A Conversation with David Childress "Maverick archaeologist and explorer David Hatcher Childress has combed the Indian Ocean, Australia and the Pacific in search of the astonishing truth about mankind's past." The author of Lost Cities of Atlantis, Ancient Europe & the Mediterranean shares his insights about lost civilizations.
The very readable book, Lost Cities of Atlantis, Ancient Europe & the Mediterranean, illustrated with stunning photographs, grabbed our attention. The author, an archaeologist, explorer and world traveler speaks with us about many subjects related to his studies and explorations of lost civilizations.
The Monthly Aspectarian: David, I'm almost through your Lost Cities of Atlantis, Ancient Europe & the Mediterranean. Fascinating stuff. How did all this start for you?
David Childress: I got started at an early age. My parents, who are Americans, liked to travel and I was born in France. I was fortunate when I was younger that I got to go to a lot of places in Europe, Greece and Turkey and to Mexico and Hawaii. I've always been interested in history and mysteries of the past, which included Atlantis.
When I was nineteen and studying at the University of Montana. I had the opportunity to go to Taiwan as an English teacher. Then I headed for Nepal and the Himalayas and India and across Asia. I was in Afghanistan, and then through the Middle East, through Syria and Jordan to Israel. I worked in Israel for a while on a kibbutz. Eventually I went to Egypt. I'd always wanted to see the Great Pyramid and the Sphinx. This is all back in the late '70s.
Eventually I traveled through Africa for two and a half years and returned to India and then to China where I became one of the first tourists ever to travel around on my own. I returned to the U.S., where I started writing my books. The first book was called A Hitchhiker's Guide and Africa and Arabia. Then after that was my first lost cities book, which was called Lost Cities of China, Central Asia and India.
TMA: Why do you suppose mainstream archaeology, seemingly on purpose, suppresses information of civilizations older than Egypt and Mesopotamia?
DHC: Mainstream archaeology does have a resistance -- it's very conservative -- a resistance to civilization being a lot older than that. They have a resistance to man being in the Americas for any great extended period of time. Mainstream science says mankind has only been in the Americas since the last Ice Age, about 12,000 BC. But that date is continually being pushed back and many scientists in North and South America place mankind already in America 30, 40, 50 thousand, even 70 or 100 thousand BC. It's increasingly difficult for the mainstream to resist this, so slowly they are pushed back. Mainstream archaeology is now going to the oldest ruins in the world, the giant ruins in Malta. They say they're older than the Egyptian ruins.
TMA: So they are admitting that.
DHC: Yes, although they're saying that those ruins on Malta are 9,000 years old or so. Other geologists are saying that the Sphinx is over 10,000 years old, but the mainstream really hasn't acknowledged that yet.
TMA: The Sphinx is lined up with the Age of Leo, which makes it 12,000 to 14,000 years ago. I think that's fairly well established. It's obvious that that's water erosion on the body of the Sphinx..
DHC: Mainstream archaeologists still won't admit that. The tunnel system beneath the pyramids is pretty interesting, really.
TMA: Do you believe there's a Hall of Records hidden in the Great Pyramid and that we're going to find it and all the history is going to be laid out for us?
DHC: I do. There's a Hall of Records maybe underground in the Giza Plateau or beneath the Sphinx or possibly under the Pyramid . . . yes, I do believe that, and perhaps the Egyptian government is on the right track, going into those tunnels. In my books I write quite a bit about secret libraries and time capsules from ancient civilizations. Some of them have actually been found. Never this Hall of Records, though, that Edgar Cayce mentions, but the Cayce Foundation is spending millions of dollars trying to find it.
TMA: It has always seemed to me that one of the greatest crimes in recorded history was the burning of the library at Alexandria.
DHC: Yes, that's right. That's exactly the thing to keep in mind. Giant libraries full of important knowledge are just torched and destroyed. The same thing happened with the Emperor Chi Wong Ti of China. He ordered every book in China destroyed in 500 BC. This is the guy who built the Great Wall of China, and has that tomb with all the terra cotta warriors.
TMA: What goes on in these people's minds that they want to destroy the past?
DHC: What happens is that you have dictators, despots who want history to start with them. The past has been destroyed many times over. There are many countries where the past is wiped out and history starts again. The Catholics and the Spanish tried to do it in Central America.
TMA: Most recently, the Cambodians.
DHC: Yes, in Cambodia, too, where anybody, even people who could read and write and knew different languages -- they were all just taken out and killed. I just came back from Cambodia, as a matter of fact.
TMA: It's always been pretty obvious to me that the first parts of Genesis are a collection of older stories. What could the Tower of Babel possibly be but an advanced civilization that had something like the Internet.
DHC: That's a good analogy. I believe they used electricity in the past and they had flight. And they had horrific weapons like we do. The ancient Indian epics read like wild science fiction. People flying around in their airships blasting each other. Sumeria, for instance, I believe, was basically just an outpost of ancient India. Ancient India is said to go back 10, 20, 30 thousand years.
TMA: Doesn't mainstream anthropology tell us that 40,000 to 10,000 years ago the Cro-Magnon emerged? Who were these people 100,000 years ago if modern man emerged only 10 to 40,000 years ago?
DHC: It's believed by some anthropologists that the Neanderthal man still exists as the yeti and the wild men of Central Asia and other remote places; that small bands of Neanderthals still exist.
TMA: If they're there, what else could they be?
DHC: It has to be that the past is cyclical, and that history is cyclical. Modern scientists, modern historians, say, "Well, here's a graph. The cave man is down here." Then they draw a straight line up to the top corner of the graph, where modern man came in. But that's not history. History is this roller coaster of ups and downs and ages of science and knowledge crashing and then a dark age, and a stone age between these ages.
TMA: What in nature doesn't have its cycles.
DHC: Yes, right. In the story of Atlantis, too. It's a world before our own, a world like ours, one of certain sciences and knowledge of the world. They had mapped the world as round.
TMA: Some things are so obvious -- like the Nazca lines -- what are they if not to be seen from the air?
DHC: Yes, I think the Nazca lines are a lot of things together, actually. Some of the lines are crossed over. Some Nazca lines go for hundreds, even thousands of miles through the mountains, perfectly straight. They just take off. And they go over cliffs and knolls, places where you wouldn't be able to walk.
TMA: This doesn't seem to be a threat anymore, but if there were to have been full-scale nuclear exchange between us and the Soviets and technology was completely wiped out, if there was nuclear winter and there were only a few million survivors scattered around the world, how many generations would it take before our technology became mythology? In three or four generations, it would all be forgotten.
DHC: Yes, that's right.
TMA: So it could happen.
DHC: Things as obvious as leaving your car out in the field -- it's not going to last that long. It'll rust away, oxidize, and wandering tribes will take it apart and hammer it into spearheads. This happens today in Africa. It's not like it's going to sit there for hundreds or thousands of years for someone to come along and go, "Wow, they had Mercedes back then." Rather, it will just be the myths and tales from that era.
TMA: It's always seemed to me that the Great Pyramid in particular was built as a signal, as a beacon to the future. As a "Hey, look what we did. Obviously, we must have known something."
DHC: There are certain things, particularly the Great Pyramid, giant stone walls in Peru, [other artifacts] around the world, they're just sitting there in silent testimony of some advanced ancient civilization that built on a grand scale. They built with blocks of stone the size of semi trucks, and put them perfectly together and made buildings to last for thousands of years. And those buildings have lasted for thousands of years.
TMA: Engineering feats that we can't equal today. How did they cut those stones!
DHC: There are certain places around the world today that modern engineering and construction companies couldn't reproduce.
TMA: We don't have a crane big enough to move those stones.
DHC: That's right. And place them together -- even to hire a modern contractor to build something like the Great Pyramid would be such a huge undertaking that who would even do it.
TMA: One thing that does trouble me is how do we lose what we have? I understand how it can happen when there's a huge disaster, but those who built the pyramids knew more than the later Egyptians. How does that happen?
DHC: You've got to look at Egypt from a proper point of view. The Egyptian civilization lasted for thousands of years. The way we look back at ancient Greece and Rome today was how they looked back at ancient Egypt. As this remote, ancient civilization that lasted for thousands of years. They were children of this ancient civilization -- and over those thousands of years of time and history, Egypt had its ups and downs. Religious wars were fought, there were invaders who came in and took over the country or sacked it, there was a lot of intrigue within the country and there would have been, naturally, times of drought and environmental changes that would affect them. Egypt was kind of like Japan a couple hundred years ago, and China similarly, in that it tried to isolate itself from other parts of the world; they deemed themselves as more cultured and civilized than other countries who were considered barbarians.
TMA: We're used to this paradigm of progress -- as you said, that straight line between the cave man and where we are now. I think that is what makes it difficult to comprehend that the early Egyptians knew so much more than the later Egyptians. It's just hard to comprehend the loss of information when we're so used to the constant expansion of it.
DHC: It's also happened in Europe during the dark ages. The Greeks and the Romans had highly developed sciences. They knew steam engines and they had big libraries of books. They knew the world was round and we have even computers from that time like the device that's in the Athens museum today. But then a dark age hit Europe and science was lost, books were destroyed. The Catholic church suppressed science, basically. They were very much anti-technology. They didn't want people to read and write. The priests would do that for them. They didn't want people to have a book and read it for themselves. They wanted books to be hand copied by their monks in Latin that only they could read. So, how do you explain that? Well, it was like a forced dark age that was pressed upon at least the European world.
The past had its ecological disasters as well. And as you know, the history of the world is one of invasion and counter invasion, and giant migrations of people. It went on constantly here in the Americas even before Europeans got here.
The story of Atlantis and the story of ancient Egypt and the story of the Americas, like what the Hopi Indians say, is that warfare has gone on for many, many thousands of years. It didn't just start 6,000 years ago or something, it went on 10, 20, 30 thousand years ago. In fact, that's part of the story of Atlantis, of Atlantis fighting this war with the Mediterraneans.
TMA: The Osirian culture?
DHC: Yes, I would say like that culture and its sunken cities . . . that's part of the story of Atlantis, this big war between Atlantis and ancient Greece, pre-Greece, like the Osirians.
TMA: What's your best guess as to where Atlantis was?
DHC: I'm a traditionalist when it comes to Atlantis and I believe that like Plato said, Atlantis was out in the Atlantic ocean. I tend to think that the mid-Atlantic ridge which the Azore islands are part of, was Atlantis, and Atlantis is below the ocean. Look at northern Atlantis, called Atlan, which was around Holland and Brittany and France, there's quite a bit of evidence for sunken cities there, plus some evidence around the Canary Islands and even around Florida, Bimini, those giant stones.
TMA: When Atlantis went down, that would have been the flooding of the Mediterranean, yes?
DHC: That's what I think, and that's what happened to Malta and other areas. When Atlantis sank, there was this giant tidal wave that basically washed through the Mediterranean valley, which was a Dead Sea or Death Valley kind of place but with lakes in it. But the entire Mediterranean was flooded at that time, which flooded all the coastal areas. I would make that around 10,000 BC, the end of the last Ice Age.
TMA: Then the Sphinx would already be there.
DHC: Yes, and certain ruins in Egypt were already there. That's what I call pre-dynastic ruins. There's a number of them in Egypt and other places.
TMA: If a giant wave flooded the Mediterranean, wouldn't there be some evidence for it going west as well?
DHC: You bet. We have areas at that same time in Mexico and the United States that were inundated and destroyed. There are Mayan glyphs showing that. We have the mystery of the Olmac people down in the Tabasco area of Mexico -- we have these giant, giant heads in these swamps. It may take something like bulldozers to go in and dig these out of the swamps. So yes, it would definitely would have been on both sides of the world. And as you know, cataclysmic earth changes happen fairly regularly.
TMA: Well, we know about the crater in the Yucatan, so we know that things do happen occasionally!
I'm curious about Rock Lake just up here west of Milwaukee.
DHC: Yes, I've been scuba diving up there. Right around Rock Lake, first of all, is this ancient pyramid site, Pyramid of the Sun and Pyramid of the Moon, just like down in Mexico.
TMA: Are you saying two hours north of Chicago there's a pyramid?
DHC: That's right, it's in southern Wisconsin. There's two large pyramids. It's a state park. These are above water, anybody can go there. Just drive your car, have a picnic . . .
TMA: Constructed by humans. Have they been dated?
DHC: They date them to about 1200 AD as the end of the time [of their construction]. That's when these areas were destroyed.
TMA: What happened?
DHC: Some Siberian invaders came down from Canada and they beseiged cities in Wisconsin, Illinois, Ohio and Missouri, in Iowa -- they killed everybody.
TMA: What's in the lake?
DHC: There are these stone pyramids that are like tents. They're in murky, muddy water so it's hard to get good pictures of them. There's little doubt that these are artificial. A lot of people think even the lake was artificially created.
TMA: As for the pyramids that are above water -- are they of cut stone?
DHC: No, they're piled-up stones. They're not really megalithic. It's not like finding something like in Egypt or Stonehenge or South America.
TMA: That's a little less exciting.
DHC: Those pyramids up in Wisconsin are very interesting but they're not in the same class as those in South America.
TMA: It was Christians who burned the library at Alexandria?
DHC: That was a schism that kind of created the Catholic church. It happened right after the Nicene Creed and the Ephesus councils. It was one special Christian group of fanatics who went to the library and burned it. That's when they killed Hypacia. Hypacia was a female mathematician and orator in Alexandria who was also, in a sense the manager of the library. She was torn from her chariot on the streets of Alexandria and killed by a rioting group of people. After killing her, they went and burned the library.
This is still going on today -- where people are afraid of knowledge and want to see books banned. You have that with fundamental Christian movements who are also anti-Catholic in many cases. Anything that's not in the Bible that they keep in their church is heresy and wrong and shouldn't be taught in schools.
TMA: So you believe that there are still Hall of Records level libraries still in existence?
DHC: Yeah, sure.
TMA: Where? Or do we want to tell?
DHC: Well, they're secret, they're underground. I believe in some cases these people are like custodians of these places. The places can be fairly obvious but we don't even see them. You're probably familiar with what they call the secret libraries of the Vatican. Only certain special priests can go down there. Maybe one day we'll all get a chance to see what's really there.
TMA: People talk about libraries that are still in existence in Tibet, but haven't the Chinese destroyed everything?
DHC: Tibet is a huge, vast area and most of Tibet is still remote. There's still plenty of places to hide things. Areas of Tibet would be a great place for your secret headquarters, even today, as long as you have the right kind of technology.
TMA: Are we at the end of a flowering? Or are we going to continue on? Because if this is as far as we get, it seems to me it isn't worth it.
DHC: (laughs) Well, I believe that we are on the edge of a Golden Age but things may well get kind of worse before they get better just because the world does need a certain restructuring. Many nations still cling to what are essentially backward and destructive beliefs. I travel all over the world and when you go to a lot a countries -- just offhand, take Saudi Arabia. We're talking about a nation -- and these are total absolute monarchies, too -- that is amazingly repressive. The kind of rules in that country are just unacceptable even to more conservative Americans. If you're a woman in those kind of countries, you're incredibly oppressed. Women aren't even allowed to drive. It goes beyond that, too, into absolute control by theocracy, of everything you do. You are forced to be part of an oppressive religion. You have no choice. You'll be literally publicly executed if you try to resist. It's horrible. I've traveled pretty much all over, and unfortunately, that's pretty standard for much of the world.
Getting back to these secret societies, you know, people like the Masons or the Knights Templar and like that, no matter what you think of those groups, they created this country. One of the things they made sure of when they created it was that America had separation of church and state and liberties and guaranteed freedoms.
TMA: Unprecedented.
DHC: They're just unheard of in most countries. Your freedom to be super right wing conservative fundamentalist Christian who thinks that any secret society is bad and ought to be banned -- you are totally free to have that opinion.
TMA: Where are we right now and what do you see in the fairly immediate future?
DHC: We're kind of at the end and we're at the beginning, too. I think it's both things.
TMA: We're not talking about the kind of crash that takes us back to the Stone Age?
DHC: I think we have the level of technology now where even though there'll be some kind of a crash, it won't be completely total. It may change the economic systems and the balance of power around the world and even the way people think about their lives. But it's not like the end of the world where we all have to go back and live in caves. In many part of the world it will be like that. It's a paradox of modern civilization.
As an example, you go to New Guinea. You'll have your nice glass of champagne just before you exit a 747 jet into Port Moresby, and then you're faced with a world that's like a Stone Age world. People who live there, they are literally are like cave men who carry clubs around and whack each other whenever they have a chance. They have no concept of what a 747 really is or how it works. You see what I mean? And this is happening right now. Much of the world was a Stone Age world 10,000 years ago but that wasn't everyplace. There were certain pockets of science and technology that existed, just like today.
It's happening today and it happened in the past. All thing cycle around. We are the Atlanteans. We are those people. We're almost repeating what happened in the past.
TMA: Have we learned anything? Are we any less likely to destroy ourselves?
DHC: I believe the point is to learn, and figure out just who we are.
TMA: If we're going to take our place in the galaxy, we're going to have to make our peace on this planet.
DHC: That's right. We have to mature as a planet, and we're doing that, slowly . . . although for a lot of people, it's happening pretty fast.
David Hatcher Childress was born in France, and raised in the mountains of Colorado and Montana. At nineteen, he left the United States on a six-year journey across Asia, Africa and the Pacific. An ardent student of history, archaeology, philosophy and comparative religion, he has authored numerous articles which have appeared in publications around the world. His many books include A Hitchhiker's Guide to Africa & Arabia, Anti-Gravity & the World Grid, Lost Cities & Ancient Mysteries of South America and others.
Currently he travels the globe in search of lost cities and ancient mysteries. He also leads small groups of similarly interested individuals to many of these sites, including some mentioned in Lost Cities of Ancient Lemuria & the Pacific. For more information on Mr. Childress' books and expeditions/tours, please write or call: Adventures Unlimited, Box 22, Stelle, IL 60919; 815/253-6390.
http://www.lightworks.com/MonthlyAspectarian/1999/April/499-03.htm[ 07-23-2006, 01:41 AM: Message edited by: Carolyn Silver ]
