Underwater Cities; Noah's Flood Proof? ... Page 2

Yonaguni:Ancient Unknown Submerged Structures Off The Coast of Japan

Yonaguni is a small island south-west of Okinawa in the Japanese archipelago. In 1988, scuba divers led by Kihachiro Aratake discovered an enormous stone structure on the seabed off the coast of Yonaguni.

The structure lay more than 75 feet below the surface. Investigation showed it was 600 feet long, 450 feet wide and 90 feet high. The locals decided it was a natural formation.

Click and drag photo to resize. Script from The Java Script Source

Ten years later, the experts weren't so sure. The first geologist to investigate the site was Professor Masaki Kimura of Ryuku University on Okinawa. In April 1998, he discovered a structure divided into five distinct layers and decided it had to be manmade. It is easy to see why. Underwater photographs and video footage reveal a stepped, ziggurat-like monument of extraordinary proportions.

Each step is about 3 feet high with clean edges and sharp angles. There is also an archway and two parallel monoliths among other intriguing features like drainage channels. Further investigation led to the discovery of smaller satellite ziggurats near the main edifice.

Each is about 30 feet wide and 6 feet high. Each appears to be constructed of stepped slabs. Divers also found what looks like a road surrounding the main structure.

Robert Schoch, the American geologist who re-dated the sphinx, dived to examine the Yonaguni Monument and later commented that while natural water erosion and rock splitting might possibly produce a structure of this type, he had never seen anything quite like it before.

Professor Kimura was even more forthcoming. He maintained bluntly that if the sharp steps were the result of natural erosion there would be debris on the seabed surrounding them. In fact, there is none.

Click and drag photo to resize. Script from The Java Script Source

The aptly named Team Atlantis expedition who dived to make a video documentary of the site concluded that while the monument may be a natural formation in part, it had certainly been extensively modified by human hands.

In other words, someone in the depths of prehistory discovered a suitable rock formation and used sophisticated engineering techniques to shape it the way they wanted.

But if the various structures in the Yonaguni complex are artificial, there is no known Japanese civilization that could have created them. Geological dating places the site above water no later than 8000 BC. (The actual time-span is somewhere between 8000 and 10,000 BC.)

Orthodox prehistory claims the most advanced culture in Japan at the time was small groups of hunter-gatherers. As Professor Kimura points out, there is no way they could have built or even modified the Yonaguni Monument.

He believes for something of this size some sort of machinery must have been involved.

The Yonaguni Discovery;

Original American Story on the Underwater Site

by Frank Joseph -

Ancient American-Archeology of the Americas Before Columbus

One of the greatest discoveries in the history of archaeology was made last summer, off Japan.

There, spread over an amazing 311 miles on the ocean floor, are the well-preserved remains of an ancient city. Or at the very least, a number of closely related sites.

In the waters around Okinawa and beyond to the small island of Yonaguni, divers located eight separate locations beginning in March 1995. That first sighting was equivocal - a provocative, squared structure, so encrusted with coral that its manmade identity was uncertain.

Then, as recently as the summer of 1996, a sports diver accidentally discovered a huge, angular platform about 40 feet below the surface, off the southwestern shore of Okinawa. The feature's artificial provenance was beyond question.

Widening their search, teams of more divers found another, different monument nearby. Then another, and another. They beheld long streets, grand boulevards, majestic staircases, magnificent archways, enormous blocks of perfectly cut and fitted stone - all harmoniously welded together in a linear architecture unlike anything they had ever seen before.

Click and drag photo to resize. Script from The Java Script Source

(This photo of the "face" purportedly from Yonaguni sites were printed in Ancient American) In the following weeks and months, Japan's archaeological community joined the feeding-frenzy of discovery.

Trained professionals formed a healthy alliance with the enthusiasts who first made the find. In a progressive spirit of mutual respect an working alliance, academics and amateurs joined forces to set an example of cooperation for the rest of the world. Their common cause soon bore rich fruit.

In september, not far from the shore of the island of Yonaguni, more then 300 airline miles south from Okinawa, they found a gigantic, pyramidal structure in 100 feet of water.

In what appeared to be a ceremonial center of broad promenades and flanking pylons, the gargantuan building measures 240 feet long. Exceptionally clear sub-surface clarity, with 100 foot visibility a common factor, allowed for thorough photographic documentation, both still photography and video.

These images provided the basis of Japan's leading headlines for more than a year. Yet, not a word about the Okinawa discovery reached the US public, until the magazine, "Ancient American" broke the news last spring. Since that scoop, only the CNN network televised a report about Japan's underwater city. Nothing about it has been mentioned in any of the nation's other archaeology publications, not even in any of our daily newspapers.

One would imagine that such a mind-boggling find would be the most exciting piece of news an archaeologist could possibly hope to learn. Even so, outside of the "Ancient American" and CNN's single report, the pall of silence covering all the facts about Okinawa's structures screens them from view more effectively then their location at the bottom of the sea.

Why? How can this appalling neglect persist in the face of a discovery of such unparalleled magnitude? At the risk of accusations of paranoia, one might conclude that a real conspiracy of managed information dominates America's well-springs of public knowledge.

Click and drag photo to resize. Script from The Java Script Source

(Photo Carved Stairway?)

UPDATE MAY 2001 Japanese Scientists Say Yonaguni Pyramid Manmade

Massive Steps
Complex Structure

"On Dreamland, Ancient American Magazine editor Frank Joseph reports on a conference he recently attended in Japan at which Japanese geologists and archaeologists argued that the sunken pyramid off the island of Yonaguni near Okinawa has been found to be manmade.

It appears to be a construction made of wide terraces, ramps and large steps. However, American geologists have contented that the structure is not manmade, but a natural formation.

According to the report, Japanese scientists have documented marks on the stones that indicate that they were hewn. Not only that, the tools used in this process have been found in the area, and carvings have been discovered. A small stairway carved into the rocks appears to render the theory that this is a natural formation implausible.

The problem with all of this for western scientists is that it implies that an unknown eastern culture had developed a high degree of organization thousands of years before the earliest western civilizations. Geologically, the Yonaguni pyramid sank into the ocean at the end of the last ice age, around ten thousand years ago.

Some western geologists have theorized that, if it is manmade, it must have risen from the sea in more recent times, and been carved then.

However, the discovery of other, similar structures beneath the sea of Japan was also announced at the conference. If these prove to be similar to the Yonaguni pyramid they may rewrite the history of early man."..Source UK INFORMER

Underwater Cities; Noah's Flood Proof? ... Page 1

Underwater Cities; Noah's Flood Proof? ... Page 1

 "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.

(Image: Atlantis Site.com--artists' (Dean Clarke, BLS)interpretation of radar image) Click and drag photo to resize. Script from The Java Script Source

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..."