Was Atlantis in Cuba?

 

THE SEARCH FOR ATLANTIS IN CUBA

A Report by Andrew Collins

British historian Andrew Collins is the author of GATEWAY TO ATLANTIS, which in 2000 proposed that Cuba was the flagship of Plato's island empire. He reports on the recent discoveries of a lost city off Cuba, and its importance to the Atlantis legend.



Readers will be aware of the discovery deep beneath the Yucatan Channel, off the coast of Guanahacabibes in western Cuba, of what is purportedly a lost city. Hi-tech sonar equipment aboard the 'Ulises', a vessel owned by Canadian firm Advanced Digital Communications (ADC), detected a several-kilometre square area of what appear to be roads, pyramids and other building structures at a depth of 2,200 feet. Yet it was not until July 2001 that Paulina Zelitsky, the Russian-born leader of the expedition, got a chance to view the site first-hand.

A remote operated video (ROV), dispatched to the ocean floor, sent back frustratingly poor quality footage of linear stone features and large stone blocks, their sides and edges worn away by the actions of the sea. What had ADC found, and was it connected in some way with the legend of lost Atlantis, as described by the Athenian philosopher Plato more than 2,350 years ago?

One man's interpretation of Cuba's underwater pyramid located in the Yucatan Channel. This 3D image was created by Dean Clarke of Atlantisite.com after he studied the deep-sea sonar image released to the world.

The Myth of Atlantis

Atlantis was said to have been an island empire the size of 'Libya and Asia put together', founded by the sea-god Poseidon. It possessed a cosmopolitan metropolis, with palaces, royal courts, harbor works and waterways that constantly received sea-going vessels from afar.

For many generations Atlantis ruled the Atlantic Ocean as well as parts of the `opposite continent'. Yet soon the empire set its sights on controlling the lands inside the Mediterranean basin. It was at this point that the fair race of Athens rose up against the Atlantean aggressor and in a decisive naval battle defeated its enemy. Some time afterwards the god Zeus unleashed 'earthquakes and floods' that drowned the Athenian navy and submerged the island of Atlantis in one `terrible day and night'. The date given for this catastrophe is post 8570 BC in Plato's dialogue the Timaeus and 9421 BC in its sequel the Critias.

Such is what Plato tells us about Atlantis, but we must never lose sight of the fact that he was writing around 350 BC at the height of the classical age. Much of what he had to say was influenced or based on political issues of his day, as well as matters of importance debated in the philosophical schools in which he moved. Unquestionably, they would have included whether or not there existed in the sea of Atlas, the modern Atlantic ocean, inhabitable islands reached by ocean-going mariners. Other contemporary writers spoke of islands to the west that had been discovered and occupied by Phoenician and Carthaginian mariners, who kept quiet about their existence in case of drawing undue interest from foreign nations.

Yet the evidence is there that these same voyagers crossed over the ocean and were aware not only of the Sargasso Sea, but also the islands of the Bahamas and Caribbean. Indeed, there is every indication that the Phoenicians and Carthaginians entered the Gulf of Mexico and made landfall on the Gulf coast, where they could have traded goods such as tobacco and coca leaves with cultures such as the Olmec and Maya of the Yucatan.

Rumours of Cataclysm

Following Columbus' celebrated landfall in the Bahamas in 1492, Spanish explorers heard stories from the indigenous peoples of the Caribbean and Bahamas that spoke of a flood which had devastated the archipelagos. It was said to have split apart a much larger landmass, killing the inhabitants and leaving the many thousands and islands and cays that remain today. Some of these stories include clues which hint at a much greater catastrophe. One from Tobago speaks of 'the ole moon breaking', while others from Venezuela and the Yucatan allude to a period of darkness, fire falling from the sky and the presence overhead of a fiery snake. Had some cosmic impact caused a massive cataclysm that devastated the Bahamas and Caribbean?

The Carolina Bays Comet

The presence of around 500,000 elliptical craters, ranging from a few hundred metres to 11 kilometres in size, across the entire eastern seaboard of the United States, from New Jersey down to Miami, is perhaps the greatest clue. Modern theories are that these so-called Carolina Bays (after the states in which they were first noted during aerial surveys in the 1920s) were caused by a comet which entered the earth's atmosphere from the north-west over Alaska and disintegrated into millions of pieces that detonated above the ground, very much in the manner of the small comet which caused the Tunguska event in Siberia in June 1908.

The effects of the catastrophe, some time around the end of the last Ice Age, were extreme. Not only would it have caused a wall of fire and wind, which would have laid flat large areas of Tundra forest and decimated flora and fauna, but the resulting dust clouds would have created a 'nuclear winter' which seems to have resulted in a temporary re-advance of the ice fields that had covered much of North America, Europe and Asia for the previous 40,000 years. Moreover, hundreds and thousands of fragments of the comet falling in the western Atlantic basin would have produced tsunami waves of immense proportions which would have temporarily drowned both the eastern seaboard of the United States and the islands of the Bahamas and Caribbean, wiping out entire populations (a few must have got away to tell the tale, as it told in the creation myths of the indigenous peoples of both Central and North America, and also those of the Caribbean).

Could memories of this cataclysmic event have been preserved across millennia until they were recounted eventually to Spanish explorers that reached in the Bahamas and Caribbean in the wake of 1492? If so, were the same tales told to Phoenician and Carthaginian voyagers who visited these same islands prior to Plato's age? Did Plato come to hear not only of the islands which existed in the outer ocean, but also of the cataclysm which once devastated this self same region? Did it cause the landmass to be inundated by flood waters, splitting it into individual islands - temporarily at first, but then more permanently when eventually the ice fields of North America, Europe and Asia finally began to melt, causing the sea-level to rise by as much as 100 metres? Thus was the sinking of Atlantis a memory of the submergence of both the former Bahaman landmass and the low-lying regions of the Caribbean? Certainly we can say that all this took place around the very same time that Plato tells us Atlantis was destroyed by 'one terrible day and night of earthquakes and floods'. Moreover, if the Caribbean islands did once form part of Atlantis, then it would mean that part of the landmass was still above water today.

The Size of Libya and Asia Put Together?

Remember, mountain ranges do not sink out of sight simply through cataclysms such as comet impacts. Certainly, it can be shown that the landmass was considerably smaller than Plato would have us believe. At one point he says that it was the size of 'Libya and Asia' put together. Yet later he reports that the island possessed a vast irrigated plain that 'stretched for three thousand stadia [552 kilometres] in one direction, and at its centre, for two thousand [stadia, i.e. 368 kilometres] inland from the coast'. Beyond it to the north, west and east were `mountain ranges' that came right down to the sea as precipitous cliffs, while the southern end of the plain, on which the city was situated, was at sea-level. It does not take a geographer to realise that Plato was describing an east-west orientated island perhaps as little as 600 by 400 kilometres in size.

By suggesting that Atlantis was the size of 'Libya and Asia' put together is likely to relate not so much to its geographical extent but to the regions of the ocean over which the kings of Atlantis were considered to hold dominion. This is verified in the knowledge that the Atlantean empire was said to consist of a whole series of islands that lay in front of an 'opposite continent', plausibly the American continent, reached by 'voyagers' using a series of 'other islands', plausibly the Bahamas or Lesser Antilles, which in early colonial times acted as stepping stones for ocean-going vessels attempting to reach the mainland.

So can we now go on to identify Plato's Atlantis?

Cuba's Great Plain

The description of an island plain surrounded to the east, north and west by 'mountain ranges', matches Cuba's western plain that stretches from Havana westwards to Pinar del Río, and is enclosed on its northern and western extremes by the Cord de Guaniguanico mountain range. We also know that until around 9,000 years ago the plain extended southwards, across what is today the Bay of Batabanó, to the Isle of Youth. Here then is evidence of a vast plain, originally 540 by 160 kilometres in extent, drowned, in part at least, during the time-frame suggested by Plato.

Cuba's Cord de Guaniguanico might also be compared with the 'mountain ranges' that Plato tells us shielded Atlantis' great plain from `cold northerly winds'. Between November and February each year, Cuba is subject to bitterly cold winds, known as los nortes, or 'northers', that blow in blizzards from the eastern United States. Although these cold fronts reach exposed regions of the Cuban landmass, the Cord de Guaniguanico completely shields the western plain from the harsh winds, which would otherwise damage winter crops.

Moreover, Cuba has been identified by leading geographers as a mysterious island paradise known as Antillia, or the island of the Seven Cities, said to have laid in the outer ocean according to Moorish, and later Portuguese medieval tradition (and unquestionably borrowed from much earlier Phoenician and Carthaginian sources). More than this, the name Antillia can be shown to derive from the Semitic word root ATL, 'to elevate', which was also the root behind the name Atlas, from which we derive the name Atlantis, 'daughter of Atlas', the term used for an Atlantic island (Atlantides, 'daughters of Atlas', was the plural used in ancient times to denote Atlantic islands in general). In other words, if Antillia was merely a medieval form of Atlantis, then it further confirms Cuba's association with Plato's Atlantic paradise.

The Seven Caves

For more evidence of the part Cuba played in the foundation of the Atlantis myth, we turn our attentions to the creation myths of the Mesoamerican peoples, such as the Aztec, Toltec and Maya. They spoke variously of their earliest ancestors coming from an island paradise located in the east, known variously as Aztlan or Tulan, following a period of darkness when the sun would not appear. On this island the first humans are said to have emerged from somewhere called Chichomoztoc, the Seven Caves. From these individuals came seven tribes, or clans, and by their hands rose Seven Cities. I believe that some semblance of knowledge regarding the creation of the seven cities in Mesoamerican myth led to Antillia, or Cuba, becoming known as the Island of the Seven Cities. Furthermore, just ten years after Christopher Columbus's famous landfall in the Bahamas in 1492, the main islands of the Caribbean - Puerto Rico, Hispaniola and Cuba - were named on maps as 'the Isles of Antillia of the King of Aragon', showing how the early Spanish explorers likewise came to identify them with ancient Antillia and its accompanying islands.

The only site in the whole of the Caribbean which bears any resemblance to Chicomoztoc, the Seven Caves, is the Punta del Este cave complex at the extreme eastern end of a peninsular on the Isla de Juventud (Isle of Youth), divided from the southern coast of the Cuban mainland by the Bay of Batabano. Ceuva # Uno (Cave No. 1) has been described as a veritable Sistine chapel of the prehistoric world, and is filled with beautiful petroglyphs of concentric circles, rectilinear shapes and other abstract forms many thousands of years old. I interpreted the symbolism of these designs as perhaps embodying the memory of some kind of comet impact suffered by the Caribbean in a distant epoch. Such thoughts came entirely from intuitive feelings experienced during a personal visit to the cave in September 1998 - feelings that led me to explore the possibility of a comet impact having devastated the region. More curiously, Paulina Zelitsky, the director of the ADC team working out of Cuba, visited the Punta del Este caves for the first time only shortly before the discovery of the Guanahacabibes site, off the west coast of Cuba in July 2002. She has since claimed that an unconfirmed carving of a cross detected on a large, roughly rectangular block videoed at the underwater site, bears some similarity to an abstract cross design found inside Punta del Este's Ceuva # Uno.

The 1951 ECOS Article

Yet it now appears that as early as 1951, a decade before the advent of Communist rule on the island, Cuban archaeologists were working on the theory that the petroglyphs in Punta del Este's Ceuva # Uno's reflected some kind of cosmic catastrophe which devastated Atlantis.

A two-page article appeared in the February 1952 edition of the magazine ECOS entitled 'Formó Cuba Parte de la Atlándida?'. Written by Francisco Garcia-Juarez, the press secretary of the Instituto Cubano de Arqueologia (Institute of Cuban Archaeology, or ICA) it posed the question: did Cuba once form part of Atlantis? He explained how members of the Institute were investigating the idea that traces of an Atlantean culture might be found in Cuba and Hispaniola, a view offered to them by Egerton Sykes, then a world renowned authority on Atlantis. In 1949 he had written an introduction for a revised edition of ATLANTIS: THE ANTEDILUVIAN WORLD, the all-time classic on the subject, written by former US congressman Ignatius Donnelly and published for the first time in 1882 (and still available as a re-print by Dover Publications). Sykes was also the editor of a journal propounding Hans Hoerbinger's Cosmic Ice theory entitled, simply, ATLANTIS, in which appeared a partial translation of the above-mentioned ECOS article.

According to Syke's translation, the ICA concluded that the most likely location where traces of the Atlantean culture might be found on Cuba was the Punta del Este cave complex. In one cave was found steps that led up to an alcove which might possibly have been used by priests to observe the movement of the stars. Moreover, petroglyphs inside the caves (presumably those in Cueva # Uno) displayed astronomical information which linked them with the origins of the Maya calendrical system, thus the possibility that Cuba had been a 'staging post' for the migrations of the Maya into Central America should not be overlooked. More than this, the translation stated:

On the South coast of Cuba, at Camaguey, there are many partially submerged mounds called "caneyes", which may have been places of refuge for primitive man. There are numerous artifacts here which have never been adequately investigated. Numerous skeleton remains found here give evidence of a sudden and violent death due to some catastrophe. The artifacts include stone balls, spherical stones, elongated stones, and rods with forked ends resembling snakes. The absence of large monuments may merely mean they have not yet been seriously looked for.

Sykes had told the ICA that if Cuba did form part of Atlantis then its archaeologists would find evidence on the island of artificial deformation of the cranium among its ancient inhabitants, as well as step monuments or ziggurats and methods of cutting and orientating large rocks. Why exactly he felt they would find these things is not made clear, although I suspect that his theories were based on Donnelly's concept of a diffusion of shared ideas among ancient cultures on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean, due to the suggested migration of peoples from Atlantis following its destruction. Whatever the reasons, the archaeologists confirmed that all of these things had been found on Cuba, but, as the article stated, there would have to be a revolution of the established ways of thinking before their presence would be seen as evidence for the existence of Atlantis.

What was infinitely more important, however, were the interpretations of the petroglyphs found in the Punta del Este caves (again, seemingly those in Cueva # Uno) by Cuban archaeologists back in 1951. Captions accompanying two examples shown as line illustrations, explained that the symbols showed a comet with a tail hitting an astral, or celestial, body, and breaking up, confirming my own theory that the petroglyphs of Cueva # Uno embodied a memory of a catastrophe caused by the fragmentation of a comet during some former age. Yet what evidence might we find that the former Bahaman landmass might once have been home to the same Atlantean culture?

Cayce's Psychic Quest

In 1926 Edgar Cayce, America's most famous psychic, agreed to use his psychic talents to find buried treasure on the twin-islands of Bimini, the self-styled 'gateway to the Bahamas'. The wealthy businessmen involved had asked Cayce to join them in Miami following some initial readings (all mostly missing now from the Cayce archives). However, Cayce had said that he could not easily take up temporary residence in Miami because of his practice at Virginia Beach. Moreover, in one letter he pointed out that his son was seriously ill and that he could not possibly make any long journeys until the boy had regained his full health.

Edgar Cayce and his business associates never did find any buried treasure on Bimini, even though the psychic made his only ever visit to the island in February 1927. However, both during the psychic investigations and afterwards Cayce now began to refer to Bimini as a surviving fragment of a great landmass called Poseidia, itself a surviving portion of a great continent called Atlantis. He predicted that parts of Poseidia would start to rise off Bimini in 'sixty-eight and sixty-nine, not so far away'. This led to a concentration of effort by the Association of Research and Enlightenment (ARE), the active arm of the Edgar Cayce Foundation, to find evidence of Atlantis in the shallow waters around Bimini, and in the summer of 1968 this culminated in the discovery of rectangular foundations (the so-called 'temple site') in the metre-deep waters off Andros, the largest island in the Bahamas, as well as the so-called Bimini Road site, located off Paradise Point, North Island.

Thus began a relationship between Atlantis and the Bahamas which has continued now for nearly 35 years, with as many as 60 sites of possible archaeological interest being noted in its shallow waters. By far the greatest concentration are found on the south-western corner of the horseshoe-shaped Great Bahama bank which, although almost entirely submerged today, was still being swallowed up by the ocean as late as 3000-2000 BC. Described by J. Manson Valentine, the great underwater explorer as the 'mother lode' of the Bahamas, they face out across the extremely deep Old Bahama Channel towards Cuba, and their presence seems to hint at a connection in prehistory between these two enormous landmasses. As early as the 1950s light aircraft pilots flying in and out of Cuba from Miami reported seeing what appeared to be walls and buildings in the waters north of the Cuban mainland.

There is no question that if the Bahaman landmass did once support a prehistoric culture, then it was also present on Cuba as well. Carved petroglyphs, with skylights in their ceilings to let in sunlight, stone cairns and age-old human bones have been found in submerged caves not only on the Great Bahama Bank, but also on its more northerly neighbour, the Little Bahama Bank. They bear striking similarities to the decorated caves of Cuba which are at least several thousand years old, and plausibly much older still. Whoever inhabited these sites were the descendants of those who survived the cataclysm, and those who went on to become the ruling class of the Mesoamerican peoples such as the Olmec, Maya, Quiche, Toltecs and Aztecs. Here somewhere is the origins of the Atlantis myth, and Cuba holds the key to its re-discovery, and one day we will have all the answers. Whether the stone structures discovered by ADC in the Yucatan Channel do turn out to be remnants of lost Atlantis remains to be seen. All we can hope is that the full extent of the finds is researched and documented, allowing people to make up their own minds on whether the greatest enigma of the ancient world has finally been solved.

GATEWAY TO ATLANTIS by Andrew Collins is published by Carroll and Graf, and is available from the website

http://www.andrewcollins.com/page/articles/atlantiscuba.htm

want to know more......

Atlantis in Cuba? .....Page 28

by Luis Mariano Fernandez

Source:Una mirada a Guanahacabibes, a Supplement to the Electronic Edition of the Guerrilla Newspaper Organ of the Provincial Committee of the Party in Pine River. Translated with the assistance of IM Translator, Babelfish and six years of public school Spanish.

On this Topic:Water1.html,Water19.html, Water20.html, Water23.html, Water27.html

The high depth submarine robot Rov descended to 600 meters (1,968 feet) as its camera focused on dark constructions in the middle of nowhere.

In the solitude of the abyss an incomprehensible historical encounter was taking place. Structures very precisely cut, passages, tunnels and temples with diverse symbols arose like ghosts in a place where officially, no human beings had ever lived.

The enclave, surrounded in excessive secrecy until today, has been christened by the scientists as a "MEGA" city. In this investigative news article we have submerged ourselves in its mysteries, offering in a world-wide exclusive the images captured by the submarine camera of the Exploramar Project....

"Although it seems incredible; a Caribbean Atlantis, it is not a preposterous idea. Especially after a group of investigators discovered symmetrical stone structures submerged to 600 meters of depth in close proximity to each other off the coasts of Cuba.

According to the investigators these structures are similar to the remains of streets, pyramids and buildings, and could have been constructed over 6 thousand years ago. The discovery was made in 2000 and now an expedition integrated by scientists of several specialties, intends to investigate the marine bottoms with a submarine robot across from the Guanacabibes Peninsula near the Western portion of Cuba.

Images of the ocean floor, taken a year ago, confirmed the presence of great granite blocks in circular and perpendicular formations, mostly between two and five meters in length. On the visible face of some of the blocks were marks that appeared to be drawings.

This intriguing discovery has encouraged the hypothesis by some that Cuba could have been united to the American continent by means of a narrow earth bridge connected to the Peninsula of Yucatan. According to the investigators it is possible that we have before us a submerged city of the preclassic period that could been have populated by an advanced civilization similar to that of Teotihuacan in Mexico.

The idea of a city submerged in the Caribbean for some brings memories of the stories of the Greek philosopher Plato on vanished Atlantis....."

Thus, on my return to Cuba, we were notified March 30 of exclusive right for an interview by the Milenio3 program of our partner Iker Jim�nez of the Network SER.

All of Spain is buzzing over the sensational news and findings. The discovery was made back in the year 2000, but the information concerning the discovery has been slow to arrive in Europe.

The person responsible for this discovery is the oceanographer and engineer Paulina Zelitsky, a Soviet expert - nationalized Canadian who during the cold war dedicated herself to the construction of secret submarine bases and who at the present time is employed on civil engineering and topography projects of the oceanic floor.

Several years ago,(1998) Zelitsky reached certain notoriety in the mass media when she located the resting place of the Battleship Maine, whose sinking ignited the Spanish-American War. The ship was located about five kilometers off the Coast of Havana at almost a thousand meters of depth. Zelitsky�s equipment was able to capture impressive video of the shipwreck location.

In 2000, the team of investigators announced the finding of a great earthen plateau with clear signs of being what seemed to be enormous architectonic structures of human origin partially covered by sand. From above, the forms suggested pyramids, streets and buildings. The discovery fired the imaginations of those who believed in the existence of Atlantis.

Aside from the sonar signals that were used for this discovery a camcorder was also sent down to the archaeological deposit. Thanks to these images they have been able to find out enough anomalous data to stimulate interest in the discovery. Most of these blocks, that are at a depth of 600 meters, have gigantic dimensions, reaching to five meters of height (16.5 feet)and several tons of weight.

It has been confirmed that the stones were cut, carved and polished to make fit them with others and thus to form greater structures. Concerning the strange inscriptions, which are similar to Egyptian hieroglyphics, very little is known except that they are very abundant and that they are in almost all the parts of the deposit. There have appeared as well, symbols and drawings whose meaning is not known.

Most of the big television networks are waiting for an opportunity to investigate this unprecedented material. Luckily, Paulina Zelitsky has permitted me an exclusive right - no other mass media has the material or has had access to the images recorded by the submarine video camera.

There are Pyramids and Streets Nearly � Mile Below the Surface

"Actually it is a question of a few extremely peculiar structures .... that have captured the imagination of all of us� commented the Cuban geologist Manuel Iturralde after having investigated the site of the discovery for some time.

"It turns out to be, to me, very complicated to explain this from a geological point of view �, he added, after a long interview coordinated with him in the city of Havana.

The examination and analysis of rock samples that will be collected in the next phase will provide more insight on the formation, that we must remember is located opposite to the Peninsula of Guacabibes, in the extreme West of Cuba.

Iturralde, who works with the National Museum of Natural History of Havana, has been attached to the Exploramar Project - the only one authorized by Fidel Castro to expend funds for the tracking of the marine floor off the Island - in an effort to understand the enigma of polished granite rocks of geometric form. The structures, that remind one of Egyptian pyramids, streets and other types of constructions, lying at more than 600 meters of depth in an area of more than 20 square kilometers.

The Exploramar Project has suggested that it could belong to a civilization that colonized the American continent thousands of years ago, probably located on an island that sank to great depth by a natural cataclysm, perhaps an earthquake.

SCIENTIFIC SKEPTICISM

This theory, and its inevitable parallelism with the mythical missing city of the Atlantis, has been received with skepticism on the part of the international scientific community, that considers only slightly convincing and believable the hypothesized antiquity, calculated to at least 6 thousand years by Exploramar.

Some European archaeologists indicated that the rocks, found in July, 2000 while Exploramar was searching for treasure and sunken Spanish galleons, could be a natural formation of limestone (a curious conclusion when nobody still could have gained access to the images recorded by the oceanic engineer). But the study and the conclusions of the geologist, Iturralde that there is no natural, obvious explanation for the formations has reinforced the Zelitsky team's hypothesis.

Wednesday 26 of March 10 a.m. National Hotel - of Havana-

It was my last day in Cuba. For eight days I have been trying to locate Manuel Iturralde of the National Museum of Natural History of the Havana. It was an impossible mission.

Iturralde, for almost two weeks, was unavailable on excavations in the center of Cuba. A telephone call to my room at the Hotel Arenas Doradas de Varadero coming from the National Museum the previous day communicated to me that the geologist would be at a Geology Conference at the National Hotel of Havana in the morning and that I might be able to receive an hour of his time.

Camera, microphones and tripod in hand, I appeared in the mythical and famous hotel to conduct an interesting interview with Manuel Iturralde, considered to be the foremost geologist of Cuba. There, he talked to me about what has been a most fascinating adventure and investigation.

Manuel, two years ago a stupendous discovery was made off the coasts of Cuba, which seems to be the remains of a submerged city. How did this story begin?

The discovery took place when they were actually making investigations in the sea to great depths of between 300 to 500 meters in search of ships and galleons. A scan of the sea bottom using sidescan radar was in progress.

In these sidescan scanner images a few slightly unusual figures appeared. It attracted the attention of the researcher who was at the head of this group, Paulina Zelitsky. This group is called Exploramar, an archaeological project searching within the territorial waters of Cuba.

She was very interested in the anomalies and made new routes with this sonar to perfect the images that had been obtained. It was then that the news went out that it appeared a submerged city had been found in the West of Cuba.

Five or six months after this news and the beginning of the investigations I was called to join the group as a geologist, because in the group everyone else was an archaeologist.

As a geologist I examined all the material that was produced by the sidescan sonar. Also, I examined all the detailed bathymetric data in order to construct a detailed topography of the formation. I began by processing all of that information.

It is true that down there at heart of the sea, are structures that sometimes have dimensions of several hundreds meters that are unusual, for which we we do not have a simple, direct explanation. We are continuing to investigate the morphology of the sea bottom --the action of the sea currents that are very intense, etc, etc .

How did these structures form at the bottom of the sea? Were more investigations done later?

A clear explanation does not exist of how these structures formed by natural means. Offered this point of view as geologist, I admit the possibility that it could be a question of not natural, that is to say structures, created by man, or some intelligent entity.

Subsequent to these findings some samplings of rocks at the heart of the sea have been made, isolated samplings, that is to say, that have not become part of a systematic investigation.

In the zone where those megaliths were found, as Paulina has labeled them, strange rocks appear. Some of them are not typical of Cuba. This leads one to think of two hypothesis: one can be that this has fallen there, and the other that all this could be part of the manmade constructions.

Also there have appeared, dispersed, a material that seems to be volcanic ash and, the information that a Soviet oceanographic research ship in the year 1967 reported to have dredged samples of volcanic ash from that place of the basic character of that formed by a submerged volcano.

Anyway this information is not confirmed and in my opinion in that location there cannot have been any type of volcano. Therefore these works and these investigations open a whole lot of mysteries on the region.

What is the significance of these structures at depths of more than 500 meters approximately two to three kilometers to the west of Cuba? At the moment we only have hypotheses to work with...

In some Cuban and American mass media it has been said that there are pyramids and streets at 600 meters of depth..... What is true in all this?

That is an interpretation. As a geologist I can say that there are high linear structures that could perfectly agree with streets and pyramids.

These high structures have rectangular forms. They form squares and some elements that are repeated from one to another one.

Also there is a semi ellipsoid form at the center, there is a perfect square with a cross in the center.... that is to say, that are a series of structures for which I do not find a simple or natural explanation.

Has it been possible to extract something of that place to be able to examine it and to date it?

No, that is at a depth of 500 to 700 meters. The power to do that requires an advanced technology that we do not possess. Therefore, what we know is its form, we have no direct data of its composition neither have we been able to explore it nor to excavate given that extreme depth.

The idea is to be able to extract samples of those structures, but this is also quite complex, because it seems that the blocks are of granite, and to perforate granite to that depth is very difficult.

What hypothesis are you working under?

Until now we have three hypotheses, that are most possible. First it is that this is of natural origin.

Second it is that it could be artificial. And the third hypothesis, is that it is a combination of the previous ones, that they are natural structures that have been transformed by intelligent beings.

At the present moment we cannot select any one of the three. I consider that it is necessary to make more additional investigations, but until now that has been impossible. This requires an investment and a very great financing that we do not have.

This company with which we are working, the ADC Sea, is looking for that financing to continue working. Meanwhile we are in a position of waiting.

It has been spoken of as the mythical and legendary "Atlantis".....

Good.... (laughter)... I do not participate in this part of the discussion. My subject is a geologic one. But good, Atlantis is a very exciting subject and quite a lot literature exists on it.

And not only of Atlantis, but the fact of the cultures of the Yucatan nowadays it is possible that what is still preserved of the natives of these places-- perhaps the Olmec or some very primitive civilization of the Yucatan � the North part of Central America - had its origin � according to them - in an island that sank by means of a cataclysm.

This island was called Atlantic�. There does not exist in Cuba any feature, any fact, any archaeological residue that is related to the developed cultures of Mesoam�rica.

Manuel, how has the scientific community reacted to this surprising archaeological finding?

There have been varied and conflicting reactions. I presented this topic at a conference of Geophysics in 2002 before a scientific community from many countries and the truth is that there were no objections.

The questions and comments that were made to me were about how to keep on investigating and supporting this matter and how to go forward.

Among archaeologists there are a variety of opinions, but the archaeologists for example of the Mexican University of Veracruz are fascinated by this subject. In general a favorable attitude exists towards this discovery although, frankly I say to you, Luis that at this moment it is a difficult matter to resolve.

If this were on the terrestrial surface the problem already would have been solved. This is a very difficult location to access. We would need robots, manned minisubmarines, etc etc, and sure this puts an inaccessible limit on us. The information level that we have is currently not sufficient to give answers.

Where are these structures located exactly?

That is to the west of Cuba, in the Guanacabibes peninsula. Two kilometers towards the Yucatan channel near San Antonio. In the vicinity of San Antonio there is a mountain that arises from the bottom of the sea.

Between this mountain and the insular platform of Cuba is a submerged or submarine valley where these structures are located. It is interesting to note that these structures are located within a valley. If one were choosing a place to live the valley would be attractive because it would be protected on all sides by the mountains.

A river could have existed in this place that is split in two parts. These formation are located near the valley.

When human and technological access to those structures is achieved might we be face to face with a city much older than we would have imagined?

Perhaps Luis Mariano, there is the biggest problem of this investigation. At the speed that the movements of the area take place today, and of the average in the world, it would be necessary for 50 or 60 thousand years to pass to submerge a city to a depth of 700 meters.

Then this puts us to the limit of the rational human being able to make constructions of importance. What could have happened? Since there has been a very sudden descent of the bottom of the sea, this can be related to the eruption of a volcano, but there are no volcanos, nevertheless as I was saying to you earlier we have found volcanic ash that does not have any terrestrial explanation.

If the age of these formations is 50 thousand or more years we are entering something incomprehensible, at least for our official history...

Concluding the interview with Iturralde, and without my foreknowledge, a surprise came later. Paulina Zelitsky, the discoverer of this anomaly, also was at the Hotel as a guest of the National Congress of Geology.

Back to Iturralde, --Not only did he give me an interview but he took me to his home in the eastern part of Havana to show all the details to me, the data, the maps, the photographs, the sidescan sonar graphs, all he had accumulated in his investigation of three years on this sensational finding.

This investigator, Manuel Iturralde, by the way, has offered very few interviews to the mass media, in fact, I believe that this one has been the first time that he received a Spanish or European journalist.

At the end of the interview and the visit at his home, he showed me the images recorded by a submarine camera of this "submerged city".

"No mass media or journalist has them, make good use of them",he said to me. I remained frozen, perplexed. I will never be able to thank him enough.

These video recordings are being studied and analyzed by the Center of Marine Archaeology and Anthropology of the Cuban Academy of Sciences. The work of these scientists is centered on the symbols and inscriptions that appear on these stone monoliths.

But lets go to the content of that other interview.....

Paulina, you were the discoverer of this "submerged city". How did it all happen?

We were investigating the channel located between Cuba and the Yucatan Peninsula which is a very interesting area with different characteristics.

While making soundings of the bottom using sidescan radar we realized that we had come upon a plain of thousands and thousands of meters covered with a very fine white sand, like silica, and which was somewhat boring.

Thus we went like that for three or four days sweeping nothing else except that very fine white desert sand. Suddenly we saw in our maps the appearance of very symmetrical structures and as if they were man made.

Within this clean sand area of silica we had been totally scared, in a strange way, because we thought in the beginning that perhaps we had come across submarine facilities of the United States or another very great world-wide power that could construct blocks of structures in totally deserted areas.

We were first in investigating the bottom of this part of the sea because it is very deep. The depth ranges from 500 up to 3000 meters (1.8 miles) and until even today very few investigators possess the instruments that could fulfill this task.

What is it exactly that is there on the marine bottom?

There are constructed gigantic structures of very large blocks of perfectly geometric forms, as if they were cut, and installed one on top of another, with a perfection that I believe that even today we cannot achieve.

Therefore, they are artificial?

They do not belong to the geology of the place. I cannot logically say to you from where they arrived because I do not have that answer. But as I say to you, Luis, they do not belong to geology of the place.

Paulina, perhaps the remains of an old civilization? There are some investigators who associate these structures with the missing Atlantis...

When we published news of this discovery for the first time the University of Veracruz was interested in our work as well as in the images that we had recorded of these structures at the bottom of the sea..

Specifically, the Institute of Anthropology of this University invited to me to excavations that they were making on artifacts and ruins of the Olmec civilization.

When they saw those submarine images they found similarities and parallels with the ruins found in those excavations that this Institute was carrying out.

Its interest also was peaked because the native Olmecs and other first civilizations all have a morphology that marked their arrival from an eastern continent.

It means this-- that they arrived from the direction of Cuba, and speculates that the city was destroyed and sank due to a great earthquake.

The study of their symbols and alphabet indicates to us that they belonged to three groups who survived. One of these groups arrived at the coast of Veracruz, --those we assume are the Olmecs.

Others arrived in Central America and traveled to the Pacific coast, and these families created the civilization of the Am�ricas as we know it today because they distributed all their knowledge.

When these anthropologists saw the submarine images of this "city" and saw on some stone monoliths some symbols and inscriptions they identified with the Olmecs, they were very surprised.

Paulina, is it a certainty that there are pyramidal structures down there?

Yes clearly, and I am going to demonstrate that to you. But there are many types and classes of structures, not just pyramids. There is even an enormous pedestal with a structure around it that could be a large perfect solar clock.

What is your theory?

Nobody knows where Olmecs came from. Nevertheless they have a very ancient art, perhaps more than 3,500 years old. One does not know its origin or its antiquity.

But all agree that they came from the East. It is very probable that some islands that sank with these established civilizations were of the Olmecs.

Some speak of the Atlantis and in Mexico they speak of Atlantic�. I believe that perhaps these structures belong to the Olmec civilization.

We believe, and many scientists are in agreement, that perhaps the Yucatan Peninsula was united by a great mountain range to Cuba and probably there, lived a native population who constructed a city. A natural catastrophe, for example an earthquake, could have caused the disaster and the collapse of the city.

What is the immediate future of this fascinating project and investigation?

We plan to go out on an expedition this summer to investigate in depth this mountain range, cataloguing and identifying each of these structures.

The plans are to work together as a team with the University of Veracruz and to continue with the process of identification of this discovery. There have already been some contacts with National Geographic and Discovery Channel to finance part of this project.

Conclusion

What exactly is this city? Of what epoch is it? Who constructed it? To what civilization does it belong? What do the symbols and inscriptions mean that appear on these stones monoliths?

Is it a question really of the remains of the mythical and legendary Atlantis? Does some type of connection exists between this submerged city and the civilization of Egypt?

Might these archaeological ruins belong to the unknown Olmec civilization? You have to ask and more questions. It is clear that this exciting matter is raising the interest of the whole international scientific and archaeological community.

We will have to wait for the new investigations of the Project Exploramar to understand more on the mysterious origin of this impressive unprecedented find. And, probably, as a result of these investigations � as says the geologist Iturralde - � it will change our knowledge of human beings and the evolution of the Americas .... �