The MEGA Blog

Is it the end of the road for Bimini?

The following comments from Dr. Greg Little were posted on the Atlantis Online message board titled “The A.R.E.’s 2008 Search for Atlantis.”

(see http://atlantisonline.smfforfree2.com/index.php/topic,6611.0.html)

These comments relate to earlier papers published by Little on the Internet and many have been reproduced elsewhere on this blog. For me – and probably for this blog – the most significant portion of the dialog that follows is in the third paragraph from the end, where Dr. Little says, “We have no intention of doing anything else at Bimini, all we can do there has been done already.”

<Begin Quote>

What we know is this: the boat on the Great Bahama Bank is from the 1600s and the wall at Joulters is a complete mystery. We have expended all the time we will on trying to gather more info on the wall at Joulters. We may eventually try to dig out some portions to see exactly how far down it extends and goes. Two of the planes we found are planes reportedly lost in the Bermuda Triangle...the second one was identified in October. The marble temple ruins we found at Bimini are supposedly the cargo of a ship from 1823 BUT we discovered that this sits on top of the long-sought-after Phoenician ship that was reported discovered in 1970 or so. The Phoenician ship was found (or allegedly found) by several of the early 1970s people who investigated Bimini. An old "In Search Of" episode was the final piece of evidence we needed. But I don't think anyone ever verified that it was really Phoenician. We discovered this fact with Andrew Collins the night we left for the conference at Virginia Beach back in October, but we have not yet publically released that bit of interesting info. At the least, we ran down the source of the Phoenician ship discovered at Bimini and now have the precise location. I have no idea how they determined it was Phoenician, but that's what they seemed to surmise from its size, shape, etc. We have no further plans regarding the marble or the ships. Plus, we processed all of the underwater photos of the rectangular formations on the bottom about 5 miles off Bimini in 90-feet of water. These were initially found in the side-scan project Bill Donato did back in Nov. 06. The photos were converted to b/w and the contrast and brightness enhanced. The rectangular formations are all deeply encrusted with coral, but seem to be formed with small building blocks neatly stacked. Corners are visible as are layers of stone. These seem to be the remains of small stone buildings that were at an elevated shoreline in 10,000 BC. I have now spoken to a well-known mainstream archaeologist about these and am trying to arrange a professional excavation conducted by a university-based archaeology group that is completely impartial. I initially had no idea if it would come about. But now I think it will.

Another large ARE side-scan sonar/sub-bottom profiling project will be done in February at Bimini. It will investigate some deep stone anomalies and look at the descending wall of the Gulf Stream at 300-feet in an area that Dr. Joan Hanley identified about a decade ago.

The ARE completed a huge side-scan sonar & sub-bottom profiling project at Bimini in the summer. It went over many of the areas Bill did back in 2006 but covered about 3x the total area Bill did. It found only one anomaly, the one that will be tested in Feb 08.

As to plans, we have been actively testing various boats and are going to buy one sufficient to do what we need. We have been to various boat shows and to marinas in Florida, Virginia and Georgia looking for what we need. It is not as easy as it sounds. We have no intention of doing anything else at Bimini, all we can do there has been done already.

Our first order of business is to do an extended aerial survey over the next portion of the Great Bahama Bank and identify the locations of potential targets. That will be in late January or early Feb.  But we intend to spend about a week in central Andros immediately after the aerial survey. We also have made tentative plans to go to the Canary islands but there are just so much time.

I am now completing our next documentary which has realistic
reenactments of Cayce giving some of the important Atlantis readings and then show what has been found. This has already been filmed and came out very well.

<EndQuote>

So here's the question of the day: Will someone else pick up the search for the ancient maritime culture(s) of the Caribbean or is it really GAME OVER?

Happy New Year and Welcome Back!

You’ve probably noticed that there haven’t been any new posts here for quite a while. Part of the reason is that I’ve been busy finishing up the third (and last) novel in my Seeds of Civilization series and I’m happy to report that I completed that project on December 31^st! The other reason is that there just hasn’t been any news relating to the search for ancient maritime cultures in MegaAmerica.

I did run across one interesting story about a month ago and I guess I’ll have to dig it out of my Pending file until something new comes in from Bill Donato or Greg and Lora Little. I’ve emailed Greg for a post-conference follow-up and I know Bill has some really interesting side-scan sonar images taken near Bimini, but so far I have nothing I can report on.

On December 17^th, National Geographic News  ran a story by Brian Handwerk titled Bahamas “Blue Hole” Yields Pre-Human Fossil Treasures. Naturally, the title caught my attention and it includes some facts that may support the work being done by Donato and the Littles.

The Bahamas are home to a large number of underwater cave systems called blue holes and many of them have never been explored. The NG article focuses on one particular site, known as Sawmill Sink, where the National Museum of the Bahamas has been recovering some remarkable fossils, including the remains of extinct species of lizards, snakes, bats, birds and plants. They’ve even found human remains that are more than a thousand years old!

 Sawmill Sink, like many of the other blue hole sites, was once a dry cave system that flooded when the seas rose at the end of the last ice age. Many blue holes in the Bahamas contain stalagmites and stalactites, features than can only develop above the surface. If the sea levels rose approximately 10,000 years ago, MegaAmerica’s blue holes may soon provide clues to what – and who – inhabited the area in ancient times.

Good Science, Bad Science and the Bahamas

Several years ago, and long before this blog, I ran across a couple of on-line articles by a Dutch professor named Dr. Zweistra that I liked so much I printed them out and filed them away in my “stuff to keep” folder. About a year ago I wanted to include those articles in a blog post I was working on but when I went back to the original Web site I found that it was now password protected. I contacted the University of Leiden (Netherlands) last January and five months later I finally received a reply that basically said, “Sorry, but we can’t help you.”

Last month blog member “SandRock” asked me why a specific Greg Little article wasn’t included in my list, so I gave him the background information above. The Little article mentions and quotes Dr. Zweistra extensively but, unfortunately, none of the links at the end work due to the password problem so I chose to omit it rather than create reader confusion.

Luckily for us all, SandRock’s brother happened to be a student at the very same University of Leiden and he helped track down the new location of Dr. Z’s articles, which I’ve listed below.

Thank you SandRock!

P.S. After you read Dr. Z’s Editorial Page and Dr. L’s article, you’ll understand the title of this post.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Dr. Zweistra’s new site: http://www.altarcheologie.nl/

Dr. Little’s article: http://www.edgarcayce.org/am/leidenunivevaluat.html

200,000-Year-Old Sailors?

An article in the July/August (2007) issue of Minerva Magazine places the origins of village life and sea travel as far back as 200,000 to 400,000 years before present (BP).

Professor Helmut Ziegert, an archaeologist at Hamburg University, has been conducting surveys and excavations for 39 years and he’s convinced that evidence from sites in Libya and Ethiopia will move the initial appearance of human civilization from 10,500 year BP back to at least 200,000 years BP and maybe well before that!

Ziegert has identified a total of 37 Lower Paleolithic sites from China to Germany that he claims support his revolutionary theory. If he’s right, the suspected ancient maritime cultures of the Caribbean and the South Pacific become much less of a mystery, given the extra 190,000 years they may have had to develop!

Read the entire Minerva article at:
http://minervamagazine.com/news.asp?min_issue=JUL_AUG2007#0

A Message From Dr. Greg Little

Some recent posts on The Mega Blog have cited the writings of Eugene Shinn and others (the skeptics) who published an article in 2004 designed to discredit those conducting real, on-site research in the Bahamas, especially at the "Bimini Road" location. I'm familiar with the report and I've also read Dr. Greg Little's comments about the report, but I thought our members would appreciate hearing from Dr. Little directly, so I asked him if he would respond. Below is his reply, word-for-word.

<quote>
The Skeptical Inquirer article authored by Eugene Shinn is so filled with lies, inaccuracies, and distortions that it is beyond absurd. These are all easily provable as wrong, but skeptics who are gullible "true believers"

will continue to cite Shinn's Skeptical Inquirer article as some sort of proof for their false belief system.

Shinn says the columns at Bimini were proven to be Portland cement and cites "Harrison" as his reference. Harrison's article related that the columns (that were not actually fluted marble) were an old form of lime kiln cement.

Shinn simply "made up" or "fabricated" the Portland Cement assertion because it makes it sound absurd. Shinn---and several notable skeptics---simply ignore the huge fluted marble columns found next to the "cement" ones--but they were detailed by Harrison.

Shinn and the skeptics will gladly send you an e-copy of everything but Shinn's actual research article that detailed the genuine results of the cores. (Ask Shinn for the actual "Sea Frontiers" article and see what

happens.) In that actual article he related that less than a quarter of the "bedding planes" in his cores were consistent in that they dipped toward deep water. But none of the skeptics will actually read what Shinn actually reported in his reported results. Instead, skeptics report the altered, fabricated, and hoaxed results--the hoax--that relates the cores were all consistent and dipped from one stone to the next.

As to the cut support stones and rectangular wedge stones being easily removed from under the big blocks, who said they were easily removed??? I personally removed about 8-9 of these, but this wasn't exactly easy and there were many, many others that couldn't be budged or dug out.

As to the carbon dates Shinn reports: they were done by students using "bulk dating." Shinn has admitted that bulk dating is unreliable. But we have not asserted that the Bimini Road is older than 7,000 years.

Shinn also cites the following "facts" in his article:

> Plato said that the Atlantis story was "7000-years old." Huh?? What Plato ever said that?

> The Bimini Road was discovered in the early 1960s. Huh?? How did Shinn make this up?

> He dismisses a "Demitri Ribicoff" a "new ager" -- who is really Dimitri Rebikoff, PhD from the Sorbonne.

> He cites an "Edward Zink" who was actually David Zink.

> He cites a "Lester Hemmingway" who was actually Leicester Hemmingway, a newspaper editor.

There are so many more errors in Shinn's article...and I admitted that I am embarassed by how terribly inaccurate an article in The Skeptical Inquirer could be because my own research has been cited by that ... ah ...

pseudoscientific claptrap ... as notable.

Here is a fact about Shinn: he received a bachelors degree in biology.

That's it... Just before he retired he got an honorary doctorate... Believe what you will--and skeptics can claim that Shinn was the greatest geologist of all time.

My bottom analytical line in this is psychological. I have met almost no one who is interested in the truth about this. People cite "things" --- factual or contrived -- that support their currently held viewpoint. Facts do not seem to matter to any "true believers" whether they believe that Atlantis never existed or Atlantis is here or there.

I do not know if Atlantis existed or not. I have written about what various people "said" about Atlantis and various research projects seeking to find Atlantis. All I know is that there are a lot of interesting underwater artifacts in the Bahamas that show there was a maritime culture present there in a time period before historians accept. Armchair skeptics as well as armchair believers can be equally gullible. But it takes actual work to find out the truth and that's a bit more than most want to do.

Dr. Greg Little
<end quote>

Dr. Little has far more important things to do than debate this issue on a blog, so I appreciate his reply to my email and his permission to post that reply here. Just in case there's still any doubt, I'm firmly on the Greg Little side of this debate and this blog is written from that stand-point. I've seen the photos and read the published work. I also recommend the 73-minute documentary video titled "The Ancient Bimini Harbor: Uncovering the Great Bimini Hoax" produced by Dr. Little.

One final thought: this Web site exists to report on the discoveries in MegaAmerica that I believe will one day lead to the undeniable conclusion that an as yet unknown ancient maritime culture once inhabited the area. I do NOT feel obligated to grant equal time to opposing views, but I made an exception in the case of the Shinn writings because I think it furthers the work in the Bahamas if people realize that some of the so-called "scientific" reports aren't supported by the work actually being done in the water. As usual, your comments are welcome.

Catastrophic Sea Level Rise

In a recent email, blog member Ron Smith suggested that my Sea Level Rise chart in the photo gallery doesn’t take into account the Younger Dryas interval, so I did some digging and I believe he’s correct. Here’s what I learned:

The Younger Dryas interval was an unusually cold period that interrupted the last deglaciaction. As the glaciers began to melt, the temperature of the earth – and the levels of the seas – began to rise as well. But something happened about 12,800 years ago that reversed this trend for more than a thousand years. Then, as quickly as it had come, the Younger Dryas event ended and temperatures in northern hemisphere rose by as much as ten degrees Centigrade in ten years! Compared to the current global warming trend of less than one degree per hundred years, the YD interval was a catastrophe of major proportions.

The exact timing of the Younger Dryas interval has a fairly wide margin of error, but evidence of its occurrence comes from a number of sources, including glacial deposits, tropical and polar ice caps, pollens, lake and marine sediments, tree rings, corals and speleothems. Furthermore, evidence appears from Greenland to China, indicating that this was not just a regional problem.

There’s a lot of speculation about what might have initiated the cold snap, but one explanation I ran across frequently was a meteor impact in the area of the Great Lakes. This could have caused an extraordinary amount of fresh water to be released through the St. Lawrence valley and into the North Atlantic which, in turn, disrupted the thermohaline circulation of the Earth’s oceans and produced global climate changes.

Another graph in the main photo gallery depicts the rate of sea level rise (not the actual depth) in centimeters per century over the past 20,000 years. Except for just the last few years (extreme right side), the seas have been experiencing a nearly constant and very gradual rise since about 1,000 B.C. Compare that to the dramatic events of the two recent “spikes” and you begin to understand how ancient civilizations could have literally disappeared off the face of the earth.

For more information on Younger Dryas I suggest:

http://www.ldeo.columbia.edu/res/pi/arch/examples.shtml

http://www.agu.org/revgeophys/mayews01/node6.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Younger_Dryas

http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/abrupt/data_glacial.html

http://www.atmos.washington.edu/2001Q2/211/groupD/page5.html

http://icebubbles.ucsd.edu/Publications/YoungerDryas.pdf

I’m still looking for a direct sea-level vs. year chart that takes into account the Younger Dryas interval. If you know where I can find one, please drop me a line.

The New Yonaguni

For a couple of weeks now, various media outlets have been running a story about the Yonaguni monument based on information from Masaaki Kimura, a professor at Ryukyu University. Kimura claims to be “on the verge” of proving that the underwater megalithic feature was the foundation of a castle built in the middle of a city that was sunk by an earthquake 3,000 years ago. That would make the site at least 7,000 years newer than previously thought! The new theory first appeared on the Reuters News Service HERE but let’s examine what we really know about Yonaguni.

First of all, the underwater feature was actually discovered by Kihachiro Aratake, a local dive operator who was scouting for new sites. This fact is overlooked in every one of the recent articles I’ve read, which credit the discovery to “scuba diving tourists.” Aratake was – and still is – a dive operator on Yonaguni Island and he made his amazing discovery in 1985, 1986, 1987 or 1988, depending which source you read. Even Graham Hancock cites two different years: 1987 in Heaven’s Mirror (Three Rivers Press, 1998) and 1986 in Underworld (Crown Publishers, 2002). Regardless of the exact year, Dive Master Aratake deserves a nod anytime the Yonaguni monument is mentioned.

According to the most recent version of his findings, Professor Kimura now believes that the Yonaguni megalith was once part of a castle in the center of a city that also included a castle, a shrine, an arch, statues and a coliseum. “Judging by the design and disposition of the ruins,” he is quoted as saying, “the city must have looked just like an ancient Roman city. I can envisage a triumphal arch-like statue stood on the left side of the Coliseum and a shrine over the hill.” Kimura claims the city was sunk by an earthquake 3,000 years ago. At least that’s what he says today. Remember that the megalith was at the center of a city that was destroyed by an earthquake – we’ll come back to this later.

In 2002, Kimura was interviewed by Morien Institute through a series of emailed questions and answers. You can read the entire article HERE but the last two questions warrant some discussion.

When asked about evidence that the Yonaguni monument was once above sea level, Kimura responded, "When it comes to evidence that Iseki Point [the site of the monument] was once well above sea-level, the Yonaguni 'sea-floor stalactite cavern' has been studied by me with scientific methods and now put this fact beyond dispute."

When asked about the age of the monument, he replied, "After studying the No 1 monument at Yonaguni for more than 10 years, the structure may have been manufactured in the dry air about 10 thousand years ago based on such evidence as age determinations of the stalactite in the underwater caverns, and of the No.1 monument using 14C and 10Be methods." [14c and 10Be are scientific dating methods and Kimura mentions the ten thousand year age several times during the interview]

Before reading on, you might want to check out the underwater site for yourself. A Google search for the exact phrase “Yonaguni photos” yields 62 hits and many of the pictures posted on the Internet are remarkable.  I’ve also added a picture to the Gallery that you should check out before continuing.

Now that you’ve seen the site first-hand (well, technically, second-hand) I remind you of Kimura’s claim that the structure was once at the center of a city that was sunk by an earthquake. Did you see, in a single photograph, the kind of rubble you would expect to find if an entire city had been destroyed? Quite the contrary! The smooth, sandy bottom is conspicuously devoid of rocks, boulders and debris. The picture I added to the gallery was taken by professional underwater photographer Danielle Caceres-Bricheno earlier this year (2007) when she explored the site with Aratake and she says, "There is nothing that looks like it was affected by an earth quake at all.” More of her incredible Yonaguni photos are online HERE.

Although I couldn’t find any photographs of the stalactite cavern Kimura claims to have studied, I seriously doubt if the stalactites would have been worthy of much study if they had been through an earthquake large enough to sink an entire city. No, I think Graham Hancock’s original scenario – that the site was submerged by rising sea levels – is much more likely to explain the physical evidence. It also explains the well-preserved stalactite and stalagmite caves of the Bahamas, and the massive complex beneath the island of Cozumel. The real question seems to be why did Kimura revise his thinking and move the submergence of the Yonaguni monument 7,000 years into the future? None of the available interviews (see YouTube interview HERE) mention his “old” theory or ask why he’s changed his mind. However, the new theory certainly fits the academic view of history much better than his old theory did.

[Footnote: The second novel in my Seeds of Civilization series takes place almost entirely on the island of Yonaguni and suggests an entirely different origin and purpose for the monument, but at least I tell my readers my story is fiction! Et tu, Kimura?]

New Discoveries in the Bahamas (Part 3 of 3)

Dr. Greg Little’s third report details the discovery of “Joulter’s Wall” – a stone wall found in shallow water off a deserted island seven miles north of Andros. Little and his team spent four days filming the wall and exploring the surrounding islands, known as the Joulter Cays.

In Little’s own words:

“The wall itself is actually located in a small, narrow bay between what appears to be two islands. The bay is 3-7-feet deep, depending on the tide, and has sharks coming in at high tide. From the bay, the wall extends diagonally away from the two islands into water that is one-to-four feet deep ending where sandbars are located and the bottom is barely covered by water. About two miles further, through this shallow water, is the [6,000-foot] deep Tongue of the Ocean.”

Describing the wall, he reports:

“The wall is primarily made from square and rectangular limestone blocks that range in length from 3-6-feet, a width of 2-3-feet, and a thickness of 6-inches to 3-feet—with some blocks far larger. The blocks are obviously cut and roughly dressed and rough tool marks are clearly visible on many. There are some smaller, cube-like stones, about a foot square, occasionally found in portions of the intact wall and in places on the bottom. One area of the wall remains fairly intact and is found in water about 6-feet deep. Brushing the sandy bottom underneath the lowest tier of stones revealed more limestone blocks under the visible portion. How far down it extends is unknown. This section of the wall runs approximately 30-feet long and is formed by the massive blocks stacked on top of each other with 2-3 vertical layers of blocks visible.”

On the nearby island, Little’s team discovered two small dams possibly used as fish traps. Although Bahamian fishermen claim they’ve never used traps, Little suggests that they look very similar to those commonly used by the Maya.

Dr. Little's complete article is available at:

http://www.mysterious-america.net/atlantisandros20.html

Don’t forget that The Littles will be presenting the full results of the 2006-2007 Bimini and Andros expeditions at the Annual Ancient Mysteries Conference in Virginia Beach, VA on October 6, 2007.

Digging for the Truth

The History Channel launches the fourth season of its Digging for the Truth series on Monday, September 3, 2007 at 9 PM (8 Central) with an episode about the Chachapoya, a band of warriors who preceded the Inca by five hundred years and built a giant stone monument three times the size of Egypt’s largest pyramid.

On September 17th the series will air an episode titled Kings of the Stone Age focusing on the Olmec – the most mysterious culture of the Americas.

Although new episodes air on Mondays at 9PM (8/C), they are repeated several times throughout the week. See the series Web site at http://www.history.com/minisite.do?content_type=mini_home&mini_id=1337 for more details.

P.S. If you know of upcoming TV shows that are relevant to the topics covered here at The Mega Blog, please drop me a line (rja@TheMegaBlog.com) and I’ll get the word out to our growing subscriber list. If there’s enough interest, I’ll consider making the TV listings a regular feature of the site. (Thanks to George E for his continued updates)

Caribbean Anomalies Revisited

As we all await the third installment of Dr. Greg Little’s Bahamas research report (see ‘Part 2 of 3’, below), I thought it might be a good time to revisit a post I published more than a year ago, on May 10, 2006. [Read it here]

In ‘Is MEGA just the tip of the Iceberg?’ I showed you a composite photo I put together [see it here] and suggested that there were still many unsolved mysteries in the Caribbean. Thanks to the efforts of Drs. Greg & Lora Little, Bill Donato and others, we will soon have some extremely significant answers – and a lot more questions!

After nearly forty years, Bimini Road can now be correctly classified as an ancient, man-made megalithic structure and not simply an accident of nature. Proving that Bimini Road is actually a breakwater that was built to protect an ancient harbor solves one mystery, but it also raises new questions. Who built this breakwater and why does it closely resemble similar structures built by the Phoenicians in the Mediterranean more than 3,000 years ago? Is this just a coincidence or were they designed by the same engineers?

As additional hard evidence is made public [see some here], the existence of an ancient maritime culture in the Caribbean will become an excepted reality and perhaps some of the anomalies in my composite will make sense. But then we’ll have a whole new set of questions to answer. Where did this culture originate? Did they interact with other cultures elsewhere on Earth? Were there even earlier civilizations, lost beneath the rising oceans?

These are exciting times we live in, and it’s rare when you can say “Stay tuned for exciting announcements next week, and again in a month,” and really mean it but here’s some dates for your calendar:

• September 1, 2007: Expected release of Little’s Part 3 of 3 report
• October 6, 2007: Presentation by the Littles at the Ancient Mysteries Conference

Dr. Greg Little on Radio Monday, 8/13/2007

Dr. Greg Little will be on Coast to Coast AM with George Noory Monday at 11:00 p.m. (PDT) discussing his recent finds in the Bahamas (see my previous post). For the next couple of days his article will include links to some never-before-seen photos from the recent expeditions. Here’s a “teaser” of what you’ll find:

http://www.nwidi.org/gallery/StoneWall.jpg

In the photo, Dr. Little is holding a block from the underwater wall discovered about 7 miles north of Bimini.

(Sorry this news is so late appearing, but as you may have heard The Mega Blog was "dark" for a week due to a blunder on my part and we just got things back up today.)

New Discoveries in the Bahamas! (Part 2 of 3)

In this second installment of his three-part report, Dr. Greg Little provides more information about the discoveries made during several recent expeditions to the Bahamas. This month he details the finds at Bimini and next month he’ll conclude the series with a piece on the discoveries at Andros Island.

Highlights of this month’s article include a more comprehensive description of the marble columns, beams and slabs (complete with underwater photos) that I discussed in a previous post and a side-scan sonar image from Bill Donato’s November, 2006 expedition. I’ve personally seen nearly thirty of these images, and some of them are very interesting, indeed. Little describes a dive to one of these sites and explains why he thinks the rectangular formations found there may be the foundations of 12,000 year-old buildings!

Read the entire article at: http://www.mysterious-america.net/bimini2007.html

Drs. Greg and Lora Little will be presenting the results of their recent Bahamas expeditions at the annual Ancient Mysteries Conference in Virginia Beach, VA on October 6, 2007. See http://www.mysterious-america.net./ancientmysteries.html for more details.

The Day the Sea Swallowed Phoenicia

Researchers at the National Center for Geophysical Research (Beirut, Lebanon) believe they’ve found the fault that caused a major earthquake and spawned huge tsunamis in 551 A.D. Historical records confirm that this catastrophic event drowned the city of Beirut and killed more than 30,000 people.

The researchers postulate that at least four other earthquakes similar to the 551 A.D. event have occurred in the past 6,000 to 7,000 years and the dating of mollusk shells indicate that these destructive events occur every 1,500 to 1,700 years. If their analysis is correct, then modern-day Phoenicia (aka Lebanon) is due for another quake of magnitude 7.5 or greater any time now. Lebanon has a population of more than 4 million people and more than 70 percent of them live along the coast where the country’s major infrastructure is also located.

[Source: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/pf/27678586.html]

Besides serving as a wake up call for the citizens of Lebanon (and all other coastal communities in geologically active areas) this discovery reinforces the need for much more underwater archaeology. I find it incredible that academia has “created” their history of earth’s civilizations knowing full well that they’ve only examined a fraction of the evidence (the part that conveniently sticks out of the water!) when most of the oldest records are probably still submerged. And they’ve not only created their own version of history, they aggressively defend it to this day! Hopefully the work going on in the Bahamas, and elsewhere around the world, will change that attitude soon – maybe even this year!

Fact Meets Fiction

As you’ve probably noticed by the links in the upper right margin of this blog’s home page, I’m also the author of a series of mystery adventure novels called the Seeds of Civilization. The stories are loosely based on Graham Hancock’s ancient/lost civilization theory and each novel uses a different unsolved archaeological mystery as its backdrop. One of my main writing goals has been to blend fact and fiction together so seamlessly that the reader loses track of when the switch occurs. I started writing the series several years ago, long before this blog was conceived, but the two seem to be converging this summer. You see, about the time I started the third book, (tentatively titled Triangle) I had just stumbled onto a report about the 2000 discovery of the “lost city of Cuba” by Paulina Zelitsky and her crew off the NW tip of Cuba. MEGA, as it was being called, seemed like the perfect story backdrop, even though it posed some difficult technical challenges for my characters due to its 2,100-foot depth.

In my writing, the background research is half the fun, and Triangle has been no exception. The search for a technology that would get my characters down to MEGA led me to the Web site of Global Marine Systems, a British company that installs and maintains trans-oceanic communications cables. Many of Global’s ships are equipped with sophisticated ROVs (remotely operated vehicles) that are capable of working at depths of 6,000 feet, more than enough to explore the MEGA site. I contacted Global for more information and not only received a thick packet of printed material and a copy of a video that featured the company, but I also received an invitation to visit one of their vessels at its home port of Victoria, BC, Canada! Although the ship that “stars” in Triangle is fictitious, it’s based on my tour of Global’s Wave Venture – a real, working cable maintenance ship capable of exploring MEGA and many other underwater sites.

While the research at MEGA has been stalled for some time now, that didn’t stop my characters from exploring – and eventually unraveling – the mysteries of the site. In fact, that effort makes up the first third of Triangle. After an unpleasant encounter with some “Cubans”, my characters follow a lead (quite literally) from MEGA to the Bahamas where the story will eventually conclude. Much of the factual information for the Bahamas location is coming from the first-hand accounts of Bill Donato and Drs. Greg and Lora Little that you have read right here on the The Mega Blog. Of course, my characters make fictional discoveries and draw fictional conclusions not suggested by either Donato or the Littles, but the parallels are intentionally close.

Triangle is expected to be complete by the end of the year, and I’m certainly feeling the pressure to finish before Donato and/or the Little’s announce discoveries that may be even more shocking than the fictional end I have planned for my novel!

Call to Action

Unfortunately, fact moves much slower than fiction in real life. While the technology to conduct underwater archaeology exploration clearly exists, the funding often does not. Much of the research described in The Mega Blog is self-funded or funded by small private donations to 501-c organizations. If you would like to help out financially, please send an email to me at rja@TheMegaBlog.com and I’ll pass your contact information along to the researcher or organization of your choice. I can not provide you with their contact info, so please don’t ask.

More on the Marble Columns

RE: Blog entry of 7/3/2007, Bermuda Triangle Yields Marble Columns …

After I posted my July 3rd entry (below) I was contacted by a reader who questioned the authenticity of the marble columns mentioned by Dr. Greg Little in his article that I cited. If you use your favorite search engine to look for "bimini marble columns" you'll discover that there's a lot of information (and misinformation) on the Internet about the alleged discovery of marble columns. I decided to take the matter up with William M. (Bill) Donato, an anthropologist and archaeologist who has accompanied Drs. Greg and Lora Little on a number of their Bahamas expeditions and who has also made many of his own, dating back to 1974.

I asked, “Did the marble columns fall off a barge or are they ancient artifacts?”

This, in part, is his reply:

“This is actually a complicated issue and depends entirely on WHICH marble you are talking about. There was a fluted marble column on North Bimini at Entrance Point. Dr. Zink checked out the area in 1989, but it was gone then. Ferro and Grumley in their book "Atlantis - The Autobiography of a Search" had a photo of it, I think. It was definitely shown in Marx's 1971 Argosy article. There was a slab on South Bimini, intentionally destroyed after 1998. I showed it to Andrew Collins, who took a sample. It supposedly came from Moselle Shoals, where there is apparently more -- though I have only seen granite there, but it is a very BIG area and I've only seen a small part of it. Some of my associates claim to have seen some marble on the Bimini Road, Raymond Leigh, Jr., among others. The marble at the "Architrave" (about 10 miles north of Bimini) is legitimate and "Classical", from a temple on a ship called "the Glory of the Sea" that went down in the 1820's.

“The problem with ballast and the column that was at Entrance Point is that it was once a government dock according to the local people. It would seem to have been strange to use it for ballast. MUCH of the ballast barrels are NOT concrete. Those Greg and I retrieved (mine analyzed by Dr. Robert McKinney, petrologist) was "caliche", also known as "mudstone" and was absolutely NOT concrete -- but was probably still used as ballast. They must not have done a very good search or sampling if they only got concrete. Here are the possibilities of the column that WAS off of Entrance Point. It was ballast, it was once at Moselle, it may have been from (or destined to go to) some part of the South [the southern U.S.], it is legitimate and from the Classical World. The marble on the Road is more likely Classical. Dr. Zink's marble head does not look like Classical Greek or Roman, but perhaps it was Phoenician or Carthaginian? Atlantean? It MAY have been dropped there, but I seriously doubt it. Anything that's fluted and looks Classical (and remember the Phoenicians and Carthaginians also imported such things) probably is -- or is a copy.”

So there you have it, directly from someone who’s made dozens (maybe hundreds) of dives in the Bahamas. From my telephone conversations with him, I’m positive that Bill Donato believes there are ancient megalithic structures – or at least the remains of them – on the ocean floor around Bimini, Andros and elsewhere in the Bahamas. I recently had the opportunity to preview some side-scan sonar images from his November expedition and all I can say is that they're truly amazing!

Stay tuned for more on this ...