Posted on 05/23/2002 4:59:38 PM PDT by blam
Mystery shrouds undersea structures
Years of study haven’t solved a puzzle found off Cuba’s coast
Russian offshore engineer Paulina Zelitsky speaks on a radiophone aboard her ship docked at Havana. Zelitsky is trying to determine whether megalithic structures beneath the ocean's surface were left behind by a vanished civilization.
By Anita Snow
ASSOCIATED PRESS
HAVANA, May 21 — Floating aboard the Spanish trawler she chartered to explore the Cuban coast for shipwrecks, Paulina Zelitsky pores over yellowed tomes filled with sketches and tales of lost cities — just like the one she believes she has found deep off the coast of western Cuba.
ZELITSKY’S EYES grow wide as she runs her small hand over water-stained drawings of Olmec temples in a dog-eared 1928 study of Mexican archaeology. The Russian Canadian explorer compares the shapes with green-tinted sonar images captured in March while studying the megalithic structures she discovered two years ago off Cuba’s Guanahabibes Peninsula.
Amid piles of sonar-enhanced maps is a well-worn copy of “Comentarios Reales de las Incas,” or “Royal Commentaries of the Incas,” a classic of Spanish Renaissance narrative by the son of an Inca princess and a Spanish conquistador. Zelitsky is particularly fascinated by Garcilaso Inca de la Vega’s account of ancient ruins at the bottom of Lake Titicaca, Peru.(BTW, these were found recently)
“You would not think that a reasonable woman of my age would fall for an idea like this,” chuckled Zelitsky, a 57-year-old offshore engineer who runs the exploration firm Advanced Digital Communications of British Columbia, Canada.
Zelitsky passionately believes the megalithic structures her crew discovered 2,310 feet (700 meters) below the ocean’s surface could prove that a civilization lived thousands of years ago on an island or stretch of land joining the archipelago of Cuba with Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula, about 120 miles (190 kilometers) away.
DETECTED BY SONAR
The unusual shapes first appeared on the firm’s sophisticated side-scan sonar equipment in the summer of 2000, during shipwreck surveys off Cuba’s western coast, where hundreds of vessels are believed to have sunk over the centuries.
The company is among five foreign firms working with Fidel Castro’s government to explore the island’s coast for shipwrecks of historical and commercial interest. But the mysterious shapes have become the focus of this crew’s exploratory efforts.
Russian offshore engineer Paulina Zelitsky points to a map of North America aboard her ship. She conjectures that an island or stretch of land may have joined the archipelago of Cuba with Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula thousands of years ago.
Puzzled by the shapes with clean lines, the team has repeatedly returned to the site — most recently in March — for more sonar readings, more videotapes of the megaliths with an unmanned submarine. The crew left in mid-May for a month.
Evidence for Zelitsky’s hypothesis is far from conclusive, and has been met with skepticism from scientists from other countries who nevertheless decline to comment publicly on the project until scientific findings have been made available. Submerged urban ruins have never been found at so great a depth.
Elsewhere in the Caribbean, the ruins of Jamaica’s Port Royal are located at depths ranging from a few inches to 40 feet (12 meters) below the ocean surface. The once raucous seaside community was controlled by English buccaneers before it slid under the waves in earthquakes beginning in 1692.
Located at just 20 feet (6 meters) are the mysterious megalithic structures discovered in the 1960s and 1970s in the sound between the Bahamas islands of North and South Bimini. Scientific expeditions there have produced inconclusive results about the shapes’ origins.
Back in Cuba, a leading scientist recently admitted there is no easy explanation for the megalithic shapes found by Zelitsky’s crew. The shapes on the sonar
look like walls, rectangles, pyramids — rather like a town viewed from the window of an airplane flying overhead.
“We are left with the very questions that prompted this expedition,” geologist Manuel A. Iturralde Vincent, research director of Cuba’s National Museum of Natural History wrote March 13. At the time he was visiting the area aboard the 270-foot-long (82-meter-long) Ulises, the Spanish trawler Zelitsky outfitted with sophisticated computer and satellite equipment for her surveys.
In his written comments, later delivered at a scholarly conference here, Iturralde concluded it was possible the structures were once at sea level, as Zelitsky theorizes.
Because of the large faults and an underwater volcano nearby, Zelitsky supposes the structures sank because of a dramatic volcanic or seismological event thousands of years ago.
Providing some support for that argument, Iturralde confirmed indications of “significantly strong seismic activity.”
COMPARISONS TO ATLANTIS
Zelitsky shies from using the term “Atlantis,” but comparisons are inevitable to the legendary sunken civilization that Plato described in his “Dialogues” around 360 B.C.
There have been untold, unsuccessful attempts over the ages to find that lost kingdom. One common theory is that Atlantis was located on the Aegean island of Thera, which was destroyed by a volcanic eruption nearly 3,600 years ago.
Zelitsky does, however, mention known archaeological monuments when discussing her find.
Numerous photographs are scattered throughout a video show of the megaliths, showing well-known ancient sites: the 1st century fortress of Masada high above the Dead Sea, Britain’s circular monument of Stonehenge, the Roman fortress of Babylon in Cairo, the walls of Chan Chan, Peru, whose inhabitants were conquered by the Incas.
Perhaps, Zelitsky mused, the megaliths off Cuba are remains of a trading post, or a city built by colonizers from Mesoamerica. Those civilizations were far more advanced than the hunters and gatherers the Spaniards found upon arriving here five centuries ago.
Zelitsky admitted much more investigation is needed to solve the mystery.
But that doesn’t keep her from believing, or from smiling slyly as she opens her agenda for 2002 to the first page.
Written there are the words Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei uttered under his breath at the height of the Inquisition, right after abjuring his belief that the Earth revolved around the sun.
“E pur si muove,” it reads — “Nevertheless, it does move.”
Moving on up the food chain.
Some here in a previous post
I go fishing off Bimini once sometimes, I think the structures are not between the 2 islands as the article says, but off the coast of North Bimini.
Yup. They are known as "The Bimini Road."
I think so. Thanks.
Someone (on another thread) told me that she and National Geographic had gone seperate ways. Is that not true?
Click here: 'Gods, Graves, Glyphs'
I even reread the "Staff of Moses Found In Birmingham" thread I was so bored. ;-)
Well, probably everyone is updating and looking over the Condidit list!
Calpowercrisis list is active too!
Global warming Hoax also!
Tell Blam to find more good stuff for the GGG list. Or help him look for it!
He gets a lot of good stuff for us to read but he is just one person!
Check out this link:
http://lantis.tv/amp/bios/zawas_bio.html
"off Bimini once sometimes"
should be off Bimini sometimes"
Of course, I like Bimini alot, unlike other island vacation spots, there's nothing there to do except fish hard and drink hard, which is what people do and have done who go there, all the way back to Hemingway.
All the quirky histories, such as the "Bimini Road," the "Healing Hole," the "Fountain of Youth," the long history of smuggling, add to its weird, but compelling, tropical charm. With the brilliant turquoises and blues of the ocean and crystal clear water and sandy beaches, the Biminis are beautiful little islands.
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