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    An alternative way to explore and explain the mysteries of our world. "Published since 1985, online since 2001."

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Reality Checking


Recovering ancient knowledge from around the World




By Brent Raynes


Brent Raynes


Recently, at Teotihuacan, a pre-Hispanic city about 30 miles from Mexico City, while archaeologists were exploring a series of winding passageways and rather inaccessible chambers beneath the Temple of the Feathered Serpent, using an infrared carrying camera onboard a remote-controlled robot, they discovered hundreds of ancient yellow spheres. Generally 1.5 to 5 inches in diameter, the “yellow orbs” are covered in a yellow material called jarosite, with a core composed of clay. Lead archaeologist Sergio Gomez Chavez stated: “The robot was able to enter in the part of the tunnel which has not yet been excavated yet and found three chambers. We believe that high-ranking people, priests or even rulers, went down to the tunnel to perform rituals.”




Acclaimed author and historian Andrew Collins of England noted: “I was intrigued to read that the walls of this chthonic domain are covered in powdered hematite, magnetite and pyrites, which would unquestionably stimulate the brain’s magnetically-attuned hippocampus, causing dreams, visions and all manner of other strange experiences.”

As more and more research and investigation probes into these ancient megalithic sites and earthworks worldwide, again and again it is noteworthy and thought-provoking how they appear to have been deliberately designed and constructed in ways (and at geological sites too) that ongoing studies reveal could have induced profound altered states of consciousness, which little doubt would have been exploited for spiritual purposes (i.e., in conjunction with rituals and ceremonies).

In Seed of Knowledge, Stone of Plenty (2005), the late John Burke described using sensitive electronic instruments at these ancient sites. I was fascinated to read of how at England’s well-known Avebury, as he studied the double row of large stones known as West Kennet Avenue, as well as the stones main and minor stone circles themselves that comprise Avebury, Burke found something quite amazing. The huge stone slabs, which were brought from another location nearby, called Marlborough Downs, contain black magnetite. Burke and his colleagues found that these slabs with magnetite crystals were aligned so that the south pole of each stone slab faced the next stone as you continued toward the circle. In the circular arrangement of the stones, they found that the south poles were aligned with the next stone in a clockwise direction, except at the two intact entranceways where the magnetic poles align with the avenue stones.

Burke reported that in duplicating the Avebury arrangement in the lab that they found that airborne ions were channeled in one direction. In addition, it was noted that this same principle was applied by modern physicists in Chicago’s Fermi Lab, a powerful circular atomic accelerator, although the prehistoric people of Avebury, back around 2,500 B.C., (Burke pointed out) had a motive and purpose that was decidedly different (i.e., altering consciousness perhaps instead of doing atomic energy research).

In this issue, Dr. Greg Little has contributed an article about a spectacular incident back in 1994, at ancient Silbury Hill, located close to Avebury, where three witnesses had a spectacular high-strangeness sighting of fiery orange orbs and glowing humanoid beings that, Greg wrote, even rivals the famous 1955 “Green Men Case” of Kelly-Hopkinsville, Kentucky. “The area around Silbury and nearby Avebury is a hotbed of strange reports: UFOs, crop circles, humanoids, strange lights, and apparitional phenomena are frequently reported,” Greg wrote. “Around 2006 my wife and I stayed with the Collins’s for a week at Avebury exploring Silbury, the Avebury circle, and nearby sites. We spent several nights walking the standing stone grassy avenues leading for miles in various directions to different sites. Oddly, each night we observed small orbs of blue/green/white lights emanating from the hills running alongside the avenues.”

Burke also noted how elsewhere in England, Scotland, and at Carnac, similar arrangements of huge stone rows leading to stone circles and how those rows typically connected the stone circles to water, where the air is easily ionized.

However, Burke had another idea as to what ancient mankind might have been using these alignments for, and it was agricultural instead of for consciousness altering.

In an interview I did with Burke for this magazine (which later appeared in my book On the Edge of Reality, 2009), he brought into focus this agricultural aspect, continuing on from what they had discovered at Avebury.

“Next we realized that the geology below both Silbury Hill and Avebury Henge was special in another way,” Burke told me. “Both were placed atop ‘conductivity discontinuities,’ something that sounds far more technical than it is. A conductivity discontinuity is simply the intersection of two zones of land, one of which conducts natural electrical ground current relatively well and the other less well. At such sties the normal daily fluctuations of the earth’s geomagnetic field are magnified several hundred percent, and with them the telluric currents that flow through the ground.”

“The way in which Silbury Hill and Avebury were designed and built further amplified this energy. Once we started looking at other places and other countries we found out that this was the rule rather than the exception. Overwhelmingly, the ancient megalithic architects all over the world chose to build on conductivity discontinuities, and then designed and built these enormous structures in such a way as to further concentrate the natural electromagnetic energies present at those sites.”

“We wondered how an ancient people without our fluxgate magnetometer, electrostatic voltmeter, and ground electrodes could have discovered such energies. But then we stumbled into a spot in the Black Hills of South Dakota that was both a geomagnetic anomaly and a vision quest site, dating from the days of Crazy Horse and his visions. That’s when we found that many sensitives, such as shamans, can sense these energies as well as our instruments.”

“Furthermore, we began examining the chronology at megalithic sites around the world, whether pyramid, henge, or mound and found that they overwhelmingly were built during a time of food crisis, and that after their construction the crisis seemed to have vanished. Now, at the time I was working for a company that enhanced agricultural seeds with an artificial version of such energies and obtained advanced yields as a result. I asked myself if the same thing might have been true for the ancient builders. So we began bringing seeds to the sites and the results were startling.”

“We have used our instruments to examine henges, mounds, pyramids, and stone chambers in England, Guatemala, and across the U.S. While we did not get to France, and the oldest megalithic structures (circa 4,800 B.C.), a Belgian engineer named Pierre Mereaux spent 30 years surveying the region with the same types of instruments we used and came up with findings that precisely matched the pattern we found. For example, stone chambers we have examined in New England, starting just one hour north of New York City, are structurally and electromagnetically identical to ones built from Ireland to India over a 6,000 year period. You cannot argue they were a cultural phenomenon because there was no one culture across that time span and geographic range. But they are functional. They are always sited on conductivity discontinuities, have a negative magnetic anomaly right at the entrance, and electrically charged air inside.”

“Working at the New York chambers, we brought in samples of the same primitive varieties of corn used by Native American farmers from 700 A.D. onwards, about the same time period as the chambers were built. We would get statistically significant improvements in the growth rate and germination percentage of these seeds as compared to seeds left 100 feet outside the chambers and in the lab back home. The climax of this investigation came when we put 9 samples of 100 seeds each inside several chambers and had them grown out to harvest organically by the same Harvard-trained ethno-botanist who had supplied the seed. The samples left in the chambers yielded double to triple the amount of corn vs. the samples placed outside. When you combine these results with the fact that most megalithic structures seem to have been erected at a time of food crisis, it becomes compelling evidence that there was a functional purpose to these things that would explain how you could mobilize a population to invest such vast resources in building them.”

Burke learned in his investigations in Guatemala that the limestone Mayan pyramids were referred to as “maize mountains,” were often located near a cave, and that even today Mayan farmers place bean and corn seeds atop these ancient pyramids, and then will later take them home.

Meanwhile, back to the processes of consciousness, Burke pointed out that Canadian neuroscientist Dr. Michael Persinger’s pioneering work had “confirmed that the magnitude of magnetic changes we have found at these sites conforms to those he has found capable of creating visions in volunteers in his lab.”

The largest conductivity discontinuity that Burke had ever studied here in the U.S. was at the Petroglyph National Monument near Albuquerque, New Mexico. As he explained in our interview, “it contains thousands of rock carvings which are considered by anthropologists today to have been made by shamans illustrating their trance hallucinations. I measured very powerful and extremely odd surges of electric current in the ground there. When the ranger at the Visitor Center heard what I was finding, she said to me, ‘You know, periodically I get these ‘New Age types’ coming in here and telling me they just love to go sit up in the rocks and feel the energy. I thought they were a bunch of flakes, but you’re telling me there might be something to this.’”

These thousands of ancient petroglyphs are scattered across a 17-mile long mesa that is composed of volcanic rock produced from eruptions an estimated 150,000 years ago. During a visit there in 2008, with a simple compass I was able to watch my needle deflected about a degree. We walked part of the site with a shamanic practitioner, of Apache and Spanish ancestry, who claimed at one point that she had received an electric shock as we were walking up part of the mesa. She also took us later up to a town in Colorado where there was an extinct volcano and where UFO and paranormal activity had been reported through the years. I wondered what Burke’s instruments would have detected there.

Obviously, as I have said and written at various times in the past, we often seem to be rediscovering bits and pieces of information that ancient mankind was already aware of. Hopefully we can make good use of such recovered knowledge and information.


Thursday, March 28, 2024