Update—As many of our readers already know, a small team of researchers affiliated with the ARE in Virginia Beach, Virginia have continued with efforts to genuinely identify underwater formations of stone located in the Bahamas. These include the Bimini Road, marble ruins found north of Bimini, the recently reported Paradise Point Pier, a large stone wall near North Andros, the Andros Platform, and other anomalies. During the past few months, and without any fanfare or publicity, several massive projects have taken place near Bimini. These include a complete side-scan sonar mapping of a vast area around Bimini and about 10 hours of high resolution video obtained of the sea bottom off Bimini at depths from 50 to 350-feet. An ROV was used to obtain the video. The video project covered several areas that seemed promising that were identified in earlier projects, some of which were conducted in the 1990s. These areas consist of what appeared to be terraces, possible walls, ancient stream beds, and a series of rectangular building foundations at the top of an ancient shoreline. The findings of these projects will be released after a careful on-site inspection of one of the "most intriguing" areas takes place. That project is tentatively scheduled for early 2009 as part of a documentary with a film crew working with Discovery.

Pyramids Search—Later this month—December 2008—we plan on completing another project we mentioned in earlier posts. That is, we plan on utilizing side-scan sonar and underwater video off the Eastern coast of Florida from essentially Sebastian moving south to Stuart, Florida. In the 1980's, three reports of underwater pyramids "emerged" in the media. The most credible appeared to be a pyramid near Vero Beach, Fl. We have the general location of this formation. However, logically, it would seem obvious that since the 1980's someone would certainly have refound this alleged structure if it existed. Nevertheless, we plan on doing a full and systematic search of the area with both the side-scan sonar and a continual video feed.

In addition, there are two other less credible reports of pyramids to the north and south of the Vero Beach that were allegedly found in the 1980s. These reports may actually be garbled retellings of the pyramid supposedly off Vero Beach. One other and more promising type of archaeological formation that will be looked for in this search are "shell rings." These are large, donut-shaped heaps of shell and sand formed by Archaic cultures living on the coast around 5000-years ago. Recent conversations with a prominent underwater archaeologist lead us to believe that the oldest shell rings are probably underwater and undiscovered. No one has ever made a systematic search for these in water.