Seeing the past

More than three years ago, after blogging about Stephan A. Schwartz's book The Secret Vaults of Time, I bought his follow-up work The Alexandria Project, which deals with the use of psychics to guide archaeological digs in Alexandria. Reading the book should have come easily to me, since I am interested not only in psychic phenomena but also in ancient Alexandria -- in some ways the most intellectually exciting city of the ancient world. Yet for some reason I did not get to the book until recently. It was worth the wait.

Originally published in 1983 and reissued in 2001, The Alexandria Project recounts two archaeological expeditions in 1979 that made use of information supplied by various psychics, including two psychics -- Hella Hammid and George McMullen -- who accompanied the author on his first trip. The author's intention was to show that psychic talents can supplement information provided by more conventional by more conventional sources, making archeology more efficient. Both before and after 1979, Schwartz conducted other such experiments, often with notable success.

The most dramatic part of the book recounts marine archaeological probes conducted in Alexandria's harbor, in which divers -- following instructions from the psychics -- found many sunken ruins, including what were evidently the Timonium (a building erected by Mark Antony) and the palace of Cleopatra. An ancient seawall and what may be the ruins of the legendary lighthouse of Pharos were also discovered.

Schwartz himself admits that the existence of ancient ruins on the harbor floor came as a surprise to nobody. It was well understood that Alexandria's shoreline had receded over the centuries, and that structures which had stood along the coast in ancient times were now underwater, having collapsed on account of beach erosion and frequent earthquakes. His point, though, is that finding these structures in the large harbor would ordinarily require far more time and effort than his team expended. He writes:

There was no question that any group of divers, swimming careful search patterns, would have found what we found. The Eastern Harbor is unlike Marea [another Alexandrian site], in that there are general locations of certain ancient structures in [the works of the Roman writer] Strabo and other sources; and the water is shallow ... Here, the issue would not primarily focus on only the psychic -- unless a specific object predicted was found, and that would require another probe -- but rather, on the role psychic data could play in making archeology more efficient and less costly. Other diving teams could have found what we found, but not as quickly or as easily. It would have been extremely difficult to make several of these finds with just the sonar to guide us, and careful search patterns would have taken weeks. But with historical sources, and the psychics, we were able to make a reasonable first approximation of what could be seen on the harbor floor in just a few days. [pp. 231-232]

Unfortunately the poor visibility of the polluted harbor waters impeded the divers' work, and many interesting sites had to be left unexplored. Subsequent marine archaeological work carried out by a French-Egyptian team in the 1990s has, according to Schwartz, confirmed "both the generalities and specifics" of the psychics' predictions. Schwartz comments only briefly on these developments in an epilogue to the new edition, referring to reader to his Web site for details. Though the site contains much material of interest, I could not find a discussion of the more recent work in the harbor. At Jeff Rense's site, however, I found an article by Beverly C. Jaegers, which recounts Schwartz's work and then reports: 

Almost as an anticlimax, the Oceanex, bearing Franck Goddio, world-famed submarine explorer, his diving and filming teams along with a sophisticated array of nuclear magnetic resonance magnetometers and computers (along with a much improved sonar array) arrived in that same harbour in 1996, and began a thorough survey.

Apparently totally unaware of the earlier pinpointing of sites by remote views and divers, Goddio was nevertheless able to rediscover the Timonium ruins, the limestone-paved area, sphinxes, statues and sites they felt were the palaces and Isis temple. This confirmed the accuracy of the Mobius probe.

Some archaeological work was also undertaken by Schwartz's team on dry land, with generally positive results. In one case, an attempt was made to open the wall of a crypt, after both of the on-site psychics reported sensing a subterranean complex. Interestingly, both psychics advised against digging at the particular spot chosen (out of necessity) by Schwartz, saying that behind the wall the excavators would find not only an impenetrable mass of debris but also a second wall. A veteran Egyptian archaeologist scoffed at the idea of a second wall, but such a wall was in fact discovered. As predicted, the dig proved unfeasible, stopped by the debris, the second wall, and bureaucratic complications.

The two psychics also spent hours in the blistering triple-digit heat of the Egyptian desert, pinpointing a spot where digging would reveal an ancient structure. One psychic, George McMullen, embedded stakes in the ground that indicated the contours of the building's walls, which were, of course, underground and invisible to normal senses. Excavation did reveal a building at that spot, with walls that matched McMullen's layout. Moreover, prior to excavation, Hella Hammid visualized a short, broken column in the center of the building, an unusual and unexpected feature. The column turned out to be there. McMullen sensed that the column had been used in conjunction with a "fire pit" -- a claim that seemed inexplicable until a local Bedouin explained that such columns were indeed used as primitive "hot plates" for cooking.

One evening McMullen participated in an informal experiment in which he was given six potsherds and asked to arrange them in chronological order. This he did. The Polish archaeologist supervising the test said that it had taken a team of experts several years to properly arrange the shards along a timeline. McMullen accomplished it in a matter of minutes. (Of course it could be argued that the Polish architect, who knew the correct sequence, unconsciously signaled McMullen during the test. But this kind of explanation would not cover McMullen's many successes when working in the field.)

The psychics' work included notable "hits," some "misses," and a great many predictions that could be neither substantiated nor disproved. An example of the latter is George McMullen's explanation of why Alexander the Great continued fighting long after his principal enemy, the Persians, had been defeated.

I'll tell you one reason why Alexander was out all the time fighting in other countries. It was like today's sports. As long as you keep the people's interest up, they are going to come and pay the freight. But in this case it wasn't a team or a sport, but an army and -- it was fighting. So who's going to pay for this? And the soldiers have to keep winning once they get started. He wasn't really out to conquer the world. It got so that one thing led to another. When he started his campaign he wanted to do what he knew how to best, and that was to fight.

This sounds plausible to me -- more plausible than the romanticized view of Alexander as a visionary -- but of course there is no way to know if it's true, as Schwartz himself points out.

Schwartz's book is written in a straightforward style and a sensible tone; he does not come across as a credulous "believer," but instead as a serious researcher interested in testable predictions and concrete results. He strikes me as honest and reliable, though I wish he had spent less time detailing his endless run-ins with the Egyptian bureaucracy; a little of this material goes a long way.

In his epilogue to the new addition he laments the knee-jerk, know-nothing skepticism that greeted the announcement of his team's results. One archaeologist, who had never worked in Egypt, publicly dismissed the whole project as "phony visions cribbed ... from a tourist guide." But no tourist guide could have specified the alignment of an ancient building's walls under the Egyptian desert, or the locations of the underwater ruins in the harbor. Indeed, Mieczyslaw Rodziewicz, the Polish archaeologist who assisted Schwartz, and who was considered the world's foremost authority on Alexandrian archeology, said that "the discoveries [in the harbor] are of the highest importance, because they extend our plan of the ancient city." The seawall and other underwater ruins found by Schwartz's team lie considerably farther from shore than the experts had expected.

In the last chapter of the original edition, Schwartz speculates on what it all means:

I know there may be critics who will attack this work and, in some details, they will be right. We could have done it better. In later experiments we have already done so. But all science could be better, and hopefully each experiment is more sophisticated than the one that preceded it. The character innuendo, which is the most prevalent form of criticism, is really no criticism at all. And the statements that the psychic basically cannot exist, based on what we understand of the universe, and that therefore there must be some other explanation, really have reached the point where they say more about the critics than the research they are criticizing.

Criticism should always play an important role in parapsychology, as it does in the rest of science, but it is time to go beyond the dispute over whether or not the psychic exists. Those who wish to argue this are welcome to do so; but we also need to start asking new questions.

Suppose we entertain a new perspective, one which does not tie consciousness to the parameters of time and space. Suppose consciousness, of which what we call the psychic is a part, exists independent of the brain. Is this nonsense? There is, as yet, no absolute answer to the question. But there is mounting evidence in disciplines as widely separated as quantum physics and neurophysiology that suggest consciousness is not only more than the brain, it is perhaps the core around which the universe has grown....

I find myself most in agreement with the late Dr. Wilder Penfield, director of the Montreal Neurological Institute, and one of the leading neurophysiologists of this century. As the father of brain-mapping -- a technique in which portions of the brain receive direct electrical stimulation to determine their function -- he looked back on a career of mapping thousands of living brains and concluded -- albeit with reluctance -- that "it will always be quite impossible to explain the mind on the basis of neuronal action within the brain...."

Penfield saw the brain as a computer and felt that if the brain was harmed, the body or reasoning abilities of a person would be impaired. He stressed that hurting the brain does not necessarily mean hurting the mind. The mind-self might not be able to communicate or control its vehicle -- the body -- but that was not evidence that it had been injured. When one consider[s] that numerous cases have been reported of people with little or no brain tissue, who are nonetheless functional and successful -- or individuals in other cases who have died and been resuscitated, bringing back accurate observations about places and events distant from their temporary corpse -- the question of the mind/body relationship is even less clear.

Regardless of this confusion and the lack of a universally accepted theoretical model, applied research should be pursued, and it may help in the development of the needed theories. And new theories about these anomalous phenomena will lead to new instruments with which to test the theories. No one can say yet exactly what shape either instrument or theory will alternately take, but there are suggestions -- and we should be prepared to accept matter, energy, and life itself as different points on the same spectrum. This will alter science as much as Einstein's equations, and life as much as the industrial revolution. When both sides of the mind -- the intuitive and the analytical -- finally function together in concert, we may find something behind both of them that we now only dimly perceive. [pp. 265-267]

Comments

[Roger Knights]

The latest I've read about the late George McMullen, a few weeks ago, is that the Discover channel (I think) is putting together a TV show about ongoing excavations on Roanoke Island, where he had staked out locations where digging would uncover buildings from the mysteriously vanished colony there. These diggings, which were unable to to get funded until recently, have been successful. If anyone hears of the time when this program will be broadcast he should post it on this site.

I've read Schwartz's Secret Vaults of Time and was very impressed. Archaeology is a very promising field for the practical application of dowsing and other psychic talents, as "truffle dogs."

[Roger Knights]

I just ordered a used copy of The Alexandria Project from Amazon--under $10.

[GregL]

Here's a little VR twist on remote viewing archaeology. The archaeological sites that are "found" by the remote viewers are not "there" until they find them. Once the site is lost and forgotten to antiquity, its location in the VR data base becomes nothing more than a probability. Remote viewers are doing nothing more, or less, than actualizing the probability, via intent, of finding a particular object at a particular site. In other words they want to find something there, so it is there.
Now to start looking for my keys......

[Michael Duggan]

Michael, I like your reference to the "brain absent" individuals who appear to enjoy a normal life, some of them quite successfully. I would be cautious in accepting the validity of these claims, most were made when brain imaging technology was non-existent, or at least in it's infancy. Quite often, what appears to be empty space, hides fairly extensive cerebral structure around the perimeter of of the skulls interior, where the brain has been pushed to the extremities (as in the the case of infantile hydrocephalus for example). If these cases can be validated with current technology (Lorbers caseload is 40 years old) that would add significantly to the evidence base in favour of brain-mind independence, but let's not get too excited over aging less trustworthy data.
Thanks for another interesting blog Michael.

[Michael Prescott]

"Michael, I like your reference to the 'brain absent' individuals"

Actually that was part of a quote from Schwartz's book. His statement "little or no brain tissue" is not too precise; "relatively little brain tissue" would have been more accurate.

"Quite often, what appears to be empty space, hides fairly extensive cerebral structure around the perimeter of of the skulls interior"

True, but the total space taken up by this structure is still minuscule in comparison with a normal brain.

[TheSlaught]

Off topic, but related:

Watch out for a lot of talk on Derren Brown who sounds like he's gearing up to launch another anti-psi polemic on UK TV in a few weeks with a "demonstration" of remote viewing if the synopsis is anything to go on. If this is anything like his live prediction of the National Lotery results earlier this week, (which I'm 90% certain was achived with camera tricks) I doubt the McMoneagles of the world should be too worried, but it's still likely to provide the usual corners with yet more ammunition to throw at those who haven't decided it's all bunk.

[Michael Prescott]

We don't hear too much about Derren Brown in the USA. But I would think that his demonstrations would be of significance only if he can reproduce what psychics and remote viewers have done under controlled conditions. As long as he is controlling the venue, he's really not proving anything.

[Michael Duggan]

Derren Brown is a publicity junkie, who doesn't rank too high in the echelons of British magical performers. He is also a lier. During his lotto prediction attempt, he states he got the result from "averaging" the response from 24 subjects, who themselves discerned the lotto numbers from examining previous draws up to 6 months. We are told that initially, the group managed 1 correct number, then 2 the week after, as so on, until the denouement of the Lotto prediction made by Brown last week. What a load of BS. Even a high schooler can tell you that "averaging" randomly produced numbers is utter nonsense! This is an example of mis-direction, that Derren Brown excels in. More likely, the event utilised simple camera tricks to project the correct numbers onto the balls.
Going back to the individuals with limited cerebral matter, I have managed to locate quite a few recent cases that have been confirmed with latest imaging techniques (MRI, fMRI), so it certainly looks very interesting. At the VERY least it shows unbelievable plasticity of the brain.

[Kris]

Hey Michael Duggan

Could we get a link or something to the recent cases.

Thanks

[Michael Duggan]

Hey Kris,

This link gives some info. There is a more recent article about german cases but I can't find it yet.

http://mindfulhack.blogspot.com/2007/07/just-how-much-brain-do-you-need-could.html