Every day at noon an air siren blasts the calm in downtown Kempton, Illinois, population 235. The horn is tested in part to serve as warning for approaching tornadoes, but David Hatcher Childress says there’s no need for that. “Towns nearby here have been hit by tornadoes,” he explains. “Kempton never has. In fact there’s kind of a legend that Kempton will never be hit by a tornado. People claim that Kempton is like a vortex area or like a power point.”
“Your mainstream archaeology students, they don’t like guys like me very much,” Childress says. “If you go to school and become an archaeologist, you’re gonna spend your summers dusting off pieces of broken pottery with a paintbrush. It’s the exact opposite of some Indiana Jones running out of the jungle finding a lost temple of treasure. To them that is total fantasy. It makes ’em mad, actually. I couldn’t do that for a day. When I’m at archaeological sites and see a bunch of broken pottery I hardly even look at it. I mean, I want giant stone walls in the jungle.” Has he discovered any? He’s run across a few things he wasn’t expecting, he says, but “nothing that National Geographic was gonna do a cover story on.” He’s better known for measuring documented structures by his own yardstick.
After six months of teaching he set off for Nepal, where he trekked around the Himalayas for a year, then moved on through India, Afghanistan, Iran, Syria, Jordan, and Turkey. In Israel he worked on a kibbutz for six months; then he landed a catering job in an oil camp in Sudan. “Suddenly I went from being totally broke in the middle of Africa to having 10,000 bucks,” he says. After ten months he quit to wander the Arabian Peninsula and Africa. He smuggled a bottle of whiskey into Saudi Arabia, chewed qat in Yemen, and scored with a girl named Fushia in Somalia. He rifled through Idi Amin’s looted house in Uganda, climbed Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania, stumbled into a bar full of drunken guerrillas in Zimbabwe, hitched across the Kalahari, and sold camping equipment in Cape Town, all adventures he would go on to recount in his first book.
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“By this time my parents were starting to get a little pissed off, because instead of coming home I went back to India,” he says. “My mom came [over] to make sure I wasn’t some heroin addict in the back alleys of Bombay.” He continued to Southeast Asia and Hong Kong, backpacked through China for several months, and then hit Taiwan, Korea, and Japan.
In The Ultimate Frontier, published in 1963, Kieninger appropriated Lemurian lesson plans and other teachings he maintained were disclosed to him by the Brotherhoods. Among the revelations was the idea that human civilization had begun 78,000 years ago, on a lost Pacific continent called Mu, or Lemuria, which sank beneath the waves 26,000 years ago. (The name derives from a theoretical land bridge posited by a 19th-century geologist to explain similarities between lemurs in India and Madagascar.) The book predicted that Armageddon would begin in 1999 and that the earth would be destroyed on May 5, 2000. After that, Kieninger wrote, he was to establish a “Kingdom of God” on an island that would rise out of the Pacific. But first he was to build a “self-sufficient and industrially strong” community in the Chicago area to prepare the kingdom’s future inhabitants.
Atlantis first appeared in Plato’s dialogues, and for most people it remains nothing more than a myth reinterpreted many times over. But for Childress, physical evidence of the sunken continent is everywhere–in fact, he sees it in many of the places von Daniken saw evidence of alien colonization. “It’s like, yeah, if there was civilization 15,000 years ago, if you have to give it a name, well, let’s call it Atlantis, ’cause that’s what the Greeks did,” he says. “Somebody finds Atlantis every year. Suddenly they’ll find something, whether it be a sunken ruin somewhere off an island that blew up or some oddball megalithic remains on an island in Korea, and suddenly they go, ‘Whoa! This has got to be Atlantis!’ And that’s why Atlantis has been placed all over the world.”
Before Richard Kieninger was banished from Stelle the second time, Childress organized two group tours with him, one to visit ruins in Peru and Bolivia and another to Egypt. Childress would show the participants around, then continue his travels after they went home. In this way he continued to gather material and experiences for his Lost Cities series, publishing volumes on South America, Lemuria and the Pacific, ancient Europe, and the Mediterranean. “They’re kind of like On the Road meets Atlantis,” he says. “I hitchhike, get drunk, and get laid, and people try to kill me, and it’s all true. And I talk about weird stuff.”
