Copyright © 2002 Joseph George Caldwell. All rights reserved. Posted at Internet website http://www.foundationwebsite.org. May be copied or reposted for non-commercial use, with attribution to author and website. 27 October 2002.
As I have traveled on the journey of life, I have seen a number of things that defy explanation in terms of the ordinary physical and mental world in which we live. The following are brief descriptions of these phenomena. I would ask that anyone having insight into these phenomena let me know his comments. (E-mail: jcaldwell9@yahoo.com )
1. Existence and Life (No response needed on this one.) The greatest wonder, of course, is existence: spiritual existence (awareness of being), energy, matter, and physical (biological) life, including the creation and development (“evolution”) of the universe and life on Earth.
2. Megaliths. By the term “megaliths” I am referring to large ancient stone constructions, such as the Egyptian pyramids and obelisks, Macchu Picchu in Peru, the Coral Castle in Florida, and the Olmec colossal heads of Mexico.
The Egyptian Pyramids and Other Monuments. Apart from their massive scale (number and size of blocks) and complexity, the most amazing thing about the Egyptian pyramids is the quality of their construction. The entrance to the largest pyramid at Giza (The Great Pyramid, or the Pyramid of Cheops/Khufu) is through a tunnel that was cut out by a “grave robber” in times long past. As you pass through the tunnel, you can see the large blocks forming the pyramid, and how closely they are put together. The incredible thing is that they all match perfectly! These are massive blocks – millions of them (2.5 million blocks weighing an average of 2.5 tons each) – and they are fitted together perfectly. There are no air spaces at all between them. As you look at the sides of the cut-out tunnel, all you see is lines where one block ends and the next begins. Every block matching every other block, perfectly. It is truly unbelievable, viewed in terms of modern technology. Is it possible, as polymer chemist Prof. Joseph Davidovitz has suggested (in The Pyramids: An Enigma Solved), that the blocks of the pyramids were poured into place, as a form of concrete? Or that “sound” was used to liquefy or “morph” the blocks into shape?
The Valley Temple, next to the Sphinx, is also quite remarkable. It contains granite blocks weighing over 200 tons! And the smaller granite blocks interlock in the most amazing way! It is very difficult to imagine that these blocks were cut in the fashion of today.
The next thing about the pyramids is the quality of the hieroglyphics on the walls of the inner chambers (“tombs”). They are perfect. The walls are perfectly flat and smooth, and they have thousands of hieroglyphic symbols carved into them. Each one is perfect. There are no imperfections. They are cut out of solid rock, with no chisel marks or mistakes. The alignment and positioning of the symbols is perfect. And there are thousands and thousands of them. They look as if they were cast in plaster by machine, or pressed into soft clay using solid stamps or seals. How were they made?
(The pyramids of Central America are not at all like those of Egypt or the edifices of Macchu Picchu. They are “rubble-filled” pyramids – piles of dirt with blocks or stones placed on the sides. They are interesting in their own right, but it is rather easy to imagine how they could have been constructed (quarried, finished, and put in place) with primitive tools. The blocks (sometimes just stones) are not truly massive, they do not fit perfectly together, and they do not involve millions of blocks or tons. The carvings on some of them are beautiful, but not of the quality of the hieroglyphics in the Egyptian monuments. There are some remarkable megaliths in Central America, but the pyramids there, while impressive, do not compare in scale or complexity to those of Egypt. They are remarkable, imposing, grand, elegant, and esthetically beautiful, but not “amazing” or “astounding” or “incredible.”)
The tombs in the Valley of the Kings and Valley of the Queens at Luxor are very impressive. The vibrancy of the colors is remarkable. Although striking, they do not fall in the “amazing” category of the pyramids. They are “believable.” They are very pretty and impressive, but it is understandable how they could have been made with primitive tools and equipment. The only really strange thing is that most of the people depicted have red skin (not just reddish, but a rather striking brownish-red). Why? People in Egypt nowadays do not have red skin. The stories of the mystics (Akashic Records) is that the Atlanteans were red-skinned, and as Atlantis sank (over thousands of years) the Atlanteans migrated to other places on Earth, such as North America (land of the Red Indians) and Egypt. Is there another explanation?
The temples at Luxor are spectacular. The Hypostyle Hall, for example, contains massive granite columns with beautiful carvings. And the temple walls contain both bas-relief and raised-relief stone carvings. Once again, with no mistakes or chisel marks (other than intentional ones made by Christian iconoclasts). One does wonder at the ingenuity required to quarry, embellish, transport, and set up these pillars, but they do not totally defy the imagination.
One of the most amazing sights in Egypt is the “unfinished” obelisk, or the “broken” obelisk. Seeing obelisks from a distance, you do not realize the significance of their construction. But when you walk on the unfinished obelisk, you realize their incredible nature. The unfinished obelisk is unfinished because it cracked while it was being made, and was abandoned in place, left unfinished. It is a massive structure, lying on its side, in a red-granite quarry in Aswan. The fourth side is still part of the granite bed. The piece is massive – several meters wide on each side, and scores of meters long. The most amazing thing about the unfinished obelisk is its quality. It is perfectly flat and polished. There is not a waver or a ripple in it (i.e., in the three sides that were completed). It is hard to imagine how this could be done, using primitive methods. And how was this massive piece to be removed from the granite bed? When you see pictures of the stolen obelisk in New York’s central park, you do not realize the quality of the construction. You no longer see the quality of the engraved hieroglyphics (not yet carved on the unfinished obelisk) – they have largely been corroded from the obelisk, by New York’s acid rain. You do not realize the significance of removing this massive piece from its granite bed, and “floating” it down the Nile from Aswan to Luxor.
Macchu Picchu. The stone construction at Macchu Picchu, although not on a scale of the Egyptian pyramids, is also incredible. The pyramids of Egypt are of sedimentary rock (limestone). The rock of Macchu Picchu appears to be igneous or metamorphic. The interesting difference is that the blocks of the Giza pyramids are designed with straight sides, and the blocks of the Valley Temple also have straight sides (sometimes with interlocking “extensions” or “lips”), whereas the rocks at Macchu Picchu have curved sides. Once again, the interface between adjacent rocks is perfect. They look as if they have been pressed or squeezed into place, each one added in custom-tailored fashion to the previous, rather than chiseled out of hard stone and fitted into place as solid objects. How was this done?
The Olmec Colossal Heads of Mexico. These massive granite heads at La Venta Park, Veracruz, Mexico, have a remarkable characteristic – they have distinctly Negroid features. Not just similar to or reminiscent of Negroid features, but archetypical Negroid feature. But they were created long before Negroes arrived in North America from Africa. How can this be? The mystics have a lot to say about human races – the Polareans (First Root Race), the Hyperboreans, the Lemurians, the Atlanteans, the Aryans (the Fifth Root Race, current Homo sapiens) – and two more to come. Some say that the Negroes are the only human race to have evolved naturally on Earth, and that the other subraces of Homo sapiens are “genetically modified.” Modern science has confirmed that modern man came out of Africa. What is the story here?
The Coral Castle of Homestead, Florida. The Coral Castle of Florida is a structure built by Ed Leedskalnin in the first half of the twentieth century. It is built out of massive (many-ton) blocks of coral, which Leedskalnin evidently carved and put in place single-handedly, using only primitive hand tools. He claims to have been able to do this using the “secrets of the pyramids.” Magnetics? Levitation? Singing? How did he do this?
3. The Moon. The Earth’s moon (“Moon”) has many unusual features, such as its being so large relative to the Earth (compared to the relative sizes of other planets and their natural satellites), and its perfectly circular orbit. To me, however, the most amazing thing is that its rotational period is perfectly synchronized with its rotation around the Earth, so that it always shows the same face toward the Earth. Given the stories that modern scientists have imagined to describe the possible evolution of the Moon (a “captured” mini-planet, a large “chunk” blown off the Earth by a massive asteroidal collision), there is no reason why this should be so. It would have been a preposterously unlikely coincidence.
Because of the friction of the tides, the Moon’s rotation around the Earth is gradually slowing the Earth’s speed of rotation down. Eventually, because of tidal action, the Earth will stop rotating with respect to the Moon, and the two will simply rotate around each other in perfect synchronicity, always facing each other. But the Moon has no oceans or atmosphere, and there is nothing to slow down its rotation. So what caused it to rotate in perfect synchronicity with its rotation around the Earth? Is it indeed a spaceship, as conjectured by Russian scientists Mikhail Vasin and Alexander Shcherbakov (discussed in Don Wilson’s Our Mysterious Spaceship Moon)?
4. Crop Circles. Many (80%) of all crop circles are explained (manmade), but 20% are unexplained. A very interesting book on this subject is The Deepening Complexity of Crop Circles: Scientific Research and Urban Legends, by Eltjo H Haselhoff, PhD. Some of these are quite amazing, not only because of their size and complexity, but because of the nature and the uniformity of the physical changes in the grain stem at the place of bending. What is causing crop circles to appear? How are the unexplained ones made?
5. Dolphins, Sharks, and Fish Schools. I used to SCUBA dive, and I saw lots of incredibly beautiful sights along the coral reefs of the Caribbean Sea and the Red Sea. But one of the strangest sights that I ever saw was a large school of hammerhead sharks swimming about twenty feet in front of me, perpendicular to my line of travel, moving from left to right. The thing that amazed me was that they were moving very rapidly, but without any apparent means of locomotion. They were not moving their bodies in a “serpentine” motion, or moving their tails from side to side or up or down, or moving other fins. They were simply moving through the water at great speed. How can this be?
I have seen similar motion of dolphins, traveling alongside and at the front of a boat. They hardly move their tails or fins, unless they wish to turn. The standard explanation for their forward motion is that they are “catching a ride” on the “pressure wave” of the boat’s bow as it plows through the water. Have you ever tried to do this? It is conceivable that one could “surf” on the frontal wake of a large ship, just as a surfer rides a wave toward the beach. But ride a “pressure wave”?
And then there are schools of small fish. They float slowly through the water as a group, and then, simultaneously, they all turn in exactly the same direction. Or, if excited, they all instantly swim in random directions. How do they communicate?
6. Remarkable Coincidences. All of us experience coincidences in our daily life. And most of them are easily explained. If you have six billion people moving around on the planet, seemingly unusual events will happen every day, just because of the sheer number of people. For example, the odds are high that in a room of just thirty people, two will have the same birthday. And, for every person who misses an airplane flight, either by accident or because of an impending sense of doom, eventually the missed plane will indeed crash and the person will feel that a mystical event saved him. But no one reports all of the times that people accidentally missed a plane or experienced a sense of doom and the plane did not crash. Most such coincidences are easily explained by random (chance) happenings (the mathematical laws of probability), and are of no significance. Every once in a while, however, normal events happen at such a time or place that are truly remarkable and cannot be explained as coincidental. Such occurrences are referred to as “paranormal” or “metaphysical.” What is the process involved in this?
7. Remarkable Cures, “Miracles”. This category is similar to item 6 above, but it refers to remarkable physical phenomena, rather than remarkable coincidences or mental phenomena. This category includes cases of people who are documented to have incurable diseases, such as a large cancerous tumor, and are instantly (e.g., in minutes or hours) cured. It may also include unusual physical phenomena such as Uri Geller’s “spoon bending.” (It may include levitation or morphing or liquefaction of solid rock, but that may be part of the construction of megaliths, in item 2.) Are there any explanations for these occurrences?
FndID(197)
FndTitle(The Seven Wonders of the World)
FndDescription(The Seven Wonders of the World)
FndKeywords(seven wonders of the world)