Underwater structures look like ancient ruins
By Vanessa Bauzá | Sentinel Staff Writer
Posted October 21, 2002
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HAVANA -- Peering through her glasses, ocean engineer Paulina Zelitsky spent months studying the grainy, black and white sonar images on her computer screen, searching for a scientific explanation for the fantastic geometric patterns she found beneath 2,000 feet of water.
Suddenly her eyes caught a calendar by her desk featuring Mayan ruins. Something clicked. Could the massive structures Zelitsky and her husband, Paul Weinzweig, stumbled upon while hunting for sunken treasure really be remnants of an ancient city?
"The structures we found on the side-scan sonar simply are not explicable from a geological point of view," Weinzweig said. "There is too much organization, too much symmetry, too much repetition of form."
The couple's company, Canada-based Advanced Digital Communications, has mapped the ocean floor surrounding Cuba for three years under contract with the Cuban government. Using their 265-foot ship, Ulises, they have found about 20 shipwrecks, including the USS Maine, and vast oil fields in deep waters around the island.
But they're stumped by the strange formations across an 8-square-mile area off Cuba's western tip. At her home in eastern Havana, Russian-born Zelitsky traced the sonar image with a pen to outline what she says could be an urban settlement with corridors and buildings. Videotape from a remotely operated, couch-sized mini-submarine deployed last summer shows cube and pyramid shapes behind a thin veil of silt and plankton.
Experts on both sides of the Florida Straits agree the formations are highly unusual but say there is not enough evidence to conclude they are manmade. A research expedition planned for July had to be canceled because ADC didn't get the Cuban government's permission to import additional equipment, including a manned submersible, Zelitsky said.
Cuban geologist Manuel Iturralde of Havana's National Museum of Natural History has analyzed the video, sonar images and rock samples from the site. While he has never seen anything like the repetitive patterns, Iturralde wants to see more samples before making any conclusions.
"We have some figures which are extremely unusual," Iturralde said. "But nature is much richer than we think."
The depths at which the structures were found pose problems for an Atlantis-type hypothesis, he added. At the maximum velocity of Earth's tectonic movements, it would have taken 50,000 years for ruins to sink 2,000 feet underwater. However, "50,000 years ago there wasn't the architectural capacity in any of the cultures we know of to build complex buildings," Iturralde said.
Michael Faught, assistant professor of anthropology at Florida State University and a specialist in underwater archaeology, agreed.
"It would be cool if they [Zelitsky and Weinzweig] were right," he said. "But it would be real advanced for anything we would see in the New World for that time frame. The structures are out of time and out of place."
Researchers at the National Geographic Society, whose planned trip to Cuba this summer fizzled because of bad weather and permit problems, say they hope to travel here next year.
"The formation of the Earth took such violent turns at times, it could be many, many things. You will always have people contending that, for example, the pyramids were built by aliens," said John Echave, senior editor at National Geographic magazine, who came to Havana last fall and studied the sonar and video images. "We're at a point where we would very much like to solve this riddle."
Vanessa Bauzá is a correspondent in Cuba for the South Florida Sun-Sentinel, a Tribune Publishing newspaper, and can be reached at
vmbauza1@yahoo.com.