Forbidden History: Prehistoric Technologies, Extraterrestrial Intervention, and the Suppressed Origins of Civilization

26 A Conversation with Peter Tompkins

Secrets of Forgotten Worlds

J. Douglas Kenyon

For the many who date their personal discovery of the wisdom of the ancients and the power of unseen forces with the late 1960s and early ’70s, two books enjoyed nearly unequaled influence. The Secret Life of Plants and Secrets of the Great Pyramid were both runaway best sellers, which, if nothing else, put the orthodox establishment to considerable trouble defending itself.

While today notions such as the preference of plants for good music and the miraculous measurements of the Great Pyramid may have become somewhat passé, twenty-five years ago they caused quite a stir and in the process earned not a little notoriety for the author Peter Tompkins. For one who had dared to challenge so flagrantly the titans of the scientific establishment, Tompkins achieved not only celebrity but also, for a time, an unprecedented measure of credibility.

Both books remain in print but Tompkins, though scrupulous in his research, came to be dismissed by the conventional as something of a crank. Two of his other books, Mysteries of the Mexican Pyramids and Secrets of the Soil, have done little to change his undeserved reputation; nevertheless, he remains busy and unrepentant. He is a seminal, fascinating figure, and Atlantis Rising was lucky enough to interview him in order to discuss his views on a number of interests that he shares with the magazine.

Originally from Georgia, Tompkins grew up in Europe, but returned to the United States to study at Harvard. College, though, was interrupted by World War II. Initially employed by the New York Herald-Tribune, Tompkins began the war as a correspondent. Soon he was broadcasting for Mutual and NBC. By the end of the war he was working with Edward R. Murrow and CBS. In 1941, his reporting career was interrupted by a stint in the TOI (a precursor of the OSS, which ultimately became the CIA).

Five months were spent behind enemy lines. “At the Anzio landing,” he recalls, “General Donovan and General Park sent me into Rome ahead of the landing, and had they not failed to arrive, we would have had a big victory. But as it was, we got stuck. Then I had to send out radio messages four or five times a day about what the Germans were doing—where they were going to attack and in what strength, and so on.”

During the mission, Tompkins recruited numerous agents who were sent north to link up with the partisans and help clear the way for the planned Allied advance. Eventually he went to Berlin. When, at the close of the war, Truman abolished the OSS, Tompkins found he had no desire to join the newly organized CIA and went his own way. The years following the war were spent in Italy learning moviemaking and scriptwriting and developing a healthy distaste for censorship: “I realized the only way I could say what I wanted to say was by writing books. They don’t get censored.”

Eventhen, he was finding his views made him anathema to many. “I got thrown out of more dinner parties,” he chuckles, “for talking about metaphysical—or what were considered crazy—notions at the time, so I learned to be quiet.”

Being quiet in print, though, has not been his wont. Nor has censorship of a sort been entirely escaped. Tompkins believes his most recent book, Secrets of the Soils, which he describes as “a cry to save the planet from the chemical killers,” was virtually “squashed by the publisher,” afraid of scaring the public. A follow-up on the Secret Life of Plants, the book spelled out alternatives to the use of chemical fertilizers that Tompkins says “are absolutely useless and only lead to killing the soil and the microorganisms, poisoning the plants and, ultimately, animals and humans.” Tompkins believes such fertilizers to be primary contributors to the spread of cancer.

The writer has found his plans thwarted not just by publishers. One idea to use a promising technology he had chanced upon to virtually X-ray the Great Pyramid was apparently blocked by Zahi Hawass and the Egyptian Antiquities Authority. “It would have cost about fifty grand to X-ray the whole pyramid and find out what the hell really is in there,” he says. “It seemed to me that it would make an interesting television program, but no one was interested. It was very strange.”

On the recent highly publicized work of the Belgian astronomer Robert Bauval purporting to show an alignment between the pyramids and the constellation Orion, Tompkins shrugs: “It’s a hypothesis, but it’s not provable. I’m only interested in those things about the Great Pyramid that are solid, that are indisputable.” Tompkins wants more than “endless theories,” of which he claims to have a roomful. But, he concedes, “if you think of the Dogon and the Sirius connection, it’s obvious that, on this planet, people knew a great deal more about astronomy, and may have been linked in one way or another with the stars. But I’m only interested when someone comes along with fairly hard proof.”

Proof of advanced ancient astronomical knowledge, Tompkins believes, is abundant in much of the ancient architecture. “It’s obvious that all the great temples in Egypt were astronomically oriented and geodetically placed,” he says. He is especially interested in Tel el-Amarna, which he sees as the subject of a possible future book. The astronomical knowledge incorporated into the city built by Akhenaton Tompkins considers “mind blowing,” as he puts it. Unfortunately for his plans, though, Livio Catullo Stecchini, the Italian scholar and authority on ancient measurement upon whom Tompkins relied for much of his work in Secrets of the Great Pyramid, is dead.

Interestingly, Tompkins never permitted Secrets of the Great Pyramid to be published in Italy because the publisher wanted to omit Stecchini’s appendix. The injustice still angers Tompkins: “Here’s an unrecognized Italian genius, but the Italians said if you print it, you can’t have the book.”

Tompkins’s subsequent book, on the Mexican pyramids, further reinforced his view that the ancients were possessed of advanced astronomical knowledge. Though not convinced that the similarities between Egypt and Mexico prove the existence of a mother culture like Atlantis, as some have suggested, he does believe “it’s obvious that people went back and forth across the Atlantic.” And he believes the Mexico builders used the same system of measurements as the Egyptians. “I should write another whole book on the subject of what was known on both sides of the Atlantic,” he says.

During his Mexico experience, Tompkins succeeded—at great expense and difficulty—in filming the effect of the rising and setting sun at the equinox on the temple at Chichen Itza. “It’s absolutely staggering,” he says, “but you can see that snake come alive, just on that one day. It goes up and down the steps. We filmed it and it’s just beautiful. How did they orient that pyramid so that would happen only on the equinox?”

Answering that question led Tompkins to New Zealand and Geoffrey Hodgeson, who gained fame in the 1920s by clairvoyantly pinpointing the precise position of the planets at a given time. Convinced by Hodgeson’s demonstration, Tompkins concluded that he knew the secret by which the ancients were able to achieve their precise astronomicalments without access to modern instruments. “They didn’t need the instruments,” he says, “because the instruments were built into them. Clairvoyantly they could tell exactly where the planets were and understand their motion.” Such understanding, while available to the ancients, has been largely forgotten by alienated high-tech Western society. “We’ve closed ourselves in,” he says. “We’ve pulled down the shades on our second sight.”

Fascinated by clairvoyance and the potential it represents, Tompkins has tried to deploy it as a resource for his more scientific investigation. When his own search for concrete proof of the existence of Atlantis took him to the Bahamas, he used every tool at his disposal. When one site appeared to be littered with ancient marble columns and pediments, it was a psychic who told him that the spot was nothing more than the final resting place of a nineteenth-century ship bound for New Orleans with a marble mausoleum on board. On the more scientific side, clandestine core sampling of the celebrated Bimini Road convinced him the pavement was not man-made but only beach rock.

It took a University of Miami geologist to give him what he wanted. Dr. Cesare Emiliani showed Tompkins the result of his own core sampling over the years in the Gulf of Mexico. Here was conclusive proof of a great inundation of water in about 9000 B.C.E. Tompkins remembers: “Emiliani said, ‘They say that Atlantis has been found in the Azores and found off the coast of Spain and off the East Coast of the United States. All of these places,’ he said, ‘could have been part of the Atlantean empire that was submerged at exactly the date when Plato said it was.’”

Several years earlier Tompkins had written the foreword for the English translation of Otto Muck’s book The Secret of Atlantis. Muck’s hypothesis that Atlantis had been sunk by an asteroid Tompkins thought very plausible, and he still thinks so, though it remains to be proved. In Emiliani’s work, though, Tompkins believes he has found the only geological proof on the subject.

Of course, proved or not, Atlantis, like many other controversial notions, is not likely to be readily accepted by the intellectual establishment. The reasons for this seem clear to Tompkins: “They would have to rewrite all their archeological schoolbooks if some of this is proved. If John West’s theory about the Sphinx is correct (that it’s over ten thousand years old), it’s going to change a lot of stuff.” By way of analogy he describes a man he knows in Canada who has developed a cure for cancer, and points out what a threat such a discovery is to the billion-dollar-a-year cancer industry.

A lifetime of searching the hidden byways has made Tompkins philosophical about his own inevitable physical transition. While acknowledging that he is “getting on,” he says, “I’m infinitely more peaceful about the prospect of death. Like time, it’s sort of an illusion. I mean, you lose the body, but what’s that? You’ve had many before and you’ll probably have more after. Maybe you’ll do better without them.”

At any rate, his productivity has yet to suffer. His next book promises to prove the existence of elemental creatures. The project was inspired by the recent scientific validation of the work of Annie Besant and C. W. Leadbeater in mapping subatomic structure. Before the turn of the century, the two leaders of the Theosophical Society had decided to use their yogic powers to analyze the elements. Leadbeater saw and Besant drew. When their work was published, no one paid any attention. After all, not only was it “impossible” to do what they were doing, but their results also contradicted conventional science.

Then, in the 1970s, an English physicist discovered their work and realized that they were accurately describing quarks and other features of the atom that had only recently been discovered. With such powerful vindication established, Tompkins now goes into the detailed work that the two produced on elemental spirits, as well as the work of the renowned clairvoyant Rudolf Steiner.

“If you put it all together,” he says, “and realize these people could actually many years ahead of the discovery of atoms and isotopes accurately describe and draw them, and then look at their description of the nature spirits, their function on the planet, their connection with human beings, and why it is that we should reconnect with them, you have to listen. I mean, it’s black and white. You can’t escape it.”