Welcome Guest   |  Login   |   Signup
JG Logo
Sat, May 26, 2012
Archive Search

Presidential Staff Member Backs Hunt for Ancient Indonesian Pyramid
Keyko Ranti Ramadhani | February 18, 2012

Mount Sadahuripan. (Photo courtesy of www.lakubecik.org) Mount Sadahuripan. (Photo courtesy of www.lakubecik.org)
Share This Page
27
6
0
8
Share with google+ :


Post a comment
Please login to post comment

Comments

padt
8:20pm Feb 18, 2012

mauriceg - you see, it's the Florence Nightingale in me.

padt
4:11pm Feb 18, 2012

mauriceg - I am sorry to hear you fell off your bike and cracked a rib. And that I have added to your suffering.

May I suggest a cure?

You see, according to another special staff member of the president, like Andi 'Toblerone' Arief, there's this lake - see - with a monster in it.

What you have to do is go down to the lake and get offended about something - anything will do - say - the word for water is 'air' and that begins with 'a' so the water is probably Ahmadiya - so you start shouting at the water and shaking your fist and threatening to burn the water down and the police will notice this and turn up and ask do you have a permit and you will say, "No, I left it at the Church", and then the police will phone up the mayor of Bogor who will suddenly rise up out of the lake like the Lady of Shallot and you can say,

"Off my bike I fell aside;

My rib has cracked from side to side;

The curse is on me, hark I cry,

O Monster of Shalott."

And the Monster Mayor will reply - "Bugger off!"

blightyboy
3:30pm Feb 18, 2012

So this guy Andi Arief is working alongside the President, at the very heart of the countries management mechine, and is presumably employed because it is believed that he is somebody who can be relied upon to decipher information intelligently and make rational decisions for the good of the country. [edit]

mauriceg
3:05pm Feb 18, 2012

@padt - I have a cracked rib from a recent bike accident. Laughing at your witty response has set back my recovery, and its all your fault.

But seriously, this is just another ancient-pyramid scam, just like an Eastern European counterpart. No money should be spent on this contrived faerie nonsense. Someone is trying to make money on the credulity of others again, in Indonesia. Maybe someone will swear that they saw a monster in a lake next.

padt
2:30pm Feb 18, 2012

Actually, the fairies at the bottom of my garden tell me that both mountains are made up of a thin cover of rock and soil and trees each covering a gigantic wedge of Toblerone.

They were transported here by genies sometime in the 15th century from Switzerland on account of the famous Swiss chococlate manufacturer William Tell who had made overtures to a guy called Rossini about setting up a system of pyramid selling. You know the scam - the Amway stuff where every second fool thinks he's going to make a fortune out of his neighbours.

Well, this William Tell thought the pyramid scheme was a good way to sell Toblerone and Rossini orchestrated the deal.

The genies were contracted and lugged two great lumps of Toblerone here and plonked themn out in the middle of no where.

"Just the place for a pryramid selling empire," said Mr Tell in a telling way.

Trouble was, the locals didn't care much for Toblerone.

They liked Cadbury's - most of them having got a taste for it while visiting Hobart.

A presidential staff member is trying to convince three ministries to support a team of scientists who want to look into rumors of pyramids lying beneath West Java’s Mount Sadahurip and Mount Padang.

Andi Arief, a special staff member to the president on social affairs and disaster management, set up a meeting on Friday to discuss the issues.

In attendance were members of the so-called Ancient Catastrophic Studies Team, led by seismologist Danny Hilman, and representatives from the ministries of tourism, research and technology, and education and culture.

Andi said there had also been informal meetings between the team and officials from the Tourism Ministry.

The ministries, he said, could bring much-needed expertise, equipment and funding to help bring the project to fruition.

Finding pyramids in Indonesia, Hilman said, would rewrite the history of the archipelago, and possibly the world.

“We could prove that our ancient civilizations were much more advanced than previously believed, even long before the Majapahit,” he said referring to one of the archipelago’s oldest and biggest known kingdoms.

“We [showed ministry officials] geological and geophysical research, which indicate that ancient ruins lie beneath the mountains,” he said.

Teguh Rahardjo, deputy minister for research and technology, said his office would look into the findings before deciding whether to get involved in the project. “But of course we support this kind of research,” he said.

The team, Andi said, had initially set out to conduct geological research rather than find pyramids. He said that the idea of looking for pyramids had come about after adventure travel company Geotrek Indonesia pointed out that Mount Sadahurip, located in Garut district, was too pyramidal in shape to be a natural occurrence.

Not everybody has bought into the pyramid theory. Sujatmiko, a geologist from the Indonesian Geological Experts Association, said he thought Sadahurip had formed naturally.

The mountain is located on a dominant volcanic line in West Java, and Sujatmiko said it had formed as a pyroclastic volcanic mound out of magma that emerged from the earth’s surface without a typical magma channel beneath.

I Gde Pitana, acting director general of the Tourism Ministry, has said the notion that Indonesia’s history might have included pyramids was implausible. There are enough mountains here that there was no need to build tall structures for worship, he said.

Pitana said his ministry had asked several universities to conduct tests and research on the site to see if the Sadahurip structure was man-made or natural. The findings, he said, conflicted with each other.

And that should give the pyramid hunters reason to hope.