the A.R.E.'s 2008 Search for Atlantis

[Desiree]

Hi all, I'd like to share some updates I got from Dr. Greg Little on the A.R.E.'s latest activities.  This material comes from info that Greg was kind enough to share with me over the course of a few discussions!


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.

[Desiree]

"The Phoenican ship in itself is an incredible find!  That alone could be the subject of it's own documentary.  When will you try and verify that it's Phoenician and release the info to the public?"

Reply: What we found was a pile of ruins from a white marble temple. Then we found through library research that it had been previously found and investigated and that the ribs of an 1800's ship were under the marble. Oddly, the night before we left our house for Virginia Beach to present the finds at a conference, Andrew Collins was staying with us. We discovered, to our amazement, another 1970s tv-documentary video piece on the marble. It stated that the Phoenician ship is under the ship with the marble on it!! Again, I'm clueless beyond that. I had long wondered about the source of the "Phoenician ship at Bimini" report--and I do not know if it's valid. We do not have plans to revisit it--there is just too much else to do. (A lot of confusion was caused by the 1970s researchers because they had no reliable way to refind something--they ad no gps. So the kept finding and losing sites that were later refound by someone else and then lost again.)

I'll add two more items. We were in Virginia Beach over New Years and spent two days in the Edgerton Sykes room copying and videotaping from his files. One of the early Bimini skeptics, John Gifford, was interviewed about the Bimini columns after he examined them in the 1970s. Gifford described the fluted marble columns and related that they appear to be directly linked to 3000-year old temples in the Mediterranean. Phoenician trading was cited. Secondly, Sykes had a huge amount of material regarding the Russian underwater explorations in the Mid-Atlantic. I wasn't aware that the Russians actually did so many followups to it all. The initial report they put out related that some of the things they found might be manmade. This is cited all the time. But, there were a host of follow-up articles by the same researchers, and they conclusively showed that everything they had seen on the bottom was natural. They had a lot of photos and scientific reports on it, most of which never were available in the US--and none of it is on the internet. Sykes also had a lot of books and articles on Atlantis in Spain, Cadiz, Andelucia, etc, etc., etc. Incredible. Not a new theory anywhere as every possible place is covered in these books even Israel, the UK, -- you name it. Sykes seemed convinced that Atlantis was primarily in the Bahamas-Carribean area, but it had remnants spread out all over the globe.

"As for the wall at Joulters, do you have any notion what it might be, any speculation?  What are it's dimensions, by the way?"

Reply: The wall, at least as far as we can tell, is about 300-400 yards long and curving before it disappears into the sand. The intact area of it is about 4-6 ft wide and 5-6 feet high as it comes off the bottom, but there are more stones below the sandy bottom. The first impression is that it could have been a high quality seawall of some sort, but the stone blocks are really nice. There is also a large flat area 30x30 feet formed by blocks. It isn't a pirate construction and it isn't modern. I remain stumped beyond that.

Dr. Michael Faught, former Chair of FSU's underwater archaeology department has accepted an offer to speak at the ARE October 9-12, 2008. See: http://www.edgarcayce.org/conferences/index.asp

"When will the documentary be out and do you have a title for it yet?"

Title: American Mysteries: The 40-Year Search for Edgar Cayce's Atlantis.

It is going to be shopped around to tv markets, starting in 2 months. If it can't be sold it'll be available as the first episode in a dvd series--around October.

[Horus]

Well this is really good news -thanks for sharing, Desiree.   

I have not talked to Greg in a while but the Phoenician ship was something I was investigating three years ago.  I have that old In Search Of video which Greg mentioned and I had I let him know about it and quoted the narration for him. 

"In Search Of Atlantis" originally aired on May 22, 1977, and the narrator Leonard Nimoy described an expedition to examine the Bimini Road which included Peter Tompkins, Dimitri Rebikoff, David Zink, and Count Pino Turolla. The relevant part of the narration goes as follows:

"Beyond the giant blocks, the divers discovered the remains of several ships.  One had gone down in the year 1830.  Beneath it lay the fragments of still another ship- one that had sailed the seas more than 3000 years ago.  Not a ship of Atlantis certainly, but according to Yale's Dr. J. Manson Valentine a voyager from Phoenicia.  The Phoenicans were the greatest sea traders of ancient times. Their ships called at every port in the known world.  Could it be that Phoenican traders came more than 5000 miles from the center of classical Mediterranean civilization to deal with a rich and fabled kingdom?  The question posed by the wrecks and the blocks of the Bimini Wall remain unanswered as the expedition continued to explore the waters of Bimini"

Throughout this quoted narration is footage of the divers exploring these wrecks then afterwards it moves on to Turolla examining the marble columns.  It looked to me like there was an amphora lodged in some debris there.

I felt it was important to relocate this wreck because of the strong superficial resemblance that the Bimini Road has to Phoenician breakwaters at Akko on the Levantine Coast.  The shipwreck is nearby and helps to support the hypothesis that Bimini (and perhaps Andros and Anguilla) were Phoenician harbors, and the greater theory of cultural diffusion from the Ancient World to North and South America.