Theos-Talk Archives (October 2002 Message tt00083)

Oct 11 2002

Remains of City of Atlantis (?) near West cost of Cuba - more details

Dear Friends:

I received in part the following communication from a correspondent.
some of this was posted a few month ago, but this gives more details
and may be an up-date.

Dallas

============================


Dear Rudy

Many thanks, Most interesting.

I posted another thing on India and Ceylon and an ancient bridge
between the a couple of hours ago. Probably relates to remains of
Atlantis continent in Indian Ocean -- as Atlantis was a vast continent
according to the S D

More evidence about a continent of Atlantis is emerging.

If you spot anything else, let all know about it. I will pass this on.

Dal

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-----Original Message-----
From: Rodolfo Don [mailto:rrdon27@earthlink.net]
Sent: Thursday, October 10, 2002 10:59 AM
To: dalval14@earthlink.net
Subject: Atlantis?


......................................................................
..
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In Cuban Depths, Atlantis or Anomaly?
Images of Massive Stones 2,000 Feet Below Surface Fuel Scientific
Speculation

HAVANA -- The images appear slowly on the video screen, like ghosts
from the ocean floor. The videotape, made by an unmanned submarine,
shows massive stones in oddly symmetrical square and pyramid shapes in
the deep-sea darkness.

Sonar images taken from a research ship 2,000 feet above are even more
puzzling. They show that the smooth, white stones are laid out in a
geometric pattern. The images look like fragments of a city, in a
place
where nothing man-made should exist, spanning nearly eight square
miles
of a deep-ocean plain off Cuba's western tip.

"What we have here is a mystery," said Paul Weinzweig, of Advanced
Digital Communications (ADC), a Canadian company that is mapping the
ocean bottom of Cuba's territorial waters under contract with the
government of President Fidel Castro.

"Nature couldn't have built anything so symmetrical," Weinzweig said,
running his finger over sonar printouts aboard his ship, tied up at a
wharf in Havana harbor. "This isn't natural, but we don't know what it
is."

The company's main mission is to hunt for shipwrecks filled with gold
and jewels, and to locate potentially lucrative oil and natural gas
reserves in deep water that Cuba does not have the means to explore.

Treasure hunting has become a growth industry in recent years as
technology has improved, allowing more precise exploration and easier
recovery from deeper ocean sites. Advanced Digital operates from the
Ulises, a 260-foot trawler that was converted to a research vessel for
Castro's government by the late French oceanographer Jacques Cousteau.

.....

.... on a summer day in 2000, as the Ulises was
towing its sonar back and forth across the ocean like someone mowing a
lawn, the unexpected rock formations appeared on the sonar readouts.
That startled Weinzweig and his partner and wife, Paulina Zelitsky,
...
military.

"We have looked at enormous amounts of ocean bottom, and we have never
seen anything like this," Weinzweig said.

The discovery immediately sparked speculation about Atlantis, the
fabled lost city first described by Plato in 360 B.C..

Weinzweig and Zelitsky were careful not to use the A word and said
that much more study was needed before such a conclusion could be
reached.

But that has not stopped a boomlet of speculation, most of it on the
Internet. Atlantis-hunters have long argued their competing theories
that the lost city was off Cuba, off the Greek island of Crete, off
Gibraltar or elsewhere. Several Web sites have touted the ADC images
as
a possible first sighting.

Among those who suspect the site may be Atlantis is George Erikson, a
California anthropologist who co-authored a book in which he predicted
that the lost city would be found offshore in the tropical Americas.

"I have always disagreed with all the archaeologists who dismiss
myth,"
said Erikson, who said he had been shunned by many scientists since
publishing his book about Atlantis. He said the story has too many
historical roots to be dismissed as sheer fantasy and that if the
Cuban
site proves to be Atlantis, he hopes "to be the first to say, 'I told
you so.' "

Manuel Iturralde, one of Cuba's leading geologists, said it was too
soon to know what the images prove. He has examined the evidence and
concluded that, "It's strange, it's weird; we've never seen something
like this before, and we don't have an explanation for it."

Iturralde said volcanic rocks recovered at the site strongly suggest
that the undersea plain was once above water, despite its extreme
depth. He said the existence of those rocks was difficult to explain,
especially because there are no volcanoes in Cuba.

He also said that if the symmetrical stones are determined to be the
ruins of buildings, it could have taken 50,000 years or more for
tectonic shifting to carry them so deep into the ocean. The ancient
Great Pyramid of Giza in Egypt is only about 5,000 years old, which
means the Cuba site "wouldn't fit with what we know about human
architectural evolution," he said.

"It's an amazing question that we would like to solve," he said.

But Iturralde stressed that the evidence is inconclusive. He said that
no first-hand exploration in a mini-submarine had been conducted,
which
would provide a much more comprehensive assessment. He said a
remote-operated video camera provides only a limited perspective, like
someone looking at a close-up image of an elephant's toe and trying to
describe the whole animal.

The National Geographic Society has expressed interest and is
considering an expedition in manned submarines next summer, according
to Sylvia Earl, a famed American oceanographer and
explorer-in-residence at the society.

"It's intriguing," Earl said in an interview from her Oakland, Calif.,
home. "It is so compelling that I think we need to go check it out."

Earl said a planned expedition this past summer was canceled because
of
funding problems. But she said National Geographic hopes to explore
the
site next summer as part of its Sustainable Seas research program.

Earl has visited Cuba and described the preliminary evidence as
"fantastic" and "extraordinary." But she stressed that as a "skeptical
scientist," she would assume that the unusual stones were formed
naturally until scientific evidence proved otherwise.

"There is so much speculation about ancient civilizations," she said.
"I'm in tune with the reality and the science, not the myths or
stories
or fantasies."

....


"One thing is legend," he said, sitting on Ulises's bridge. "Another
is
the hard evidence you find on the ocean floor."



(c) 2002 The Washington Post Company

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