A Lost Love, Coral Castle, and the Case for Anti-Gravity

 

For many of us interested in the paranormal, we may still be surprised to find there may be a link between the Ancient Egyptians, a Tourist Attraction in Florida and the Flying Saucer Phenomenon. At least, this was what I thought when someone sent me a web link to an article about Coral Castle - the work of a man called Edward Leedskalnin. A great name to conjure with already!

 

Ancient Egyptians

 

I was fortunate enough to enjoy a holiday in Cairo in 1997, and realised a life-long dream of entering the Great Pyramid at Giza, but we also saw other magnificent sites in the area. Like many sites in Rome, Egypt is a place where Ancient History is palpable. One particular site, about 10 miles from Cairo is called Saqqara. In Saqqara, there is an underground burial chamber complex called The Serapeum, where sacred Bulls were buried. Here is the entry from the diary I kept at the time:

 

In one of these chambers, we view an enormous sarcophagus, made of basalt. Its surface is marble-smooth and on one side are etched hieroglyphics and pictures. The top of the sarcophagus rises about 6 and a half feet above the ground and the lid is about 1½ feet thick. I begin to imagine the work it took to carve out the chamber from the solid rock, then to make the enormous sarcophagus and then place it centrally in the chamber. My imagination fails me when I walk past the other 24 identical chambers and look upon their sarcophagi, looted long ago.

 

As with the Pyramids and similar structures, one asks “how was this made?” Can it be correct that these things were constructed using only simple stone tools, rollers, piles of earth, huge numbers of men and brute force? Theories that this was not the case are never taken very seriously. But could a place like Coral Castle (which was originally called “Rock Gate Park”) ever be taken as proof that such theories about “brute force” methods of construction are not necessarily correct in all cases?

 

Edward Leedskalnin

 

Edward Leedskalnin was born on August 10th, 1887 to a farming family at Stramereens Pogosta, a small village near Riga, Latvia, but he emigrated to North America in about 1913.

 

While working in a Canadian lumber camp, Leedskalnin contracted tuberculosis and, in 1918, moved to the warmer climate of Florida. There, he purchased an acre of land near Florida City, for $12. He had no formal education.

 

Lost Love

 

The reason why Ed emigrated seems to be related to the fact that, when he as 26 years old, he was engaged to be married to his one true Love, Agnes Scuffs. Agnes was ten years younger than Ed; he affectionately referred to Agnes as his “Sweet Sixteen”. Agnes cancelled the wedding just one day before the ceremony – apparently saying Ed was too poor and too old! Ed was heartbroken. After settling in Florida, some 5 years after this great disappointment, he began a “project” which is said to be the result of his will to create a monument to his lost love – to show her what he was capable of. Like the Taj Mahal, Coral Castle was built as a testament to his loved one.

 

Coral Castle - A Tourist Attaction

 

Coral Castle is now a tourist attraction and the story of its construction seems to be remarkable and mysterious. Unlike many other stories and phenomena we hear of, Coral Castle can be visited any day of the year. It opens at 7 am and closes at 9 pm. The current adult admission price is only $9.75 – I can’t wait to see it myself! The Website  (http://www.coralcastle.com/) has directions and a map.

 

Before this article begins to sound too much like a travel magazine, let’s look at some of the curious things about Coral Castle.

 

Ed started to build Coral Castle where he originally lived, in Florida City, in about 1924. It is called Coral Castle, because Coral is the material from which it is made. Ed had acquired some skills working in lumber camps and some stone mason’s skills whilst he was still in Latvia. His blocks were carved at the original Florida City site, as he constructed the place.

 

The construction work continued until about 1936, when he found out that someone planned to start building housing (or at least some kind of building) next to him. Being intensely private and reclusive, Ed decided to “up bricks” and leave and he transported the nearly-complete Coral Castle to a new site, which was 10 acres of land he had purchased at Homestead (still in Florida), 10 miles away from the original site. This move took him 3 years to complete.

 

This story doesn’t sound so unusual, until you realise that Ed built the whole of Coral Castle himself, using only tools and equipment that he made. Ed was 5 ft. tall and weighed about 100 lbs – a diminutive 7 stone! This tale still doesn’t very unusual until you realise that the abode he constructed was no maisonette, bungalow or 3-bed semi. - the blocks Ed used to build Coral Castle weighed up to 30 tons!

 

There are quite a number of intriguing structures at Coral Castle. One such structure called The Great Obelisk is over 25 feet high and weighs over 28 tons - taller than the Great Upright at Stonehenge. Carved and on its surface is the year of completion, the year it was moved and the year and country of Ed's birth. The hole near the top is carved in the shape of the Latvian star.

 

Among its other oddities is a scattering of oversized chairs also made of coral, each one weighing half a ton. Although they look extremely uncomfortable, the chairs are said to be exceptionally restful and balanced into perfect rockers. Another unusual construction is a heart-shaped table – which is estimated to weigh about 5 tons. Always practical, even in romance, Ed decided it would be too difficult to keep fresh flowers on his feast of Love Table. His solution was to plant an Ixora bush in the centre of the table. Ed's original plant has been in place for almost 50 years.

 

When Ed moved the site, many people saw the coral carvings being transported along the Dixie Highway, but no one had actually ever seen Ed loading or unloading the trailer. In 1940, after the carvings were in place, Ed finished erecting the walls. The coral walls weigh about 125 pounds per cubic foot. Each section of wall is 8 feet tall, 4 feet wide, 3 foot thick, and weighs more than 58 tons!

It has been estimated that 1,000 tons of coral rock were used in construction of the walls and towers, and an additional 100 tons of it were carved into furniture and art objects, which adorn the site.

 

These facts, then, present us with several puzzles. Firstly, how did Ed single-handedly carve out these blocks? Secondly, how on earth did he move them, and lift them into place without large cranes or other heavy-duty equipment? Even if you decide that he must have used some kind of crane, as a comparison, consider this story about a modern construction project:

 

“My company recently installed a hydraulic press that weighed 65 tons. In order to lift it and drop it through the roof, they had to bring in a special crane. The crane was brought to the site in pieces and was transported from 80 miles away over a period of five days. After 15 semi-trailer loads, the crane was finally assembled and ready for use.

 

As the press was lowered into its specially prepared pit, I asked one of the riggers about the heaviest weight he had lifted. He claimed that it was a 110-ton nuclear power plant vessel. When I related to him the 70 and 200 ton weights of the blocks of stone used inside the Great Pyramid and the Valley Temple, he expressed amazement and disbelief at the primitive methods that are promoted by Egyptologists.”

 

Thirdly, how can he possibly have moved these blocks a distance of 10 miles? It is reported that Ed had the chassis of an old truck on which he laid two rails. Ed would load the trailer himself. He had a friend with a tractor move the loaded trailer from Florida City to Homestead. Ed lived a very simple life, and did not own a car. Instead, Ed would ride his bike 3½ miles into town, to do his shopping! So somehow, Ed managed to construct coral Castle and move it a distance of 10 miles, apparently with no special equipment at all!

 

The details of how he did it are not clear. If it was done by some kind of trickery or as a “magician’s stunt”, then it must surely rank as the greatest (and longest) ever performed. It certainly does not seem to be possible that the blocks are hollowed out – unless someone has carefully replaced them one by one, as they must have crumbled over the years.

 

Ed Leedskalnin worked in secrecy, after sundown - by lantern light, when he was certain no one was watching him. It was reported that some curious neighbours did see Ed move the stones. They say he placed his hands on the stone to be lifted... but what was in his hands? Somehow this levitated the blocks. According to an article in Fate magazine, "some teenagers spying on him one evening claimed they saw him 'float coral blocks through the air like hydrogen balloons,' but no one took them seriously. When he was personally asked how he managed the feat, Leedskalnin replied only that he understood the laws of weight and leverage. He is also quoted as saying, "I have discovered the secrets of the pyramids. I have found out how the Egyptians and the ancient builders in Peru, Yucatan, and Asia, with only primitive tools, raised and set in place blocks of stone weighing many tons." The very stones of Coral Castle support his story - at an average of six tons, they are twice the weight of the blocks in Egypt's Great Pyramid at Giza. According to The Enigma of Coral Castle, Ed disagreed with modern science, and claimed that the scientists were wrong, 'that nature is simple.'

What other evidence is there that he did not use cranes or other heavy equipment to build his masterpiece?

 

The Case for Anti-Gravity

 

At the castle, you can see the tool room where some of Ed’s equipment is on show. One item (pictured right) is said to be an AC generator he built, though how he used this is not really known. At one time Ed erected a massive grid of copper wire poised above his quarried stones – there is quite a lot of copper wire in his workshop. Pictures also show Ed working with tripods, though none of these are seen anywhere on the site.

 

A man called Christopher Dunn suggests that the device shown above is not an AC (“alternating current”) generator, but an “alternating magnetism” generator. He proved this by holding a bar magnet near the device and setting the “generator” in motion and found that the North end of the magnet was alternately repelled and attracted. Dunn goes on to suggest that gravity may not be a “real” force – it arises due to an object’s own magnetic field interacting with the Earth’s magnetic field. He also suggests that Ed had devised a method for making the magnetic fields within the coral blocks line up in opposition to the Earth’s magnetic field. As a guess, Ed wrapped the blocks with a copper wire grid and then connected this wire to his magnetic field generator. Starting up the generator then had the effect of changing the magnetic field in or around the block in such a way that it was levitated. It is therefore suggested that the tripods were used merely as a way of supporting the wires and chains which were used on the copper grid – or maybe they were used in the photographs as a “decoy”, to throw people off the scent of how he actually did it (i.e. they may not have been used in the lifting procedure at all). Carrol A. Lake, a colonel in the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, stated, "Leedskalnin proved for all the world to see today that he knew the construction secrets of the ancients." Vincent H. Gaddis, who wrote a number of articles for Amazing Stories magazine, said of the mysterious Latvian immigrant, "There is no doubt that he applied some principle in weight lifting that remains a secret today." Or is it just the case that no one has understood the articles Ed Leedskalnin wrote in 1945 about “Magnetic Current” and no one has developed them into a working method? (http://www.fortunecity.com/ greenfield/bp/16/leed1.htm).

 

The idea of gravity and magnetism being inter-related is certainly not new. Wilbert Smith and, more recently, John Hutchinson (the “Hutchinson Effect”) have carried out experiments that seem to strongly indicate that a non-magnetic (or non-ferrous) object’s weight can be influenced by magnetic fields. It has been stated many times that this inter-relation is at least partly responsible for various phenomena associated with Flying Saucers – including propulsion. Thomas Townsend-Brown was also quite a prominent figure to have worked on theories such as these, and whose work has been reportedly developed into “ARV’s” (Alien Reproduction Vehicles) in “Black Projects” in the USA such as the TR-3B. Sightings, photographs and videos of strange objects over Area 51 and similar facilities do nothing to disprove these ideas. Such ideas are also supported by a number of witnesses who state they have either directly seen or been involved in such projects.

 

Returning to the story of Coral Castle, in December 1951 Ed fell ill. He put a sign on the door of his Castle saying “Going to the Hospital” and bussed himself to Jackson Memorial Hospital in Miami. Three days later he died in his sleep, of malnutrition and kidney failure, at the age of 64. After his death, his only surviving relative, Harry who lived in Michigan, inherited the Castle. In 1953, shortly before Harry’s own death, he sold the Castle to a family from Chicago, who gave it its present name. During the take-over, a box of Ed’s personal effects was found. It contained a set of instructions that led to the discovery of 35- $100 bills, Ed’s life savings - which he made by giving tours of the castle for 10¢ or 25¢, selling pamphlets and from the sale of the land where U.S. Highway 1 passes the Castle.

 

One would have thought that because Coral Castle was built and still exists – a testament to “lost love” - people might take the theories of someone like Leedskalnin much more seriously. Perhaps people again have developed methods similar to Ed’s, but they have been suppressed. He was either onto something, or he pulled off perhaps the greatest civil engineering hoax in history.

 

Click here for short video about Coral Castle

 

Sources: http://www.coralcastle.com/, http://www.rense.com/general10/geo.htm, http://www.rense.com/general39/coral.htm, http://www.bercilak.com/bercilak_046.htm