Free Area 51 by Robert Doherty Page A

held hundreds of thousands of such abstracts. The system also had the advantage of holding practically every bit of information about Egypt and Cairo that had ever been recorded.
    There was no record of Germans in the Great Pyramid during World War II; not that he had expected to find any.
    But, sorting through bits and pieces of local newspaper articles from 1945, it did appear that access to the Great Pyramid had been restricted for several months during that year and that some strange Allied military activity had centered around the building, as Kaji had said.
    Cross-referencing the word Tliuie with the Nazis brought a surprising result.
    Nabinger had been familiar with the word Thule in the traditional sense from ancient mythology: a northern, inhabited region. The Nazis, however, had perverted that concept--and many other myths and legends--for their own purposes and they had used the science of archaeology to try to support their claims.

    Even nonarchaeologists knew about the Rosetta stone, found in 1799 when Napoleon's army had invaded Egypt.

    In many ways the stone had been the key that opened up study of ancient Egypt, because when Champollion finally broke the code to the traditional Egyptian hieroglyphics and deciphered it, a wealth of information was unleashed.
    Despite his having studied the history of archaeology in college and graduate school, the information Nabinger was now reading was new to him. What Nabinger had never been told was that in 1842 the King of Prussia had led an expedition to Egypt that had done further work on deciphering ancient Egyptian texts and markings. A German Egyptologist named Richard Lepsius had accompanied the king and remained there for three years, producing drawings and measurements of all three pyramids.
    Over the years that followed, the Germans had invested quite a bit of time and energy in the study of the pyramids, hieroglyphics, and high runes. Obviously--if Kaji's story was true--that effort had borne some fruit.
    In the decade just prior to World War I various German groups had used myths and archaeology to weave a strange and convoluted web of doctrine to support their racial and anti-Semitic philosophies. The swastika, a symbol that had been used by several ancient peoples, was resurrected. List, an early influence on Hitler, used his own false deciphering of high runes to justify his beliefs.
    Nabinger stopped scrolling the computer for a second and stroked his beard.
    Although the deciphering of the Rossetta stone had greatly increased understanding of hieroglyphics, it had been of no help in the deciphering of the high runes. Nabinger's own feeling was that the high runes were older than hieroglyphics.
    Nabinger remembered Kaji's comments about the Germans using some sort of map with markings on it to find their way. What had the Germans uncovered? Had they discovered a way to decipher high rune text that still remained unknown to the rest of the world? Were they using some ancient document or perhaps something drawn by Lepsius in the nineteenth century? Or had they simply used a map, copied from someplace, and still been unable to read the high runes?

    Nabinger had heard about the German fascination with the myth of the Holy Grail and the search for the lance supposedly used on Jesus after his crucifixion, but his instructors in school had laughed away the Nazis as amateurs in the scientific field of archaeology, more interested in propaganda than science. But perhaps, Nabinger wondered, there had been other searches with better results?
    Nabinger thought of his own hypothesis connecting the high runes in South and Central America with those in the pyramid. He knew he would be laughed at also if he tried to publish his results.

    Nabinger read on. At the end of World War I many of the occult groups that had been born in Germany prior to the war grew in strength, feeding off the deep and bitter dissatisfaction of the people with the defeat and peace imposed on