Lake Rock lies 20 miles east of Madison in the US state of Wisconsin. The lake is eight kilometers long and about four kilometers wide. In 1836, Nathaniel Heyer accidentally discovered a small stone pyramid with a flat top in the Rock Lake. The discoverer named his find Atzalan and suggested that the monumental building was at least a thousand years old.
Heyer saw nothing special about Atzalan. After all, the indigenous inhabitants of the continent everywhere built a kind of pyramids, "cult hills", mounds. But already in 1862, sensational notes about the Rock Lake pyramid appeared in some magazines, which said that Atzalan was much older than other pyramids. If this pyramid was built by the ancestors of the American Indians, then why did it end up at the bottom of a lake that was formed many millennia ago? The building must be much older than all Indian tribes!
In 1900, there was a terrible drought in the Rock Lake area. The Mayor of Lake Mills, Lee Wilson, and his brother Claude Wilson were fishing in a very shallow lake and right under their boat they saw stone masses in the water. No one was particularly interested in this unexpected discovery, and the 'rocks in the lake' were again forgotten for a long time.
In the spring of 1936, a certain Victor S. Taylor announced that he had discovered at the bottom of Lake Rock "four pyramids, apparently of Indian origin, probably built by the Aztecs." This note was drawn to the attention of the publisher of the travel guide to the United States, Dr. B. W. Saunders, who was interested in the various sights of the country and organized expeditions to the mysterious ruins. Saunders decided to find some inscriptions on the underwater pyramids, by which he hoped to date unknown buildings. He knew that the Aztecs lived in Mexico, very far from the state of Wisconsin, which is located next to the Great Lakes on the border with Canada.
Dr. Saunders vigorously advertised his upcoming underwater research, but for some reason no one wanted to give him money for the expedition. Geologist Professor E. F. Bean and historian Dr. Charles E. Brown also wanted to, after waiting for the right weather, to explore the ruins in the murky waters of Lake Rock, but they were unlucky - they did not find anything.
Record holder for deep diving, scuba diver Max Jean Knowle, also became interested in the secret of Rock Lake. In 1937, in various places, he crossed the lake in a small boat and dragged a metal blank along the bottom on a strong cable. With the help of such a home-made "device" Knowle determined the location of underwater objects and made many dives in order to examine the stones that his "device" stumbled upon. Knowle, he said, found one pyramid roughly in the middle of the lake. He wrote in his diary:
“The structure has the shape of a truncated pyramid. At the top is a small square platform with a side of 1.4 meters. The side of the square base is 5.43 meters, and the height of the pyramid is 8.83 meters. The structure, obviously, consists of smooth stones, connected by a building compound. The stones are covered with a thick greenish coating, which is easily scraped off, and then the smooth gray surface of the stones opens."
Although the giant pyramids in Egypt, Central America and China are much larger than the modest "pyramid of the lake" that Knowle so carefully measured, the Rock Lake find was fraught with an unsolved mystery. The public again "missed" the sensational discovery, and the pyramid was forgotten.
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On July 30, 1967, after a good thirty years, a group of seven scuba divers settled on Rock Lake. One of them was the scuba diving instructor Lambard. He was the most experienced in the group and stayed underwater the longest. When he was already running out of oxygen, the scuba diver suddenly saw a platform about 6x12 meters protruding one and a half meters above the lake bottom. Lambard urgently floated to the surface, solemnly raising above his head three pieces of stone hastily broken out of this platform.
Lambard could not prove that the stones were raised from the underwater ruins, and many of his colleagues declared him a fraud. At a scuba diving symposium in 1968, a colleague scuba diver insisted with confidence: "There is no pyramid where we were looking!" Meanwhile, many swimmers and fishermen saw some ruins in the lake. For example, the chairman of the diving group, Craig Scott, explored the bottom of Rock Lake with instruments and found structures there. Scuba diver John Shulyak also managed to get to them. He said: “I rummaged around Rock Lake to no avail for six years, then I used sonar, electronics, and the pyramids appeared in front of me one after another. I especially remember two of them, both in the middle of the lake. One is almost four meters wide and 30 meters long. This pyramid rises 2.43 meters above the muddy bottom. It is made of stones of different sizes,the largest are laid at the base, and the smallest make up the top. The stones are carefully fitted to each other, and then fastened with a compound like concrete. " Dr. James Schertz, an engineer at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, described the Rock Lake Pyramid as a "fantastic find." He suggested that from its summit the priests and astrologers "observed the Sun, Moon, planets and stars in their perpetual motion" and that "the underwater pyramid is oriented exactly to the north." Diving magazine Skin Diver, in its January 1970 issue, wrote about the Rock Lake mystery: “These pyramids are absolutely incredible, impossible - they are too old and in a place where no one could build them. Logically they cannot exist, but history rarely follows correct logic. Why were the Rock Lake pyramids called "incredible"It is not difficult to understand: after all, all 13 pyramids were built by someone, in addition, not under water, not at the bottom of the lake, but on land. This means that the pyramids were erected when there was no lake on this place yet, that is, at least 12 thousand years ago, at the end of the Ice Age. Other methods of dating give even more startling results - about 16 thousand years ago! At this time, the glaciers gradually receded, melted and left behind numerous lakes and rivers, and part of the American continent was still under the ice. It was during this period that the Great Lakes on the border between the United States and Canada emerged. Since then, the depression that contains the quiet Rock Lake has always been filled with water. If this area during the Ice Age was covered with a thick layer of ice, then it is not clear how the pyramids could withstand the pressure of the ice masses?in addition, not under water, not at the bottom of the lake, but on land. This means that the pyramids were erected when there was no lake on this place yet, that is, at least 12 thousand years ago, at the end of the Ice Age. Other methods of dating give even more startling results - about 16 thousand years ago! At this time, the glaciers gradually receded, melted and left behind numerous lakes and rivers, and part of the American continent was still under the ice. It was during this period that the Great Lakes on the border between the United States and Canada emerged. Since then, the depression that contains the quiet Rock Lake has always been filled with water. If this area during the Ice Age was covered with a thick layer of ice, then it is not clear how the pyramids could withstand the pressure of the ice masses?in addition, not under water, not at the bottom of the lake, but on land. This means that the pyramids were erected when there was no lake on this place yet, that is, at least 12 thousand years ago, at the end of the Ice Age. Other methods of dating give even more startling results - about 16 thousand years ago! At this time, the glaciers gradually receded, melted and left behind numerous lakes and rivers, and part of the American continent was still under the ice. It was during this period that the Great Lakes on the border between the United States and Canada emerged. Since then, the depression that contains the quiet Rock Lake has always been filled with water. If this area during the Ice Age was covered with a thick layer of ice, then it is not clear how the pyramids could withstand the pressure of the ice masses?that is, at least 12 thousand years ago, at the end of the ice age. Other methods of dating give even more startling results - about 16 thousand years ago! At this time, the glaciers gradually receded, melted and left behind numerous lakes and rivers, and part of the American continent was still under the ice. It was during this period that the Great Lakes on the border between the United States and Canada emerged. Since then, the depression that contains the quiet Rock Lake has always been filled with water. If this area during the Ice Age was covered with a thick layer of ice, then it is not clear how the pyramids could withstand the pressure of the ice masses?that is, at least 12 thousand years ago, at the end of the ice age. Other methods of dating give even more startling results - about 16 thousand years ago! At this time, the glaciers gradually receded, melted and left behind numerous lakes and rivers, and part of the American continent was still under the ice. It was during this period that the Great Lakes on the border between the United States and Canada emerged. Since then, the depression that contains the quiet Rock Lake has always been filled with water. If this area during the Ice Age was covered with a thick layer of ice, then it is not clear how the pyramids could withstand the pressure of the ice masses?melted and left behind numerous lakes and rivers, and part of the American continent was still under the ice. It was during this period that the Great Lakes on the border between the United States and Canada emerged. Since then, the depression that contains the quiet Rock Lake has always been filled with water. If this area during the Ice Age was covered with a thick layer of ice, then it is not clear how the pyramids could withstand the pressure of the ice masses?melted and left behind numerous lakes and rivers, and part of the American continent was still under the ice. It was during this period that the Great Lakes on the border between the United States and Canada emerged. Since then, the depression that contains the quiet Rock Lake has always been filled with water. If this area during the Ice Age was covered with a thick layer of ice, then it is not clear how the pyramids could withstand the pressure of the ice masses?
