Part Two

Nexus Magazine

Volume 7, Number 5 - August-September 2000

VITRIFIED RUINS IN CALIFORNIA'S DEATH VALLEY

It seems one local character knew how to find the place. Brandon relates that "Death Valley Scotty", an eccentric who spent millions building a castle-estate in the area, was known to go "prospecting" when funds ran low. Death Valley Scotty would check out for a few days of wandering in the nearby Grapevine Mountains, bringing back suspiciously refined-looking gold that he claimed he had prospected. Many believe that he got his gold from the stacked gold bars in the tunnel system beneath Death Valley.

Evidence of a lost civilization in Death Valley came in a bizarre report of caves and mummies in the Hot Citizen, a Nevada paper, on August 5, 1947. The story ran as follows:

EXPEDITION REPORTS NINE-FOOT SKELETONS

A band of amateur archaeologists announced today they have discovered a lost civilization of men nine feet tall in Californian caverns. Howard E. Hill, spokesman for the expedition, said the civilization may be "the fabled lost continent of Atlantis".

The caves contain mummies of men and animals and implements of a culture 80,000 years old but "in some respects more advanced than ours," Hill said. He said the 32 caves covered a 180-square-mile area in California's Death Valley and southern Nevada.


ARCHAEOLOGISTS SKEPTICAL

"This discovery may be more important than the unveiling of King Tut's tomb," he said.
Professional archaeologists were skeptical of Hill's story. Los Angeles County Museum scientists pointed out that dinosaurs and tigers which Hill said lay side by side in the caves appeared on Earth 10,000,000 to 13,000,000 years apart.

Hill said the caves were discovered in 1931 by Dr F. Bruce Russell, Beverly Hills physician, who literally fell in while sinking a shaft for a mining claim.

"He tried for years to interest people in them," Hill said, "but nobody believed him."

Russell and several hobbyists incorporated after the war as Amazing Explorations, Inc. and started digging. Several caverns contained mummified remains of "a race of men eight to nine feet tall," Hill said. "They apparently wore a prehistoric zoot suit--a hair garment of medium length, jacket and knee-length trousers."


CAVERN TEMPLE FOUND

Another cavern contained their ritual hall with devices and markings similar to the Masonic order, he said.
"A long tunnel from this temple took the party into a room where," Hill said, "well-preserved remains of dinosaurs, saber-toothed tigers, imperial elephants and other extinct beasts were paired off in niches as if on display.
"Some catastrophe apparently drove the people into the caves," he said.
"All of the implements of their civilization were found," he said, "including household utensils and stoves which apparently cooked by radio waves."
"I know," he said, "that you won't believe that."
While of doubtful authenticity, this is an interesting story, to say the least. The last comment about cooking food with radio waves being unbelievable is ironic. That is the one thing that modern readers of the story could certainly believe was true, considering the widespread use of microwave ovens today. Who had heard of them in 1947?

Sodom and Gomorrah meet Hiroshima and Nagasaki

Probably the most famous of all ancient "nuke 'em" stories is the well-known biblical tale of Sodom and Gomorrah:

And the Lord said, Because the cry of Sodom and Gomorrah is great, and because their sin is very grievous. Then the Lord rained upon Sodom and upon Gomorrah, brimstone and fire from the Lord out of heaven; And he overthrew those cities, and all the plain, and all the inhabitants of the cities, and that which grew upon the ground. But his [Lot's] wife looked back from behind him, and she became a pillar of salt. And lo, the smoke of the country went up as the smoke of a furnace. (Genesis 18:20; 19:24-26,28)

This biblical passage has come to epitomize the destructive power of God's wrath visited on those places which sin. The Bible is very specific about the site of Sodom and Gomorrah plus several other towns; they were in the Vale of Siddim, which was located at the southern end of the Salt Sea (now called the Dead Sea). Other towns in the area, according to the Bible, were Zoar, Admah and Zeboiim (Genesis 14:2). As late as the Middle Ages, a town called Zoar existed in the area.

The Dead Sea is 1,293 feet [394 meters] below sea level and at least 1,200 feet [365 m] deep. The bottom of the sea is therefore about 2,500 feet [762 m] below the level of the Mediterranean. Approximately 25 per cent of the water of the Dead Sea consists of solid ingredients, mostly sodium chloride. Normal ocean water is around 4.6 per cent salt. The Jordan and many smaller rivers empty themselves into this basin, which has no solitary outlet. What its tributaries bring to it in the way of chemical substances remain deposited in the Dead Sea's 500 square miles. Evaporation under the broiling sun takes place on the surface of the sea at a rate of over 230 million cubic feet per day. Arab tradition has it that so many poisonous gases come out of the lake that birds could not fly across it, as they would die before reaching the other side.

The Dead Sea was first explored in modern times in 1848 when W. F. Lynch, an American geologist, led an expedition. He brought ashore from his government research ship two metal boats which he fastened onto large-wheeled carts. Pulled by a long team of horses, his expedition reached the Dead Sea some months later. Lynch and his team discovered that the traditions were correct in that a man could not sink in the sea. They also surveyed the lake, noting its unusual depth and the shallow area or "tongue" at the southern end of the lake. This area is thought to be where the Vale of Siddim was located and the five cities existed. It is possible to see entire forests of trees encrusted with salt beneath the water in this southern part of the lake.

Standard historical theory on the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, such as in The Bible As History by Werner Keller,18 holds that the cities of the Vale of Siddim were destroyed when a plate movement caused the Great Rift Valley--of which the Dead Sea is a part--to shift, and the area at the southern end of the Dead Sea to subside. In the great earthquake there were probably explosions, natural gases issuing forth and brimstone falling like rain. This is likely to have happened about 2000 BC, the time of Abraham and Lot, thinks Keller, though geologists place the event many thousands of years before this. Says Keller:

The Jordan Valley is only part of a huge fracture in the Earth's crust. The path of this crack has meantime been accurately traced. It begins far north, several hundred miles beyond the borders of Palestine, at the foot of the Taurus mountains in Asia Minor. In the south it runs from the south shore of the Dead Sea through the Wadi el-Arabah to the Gulf of Aqabah and only comes to an end beyond the Red Sea in Africa. At many points in this vast depression, signs of intense volcanic activity are obvious. In the Galilean mountains, in the highlands of Transjordan, on the banks of the Jabbok, a tributary of the Jordan, and on the Gulf of Aqabah are black basalt and lava...

The subsidence released volcanic forces that had been lying dormant, deep down along the whole length of the fracture. In the upper valley of the Jordan near Bashan there are still the towering craters of extinct volcanoes; great stretches of lava and deep layers of basalt have been deposited on the limestone surface. From time immemorial the area around this depression has been subject to earthquakes. There is repeated evidence of them and the Bible itself records them...

Did Sodom and Gomorrah sink when perhaps a part of the base of this huge fissure collapsed still further to the accompaniment of earthquakes and volcanic eruptions?

As for the pillars of salt, Keller says:

To the west of the southern shore and in the direction of the Biblical "Land of the South", the Negeb, stretches a ridge of hills about 150 feet high and 10 miles from north to south. Their slopes sparkle and glitter in the sunshine like diamonds. It is an odd phenomenon of nature. For the most part this little range of hills consists of pure rock salt. The Arabs call it Jebel Usdum, an ancient name, which preserves in it the word "Sodom". Many blocks of salt have been worn away by the rain and have crashed downhill. They have odd shapes and some of them stand on end, looking like statues. It is easy to imagine them suddenly seeming to come to life.

These strange statues in salt remind us vividly of the Biblical description of Lot's wife who was turned into a pillar of salt... And everything in the neighborhood of the Salt Sea is even to this day quickly covered with a crust of salt.

However, Keller himself admits that there is a very serious problem with this theory of a cataclysm sending the Vale of Siddim to the bottom of the Dead Sea: it must have happened many hundreds of thousands, even millions, of years ago--at least according to most geologists. Says Keller:

In particular, we must remember there can be no question that the Jordan fissure was formed before about 4000 BC. Indeed, according to the most recent presentation of the facts, the origin of the fissure dates back to the Oligocene, the third oldest stage of the Tertiary period. We thus have to think in terms not of thousands, but of millions of years. Violent volcanic activity connected with the Jordan fissure has been shown to have occurred since then, but even so we do not get any further than the Pleistocene which came to an end approximately ten thousand years ago. Certainly we do not come anywhere near to the third, still less the second millennium before Christ--the period, that is to say, in which the patriarchs are traditionally placed.

In short, Keller is saying that any geological catastrophe that would have destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah would have had to have happened a million years ago, or so geologists have told him. Keller says that geologists have not found any evidence of a recent catastrophe at the southern end of the Dead Sea, at least not for about 10,000 years. Says Keller:

In addition, it is precisely to the south of the Lisan peninsula, where Sodom and Gomorrah are reported to have been annihilated, that the traces of former volcanic activity cease. In short, the proof in this area of a quite recent catastrophe which wiped out towns and was accompanied by violent volcanic activity is not provided by the findings of the geologists.

So here is the problem: the Dead Sea area may have had a cataclysm that could be the origin of the Old Testament story; however, conservative uniformitarian geologists have said that any such Earth changes must have occurred long before any sort of collective memory of the event.

In late 1999, a new theory was proposed by British Bible scholar Michael Sanders and an international team of researchers who, after several fraught weeks of diving in a mini-submarine, discovered what appears to be the salt-encrusted remains of ancient settlements on the seabed. Sanders told a television crew from BBC/Channel 4 who were making a documentary about the expedition:

There is a good chance that these mounds are covering up brick structures and are one of the lost cities of the plains, possibly even Sodom or Gomorrah, though I would have to examine the evidence. These Bible stories were handed down by word of mouth from generation to generation before they were written down, and there seems to be a great deal in this one.

Sanders had unearthed a map dating from 1650, which reinforced his belief that the sites of the two cities could be under the northern basin rather than on the southern edge of the Dead Sea. He recruited Richard Slater, an American geologist and expert in deep-sea diving, to take him to the depths of the Dead Sea in the two-man Delta mini-submarine that was involved in the discovery of the sunken ocean-liner, the Lusitania. Sanders's location for Sodom and Gomorrah, in the deep northern part of the Dead Sea, is even more at odds with history and geology than Keller's theory of the cities being at the shallow southern end.

Therefore we come back to the popular theory that these cities were not destroyed in a geological cataclysm but in a man-made (or extraterrestrial-made) apocalypse that was technological in nature. Were Sodom and Gomorrah attacked with atomic weapons, as Hiroshima and Nagasaki were?

Researcher L. M. Lewis, in his book Footprints on the Sands of Time,19 maintains that both Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed by atomic weapons and that the salt pillars and high salt content around the Dead Sea are evidence of a nuclear blast. Says Lewis:

When Hiroshima was being rebuilt, stretches of sandy soil were found to have been atomically changed into a substance resembling a glazed silicon permeated by a saline crystalloid. Little blocks of this were cut from the mass and sold to tourists as souvenirs of the town--and of atomic action.

Had an even larger explosion pulverized every stone of every building--and had the complete city disappeared into thin air--there would still have been tell-tale indications of what had occurred on the outskirts of the area of devastation. At some points there would surely be a marked difference in the soil or an atomic change in some object of note.

Lewis maintains that if the pillars of salt at the end of the Dead Sea were ordinary salt, they would have disappeared with the periodic rains. Instead, these pillars are of a special, harder salt, only created in a nuclear reaction such as an atomic explosion.

These pillars of salt have indeed lasted a long time. Not only were they present in ancient times, but are still standing today. Lewis quotes from the historian Josephus, who says in his History of the Jews:

Ébut, Lot's wife, continually turning back to view the city as she went from it, although God had forbidden her so to do, was changed into a pillar of salt; for I have seen it, and it remains to this day.

Comments Lewis:

It should be emphasized that Flavius Josephus lived from 37 to approximately 100 AD. As previously stated, Sodom was disintegrated in 1898 BC. How amazing, then, that Josephus should actually have seen the human "pillar of salt" after it had stood for almost 2,000 years! If it had been ordinary salt, it would have disappeared with the first rains.

There may have been many pillars of salt throughout history, but Lewis thinks the evidence supports an atomic blast:

The atomic change of the soil upon which Lot's wife stood and that of the shore of Hiroshima have a similarity that cannot be denied! Both had undergone a sudden atomic conversion which could only have been caused by the instant action of nuclear fission. As those things which equal the same thing must be equal to one another, it is difficult to escape the conviction that as Hiroshima was destroyed, so, by similar means, Sodom was disintegrated and Lot's wife at the same moment atomically changed. Relying on the veracity of Josephus, the only conclusion that can be reached is that Sodom was destroyed by nuclear fission.

The story of Sodom and Gomorrah is puzzling not just because of the destruction but also because of the personalities involved, such as the angel warning Lot to leave the doomed cities. Was Lot warned beforehand that the cities were going to be "nuked" by extraterrestrials or humans with high-tech weapons? Lot was warned to get his family out, but his wife looked back and was blinded by the atomic flash. Perhaps her body was even atomically changed.

At the southern end of the Dead Sea today is a modern chemical plant that looks like an alien base. Strange towers shoot up out of the desert. Bizarre buildings with domes and spires are covered with multi-colored lights. One expects to see a flying saucer land at any moment. It is the Dead Sea Chemical Works. During the day it looks like an oil refinery or something similar, but at night the lights that are strung about the facility make it seem otherworldly. This huge chemical plant is said to have an endless supply of valuable minerals, including radioactive salts, with which to work. Are some of these chemicals the result of an ancient atomic blast?


Atomic War in Ancient India

These verses are from the Mahabharata (written in ancient Dravidian, then later in Sanskrit) and describe horrific wars fought long before the recorder's lifetime.

• Various omens appeared among the gods: winds blew, meteors fell in thousands, thunder rolled through a cloudless sky.

• There he saw a wheel with a rim as sharp as a razor whirling around the soma... Then taking the soma, he broke the whirling machine...

• Drona called Arjuna and said: "Accept from me this irresistible weapon called Brahmasira. But you must promise never to use it against a human foe, for if you did it might destroy the world. If any foe who is not a human attacks you, you may use it against him in battle. None but you deserves the celestial weapon that I gave you."

This is a curious statement, as what other kind of foe different from a human might there have been? Are we talking about an interplanetary war?

• I shall fight you with a celestial weapon given to me by Drona. He then hurled the blazing weapon...

• At last they came to blows, and seizing their maces struck each other; they fell like falling suns.

• These huge animals, like mountains struck by Bhima's mace, fell with their heads broken, fell upon the ground like cliffs loosened by thunder.

• Bhima took him by the arm and dragged him away to an open place where they began to fight like two elephants mad with rage. The dust they raised resembled the smoke of a forest fire; it covered their bodies so that they looked like swaying cliffs wreathed in mist.

• Arjuna and Krishna rode to and fro in their chariots on either side of the forest and drove back the creatures which tried to escape. Thousands of animals were burnt, pools and lakes began to boil... The flames even reached Heaven... Indra without loss of time set out for Khandava and covered the sky with masses of clouds; the rain poured down but it was dried in mid-air by the heat.

Several historical records claim that Indian culture has been around for literally tens of thousands of years. Yet, until 1920, all the "experts" agreed that the origins of the Indian civilization should be placed within a few hundred years of Alexander the Great's expedition to the subcontinent in 327 BC. However, that was before several great cities like Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro (Mound of the Dead), Kot Diji, Kalibanga and Lothal were discovered and excavated. Lothal, a former port city now miles from the ocean, was discovered in Gujarat, western India, just in the late 20th century.20 These discoveries have forced archaeologists to push back the dates for the origin of Indian civilization by thousands of years--in line with what the Indians themselves have insisted all along.

A wonder to modern-day researchers, the cities were highly developed and advanced. The way that each city was laid out in regular blocks, with streets crossing each other at right angles and the entire city laid out in sections, gives archaeologists cause to believe that the cities were conceived as a whole before they were built--a remarkable early example of city planning. Even more remarkable is that the plumbing/sewage systems throughout the large cities were so sophisticated--superior to those found in Pakistan, India and many Asian countries today. Sewers were covered, and most homes had private toilets and running water. Furthermore, the water and sewage systems were kept well separated.21, 22, 23

This advanced culture had its own writing, which has never been deciphered. The people used personalized clay seals, much as the Chinese still do today, to officialize documents and letters. Some of the seals found contain figures of animals that are unknown to us today, including an extinct form of the Brahman bull.

Archaeologists really have no idea who the builders were, but their attempts to date the ruins (which they ascribe to the "Indus Valley civilization", also called "Harappan") have come up with something like 2500 BC and older, but radiation from the wars apparently fought in the area may have thrown off the date.

The Rama Empire, described in the Mahabharata and Ramayana, was supposedly contemporaneous with the great cultures of Atlantis and Osiris in the West.

Atlantis, well known from Plato's writings and ancient Egyptian records, apparently existed in the mid-Atlantic and was a highly technological and patriarchal civilization.

The Osirian civilization existed in the Mediterranean basin and northern Africa, according to esoteric doctrine and archaeological evidence, and is generally known as pre-dynastic Egypt. It was flooded when Atlantis sank and the Mediterranean began to fill up with water.

The Rama Empire flourished during the same period, according to esoteric tradition, fading out in the millennium after the destruction of the Atlantean continent.

As noted above, the ancient Indian epics describe a series of horrific wars--wars which could have been fought between ancient India and Atlantis, or perhaps a third party in the Gobi region of western China. The Mahabharata and the Drona Parva speak of the war and of the weapons used: great fireballs that could destroy a whole city; "Kapila's Glance", which could burn 50,000 men to ashes in seconds; and flying spears that could ruin whole "cities full of forts".

The Rama Empire was started by the Nagas (Naacals) who had come into India from Burma and ultimately from "the Motherland to the east"--or so Colonel James Churchward was told. After settling in the Deccan Plateau in northern India, they made their capital in the ancient city of Deccan, where the modern city of Nagpur stands today.

The empire of the Nagas apparently began to extend all over northern India to include the cities of Harappa, Mohenjo-Daro and Kot Diji (now in Pakistan), as well as Lothal, Kalibanga, Mathura and possibly other cities such as Benares, Ayodha and Pataliputra.

These cities were led by "Great Teachers" or "Masters" who were the benevolent aristocracy of the Rama civilization. Today they are generally called "Priest-Kings" of the Indus Valley civilization, and a number of statues of these so-called gods have been discovered. In reality, these were apparently men whose mental and psychic powers were of a degree that seems incredible to most people of today. It was at the height of power for both the Rama Empire and Atlantis that the war allegedly broke out, seemingly because of Atlantis's attempt to subjugate Rama.

According to the Lemurian Fellowship lesson materials, the populace surrounding Mu (Lemuria, which predated the other civilizations) eventually split into two opposing factions: those who prized practicality and those who prized spirituality. The citizenry, or educated elite, of Mu itself was balanced equally in these two qualities. The citizenry encouraged the other groups to emigrate to uninhabited lands. Those who prized practicality emigrated to the Poseid Island group (Atlantis), and those who prized spirituality eventually ended up in India. The Atlanteans, a patriarchal civilization with an extremely materialistic, technologically oriented culture, deemed themselves "Masters of the World" and eventually sent a well-equipped army to India in order to subjugate the Rama Empire and bring it under the suzerainty of Atlantis.

One account of the battle, related by the Lemurian Fellowship, tells how the Rama Empire Priest-Kings defeated the Atlanteans. Equipped with a formidable force and a "fantastic array of weapons", the Atlanteans landed in their vailixi outside one of the Rama cities, got their troops in order and sent a message to the ruling Priest-King of the city that he should surrender. The Priest-King sent word back to the Atlantean General:

We of India have no quarrel with you of Atlantis. We ask only that we be permitted to follow our own way of life.

Regarding the ruler's mild request as a confession of weakness and expecting an easy victory--as the Rama Empire did not possess the technology of war or the aggressiveness of the Atlanteans--the Atlantean General sent another message:

We shall not destroy your land with the mighty weapons at our command, provided you pay sufficient tribute and accept the rulership of Atlantis.

The Priest-King of the city responded humbly again, seeking to avert war:

We of India do not believe in war and strife, peace being our ideal. Neither would we destroy you or your soldiers who but follow orders. However, if you persist in your determination to attack us without cause and merely for the purpose of conquest, you will leave us no recourse but to destroy you and all of your leaders. Depart, and leave us in peace.

Arrogantly, the Atlanteans did not believe that the Indians had the power to stop them, certainly not by technical means. At dawn, the Atlantean army began to march on the city. From a high viewpoint, the Priest-King sadly watched the army advance. Then he raised his arms heavenward, and using a particular mental technique he caused the General and then each officer in order of rank to drop dead in his tracks, perhaps of some sort of heart failure. In a panic, and without leaders, the remaining Atlantean force fled to the waiting vailixi and retreated in terror to Atlantis. Of the sieged Rama city, not one man was lost.

While this may be nothing but fanciful conjecture, the Indian epics go on to tell the rest of the horrible story, and things do not turn out well for Rama. Assuming the above story is true, Atlantis was not pleased at the humiliating defeat and therefore used its most powerful and destructive weapon--quite possibly an atomic-type weapon!

Consider these verses from the ancient Mahabharata:

...(it was) a single projectile
Charged with all the power of the Universe.
An incandescent column of smoke and flame
As bright as the thousand suns
Rose in all its splendor...

..it was an unknown weapon,
An iron thunderbolt,
A gigantic messenger of death,
Which reduced to ashes
The entire race of the Vrishnis and the Andhakas.

..The corpses were so burned
As to be unrecognizable.
The hair and nails fell out;
Pottery broke without apparent cause,
And the birds turned white.

After a few hours
All foodstuffs were infected...
...to escape from this fire
The soldiers threw themselves in streams
To wash themselves and their equipment.24

In the way we traditionally view ancient history, it seems absolutely incredible that there was an atomic war approximately 10,000 years ago. And yet, of what else could the Mahabharata be speaking? Perhaps this is just a poetic way to describe cavemen clubbing each other to death; after all, that is what we are told the ancient past was like. Until the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, modern mankind could not imagine any weapon as horrible and devastating as those described in the ancient Indian texts. Yet they very accurately described the effects of an atomic explosion. Radioactive poisoning will make hair and nails fall out. Immersing oneself in water gives some respite, though is not a cure.

Interestingly, Manhattan Project chief scientist Dr J. Robert Oppenheimer was known to be familiar with ancient Sanskrit literature. In an interview conducted after he watched the first atomic test, he quoted from the Bhagavad Gita:

'Now I am become Death, the Destroyer of Worlds.'
I suppose we all felt that way.

When asked in an interview at Rochester University seven years after the Alamogordo nuclear test whether that was the first atomic bomb ever to be detonated, his reply was:

Well, yes, in modern history.25

Great Civilizations Meet their Doom

Incredible as it may seem, archaeologists have found evidence in India and Pakistan, indicating that some cities were destroyed in atomic explosions. When excavations of Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro reached the street level, they discovered skeletons scattered about the cities, many holding hands and sprawling in the streets as if some instant, horrible doom had taken place. People were just lying, unburied, in the streets of the city. And these skeletons are thousands of years old, even by traditional archaeological standards. What could cause such a thing? Why did the bodies not decay or get eaten by wild animals? Furthermore, there is no apparent cause of a physically violent death.

These skeletons are among the most radioactive ever found, on par with those at Nagasaki and Hiroshima. At one site, Soviet scholars found a skeleton which had a radioactive level 50 times greater than normal.26

The Russian archaeologist A. Gorbovsky mentions the high incidence of radiation associated with the skeletons in his 1966 book, Riddles of Ancient History. 27 Furthermore, thousands of fused lumps, christened "black stones", have been found at Mohenjo-Daro. These appear to be fragments of clay vessels that melted together in extreme heat.

Other cities have been found in northern India that show indications of explosions of great magnitude. One such city, found between the Ganges and the mountains of Rajmahal, seems to have been subjected to intense heat. Huge masses of walls and foundations of the ancient city are fused together, literally vitrified! And since there is no indication of a volcanic eruption at Mohenjo-Daro or at the other cities, the intense heat to melt clay vessels can only be explained by an atomic blast or some other unknown weapon.28, 29, 30 The cities were wiped out entirely.

If we accept the Lemurian Fellowship stories as fact, then Atlantis wanted to waste no more time with the Priest-Kings of Rama and their mental tricks. In terrifying revenge, they utterly destroyed the Rama Empire, leaving no country even to pay tribute to them. The areas around the cities of Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro have also been desolated in the past, though agriculture takes place to a limited extent in the vicinity today.

It is said in esoteric literature that Atlantis at the same time, or shortly afterwards, also attempted to subjugate a civilization extant in the area of the Gobi Desert, which was then a fertile plain. By using so-called scalar wave weaponry and firing through the centre of the Earth, they wiped out their adversaries--and possibly did themselves in at the same time!

Much speculation naturally exists in connection with remote history. We may never actually know the complete truth, though ancient texts still in existence are certainly a good start.

Atlantis met its own doom, according to Plato, by sinking into the ocean in a mighty cataclysm--not too long after the war with the Rama Empire, I imagine.

Kashmir is also connected with the fantastic war that destroyed the Rama Empire in ancient times. The massive ruins of a temple called Parshaspur can be found just outside Srinagar. It is a scene of total destruction. Huge blocks of stone are scattered about a wide area, giving the impression of explosive annihilation.31 Was Parshaspur destroyed by some fantastic weapon during one of the horrendous battles detailed in the Mahabharata?

Another curious sign of an ancient nuclear war in India is a giant crater near Bombay. The nearly circular 2,154-metre-diameter Lonar crater, located 400 kilometers northeast of Bombay and aged at less than 50,000 years old, could be related to nuclear warfare of antiquity. No trace of any meteoric material, etc., has been found at the site or in the vicinity, and this is the world's only known "impact" crater in basalt. Indications of great shock (from a pressure exceeding 600,000 atmospheres) and intense, abrupt heat (indicated by basalt glass spherules) can be ascertained from the site.

Orthodoxy cannot, of course, concede nuclear possibilities for such craters, even in the absence of any material meteorite or related evidence. If such geologically recent craters as the Lonar are of meteoric origin, then why don't such tremendous meteorites fall today? The Earth's atmosphere 50,000 years ago probably was not much different from today's, so a lighter atmosphere cannot be advanced as an hypothesis to explain an immense-sized meteorite, which of course would be considerably reduced by heat oxidization within a gaseously heavier atmosphere. A theory was advanced by American space consultant Pat Frank, to the effect that some of the huge craters on the Earth may be scars from ancient nuclear explosions! 32

The echoes of ancient atomic warfare in southern Asia continue to this day, with India and Pakistan currently threatening each other. Modern India is proud of its nukes, likening them to "Rama's Arrow". Similarly, Pakistan would love to use its Islamic atomic bombs on India. Ironically, Kashmir, possibly the site of an earlier atomic war, is the focus of this conflict. Will the past repeat itself in Pakistan and India?

There is always the possibility that this has all happened before. Déjà vu!

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Endnotes

18. Keller, Werner, The Bible As History, Hodder & Stoughton, London, 1956.
19. Lewis, L.M., Footprints on the Sands of Time, Signet Books, New York, 1975.
20. Service, Alistair, Lost Worlds, Arco Publishing, New York, 1981.
21. ibid.
22. Kolosimo, Peter, Timeless Earth, University Press, Secaucus, New Jersey, 1974.
23. Reader's Digest, The World's Last Mysteries, Reader's Digest Association, Inc., Pleasantville, New York, 1976.
24. Berlitz, Charles, Mysteries of Forgotten Worlds, Doubleday, New York, 1972.
25. ibid.
26. ibid.
27. Gorbovsky, A., Riddles of Ancient History, Soviet Publishers, Moscow, 1966.
28. Kolosimo, ibid.
29. Tomas, Andrew, We Are Not the First, Souvenir Press, London, 1971.
30. Gorbovsky, ibid.
31. Childress, David Hatcher, Lost Cities of China, Central Asia & India, Adventures Unlimited Press, Stelle, Illinois, 1991.
32. Collyns, Robin, Laserbeams From Star Cities, Sphere Books, London, 1971.