Cygnus and the Giza Caverns

The discovery of a network of caves under the pyramids of Giza suggests a possible new astronomical alignment for the various archaeological elements found on the Giza Plateau. For a long time, many archaeologists have believed that the three major pyramids were meant to represent the belt of Orion at a particular point in time, more than ten thousand years ago. However, Egyptologist Andrew Collins worked out an alignment that fit more closely with one key exception.

Collins discovered another group of stars in the constellation Cygnus that matched with the same perfection that was the trademark of the Egyptians. By superimposing the stars of Cygnus over the three pyramids he could see that one star, Deneb, was not aligned. Looking where something should be -- a pyramid or temple -- there was nothing. Perhaps time had destroyed it? Perhaps it was buried? Or perhaps it was a sign that something else was under the plateau, waiting to be discovered.

Collins later found clues left in the 200-year-old memoirs of British diplomat and explorer Henry Salt. Salt wrote how, in 1817, he and Italian explorer Giovanni Caviglia had investigated cave "catacombs" at Giza for a distance of "several hundred yards" before coming across a "spacious" chamber. This chamber linked to three others of equal size, from which went various labyrinthine passages, one of which the Italian later explored for a distance of "300 feet further".

Collins decided to look for these caves in the area where the unmarked star of Cygnus would align in relation to the three pyramids. He discovered a series of catacombs, as Henry Salt had described, but no sign of any caves. Then, as he was about to leave the site he noticed a break in the catacomb wall which eventually revealed the entrance to this huge complex network of caves.

Now above and beyond the archaeological significance itself, here's why this is important. It's speculative and a little out there, but bear with me. The biggest problem with most theories of extraterrestrials visiting Earth in ancient times is that interstellar travel must by necessity cross enormous distances and consume vast amounts of energy. Science fiction authors have suggested possible "short cuts" such as warp drive to allow for this, but even though NASA is now beginning to experiment with the concept it is incredibly energy-intensive no matter how you do it.

Also, I'm of the opinion that our civilization has actually arisen fairly early in the overall scheme of things, and that we are in fact likely to possess a more advanced level of technology than any other civilizations anywhere nearby. My logic goes like this: first-generation stars consist almost exclusively of hydrogen and helium, because the reactions they generate are required in order to produce heavier elements. Those heavy elements are required for both the formation of planets and life as we know it.

So the first generation of stars that could possibly result in an advanced civilization is the second, and our Sun is in fact an early second-generation star. It's hard to estimate all the factors that would go into the rate of evolution once life appears on a planet, but one hypothesis I've heard suggests that the fact Earth has a very large moon may have played a role in both protecting the planet from asteroids and facilitating evolution onto land by creating such strong tides and other gravitational effects.

If this is the case, not only is Earth an unusual planet in terms of the progression of evolution, but its starting point happened about as soon as it could in terms of the state of the universe. This doesn't mean that we're the most advanced civilization in the universe by any means, but it does mean that in order to find a more advanced one we probably will have to travel a lot further than most of us realize, compounding the problem of interstellar distance.

Modern physics predicts that the ultimate way to travel between the stars is to create a stable wormhole, as this would like two disparate points in the universe together even if those points were light-years apart. The energy required to do this in normal space, however, is so massive that it seems impossible. Various physicists have proposed work-arounds for this as well from a number of different theoretival perspectives, but what they all have in common is the creation of an artificial singularity such as those that occur naturally at the core of black holes.

Years ago, I proposed that if we really wanted to find an extraterrestrial civilization that had visited Earth, we should focus on star systems with naturally occurring black holes. The reason is that in a star system with such a body you already have a singularity that you can work with in order to generate wormholes using whatever theoretical shortcut turns out to be correct in terms of how the universe works. And what's interesting about Cygnus is the presence of Cygnus X-1, the first black hole candidate ever discovered and the most studied.

None of this proves that ancient aliens came from the Cygnus system or that the Egyptians had anything to do with them, but I will find it interesting that if the Cygnus system turns out to be especially significant to the Egyptian cosmology. The gods in Egyptian mythology are described in much the same way that many experts think ancient people would perceive alien visitors, and without radio astronomy the black hole itself would have been invisible to any ancient civilization. I also am not sure whether this has any bearing on the status of modern unidentified flying objects as extraterrestrial craft. If space aliens were currently using a wormhole drive to travel here from the Cygnus system, I'm pretty sure that we would have detected some sort of anomaly related to its use by now.