But why 10500 BC?
Perhaps it is connected with the prophecies of the American psychic Edgar Cayce - for whom Hancock and Bauval seem to have a great deal of respect. Edgar Cayce, known as the 'Sleeping Prophet', who died in 1945, is widely believed to be a simple, uneducated Kentucky man, who entered a trance state and made pronouncements about the ancient past as well as giving predictions for the future. According to Cayce, the Great Pyramid and Sphinx were built by survivors from Atlantis - in 10500 BC. He said that the Atlanteans had built an underground 'Hall of Records' that contains the collected wisdom of their race and which, he said, would be discovered in 1998. This would somehow trigger a New Age, and the emergence of a new race. We spent a lot of time looking at Cayce's predictions - and found that, despite the fact that his followers claim that he was 'close to one hundred per cent accurate', you would be hard pressed to find even one of his prophecies that has come true.
For example, recently someone told us that Cayce was a brilliant prophet because, in the early 1940s, he predicted that China would become Communist by 1968. Of course, if true, that would be impressive. Unfortunately, what Cayce actually said was that China would become Christian by 1968. But even so Cayce is extremely interesting. Far from being a virtual simpleton, he was extremely widely read, and as a young man worked in several bookstores. He was also entrusted with setting up new lodges for his fellow Freemasons.
But more significant than that were his contacts. We discovered that, just after the First World War, Cayce was called in to advise President Woodrow Wilson. The person who arranged this was a close friend of Cayce's, Colonel Edmond Starling, who was head of the US Secret Service. Cayce was best known for the cures that he prescribed while in trance, which were often genuinely impressive. This is what hooked his admirers, who made the fatal error of assuming that all his psychic abilities were just as good. However, as we have seen, it turns out that this is not the case. But people at the time did not know that his predictions would fail, and he was feted by leading industrialists, top politicians - including at least one President - senior Army commanders, and members of the intelligence services.
Cayce, as we have seen, predicted the finding of the Hall of Records at Giza. It is interesting that there have been many attempts to find the Hall of Records there in the last 25 years. It needs to be pointed out that the ancient Egyptians themselves never mentioned any such thing in the context of Giza, nor is there any archaeological evidence for it. The concept of the Hall of Records comes entirely from Edgar Cayce. As we would expect, the prime movers in the search for the Hall of Records have been the Association for Research and Enlightenment (ARE), which was formed by Cayce in the 1930s and continues to promote his work. Other key players on the Giza plateau (sometimes working in collaboration with ARE) have been a team from a very interesting organisation called SRI International (formerly the Stanford Research Institute - ed.).
This is one of the world's biggest private scientific research institutes, and it has a reputation - which we discovered is justified - for working closely with the American military and intelligence community. Around 75 per cent of SRI's income comes from contracts with the Pentagon and other US government agencies, including the CIA.
SRI made many expeditions to Egypt during the 1970s, taking with it state-of-the-art equipment designed to locate hidden chambers. The team was led by physicist Dr Lambert Dolphin Jr. But it is interesting that they gave up looking at Giza in 1979, apparently without having found anything. However, since then the mystique of the Hall of Records has continued to be built up, so that there is an expectation of revelations coming from Egypt in the near future.
Now that 1998 - when Cayce said the Hall of Records would be found - has passed, rumours are beginning to circulate that it was found in the form of the so-called Tomb of Osiris. This is a chamber at the bottom of a shaft some 120 feet beneath the Giza plateau not far from the Sphinx, which was re-excavated last year. It has no records of any kind in it, and yet attempts are being made to pass this off as somehow confirming Cayce's prophecy. In any case, it was first excavated in the 1930s.
The point is that, if any of these people find something that might be a Hall of Records, it will be taken as proof that Cayce was right not only about his version of ancient history, but also in his predictions of imminent global transformation. But you can be sure that, if the year 2000 comes and goes without any Hall of Records, the same people will continue to exploit the increasingly fervent longing for it to be found. Make no mistake: Egypt itself is a very potent symbol. This has not escaped those that deal in the exploitation of belief systems - such as the intelligence agencies.
Another emotive issue is the whole question of life on other planets, and recently we have seen a concerted effort to connect ancient Egypt with a putative lost civilisation on Mars, as for example, in Hancock and Bauval's 1998 book The Mars Mystery. Everybody will be familiar with the so-called Face on Mars and Pyramids of Mars, features of an area of known as Cydonia that some argue can only be artificial. They were discovered in photographs taken by the Viking mission in 1976. Their most enthusiastic exponent is science writer Richard C. Hoagland. Since the early 1980s, Hoagland has run a well-funded group which is currently called the Enterprise Mission. Although there are other, more cautious, researchers in this field whose work deserves serious consideration, Hoagland and his team's primary aim is not simply to promote the idea of artificial structures on Mars, but to extrapolate from their existence a message for Earth today - and for our immediate future. They also try to link the alleged monuments of Cydonia to ancient Egypt. Hoagland's own message is that the Martian monuments were built by an extraterrestrial civilisation that came from outside our solar system, who also visited ancient Egypt and influenced the development of that civilisation - and who are about to return.
