"It is stunning. What we see in our high-resolution sonar images are limitless, rolling, white sand plains and, in the middle of this beautiful white sand, there are clear manmade large-size architectural designs.
It looks like when you fly over an urban development in a plane and you see highways, tunnels and buildings," Zelitsky said.
Evidence of ancient city found in depths off Cuba 1/2 Mile Down
By Michael Posner. The Globe and Mail. Montreal, Canada. December 7, 2001.
A team of Canadian and Cuban researchers have discovered the remains of what may be a 6,000-year-old city submerged in deep ocean waters off the western coast of Cuba.
Using sophisticated sonar and videotape equipment, offshore engineer Paulina Zelitsky, her husband, Paul Weinzweig, and her son, Ernesto Tapanes, have found megaliths "of a kind you'd find at Stonehenge or Easter Island," Mr. Weinzweig said in an interview yesterday.
"Some structures within the complex may be as long as 400 metres wide and as high as 40 metres," he said. "Some are sitting on top of each other. They show very distinct shapes and symmetrical designs of a non-natural kind. We've shown them to scientists in Cuba, the U.S. and elsewhere, and nobody has suggested they are natural."
Moreover, an anthropologist affiliated with the Cuban Academy of Sciences has said that still photos taken from the videotape clearly show "symbols and inscriptions," Mr. Weinzweig said. It is not yet known in what language the inscriptions are written.
The sonar images, he added, bear a remarkable resemblance to the pyramidal design of Mayan and Aztec temples in Mexico. Mr. Weinzweig said it is too early to draw firm conclusions from the evidence collected so far.
The research team plans another foray to the site -- off the Guanahacabibes Peninsula on Cuba's western tip -- next month. Next summer, it hopes to return again, this time with the first deep-water mobile excavator, equipped with functions needed for on-site archeological evaluation, including the ability to blow sand off stone.
Geologists have recently hypothesized that a land bridge once connected Cuba to Mexico's Yucatan peninsula. And portions of the Cuban island are believed to have been submerged in the sea on three separate occasions in the distant past.
The structures are on a plateau that forms the bottom of what is thought to be a mud volcano, 650 to 700 metres beneath the surface of the ocean and along what is clearly a geological fault line. "It's well known that ancient civilizations liked to build at the base of volcanoes, because the land is fertile. So that's suggestive," Mr. Weinzweig said.
One tantalizing possibility, entirely speculative for now, is that if the legendary sunken continent of Atlantis is ever proven to have existed, these structures may have been submerged during the same cataclysm.
Mr. Weinzweig simply says that more information is needed. "We'd prefer to stay away from that subject. This is something of great potential scientific interest, but it must involve serious authorities on ancient civilizations."
The precise age of the underwater site is also unknown, although Cuban archeologists in 1966 excavated a land-based megalithic structure on the western coast, close to the new underwater discovery, said to date from 4000 BC.
"Based on that and other geological information, we're speculating that these are 6,000 years old," he explained. "It's not exact, but they're very ancient."
If that dating estimate proves accurate, it would mean that an ancient civilization had designed and erected these vast stone structures in the Americas only 500 years after human settlements first became organized in cities and states.
They would also have been built long before the wheel was invented in Sumeria (3500 BC), or the sundial in Egypt (3000 BC). The three pyramids on Egypt's Giza plateau are thought to have been constructed between 2900 and 2200 BC.
The couple's Havana-based company, Advanced Digital Communications, discovered the site in July of 2000, using side-scan sonar equipment to view what resembled an underwater city, complete with roads, buildings and pyramids.
The team returned this past summer with a 1.3-tonne, unmanned Remotely Operated Vehicle, controlled from the mother ship via fibre-optic cable. Its cameras confirmed the earlier findings, showing vast granite-like blocks, between two and five metres in length, that were cut in perpendicular and circular designs.
But because of technical problems, Mr. Weinzweig said, "we were only able to survey the perimeter of the site.
Based on initial explorations, we think it's much larger than even our sonar projections show. It may extend for several kilometres."
In addition to the archeological site, ADC has been exploring what Mr. Weinzweig calls "the richest underwater cemetery in the world" for sunken Spanish galleons. Hundreds of treasure-bearing ships are said to lie around the island, several hundred to several thousand metres deep.
Last year, off Havana Bay, it found the remains of USS Maine, the battleship that blew up in 1898. That incident, never entirely explained, killed 260 sailors and precipitated the Spanish-American War.
Copyright © 2001 Globe Interactive, a division of Bell Globemedia Publishing Inc.
Explorers Return To Study 'City'
On Ocean Floor Off Cuba
Las Vegas Sun
5-19-2
HAVANA- Floating aboard the Spanish trawler she chartered to explore the Cuban coast for shipwrecks, Paulina Zelitsky pores over yellowed tomes filled with sketches and tales of lost cities - just like the one she believes she has found deep off the coast of western Cuba.
Zelitsky's eyes grow wide as she runs her small hand over water- stained drawings of Olmec temples in a dog-eared 1928 study of Mexican archaeology. The Russian Canadian explorer compares the shapes with green-tinted sonar images captured in March while studying the megalithic structures she discovered two years ago off Cuba's Guanahabibes Peninsula.
Amid piles of sonar-enhanced maps is a well-worn copy of "Comentarios Reales de las Incas," or "Royal Commentaries of the Incas," a classic of Spanish Renaissance narrative by the son of an Inca princess and a Spanish conquistador. Zelitsky is particularly fascinated by Garcilaso Inca de la Vega's account of ancient ruins at the bottom of Lake Titicaca, Peru.
"You would not think that a reasonable woman of my age would fall for an idea like this," chuckled Zelitsky, a 57-year-old offshore engineer who runs the exploration firm Advanced Digital Communications of British Columbia, Canada.
Zelitsky passionately believes the megalithic structures her crew discovered 2,310 feet below the ocean's surface could prove that a civilization lived thousands of years ago on an island or stretch of land joining the archipelago of Cuba with Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula, about 120 miles away.
The unusual shapes first appeared on the firm's sophisticated side-scan sonar equipment in the summer of 2000, during shipwreck surveys off Cuba's western coast, where hundreds of vessels are believed to have sunk over the centuries.
The company is among five foreign firms working with Fidel Castro's government to explore the island's coast for shipwrecks of historical and commercial interest. But the mysterious shapes have become the focus of this crew's exploratory efforts.
Puzzled by the shapes with clean lines, the team has repeatedly returned to the site - most recently in March - for more sonar readings, more videotapes of the megaliths with an unmanned submarine. The crew left in mid-May for a month.
Evidence for Zelitzky's hypothesis is far from conclusive, and has been met with skepticism from scientists from other countries who nevertheless decline to comment publicly on the project until scientific findings have been made available. Submerged urban ruins have never been found at so great a depth.
Elsewhere in the Caribbean, the ruins of Jamaica's Port Royal are located at depths ranging from a few inches to 40 feet below the ocean surface. The once raucous seaside community was controlled by English buccaneers before it slid under the waves in earthquakes beginning in 1692.
Located at just 20 feet are the mysterious megalithic structures discovered in the 1960s and 1970s in the sound between the Bahamas islands of North and South Bimini. Scientific expeditions there have produced inconclusive results about the shapes' origins.
Photo: Curved, megalithic sized white rock with line detail visible. Video still © 2002 by ADC International, Inc.
Back in Cuba, a leading scientist recently admitted there is no easy explanation for the megalithic shapes found by Zelitsky's crew. The shapes on the sonar maps look like walls, rectangles, pyramids - rather like a town viewed from the window of an airplane flying overhead.
"We are left with the very questions that prompted this expedition," geologist Manuel A. Iturralde Vincent, research director of Cuba's National Museum of Natural History wrote March 13. At the time he was visiting the area aboard the 270-foot long Ulises, the Spanish trawler Zelitsky outfitted with sophisticated computer and satellite equipment for her surveys.
In his written comments, later delivered at a scholarly conference here, Iturralde concluded it was possible the structures were once at sea level, as Zelitsky theorizes.
Because of the large faults and an underwater volcano nearby, Zelitsky supposes the structures sank because of a dramatic volcanic or seismological event thousands of years ago.
Providing some support for that argument, Iturralde confirmed indications of "significantly strong seismic activity." Zelitsky shies from using the term "Atlantis," but comparisons are inevitable to the legendary sunken civilization that Plato described in his "Dialogues" around 360 B.C.
There have been untold, unsuccessful attempts over the ages to find that lost kingdom. One common theory is that Atlantis was located on the Aegean island of Thera, which was destroyed by a volcanic eruption nearly 3,600 years ago.
Zelitsky does, however, mention known archaeological monuments when discussing her find.
Numerous photographs are scattered throughout a video show of the megaliths, showing well-known ancient sites: the 1st century fortress of Masada high above the Dead Sea, Britain's circular monument of Stonehenge, the Roman fortress of Babylon in Cairo, the walls of Chan Chan, Peru, whose inhabitants were conquered by the Incas.
Perhaps, Zelitsky mused, the megaliths off Cuba are remains of a trading post, or a city built by colonizers from Mesoamerica. Those civilizations were far more advanced than the hunters and gatherers the Spaniards found upon arriving here five centuries ago.
Zelitsky admitted much more investigation is needed to solve the mystery. But that doesn't keep her from believing, or from smiling slyly as she opens her agenda for 2002 to the first page.
Written there are the words Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei uttered under his breath at the height of the Inquisition, right after abjuring his belief that the Earth revolved around the sun.
"E pur si muove," it reads - "Nevertheless, it does move."
All contents © 1996 - 2002 Las Vegas Sun, Inc.
Earlier this year, using a submersible, they were able to obtain samples of the underwater objects. "The stone we recovered from ocean bottom is very polished granite. All of the peninsula of northwast part of Cuba, all of this peninsula is limestone, very fractured limestone. So, geologically, it (megalithic granite structures) is totally foreign to Cuba. But it's also not known in Yucatan because Yucatan is also limestone, not granite..."
