastrophe caused by the fragmentation of a comet during some former age.
Yet what evidence might we find that the former Bahaman
landmass might once have been home to the same Atlantean culture?
The wealthy businessmen involved had asked Cayce to join them in Miami following some initial readings (all mostly missing now from the Cayce archives). However, Cayce had said that he could not easily take up temporary residence in Miami because of his practice at Virginia Beach.
Moreover, in one letter he pointed out that his son was
seriously ill and that he could not possibly make any long journeys
until the boy had regained his full health.
He predicted that parts of Poseidia would start to rise off Bimini in ’sixty-eight and sixty-nine, not so far away’.
This led to a concentration of effort by
the Association of Research and Enlightenment (ARE),
the active arm of the Edgar Cayce Foundation, to find evidence of
Atlantis in the shallow waters around Bimini, and in the summer of
1968 this culminated in the discovery of rectangular foundations
(the so-called ’temple site’) in the meter-deep waters off Andros,
the largest island in the Bahamas, as well as
the so-called Bimini
Road site, located off Paradise Point, North Island.
Described by J. Manson Valentine, the great underwater explorer as the ’mother lode’ of the Bahamas, they face out across the extremely deep Old Bahama Channel towards Cuba, and their presence seems to hint at a connection in prehistory between these two enormous landmasses.
As early as the 1950s light
aircraft pilots flying in and out of Cuba from Miami reported seeing
what appeared to be walls and buildings in the waters north of the
Cuban mainland.
They bear striking similarities to the decorated caves of Cuba which are at least several thousand years old, and plausibly much older still. Whoever inhabited these sites were the descendants of those who survived the cataclysm, and those who went on to become the ruling class of the Mesoamerican peoples such as the Olmec, Maya, Quiche, Toltecs and Aztecs.
Here somewhere is the origins of the Atlantis myth, and Cuba holds the key to its re-discovery, and one day we will have all the answers. Whether the stone structures discovered by ADC in the Yucatan Channel do turn out to be remnants of lost Atlantis remains to be seen.
All we can hope is that the full extent of the finds is researched and documented, allowing people to make up their own minds on whether the greatest enigma of the ancient world has finally been solved.
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