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Petra, carved out of the red sandstone cliffs and filled with stately columns and temples. This Arab Shangri-la was constructed around 700 B.C. and must have housed thousands of people. Food, water, and supplies had to be brought in through the gorge - the only approach - from miles away. Thousands of men must have laboured for generations, hacking these monuments out of the walls of this hidden valley. Some of the ruins are pre-Roman. There are ancient tombs, and a narrow stone staircase leads to an area on top of a cliff where two twenty-foot obelisks are located on 'the high place' - a platform measuring forty-five by twenty feet. Perhaps Professor Agrest would regard it as another launching platform for nuclear rockets. The culture that built Petra is lost in legend and archaeological confusion, but in the city's final days it was used as a hideout by desert bandits. For the most part, believers in Mu, Atlantis, and flying saucers have ignored the ruins of the Middle East and Africa, concentrating instead on the lost cities of Central and South America. The fairly recent Mayan, Inca, and Aztec civilizations cannot account for all these ruins. There is evidence that another, possibly far more advanced, culture thrived in the Americas in earlier times. Remnants of that civilization may have been handed down to the Indians who followed. Tiabuanaco, a fabulous stone ruin high in the Andes Mountains, has inspired more curiosity, speculation, and nonsense than any other. It has been the subject of countless books and articles and has been used to support the beliefs of nearly every outlandish cult going. In recent years there have been innumerable flying saucer sightings and appearances of little glowing green men around Lake Titicaca, which is 12,644 feet above sea level, Tiahuanaco is at the south-east end of the lake. Although the ruins cover only about one sixth of a mile, they feature impressive tumuli (man-made mounds), a fifty-foot high pyramid, and a number of stone platforms and underground chambers. The famous Gateway of the Sun is an arch weighing nearly ten tons. Archaeologists believe that the Tiahuana-cans were part of an empire that preceded the Incas by rs an two thou- sand years, but they left no -written record, and there are no local legends about them. When the Incas latet conquered the Lake Titi-caca region, they found Tiahuanaco abandoned.” ' While many of tie structures in Petra were carved from the sandstone cliffs in place, same of the walls in Tiahuanaco were whittled out of huge blocks weighing as much as sixty tons and then somehow moved into place. Giant statues also stand around the site. One weighing twenty tons has been moved to a museum in La Paz. In their book, The Great Idol of Tiahuanaco, Hans Bellamy and P. AlJan offer an interpretation of the symbols found in a huge statue discovered in a Tlahuanacan temple. They claimed the symbols recorded astronomical knowledge of a very oe er ce eee advanced order. Erich Von Daniken, author of Chariots of the'Gods, visited the Andes is his search for evidence that spaceships had visited the Earth in prehistoric times. He describes seeing a twenty-thousand- toa stone block near the ruins of the Incan fort of Sacsahuaman. Danikcn explains: It is a single stone block the size of a four-storey house. It has been impeccably dressed in the most craftsmanlike way; it has steps and ramps and is adorned with spirals and holes... the