VISITORS FROM HIDDEN REALMS

Discover the connection between UFO visitors and shamanic lore! Brent Raynes' stunning book—intro. by Brad Steiger.

Portsmouth Bound: Looking for an Atlantean Replica?

We arrived in South Shore, Kentucky, across the Ohio River from Portsmouth, Ohio to be greeted by a torrential downpour, high winds and lightning. Although we didn’t know it at the time, the tornado siren had been sounded around 4:30 p.m. in downtown Portsmouth. All the way up from Tennessee and traveling up through Kentucky it had been very pleasant weather, even though it had been cloudy. We were hurrying to arrive in the Portsmouth area as soon as possible because Allison Kalb, the wife of the Mayor of Portsmouth, had been in touch with Greg’s wife Lora and had revealed that a very significant ancient earthworks site that Greg had previously written about in Mound Builders: Edgar Cayce’s Forgotten Record of Ancient America (2001) [co-authored with his wife Lora and with John Van Auken] and in his most recent The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Native American Mounds & Earthworks (2009), was not “obliterated” completely as had been previously reported and believed.

This was certainly exciting news as this particular earthworks was the one that was very similar in appearance to Plato’s description of the center of the city of Atlantis which had been described as having a high hill with a flat top (upon which a temple had been constructed), was surrounded by three water rings, and was divided up into a cross-shaped pattern with three bridges and a canal that led to the ocean. However, in this case the canal was replaced by an “embanked walkway” that led 1.5 miles to the Ohio River (perhaps a symbolic substitute for the ocean). In Edgar Cayce’s trance readings he stated that “the mounds that were called the replica or representative of the Yucatan experience, as well as the Atlantean and in Gobi land.”

“Indians who lived in the heart of the Mississippian Era mounds believed the earth started as a huge circle of land surrounded by water,” the authors of Mound Builders wrote. As Greg and Lora have pointed out, that “walkway” just mentioned continued on the other side of the Ohio River, ran another five miles into what is modern Portsmouth, to two huge horseshoe shaped mounds. They point out that at the center of England’s Stonehenge there is a “horseshoe” arrangement of stones strikingly similar to Portsmouth’s “horseshoe” earthworks. (One unfortunately has a school built on top of it, but the other is still quite intact and in a park) “In addition, the ‘ceremonial causeway’ leading from the center of Stonehenge is similar to that found in Portsmouth as well as at many other American sites,” these scholarly authors added.

The next morning, Sunday, July 12th, 2009, we were greeted by beautiful sunshine. We arrived at about 9 a.m. at K.C. Hardin’s Greenhouse and Garden Center in South Shore. Mr. Hardin greeted us warmly and led us through three gates out past his barn to what we now could see was a huge central mound! In years past, a large amount of its upper portion had been removed. Still what a thrill it was to see and walk around the remaining mound. Though not nearly as tall as it used to be obviously, it was still noticeably on elevated ground, and enormous in size. Greg and Lora excitedly looked at a blow up that Greg had had made of the Squier and Davis 1848 survey map of the site and together they were able at times to identify and at other times logically guess certain physical features in the landscape indicative of the rings and the four walkways. At one point as we stood atop this mound, Greg had, he would tell me later, a brief and unexpected clear vision of what it must have looked like. In that “vision”, he could see the “walkway” all the way over to the horseshoe mounds.

Little did we know at the time how that brief “vision” foreshadowed startling events that would occur to us, as well as twenty-one other people from across the nation who were gathering to meet us in Columbus, Ohio to go with us on an A.R.E. (Association for Research and Enlightenment) sponsored tour of Ohio’s incredible ancient Indian Mounds and geometric earthworks.

That evening, at the Baymont Inn and Suites off of Mediterranean Avenue in Columbus, we all gathered in a small meeting room on the first floor. Chairs were arranged in a circle and going around the room each person introduced themselves and shared with everyone some information about themselves, including what they hoped to learn from the tour experience. It was soon apparent that this was a very intelligent, outgoing, and friendly group of people. In fact, quite a few of them had served in various backgrounds of teaching and education. Lora brought everyone up to speed on everything that was scheduled, the latest updates, what to expect, how to dress, and, most important of all perhaps, what was to be served on the next menu. She kept us in the know, and she also helped the bus driver reach our many destinations (which were often in some very remote places down very narrow roads), which involved unexpected detours and critical locations that were not marked as they should have been by road signs. And our bus driver, God bless America, pulled us out of some tight spots that I probably would have been afraid to have attempted with my pickup truck! At any rate, Greg presented an overview on the mounds and earthworks, showing numerous pictures and illustrations that he projected onto a movie screen. As usual, he gave a great talk. Then it was my turn, and I stepped into the center of the room and showed them a set of fully functional replicas of the pre-Columbian Peruvian whistling vessels, explained about the significance of whistles in ancient ceremonies, and then gave a demonstration of how they sounded.

Monday morning, July 13th, our tour began. We headed out for our first ancient Native American site. Our destination was nearby Newark, where Greg explained to us that we were about to behold some of the most incredible and best preserved ancient earthworks anywhere around. And if he didn’t say it, I’m sure he’d have included also that they were among the most mysterious earthworks to be found anywhere too. Attributed to the ancient Hopewell culture, one of the most magnificent and enigmatic centerpieces of this group of earthworks was the enormous walled octagon shaped enclosure, whose interior covered 50 acres! Connected by a narrow set of parallel walls to a circle whose interior covered some 20 acres and whose walls ranged from 8 to 14 feet tall, this awesome geometric earthwork was used to make lunar and solar observations, and even had alignments that incorporated the 18.61 year cycle of maximum and minimum moonrise and moonset.

We also walked to the center of the Great Circle Earthworks, which once had been called the Fairgrounds Circle as the local county fair used to set up there. Consisting of a 9 foot high wall, with a 7 foot deep moat on the inside, the interior consists of 30 acres. At the center is what has been described by archeologists as a large bird effigy mound, but when Greg and Lora accompanied British science writer Andrew Collins to the site in 2004, he concluded that it was a bird’s foot effigy mound instead. It was here that Joan and I smudged the mound and our accompanying ARE entourage of friends. Although Joan and I had been with Greg and Lora to this mound back in 2001, on another ARE sponsored mounds tour, I was now able to look at the effigy mound from the perspective of a bird’s foot. I had read Andrew’s book The Cygnus Mystery and indeed he was absolutely correct. It did resemble a huge bird’s foot!

Tuesday morning, July 14th, in the city limits of Columbus, we stopped shortly after 10 a.m. to see a 20 foot tall Adena era conical mound, known as Shrum Mound, located off of McKinley Avenue, close to the Scioto River. While Greg walked a group of folks to the top of the mound and explained what was known about the site and these ancient people, Joan and I found a shaded area on the back side of the mound.

An Appreciative Indian Spirit?

It was a sunny and pleasant day. Joan took our small deer skin drum and sounded four beats in each of the four directions to call in the spirits, and then we lighted the white sage in our seashell. Soon everyone had gathered around us on the grass in a semicircle, some leaning up against a nearby stone wall. I instructed everyone to relax and sit with their back’s straight, to close their eyes and take three deep breaths. I had them to visualize a medicine wheel and instructed everyone that we would briefly visit each of the four directions individually and try for some sort of message, guidance, or insight each time. Afterwards Greg complimented me from his nearby spot on the ground stating he had found the slow beat of the drum very pleasant. Then he added that he seldom meditated, joking that he meditated with his eyes open, but at any rate he wanted to share something quite extraordinary that had just happened to him! He said that soon after Joan had smudged him with the sage, (and before I began the drumbeat) an opening had appeared to him from inside the mound to his left. A Native American man came up to Greg from the mound. He was tall, strong, bare chested. It all happened suddenly and quickly, Greg pointed out. He spoke a different language, but Greg somehow knew that he was saying something like “Thank you for bringing these people here. This is a good thing you are doing.”

Greg said that it was like he could see inside the mound, like it was illuminated, and he could see clay pottery that this man’s people had buried with him, but that none of this really mattered to him anymore. Greg just instantly knew things about this man. He died at age 35. He had been a fierce and mighty warrior. He had killed many of his enemy. But later on in his life he had become a beloved leader of his people.

A lady sitting right next to Greg stated that she had sensed a protective Indian presence behind her.

From here we headed out for Chillicothe to do lunch and then that afternoon we visited nearby Mound City, a Hopewell burial site and ceremonial center consisting of 24 burial mounds surrounded by a square earthen wall enclosure. Although an impressive site, Greg told Joan and I privately at one point that he felt nothing there. After Shrum, which was such a good feeling experience, Mound City just felt dead.

That evening on the outskirts of Chillicothe, we attended a powerful outdoor play at the Sugarloaf Mountain Amphitheatre entitled “Tecumseh!” Based on the life of the legendary Shawnee leader Tecumseh, one odd historical footnote (which was included in the play) is how he accurately “prophesied” the New Madrid earthquake. It was to be a signal to other Indian tribes to band together and to push the whites out.

Mysteries within Portsmouth’s Horseshoe Mound

Wednesday, July 15th, we headed out for Portsmouth. We arrived there around 11 a.m. at the large Horseshoe Mound. Joan and I entered this walled enclosure first and while Joan began smudging around the walls of the mound and the opening, I faced the four directions with my functional eagle bone whistle replica, blowing three times in each direction. Then we decided we should have smudged ourselves at the beginning and so I asked Joan where the feather was. She said she had laid it on the small Indian blanket that we had laid on the ground. I looked and it wasn’t on the blanket. Joan then looked and she couldn’t find it either. I looked over the blanket and surrounding grass again. We both felt that we had done a thorough search of it. Still no feather, so then we decided we’d just go ahead and smudge each other fanning the smoke with our hands. I smudged Joan and she smudged me. As we were finishing up I glanced back down at the blanket and there it was!

It’s a good sized feather, about a foot long. How did we miss it, we wondered?

Joan felt strongly that everyone who wanted to should enter the mound site in a line, doing a simple toe, heel Indian style dance. She gave them a quick dance lesson and then led the way. Once inside they formed a circle and sat down on the ground. Joan smudged everyone and again I blew the eagle bone whistle in the four directions. Then everyone relaxed and meditated for a few minutes. Afterwards, Greg wanted to know if anyone had seen any “lights” or heard anything unusual. One man meditating nearby stated that he had “seen,” out from the area of his Third Eye, a sun-like image. Joan said that with her inner vision she “saw” a sun-like display with a ring of light around it, with a beam that she felt, she said, “was coming into my heart.” Greg then shared that he had heard a humming sound like—a vibration—seemed hard to explain. Lora also felt a strange vibration that seemed, I gathered, to come up from the ground into the body. Both were sitting with their backs close to the back wall of the horseshoe mound.

Greg said that he had seen flashes and then a sun-like light. That evening though, after supper, Greg paid Joan and I a visit to our room. We were talking about the events of the day when, out of the blue, Greg began to share with us what he experienced and “saw” before the hum and lights. He said it was like he was walking from the huge mound with the concentric rings, walking down to the Ohio River, and the ground at the site and within the walkway was white. On each side of the wide road he was walking were these wide walls and 20 to 40 feet out from the walls were the trees, the forest. He got to the river and then he just found himself across that body of water walking up the hill to the horseshoe mounds. From there he could look around at it all, plus the mound with the rings, and the rectangular walled site across the Ohio River, across from where the Scioto River enters the Ohio.

“And I was an Indian,” Greg then exclaimed with a laugh. He said he had something on his head, and in his hand. His walk, it seemed, was part of some sort of ceremony.

Greg wasn’t the only one who experienced a “past life” kind of memory while inside the horseshoe mound. Long time ARE member and author Ann Jaffin shared this experience:

"On our recent ARE mounds tour of Ohio, I received a gift of understanding. I picked up a past life for my husband, Stan. Over the years, I’ve traveled the world often with ARE groups. Stan never objected to my going but he never wanted to go along. The exception was Bimini. He loved this beautiful little island in the Bahamas where Cayce said to look for Atlantis, and visited it more than a dozen times. Not being a diver, it was the mounds that attracted Stan. These mounds are located in remote, uninhabited east Bimini and are very difficult to reach. Wielding his machete, I called him "Indiana Jaffin" as he carved numerous paths through the mangrove swamps to 11 different mounds, including the magnificent 450-foot-long effigy mound of a lemon shark.

Given his disinterest in foreign travel and love of the outdoors as well as his physical strength and athleticism, I had speculated that Stan may have had more than one lifetime in early America. On Thursday morning our group visited the unique horseshoe mound in Portsmouth. The mayor’s wife kindly allowed us to enter this restricted area for a meditation and a ritual. After the meditation I remained seated and did not rise to get tobacco to offer to the four directions. Stan is not usually drawn to group activities and I was quite surprised when he rose, took some tobacco, and made offerings to the cardinal points. As I watched him turn and make the offering, in an intuitive flash I knew that he had been a builder of that mound. Very, very briefly I saw him as he had appeared then.

There is perhaps an irony to his association with a horseshoe mound. Both of us love horses and ride as often as we can. We had long known that we had a lifetime together among the horsemen of the Asian steppes. No wonder that Stan chose to go on a tour that took him home. "

After the group meditation in the horseshoe mound, I stood in the center of the group’s circle and I spoke to them about this site and the importance of the rituals and ceremonies that were conducted at this and other ancient sites. Greg later explained that he’s heard me talk many times before, but inside this mound something was different. He couldn’t hear me except when I was facing him. He said it was strange, as my words seemed kind of muffled like, as though they were being absorbed and sucked up into a vacuum of some sort. Later I played him a recording I did inside the mound, just after the feather incident, when it was just Joan and I there. I was using the tape recorder with hand held microphone that I often use for doing interviews. It picks up sounds very well, and though there was a school nearby, a helicopter that frequently flew over, there was a lawn mower and a weed eater, people and traffic nearby, all you can hear is my voice. I asked Joan a question. She was standing nearby, but on the tape you can just barely hear her voice, and you definitely can’t tell what she was saying.

The following week I phoned Allison Kalb, the wife of the Mayor of Portsmouth, to discuss our visit and to find out more about these ancient sites. I was telling Allison about the feather incident that had occurred at the horseshoe mound and she told me that Joan had told her that same story over lunch later that day at a restaurant in Portsmouth named Damons, located at the Ramada Inn. “You know, while she was telling me that I had the weirdest experience,” Allison said. “I’ve thought a lot about it since then. But I started feeling really strange. She was talking about that and it was almost like everything started getting really far away. I could hear what she was saying but it sounded real far away. I’ve never felt like this before. I can’t even explain it. It was almost like an out-of-body thing or something. I kept thinking: ‘I’m going to pass out,’ but I was trying to concentrate so hard on what she was saying.”

“I was afraid that you all could tell. I thought: ‘I feel so strange.’ I just felt like I was going to black out. I can’t even explain it. I have never felt like that before. I thought, ‘Am I having a panic attack?’”

I asked, “So her voice sounded far away too?” and Allison replied, “Yeah. It was like I could see her lips moving. I could hear what she was saying, but it was like I was in a tunnel or something. I can’t even explain it.”

I next described to Allison the sound dampening effect that we had experienced inside the horseshoe mound, how Greg had said that unless I was looking directly at him he couldn’t hear me, and that it was sort of like my words were being sucked up. “See. Oh my gosh,” Allison said. “Yeah, that’s how I felt when your wife was talking, and we were down at the Ramada, sitting there eating, and I thought, ‘I feel like I’m in a tunnel,’ and I’m watching her mouth move but I’m having such a hard time hearing her, and she wasn’t far away from me. It just sounded really, like you said, like the words were being sucked up.”

Joan and Allison were sitting directly across from each other at a long table. There was only three or four feet between them.

Many people have described strange things happening to them at the horseshoe mound site. “People have reported that they have seen little glowing lights over the mound, like little balls of dancing light floating through the air,” Allison told me. She also described how ghost hunters have even visited the horseshoe mound and the surrounding site and reported quite a number of unexplained occurrences.

Portsmouth and the immediate surrounding area held many fascinating surprises for us.

Thursday morning, July 16th, we left Chillicothe’s Comfort Inn at 9 a.m. First we went to see the four conical burial mounds at Mound Cemetery in Piketon. Then we proceeded on to Seip Mound, described as one of the largest earthen mounds built by the Hopewell culture. There we smudged and on top of this enormous mound we blew six of the Peruvian whistling vessels. The lady who had felt the protective Indian presence back at the Shrum Mound told me how it was as though she “saw” the face of an Indian man at this site. She said he had like a peacock feather headdress. She also envisioned Indians surrounding the mound. As we were leaving, Joan told me that she sensed an old Indian man with a staff taller than him standing near the opening in the earthen wall in front of Seip Mound. She “saw” him as having skins on and felt he was like a caretaker. He seemed to be watching all of us, she said. That afternoon we headed for Fort Hill, where many of us got a real physical workout climbing up to the top of this ancient site. Some opted to stay behind and again blow the whistles with Joan at a picnic area at the bottom. After that it was on to Miamisburg, where we spent the night at the Comfort Suites Hotel.

Friday morning, around 7 a.m., we headed out bright and early for Fort Ancient. We toured their wonderful museum, a lot of us also did business at their gift shop (I noticed one person purchasing a booklet on sage) and then we went back outside and looked at the mounds, earthen walls, and went to a lookout spot that afforded a great view of the surrounding area. Our bus even passed some people doing an archeological dig.

Confirmation?

Then we returned to Miamisburg to visit one of the two largest conical mounds in the eastern U.S. Joan smudged each person as they were about to go up the stairs to the viewing platform located at the top of this 65 foot tall mound, while I held out a small plastic pouch for anyone who wanted to have a pinch of tobacco mix to make an offering to the four directions. This was going to be our final Indian Mound visit on this tour, and this was to be everyone’s final opportunity for a smudging and to make an offering. It was at this time that a young lady in our group approached me and told me that she didn’t know quite how to ask me this and wondered if I knew it already, but that at one of the recent site smudging and meditational events these human shaped shadow forms, as best as she could describe them, had appeared around me. They came up to around my shoulders (I’m about 5’ 9” tall) and at first there was like one, then two, then three, and it seemed that pretty soon there was a pretty good sized group of them. At any rate, she said that she just wanted me to know that the spirits were listening to me, that when I called them in that they indeed did come. I must admit that listening to her share this story with me gave my arms goose bumps.

Bullwinkle’s Top Hat:

Were the Spirits Friendly?

After our visit at this great site, we all headed into Miamisburg to do lunch at Bullwinkle’s Top Hat. I chuckled to myself, wondering if Greg had had a hand in the selection of this restaurant. In his book People of the Web he actually mentioned Bullwinkle J. Moose in a subtitled section in chapter 5 entitled “The Spirits Are About To Speak – Are They Friendly Spirits? …Friendly? Just Listen.” But from what I knew of the arrangements, Greg didn’t have a hand in the restaurant selection at all. Maybe Trickster Coyote was playing a synchronistic little mind game with us.

Indeed were they friendly? We certainly felt like they were!

After another delicious meal (much more than the average person should eat at one sitting), we headed back to Columbus, where we’d spend the final night of our tour. But on the way back we were to stop at Columbus’s Ohio Historical Center where acclaimed archeologist Bradley T. Lepper would lead us on a personally guided tour of their archeological displays. Greg said that in the field of archeology Bradley Lepper was his hero. A few years back, Lepper had announced to the world the existence of the remains of an apparent 56 mile long straight line walled walkway from Newark’s Octagon to Chillicothe’s High Banks Circle and Octagon site. When we were visiting Mound City, most of us walked down to the Scioto River and Greg pointed to the fields across the river from us, to the locations of where this Circle and Octagon had been. Unfortunately, it was demolished by white settlers like thousands of other sites, but pictures from the air still show its outline on the ground below. It looked very similar to the Newark site and was used the same way it seems, but while the circle was 20 acres as well, the octagon was a smaller 18 acres.

We heard talk that this site might be reconstructed. Hopefully this is so, but due to the present economic crisis this looks very unlikely any time in the near future. Both Greg and Mr. Lepper expressed concern about the future of archeology in Ohio. There were impending cut backs, anticipated lay offs, parks and museums were opening fewer hours to save money (this was a problem in planning our tour), and Greg was disappointed to see how this museum’s archeological section had been greatly reduced in size while the existing space was being used for other things. We expressed our collective concern to Mr. Lepper that these wonderful treasures were going to become less and less available to the public. I think we also wondered (at least some of us) if the public at large fully appreciated the significance of all of this. I remember talking about the archeological treasures of Portsmouth with Allison Kalb and what a great shame it was that so little of the original sites remained intact, that what was originally there had been just as spectacular, if not more so, than England’s cherished tour attraction Stonehenge. She quickly agreed, saying that she really didn’t think that most area citizens really comprehended and fully appreciated what had once been there.

As an added footnote to this article, I should point out how Greg mentioned one day how in one of Edgar Cayce’s readings he described a Chief Powhatan and the chiefs of “five great nations” who came together for a “pow wow” in an “Octagon” on the banks of the Ohio River in West Virginia. Greg said that this reading was quoted in the back of his Mound Builders book, which I had with me, and that evening I looked it up. Though we know about Ohio’s Newark and High Banks “octagon” earthworks, no one seems to have a clue about one on the banks of the Ohio River in West Virginia. Not even Richard Barnhouse.

Who?

The week following our tour, back at home again in Tennessee, I called Richard Shadow Hawk Barnhouse, who we all met all too briefly in Portsmouth on the 15th, to discuss with him his findings regarding ancient petroglyphs and other ancient Native American sites in Ohio and other surrounding states. Originally from West Virginia, as a young boy he had heard about a great-grandmother who was a full blooded Shawnee. He wanted to know more about her but the family was pretty tight lipped on the subject. “They’d be sitting on the front porch talking about the old days and I’d ask about the Indians and then they didn’t want to talk,” Richard said. “They’d shut up. My grandpa took me, years later after she had passed away, grandpa took me and showed me a petroglyph site and he said, ‘You asked a lot of questions, and if you want to know then you’ll have to learn to read what’s on this rock and then you’ll know what your grandmother was about.’”

“And that’s what got me started,” Richard told me. He had set up in a building near the Horseshoe Mound in Portsmouth a great many art pieces that he had done that were based, he stated, on his factual and detailed research into ancient Native American petroglyph sites. He also had drawings and photographs of many fascinating places that he had visited and studied over the many years. Today in his sixties, Richard still doesn’t tire talking about this subject. He still wants to know more “about the Indians”.

In the next issue, I will have to devote a little more time and space to Richard and the interesting things that he had to share. I’ll also have to tell you about the huge boulder removed from the Ohio River at Portsmouth that had a face carved on it, and what Richard had to say about it.

Below is a notice that I’m adding for Nancy Wallace out in New Mexico, on behalf of her worthy sounding cause known as A Child’s Miracle Mind. Priscilla Wolf and I will be her radio guests on August 17th on her program The Metaphysical World and Beyond (www.achieveradio.com) :

David Icke talk

Call 1-800-905-3315.

Full day talk $50.00.

Sunday, October 11, 2009 from 10 AM to 5 PM

Hilton Santa Fe Golf Resort and Spa at Buffalo Thunder

20 Buffalo Thunder Trail, Santa Fe, NM 87506

The David Icke Live event in Santa Fe on October 11, 2009, is a benefit for The School of Now in Los Lunas, NM, which is a project of A Child’s Miracle Mind, Inc., a 501c3 organization. Ticket price is tax deductible.

Acclaimed British writer and speaker David Icke is changing history with his controversial research and revelations about the true nature of reality that has been kept from humanity for too long. Join 2000 other courageous truth seekers for a day that will change your life forever. Over more than seven hours, and with 1000 images, David will expose the hidden hand behind global events in what is one of the most challenging times in human history. Doing nothing is no longer an option and people must get informed about what is really happening in their world. Do it for yourself—do it for the children.

For more information contact Catherine Hart, Publicist, 575-776-1425