Pyramid Quest (9 page)

The problems surrounding Dunn’s power plant theory do not stop in Dendera. Consider just how much machinery has to be added to the pyramid to make the theory work. It begins with vibration equipment in the Subterranean Chamber and extends through banks of Helmholtz resonators in the Grand Gallery, an acoustic filter in the Antechamber, metal linings for both King’s Chamber shafts and a crystal filter in the northern one, a microwave receiver in the King’s Chamber, and a wireless transmission system that included relay satellites in earth orbit. As it is, none of this equipment now resides within the Great Pyramid. Even if it had been purposefully removed, some evidence should point to its prior presence.

Dunn’s model faces yet another tall hurdle: in my assessment, his mechanics is questionable, and I am not at all certain that it would work. A central process in his theory is the production of hydrogen gas in the Queen’s Chamber, a reaction fueled by chemicals placed in the so-called airshafts. These shafts, however, apparently connect neither to the exterior surface of the Great Pyramid nor, as far as we can ascertain, did they originally connect to the interior of the Queen’s Chamber (see the appendices). Rather, the shafts stopped 5 inches short of connecting to the interior of the Queen’s Chamber until Waynman Dixon discovered them in 1872; he removed the last 5 inches of stone. Dunn, however, speculates that originally there was a small hole connecting each of the shafts to the interior of the Queen’s chamber, and these holes served to meter or measure specific amounts of fluids entering the Queen’s Chamber. Even if the seemingly impossible were accomplished and chemicals were pumped into the airshafts (through the small holes that Dunn postulates were originally there, or perhaps if different, as yet undiscovered, shafts were used), I do not believe that they would mix and react exactly as Dunn requires.

In an article published in the 2001
Meta Research Bulletin,
chemical engineer Erica Miller, mechanical engineer Sean Sloan, and chemical engineer Gregg Wilson agree with Christopher Dunn that the Great Pyramid was a power plant. They have their own very different idea of the type of plant it was. As they see it, the pyramid produced fuel by nuclear fission in a breeder reactor, most likely for interplanetary export to Mars.

A breeder reactor is an extension of the kind of nuclear plant used to produce plutonium-239 for weapons. The process begins with uranium ore, which contains two primary isotopes, or forms, of uranium: slightly more than 99 percent uranium-238, and the tiny remainder uranium-235. Uranium-235 can be used to make a nuclear bomb, but extracting it from uranium ore requires so many steps that the military uses plutonium instead. In the presence of a moderating material like graphite or water, the natural fission of uranium-235 in uranium ore converts some of the uranium- 238 into plutonium-239. Further fission reactions from the plutonium-239 convert even more uranium-238 into plutonium-239, “breeding” this desired material from the uranium. Unchecked, the reaction can lead to a runaway nuclear meltdown, such as the accident that destroyed the Chernobyl nuclear plant in Ukraine in 1986. But if engineers slow the reaction with water or graphite, they can produce either bomb-grade plutonium for weapons or plutonium fuel, which lacks the explosive potential of its bomb-grade cousin but can be used as an energy source.

Miller, Sloan, and Wilson maintain that the Great Pyramid was used in the ancient past to produce plutonium fuel. The evidence, they argue, is the monument’s peculiar and unique internal geometry. The sarcophagus in the King’s Chamber was packed with uranium ore, and the King’s Chamber itself was flooded with water pumped in from outside the pyramid through the southern airshaft. The water reflected neutrons released by fission back into the nuclear pile, and it also slowed and controlled the reaction, preventing an ancient preview of Chernobyl along the Nile. The Relieving Chambers, which sit atop the King’s Chamber, protected the structure against the explosive force of steam produced by fission in water. Water, steam, and gasses would have flowed out of the King’s Chamber and down the Grand Gallery. Radioactive waste materials, such as strontium-90 and cesium-137, were carried away from the core, while steam and gasses escaped through the northern airshaft. The Grand Gallery also served as the pathway for raising new uranium cores into the King’s Chamber and removing spent cores, probably by means of a hoist mounted in the ceiling.

The Great Pyramid even produced its own electrical power for lighting throughout the structure and electrical machinery in the Queen’s Chamber. Radioactive water spilling down the Well Shaft turned a turbine in the Subterranean Chamber, which, the engineers argue, bears a striking resemblance to the support structure for a water-driven turbine electric generator.

Wear and tear on various parts of the Great Pyramid indicate that it produced power for a few hundred years, then it was purposely decommissioned and the internal machinery removed. Since there is no archaeological evidence of power stations or electrical grids in the ancient world, and since no one has yet stumbled across a stash of ancient Egyptian nuclear fuel, all the plutonium produced by the Great Pyramid in its centuries of operation must have been transported elsewhere, most likely to Mars, in the authors’ view. And what better site for an interplanetary nuclear power plant than Giza? It lies near the equator, which simplified orbital landings and takeoffs. The Nile Delta’s beneficent climate, predictable water supply, and fertile soil made it an ideal location for interplanetary travelers to assemble the human workers the nuclear project required. Miller, Sloan, and Wilson never specifically address the details of how the plutonium was transported to Mars. Presumably, the Martians who actually organized the construction and operation of the Great Pyramid had their own interplanetary means of travel.

Quite apart from the science fiction flavor of this idea, it suffers from a major problem: lack of evidence. Like Dunn’s theory, the Giza nuke plant hypothesis rests on the supposition that the Great Pyramid once contained a vast array of equipment later removed without the least trace. That is hard to believe. What makes it even harder to believe is the absence of the evidence one would most expect in the vicinity of a nuclear power plant: radioactivity. The authors repeatedly cite Hanford, Washington, the primary production site for American nuclear weapons material during the Cold War, as an example of the kind of nuclear operation they have in mind. Nuclear production operations were shut down in Hanford in part because plutonium production had made it one of the most fiercely polluted places on earth. It will remain a dangerous hot spot for millennia. The half-life for plutonium-239—that is, the period it takes for the element to lose 50 percent of its radioactivity—is 24,000 years, and for uranium-238 about 4.5 billion years. Such long half-lives mean that even now, thousands of years after the Giza nuke plant shut down, the structure would be so radioactive that various phenomena should hold true. For one thing, the monument would glow at night inside. I have spent numerous hours in the Great Pyramid at night, and I can attest that it doesn’t glow with radioactivity. For another, the expected high level of radioactivity might damage film and electronic equipment, but I have encountered no signs of such damage either in my own equipment or that of my colleagues who have spent much time in the Great Pyramid. Finally, the guards who spend years of their lives inside the pyramid should reveal an unusual cluster of cancers and radiation sickness. To my knowledge, no such incidents among the guards have ever been reported.

Miller, Sloan, and Wilson’s fanciful idea is just that: a fancy, with no substantial evidence to support it.

Dunn’s model of the Great Pyramid as an electrical power plant and Miller, Sloan, and Wilson’s notion of the structure as a producer of nuclear fuel for interplanetary trade assume that the intention underlying Khufu’s monument is benevolent. In his two books,
The Giza Death Star
(2001) and
The Giza Death Star Deployed
(2003), physicist Joseph P. Farrell offers an altogether different take on the beneficence of the Great Pyramid. Like the other writers, he sees the monument as evidence of a very high yet misunderstood technology. The people (or beings, for in his scenario it is not clear that they were humans) who used this sophisticated, ancient physics, however, were up to no good. The Great Pyramid, in Farrell’s eyes, was a very bad weapon in the hands of very bad guys.

The civilization that built this weapon was, Farrell writes, “far too much like our own: capable of technological wonders, capable of mass destruction, and like our own, in almost complete moral decay. In that most profound sense, the Great Pyramid is a prophecy, and a warning.”
⁶

The theory that Farrell spins out begins with what he considers evidence of a global war fought with weapons of mass destruction in ancient times. He points to stories of reputed unnamed ancient cities of India turned to glass by extreme heat. And he cites vast fields of fused green glass—produced from sand by tremendously hot explosions—as proof positive that thermonuclear bombs were detonated in Egypt, other parts of the Middle East, and the Indian subcontinent. Three civilizations, based in India, North Africa and the Mediterranean, and either Antarctica or the Atlantic Ocean, were locked in a long world war and blasting away at each other.

Farrell maintains that this ancient war was fought with a weapon of frightening potential, one so powerful it could bust a planet in one blow. Something like Dunn’s electrical power plant, Farrell’s death star used the energy of hydrogen plasma to gather, oscillate, and harmonically resonate nuclear, electromagnetic, acoustic, and gravitational energy from the earth, the solar system, and even the galaxy itself, then direct it like an artillery piece at a distant target. When it fired, the pyramid was probably sheathed in a blue light that moved from the base of the structure to its apex, then disappeared into the atmosphere (possibly reflecting off of the atmosphere, or perhaps satellites) to strike down like a bolt of lightning at the target. There, literal hell would break loose. If the death star’s commanders so wished, they could induce a violent reaction in the atomic nuclei composing the target’s mass that would result in a nuclear explosion. Or they could cook the target with extreme heat, destroying the enemy without nuclear fallout. The commanders could even choose the size of blast they wanted: from small tactical detonations to full-scale big bangs that might threaten an entire planet’s very existence.

Farrell’s thermonuclear weaponry was only one of the many technological attributes of the ancient civilization whose various outposts were locked in this global war of long, long ago. They had at their fingertips a physics vastly more sophisticated than our own, possessed some kind of advanced computational technology and algorithms, and used their science to travel between the planets. In time, their dedication to evil purposes led to a destruction and downfall as great and awesome as Wagner’s twilight of the gods or Plato’s drowning of Atlantis. But before this civilization breathed its last, the death star’s commanders removed the military apparatus and left the empty structure as a memorial to the evils of war, much as the preserved hulks of Auschwitz, Buchenwald, and Dachau remind us still of the horror of Nazism and the Holocaust.

Importantly, these now-vanished people or beings were not the ancient Egyptians of the Old Kingdom. Rather, they came earlier, although Farrell does not say precisely when. In
The Giza Death Star Deployed,
Farrell maintains that the Great Pyramid was built sometime before 10,000 B.C., perhaps even tens of thousands of years earlier. The Great Pyramid was already standing, in stripped, mute testimony, when the Fourth Dynasty moved its base of religious operations to Giza and invented the mythology of Isis, Horus, and Osiris to explain the presence of so great and mystifying a structure. The ancient Egyptians didn’t realize it was a weapon; neither do traditional Egyptologists.

Yet the Great Pyramid’s primeval purpose, Farrell says, is evident. The granite core of the pyramid functioned like an immense capacitor to build up a tremendous charge augmented by the windings of the stone courses forming the monument’s exterior bulk. The asymmetric arrangement of the internal chambers and passages would amplify the shock wave, an effect explored experimentally by maverick inventor Nikola Tesla (1856-1943). Add acoustic resonators in the Grand Gallery, made of crystals engineered to resonate with the harmonics of gravity, much as Dunn imagined, and you have your death star, ready and able to immolate enemy nations at any distance.

Farrell draws heavily from Dunn’s model, in fact, and he faces the same key problem as Dunn: absence of evidence. Even if the dubious physics behind his model worked, there are no indications that the Great Pyramid ever served as a high-energy howitzer. The death star theory rests on hypothesized machinery removed long ago from the Great Pyramid. No evidence points to such machines within the structure or anywhere else in ancient Egypt. Were the builders of the death star indeed trying to leave the emptied structure as a memorial, it is hard to understand why they were so secretive and cryptic about their eleventh-hour conversion from the path of evil.

There would certainly be good reason to search harder and wider for such machines if evidence suggested that ancient civilizations predating the Old Kingdom had fought a global thermonuclear conflict. Nothing points that way. Farrell asserts that the presumed fields of fused green glass (I question their existence) must have come from nuclear detonations, not exploding meteorites. Meteorites, he says, always leave a crater, because they explode on hitting the ground, not in the air like a nuclear weapon. But he’s wrong. When comet P/Shoemaker-Levy 9 collided with the planet Jupiter in July 1994, many of the fragments from the disintegrating object exploded in the Jovian atmosphere. The same phenomenon has been observed on earth—in the Tunguska explosion of June 30, 1908. The Tunguska object exploded between 3 and 5 miles above the earth’s surface, and the heat and force of the blast burned or flattened trees across 850 square miles of Siberian forest. Had the Tunguska object detonated over the Sahara sands rather than Siberian taiga, it would have produced a vast field of fused green glass. Farrell’s “evidence” of ancient thermonuclear blasts actually marks the impact sites of objects streaking into earth from space. It tells us nothing about the purpose of the Great Pyramid or the intentions of its builders.