Giza & Archaeology Archives

January 15, 2019 16 Comments

WHAT’S THE NEW US EMBASSY IN BAGHDAD REALLY FOR?

I'm constantly amazed at the resourcefulness of the Gizar community for spotting the strange and unusual story, and this is one of those cases. When the story first came in, I read it, shrugged my shoulders, and thought, "well, that's interesting but hardly blog material." The story kept coming in in various articles that people were sending, and so I thought, "wait a minute, there's something going on and they're spotting it and I'm not." Now before we get to what finally made me consider this story, I'd better tell you what the story is about; it's about the new, and apparently, very large US Embassy in Baghdad, which, as embassies go, is not only huge, and hugely staffed, but apparently the hub of some sort of vast transportation enterprise:

The Secret Logistics of America’s Global Deep State

Now, I rarely count how many versions of an article people send me, but this time I did, and the total number of people who sent in some version of this story were around 23, as far as I can tell. Considering that I get an average of about 100-150 emails a day (best guesstimate), that places this story near the all-time high for people noticing it and bringing it to my attention. So what caught people's attention? This:

The world's largest embassy is situated in the Green Zone and fortified by three walls, another barrier of concrete slabs, followed by barbed wire fences and a wall of sandbags. It covers an area of 104 acres, six times larger than UN headquarters in New York and ten times larger than the new embassy Washington is building in Beijing – which is just 10 acres.

[Editor's' Note: The ten-acre US Embassy in Beijing is the second largest overseas construction project in the history of the Department of State — and the 104-acre US Embassy in Iraq is the largest.]

So, America's largest diplomatic mission is surrounded by high concrete walls, is painted in black, brown and grey and is completely isolated from its environment. … The United States announced several months ago that between diplomats and employees, its embassy would include 16,000 people after the pullout of US forces. (Emphases in the original)

But wait. That's not all:

More than a million kilograms of cargo were shipped from Baghdad to different parts of the world, reveals US embassies procurement documents.

Mysterious cargo shipments from the US Embassy in Baghdad to other American embassies and consulates around the world have been revealed on a Wikileaks' database. Procurement orders of US embassies are public documents, but Wikileaks put them in a searchable database making it easier to analyse.

The database displaying worldwide US embassy orders of goods and services reveals Baghdad as a postal and shipping centre for tonnes of freight.

So, we have a 104 acre embassy, with apparently over 16,000 employees, and it's a "post office" shipping things to just about everywhere apparently. In fact, over a million kilograms gives a whole new meaning to the immunity of a "diplomatic pouch" I suppose. And under the cover of the "diplomatic pouch" one could smuggle, I mean, ship...well, just about anything. We'll get back to that, because it's part of today's high octane speculation. As the article itself notes, the shipments include "containers" and, it argues, weapons. And all this, let us remember, under the aegis, apparently, of the US Department of State:

On 2 July 2017, the great investigative reporter Dilyana Gaytandzhieva headlined "350 Flights Carry Weapons Diplomatic for Terrorists”, and provided documentation of the US CIA’s intricate global network, which secretly “sends $1 billion worth of weapons” through many countries to jihadists in Syria to take down Syria’s Government. Iraq was mentioned 6 times in the original publication of her article, and is mentioned 9 times in the 29 April 2018 updated version. That secret US supply of weapons to jihadist groups to overthrow Bashar al-Assad and his secular, non-sectarian, Baathist Party, is a secret operation, just like the US State Department’s Baghdad Embassy’s operations are, and that Embassy could even be this particular operation’s headquarters.

Then, Mr. S.D. weighed in on the whole affair, and sent along another article:

The U.S. art market for stolen antiquities from Yemen must be shut down

Mr. S.D. wondered, as did a few others who sent along the story, if in fact part of those "containers" contained not weapons, but antiquities. Some even included articles about British Petroleum's recent discovery of yet another vast pool of oil beneath the Gulf of Mexico, putting to rest, they speculated, the narrative that the USA needed Middle East oil: if the USA is awash in oil, why is it still in the Middle East? Well, most regular readers here are aware of my own high octane speculation that the whole "weapons of mass destruction" and "we need to secure the oil" explanation was a bit of a cover story, to gain permanent access and control over the antiquities of the region. Dr. Heather Lynn has speculated that oil, and oil companies, were the cover for a similar "antiquities acquisition" scheme in Syria. So, Mr. S.D. wondered, is the war in Yemen really about the same thing?

But there are other possibilities, though I remain persuaded that antiquities is at least part of the agenda, after all, the US-sponsored Arab spring occurred in countries laden with antiquities, Lybia, Egypt, and of course, "their" sights have also focused on Iran, and Turkey, recent victim of a coup plot which Sultan Erdogan has always maintained was an American attempt to overthrow his regime, also has antiquities. Think only of Gobekli Tepi. And the allegations that antiquities trafficking was in part the funding mechanism for terrorist activity is fairly certain. But antiquities are probably only part of a wider agenda. A few months ago, stories began to circulate from the former Soviet republic of Georgia that local American consulates were also involved in covert bio-weapons programs and testing. Again, "shipments" were observed going in and out of the facilities, and the Georgian and Russian journalists covering the story speculated that bioweapons were being positioned for an eventual war with Russia. And all of it, again, under the aegis of the Department of State.

So what's going on? I suspect the speculation of the article, and of all the people sending the story, is true: some sort of vast logistics operation is under way using embassies. Literally anything could be being shipped, from weapons, antiquities, to more salacious cargoes, including drugs and humans, engraving plates for currencies, securities, you name it.

There's more to this story, I'm sure, and I don't know about you, but I suspect we'll be hearing more about it. The only problem is, this story is of such a nature that it will require a careful eye for connecting dots.

See you on the flip side...

December 13, 2018

THE ARCHEOLOGY WARS CONTINUE IN SYRIA

Mr. C.D.M. spotted this story on China's Xinhua news agency site, and I want to talk about it for today's high octane speculation:

Syria condemns "illegal excavations" by U.S., France, Turkey in northern Syria

This is, by now, a familiar pattern, or rather, interpretation of events: terrorist groups traffic in illegal artifacts as a means of funding their operations, and behind such groups, one has state actors: France, the USA, and so on:

The Syrian Foreign Ministry on Monday condemned what it called the "illegal excavations" in historic sites in northern Syria by the United States, France and Turkey, state news agency SANA reported.

The excavations are being carried out in the northern cities of Manbij and Afrin in Aleppo Province as well as in ancient sites in the northern cities of Idlib, Hasakah and Raqqa.

The ministry said it has information that the illegal excavation work has been increased in the areas where the aforementioned forces have a presence and a clout over local militia groups.

The pattern is as old as western imperialism itself: the Middle East has been plundered by a kind of "archeology imperialism" by France (think of Napoleon Bonaparte's expedition to Egypt, occasion of the discovery of the Rosetta Stone and its deciphering by Champollion), Prussia-Germany (think of the Prussian Academy's drawings of the actual entrance to the Great Pyramid and its strange markings or glyphs, or Von Schliemann's discovery of Troy. Von Schliemann, it might be added, challenged the assumptions of the day that Troy was a fiction invented by Homer, but rather that it actually existed, and used clues in Homer to find it.). Or, more recently, think of the Baghdad Museum looting, and the alleged recovery of its artifacts, a story which never seems to mention the still-unaccounted for cuneiform tablets, or the recent story of Hobby Lobby trying to acquire some tablets under highly questionable circumstances. I'm on record both on this website and in a few of my books as advancing the theory that the Baghdad Museum looting was more than a bit suspicious. I've even entertained the idea that the G.W. Bush administration's argument that Saddam Hussein was developing weapons of mass destruction, when none were subsequently forthcoming from the American invasion of that country, may have been a bit of very clever misdirection: the USA may have been looking for weapons of mass destruction, but didn't find any of the conventional chemical, atomic, or biological variety, which is what most people think when they encounter the phrase or recall the story. But ancient weapons of mass destruction, or information about them, is off most people's radar. But that is, indeed, one of the agendas that I think is at work, perhaps to discover the ancient Tablets of Destinies referred to in Mesopotamian texts in contexts that suggest some sort of weapon of mass destruction was at work. I have entertained that a similar agenda is covertly at work behind the space program, with probes to the Moon, Mars, and most recently, the curiously named asteroid Bennu (which is also, I might add, a curiously shaped asteroid which intriguing "stuff" on its surface).

So, it should come as no surprise, if this covert "imperial archeology" game is indeed at work, that Syria would enter the picture, and how better than to conduct such an agenda than under the cover of terrorist groups trading in artifacts to fund their operations? It's a useful "cut-out" and cover story for such an agenda. So is it going on in Syria?

Well, consider this. In a remarkable little book The Sumerian Controversy: A Special Report: The Elite Power Structure behind the Latest Discovery Near Ur, Dr. Heather Lynn recounts the strange power structure behind the excavations near Tell Khaiber in southern Iraq, a power structure that included an oil company in Texas(!) (p. 23), with connections to the widely known accounting firm Price Waterhouse and Lorne Thyssen of the German Thyssen family (p. 25), which of course had connections to Prescott Bush, whose son GHW was a Texas oilman, and whose own son, G.W., launched the Iraq invasion. Among some of the tablets found at the site, some allegedly contained information about Babylonian bloodlines. (p. 36). Oh and did I mention that the oil company in question also had a significant block bought by... the Russians. You just can't make this stuff up.

So do I suspect that a similar network might be at work in Syria to explore and "recover" artifacts?

Yes I do.

See you on the flip side...

September 5, 2018

OF FOSSILS AND STRUCTURES AND TIRE TRACKS… IN ANTARCTICA

When Mr. M.S. sent me the link for the following video about the discovery of several "somethings" in Antarctica, I was, at first, inclined to hit the "delete" button, as I do with about 99% of videos people send me. Sorry folks, it's just the reality of things: I simply do not have the time to watch videos from hundreds of people. But every now and then, one manages to pique my curiosity sufficiently that I have to watch. In this case, I was floored, flabbergasted, stunned, shocked; and there was more than just a queasy anxiety in the pit of my stomach, for if true, then it's definitely confirmation that "something" is "up" down there.

But first, let me hedge today's blog around with multiple riders, caveats, exemptions, exceptions, and cave legentibus: (1) I have no idea of the reliability of the site from which the video came; I did watch several other videos from the same site, just to get a "feel" for it, and I come away with some ambivalence, though I did not detect any intention willingly to dissemble, but that is a purely subjective assessment, and the reader may disagree; (2) the video links yet another video about "high Antarctic strangeness" that I also watched and will link below, which seems to "confirm" the anomalies found in the first video; (3) if true, what is shown in both videos is nothing less than stunning, and it tends to confirm my suspicions - stated most recently for example on the Richard Dolan Show - that the high strangeness going on in Antarctica may be due to the fact that they "found something"; if these videos are showing genuine anomalies, then that hypothesis has just been confirmed, and in spades; (4) this, however, must always be tempered by the fact that in today's digital age, anything can be "photoshopped". The question then becomes, who photoshopped what is seen, and why. That said, I'd be remiss on a website that specializes in high octane speculation and "the weird" not to pass this along. Finally, an apology to readers: the videos will require about thirty minutes of your time. Again, I pass them along for their intrinsic prima facie interest.

That said, here is the video sent by Mr. M.S.:

And here is the second video that the above video referred that I also investigated:

Now, if you've managed to make it through both videos, there are a number of things that stand out to my mind, and which form the focus of my daily dose of high octane speculation. Again, for the sake of argument, let us assume that the anomalies highlighted in both videos is genuine. What, then, emerges? Firstly, I note that the anomalies for the most part, as far as I can tell, fall within the general regions that were either "invaded" or that were explored by aerial photogrammetry mapping missions by Admiral Richard Byrd in the well-known Operation High Jump, 1946-1947. Let me underscore that once again: they are within the general regions in which Operation High Jump took place. A careful and detailed examination of this correspondence I did not do; and thus this remains a merely qualitative "first glance" assessment. Secondly, what is also interesting and intriguing to me is that the author of both of these videos, who calls himself "Florida Maquis" and who did a great deal of yeoman's work on these videos, also did yet another video in which he examines other Antarctic anomalies which fall within the general region explored by the 1938-1939 German expedition in the region they called Neuschwabenland, otherwise known as Queen Maud Land. Thirdly, if these anomalies are genuine, then my hypothesis that the reason for all the recent strangeness in Antarctica, from the sudden visit of former Secretrary of State John Kerry to the visit of Patriarch Kiril III of Moscow, to Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin - who incidentally made several strange tweets on his Twitter account both prior to and after his visit, one of which was a tweet that was quickly taken down that what was down there was "pure evil" - assumes a context that they did not have before: they were most probably down there have a first hand look at these anomalies for themselves. The sudden interest of Turkey in Antarctica would also make sense, because if these anomalies are genuinely there, then it stands to reason that there is a lot of quiet discussion taking place in the background by the "powers that be."

The anomalies themselves are worth commenting on: again, if genuine, then they are showing three basic classes of "things" there: (1) structures indicating an intelligent origin; (2) fossil-like remains that are quite large; and (3) anomalies both on or beneath the land surface, and beneath the coastal waters, whose exact nature is unknown, but which in some cases exhibit recurring rectilinearity. With respect to the last class, recall that Russia was going to send elements of its Baltic Fleet to Antarctica, along with a "spy ship" to do coastal explorations off the continent.

To put all this high octane speculation as succinctly as possible: if the anomalies are indeed genuine, than we now have clear evidence that there may once have been some sort of civilization on the continent, but of a very bizarre nature, given the "fossils" displayed in the second video. The author of the videos, "Florida Maquis", also points out that these anomalies are not necessarily visible from a simple Google Earth search, but rather, that one can only view them in the professional version, and even then, only by using the time stamp feature, which, he maintains, is a simple but effective way that "the powers that be" have been hiding things; something might be visible, or hidden, in the year (to pick a date at random) 2011, that will not be visible in the same area if one only looks at 2018, which as he also correctly points out, most people will do.

Which brings me to a second high octane speculation: let us assume - again only for the sake of argument - that the anomalies uncovered by "Florida Maquis" were indeed photoshopped and injected into the Google Earth (pro version) data stream. The question then becomes "who did it" and "why"? Here, I suspect, a team of delinquent hackers playing an elaborate practical joke on the rest of us, while possible, is only barely so. If such occurred, in my opinion it would be much more likely that it would come from "much higher up." The question then becomes "why", and here I suspect that the reason is simply to create both a misdirection, and to keep attention focused on Antarctica, but to misdirect it. Why be concerned, for example, about Lockheed-Martin's presence in Antarctica, if there are large "fossils" of a large "something" to be found there?

When all is said and done, I am left with that same queasy feeling in the pit of my stomach that these pictures may be genuine, rather than a faked deception and misdirection, for if genuine, they explain a lot of the strange history of that continent in the decades immediately prior to World War Two, and ever since. In other words, if one assumes their genuineness, then they explain much of the hidden reasons for the recent strange interests and activities there. If one assumes for the sake of argument that these anomalies are genuine, then they explain the presence and associations of Aldrin, Kiril III, John Kerry, and many others in and with Antarctica. For the moment, my vote is on the genuine side.

See you on the flip side...

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July 31, 2018

YOU DON’T SAY: RUSSIAN SCIENTISTS SAY GREAT PYRAMID FOCUSES ...

I suspect that as soon as Ms. M.K. and Mr. S.D. sent along the following articles, that they knew I'd blog about them. Well, here I am, blogging about them. Now, for those of you in Harvard yard or MIT, you're fully entitled to reserve me a first class seat in a rubber room on this one, because once again, like the goat that I am, i'm going to run right out to the end of the twig of High Octane Speculation on this one. I might, and probably will, find myself like Wile E. Coyote, flailing away madly with all four limbs and making great progress, until I realize there is nothing beneath me, and plummet into the canyon below. The Observer principle in modern physics can be a bitch.

Capricorns speculating...

Now the two articles in question are these, one from the UK's famous tabloid, The Daily Mail, and the other from Russia's Sputnik online magazine:

Secrets of the Great Pyramid of Giza continue to unravel as scientists discover it can focus electromagnetic energy through its hidden chambers

Blast From the Past: Great Pyramid 'Concentrator' of Radio Waves – Study

Now, color me surprised. This comes a merely a near two decades after Chris Dunn's study, The Giza Power Plant, and almost the same amount of time after my Giza Death Star trilogy, in which both of us argued essentially the same thing. For Dunn, certain properties of the Great Pyramid suggested to him that the machine was designed to modulate acoustic information into microwaves. I expanded the idea and elaborated a hypothesis that the structure was a coupled harmonic oscillator to the structure of local space. Either way, one has the idea that it was a manipulator of electromagnetic energy either as a primary or secondary function of its purpose. (Oh, by the way: to the good folks at the Daily Mail, the picture in your article is not the Great Pyramid, it's the other large pyramid at Giza, though people often get confused on that score.)

One must not assume that I'm chastising the Russians for being "late to the game" here. I'm not. In fact, as I pointed out in The Giza Death Star Deployed, the Russians were doing all sorts of classified experimental research into "pyramid power" during the Soviet era, research which only came to light after the fall of the Soviet Union. One of the people involved was Ukrainian physicist Dr. Volodomyr Krasnoholovets, who published some very interesting papers in topology with Michael Bounias, and whose work was made known to Great Pyramid enthusiasts by the American biophysicist, Dr. John DeSalvo's Great Pyramid of Giza Research Association. And if you're familiar with the "psychic research literature," this program of research may have been based on the Czechoslovakian research of the late 1960s and 1970s that was disclosed in Ostrander's book Psychic Discoveries Behind the Iron Curtain.

So, no high octane speculation there. What intrigued me was this comment in the Daily Mail article:

Scientists have found that the famous pyramid can concentrate electric and magnetic energy in its chambers and below its base, giving rise to distinct pockets of higher energy.

This is accompanied by some graphs of the showing concentrations of energy below the structure itself, a feature which I particularly find fascinating, since I outlined in those Giza Death Star books a hypothetical case that the structure was deliberately designed to oscillate the Earth, and to project energy into it. It literally "moves the Earth," an intriguing hypothesis if one grants Mr. Dunn's hypothesis that it was designed, in part, to modulate acoustic information into the radio-microwave end of the spectrum.

While all that was high octane speculation at the time we were advancing it, it now appears that it may no longer be so "high" in its octane, but merely speculation which, at this point, may have been pointing in the right direction.

So where's the high octane speculation here?

Well, I have to wonder about the timing of this release. As I outlined in The Giza Death Star Destroyed, the research of the Soviet era that was known at that time said pretty much the same thing as this latest Russian study. This latest study is adding some new details, but not changing the overall picture. But perhaps the Russians are trying to send messages with this latest release, the message being, perhaps, that they know a whole lot more than they're really saying, and they're producing the graphs and charts to drive the point home. Now that I've crawled to the end of the twig, permit me to run right off of it, for I to this day find it intriguing that the two books of mine that have been published in Russia are precisely The Giza Death Star, and The SS Brotherhood of the Bell. Perhaps, indeed, the Russians are sending messages...

See you on the flip side...

May 23, 2018

THINGS THAT MAKE YOU GO “HMMM….”: MACH THRUSTERS, ...

Mr. P.J. spotted this article and shared it with me this past week, and I have to express my deep gratitude, for this is one of those papers that makes you go "Hmmmm..." Indeed, as we shall see, there are many things in this paper that make you go "hmmm", and many of them probably weren't even intended to do so by its authors. Needless to say, I have to indulge my penchant for high octane end-of-the-twig-beyond-the-weight-of-evidence speculation.

First things first, though, so here's the paper:

SP2018_016 Page 1 The SpaceDrive Project – First Results on EMDrive and Mach-Effect Thrusters

What caught my attention here was not the usual attention on the so-called EM thruster, a device which claims to generate thrust by the interaction of microwaves in a conical waveguide, but rather, the focus on the Mach thruster, which derives its thrust from the acoustic cavitation of crystals! Here's the essence of the idea, from the paper itself:

The second concept to be studied in detail is the so-called Mach-Effect thruster which is being developed by J.F. Woodward since the 1990s and more recently by H. Fearn [19]–[22]. It is based on one interpretation of Mach’s principle (inertia here is due to mass out there), that inertial mass is due to the gravitational interaction with the whole universe [23]. Woodward and others showed that linearized general relativity theory with time-varying solutions and Sciama’s analysis altogether leads to mass fluctuations that can be up to 11 orders of magnitude higher for typical devices than classically expected from E=m.c² [24].

In the Mach-Effect thruster, a stack of clamped piezo crystals is excited using a frequency in the tens of kHz range. According to Woodward, this energy oscillations leads to transient Machian-mass variations that can lead to time-averaged stationary thrusts if they are properly pushed and pulled with the correct frequency and phase. This is believed to happen thanks to the piezoelectric and electrostrictive material properties of piezo crystals. Although at much smaller amplitudes, electrostriction happens at twice the applied frequency and at a 90° phase shift, which is required for stationary thrust [22],[24]. A large brass reaction mass can amplify this effect. A schematic sketch of the thruster as well as an actual thruster and a corresponding ANSYS odel is shown in Fig. 11. We are working on analytical as well as finite element models to accurately predict the oscillation movements on the thruster (verified using laser vibrometry) in order to predict and enhance the thrust produced. (Emphasis added)

Of course, all sorts of science fiction, and science factoid, came flooding into my mind reading this. On the science fiction side, one could not help but think of Gene Roddenberry's Star Trek series of science fiction television series, in all its various morphologies from the original series to Deep Space Nine, with their constant reference to "di-lithium crystals" being somehow a key or crucial component to warp drive engines, and hence to the ability to transit whole star systems in a few days' time. One was never told, of course, how exactly crystals operating in anti-matter/matter reactors worked, but nevermind, this was science fiction. Sit back, enjoy the show, and eat your popcorn. (Maybe "dilithium" simply referred to the matter and antimatter versions of the element? Oh, nevermind... back to the popcorn.)

What's much more intriguing is the idea that acoustic cavitation of piezo-electric crystals can produce mass variations that "can lead to time-averaged stationary thrusts if properly pushed and pulled with the correct frequency and phase." Indeed, one wonders if plasmas, with their own unique semi-lattice structures, could do the same (Dr. Ronald Richter, anyone?) The idea of direct relationships between crystals, mass, and gravity and the local lattice structure of a particular local space is, of course, roughly the idea I was getting at in the various pyramid books. One wonders if, indeed, thus pulsed Machian piezo-electric thrust effect could generate longitudinal waves in the medium. My guess is yes, but that's a long story. The bottom line here is the connection of piezoelectric effect, acoustic cavitation at the proper resonate frequencies, and the resulting pulsed inertial mass effect leading to thrust. One wonders, indeed, if this principle could be coupled the concept of warp drive, ala Miguel Alcubierre and Dr. Harold White, and "scaled up" to produce the requisite mass-energy conversions necessary for a practical warp drive, which, if that were the case, would be a pulsed phenomenon, and hence, capable of producing those shadowy longintudinal waves in the medium. (And that in turn, of course, would raise the dreaded weaponization potentialities).

It's that relationship that leads me to my really high octane speculation at the end of today's twig. To get there, let's look at a statement toward the end of this paper:

The SpaceDrive project aims at developing cutting-edge measurement equipment to thoroughly test the latest EMDrive and Mach-Effect thruster models, the two most promising revolutionary thruster concepts that are presently under investigation at various labs. Our thrust balances shall provide the necessary resolution and investigate electromagnetic and thermal artefacts to obtain reliable measurements in order to confirm or refute the claimed thrusts.

First measurement campaigns were carried out with both thruster models reaching thrust/thrust-to-power levels comparable to claimed values. However, we found that e.g. magnetic interaction from twisted-pair cables and amplifiers with the Earth’s magnetic field can be a significant error source for EMDrives. We continue to improve our measurement setup and thruster developments in order to finally assess if any of these concepts is viable and if it can be scaled up.

In addition, a number of complementary experiments are carried out to investigate e.g. Machian-mass variations with an alternative rotary setup. (Emphasis added)

In other words, when the experiments were performed on the EM and Mach-crystal thrusters, results commensurate with prior claims for the devices were indeed measured, but these engineers are concerned that some of these readings are effects of inadequate shielding from the power cables to the devices. A proper concern. But what intrigued me about their concluding remarks was not this, but rather, the remark about re-performing the experiments under conditions were the thruster assemblies are in rotation, a clear clue that they are aware of potential torsion effects that could render the thrusters more efficient.

This got me to thinking, and those thoughts are the subject of today's end-of-the-twig high octane speculation. What other way might there be to make the thrust of these crystal structures more efficient? Crystals grow in such a way that their lattice defects, I believe, are responses to the minute variations in the structure of local space-time. In this sense, they are records of those variations. For this reason, crystals grown in outer space, in zero or near zero gravity, are found to be "purer" in the sense that these lattice defects - screw defects, displacement defects, and so on - are not nearly so prevalent. So I have to wonder if such crystals as used in these Mach thrusters, if grown in such conditions, might generate either an amplifying, or damping, effect on the resulting thrust, or, to restate the speculation in a slightly different form, if crystals grown in a certain local region will enhance the thrust effect of such devices when they are used in that region. I suspect that we may eventually discover that these things are the case.

But if so, wouldn't that restrict their potential use outside the region in which they were grown? Yes, possibly.

But that's where modifiable crystals - liquid crystals, even plasmas - might come in.

In any case, that's today's high octane end of the twig speculation.

See you on the ...

... oh, by the way, did you notice another odd thing? Consider this:

We gratefully acknowledge the support for SpaceDrive by the German National Space Agency DLR (Deutsches Zentrum fuer Luft- und Raumfahrttechnik) by funding from the Federal

Ministry of Economic Affairs and Energy (BMWi) by approval from German Parliament (50RS1704). We would also like to acknowledge the support from J. Heisig, W. Stark, C. Holzapfel, J. Woodward and H. Fearn for their contributions to the ongoing experiments.

...Hmmm.... I've always wondered why modern Germany isn't very interested in rockets.

See you on the flip side...

May 11, 2018

WHAT IF THERE REALLY WAS A VERY HIGH CIVILIZATION IN THE MISTS OF ...

So many people have sent me this story over the last few days, that it would be hazardous to ignore it, and impossible to thank everyone. It's easy to see why it has caught people's attention, for the story - in various versions - has been appearing in the lamestream corporate controlled media and their approved organs; major magazines have run some version of it. What really caught my eye was when it finally made the pages of Scientific American. Of course, the idea of a very ancient high civilization - human or otherwise - based on this planet in the mists of prehistory is usually derided and even lampooned by contemporary academic orthodoxy. That's not saying much, in an age when the academy is busily transforming itself into the quackademy.

Such ideas are fantasy, "Atlantis theories," and so on. We were always told that there's no evidence of anything in pre-history resembling either an industrial or other sort of technological civilization. To be sure, there was the odd "factoid" or two in Sir Flinders Petrie's Pyramids and Monuments of Giza, or a transatlantic anomaly in Ignatius Donnelly or Hapgood's Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings, there might even - as some alleged - be weird connections between Cydonia on Mars and Silbury Hill in England(!). It was all dismissed as "coincidence", if it was given even that dignity.

Something has therefore changed, if lamestream corporate media sources - or journals like Scientific American - are willing even to talk about the theory. The questions are: what changed, and why? We'll get back to that, because it forms today's high octane speculation.

Here's the article, shared by so many people I cannot thank you all:

Could an Industrial Prehuman Civilization Have Existed on Earth before Ours? A provocative new paper suggests some ways to

Now, of course, the paper is not admitting of the actual existence of such a civilization, but merely suggesting a way to find out. The bets are still being hedged, in other words. What intrigued me here was that two new proposals are being advanced. The article begins with a stunning paragraph whose implications are immediately apparent if one wants to entertain the premise as being true for the sake of argument:

One of the creepier conclusions drawn by scientists studying the Anthropocene—the proposed epoch of Earth’s geologic history in which humankind’s (sic.) activities dominate the globe—is how closely today’s industrially induced climate change resembles conditions seen in past periods of rapid temperature rise. (Emphasis added)

The implicit presuppositions here are (1) previous eras of climate change resemble the current era (2) some of the current era's change is industrially driven, with the unstated conclusion hovering in the spaces between the lines: (3) therefore, previous eras of such change might be a potential indicator of some prior industrial civilization. The hidden premise here is that such prior civilizations had a similar physics, technology, and energy-financial system to our own. I've written a great deal of speculation to the contrary, but at least the overall basic idea is now being seriously entertained.

That, folks, in and of itself, is a revolution.

The article goes on to explain how, in this case, the openness to the question even occurred:

The canonical example of a hyperthermal is the Paleocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM), a 200,000-year period that occurred some 55.5 million years ago when global average temperatures rose by 5 to 8 degrees Celsius (about 9 to 14 degrees Fahrenheit). Schmidt has pondered the PETM for his entire career, and it was on his mind one day in his office last year when the University of Rochester astrophysicist Adam Frank paid him a visit.

Frank was there to discuss the idea of studying global warming from an “astrobiological perspective”—that is, investigating whether the rise of an alien industrial civilization on an exoplanet might necessarily trigger climate changes similar to those we see during Earth’s own Anthropocene. But almost before Frank could describe how one might search for the climatic effects of industrial “exocivilizations” on newly discovered planets, Schmidt caught him up short with a surprising question: “How do you know we’re the only time there’s been a civilization on our own planet?”

Frank considered a moment before responding with a question of his own: “Could we even tell if there had been an industrial civilization [long before this one]?”

"Would such traces even be detectable today?" becomes the central question. And here's where it gets even more intriguing, for it turns out that the ability of artifacts of such a civilization to survive in the geological record is...well...small:

Today, less than 1 percent of Earth’s surface is urbanized, and the chance that any of our great cities would remain over tens of millions of years is vanishingly low, says Jan Zalasiewicz, a geologist at the University of Leicester in England. A metropolis’s ultimate fate, he notes, mostly depends on whether the surrounding surface is subsiding (to be locked in rock) or rising (to be eroded away by rain and wind). “New Orleans is sinking; San Francisco is rising,” he says. The French Quarter, it seems, has much better chances of entering the geologic record than Haight–Ashbury.

“To estimate the odds of finding artifacts,” Schmidt says, “The back-of-the-envelope calculation for dinosaur fossils says that one fossil emerges every 10,000 years.” Dinosaur footprints are rarer still.

“After a couple of million years,” Frank says, “the chances are that any physical reminder of your civilization has vanished, so you have to search for things like sedimentary anomalies or isotopic ratios that look off.” The shadows of many prehuman civilizations could, in principle, lurk hidden in such subtleties.

Or to put this point country simple and with the elegant observation of Stanton Friedman regarding UFOs: "Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence." Indeed, the article even cites this statement of Mr. Friedman without noting that he has made it many times over the course of many years and many UFO-related investigations, but seems unaware of its origin and the context in which it was originally made (or, perhaps, does know, but simply is unwilling to "go there").

In this respect, the article goes on to point out that if such a civilization had energy requirements similar to our own, and had developed a similar technology reliant upon so-called fossil fuels, then its likely longevity would be very short relative to the long periods of the geological record - just as ours is - and would leave a very small footprint there. (And of course, I and others would argue, and have argued, that this ancient civilization shows all the signs of having a very different physics and understanding of energy, and hence its footprint might be very different.)

Of course, all of this falls far short of admitting the existence of such a civilization; it merely raises questions of how one might go about looking for it.

So what and why is this apparent change happening? I suspect that, in one sense, the pressures to entertain the idea are becoming - if not overwhelming - then at least heavy enough to be dealt with. After all, if one really has followed the stories from space and the rich lore of anomalies and anomalous "structure" on nearby celestial bodies, and couples that with the growing body of literature and evidence of similar anomalies on this planet, that maintaining the simple "academic" and "scientific" dismissal and denial of such possibilities is becoming increasingly difficult.

That's only part of the "why", however, for I strongly suspect that the other question at work here is "how do we reassert control over the narrative"? For that is what I suspect may be going on here. What we might be seeing emerge, in other words, is a limited hangout, a fall-back position, a "marketing scheme," to keep the narrative firmly in the hands of the scientific priesthoods and orthodoxies and gatekeepers, for notably, the template by which the whole hypothesis is to be examined and entertained is that of our own current civilization. This provides a tight control on the types of data to be admitted and discussed: current alleged climate change, and earlier periods, current paradigms of energy, "fossil fuels" and so one; what is carefully excluded on such an approach is any viewpoint that looks at the past and its monuments as possibly embodying very different paradigms of energy and technology.

And another thought - the most highly end-of-the-twig-no-extant-evidence-speculation of them all - occurs to me in connection with the question "why now?" I cannot resist the thought that perhaps maybe someone learned something in their private and hidden translations of some of those old looted and recovered cuneiform tablets.

There... I said it.

See you on the flip side...

February 7, 2018

FLASH! RELATIVISTS PANIC AS SPEED OF LIGHT DROPS TO ZERO!

I knew that Onion-like headline would grab your attention. Now that I have it, suffice it to say that there are plenty of caveats here. Nonetheless, when I saw the following headline from our friends at phys.org shared by Mr. B., I really did think that this might be yet the newest "modification" to come along that might lead to a reworking of the famous theory:

Speed of light drops to zero at 'exceptional points'

The title says it all: light doesn't move at certain exceptional points. The question is, what are those exceptional points? Well, this one is an epistemological noodle-baker for sure:

The researchers, Tamar Goldzak and Nimrod Moiseyev at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, along with Alexei A. Mailybaev at the Instituto de Matemática Pura e Aplicada (IMPA) in Rio de Janeiro, have published a paper on stopping light at exceptional points in a recent issue of Physical Review Letters.

As the researchers explain, exceptional points can be created in waveguides in a straightforward way, by varying the gain/loss parameters so that two light modes coalesce (combine into one mode). Although light stops at these exceptional points, in most systems much of the light is lost at these points. The researchers showed that this problem can be fixed by using waveguides with parity-time (PT) symmetry, since this symmetry ensures that the gain and loss are always balanced. As a result, the light intensity remains constant when the light approaches the exceptional point, eliminating losses.

To release the stopped light and accelerate it back up to normal speed, the scientists showed that the gain/loss parameters can simply be reversed. The most important feature of the new method, however, is that the exceptional points can be adjusted to work with any frequency of light, again simply by tuning the gain/loss parameters.

Now, I seem to remember something about Einstein talking about frames of reference and observers and so on, the gist of which was to maintain that the velocity of light was constant to every observer and any frame of reference. So the first thought I had when I read this was that the velocity of light drops to zero relative to what? In the article we're told that that this is achieved by certain times of wave guides that adjust gain and loss parameters with "parity--time symmetry." Whatever that means, and I'll take their word for it. But zero in reference to the waveguide? Presumably so. But the waveguide itself is still stuck on the laboratory tabletop, which is stuck to the ground of planet Earth, which is (the last time I checked) still moving around the Sun, which is still moving around the center of the galaxy... you get the idea.

It's that idea of being "trapped within the waveguide", in other words, that really grabbed my attention, because if one looks at it a certain way - and again taking these guys at their word - it is really suggesting yet another strange twist: within certain systems under certain conditions, the velocity of light is zero, whether or not the system is moving. Phrased that way, it's the sort of paradox that the great Albert might have liked, and phrased that way, it sounds like a way to mimic black holes, without the gravitational effects thereof (or, conversely, by "stopping" light in this fashion, is a gravitational effect induced After all, one of the consequences of relativity was that as the velocity of a mass approached light speed, its mass approached infinity. Does the opposite occur if light is "stopped"? The article doesn't say, but it would seem to me to be a question worth following.)

But I have to admit, that what really grabbed me here was that these scientists appeared to be playing with the same idea that I was playing with long ago in The Giza Death Star, the idea of "trapping" light under certain special conditions in a special lattice work of crystals, which would function as a waveguide for that purpose. To say all this is, of course, to say that a way may have been found to tap into the electromagnetic energy that is all around us. If those scientists are correct, then speculating a bit more here, adjusting those "gain and loss" parameters to control the way that "trapped" or "stopped" light is released might be profoundly destructive, or profoundly beneficial.

See you on the flip side...

December 30, 2017

THE BALOCHISTAN SPHINX AND THE INDUS VALLEY CIVILIZATION

This intriguing and very fun story was shared by Mr. V.T., and I want to present the article here without any further commentary, as the final blog here for 2017. Enjoy, and to all: our best wishes for every good thing in the coming New Year:

The Sphinx Of Balochistan: Is It A Man-made, Rock-cut, Architectural Marvel?

November 14, 2017

NEW CHAMBER IN THE GREAT PYRAMID DETECTED

This story, I suspect, regular readers here knew I would be talking about. Using muons, scientists seem to have confirmed the existence of yet another chamber in the Great Pyramid:

Archaeologists discover mysterious void deep within Great Pyramid of Giza

Now, so many people sent this story along this week, with the statement or query that this seems to prove my "weapons hypothesis" for the structure, or asking if it does, so I'm constrained to blog about this issue today.

First, the chamber seems to be a kind of parallel structure to the Grand Gallery, lying above it:

The massive cavity stretches for at least 30 metres and lies above the grand gallery, an impressive ascending corridor that connects the Queen’s chamber to the King’s in the heart of the historic monument. It is the first major structure found in the pyramid since the 19th century.

It is unclear whether the void is a chamber or a corridor, or whether it played any more than a structural role in the pyramid’s construction – such as relieving weight on the grand gallery below. But measurements show that it has similar dimensions to the grand gallery, which is nearly 50 metres long, eight metres high and more than a metre wide.

...

“We know that this big void has the same characteristics as the grand gallery,” said Mehdi Tayoubi at the HIP Institute in Paris, a non-profit organisation that draws on new technology to study and preserve cultural heritage. “It’s really impressive.”

Now, if one follows the reasoning of pyramid researcher and engineer Chris Dunn, author of The Giza Powerplant, this would appear to make the chamber not a "relieving chamber" but rather some sort of acoustic amplification chamber, for Dunn does an excellent job of pointing out its acoustical properties. The idea of "relieving chambers" is derived from the standard narrative that the chambers above the King's chamber are "relieving chambers" to deal with the massive weight pressing down on the structure. They are no such thing, argues Dunn. Rather, the "relieving stones," notes Dunn, appear to have been so roughly carved on their tops to achieve certain acoustical properties. Or to put it more simply, the rough carving is to give the "relieving stones" resonant properties.

So by parity of argument, one might argue that this new chamber is for a similar functional and acoustic purpose.

But that's the rub: this is speculation, argued speculation and hypothesis to be sure, but still an hypothesis. And in the final analysis, until more is known about this chamber, one has to argue that the new chamber (1) may tend to corroborate such "machine hypotheses" as I outline in the above two paragraphs, or (2) to corroborate the standard Egyptological narrative, or (3) disprove one or the other absolutely.

How would it do the last? The answer is simple: if the chamber were accessed in such a way that there was no possibility of fraud, and if, for example, a mummy or actual pharoanic burial chamber was found, then, of course, the machine hypotheses would be immensely damaged. Why do I say "with no possibility of fraud?" Recall, in this case, the case of British Colonel Vyse and his suspiciously "convenient" discovery of cartouches in the "relieving chambers" above the King's Chamber, as outlined by Alan Alford in his book The Phoenix Solution. The problem with Vyse's discovery, as Alford points out, is twofold: (1) there were mistakes in the cartouches of a basic and egregious nature, such that it is unlikely an Egyptian builder would make them, and (2) the cartouches all appeared to be written on walls in the "relieving chambers" that were not dynamited by Vyse to gain entry into them. The odds of this were and are, as Alford points odd, not very likely. The problem, in other words, is that Egyptology, in the form of Colonel Vyse, would appear to be willing to go to extraordinary lengths to "prove" its narrative, and the proof, on examination, is highly problematical in his case.

For the moment, by parity of reasoning, it looks as if the new chamber does more to corroborate the machine hypotheses than the standard Egyptological view, but that said, it falls far short of conclusively proving them.

See you on the flip side...

August 17, 2017

ISIS, INTELL, AND ANTIQUITIES

When Mr. S.D. sent the following article to me this week I knew I would be blogging about it, and accordingly, it went straight to my "final seven" folder right away, which is a rare occurrence. Normally, I sort email articles as I receive them into a "semi-finals" and "finals" folder, and at the end of the week, comb through both and pull articles for blogging which go into the "final seven". Not this one; it went directly to the final seven. I think you'll see why once we get to my high octane speculation of the day. But first, the article:

Isis Makes Up to $100 Million a Year Smuggling Ancient Artifacts From Iraq and Syria

What makes this article so delicious, from a certain point of view, is that it comes from a lamestream corporate controlled media "source" like Newsweek; it's not a conspiracy theory coming from an "alt media" site. So here's what I want to concentrate on:

The Islamic State militant group (ISIS) makes as much as $100 million annually by trafficking looted antiquities out of Iraq and Syria and selling them on the black market.

The Wall Street Journal reported that while it was not possible to put a precise figure on the amount of revenue generated for ISIS by the trade of the artifacts, an unnamed French security official believed it to be around $100 million. Estimates from other sources ranged from the low tens of millions upward.

Read more: Christian retailer Hobby Lobby stole Middle East history to make a Bible museum in Washington

One could hardly expect an "outlet" like Newsweek to pass up the opportunity to tar Hobby Lobby, an American retail chain whose owners are evangelicals, en passant with the implication that they might have been wittingly or unwittingly dealing with ISIS. The real story here however is the allegation that antiquities trafficking forms a large income source to the terrorist group.

And this is where my high octane speculation of the day comes in, for as most readers here probably know, the internet is rife with suspicion, some of it very well argued, that the real backing of ISIS comes from a variety of western or allied intelligence agencies; people have argued cases for Israeli intelligence, Saudi intelligence, British intelligence, and various American intelligence agencies being connected to, and supplying, and helping even to train, the group.

That, of course, now puts a very different spin on this story, for if one combines these two ideas, then one is left with the implication that these intelligence agencies are in the antiquities smuggling business, and that means by further implication, that the antiquities allegedly being smuggled are also being vetted by these agencies prior to being sold on the black antiquities market, as Mr. S.D. observed in his accompanying comments to the article. I could not agree more, for I have argued, since the appearance of my book Babylon's Banksters some years ago, that the recovery of antiquities and any potential information that might be gleaned therefrom was a hidden objective of the latest American-British invasion of Iraq, and that it may form one of the hidden reasons for their ongoing attempts to topple the regime of Mr. Assad in Syria, and that this same motivation may ultimately lie behind those advocating a military intervention in Iran as well. Such a scheme would indeed "fit the pattern" of designing operations to fulfill several objectives, in this case, to create yet another funding mechanism for covert operations and projects, while at the same time, using that mechanism to search for knowledge and or technology, and "pull" it from public view.

In short, I am viewing this odd story as a little bit of confirmation of my high octane speculation that antiquities are at the top of a very covert agenda in the Middle East.

See you on the flip side...

August 16, 2017

HIDDEN CHAMBERS FOUND IN GREAT PYRAMID…

Every now and then a story is shared with me that involves not only one of my favorite subjects, but the subject that this website is (obliquely) named for: the Great Pyramid. Most readers here know that I am a "pyramidiot", as the lamestream quackademy likes to call us folks who think there's much more going on with that structure than meets the myopic quackademic eye. Whatever that structure really is, one thing it is not is "ordinary." Even "respected" archaeologists like Sir Flinders Petrie, the so-called "founder of modern Egyptology" were honest enough to make statements that the modern quackademy would rather forget they made, such as his observation that the "sarcophagus" in the "King's chamber" in the Great Pyramid looked to his late 19th century-early-2oth-century eyes as if it had been drilled out.

So whenever a story comes along that suggests there is more than meets the eye about the structure, I'm all ears, and such is the case with this story shared by Mr. F.L.M.:

Major breakthrough in the search for hidden chambers inside Pyramid of Giza

HOBBY LOBBY FINED FOR IMPORTING STOLEN ARTIFACTS

This week has been such an unusually fruitful week for articles being shared that, today, Saturday, I am still combing through them to decide on what to schedule for blogs this coming week! So I want to thank everyone once again for sharing so many good finds, making the choice of what to blog about more difficult and, in a way, more fun. Some of these articles I have in fact archived for next week, as I may yet blog about them.

But this story had to be at the top of the list. Indeed, when I saw it, there was no doubt in my mind that it was at the top of the "final cuts" folder. So many people found various versions of it that I knew there was something in the aether and that this story would require some attention. So I present some of those various versions that people found for your consideration, before I get to my high octane speculation about the story, with a thank you to all of you who shared these articles and who are following the story:

Hobby Lobby to pay $3 million fine, forfeit smuggled ancient artifacts

Hobby Lobby will pay $3 million, forfeit ancient items smuggled from Iraq

Justice Department sues Hobby Lobby over thousands of looted Iraqi artifacts it bought

Let's begin with the last of these articles, which indicates that Israel and the United Arab Emirates were involved in the deal. What is unclear, of course, is whether the individuals and organizations that functioned as components of the deal were simply located in these countries, or whether they were actually members of their governments. For reasons I'll get to in the high octane speculation, I suspect the latter.

Turning to the second article, we see a picture of a cuneiform tablet from the New York Times, with the caption "Pictured is a cuneiform tablet, one of several artifacts smuggled from Iraq by owners of Hobby Lobby." Then we read:

Prosecutors said in the complaint that Hobby Lobby, whose evangelical Christian owners have long maintained an interest in the biblical Middle East, began in 2009 to assemble a collection of cultural artifacts from the Fertile Crescent. The company went so far as to send its president and an antiquities consultant to the United Arab Emirates to inspect a large number of rare cuneiform tablets — traditional clay slabs with wedge-shaped writing that originated in Mesopotamia thousands of years ago.

In 2010, as a deal for the tablets was being struck, an expert on cultural property law who had been hired by Hobby Lobby warned company executives that the artifacts might have been looted from historical sites in Iraq and that a failing to determine their heritage could break the law.

Despite these words of caution, the prosecutors said, Hobby Lobby bought more than 5,500 artifacts — the tablets and clay talismans and so-called cylinder seals — from an unnamed dealer for $1.6 million in December 2010.

Now, this really captured my attention, not for what it is saying, but rather, for what it seems to be carefully avoiding saying, namely, that these cuneiform tablets and cylinder seals might be some of the missing loot from the Baghdad Museum Looting, about which I have written in my books and blogged about. I have always been suspicious of the whole events for several reasons, and it's worth recalling those reasons: (1) People dressed in American uniforms were seen by others going into the museum and removing things. Whether they were actually American soldiers or merely people dressed in American uniforms is a moot point. I have suspected the latter, and that the looting was a false flag, because (2) the story of the looting and people dressed in American uniforms was broken - as far as I am aware - by Germany's Der Spiegel magazine, a point which puts a rather funny light on the whole event, for as I have pointed out numerous times, the French and Germans had several archaeological teams in Iraq at the behest of Saddam Hussein's government, digging up the Iraqi desert. These teams would have kept field catalogues of their discoveries, including brief notes about the contents of any cuneiform tablets they unearthed. Of course, when the US and UK and its "allies" went into Iraq during operation Desert Storm, the French and Germans were advised to remove their archaeological teams. The unwritten part of this story is that the German intelligence, the BND (Bundesnachrichtendienst) maintained a presence in the country, and hence, in my speculations previously advanced, would have been capable of mounting a looting of the Museum with personnel in American uniforms. (3) When the Museum looting was studied, experts came to the conclusion that it was an "inside job" since the looters apparently were interested in specific things and knew exactly where to go to get them, in spite of the fact that many items had not, apparently, been entered into the Museum catalogue.

(4) Then came the U.S.-led recovery operation led by Marine Colonel Bagdonovich, which, in terms of the art works recovered, was quite successful. But as I mentioned at the time, something disturbed me, and this was the fact that the missing cuneiform tablets had seemed to drop completely out of the story, while the world's newspapers concentrated on supplying us with pictures of dazzling and beautiful ancient Mesopotamian art works that had been recovered. Faced with golden crowns and jewelry, thousands of dusty brown clay tablets really weren't very sensational, and I suspected then, and still do now, that that was the whole point: the really important loot was the tablets, not the art works.

The tablets, in other words, had dropped right off the radar, until a few years later, several thousands apparently turned up in Spain, causing a rumpus between Madrid and Baghdad, because Madrid did not want to return them. I say apparently turned up in Spain, because, like so often in these stories, we are never presented with the chain of evidence concerning these tablets to document the claim that they were, indeed, recently looted. And so it is here: we're supposed to believe that Hobby Lobby was the final step in a chain of custody from Iraq, to Israel and the Emirates, to the USA. But in order to establish this, it would seem to me that one would have to have an itemized inventory of what was on the tablets, or a photo record of each one, and then establish that the specific tablets in question were in the possession of each of the alleged participants. So the question remains open: were these tablets part of the original Baghdad Museum Looting haul (or any associated looting activity at that time?) and what is on said tablets that would make Hobby Lobby want to buy them (and then, sell some of them)?

All this brings me to my high octane speculation of the day, for in the first article we read that this may not have been a "simple mistake" on Hobby Lobby's part:

Ancient cuneiform tablets and clay bullae from modern-day Iraq were smuggled into the United States through the United Arab Emirates and Israel, JOD officials said. With Hobby Lobby’s consent they were falsely labeled as “ceramics” and “samples” and illegally shipped to Hobby Lobby stores and two corporate offices, according to the DOJ.

Cuneiform is an ancient system of writing on clay tablets that was used in Mesopotamia, according to the DOJ, and clay bullae are balls of clay on which seals have been imprinted.

“In 2009, Hobby Lobby began acquiring a variety of historical Bibles and other artifacts. Developing a collection of historically and religiously important books and artifacts about the Bible is consistent with the company’s mission and passion for the Bible,” said a Hobby Lobby statement. (Emphasis added)

We are told that the haul was not simply cuneiform tablets, but cylinder seals and so on, and that all this interest was because of Hobby Lobby's interest in the bible. Cylinder seals were used in Mesopotamia as a way of sealing documents; they would be equivalent to today's corporate seals, or monarchial or hierarchical seals of a king, nobleman, or bishop, and thus they are rather important from a legal point of view. They could, potentially, be seals that once belonged to Mesopotamian dynasties (and I'll let the reader run wild with speculation on that possibility... I don't think I need to say any more). What interests me rather is the allegation that these items were intentionally mislabeled, and therefore that the intention was to smuggle them into this country. That implies, to my speculative mind, a further intention to possibly remove more "intriguing" or perhaps even "offending" tablets from public view and scrutiny, while benefiting a narrow circle of insiders studying the contents of these objects. And what better way to do it than through corporate cutouts. I've even entertained the notion that the real reason Saddam Hussein was hung was that he may already have been briefed on the possible "sensational contents" of some of the things being dug up in his country's deserts, and that he simply had to be permanently silenced. After all, it was he who invited those archaeological teams to Iraq in the first place.

And, as always, we're still waiting for these media to report on the contents of these tablets, or at least, direct us to links where we may view each and every one, and to sites where - if any translations have been made - we can read what's on them. I suspect if that were to happen, we'd be reading a lot of ordinary business transactions, a bit like reading someone's checkbook register. The "juicy" stuff has probably been carefully removed from public view... and perhaps found its way into a corporate vault somewhere between Baghdad and here.

The sad bottom line is, that the looting of antiquities from Iraq is a story that just keeps on giving.

See you on the flip side...