Hall of Records

Cayce's assertions had many precursors, particularly the pseudohistorical theories about Atlantis that Ignatius Donnelly promulgated in the late 19th century, as well as claims about hidden passages at Giza that date back to medieval times.

In the 1990s, Cayce's claims about the Hall of Records became conflated with two other fringe hypotheses about the origin and age of the monuments at Giza: the sphinx water erosion hypothesis and the Orion correlation theory.

[1] The monuments of the Giza pyramid complex, most of which were built during the Fourth Dynasty of Egypt (c. 2500 BC), have inspired speculation and folklore about their origins and purpose since ancient times.

[30] Shortly afterward, the authors Adrian Gilbert and Robert Bauval put forward the Orion correlation theory, which argues that the monuments at Giza were arranged according to stellar alignments from several thousand years before the conventional date of their construction.

[31] In 1995, the author Graham Hancock published Fingerprints of the Gods, in which he drew together the sphinx water erosion hypothesis and the Orion correlation theory to argue that the Giza monuments were built by or under the influence of a lost civilization that was remembered in legend as Atlantis.

[32] Hancock, Bauval, and John Anthony West, who had initially convinced Schoch to study the erosion of the sphinx, all advocated these claims and attracted wide publicity.

[34][35] Hancock and Bauval also implied that future finds at Giza could have a transformative impact on the world, reminiscent of Cayce's claim that the discovery of the hall would coincide with other dramatic changes.

[36] Beginning in 1996, Schor and Florida State University sponsored a further survey of possible cavities in the rock on the plateau, including the anomaly near the sphinx that Dobecki identified.

In 1998, the Supreme Council of Antiquities, the government agency that oversees archaeological work in Egypt, permitted these investigators to drill into one of the anomalies they detected, near the Great Pyramid, as a test of how effective radar might be in finding man-made chambers.

[40] Enthusiasm over the Hall of Records waned toward the end of the 1990s as the predicted window of time for its discovery passed, and as mainstream academic criticisms of the claims about Giza came to be more widely aired.

[41] Colavito writes that beliefs about the Hall of Records are motivated by "the idea that seeking out physical evidence of Atlantis or some other lost civilization would somehow prove that the spiritual values embodied by occult and New Age groups were objectively true...

The search for the Hall of Records became a cudgel to be used against doubt, since the possibility that physical proof could be found removed the temptation to question the otherwise outlandish claims believers were asked to accept.