The Atlantis Blueprint by Colin Wilson Page A

weathering.
    The difference is easy to explain. When a rock face is blasted by wind-blown sand, its soft layers are worn away while its hard layers continue to jut out, so the profile of the rock looks like a layer cake or a club sandwich. When a rock face is eroded by rainfall, the soft layers are still worn away horizontally, but the rain also cuts vertical channels, so the profile of the rock is a little like a series of babies’ bottoms, with rounded curves. Such weathering could be seen on the Sphinx and the Sphinx enclosure.
    In Schoch’s opinion the Sphinx might well have been built around 7,000 BC which would make it 9,000 years old instead of 4,500. When he announced this result to fellow geologists at a conference of the Geological Society of America in October 1991, it aroused intense controversy, although – strangely enough – many of the geologists were inclined to agree. It was the Egyptologists among them who denounced Schoch’s views as pure fantasy.
    West also persuaded a senior forensic artist, Frank Domingo of the New York Police Department, to examine the battered face of the Sphinx, and assess whether it might be that of the pharaoh Chefren, whose bust had been found buried in the Valley Temple facing the Sphinx. Domingo went to Cairo and applied to the Sphinx the same methods he would employ in trying to identify the damaged face of a corpse from a photograph. His conclusion was that the Sphinx was emphatically
not
Chefren – the chin was more prominent, the mouth a different shape, and the cheeks sloped at a different angle.
    West published an article about the findings in a glossy magazine and sent me a copy. It so happened that I had been asked to write a film outline about Atlantis for a Hollywood producer, and had used West’s theory that the Sphinx had been built by survivors from Atlantis. We met in New York in
    September 1993, and he showed me the rough cut of a television documentary he had made about the Sphinx. When I told him that I was thinking of writing a book about the whole question of the Sphinx and the age of civilisation, he recommended that I contact two other writers who were working along the same lines. One was an economics journalist named Graham Hancock, who had written a book called
The Sign and the Seal,16
about the Ark of the Covenant, and was now writing a book arguing that civilisation may be many thousands of years older than historians believe. The other was a Canadian librarian called Rand Flem-Ath, who had written a book about Atlantis that was still in typescript. I made a note of both their addresses.
    How had John West come to hear about Rand and
When the Sky Fell?
By another coincidence. In March 1993, Rand read a copy of a magazine called
Saturday Night,
which contained an article about the Sphinx by Paul Roberts, 17 a writer on Eastern philosophy, telling the story of John West and Robert Schoch and describing West’s suspicion that the Sphinx may have been built by survivors of Atlantis. Rand wrote to Paul Roberts, enclosing an outline of
When the Sky Fell.
To his delight, Roberts replied a few days later by fax, expressing his willingness to read the entire book. Paul Roberts sent the outline on to his old friend John West, and also suggested a Canadian publisher.
    When I returned to England in late September 1993, I lost no time in writing to Rand and to Graham Hancock. Within little more than a week, I had received typescripts of
When the Sky Fell,
and of a book called
Fingerprints of the Gods.18
    Hancock’s typescript was vast. He was not, like Däniken, arguing that space visitors were responsible for civilisation but simply proposing that our human ancestors – who built Tiahuanaco in the Andes and the pyramids of Mexico and Egypt – were far more technically accomplished than had ever been acknowledged. He cited astronomical evidence by the Bolivian scholar Arthur Posnansky, who had spent a lifetimestudying the ruins of Tiahuanaco, that the