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Thank you.
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My name is Jan Harzan.
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I'm the executive director for MUFON.
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We are a scientific research organization that basically collects sighting reports
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from the public and then goes and investigates them.
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Our mission statement as an organization is the scientific study of UFOs for the benefit
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of humanity.
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And we have three primary goals.
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We investigate UFO reports, we promote research into the UFO subject, and we educate the
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public on our findings.
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The project about which I'm going to speak was actually something that was much more
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the brainchild of my former uncle-in-law, but I'll get to that shortly.
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I'd like to thank Jennifer for giving me the opportunity to resurrect this and talk about
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it to an audience who I hope will find it interesting.
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Last year, toward the end of the MUFON season, when she solicited by email some suggestions
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for programs for this year, one of the things that had attracted me to this group when
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I first found it on the internet, actually searching for a local noetic sciences chapter
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or group or whatever, was ancient archeology.
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So I responded to her request saying, I'd be glad to see some programs in ancient archeology
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having to do with that, and to sort of validate that, I added, I've actually had a little
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experience along that line, which of course would raise the question of, well, what's
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that?
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So parenthetically, I just stuck in that in 1984, I was in Brazil looking for the
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city that Colonel Fawcett has designated as Z, and that he and his son and one of his
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son's school chums disappeared trying to find in 1925.
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My ex-uncle-in-law was René Jean-Antoine Chabert, who while he was in the US Air Force
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stationed in Spain around 1962, ran into a gentleman who was British, they were in,
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I guess, an antiquarian bookstore browsing around, and they were both looking at a map
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on the wall that purported to be a map of Atlantis, and I don't know if it was the
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haircut or what, but the British gent somehow pegged René for an American, which he wasn't,
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he's French, but he came over here as an older teenager with his older sister, who
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was my mother-in-law, and you know, long story, but anyway, he wound up in the American army,
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then the Air Force, and he and this British gentleman started chatting, and somehow the
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idea of mysteries, Atlantis, lost cities, all this stuff came up, and it turned out
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that this British fellow had served with Colonel Percival Harrison Fawcett in World War II,
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and Fawcett is a little better known in England than he is here.
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He was a British military engineer who was tapped by the British government at the request
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of Brazil and Bolivia, who were always in dispute over the border between the two countries,
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which goes through just hellacious jungle and impenetrable wilderness and all this,
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and they wanted someone, they wanted a neutral party to do a definitive survey so that they
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could stop arguing and going to war about this, and they asked the British government
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if they would send someone to do this, and Fawcett was the one who was chosen.
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He did this in record time.
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It was amazing how fast he traveled and how well the assignment was executed, but while
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he was in South America, in Brazil, and prowling around in the jungles, he heard stories of
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large, ruined cities, of a tower somewhere in the jungle with a light at the top that
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never went out.
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The Indians gave it a wide berth of white-skinned, blue-eyed Indian tribes and so on, and all
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sorts of fantastic things, and he became fascinated by these, and he decided to investigate.
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So he got a little money together, and he financed his subsequent expeditions to a
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large extent by writing about the previous one, and he made many forays into the jungle,
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and he was looking for more than one city.
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He had more than one target that he was after, although the main one was what he designated
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as Z, which he apparently thought was somewhere in the region of Amazonia around the Xingu
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River.
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It's now a huge Indian reservation in Brazil, the Xingu Reserve, but, excuse me, one of
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the things he did that René, my ex-uncle in law, discovered was to falsify his locations,
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his bearings, his coordinates, and so on, when he wrote about these things, so that
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someone with more money than he wouldn't pick up where he left off and discover this before
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he got there.
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David Grant, a staffer for the New Yorker, decided to take up the search and publish
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this book just about two years ago, in 2009, The Lost City of Z.
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He had access to some of Voss's papers that had just been opened, released, whatever,
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by the Royal Geographic Society and the British Museum and so on, that gave him information
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about how to adjust for Fawcett's secrecy and so on that René did not have.
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What he did have was one of the major clues that Fawcett employed, which was, again,
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much better known about back in the early decades of the 20th century than it is now,
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and we'll get to that, but this is Colonel Fawcett in what were his younger days, relatively
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speaking.
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On the left is his son, no, I'm sorry, on the right is his son, Jack, and on the left,
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Jack's school chum, Raleigh Rimmel.
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In 1925, in what was to be his last expedition, Fawcett had done enough of this that he had
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reached the conclusion that the only way you could get through this jungle, this mess,
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this tangle of vines and weeds and trees and fallen stuff was with few people, with little
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equipment, with maybe a pack animal or two in this book, Exploration Fawcett, which
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was, this is a British edition, actually, I got it in this country, but, excuse me,
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the American edition published in 1953 was called Lost Trails, Lost Cities.
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It was published by Funk and Wagnalls, and I'm almost certain that it's no longer available,
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no longer in print.
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This dates from 2001.
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It was put together by his son, Brian, who did not disappear along with the party in
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1925, and he tells of things like having to have a strong stomach to follow the oxen
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that they had as pack animals because they were just constantly attacked by these stinging
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flies and they would bite the animals and they would lay eggs in the wounds and things
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would fester and pus would drop off.
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On one expedition, one of the oxen actually collapsed and died, an ox.
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It was tough going, and there are all kinds of most unpleasant things in the jungle,
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insects and little things in the rivers and all sorts of stuff.
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Fawcett withstood all of them.
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He was amazingly hardy.
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Raleigh was not quite so hardy as Fawcett and his son, Jack, but they ventured off
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into the wilderness from Cuyahoga toward what they hoped would be Zee, and the Indians,
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there were search parties that went out for him for several years after he disappeared.
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probably the most notable, run by a fellow named Diet, D-Y-O-T-T, who did not find Fawcett
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or any concrete trace of him that could be directly linked to him and the expedition,
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but the Indians said they could see the fires of the English for about three days, see
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the smoke from the fires.
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It's very flat.
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They could see the smoke from the campfire, and then after three days, they couldn't
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see it anymore.
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They say that Fawcett and his party ventured into a part of the region that was inhabited
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by very hostile Indians, very hostile tribe, and that's what happened to Fawcett and Jack
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and Raleigh Rimmel.
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That's Fawcett when he was somewhat older, obviously, but this is essentially how he
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traveled.
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He went out with one other person, or maybe two.
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They had an animal or two to carry things for them.
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They lived off the land to some extent, but this was tough.
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Contrary to what a lot of people believe, the rainforest in Brazil and other places
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is not teeming with fruit and little game animals and so on like that.
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The soil is poor because of the density of the canopy overhead.
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Not much of anything grows down at ground level, just huge trees that shade everything
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else and make them die because they can't get light.
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He tells at one point how they lived for, I think, about 10 days on giant ground peanuts.
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I don't really know what they are, but they were apparently just big peanut-like things
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that grew out of the ground, and that was it.
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It was all they could find to eat.
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So it was tough going.
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Next slide, please.
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The clue that I alluded to earlier that Fawcett had and that René seized upon, because there
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was actually no real evidence for Zee in the region where Fawcett said he was looking.
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What there was was document 512 in the National Archives of Rio.
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There's a photocopy of it here on the table.
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In 1753, some Portuguese adventurers who were out hunting for the lost mines of Muro
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Beca, supposedly fabulously rich silver mines under the control of a half-breed Indian who
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took their location to his grave, were out there somewhere and the Portuguese were looking
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for them.
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In the process, they stumbled upon the ruins of a fairly large-sized city, stone construction.
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They wrote up a description of it.
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They copied some inscriptions, wrote up a description of it.
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They copied some inscriptions from the sides of a few buildings and signed this.
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These things over on the right are firma.
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They're the legal signatures of illiterate people.
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They're still common in Europe for a lot of people to have a squiggle that serves as
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their legal signature, even though they can read and write.
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It just goes way back there.
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On the left, however, are four inscriptions that they copied from some of the buildings
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in this ruined city.
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They sent this description, this letter back to the viceroy of Bahia by way of Indian runner.
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The Indian got there, supposedly, about a year later.
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The Portuguese were never heard from again.
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This was mostly regarded as a hoax because the inscriptions on the left resembled no
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known Indian writing.
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Why the Portuguese would go to this kind of trouble is open to speculation.
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They were pulling hoax, but it was filed.
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It was numbered, and it was largely ignored by anybody but adventurers looking for lost
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cities.
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Now, here's where I come in.
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While I was still married to Rene's niece, he was doing this research.
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I had come across an article in Saturday Review, and it was still a viable magazine, about
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a book called America, B.C.
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It was published by Dr. Barry Fell.
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Barry Fell is a professor emeritus in marine biology who retired from the faculty at Harvard
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University, but in his travels around the world, he developed a hobby of epigraphy,
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which is the study of the written symbols of various languages throughout the world.
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He founded something called the Epigraphic Society, and it had a parallel enterprise
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going with the academic establishment linguists at various universities.
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He wasn't particularly welcome in those circles because he was a marine biologist.
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Of course, they are not supposed to know anything about language.
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They should only know about fish and whales and octopuses and all that stuff.
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The linguists knew about that.
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Well, Rene took this, a copy of this, and sent it out to Dr. Fell, who didn't seem
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particularly surprised by it.
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He may have known about it before.
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Anyway, Rene, again, being a non-academic, non-professional archaeologist or what have
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you, didn't know what was impossible.
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So he looked at those and he looked at the first one and he thought, well, son of a
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gun, that looks kind of like Greek.
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So he got out a dictionary and some alphabet tables, and just working from that came up
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with a translation of the first one as koufi, which means fragrant perfumes.
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And Dr. Fell got ahold of the rest before Rene got any further.
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Well, that's exactly what it is.
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The first two and the last are corrupt Ptolemaic Greek, which was used in Egypt around the
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dawn of the Christian era to replace the more cumbersome hieroglyphics.
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And of course, I say corrupt, writing like language back then when there were no such
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thing as dictionaries and so on like that, becomes dialectualized just like language
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itself.
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The third thing is written in the alphabet of Scorpio, which Dr. Fell had a copy of
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that was photocopied and sent to him from some caliph's library in the Middle East
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by a colleague who happened to be there.
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Although David Hatcher Childress in his book here says that both of these alphabets were
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commonly used by ancient mariners.
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Maybe, maybe not.
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At any rate, not only did Fell identify them as a known script, but he translated them.
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Indeed, the first one translates as fragrant perfumes, the second as herbs and spices,
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the third as storehouse for gold, and the last as storehouse for unmarked ingots of
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silver.
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So apparently, this city was like a collection point for precious things, minerals and spices
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and woods and whatnot, that were gleaned from the surrounding territory.
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This is a gold derrick.
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It was minted in Halicarnassus around 500 BC.
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One of the things that the Portuguese described that they found, and they found very little,
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They said there was no furniture, no artifacts of any kind worth mentioning in the city,
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but they did find a coin.
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And they described the coin as having on one side a youth kneeling and on the other side
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a bow and arrow.
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And one of the investment partners who participated in financing our expedition was into numismatics.
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And he did a little research and came up with that.
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That doesn't quite match the description that the Portuguese gave in my mind, but there
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it is.
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This is an alphabet table, such as Renee used.
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And you can see going across any line there, how depending on where the script was found,
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the letter was slightly different.
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Had the same meaning, but it wasn't formed in exactly the same way.
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That's Dr. Fell.
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He's calling out from under a rock, probably doing some work for the New England Antiquities
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Research Association, which publishes a journal and a newsletter, with which I became associated
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while I was working on this.
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They started out as a largely amateur organization, investigating sites, mostly in New England,
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that suggested origins going back to the other side of the Atlantic.
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And this is what we were really involved with if we were going after a ruined city that
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had inscriptions in Ptolemaic Greek, which of course weren't supposed to be there at
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all.
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If you were in 1984 or earlier, solidly into the academic, scientific, archaeological
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establishment, you knew that this was impossible.
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You knew that nobody was here before Columbus except maybe Leif Erikson or somebody like
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that, but that was it.
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You didn't really consider that those inscriptions were anything but a hoax because they didn't
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resemble any known Indian writing.
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Nobody but the Indians could possibly have made them.
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This is an alphabet table from one of Dr. Fell's books.
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And if you look carefully, if you can read it, this says, style of Syria and Lebanon,
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Phoenician, style of Punic, something or other, of Iowa.
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These are inscriptions from the Near East.
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These are inscriptions found in Iowa.
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Not precisely the same, but obviously very similar.
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These are from Spain.
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And this is what made Dr. Fell's work controversial.
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He's written three books.
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One is America, B.C.
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The other is Saga America.
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And the third, no, I'm sorry, is, yeah, the third is Saga America.
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The other is Bronze Age America.
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As a former professor of mine used to say, they smack a bit of the lamp.
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They're rather scholarly.
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The first, America, B.C., is probably the most accessible to people who are not really
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into epigraphy and so on.
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But he has documented all over North America inscriptions that can be translated as Phoenician,
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Greek, Egyptian, Libyan, Celtic, no, Celtic, O-Gam, and so on.
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People you would never have imagined had gotten here, apparently got here and left
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some graffiti behind because he could recognize it, he could translate it.
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This, if you look at the little cartouches here and so on, and the pose and angle of
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the figures, the ankh, the ibis, the whole bit there looks obviously Egyptian.
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It was dug up in Ecuador.
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This is pretty obviously Greek.
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You can see the letters, Greek having been based on Phoenicians and so on.
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You can see the letters are recognizably in that tradition.
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This was dug up in Brazil.
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This is the Paraiba inscription.
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Paraiba, both of them, are along the coast of Brazil.
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Back in 1867 or something like that, a farmer dug up a stone in his field with this inscription
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on it.
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His son was a trained artist, and the viceroy at the time happened to have a hobby of linguistics.
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These were the days of the Rosetta Stone and Champollion and all this kind of thing.
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So he had his son copy accurately this inscription and send it to the viceroy who was fascinated
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by it, wanted to talk to the people from whom this was sent, and found out that there were
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two ba'iyas, one here, one there, and no way to trace which one this had come from.
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And this too was regarded as a hoax.
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That's not Indian writing.
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Well, I don't have a picture of Cyrus Gordon.
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Cyrus Gordon, whose book Forgotten Scripts is over there on the table, was a scholar
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of ancient and Near Eastern languages at Brandeis and NYU.
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In around 1972, he discovered a lost dialect of Phoenician called Ugaritic, and he also
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recognized that the ancient craft of being a scribe had some special things about it.
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Not that many people could read and write if you were a scribe.
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You weren't necessarily up there in the stratosphere of society, but you had a very specialized
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skill that was valuable and frequently in demand.
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Well, scribes developed a way of sort of encoding things in their inscriptions.
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For example, if you were commissioned to make a plaque for a bridge that said, you
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know, this bridge was dedicated by Mayor Joe Schmoe in the year whatever, and so on and
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so on, blah, blah, blah, et cetera.
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If you were a scribe and you knew how to read the code, you could also find out that Joe
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Schmoe beat his wife, abused his children, kicked his dog, and embezzled money from the
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city treasury.
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Okay.
25:14.860 --> 25:22.340
So, Cyrus Gordon not only recognized elements of Ugaritic in this Paraiba inscription, but
25:22.340 --> 25:31.300
also recognized a little bit of the code that scribes were sometimes want to put into their
25:31.300 --> 25:34.700
writing.
25:34.700 --> 25:38.620
Professor Ivan van Sertima from Rutgers.
25:38.620 --> 25:49.020
His book is, They Came Before Columbus Documenting West African Visitation to the Americas.
25:49.020 --> 25:54.140
We went down to, made a few trips to Washington, D.C.
25:54.140 --> 26:00.700
Where we met him was at a slide lecture given by an organization called SEES.
26:00.700 --> 26:01.920
It's an acronym.
26:01.920 --> 26:06.380
It's an amateur underwater archaeological organization.
26:06.380 --> 26:13.740
They dive at various sites and look for archaeological remnants.
26:13.740 --> 26:19.260
He was on the program with Alexander van Vootenau, an art historian from the University of the
26:19.260 --> 26:27.000
Americas in Mexico City, who gave about an hour slide presentation of artifacts dug
26:27.000 --> 26:36.280
up on the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico that included a terracotta head that was a dead
26:36.280 --> 26:44.880
ringer for a Maasai warrior right out of National Geographic that featured some of these things
26:44.880 --> 26:49.320
you may have seen in books if you've read about this at all.
26:49.320 --> 26:52.700
A little, I call him a sumo wrestler, although he's not.
26:52.700 --> 27:01.740
It's a figure in a sort of aggressive pose with what appear to be oriental eyes and
27:01.740 --> 27:04.600
a little beard.
27:04.600 --> 27:13.860
And he said that among these things that were dug up was a tablet depicting a red man,
27:13.860 --> 27:21.920
a black man, and a white man with a kinky beard signing something beneath a tree.
27:21.920 --> 27:27.240
All this stuff was crated and shipped back to the museum in Mexico City.
27:27.240 --> 27:30.880
When they unpacked it, the tablet was gone.
27:30.880 --> 27:31.880
It wasn't there.
27:31.880 --> 27:34.120
Nobody knows what happened to it.
27:34.120 --> 27:40.080
One of the obvious pieces of evidence that Professor van Sertima presents is the Olmec
27:40.080 --> 27:46.920
heads, these huge stone heads that are all over Belize depicting what is pretty clearly
27:46.920 --> 27:49.320
an African face.
27:49.320 --> 27:54.240
And of course, the obvious question is, how could people who had never seen an African
27:54.240 --> 28:03.480
face come up with all the exactly right features in the exactly right combination, and why
28:03.480 --> 28:11.640
would they memorialize this with such a huge monument or such huge monuments all over their
28:11.640 --> 28:12.640
homeland?
28:12.640 --> 28:16.400
Whoever these people were must have been pretty special to them.
28:16.800 --> 28:21.120
If this is what those people looked like, they were obviously African.
28:21.120 --> 28:23.040
Another view of the same thing.
28:23.040 --> 28:29.800
Supposedly, the headgear is something worn by Nubian kings at a certain period, going
28:29.800 --> 28:32.640
back a couple of thousand years.
28:32.640 --> 28:36.160
There something you may have seen before.
28:36.160 --> 28:40.680
The natives in Latin and South America had and understood the wheel, but they didn't
28:40.680 --> 28:43.080
have any draft animals.
28:43.080 --> 28:46.440
They could build the cart, but they didn't have the horse.
28:46.440 --> 28:48.720
So they just didn't bother building the cart.
28:48.720 --> 28:51.920
But they did have the wheel.
28:51.920 --> 28:55.520
This is Professor Cyclone Covey.
28:55.520 --> 29:05.240
He did work on the Chinese presence in the Americas through some inscriptions that have
29:05.240 --> 29:09.480
been left behind, other artifacts, and so on like that.
29:09.480 --> 29:16.960
We'll get to something a little later having to do with the Chinese in North America.
29:16.960 --> 29:26.240
But if you think back over the last several minutes of this, we've been getting Africans
29:26.240 --> 29:35.040
before Columbus, Chinese before Columbus, Celts, Libyans, Egyptians, Greeks, Phoenicians
29:35.040 --> 29:37.640
before Columbus.
29:37.680 --> 29:43.480
In terms of what was left behind and dug up in recent times, there must have been a lot
29:43.480 --> 29:49.040
of traffic across the Atlantic a long, long time ago.
29:49.040 --> 29:50.400
Why did it stop?
29:50.400 --> 29:52.400
What happened to it?
29:52.400 --> 29:53.680
Who knows?
29:53.680 --> 29:57.040
There's the, what I refer to as the sumo wrestler.
29:57.040 --> 30:02.000
And again, American Indians, native people, do not have facial hair.
30:02.000 --> 30:04.000
They don't grow beards.
30:04.520 --> 30:12.200
And that looks enough like the eyes of someone from China or Korea or Japan that you could
30:12.200 --> 30:21.600
easily take this person for an Oriental individual, particularly in view of the beard and the mustache.
30:21.600 --> 30:30.960
Now, having the inscriptions on 512 not only identified but translated suggested that
30:30.960 --> 30:33.520
they must be from something real.
30:33.520 --> 30:35.880
It wasn't a hoax.
30:35.880 --> 30:42.040
And why would a bunch of semi-literate Portuguese scrabbling around in the jungle for 10 years
30:42.040 --> 30:48.040
looking for lost silver mine ever go to the trouble to perpetrate such a hoax?
30:48.040 --> 30:49.480
What would the point be?
30:49.480 --> 30:55.360
And where would they come up with Ptolemaic Greek?
30:55.360 --> 30:57.000
It had to be real.
30:57.000 --> 31:07.120
So, Rene got together some private investment money and purchased, you know, going by his
31:07.120 --> 31:15.040
retracing what he believed must have been the root of the Portuguese, according to
31:15.040 --> 31:22.240
their description, how they came into the city and so on, selected a few target areas
31:22.240 --> 31:28.360
in Bahia, the northeastern province of Brazil, and purchased, and we're going back, remember
31:28.360 --> 31:36.000
now this is the early 80s, possibly the late 70s, purchased Landsat infrared photographs
31:36.000 --> 31:41.600
of these target areas, infrared photographs because it's jungle.
31:41.600 --> 31:48.920
You can't see what's underneath most of it because it's all covered up.
31:48.920 --> 31:51.400
He selected one of these that looked really good.
31:51.400 --> 31:53.520
Now, this doesn't look like much of anything.
31:53.520 --> 32:01.200
This is an enhanced infrared satellite photograph for, I think, about $1,500.
32:01.200 --> 32:09.240
He had one of these things enhanced down at the General Electric Labs in Lanham, Maryland.
32:09.240 --> 32:11.320
And this is what they came up with.
32:11.320 --> 32:13.280
I don't know what that line is.
32:13.280 --> 32:16.880
It must be a scratch on the slide.
32:16.880 --> 32:22.640
But if you look around here, you see a circle.
32:22.640 --> 32:29.960
And here would be the Central Plaza, and here would be the river emanating from that into
32:29.960 --> 32:34.560
the larger body of water nearby.
32:34.560 --> 32:39.300
And this certainly looked like a target.
32:39.300 --> 32:45.760
He sent this up to a gentleman named, I think it was Richard Foos at Amherst.
32:45.840 --> 32:51.280
And Foos was at the time one of the foremost authorities in captivity on interpreting infrared
32:51.280 --> 32:53.280
satellite photographs.
32:53.280 --> 32:56.340
And he said, this is definitely something real.
32:56.340 --> 32:57.340
It's manmade.
32:57.340 --> 32:58.520
It's not natural.
32:58.520 --> 33:04.160
And you may use my name in trying to convince people of its validity.
33:04.160 --> 33:07.720
This is René's diagram of that.
33:07.720 --> 33:14.440
If you can recall the previous slide, the river emanating from the Central Plaza into
33:14.440 --> 33:20.080
another body of water, probably the gates or arches that were described here, the Central
33:20.080 --> 33:21.720
Plaza, and so on.
33:21.720 --> 33:23.120
Well, OK, we can do that.
33:23.120 --> 33:24.120
Switch back.
33:24.120 --> 33:25.120
Yeah.
33:25.120 --> 33:30.520
You can't see these very well on the projected slide.
33:30.520 --> 33:39.560
But over here is a kind of break in the wall that is probably the arches and the gates
33:39.560 --> 33:40.960
and so on.
33:40.960 --> 33:47.320
And again, the river is fairly obvious if you look carefully.
33:47.320 --> 33:56.120
And the variation in the color would suggest what was stone, what was covered by vegetation,
33:56.120 --> 33:58.200
et cetera, and so on.
33:58.200 --> 34:05.360
This is Megiddo, a city prominent in the Near East a couple of thousand years ago.
34:06.160 --> 34:13.600
What this shows is that the image on the infrared satellite photograph is a circular
34:13.600 --> 34:21.040
walled city, similar to those that were built in the Near East, large Central Plaza and
34:21.040 --> 34:24.420
so on, some water, apparently cisterns and so on like that.
34:24.420 --> 34:32.220
But the South American civilizations, the Inca, the Aztec, and so on, seemed to like
34:32.220 --> 34:35.780
squares when they built cities and things.
34:35.780 --> 34:42.200
And the edges of their cities were largely straight and had corners, and they were much
34:42.200 --> 34:45.380
more square or rectangular than round.
34:45.380 --> 34:50.580
However, the image on the infrared satellite photograph is definitely round or oval, and
34:50.580 --> 34:52.040
so is this.
34:52.040 --> 34:57.420
So we got some investment money and we went down to Rio, went down to Brazil.
34:57.420 --> 35:00.860
This is Rio de Janeiro, beautiful city.
35:00.860 --> 35:02.420
This slide.
35:02.420 --> 35:03.820
It was wintertime there.
35:03.820 --> 35:08.220
We went in the summer, and unfortunately there wasn't much happening on the beach.
35:08.220 --> 35:12.400
No bikinis, no topless sunbathing, you know, dull times.
35:12.400 --> 35:16.840
About the only thing going on was groups of young men playing what appeared to be volleyball
35:16.840 --> 35:18.580
with their feet.
35:18.580 --> 35:19.660
Shot of the ocean.
35:19.660 --> 35:22.180
Next one.
35:22.180 --> 35:24.340
I took that.
35:24.340 --> 35:28.560
Didn't have to leave it in the presentation necessarily, but I took it because I had done
35:28.560 --> 35:35.120
little rock climbing not too long before that when I was in the Navy and so on.
35:35.120 --> 35:39.920
And this was a pretty, pretty good cliff, rather high, rather vertical.
35:39.920 --> 35:41.360
There are two teams.
35:41.360 --> 35:46.080
Here is a pair of climbers, and up here is a pair of climbers.
35:46.080 --> 35:51.320
And the rock face itself was made up of something like I had never seen.
35:51.320 --> 35:52.320
It was a conglomerate.
35:52.320 --> 35:58.380
It was as if you took a whole bunch of roughly golf ball sized smooth pebbles from Creek
35:58.380 --> 36:03.820
bottoms, dumped them into a cement mixer, and built a cliff out of it.
36:03.820 --> 36:12.020
It was just all these little, these little smooth round rocks embedded in that.
36:12.020 --> 36:15.180
That's Sugarloaf, a tourist destination.
36:15.180 --> 36:20.100
You go over on the cable car and you get your camera out and you take some of the pictures
36:20.100 --> 36:23.800
like you just saw, and we'll see for the next few slides.
36:23.800 --> 36:27.300
That's what Rio looks like from, you know, from Sugarloaf.
36:27.460 --> 36:29.740
Again, it's a very beautiful location.
36:29.740 --> 36:36.260
That lagoon our man in Rio told us is very attractive visually, but completely polluted.
36:36.260 --> 36:37.380
You should not swim in it.
36:37.380 --> 36:39.900
You should not fish in it and eat the fish.
36:39.900 --> 36:44.780
It's okay to run your boat around in it, but that's about all.
36:44.780 --> 36:49.540
And Corcovado, the Christ of the Andes statue there.
36:49.540 --> 36:53.500
And you can see how the city itself is situated in the valley.
36:53.500 --> 36:58.180
While we were in Rio, we did some tourist stuff.
36:58.180 --> 36:59.860
I had never been to Rio.
36:59.860 --> 37:05.460
Clyde, one of the other Americans who came with us, had never been out of the country.
37:05.460 --> 37:08.400
And I should back up a little bit.
37:08.400 --> 37:17.700
In addition to the investment money, one of the investment partners knew a guy from Baltimore
37:17.700 --> 37:24.220
who had done some adventuring here and there about the world.
37:24.220 --> 37:27.940
He described himself as a municipal employee.
37:27.940 --> 37:29.260
He worked for the city.
37:29.260 --> 37:34.740
That's about all we ever learned about his occupation, but he seemed to be able to get
37:34.740 --> 37:36.380
a lot of time off.
37:36.380 --> 37:41.940
And he knew more about launching an expedition like this than any of us did.
37:41.940 --> 37:47.940
So Renee and the partners decided that, okay, he should be it.
37:47.940 --> 37:52.380
We were in contact with David Hatcher-Childress, who at the time was running something called
37:52.380 --> 37:58.380
Adventures Unlimited about leading the expedition, but he wanted an awful lot of money to do
37:58.380 --> 37:59.380
it.
37:59.380 --> 38:02.540
So that kind of disqualified him.
38:02.540 --> 38:07.780
In Rio, we went map hunting.
38:07.780 --> 38:15.860
We got three maps that covered three adjacent sides of where we were going.
38:15.860 --> 38:18.180
We couldn't get a map for where we were going.
38:18.180 --> 38:23.420
There was some weird jurisdictional thing that dictated that we would have had to send
38:23.420 --> 38:29.180
up the coast to Sao Paulo for that map and wait about 10 days for it to be sent down
38:29.180 --> 38:31.020
to us.
38:31.020 --> 38:37.620
As it was, one of the maps that we did get was about two-thirds blank, absolutely white,
38:37.860 --> 38:42.300
nothing on it but the word compo, which means countryside, wilderness, whatever applies,
38:42.300 --> 38:43.300
and so on.
38:43.300 --> 38:45.060
They did not know what to put on the map.
38:45.060 --> 38:47.540
They didn't know what was there.
38:47.540 --> 38:52.860
And the one that covered where we were going, we couldn't get.
38:52.860 --> 38:59.180
Paulo and his cousin Carlos went to a sort of nightclub one of the first nights that
38:59.180 --> 39:05.660
we were there, ran into a friend of theirs who was like a Brazilian FBI guy, and they
39:05.660 --> 39:10.580
talked about our forthcoming expedition and so on.
39:10.580 --> 39:17.580
And their friend looked a little bit concerned, said, it's not really a safe place to go.
39:17.580 --> 39:25.780
And said there are, he referred to them as gypsies, said there are people up there who
39:25.780 --> 39:30.980
live by what they can steal, said if you wind up anywhere where they are, don't leave
39:30.980 --> 39:32.860
until they leave.
39:32.860 --> 39:37.700
If you leave before them, they will follow you, run your car off the road, slit your
39:37.700 --> 39:42.220
throat, throw your body into the brush, and drive off in your car, and that will be the
39:42.220 --> 39:43.220
end of you.
39:43.220 --> 39:48.180
Well, Paulo said, hey, well, it's okay, we're taking a gun.
39:48.180 --> 39:51.500
And he said, how many of you are going?
39:51.500 --> 39:57.060
Paulo said four, said take four guns, one for each of you.
39:57.060 --> 40:03.740
So, Paulo called his father in Brasilia and arranged to pick up his father's .32 while
40:03.740 --> 40:11.540
we went shopping for a gun in Rio and wound up with a big Brazilian .38 secondhand.
40:11.540 --> 40:15.360
Interestingly enough, at that time at least, you could not bring weapons into the country,
40:15.360 --> 40:20.300
but once you got there, it was pretty easy to get a gun, a handgun, a rifle, whatever
40:20.300 --> 40:23.360
you wanted.
40:23.360 --> 40:26.640
We went to Brasilia.
40:26.640 --> 40:29.360
Paulo's father arranged for us to stay.
40:29.360 --> 40:35.320
He came out on the wrong side of the revolution a few years before.
40:35.320 --> 40:42.720
He had been a colonel in the Brazilian army, trained with the 82nd or 101st Airborne, Fort
40:42.720 --> 40:47.360
Benning, Georgia, 82nd or 101st.
40:48.360 --> 40:56.280
He trained with the airborne troops at Fort Benning and arranged for us to stay at what
40:56.280 --> 41:00.600
amounted to an officer's hotel in the military sector of Brasilia.
41:00.600 --> 41:10.080
Brasilia, of course, was designed by the socialist regime in Brazil, was constructed from scratch
41:10.080 --> 41:13.880
as a brand new city, opened in 1960.
41:14.400 --> 41:18.800
And you can't get anywhere without a car.
41:18.800 --> 41:23.080
There's not a downtown area or neighborhoods and so on like that.
41:23.080 --> 41:28.760
There is the commercial sector and there is the military sector and there is the residential
41:28.760 --> 41:30.320
sector.
41:30.320 --> 41:35.240
And if you want to get from one to the other, you've either got to be a good walker and
41:35.240 --> 41:41.000
a fast walker or you've got to have a car or take some kind of transportation, even
41:41.000 --> 41:43.600
to get your loaf of bread and quarter of milk.
41:44.320 --> 41:48.240
They don't have 7-elevens and wah-wahs two blocks down the street.
41:48.240 --> 41:53.960
That's in the commercial sector, which is three miles away or five miles or whatever.
41:53.960 --> 41:57.000
That's the only picture I have of Brasilia.
41:57.000 --> 42:01.800
For one thing, I was saving my film here.
42:01.800 --> 42:07.320
I could only take so much with me and once we got out into the boondocks, Lord knows
42:07.320 --> 42:09.560
where I would have gotten anymore.
42:09.560 --> 42:12.320
So I didn't want to waste too much on touristy stuff.
42:12.320 --> 42:14.400
I was saving it for the big prize.
42:14.400 --> 42:19.200
I was going to be taking pictures of that lost city and the inscriptions on the walls
42:19.200 --> 42:22.920
and the central plaza and all that.
42:22.920 --> 42:25.300
So that's the picture of Brasilia.
42:25.300 --> 42:32.480
We did some more shopping, got some supplies that we needed, not all of what we needed,
42:32.480 --> 42:35.280
but enough to leave.
42:35.280 --> 42:41.160
While we were there, we wanted to see if we could rent a plane to fly over our targets
42:41.320 --> 42:44.200
and see what we were going to contend with.
42:44.200 --> 42:48.480
As I said, we couldn't get a map for where we were going.
42:48.480 --> 42:51.200
One of the maps that we could get wasn't any good.
42:51.200 --> 42:54.080
It was two-thirds blank.
42:54.080 --> 42:58.920
This target was up on a plateau, a couple of hundred miles above this little wilderness
42:58.920 --> 43:01.840
town called Baharas.
43:01.840 --> 43:04.440
We knew we had to go up the side of the plateau.
43:04.440 --> 43:08.880
We didn't know how high it was, how steep it was, or what the composition of it was.
43:08.880 --> 43:12.440
If you have to cross a river, we didn't know how wide or how deep.
43:12.440 --> 43:18.560
We didn't know exactly what the vegetation was like, how thick it was.
43:18.560 --> 43:24.600
One of the things that we shopped for in Rio was machetes, good machetes.
43:24.600 --> 43:28.880
Here's a little factoid with which you can amaze your friends and humble your adversaries.
43:28.880 --> 43:34.600
The best machetes are made from old rails, old train rails, because the weight of the
43:34.600 --> 43:42.640
train over the years on those rails compresses the metal so much that it becomes very dense
43:42.640 --> 43:45.840
and holds an edge extraordinarily well.
43:45.840 --> 43:51.800
So the next time you buy a machete, make sure that it was made from an old train rail.
43:51.800 --> 43:52.800
We found a plane.
43:52.800 --> 43:57.760
Paul and I were supposed to go map shopping.
43:57.760 --> 44:02.960
Clyde and Mark, the other two, were looking for an airplane to rent.
44:03.000 --> 44:09.080
They found one that could take all of us, which was unexpected.
44:09.080 --> 44:17.380
So we quickly gathered there, and we took off about 11.30 in the morning, which was
44:17.380 --> 44:18.380
the worst time.
44:18.380 --> 44:25.240
If any of you have ever seen the hot air balloons around in the summertime and so on, you don't
44:25.240 --> 44:26.240
see them in the afternoon.
44:26.240 --> 44:27.860
You see them early in the morning.
44:27.860 --> 44:29.800
You see them early in the evening.
44:30.120 --> 44:36.680
It's because in the afternoon, the land heats up and the updrafts make something like that
44:36.680 --> 44:40.720
very difficult and unpleasant.
44:40.720 --> 44:44.000
Well, we started flying several hundred miles.
44:44.000 --> 44:47.200
We were gone seven hours, which was way too long.
44:47.200 --> 44:49.440
That's another story.
44:49.440 --> 44:57.000
But we were flying at the very time when this open arid desert was heating up and creating
44:57.000 --> 44:58.320
updrafts like mad.
44:58.320 --> 45:03.400
I had never gotten sick on an airplane before, but I really wanted to get sick on that one.
45:03.400 --> 45:07.120
Mark, the leader of the expedition, did get sick.
45:07.120 --> 45:12.960
So we sat down at this cane plantation, sugar cane plantation, way out in the boondocks.
45:12.960 --> 45:16.800
Cane growing is a big agricultural industry in Brazil.
45:16.800 --> 45:22.260
They had, at least at that time, I'm sure they still do, a lot of alcohol-burning automobiles.
45:22.260 --> 45:28.240
If you own one, you get a tax break because you're supporting the domestic cane industry.
45:28.240 --> 45:30.960
So it's kind of a thing that feeds itself.
45:30.960 --> 45:35.060
You grow sugar cane, you make alcohol fuel out of it.
45:35.060 --> 45:39.200
People who drive the alcohol-burning cars buy that.
45:39.200 --> 45:42.600
This puts money in your pocket, et cetera, and so on.
45:42.600 --> 45:44.780
It's a nice domestic thing.
45:44.780 --> 45:50.720
We dropped Mark off, took off again, and went up to check out.
45:50.720 --> 45:55.640
We had a short list of targets that we wanted to fly over and check out from the air.
45:55.640 --> 46:02.320
If you look right there, that looks like something not like what's on the rest of
46:02.320 --> 46:03.320
the landscape.
46:03.320 --> 46:08.640
Now, we were, this was supposed to be Hugh McCarthy's site.
46:08.640 --> 46:15.520
Hugh McCarthy was a New Zealand schoolteacher who got the lost city Percival Faucet bug
46:15.520 --> 46:25.080
in the mid-40s and went to Brazil to pursue Z, to find Z.
46:25.080 --> 46:27.080
He was by himself.
46:27.080 --> 46:29.800
He went into the wilderness.
46:29.800 --> 46:37.520
He kept in touch with a missionary by carrier pigeon for several weeks.
46:37.520 --> 46:41.240
Not all the messages got through, but the missionary saved those that did.
46:41.240 --> 46:48.800
It became apparent after several weeks that McCarthy was losing his marbles a little bit.
46:48.800 --> 46:50.500
He was ill.
46:50.500 --> 46:56.500
He said that he was sick and he was rescued by an Indian tribe.
46:56.500 --> 47:04.340
He married a young Indian maiden there and could die happy because he had found his
47:04.340 --> 47:05.900
golden city.
47:05.900 --> 47:08.020
Well, maybe he did.
47:08.020 --> 47:09.620
Maybe he just thought he did.
47:09.620 --> 47:16.620
Anyway, the pilot, when we told him about this, he said, that's where we are.
47:16.620 --> 47:19.780
This is right where you're spot on the map.
47:19.780 --> 47:22.460
This is McCarthy's site.
47:22.460 --> 47:28.100
Yeah, that's blown up a little bit on Jennifer's machine.
47:28.100 --> 47:31.100
Next one.
47:31.100 --> 47:36.940
This is a river, kind of a scummy river, but there's an outlet that comes possibly from
47:36.940 --> 47:39.360
that area.
47:39.360 --> 47:40.740
We couldn't get down that low.
47:40.740 --> 47:42.820
We couldn't get that close.
47:42.820 --> 47:48.340
And again, I was trying not to waste film on this.
47:48.860 --> 47:56.980
And once again, is that construction or is that just a very, very unusual rock outcropping?
47:56.980 --> 47:59.980
Can you tell?
47:59.980 --> 48:05.900
And finally that, and we flew on.
48:05.900 --> 48:08.640
So we got back to Brasilia.
48:08.640 --> 48:14.780
We stopped and picked up Mark at the cane plantation on the way back, and it was late
48:14.780 --> 48:18.940
in the afternoon and the pilot was getting kind of nervous.
48:18.940 --> 48:23.020
And we asked Paulo, what's his problem?
48:23.020 --> 48:25.220
He seems kind of edgy.
48:25.220 --> 48:29.580
And Paulo asked him, and of course, they were speaking Portuguese.
48:29.580 --> 48:31.180
Paulo was our interpreter.
48:31.180 --> 48:35.580
And he said, it gets dark really fast in these latitudes.
48:35.580 --> 48:37.140
There's not much twilight.
48:37.140 --> 48:40.580
And he doesn't want to have to fly back to Brasilia in the dark.
48:40.580 --> 48:44.500
Well, this didn't seem like a big problem, but okay.
48:44.500 --> 48:51.220
So we got in the plane, we took off, and it wasn't long before it was just about dark.
48:51.220 --> 48:55.420
The pilot turned around and asked us to look in a pouch behind one of the seats, see if
48:55.420 --> 48:57.420
there was a flashlight in there.
48:57.420 --> 48:58.420
There wasn't.
48:58.420 --> 49:01.700
Does anybody smoke, have a lighter?
49:01.700 --> 49:03.380
Nope, nobody did.
49:03.380 --> 49:11.100
Well, it seems that the plane's compass was on a strut from the windshield divider, one
49:11.100 --> 49:16.420
of those big egg-shaped compasses and floating liquid and so on.
49:16.420 --> 49:18.420
And it was not illuminated.
49:18.420 --> 49:23.140
The pilot couldn't see the compass to navigate back to Brasilia.
49:23.140 --> 49:26.820
And we were like a few hundred miles out, all right?
49:26.820 --> 49:28.980
And there was nothing beneath us but blackness.
49:28.980 --> 49:31.300
I mean, nothing.
49:31.300 --> 49:39.460
So Clyde had a pair of these Mississippi Highway Patrol mirror lens sunglasses with reflecting
49:39.460 --> 49:40.460
lenses.
49:40.460 --> 49:44.900
We took them out of his pocket, we turned on the little translucent cabin light, and
49:44.900 --> 49:50.820
he was able to reflect just enough light off the lens of his sunglasses up onto the compass
49:50.820 --> 49:53.460
so that the pilot could see where we were going.
49:53.460 --> 49:58.660
And that's how we got back to Brasilia.
49:58.660 --> 50:02.700
It was a little nerve-wracking, to say the least.
50:02.700 --> 50:10.420
So we got back to Brasilia, went back to the officer's hotel there, got our stuff together,
50:10.420 --> 50:11.980
and we were ready to go.
50:11.980 --> 50:19.780
Up a road from Brasilia to Baharas, which is as long as from here to just past the
50:19.780 --> 50:27.260
Ohio border, it has one tiny town and one intersection.
50:27.260 --> 50:28.800
That's it.
50:28.800 --> 50:37.180
There are no markings for where you are, how far you are, from what, where this...
50:37.180 --> 50:39.820
The road itself is like two sides of a triangle.
50:39.820 --> 50:43.980
It goes north and then it cuts east to Baharas.
50:43.980 --> 50:48.080
There is like the hypotenuse of the triangle that we wanted to take as a shortcut.
50:48.080 --> 50:49.080
We missed it.
50:49.080 --> 50:51.260
I'll tell you why in a moment.
50:51.260 --> 50:53.340
That's what the country was like.
50:53.340 --> 50:54.340
Mountains in the distance.
50:54.340 --> 50:58.620
It looks a lot like pictures I've seen of the southwest, or parts of it.
50:58.620 --> 51:04.580
Every once in a while, we'd run into a little farm-type activity there.
51:04.580 --> 51:07.320
The road was arrow straight.
51:07.320 --> 51:09.580
These roads were obviously constructed recently.
51:09.580 --> 51:15.500
They were arrow straight and went on for miles and miles and miles and miles without
51:15.500 --> 51:21.580
another car, without a gas station, without anything except more road.
51:21.580 --> 51:23.180
More of the same.
51:23.180 --> 51:28.820
That's what we looked at most of the time that we were traveling north, except for this.
51:28.820 --> 51:36.860
Now, if you look at the landscape, you realize there's nothing like that on the landscape.
51:36.860 --> 51:40.140
Not only that, it's awfully symmetrical.
51:40.140 --> 51:44.740
Its proportions are awfully pyramid-like.
51:44.740 --> 51:50.820
And I'll show you a little bit farther down the line, a picture of an unexcavated pyramid
51:50.820 --> 51:57.000
in Chichen Itza in Mexico, which is exactly like that.
51:57.000 --> 52:00.020
But again, we weren't going to go excavated.
52:00.020 --> 52:01.980
We had other fish to fry.
52:01.980 --> 52:03.480
I took one picture of it.
52:03.480 --> 52:06.220
That seemed to be enough, and we pushed on.
52:06.220 --> 52:08.820
That's the end of our shortcut.
52:08.820 --> 52:14.420
When we got up to the hard right that turned east, we realized where we were and that
52:14.420 --> 52:16.340
we had missed our shortcut.
52:16.340 --> 52:20.140
Now, you notice the shortcut is dirt.
52:20.140 --> 52:23.060
The road we were on was paved.
52:23.060 --> 52:27.380
However, our map was seven years old.
52:27.380 --> 52:31.060
The paved road had been paved five years before.
52:31.060 --> 52:35.300
When the map was made, both roads were like that.
52:35.380 --> 52:38.940
So we were looking for another paved road because they were both marked the same on
52:38.940 --> 52:40.060
the map.
52:40.060 --> 52:41.760
We didn't see one.
52:41.760 --> 52:46.580
And it wasn't until we got to the other end of it, and it's probably just as well that
52:46.580 --> 52:54.220
we didn't take it, because we found out in Baheras that these roads, not only are they
52:54.220 --> 53:00.140
unmarked, this actually had a route number, believe it or not, but no sign as to where,
53:00.140 --> 53:01.500
you know, this was it.
53:01.500 --> 53:04.300
Turn here if you want route such and such.
53:04.300 --> 53:11.540
These roads could go on for 50, 80, 100 miles and you'd come to a huge washout, a huge
53:11.540 --> 53:18.700
swell, maybe 20, 30 feet across and 10 feet deep, and that was it.
53:18.700 --> 53:23.460
Unless you could fly across it, you turn around and went back where you came from.
53:23.460 --> 53:30.420
This is apparently like the southwest, where it rains two or three times a year, an ocean,
53:30.540 --> 53:34.260
and everything just, you know, gets washed out.
53:34.260 --> 53:39.980
I have a friend who, excuse me, who was almost washed off the road in Arizona a number of
53:39.980 --> 53:40.980
years ago.
53:40.980 --> 53:43.820
You know, they were driving along, oh, I'm going to get a little rain.
53:43.820 --> 53:49.420
Well, they got a little rain in the mountains, and it all came funneling down into the same
53:49.420 --> 53:54.820
chute and across the road, and he said it could have taken away a trailer truck.
53:54.820 --> 53:58.700
There was so much water coming with so much force.
53:59.660 --> 54:05.420
As we were going north, it's a long trip to Bajeras.
54:05.420 --> 54:08.100
We were warned that it was somewhat dangerous.
54:08.100 --> 54:13.260
The place where we rented the car, took the car and went all over it the night before
54:13.260 --> 54:18.100
to make sure that it was in good running condition, wasn't going to break down and so on like
54:18.100 --> 54:20.220
that.
54:20.620 --> 54:31.740
We found a plantation, a fazenda, a farm, rode back to that along the way, near those
54:31.740 --> 54:36.620
remains that we had seen that identified as McCarthy's site and so on.
54:36.620 --> 54:39.820
We knew on the ground where we were, okay?
54:39.820 --> 54:45.580
So we found a place to camp for the night, sugar cane plantation.
54:45.580 --> 54:51.260
Two of us, Paul and I slept in the tent, Mark and Clyde slept in the car because the
54:51.260 --> 54:53.580
cane workers said there were a lot of snakes around.
54:53.580 --> 54:56.540
You know, you didn't want to sleep out in your sleeping bag.
54:56.540 --> 55:01.820
You'd probably wake up with something curled up on your belly where it was nice and warm.
55:01.820 --> 55:06.060
The next morning, we had a little trouble starting the car, but we did manage to get
55:06.060 --> 55:15.220
it started and start off on what roads we could find that wound through the plantation
55:15.220 --> 55:17.300
in that general territory.
55:17.300 --> 55:18.900
That's the Rio das Ondas.
55:18.900 --> 55:20.420
Again, we knew where we were.
55:20.420 --> 55:26.660
We knew what we were looking for and the pilot had said that, you know, when we saw
55:26.660 --> 55:31.540
McCarthy's site or what we thought was McCarthy's site, that's where we were, okay?
55:31.540 --> 55:32.900
So we tried to find this.
55:32.900 --> 55:34.100
Next slide.
55:34.100 --> 55:36.180
That's what the roads were like.
55:36.180 --> 55:40.180
Arrow straight and you see what's alongside of it.
55:40.180 --> 55:46.900
If you can imagine the thickest tangle of vines and trash weeds and whatnot you've
55:46.900 --> 55:53.140
ever seen along any back road, multiply that thickness factor by about 10 or 12 and imagine
55:53.140 --> 55:59.300
that 8 to 10 feet high as far as you can see in every direction.
55:59.300 --> 56:00.380
That's what the land was like.
56:00.380 --> 56:01.700
Northeastern Brazil.
56:01.700 --> 56:08.700
Biotropical wilderness or thorn forest is the official designation for that type of
56:08.700 --> 56:11.840
territory.
56:11.840 --> 56:14.860
That's how the average campesino or country person lives.
56:14.860 --> 56:21.220
Paulo explained to us that Brazil's population is 90% illiterate, 90% poor.
56:21.220 --> 56:26.980
Nine out of 10 people live below the poverty line, whatever that is in Brazil, and cannot
56:26.980 --> 56:28.540
read or write.
56:28.540 --> 56:36.940
Now in our travels we happened upon these, maybe an eighth of a mile or so from the
56:36.940 --> 56:37.940
road.
56:37.940 --> 56:42.620
Now this is not a good picture, but if you look carefully you see that these are all
56:42.620 --> 56:45.380
of essentially uniform height.
56:45.380 --> 56:50.060
They're all about the same size and proportion.
56:50.060 --> 56:58.100
As we look at them they go back from the foreground, back and slightly to the left.
56:58.660 --> 57:04.740
Basically their proportions are about what you'd have if you took a pavement brick and
57:04.740 --> 57:07.740
stood it up on its long side.
57:07.740 --> 57:14.300
I refer to them as ancient bridge supports, because I can just imagine a railroad or traffic
57:14.300 --> 57:19.180
bridge going across the tops of those.
57:19.180 --> 57:21.140
They certainly don't look natural.
57:21.180 --> 57:28.500
It's a little hard to tell in that picture, but I took it because it was so striking.
57:28.500 --> 57:32.300
These don't look like anything that would occur in nature.
57:32.300 --> 57:36.700
As deteriorated as they are, they look like construction.
57:36.700 --> 57:41.740
They're uniformly spaced, they're uniformly oriented, they're all about the same size
57:41.740 --> 57:42.980
and shape.
57:42.980 --> 57:45.100
This isn't mother nature at work.
57:45.100 --> 57:47.340
Same thing here.
57:47.540 --> 57:55.940
Right side corner at the top, you can't see it clearly, but here the striations are horizontal
57:55.940 --> 58:01.560
and uniform and certainly suggest construction more than sedimentation.
58:01.560 --> 58:06.900
If it were sedimentation they'd be slightly different color, they wouldn't be uniform
58:06.900 --> 58:10.500
depth and so on like that, but they were here.
58:10.500 --> 58:15.380
I asked Paulo at this point, I said, geez, there were engineers through here to build
58:15.380 --> 58:16.380
a road.
58:16.420 --> 58:18.580
Didn't they recognize this stuff?
58:18.580 --> 58:20.900
And he just said, they were here to build a road.
58:20.900 --> 58:24.300
If there were old stones in the way, they moved them.
58:24.300 --> 58:31.860
And that, I came to realize, surprisingly characterizes the attitude toward such things
58:31.860 --> 58:33.940
in Brazil.
58:33.940 --> 58:38.100
We encountered truck drivers who could not read maps.
58:38.100 --> 58:42.140
Just had no idea how to read a map, but they were truck drivers, but they knew how to get
58:42.140 --> 58:44.260
from point A to point B and that was their job.
58:44.260 --> 58:49.000
They drove the truck from point A to point B and back to point A and just, you know,
58:49.000 --> 58:50.000
that was their job.
58:50.000 --> 58:51.860
They didn't have to read a map.
58:51.860 --> 58:56.020
Pilots, bush pilots particularly, were kind of like truck drivers here.
58:56.020 --> 59:01.540
It was a somewhat specialized skill, but they were not the kind of people whom we think
59:01.540 --> 59:07.100
of as pilots in this country who are generally educated, have a little bit of money, have
59:07.100 --> 59:12.400
a highly specialized skill, have to go through all kinds of technical training and whatnot
59:12.400 --> 59:13.880
in order to get the license.
59:13.880 --> 59:18.160
As long as these guys knew how to fly the plane, they were in.
59:18.160 --> 59:19.160
That's all it took.
59:19.160 --> 59:22.000
Finally, we reached Baheras.
59:22.000 --> 59:27.420
Now I've checked a map more recently and there's a lot more on the map these days than there
59:27.420 --> 59:30.320
was back here.
59:30.320 --> 59:37.200
Baheras was on the map because as small as it was, that's all there was.
59:37.200 --> 59:43.840
So if there's anything amid 10,000 miles of emptiness, you put it there because there's
59:43.840 --> 59:44.840
a road that goes there.
59:44.840 --> 59:48.880
There's a bus that goes there every other day or every third day.
59:48.880 --> 59:51.560
It's a nine hour trip one way and so on.
59:51.560 --> 59:58.440
Baheras had one paved road, the one that we were on, one little motel where we stayed
59:58.440 --> 01:00:02.120
and a car wash and a laundromat.
01:00:02.120 --> 01:00:07.760
So it was very sophisticated.
01:00:07.760 --> 01:00:13.440
Oddly enough, it had excellent telephone service, good telecommunications.
01:00:13.440 --> 01:00:17.280
We called Rene and the states heard him clear as a bell and so on.
01:00:17.280 --> 01:00:23.000
However, that was because that was the first telephone service they had ever had.
01:00:23.000 --> 01:00:27.540
They had state of the art telecommunications because it was brand new.
01:00:27.540 --> 01:00:28.800
It was just installed.
01:00:29.800 --> 01:00:34.240
I was telling Jennifer, I ran into a similar thing in Romania two summers ago.
01:00:34.240 --> 01:00:41.200
I went there to hike in the Carpathian Mountains and I have a picture of a typical Eastern
01:00:41.200 --> 01:00:46.440
European grandmotherly lady in her black dress and black stockings and black headscarf and
01:00:46.440 --> 01:00:49.600
so on standing there on her cell phone.
01:00:49.600 --> 01:00:55.780
But our guide explained to us that when the communists took over in 47, they just didn't
01:00:55.780 --> 01:00:58.060
install telephones.
01:00:58.060 --> 01:01:01.300
Some of the party bigwigs had phones, nobody else did.
01:01:01.300 --> 01:01:07.260
In 1989, when the communists were booted out, cell phones were a rapidly emerging technology.
01:01:07.260 --> 01:01:11.740
People were scooping them up and the powers that be, the new powers that be said, well,
01:01:11.740 --> 01:01:16.160
why should we waste all the time and money installing landlines when everybody's got
01:01:16.160 --> 01:01:17.800
a cell phone anyway?
01:01:17.800 --> 01:01:22.100
So Romanians went right from no phones to cell phones.
01:01:22.100 --> 01:01:25.620
And a similar thing was the case here in Baheras.
01:01:25.620 --> 01:01:28.940
Now think back to the pyramid that we saw.
01:01:28.940 --> 01:01:32.260
Here is a pyramid, okay?
01:01:32.260 --> 01:01:34.620
And I'm jumping ahead a little.
01:01:34.620 --> 01:01:37.140
I should have stopped.
01:01:37.140 --> 01:01:44.660
Baharas is the last expedition slide because when we got to Baharas, for one thing, we
01:01:44.660 --> 01:01:50.140
had found out before we ever left the states that, how was it?
01:01:50.300 --> 01:01:55.740
I think it was as Paul, his cousin Carlos told us, that there had been a British team
01:01:55.740 --> 01:02:01.820
the year before that went up to Baharas, went north on the same road that we were going
01:02:01.820 --> 01:02:05.220
north on and disappeared.
01:02:05.220 --> 01:02:06.660
Never came back again.
01:02:06.660 --> 01:02:08.560
Nobody knows what happened to them.
01:02:08.560 --> 01:02:12.620
And they would have come back because there's no place else to go.
01:02:12.620 --> 01:02:19.140
I mean, you know, it would have been completely impractical to continue on to the next settlement
01:02:19.140 --> 01:02:22.940
over what they would have had to cross and as far away as it was.
01:02:22.940 --> 01:02:25.060
But nobody knows what happened to them.
01:02:25.060 --> 01:02:28.700
The guy who ran the little motel, his name also was Paul O.
01:02:28.700 --> 01:02:30.820
And he said, oh yeah, I remember them.
01:02:30.820 --> 01:02:34.460
Yeah, they went north and, you know, up toward the Rio Preto.
01:02:34.460 --> 01:02:35.460
No, never came back.
01:02:35.460 --> 01:02:37.380
Don't know what happened to them.
01:02:37.380 --> 01:02:42.580
And he treated this as if it were not particularly unusual for people to venture out into the
01:02:42.580 --> 01:02:45.700
wilderness there and just disappear.
01:02:45.700 --> 01:02:48.700
And excuse me.
01:02:48.860 --> 01:02:51.700
Yeah, I got to collect my thoughts here.
01:02:51.700 --> 01:02:57.180
At dinner in the little dining room, food wasn't all that great.
01:02:57.180 --> 01:02:59.340
Little dining room.
01:02:59.340 --> 01:03:03.780
We were at a table and there was one other occupied table, a few men and a couple of
01:03:03.780 --> 01:03:06.380
women and we were talking and so on.
01:03:06.380 --> 01:03:14.700
And before long, a gentleman, maybe 50ish came over from the other table, sat down
01:03:14.780 --> 01:03:23.380
and introduced himself as Senator, a name that I won't mention, Senator so and so.
01:03:23.380 --> 01:03:26.780
Educated at the University of Indiana.
01:03:26.780 --> 01:03:30.860
Married to an American woman and so on.
01:03:30.860 --> 01:03:35.860
And you know, asked us what we were doing, what were Americans and a guy from Rio doing
01:03:35.860 --> 01:03:37.760
in Little Old Biharros and so on.
01:03:37.760 --> 01:03:43.080
So we were eager to tell him why we were there and what we were after and so on.
01:03:43.120 --> 01:03:45.920
He was very interested, very interested.
01:03:45.920 --> 01:03:50.960
And Mark went back to the room, got the map and showed him where we were going, the aeronautical
01:03:50.960 --> 01:03:53.440
chart and so on.
01:03:53.440 --> 01:03:55.520
And he was very, very interested.
01:03:55.520 --> 01:04:03.080
In fact, he offered to fly us up over our target areas in his private plane the next
01:04:03.080 --> 01:04:04.080
morning.
01:04:04.080 --> 01:04:12.280
Now we had seen his private plane down at the dirt airstrip and every place has an
01:04:12.280 --> 01:04:14.200
airstrip.
01:04:14.200 --> 01:04:16.820
The interior of Brazil is like Alaska.
01:04:16.820 --> 01:04:22.200
The distances are so vast, the roads so poor, so few and far between that the only practical
01:04:22.200 --> 01:04:25.480
way to get anywhere is with an airplane.
01:04:25.480 --> 01:04:33.360
Nice, nice twin engine, six or eight place aircraft, American made, obviously cost a
01:04:33.360 --> 01:04:34.860
few bucks.
01:04:34.860 --> 01:04:37.760
And so we said, wow, you know, what a break.
01:04:37.760 --> 01:04:38.760
All right.
01:04:38.760 --> 01:04:39.760
Okay.
01:04:39.760 --> 01:04:40.760
So we went for this.
01:04:40.840 --> 01:04:50.960
The next morning we got up and got ourselves together and the senator's co-pilot asked
01:04:50.960 --> 01:04:54.840
us for a ride down to the airport.
01:04:54.840 --> 01:04:59.160
And we sort of, you know, why wouldn't you go with the senator and whoever else is going
01:04:59.160 --> 01:05:00.160
and so on.
01:05:00.160 --> 01:05:05.080
So we loaded him into the car, but Paul wasn't with us.
01:05:05.080 --> 01:05:10.520
And Mark kind of offhandedly said, you know, Paul will join us later.
01:05:10.600 --> 01:05:11.600
Okay.
01:05:11.600 --> 01:05:15.480
So we went down to the airport and the co-pilot got out.
01:05:15.480 --> 01:05:16.480
We got out.
01:05:16.480 --> 01:05:19.160
The senator's plane was gone.
01:05:19.160 --> 01:05:21.600
Wasn't there.
01:05:21.600 --> 01:05:26.880
But we had given the co-pilot a ride down to the airstrip.
01:05:26.880 --> 01:05:30.240
About that time, Mark said, it's time for a conference.
01:05:30.240 --> 01:05:33.640
We went behind the little hanger there.
01:05:33.640 --> 01:05:39.440
Come to find out that Paulo had called his father the night before in Brasilia to check
01:05:39.520 --> 01:05:40.520
on the senator.
01:05:40.520 --> 01:05:43.760
His father said the guy is bad news.
01:05:43.760 --> 01:05:45.440
Don't have anything to do with him.
01:05:45.440 --> 01:05:46.880
He's probably dangerous.
01:05:46.880 --> 01:05:48.960
Stay away from him.
01:05:48.960 --> 01:05:53.840
Paulo had taken the 32 and made himself scarce.
01:05:53.840 --> 01:05:58.720
Clyde was packing the 38, had it wrapped in his jacket.
01:05:58.720 --> 01:06:04.520
And we suddenly realized we don't think we want to take this airplane trip up over the
01:06:04.520 --> 01:06:09.000
wilderness with the senator and his goon squad or whatever.
01:06:10.000 --> 01:06:11.000
So what to do?
01:06:11.000 --> 01:06:16.240
Well, we decided that, you know, I would have I would come down with a serious case of the
01:06:16.240 --> 01:06:17.240
travelers misery.
01:06:17.240 --> 01:06:19.520
Oh, oh, man, I can't go.
01:06:19.520 --> 01:06:20.760
I got to go back to the hotel.
01:06:20.760 --> 01:06:22.080
I don't know that kind of thing.
01:06:22.080 --> 01:06:23.080
Did a great job.
01:06:23.080 --> 01:06:24.080
Very convincing.
01:06:24.080 --> 01:06:30.000
And the co-pilot looked at us and said, so the senator will not like this.
01:06:30.000 --> 01:06:34.840
He won't be happy that you're not going to you're not going to take the airplane flight.
01:06:34.840 --> 01:06:37.960
And we thought he won't be happy.
01:06:37.960 --> 01:06:42.400
He doesn't get he doesn't get the burn an hour, two hours worth of his aviation fuel
01:06:42.400 --> 01:06:44.680
just to fly us over our targets.
01:06:44.680 --> 01:06:46.080
Wow, what a disappointment.
01:06:46.080 --> 01:06:50.080
I could understand why he'd be upset.
01:06:50.080 --> 01:06:53.360
So we went back to the hotel.
01:06:53.360 --> 01:06:57.800
Clyde gave me the 38 showed me how to work the safety.
01:06:57.800 --> 01:06:58.800
Lock me in the room.
01:06:58.800 --> 01:07:05.420
They said, don't open the door for anybody under any circumstances, unless it's us.
01:07:05.420 --> 01:07:07.800
They went to look for Polo.
01:07:07.840 --> 01:07:11.480
I lay down on the bed and just shook.
01:07:11.480 --> 01:07:13.560
I mean, I was scared.
01:07:13.560 --> 01:07:17.240
I was lying there with a loaded gun under the pillow.
01:07:17.240 --> 01:07:23.000
I didn't know what we were into or how deep we were into it, but it sure was good.
01:07:23.000 --> 01:07:30.520
And the other guys, they went out, they found Polo and they found they found a bush pilot
01:07:30.520 --> 01:07:34.360
who would fly them up over the targets.
01:07:34.600 --> 01:07:39.000
It was about five hours till they got back.
01:07:39.000 --> 01:07:44.880
And what they had seen, and we had several targets, they just flew up over the northernmost
01:07:44.880 --> 01:07:46.520
ones and so on.
01:07:46.520 --> 01:07:54.360
What they had seen from the air was first a large round patch where the jungle was
01:07:54.360 --> 01:07:58.800
less dense in the middle than it was all around it.
01:07:58.800 --> 01:08:04.480
And off in the distance, another similar patch completely cleared with rows of something
01:08:04.480 --> 01:08:13.760
growing in it and not a road, not a house, not any sign of human presence visible anywhere
01:08:13.760 --> 01:08:15.880
from the air.
01:08:15.880 --> 01:08:23.160
Now, you know, Polo said what his face changed when they said rows of something growing.
01:08:23.160 --> 01:08:28.760
The Indians prepare land for planting by digging a fire break around an area and burning
01:08:28.760 --> 01:08:31.200
off what's in the middle.
01:08:31.200 --> 01:08:36.200
That's probably what the first one was, at least, you know, whether the Indians made
01:08:36.200 --> 01:08:37.480
it or not.
01:08:37.480 --> 01:08:39.000
That's what it was.
01:08:39.000 --> 01:08:43.640
The second one was already under cultivation.
01:08:43.640 --> 01:08:47.160
But you know, Polo said Indians don't plant in rows.
01:08:47.160 --> 01:08:51.080
White people plant in rows.
01:08:51.080 --> 01:08:57.960
Everybody was growing something way up there in the boondocks, far away from everything
01:08:57.960 --> 01:08:59.760
in rows.
01:08:59.760 --> 01:09:01.720
They weren't Indians.
01:09:01.720 --> 01:09:08.180
Now we started to put things together.
01:09:08.180 --> 01:09:16.020
The cane plantation where the pilot from Brasilia had set down to drop Mark off was the senator's
01:09:16.020 --> 01:09:18.120
cane plantation.
01:09:18.120 --> 01:09:20.040
That was his.
01:09:20.040 --> 01:09:23.760
Polo said, cane planters come in all varieties.
01:09:23.760 --> 01:09:29.200
Some are bigger than others, but very few, if any of them, make enough money to afford
01:09:29.200 --> 01:09:35.640
a six or eight piece twin engine aircraft like that and retain a pilot and co-pilot
01:09:35.640 --> 01:09:36.640
on staff.
01:09:36.640 --> 01:09:40.680
This, you know, this guy's up to something.
01:09:40.680 --> 01:09:42.200
Okay.
01:09:42.200 --> 01:09:46.880
We also, and I forgot this, there's so many ramifications to this.
01:09:47.040 --> 01:09:53.400
What we discovered, what we realized when we drove all around the plantation, the farm
01:09:53.400 --> 01:10:01.360
near the Girdas Ondas before we got to Baharas, we couldn't find anything that looked like
01:10:01.360 --> 01:10:04.600
that stone business we photographed from the air.
01:10:04.600 --> 01:10:07.280
We couldn't find anybody who knew anything about it.
01:10:07.280 --> 01:10:13.960
And in fact, we began to realize this doesn't look anything like what we saw from the air.
01:10:13.960 --> 01:10:19.040
This is totally different topography, totally different vegetation, a totally different
01:10:19.040 --> 01:10:20.600
layout altogether.
01:10:20.600 --> 01:10:27.240
We must not have been flown where we thought we were.
01:10:27.240 --> 01:10:35.620
And why, you know, why was the senator and his people right there in little old Baharas,
01:10:35.620 --> 01:10:42.120
right when we got there, he said he was thinking about establishing another cane plantation
01:10:42.200 --> 01:10:44.720
up there in that neighborhood where we were going.
01:10:44.720 --> 01:10:47.960
Well, Paulo said, that's a totally impractical idea.
01:10:47.960 --> 01:10:49.240
It's too isolated.
01:10:49.240 --> 01:10:56.280
It's not close enough to any roads or any means of getting the cane to where it can
01:10:56.280 --> 01:10:59.520
be processed and marketed and so on.
01:10:59.520 --> 01:11:01.840
The land is much too dry.
01:11:01.840 --> 01:11:02.840
It's too remote.
01:11:02.840 --> 01:11:04.440
Who would you get to work there?
01:11:04.440 --> 01:11:05.440
And so on.
01:11:05.440 --> 01:11:10.080
So it's not, that's not what he was doing up here.
01:11:10.080 --> 01:11:15.800
So gradually, we started to think when I guess who is growing what?
01:11:15.800 --> 01:11:17.560
Oh, I'm sorry.
01:11:17.560 --> 01:11:19.840
I didn't mention this.
01:11:19.840 --> 01:11:20.840
The gypsies.
01:11:20.840 --> 01:11:21.840
Okay.
01:11:21.840 --> 01:11:23.600
Also, Paul's father.
01:11:23.600 --> 01:11:25.800
Look out for Indians.
01:11:25.800 --> 01:11:28.160
There weren't supposed to be any where we were going.
01:11:28.160 --> 01:11:29.160
Look out for Indians.
01:11:29.160 --> 01:11:32.720
If they think you're after their land, they will shoot you.
01:11:32.720 --> 01:11:34.440
Look out for squatters.
01:11:34.440 --> 01:11:38.020
If they think you are after their land, they will shoot you.
01:11:38.020 --> 01:11:42.200
First of all, look out for cocaine growers.
01:11:42.200 --> 01:11:46.660
There was cocaine growing up around there.
01:11:46.660 --> 01:11:54.480
And as nearly as we could figure, Senator What's-his-name had a few cocaine fields
01:11:54.480 --> 01:11:57.580
up there where nobody would know about them.
01:11:57.580 --> 01:12:02.320
And we were going to get a little too close to those.
01:12:02.320 --> 01:12:04.040
Maybe we knew what we were doing.
01:12:04.040 --> 01:12:06.880
Maybe we didn't, but he didn't want to take the chance.
01:12:06.900 --> 01:12:12.740
And he was probably in his plane when we went down to the airstrip checking out just
01:12:12.740 --> 01:12:20.020
how close our targets were to his protected area that he didn't want anybody to discover.
01:12:20.020 --> 01:12:25.540
Because doing to us what he very well may have done to the British the year before was
01:12:25.540 --> 01:12:26.540
a little risky.
01:12:26.540 --> 01:12:30.280
You know, you don't want to erase four people on a hunch.
01:12:30.280 --> 01:12:35.220
You want to make sure that they're on to what you don't want them to be on to.
01:12:35.220 --> 01:12:41.960
Not only that, but the pilot from Brasilia probably did some transporting of some sort
01:12:41.960 --> 01:12:47.920
for the Senator so that he knew exactly where the Senator's cane plantation was.
01:12:47.920 --> 01:12:53.320
He knew that he didn't want to fly us over where we wanted to go because that's, he
01:12:53.320 --> 01:12:58.600
must have known what was there and was sure the Senator didn't want anybody to see it.
01:12:58.600 --> 01:13:04.200
And tipped off the Senator when he got back to Brasilia so that when we finally made it
01:13:04.200 --> 01:13:06.860
to Bahedas, guess who was waiting for us?
01:13:06.860 --> 01:13:12.620
Eager to do us the favor of flying us up over the targets and so on and quite possibly
01:13:12.620 --> 01:13:14.020
pushing us out the door.
01:13:14.020 --> 01:13:20.020
If in fact they hadn't landed somewhere to put a bullet through our heads and toss our
01:13:20.020 --> 01:13:21.920
bodies in the weeds.
01:13:21.920 --> 01:13:26.840
So as we realized this, we were running low on money.
01:13:26.840 --> 01:13:32.460
There was some not particularly responsible handling of expedition funds early on.
01:13:33.060 --> 01:13:38.860
If we pushed on north to our targets, it would be at least another week on the rental
01:13:38.860 --> 01:13:43.300
car bill.
01:13:43.300 --> 01:13:48.780
We didn't have what we figured we needed to get in there, the right equipment and so
01:13:48.780 --> 01:13:50.060
on.
01:13:50.060 --> 01:13:55.420
And we were, we didn't know how much danger we were in, but we were in a lot more than
01:13:55.420 --> 01:13:57.100
we wanted to be.
01:13:57.100 --> 01:13:59.740
And we finally realized we don't want to be here.
01:13:59.740 --> 01:14:00.740
This is not worth it.
01:14:01.060 --> 01:14:05.460
And we called Rene, we told him what the situation was, and he said, no, come home,
01:14:05.460 --> 01:14:08.340
get out of there before anything happens to you.
01:14:08.340 --> 01:14:15.600
So we jumped in the car and we hightailed it back to Brasilia and made connections
01:14:15.600 --> 01:14:17.240
and came home.
01:14:17.240 --> 01:14:24.020
But you know, afterward, you know, it was an interesting story, but what do you do
01:14:24.020 --> 01:14:26.540
with a story of a failed expedition?
01:14:26.540 --> 01:14:30.660
An expedition that didn't reach its target, that didn't discover what it set out to
01:14:30.660 --> 01:14:31.780
find?
01:14:31.780 --> 01:14:36.020
You know, it's basically a dead story, I figured.
01:14:36.020 --> 01:14:37.020
So what?
01:14:37.020 --> 01:14:40.860
Well, you know, I thought I thought about that.
01:14:40.860 --> 01:14:44.300
But what's like, well, who wants to read about failure?
01:14:44.300 --> 01:14:46.620
Who wants to read about you didn't get where you were going?
01:14:46.620 --> 01:14:48.860
Who wants to read about you didn't find what you were looking for?
01:14:48.860 --> 01:14:50.980
Yeah, but it turned into another story.
01:14:50.980 --> 01:14:51.980
Well, it did.
01:14:51.980 --> 01:14:55.340
Well, you know, I just kind of put it put it behind me there.
01:14:55.340 --> 01:14:58.780
It's it's it's in other words, a long story.
01:14:58.780 --> 01:15:03.740
But when we got back, René had exhausted what money he inherited from his parents
01:15:03.740 --> 01:15:06.460
and what he could save.
01:15:06.460 --> 01:15:11.420
There was some outstanding debt that that the investment partners had agreed to cover
01:15:11.420 --> 01:15:16.340
and they weren't happy about that because they didn't expect it to happen and so on.
01:15:16.340 --> 01:15:21.660
And you know, we had we had tried and we had just run into too much danger.
01:15:21.700 --> 01:15:24.500
And René kind of hung up his spurs there.
01:15:24.500 --> 01:15:30.740
And then he he he thought I was going to be his his hunting buddy and his drinking buddy
01:15:30.740 --> 01:15:31.740
and so on.
01:15:31.740 --> 01:15:35.300
Well, I wasn't particularly interested in either one like René a great deal.
01:15:35.300 --> 01:15:38.820
And I had all kinds of interesting times working on this with him.
01:15:38.820 --> 01:15:40.820
But I don't hunt.
01:15:40.820 --> 01:15:42.100
I don't drink.
01:15:42.100 --> 01:15:43.180
Worth mentioning.
01:15:43.180 --> 01:15:46.020
And it was kind of awkward.
01:15:46.020 --> 01:15:49.380
I didn't want to tell him, you know, like, no, I'm not interested.
01:15:49.380 --> 01:15:50.380
You know, have a nice life.
01:15:50.380 --> 01:15:51.380
See you around.
01:15:51.540 --> 01:15:57.940
So I just kind of little by little didn't go down to his place and hang around and have
01:15:57.940 --> 01:15:59.020
dinner and, you know, all that.
01:15:59.020 --> 01:16:03.420
And we just sort of without any animosity, we just sort of realized, well, the one thing
01:16:03.420 --> 01:16:10.060
that that brought us together is gone and there's just nothing left to serve that same
01:16:10.260 --> 01:16:15.220
purpose. And sort of like the whole thing kind of just just melted away in a big hurry.
01:16:15.460 --> 01:16:17.020
And, you know, I put my slides away.
01:16:17.060 --> 01:16:21.980
I made up this little slide presentation to show to some friends.
01:16:21.980 --> 01:16:26.940
And I did did a presentation for a Lions Club and a local historical society.
01:16:26.940 --> 01:16:27.940
And that's it.
01:16:27.940 --> 01:16:33.380
And so on. Anyway, think back to the pyramid that you saw photographed from the side road.
01:16:33.940 --> 01:16:40.980
This is an unexcavated pyramid from Chichen Itza in Mexico, which I think looks a lot
01:16:40.980 --> 01:16:44.140
less like what it is than the one I photographed from the road.
01:16:44.860 --> 01:16:49.500
Think of the ancient bridge supports there and how deteriorated they were.
01:16:49.780 --> 01:16:52.940
This is the Pont du Garde in Provence in France.
01:16:53.300 --> 01:16:54.580
It's a Roman aqueduct.
01:16:54.580 --> 01:16:56.780
It was finished in about 450 A.D.
01:16:58.020 --> 01:16:59.620
I've walked across the top of it.
01:17:00.460 --> 01:17:02.420
That was about 40 years ago.
01:17:02.460 --> 01:17:05.700
You can't do that anymore, but you could then.
01:17:05.940 --> 01:17:08.660
And it looks about five years old.
01:17:08.820 --> 01:17:11.220
It's barely deteriorated at all.
01:17:11.860 --> 01:17:18.940
I think the construction is primarily limestone, which is not a really durable mineral.
01:17:19.540 --> 01:17:27.820
The the the waterway here, the Romans actually lined with a sort of a sort of concrete
01:17:27.820 --> 01:17:32.820
mixture that is resistant to the erosive action of flowing water.
01:17:33.460 --> 01:17:36.820
So it didn't matter if the rest of it was limestone and the water didn't flow over
01:17:36.820 --> 01:17:39.940
the limestone. But my point is this thing.
01:17:40.700 --> 01:17:44.820
Being about 1500 years old looked brand new.
01:17:45.180 --> 01:17:49.340
That part of France is not quite so dry as the part of Brazil we were in.
01:17:49.340 --> 01:17:55.860
And yet look at how deteriorated the you know, those those ancient bridge supports
01:17:55.860 --> 01:18:00.020
were the things by the side of the road with the tree growing out of it.
01:18:00.340 --> 01:18:07.460
How old must they be in order to have deteriorated that much over over time?
01:18:08.100 --> 01:18:12.580
While we were there, Paul's father cut out some things from the newspaper from us.
01:18:12.780 --> 01:18:19.780
This is an article indicating that people inhabited Bahia, the region of Brazil that
01:18:19.780 --> 01:18:24.220
we were in as long ago as twenty seven thousand years.
01:18:25.140 --> 01:18:31.500
Now, the prevailing theory at the time was that people came to the Americas over the
01:18:31.500 --> 01:18:36.300
ice bridge across the Bering Strait during or toward the end of the last ice age, about
01:18:36.300 --> 01:18:41.460
ten thousand years ago. And one of the big archaeological mysteries has been how do
01:18:41.460 --> 01:18:47.580
they get all the way from the Arctic Circle to the tip of South America while stopping
01:18:47.580 --> 01:18:55.140
along the way to create civilizations like Cahokia and the Aztecs and the Inca and
01:18:55.620 --> 01:19:00.580
excuse me, the the Olmec and so on like that all the way down to Patagonia.
01:19:00.580 --> 01:19:05.540
They must have been on the dead run in order to cover that much territory in that
01:19:05.540 --> 01:19:12.780
short time. And of course, one of the things that we were involved in here was the
01:19:13.300 --> 01:19:17.780
debate between diffusion and independent origin.
01:19:18.260 --> 01:19:25.700
Did the various technologies, methods of building ideas like like the well, the the
01:19:25.820 --> 01:19:31.740
the alphabets and the inscriptions and the other things, technologies like weaving
01:19:32.100 --> 01:19:39.300
certain plants and all that, were they arrived at independently on each side of the ocean
01:19:39.300 --> 01:19:41.460
or was there some kind of contact?
01:19:42.180 --> 01:19:48.100
Professor Van Sertima's book that has the Olmec heads in it, he cites the Olmec heads
01:19:48.340 --> 01:19:55.660
as evidence. He cites cotton as evidence, the kind of cotton that the Indians used
01:19:56.500 --> 01:20:02.380
to weave their cloth and so on. When they when the first Europeans arrived in South
01:20:02.380 --> 01:20:08.500
America is actually a hybrid of old world cotton and new world cotton.
01:20:09.140 --> 01:20:16.700
There have been looms discovered in Egyptian tombs that are identical to the ones used
01:20:16.940 --> 01:20:24.700
by people in South America, the mountain people in the Andes and so on like that.
01:20:25.180 --> 01:20:30.300
Another is bottle gourds, the gourds that are hollowed out, used for carrying water
01:20:30.300 --> 01:20:36.140
and so on. These are African plants and people have experimented with them, thrown them
01:20:36.140 --> 01:20:39.380
into a tub of saltwater to see how long it would take them to turn to mush.
01:20:39.660 --> 01:20:44.580
And it was just a couple of weeks. They could not possibly have survived a journey across
01:20:44.580 --> 01:20:47.900
the Atlantic to the shores of Brazil.
01:20:47.940 --> 01:20:49.820
And yet they're all over South America.
01:20:50.140 --> 01:20:51.060
How did they get here?
01:20:51.580 --> 01:20:58.300
The first Europeans, some of the first Europeans to reach the Americas thought that they
01:20:58.300 --> 01:21:03.300
were indeed in China and the Orient because they thought that people were wearing silk.
01:21:03.860 --> 01:21:09.820
They were wearing cotton garments that were so finely woven, so smooth, so tight,
01:21:10.620 --> 01:21:12.180
nothing comparable in Europe.
01:21:12.340 --> 01:21:14.300
And the Europeans thought they were looking at silk.
01:21:14.620 --> 01:21:20.380
Now, spinning and weaving, that's a pretty complex and sophisticated technology.
01:21:20.660 --> 01:21:25.300
How likely is it that something like that would just sort of spontaneously evolve at
01:21:25.300 --> 01:21:28.420
about the same time on two sides of the Atlantic?
01:21:30.100 --> 01:21:37.900
The theories about the peopling of the Americas have been extensively revised since 1984.
01:21:38.260 --> 01:21:46.540
When we were there, the idea of diffusion has become a lot more acceptable in academic
01:21:46.540 --> 01:21:48.300
circles than it was.
01:21:49.260 --> 01:21:56.100
One of our trips to Washington, we went to the Smithsonian Institution, went down into
01:21:56.100 --> 01:22:01.340
the basement where the offices are, walked back long hallways with these huge bins full
01:22:01.340 --> 01:22:03.580
of stuff that you can only imagine.
01:22:03.580 --> 01:22:04.780
It wasn't on display yet.
01:22:05.300 --> 01:22:12.140
Back to the office of Dr. Betty Meagher, who was at that time the archaeologist who
01:22:12.140 --> 01:22:14.700
had done the most work in the Amazon basin.
01:22:15.180 --> 01:22:20.060
She was a nice, she must have looked a little older than she was because she's still alive.
01:22:20.060 --> 01:22:21.020
And I'll get to that in a moment.
01:22:21.340 --> 01:22:27.540
Nice little gray haired sort of grandmotherly lady about, you know, so high, maybe 105
01:22:27.540 --> 01:22:32.900
pounds or something like that, spent her career prowling around the Amazon basin, digging
01:22:32.900 --> 01:22:35.420
up arrowheads and a few chunks of pottery.
01:22:35.580 --> 01:22:36.500
That was it.
01:22:36.900 --> 01:22:41.940
As of the time we went there, no significant archaeological remains had ever been
01:22:41.940 --> 01:22:43.420
discovered in Brazil.
01:22:44.380 --> 01:22:51.460
And, you know, we wanted to hit the Smithsonian for financing, for an expedition.
01:22:51.460 --> 01:22:54.300
We wanted her opinion, her support, et cetera, and so on.
01:22:54.820 --> 01:23:00.500
Well, she was very nice, but she kind of looked at us with that, oh, you know, you poor
01:23:00.500 --> 01:23:05.460
amateurs, you've been sucked in by this diffusion business, you know, this transatlantic
01:23:05.460 --> 01:23:06.660
contact and so on.
01:23:08.060 --> 01:23:12.820
You know, I'll listen to your tale, but, you know, I can't really buy this.
01:23:13.060 --> 01:23:18.220
But before we left, she showed us a book that she and her husband had put together
01:23:18.580 --> 01:23:24.660
that documents photographically the remarkable similarities in technique and design of
01:23:24.660 --> 01:23:32.700
marking pottery between shards that had been found on the coast of Ecuador and ancient
01:23:33.020 --> 01:23:38.140
Jomon era pottery from Japan, which goes back about 3000 years.
01:23:39.140 --> 01:23:45.020
Now, that suggests Trans-Pacific contact way long ago.
01:23:45.460 --> 01:23:49.980
And isn't the Pacific Ocean a lot bigger and more difficult to cross than the Atlantic?
01:23:50.220 --> 01:23:52.980
And yet she, you know, here's the evidence.
01:23:53.060 --> 01:23:58.300
She was OK with that, but she couldn't buy the possibility that ancient people had
01:23:58.300 --> 01:24:01.460
crossed the Atlantic on a regular and frequent basis.
01:24:01.660 --> 01:24:10.260
Dr. Magers is now publishing papers in the New England Antiquities Research Association
01:24:10.260 --> 01:24:17.980
Journal in the world, at least as it was in 1984 of academic archaeology.
01:24:18.300 --> 01:24:20.340
She has gone over to the dark side.
01:24:21.300 --> 01:24:26.220
OK, but she, you know, she's apparently she's apparently convinced.
01:24:27.020 --> 01:24:29.020
Legendary ruins found in Brazil.
01:24:29.020 --> 01:24:36.620
An archaeologist named Abreu found what he thought was Angrejil, a ruins city again,
01:24:37.380 --> 01:24:45.740
ruins construction in Bahia, more toward the coast than where we were.
01:24:46.420 --> 01:24:54.740
His theory is that it was built by a bunch of Incas who had migrated from Peru over to
01:24:55.740 --> 01:24:59.300
the other side of the continent.
01:24:59.300 --> 01:25:06.660
But that was the first really significant archaeological find other than arrowheads,
01:25:06.780 --> 01:25:09.220
spearheads and chunks of pottery in Brazil.
01:25:09.820 --> 01:25:11.420
Now, this is quite interesting.
01:25:12.460 --> 01:25:18.980
While we were there, some guys and some workers down in Chile were excavating to lay water
01:25:19.220 --> 01:25:26.780
lines on the side of a hill and their, you know, their front end loaders or their shovels
01:25:26.780 --> 01:25:27.860
or whatever they were using.
01:25:28.220 --> 01:25:33.020
And they ran into rock, solid rock, a lot of rock.
01:25:33.820 --> 01:25:37.620
And they weren't sure whether this was bedrock or a great big boulder or what it was.
01:25:37.620 --> 01:25:38.660
So they stopped.
01:25:39.140 --> 01:25:40.420
They dug around a little bit.
01:25:40.700 --> 01:25:46.900
They found out that the rock had a smooth, flat horizontal surface and square corners.
01:25:47.460 --> 01:25:48.740
They were on a pyramid.
01:25:49.540 --> 01:25:51.940
They were on a step of a pyramid.
01:25:52.340 --> 01:25:55.380
So they stopped.
01:25:55.380 --> 01:26:01.060
They, you know, they brought in archaeologists to excavate the pyramid.
01:26:01.460 --> 01:26:09.340
They brought out a dozen mummies from the pyramid and they took samples and sent them
01:26:09.340 --> 01:26:12.220
up to the Smithsonian Institution for Carbon 14 dating.
01:26:12.700 --> 01:26:19.420
These mummies were 25 centuries older than the oldest known Egyptian mummy and were
01:26:19.620 --> 01:26:25.220
prepared with a knowledge of human physiognomy that the Egyptians never quite achieved.
01:26:26.020 --> 01:26:28.340
These people in Chile knew more about what they were doing.
01:26:28.420 --> 01:26:32.940
Now, didn't we all know that the Egyptians invented mummies?
01:26:33.740 --> 01:26:35.100
Well, you know, apparently not.
01:26:36.100 --> 01:26:42.900
There's a copy of an article over there that appeared in a fall 1985 issue of Natural
01:26:42.900 --> 01:26:46.140
History magazine about these mummies.
01:26:46.380 --> 01:26:54.460
It was written by a paleo, an archaeopathologist who studies what diseases and physical
01:26:54.460 --> 01:26:58.540
conditions ancient people had from examining their skeletons.
01:26:58.820 --> 01:26:59.980
And he wrote about that.
01:27:00.460 --> 01:27:08.900
But he says at the end, I can't explain how mummies 25 centuries older than the oldest
01:27:08.900 --> 01:27:11.980
Egyptian mummy wound up in a pyramid in Chile.
01:27:13.020 --> 01:27:13.820
But there they were.
01:27:14.580 --> 01:27:16.660
There's another shot of the mummies or one of them.
01:27:21.220 --> 01:27:24.780
I think they just look that way because they're skinny here.
01:27:26.580 --> 01:27:27.940
And this goes back.
01:27:27.980 --> 01:27:35.300
I have other clippings that I've that I've gleaned over the years that I never
01:27:35.300 --> 01:27:37.020
incorporated into the slideshow.
01:27:37.020 --> 01:27:39.420
I didn't have slides that made I didn't have any particular reason.
01:27:40.020 --> 01:27:43.300
Ancient stone tablets may link Peru and Mideast.
01:27:43.700 --> 01:27:48.300
What the text says is that Jean Savoy, a member of the Explorers Club, who spent
01:27:48.300 --> 01:27:55.180
decades in South America, is credited with like a dozen major archaeological finds,
01:27:55.180 --> 01:28:02.940
has written several books, made a career out of this, found in a cave some tablets
01:28:03.420 --> 01:28:08.180
inscribed with writing that was recognizably and decipherably Hebrew.
01:28:09.900 --> 01:28:17.180
I never heard much of anything more about this except New Age Journal 1991.
01:28:17.620 --> 01:28:24.260
OK, Jean Savoy joined an incredible voyage of discovery and share in the world's best
01:28:24.260 --> 01:28:30.540
kept secret. The secrets of the universe, the secrets of life revealed to you only
01:28:30.540 --> 01:28:36.860
ninety nine bucks for the, you know, the the complete video presentation and so on
01:28:36.860 --> 01:28:44.460
like this. And, you know, I looked at that Project X, all right, offered through the
01:28:44.460 --> 01:28:50.340
Jamillion University in Reno, Nevada, a city renowned for its academic institutions.
01:28:50.340 --> 01:28:57.940
I look at things like this and I think if I had a dollar for everybody who wanted to
01:28:57.940 --> 01:29:04.180
sell me a book, a video, a course, whatever, all about the secrets of the universe, the
01:29:04.180 --> 01:29:10.500
key to life, you know, happiness, longevity, eternal bliss, whatever it is, I could retire
01:29:10.500 --> 01:29:14.540
and live to a ripe old age in a luxurious villa in the south of France.
01:29:15.020 --> 01:29:18.780
Now, what surprised me is Jean Savoy.
01:29:20.620 --> 01:29:22.980
I mean, what was he running out of money or something?
01:29:24.020 --> 01:29:25.380
Is this a scam?
01:29:26.220 --> 01:29:31.540
And if so, how in the world did someone like him wind up associated with it?
01:29:32.460 --> 01:29:33.380
Is it legitimate?
01:29:33.900 --> 01:29:36.740
Never heard anything more about this again, ever.
01:29:36.780 --> 01:29:41.820
Never saw another ad, never heard anything about this course or whatever.
01:29:42.460 --> 01:29:53.220
And all I can all I can connect that with is Hugh McCarthy's going gradually bonkers
01:29:53.500 --> 01:29:57.460
after so much time in the wilderness of Brazil.
01:29:58.940 --> 01:30:05.420
Percival Fawcett, as he got older, the more time he spent in the jungle prowling around,
01:30:06.220 --> 01:30:11.100
he was when he was in the army, when he was a military engineer and so on, doing a
01:30:11.100 --> 01:30:15.980
surveying and whatnot, the most pragmatic of men, according to this guy to whom René
01:30:16.060 --> 01:30:18.660
talked in the bookstore in Sevilla.
01:30:19.380 --> 01:30:24.700
Later on in life, he got hooked up with Madame Blavatsky, theosophy, you know, the
01:30:24.700 --> 01:30:26.940
whole business and so on.
01:30:28.500 --> 01:30:34.740
It's like it's like Joseph Conrad's character in the Heart of Darkness, who just came out
01:30:34.740 --> 01:30:37.380
of the jungle muttering the horror, the horror.
01:30:38.340 --> 01:30:39.140
What happens?
01:30:39.180 --> 01:30:40.740
You know, does something happen to people?
01:30:41.420 --> 01:30:43.540
When they spend so much of their lives.
01:30:44.740 --> 01:30:52.660
Out alone or essentially alone in this uncharted wilderness, encountering God knows what
01:30:52.660 --> 01:31:00.220
around any corner, living a very hard life, struggling every day, not only to avoid dying
01:31:00.220 --> 01:31:04.460
in some very unpleasant way, but trying to find something that they've been looking for
01:31:04.460 --> 01:31:07.180
for years and haven't found yet.
01:31:07.660 --> 01:31:08.260
I don't know.
01:31:08.940 --> 01:31:13.300
It's an interesting it's an interesting question, though, and it may, you know, it may
01:31:13.300 --> 01:31:15.100
explain something.
01:31:15.340 --> 01:31:22.420
It may explain, you know, Jean Savoy's association with whatever that is, as well as some
01:31:22.420 --> 01:31:22.980
other things.
01:31:23.300 --> 01:31:29.860
Now, this is an article about a house, roughly 10,000 years discovered in Fresno, California.
01:31:30.180 --> 01:31:37.300
There again, about 10,000 years that would that would date it appropriately for the
01:31:37.300 --> 01:31:40.300
prevailing theories of the people of the Americas.
01:31:40.540 --> 01:31:45.980
Yet, you know, these people would have had to get down through the ice fields, through
01:31:45.980 --> 01:31:54.460
Canada, over to the West Coast, down through California to Fresno to start building houses,
01:31:54.580 --> 01:31:56.420
building stone houses and so on.
01:31:57.020 --> 01:32:05.220
And as far as I was aware at the time, the belief that American Indians got here much,
01:32:05.220 --> 01:32:07.980
much later than 10,000 years ago.
01:32:08.620 --> 01:32:09.780
And here's something interesting.
01:32:09.820 --> 01:32:14.940
And this is what irritates me a little bit about establishment science.
01:32:14.940 --> 01:32:16.260
And I'm not against science.
01:32:16.260 --> 01:32:21.500
I have great respect for science as a means of ascertaining truth.
01:32:21.500 --> 01:32:22.780
I like to read about it.
01:32:22.780 --> 01:32:23.940
I like to learn about it.
01:32:24.060 --> 01:32:30.020
I don't know of any better way of finding out how the world and the universe works.
01:32:30.260 --> 01:32:36.980
But this is an article about a tomb in China that was dug up.
01:32:37.500 --> 01:32:42.700
And it was apparently the tomb of somebody reasonably important because among other
01:32:42.700 --> 01:32:48.420
things, they found a little ornately decorated, possibly jeweled chest right next to the
01:32:48.420 --> 01:32:53.180
body. And when they opened this, there was nothing in it but a few seeds.
01:32:54.860 --> 01:32:57.860
So they said, you know, let's let's plant a couple, see what comes up.
01:32:58.620 --> 01:33:02.060
So they planted some and what came up was tomatoes.
01:33:04.660 --> 01:33:07.900
No tomatoes are a new world fruit.
01:33:08.180 --> 01:33:09.100
They didn't have them.
01:33:09.860 --> 01:33:14.580
You know, the the the Italians underwent terrible hardship for centuries because they had
01:33:14.580 --> 01:33:20.180
no sauce for the spaghetti until tomatoes were brought back from back from back from
01:33:20.180 --> 01:33:23.780
the Americas. So what did what did the archaeologists do?
01:33:24.300 --> 01:33:28.220
Why they went back to all the ancient Chinese cookbooks they could find and started
01:33:28.220 --> 01:33:31.020
pouring through them again to see where they missed tomatoes.
01:33:32.420 --> 01:33:33.220
Well, now, wait a minute.
01:33:33.780 --> 01:33:38.100
If these things were in this, you know, this very ornate little chest right next to an
01:33:38.100 --> 01:33:43.100
important person and there was only a handful of them, must they not be very special
01:33:43.100 --> 01:33:48.020
seeds? Must they not have maybe come from somewhere very far away?
01:33:48.500 --> 01:33:49.500
Be hard to get.
01:33:50.660 --> 01:33:56.140
And precious, if you will, to be offered as a gift to this important person, whoever
01:33:56.140 --> 01:34:03.140
it was. If they were if they were in the Chinese cookbooks, you know, why why would
01:34:03.140 --> 01:34:08.700
you ask to be buried with your burpee sunflower seeds or something in a little jeweled
01:34:08.700 --> 01:34:12.020
chest, the side of your, you know, side of your arm or something like that?
01:34:12.020 --> 01:34:13.100
It makes no sense.
01:34:13.100 --> 01:34:18.100
The the couple of Nera New England Antiquities Journal Association journals have
01:34:18.100 --> 01:34:24.700
their feature articles by Norman Muller, who is a conservator at the Museum at
01:34:24.700 --> 01:34:29.780
Princeton. He's been working, among other places, at the Olie Hills site, which I
01:34:29.780 --> 01:34:30.780
used to live near.
01:34:31.140 --> 01:34:36.380
And a guy named Fred Workheiser from Bethlehem contacted me through Nera to go
01:34:36.380 --> 01:34:37.380
up there with him.
01:34:37.420 --> 01:34:45.380
It's several acres of large stone cairns, ice cream cone shape, shaped like an
01:34:45.380 --> 01:34:46.380
overturned boat.
01:34:47.820 --> 01:34:51.300
You know, the the hull of an overturned boat, a few other things.
01:34:51.300 --> 01:34:56.340
And at the very top of the hill is a dolmen, a standing stone, a huge boulder.
01:34:57.060 --> 01:35:02.140
You know, the the cement mixer trucks that carry concrete down the highway and so on.
01:35:02.300 --> 01:35:06.420
The cement mixer trucks that carry concrete down the highway and so on.
01:35:06.660 --> 01:35:09.620
Well, the barrel of those.
01:35:09.860 --> 01:35:16.140
Imagine a boulder that size and roughly that shape at the top of a hill supported on
01:35:16.660 --> 01:35:22.820
two little stones in the front and the end of a stone wall coming straight up
01:35:22.820 --> 01:35:23.820
through a field.
01:35:24.980 --> 01:35:25.980
How did it get there?
01:35:26.780 --> 01:35:31.660
I mean, there were other big boulders buried in the in the ground, some of which
01:35:31.660 --> 01:35:33.340
were, you know, some of them were sticking out.
01:35:33.580 --> 01:35:35.020
This thing was totally clear.
01:35:35.340 --> 01:35:39.700
It was the highest thing on the hill and it was big and it was heavy.
01:35:40.180 --> 01:35:46.020
And dolmens are common in this country, in Europe, in Asia.
01:35:46.060 --> 01:35:48.180
There's something that's found all over the world.
01:35:48.260 --> 01:35:51.740
Nobody knows precisely what they mean or what they were for.
01:35:52.140 --> 01:35:54.060
But the point is, they are all over.
01:35:54.420 --> 01:36:01.100
People long, long ago all over the world were constructing these things, placing
01:36:01.100 --> 01:36:02.220
these things, whatever they did.
01:36:02.620 --> 01:36:09.860
OK, there are many ramifications here, many tangents that I could could go off on.
01:36:10.460 --> 01:36:16.060
And there are many questions raised by the whole thing, which is actually what any good
01:36:16.060 --> 01:36:17.980
scientific investigation should do.
01:36:17.980 --> 01:36:20.420
I think raise more questions than it actually answers.
01:36:21.900 --> 01:36:23.380
Was there actually.
01:36:24.420 --> 01:36:29.660
Regular and frequent traffic between the old world and the new centuries before
01:36:29.660 --> 01:36:31.100
Columbus ever got here?
01:36:31.380 --> 01:36:34.500
Well, there certainly seems to be ample evidence for it.
01:36:35.140 --> 01:36:36.060
But what happened to it?
01:36:36.660 --> 01:36:37.740
Why did it stop?
01:36:38.780 --> 01:36:40.700
Why, you know, why is there no more?
01:36:41.420 --> 01:36:45.980
Why doesn't it appear in Roman times and, you know, late Greek times and so on like
01:36:45.980 --> 01:36:47.940
that? We don't really know.
01:36:48.740 --> 01:36:53.740
Excuse me. Another thing is what what was.
01:36:54.740 --> 01:37:00.700
That's the city described in 512 document 512, the one we were looking for.
01:37:01.380 --> 01:37:04.980
There's one theory that this could possibly be Solomon's Mines.
01:37:04.980 --> 01:37:09.940
This could be Ophir, the land of Ophir, where the ships of Tarshish took a year and a half
01:37:10.140 --> 01:37:12.300
to get there and get back again.
01:37:12.460 --> 01:37:17.100
Now, there's no place in the Mediterranean that takes you a year and a half for a round
01:37:17.100 --> 01:37:20.660
trip. It must have been somewhere much farther away.
01:37:21.460 --> 01:37:28.460
This was apparently a collection place for gold and silver and aromatic herbs and spices
01:37:28.460 --> 01:37:33.460
and whatnot gathered from the, you know, from the surrounding territory.
01:37:34.060 --> 01:37:38.460
Maybe we have what became known as Solomon's Mines.
01:37:38.500 --> 01:37:42.140
I don't know, but there's, you know, there's another interesting connection.
01:37:44.380 --> 01:37:46.900
There were other things besides just pure research.
01:37:47.700 --> 01:37:51.620
One of the investment partners had done a little treasure hunting previously
01:37:52.740 --> 01:37:56.780
and had some experience in dowsing.
01:37:57.740 --> 01:38:03.020
He took the aeronautical chart that René had been working with, the one that said
01:38:03.020 --> 01:38:07.860
that the mountains where we were going were believed not to exceed 6000 feet and things
01:38:07.860 --> 01:38:13.220
like that, took it up to a dowsers convention in New England and had the head
01:38:13.220 --> 01:38:15.540
dowser dows the map.
01:38:16.500 --> 01:38:18.380
I had no idea you could douse maps.
01:38:19.540 --> 01:38:25.220
This guy was a retired electrical engineer, someone thoroughly grounded in science
01:38:25.700 --> 01:38:29.260
and, you know, the pragmatic end of doing science.
01:38:29.540 --> 01:38:31.860
But he was a dowser and he doused the map.
01:38:32.740 --> 01:38:39.260
And, you know, Ed came back with a with a mark on the aeronautical chart where the
01:38:39.260 --> 01:38:43.300
head dowser, the president of the Dowsers Association or whatever, had put it.
01:38:43.660 --> 01:38:48.940
We used to work on Sunday afternoons in the meeting room of the Chester County
01:38:48.940 --> 01:38:54.980
Library. And I don't remember what I was doing, but one of the guys was transferring
01:38:54.980 --> 01:39:02.740
coordinates, excuse me, from the infrared satellite photos to the aeronautical chart
01:39:02.900 --> 01:39:07.780
and locating our, you know, locating our infrared satellite photo targets on the
01:39:07.780 --> 01:39:08.780
ground with the map.
01:39:09.100 --> 01:39:13.060
And all of a sudden he went, damn, I'm impressed.
01:39:13.900 --> 01:39:19.740
The dowser had put a mark exactly where Renee's prime target was.
01:39:21.260 --> 01:39:22.420
Now, how did he do this?
01:39:23.340 --> 01:39:24.500
How do you douse a map?
01:39:25.220 --> 01:39:28.900
I can I can think of possible explanations for dousing for water, particularly with
01:39:28.900 --> 01:39:30.660
metal rods and so on.
01:39:30.940 --> 01:39:32.220
But how do you douse a map?
01:39:33.140 --> 01:39:40.820
We talked later with a guy who sold high powered metal detectors who had taken a
01:39:40.820 --> 01:39:43.060
course in dousing down in the Carolinas.
01:39:43.460 --> 01:39:44.460
And he told us about it.
01:39:44.460 --> 01:39:47.940
He said, you know, they started with like engine blocks and refrigerators and stuff
01:39:47.940 --> 01:39:54.660
that were buried here and there around the the big compound where this course was
01:39:54.660 --> 01:39:58.060
given. He said the last thing they had to do was to douse a map.
01:39:58.900 --> 01:40:04.740
And his two targets were I forget what the one was, but the other one was the the
01:40:04.740 --> 01:40:07.380
only working gold mine in Georgia.
01:40:08.260 --> 01:40:13.420
And he said, I had no idea that there was a working gold mine in Georgia, but I was
01:40:13.420 --> 01:40:14.900
supposed to douse the map for it.
01:40:15.140 --> 01:40:15.740
He nailed it.
01:40:17.100 --> 01:40:20.380
Said he doesn't know how he did it, but he nailed it.
01:40:21.700 --> 01:40:24.020
He got got it located exactly.
01:40:24.700 --> 01:40:25.620
How does this work?
01:40:26.020 --> 01:40:27.060
What's the mechanism here?
01:40:27.060 --> 01:40:27.580
Who knows?
01:40:28.020 --> 01:40:35.220
But but my my problem is that so much of this stuff that holds so much promise and for
01:40:35.220 --> 01:40:41.020
which there seems to be so much evidence is pretty much ignored still by conventional
01:40:41.020 --> 01:40:46.020
science, largely because it's hard to reproduce on demand and.
01:40:46.740 --> 01:40:51.340
Yeah, well, as as as the fellow says, it ain't what we don't know.
01:40:51.340 --> 01:40:52.700
It's what we know that ain't so.
01:40:52.740 --> 01:40:53.700
Another another.
01:40:53.700 --> 01:40:54.780
Yeah, another thing.
01:40:54.780 --> 01:40:56.620
And I'll finish up here quickly.
01:40:56.620 --> 01:41:02.860
Another thing here is if you're going to travel, if you're going to travel transatlantic
01:41:02.860 --> 01:41:10.100
trans-pacific journeys in the kinds of boats that were available a few thousand years
01:41:10.100 --> 01:41:12.820
ago, you better have some pretty good navigational skills.
01:41:12.820 --> 01:41:15.980
You better know, you know, better know what you're doing, where you're going and how to
01:41:15.980 --> 01:41:16.500
get there.
01:41:17.500 --> 01:41:23.180
Charles Hapgood was a professor of the history of science at the University of New Hampshire
01:41:23.180 --> 01:41:29.100
several years ago, and Hanna students got interested in old maps for some reason as
01:41:29.100 --> 01:41:32.900
something other than just a frame and hang on your wall for curiosity.
01:41:33.220 --> 01:41:40.900
And they studied these things and they found that many different projections were used
01:41:40.900 --> 01:41:42.420
in ancient maps.
01:41:42.620 --> 01:41:49.740
And if you understood the projections, not only were these maps accurate latitudinally,
01:41:49.740 --> 01:41:54.620
which is pretty easy to determine just by looking at the stars and so on, but also
01:41:54.620 --> 01:41:57.380
longitudinally, which is a lot harder.
01:41:59.140 --> 01:42:05.060
Determining longitude wasn't really perfected until around the mid 19th century when
01:42:05.540 --> 01:42:13.460
somebody finally perfected a seaworthy, accurate, jewel movement chronometer to measure accurately
01:42:13.460 --> 01:42:19.060
how much and keep measuring how much time it was since sunrise or sunset or what have
01:42:19.060 --> 01:42:19.460
you.
01:42:20.660 --> 01:42:26.500
Anyway, they got into these things and there's something called the Piri Reis map or Piri
01:42:26.500 --> 01:42:28.020
Reis map, as some people say.
01:42:28.420 --> 01:42:34.980
It dates from the 15th, pardon me, from the 16th century, and it's a very long, very
01:42:34.980 --> 01:42:36.180
long time ago.
01:42:36.180 --> 01:42:37.700
It's a very long time ago.
01:42:37.700 --> 01:42:38.900
It's a very long time ago.
01:42:38.900 --> 01:42:40.260
It's a very long time ago.
01:42:40.260 --> 01:42:41.780
It's a very long time ago.
01:42:41.780 --> 01:42:43.300
It's a very long time ago.
01:42:43.300 --> 01:42:44.900
It's a very long time ago.
01:42:44.900 --> 01:42:46.420
It's a very long time ago.
01:42:46.420 --> 01:42:48.100
It's a very long time ago.
01:42:48.100 --> 01:42:49.700
It's a very long time ago.
01:42:49.700 --> 01:42:51.300
It's a very long time ago.
01:42:51.300 --> 01:42:52.900
It's a very long time ago.
01:42:52.900 --> 01:42:54.660
It's a very long time ago.
01:42:54.660 --> 01:42:56.420
It's a very long time ago.
01:42:56.420 --> 01:42:58.420
It's a very long time ago.
01:42:58.420 --> 01:43:00.260
It's a very long time ago.
01:43:00.260 --> 01:43:02.180
It's a very long time ago.
01:43:02.180 --> 01:43:04.100
It's a very long time ago.
01:43:04.580 --> 01:43:06.420
I took a copy of this map.
01:43:06.420 --> 01:43:09.940
There was a strategic air command base near the university.
01:43:10.740 --> 01:43:16.420
He took this map and showed it to the cartographic officers at the SAC base.
01:43:16.420 --> 01:43:23.620
And as it happened, there had been just recently a definitive seismic survey done of the contours
01:43:23.620 --> 01:43:27.220
of the landmass of Antarctica beneath the ice shelf.
01:43:27.220 --> 01:43:33.300
And there is in the appendix of the book an appendix with the names of those officers
01:43:33.300 --> 01:43:39.940
listed that says, we don't know how this is possible, but this map in fact shows
01:43:39.940 --> 01:43:46.980
the true contours of the landmass beneath the ice shelf of Antarctica according to the latest
01:43:46.980 --> 01:43:48.660
electronic seismic surveys.
01:43:49.540 --> 01:43:58.580
So Hapgood theorizes a very ancient, very sophisticated society of mariners that did
01:43:58.580 --> 01:44:05.140
in fact sail and travel all over the world to trade, to explore, you know, whatever.
01:44:05.140 --> 01:44:09.460
What happened to them, who they were, you know, he doesn't know.
01:44:09.460 --> 01:44:12.900
But the maps that they left behind were passed down.
01:44:14.340 --> 01:44:17.300
You know, Columbus knew that there was something over here.
01:44:17.300 --> 01:44:24.500
He didn't know what it was, but he had maps and he had, you know, other things that gave
01:44:24.580 --> 01:44:35.460
him the courage and the will and the lust, I guess, to get to whatever was over here.
01:44:36.100 --> 01:44:36.980
He was after money.
01:44:36.980 --> 01:44:40.100
I mean, you know, he was a brave sailor and all that stuff, but he was no fool.
01:44:41.060 --> 01:44:45.140
He knew what he was doing and he knew what the odds were, apparently, that he would
01:44:45.140 --> 01:44:48.020
find something like what he was looking for.
01:44:48.020 --> 01:44:49.380
Now, where did he get these things?
01:44:50.180 --> 01:44:52.420
Where did this information come from?
01:44:52.420 --> 01:44:53.780
How old was it?
01:44:53.780 --> 01:44:55.220
Who originated it?
01:44:55.220 --> 01:45:01.780
How long had it been passed down from one generation of mariners and navigators to another?
01:45:01.780 --> 01:45:07.380
We don't know, but these are fascinating mysteries and they're fun and interesting
01:45:07.380 --> 01:45:12.660
to read about, to explore, to learn about, and just think about while you, you know,
01:45:12.660 --> 01:45:14.900
take your afternoon walks in the nice weather.
01:45:14.900 --> 01:45:19.220
As I said, once we got back, things just kind of fell apart.
01:45:20.580 --> 01:45:22.580
You know, it was like, now what?
01:45:22.580 --> 01:45:31.940
Well, you know, the only thing, the only thing that, that came afterward of any significance,
01:45:32.740 --> 01:45:38.260
several months after we got back, Renee somehow made contact with an American lawyer
01:45:38.260 --> 01:45:46.260
who was practicing in Brazil, in Rio, and he told Renee that apparently, at least to
01:45:46.260 --> 01:45:53.140
some extent, because of our activity and our inquiring in, in Brasilia, the capital,
01:45:53.140 --> 01:45:57.860
and our, our trying to get information and maps and all that kind of thing, there were
01:45:57.860 --> 01:46:03.380
no treasure laws in Brazil as of the time we left, mainly because no treasure had ever
01:46:03.380 --> 01:46:04.340
been found.
01:46:04.340 --> 01:46:05.860
Nobody expected any.
01:46:05.860 --> 01:46:11.780
However, according to the lawyer, the Brazilian legislator had, his legislature had just
01:46:11.780 --> 01:46:19.380
passed a set of laws stipulating that any expedition into the interior to seek treasure
01:46:19.380 --> 01:46:26.740
or archaeological remains must be sponsored by a Brazilian institution, must be led by
01:46:26.740 --> 01:46:33.540
a Brazilian, that if books were written, films were made, and so on, no royalties would accrue
01:46:34.340 --> 01:46:36.020
in Brazil from this.
01:46:36.580 --> 01:46:37.940
You know, nobody would get anything.
01:46:38.020 --> 01:46:45.540
And this, this made it effectively impossible for anybody except the Brazilian to go, to go in
01:46:45.540 --> 01:46:46.900
there and look for these things.
01:46:46.900 --> 01:46:55.860
Now, you know, no, no, as far as we know, it's there, but so is the pyramid.
01:46:55.860 --> 01:46:57.460
So are the ancient bridge abutments.
01:46:57.460 --> 01:47:06.100
Oh, another thing, the, the bush pilot from Bahamas that, that Mark and Clyde hired to
01:47:06.740 --> 01:47:13.700
fly them up over the targets, he told them, he told them of some old stone houses up near
01:47:13.700 --> 01:47:19.460
his village, near the Rio de Oro, that were so old, even the oldest person in the village
01:47:19.460 --> 01:47:20.500
didn't know who built them.
01:47:21.540 --> 01:47:21.860
Okay.
01:47:22.660 --> 01:47:30.900
Now, what's the likelihood that this guy would ever talk to anybody who would recognize the
01:47:30.900 --> 01:47:36.900
significance of that stone houses, the like of which had never been found, old stone houses,
01:47:36.900 --> 01:47:40.980
ancient stone houses, the like of which had never been discovered anywhere in Brazil,
01:47:40.980 --> 01:47:42.500
up near the Rio de Oro.
01:47:42.500 --> 01:47:43.540
People were afraid of them.
01:47:43.540 --> 01:47:44.100
Okay.
01:47:44.100 --> 01:47:49.300
Talk to anybody who would recognize the significance of that, who would also be able to talk to
01:47:49.300 --> 01:47:55.220
someone who would have the wherewithal to exert enough influence for something or somebody to
01:47:55.220 --> 01:48:00.500
get together an expedition with the right people, the right amount of money to go up there and
01:48:00.500 --> 01:48:02.740
investigate these things and see what they are.
01:48:03.940 --> 01:48:05.700
Chances are just mighty slim.
01:48:05.700 --> 01:48:08.580
Like Paulo said, the engineers were here to build a road.
01:48:08.580 --> 01:48:10.820
If there were old stones in the way, they moved them.
01:48:11.780 --> 01:48:14.180
They weren't interested in archaeology.
01:48:14.180 --> 01:48:16.340
They weren't interested in ancient ruins.
01:48:16.340 --> 01:48:20.980
They were interested in building a road and they may not even have recognized those things
01:48:20.980 --> 01:48:22.580
for what they could possibly have been.
01:48:23.860 --> 01:48:24.580
So, okay.
01:48:24.580 --> 01:48:26.660
Well, I've taken up more than enough time here.
01:48:26.660 --> 01:48:26.980
Thank you.
01:48:26.980 --> 01:48:27.940
Thank you very much.
01:48:27.940 --> 01:48:28.260
Thank you.
01:48:30.660 --> 01:48:37.860
My name is Jan Harzan.
01:48:37.860 --> 01:48:40.340
I'm the executive director for MUFON.
01:48:40.340 --> 01:48:45.380
We are a scientific research organization that basically collects sighting reports
01:48:45.380 --> 01:48:47.700
from the public and then goes and investigates them.
01:48:48.340 --> 01:48:53.140
Our mission statement as an organization is the scientific study of UFOs for the
01:48:53.140 --> 01:48:56.660
benefit of humanity and we have three primary goals.
01:48:56.660 --> 01:48:58.500
We investigate UFO reports.
01:48:58.500 --> 01:49:06.740
We promote research into the UFO subject and we educate the public on our findings.