Robert Todd Carroll
Internet Bunk features WWW sites that provide false, misleading or deceptive information regarding scientific matters or alleged paranormal or supernatural events. Because there are millions of such sites, we try to present only the most egregious and offensive. Readers are encouraged to send Internet Bunk material to: btcarrol@skepdic.com
Pharaoh's Pump Foundation
Steven Myers has created this Internet site in honor of his hero Edward J. Kunkel and his book Pharaoh's Pump. Kunkel argued that the great pyramid in the desert at Giza was a water pump.
Myers has created The Pharaoh's Pump Foundation, which, he claims, is going to build a pump using ancient Egyptian technology. He is accepting donations. Even if it were true that Giza was a water pump in the desert, why bother to build a copy of a pump that's been broken for thousands of years? Because the "ancient pumping technology is nonpolluting and does not require fossil fuels or electricity to operate." Just like windmills! Not quite. According to Myers, the pyramid pump was fueled by fire. I am just guessing here, but I think if it was fueled by fire, something had to burn. I guess they burned all those forests that used to be in the desert, or maybe they burned some magic non-polluting fuel brought in by aliens.
Apparently, Myers envisions a countryside dotted with pyramids, pumping our polluted rivers and streams into our polluted cities and out to our poisoned and mineral-depleted farmlands.
Myers' visions seem to have been stimulated by his reading of 5/5/2000: Ice: The Ultimate Disaster by Richard W. Noone, a cult classic which, among other things, predicts doomsday on May 5, 2000, when Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn will be aligned with Earth. This alignment, he says, will cause the polar ice caps to melt. Since Noah won't be around to build an ark for us, we'll need pyramids to pump all that water away from our cities. Otherwise, we drown. It seems of little interest to Myers that astronomers are well aware of the upcoming alignment and do not see why there is concern. It's happened before and it will happen again.
The notion that Giza was a water pump is bunk, according to the most recent issue of Skeptic magazine (Vol. 7 No. 2, 1999). In the "Skeptic's Forum" there is a letter from Norman Cohan, Director of the Karpeles Manuscript Museum (Santa Barbara branch), in which he exhorts readers of Skeptic to "reexamine the latest evidence with respect to the bewildering construction techniques utilized in the Great Pyramid of Giza, as presented in Christopher Dunn's new book The Giza Power Plant. Giza was not a water pump but a power plant! Dunn claims that the Giza power plant worked "by responding harmonically with the seismic energy contained within the Earth." He claims that "the Great Pyramid became a coupled oscillator and drew energy through it and converted it to electromagnetic energy through the sophisticated use of acoustics and quartz-bearing rock." What did the ancient Egyptians use this great power plant for? Among other things, they used it for levitation, according to Mr. Cohan.
Dunn is said to be "an engineer with intimate knowledge of machine tools." He went to Egypt and became convinced that many of the artifacts created by the ancient Egyptians had to be done using precisely machined tools. Once he believed this, it was not difficult for him to see evidence everywhere (confirmation bias) and see everything from the smallest artifact to wall carvings and papyrus paintings to the pyramids themselves as requiring advanced technology. Margaret Morris (The Egyptian Pyramid Mystery is Solved) thinks Dunn is all wet because he didn't realize that the stones the Egyptians used to build the pyramids weren't natural and didn't need to be cut from quarries. The stones are synthetic and were made by adding water to "earthen materials" and shaped while soft.
Myers and those who see Giza as a water pump have also deluded themselves. How easy it is to find supportive evidence for our hypotheses! And how powerfully strong our arguments seem when we selectively present our facts and make no effort to find contrary evidence. It is especially easy when our audience isn't knowledgeable enough to know what's been left out or how plausible one's claims are.
What next? That mummies were repositories of vibratory chi? That all those centuries of hieroglyphics that give no indication of a high-tech society, were done that way so that future generations wouldn't know how advanced the Egyptians were? That those ancient historians, such as Herodotus, who are brought in to support the view that the pyramid was a water pump because he says he saw water around it, omitted mentioning that the Egyptians had created a huge water pump in the desert? Maybe Herodotus, not being from Atlantis, couldn't tell the difference between a water pump and a power plant. Fortunately, our modern day alternative "scientists" can. They just don't realize how easy it is to deceive ourselves into believing something simply because we can find confirmation for our belief in the form of data that is consistent with the belief, or is easily molded to be consistent with the belief.
See related entry on pyramidiocy.
further reading
De Camp, L. Sprague. The Ancient Engineers (New York: Ballantine Books, 1977).
Hodges, Peter. How the pyramids were built, edited by Julian Keable (Warminster: Aris & Phillips, 1993).
Robert Todd Carroll
The Skeptic's RefugeLast updated 10/25/00