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

28 Atlantean Technology: How Advanced?

What Does the Evidence Really Show?

Frank Joseph

Edgar Cayce said that the inhabitants of Atlantis operated aircraft and submarines, and were in possession of a fabulous technology superior to that achieved in the twentieth century. The question of so advanced a technology in ancient times is the most difficult argument for many investigators to accept, especially Cayce’s descriptions of achievements beyond anything known today. He said the Atlanteans were adept at “photographing from a distance” and “reading inscriptions through walls—even at distances.”

The Atlantean “electrical knife was in such a shape, with the use of the metals, as to be used as the means for bloodless surgery, as would be termed today—by the very staying forces used which formed coagulating forces in bodies where larger arteries or veins were to be entered or cut,” he said.

Refugees from Atlantis supposedly brought to Egypt “electron music where color, vibration, and activities make for toning same with the emotions of individuals or peoples that may make for their temperments being changed. And same may be applied by the entity in those associations with what may be called the temperments of individuals, where they are possessed—as it were—by the influences from without, and those that are ill from diseases that have become of a nature or vibratory influence within the body as to set themselves as a vibration in the body.”

Cayce told of “a death ray that brought from the bowels of the Earth itself—when turned into the sources of supply—those destructions to portions of the land.” This “death ray” may be today’s laser because, Cayce said in 1933, it “will be found in the next twenty-five years.” He spoke of “electrical appliances, when these were used by those peoples to make for beautiful buildings without but temples of sin within.” The Atlanteans were skilled in “the application of the electrical forces and influences especially in the association and the activities of same upon metals; not only as to their location but as to the manner of the activity of same as related to the refining of some and the discovery of others, and the use of the various forms or transportation of same—or transformation of same to and through those influences in the experience.”

At the time Cayce said that the Atlanteans used electrical current for the working of metals, there was no evidence that the ancients knew anything about electricity, let alone how it might be applied to metallurgy. Then in 1938, Dr. Wilhelm Koenig, a German archeologist, was inventorying artifacts at the Iraq State Museum in Baghdad when he noticed what seemed to be the impossible resemblance of a collection of two-thousand-year-old clay jars to a series of dry cell storage batteries. His curiosity had been aroused by the peculiar internal details of the jars, each of which enclosed a copper cylinder capped at the bottom by a disk (also of copper) and sealed with asphalt.

A few years later, Dr. Koenig’s suspicion was put to the test. Willard Gray, a technician at the General Electric High Voltage Laboratory in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, finished an exact reproduction of the Baghdad jars. He found that an iron rod inserted into the copper tube and filled with citric acid generated 1.5 to 2.75 volts of electricity, enough to electroplate an object with gold. Gray’s experiment demonstrated that practical electricity could have been applied to metalworking by ancient craftsmen after all.

Doubtless, the “Baghdad battery,” as it has since become known, was not the first of its kind—it was a device that represented an unknown technology preceding it by perhaps thousands of years, and might have included far more spectacular feats of electrical engineering long since lost.

According to Cayce, the Atlanteans did not confine their application of electricity to metallurgy. They had “the use of the sound waves, where the manners in which lights were used as a means of communication,” he said.

“Elevators and the connecting tubes that were used by compressed air and steam” operated in Atlantean buildings.

Atlantean technology soared into aeronautics. Airships of elephant hides were “made into the containers for the gases that were used as both lifting and for the impelling of the crafts about the various portions of the continent, and even abroad. . . . They could not only pass through that called air, or that heavier, but through that of water.”

Manned flight is practically emblematic of our times, and we find such references to ancient aeronautics incredible. Yet serious researchers believe Peruvian balloonists may have surveyed the famous Nazca Lines two thousand or more years ago from aerial perspectives. Despite reluctance to take Cayce at his word, equivocal yet tantalizing evidence does exist to at least suggest that manned flight may indeed have occurred in the ancient world.

The earliest substantiated journeys aloft took place in the fifth century B.C.E., even before Plato was born, when the Greek scientist Archytas of Tarentum invented a leather kite large enough to carry a young boy. It was actually used by Greek armies in the earliest known example of aerial reconnaissance.

More amazing was the discovery made in the Upper Nile Valley near the close of the nineteenth century. The story is best told by the famous author and explorer David Hatcher Childress: “In 1898, a model was found in an Egyptian tomb near Sakkara. It was labeled a ‘bird’ and cataloged Object 6347 at the Egyptian Museum, in Cairo. Then, in 1969, Dr. Khalil Massiha was startled to see that the ‘bird’ not only had straight wings, but also an upright tail-fin. To Dr. Massiha, the object appeared to be that of a model airplane. It is made of wood, weighs 39.12 grams and remains in good condition.

“The wingspan is 18 cm, the aircraft’s nose is 3.2 cm long, and the overall length is 18 cm. The extremities of the aircraft and the wing-tips are aerodynamically shaped. Apart from a symbolic eye and two short lines under the wings, it has no decorations nor has it any landing legs. Experts have tested the model and found it airworthy.”

In all, fourteen similar flying models have been recovered from ancient digs in Egypt. Interestingly, the Saqqara example came from an archeological zone identified with the earliest dynastic periods, at the very beginning of pharaonic civilization, which suggests that the aircraft was not a later development but belonged instead to the first years of civilization in the Nile Valley.

The Egyptians’ anomalous artifacts may indeed have been flying “models” of the real thing operated by their Atlantean forefathers. The Cairo Museum’s wooden model of a working glider implies the ancient Egyptians at least understood the fundamental principles of heavier-than-air, man-made flight. Perhaps such knowledge was the only legacy left from a former time, when those principles were applied more seriously.

The quote from Childress is excerpted from his book Vimana Aircraft of Ancient India and Atlantis (coauthored with Ivan Sanderson), the most complete examination of the subject. In it, he was able to assemble surprising evidence from the earliest Hindu traditions of aircraft supposedly flown in ancient times. Then known as vimanas, they appear in the famous Ramayana and Mahabharata and the less-well-known but earliest of the Indian epics, the Drona Parva.

Aircraft were discussed in surprisingly technical detail throughout several manuscripts of ancient India. The Vimaanika Shastra, Manusa, and Samarangana Sutradhara, all classic sources, additionally describe “aerial cars” that were allegedly operating from deeply prehistoric times.

Each of these epics deals with a former age, hinting at the last, bellicose, cataclysmic years of Atlantis. Childress’s collection of impressive source materials dating back to the dawn of Hindu literature heavily underscores Cayce’s description of flying devices in Atlantis. It is important to understand, however, that these vimanas had virtually nothing in common with modern aviation, because their motive power was utterly unlike combustion or jet engines. They also had little to do with aeronautics as we have come to understand it.

Apparently, the Atlanteans operated two types of flying vehicles: gas-filled dirigible-like craft and heavier-than-air vimanas directed from a central power source on the ground. While the latter represented an aeronautical technology beyond any known aircraft, the balloons Cayce describes featured a detail that suggests their authenticity.

He said their skin was made of elephant hides. They probably would have been too heavy to serve as envelopes for the containment of any lighter-thanair gas. But lighter, expandable, and non-leaking elephant bladders might have worked. In any case, Cayce says that the Atlanteans used the animals, which were native to their kingdom, for a variety of purposes.

The Critias also mentions that elephants abounded on the island of Atlantis. Skeptics long faulted Plato for including this out-of-place pachyderm until the 1960s, when oceanographers dredging the sea bottom of the Atlantic Ocean some two hundred miles west of the Portuguese coast unexpectedly hauled up hundreds of elephant bones at several different locations. The scientists concluded that the animals had anciently wandered across a now submerged land bridge extending from the Atlantic shores of North Africa into formerly dry land long since sunk beneath the sea. Their discovery gave special credence not only to Plato, but to Cayce as well.

No less surprising are the submarines known to the early-fifth-century-B.C.E. Greek historian Herodotus and the first-century-C.E. Roman naturalist Pliny the Elder. Even Aristotle wrote about submarines. His most famous pupil, Alexander the Great, was said to have been on board a glass-covered undersea vessel during an extended shake-down cruise beneath the eastern Mediterranean Sea, around 320 B.C.E.

While these submersibles may have gone back twenty-three centuries or so, Atlantis had already vanished about one thousand years earlier. Even so, if such inventions took place in Classical times, they might just as well have operated during the Bronze Age, which was not much different technologically.

Ancient aeronautics paled in comparison to even greater technological achievements, as Atlantean scientists succeeded “in the breaking up of the atomic forces to produce impelling force to those means and modes of transportation, or of travel, or of lifting large weights or of changing the faces or forces of nature itself,” said Edgar Cayce. The same life-reading explains that explosives were invented by the Atlanteans. Seven years earlier, he mentioned what he called “the Atlantean period, when those first of the explosives were made.” Ignatius Donnelly, the father of modern Atlantology, wrote even earlier that explosives were developed in Atlantis.

Cayce explained that the Atlanteans were able to create such an advanced society because their civilization developed over a more or less continuous history until the final catastrophe. Their cultural evolution had been graced with many centuries of growth in which to develop and perfect the scientific arts. The basis of this ancient technology was an understanding and application of crystal power. Through it, the motive forces of nature were somehow directed to serve human needs. Transportation on, above, and under the sea became possible, and long-distance communication bound together the world of Atlantis.

We find such a high level of material progress set in prehistoric times incomprehensible and beyond belief. Yet many better-known civilizations achieved technological breakthroughs that were forgotten when their societies fell, only to be rediscovered sometimes thousands of years later. In Middle America, for example, Mayan accomplishments in celestial mechanics were not matched until the last century. Incan agricultural techniques, abandoned with the Spanish Conquest, yielded three times more produce than farming methods employed in Peru today.

At the same time Plato was writing about Atlantis, his fellow Greeks were sailing the Alexandris. More than four hundred feet long, she was a colossal ship, the likes of which would not be seen again for another two thousand years. A pregnancy test in use among eighteenth-dynasty Egyptians was not discovered until the 1920s. As for Egypt, our modern world’s top engineers lack the knowhow capable of reproducing the Great Pyramid in all its details. Certainly, far more was lost with the fall of ancient civilization than has yet been found.

Moreover, our times do not have a monopoly on human beings of great genius and inventiveness. That they were able to create complex technologies in other times and societies long since forgotten should not overtax our credulity. And if one of those lost epochs belonged to a place known as Atlantis, we have it on the authority of Western civilization’s most influential philosopher and the foremost psychic our country has yet produced.

However they may disagree in their interpretations of the lost civilization, both metaphysical and worldwide mythological sources are almost unanimous in describing a central role for the sophisticated technology of Atlantis in its ultimate destruction. Cayce said that the Atlanteans grew intoxicated with the material wonders made possible through quartz crystal technology. The riches and luxuries it generated inspired them with an insatiable desire for abundance.

They turned the beams of their power crystals into the very bowels of the planet, excavating for even greater mineral wealth. Prodigious amounts of high-grade copper, which fueled the bronze weapons industries of the pre-Classical world, and gold enough to sheet the walls of their city poured forth from Earth’s violated cornucopia.

The copper-mining operations of prehistoric Michigan still bear the scars of Atlantean technology. For example, some unknown device enabled the ancient miners of the Upper Peninsula to sink pits vertically through sixty feet of solid rock. Another piece of lost instrumentation directed them to all the richest veins of copper hidden under the hillsides of Isle Royale and the Kewanee Peninsula.

These and similar achievements of the late fourth millennium B.C.E., which allowed the prehistoric miners to remove a minimum of half a billion pounds of raw copper, are no speculation; they have been known to archeologists for more than a century. Perhaps in overreaching themselves through their mining operations, the Atlanteans excavated too deeply into the already seismically unstable Mid-Atlantic Ridge on which their capital perched. They were blind to the geologic consequences of their ecological selfishness, and regarded our living planet as an inexhaustible fount of mineral wealth. Parallels with our times are uncomfortably close.

The Atlanteans reveled in an orgy of self-indulgent materialism. But at some indefinable point, long-suffering Nature rebelled. The threshold of her forbearance had been crossed, and she chastised her sinful children with a terrible punishment. Her fires of hell opened to engulf opulent Atlantis in a volcanic event so cataclysmic that it destroyed the entire island. The crumbling, incinerated city with its screaming inhabitants was dragged to the bottom of the sea and into myth. The “great, terrible crystal”—the source of the Atlanteans’ unexampled prosperity—had become the instrument of their doom.