The Pyramids and the Pentagon

THE PYRAMIDS AND THE PENTAGON

THE GOVERNMENT’S TOP SECRET

PURSUIT OF MYSTICAL RELICS,

ANCIENT ASTRONAUTS,

AND LOST CIVILIZATIONS

THE PYRAMIDS AND THE PENTAGON

TOP SECRET

The Government’s

Top Secret Pursuit of

Mystical Relics,

Ancient Astronauts, and

Lost Civilizations

BY NICK REDFERN

Copyright © 2012 by Nick Redfern

All rights reserved under the Pan-American and International Copyright Conventions. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, in any form or by any means electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system now known or hereafter invented, without written permission from the publisher, The Career Press.

THE PYRAMIDS AND THE PENTAGON

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Redfern, Nicholas, 1964-

The pyramids and the Pentagon : the government’s top secret pursuit of mystical relics, ancient astronauts, and lost civilizations / by Nick Redfern.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN 978-1-60163-206-7-- ISBN 978-1-60163-611-9 (ebook) 1. Parapsychology--

Government policy--United States. 2.

Official secrets-United States 3. Defense information, Classifieds--United States. 4. Relics. 5. Mysteries, Religious. 6.

Extraterrestrial beings. 7. Antiquities. 8. Civilization, Ancient. 9. Curiosities and wonders. 10. Conspiracies. I. Title.

BF1040.R427 2012

001.94--dc23

2012013334

DEDICATION

For Rich Reynolds, for being a good friend and a voice of sanity.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to offer my sincere thanks and deep appreciation to everyone at New Page Books and Career Press, particularly Michael Pye, Laurie Kelly-Pye, Kirsten Dalley, Nicole DeFelice, Gina Talucci, Jeff Piasky, and Adam Schwartz; all of the staff at Warwick Associates for their fine promotion and publicity campaigns; and my literary agent, Lisa Hagan, for her always excellent work.

CONTENTS

Introduction: In the Beginning

Chapter 1: Dead Sea Discoveries

Chapter 2: Saucers and Scrolls

Chapter 3: Secrets of the Ark

Chapter 4: Ararat and the Agency

Chapter 5: Moon Dust on the Mountain

Chapter 6: Levitation and the Pharaohs

Chapter 7: Pyramid Power

Chapter 8: Conspiracies of the Naval Kind

Chapter 9: Controlling Gravity

Chapter 10: Ancient Atomic Annihilation

Chapter 11: Talk Like an Egyptian

Chapter 12: Red Planet Mysteries

Chapter 13: The Pyramids of Mars

Chapter 14: Martian Conspiracies

Chapter 15: The Circles of Doomsday

Chapter 16: Visions in the Skies

Chapter 17: Djinn, Star-Gates, and Immortality

Chapter 18: Seeking Ancient Artifacts

Chapter 19: The Dancing Stones of England

Chapter 20: Stonehenge and Secret Files

Conclusion: Past, Present, and Future

Bibliography

Index

About the Author

INTRODUCTION

IN THE BEGINNING

In the 1981 movie Raiders of the Lost Ark, which starred Harrison Ford as archaeologist Indiana Jones, Nazi hordes were in hot pursuit of the legendary Ark of the Covenant, a mysterious chest said to have housed the Ten Commandments provided to Moses by God on Mount Sinai. Given that the Ark was supposed to possess powers both awesome and devastating, Hitler’s intention was to harness those same powers, use them against anyone and everyone who might stand in his way, and take control of the world. Fortunately, things did not go Hitler’s way. After a wild adventure that took him from Peru to the United States and from Egypt to an island in the Aegean Sea, Indiana Jones saved the day, wrestled the Ark out of the clutches of Hitler’s minions, got the girl, and all was good. But, it’s the final moments of the movie that are the most memorable.

The Pentagon: keeper of ancient mysteries.

(Copyright U.S. government.)

After the Nazis were defeated, the Ark of the Covenant was transferred to the United States, where military intelligence personnel assured a pleased and satisfied Jones that the priceless artifact would be studied carefully by the finest minds and scholars available. That assurance, however, was nothing less than a brazen lie. Instead, something very different happened. Unbeknownst to Jones, the Ark was not studied. The U.S. government, perhaps fearful of unleashing the incredible forces the Ark possessed, took what it considered to be the wisest and safest course of action: The Ark was placed into a wooden crate, which was then carefully and firmly sealed, and taken to a secure warehouse away from any and all prying eyes and inquiring minds. The government was intent on keeping the genie firmly in the bottle, so to speak, never again to be released.

Raiders of the Lost Ark was, and more than 30 years after its release still is, a work of highly entertaining fiction. The deep and secret involvement of the U.S. government in the study of ancient artifacts, religious relics, and numerous archaeological wonders, however, is most assuredly not fiction. In the pages that follow, you will learn of astounding official knowledge of, and secret quests to seek out the truth behind Noah’s Ark, the Dead Sea Scrolls, the magical history of Stonehenge, tales of nuclear warfare in the distant past, prophecies of the Mayans, and much more. It is a wild and amazing story that spans millennia and takes us from the heart of the pyramids to the depths of the Pentagon.

CHAPTER 1

DEAD SEA DISCOVERIES

In terms of key and integral world events, 1947 was a year of profoundly deep and significant proportions. United States President Harry S. Truman signed the National Security Act, which paved the way for the creation of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). The first, priceless collection of what have famously become known as the Dead Sea Scrolls was found in caves at Qumran, an ancient and historic site on the West Bank. At the White Sands Proving Ground, New Mexico, a collection of fruit flies made history when they became the first living creatures to reach the fringes of space, after being blasted into the skies above aboard a captured German World War II–era V-2 rocket. The age of the flying saucer was famously ushered in, after American pilot Kenneth Arnold witnessed nine strange-looking aircraft flying close to Mount Rainier, Washington State. And, many UFO researchers believe an alien spacecraft crashed on harsh, remote desert land outside Roswell, New Mexico. Singular, unconnected events in a world constantly in a state of change, development, and wonder? Or integral parts of a greater, and very old, puzzle guided by the mysterious hands of destiny, fate, and grand design? Most people would probably say the former. But, sometimes, the majority are wrong—devastatingly so, even.

Secrets of the Caves

Close to 1,000 in number, the Dead Sea Scrolls represent a veritable treasure-trove of early written material from almost every book of the Old Testament, chiefly dating from around 150 BC to 70 BC. Their amazing discovery dates back to February 1947, when, along with his young cousin, Muhammad edh-Dhib, then only a teenager, stumbled across a series of caves at Qumran on the northwest side of the Dead Sea, which borders Jordan to the east, and Israel to the west. Upon exploring one particular cave, edh-Dhib was amazed to find a number of ancient texts, carefully and faithfully recorded on aged parchment. edh-Dhib excitedly scooped up the items and, with his cousin in tow, raced back home to his family’s Bedouin camp to show them his discovery. It didn’t take long before word got around that something unusual had been unearthed. In fact, matters began to spiral with extraordinary speed when talk of the scrolls began to heat up in and around Bethlehem, particularly when more scrolls were found in 11 other caves, and throughout a period of time that extended up until 1956.

Those immediate times after edh-Dhib’s discovery were distinctly wild and turbulent ones. The Syrian Orthodox Church expressed its firm interest in seeing the scrolls, as did representatives of the American Schools of Oriental Research. Interested parties in the Vatican secretly negotiated to buy some of the scrolls; others in the field of biblical archaeology scrambled to see them and examine them; and some scholars called for the scrolls to be placed under official control and oversight, lest they be spread far and wide, possibly even becoming catastrophically lost or destroyed.

Due to circumstances provoked by the turbulent Arab-Israeli War of 1948, the scrolls were hastily transported to Lebanon for safe-keeping. Six years later, they were up for sale and were ultimately sold for $250,000 and transferred to the Rockefeller Museum in Jerusalem. Then, after the Six-Day War of 1967, the scrolls ended up at the Shrine of the Brook, an arm of the Jerusalem-based Israel Museum, where they continue to reside to this very day. There is, however, yet another story of the Dead Sea Scrolls. It is one filled with, and fueled by, dark conspiracy and involves none other than the CIA.

An Encounter at the Embassy

While extraordinary findings were being made at Qumran, historic events were unfolding in the United States. Back in late 1944, William J. Donovan, who was the founder of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), arguably the earliest incarnation of what eventually became the CIA, mused upon the idea of establishing the ultimate intelligence-gathering agency. It was designed to act as the nation’s focal point for securing and analyzing data relevant and vital to U.S. national security and the defense of the nation. The ambitious idea was of great interest to the president, Franklin D. Roosevelt. With the battle still on to defeat Germany, Italy, and Japan, however, survival was the primary name of the game. It was not until July 26, 1947, two years after world peace had been restored, that this ultimate secret agency finally came into being, when Roosevelt’s successor, Harry S. Truman, passed the National Security Act. The Central Intelligence Agency was duly born.

The very idea that the newly created CIA might have played an integral, albeit deeply clandestine, role in the saga of the Dead Sea Scrolls sounds manifestly bizarre in the extreme. But, in this particular case, the old adage about truth being far stranger than fiction really does apply. As an example of the speed with which the CIA became a major player on the world stage, within weeks of its establishment, its coiling tentacles had spread far and wide. A sizeable number of its newly recruited staff had previously been employed as deep-cover, overseas operatives and assets in the wartime Office of Strategic Services (OSS) and the Central Intelligence Group (CIG). Many of them, therefore, were already in place to ensure the successful growth of the CIA’s new presence and influence at a global level.

One of those who went on to play an intriguing and significant role in the formative years of the CIA—and who had previously served with the Strategic Services Unit (the remnants of the OSS) and the Counter-Intelligence Corps (CIC)— was Miles Axe Copeland, Jr. Back in 1947, Copeland was working to both develop and further expand U.S. interests in the ancient city of Damascus, the capital of Syria. In fact, Copeland was nothing less than the CIA’s station officer there—a prestigious position, indeed. Agency personnel are trained to deal with unpredictability, with do-or-die decisions, and with breaking, escalating events. But, perhaps, even Copeland was unprepared for what was certainly the most memorably odd experience of his time spent in old Damascus.

On one particular morning in the fall of 1947, a mysterious Egyptian merchant quietly knocked on the door of Copeland’s office, which was housed innocuously in the confines of the American Embassy. Dressed in flowing Bedouin robes, the somewhat-Machiavellian visitor came bearing a gift: It was a very old, and somewhat decayed, rolled-up parchment displaying text in a language that Copeland did not recognize. Copeland watched carefully as the man unrolled the material and listened intently as his purpose for turning up at the Embassy was explained: The man wanted U.S. officialdom’s help in deciphering the aged material. Copeland, his interest now piqued, took a close look at it. Maybe it was written in Hebrew or Aramaic; given that he was not fluent in either, Copeland wasn’t altogether sure. But he had a friend and colleague who surely would know: Kermit Roosevelt, a director of the Institute of Arab American Affairs, a significant figure in the CIA’s Middle Eastern division, and a man who was fluent in both Hebrew and Aramaic. The Egyptian was seemingly satisfied and pleased that Roosevelt would likely be able to help him in his quest to have the texts translated, and he turned on his tail and vanished into the bustling Damascus afternoon, promising to later return. He never did. Whoever the curious caller really was, he seemed determined to ensure his identity never became known after handing over his amazing treasures to Copeland.

Recognizing that, whatever the nature and subject of the material that had fallen so mysteriously into his lap, it was surely of some deep significance, Copeland quickly raced to the roof of the Embassy, along with two colleagues, and carefully unrolled the unique collection to photograph it. To the alarm of all three, however, bits and pieces of the old material began to flake and fragment as the wind suddenly picked up speed. Copeland could only stand and stare, helpless, as the disintegrating data floated like snowflakes down into the winding streets below. There was not a single moment to lose. Gathering his wits, Copeland quickly photographed as much of the remaining parchment as he conceivably could. He then personally delivered the developed 30 or so pictures and the original negatives to Roosevelt, who was working out of the American Embassy in Beirut at the time, and who, equally as intrigued as Copeland, promised to have it all checked out. The remains of the parchment, meanwhile, were dutifully placed in a drawer in Copeland’s office for safe-keeping. And here’s where the trail gets downright cold.

Copeland later heard a few Agency-originated whispers that the material represented a fragment of what ultimately became known as the Dead Sea Scrolls, and was specifically related to the Hebrew Bible’s book of the Judean exile, Daniel. And, though Copeland learned that somewhere in officialdom the priceless text was the subject of deep analysis, no one ever fully confided in him what the CIA had discovered from studying his unique photographs. Nor did Copeland ever get an answer as to why he had been sought out in the first place by the enigmatic Egyptian who turned up so strangely on his doorstep on that fateful morning in the latter part of 1947. And there was more high-strangeness to come: The original material that Copeland was careful to secrete in a drawer in his office vanished, never to be seen again. Case closed? No, wide open. And it spilled over into yet another controversy: Those strange aerial objects—flying saucers—that firmly hit the world’s stage in June 1947, only a few months before Miles Copeland’s curious experience in Damascus.

CHAPTER 2

SAUCERS AND SCROLLS

The Rise of the Saucers

On the afternoon of June 24, 1947, a pilot named Kenneth Arnold was diligently searching for an aircraft that had reportedly careened into the southwest side of Mt. Rainier, a large peak on Washington’s huge Cascade Mountains. I hadn’t flown more than two or three minutes on my course when a bright flash reflected on my airplane, Arnold began after his unsuccessful search for the plane was over. It startled me as I thought I was too close to some other aircraft. I looked every place in the sky and couldn’t find where the reflection had come from until I looked to the left and the north of Mt. Rainier, where I observed a chain of nine peculiar looking aircraft flying from north to south at approximately 9,500 feet elevation and going, seemingly, in a definite direction of about 170 degrees (Arnold, 1947).

Arnold added that the mysterious craft were closing in rapidly on the mountain, and he openly admitted to being baffled by their unusual shape and design. I thought it was very peculiar that I couldn’t find their tails, he said, but assumed they were some type of jet plane. The more I observed these objects, the more upset I became, as I am accustomed and familiar with most all objects flying whether I am close to the ground or at higher altitudes. The chain of these saucer-like objects [was] at least five miles long. I felt confident after I would land there would be some explanation of what I saw [sic] (Ibid.).

Only a little more than a week after Kenneth Arnold’s life-changing experience, something very unusual plunged to earth in the deserts of Lincoln County, New Mexico, not far from the infamous town of Roswell. The event has been the subject of dozens of books, official studies undertaken by both the General Accounting Office and the U.S. Air Force, a plethora of television documentaries, a Hollywood movie called Roswell, and considerable media scrutiny. The admittedly odd saga has left in its wake a near-mountain of theories to explain the event, including a weather balloon, a Project Mogul balloon secretly utilized to monitor for Soviet atomic-bomb tests, an extraterrestrial spacecraft, some dark and dubious high-altitude-exposure experiment using Japanese prisoners of war, a near-catastrophic, atomic-bomb-based mishap, the crash of a V-2 rocket with shaved monkeys on board, and an accident involving an early aircraft secretly built by transplanted German scientists who had relocated to the United States following the end of World War II.

Whatever the exact nature of the device, it certainly seems to have been extraordinary in nature. Jesse A. Marcel, the intelligence officer for the 509th Bomb Group at Roswell Army Air Field in 1947, who personally saw, handled, and even collected some of the remains of the object at the crash site, the Foster Ranch, said of it years later: The wreckage was scattered over an area about three-quarters of a mile long and several hundred feet wide. What is was we didn’t know. We just picked up the fragments. [It] could not be bent or broken…or even dented by a sixteen-pound sledgehammer. [It was] almost weightless…like a metal with plastic properties (Moore, 1982).

The Roswell event was born and the era of the flying saucer was ushered in—in spectacular style, one might very reasonably argue. And with the origins of the UFO puzzle now described, it’s time to learn what on Earth, or, quite possibly, off of it, all this has to do with the U.S. government’s interest in the Dead Sea Scrolls. For the answer to that conundrum we have to take a gigantic and dramatic leap from the heart of Damascus in 1947 to early-1990s California.

Deep Throat Discussions

In 1991, a man named Timothy Cooper, of Big Bear Lake, California, exploded onto the UFO research scene amid a storm of furious debate. This is not surprising, because Cooper brought with him to the ufological table a huge selection of very controversial data and official-looking documentation of a reportedly top-secret nature. Cooper claimed the priceless stash had been secretly provided to him by a number of Deep Throat like sources with personal knowledge of some of the U.S. government’s most deeply guarded and troubling secrets relative to extraterrestrial visitation. The startling papers said to have been leaked to Cooper told of classified investigations into