Seed of Knowledge, Stone of Plenty: Chapters 5 & 6 by John Burke and Kaj Halberg

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Archaeologist Kolata accompanied a group of Ayamara shamans on a pilgrimage and states that his consciousness became dramatically altered, as soon as they set foot on a field of andesite bedrock, underlain by a rushing stream.

Kolata¹⁴ relates, “I know at this point of transition I felt distinctly strange, possessed of an exquisite, yet disturbing, hypersensitivity. My senses seemed abnormally acute. I could focus with great clarity on individual sounds and sights, but my overall perceptions of people and landscapes seemed indistinct. Even now I remember small details of objects, of places, of scenes with extraordinary precision, while my impression of the whole experience is inchoate…If this stage of the pilgrimage was evoking these emotional states in me, what was happening to the mind and sensibilities of my Aymara companions, and especially to the shamans?”

The shamans continued to the far edge of the andesite, to a point where it meets a sandstone ridge and a granite outcrop with a spring, forcing its way out of the rock wall. Sitting here, as sunset was followed by darkness, the chief shaman underwent an epileptic-like convulsion and entered a trance. During this trance, the shaman would sense whether or not this year’s growing season would be a good one. How could he know?

We wonder whether the electrical lability of the shaman’s temporal lobes enabled him to gauge the degree of electric energy in the earth. A spot like this should be electromagnetically powerful and, as we have seen, even the archaeologist was dramatically affected.

The shamans attempted to mediate with the ispallas of their crops. According to one Aymara shaman, the “spirits of the ispallas are the spirits of the fields, the spirits of the harvest, the forces within the seeds of the edible plants.”

These ispallas are reported to be the same forces that can draw a shaman into trance.¹⁵ Ispa means both ‘twin’ and a large potato, their main crop, thought to be struck by lightning and then called ‘potato with two faces’.¹⁶ The ispallas, lightning, twins, shamans, and the proper growth of food crops are all entangled in the mind of the Aymara.¹⁷ All but the twins are recurring factors in our investigation.

Some commentators have described these spillways as intended to imitate mountain streams, running now inside, now outside rock faces. The drains were almost hermetically sealed so that very little of the electrically charged air could escape – just as they had been in Chavin, and in the Olmec area.

The splashing of the water running downward inside the drains would generate electrical charge. Like the Olmec, the Tiwanakans might have noticed the electrical properties of running water, as well as the effect on the human mind of magnetic forces. Also, the effects on their crops might have been noticed, and they wanted to copy this effect.

The wet and highly conductive rock segments of the drain were made all the more electrically conductive by being bound together with clamps made of copper. Into T-shaped grooves, carved into the edges of adjacent stone blocks, liquid copper was poured, binding the blocks tightly together and forming an electrically conductive bridge between them.¹⁹ (Fig. 21)

The entire length of the drains, coursing throughout the inside of the hill, would become electrified. The top layer consisted of copper gravel. In the center, an artificial pond held tens of thousands of gallons of water that could be released into the drain system by lifting a sluice gate, again similar to the Olmec system.

According to archaeologist Arthur Posnansky²⁰, the stone buildings atop Akapana were made of andesite. They were too cramped, plain, and unadorned to have ever been designed for ceremony and ritual. It is unlikely that anybody would be living there with no hearths for the frigid climate and no kitchen. All that was found inside these windowless buildings was broken shards of undecorated, utilitarian pottery and the remains of corn and small potatoes, perhaps seed corn and seed potatoes.

Even today, seed potatoes are a common ritual offering at Aymara shrines. If the Tiwanakans ultimately removed and used their offerings (like the Maya), this could be the way they had discovered the seed enhancement potential of the early shrines.

Around 600 AD, the drains of Akapana got clogged and stopped flowing. Another manmade hill was erected less than a mile away at Puma Punku, even closer to the fault. It was threaded within by similar andesite drains. Here, they not only ran down through the man-made mound to the base of the artificially modified rock outcrop, on which the complex was erected, but also ran through farm fields. As one commentator put it²¹ : “thus unambiguously linking the summit complex with agricultural productivity”.

In fact, it is generally assumed that the leaders of Tiwanaku, as with the later Inca, derived their power and legitimacy from the fact that they guaranteed agricultural and reproductive success.²²

Later, the Tiwanakans further enclosed the Kalasaya by filling the spaces between the pillars with blocks of cut stone, as if to more completely contain something within its walls.

Sunrise on the two Equinoxes bisects the courtyard, but none of the design was actually necessary to that purpose. The whole structure functions to achieve an energetic end. The drain from Akapana ran around the inner edge at the base of the stones, possibly to help fill the courtyard with airborne ions.

Flanking the courtyard is a series of small stone rooms. They have always puzzled investigators, having no windows, benches, or decoration – no indication that they were ever used for ceremonial as well as standard utilitarian purposes. Yet they had the now familiar large, flat stone slab ceilings and were designed with small doors that would minimize air turbulence inside, just what you would need to separate electrically charged components of the air and generate pulses. The builders went to the extra trouble of providing some with sliding doors of heavy stone slabs to seal and open them at will.

As we shall later discover in Chapter 6, slab-roofed rock chambers in New England dramatically enhanced the growth of wheat, bean and corn seed. Is this what the builders of Tiwanaku were after? Would it justify such Herculean labors?

On the altiplano, during the frigid high-altitude nights, one of the gravest threats to farmers is cold damage to their seedlings early in the year. Today, on the altiplano, frost heavily damages crops on average three years out of five and entirely destroys one crop in five years. Getting the crop through the vulnerable seedling stage as quickly as possible would lessen this threat.

This is exactly what the New England rock chambers have done to seed placed in them: increased the rate of germination, improved seedling growth, and seedling tolerance to cold and stress, and, finally, made such seed produce up to three times more food. Bear in mind that it has been estimated that the peasants of Tiwanaku grew three times the amount produced by other Andean peasants.

On the north-eastern tip of the Copocabana Peninsula, on a hill above Lake Titicaca, lies a cluster of dry-wall, corbel-vaulted, oval rock chambers, named Poto Poto. When they were excavated, many contained no bones and therefore were never the tombs that archaeologists label them as. Others contained bones, but they were ‘intrusive’ burials – placed here long after the structure was built. The chambers have large, flat rock roof slabs similar to those of all the chambers known to improve seed performance.

Another cluster of both rectangular and beehive-shaped rock chambers lies on Taquiri Island, close to the north-eastern corner of Copocabana Peninsula. One of the chambers held 12 skulls,²³reminiscent of the interred skulls at the causewayed enclosures that we shall later visit in England. All these chambers look across a few miles of the lake to Tiwanaku.

The Inca have often been called sun worshippers, but their own Temple of the Sun stands second to this object of reverence on the still sacred Isla del Sol. The island was considered the center of the world and site of the origin of life, not only by the people of Tiwanaku, but even by the Inca a thousand years later.

The Aymara name of this island, Thichicasa (and also Titicaca), comes from Titi-kala, meaning ‘Rock of the Wild Cat’²⁴, named after the supreme mythological figure of the jaguar, which throughout the Americas was considered a symbol of fertility. From this rock, the island, and the enormous lake itself, take their names.

Legend says that when the whole world was dark, the sun itself was born from this rock.²⁵Could this legend have arisen from the presence of a ball of orange light rising off this rock one night? Similar balls have appeared around the world near fault lines and conductivity discontinuities.

It is known that after the Inca kicked the Tiwanakans out, the chief Inca would travel all the way here from Cuzco for each New Year’s dawn and, by his presence, help to usher life back into the world.

Whatever might have made it famous, the Rock of the Cat is certainly not revered for its vista. Sited on the north-western neck of the island, the view from here is described as ‘monotonous’, whereas elsewhere on the island there are spectacular views of the highest range of the snow-capped Andes, towering over the deep blue waters of the lake. In a saddle between bumps on a ridge, the Rock of the Cat appears as a shapeless lump, measuring 130 by 190 feet. The Rock is red sandstone, the most magnetic type.

According to legend, there was a sacred cave in the rock, but in fact, the ‘cave’ is a natural recess with a simple altar in it. On either side of the recess is a 2-meter sized nodule of exposed illmenite, a magnetic mineral. These nodules are also considered sacred. The electromagnetic forces of these rocks may be enough to alter people’s consciousness.

On the ground below are what archaeologist Adolph Bandelier called finely worked slabs of ‘prismatic’ andesite, brought from outside the island.²⁶The ‘prismatic’ part of his description reminds us of the seemingly crystallized surface of the highly magnetic roof slabs in the rock chamber shown in Fig. 24, Chapter 6.

Like the stream at Chavin and the tunnel below the Aztec Pyramid of the Sun, the Rock of the Cat was said to have oracular effects.

Another phenomenon here might also have garnered notice. In 1910, Bandelier was told that no birds ever fly over the rock.²⁷One wonders, if it interferes with their magnetic navigation senses.

On this limestone, the Tiwanakans concentrated their building. The structures were made of stone, ranging up to half the size of a football field, and were filled with mazes of tiny rooms. There were no windows, no chimneys, no light, usually only one small door, and no appreciable air circulation. As dwellings, they would be torture chambers.

The ceilings are interesting, generally being large stone slabs, just like in the rock chambers or dolmens. Some are highly corbelled to assume a beehive-like shape inside and can be expected to create the kind of air separation present in the seed enhancing chambers of New England (Chapter 6). Some of the larger chambers had andesite doorways. Whatever these structures were used for, they were not tombs.²⁹

The Tiwanakans must have been satisfied with the results, because they continued to erect bigger buildings. A thousand years later, the Incas expelled the Tiwanakans from the island, claimed possession of it for themselves, and built even larger structures.

Interestingly, the buildings invariably follow the lay of the land. If a boulder stuck out of the hillside, it was not removed but incorporated into a wall like the rock chamber shown in Fig. 26 (Chapter 6).

Although the hillsides all over the island were terraced for farming, no one ever changed the ground level in these buildings. They simply followed the natural contours, although that meant irregularities in the building everywhere. Such behavior was puzzling, unless there was something valuable in the ground that the Tiwanakans did not want to alter.

In the beginning of the 17th Century, a building 450 feet away from The Rock of the Cat was known as Chincana (‘the place where people lose themselves’).³⁰

Too cramped and unadorned to be a palace (as it is colloquially referred to today in travel guides), and too big to be a warehouse for the limited population of the island, it consists of twenty tiny rooms with large stone slabs on their corbelled, vaulted ceilings. It was built to surround a spring. The walls are between 2 and 8 feet thick, but only 8 feet high – similar to other rock chambers around the world. Bandelier³¹ states, “The whole complex has but one small air-hole, to which the name of window cannot in justice be given.”

We shall later discuss how geomagnetic fluctuations are maximized by what geophysicists call the ‘island’ and ‘peninsula’ effect. The Rock of the Cat lies on the north-western neck of the island. This entire side of the island is composed primarily of Devonian shale and quartzite. What is fascinating is that the major seismic fault in the area runs right along this side of the island. It hugs the coast and runs up along the promontory upon which The Rock sits.

This combination should subject the area to the well-known piezo-electric effect, in which quartz, under pressure such as tectonic strain, develops electric charge. It is believed to be this mechanism that causes production of earthquake lights, mysterious glowing balls, and even large hemispheres of corona discharge during earthquakes. They might even look like a sun rising.

The entire island is a perfect site for maximizing natural electromagnetic forces, and the visual appearance of these forces may be enshrined in the local folklore. The sloping point of the Sicuyu promontory, where such forces could be expected to be at their maximum, is covered with offertory cysts, from which gold statues have been recovered.

When the conquistadors began pillaging this site, the local inhabitants would make their offerings by lowering them onto the underwater extension of the ridge. Even today, no one crosses over this ridge in a boat, unless to make an offering, the purpose of which is to seek fertility for the crops.³²

In what they considered superior wisdom, the Spanish conquerors instructed the locals what to grow. Wheat, olives and other European crops were introduced, crops totally unsuitable for the high-altitude climate of the Andes and the altiplano. The transformation was performed with what the Spanish considered modern farming practices – simply meaning the European ones. These crops failed, and the formerly rich cultures plummeted into poverty.

And still today it is so. The current sad state of Andean agriculture is the inevitable result of a paradox of modern farming. The methods employed are those espoused by 21-Century farmers, using heavy doses of artificial additives to their fields, such as chemical fertilizer, herbicides, and pesticides. Today’s Peruvian and Bolivian farmers cannot afford these additives.

The result is exhausted land. The nutrients of the Andean and the altiplano soils are long depleted. The pathetic returns from farming this land can only support a fraction of the number of people who inhabited the Tiwanakan and Incan empires.

A new approach is needed desperately. Or perhaps it should be an old approach?

³⁴Coe et al., op. cit., p. 189

Chapter 6: Rock chambers of New England

“Rules of Reasoning in Philosophy, Rule II (…) We are certainly not to relinquish the evidence of experiments for the sake of dreams and vain fictions of our own devising; nor are we to recede from the analogy of Nature, which is want to be simple and always consonant to itself.”

English physicist and mathematician Sir Isaac Newton (1642–1727), in his book The System of the World (1687)

 

North Americans tend to think of megalithic structures as something you have to go overseas to experience. The truth is that two thirds of the U.S. population lives within a few hours drive of one. Just one hour north of New York City lie some exceptional examples, and we are grateful to the scientific investigators who first introduced us to the energetic nature of these structures.

Dr. Bruce Cornet is a geologist whose palaeontological discoveries were hailed by Discover Magazine as one of the top hundred science stories in the late 1990s.

In his spare-time, he and Connecticut science teacher Phil Imbrogno studied reports of unusual lights in the area. They were working in the Hudson River Valley, New York, charting repeated sightings of mysterious lights, moving through the sky. Mapping the movements of these lights over time, they found that their trajectories would often trace back to common points of origin.

When they mapped these points and compared them to a detailed magnetic map of the area, they found that the lights would always cluster near a negative magnetic anomaly – a spot where the earth’s magnetic field is weaker than in the area around it.

“And,” says Imbrogno, “when we visited these sites, we invariably found one of these rock chambers right at the anomaly”.¹ What he is referring to, are the mysterious, pre-Columbian rock chambers found all over New England, presumed to have been built by Native American tribes.

Cornet was able to get access to a state-of-the-art proton precession magnetometer from the Lamont-Doherty Geophysical Observatory of Columbia University. When used at the rock chambers, it would always show a spot with a negative magnetic anomaly in the ground – right outside the single doorway to the chamber. (Fig. 22)

As Imbrogno and Cornet questioned local residents, they began to hear interesting tales. A man, walking his dog around 11 o’clock one night, heard a deep, low hum emanating from the direction of a rock chamber, “like the sound an electrical transformer makes.” As he came around a bend, into sight of the chamber entrance, he saw that it was dimly illuminated from within by a blood red glow.

Other stories entail ghost-like entities inside of or emerging from rock chambers.²

 

Fig. 22. Geomagnetic contour map of a Native American rock chamber in Kent Cliffs, New York, showing a negative magnetic anomaly right at the open doorway – typical of such structures. This anomaly will electrify part of the air as it enters the chamber. (Courtesy of Dr. Bruce Cornet ©)

There was no mystery about the source of these negative anomalies. The chambers were built in areas where magnetite is common. Magnetite is the magnetic form of iron – what the Chinese called lodestone, using it as compass needles. Incidentally, the rock chambers discussed in this chapter are located near a 19th Century magnetite mine in Clarence Fahnestock State Park. A collapsed chamber lies on Magnetic Mine Road.

The shape of the interior of these stone structures is distinctive, like a beehive. Most of them are covered in a huge pile of dirt, measuring about 15 feet across. Their walls of piled stones curve inward as they rise. Each succeeding layer of wall stones protrude slightly further into the airspace of the chamber until they reach a height of 7 or 8 feet on average. Here the walls stop, and table-sized slabs of stone lie flat over this abbreviated dome to form a ceiling.

The archaeological term for this overlapping, inwardly protruding rock pattern is corbelled. From inside, they look to us a bit like stone igloos with flat ceilings. From outside, they often just look like an inconspicuous pile of dirt having a rock wall with an opening on one side.

Some chambers remind us of an old-fashioned icehouse. In the old days, country estates used icehouses to store blocks of pond ice that had been cut in winter, to be used in the kitchen icebox. An icehouse had a conical roof, shaped ironically like an upside-down ice cream cone, because this shape encourages lighter, hotter air to rise and heavier, colder air to sink, thereby keeping the ice blocks on the floor cool enough to last through the summer. We didn’t think that the chambers were icehouses, but wondered if perhaps gravity separation of something else was taking place here.

We found that the air inside these chambers was not at all normal – electrically speaking. The top few feet of air near the ceiling had a net negative electric charge compared to the more positively charged air near the floor. (Fig. 23) This is exactly the opposite of the normal fair-weather electric field of the Earth.

Of the common, electrically charged air molecules (ions), the most prevalent are positively charged carbon dioxide, which is heavy and sinks, and much lighter, negatively charged oxygen molecules, which will rise above the carbon dioxide. Just like an icehouse separates air by temperature, so do these beehive-shaped interiors separate air ions by electric charge, in both cases due to differing weights.

Furthermore, the readings on our electrostatic voltmeter showeda persistent pulsing inside the chambers. The readings of electric charge of the air inside would suddenly jump, or fall. Sometimes the changes were small, at other times they were large – larger than usual in normal air, indoors or out. So how did this air get electrified in the first place?

Part of the answer is that the air is always electrified to some extent. But in magnetite country there is more to it than that. A basic principle of physics is called induction. It means that whenever anything moves through a zone of changing magnetic field strength, it acquires electric charge or current. Some of the air entering a rock chamber could be electrified just by moving across the changed magnetic field strength at the entrance. The faster it would move, the more powerful the effect would be. And we have found the air to be most electrified on the windiest days.

Was this electrical separation and its resultant pulsing the goal of the people who constructed these chambers? This question got our attention, because the rock chambers began to look more and more like large stone versions of the apparatus that we were using to treat seeds in the laboratory. The essence of this technique is to put seed between two large, flat metal plates that are electrified with opposite charge: negative on top, positive on bottom, like the air in the chambers. Through a special technology, the charges of the plates create electromagnetic pulses in the air between them. As we saw in Chapter 2, seeds treated in this way are improved dramatically in a variety of ways, with the result that more food per acre is produced.

The similarities with the rock chambers were too great to ignore, so we went back and tried to find out more. On our second visit, we happened to be struck by beginner’s luck while taking flash photos of one chamber at dusk.

In Fig. 24, the photo was taken from across the road, while Fig. 25 shows a close-up of the area to the left of the doorway, with a completely unexpected glowing column or arch of white light. If you look carefully at the arch, you can see an inner structure to it. The entire phenomenon is composed of separate, parallel rectangles of white light.

Previously, we had found similar structures in other localities with high levels of natural electrical activity. We had also encountered them in other experiments on electrically charged air masses, called plasmas.³

It was annoying – but not puzzling – when we realized that our electrostatic voltmeter had been ‘fried’. Located in an outside pocket of the backpack shown in Fig. 24, lying directly below the white arch in Fig. 25, the unit had been subjected to a disabling electrical surge that left its needle stuck near the maximum reading of positive charge. It was six months before it worked again.

From repeated experience, we would come to expect electrical equipment problems near the chambers, for example batteries that would fail to work in a chamber, then work fine again when taken miles away, just to fail again in the next chamber.

At Pinelandia Biophysical Laboratory in Michigan, Dr. W.C. Levengood germinated them in a standard germination chamber, using internationally accepted scientific protocols. We compared growth of seeds left in the rock chamber to those of control groups of seed that had been kept in our car at the chamber, and also back at the lab.

The seeds left in the chambers showed changes similar to what we had previously found in our lab, using the modern techniques. A larger percentage of them germinated. They germinated earlier and grew faster. Finally, they were far more uniform in growth than the controls.

In these early tests, control lots of seed were also sometimes placed just outside the chambers, even at the spot where we had previously photographed the glowing arch. They did not show improvement. Something very special was happening inside the chambers.

Our experiment was repeated again and again over a two-year period. We consistently found that the chambers would improve seed and that the improvements were often statistically significant, meaning that the odds were a hundred to one against this being the result of random chance. In other words, with a 95% probability, the unusual electromagnetic environment of the chamber had in fact done something profound to the biology of the seed.

During our first tests, we had no idea of how long to leave the seeds in a rock chamber to get good results. Some were left inside for two days, others for just an hour and a half. What happened made us realize that the timing was not a simple matter. Three of the first samples left in the chambers were improved to a level of statistical significance versus the control left in the car. However, a sample left for 50.5 hours was actually harmed to a level of statistical significance. This effect was similar to what we had found in our laboratory seed treatments. More of a good thing is not necessarily good. The 50.5-hour sample probably got an overdose of energy.

We would see this effect time and again, inside and outside the lab. Clearly, we were dealing with a natural balance here. Some of the effect was better than none, but it wasn’t hard to get too much. On days when electrical activity around the chambers was particularly intense, we found that seeds left inside for 30 minutes outperformed those left in for 60 minutes, and both outperformed controls in the lab.

On October 14, 1995, we put winter wheat, some old type navy beans, and Tuscarora corn in two chambers simultaneously. All were improved! They not only germinated faster than the controls, but also grew faster under grow lights for a week, which was as far as they could be taken in the lab.

For the beans, growth was actually tripled. Along with corn, beans were one of the staples of the North American diet. They were farmed along with squash, long before corn was adopted from Mexico. When beans are combined with corn, they constitute a whole protein, which means the food can nourish a growing child or an adult alike. Another experiment produced results that were particularly striking using low vigor bean seed. The control seed that was kept in the lab had only 15% of its seeds germinate, compared to an average of 80% of the different groups of seed placed in two rock chambers.

This advantage would have been of special value to the Indian farmers. The germination rates were so low, that early European observers report that they planted five seeds in each hole to ensure that one of them would germinate. This is substantial waste of what could have been used as food. In Europe, academics estimate that one quarter of the harvest had to be replanted as seed, again seriously denting the food supply.⁴

Again, we noticed that determining the optimal length of the treatment was not a simple matter. For the winter wheat, 105 minutes in the chamber improved the seed more than a 30-minute stay. For the beans, two hours was better than one hour. For Tuscarora corn, on the other hand, 30 minutes was better than 3 hours.

We began to equate this to cooking meat in an oven. Each type of meat does best at a different temperature. Then even the ideal temperature must be maintained for differing lengths of time, depending on whether you are cooking chicken or roast beef. If you have an oven without an accurate thermostat, you have to alter the cooking time. But by how much? If you also lack a meat thermometer, a certain amount of guesswork becomes involved, an intuitive ‘feel’ for when the roast is ready. This feeling is rooted in experience. A similar intuition was probably involved in using the rock chambers to enhance seed.

Of the two rock chambers used in our early tests, we found that either one could outperform the other on a given day. In fact, one chamber might produce no changes in the seed, while the other would improve them dramatically.

This outcome made perfect sense because our readings of electrical separation in the air inside the chamber also varied from day to day. In fact, we began to be able to predict what constituted a ‘good’ day. If there was substantial separation of charge in the air inside, and if the electrical readings varied in frequent pulses of significant size, we could generally count on a 30-minute exposure improving the corn. When we found no separation of charge in the air inside, typically in the winter, we would see no effect on the seed at all. When there was no significant pulsing, we got no effect. However, we cannot emphasize enough that it was only on rare occasions that the effect on the seeds was negative.

Before long, we were shown a startling infrared photo (Fig. 26), taken inside a rock chamber in Ninham Mountain State Park, New York. In this picture, a glowing mass was suspended in midair. It was invisible to the naked eye, but showed up on the infrared photo. While it is still unknown to science what could account for this light, similar reports do exist in the scientific literature.⁵

Our magnetometer survey of the chamber showed that it was located on the usual negative magnetic anomaly. In addition, it lay on a boundary where a zone of homogeneous magnetic readings downhill from the chamber met a zone of highly varied readings uphill, a pattern we would see again and again. The roof slabs directly over the glowing ball were some of the most magnetic rocks we had ever encountered anywhere. Some careful magnetic engineering seemed to have taken place here hundreds of years ago.

In Chapter 3, we learned that most people can be quite sensitive to minute changes in these natural forces. Under the right conditions, an average person can detect the magnetic anomalies we found. And some people are far more sensitive than others. These chambers were built when the area was inhabited by the Wappinger and Mohegan tribes. Perhaps the Native American farmers, or at least their shamans, discovered the connection between energy and seed.

The following year, we received Iroquois Blue Flint corn seed from Lawrence Davis-Hollander of the Native Seed Conservancy in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. Lawrence got his Ph.D. at Harvard in an unusual field. Ethnobotany is the science of studying plants grown by ancient peoples, and keeping those seed stocks alive.

We are grateful to his mentor at Harvard, who convinced Lawrence that if someone did not do this, these old plant types would be lost forever. He launched Lawrence on a pioneering road that has shown just how important ancient knowledge can be.

Lawrence now spends his time doing things like hunting up farmers on New York’s Mohawk reservation, a few of whom are farming particular varieties of corn and beans that are no longer in commercial use. Then he will hunt up someone else and turn on his considerable charm to convince them to grow these varieties and give him some of the next generation of seed.

On a single day, we put three samples each of Blue Flint and Tuscarora corn inside three rock chambers. At all three sites, control seed lots were placed 100 feet outside the chamber, while other controls were kept in the car and in the lab. Then the Blue Flint seed was planted, and the controls performed consistently similar to one another. However, the 18 lots that had been left in the three chambers had their yields raised in proportion to how long they had been inside.

Some of the Blue Flint corn was placed inside the rock chamber where the energy mass in Fig. 26 was photographed. Electrostatic voltmeter measurements of the air inside the chamber, on the day the seeds were exposed, had shown one spot to be much more negatively charged than any other. This was the spot on the floor above which the glowing ball had appeared in the infrared photo. We placed samples of the Blue Flint seed on the dirt floor there for 73 minutes. When compared to the five control samples, the sample left longest on that spot in the chamber had 84% more seeds germinate and grow to maturity.

The Blue Flint corn was grown to maturity in the field by Lawrence and his assistants, using Native American farming methods. While I was on a follow up visit shortly after planting, Lawrence’s assistant rushed in, flushed with excitement. He blurted out that one row of the Iroquois Blue (the row left longest in the chamber) was up, and they had never seen Iroqouis Blue emerge like this before. We hurried out to the field where it turned out that 90% of this row was up, uniform in height, and looking vigorous. Normally only 50% of the seed germinates.

In addition to the obvious advantage of a higher percentage of germination, speed of emergence is of great value to every farmer, because in the early stage of a plant’s life, it is most fragile, and the sooner it gets through this stage the better. Equally important was the fact that the chamber seeds grew far more uniformly. As a result, most of them would mature at the same time.

This is a property of extreme importance to farmers, because if a plant reaches sexual maturity too far ahead of or behind its neighbors, it will have no way to pollinate or be pollinated. In that case, it may grow to full height but never produce an ear. Even with the best modern corn seed this still happens to a percentage of plants on today’s farms. A few centuries ago, the problem was much worse.

Both the Blue Flint and Tuscarora corn seeds left in the chambers did in fact have dramatically fewer free radicals than the control seeds when tested by bio-electrode analysis.^6,7

We expected improvements in the harvest, but the differences exceeded our expectations. As shown in Fig. 27, 40 seeds left in the chamber produced three times the amount of corn as 40 seeds left a hundred feet outside the chamber. 40 seeds, left for only 30 minutes in the chamber with the glowing plasma arch (Fig. 26), produced more than twice the amount of corn as 40 seeds left in the lab. Of the nine chamber entries, all fell within this range.

Apparently, if a Native American farmer placed his seed inside a rock chamber and left it there for an hour or two, he could have doubled or tripled his harvest.

Probably, the most famous group of rock chambers is at Mystery Hill, often called America’s Stonehenge, in North Salem, New Hampshire. Here, carbon-14 dating has shown that the rock chambers originated long before Columbus. In a few cases, organic remains have been discovered inside the chambers, the oldest dating back to about 200 AD.⁹ We brought our magnetometer to Mystery Hill to find that the chambers here also have negative magnetic anomalies at their doors.

We are disappointed indeed that these chambers have been largely ignored by American archaeologists. In fact, academics seem to have gone out of their way not to study them. The excuses have been varied, including a dismissal of the chambers as root cellars or storage sheds of colonial farmers.

This interpretation is inconsistent with the following facts: The chambers were reported by the first white settlers of some areas.^10,11 Root cellars are not built at ground level, where everything freezes solid in the winter. And a colonial farmer would most likely not invest what one engineer, who owns a rock chamber, has carefully estimated to be six months of labor with a horse to drag tons of stones downhill, and use the help of gravity to slide them into place, when that same farmer could have built a log storage shed with a small fraction of the time and effort.

We understand that the issue has been clouded by a few chambers that were later modified. For example, in Ninham Mountain State Park, a farmer added cement and two-by-fours to the opening of a nearby chamber to put in a door and use the chamber as a storage shed. But such chambers are the exception. In fact, many of the most impressive chambers lie in marshes like Gungywamp or on mountains in Woodstock, Vermont, where no one ever farmed, and no colonial settler lived.

Some organizations that study the chambers, note that they are virtually identical to dolmens, found all over Europe. Their interpretations of the chambers’ origins seek to make a connection between the chambers and dolmens. These theories have ranged from Druids and Vikings to Irish monk explorers, Phoenician and Portuguese sailors.

Old World residents did erect virtually identical structures. Over a 6,000-year period, thousands were erected from Ireland and Britain, through France, Portugal and Spain, and eastwards as far as India.¹² (Fig. 29)

Dolmens are a phenomenon linked to many cultures. Given what we now know about the capabilities of the chambers, we consider it likely that they were utilitarian structures, serving an eminently practical purpose, rather than being solely ritual or cultural, and that this was the cause of their almost worldwide distribution. In Chapters 8 and 9, we examine the evidence to back up this theory.

Whether their invention arose separately or was transmitted by early explorers, we propose that it was their practical benefits that caused so many to be built. The similarities in design, therefore, could either be from knowledge passed from one people to another, or from the engineering necessary to achieve the desired effect.

This room-sized, 90-ton boulder is perched precariously atop several small slabs of granular quartz that rise vertically from the ground and give all the appearance of having originally enclosed a small space beneath the giant rock.

At what looks like the door of this chamber, our magnetometer revealed an unusually strong magnetic anomaly. This spot is the intersection of two different areas of homogeneous magnetic fields. On one side of the rock, the land for some distance around has a vertical field strength of 54,200 gammas. On the other side, the land all reads 54,400 gammas. But in the middle, right where the rock is perched, the vertical field strength plunges to 53,800 gammas. This anomaly is not located in the boulder itself but in the ground beneath.

The Earth’s magnetic field is quite uniform everywhere, in percentage terms. A 400-gamma magnetic difference is huge for natural objects. Golf-ball sized globes of orange light have frequently been photographed at Balanced Rock. (Fig. 31) Numerous people, who sat up the night at the rock, have reported strange sensations and perceptions. It is not surprising to us that Native Americans were able to recognize this place as special.

The historical marker here labels the rock as a glacial erratic. It seems improbable, though, that it would have accidentally settled on several connected upright quartz slabs on the exact spot of a striking magnetic anomaly. American archaeologists generally do not pursue the theory that pre-Columbian technology could have moved such a boulder. But Balanced Rock is no larger than many of the dolmen capstones in Europe, some of which weigh up to a hundred tons.

The Olmec and Mayan cultures (Chapters 1 and 4) were the first to start large-scale maize and bean farming, making it possible to give up a hunter-gatherer existence. Their knowledge spread north to eventually reach tribes of the present-day United States.

In the Tuxtla Mountains of Mexico, the Olmec would often store seed in caves. Perhaps in this way, they first accidentally discovered the fertilizing powers of the electromagnetic energy of Mother Earth. Like their Olmec predecessors, the Maya regarded caves at the peak and foot of sacred mountains as the origins of fertility, and an opening framed by human lower jaw bones, or mandibles, was a symbol of this fertility cave.¹³ (In Europe, lower jaw bones were buried in great numbers at megaliths and henges, as we shall see in Chapters 8 and 9.)

Specially marked ‘fertility’ pottery full of maize was often presented in certain Mayan caves as offerings to the jaguar fertility god.¹⁴ Such offerings were left there a while, then removed.¹⁵

If these chosen caves were anything like the New England rock chambers, this would be a very effective procedure when the energies were right. The result would be seed with an ability to produce several times more food per acre. Certainly, the Maya believed that enhanced fertility was obtained by these rituals. In order to commemorate these powers, they built artificial ‘maize mountains’ – what we call pyramids – near their sacred caves.¹⁶

As we contemplate the prevalence of beehive-shaped rock chambers from North America to Ireland to India to Peru, we can’t help but be reminded that the Mayan glyph for fertility is a cave with a beehive inside.¹⁷

When we first stood in Lawrence Davis-Hollander’s field and gazed down at our newly germinated seedlings, we were reminded of the Mayan myth for the origin of corn. It is described in the sacred book of the Quiche Maya, the Popol Vuh, the sole surviving script of this people, written shortly after their capital was destroyed by Spanish conquistadors in 1524.¹⁸

According to this book, maize lay undiscovered in a mountain cave underneath a large rock, until a bolt of lightning penetrated the cave and split the rock apart, revealing the seed of the crop that was to become the staple diet of tribes throughout the Americas.¹⁹