I first learned of Edgar Cayce over 50 years ago. I’ve been hooked ever since. My late father had started reading out loud from There Is a River. This was better than television.

Half a century later, and after two successful careers, I finally figured out what I wanted to be when I “grow up.” Edgar Cayce had given me a fascination for Atlantis. His readings had stirred lost memories. When finally I had started my third career as a writer, I chose to write about those memories.

Researching everything I could about human prehistory, I attempted to build the best possible back story for my novel. I reread Genesis and Edgar Cayce’s readings and studied anthropology and geology. And I made several startling discoveries.

Not only did I find scientific evidence that proved an Atlantis-like destruction event had occurred right when Plato said the island empire had subsided, I also uncovered geological evidence that tells us how Atlantis was likely created and inevitably destroyed.

In my thousands of pages of notes, I found dates given in Cayce’s readings for two biblical events. Earlier, I had dismissed the dates as unimportant to my story. Both stood far beyond the era of my novel. One date—28,000 BC—told of Noah’s Flood and the Second Upheaval of Atlantis.

The prior date—10.5 million BC—talked of an early meeting of man. Was it humanity’s arrival on earth? Was this the time of Adam?

I should have known better not to be so dismissive, but everything I had learned in anthropology screamed “impossible.” This date placed humanity in the middle of the Miocene Epoch, when giants roamed the earth that would’ve made full-grown elephants look like miniature puppies!

Later, curiosity got the best of me, and I dedicated several days to the puzzle. If these dates were true, then the Bible might have some way of confirming them. I started by reading the Bible’s first few books. I had already found a knack for discerning patterns in data that had helped me confirm the possibility of Atlantis. Now, those same skills came alive as the details of the early Bible bristled with new energy. Something was here. I could feel it.

Numbers 14:34 suggested a multiplication factor. But what should I use? The early patriarchs already seemed impossibly old. How could their ages be far longer? And yet, science had already shown humanity to have been around at least 200,000 years. The old Archbishop Ussher timeline only went back to 4004 BC. Something wasn’t right.

Then, I spotted Genesis 5:2. Alarms went off. It talked of Adam as “them,” “male” and “female.” Could the names of Genesis 5 (from Adam and Seth all the way up to Methuselah, Lamech, and Noah) be both individuals and eponymous tribes? Suddenly, any shyness about giving them far longer ages vanished.

I found my factors, and they worked far better than I had anticipated. Any student of the Bible should immediately recognize the numbers “40,” “7” and “77.” Why these are the right numbers and how they are used take up several chapters of my current book. The calculated date for the Flood turned out to be 27,970 BC, while the creation of Adam came in at 10,434,130 BC. Both dates were a veritable bulls-eye—each within 1% of Cayce’s rounded approximations.