Dr. Robert M. Schoch is a fellow at the College of General Research, Boston University (since 1984), Ph. D. in Geology and Geophysics from Yale University (1983), and studied anthropology at George Washington University.
In the early 1990s, Dr. Schoch surprised the scientific community with his pioneering research on the Great Sphinx at Giza, which, in his opinion, is several millennia older than generally accepted.
Dr. Schoch also researched a number of other mysterious monuments: underwater formations near the Japanese island of Yonaguni, statues of Easter Island. In recent years, he has focused on exploring the possible astronomical reasons for the decline of ancient civilizations, as he wrote in his book Forgotten Civilization: The Role of Solar Flares in Our Past and Future (2012).
In the sphere of interests of Robert Schoch was the area of parapsychological phenomena, which he openly announces on the pages of his website. He co-authored the book The Parapsychological Revolution: A Brief Anthology of Paranormal Activity and Psychical Research with Logan Ionaviak.
Books by Robert Schoch
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“The Great Sphinx is located near the Cheops pyramid on the western bank of the Nile, outside the city limits of Cairo. According to the generally accepted opinion in Egyptology, the monument was hewn out of a monolithic limestone rock by order of Pharaoh Khafre around 2500 BC.
In 1990, I visited Egypt for the first time with the intention of conducting a geological study of the Sphinx. I assumed that the Egyptologists dated the monument correctly, but soon facts of a geological nature were discovered that did not fit into the generally accepted picture.
Traces of erosion were found on the body of the Sphinx, as well as on the walls surrounding it (surrounding the depression left after the monument was carved out of the rock), which, in my opinion, could only have arisen as a result of heavy precipitation and rainwater flows.
The problem was that the Sphinx is located on the border with the Sahara, in a region where an extremely arid climate has dominated for about 5 thousand years. It also turned out that other structures dating from the Old Kingdom bear traces of erosion that could not be left by wind and sand.
In short, I came to the conclusion that the oldest part of the monument should have arisen in a much earlier period (at least 5 thousand years before the birth of Christ, but it is not excluded that for 7 or 9 thousand years), when for this area was characterized by a more rainy climate.
On this occasion, many people gave me counter-arguments that the Sphinx cannot be so ancient, since its head has pronounced features of the dynastic period, which began at the end of the 4th millennium BC. But if we look at the modern form of the monument, we will easily notice that this is not its original head.
If it were otherwise, then it would be as severely eroded as the body. Hence the assumption that during the time of the pharaohs the Sphinx was altered - hewn down to smaller forms with a change in the shape of the head. In reality, the Great Sphinx of Giza might not have originally been a sphinx at all. Plausibly, it could be a statue of a lion.
To test these assumptions, we, together with Thomas Dobetsky, conducted seismic surveys at the base of the monument, measuring the level of erosion below the surface. In other words, we studied how sound waves propagate in a given rock formation, from which a picture of the properties of limestone was obtained. After analyzing the data, I noticed that the significant level of erosion under the surface of the monument should support the assumption that the Sphinx is more than five thousand years old.
Also during the research, we received data indicating the presence of a camera or cave under the left paw of the Sphinx. In addition, smaller and hitherto unknown underground cavities around the monument were discovered, as well as what looked like a tunnel running underneath.
In the early 1990s, when I first announced the much greater age of the Sphinx, I was criticized by Egyptologists who demanded other evidence of the existence of a civilization that predated the ancient Egyptian and erected this monument. They were sure that developed cultures or civilizations in the period before the V-VI millennium BC. was not available, despite the fact that in Turkey there are archaeological monuments of about 10 thousand years old, one of which is Göbekli Tepe. It remains incomprehensible here why the cultures in which the rudiments of civilization arose disappeared so suddenly, and a lull reigned in the development of mankind for several millennia?
Robert Temple tried to explain the traces of water erosion on the Sphinx by the existence of a moat around it. Here I will skip other of his unconvincing concepts, such as the fact that the Sphinx was originally a jackal - an animal that was identified with the god of death Anubis, and that his face belonged to Pharaoh Amenemhat II.
On one of my last trips to Egypt in March 2009, I took a fresh look at the erosion situation.
Firstly, the blocks from which the Temple of the Sphinx was built (the material for it was taken from the same limestone rock during the cutting of the monument), as well as the lower temple located to the south, have the same degree of erosion. The limestones of which they are composed were overlaid with Aswan granite during the ancient kingdom. Temple's theory of the moat is unable to explain where the mentioned footprints came from.
Contradictory erosion marks (illustrations from robertschoch.com)
Second, more severe erosion of the stone surface is seen on the western side of the Sphinx enclosure, significantly different from the degree of erosion on the eastern side. The nature of this erosion is not associated with water, which should have accumulated at the base of the monument, but is associated with rainfall and paleohydrology of the area.
The seismic data on the degree of erosion under the Sphinx Moat, based on my analysis, indicate that the site is at least 7,000 years old.
Water accumulating around it would not have accelerated the erosion of the stone so much. In turn, the vertical cracks observed on the walls of the ditch have characteristic traces of rainwater flows. There is nothing to suggest that they may have arisen during the draining of the hypothetical pond around the Sphinx, as Temple claims.
The walls around the Sphinx, carved into the rock, would serve as walls for such a catchment. And since the rock itself has many cracks and is subject to karst formation processes, water would seep through them as through a sieve. The walls around the monument should have been vaulted, however, we do not see anything like that on them. Moreover, the chambers and tunnels under the Sphinx could be used by people in some way that would not have been possible due to their complete flooding."
Robert M. Schoch