B: Bacab to Byamspa 73
“Sleeping Prophet” predicted, “Poseidia will be among the first portion of Atlantis to
rise again. Expect it in ’68 and ’69; not so far away!” The so-called “Bimini Road” was,
in fact, “discovered” in 1968 by maverick archaeologist Mason Valentine, while look-
ing for Atlantean remains around the island in hopes of confirming Cayce’s prophesy.
Since then, the underwater site has been subjected to continuous investigation
by researchers convinced it is an Atlantean ruin and critics sure it is nothing
more than a natural formation of beach rock. The latter, despite their standard
array of academic credentials, have for more than 30 years failed to show an
analogous arrangement of beach rock, not only at Bimini, but anywhere else in
the world. Allegedly similar examples from Loggerhead Key, Dry Tortugas, or
near Sri Lanka, cited as evidence for its entirely natural provenance, are so unlike
the linear, organized blocks found at Bimini that such comparisons are worthless.
Moreover, core-drillings at the Bimini Road, beginning in the mid-1980s, extracted
micrite, which does not occur in beach rock. Some of its stones contain con-
glomerations of aragonite and calcite, patterns likewise missing from beach rock.
Florida geologist, Eugene A. Shinn, a harsh critic of theories on behalf of the
Bimini structure’s artificiality, radio-carbon dated the stones, which range in age
from 2,000 to 4,000 years before present. The oldest end of this time parameter
coincides with the Middle Bronze Age, just when port facilities resembling the
Bimini site were being constructed in the Near East, and Atlantis was nearing the
apogee of its material greatness, according to researchers who argue that Plato’s
sunken city flourished from 3000 to 1200 B.C.
Serious investigation of the Bahama site began in the late 1960s under the
direction of Valentine and his scientific colleague, Dimitri Rebikoff, continuing
into the 1970s and early 80s through the work of Dr. David Zink, whose Stones of
Atlantis was the first full-length book published on the subject. During the 1990s
and early years of the 21st century, numerous underwater expeditions to Bimini
conducted by William Donato, president of The Atlantis Organization (Buena
Park, California), have contributed significantly toward a general appreciation of
the structure’s real identity.
The underwater ruin appears to be the foundation of a continuous rampart
which originally formed an elongated oval (the Lucayans’ “Encircling Wall”?)
to shelter seagoing vessels. A harbor at the north end of Bimini makes abundant
maritime sense, because its location serves two fundamentally important pre-
requisites for transoceanic travel: First, the island stands directly in the path of
an Atlantic current that travels like an underwater conveyor belt—northward,
parallel to New England shores, then due east toward the Azores, the British
Isles, and Western Europe. Second, Bimini is the last landfall for fresh water
before a transatlantic voyage from North America.
The discovery at Bimini of additional, prehistoric evidence underscores the site’s
ancient, man-made identity. These include colossal effigy mounds shaped like fish
and other zoomorphic and geometric figures, together with additional blocks also
found at 19-foot depths, about 3 miles northeast of the road, resembling Tiahuanaco’s
squared columns in the high Andes of Bolivia. But what divers see at Bimini today
are the ruins of a ruin. As recently as the early years of the 20th century, the surface