Dear Professor Fairall

I have just read your posting about the post-Horizon Orion complaints at http://www.museums.org.za/sam/planet/pyramids.htm. You may or may not be aware of the book "Giza: The Truth" in which I and my co-author, Chris Ogilvie-Herald, provide a detailed rebuttal of the Orion correlation theory in Chapter 9. Since its publication I have to a limited extent managed to engage Robert Bauval in "debate" on this subject, all of which can be found on my web site.

You will perhaps notice three things:

1. Personally I do not agree with any concerns you or Ed Krupp have about the juxtaposition of North and South, and I believe that undue concentration on this issue gives Bauval a chance to deflect the debate away from the real areas he cannot defend.

2. I accept Bauval's contention that the only angle of relevance is the one between Al Nitak and Al Nilam. Again, undue concentration on the exact angles of the third star and its offset can attract charges of pedantry and a lack of understanding of esoteric symbolism. Concentrating then on this angle between the two major stars, he has now completely disowned SkyGlobe (which gives a 45 degree angle in c. 12,000 BC - the same epoch you mention), and now relies on calculations provided by Prof. Mary Bruck which suggest a figure of between 47 and 50 degrees from the vertical at 10,500 BC, depending on whether or not nutation is accounted for. He says in our correspondence that this confirms your figures, and in your diagrams you do show one angle of 50 degrees. And yet you also mention that the figures are 10 degrees off in the text. Am I being stupid, or is there some confusion here? The reason I ask is that I can accept Bauval's contention that up to 5 degrees out is a close enough approximation not to invalidate his theory, given that he regards the timing of Orion's zenith at sunrise and other issues as equally important symbolic factors in his "lock". However a 10 degree discrepancy clearly starts to be easily visible and to invalidate his hypothesis. If you could point me towards your exact calculations I would be grateful, since clearly I am not and never will be a professional astronomer able to make my own check on such calculations.

3. All this aside, I believe most strongly that there are two basic factors which are not normally discussed in this debate but which undermine the basic correlation theory completely, irrespective of any dating issues. These are, in brief, that the visible magnitude of Mintaka is nothing like comparably small enough to justify the Third Pyramid having only 20% of the base area of each of the other two; and that the concrete evidence for the massive replanning of the Second and Third Pyramids after construction had already begun, both in terms of their size and their location, indicates that there could never have been an all important master plan for the layout. You will notice that once I had given some ground on the dating issue and tried to force Bauval to comment on these two points, he accused me of commercialisation and refused to continue our discussion. Familiar tactics from a political master, but I think increasingly people will see through this sort of chicanery.

You will find all these points elucidated better in the book and the website. I hope you find this a useful contribution, and would be interested to hear your views.

With best wishes

Ian Lawton