How Do You Build a Pyramid? Go Fly a Kite

Kneeling before a 400-lb. concrete obelisk in the hills northwest of Los Angeles, Maureen Clemmons mutters a prayer to the ancient Egyptian god of wind. An hour passes. Then a strong gust straightens the lines that attach the obelisk to two nylon kites, shaped like the ones used in parasailing. Soon the kites flip the obelisk and drag it across a grassy field. Clemmons and her 12 assistants erupt in cheers.

For three years, Clemmons, 42, who runs a hair-care-products company and has no formal scientific training, has devoted her spare time and more than $10,000 of her own money to solving everyone's favorite engineering enigma: how the Egyptian pyramids were built. Over the years, researchers have experimented with everything from ramps to levers in failed attempts to move counterparts of the three-ton pyramid stones.

Inspired by winds that buffet her home in Reseda, Calif., each November, Clemmons recalled that even stronger winds blow in Egypt from February through June. Then she remembered that the Egyptians mass-produced linen for sailcloth, and that some of their hieroglyphs suggest that the pyramids were raised by "invisible gods in the sky." Clemmons concluded that the ancient Egyptians could have used a system of large kites to lift the pyramid stones into place.

Sound ludicrous? That's what her friends said. So Clemmons did some research and conferred with Mory Gharib, an aeronautics engineer at the California Institute of Technology, who surprised everyone by endorsing her concept. According to Gharib, two 6-ft. by 15-ft. kites, used in conjunction with three pulleys, will easily lift the average pyramid stone in a 25-m.p.h. wind. "It needs more study," Gharib says, "but all of the math works." Others were persuaded by what they witnessed. "I thought it was bull," admits Lynn Velazquez, an administrator at Pepperdine University who assists with the field tests. "Then I saw Maureen use a kite to lift a log, and I started to believe."

The kite theory evokes a rolling of eyes, however, from professional Egyptologists, most of whom believe the pyramid builders used ramps. Many of these experts are weary of amateurs' pushing bizarre theories that often involve space aliens. "Even if Caltech demonstrates you can lift heavy blocks using kites, that doesn't prove the Egyptians could have built a pyramid that way," says Edward Brovarski, an Egyptologist at Brown University. Mark Lehner, a Harvard archaeologist widely regarded as the leading U.S. expert on the pyramids, was so appalled at the kite theory that he declined comment. Zahi Hawass, Under Secretary of State for Egypt's Giza plateau, explained that "Egyptologists call people with these kinds of theories 'pyramidiots.'"

Nonetheless, Caltech's Gharib is drafting plans to assemble a full-scale, 15-ft.-wide kite for use with a pulley system capable of lifting blocks as heavy as the pyramid stones. The initial tests will take place in California's Mojave Desert--once someone secures the $100,000 required to fund the research. To that end, Clemmons persuaded several companies to collaborate on a new perfume dubbed Ala (Latin for "wing"), which goes on sale in pyramid-shaped bottles in December, with all profits donated to the kite-research project.

If Caltech's experiments are successful, Clemmons says, she wants to demonstrate her theory on a grander stage: in the shadow of the Giza pyramids outside Cairo, in what she envisions as the most notable kite flight since Ben Franklin's. In the meantime, Clemmons is taken with the idea that a hobbyist like herself might somehow scoop all the pyramid experts. "Other research expeditions had a bunch of men pushing and pulling," she says. "Mine will be me and my girlfriends with kites and a pack of beer, sitting in lawn chairs, waiting for the wind to kick up."