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Pyramid Star Maps
| Date: |
18 May 2003 12:00 |
| Producer: |
Carol Albertyn Christie
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| Show: | Carte Blanche |
There are places on our Earth that are shrouded in secrets, mysterious monuments of ancient civilisations. Theories of why, how, when and by whom they were built abound. What message of our past is encoded in these structures?
Wayne Herschel: 'I think the big thing in this message is an obsession to portray the origins of humankind.'
Wayne Herschel makes concrete rock structures in Durban, a job that allows him enough free time to study the origins of humankind. He has no academic training, but has spent over 15 years researching ancient civilisations and has developed a very controversial theory of our beginnings.
Wayne: 'Well, the people who built these great pyramids, the people that make up the bulk of religious texts, people that came from the sky, the celestial boats of Egypt, Ra, they would have had obviously the technology for space travel, to build this equipment, and yes, we are the descendants of those people.'
Carte Blanche broadcast a remarkable story on the pyramids six years ago, which sparked Wayne's interest. The programme was based on Robert Bauval's book Keeper of Genesis, in which he alleged that the three pyramids of Giza were linked to the three stars in the Orion Belt.
Robert Bauval [from Carte Blanche 29 September 1996]: 'And I was one evening with a few friends sitting on a dune in the desert, and one of my friends was a navigator. And we were talking about sea sailing, and he said, 'Let me show you how I use the stars. So one of the most important stars to look at in the sky is the bright star Sirius, and let me show you how you can find it'. And he said, 'If you look here, here is the constellation of Orion, here are the three best stars ... and if you follow them, if you follow a line downwards to the horizon you will see the star Sirius'. And suddenly I look at these three stars, and I was looking at them, and he said, 'Well, actually I told you they were in a row, but you probably notice that the smaller one is offset'. The word offset did it. The minute I heard 'offset' I began thinking, 'What is the offset of the three pyramids, why is the third pyramid offset of the other two?' and the two images merged in my mind.'
Looking further, he discovered that the ancient Egyptians had given two other pyramid sites star names, and that there appeared to be a correlation between their sacred River Nile and the Milky Way.
Were they symbolically trying to replicate regions of the sky here on Earth?
Wayne had a feeling that that was precisely what they were trying to do. He knew that there were many more pyramids along the Nile and wondered whether they too formed some kind of a correlation with the stars.
Wayne 'And I decided to get out an atlas - I was lucky to have reference books close by, and no computers at that time - but I ended up reproducing the maps on a grand scale, taking all the pyramids of lower Egypt, and taking the entire Milky Way as a whole, and put them next to each other and compare. That's as simple as it was.'
Wayne was astonished when he saw at a glance that his layout of 63 pyramids along the Nile could be superimposed exactly on prominent star positions in the sky, along the Milky Way.
The top pyramid at Abu Roash represents Sirius and the pyramids are laid out with incredibly accurate geometry. The Southern Hemisphere stars are also included, so in effect the pyramids represent a complete circuit of the night sky around the Earth. The detail is remarkable. Even the size of the stars is reflected in the size of the pyramids.
Wayne: 'Some are so small that you need advanced equipment to see, for example, take the Andromeda - you see the zoom-in of Andromeda, there are little group stars around the main sequence stars. Those group stars are even in the same position as the smaller pyramid ruins at Sikara.'
These small stars are not visible to the naked eye. The ancients who built these pyramids must have had advanced technology to see into space.
One could argue, though, that given the billions of stars in the sky there would be endless permutations of points of lights that could link to the layout of the pyramids.
Wayne: 'As somebody seeing this for the first time, I challenge them to look at the distances, the angles and the sizes - not just all 63 being perfectly in position. It's the whole clear picture. It's probably a billion-to-one chance.'
If the pyramids were built in a specific layout, the obvious question to ask is, 'Why?' Wayne was determined to find the answer.
Wayne: 'The journey then would take me to other pyramid cultures.'
His first stop was Angkor Watt in Cambodia, where he found that the pyramid-like temples were also built to represent a star map.
Few know that Japan also has its own pyramids. One is the Kitora Kofun pyramid. Although Wayne did not find a layout of pyramids here, he did find an interesting drawing on the ceiling of the tomb.
Wayne: 'They found a star map. It's not really known to the world, but what really excited me about the star map was the depiction of a cluster of stars in the shape of a thigh - the thigh of a bull - and this rang some bells in the back of my head.'
In the research that Wayne has done through books and via the Internet, he noticed that there were many unusual references to the Pleiades. They are a group of stars that form the shape that many refer to as the leg of the bull, and curiously, they are found behind the head of the bull in the Taurus constellation.
Homer mentions this cluster of stars in the Odyssey, and the Bible has three references to the Pleiades. But it seems that there may even be much earlier records of its mention.
When scientists saw the 17 000-year-old cave painting of the bulls in Lascaux, France, some thought that the black dots could represent stars. In that interpretation, the three stars of Orion are just underneath the chin of the bull and the Pleiades is the cluster above the head.
Wayne also found many Sumerian scroll seals well over 5 000 years old with the same cluster of stars in the sky. Egyptology, it seems, is also obsessed with the Pleiades.
Wayne: 'From this point onwards, we knew there was something very important to find about what was so special about this thigh.'
Wayne went to Egypt to see if he could find out more information about why these stars were so important to the ancient cultures. In Luxor he found a stone engraving that seemed to unlock more of this mystery.
Wayne: 'It was in the Senmut tomb of Luxor where a star map of a very different kind was in play. There were two versions of it, one using mythology and the other one using astronomy. Particularly the mythology part of it - it has the leg constellation, and it also had a star just offset from it, and from this star the gods came from. All the gods are shown in the picture as well, on terra firma, on Earth. I think it is very likely that this is pertaining to an arrival - an arrival of these gods from this star.'
To see if there were any other references, Wayne retraced his steps back to the Abusir pyramids that represented the Pleiades along the Nile. In the same place as the mystery star in the Senmut tomb, they too point to an old temple called the Abusir Sun Temple.
Wayne: 'Which was a vertically sided pyramid. Obviously it couldn't stand up to the last few earthquakes we've had - it's a pile of rubble now.'
Wayne thinks the temple was built to pay homage to a star or another solar system near Earth. Why would it have a platform for a celestial boat (as a recreation of the temple shows)? And the same theme is repeated again in a Sumerian clay tablet.
Wayne: 'On that star depiction, there's a man inside a disc. He's probably some kind of leader, and he's actually in the place of a star. There's a little star depicted right next to the disc, at the exact same place. And it is the Pleiades - you'll see by the depiction, it has the right amount of stars, the right sizes, and it kind of points again to this star.'
After Egypt, Wayne went to England to look at another site he felt may reinforce his theory - Stonehenge. Mounds, also called barrows, are situated a little way from the stone circle. According to Wayne, they were built to replicate the shape of the Pleiades and the Stonehenge circle fits in exactly the same place as his mystery star.
Four completely different sources - two in Egypt, one in Sumeria and another in England. What are they trying to show us?
Wayne believes that all of these star maps from ancient civilisations around the world are trying to show us the place where humanity came from. He says that it is something similar to the way that we identify Earth on the satellites that we shoot up into space.
To identify where the satellites come from, the manufacturers have attached an identification plaque onto it. It shows where Earth is situated in the solar system and also the male and female forms. Wayne argues that this plaque shows exactly the same logic behind the star maps he has found - a need to identify where we originate from.
Wayne: 'The importance is the statistical value of this whole theme showing up in different parts of the world that shouldn't really be related. Isn't it obvious and logical that they are depicting where they came from - the people who colonised this world come from that spot.'
It's a bit difficult to accept that beings from outer space came down and populated our Earth. On the other hand, given the vastness of the universe, one would have to consider that the probability that there's some sort of life out there is quite high.
Graham Hancock [Carte Blanche, 8 November 1998]: 'I am sure that the universe is full of life. I'm sure that's what the universe is for. It's a place for life to express itself, and to develop and to grow. I'm certain there are habited planets all over the place in the universe, full of people just like you and me wondering what the meaning of their lives are.'
Graham Hancock is an avid Egyptologist and world-renowned author. Carte Blanche broadcast a programme featuring his book The Mars Mystery in which he attempts to link the destiny of the Red Planet and our Earth.
Graham: 'Back in 1976, the Viking orbiter took lots of photographs of the planet Mars, but two of those photographs, separated by an interval of 35 days, of the Sudonia region in the Northern Hemisphere of Mars, showed what looks like an enormous face. It's about two-and-a-half miles long, half-a-mile high, and surrounded by a series of artificial structures, most of them in the form of pyramids. That's what they look like - it doesn't mean they are. It could just be weird geology of a kind that we've not experienced here on Earth.'
Would these 'supposed' pyramids also fit into Wayne's star map theory?
Wayne: 'So having found all the others, and then seeing the Mars images, I was expecting, 'Now what are the chances of this being the Pleiades?' It just hit me on the first visual that this is too good to be true.'
The curious geometry of these mounds also made an impact on Graham Hancock.
Sixteen kilometers from the face lies the so-called DNM pyramid. One-thousand times larger than Giza, it stands nearly one-kilometre high, and has five sides, not four. It is surrounded by a city containing four smaller pyramids.
Graham: 'What's intriguing about the photography is that mathematical relationships are indicated amongst these monuments. The recurrence, for example, of the angle 90.5 degrees between and within structures repeated, this is not the kind of thing one would expect nature to do. It's the kind of thing that human beings have done on Earth and God knows who did on the face of Mars.'
Wayne has an unusual interpretation of the five-sided pyramid.
Wayne: 'It maps out the human code very mathematically. It's not a coincidence. It's just too beautiful to be scoffed at. That code also pointing to the face image, it seems so inevitable - this is the human code, that is where it comes from.'
Like the five-sided pyramid on Mars, Wayne says the circle at Stonehenge also represents the human genome. According to him, both the Stonehenge circle and the face on Mars are in the same place as the mystery star on his star map layout.
There has been much controversy surrounding the photograph of the face. After its release, NASA said that it was just a trick of light and shade, but Wayne does not agree.
Wayne: 'Thanks to the computer age, we can now add on colour, we can add on the right shadow and lighting, all from correct data that was from previous images of the Mars face area.'
When Wayne enhanced the face on Mars, he thought that because of the long chin, and a bit of sediment under the nose, that perhaps it was actually a representation of a bearded man. Is this what the beings that came to Earth looked like?
If we were to travel into space, after a couple of light years our sun would look like a small star and the planets that form our solar system would not be visible. So for Wayne to prove his theory, he would have to find a star in the small area of space that the Mars face depicts.
Bill Hollenbach is an astronomer and runs the observatory in the Cradle Of Mankind near Johannesburg. He was fascinated by Wayne's theories.
Bill Hollenbach, astronomer: 'These star charts were drawn up thousands of years before 'civilised man', and this I found this quite intriguing.'
The probability of finding a star similar to our sun in that small area was very, very slim. In the whole of the night sky there are less than a hundred stars that fall into that specific category. Wayne pored over star catalogues and after a couple of months identified a star, catalogued as TYC 1817 - 20 -1. He asked Bill to verify his findings.
The current position of the star that Wayne thinks might be the mystery star is not quite in the right place at the moment.
Wayne and Bill decided to go back in time and check the star's movement.
Astonishingly, it starts to move directly back to the area of the mystery star. At 23 000 years it rests exactly on top of the position where the ancients told us we could find it.
Wayne: 'I was absolutely astounded when it actually moved exactly into position. That blew my mind completely. I could never imagine that it would be so accurate.'
Bill: 'For that star to go to that exact point, to what Wayne was looking for, I mean it's a chance in a million. So the odds are too high to be coincidental.'
The star is in our own backyard, astronomically speaking - it is between 15 to 400 light years away.
Wayne thinks this could lead to a new interpretation of the biblical concept of man's genesis.
Wayne: 'The name in the Old Testament for creation is Elohim. Elohim stands for a dual-syllable Hebrew text - Elo meaning 'people', and Him is 'from the sky, from the heavens'. People - one person, and many people from the sky. And there are some Sumerian texts that use the same Elohim context and say they lived on the land.'
If these people or gods had the ability to travel through space, Wayne believes that they would not have built the pyramids and ancient monuments with ramps and pulleys, but would have used their own sophisticated technology.
Given that there are star maps on Earth and one on Mars, Wayne says that these beings from outer space colonised both planets. He also believes that Mars had an atmosphere and oceans and was once a beautiful planet like our own.
Wayne: 'In Revelations, I think it's Chapter 21, it mentions the first Earth was destroyed and lost its oceans. In NASA findings recently, the Mars planet had ocean beds. How can a planet lose its oceans?'
A growing number of theorists believe that Mars was struck by a meteor that created an impact crater 2 000km wide, destroying the whole planet. The oceans would have poured into the exposed iron mantle and it would have oxidised, giving the planet its red colour.
Wayne surmises the Earth's biblical flood was at the same time, from the same cause.
Wayne: 'And it's written in more than 500 accounts in all ancient civilisations, according to Graham Hancock's research, of a massive cataclysmic flood, and life starting fresh again after that. So any technological material, writings, libraries would have been destroyed, and human nature would have had to start again like cave men.'
Even if there's just a grain of truth in this, it puts a whole new twist on the evolution of mankind. Could these beings from outer space be the missing link? It's all pure conjecture at the moment and almost impossible to prove - or disprove.
Bill: 'I respect what Wayne is doing. People are going to shoot him down in flames, that I can tell you, but it takes somebody to be unconventional, to bring something to the foreground, to get attention to it.'
Wayne, with the help of his partner Birgitte, has written a book called The Hidden Records and is negotiating to have it published.
Wayne: 'If people feel uncomfortable about this, they can moan at me and say I'm crazy, but let them come with something that's more logical, more reasoned and more referenced, and I'll gladly put my story aside. It's now going to be up to the scholars - before they're quick to moan at me and say that I'm a crackpot, let them now in the thick of this, let them now see what the truth is.'
IMPORTANT DISCLAIMER:While every attempt has been made to ensure this transcript or summary is accurate, Carte Blanche or its agents cannot be held liable for any claims arising out of inaccuracies caused by human error or electronic fault. This transcript was typed from a transcription recording unit and not from an original script, so due to the possibility of mishearing and the difficulty, in some cases, of identifying individual speakers, errors cannot be ruled out.
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