Vitrified Ruins in California's Death Valley: Evidence of Atomic War? ( Archived) (5)

In Secrets of the Lost Races, Rene Noorbergen discusses the evidence for a cataclysmic war in the remote past that included the use of airships and weapons that vitrified stone cities.

The most numerous vitrified remains in the New World are located in the western United States. In 1850 the American explorer Captain Ives William Walker was the first to view some of these ruins, situated in Death Valley. He discovered a city about a mile long, with the lines of the streets and the positions of the buildings still visible. At the center he found a huge rock, between 20 to 30 feet high, with the remains of an enormous structure atop it. The southern side of both the rock and the building was melted and vitrified. Walker assumed that a volcano had been responsible for this phenomenon, but there is no volcano in the area. In addition, tectonic heat could not have caused such a liquefication of the rock surface.

An associate of Captain Walker who followed up his initial exploration commented: "The whole region between the rivers Gila and San Juan is covered with remains. The ruins of cities are to be found there which must be most extensive, and they are burnt out and vitrified in part, full of fused stones and craters caused by fires which were hot enough to liquefy rock or metal. There are paving stones and houses torn with monstrous cracks. [as though they had] been attacked by a giant's fire-plough."

These vitrified ruins in Death Valley sound fascinating--but do they really exist? There certainly is evidence of ancient civilisations in the area. In Titus Canyon, petroglyphs and inscriptions have been scratched into the walls by unknown prehistoric hands. Some experts think the graffiti might have been made by people who lived here long before the Indians we know of, because extant Indians know nothing of the glyphs and, indeed, regard them with superstitious awe.

Says Jim Brandon in Weird America:

Piute legends tell of a city beneath Death Valley that they call Shin-au-av. Tom Wilson, an Indian guide in the 1920s, claimed that his grandfather had rediscovered the place by wandering into a miles-long labyrinth of caves beneath the valley floor.

Eventually the Indian came to an underworld city where the people spoke an incomprehensible language and wore clothing made of leather.

Wilson told this story after a prospector named White claimed he had fallen through the floor of an abandoned mine at Wingate Pass and into an unknown tunnel. White followed this into a series of rooms, where he found hundreds of leather-clad humanoid mummies. Gold bars were stacked like bricks and piled in bins.

White claimed he had explored the caverns on three occasions. On one, his wife accompanied him; and on another, his partner, Fred Thomason. However, none of them able to relocate the opening to the cavern when they tried to take a group of archaeologists on a tour of the place.

It seems one local character knew how to find the place. Brandon relates that "Death Valley Scotty", an eccentric who spent millions building a castle-estate in the area, was known to go "prospecting" when funds ran low. Death Valley Scotty would check out for a few days of wandering in the nearby Grapevine Mountains, bringing back suspiciously refined-looking gold that he claimed he had prospected. Many believe that he got his gold from the stacked gold bars in the tunnel system beneath Death Valley.

Evidence of a lost civilisation in Death Valley came in a bizarre report of caves and mummies in the Hot Citizen, a Nevada paper, on August 5, 1947. The story ran as follows:

EXPEDITION REPORTS NINE-FOOT SKELETONS

A band of amateur archaeologists announced today they have discovered a lost civilization of men nine feet tall in Californian caverns. Howard E. Hill, spokesman for the expedition, said the civilization may be "the fabled lost continent of Atlantis".

The caves contain mummies of men and animals and implements of a culture 80,000 years old but "in some respects more advanced than ours," Hill said. He said the 32 caves covered a 180-square-mile area in California's Death Valley and southern Nevada.

ARCHAEOLOGISTS SKEPTICAL

"This discovery may be more important than the unveiling of King Tut's tomb," he said.
Professional archaeologists were skeptical of Hill's story. Los Angeles County Museum scientists pointed out that dinosaurs and tigers which Hill said lay side by side in the caves appeared on Earth 10,000,000 to 13,000,000 years apart.
Hill said the caves were discovered in 1931 by Dr F. Bruce Russell, Beverly Hills physician, who literally fell in while sinking a shaft for a mining claim.
"He tried for years to interest people in them," Hill said, "but nobody believed him."
Russell and several hobbyists incorporated after the war as Amazing Explorations, Inc. and started digging. Several caverns contained mummified remains of "a race of men eight to nine feet tall," Hill said. "They apparently wore a prehistoric zoot suit--a hair garment of medium length, jacket and knee-length trousers."

CAVERN TEMPLE FOUND

Another cavern contained their ritual hall with devices and markings similar to the Masonic order, he said.
"A long tunnel from this temple took the party into a room where," Hill said, "well-preserved remains of dinosaurs, saber-toothed tigers, imperial elephants and other extinct beasts were paired off in niches as if on display.
"Some catastrophe apparently drove the people into the caves," he said.
"All of the implements of their civilization were found," he said, "including household utensils and stoves which apparently cooked by radio waves."
"I know," he said, "that you won't believe that."
While of doubtful authenticity, this is an interesting story, to say the least. The last comment about cooking food with radio waves being unbelievable is ironic. That is the one thing that modern readers of the story could certainly believe was true, considering the widespread use of microwave ovens today. Who had heard of them in 1947?