Atlantis: Bermuda Triangle a-2 Page 6

  It was not taken seriously by scientists in the west, being lumped with articles in the same journal on psychic power and other matters 'real’ scientists considered the work of the lunatic fringe. Only in the last several years were the ‘real’ scientists beginning to realize the error of their ways and opening their minds to possibilities they had never considered before. And that awakening was not due to acceptance of the Russian theories, but rather new discoveries in physics that demolished old accepted beliefs.

  The three Russian scientists who wrote the article had backgrounds in history, electronics and engineering and they threw aside their differences and preconceived notions to explore the world around them. They started with an earlier, widely debunked theory that a matrix of cosmic energy was built into the planet at the time of its formation and that the effects of this matrix were occasionally evident in modern times in areas that were now known as gates.

  The Russians scientists divided the world into twelve pentagonal slabs. On top of those slabs they delineated twenty equilateral triangles. Using this overlay, they postulated that these triangles had a great influence on the world in many ways: fault lines for earthquakes lay along them; magnetic anomalies were often recorded; and ancient civilizations tended to be clustered along the lines.

  They called junctions of these triangles Vile Vortices. It just so happened that these Vile Vortices were in many of the same places as the gates that Foreman was investigating. Thus, while the rest of the scientific community ignored the Russian paper, Foreman was very interested and passed it along to Nagoya in the mid-1960s.

  The Russians had even postulated a mathematical harmony to the crystalline structure that formed these Vortices to explain the rhythmic nature of the disturbances associated with them.

  Nagoya, upon receiving the paper from Foreman and being a scientist, had had two reactions. One was that the Russians were onto something by connecting the Vortices. The other was that the crystalline theory was grasping for an explanation that current science couldn’t give. Nagoya knew that the lithosphere, the outer surface of the planet, which is where these Vortices were located, had been moving for millions of years. He even knew of Einstein’s theory of crustal displacement which was not commonly accepted. Regardless, he knew that any crystal formation would be so disfigured by this movement as to make the fixed nature of the patterns the Russians postulated impossible over any period of time. Also, Nagoya knew there was no evidence of the planet having any sort of massive crystalline structure.

  But during the recent expansion of the gates, there had been no doubt they were connected as they linked along the lines delineated by the Russians with electro-magnetic and radioactive propagation and were only stopped at the last minute by Dane from completely covering the planet.

  The recent information from Foreman about the lines of propagation from the gates that flowed along the intersection of the world’s tectonic plates gave more validity to the Russian theory. The movement of the plates, continental drift in laymen’s terms, was the most powerful force on the surface of the planet. It could bring forth devastating earthquakes, volcanoes, tsunamis, create the tallest mountain range on the surface in the Himalayas, and crack open the deepest depths of the oceans in the Marianas Trench.

  Nagoya also believed tectonic plate intersection had been used to destroy a continent and civilization. His first contribution to gate theory was a historical one, based on his fascination for ancient cultures and civilizations. During his undergraduate years he had had dual majors in history and physics, only deciding to go into the latter when he accepted that it was the more factual of the two, able to be proved, whereas history, the more he studied of it, presented itself as fact, but was often wrong.

  Nagoya had always been fascinated by the legend of Atlantis. First mentioned by Plato in the Timaeus and Critias, two of his dialogues, historians had widely felt it was just a device used in the oratories and not based on an actual place. Nagoya had found that assumption rather naive. Connecting that legend with archeological finds that were often suppressed and alternative theories of the development of civilization, Nagoya believed that a highly advanced human civilization had once existed in a place known as Atlantis and the gates had opened- as they had just a week ago- destroying it to the point where it was now only a legend.

  Besides Plato’s mention, Nagoya believed in the existence of Atlantis for other reasons. The discovery of large stone blocks, closely fitted together in about fifty feet of water of the coast of the island of Bimini in the Bahamas had excited him. He felt that it might be actual, physical evidence of the existence of Atlantis or more likely, given the location, an outpost of Atlantis.

  Another area he found fascinating- and one that the writing on the Scorpion had resurrected- was the similarities in early writing among ancient cultures. The Viking runic alphabet was not that much different from writings he had studied in South America, Mexico, Africa, even on Easter Island.

  Nagoya believed these similarities were because they stemmed from a common ancient writing system that predated the oldest recorded language that was generally accepted by historians. That interest had led him to the diffusionest theory of the development of civilization.

  The historically accepted concept of the development of civilization was the isolationist one. Isolationists believed that the ancient civilizations all developed independent of each other. The cities of South and Central America, Mesopotamia, the Indus Valley, China, Egypt- all crossed a threshold into civilization at about the same time- the third or fourth century before the birth of Christ. When looking at the vast timeline of the existence of the planet, and even mankind, that was a rather remarkable coincidence.

  Nagoya knew of course that there were explanations for that coincidence the largest one being natural evolution. The many common discoveries in the archeological finds of these civilizations- such as the similarities in written language- were explained by isolationists as due to man's genetic commonness. Nagoya called that the great minds think alike’ theory and he didn’t buy off on it one bit. An isolationist would say that there were ancient pyramids in South America, in Egypt, in Indo-China, even in North America- some made of stone, some of earth, some of mud, but remarkably similar given the distances between those sites and the traditionalists insistence that those sites had had no contact with each other- all that was because each society as it developed had a natural tendency to do the same thing.

  Nagoya was much more a fan of the diffusionest theory of civilization. He believed that those widely separated civilizations developed at roughly the same time in roughly the same way because those civilizations were founded by people from a single earlier civilization- survivors from the destruction of Atlantis.

  Isolationists over the years had scoffed at the diffusionest theory on two counts. One was the very existence of Atlantis. The second was the issue of how survivors could have gotten from Atlantis to such remote locations around the world. In response, Nagoya pointed to the fact that modern scholars, sailing on reconstructed vessels, had crossed both the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. Whether it was a balsa-wood raft of Polynesian design named Kon Tiki or the longship of the Vikings, the ocean had been crossable in ancient times.

  There were archeological facts to support the theory that the ancients had indeed crossed those oceans. Artifacts found in places where they had not originated. There was an entire group of people devoted to the field of what was known as forbidden archeology’. Investigating things found in places where conventional archeology said they shouldn’t be.

  Nagoya, as a scientist, had not been overly surprised to learn that there were many discoveries made by archeologists that were suppressed. He knew that scientists tended to bury evidence that contradicted their own theories. There were locked rooms in almost every museum around the world where artifacts that could not be logically explained were hidden away from the public’s eyes.

  Nagoya believed that if one accepted that there w
as an Atlantis- a civilization 7,000 years before the accepted rise of civilization- many of those hidden objects could be explained.

  Even the destruction of Atlantis around 10,000 BC was recorded in almost every culture around the world. There were many records of a great flood at about that time. Not only in the Bible but in such tomes as the Tibetan Book of the Dead which described a large land mass sinking into the sea at that time. The Mayans called Atlantis Mu. The northern Europeans- Thule. And a large land mass sinking into the ocean would produce tsunamis- waves- hundreds if not thousands of feet high that would race around the world’s oceans inundating low-lying coastal planes with such devastation that it could easily be interpreted as a world-wide flood.

  There was no doubt in Nagoya’s mind that Atlantis had existed and there was also no doubt that the world was now facing the same threat that had destroyed it. He thought it was important to study as much as was known about that ancient culture and how it was destroyed.

  While many modern scholars and scientists scoffed at ancient writings as more fiction than fact, Nagoya took the opposite view. He’d read translations of the early documents, such as Solon’s dialogue which first mentioned Atlantis, placing it in the Atlantic. The description of the destruction of Atlantis fit in with what would happen if tectonic plates were manipulated to unleash their terrible force, resulting in earthquakes, volcanoes, giant waves and ultimately disappearance under the waves. The Greeks even said that where Atlantis had been, parts of the ocean were blocked by mud and underwater plants.

  “Another five minutes and we will have the complete read-out,” Ahana interrupted Nagoya’s thoughts.

  He acknowledged the information with a nod. Nagoya- and Foreman- believed the latter part about the impassable sea might refer to the Sargasso Sea which was north of the Puerto Rican Trench and in which they now knew close to where the Bermuda Triangle gate opened.

  Beyond Atlantis, Nagoya had read extensively about any theory regarding earlier civilizations. The Vikings had had a land they called Thule, a land of fire and ice where creatures and gods lived, separated from the real world by a deep chasm. Another interesting legend was that of Mu, a lost continent of the Pacific Ocean. Some claimed that Mu predated even Atlantis. A French scholar in 1864, translating one of the few surviving texts of the vanished Mayan civilization of Central America uncovered references to a place called Mu- which the text described as an ancient landmass with a bustling civilization that sunk into the sea after catastrophic volcanic explosion.

  Another French archeologist, examining Mayan ruins and translating some of what he found, added to the story of Mu. It had been a civilization that ended when two brothers fought for the right to marry the Queen. When the continent was destroyed, the Queen fled to Egypt where, with the new name of Isis, she built the Sphinx and began civilization in that part of the world.

  These Frenchmen placed Mu not in the Pacific, but rather in either the Gulf of Mexico or the Caribbean, and Nagoya believed they might have stumbled across records of Atlantis under a different name and from a western Atlantic perspective rather than eastern.

  Looking around at the sophisticated scientific equipment that surrounded him, Nagoya knew there was a tendency for scientists to be very conservative and overly reliant on equipment rather than the power of their own minds. Nagoya firmly believed the human mind to be the most intricate device on the face of the planet, but the one which the least was known about.

  The person Nagoya was most fascinated with was a man who was neither scientist or philosopher, but the son of a Kentucky farmer named Edgar Cayce. Born in 1877 and dying in 1945, Cayce left behind a legacy of 'visions’, many of which regarded Atlantis.

  Like Plato, Cayce placed Atlantis in the Atlantic. But Cayce provided much more information, gathered while he was in a trance state, about the legendary island kingdom. He claimed that people lived on the island for thousands of years and it experienced three major catastrophes, only the last of which was the ultimate devastation that wiped it off the face of the Earth. Also, Cayce said the Atlanteans were highly evolved, using electricity and flying aircraft. He also spoke of a strange element he called 'firestone’ that generated energy. First mentioned by Cayce in 1933, Nagoya found that early writing very intriguing in that the description given by Cayce of firestone was very similar to how one would describe radioactive materials- and this a decade before the first public recognition of atomic energy.

  Nagoya believed there were nuggets of truth in every legend and now that there was no doubting the reality of the gates, he also had to wonder how much truth there was to Cayce’s visions and predictions. Cayce had also said that the first Atlanteans were spiritual beings, lacking physical form. And it was after they began achieving physical form that the troubles began. Nagoya wasn’t sure how much to make of Cayce’s visions but he kept an open mind, more so since the assault out of the gates.

  Nagoya had no doubt that Earth had been threatened by the gates in the past as it was being threatened now. And he also believed that although Atlantis was destroyed, that was only a defeat in a battle in which the war had yet to be decided. Somehow, the invasion through the gates had been stopped years ago. And however that had been done, it was necessary to find those same means to stop it once again, even more so now that the Trident had been fired in the Atlantic and the nuclear weapons exploded along the fault line.

  Nagoya took hope from the fact that someone on the other side of the gates was obviously on mankind’s side. The fact that Foreman’s man Dane had been contacted by his former team-mate Flaherty both before he entered the Angkor gate and after he was at the ruins of Angkor Kol Ker were positive signs. The return of the Scorpion with the map etched into its metal was also positive.

  Somehow, that site marked on that map, which coincided with the location of the deepest spot in the Atlantic, the Milwaukee Depth, was important. And that was the data he was waiting for from Ahana. As soon as he’d been alerted by Foreman about the map on the Scorpion, he’d had the computers that recorded data from the Can focus on that spot almost on the other side of the world, recording the muons that came out of it.

  “We’ve centered and plotted the muon emission pattern,” Ahana spun her seat about. “Very strange, sir.”

  “How so?” Nagoya asked.

  Ahana stood, indicating for Nagoya to take her place. “This-” she said, pointing at the screen- “is the muon level reading. Note that the Bermuda Triangle gate is steady as we’ve always noted. This is the level we’ve been scanning around the world to map the gates. We never noticed anything different until you directed us to do a more thorough search of that specific area. I fine-tuned the sensors to record any muon activity down to one-tenth of the current gate reading.”

  Her finger touched the monitor screen. “Note this very thin trace going from the Bermuda gate south? It ends exactly here, the same spot noted on the side of the Scorpion.”

  “So they are indeed connected,” Nagoya said.

  “Yes, sir. We not only have a longitudinal and latitudinal reading, but because we are reading this through the mass of the Earth, we were able to get a depth reading. That spot is at the very bottom of the ocean. And at that location it spreads and encompasses an area on the ocean floor over eight miles in circumference and a half mile in height that has low levels of muonic activity.”

  “What do you think it is?”

  “It’s not a gate,” Ahana said. “It’s on 'our’ side, in our world, but it has some qualities like a gate.”

  Nagoya knew his assistant did not want to make a foolish guess but one thing he had learned over the years was that no guess could be too wild when dealing with anything associated with the gates. “A theory?” he prompted.

  Ahana bit her lip, then spoke. “I think it is some sort of statis field surrounding an open space.”

  “Holding what?”

  “I don’t know.”

  * * *

  The submarine cut the water smo
othly, the special rubberized absorbing material attached to the outer hull leaving minimum disturbance in the ocean it passed through. The specially designed propellers gave off little signature making it the quietest submarine in the ocean. At full speed, this vessel was quieter than any other submarine built simply sitting still in the ocean.

  At one thousand feet, the sub had at least another fifteen hundred feet of ocean to spare below it before the modular hull would experience any pressure problems. Speed was perhaps the most important aspect of the ship’s design as its nuclear power plant allowed it to cruise at thirty-five knots, almost forty miles an hour.

  The Seawolf was the US Navy’s most modern and most expensive submarine. Designed from first deckplate to the top of the sail as an attack submarine, the Seawolf had one priority mission- kill other submarines. At over two billion dollars cost, it incorporated every advance in underwater warfare ever developed. Not only could it kill other subs with its Mark-48 torpedoes, it was also armed with Tomahawk cruise missiles, enabling it to target 75 % of the earth’s land surface. 353 feet long, the Seawolf was actually not much longer than the first US Navy sub given that name during World War II. However, its forty foot beam was almost twice the diameter of those earlier vessels.

  The rear two-thirds of the submarine were taken up with the nuclear power plant, engine room and environmental control systems. The crew of 14 officers and 120 enlisted men worked and lived in the forward third. Not as cramped as earlier submarines, the Seawolf still required a special type of man willing to work in tight quarters and live under the surface of the water for extended periods of time.

  An example of the lack of space was the fact that the commander of this ship, Captain McCallum had to hold meetings with his officers in the wardroom where they also ate their meals. There was barely room for the twelve officers- two remaining on watch in the operations and engine room- to fit.