Atlantis: Bermuda Triangle Page 6

  Like Foreman and the CIA, Kolkov had worked in the dark hallways of the KGB for decades searching for answers when no one was even sure what the questions were.

  Nagoya, with less resources but more technical expertise at his beck and call, had focused on scientific answers to the gate anomalies. The Japanese over the centuries had lost ships and more recently planes in the Devil’s gate and there were many legends about the area.

  Nagoya wanted to step forward and look over Ahana’s shoulder to see how the data was progressing but he knew to do so would cause her some loss of respect among her peers, so he forced himself to continue waiting, standing over the tank, looking down at totally smooth black surface.

  The Super-Kamiokande-- the Can-- had been developed because Foreman had discovered something rather strange about the gates. Using research money that poured down from the United States government to various university for projects, some of which even the American public considered quite arcane and bizarre, Foreman had had the Bermuda Triangle gate checked with just about every type of scanner science had ever invented in the desperate hope of uncovering any information that might yield data on what exactly the gates were and what was on the other side. Up until a year ago the gates had been simply a black hole to all imaging and sensing devices, recording nothing.

  But last year one of those research projects discovered that the gates discharged muons which was strange information indeed. As a physicist, Nagoya knew the history of the muon.

  In the 1930s, physicists had been very confident that the building blocks of matter were the proton, electron and neutron. There were three other basic particles that scientists were aware of but knew little about-- the photon, neutrino and positron.

  But there was a problem with the physics of the time-- scientists also knew that the protons in the proximity of the nucleus, holding equal charges, should strongly repel each other, yet they remained there. Nagoya was very proud that it was a Japanese scientist, Hideki Yukawa, who came up with the answer and was awarded the Nobel Prize for his brilliance.

  To explain why the protons were held in place, he proposed a new force in the nucleus formed by a new particle, which he called the meson. He also determined that the ratio of the force of this new particle was inversely proportional to its mass which made the meson 200 times more massive than the electron.

  Other scientists around the world searched for mesons, mostly by studying cosmic radiation from the sun, the strongest electro-magnetic field they could find, infinitely more powerful than anything man could produce. The researchers discovered that it wasn’t quite as Yukawa had predicted-- there was more than just a meson, there were two particles under that heading. One held the strong charge with little mass-- now named the pion-- and the other held a lot of mass with little charge-- now called the muon. Both the pion and muon were very unstable and decayed rapidly when separated. The muon decayed into an electron, a neutrino and an anti-neutrino.

  These discoveries were the beginning of particle physics which opened the doorway to quantum mechanics as well as a new perspective on special relativity and Einstein’s energy-mass relation.

  The fact that the gates emitted muons which did not decay as rapidly as established equations for physics predicted they would was troubling to Nagoya and the other scientists who were investigating the gates. Fundamentally it meant that the physical rules on the other side of the gates were different than that on the Earth side-- or, and this was even more troubling-- it meant that whoever or whatever was on the other side was manipulating particles at the very basic level in order to make the gates work. Nagoya thought it was likely both. He also felt that the gates were tears in the very fabric of the Earth’s physical nature and, deliberately done by some force at another place, probably another dimension.

  It was a staggering concept and one that Nagoya was determined to resolve. He had to admit that the Russians had suspected as much before anyone else, seeing a link between the gates. In the 1960's, three Russian scientists had published an article in the journal of the Soviet Academy of Sciences titled: Is The Earth A Large Crystal?

  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, historian
s 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 was 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.