Our Haunted Planet - John Keel-pages

Page 11 of 135

Page 11 of 135
Our Haunted Planet - John Keel-pages

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drawn by amateur cartographers and guesswork. Vast sections of the earth's oceans have not been adequately charted. There are count- less islands everywhere that have never been visited, named, or mapped. If WOW actually exists, they could occupy a large island in the Pacific or Antarctica and nobody would ever he the wiser. We have, of course, flown over a great part of the earth. Back in the 1930s Charles Lindbergh flew over Brazil and reported seeing an enormous stone wall deep in the jungle. A wall that stretched for miles. No explorer has ever penetrated to that wall overland. We still don't know anything about it. Other flieis in other parts of the world have reported similar oddities and most of them remain unexplored mysteries. In 1970 the United Nations issued a report which stated that four-fifths of the earth's surface was inadequately surveyed and charted and that tremendous areas remain unexplored altogether. The cartographers who drew up the original Piri Re'is maps probably knew more about our planet than we do. Despite all these facts, most of us like to pretend that our planet is fully explored and that all of its many mysteries have been adequately solved. We believe our history books. In fact, many millions of people still cling to the thoroughly discredited religious belief that mankind is only four thousand years old. Science labours to ignore the mounting evidence that we may not be the only intelligent life form on this planet. Yet historians have always carefully recorded the events which indicate that a parahuman race does exist alongside us. Millions of people have encountered them and thousands of books have been written about those encounters. Now that we are zooming headlong into the Age of Aquarius, it is time for us to take a new look at the world around us; time for us to study those despicable erratics of archaeology and history; time for us to think about the unthinkable. Our much-touted technology has led us down the road to ruin, poisoned our environment, and given us the implements for destroying the earth itself. If there was a great superculture thousands of years ago, perhaps it followed the same tragic course. Perhaps even the Abominable Snowmen of the Himalayas and their North American counterparts, the Sasquatch of Canada, will inherit the earth, and ten thousand years from now their descendants will be studying a frayed copy of an old road map and speculating about us. Naturally, there will be scientists among them who will sneer at the whole thing... and they will get back to the business of trying to split the atom. CHAPTER TWO Every two or three years some adventurous scientist or peripatetic deep-sea diver discovers lost Atlantis. He usually announces Ms find during the summer silly season when news is slow, and the papers are filled with yarns about the Loch Ness monster and bathing beauty contests. Atlantis has now been located in the Mediterranean (many times), west of the Azores, south of the Azores, in the -Caribbean, off the west coast of South America, off the east coast of South THE CONTINENT THAT VANISHED