Benson Arendt's Folly

submitted by Morton Charnel

Henry:A short ways south of Mt. Pleasant, the Skunk River lazily cuts under Highway 218 on its way to the Mississippi. If you turn just before the bridge onto Massaraty Avenue and go past the Skunk River Brew Pub for two miles, you'll come to a broad terrace overlooking the river. There lies the remains of a broad-shouldered earthen mound---a mound that most disinterested folks dismiss as a gravel pile and the United States Geological Survey now labels a "borrow pit".

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This gravel mound is all that remains of
Benson Arendt's Folly.
     But it used to be a pyramid. One of a series of six pyramids arranged in the exact same orientation as those on the Giza Plateau in Egypt over 6000 miles away. Known for years as "Arendt's Folly", they were built over a hundred years ago by Benson Arendt, a flamboyant speculator and collector of antiquities.

     Over the years, the existence of the pyramids was forgotten and the pyramids themselves were sold off for use as fill by Arendt's heirs. Recently, the land was annexed by the City of Mt. Pleasant which plans to build a new 9 million dollar water treatment facility on the site.

     But one of Arendt's descendants, Franklin Gaynor of Mt. Pleasant, wants to preserve the area by turning it into a park. Gaynor, a stocky muscular machinist who at 53 years old is Arendt's last direct male descendent, wants to restore his ancestor's work as an educational park for area school children. While his entreaties to the city have fallen on deaf ears, his activities have attracted some unwelcome allies.

     "They're mostly a bunch of kooks," Gaynor snorts. "SEAT, IUFORN---especially that nut Charles Williams. And there's that flaky UFOCRAP from Georg von Podebrad College---now there's a pack of real crystal-gazers for ya. Basically, they all think the pyramid site is some sort of mystical space station for Martians and that Benson Arendt was a psychic visionary for building it. That's absolute chaff. He was a rich business man fascinated by all things Egyptian. Half the world was back then. Hell, rich folks back then were taking patent medicines made from ground-up mummies for everything from liverspots to impotence. So he built a model of the Pyramids at Giza and it's very accurate because he had the money to throw at it. Big deal."

     Amber Kirchner of the Georg von Podebrad College UFO Citizens Research & Advisory Project (UFOCRAP) thinks that Gaynor terribly underestimates the importance of Arendt's Folly. The 24 year old graduate student of Structural Engineering has studied aerial photos and maps of the site dating from before the turn of the century. She believes certain features of both the great pyramid and the site location are more than just coincidence.

     "Benson Arendt's model of the Giza pyramids first of all was mathematically perfect," says Kirchner standing atop her battered red 1990 Ford Explorer. She sweeps one hand dramatically from north to south, while the other tightly clenches the photocopied map against the wind. "Imagine if you can, the six pyramids from Giza---the three big ones and the three queens' pyramids---right here only at 1/20th scale. The Great Pyramid, the remains of it you can see there, was exactly 38.045832 feet wide per side and 24.22075 feet tall.

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A 1934 photo taken from the air of the Skunk River Pyramid Complex.
     Amber's tone then becomes more conspiratorial. "But there is a far more significant connection that we are only just beginning to unravel; an extraterrestial one. I believe Benson Arendt was trying to contact the ancient civilization that may yet inhabit Mars."

     Despite my attempts to quash a smile, she continues.

     "First of all, if you read the original description of this site, there is mentioned a series of low ridges only a few feet tall to the north, west and east. These are called "ha---ha's" and came from a tradition of English landscaping from the 18th century. I believe they were meant to represent the Face in the Cydonia Region on Mars. Also, no one has really understood why Arendt chose this site---it's prone to flooding, mosquito ridden in the summer, and hard to get to in the winter. It also has the exact latitude and longitude as the Face on Mars: N41.9 W92.75. Another coincidence? Thirdly, if you examine the height of his Great Pyramid, the figure 24.22075 is also the interval between launch windows that NASA currently uses for sending satellites to Mars!"

     People have known for centuries that there are certain mathematical secrets locked in the Great Pyramid of Giza. The same holds true here. Arendt purposely chose 1/20 scale to encode personal facts within the mathematical structure of his Great Pyramid when he built them in 1866. He was born the night of March 14, 1826. He last saw the Great Pyramid of Giza on March 30, 1864 at about 1:00 in the afternoon. Now these facts are well documented historically from letters to his friends and other notables of the time.

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USGS Quad map showing location.
     We know from them that he first visited Egypt in 1851. However, if you convert the length of a side from feet to inches and then add all four sides together you wind up with 1826.1999---the date of Arendt's birth. And if you also examine the value of the length of a side, you'll find that 38.045832 is his precise age when he last saw the Great Pyramid. This isn't just coincidences! Arendt purposely chose 1/20 scale because it reflects the total degrees in a pyramid: 120 degrees. Arendt's Great Pyramid is perfect---just like the one in Giza. If you divide the circumference by twice its height you get the universal constant pi. So you can see from the other measurements about his life that this pyramid is working as Arendt's mirror of his life. Then we come to one of the more startling aspects of this pyramid: that Arendt died in early afternoon on June 18, 1888 at the age of 62. Guess what? If you add the height of the pyramid to the date for his having last seen the Great Pyramid of Giza you get that date! How did this man know not only the exact day of his death but know it down to the precise second 22 years before the event?"

     Charles Williams of the Iowa UFO Research Network (IUFORN), veteran contributor to Third Eye Over Iowa, sees Arendt's Folly as part of a planetary wide machine. Williams explains this machine as a "hyperdimensional energy lens".

     "If you draw an equilateral triangle," he says gesturing with his pipe to a large map of the world mounted on the wall, "with fixed points at Arendt's Folly and Giza, the third point rests on a spot in the south Atlantic; roughly S45 W35. This is 720 nautical miles due north of South Georgia Island. It is also at the northwest end of the South Sandwich Trench and is geologically unstable."

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Charles Williams
Iowa UFO Research Network
     He puffs his pipe then smiles and shrugs, "Now, perhaps this is an unusual coincidence. However, if you extend this triangle into a pyramid the two other remaining points are very fascinating indeed. The next point is at W150 S45---sited directly on the highly geologically unstable mid-Pacific Ocean Fracture Zone. And the third point---most alarming of all---is on Kobé, Japan. That's right! The very city devastated by a massive earthquake only a few short years ago. Hundreds of people killed! Billions of dollars in damage! Surely not a coincidence! I don't make this stuff up like that crackpot colonel writing for you. This is hard science---advanced physics I'm talking about!"

     "We know through proton acceleration experiments at Tesla Labs, at Fermi Labs, and CERN that certain forms of subatomic matter at very high energy states and very high speeds may not exactly decay. There are some mathematical theories that show them moving into a higher dimension. Theoretically, there maybe as many as 27 higher dimensions. If, for example, we calculate the required energy state for a particle to be in dimension #7, it's not only likely that we'll find those sort of hypercharged particles captured by the earth's magnetic field but we will find a correlation between the energy released by the particle as it enters our planet's core and the amount of energy released in an earthquake or volcanic eruption. Now, it's likely that our sun only emits a couple of billion of such hypercharged particles in our direction as we orbit. And still fewer enter the Earth's core. However, the amount of energy these particles release by decelerating from such an extremely charged state would be enormous. A trillion times that of our biggest nuclear weapon! This could be the very energy source that alien technology harnesses to propel them across cosmic distances.

     My theory is that Giza was built to redirect the outflow of that phenomenal energy away from populated areas! Given axial precession, Giza no longer functioned properly after 4 millennia and Arendt, seeing this, built his miniature to compensate and thus deflect these hyperdimensional energy bursts. I think, though, that it is too small or too torn up to have a beneficial effect anymore. Someone must rebuild it to prevent anymore needless death!"

     And so the heated debate among these contentious allies might smolder on without end but for the strange and marvelous historical circumstances further surrounding Arendt's Folly. Benson Arendt was born on March 14, 1829, his Dutch immigrant parents eking a living as tavern owners in Baltimore, Maryland. The young Arendt shortly distinguished himself as a bookie and scalawag and by the age of 16 amassed a sizeable nest egg of several thousand dollars. Overcoming the temptation to squander it, he scrupulously invested his money eventually buying half ownership of a swift three---masted Baltimore clipper called the Michaela. The vessel's ventures grew very profitable over time making Arendt quite wealthy. He built the right sort of big house on Druid Hill, married the right sort of wife from the right sort of family, begat several children and began a hobby of collecting antiquities from France and Italy.

     Then in late August, 1851, Arendt traveled to Alexandria, Egypt to negotiate the release of Captain Edward Jones, Master of the Michaela,who had been imprisoned for failing to adequately bribe a customs official.

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Skunk River Pyramids showing the work nearly completed c.1867.
     In need of assistance from someone with influence at the Pasha Abbas' court, Arendt spent three weeks navigating the treacherous political currents until he arrived in the presence of Sheik Abdula Ab H'don---a man of considerable means and influence at court though little else is known exactly about him (several scholars attribute his engineering of the Pasha's assassination by his own slaves in 1854).

     The two men found they both share a profound interest in history and mysteries of antiquities. While awaiting Captain Jones' release, the two toured many Greek, Roman and ancient Egyptian sites. In late October, they befriend a like-minded young man from Iowa named Ezra Thornson traveling with a newly wedded couple from Philadelphia: Charlotte and the legendary Amos Dués.(see:The Pharaoh of Hauntown, Pt. I& II, January & February, 1998, vol. 5, Issue #1 & 2)

     When Ab H'don securing Jones' release a few weeks later in early November, Arendt returned to Baltimore. The following year, 1852, he returned in September ostensibly to purchase several items for his collection ("a good mummy case and some alabaster jars" as he writes to his wife) but his letters recount almost secretive meetings with his friend the Sheik, Thornson, and Mrs. Charlotte Dués and hint at a virtually Cabalistic study of the ancient Egyptian Book Of The Dead.

     Then, on November 27, Arendt penned a letter to his wife describing a shocking chain of events.

     "My dearest, I write this in a state of amazement at these past days. Mr. Amos Dués has relieved me of all doubt as to his identity of a being a compleat ass. Last Tuesday in the midst of an enjoyable dinner, the drunken imbecile hoisted himself up before our host, the Sheik, and not only accused the man of having gotten his new wife with child, but flung his goblet of wine in Ab H'don's face and demanded satisfaction. This morning, we all duly convened in his Grace's walled rose garden, Ezra acting as Dués' second. The Sheik eschewed his option of appointing his slave Hassan to fight the duel for Honor's sake, he told me. The pistols being produced, the doctor---a Greek whose name I have forgotten---instructed the men to take their stations at some 20 paces apart. He then counted to three and they fired. Dués fell to the ground, shot through the belly. As the doctor strove to staunch the bleeding, the Sheik approached and asked Dués to forgive him. When Dués cursed him, the Sheik advised Ezra that Dués should leave Egypt as soon as he was fit to travel.

     Yet, despite of the Sheik's escape from death, I am certain I saw him struck in the chest by the ball from Dués' pistol. I saw him shudder and heard him utter a faint grunt. He laughed at me when I told him this--- and even bared his chest to see for myself there was no injury. Yet at night when I close my eyes, I see it all so clearly in my mind's eye that I can scarcely disbelieve it."

     Arendt returned to Baltimore shortly afterwards, returning to Egypt every two years or so until 1864. He maintained his friendship with Ab H'don until the Sheik's murder in 1872.

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Massaraty Asylum, c. 1878.
     He also continued writing to his good friend Ezra Thornson, who persuaded him to purchase land in Iowa in 1865. Arendt did and in the spring of 1866, he began building his pyramids, constructing them with precisely hewn Burlington limestone slabs mortared together over gravel fill. While he never moved to Iowa, he visited the site once in 1874 and again 1877 and thence after never returned again.

     His death in 1888 left the bewildering mass of artifacts, notes, journals, and letters concerning the Skunk River Pyramids---many of these probably having to do with Ezra Thornson's delvings into the ancient Egyptian mysteries of death which ultimately produced the fantastic occurrences in Hauntown just last year.

     But do these same documents detail communications with a higher consciousness not of this Earth? Did he in fact discover an amazing ancient device designed to prevent earthquakes? Had he divined the now dreaded Y2K Apocalypse? The terrible truth is that we may never know. Upon Arendt's death, he willed specific items and files to be locked in a cell in the nearby Massaraty Asylum. And a spokesman for the facility has refused to comment on whether or not such a bequest was ever made...or if the such a cell even exists.





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