Introduction

 

A German historian/scuba diver has recorded the exact location and value of deviations in magnetic fields off the Bahamas coast.

 

Scientists to whom he has shown the figures do not dismiss the possibility that they are caused by micro-wormholes. His researches have also led him to wonder whether the American AUTEC naval base on Andros Island is not-perhaps on account of these same wormholes - an "Underwater Area 51 of the Caribbean."

 

And he has reached some new conclusions concerning Atlantis and the Bahamas.

Oceans of ink have been spilt over the subject of the Bermuda Triangle, that apparent paranormal grab-bag of missing vessels (hundreds of ships and scores of planes), deviations in the magnetic field, abrupt outpourings of fog, UFO sightings far above the national average-and much, much more. A vast amount of pure speculation has accompanied these reports, the most controversial being that the Bahamas archipelago is comprised of the mountaintops and higher areas of the lost continent of Atlantis, sunk beneath these waters millennia ago.

As a practicing historian, with a doctorate in history and sociology from the German Sports University in Cologne - and therefore with a vigorous training in avoiding speculation - I certainly never expected to have anything to contribute to this controversy, which I tended to entirely dismiss.

Pure happenstance changed all that. I am also a trained scuba diving instructor; and, in 1995, I was sent by my company on a six-month stint to Nassau, Bahamas, with my wife and children. My German customers were the travel companies Inter Airlines and Aeroplane. My task was to develop tourist programs for scuba divers and help customers who were already there.

In the course of my work, I heard persistent reports of persons on boats who had experienced sudden deviations in their compass readings which had put them right off course.

 

My curiosity as a historian got the better of me (and, besides, it would make for an unusual diving experience): I decided to look for magnetic field anomalies in the places where the deviations had been noted, and try to bring back exact figures for those deviations.

Based on the stories I'd heard, I chose more than half-a-dozen points at which to dive:

  • Fish Hotel, Lyford Cay, and White Hole, near Nassau

  • Lost Blue Hole, about an hour by boat from Nassau

  • Dogleg Reef, an hour by boat from Marathon, in the Florida Keys

  • the "Atlantis Wall," near Bimini

  • Sunken Train, near Eluthera

 

 

Fellow scuba divers Al Miller, an American, and Joel Green, a Jamaican, accompanied me on these expeditions.

 

Over the course of several weeks, we carried out one to seven dives a week, depending on the time we had available.

Dressed in our scuba gear, and singly or in pairs, we dove at each location several times, usually descending to a depth of no more than a few dozen feet. The dives lasted 60 to 75 minutes; sometimes we made them from cheap inflatables, other times from rented boats.

We found clear evidence of deviations at four locations:

  • Fish Hotel, Lyford Cay, White Hole, near Nassau

  • Dogleg Reef, near Marathon, in South Florida

In the course of our dives, we recorded precise figures for what the compass readings were as compared to what they normally should have been.

Over the next few months, I communicated these figures to a number of physicists around the world. To a one, they told me that such magnetic field anomalies could be caused by briefly-appearing micro-wormholes. They could think of no other explanation for the deviations. Prof. John Wheeler, of Princeton University, in Princeton, NJ, has given the name of "wormhole" to what he believes may be "transit tunnels" between different dimensions of reality.

 

According to Wheeler, these wormholes may be only a giga-fraction of a square inch in size-the number one preceded by 33 zeroes, preceded by a decimal point. Wheeler says these mini-black holes, constantly blinking in and out of the geometry of space, are thought to be bits of "virtual matter;" that is, they can exist for a limited time only.

 

Their counterparts-so-called mini-white holes - are virtual anti-matter. Whenever these two kinds of virtual matter build up to any extent, they immediately destroy themselves. Wheeler can offer no explanation as to why mini-holes appear, disappear, then reappear.

Regarding my magnetic field anomaly readings, here are some typical responses, from some of the scientists-usually quantum physicists - to whom I spoke:

  • Dr. Werner Muller, physicist, Karlruhe, Germany, in a 1995 phone interview: "According to the figures you provided and the fact that no natural source was found in the bottom of the sea, there are just the quantum physical theories left to explain the phenomenon."
     

  • Professor Tsung-Min Gung, physicist, Tokyo, Japan, 1995; phone interviews: "If the theories of inter-dimensional connections are not completely wrong and can develop in the way I am expecting them to, the strong interdependencies with gravitation and the earth's magnetic field may be a way to track them down."
     

  • Grazyna Fosar, physicist, Berlin, Germany, in a radio discussion together with myself, in 1997: "From the physicist's point of view, gates to hyperspace can be the only reasonable explanation for these mysterious deviation fields."

These startling results led me to investigate, tentatively at first, then with growing interest, some of the other "Bermuda Triangle" phenomena associated with the Bahamas area.

 

I knew that the theory of compass deviations as being caused by "stargates" went back some way (though, as far as I knew, I was the first to come up with any figures); I was now told that the extremely high incidence of UFO sightings in the Bahamas archipelago had been associated by some researchers with these stargates.

I was further told that many of the sightings took place near the Atlantic Undersea Test and Evaluation Center (AUTEC), the American naval base on the Bahamas island of Andros, and that some researchers believed AUTEC might be an underwater "Area 51"- a place where secret research was being carried out on UFOs by the American government, and which, from time to time, was even visited by UFOs.

I decided, as a historian, to try to get to the bottom of these extraordinary speculations. The Atlantic Undersea Test and Evaluation Center (AUTEC) possesses unique resources, including an underwater range for testing and research on acoustic equipment. It is located 177 miles southeast of West Palm Beach, Florida, at Andros Island and the Tongue of the Ocean, in Bahamas.

 

The Andros Island AUTEC test facility-access to which must be obtained beforehand - covers only one square mile on land, but actually comprises 1,670 square miles of the surrounding Caribbean. This ocean area is a steep-sided deep-water embayment 100 miles long and 20 miles wide, with depths varying from 700 fathoms at the "rim" to 1,100 fathoms (more than a mile) at the northern end.

 

By any reckoning, this is a huge amount of underwater space.

I learned from more than one source that the Andros base has an ultra-top secret caliber of security. Here is an illustration. In 1997, a group of duck-hunters - who, admittedly, had walked right by a PROHIBITED AREA sign less than a mile from the base - suddenly found themselves confronting an unusually thick wall of foliage. At that very moment, they were knocked off their feet and their faces thrust into the ground.

The hapless duck-hunters quickly discovered that the foliage contained sailors in heavy camouflage, and that other sailors, leaping out of the foliage behind them, had hurled them to the ground. Taken to a nearby tent, they were grilled by a colonel for hours, until they were certain they would be thrown into prison.

 

Then, abruptly, the officer released them, declaring,

"I believe your story."

In the waters off Andros island, strange craft have been seen from time to time which not only resemble UFOs, but which display the same unbelievable swiftness of motion and execute the same incredibly sharp turns.

 

A Viennese businessman told me that, once, when he was yachting off the coast of Andros, he glimpsed, two miles away (it was a very clear day), in waters over a mile-and-a-half deep, a motionless object he thought was a whale. Coming to within almost half-a-mile of the object-which was now gleaming oddly-the yachter observed that it was some kind of man-made craft of ultramodern design.

Suddenly, the craft took off in a southerly direction at what my informant described as a "lunatic speed." It sped along the surface of the water. Then, abruptly, it disappeared beneath the waves, not to be seen again.

I have been told of conspiracy and suppression theories of a very dark nature which have been burgeoning around the subject of AUTEC as an "underwater Area 51," just as they have been around the subject of the real "
Area 51."

Here is an example, passed along to me by an informant whom I interviewed in November, 1998, at NASA headquarters at Cape Kennedy, Florida.

I was told that highly respected and world-class British scuba diver Rob Palmer, who had been director of a "blue holes" research center in Bahamas for a number of years, had failed to surface after a dive in the Red Sea, in Israel, in mid-July, 1997, and was presumed dead. Blue holes are small underwater caves, apparently formed from within, which are found predominately in the area of the Bahamas archipelago.

 

I think it possible that blue holes may, perhaps, have been formed by the popping in and out of existence of micro-wormholes.

Rob Palmer, apparently, had entertained a roughly analogous theory. In addition, he believed blue holes might be the transit points for UFOs arriving here from other dimensions, and his investigations were taking him closer and closer to the AUTEC base on Andros Island, where there is a very great proliferation of blue holes.

 

My informant told me there was a rumor that Palmer might have been murdered by officials at AUTEC, probably because he knew too much, and possibly by a post-hypnotic suggestion which caused him to take his own life while he was under the waters of the Red Sea.

As a professional historian, I don't care to indulge in such lurid speculations. But their existence suggests there might well be significant clandestine activity taking place at the Andros island AUTEC facility.

Since so much of the far-fetched material I had investigated had turned out to have some basis in reality, however indirect, I now decided to investigate the story that the area of the Bahamas is the site of the (not completely sunken) continent of
Atlantis.

Many have long believed that Bimini is a remnant of Atlantis. The idea was first mooted by trance-medium
Edgar Cayce, who claimed that many of the people to whom he gave readings had lived past lives on Atlantis. Using the latest technology, scientists from the British Government's Building Research Establishment have even discovered tiny amounts of coal and gold in apparently man-made stone found on the seabed at Bimini.

As a historian interested in primary rather than secondary sources, I decided to read the single text upon which all of the thousands of books on Atlantis are based: the dialogue called the Critias, by the Greek philosopher Plato.

Moreover, I decided to read the dialogue, not, as so many have, as myth or metaphor, but as historical fact. And I bypassed most of Plato's detailed account of the splendors of this ancient kingdom, concentrating instead on its dimensions as reported by Plato: What shape did Atlantis have? How long and wide was it?

I learned something intriguing:

  • that if you were to take the present-day Bahamas archipelago and raise the entire land-mass by 300 feet - or, to put it another way, lower the water level surrounding Bahamas by 300 feet (its level during the last Ice Age) - you would end up with a country that closely matched, in shape and size, the ancient Atlantis of Plato: The philosopher wrote in the Critias that the continent was larger than Egypt (as it was then known)

  • that the center of the island, not far from the sea, was formed by a plain surrounded by shallow mountains to a distance of six miles

  • that these mountains themselves were located in a large plain, surrounded by high mountains to a distance of 200 miles

My conclusions regarding the so-called Bimini Wall, thought by many to be a remnant of Atlantis, were not nearly so "New Age."

 

I believe that some of the stones making up the wall appear to be man-made, not because they came from Atlantis, but because they were left there during the American Civil War.

In those days, a great many ships ran the Union blockade to bring trade to Confederate harbors. Pursued by Union ships, these vessels often escaped into the shallow Bahamas waters where the big man-o-wars couldn't follow.

To navigate over the reefs that filled these waters, they frequently had to jettison weight so as to ride higher in the water. What easier way to do this than by dumping granite stones from the ship's ballast? That, I think, may account for a good many of the granite stones now found at such places as Bimini.

I pursued my investigations in a number of other areas. I found out, for instance, that Bahamas has its own legends of mysterious little monkey-like creatures that are almost never seen: the "chickcharnies".

 

I discovered there are numerous "ghost stories" associated with Bahamas, and that the shamans of the area are reputed to have almost godlike-powers. I came away with the impression - one that can scarcely be proven scientifically - that there is high degree of psychic, even "interdimensional," energy in the Bahamas archipelago.

My attention, though, keeps returning to the "underwater stargates of the Caribbean," which I discovered with my friends Al Miller and Joel Green. I continue to wonder what might be the next step in researching these "stargates." I have a proposal. It would be interesting to actually try to enter one of these "stargates", except that they are usually microscopic to an extreme degree, and they tend to fluctuate in and out of existence.

Therefore, I would like to suggest that one or a number of psychics descend to the sites of some of these underwater anomalies, perhaps those near Nassau, which are shallow, and not far from shore, and not far from the Bahamas capitol, which could make an excellent host to a world press tempted to attend this unusual,

"Underwater splashdown to the Stargate of the Caribbean."

Jeanne Dixon may be too old for such a venture; but there must be many youngish, athletic and gifted psychics who could be persuaded to don scuba diving gear and venture to the bottom of the ocean to see what telepathic feelings and messages they might be able to pick up, filtering ever so briefly through these on-again, off-again, underwater micro-wormholes.

My proposal may seem outlandish. But I and my scuba diving colleagues would be glad to train as divers any prospective psychics, and descend with them to the ocean bottom off Bahamas.

 

We could do it during the coolest month of the year in Bahamas-January.

 

January 1, 2000, seems like a propitious date. Do I have any takers?

 

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