Vitrified Ruins in California’s Death Valley

In Secrets of the Lost Races,16 Rene Noorbergen discusses the evidence for a cataclysmic war in the remote past that included the use of airships and weapons that vitrified stone cities.
The most numerous vitrified remains in the New World are located in the western United States. In 1850 the American explorer Captain Ives William Walker was the first to view some of these ruins, situated in Death Valley. He discovered a city about a mile long, with the lines of the streets and the positions of the buildings still visible. At the center he found a huge rock, between 20 to 30 feet high, with the remains of an enormous structure atop it. The southern side of both the rock and the building was melted and vitrified. Walker assumed that a volcano had been responsible for this phenomenon, but there is no volcano in the area. In addition, tectonic heat could not have caused such a liquidization of the rock surface.
An associate of Captain Walker who followed up his initial exploration commented: “The whole region between the rivers Gila and San Juan is covered with remains. The ruins of cities are to be found there which must be most extensive, and they are burnt out and vitrified in part, full of fused stones and craters caused by fires which were hot enough to liquefy rock or metal. There are paving stones and houses torn with monstrous cracks [as though they had] been attacked by a giant’s fire-plough.” These vitrified ruins in Death Valley sound fascinating–but do they really exist? There certainly is evidence of ancient civilisations in the area. In Titus Canyon, petroglyphs and inscriptions have been scratched into the walls by unknown prehistoric hands. Some experts think the graffiti might have been made by people who lived here long before the Indians we know of, because extant Indians know nothing of the glyphs and, indeed, regard them with superstitious awe. Says Jim Brandon in Weird America Magazine.
Piute legends tell of a city beneath Death Valley that they call Shin-au-av. Tom Wilson, an Indian guide in the 1920s, claimed that his grandfather had rediscovered the place by wandering into a miles-long labyrinth of caves beneath the valley floor. Eventually the Indian came to an underworld city where the people spoke an incomprehensible language and wore clothing made of leather. Wilson told this story after a prospector named White claimed he had fallen through the floor of an abandoned mine at Wingate Pass and into an unknown tunnel. White followed this into a series of rooms, where he found hundreds of leather clad humanoid mummies. Gold bars were stacked like bricks and piled in bins. White claimed he had explored the caverns on three occasions. On one, his wife accompanied him; and on another, his partner, Fred Thomason. However, none of them [was] able to relocate the opening to the cavern when they tried to take a group of archaeologists on a tour of the place. VITRIFIED RUINS IN CALIFORNIA’S DEATH VALLEY
It seems one local character knew how to find the place. Brandon relates that “Death Valley Scotty”, an eccentric who spent millions building a castle-estate in the area, was known to go “prospecting” when funds ran low. Death Valley Scotty would check out for a few days of wandering in the nearby Grapevine Mountains, bringing back suspiciously refined-looking gold that he claimed he had prospected. Many believe that he got his gold from the stacked gold bars in the tunnel system beneath Death Valley. Evidence of a lost civilisation in Death Valley came in a bizarre report of caves and mummies in the Hot Citizen, a Nevada paper, on August 5, 1947. The story ran as follows:
EXPEDITION REPORTS NINE-FOOT SKELETONS

A band of amateur archaeologists announced today they have discovered a lost civilization of men nine feet tall in Californian caverns. Howard E. Hill, spokesman for the expedition, said the civilization may be “the fabled lost continent of Atlantis”. The caves contain mummies of men and animals and implements of a culture 80,000 years old but “in some respects more advanced than ours,” Hill said. He said the 32 caves covered a 180-square-mile area in California’s Death Valley and southern Nevada.
ARCHAEOLOGISTS IS SKEPTICAL
“This discovery may be more important than the unveiling of King Tut’s tomb,” he said. Professional archaeologists were skeptical of Hill’s story. Los Angeles County Museum scientists pointed out that dinosaurs and tigers which Hill said lay side by side in the caves appeared on Earth 10,000,000 to 13,000,000 years apart. Hill said the caves were discovered in 1931 by Dr F. Bruce Russell, Beverly Hills physician, who literally fell in while sinking a shaft for a mining claim.
“He tried for years to interest people in them,” Hill said, “but nobody believed him.”
Russell and several hobbyists incorporated after the war as Amazing Explorations, Inc. and started digging. Several caverns contained mummified remains of “a race of men eight to nine feet tall,” Hill said.
“They apparently wore a prehistoric zoot suit a hair garment of medium length, jacket and knee-length trousers.”
CAVERN TEMPLE FOUND

Another cavern contained their ritual hall with devices and markings similar to the Masonic order, he said. “A long tunnel from this temple took the party into a room where,” Hill said, “well-preserved remains of dinosaurs, saber-toothed tigers, imperial elephants and other extinct beasts were paired off in niches as if on display. “Some catastrophe apparently drove the people into the caves,” he said. “All of the implements of their civilization were found,” he said, “including household utensils and stoves which apparently cooked by radio waves.”
“I know,” he said, “that you won’t believe that.” While of doubtful authenticity, this is an interesting story, to say the least. The last comment about cooking food with radio waves being
unbelievable is ironic. That is the one thing that modern readers of the story could certainly believe was true, considering the widespread use of microwave ovens today. Who had heard of them in 1947?
Sodom and Gomorrah meet Hiroshima and Nagasaki

Probably the most famous of all ancient “nuke ‘em” stories is the well known biblical tale of Sodom and Gomorrah: And the Lord said, Because the cry of Sodom and Gomorrah is great, and because their sin is very grievous Then the Lord rained upon Sodom and upon Gomorrah, brimstone and fire from the Lord out of heaven; And he overthrew those cities, and all the plain, and all the inhabitants of the cities, and that which grew upon the ground. But his [Lot's] wife looked back from behind him, and she became a pillar of salt And lo, the smoke of the country went up as the smoke of a furnace. (Genesis 18:20; 19:24-26,28) This biblical passage has come to epitomise the destructive power of God’s wrath visited on those places which sin. The Bible is very specific about the site of Sodom and Gomorrah plus several other towns; they were in the Vale of Siddim, which was located at the southern end of the Salt Sea (now called the Dead Sea). Other towns in the area, according to the Bible, were Zoar, Admah and Zeboiim (Genesis 14:2). As late as the Middle Ages, a town called Zoar existed in the area.
The Dead Sea is 1,293 feet [394 metres] below sea level and at least 1,200 feet [365 m] deep. The bottom of the sea is therefore about 2,500 feet [762 m] below the level of the  Mediterranean. Approximately 25 per cent of the water of the Dead Sea consists of solid ingredients, mostly sodium chloride. Normal ocean water is around 4.6 per cent salt. The Jordan and many smaller rivers empty themselves into this basin, which has no solitary outlet. What its tributaries bring to it in the way of chemical substances remain deposited in the Dead Sea’s 500 square miles. Evaporation under the broiling sun takes place on the surface of the sea at a rate of over 230 million cubic feet per day. Arab tradition has it that so many poisonous gases come out of the lake that birds could not fly across it, as they would die before reaching the other side. The Dead Sea was first explored in modern times in 1848 when W. F. Lynch, an American geologist, led an expedition. He brought ashore from his government research ship two metal boats which he fastened onto large-wheeled carts. Pulled by a long team of horses, his expedition reached the Dead Sea some months later. Lynch and his team discovered that the traditions were correct in that a man could not sink in the sea. They also surveyed the lake, noting its unusual depth and the shallow area or “tongue” at the southern end of the lake. This area is thought to be where the Vale of Siddim was located and the five cities existed. It is possible to see entire forests of trees encrusted with salt beneath the water in this southern part of the lake.
Standard historical theory on the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, such as in The Bible As History by Werner Keller,18 holds that the cities of the Vale of Siddim were destroyed when a plate movement caused the Great Rift Valley–of which the Dead Sea is a part–to shift, and the area at the southern end of the Dead Sea to subside. In the great earthquake there were probably explosions, natural gases issuing forth and brimstone falling like rain. This is likely to have happened about 2000 BC, the time of Abraham and Lot, thinks Keller, though geologists place the event many thousands of years before this. Says Keller:
The Jordan Valley is only part of a huge fracture in the Earth’s crust. The path of this crack has meantime been accurately traced. It begins far north, several hundred miles beyond the borders of Palestine, at the foot of the Taurus mountains in Asia Minor. In the south it runs from the south shore of the Dead Sea through the Wadi el-Arabah to the Gulf of Aqabah and only comes to an end beyond the Red Sea in Africa. At many points in this vast depression, signs of intense volcanic activity are obvious. In the Galilean mountains, in the highlands of Transjordan, on the banks of the Jabbok, a tributary of the Jordan, and on the Gulf of Aqabah are black basalt and lava. The subsidence released volcanic forces that had been lying dormant, deep down along the whole length of the fracture. In the upper valley of the Jordan near Bashan there are still the towering craters of extinct volcanoes; great stretches of lava and deep layers of basalt have been deposited on the limestone surface. From time immemorial the area around this depression has been subject to earthquakes. There is repeated evidence of them and the Bible itself records them. Did Sodom and Gomorrah sink when perhaps a part of the base of this huge fissure collapsed still further to the accompaniment of earthquakes and volcanic eruptions? As for the pillars of salt, Keller says: To the west of the southern shore and in the direction of the Biblical “Land of the South”, the Negeb, stretches a ridge of hills about 150 feet high and 10 miles from north to south. Their slopes sparkle and glitter in the sunshine like diamonds. It is an odd phenomenon of nature. For the most part this little range of hills consists of pure rock salt. The Arabs call it Jebel Usdum, an ancient name, which preserves in it the word “Sodom”. Many blocks of salt have been worn away by the rain and have crashed downhill. They have odd shapes and some of them stand on end, looking like statues. It is easy to imagine them suddenly seeming to come to life.
These strange statues in salt remind us vividly of the Biblical description of Lot’s wife who was turned into a pillar of salt… And everything in the neighbourhood of the Salt Sea is even to this day quickly covered with a crust of salt. However, Keller himself admits that there is a very serious problem with this theory of a cataclysm sending the Vale of Siddim to the bottom of the Dead Sea: it must have happened many hundreds of thousands, even millions, of years ago–at least according to most geologists. Says Keller: In particular, we must remember there can be no question that the Jordan fissure was formed before about 4000 BC. Indeed, according to the most recent presentation of the facts, the origin of the fissure dates back to the Oligocene, the third oldest stage of the Tertiary period. We thus have to think in terms not of thousands, but of millions of years. Violent volcanic activity connected with the Jordan fissure has been shown to have occurred since then, but even so we do not get any further than the Pleistocene which came to an end approximately ten thousand years ago. Certainly we do not come anywhere near to the third, still less the second millennium before Christ–the period, that is to say, in which the patriarchs are traditionally placed. In short, Keller is saying that any geological catastrophe that would have destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah would have had to have happened a million years ago, or so geologists have told him. Keller says that geologists have not found any evidence of a recent catastrophe at the southern end of the Dead Sea, at least not for about 10,000 years. Says Keller: In addition, it is precisely to the south of the Lisan peninsula, where Sodom and Gomorrah are reported to have been annihilated, that the traces of former volcanic activity cease. In short, the proof in this area of a quite recent catastrophe which wiped out towns and was accompanied by violent volcanic activity is not provided by the findings of the geologists.

So here is the problem: the Dead Sea area may have had a cataclysm that could be the origin of the Old Testament story; however, conservative uniformitarian geologists have said that any such Earth changes must have occurred long before any sort of collective memory of the event. In late 1999, a new theory was proposed by British Bible scholar Michael Sanders and an international team of researchers who, after several fraught weeks of diving in a mini-submarine, discovered what appears to be the salt-encrusted remains of ancient settlements on the seabed. Sanders told a television crew from BBC/Channel 4 who were making a documentary about the expedition: There is a good chance that these mounds are covering up brick structures and are one of the lost cities of the plains, possibly even Sodom or Gomorrah, though I would have to examine the evidence. These Bible stories were handed down by word of mouth from generation to generation before they were written down, and there seems to be a great deal in this one. Sanders had unearthed a map dating from 1650, which reinforced his belief that the sites of the two cities could be under the northern basin rather than on the southern edge of the Dead Sea. He recruited Richard Slater, an American geologist and expert in deep-sea diving, to take him to the depths of the Dead Sea in the two-man Delta mini- submarine that was involved in the discovery of the sunken ocean-liner, the Lusitania. Sanders’s location for Sodom and Gomorrah, in the deep northern part of the Dead Sea, is even more at odds with history and geology than Keller’s theory of the cities being at the shallow southern end.
Therefore we come back to the popular theory that these cities were not destroyed in a geological cataclysm but in a man-made (or extraterrestrial-made) apocalypse that was technological in nature. Were Sodom and Gomorrah attacked with atomic weapons, as Hiroshima and Nagasaki were? Researcher L. M. Lewis, in his book Footprints on the Sands of Time,19 maintains that both Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed by atomic weapons and that the salt pillars and high salt content around the Dead Sea are evidence of a nuclear blast. Says Lewis: When Hiroshima was being rebuilt, stretches of sandy soil were found to have been automatically changed into a substance resembling a glazed silicon permeated by a saline crystalloid. Little blocks of this were cut from the mass and sold to tourists as souvenirs of the town and of atomic action. Had an even larger explosion pulverized every stone of every building– and had the complete city disappeared into thin air–there would still have been tell-tale indications of what had occurred on the outskirts of the area of devastation. At some points there would surely be a marked difference in the soil or an atomic change in some object of note. Lewis maintains that if the pillars of salt at the end of the Dead Sea were ordinary salt, they would have disappeared with the periodic rains. Instead, these pillars are of a special, harder salt, only created in a nuclear reaction such as an atomic explosion.
These pillars of salt have indeed lasted a long time. Not only were they present in ancient times, but are still standing today. Lewis quotes from the historian Josephus, who says in his History of the Jews: but Lot’s wife, continually turning back to view the city as she went from it, although God had forbidden her so to do, was changed into a pillar of salt; for I have seen it, and it remains to this day. Comments Lewis:
It should be emphasized that Flavius Josephus lived from 37 to approximately 100 AD. As previously stated, Sodom was disintegrated in 1898 BC. How amazing, then, that Josephus should actually have seen the human “pillar of salt” after it had stood for almost 2,000 years! If it had been ordinary salt, it would have disappeared with the first rains. There may have been many pillars of salt throughout history, but Lewis thinks the evidence supports an atomic blast: The atomic change of the soil upon which Lot’s wife stood and that of the shore of Hiroshima have a similarity that cannot be denied! Both had undergone a sudden atomic conversion which could only have been caused by the instant action of nuclear fission. As those things which equal the same thing must be equal to one another, it is difficult to escape the conviction that as Hiroshima was destroyed, so, by similar means, Sodom was disintegrated and Lot’s wife at the same moment automatically changed. Relying on the veracity of Josephus, the only conclusion that can be reached is that Sodom was destroyed by nuclear fission.
The story of Sodom and Gomorrah is puzzling not just because of the destruction but also because of the personalities involved, such as the angel warning Lot to leave the doomed cities. Was Lot warned beforehand that the cities were going to be “nuked” by extraterrestrials or humans with high-tech weapons? Lot was warned to get his family out, but his wife looked back and was blinded by the atomic flash. Perhaps her body was even atomically changed. At the southern end of the Dead Sea today is a modern chemical plant that looks like an alien base. Strange towers shoot up out of the desert. Bizarre buildings with domes and spires are covered with multi- coloured lights. One expects to see a flying saucer land at any moment. It is the Dead Sea Chemical Works. During the day it looks like an oil refinery or something similar, but at night the lights that are strung about the facility make it seem otherworldly. This huge chemical plant is said to have an endless supply of valuable minerals, including radioactive salts, with which to work. Are some of these chemicals the result of an ancient atomic blast?