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the needed equipment could take more than a week to lift one block," Noone stated. "In the early 1930s, during the Great Depression, a tremendous inventor, Edward Kunkel, began studying how the Great Pyramid was built. A friend of his commented to him, after hearing a lec- ture about the date and size of the stones used in building the Great Pyramid: ‘I bet a fellow could make $50 if he could figure out how it was done and write a newspaper article about it.' Kunkel in his autobiography said that $50 was a huge sum of money back in the Depression. So this could have been his prime motivation." In describing this unique pyramid-building theory, Noone said: "Kunkel examines every known means for lifting a weight. The phenomenal weight of the blocks that make up the Great Pyramid has boggled the mind of anyone who has studied thousands of years of stone masonry. Today, people even speculate that advanced beings from outer space came down and built the Great Pyramid, or that at one time man had somehow learned to use the power of his mind to levitate the blocks into place. Now, either one of those may or may not be true. What Kunkel did was examine the seven ways to move a mass, e.g., manually or with the use of a wedge or screw, an inclined plane, a lever, gear wheels or a pulley. One way was with the use of pumps and hydraulics or water power. In essence, Kunkel was making a list and using a process of elimination to see which method was actu- ally used." Noone pointed out the flaws in mainstream thinking about pyra- mid construction. "Most of us are brainwashed from seeing too many television specials where the orthodox Egyptologists have shown modern-day workers pulling with ropes, muscle and human sinew a block of stone that weighed maybe a ton. You watch them and they have a tremendously difficult job moving a one-ton stone. That is a small block compared to most of the blocks in the Great Pyramid, so it has no basis in reality when you talk about some of the blocks in the Great Pyramid weighing as much as a modern diesel train engine of 90 tons. I would like to see these proponents of slaves pulling a weight with primitive methods, take a diesel train engine out to the Gizeh Plateau, take the wheels off it and pull it 50 feet up a ramp. I once saw a pic- ture where 900 men were in harness pulling a large block in cadence (i.e., one, two, three, heave!), unlike dumb beasts of the field that couldn't pull together. The first thing I imagined when I saw this picture was the rope snapping like a kite string." Certainly it's a worthwhile point to note that if massive ropes or chains were used, there could be handling scars from dragging on the stone. But there are no such traces of either handling scars or ANCIENT FORCED ENTRY MADE SOUTH TOP END OF GRAND GALLERY FOR INSPECTION OF CRACKS ETC IN CHAMBERS OF CONSTRUCTION. 42 - NEXUS The passage system of the Great Pyramid, as it looks west. Courtesy Richard Noone, reprinted from 5/5/2000. DECEMBER 1998 - JANUARY 1999