Skip to Main Content

Power Places and the Master Builders of Antiquity

Unexplained Mysteries of the Past

Published by Bear & Company
Distributed by Simon & Schuster

About The Book

A collection of investigations into strange and mysterious phenomena from around the world

• Explores ancient and modern sacred sites, places of power, natural wonders, altered states, UFO encounters, and the afterlife

• Investigates sites and phenomena in Egypt, China, Ireland, and throughout North America, including Oak Island, Florida’s Coral Castle, Wisconsin’s UFO hot-spot, and giant-built constructions in Illinois

• Examines the forgotten or suppressed work of extraordinary personalities, including Jules Verne, Sir Francis Bacon, and the real-life Indiana Jones, Count Byron de Prorok

Sharing his personal investigations into a wide range of ancient mysteries and paranormal enigmas in America and abroad, Frank Joseph takes us on a journey into the high strangeness of our world.

Beginning with the work of the master builders of antiquity, the author examines Old World connections with New World sacred centers, such as the similarities between Ohio’s Mound City and the pyramids and tombs of the Giza Plateau, as well as ancient American cities of the Sun, China’s Great Pyramid, and the possibility of a Templar treasure on Oak Island. He explores modern sacred sites, such as Iowa’s Grotto of Gems, Tennessee’s Greek Temple of the goddess Athena, and Florida’s Coral Castle. He investigates pre-Columbian sites and underwater pyramids in the Midwest, Wisconsin’s UFO hot-spot, lost Aztec Cities of Gold in Kansas, and giant-built constructions in Illinois. He details how the intriguing acoustics of Newgrange in Ireland are echoed in its spiral carvings. Exploring spiritual uses of altered states, he looks at the practices of Minoan snake handlers, Mayan shamans, and prophets through the ages.

Providing his own investigations into classic paranormal phenomena and ancient mysteries, the author also examines evidence of the Bermuda Triangle, Atlantis, and the Ark of the Covenant. He explores the forgotten or suppressed work of some of history’s most extraordinary personalities, including Jules Verne, Sir Francis Bacon, Mother Shipton, and the real-life inspiration for Indiana Jones, Count Byron de Prorok. He investigates wonders of our natural world, including communication with elemental beings, the numinous secrets of water, and the living soul of matter.

Frank Joseph investigates these phenomena not to explain them away, but to expose their power to affect and elevate human consciousness.

Excerpt

Chapter 23

Illinois’ Gold Pyramid, Iowa’s Grotto of Gems, and Tennessee’s Greek Temple


Drivers speeding along Highway 94, forty miles north of Chicago, occasionally catch a glimpse of a glittering anomaly in the otherwise ordinary suburb of Wadsworth, Illinois. Built in 1974, America’s own pyramid is the private home of the James Onan family, who, until the mid-1990s, opened their untypical domicile to the public each summer.

Visitors emerged from [the dazzling recreation of the tomb of Tutankhamun] through a south exit and followed the sidewalk to the Pyramid House. The house is surrounded by a moat, and its twelve thousand square feet of walls are covered with twenty-four-karat gold plate... At fifty-five feet in height, the Gold Pyramid is a 1/100th-scale replica of Egypt’s Great Pyramid on the Giza Plateau. Like the original, the six-story structure is oriented to true north. Its interior contains seventeen thousand feet of living space, featuring a full-sized re-creation of Tutankhamun’s ceremonial chariot covered entirely in gold.

The Chariot Room also displays some authentic Egyptian artifacts, many statues, another solid-gold coffin lid, and hundreds of marvelous objects. The Pyramid House is unquestionably an evolving sacred site, one of the latest in North America, although that is not the original intention of its builder and owner. Yet, from its very inception, it has evidenced many qualities typically identified with sacred centers.

As an experienced and successful contractor, James Onan knew not to build over an underground water source. Even so, weeks after the foundations of the Pyramid House were laid, a freshwater spring inexplicably bubbled forth at the very center of the construction. It grew so large that it completely surrounded the structure. Remarkably, archaeologists know that, during its civilized heyday, the Giza Plateau was likewise completely surrounded by water from the river Nile. Access to the Great Pyramid then was via a bridge, just as the Illinois Gold Pyramid is reached today.

What mysterious forces required that North America’s 20th-century version of the Great Pyramid be encircled by a moat like its ancient Egyptian counterpart? Tests of the spring surrounding the Gold Pyramid House reveal its excellent purity and high mineral content. Just before the unexpected arrival of the freshwater spring, a bulldozer broke its steel teeth against a large, immovable outcropping of black rock. Chunks of it were sent to the Colorado Assay Office in Denver for analysis.

Meanwhile, the spring continued to rise ever higher, eventually drowning the black rock lying just outside the perimeter of the foundation under twenty feet of water. It was then that the Colorado report arrived, informing the astounded Onan that the sample pieces were gold ore! He is the only person to have found gold in Illinois. So far, he has been unsuccessful in retrieving the submerged mass of gold at the bottom of the moat.

Claims that pyramid structures exert some kind of preservative influences are born out at Onan’s unusual home. He experimented with different kinds of food placed at various locations inside and in its immediate vicinity. They naturally spoiled over time, save one banana, which he left at the midpoint between the very center of the Gold Pyramid and its south wall, halfway up the structure, on its second floor. Incredibly, the fruit desiccated but refused to rot. To this day, more than twenty years later, Onan still shows visitors the dried banana, preserved through the unseen energy coursing through the Gold Pyramid House.

Indeed, the place [also] does seem to exert unusual influences on human behavior. Some years ago, I was fortunate enough to be an overnight guest at the Gold Pyramid House where I had a precognitive dream. The vivid psychodrama featured a small aircraft, which narrowly missed colliding with the structure to crash on the street just outside the main gate. Later that same month, a private pilot, while sightseeing over the Gold Pyramid, lost control of his single engine plane and crashed on the street out front, just as foreshadowed in the dream.

But humans are not the only creatures apparently affected by the Gold Pyramid House. Strange animal events are also known to have occurred there. For two summers running, beginning in 1986, hundreds of jellyfish suddenly appeared in the moat, an impossible event in the Midwest, according to experts at Chicago’s renowned Shedd Aquarium. As suddenly as they arrived, the creatures vanished and never returned. No similar occurrence has ever been reported in Illinois, or anywhere else. The Pyramid House has been home to other bizarre animal phenomena.

Families of vicious birds roost above its eaves outside the north exit of the Chariot Room, which is no longer usable, because the birds boldly swoop to attack anyone approaching its glass doors. Coincidentally, the Chariot Room contains the faithful replica of Pharaoh Tutankhamun’s coffin lid, its golden side panels illustrating his judgment and spiritual apotheosis. In ancient Egyptian religion, the king’s resting place was guarded at its northern end, the Pathway of the Soul, by Sokar, a bird that attacked anyone seeking entry to the royal burial chamber.

An ancient arcane principle states that the faithful re-creation of a sacred object or place infuses some energy of the original into the duplicate. This explanation accounts for the sacred power, say, of even a cheap, plastic crucifix, which nonetheless resonates with at least something of the power of the Cross it is meant to simulate. The same principle appears to be at work at Illinois’ Gold Pyramid House, whose faithful if downsized reproduction of the Great Pyramid has attracted to itself a portion of the mysterious power still in evidence at Egypt’s Giza Plateau.

About The Author

Frank Joseph was the editor in chief of Ancient American magazine from 1993-2007. He is the author of several books, including Before Atlantis, Advanced Civilizations of Prehistoric America, The Lost Civilization of Lemuria, and The Lost Treasure of King Juba. He lives in the Upper Mississippi Valley.

Product Details

  • Publisher: Bear & Company (June 12, 2018)
  • Length: 320 pages
  • ISBN13: 9781591433149

Browse Related Books

Raves and Reviews

“For decades, Frank Joseph has unraveled with compelling evidence the vast hidden and complicated history of Earth and the rise and fall of advanced civilizations across every continent. In his latest book, Power Places and the Master Builders of Antiquity, he unwinds the mystery of mysterious ancient sites left here by these advanced cultures whose knowledge of the multidimensional universe empowered them with expanded consciousness and otherworldly science. Break free from the old paradigms that lock you into a fixed illusion of hopeless reality by unleashing the unbridled beliefs, told brilliantly in Frank Joseph’s writings, that shift us into immortal sovereignty. A courageous warrior of truth, Frank leaves you with the deepest yearning for the truth of where we came from and why we are here.”

– Debbie West, producer and host of Lost Knowledge radio show

“If you have an appetite for the mysterious and the unexplained, the latest from tireless researcher Frank Joseph, Power Places and the Master Builders of Antiquity, is essential reading and a must-have for your library.”

– J. Douglas Kenyon, editor and publisher of Atlantis Rising

“I have known Frank Joseph as a fellow researcher and author for years, and with his latest book, he has outdone himself. He makes me wish I had his ability to see so deeply into the otherwise unseen. Frank’s writing is a journey of the mind, especially in Power Places and the Master Builders of Antiquity.”

– John DeSalvo, Ph.D., biophysicist and author of Power Crystals

“I have heard many of Frank Joseph’s well-researched lectures over the past twenty years, and he has put the same attention to facts and detail into his latest book. By collecting over thirty modern and ancient power places from around the world, Frank demonstrates that the power and wisdom of the ancients is still with us today. This work connects many locations across time and space and uncovers some common threads between them. The adventurous soul would do well to use this book as the start of a ‘bucket list’ of sacred sites--both ancient and modern--throughout the world.”

– Kevin Reger, Wisconsin coordinator of Edgar Cayce’s Association for Research and Enlightenment

Resources and Downloads

More books from this author: Frank Joseph