Hoover Dam’s Mysterious Star Map: “As Above, So Below”
By | October 17, 2022
We have repeatedly seen that the builders of ancient structures and monuments added secret messages, often depicting astronomical observations, in their stone building materials. Since stone is so permanent, this was an ideal way for people of the past to make sure their information could be seen by people far into the future. But a fairly recent structure, the Hoover Dam, which was completed in 1931, also contains an encoded astronomical message in the form of a star map. The map is easy to find, but many of the roughly seven million visitors to come to Hoover Dam each year miss this celestial map. Let’s find out why the star map was built, what it means, and why it is easy to overlook.
Why Include a Celestial Map?
The Hoover Dam Star Map was the brainchild of Oskar Hansen, the artist who designed the sculptures at the visitors’ center. An immigrant from Norway, Hansen was a merchant marine and member of the U.S. Army before he started his lengthy career as a sculptor. Hansen became part of the Hoover Dam as the building project was nearing completion. A contest was held to find a suitable sculpture to mark the entrance to the massive engineering marvel. Oskar Hansen’s design was selected as the winning entry.
Although the contest called for one sculpture, Hansen created twin angels that would flank a 140-foot-tall flagpole. His unique design also included an art-deco style floor of the plaza which would have a highly detailed and scientifically accurate star map that would forever fix in stone the exact date that Hoover Dam was dedicated … September 30, 1935.
Reading the Map
The celestial map at Hoover Dam is quite complex. At the time it was made, only a few people on the planet – super-smart astrophysicists and astronomy experts – could read it. It is not like a MapQuest map. It requires the reader to do advanced mathematical calculations to uncover the meaning. Thanks to computer technology, the internet, and articles like this one, more and more people are able to interpret what the map is trying to tell us. Spoiler alert: The answer is September 30. 1935.
Why the Coding?
By all accounts Oskar Hansen was a lover of symbols and hidden messages. Several years earlier, in 1928, he spoke at the unveiling of one of his other sculptures and remarked, “Mas has always sought to express and preserve the magnitude of his exploits in symbols. They form the connecting link between the spiritual and the material world.”
As for Hansen’s description of the Hoover Dam Star Map, his words were more difficult to interpret. He said, “These human postures may be matched to their corresponding reflexes in terms of angle and degree much as one would join cams in a worm-gear drive.” He added, “Who knows not all these postures of the mind if he would but stop to think of them as usable factors for determining proclivities of character? It is a knowledge bred down to us through the past experience of the whole race of men.” Huh? It seems that Oskar Hansen was more philosophical and geekier than your typical merchant marine (no offense to any merchant marine).
It seems that the celestial map was a fancy and complicated way to affix the date and time of the Hoover Dam’s dedication to the structure itself, but in a way that people in the future, with no understanding of the English language or the global calendar system, could find out when the structure was made. This begs the question … did Oskar Hansen think that the current human population would be wiped out and a new race of people would emerge and be curious about the construction of the Hoover Dam? Or was he leaving that information for future extraterrestrial visitors?
