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| Fig. 1 - Me and my book |
To say it up front: No, I am not a dogmatic scientist sitting all day long in his ivory tower working out schemes to destroy the reputation of alternative history geniuses :-)
I studied physics, but never worked in that job, because I founded a small computer company with some friends during my time at university. But let's start at the beginning.
My name is Frank Dörnenburg. I was born at the beginning of the 1960s in Essen, the largest city of the Ruhr region. I still live there.
The Ruhr region is known from its heavy industry and coal mines, dirt and ugly houses built after WWII because all the cities in this region were bombed to rubble in the war. And asthmatic children playing in sooty playgrounds between smoking industrial chimneys.
But that is long forgotten history, even I can't remember any of this. There was a film called "Smog" by Wolfgang Menge which dramatised the situation in the early 1970s, but I have never seen such situations with my own eyes, aside from some inversion layer conditions in January. But even that is long forgotten history.
Fact is: the next barnyard is 10 minutes by foot away, and the suburb "Haarzopf" where I live is surrounded by fields, woods and meadows. Otherwise I would have moved long ago :-)
Now I am working as a freelance software engineer specialised in C++ and web development with CSS and PHP. If you have some work for me to do, contact me :-)
My way to archaeology was not a straight one. It began in the year 1989, when the computer company we were developing hard and software for ,Atari, moved its developer support to the internet. No, the colourful click able WWW was not invented yet, it was only text based usenet, the forerunner of the message boards of today. And besides many computer- and support groups more strange ones could be found, like sci.archaeology, de.sci.geschichte or alt.ufo. As a child I was hooked on the ideas of Erich von Däniken and other authors writing about ancient astronauts. Since the time when I was in primary school all new books about that topic were reserved for me, but after a while nothing new came. The books repeated themselves, and I found more and more holes in the general idea of ancient astronauts. When I was 15 or 16 I had completely lost interest.
Funny: in these groups those ideas were discussed as if the last 15 years did not have happened. Still the same questions were asked, and it still was asserted, that "Science" had no answers to them. I could not believe this and so I started digging into the matter.
This new medium gave a completely new wax of communication. I asked the people in the groups to collect questions where I could look up possible answers for, and started buying specialist literature. I concentrated on the topic Egyptian pyramids, because one has to start somewhere. The results were published in several FAQs between 1990 and 1996, and during this time I was asked if I could write a book about it. Well, the book is out now (in German only, sorry, but I am looking for a publisher for an English version (my contract only covers the German edition), you can read about it in "My book".
Aside from that I do a lot of photography and try out new things like panorama shots or HDR pictures. I have a "small" sea water reef tank (hexagonal, diameter 1,30 m, water depth 75 cm), and dive whenever I have the chance. But I am a strict warm water diver, I see no sense in jumping into cold mud holes with zero visibility, I need fish, the more and colourful the better - and the one or other wreck, although I didn't make it to the Thistlegorm yet. I tried three times, but every time the wind or the current was wrong.
Pyramid mysteries