Our Cosmic Ancestors by Maurice Chatelain

Lower Egypt had been annexed to Upper Egypt and the length of the kingdom had grown to seven-sixths of its previous size.
    In reality, the architects who built the Pyramid of Kephren used another simple standard - five-thirds of the royal Egyptian cubit, that is, seven-eights of a modern metre, and this is one of the most direct correlations that I have found between the ancient measurements and the metric system. (Such is also the ancient Mycenaean 18-foot standard, that equals exactly 5 m.). To keep these measures separated, let's call the Kephren unit the `Kephren yard' as opposed to the 'Cheops cubit' that was the basic measure for the Great Pyramid.
    The perimeter of the base for the Kephren Pypramid is then 984 yards, or 861 m; half side of the base itself 123 yards, or 107.625 m; the pyramid height 164 yards, or 143.5 m; and the apothem 205 yards, or 179,375 m. Each of the last three dimensions can be divided by 41 to give us proportions of 3:4:5. The base area and the volume of the Kephren Pyramid are both 87 per cent of those of the Cheops Pyramid, so that pyramid is not so small after all.
    The smallest pyramid at Giza is the Pyramid of Mykerinos, the son of Cheops who was the successor of his uncle Kephren. This pyramid is about 72 m high and has a base side length of 108 m. At first glance it seems that it was built with a 30 cm foot, but precise measurements show that the unit used was the foot of 0.301845 m - a unit of length that could be more than 10,000 years old and was

    used also in the valley of the Indus River in Pakistan. Measured with that foot, the Mykerinos Pyramid also corresponds exactly to the sacred triangle proportions and is about 22 per cent in surface and 11 per cent in volume of the Great Pyramid.
    Why did Mykerinos build such a modest pyramid? Legends tell us that he wanted to be the 'king of the people' and was disgusted with the luxury and cruelty of both his father and his uncle. To show the difference, he chose a small foot as standard for his monument instead of the royal cubit and picked a unit of length that was very ancient and half-forgotten. Mykerinos died very young after a reign of only eighteen years and it was probably his son Shepseskaf who finished the pyramid. The lower part is clad in red granite, and since the outer covering of pyramids was always done starting from the top while all the working ramps and scaffoldings were still in place, the bottom was the last part added to the Pyramid of Mykerinos, after his death.
    Both the Kephren and Mykerinos pyramids are so perfect in their simple mathematical proportions that nobody seemed to pay much attention to them until one of the world's most prominent nuclear physicists, the 1968 Nobel prize winner Professor Luis W. Alvarez, of Berkeley, California, proposed to use cosmic rays to discover the hidden passages and secret chambers that everybody hoped to find in the Kephren pyramid. His plan looked very promising. Cosmic rays, discovered in 1911 by the Austrian physicist Victor Hess, would show a higher intensity if they encountered hollow passages on their way through the pyramids, and those changes would be registered by the most modern devices and analysed by computer.
    Alvarez had the full cooperation of the Egyptian government. He had all the equipment he could dream of, and the archaeological frater
    [Previous] opposite Pyramid of Kephren
Original dimensions in metres and yards
    Edge : 209.185 metres ; base area : 46,332 square
metres ; volume : 2,216,240 cubic metres
    With the foundation, the volume was rounded to 2.268.000 cubic metres or 7/8 of that of the Pyramid of Cheops.
    The volumes of both pyramids were exact fractions of the volume of the Earth of 108,864 x 10 16 cubic metres. nity was positive Alvarez would solve the secrets of the pyramids just as they had been sure carbon dating would unlock the Mayan mysteries.
    A cosmic ray detector was installed in the inner chamber of the Kephren pyramid, which Alvarez