Mystery Shrouds Underwater Structures (Off Coast Of Cuba)

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.”

"Do you think it's possible they could have sunk 1700 feet or so during a cataclysmic event and still retained enough integrity to be recognizable as man made centuries later? "

Not likely. See my post #25 for a possible explanation.

Many of Cayce's "nails" were related to his readings for various individuals who lived during New Testament times. Subsequent translations of Dead Sea scrolls and archeological digs verified his description of the people and their customs, and events in those times, not known at the time of the readings. There's a book covering his "nails"; I don't know the name of it. Check with the ARE Press.

I was at the ARE in the summer of '68, when some guys runs up to the porch with a newpaper. I saw with my own eyes a story in the NY Times (I think it was the Times) with a aerial photograph included with the article of a (large, it seemed like) )roofless, rectangular structure, the rim of which was visible on the surface of the water.

It was off the coast of Bimini, after a seismic disturbance in the area. The article stated that British and American scientists were on site. For years afterward I looked for current reporting that had to do with it and I found none. The only thing I have seen is a discussion of some maybe road headed into the ocean.

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