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

For all of the civilizations that have shared this lump of rock we call Earth with us, it is often a sobering thought to realize that a great many of them have actually faded into the oblivion of forgotten history, forever lost to the eternal midnight of vanished knowledge that we can no longer see into. Often these civilizations were magnificent, sprawling, and advanced, yet they have nevertheless managed to melt away into the abyssal depths of time. These are the civilizations that have for whatever reasons become lost to us, invisible to our efforts to gaze upon them and learn more about them, as hard as we try. Whether it be due to a lack of written records, their sudden disappearances, or their often baffling monuments that they have left behind, these peoples have managed to defy understanding, leaving only perplexing clues in their passing. One such civilization once lived upon the Mediterranean island of Sardinia, a once proud people who have left behind mysterious structures and monuments that are as enormous as they are inscrutable.

-Going back into the mists of time, from the Bronze Age of around the 18th century BC, the island of Sardinia, in the Mediterranean Sea, was once ruled by the mysterious Nuragic civilization. This lost culture lasted until the time of the Romans, who came to the island in 238 BC, after which the enigmatic Nuragic faded into obscurity and out of existence. The Nuragic civilization left behind no written history of their people, merely romanticized and exaggerated tales told by the Greeks and Romans, and they largely remain a perplexing mystery. One of the only legacies they did leave imprinted upon the land and its history are the many megalithic stone structures they left behind, such as the nuraghe, which are ancient fort-like structures with their purposes mysterious and long lost to time, numbering in the thousands, scattered all around the Sardinian landscape. There are also the mysterious immense stone tombs that dot the landscape here, called the Tomba dei gigantic, or “The Tombs of Giants,” due to their gigantic size.

Nuragic ruins

These massive funerary monuments were constructed of enormous slabs or blocks that rose up to 13 feet high which were arranged around an even bigger central stele or portal stone with a doorway carved into it, to form corridors and rooms or chambers that can measure as much as 50 feet in length. The most famous one of these giant’s tombs is one that can be found at a place called Coddu Vecchiu, in Arzachena, northern Sardinia, and which was built between the years of 1800 to 1600 BC and first uncovered in 1966. The tomb at Coddu Vecchiu has a forecourt made of eleven granite stones standing in a semi-circle, and is composed of a central stele standing 13 feet high, which marks the entrance to the tomb, and a corridor within measuring 33 feet long.

This tomb and others like it have many legends attached to them. Since they were found to hold within them large numbers of human remains, in past ages they were said to be the leftovers from some wicked giant’s meal of human flesh, and other lore said that they served as the graves or giants or even their residences. Yet in fact they were most likely used as massive public communal graves, with the doorways serving as a passage through the barrier to the afterlife, but this doesn’t make them any less mysterious, as the rituals involved with creating them and the significance of their designs are poorly understood, and we know little about the people who made them.

One interesting idea is that the arrangement of the stones was designed to channel the telluric current and magnetic forces of the surrounding granite and energy lines, possibly for the purpose of rejuvenation and regeneration, or to provide a smoother transition to the afterlife. It is speculated that these tombs were perhaps purposefully built over earth energy lines, that the semicircular layout would focus these powers, and that not only would the dead would come here, but also the sick or wounded, hoping that these mysterious forces would heal them. This has been somewhat supported by the many visitors to such tombs who have reported feeling invigorated while there, or of feeling a thrumming energy in the air and the stone. Did this ancient people understand these forces and seek to harness them through the construction of these gigantic toms It is unclear, and for now the exact nature of the Tombs of Giants remains a mystery.

The Tomb of Giants at Coddu Vecchiu

In addition to Tombs of Giants, Sardinia has another mystery of actual giants, or at least statues of them. In 1974, some random, nondescript farmland near Monte Prama yielded quite an amazing find. There in the earth were found the broken remains of a total of over 40 massive statues, crafted into the likenesses of armored warriors, each around 2 meters in height and fashioned from solid stone, which had been abandoned there to the elements for millennia. Oddly, the statues do not appear human, but rather have outlandish and creepy visages with large concentric circles for eyes and very small, sometimes nonexistent mouths, as well as elongated necks, which along with their fierce weaponry and armor lend them a rather unsettling and formidable appearance.

The statues, which were dubbed the Kolossoi, were most certainly made by the Nuragic civilization, and were thought to have possibly been constructed as intimidating warrior guardians of the dead for a nearby necropolis, but this is uncertain, as is the reason why they look the way they do. At the time, it was quite a groundbreaking discovery, as no other such collection of larger than life sized sculptures had ever been found in Europe, and they were enigmatic in their design and purpose. Despite this, the statues were whisked away and stored in a museum vault, where they would sit in the darkness much as they had for centuries, collecting dust until decades later, when in 2006 researchers sort of rediscovered them and began piecing together some of the broken parts, a daunting task, especially since many of the fragments are missing.

One of the Sardinia giants

The reconstruction work took a total of 4 years, and 25 of the ancient warrior statues were restored to some semblance of the way they might have once looked, complete with bows, shields, swords, armor, and horned helmets. In 2014, these amazing statues were put on display at the national archaeological museum, in Cagliari, in southern Sardinia, much to the awe and amazement of visitors. The statues themselves, although finally brought into the light after so long, still keep their mysteries close. No one is really sure why they were made, how they were once arranged, or even exactly where they originally stood, and they remain another mystery of Sardinia’s lost Nuragic people.

These mysteries have managed to remain elusive and murky, the remnants of a culture who left little in the way of information about themselves except these massive stone structures and statues, practically the only evidence that they ever even existed at all. Yet even though we have these relics of the past to use in order to try and peer through the window of history, that window remains rather foggy, what lies beyond indistinct and fleeting. The Tombs of Giants, giant warrior statues, and other such structures scattered about Sardinia have managed to remain as cryptic puzzles that fire the imagination and offer hints, but no real answers, the people who made them just as mysterious as they ever were, their culture and ways lost to time even as their grand, giant constructions live on.

Sprawled out over approximately 350,000 square miles of the African countries of Botswana, Namibia, and South Africa is a vast expanse of arid, sandy savanna wilderness known as the Kalahari Desert. The word “Kalahari” comes from the local Tswana word Kgala, meaning “the great thirst”, or Kgalagadi, meaning “a waterless place,” and the Kalahari Desert certainly looks the part, with immense swaths of land that look like something from some inhospitable alien planet, all twisted scrub, gnarled dead trees and contorted rocks, and shifting red sands devoid of any source of water. This is for the most part a forbidding moonscape of a place, and it was long a domain that may as well have been on another world for outsiders, yet in 1885 one of the first Westerners to ever set foot within these badlands ventured out into an uncharted area of the Kalahari Desert and would lay eyes upon a great mystery that still remains unexplained.

The expedition was carried out by a American explorer and entertainer from New York by the name of William Leonard Hunt, who in his native land made a living performing death defying stunts such as tightrope walks over the Niagara Falls, as well as exhibiting African bushmen like a human zoo, and usually went by his alias Guillermo Farini or “The Great Farini.” In February of 1885, he set out from Cape Town South Africa, along with a contingent of fellow adventurers, some native guides, and his son, Lulu. The goal of the trip was not particularly noble, they were not there to map out a new realm of the planet or catalogue its new plants, animals, and people, but rather they were there to get rich by seeking out diamonds, which Farini had heard the region was brimming with. The adventurers penetrated out into an area of the desert never before seen by the outside world, and when they returned they did so with quite the tale to tell.

The Kalahari Desert

Upon his return to civilization, Farini immediately went about compiling a report of his findings, which he presented to the Berlin Geographical Society in 1885 and the Royal Geographical Society of Great Britain in 1886, shortly after followed by a book on what he had seen and experienced out in those sun scorched wilds, titled Through the Kalahari Desert. One of the main events of these reports and the book was an account of coming across the ruins of some what looked to have been a once great city out there half-buried in the blood reds sands, and which he estimated to have been thousands of years old. Farini would write of this enigmatic lost city:

We camped at the foot of the mountain – near a rocky ridge, which looked like a Chinese wall after an earthquake – it was the ruins of a huge structure, sometimes sanded in. We carefully inspected the ruins almost a mile long, they were a pile of huge hewn stones, and Here and there, the traces of cement were clearly visible between them … In general, the wall had the shape of a semicircle, inside of which, approximately forty feet apart, were piles of masonry in the shape of an oval or a blunt ellly The height of a foot and a half … As all of them were to some extent sanded, we ordered all our people to dig out the largest of them (and this work clearly did not suit them) and found that the sand had protected the junction from destruction.

Excavations took almost the whole day, which caused a lot of indignation in Jan. He could not understand why it was necessary to dig out the old stones, for him this activity seemed a waste of time … We began to dig up sand in the middle of the semicircle and discovered the footwall of the twentieth wide, lined with large stones. The top layer was composed of oblong stones placed at right angles to the bottom layer. This bridge was crossed by another one, forming as it were a Maltese cross. Apparently, in the center of it was once some altar, a column or a monument, as evidenced by the preserved foundation – dilapidated masonry. My son tried to find some hieroglyphics or inscriptions, but did not find anything. Then he took a few photographs and sketches. Let the people who know better than me judge them by when and by whom this city was built.

In general, the ancient city was described as being quite extensive and immense, and Farini would speculate that some great catastrophe had wiped it and its people out, whoever they may have been. Considering that there was not known to have ever been any great civilization to have ever inhabited that region, and that it seemed to match stories the bushman of the area had long told of lost cities hiding out in the sands, the account grew a great amount of interest at the time, and the allure of some ancient lost people hidden away within the remote Kalahari proved to be romantic and irresistible.

A sketch of the Lost City

Fueled by the reports, the sketches, and the photographic evidence provided by Farini, there have been numerous follow-up expeditions to try and find the Lost City of the Kalahari, and to date there have been about 30 such expeditions launched over the years, none which have managed to find anything quite so spectacular as what Farini described, and some have come back doubtful of the truth of the story. One such prominent expedition was launched in 1964 by a professor named A. J. Clement, who followed what he believed to have been Farini’s original route and came across a very odd rock formation out in the desert that he believed was the very same one Farini had encountered and which could have been mistaken for something manmade, but which he concluded was merely an anomalous natural formation, most likely caused by the erosion of a particular type of igneous rock called dolerite. Indeed, Clement expressed doubt that the region could have ever supported such a legendary city at all, and would say of the Lost City of the Kalahari:

The climatological history of the Kalahari does not appear to have undergone any marked change for several thousand years, and it is obvious that no settlement of the size indicated by Farini could exist without perennial rivers or lakes in the vicinity. And, suitable conditions for the establishment of a city cannot have existed along any of the river courses for tens of thousands of years. Furthermore, if the age of the Lost City is assessed in relation to Zimbabwe and the ancient ruins of Persia, it is impossible to conceive of any in the Kalahari having been built more than 15,000 years ago.

Like all legends, that of the Lost City will be a long time a-dying, and doubtless there will still be some who are disinclined to let the matter rest in spite of all the contrary evidence. And possibly this is just as well, for there is something rather sad about the destruction of a legend.

Clement was right in the sense that there are many who have not let the legend die, and are still convinced the legendary city really does exist, with expeditions continuing all the way up the present and using new technology to help them. One recent search was carried out in 2013 by a crowd-sourced research project using Google Maps, called the Marcahuasi Project, which found anomalies in the desert that could be indicative of walls of the lost city, but it is still unknown if the images are of an ancient city, more recent abandoned irrigation circles for crops formed by the native tribes, or merely a natural formation.

Farini’s expedition in the Kalahari

Even more recently still was an expedition in 2016 by the Travel Channel series Destination Unknown, headed by explorer and host Josh Gates and equipped with state of the art technology such as aerial scans and radar. They managed to find some unusual rock formations that resemble walls and ruins, but again it is unknown if they are artificial or if they were really what Farini wrote of. One of the problems with locating the Lost City is that the area is just so remote and inhospitable, and this coupled with its sheer size makes it a formidable task to try and locate these alleged ancient ruins among the endless sands and desert scrub. Not helping matters is that Farini did not give very detailed descriptions of the actual location, and this is further exacerbated by the fact that the ruins are supposedly half buried. One member of one of the many expeditions that have tried and failed to find the city once lamented:

It’s all very vague. When you see this desert, you will understand that you can wander among the sand dunes for months and not even come close to the places where the lost city is located.

The Lost City of the Kalahari described by Farini has gone on to become a legendary, almost mythical place in the same realm as places like Atlantis, and there have been many theories as to its existence. Some think it is a real place, perhaps a city once built and abandoned by its creators due to a great drought or even that of a thriving lost civilization. Others, like Clement, think it is likely just misidentified natural rock formations. Still others point to Farini’s showman background, and claim that the whole report, the sketches, and even the photographs were likely faked, that it was all a big hoax. Considering that Farini is the only one to have documented the city in any appreciable way, and the vast stretches of harsh terrain involved, if there really is a city out there then it is very possible that it will remain buried and hidden, as it has for thousands of years and just might for thousands more yet to come.