Aftershock

  Aftershock:

  The Ancient Cataclysm That Erased Human History

  Authored by Brien Foerster

  Cover by Hans Messerschmidt

  All photos in the book by Brien Foerster or Irene Mendoza

  Machu Pic'chu: Inca repair work on top of older megalithic walls

  Dedication

  A book like this is not the labor of one person, but is the compilation of all of those that came before him. The Inca were one of the greatest cultures of all time, in part due to their social cohesion and mastery of astonishing agricultural systems that stretched from valley floors to the tops of mountains. Although the colonial Spanish tried brutally to extinguish any vestiges of their culture and works, and wrote incorrect histories about them, we know through oral traditions that they did not claim responsibility for the great megalithic works attributed to them by most writers.

  The dynastic Egyptians, makers of astonishing temples and other structures of stone, also recorded through their glyph system that their ancestry went much farther back in time than most academics will accept. It is the hope that this book will shed light into a much more complex and intriguing history of our planet than what we have been taught.

  To this end, as regards ancient Peru, I wish to thank Dr. Theo Paredes, Willco Apaza, Sr. Juan Navarro, and Sr. Renato Davila Riquelme for their assistance in guiding me through the complex history of that enchanting country. In Bolivia, Antonio Portugal has been a vital teacher, and in Egypt, no one could possibly have had better resources and insights than those graciously and freely given by Stephen Mehler, Mohamed Ibrahim, and the amazing Yousef and Patricia Awyan, as well as the rest of the Awyan family of Giza.

  In addition, to my beloved Irene, who has walked with me every step of the way.

  Forward by Stephen S. Mehler

  In the last decades of the 20th, and the first two decades of the 21st centuries, many researchers have arisen to seriously question accepted academic theories concerning the ancient history and prehistory of humanity, and call for new paradigm shifts about human origins and distinct existence of ancient advanced civilizations.

  Brien Foerster has emerged as one of the most active and profound of these researchers. He not only questions academic theories, but actively and vigorously goes to ancient megalithic sites around the world to investigate for himself. Brien has visited these sites in the presence of world-class archaeologists, geologists, engineers of all types, chemists, physicists, and stone masons.

  I have had the privilege to be with Brien onsite four times in Egypt, and to Peru, Bolivia and Lebanon, and watch and experience him deeply investigate these areas.

  Brien has produced many books and this current one is an excellent work, with his own concise analysis of the literature and onsite observations. It is full of visual evidence of artifacts and sites not seen by most scientists and laypeople. The evidence is in strong support of the theory that a worldwide cataclysm - mentioned in ‘great flood’ myths of over 250 different cultures - impacted the Earth and humanity ca. 11,500 years ago. This book is a must read for professionals and laypeople alike - well written and presented with ample physical evidence that can no longer be denied or ignored by anyone seriously interested in the true prehistory of humanity.

  Stephen S. Mehler, MA

  Lafayette, Colorado

  May 2016

  Contents

  1. The Case For Ancient Cataclysm pg.8

  2. Peru And Bolivia pg.64

  3. Egypt pg.117

  4. Lebanon pg.292

  5. Closing Thoughts pg.309

  6. Bibliography pg.311

  1. The Case for Ancient Cataclysm

  Most readers have likely heard the story about the ‘great flood’ from their childhoods, as portrayed in the Bible. The Genesis chapter describes how a vengeful God punishes humankind by literally flooding the surface of the Earth with water, extinguishing most terrestrial life over 40 days and nights of torrential rain. Those who survive are a small, divinely chosen group led by a righteous man named Noah, who not only leads his family but one male and one female of each land-based species onto a ship he built to survive

  One version of how Noah's Ark may have looked

  the cataclysmic ordeal.

  Many believe so strongly in the ancient texts that comprise the Bible, that they accept the great flood as truth. Readers that are more pragmatic may ask, When did this flood occur? And, How is such a meteorological event possible? Biblical sources are not forthcoming with answers.

  The Flood myth is not solely the domain of one specific religious text or belief system, however, and is often a symbolic narrative in which a great flood is sent by a deity, or deities, to destroy civilization in an act of divine retribution. Parallels are often drawn between the flood waters of these myths and the primeval waters found in certain creation myths, as the flood waters are described as a measure for the cleansing of humanity, in preparation for rebirth. Most flood myths also contain a culture hero, who strives to ensure this rebirth. (1)

  The flood myth motif is widespread among many cultures, as seen in Mesopotamian flood stories, the Puranas (ancient Hindu texts), in the Greek Deucalion mythology, the lore of the K'iche' and Maya peoples of Central America, as well as the Muisca people of present day Colombia in South America. In fact, there are oral tradition stories pertaining to this concept from antiquity, from cultures of Sumeria, Babylonia, Germany, Ireland, Finland, the Maasai of Africa, Egypt, India, Turkestan, China, Korea, Malaysia, Lao, Australia, Polynesia, and Native people of North America, Mesoamerica and South America… to name just a handful.

  ‘Catastrophism’ is the theory that the Earth was affected in the past by sudden, short-lived, violent events, possibly worldwide in scope. (2) The dominant paradigm of modern geology is called ‘uniformitarianism’ (sometimes described as ‘gradualism’), in which slow incremental changes, such as erosion, create the Earth's appearance. This view holds that the present is the key to the past, and that all things continue as they were, from the beginning of the world. Recently a more inclusive and integrated view of geologic events has developed, changing the scientific consensus to accept some catastrophic events in the geologic past.

  Mayan text known as the Dresden Codex

  This holds that there have been violent and sudden natural catastrophes such as great floods and the rapid formation of major mountain chains, such as the Himalayas and the Andes of South America. Plants and animals living in those parts of the world where such events occurred were often killed off, according to the 19th century French scientist Georges Cuvier. Then, new life forms moved in from other areas. As a result, the fossil record for a region shows abrupt changes in species.

  Cuvier's explanation relied solely on scientific evidence rather than biblical interpretation. His motivation was to explain the patterns of extinction and faunal succession that he and others were observing in the fossil record. While he did speculate that the catastrophe responsible for the most recent extinctions in Eurasia might have been the result of the inundation of low lying areas by the sea, from the melting of ice at the end of the last ice age, he did not make any reference to Noah's flood. (3) Nor did he ever make any reference to divine creation as the mechanism by which repopulation occurred following an extinction event. In fact, Cuvier, influenced by the ideas of the European Enlightenment and the intellectual climate of the French revolution, avoided religious or metaphysical speculation in his scientific writings. (4)

  Cuvier further believed that the stratigraphic record (layers of deposits) indicated that there had been several of these revolutions, which he viewed as recurring natural events, amid long intervals of stability during the history of life on Earth. This led him to believe the Earth was several million yea
rs old. (5) This clearly flew in the face of the predominant religious contention of the time that the planet on which we inhabit was regarded as only being several thousand years old.

  Painting of Georges Cuvier

  By contrast, in England, where natural theology was very influential during the early 19th century, a group of geologists that included William Buckland and Robert Jameson would interpret Cuvier's work in a very different way. Jameson translated the introduction Cuvier wrote for a collection of his papers on fossil quadrupeds (having four legs), that discussed his ideas on catastrophic extinction, into English and published it under the title Theory of the Earth. He added extensive editorial notes to the translation that explicitly linked the latest of Cuvier's revolutions with the biblical flood, and the resulting essay was extremely influential in the English-speaking world. (6)

  Buckland spent much of his early career trying to demonstrate the reality of the biblical flood with geological evidence. He frequently cited Cuvier's work even though Cuvier had proposed an inundation of limited geographic extent and extended duration, and Buckland, to be consistent with the biblical account, was advocating a universal flood of short duration. (7) Eventually, Buckland would abandon flood geology in favor of the glaciation theory advocated by Louis Agassiz, who had briefly been one of Cuvier's students. As a result of the influence of Jameson, Buckland, and other natural theology advocates, the 19th century debate over catastrophism took on religious overtones in Britain that were not nearly as prominent elsewhere. (8)

  Uniformitarian explanations for the formation of sedimentary rock and an understanding of the immense stretch of geological time, or as the concept came to be known ‘deep time,’ were found in the writing of James Hutton, who is sometimes known as the father of geology, in the late 18th century. The geologist Charles Lyell built upon Hutton's ideas during the first half of 19th century and amassed observations in support of the uniformitarian idea that the Earth's features had been shaped by same geological processes that could be observed in the present, acting gradually over an immense period of time.

  Charles Lyell

  Lyell presented his ideas in the influential three-volume work, Principles of Geology, published in the 1830s, which challenged theories about geological cataclysms proposed by proponents of catastrophism like Cuvier and Buckland. (9)

  From around 1850 to 1980, most geologists endorsed uniformitarianism (‘the present is the key to the past’) and gradualism (‘geologic change occurs slowly over long periods of time’), and rejected the idea that cataclysmic events like earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, or floods of vastly greater power than those observed at the present time, played any significant role in the formation of the Earth's surface. Instead, they believed that the Earth had been shaped by the long-term action of forces such as volcanism, earthquakes, erosion, and sedimentation, which could still be observed in action today. In part, the geologists' rejection was fostered by their impression that the catastrophists of the early 19th century believed that God was directly involved in determining the history of Earth. (10)

  In the 1950s, Immanuel Velikovsky propounded catastrophism in several popular books. He speculated that the planet Venus is a former comet, which was ejected from Jupiter and subsequently - 3,500 years ago - made two catastrophic close passes by Earth, 52 years apart. It later interacted with Mars, which then had a series of near collisions with Earth, ending in 687 BC and settling into its current orbit. Velikovsky used this to explain the biblical plagues of Egypt, the biblical reference to the ‘sun standing still’ for a day (from the biblical book of Joshua 10:12 and 13, explained by changes in Earth's rotation), and the sinking of Atlantis. Scientists rejected Velikovsky's theories, often quite passionately. (11)

  Almost 50 years later, in 1997, authors D.S. Allan and J.B. Delair published their book Cataclysm! Using more powerful analytical tools, they looked at the data Velikovsky examined and proposed a fresh thesis of their own.

  Book written about the life of Velikovsky

  Like Velikovsky, they believed that folklore myths were eyewitness reports of what was seen in the sky. They described many of the myths Velikovsky described and added more that were unavailable to Velikovsky. From their research, they concluded that a fragment of an exploding supernova entered our solar system around 9500 BC. This fragment, called Phaeton-Marduk, caused one of Neptune's moons to become the planet Pluto. Phaeton-Marduk then pulled one of Saturn's moons, Chiron, away from Saturn, making it the smallest planet in the Solar System. Chiron was first discovered in 1976. Phaeton-Marduk then caused the fragmentation of the planet Taimat. Taimat's fragments are now the asteroid belts between Jupiter and Mars. Taimat's moon, Kingu, went into orbit around Phaeton-Marduk. Phaeton-Marduk then came close to the Earth disturbing the Earth's rotation. The moon, Kingu, was pulled from Taimat by Earth's gravitation. Kingu fell apart, the pieces plunging into the Earth. These combined disturbances caused the deluge. Phaeton-Marduk then flipped Venus upside down, causing it to have a backward rotation, and Phaeton-Marduk finally fell into the sun.

  Allan and Delair also described geological data showing large deposits of broken bones and shattered trees mixed together in heaps, and lakes that have beds resembling craters that might have been formed by aerial bombardment of huge meteors, and many other geological abnormalities. Allan and Delair state in their book, “many had doubtless seen the great antediluvian buildings, large boats (arks included), irrigation systems, pottery, metallic utensils, and weaponry specifically mentioned in innumerable traditions they had not themselves designed.” And they pose this question: What firm evidence is there that such artificial creations existed before the Phaeton disaster? This they date at 11,500 years ago. (13)

  In this book we will explore many ancient megalithic works, especially those in Peru, Bolivia, Egypt, and Lebanon, which defy standard archaeological explanations. They could be the remnants of great highly technological civilizations that existed prior to Allan and Delair’s catastrophic event.

  Also, did those who have written of the end of the Ice Age as a cause of cataclysms take

  Animation of a catastrophic event

  on board the repeated cosmic impacts and the resulting convulsions of Earth? Did they take into account specifically the probable buckling of the Earth’s surface? The possible shifting landmasses and oceans (from east/west to north/south in orientation) through the effects of the Deluge triggered by Phaeton, the fragment of Vela? The associated tilt of the globe (from vertical to the now 23.5 degrees)? And the probability that the residents of previously unknown advanced cultures, who survived the Deluge of about 12,000 years ago, aided the subsequent recovery of human societies?

  Of course, the obvious candidate for an advanced civilization existing prior to the more famous ones of Egypt, Sumeria, and the Indus Valley is that of Atlantis, which will not be covered much in this book, as there are literally thousands of accounts that can be found elsewhere. However, a teaser to the idea that the Earth has not always been stable does come from the famous statements by Plato.

  In the Timaeus dialogues, these being a record of discussions between the Greek Statesman Solon and an Egyptian priest, Plato reports the following:

  “You Greeks are all children… you have no belief rooted in the old tradition and no knowledge hoary with age. And the reason is this. There have been and will be many different calamities to destroy mankind, the greatest of them by fire and water, and lesser ones by countless other means… You remember only one deluge, though there have been many.”

  Bust of Plato

  What might these calamities be which Plato's Egyptian informants are referring to? Evidence has accumulated from a variety of scientific disciplines, which demonstrate that a massive cosmic object (probably a portion of an astronomically-near supernova explosion) passed close by the Earth in approximately 9500 BC. This cosmic event caused a worldwide cataclysm of enormous proportions, including massive shifting of the Earth's surface, devastating volcanic
activity, mega-tsunami waves, subsidence of regional landmasses, and mass extinctions of both animals and humans. In this regard it is vitally important to note that many of the geological and biological effects previously attributed to the hypothesized glacier movements of ice age times could not have been caused by the slow movement of ice but were in fact caused by the rapid and vast displacement of oceanic bodies of water (this being caused by the irresistible gravitational pull of the enormous cosmic object passing by the Earth). Additionally, the species-wide animal extinctions caused by this event occurred far beyond the geographical boundaries set for the 'Ice Age glaciations' by orthodox theorists. (14)

  Approximately 2000 years later, in roughly 7640 BC, a cometary object sped towards the Earth. This time, however, rather than passing by the Earth as the cosmic object of 9500 BC had done, the cometary object actually entered the atmosphere, broke into seven pieces, and impacted the Earth at known locations on the planet's oceans. Scientific studies of the effects of rapidly moving large objects impacting with the ocean surface have conclusively demonstrated that waves resulting from a massive cometary impact would attain vertical heights of 2 to 3 miles, with forward speeds of 400 to 500 miles per hour, and a sustained force that would carry them 2000 to 3000 miles in every direction radiating from the impact location. It is clear that these great waves would have crashed upon the shores of numerous continents, totally obliterating, especially in coastal areas of gently rising lands, all human settlements and any structures they had built.

  Archaic myths from many parts of Europe (and around the world) refer to this event by mention of bright new stars which fell to Earth as seven flaming mountains, of how the oceans rose up in vast waves and totally engulfed the lands, and how summer was driven away with a cold darkness that lasted several years. In support of the mythological accounts of the vast waves covering the lands it is important to mention that many of the highest mountains in England, Scotland, and Ireland are littered with beds of sand and gravel containing sea shells deposited in the very recent geological past. Geology also gives irrefutable evidence that at two times in the recent past, around 7640 BC and 3100 BC, there have been complete reversals of the Earth's magnetic field caused by an outside influence, most probably a comet.