American Genesis: The American Indian and the Origins of Modern Man

LOST TRIBES AND SUNKEN CONTINENTS 37
with later Indians subscribing to the Lemurian "reverence" for the
earth.
In 1977, retired space scientist Sepp Blumrich said he had
traced the Indians' origin to a lost continent in the Pacillc, the
pOint of view that was championed by Churchward. This was not
Blumrich's maiden voyage into esoteric space; in 1973, Blumrich,
then at NASA's Marshal Space Flight Center in Alabama, amazed
his compatriots with his theory that the "visions of God" recorded
by the prophet Ezekiel in the Bible were really an account of the
landing of a spaceship. He outlined this revelation in a highly
speculative book, The Spaceships of Ezekiel. Now he contends
that the Indians of North America, as well as the Aztec and
Mayan civilizations of Mexico and Central America, came from a
lost continent in the Pacific that sank as the South American land
mass rose, some time before the sinking of Atlantis. He adds that
some of the survivors traveled to their new lands by air, since this
ancient civilization had the power of Hight.
The advocates of the Lost Continent and Lost Tribes theories
never compared their theories with Indian myths and beliefs. If
the Atlantis and Lemuria devotees had taken the trouble, they
would have found to their delight that some Indian groups speak
of their arrival in the Americas by ocean voyages from now
sunken islands in the ocean. For example, the origin legends of
some Hopi clans, Arizona Pueblo Indian groups directly linked to
the prehistOric Anasazi or Basketrnakers, relate that during their
fourth world they came from the west, crossing the sea on boats
hom one "stepping-stone," or island, to the next until they
reached the mountains of the California coast and moved inland.
They say these islands then broke up and sank beneath the sea'
The mytlls of the Dakota, Sioux, Mandans, Delaware, and Iroquois
refer to an island in tbe Atlantic Ocean "towards the sunrise"
which sank. The Mandal15 say tbat a tribe of white men
lived there.' The Okanagans of northern Washington and British
Columbia also talk about a "lost island" in the ocean."
Close examination of Indian mytl1S, however, reveals a saga of
greater complexity than the simplistic stories put forth by these