UFO'S of UAP'S, ASTRONOMIE, RUIMTEVAART, ARCHEOLOGIE, OUDHEIDKUNDE, SF-SNUFJES EN ANDERE ESOTERISCHE WETENSCHAPPEN

(Note: photo above is not the fossil in this article)

Scientists of all disciplines generally accept that the Earth is about 4.5 billion years old. Paleontologists are dependent upon fossils to determine when the first life appeared on Earth, so fossilized microorganisms found in Australian Apex chert rocks that date back 3.465 billion years are generally considered to be the first confirmed life forms. That may change significantly as experts analyze a rock found in Quebec, Canada, with tiny fossilized filaments and other evidence suggesting they were made by bacteria that lived between 3.75 and 4.28 billion years ago. If this is confirmed, it pushes the birth of life on Earth back 300 million years to very near the birth of the planet itself. Does this qualify as a “This changes everything!” moment?

You never know which rock will change everything.

“This means life could have begun as little as 300 million years after Earth formed. In geological terms, this is quick – about one spin of the Sun around the galaxy.”

Dr Dominic Papineau, an associate professor in geochemistry and astrobiology at University College London and lead author of a report on the discovery published in the journal Science Advances, sounds pretty excited about the fossil in a press release. Of course, that could be because he found it – he collected it, along with others, from a former seabed in Quebec’s Nuvvuagittuq Supracrustal Belt (NSB) in 2008. The canhces of finding ancient fossils are excellent here – the NSB was once near a system of hydrothermal vents heated by magma. Besides panspermia and biblical creationism, hydrothhemal vests are thought to be places where heat and chemicals could react to form life that might live on metals and elements on the sea floor.

“One thing that I think is amazing is the sheer size of the tectonic branching structure, which is several millimetres, if not more than a centimetre in size.”

While he found the rock in 2008, this is the first time Papineau was able to use modern techniques to study what is inside them. His team sliced it with a diamond-encrusted saw, creating sections as thin as 100 microns -- about the thickness of paper but double the thickness of previous cuts. This allowed a computer to create a 3D model showing larger structures inside the rock. Papineau told The Guardian he could see tiny filaments, knobs and tubes of an iron oxide called haematite that today are made by bacteria living around hydrothermal vents that survive on iron-based chemical reactions. However, this structure resembling a stem with branches filled with distorted spheres appeared to be more than a single life form.

“I think what we are seeing is a microbial community – that they were working in concert and as the filaments grew from groups of these cells, they got intermingled and made a bigger, thicker haematite filament.”

Taken together with the mineralized chemical byproducts in the rock, Papineau and his colleagues are convinced these are microbial life forms that existed 4.25 billion years ago -- just 300 million years after Earth was formed. And yes, this is a game-changing discovery.

“Pushing the clock back is very important, because it tells us that it takes a very short time for life to emerge on a planetary surface. Very quickly after [Earth formed] there was microbial life taking place, eating iron and sulphur in these hydrothermal vents.”

All it took was one ...

While it adds to Earth’s history, what Papineau is more excited about is that this means the search for alien life forms can be extended to extremely young exoplanets. Of course, this assumes the age and origin of his fossils is confirmed by other scientists, and some think it could just be a chemical metamorphism caused by the magma heat released from the hydrothermal vents.

So, this discovery of a potentially 4.25-billion-year-old fossil may not have changed everything yet, but it’s already affecting a lot of exciting things.

Detail of the microfossils that scientists believe are evidence of life existing 300m years after Earth’s formation.

Photograph: UCL

In the November 1981 issue of the Flying Saucer Review there is a curious case that was sent in a letter directly to the magazine by a witness who claims that she had had a very odd and terrifying experience out over the ocean with a massive, cigar-shaped unidentified object. The unnamed witness claims that at the time she had been working for NATO as an English language secretary based in Paris, and was aboard an Air Canada DC-8 aircraft on a military sanctioned mission with a party of fifty NATO personnel who were en route From Paris to Canada for the NATO Ministerial Meetings in Ottawa. At the time, the plane was deep over the Atlantic Ocean and the witness was in a window seat looking out enjoying the view of sky when something very strange and very large caught her attention. She describes it this way:

I was just reaching down to take a book from my hold-all, and was astonished to glimpse below the ‘plane something dark and absolutely tremendous that stood out in vivid contrast to the brightness all around. I could not believe my eyes. I pressed close to the window in unbelief and there, almost beneath the DC-8, was a gigantic dark grey ‘torpedo’. It seemed menacing and frightening, and I had the impression that it was stationary. It was utterly unlike anything that I had ever seen in my whole life. It looked as though made of steel. No portholes or windows were visible. No wings or projections. Nothing but the long perfect torpedo form, with its bullet-shaped head, and the rear end which was cut off sharply and squarely. The monster – and I emphasize that it was this terrifying size that impressed me – was well below us. I thought maybe 2,000 meters or so below us, but of course I had no way of being able to gauge this or to estimate the size of the thing. I looked down again quickly at the monster, and saw that a swathe of tiny clouds was beginning to pass over it, though it remained visible through them for a few seconds before being lost to my sight.

The sighting greatly disturbed the witness, but when she looked around the other passengers on the mostly empty flight were either asleep or lost in their books or thoughts, so it did not seem as if anyone else had seen that behemoth in the sky. At the time, she decided not to mention it, afraid that no one would believe her and that she would be ridiculed. The witness at the time had no real knowledge of the UFO phenomenon, and was rather confused and frustrated, but years later she would read several books on the subject that convinced her that she was not crazy. She would also begin to link what she had seen with a more frightening aspect of her experience that had happened after she had seen the object. She says of this:

After my glimpse of the monster ‘torpedo,’ I sat there brooding on it for half an hour or so, as I recall, when suddenly the DC- 8 started to shudder and pitch up and down violently, nosing steeply upwards, then steeply downwards, and this went on for a long, long time. I might explain that I had often encountered turbulence and ‘air-pockets’ when travelling by airplane, but it had never been anything remotely like this. This was as though we were in a gigantic lift that was shooting up and down madly. And, as though that was not enough, there now came a succession of reports like cannon-fire or thunder, filling the cabin.

Meanwhile the plane continued to shudder and ‘buck’ violently, and each time it came down I had the sensation that it was going to break in half. Throughout all this, everybody in the passenger’s cabin sat there petrified, absolutely silent, white-faced. After a while of this, I felt such panic that I rushed up front in search of a stewardess, and shouting “What’s going on? I’m scared!” I lifted a curtain in front of what seemed to be a sleeping-berth, and found a stewardess lying on the bed there, her hands covering her eyes as though she were weeping. She gave no response to my shouts, and all around there was total silence still, apart from the sound of the engines, overlaid by the repeated ‘claps of thunder’ and the continued bucking up and down of the plane.

I went back to my seat, and suddenly found myself bathed in perspiration. Every pore in my body seemed to be hard at work. And yet I noticed that the light dress I was wearing was still completely dry. A second time, I ran forward to the stewardesses’ quarters but there was nobody there. I hammered on the door leading to the cockpit, and shouted again, asking what was happening, as I was scared to death. The other stewardess came out and looked at me as though I were an idiot, and for a while said nothing. Then, calmly, she announced ‘Ladies and Gentlemen, do not be alarmed: the cabin is being depressurized.’ Shortly afterwards, the Captain was heard to make the same announcement.

Although at the time she had not put the two events together, upon learning more about UFOs she said that she was fairly convinced that they were intimately connected. Additionally, she expresses suspicion that the crew may have even been trying to cover something up about the incident. She explains:

I should like very much to know whether all that I have just described, about the violent behavior of the aircraft and the loud reports, is explicable as being due to the process of ‘depressurization’ and, if so, what are the circumstances that are likely to have made it necessary for such alarming and drastic steps to be taken? Is this sort of thing usual and normal – as the calm behaviour of the second-mentioned stewardess seemed to indicate? And why, in that case, had the other stewardess – as it seemed – been weeping? Was this simply because she, like all the rest of us, found the turbulence just a bit too alarming? ‘Or is it possible that she was still suffering from shock after seeing the gigantic ‘torpedo’? It certainly would be interesting to know the answers to these questions.

As for the plane’s crew, there was only the one stewardess who seemed upset. What is certain is that the pilots up in the nacelle certainly would have had abundant time in which to see the ‘cigar,’ as it cut slightly diagonally across their route from their port side and well below them. No explanation or comment whatsoever about the ‘cigar’ was given by the Captain or any other crew member, and no statement was made by the authorities when we landed in Canada. We were flying under NATO auspices and in that sense we were under military control. In such circumstances it would not be surprising if the cockpit crew and the stewardesses were less forthcoming about a UFO than perhaps they might have been, were it an ordinary passenger flight.

What was going on here? Another case involving a similarly enormous craft that had physical effects on a military vessel allegedly occurred on July 2, 1971, rather fittingly in the Bermuda Triangle, southeast of Florida. On this day, the U.S. Navy aircraft carrier, USS John F. Kennedy CVA-67 was returning to Norfolk, Virginia after completing a two-week operational readiness exercise in the Caribbean, where they were to take some leave time before heading off for duty in the Mediterranean for six months. This main witness in this account, who reported it to the National UFO Reporting Center, was at the time assigned to the communications center monitoring teletypes printing the Fleet Broadcasts. On this evening at around 8:30 p.m., his equipment suddenly began going haywire, after which he soon learned that all communications on the ship were malfunctioning. Soon after this, there was someone shouting that something was hovering over the ship, and when he went up with some other personnel they saw something their training had never prepared them for. The witness would say:

As we looked up, we saw a large, glowing sphere. Well, it seemed large, however, there was no point of reference. That is to say if the sphere were low; say 100 feet above the ship, then it would have been about two to three hundred feet in diameter. If it said 500 feet about the ship then it would have been larger. At arm’s length it was the size of a beach ball. It made no sound that I could hear. The light coming from it wasn’t too bright, about half of what the sun would be. It pulsated from yellow to orange slowly. We didn’t get to look at for more than about 20 seconds because General Quarters (Battle stations) was sounding and the Communication Officer was in the passageway telling us to get back into the Comm Center. We returned and stayed there (that was out battle station). We didn’t have much to do because all the communication was still out.

After about 20 minutes, the teletypes started printing correctly again. We stayed at General Quarters for about another hour, then secured. I didn’t see or hear of any messages going out about the incident. Over the next few hours, I talked to a good friend that was in CIC (combat information center) who was a radar operator. He told me that all the radar screens were just glowing during the time of the incident. I also talked to a guy I knew that worked on the Navigational Bridge. He told me that none of the compasses were working and that the medics had to sedate a boatswain’s mate that was a lookout on the signal bridge. I figured this was the one yelling it was God. It was ironic that of the 5,000 men on a carrier, that only a handful actually saw this phenomenon. This was due to the fact that flight Ops had just be completed a short time before this all started and all the flight deck personnel were below resting. It should be noted that there are very few places where you can go to be out in the open air aboard a carrier.

He would soon after learn that not only the communications equipment, but many other pieces of equipment onboard, including even aircraft had ceased to function when the mysterious object had been looming there. Even more ominously, it would also seem that there were “men in trench coats” soon aboard interviewing witnesses on what they had seen and that there was an air of secrecy about the whole thing. The witness would explain of all of this:

From what I could learn, virtually all electronic components stopped functioning during the 20 minutes or so that whatever it hovered over the ship. The two Ready CAPs (Combat Air Patrol), which were two F-4 Phantoms that are always ready to be launched, would not start. I heard from the scuttlebutt (slang – rumor mill) that three or four “men in trenchcoats” had landed, and were interviewing the personnel that had seen this phenomenon. I was never interviewed, maybe because no one knew that I had seen it. A few days later, as we were approaching Norfolk, the Commanding and Executive Officers came on the closed-circuit TV system that we had. They did this regularly to address the crew and pass on information. During this particular session, the Captain told us how well we did on the ORE and about our upcoming deployment to the Mediterranean. At the very end of his spiel, he said “I would like to remind the crew, that certain events that take place aboard a Naval Combatant Ship, are classified and are not to be discussed with anyone without a need to know”. This was all the official word I ever received or heard of the incident.

An account that involves an even more gargantuan craft purportedly occurred on October 24, 1989, with a report made by a sailor aboard the Naval submarine USS Memphis (SSN-698), operating out of Cape Canaveral, Florida. At the time they were on Special Assignments protecting the Space Program, on patrol about 150 miles of the Florida coast when the submarine began experiencing a deluge of technical problems. Numerous electronics systems were going haywire, communications were totally shut down, tanks were blowing out of control, navigation ability was lost, and even the controls in the reactor were on the fritz. It was a very dangerous situation, and so they surfaced and went to diesel engines. The witness says of what happened next:

It was raining and the entire sky was red like a red neon sign. I saw a large inverted V-shaped UFO off the port side. The executive officer told me to stand fast and he would speak to the captain. In a minute, the captain appeared on the tower and asked me for a distance to the craft. The laser range finder determined the closest point was 200 meters, and the farthest point was 1,000 meters off the port. The UFO was not perpendicular to our ship but at about a 45′ angle.

This huge vessel was over a half-mile across. The UFO made a half-circle around our ship then passed across the stern causing our electronics systems to go crazy. We had permanent damage in communications and the sonar room. As the craft flew over the stern, I could see the rain stop under its red glow. The water seemed to rise almost afoot as the UFO passed over silently. When the UFO finished its swing across the stern it paused – the sky got brighter red and it simply moved off at tremendous speed inside 15 seconds. When the UFO left, our boat returned to normal with the exception of the radio and sonar. We did a quick system check and the captain ordered us to return to reactor power and get underway.

He then explains that after they reached port they were pulled aside by their superiors and put into what he calls “protective custody.” The atmosphere was apparently very intense, and they proceeded to be told the “official story” and that they should not talk about what they had seen. The witness would say of this:

We reached port in about 7 hours where I was taken into “protective custody.” Two enlisted men and I agreed we had witnessed a real UFO. I was the one who shot it with a laser range finder, so I was the only one that had its exact sizes. I shot that vessel as it hovered and I got solid readings, not spotty like I would on debris. We were in holding for about three hours when an officer from the Air Force arrived and gave us a line of bull about an exploding weather satellite. The Navy then transferred virtually everyone on the crew to new assignments. This included the captain, the executive officer and the entire crew. They were split up which almost never happens unless one of them gets a promotion or a new command, neither of which happened.

It seems to be a pattern that such incidents are swept under the carpet, only adding to the eerie vibe of such cases. What was going on in any of these cases? Are there these massive craft roaming about over the oceans of our world? What are they trying to say with these physicsl effects they have put forth? It is hard to say, and these remain a very curious corner of the UFO phenomenon indeed.

Sitting out at a place called Chitose, on Japan’s northern island of Hokkaido, is Chitose Air Base, a Japan Air Self-Defense Force base and an integral base for monitoring Japan’s maritime borders with Russia. Back in 1947, the United States Armed Forces had taken over the base in the wake of World War II, and it was primarily under the control of the United States Army Air Forces, and later the United States Air Force Fifth Air Force. From July 1, 1947 to September 16, 1947, it was also the center of a very strange flap of UFO phenomena that has never been explained.

On July 1, 1947, a strange radar target was picked up 16 miles north of the base on a course of 180 degrees, moving at 500 m.p.h at an altitude of approximately 9,000 feet. The target sharply reversed course to 360 degrees and was tracked out to a range of 28 miles, before abruptly changing course again to 240 degrees, then reversing and returning to its original position before fading out of range. During the duration of the incident, the object seemed to not only defy known physics and technology at the time, but also break into two smaller objects, before merging back together again. A portion of the official report reads:

In the case of the pick-up on 1 July 1947 it was indicated as being more than one object. The size was comparable to that of the response received from four P-51 type aircraft. When this target initially reversed course at point A’ it broke up into two responses and then again merged into one large response on its outbound course.

There could be found no origin for the mystery object and no known aircraft were supposed to be operating in the area at the time. Two more radar contacts of this nature were picked up on August 29 and September 16 of that year, with the September incident showing something moving at supersonic speeds and showing maneuverability far beyond what was known at the time. The official report would conclude on this:

The speed indicated in the last report seems unreasonable for piloted aircraft since it was well into the supersonic range. The target, if an aircraft, would require an extremely large fuel supply for this speed. If rocket propelled, it is hard to visualize its operation for a long enough period of time to enable it to return to its base. The cable report of this last sighting indicated that further details, including weather, would follow. Upon receipt of this information a better evaluation may be possible. Present information does not permit a definite evaluation that all objects reported were either aircraft or airborne missiles but does support the conclusion that they were not natural phenomena. Great stress was given by the reporting agency to the high degree of proficiency of the radar operators and controllers in each case. An operator of even moderate proficiency would have no trouble in differentiating between a target and weather phenomena. Frontal activity as seen on a radar screen would show depth while the reflection from a meteor exists for such a short period of time that it would probably not be distinguishable from static interference. Therefore, it appears that the incidents are not due to natural phenomena.

What was going on here? In 1952 there was a strange incident at Haneda U.S. Air Force Base, near Tokyo, where on August 5 of that year two Air Force control tower operators at the base noticed a brilliant light in the sky. This object approached the base and clearly hovered near the control tower, and it was noticed that behind the light, there was a dark circular shape four times the light’s diameter. This unidentified object apparently flitted around and did a variety of aerial maneuvers, all while being tracked both visually and by ground radar. The base was alarmed, and an F-94 interceptor was scrambled with pilot 1st Lieutenant W.R. Holder, who was unable to successfully lock onto the mysterious object as he chased it. A report on the incident would read:

The UFO was given chase by the F-94, tracked on ground radar also, and went into a series of circular maneuvers, repeated several times. At one point, the UFO suddenly raced away at a clocked speed of 300 knots (about 345 mph), dividing into three separate radar targets at spaced intervals. Contact with the UFO either by radar or visually from Haneda AFB, was maintained for over 30 minutes. During this period, scattered witnesses saw the UFO exactly where radar showed it to be. The UFO maneuvers were so clearly under intelligent control that Major Dewey Fournet, the representative of Project Blue Book at the Pentagon, elected it one of the example that would prove that UFOs are spaceships from some other planet.

The whole thing would be brushed under the carpet, the official explanation being that it had been “a light that looked like a star and false radar echoes caused by a temperature inversion layer.” The UFO study called the Condon Report, of the University of Colorado would come to the same conclusion, but some ufologists disagree, with researcher Patrick Gross stating:

This is one of the cases that the Colorado Project has considered “explained” – a star and an anomalous radar propagation. Not so. On the contrary, as a careful study of the records shows, it is a very interesting case of anomalous flying objects in the sky who fly under intelligent control and cannot be of human origin. The Colorado Project, a skeptical UFO study effort conducted for the USAF that did not want to deal with the UFO problem anymore, minimized the details of the sighting. Every little detail of the case is important. Actually, it is by forgetting and minimizing case details that this case has been turned into an “explained” case by the Colorado Project which lead to the Condon Report. Professor James McDonald, a world famous specialist of meteorology and atmospheric physics, who disagreed with the handling of UFO cases by the Condon Report, re-evaluated and re-investigated the case and demonstrated how erroneous the Condon Report conclusion on this case – and on many other cases – was. I deeply encourage the seriously interested person into reading all the documents listed above.

Who knows what was going on there. Moving ahead to 1963, we have a case from Naha Air Base, in Okinawa, Japan, with a report filed from a base personnel to NICAP. The witness, named Marty, says that he was skywatching with a partner called Frank at around 11:40 p.m. on June 26 of that year when they saw something up there in the sky that they could not explain. The witness would say of it:

It looked like nothing we had ever seen before. I positioned my binoculars for a better look. We did not use the term “UFO” at that point, but we knew the craft we saw did not match anything in the Air Force’s aircraft inventory. We saw a large, slow-moving disk traveling in a steady northerly direction–right smack over our base. We did not see the usual flashing navigation lights or red and green wing-tip lights. All pilots who fly at night must have their aircraft’s navigation lights turned on. It was not just an unusual cloud formation, flares or a weather balloon. In the Air Force, working as communications specialists at control towers and around busy flight lines, Frank and I became knowledgeable about most types of aircraft in the military inventory. It traveled at an estimated speed of one hundred knots. The craft held a steady altitude of three or four thousand feet. It had a diameter of about seventy-five feet. We saw no antennae, dome, windows or markings. It was silent and produced no engine noise. Having a disk shape, it looked as flat as a quarter. The craft’s outer surface appeared smooth, constructed of a dull, yet reflective metallic material. Its outer edges appeared razor thin.

At first they were afraid it was preparing to engage them, they decided to get out of there, but luckily it was moving away from them and they relaxed somewhat. They then climbed the building’s fire ladder to watch the strange object, which they did until it faded out of sight. They then were in confusion about what to do about what they had just seen, and when they called it in they were told that there had been no radar contacts to corroborate it. Marty began watching the skies hoping to see the object again, and after several weeks of searching in vain he was successful. He says of this:

For weeks, I spent my free time watching the night sky and hoping for another sighting. I even bought a Nikon 8mm camera. I carried it with me wherever I went—just in case. My hopes of seeing it again began to fade after several weeks. However, just as I started to think the earlier sighting was just a onetime fly-by, I saw it again. Returning to my barracks from a second shift tour at the Communications Center, I decided to relax for a while. I sat in a chair on the second floor outside landing. Propping my feet up onto a railing, I began reminiscing about the first sighting. Since I was alone, the thought scared the hell out of me. Just before 1:00 a.m. I was about to call it a night when it reappeared. A craft similar to the type Frank and I saw one month earlier. In an instant, my mind switched from a relaxed state to one of “fight or flight.” My body froze and my adrenaline level skyrocketed. My hair hackled. My heart raced. I could not move my legs. My camera—I left it in my room. In my mind, I calculated the best course of action. There I was, sitting alone in the dark outside my barracks with no one else around, except–what? Common sense soon prevailed. No light beams were shooting down at me from the craft. It became clear that it took no notice of me and was moving northward away from my position. Thank God. After a few seconds, my brain regained control of my body and I was able to move my legs. I stood and took the next logical step, I ran like hell.

Once again, no radar contacts were reported. The witness was requested to fill out an Unidentified Aircraft Report and he declined, wary of being seen as crazy. That seems to have been the end of it, and we will probably never know just what really went on out there. Indeed, all of these cases remain unsolved and mostly forgotten, but they are certainly bizarre examples of these sorts of reports going on all over the world.

Date 1: Oct 3, 2015

Date 2: June 19, 2016

Location of sighting: Volcano Popocatepetl, Mexico

I know these two videos are old, but I have never put them together in a video before so that people can compare and contrast them. Here we can see both entities in both videos are the same. The second video is the most interesting to me, due to the fact it was seconds after a major eruption at the volcano in the background, compounded by the fact its just 7 minutes after midnight...the legendary witching hour...which might be based on sightings of these alien entities, which could easily be mistaken for spirits, ghosts, demons, angels. These are alien entities who have the power to leave their bodies behind and travel in pure energy form. They are rare, and usually avoid human contact, but they have a high curiosity of anything new to them, just as we do, so...if you encounter some, they may stick around a bit to watch you too. 100% proof of energy entities existing at Popocateptl volcano.

Scott C. Waring - Taiwan

The Great Pyramid of Giza is the largest of the three great pyramids of the Giza pyramid complex. There is more mystery and allure surrounding the three main Giza Pyramids, and the Great Pyramid of Giza specifically, to the degree that there are more fundamental unanswered questions remaining than those we have answered.

[Great Pyramid of Giza, Pyramid of Khufu]

The Great Pyramid of Giza.

Credit: Nina Aldin Thune CC BY 2.5.

Regardless of what textbooks, mainstream or alternative history books alike may tell you, the fact remains that nobody knows how the Great Pyramid of Giza was built. Not conclusively.

We do not even know for certain who built it, when it was built, nor for what purpose. The Ancient Greeks believed that the pharaoh of Ancient Egypt used hundreds of thousands of slaves to build the monument. Modern Egyptologists have beliefs ranging from agreement with the Greeks, to the ideas that a smaller specialized task force of skilled artisans was sufficient.

The idea that the structure was built (or at least planned) by a Lost Civilization around the End of the Last Ice Age c.10,500 BCE is especially convincing based on the evidence. Others claim that the Great Pyramid was built by ET’s or that it was manifested directly with thought by Higher Dimensional Beings.

I have no answers to offer you.

Let us first understand and explore the incredible facts of the Great Pyramid of Giza, before we delve into such speculations.

Unparalleled Precision of the Great Pyramid of Giza

The first thing to understand about the Great Pyramid is what it used to look like.

I have a feeling that from the image above, one might get the wrong impression of this structure. It looks roughly hewn, which is not remotely the case. It is nothing short than one of the most technically precise structures ever built, even while it was literally one of the first monumental structures built by human hands, and probably is the largest structure still, by mass.

The Great Pyramid used to be cased in gleaming white limestone. It would have been a glowing white beacon visible across the desert, reflecting light for all to see, that stood in this manner for at least 3800 years (by conventional dating). Rumor has it that it was topped with a golden capstone called the Pyramidion.

It wasn’t until 1303 CE that an earthquake fractured some of the casing stones, reaving a chink in this great monuments armour, so to speak, which allowed a sultan of the Mamluk dynasty to cart them away around 1356 CE to help build the city of Cairo.

[The Great Pyramid of Giza with Original White Limestone Casing]

The Great Pyramid With It’s Original White Limestone Casing. What the Great Pyramid of Giza would have looked like with its casing in tact, before it was mined in the Middle Ages to build Cairo, with its golden capstone.

Credit: Openculture (Used without permission for educational purposes.)

Sir Flinders Petrie, a pioneering figure among Egyptologists, in the 19th century was the first scholar to take precise measurements of the dimensions of the Great Pyramid of Giza.

Around 1880-82 he estimated the dimensions of the Great Pyramid in units of the Egyptian Royal Cubit (the unit of measure used in Dynastic Egypt) at 280 royal cubits tall, with each of the four sides at the base of the pyramid measuring 440 royal cubits in length.

Each cubit was almost twice as long as a modern meter, giving the Great Pyramid estimated dimensions of 146.6 meters tall with side lengths of about 230.3 meters.

The Great Pyramid of Giza originally stood some 481.0 feet tall (146.6 m). Though with the removal of the original white limestone casing in 1356 CE by a local sultan, and its presumed capstone at some point in antiquity, it’s height was diminished about 30 feet to 449.5 ft (137 m).

The sides of the Great Pyramid of Giza are each about 230 meters in length, enclosing a surface area some 52,900 meters squared. Each of the four sides differ slightly in length, but by an incredibly small margin, which is difficult to measure precisely as measuring the actual length of the base without the original outer casing is difficult.

What is certain is that all four sides have a length at the base within mere centimetres from one another, differing by a magnitude on the order of mere ten thousandths of a percent of the total base length. Furthermore, the base of the structure is almost perfectly level, any point of the base differing from horizontal by only $pm 1.5 cm$ . [5]

It is estimated to weigh about 6 million tonnes (12,000,000,000 lbs).

Conventional theory is that it was built over a 10 to 20 year period for a pharaoh. Though this time frame is hotly contested under grounds of sheer mathematical impossibility with the technology available.

To complete the monument in 20 years they would have to place 1 block every 4.57 minutes working night and day with no variance in pace. Leaving out the fact that they couldn’t have worked this fast, nor worked through the night at all, this theory is, frankly, absurd. At least the time time frame.

The Great Pyramid of Giza consists of around 2.3 million blocks of limestone and granite, enclosing an estimated volume of 2,300,000 cubic meters, some stones weighing as much as 80 tonnes (160,000 lbs).

Each block was placed with nearly incomprehensible precision, especially when considering the sheer volume of blocks that had to be placed. All errors in alignment would have been magnified at each successive layer. Yet the space between the internal blocks is little more than a razor blade in width, and the white limestone outer casing (at least those that remains) appear to have possessed an even tighter fit. So the incredible alignment of higher levels speaks to a level of technical precision at the base we need lasers to achieve today, if we can achieve it at all on this scale.

The monument is further aligned with remarkable accuracy to the 4 cardinal directions with an error of around 1/15th of a single degree.

Equivalent to an accuracy of 4 arc minutes. However the Great Pyramid is not aligned with magnetic north, but with true north, which has staggering implications for the level of knowledge, scientific and technical understanding of the builders.

There is a slight discrepancy between the north pointed towards with a compass and the actual direction of the north pole from a given position on the globe because of the curvature of the Earth itself.

From a given latitude if you were to point directly at the North Pole you would technically be pointing into the ground, rather than along the surface, because of the curvature of the Earth. The direction that you point in towards the North Pole will be in the same vertical plane with the North Star, Polaris, at least in this age. This vertical plane, depending on latitude, will differ from magnetic north as determined by a compass.

The builders of the Great Pyramid of Giza appear to have known the difference, even though they are supposed to not even had the compass back then. Even to align it with the North Star was no mean feat. They might have used the star Thuban in those times (assuming c.2500 BCE) which was the North Star then.

Interior Chambers

There are three known chambers within the Great Pyramid.

There is a subterranean chamber which is believed to be unfinished because of its rough appearance. Followed by the so-called Queen’s Chamber which is in the center of the pyramid above the Subterranean Chamber, and the so-called King’s Chamber above the Queen’s Chamber.

There is an entrance to the Great Pyramid of Giza on the north side, which was found only after dynamite was used to blast a whole into the pyramid. Upon entering the pyramid you travel a downward-sloping passage which ultimately goes to the subterranean chamber.

Though an upward sloping passage intersects with the entryway passage called the Ascending Passage. This takes you to another intersection where one passage breaks off horizontally taking you to the Queen’s Chamber. While the ascending passage continues upwards in what is called the Grand Gallery to the so-called King’s Chamber.

Encoded Information

One of the most startling aspects of the Great Pyramid of Giza is that the builders intentionally encoded mathematical and scientific knowledge into it’s dimensions. This is a fact contested by some Egyptologists, on the grounds that it is their belief this knowledge was well beyond the level of advancement of the Ancient Egyptians at the generally accepted date of construction. They believe that these mathematical symmetries were accidental, which is a statistically irrational.

One of the encoded mathematical quantities can be found as the ratio between the Great Pyramids perimeter and height.

It doesn’t matter if we take the perimeter-to-height ratio using Egyptian royal cubits (1760/280) or in modern meters (921.2/146.6). Regardless of what unit we measure the distances in, this ratio gives us an incredibly close approximation to $2 /pi$ .

$begin{equation*} begin{align} (1760/280) = 6.28571 \ (921.2/146.6) = 6.28377 \ 2 pi = 6.28319 \ 2 big( frac{22}{7} big) = frac{44}{7} = 6.28571 end{align} end{equation*}$

The perimeter-height ratio in royal cubits is closer to $2 pi$ if we use the common fractional approximation for $pi$ as (22/7) whereas the precise estimates for the perimeter and height in meters give us $2 pi$ accurate to the nearest thousandth.

This tells us that the Ancient Egyptians at the dawn of Egyptian History knew the number $pi$ , which in itself is incredible. Other encoded numbers include relationships that refer to the Golden Mean and even possibly the Dimensions of the Earth.

[Map of the Giza Pyramid Complex]

Map of the Giza Pyramid Complex. The Great Pyramid of Giza (Pyramid of Khufu) with the Pyramid of Khafre and the Pyramid of Menkaure mimicking the stars of Orion’s belt in their position.

Credit: MesserWoland CC BY-SA 3.0

The Builders of the Great Pyramid

The story told by Egyptologists is that the Great Pyramid of Giza was built as a tomb for the second pharaoh of the illustrious Fourth Dynasty (Dynasty IV) of the Old Kingdom of Ancient Egypt: Pharaoh Khufu.

Khufu is believed by many to have been the son of Snefuru, the first pharaoh of Dynasty IV. His father had three vastly smaller pyramids built in his honor, which are nothing compared to the Great Pyramid of Giza. The pyramids of Snefuru are the Red Pyramid, Bent Pyramid, and Meidum Pyramid all built at Dahshur. These are believed to represent nearly all attempts at pyramid building before the engineering marvel that is the Great Pyramid of Giza.

[The Great Pyramid and Giza Pyramids]

The Pyramids of the Giza Plateau. From left to right the Pyramid of Menkaure, the Pyramid of Khafre and the Great Pyramid of Khufu. The three smaller foreground pyramids are subsidiary structures associated with Menkaure’s pyramid.

Credit: Ricardo Liberato CC BY-SA 2.0

Khufu was also the father of Pharaoh Khafre, to whom the second largest of the Giza Pyramids is attributed, and the grandfather of Menkaure, to whom the smallest of the three Giza Pyramids is attributed. In the image to the right, the three small pyramids in the foreground are known arbitrarily as the Queen’s Pyramids. The Great Pyramid of Giza is the most distant of the large three (furthest right), with the middle Pyramid of Khafre in the center, and the smallest Pyramid of Menkaure in the furthest to the left.

The only reason that these structures are associated with Khufu, Khafre, and Menkaure is because this was a legendary association perpetuated by the ancient Greeks. It is from this association that we approximate a date of 2560 BCE for the Great Pyramid. However, the singular piece of evidence is a suspect piece of graffiti in one of the Relieving Chambers above the King’s Chamber.

It is suspect not only because grammatical mistakes in the graffiti itself, but in the fact that it was literally the last place explored. After finding not a shred of hieroglyphic script in any other part of the pyramids interior or exterior, literally the last place they looked, a place never supposed to have been entered at all because it was structural, they had to use dynamite to blast their way through some of the most massive stone blocks in the entire pyramid, they happened to find a misspelled inscription bearing Khufu’s name. Suspicious.

Various theories about the method of construction of the Great Pyramid have been proposed. Though not a single one of them are conclusive, as none of them work. The ramp theory (that they built a ramp to transport blocks up the pyramid to the level they were working on) is the most accepted, yet it holds no water because the ramp would have been larger than the pyramid itself.

Not a single one makes logical, realistic sense. We do not know conclusively how, why, or by whom this structure was built. Thus we do not technically know when either.

A Technological Marvel

There are so many unknowns about the Great Pyramid of Giza. At this time I have nothing constructive or conclusive to add to this state of affairs. All that we can take away from the Great Pyramid is a sense of awe and wonder, at the sheer technological skill required to build it.

Do not underestimate this piece of architecture, as it cannot be ignored. The sheer size of it. The incredible precision necessary for it to fit together so snugly after placing more than 2 million blocks of stones each of which weighing a couple thousand pounds minimum.

Remember also the mathematical relationships which give rise to advanced mathematical quantities, advanced at least for 4500 years ago, just after the earliest cultures are believed to have invented writing.

Try and get a sense of the mystery, rather than reducing this structure to certainties, of which there are few. How did they do this? When by conventional chronology this was one of the first 10 large scale structures every built by human hands?

How did they reach a level of technological precision superior to every architectural monument ever created by Egyptians in almost 3000 years afterwards?