My own recognition of this fact occurred during a trip with two geologist-cavers in the Grand Canyon. They were mapping a measured section through the Redwall limestone cliff along a steep fault ravine, while I was leading, deliberately examining the walls for caves. None of us saw any caves during the descent. On returning up the route, we again saw no caves until the last man suddenly saw to his left, 20 feet away and in plain sight, an entrance ten feet square behind a Douglas-fir trunk. It led to a cave with 2000 feet of passage. It had obviously dilated, or blinked into existence, at that final moment when the mental force of our party’s attention to the matter had built up to the intensity necessary to create the cave.     

Cave dilation evidently operates according to quantum-mechanical laws in which the cave flips instantly from “off” to “on” when the threshold energy input has been reached, with no intermediate state. This is why no one sees caves opening slowly as they watch. Since it is well known that psychokinetic forces operate independently of the inverse-square law that governs normal physical interactions, most caves will be dilated at distances out of sight of the creators, and the caves will appear to have been there for much longer than they really have.

After providing an example of another Colorado cave unquestionably created through dilation, the author proposes an operative mechanism:

Most caves are found in limestone, dolomite and gypsum because these rocks are associated with barren and unproductive landscapes whose inhabitants had little to entertain themselves but to relieve their boredom unconsciously by creating cavities underground. Once begun, the trend was self-accelerating by suggestion to others. When scientists then developed a wrong but superficially plausible explanation that water action caused the cavities, then caves dilated later (or even earlier, since psychokinesis may incorporate precognition) would tend to take on the features expected—a self-fulfilling prophecy.[ii]

The text continues in this wonderful vein, concluding with “Cautionary Notes” regarding the potential of widespread dilation research to precipitate black holes, by creating cave space which exceeds the volume of the planet.

Anyone who has done much caving recognizes the experience Davis describes—the cave that appears in plain sight only at the end of a long day spent looking for it, during which you passed the “obvious” entrance several times. And I’ve experienced and heard many others describe an oft-proven corollary for major expeditions to large caves in foreign lands. On the last day of a big trip, as unwashed explorers contemplate the return to jobs, spouses, running water, etc., someone in the team will find a new passage leading in an unexpected direction, an immense borehole inevitably broken after a short distance by a vertical drop. This pit will prove deeper than the longest rope available, insuring that the new passage will remain unexplored until some future expedition. The last-day pit is virtually assured in those cases when there have been no other major finds during the course of a lengthy and difficult trip, especially to equatorial jungles.

Perhaps the most significant American cave explored recent decades is Lechuguilla, located in Carlsbad Caverns National Park in southern New Mexico. The cave has grown from a known length of a few hundred feet in 1986 to over 100 miles today, and grows longer with every expedition. It is an ideal candidate for having been dilated into existence, not in the least because Donald Davis has been one of its principal explorers. (Those who have been there with Donald tell me that he will sometimes enter a newfound chamber and say in a demanding tone, “Dilate spaciously”; the cave often complies.) Lechuguilla’s single natural entrance was first observed in 1914 by John Ogle, a miner of bat guano who undoubtedly found himself inhabiting the barren and unproductive landscape with little to entertain himself. A shaft about 70 feet deep led to a pile of rocks from which a strong wind issued. In the early 1980s, a group of Colorado cavers became convinced that the source of the breeze was some vast unexplored cavern, and set about digging their way into it.

Over the course of several years, assorted small groups spent weekends poking at the rubble, and in 1986 a particularly determined party of four punched through to unknown miles of highly decorated cave passage. Because of the meandering nature of the cave tunnels, along with unusually high concentrations of gypsum and other minerals, Donald Davis and other speleologists concluded that Lechuguilla had been formed not by surface runoff, as was usually the case with limestone caves. Instead, they posited that the cave appeared to have been carved from the bottom up, by rising springs rich in hydrogen sulfide, which could react chemically to form sulfuric acid and dissolve rock at a rapid rate.

In the early 1990s, this theory attracted microbiologists to the cave. Other deep, dark environments rich in hydrogen-sulfide, such as mid-ocean volcanic vents, had proven to contain treasure troves of odd bacteria that drew energy from chemicals in rocks. The life in these “extreme” environments was built around a chemical food chain—as opposed to the more familiar food chain of the surface world, based on energy gathered from sunlight. Once again, here were a group of determined explorers looking for a thing unknown to science, yet a thing they could expect to find according to a reasonable, if novel, scientific theory. Naturally enough, they found what they sought in Lechuguilla. The cave contained thousands of species of previously uncatalogued microorganisms living in complex communities that redefined the concept of life “as we know it.”

These ecosystems attracted NASA investigators to Lechuguilla, astrobiologists hoping to support reasonable expectations for primitive life beneath the icy surface of Mars and other planets. Inevitably, the new cave, the new bugs, and the NASA interest in turn attracted journalists, among them me. In 1996 I spent four days camped underground in Lechuguilla’s nether reaches, assisting microbiologists in collecting rock-eating bacteria. Within a few months, I had landed a book contract and taken a course in microbiological lab procedures at the university where I teach.

Tradition in American journalism holds that the reporter must remain detached from his subject, a mere observer as opposed to participant. Yet there has always been a contrary undercurrent of “participatory journalism,” in which one does something exciting and writes about it. Moreover, quantum theory, I realized—or perhaps I should say rationalized—teaches us that the act of observation itself profoundly affects the observed phenomenon, to the point of determining its very reality. If this is so, journalistic objectivity becomes illusory at best.[iii]

To cut to the chase: I began looking for and finding my own cave bugs. Specifically, I became fascinated with a controversial subset of microbes from deep underground that had been given a different name by each of the three prinicpal researchers to study them: nanobacteria, nannobacteria, and nanobes. Until 1996, alleged discoveries of tiny bacteria up to 1/100^th the size of more familiar microbes had been largely dismissed by the scientific establishment as impossible. The DNA molecule alone, the skeptics argued, was too large to fit in such a small package—never mind proteins, organelles, and all the other stuff of life. But in 1996, a group of meteorite researchers began looking inside carbonate minerals (chemically much like a common cave stalactite) that appeared to have been deposited by groundwater inside a volcanic meteorite. In that the meteorite appeared to have been blasted off the surface of Mars, and that minerals deposited by groundwater on Earth often contain fossils of dead bacteria, these researchers went prospecting for evidence of life. Using the finest measuring devices available, they magnified slices of the Mars rock to powers and degrees of clarity never before achieved with a mineral sample. The now famous—and still widely distputed—“worms” that Dave McKay of NASA and his colleagues found inside the meteorite Allen Hills 84001 appeared visually identical to “nanobacteria” claimed by earlier researchers.

One effect of the massive press surrounding the controversial claims made by McKay’s team has been a recent explosion in the scientific hunt for nanobacteria on Earth—in mineral deposits, seafloor sediments, industrial wastes, kidney stones, human arterial plaques, and a variety of other environments. While the existence of these tiny life forms remains hotly debated, several leading scientific journals have published evidence that nanobacteria can be cultured or killed, contain internal cellular structures, use nucleic acids to reproduce, and are otherwise alive and occasionally virulent. At the invitation of Carl Allen, one of McKay’s colleagues at the Johnson Space Center, I’ve been collecting fresh hot spring mineral deposits from a wet tunnel beneath Hot Springs National Park. When I drove the first sample down to Houston, where it was placed into an electron microscope powerful enough to magnify even the smallest bits of reality, I saw a mass of cell-like objects as small as those in the Mars rock. Clusters of rods and tiny balls were embedded in the stringy substance that microbiologists term biofilm. That was in 1997; I’ve now collected possible nanobacteria samples as well as dozens of definite bacteria samples from caves and hot springs that, according to scientific publications of previous decades, are “almost completely devoid of microbial life” and “naturally sterile.” I’ve collected and studied “snot-tites” from Cueva de Villa Luz in Tabasco, Mexico. Gooey wormlike cave formations that drip pure sulfuric acid, snot-tites appear to be comprised of hundreds or thousands of species of interdependent microbes living in a biolfilm matrix.

Almost every time I venture underground, I see new evidence of a pervasive subterranean biosphere extending deep into the planet. Or so says my wife, who has become increasingly suspicious of the things I put in our refrigerator. But I keep bringing the stuff home. I feel like a mage who has mastered the charm of making. I placed slides yesterday morning in yet another unstudied pool, this one steaming into a corner of the basement in the administration building of Hot Springs National Park. Today nanobacteria are either growing on them or not. Or growing on them and not—whatever lies there now lies within the quantum foam, part of a possible reality yet to be determined, possible news yet to be reported.