Chicanonautica: In Search of Atlantean-Brazilian White People

by Ernest Hogan

I just couldn’t resist the title Mysteries of Ancient South America. I consider myself an amateur archaeologist. Combine that with my being a Chicano living in Aztlán, I have access to at lot archaeological sites, and my take on things is deliberately anticolonial. I’ve also found that things tend to get older as you go south, suggesting that the general movement over the centuries has been south to north, rather than across the northern land bridge from Asia.

Interesting finds that could come from advanced civilizations are reported in the Amazon, but they are rare, and information remains spotty. I have to settle with old books and things from the fringes.

Mysteries of Ancient South America turns out to be a treasure of material, that author Harold T. Wilkins researched for years, both in books and insect-eaten manuscripts, as well as travel. The dust jacket says, This book was written to dispel the misconception, common in the scientific world, that ancient civilization began in Akkad, Sumer and Egypt. I only wish that the documentation was better and the connecting of the dots to make the big picture was more satisfying . . .

 

The central premise turns out to be that an advanced civilization existed as long as a hundred thousand years ago, in South America, that was a colonized by Atlantis. It’s very important to the author that the creators of this civilization be white, he keeps mentioning it ad nauseam. 

I wonder what color he believed the peoples of the African and Middle Eastern regions mentioned in the jacket copy were?

This isn’t all that surprising. Before Erich Von Däniken popularized the sci-fi idea of ancient aliens, lost white races were the go-to explanation for archaeological anomalies. The “lost race” novel was a popular fiction genre, as seen in the works of H. Rider Haggard and Edgar Rice Burroughs.

Though he does mention statues of Africans and other races being found in South America, he is more interested in tales of “bearded white Indians” and Amazons who may be the same ones mentioned by the ancient Greeks. He dutifully reports rumors of degenerated descendants of the Brazilian-Atlanteans, like the Lancandones—dwarves in the “Chiappas” region of Mexico (yes, South America seems to start at the Mexican-American border).

Hmm. I wonder if any has asked SubComandante Marcos and his Zapatistas if they have encountered them?

Wilikins introduces material from places as far away as Ireland and Mongolia, a “Great Catastrophe” that includes meteors, the sinking of Atlantis, the Biblical flood, the raising of the ruins of Tiahuanacu from the bottom of the Pacific Ocean to the Andes, a vast network of subterranean tunnels, races of giants, and even ancient Men in Black (note that this book was published before Ufologists started reporting Men in Black).

There seems to be a desire among writers of such books to come up with a unified field theory for weirdness.

This book is brimming over with weirdness, which can be fun if you don’t take it too seriously. And dammit, we do keep finding these strange artifacts, and somebody did genetically engineer the banana before the beginning of recorded history, and we won't ever know who without a time machine . . .

Ernest Hogan studies lost, ignored, and emerging civilizations. It helps in his work.