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June 18, 1996 - Art Bell
01:54:56
Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell - Graham Hancock - Fingerprints of the Gods (first appearance)
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From the high desert in the great American Southwest.
The desert.
No pyramids that I know of, but the desert.
I wish you all a great good morning and good evening, depending on your time zone, across all these many from the Tahitian and Hawaiian Islands, east to the Caribbean and the U.S.
Virgin Islands, south into South America, north to the pole worldwide on the Internet.
And that's getting to be a mouthful.
Good morning, this is Coast to Coast AM.
I'm Art Bell.
As promised, with us this morning is Graham Hancock, author of Fingerprints of the Gods, The Sign and the Seal, and the recent The Message of the Sphinx.
I will learn with you this morning, and what a journey it's going to be.
So that's what's on tap.
In a moment we get underway.
Graham is on his U.S.
book tour.
Presently caught up with him in Chicago, where he's probably not going to get very much rest in his hotel room.
Underway in a moment.
Well, alright, here we go.
Now, as promised on his American tour, in Chicago in a hotel room where he's probably not going to get very much sleep, here's Graham Hancock.
Graham, hi!
Hi, good morning to you.
Oh, it's so good to hear your voice without the delay that we get when I called you one night in London.
Yes, that's right, or one morning as it was in my case, yes.
That's right.
Absolutely, we had a bad line that time.
Well, listen, it's great to have you on the program and Richard Hoagland, who I have interviewed many, many times, badgered me and badgered me, as if he had to, to get you on the program.
Well, I'm glad he did that.
Well, I am too.
Richard is a good friend, and Richard and I, together with my co-author Robert Boval, presented two major conferences recently in England, one at Imperial College London and the other at Leeds University, where we made common cause with Richard on the issue of freedom of information and freedom of knowledge and freedom of ideas, because the work that Richard is doing, particularly regarding the structures, the apparent structures on Mars, is of enormous importance and enormous interest.
And we feel that it's extraordinary that this work has not been followed up by the powers that be.
And we've been trying to draw attention to that with him in England.
And it has many points in common.
With the suppression of knowledge regarding the pyramids and the Great Sphinx of Egypt.
Yes, you and I have common cause.
I have done the same thing with Richard.
I guess, Graham, the answer is that a lot of scientific paradigms and careers are challenged By tampering with conventional wisdom in those areas.
Graham, before we get started, tell us a little bit about Graham Hancock.
Not everybody knows.
What is your background, Graham?
My background?
Well, how far should we go back?
I was born in 1950 in Edinburgh in Scotland, so I'm 45 years old now.
I lived in India as a child.
My father is a medical doctor and we lived in southern India.
I went to university in the north of England and I became a journalist and a writer.
I worked for the Economist newspaper and wrote regularly for the London Sunday Times and The Guardian and other newspapers.
I was deeply interested in Africa and in the events of Africa.
I covered the war between Somalia and Ethiopia in 1977 as a war correspondent.
I lived in East Africa for several years in Somalia and in Kenya.
I was finally the East Africa correspondent for The Economist, visited Ethiopia many times.
And it was through visiting Ethiopia, and at that time with purely an interest in politics and famine and wars and economics, that I came across Ethiopia's extraordinary claim to possess the lost Ark of the Covenant.
As in Raiders of the Lost Ark, the biblical ark that supposedly contained the Ten Commandments written by the finger of God.
And I discovered that this claim was ridiculed by scholars.
They regarded it as laughable and as funny and as a primitive superstition.
But the more I looked into it, the more intriguing it seemed to me that it was.
Ethiopia is the only country in the world that claims to possess this amazing relic.
And there's a living tradition of worship of the Ark of the Covenant in Ethiopia.
And there's an indigenous population of Ethiopian Jews who practice a pre-Talmudic Judaism.
They seem to have been cut off from the main body of Judaism for thousands of years.
And I thought, hey, this claim to possess the Ark of the Covenant is not without foundation.
And I decided to Look into it initially from the perspective of an investigative reporter, an investigative journalist, and it led me down an avenue of discovery and learning concerning the mysteries of the past of humanity because I came to realize that we're a species with amnesia, that we all know almost nothing about our own past, and therefore we know almost nothing about ourselves.
And researching and writing The Sign and the Seal, the book about the Ark of the Covenant, led me to Egypt, And the mystery of the sudden, fully formed emergence of Egyptian civilization at around 3000 years ago, apparently out of nowhere, and that led me into the mystery of a lost civilization, which is what I cover in Fingerprints of the Gods, and finally, returning to this matter in much greater depth in The Message of the Sphinx.
So that's Graham Hancock as a As a writer and as an investigator.
I'm a family man.
I have six children.
I've been married twice before and I'm married again now.
My wife is Santa.
She's a wonderful woman.
She's changed my life.
She's brought meaning and spirituality into my life and we pursue this quest for knowledge and learning together.
Is it a driven thing with you, Graham?
Are you driven to do this?
I feel totally caught up and captivated and entranced by the mystery of the past.
I feel that there has been a huge forgotten episode in human history, a lost civilization, a chapter in the story of mankind that we have forgotten entirely, and that this Lost, forgotten period in our history is unrepresented in the modern world.
It has no ambassadors in the modern world.
Nobody speaks for the past.
Our scholars simply write off the prehistory of mankind as a period of primitive superstition when men lived in caves.
And they don't realize the mystery and the magic that lies there.
And what I sense is an ancient voice trying to come through to us.
Through the veil of the past, and I have tried to speak for that ancient voice, to give it a voice in the modern world, to allow it to be heard, and to do so with reason and with argument.
There's a great deal of wishy-washy material out there in the so-called New Age field where people speculate wildly and have woolly ideas, and this is not I'm going to change the way that people think.
The only way that we can change a paradigm, that we can change a fixed and rigid system of ideas, is to fight that system of ideas on its own terms.
And that's what I've tried to do in my books, particularly in Fingerprints of the Gods, and in the new book, The Message of the Sphinx, is to present solid, reasoned evidence, which any person with common sense can see makes sense, and which does challenge the existing view of history.
Well, there might be some who would say that, um...
That you, in fact, are all wrong.
In fact, a lot of people, Graham, who have a lot at stake in the traditional paradigm, entire lives and careers and theorems are built about the way it was supposed to be.
So, how is all this received by peer colleagues?
The conclusion that we're coming to, particularly with the Egyptian material that I cover in Fingerprints of the Gods and that we go into in more depth in The Message of the Sphinx, is that in a sense the Egyptologists, who are the self-appointed specialists in this area, have made themselves irrelevant to the argument.
We no longer seek their approval.
We no longer seek their acceptance.
of our ideas in this field.
The evidence that we present speaks for itself, and our strategy and our policy is to go directly to the public.
When I say I, our, when I speak in the plural, I'm talking here about Robert Boval and myself.
He's the author of a book called The Orion Mystery, which presented the Orion correlation, an extraordinary breakthrough in the understanding of the pyramids, and he and I got together to work on the message of the Sphinx.
And what we feel is that really the Egyptologists are irrelevant to this argument.
The public are not listening to them anymore.
The tired old theories about the pyramids being tombs of megalomaniac pharaohs, the fixed and rigid idea of what ancient Egypt was, is just no longer accepted by the majority of the general public today.
And the burden of proof has shifted.
It's no longer on us to prove that we All right.
It's now for the Egyptologist to prove that we are wrong.
It's not acceptable anymore for them to stand up there and say, well, listen, I'm the professor of Egyptology at the Oriental Institute in Chicago, and I know that you guys are wrong, and therefore, please go away.
The public just won't accept that anymore.
As a matter of fact, when I say the word Egyptologist at public conferences and conventions these days, The word alone causes the whole audience to burst into laughter.
Listen, Graham, don't be afraid to get in their face.
I'm not.
That was a joke.
Alright, Graham, exactly what are the pyramids?
Okay, let's first of all deal with the Egyptological orthodoxy.
They tell us that the three great pyramids of Egypt are the tombs of three megalomaniac pharaohs, Khufu, Khafre and Menkaure, three pharaohs of the fourth dynasty, who ruled at around the period of 2500 BC.
And they say that that's all they are.
Tombs and tombs only.
They say that the Great Sphinx is a monumental statue that was carved to aggrandize the ego of one of those pharaohs, Pharaoh Khafre, and that the face of the Sphinx is carved in his image And that it was created in 2500 BC.
And if you look this matter up in any encyclopedia, or if you read it in any orthodox popular text, such as the National Geographic magazine, or the misleadingly named Time-Life Lost Civilization series, you'll see the same tired, old theory being regurgitated again and again as though it were the revealed truth of God.
And nobody ever tells us that that's all it is.
It's just a theory.
It's just the opinion of a few, a very few by the way, scholars.
It's just their opinion based on no facts whatsoever.
The Egyptological notion that the Great Pyramids are tombs is purely and simply a matter of opinion.
No burial of any pharaoh has ever been found inside those colossal and extraordinary
monuments.
They are completely bare.
They contain no inscriptions whatsoever.
They are stark, austere, and anonymous.
They stand out there on the Giza Plateau, begging the intelligent and the curious to work out what
they are.
But they tell us one thing very definitely about themselves, that they were built by master astronomers and master
engineers with skills and talents almost beyond human imagining.
Graham, you said that there was nothing in them, at least no burial point.
No burial, no mummified body ever found, no sarcophagus ever found.
What is in them?
Aren't there chambers and so forth and so on?
I've never been there, so I don't know.
All of the three pyramids of Giza have chambers in them.
Yes.
Known chambers, and as we show in the Message of the Sphinx, as yet undiscovered chambers as well.
The two secondary pyramids, the Second Pyramid and the Third Pyramid, have just one major chamber each.
The Third Pyramid has a group of smaller chambers as well, and these are underground.
The chamber systems are under the ground, under the base of the pyramid, but the Great Pyramid, the pyramid that Egyptologists attribute to Khufu, Contains a subterranean chamber, which is a hundred feet below ground.
It contains the so-called Queen's Chamber, and this attribution is purely arbitrary.
There's no basis for it, which is in the superstructure of the monument about a hundred feet above ground.
And about a further hundred feet above that, there's a third, much larger chamber with a group of smaller chambers above it.
These are massive cavities in some cases.
Inside the body of this six million ton monument, they're joined up by an intricate network of corridors and passageways.
And mysteriously, in the Great Pyramid, there are four very narrow shafts, two of them from the so-called King Chamber.
These are eight inches wide and eight inches high, cut all the way through the body of the monument.
They rise at an incline, at an angle, and they exit on the outside of the monument.
But the two lower shafts from the so-called Queen's Chamber do not exit on the outside of the monument.
They stop somewhere inside that vast six million tonne bulk.
And the mystery of these shafts is one of the issues that we investigate in The Message of the Spigs, because at the end of one of those shafts, in 1993, after an exploration by a small robotic camera, Was discovered a door complete with two metal handles, and an amazing archaeological scandal surrounds what has happened concerning that door, and the chamber that lies beyond it, and also a chamber that lies deep beneath the Great Sphinx.
Yikes!
Um, what, aside from when we get down to the very mysterious door and so forth, What use do you suppose all these chambers had?
What function?
What use?
Well, it's going to take us some time to talk this through.
This is a deep and mysterious matter, but there's something that I want to draw attention to right now, and that is the precision of the Great Pyramid.
Remember that this monument is supposed to be the tomb of a megalomaniac pharaoh, although no burial was ever found inside it.
The Great Pyramid weighs six million tons.
It has a footprint of just under 14 acres, and it stands more than 450 feet tall.
Mysteriously, it is perfectly aligned to true north, south, east, and west.
The north-south faces of the Great Pyramid are better aligned to true north and south than the meridian building of the Greenwich Observatory in London.
The Greenwich Observatory in London is 9 60ths of a degree off True North.
The Great Pyramid, the last surviving wonder of the ancient world, the oldest massive construction on Earth, is just 3 60ths of a single degree off True North.
And this tells us beyond any shadow of a doubt that astronomers of astonishing skill and talent We're at work in the surveying and setting out of this amazing monument.
And this is the first clue as to its function, because it speaks the language of astronomy.
And astronomy is a language that can pass and transcend the passage of thousands of years and the change of cultures and symbols.
It's a language that any intelligent civilization can decode.
If we wish to understand these monuments, we have to look to astronomy.
We have to look to the stars, and therein lies the beginning of a trail of clues that leads, finally, to a conclusion.
Graham, at the time the pyramids were built, did we have, did mankind have, the knowledge to determine very nearly precisely True North?
Well, not according to Orthodox history, no.
Didn't have the knowledge to do that at all.
And also, the question that arises is, when were the pyramids built?
Orthodox Egyptologists say that the pyramids were built in 2500 BC.
But that, again, is a statement of opinion.
These monuments are made of stone, and you cannot date stone monuments by any objective technique.
Carbon dating only dates organic material.
Right.
Therefore, you need to look to other sciences to put a dating on these monuments.
And we think that the story of these monuments, the chronology of these monuments, is extremely different To the chronology presented by Egyptologists.
And that although the period of 2,500 B.C.
does figure in their story, it's only part of their story.
And that the origins and the genesis of this amazing site go back to 10,500 B.C.
Twelve and a half thousand years ago, the end of the last Ice Age, when very strange things were happening on this planet.
A time of mystery and darkness about which very little is known, and the evidence that links the Three Great Pyramids and the Great Sphinx to the date of 10,500 B.C.
is astonishingly strong, and we present that evidence in the new book, in The Message of the Sphinx.
I'd like to talk a little bit about that evidence, because if you cannot date to 2,500 B.C., how can you date to almost 10,000 years even earlier than that uh...
to precise sciences
one is astronomy and the other is geology
as i've had a moment ago it's astronomy that really holds the key
to these monuments because what we've discovered and and what we present
is simply that that the three great pyramid map on the ground of the
pattern of three prominent
stars in the sky.
All right, hold that thought.
Graham, we'll come right back to it.
Graham Hancock is my guest.
He's in Chicago.
It doesn't matter where you are.
You're in for the ride of your life.
The modern day Indie Anna Jones.
Graham Hancock right back.
From somewhere out there, this is Coast to Coast AM on the Premier Radio Networks.
Thanks for watching.
From Chicago, Graham Hancock.
Graham, where were we?
We were in the three stars of Orion's Belt.
Yes, we were.
We were talking about the majestic plan that is transcribed on the ground of the Giza Plateau in Egypt.
The plan that Egyptologists, the self-appointed Academic interpreters of this site have never noticed, and still to this day regard it as a coincidence, if they even accept that it exists at all.
To explain this plan, let me first of all preface it with a remark about a huge piece of architecture in the United States.
I don't know whether I correctly refer to it as the Boulder Dam or the Hoover Dam.
Well, Boulder Dam, I think.
Boulder Dam will do.
And the state is Colorado, or?
Well, Boulder Dam is down here.
It's Nevada, Arizona.
Nevada, Arizona.
Okay.
The Boulder Dam includes an enormous star map.
The architect who created that massive piece of architecture built into it a huge star map.
He froze the stars above the dam and brought them down into a piece of architecture that he built into the dam.
And the reason that this was done is very interesting.
Because he knew what the ancient Egyptians knew, that the positions of all the stars in the sky change very, very, very slowly down the ages as a result of a phenomenon called precession.
Our planet, which is the viewing platform from which we observe all the stars in the sky, has a very slow wobble on its axis, and this wobble ...operates in a great cycle of 26,000 years, and as a result of this, the patterns and positions of all the stars in the skies change.
And the reason that that piece of architecture in the Boulder Dam was put there was so that any future civilization, if ours were to be destroyed, would be able to work out when the Boulder Dam was built.
Because if they had a knowledge of astronomy, they could look at that star map built into the architecture, And they could work out from that when the star map and therefore the dam was made.
And it's the same principle that we find at work in the monuments of Giza.
Only in the case of the monuments of Giza, it's not just a matter of dating the monuments, it also helps us to get to grips with what they really mean.
Two constellations are represented on the ground at Giza.
Graham, before we get there, let me understand a little bit better the science of the wobble effect.
In other words, how we are able to measure, without 26,000 years of experience in one wobble cycle, what standard of measurement do we then use and apply toward being able to date these structures?
With very fine and precise observations, You can note that the wobble is underway over a relatively short number of years.
Within a human lifetime of 72 years, this wobble on the axis of the Earth affects a one-degree shift in the positions of the stars.
Ancient cultures particularly observed it at the Spring Equinox.
Now, the Spring Equinox is the time of the year when night and day are of exactly equal length, and it falls in our epoch on the 21st of March.
And on the Spring Equinox, the sun rises perfectly due east of wherever you are situated on the planet.
This is because our planet revolves around the sun, and there are four key moments in the year.
The two other, the Winter Solstice and the Summer Solstice are the longest and shortest days of the year.
On the Summer Solstice, the North Pole of the Earth, the Summer Solstice in the Northern Hemisphere, the North Pole of the Earth points most directly at the Sun, because the Earth lies tilted on its axis.
And on the Winter Solstice, the shortest day of the year, the 21st of December, The North Pole of the Earth points most directly away from the Sun.
But at the equinoxes, spring and autumn equinoxes, the Earth lies broadside onto the Sun in its orbit.
Then one could almost make a structure with a tiny pinpoint hole in it, and on the precise time of the precise day, measure the point where the Sun hits?
Yes.
You could.
Many ancient structures target the rising point of the sun on the spring equinox.
They point perfectly due east, and one of those structures is the Great Sphinx of Egypt.
The Great Sphinx of Egypt is targeted perfectly due east.
Its gaze sights the rising sun on the spring equinox.
In the New World, if you go to Chichen Itza, in the Yucatan, You will find an enormous pyramid, the Pyramid of Kukulkan, which was one of the names of Quetzalcoatl.
I went into this at some length in my previous book, Fingerprints of the Gods.
And this wonderful step pyramid at Chichen Itza is also an equinoctial marker because it is so set that on the day of the spring equinox, a wonderful effect of light and shadow is created and a gigantic feathered serpent, which was the symbol of the civilizing deity Quetzalcoatl, is seen to undulate up and down the staircase of the
pyramid and therefore even if you've lost touch with your calendar
system, if there's been some great cataclysm and you've forgotten how to
calculate your calendar that monument will tell you when the spring equinox has
occurred and so also will the sphinx.
When the Sun rises in direct alignment with the gaze of the sphinx
it's the spring equinox. Now for the ancients they weren't just interested in
the position that the Sun rises along the horizon and it slowly changes
north of east at the summer solstice, south of east at the winter solstice,
perfectly due east at the spring equinox.
They were also interested in the constellation, the group of stars that lay behind the sun at dawn on the spring equinox.
It's a wonderful, marvellous, magical coincidence of our cosmic environment that twelve great constellations Lie in the plane of the Earth's orbit around the Sun, and these are the 12 constellations of the Zodiac.
Everybody knows about the Zodiac.
We all look at our horoscope every day.
So there are many points of measurement, not just one.
No, no, no.
This is a very complex machine that we're looking at here.
Think of it as a great clock, a great celestial clock operating in the heavens that we can tune into to find out where we're located in time.
The point is this, because these twelve zodiacal constellations lie in the plane of the Earth's orbit around the Sun, it means that the Sun will rise against the background of one of these constellations on the spring equinox.
The Sun lies between the Earth and that constellation, and as the Earth rotates towards the Sun, we see the Sun rising against the background of that distant constellation.
And for the ancients, the constellation that lay behind the Sun on the spring equinox was considered To mark the age.
That's why everybody's familiar with the notion of a new age and the notion of the dawning of the age of Aquarius.
What this actually refers to is the phenomenon of precession of the equinoxes.
Alright, again, the only thing that I don't understand, now I understand the number of data points you have and follow on this, but how do you make a determination from one lifetime or even several that the period of wobble This is 26,000 years.
Two ways.
You must have very long-term observations which plot this change in the stellar positions against the rising point of the Sun over hundreds and preferably over thousands of years.
And those observations must be meticulously recorded and kept.
Have we done that?
Yes, we do it now and we've been doing it certainly since the time of the Greeks.
That the evidence that we present in our books in Fingerprints of the Gods and The Message of the Sphinx compellingly suggests that the ancient Egyptians were doing it and that they inherited this knowledge from an earlier lost civilization.
That the whole knowledge of the procession is one of the most ancient sciences of mankind and we find the values, the numbers that relate to this astronomical phenomenon recorded in the oldest myths of mankind.
There were two great scholars Giorgio de Santillana and Hertha von Deschend, who wrote a wonderful book in the 1960s called Hamlet's Mill.
And Giorgio de Santillana was no lightweight.
He was professor of the history of science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
But because the idea he put forward was so much at variance with orthodox scientific view, his work was never adopted by the scientific community.
But what he argued, quite simply, was that precise, accurate measurements of the rate of the precession of the equinoxes were encoded in the most ancient myths of mankind.
And curiously, these are all cataclysm myths.
They're all myths that relate to the recurrent destructions of civilizations and of the Earth and of a recurrent flood and a huge global earthquake that strikes the planet.
And incorporated in these myths are precise values for the rate of precession As good as our best astronomers can calculate today.
A series of numbers that only make sense as references to the procession of the equinoxes and that are linked in these myths with astronomical symbolism of great intensity and cleverness.
So there's powerful evidence in ancient myths that some ancient people, as yet unidentified by history, were observing this phenomenon as accurately and precisely as our scientists do today.
And this evidence is also encoded in monuments all around the world, including the monuments of Egypt, and they speak to us in the language of precession.
They speak to us in the language of precession, and they use it to draw our attention to a particular time, to the positions and the exact patterns of the stars of two constellations, the constellation of Leo and the constellation of Orion.
At a particular time, very distant in the past, and that time is 10,500 B.C.
Alright, well that's a lot of good scientific basis for saying what you say.
What do the traditionalists do with that?
Do they just dismiss it?
Do they say, interesting?
How do they respond?
Well, first of all, you have to understand that Egyptologists are astronomically illiterate.
Egyptology is a discipline that focuses on the dust at their feet, and they seek to evaluate Egyptian civilization by what they can dig out of the earth, by artifacts pulled out of the ground.
And if it hasn't come out of the ground, then it doesn't fit in with their method of doing research, and therefore they ignore it.
And they do not look at the stars, and they do not look at the skies.
And this is very strange, because the ancient Egyptians themselves were avid star watchers.
And their entire religion was focused around astronomy.
Even the most orthodox of Egyptologists will accept that the high god of resurrection and rebirth in the ancient Egyptian system, the god Osiris, who was said to have brought civilization to Egypt in a remote epoch that they called the first time, Reptepi in their language, that this god Osiris was seen to have a celestial image, a celestial twin, That the constellation of Orion was considered to be the image of Osiris in the sky.
This is well known and well accepted and yet Egyptologists have never considered the implications of it.
And those implications are there staring us in the face in 15 million tons of pyramids standing on the Giza Plateau in exactly the pattern of the three stars of Orion's belt.
As they looked, and only as they looked, in 10,500 BC.
All right, Graham, then the charge you're making is that our modern science is insufficiently, by comparison, integrated.
It is a science that is overly specialized.
Egyptology makes the arrogant claim to be the sole body of knowledge capable of interpreting
ancient Egyptian civilization to the modern world.
And yet it is a body of knowledge, it's a system of knowledge that relies only on one
method of investigation.
Egyptologists do not use astronomy, and neither do they use geology.
And geology is an important science when it comes to dating a very ancient site.
But I would have imagined that you would have tried to grab one of them and integrate and
show him what you know and get his reaction.
No, again, we have tried to do that, and we've now got to the point where, in fact, we got
to the point quite some time ago.
Where we feel that it is pointless to do that.
Because you can present this information again and again and again to Egyptologists and they'll say, we're sorry, this does not coincide with what we know, therefore it must be wrong.
Egyptology must be one of the few sciences in which when new facts appear, which challenge the prevailing theory, instead of the theory being changed, the facts are rejected.
This is the way that Egyptologists do business, and this is what has happened in this case.
But we're dealing here with an extraordinarily clever ancient people who went to great lengths to pass knowledge about themselves down to the future.
And they used the language of the stars and the language of this phenomenon of precession so carefully and so cleverly that there can be no mistake about it.
And I've presented this information, Robert Boval has presented this information, Jointly we've presented this information to thousands of people, ordinary people, people like you and I and they look at the information and their common sense tells them this has to be right and that's why the name Egyptologist these days raises a giggle rather than a serious response because the Egyptologists are still insisting that all of this is coincidence and we'll lay out during the course of this evening the evidence that supports why this is not a coincidence and why it provides the key to a deep
and mysterious secret of the past of humanity.
Suppose I were a modern contractor and some very rich entity in Egypt came to me and said
I want to build this pyramid and he gave me the design for one of the great
pyramids.
As a contractor could I do it?
I don't think so. My co-author Robert Boval is a construction engineer.
This was one of the reasons we teamed up, because we're able to bring different skills to bear on this problem.
Robert is a construction engineer by training.
He spent 20 years building enormous buildings in the Middle East.
And his background was specifically as a setting out engineer.
And Robert, therefore, has looked in depth into the construction aspect of the Great Pyramid from a professional point of view.
You know, Egyptologists have the view that the pyramid was built by teams of men hauling blocks of stone up ramps.
Yes.
And that's the view that is presented in all the popular texts as though it were a fact.
Again, there is no evidence for that view whatsoever.
It's a simple fact of construction that human labor ...cannot haul blocks of stone weighing tens of tons each.
And some of the blocks in the pyramid weigh more than 70 tons.
And there are blocks in neighboring temples that weigh more than 200 tons.
But human labor simply cannot haul blocks of stone up a ramp that has an incline steeper than one in ten.
And to take a one in ten ramp to the top of a 450 foot tall structure requires a ramp almost one mile in length.
Involving about five times as much material as is used in the Great Pyramid itself.
Wow.
And that material is to be found nowhere around the flat desert plateau on which the pyramids stand.
And furthermore, the ramp itself would have had to have been made of blocks of stone as solid as those are used in the pyramid.
Otherwise, it would have collapsed under its own weight.
There's a great mystery regarding the construction of these monuments.
In fact, Robert and I have put out a suggestion through various construction engineering
journals in Britain to get a team of people together
to try to really puzzle out how these monuments were built.
We feel we have to dispense entirely with this Egyptological nonsense about
slaves and gangs of men drawing
blocks of stone up ramps a mile long and we feel we have to look into this
problem very seriously. I've climbed the Great Pyramid three times.
It's illegal to climb it but certain arrangements can be made and I
I've climbed it three times, and on one of those occasions, which happened just after a great festival that was taking place in Egypt in 1995, the so-called Eid that follows the holy month of Ramadan, there were 30,000 citizens of Cairo on the Giza Plateau having a picnic.
They were having a holiday.
Two or three hundred of them decided to climb the Great Pyramid, even though the guards didn't want to do that.
Myself and my wife, Samantha, joined those climbers, and we climbed the Great Pyramid in broad daylight, illegally, with a lot of Egyptians also climbing it.
And we discovered something very interesting.
Don't they frown on that?
Well, they do frown on it, and they said it was forbidden, but since hundreds of other people were doing it, it seemed a reasonable proposition for us to do it.
And the interesting thing was this, that the climb itself is physically dangerous.
I've climbed it on two other occasions when we climbed it alone, without other people climbing it, and that was dangerous enough.
But to climb it when hundreds of other people are climbing it is astonishingly dangerous.
And the biggest danger of all is the other people who are passing you, going up and down on the monument.
Domino effects.
A domino effect.
You can literally get knocked off.
And if you fall off this monument, then you're going to go all the way down to the bottom and you're going to die.
And it's going to be very, very messy.
Strawberry jam.
And the situation that I started to wonder about was this.
The Egyptological scenario sees thousands of men Swarming all over this monument.
I've seen the movies.
Yeah.
Transporting blocks of stone weighing two and a half tons each minimum.
That's the lowest weight of a block of stone on the pyramid.
Now two and a half tons is approximately what?
Four family sized automobiles in weight.
Big, yeah.
And the Egyptological view is that hundreds or thousands of men are gaily swarming all over the pyramid, hauling these blocks up and down.
Well, when you lay... I can tell you it's not possible.
You can't even walk up and down it safely with just a couple of hundred people.
Well, you can tell me that.
When you tell them that... When I tell them that, they ignore it.
This is why we feel that the Egyptological establishment has to be bypassed.
That it is no longer relevant to this debate.
It has shown that it is not intellectually competent to deal with the staggering challenges that these monuments represent.
And as we show in the message of the Sphinx, Egyptology is also a deeply corrupt and dishonest discipline, which has been involved in most peculiar scams and scandals at the pyramids over the last 20 years, and which has not been honest with the public about certain matters that are taking place then, which is kept silent.
While the Sphinx and the Three Great Pyramids have been hijacked by two powerful multi-millionaires.
I take it you don't speak often at Egyptology conventions?
No, we do not speak at Egyptology conventions.
But talking about conventions, we are inviting Egyptologists to attend a conference that's going to be held at the University of Delaware.
Alright, Graham, hold on, we'll tell them all about it in a moment.
We break here, we'll be right back.
♪♪ ♪♪
Back now to Graham Hancock.
Graham, here's a question for you.
Regarding the stones, which I think you've adequately shown could not be hauled up today intact, what about the theory that the stones instead were poured in place?
Yes, that is the theory of a man called Davidovits, and he put it forward in quite an interesting book published about 12 years ago.
The stones were not poured intact. They contain ancient fossils of
numulites. These are ancient sea creatures that dwelled in ancient oceans out of which the limestone sediments were
formed. And I'm afraid that the fact that these stones are made of numulitic
limestone rules out the possibility that this was some kind of concrete.
Those fossils would have been liquefied?
Yes, they wouldn't be found in a concrete.
It's a cool theory, it's interesting, it's neat, but it just is not supported by the evidence.
It shows the questions that these incredible structures raise, that somebody would go to that length to develop a theory like that to try to explain this, because that would be a way of explaining how they got these big blocks up to such a height, as if they were pouring them into mould at that height from a liquid solution.
But I'm afraid it just doesn't work, and the theory does not hold water.
To coin a phrase.
It's a slightly crazy theory, but it's not nearly as crazy as the orthodox theory which Egyptologists put forward about gangs of slaves hauling these things up ramps.
Alright, so it couldn't have been poured, it couldn't have been hauled.
How did they get there?
Well, I think that the most honest answer to that question is this.
We just don't know.
Let's be open-minded about this.
Let's not approach this monument with fixed ideas.
Let's approach it with open minds and questions.
Let's try and resolve these questions.
In order to do that, we first of all have to sweep away the dead hand of Egyptology and open the subject to rational debate from large numbers of people all around the world.
People who bring different skills to bear on these monuments.
Engineers, architects, philosophers, astronomers, geologists, People from all walks of life who seriously have the capacity to study these monuments need to be brought there and need to consider these monuments.
Can I mention that conference in the University of Delaware?
Absolutely.
Because this could be a forum where this could be aired.
We're issuing a challenge to Egyptologists to join us at that conference and to debate with us.
It's at the University of Delaware.
It's called Return to the Source, Rediscovering Lost Knowledge and Ancient Wisdom.
I'll be speaking at that conference.
So will John Anthony West, the most courageous and far-sighted American who's been working on the problem of the age of the Sphinx for the last 20 years.
So will Professor Robert Shock of Boston University, whose geological studies have shown that the Sphinx is thousands of years older than Egyptologists think it is.
So will Robert Boval.
So will Rand and Rose Flemmart, whose work on Earth crust displacement I reported in Fingerprints of the Gods, and whose own book, When the Sky Fell, I would highly recommend to Anybody who's interested in ancient catastrophes, and they'll be talking about earth crust displacement and the mystery of the end of the last ice age.
So will Colin Wilson from England, and many other independent thinkers who are working on the past of mankind.
And this conference is taking place at the University of Delaware 27, 28, and 29 September.
And I can give out two numbers that people can call if they're interested in attending that conference.
Well, give them a little incentive.
If I were an Egyptologist out there this morning, I'm not sure that I would walk into the arena you just described for fear of being ganged up on.
Well, we would like a gang of Egyptologists.
We would like dozens of them to come.
Graham, even if just one shows up, will he get a good fair debate?
Oh yes, very much so.
We feel that fair debate is very important because we don't claim what they claim.
We don't claim to be the sole source of knowledge on this subject.
Our main role is to raise questions and to show that so far the questions have not been answered, but we think that the best way forward is through constructive debate and dialogue.
And we'll all be presenting papers at that conference, but we would like Egyptologists to come and present papers, and we will set up a forum for debate where these issues can be openly aired in front of the public.
And no, they certainly won't be ganged up on, and that's more than we can say for what they've done to us over the years.
There was a very interesting program that ran here in America.
I don't know if it ran in Britain.
Have you seen it?
I'm sure you have.
The Mysterious Origins of Man.
I appeared on it.
Well, that's right.
I was most of the last half of that program.
I was the guy that they filmed walking around in Stonehenge.
That's right.
And then they did a long interview with me.
That was about the theme of my book, Fingerprints of the Gods, which explored the possibility of a lost civilization all around the world.
Yes, it was an excellent program, and interestingly enough, Bill Cote, who made that program, was deluged with hate mail by established academics.
In fact, there was a campaign To try to get that program pulled off the air.
I mean, America, I was always told, was supposed to be the home of freedom of speech.
But when I read this ream of hate mail, which piles up about three feet tall, I suddenly realized that there's a whole movement in this country that does not want people to speak out.
Was it aired in Britain?
It has not been aired in Britain yet.
I hope that it will be.
The earlier documentary, also presented by Charlton Heston, The Mystery of the Sphinx, in which John West and Robert Shock's work on the vast antiquity of the Sphinx was first put before the public, was shown in Britain.
They did a re-cut and re-edited version, and they added some new material to it, which, by the way, entirely supported The findings on the geology of the thing.
Well, among the many findings in Mysterious Origins, there was the theory that the continents on the world have shifted.
And what is the Arctic, or Antarctic, then becomes something else.
That's right.
This is the theory of Earth crust displacement.
And as I say, I would mention Randall Rose Flemath's book, When the Sky Fell, which is excellent work on that theory.
and I also cover it at length in Fingerprints of the Gods.
The theory was first developed by an American academic, an American historian of science called Professor Charles Hapgood
back in the early 1950s.
And Charles Hapgood was supported at the time, and this is very important,
as to the physics of his theory of Earth-crust displacement by no less a figure than Albert Einstein.
And Albert Einstein was a man who knew his physics.
All right, give us the short version.
Okay, the short version is this.
We've all heard of continental drift.
We've all heard of plate tectonics.
We all now know that the continents of the Earth move around on the surface of the Earth very, very slowly, like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle.
Look at West Africa and the East Coast of South America.
You can see that they once fitted together and that they've drifted apart.
And by the way, this theory of continental drift was not accepted When it was first proposed in 1916, it was universally ridiculed and it took more than 50 years for geologists to come to terms with the fact that it is a reality.
But now it's the basis of all modern geology.
The theory of Earth's crust displacement is not contradictory with continental drift.
It doesn't rule... it does not contradict it.
It actually works together with it.
It suggests that from time to time there's another motion of the Earth's crust.
In addition to the continents rearranging themselves in relation to one another, sometimes the entire outer crust of the Earth can shift in one piece.
Around the body of the Earth, like the loose skin of an orange.
Kind of a continental little game you play with chairs, where you run around.
Everything shifts all at once.
Everything shifts at once.
The whole thing moves at once.
And when this happens, land that is in very cold parts of the planet, close to one or other of the poles, is cataclysmically shifted into warm parts of the planet.
And land that is in warm parts of the planet ...is cataclysmically shifted into cold parts of the planet.
And what's the best evidence for this?
Well, the best evidence for this is the mystery of the last Ice Age.
Again, we don't have time to go into vast detail here.
All of it is in Fingerprints of the Gods.
But the mystery of the last Ice Age is this.
We all know there was an Ice Age.
We all know that North America was covered with ice more than two miles thick.
Six million square miles of it, as far south as the Mississippi Delta, almost into the tropics.
And this ice was stable.
For a hundred thousand years, and then suddenly, around 14,000 years ago, for reasons that no geologist has ever been able to explain, it all melted.
Just within a thousand or two thousand years, the whole lot melted.
The same thing happened in Northern Europe.
The same quantity of ice was stable for the same length of time, and it all melted down within just a couple of thousand years.
Sea levels went up by 400 feet.
Hundreds of animal species, the woolly mammoths, the The woolly rhinoceros, the saber-toothed tiger, hundreds of animal species were rendered extinct during this gigantic cataclysm that brought the last ice age to an end.
And it was, by definition, a cataclysm.
This was no slow-acting climate change.
The question is, what caused the cataclysm?
Earth crust displacement provides a very simple and elegant, clear answer, as Hapgun and Einstein showed back in 1953.
It argues simply that We have masses of ice on our planet now.
We have an ice age now at the North Pole and at the South Pole.
Indeed.
In the cold latitudes.
And this ice is asymmetrically distributed around the poles.
It isn't evenly distributed around the spin axis of the Earth.
Look at Greenland, which is way off-center to the rest of the ice.
If you look at Antarctica, you'll find that the ice on the Antarctic plane, on the polar plane, is twice as thick as the ice on the Antarctic Peninsula.
It's uneven, it's unstable, and with our spinning planet, and it's spinning at a thousand miles an hour at the equator, and it's going round the sun at almost 70,000 miles an hour, with all these centrifugal and rotational forces, this huge, unstable mass of ice, not symmetrically distributed around the poles, creates an extremely deadly and dangerous situation, and at widely separated intervals, as it builds up to a particular level, As Einstein argued, it can exert sufficient thrust on the crust of the Earth, and we all live on the Earth's crust, it's just 30 miles thick, and it floats on a lubricating layer.
It can exert sufficient thrust on the crust of the Earth to set the whole crust in motion, moving in one piece, moving very, very fast, creating enormous tidal waves, huge earthquakes across the whole planet, filling the air with volcanic dust, A darkness, a time of darkness, and all the myths of mankind speak of such an event, speak of black bituminous rain falling from the skies and huge floods, the flood of Noah, and it may just be that that's what these myths remember, the cataclysm that brought the last ice age to an end, and it may just be that all our memories of a great golden age in the story of mankind, of a high civilization that was destroyed in an enormous cataclysm long ago,
It may just be that that is connected to this mystery.
Alright, Graham, answer this.
If that were to occur today, with all our great cities, and all our industry, and all our population, and all of the artifacts that are us today, if that cataclysm occurred today, what would be left of, or seen or found, of our great civilization after the shift?
Almost nothing.
Almost nothing.
The face of the Earth would be wiped clean.
I have to stress it might not be Earth crust displacement, but there is some cataclysmic agent that strikes the Earth at regular and widely separated intervals of time.
It may be a massive asteroid strike.
A 10 mile wide nickel-iron asteroid incoming at cosmic speed would have the same effect.
It could knock the Earth off its axis.
It could create a kind of nuclear winter.
Our civilization would be destroyed by that, too.
One of the things that my research has done to me, when I was working on Fingerprints of the Gods, was make me realize how fragile this beautiful blue planet of ours is, this garden of experience on which we all live, how fragile our cosmic environment makes our life on this Earth, and how easily we could lose it.
The answer to your question is, modern civilization, with all its much-vaunted achievements, could be rubbed out in the blink of an eye.
And there might just be a handful of survivors, and those survivors, I am sure, would do their best to keep the light of our knowledge burning and to pass it down to the future, just as the survivors of that great lost civilization of the past sought to do so.
And I think that that's what we're seeing in the Pyramids and the Sphinx of Giza, a memory device containing a time capsule of knowledge From a lost civilization of long, long ago, knowledge and wisdom that may be of vital importance to us today.
Behind that door, in the Sphinx, does the library of that knowledge lie?
I think there is extraordinarily powerful evidence to suggest that this is so.
If you were amongst the survivors of a high civilization, and you had been Your civilization had been destroyed in an enormous cataclysm.
Yes.
And you wanted somehow to keep the memory of your civilization preserved and to pass down the knowledge to the future.
And you might particularly want to do that if you believed passionately in the reincarnation of the soul, by the way, because you might believe that you would come back.
And the ancient Egyptians inherited a system of religious ideas that did believe in the reincarnation of the soul.
You might want to pass that knowledge down to the future to wake yourself up at some distant time.
If you had such knowledge, you wouldn't just put it in one place.
You would, as it were, make a backup copy of your precious disc.
And that's why we think that there is more than one place of refuge for this time capsule.
That's why there is a deeply buried chamber in the bedrock beneath the Great Sphinx.
And that's why there is a hidden chamber The doorway of which has now been discovered inside the Great Pyramid of Egypt.
Alright, this theory presupposes that that civilization understood what was going to occur.
It presupposes that they had very little time and very little warning.
That there were a few survivors and that they did do their best with the high knowledge they had preserved to create a sanctuary for that knowledge and to pass it down to the future.
And they used many different techniques to do this.
But one of the ways they did it was in creating these gigantic monuments and in concealing within them something of extraordinary importance.
And clues as to what that might be are contained in the vast literature of the ancient Egyptians, because the ancient Egyptians were the inheritors of this civilization.
They spoke of these survivors as the gods.
They spoke of the time when the gods came to Egypt, far off in a remote epoch called the First Time.
The god of Cyrus, the god of resurrection and rebirth, the god Thoth, the god of high magic and wisdom, the goddess Isis, Horus, the gods who came to Egypt bringing a knowledge of the divine origin of civilization wisdom and an understanding of how to live, of what life really means.
And they encoded that in monuments, they hid it in chambers inside those monuments and they passed it down through myth and scripture and culture And it has reached us today, and it can still be understood.
What do we know about the contents of the secret areas of, for example, the Sphinx?
What do we actually know about what's in there?
One thing we know for sure is that licenses have been granted by the Egyptian government, by the Egyptian Department of Antiquities, involving a specific individual in that department.
Zahi Hawass, who is the Director of Antiquities for the Giza Plateau.
Licenses have been granted to two teams.
Both of these teams are led by multi-millionaires.
One of them involves Florida State University.
They are presently at the Great Sphinx of Egypt.
They have a million dollars worth of ground-penetrating radar and seismic equipment.
And they are looking for chambers under the Sphinx.
We already know, and have known since 1993, that a large chamber exists at a depth of 25 feet beneath the front paws of the Sphinx.
All right, hold it right there.
We'll be right back to you.
Graham Hancock is my guest.
don't move all right once again on his american tour here from chicago
is graham Graham, if they were to open up this secret chamber, or series of chambers, and they found this great library of information from the past, it would certainly smash all kinds of scientific paradigms, no question about it, but would also, would it not, or would it, smash a lot of religious paradigms?
Yes, there is a deep religious mystery involved in all of this.
And it concerns the meaning of human life.
And this is the matter that we address perhaps most centrally of all in the message of the Sphinx.
The ancient Egyptians believed that their civilization had been bequeathed to them.
That it was a legacy of beings that they called the gods.
And the ancient Egyptians believed passionately in life after death.
Indeed, for 3,000 years, they devoted their best minds to the consideration of no other issue than the issue of whether or not human consciousness survives death.
And they believed that there was a way of living, a certain way of living in balance with the universe,
which they called the law of Maat, the law of universal justice and cosmic harmony,
which it was necessary for us to follow if we were to attain life after death.
They believed that the soul was the immortal essence, and that the soul had been plunged into the material envelope,
into the material form of the body, in order to undergo certain experiences that could only be had in the form of a
human body.
And indeed they believed that the human body was a precious gift for the soul, but that we must not waste this gift.
It's the view, certainly of most Orthodox Christianity today, that salvation is to be achieved only through faith.
That blind faith alone is enough.
We only have to believe, and then we will move on after death to heaven.
This was not how the ancient Egyptians saw it.
They believed passionately.
That life is an opportunity, a precious opportunity for the soul to learn and grow, and that our fundamental mission here is to acquire knowledge.
Therefore, you might sum up their system by saying, not salvation through faith, but salvation through knowledge.
Alright, but to be fair to Christians, Graham, we are not without guidance.
We have the Ten Commandments, we have the Bible, we have things that tell us how we should live, To attain some sort of eternal position for the soul?
You know, I see a direct continuity between the ancient Egyptian wisdom tradition and the early, the pure, the original Christianity.
But something bad happened to Christianity at the time of Constantine the Great, when the Roman Empire in its jackboots hijacked that religion.
And turned it into a religion that in later times would burn people at the stake for using their mind.
Burn people like Giordano Bruno at the stake in the year 1600.
Why?
Because he said there is life on other planets.
Because he said the universe is filled with life, and it doesn't make sense that our Earth is the only place in the whole universe with life on it.
For saying that, and for saying that the Earth revolved around the Sun, Which was a simple observation that had been made by Copernicus and that Giordano Bruno supported.
This courageous man was burned at the stake by Christians.
Christianity, through its hijacking by the Roman Empire and through the bureaucratic changes that were instituted in it at that time, became a religion of suppression of knowledge.
In which knowledge was considered not to be a brilliant gift, But a danger, and anyone who sought after knowledge was seen as a threat to Christianity.
Indeed, the holding of books was a crime punishable by being burned, I think.
Indeed it was, and it was Christians, when they came to the New World, so-called Christians, who heaped up the manuscripts of the Maya, of that wonderfully civilized people of Mexico, of Central America, the Maya, heaped them up into piles 30 feet high, and burned them in bonfires, thus wiping clean The memory banks of mankind in Central America, and who did the same thing in South America, destroying human knowledge, simply because they felt that it conflicted with the teachings of the Christian faith, or should I say the Christian bureaucracy, because as I said a moment ago, if we go back to true and original Christianity, the beginning of this religion, the Gnostic Christianity, the Hermetic Christianity, we find a religion that's totally different.
And that emphasizes the need to acquire knowledge, to use this wonderful intellect that God gave us, to use our minds, not to vegetate and blindly accept dogma from people who call themselves priests, but to use our minds and our initiative and our instinct and our intuition.
And this was the central concept of the ancient Egyptian religion.
The ancient Egyptians spoke of the equipped spirit, that the purpose of life was to perfect the soul, to perfect consciousness, to become an equipped spirit.
And that the equipped spirit would then have the ability to navigate eternity, like a bird.
All right.
Wonderful.
So suppose these millionaires, with all their equipment, and then Graham Hancock and others, go over there and begin to acquire this knowledge.
Wouldn't the religious capitals and power centers of the world If not burning you at the stake, Graham, do so in sort of a modern way.
In other words, that knowledge would never, ever, ever see the light of day.
I'll answer that question in a moment.
I want to say something a little further first, which it's important that listeners understand.
About this ancient Egyptian religious system, and about why it offers something of extraordinary importance to the modern world, and about why indeed it would be suppressed by the powers that be.
The ancient Egyptians spoke of a special region of the sky, and they called that region of the sky the Duat.
It's spelled D-U-A-T when you transcribe it into our alphabet.
And this region of the sky consisted of two principal constellations, the constellation of Leo,
which I spoke of earlier, and the constellation of Orion, which I spoke of earlier,
on either side of the Milky Way, that the ancient Egyptians called the Winding Water Way.
And what we're showing in the Message of the Sphinx is that it is this region of the sky,
this incredibly important region of the sky, through which the ancient Egyptians believed
that the souls of the dead must journey after death, and must undergo certain trials and ordeals
for which their life was supposed to have prepared them.
It is this region of the sky that is built on the ground at Giza, with the Sphinx replicating the constellation of Leo.
And with the three great pyramids representing the three stars of Orion's belt.
And the ancient text, for example, the book of what is in the Duat, which is inscribed on the walls of tombs in the Valley of the Kings in Upper Egypt, tells the initiate to do this.
It says to the initiate, build on the ground a perfect copy of the hidden circle of the Duat and know it.
And through that knowledge, you may hope for eternity.
And we think that's what they did.
The hidden circle of the Duat is a reference to these skies, this area of the sky hidden in time, hidden in the sky of 10,500 B.C., and it is that sky that is built on the ground in the form of the Great Sphinx and the Three Great Pyramids with the Milky Way represented by the River Nile.
Let me see if I'm grasping this, Graham.
They felt that that was the pathway the soul would take.
Yes.
In what manner would these Precisely built structures aid the soul.
In other words, is it sort of a... They were a place of initiation.
They were a place of preparation.
They were a place in which the individual, the initiate, was immersed in darkness, in an underground labyrinth of corridors and passageways to find his way or her way finally to a place where an experience, where an encounter With a physical object, with physical records, with the books of the wisdom God thought, as all the ancient texts tell us, an encounter would take place and there knowledge would be revealed to the initiate that would be the knowledge necessary to pass safely through the Duat after death.
In other words, the ancient Egyptians believed that on death, unless one were properly prepared, the soul confronted a moment of terror and confusion and disorientation.
And what they sought to do through the course of their lives was to prepare themselves for that moment so that they would be alert and awake and aware and ready to confront the challenges and the judgment that took place in the Duat because these were a people who believed that there was a reckoning and that everything we do in life is counted up And that at the end of life, as we journey through the Duat, we confront that reckoning in a scene that appears painted on tomb walls that is called the Judgment Scene.
But when you translate the ancient Egyptian text exactly, they called this scene the Weighing of Words.
And what you see is the soul in the Judgment Hall of Osiris, in one of these divisions of this strange parallel universe called the Duat.
And there the soul confronts the Great Scale, And on the scales in one pan is weighed the heart of the soul, which symbolizes its immortal essence, and on the other is weighed the feather of truth, and the feather of truth must balance the heart, and if the heart is heavy with sin, or if the individual has wasted his or her life and never used it to accumulate experience and overcome challenges and difficulties, but just idled life away, then the individual would face what they called the second death, and this was the ultimate end
Never ever to live again, never to come back, never to have the opportunity to perfect oneself, but simply to be annihilated and never live again.
On the other hand, if life had been lived well, and if the spirit were equipped, then it would pass on into eternity, or at any rate be reborn and have an opportunity to live and learn those lessons again.
And the system of monuments on the Giza Plateau, we have no doubt, We set out the evidence in depth in the Message of the Sphinx, but the system of monuments on the Giza Plateau was built to reflect the skies of 10,500 BC, to reflect the Duat region of the sky, to be a place of preparation and initiation, and to encapsulate and encode the knowledge of divine origin and the meaning of life that the gods brought to Egypt, as all the ancient Egyptian texts tell us.
How far are the Egyptians going to let us go?
The electronics is going to go over there and look as hard as it can look.
What about us going in?
Well, the biggest problem is human nature itself, and the biggest problem is the motives of the individuals who are presently working at this site.
This story goes back to 1991, in its most recent incarnation, when John Anthony West A very courageous man.
For 20 years, John West has been trying to draw the attention of Egyptologists to the anomalous weathering patterns on the Sphinx.
To the fact that the Sphinx was clearly exposed to thousands of years of heavy rainfall after it was carved.
Finally, in 1991, he got Professor Robert Shock of Boston University, a leading geologist, to join him.
And subsequently their findings have been supported by hundreds of geologists around the world that the Sphinx is vastly older than 2,500 BC because it was carved when the Sahara Desert was still green at the end of the last ice age around 12,000 years ago.
But that team also conducted seismic surveys around the Sphinx and their seismic equipment identified a large perfectly rectangular chamber buried in the bedrock at a depth of about 25 feet beneath the front paws of the Sphinx.
As soon as they'd revealed this information to the public, they were kicked off the site by the Egyptian authorities and by a particular individual whose name I mentioned before, Zahi Hawass, who is the head of the Antiquities Organization with responsibility for the pyramids and the Sphinx.
And they have never been allowed to return to continue their work.
In the same year, In 1993, a German robotics engineer, Rudolf Gantenbrink, as I mentioned earlier, used a robot to explore the so-called Southern Shaft of the Queen's Chamber in the Great Pyramid.
Right.
And after a journey of 200 feet, discovered a door at the end of that shaft.
And the same thing precisely happened to him.
He released the information to the public and he was kicked off the site.
And has never been allowed to return to continue his work.
In 1995, realizing that he would never be allowed to come back, he offered to donate his robot to the Egyptian authorities and to train an Egyptian technician to do the job.
And they wrote back to him and they said, we're sorry, Mr. Gantenbrink, thank you for your kind offer, but we're much too busy at the moment.
Please go away.
And there the situation rested for some time.
Just this year, as we expose in the new book, and as we've been trying to draw public attention to, a scandal has begun to unfold.
Two multi-millionaires, one of them American, one of them Canadian, working through, in the case of the Sphinx, the Florida State University, because you need to have a university on your side in order to get a license from the Egyptian authorities, have been granted concessions, one team to open the chamber under the Sphinx and to search for more, And the other team to open the chamber inside the pyramid.
And this work is happening now.
And greed and ego and a private agenda and absolute secrecy surround this investigation.
Robert Boval and myself were invited by the team working at the Sphinx to participate in their project.
And this is a project that has been stolen from the original discoverer, John Anthony West.
I mean, literally taken out of his hands by wealthy individuals and taken over by them.
And these individuals asked myself and Robert to be part of their team because of our astronomical work, which pinpoints another chamber under the Sphinx.
But they imposed two conditions on us.
One was that we should write a letter condemning John Anthony West.
This is like the Spanish Inquisition.
And the other was that we should undertake to maintain absolute secrecy and not to reveal to the public anything that was found until the multimillionaire leading the team Decided that he was prepared to reveal that information to the public.
We rejected these absurd and outrageous conditions, and we're campaigning for an independent inquiry to be undertaken as to what on earth is going on.
Alright, the obvious question is, have they made a deal, a very specific deal, with the Egyptian government regarding the flow of information?
Well, it's certainly the case that a deal has been made with somebody The central figure who appears in both these projects is Zahi Hawass, the Egyptian Antiquities Authority's official with responsibility for the pyramids and the Sphinx.
He has been involved in both of them.
The team working at the Sphinx have been making a video film of what they've been doing.
In fact, they've had a professional film crew from Los Angeles with them, and the initial filming was done in December last year.
And the initial filming alone cost $100,000.
And we have been leaked a seven-minute videocassette that was made by this team.
And the videocassette is most bizarre.
It appears to be a promotional... In fact, when it was sent to us, they said it was a promotional videocassette.
It appears to be a promotional videocassette designed to hook a major U.S.
television network into some kind of ghastly stage live televised opening of a chamber under the Sphinx at very large expense.
And appearing in this videocassette, very oddly, because of something that the narrator of the videocassette says, I'll tell you what he says.
He speaks of an American psychic called Edgar Cayce, who prophesied that the Hall of Records of the Lost Civilization of Atlantis would be discovered under the Sphinx in 1996.
Appearing on this video, opening the video, in fact, is none other than our friend Zahi Hawass, this Egyptian official whose name I've been mentioning again and again, who's the man who controls the pyramids and the Sphinx, and who previously has spoken out very insultingly against Edgar Cayce, and has condemned any notion that the Sphinx might have been built by survivors of Atlantis, and yet, mysteriously, this individual appears on this film, entering a tunnel At the rear of the Sphinx, which cuts down towards the chamber that we've identified with our astronomical work, and who invites the viewer to follow him down into this tunnel, and he says, tonight, live on your television screens, we will open for the first time this tunnel that has never been opened before.
What is going on here is truly extraordinary.
This is not decent science, this is not working which the public can expect to be told the truth
some kind of hidden agenda is operating behind the scene
millions of dollars are involved in it and we're not getting the straight scoop
brother uh...
so you think there is a very public uh... avenue they're going to follow you follow all
together to public and not scientific enough and a very
private and separate agenda the public the public avenue will come when it
suits them to go public with the information and in the meantime they
have absolute control and absolute secrecy over everything that they are
doing and what concerns us about this is whether when they do finally choose to reveal
information to the public anything will be believed at all the way that this research
should be done from the beginning
is under full public scrutiny With no secrecy.
It should be done completely out in the open because these monuments are a legacy of mankind.
And to have this secrecy going on, to have people being actually sworn to secrecy and not allowed to speak to anybody about what's happening there, the team who are working at the Sphinx have now been instructed not to speak to me or to Robert Boval or John Anthony West or any of the others of us who are investigating this matter.
To have this kind of secrecy going on and yet at the same time to have some kind of Some kind of carnival event being arranged for television in the next few months.
I think I get the picture, Graham.
Hold on, we'll be right back to you.
My guest is Graham Hancock.
He'll be right back.
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It started one night about two months ago.
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If that was me, I would be wanting to talk to an exorcist right now.
We have been carefully laying out the science and the theory behind The incredible structures known as the pyramids, and of course the Sphinx, and we're going to talk a little bit about the Ark of the Covenant as well.
But I've got one sort of overall question for you, Graham, and we do have to get to the phones eventually here, and that question is, were they to open this up, and there was no interference, no secret deals, and we got the knowledge as it came out, what do you imagine Graham, what do you imagine is in that material?
Hundreds of references that have come down to us in known Egyptian texts, in the ancient Egyptian book of the dead, in the so-called pyramid texts that were carved on the walls of later pyramids, not the pyramids of Giza, but pyramids from about 2300 BC at Saqqara, south of Giza.
The book of what is in the duat, the coffin texts, and others of these amazing ancient Egyptian funerary and rebirth texts.
Tell us what will be found there.
They tell us that it's an extraordinary secret, that it concerns the wisdom of the gods Thoth and Osiris.
And Thoth was the god of high magic and wisdom.
They called him the counter of the stars.
He was known in later times by the Greeks as Hermes.
And the tradition passes down from the earliest times in ancient Egypt Up to the present day, a tradition that was somehow picked out of the ether by that American psychic Edgar Cayce, who spoke of the Hall of Records of Atlantis concealed under the Sphinx.
And I've been speaking, by the way, of this American multi-millionaire who's financing this so-called project at the Sphinx at the moment involving Florida State University.
I have to tell you that this individual is a life member of the Association of Research
and Enlightenment, which is the Edgar Cayce organization.
And while I want to stress that I regard Edgar Cayce with the highest respect and also the
Association for Research and Enlightenment with the highest respect, but that doesn't
mean that like any other organization it doesn't have a few members who are loose cannons,
particularly if they've got $100 million in the bank.
Mr. Edgar Cayce, I'm going to tell you what the Egyptian texts tell us is in those chambers,
but I need to just give a bit more background first.
Alright.
This Edgar Cayce organization, the Association for Research and Enlightenment, is a psychic organization, and normally Egyptologists and psychics mix about as well as polecats and chickens.
Egyptologists deride psychics, and they insult them, and they claim that they're cranks and kooks and all of that kind of stuff.
We were interested to discover that the leading Egyptological expert on the Great Sphinx, a man who is the voice of Orthodoxy on the Great Sphinx, a man who has spoken out in many public fora, insisting that the Great Sphinx was built in 2500 BC, the Orthodox view, and that it was simply a great statue to aggrandize the ego of a pharaoh called Khafre, A man whose work has been regularly published in National Geographic magazine, who's a pillar of the establishment, a professor at the Oriental Institute in the University of Chicago, Professor Mark Lehner.
We were astonished to discover that his education at the American University in Cairo was paid for by the Edgar Cayce Organization.
And by friends of the Edgar Cayce Organization, including certain millionaires, and that for many years after he graduated from the American University in Cairo, he continued having exclusive access to the Sphinx to carry out research projects financed by the Edgar Cayce Organization and by the friends of the Edgar Cayce Organization.
Mark Lehner has admitted this to us, and we've published in the message of the Sphinx an appendix, a letter from him, in which he admits this connection.
To us.
And this is why we feel that the independent inquiry that is desperately needed into what is going on at the Sphinx and inside the Great Pyramid cannot be carried out by Egyptologists.
We think that the whole discipline of Egyptology is compromised by what has been happening at the Pyramids and at the Sphinx.
And that the independent inquiry needs to be conducted perhaps best of all by the world's media.
And in fact we find that this Compromising of Egyptology goes back a very long way.
In part of our book, in part two of The Message of the Sphinx, we look at Egyptology over the last hundred years and how it has systematically neglected and ignored crucial aspects of the Pyramid of the Sphinx and sometimes even misinformed the public about what is happening there.
For example, certain mysterious relics were found inside the shafts of the Great Pyramid and this was never publicly announced.
They were hidden away in a drawer in the British Museum.
Until we unearthed them, and my colleague Robert Boval was instrumental in that.
An iron plate was discovered at the end of the mouth of the southern shaft of the so-called King's Chamber, a shaft that targets the lowest of the three stars of Orion's belt.
This iron plate was discovered in 1837, deeply embedded in the masonry of the Great Pyramid, and clearly contemporary with the building of the Pyramid.
refused to accept that it could be contemporary because it doesn't fit their paradigm of history.
They believe that the Iron Age started in Egypt in 600 BC and therefore an iron plate in a monument that is at least four and a half thousand years old doesn't fit their theory.
So instead of making public knowledge about this mysterious discovery they hid it away in a drawer in the British Museum from which Robert and I unearthed it in 1993.
There has been a systematic A systematic dishonesty about these monuments going on for a very long time and we think that the entire discipline of Egyptology is compromised and thoroughly discredited by the way that it is handled research at this site and this unfortunately comes to a head with this most important matter of the hidden chamber under the Great Sphinx and the hidden chamber inside the Great Pyramid.
Just to close this story I'll quote you from a telephone, a recorded telephone interview That I did with the millionaire who's financing the other project.
He's a Canadian millionaire and he's financing the opening of the door at the end of the southern shaft of the Queen's Chamber.
Yes.
And he said to me, I'm working with a private guy who is a personal friend of Hawass and that Zahi Hawass again.
Right.
And we are absolutely going to drum this thing to death.
Whatever the event we are going to stage, it will be televised live.
And he says that they're looking to raise $10 million from the United States television networks for this so-called live opening of the door.
In other words, the Great Pyramid, the last surviving wonder of the ancient world, and perhaps its last and greatest secret, the contents of a hidden chamber, has been sold to the highest bidder.
And this monument, the research in this monument has been delayed for three years for reasons of human greed and ego.
Okay, having said that, Graham, at the same time you've called for media coverage.
Yes, we're calling for media coverage, but the research must be done openly and honestly.
It can't be done, there must be no commercialization, there must be no hidden agenda, there must be no secrecy.
Do you think a network is going to put ten million dollars into the opening of a door that they have no idea what is
behind it?
Wouldn't that be the ultimate anti-climax, the anti-climax of the century?
If that door were opened and there was nothing behind it?
They want to look behind there first.
The secrecy that surrounds the research that is going on at the Great Pyramid
and the Great Sphinx at the moment is so intense that nobody knows what's going on.
These teams have exclusive access to these two matters.
They are doing what they like with these monuments.
The entry fee is large sums of money.
and the public are not being told what is happening there.
This is what we're outraged about, and this is why we're campaigning
for this work to be stopped dead in its tracks.
The Egyptian government needs to be embarrassed into stopping this work.
There needs to be a pause, and then new research needs to be started.
A project has been proposed through Boston University and Princeton,
and this project would be done in a scientific manner with full public scrutiny.
And so far this project has been entirely ignored by the Egyptian authorities,
authorities and we wonder why.
All right, Graham, if there is this great staged commercial opening, do you think it will be the first opening, or will there be a bit of a private pre-opening and extraction?
I think it's certain that there will be a private pre-opening.
Yes, yes.
And I think it's possible that the mine will be salted.
This is perfectly possible under the present circumstances and nobody will ever know the truth if these projects are allowed to continue in the present manner.
This is what is so disturbing about this.
That's a very serious charge.
The mine would be salted.
It is possible that the mine will be salted.
Zahi Hawass, the individual who... It is possible.
I'm saying it's possible that it will be salted because of the secrecy.
Yes, and what would you imagine they would salt it with?
Well, let me tell you that Zahi Hawass, the individual who has been involved in granting these licenses, recently made an announcement in the Egyptian press concerning the work that is being done around the Sphinx and the secret tunnels under the Pyramid Plateau.
And he said that he expected them to find a large statue of the Pharaoh Khafre there.
The Pharaoh who is favored by Egyptologists.
So you think it's being chiseled out as we speak?
I'll leave it to our listeners to make up their own minds on this matter, but unfortunately the situation has just become so messed up by all these worst aspects of human nature, by greed and ego and secrecy and power.
That we aren't going to get the truth unless the work is stopped and the project is started again in a clean and honest and open manner.
Alright, there are many people who think that, for example, Rome, the Pope, has knowledge, generally, of what will be found, what is in there, what secrets are in there, some sort of general knowledge, and this has been passed from Pope to Pope to Pope.
Is that possible?
Well, let me tell you what the ancient Egyptians said.
They referred, as I mentioned earlier, hundreds of times to a great secret concealed there.
And there was a kind of initiate's quest that appears to have been undertaken by the pharaohs themselves, by the Horus kings of ancient Egypt, for this great secret.
They spoke of the books of Thoth, the books of the ancient Egyptian wisdom god.
And can I read you a couple of short passages from the ancient text?
Fire away.
In one of these, Thoth is known by his Greek name, Hermes.
Such was all-knowing Hermes, who saw all things, and seeing, understood, and understanding had the power both to disclose and to give explanation.
For what he knew he graved on stone, yet though he graved them onto stone, he hid them mostly.
The sacred symbols of the cosmic elements he hid away, hard by the secrets of Osiris, keeping sure silence that every younger age of cosmic time might seek for them.
And in another passage, Thoth, the God of Wisdom, speaks of his holy books that he has concealed at Giza, and he says, O holy books, who have been made by my immortal hands, by incorruption's magic spells, free from decay, throughout eternity remain, and incorrupt from time, become unseeable, unfindable, for everyone whose foot shall tread the plains of this land, until old heaven doth bring forth neat instruments for you.
What instrument, we wonder, might lead to the recovery of unseeable and unfindable secrets concealed at Giza?
Could it be ground-penetrating radar, seismic equipment, a robot with a video camera mounted on the front of it?
The last passage that I'll read you is just three lines long, and it speaks of the ancient name by which Giza was known, which was Rostau.
And Rostau means, and it's very mysterious, it means gateway to the stars.
This is the sealed thing which is in darkness with fire about it, which contains the emanation of Osiris, and it is put in Rostau.
It has been hidden since it fell from him, and it is what came down from him onto the desert of sand.
It means that what belonged to him was put in Rostau.
Hundreds of references in the ancient Egyptian texts speak of a great secret Concerning the divine origins of their civilization, written records that refer to that time and that refer to the mystery of the meaning of life and of life after death associated with the god Osiris.
I think that what's hidden there is a matter of extraordinary importance for mankind today and that's why I feel so passionately and so strongly about what is happening at that time.
I understand.
A contemporary A caveat for you.
Did you see a movie called Stargate?
Yes, indeed.
I saw Stargate.
Ah, good.
And I saw the first 12 minutes of Stargate, which are about the only minutes of the film that are really any good.
And in those 12 minutes, the researchers of that film had clearly got into the latest work, because they spoke of the connection with the Orion Correlation, and they spoke of the geological weathering of the Sphinx.
So that film, in a way, was up to date, and we find it interesting that they called the film Stargate, because not many people know that Rustau, the ancient name for Giza, does literally mean gateway to the stars.
That was going to be my question, Graham.
Might, along with whatever else may be there, might there in effect be a gateway?
We think that this is precisely what the monuments are.
They are a gateway to the stars.
They are a gateway to this region of the heavens that the ancient Egyptians called the Duat.
They're an interface between this material life and the life beyond death that the ancient Egyptians believed was experienced in that region of the sky through which the soul had to dwell, to travel.
A physical interface.
Extraordinary monuments with a transformatory capacity on the human mind that can lift the mind out of the body, lift spirit out of matter, help us to realize what we really are.
Yes, they are a gateway to the stars.
Should we have such a thing, Graham?
Well, we do have such a thing, and it was created with extraordinary intelligence and skill, and it was created for a purpose.
And those chambers, so cleverly and cunningly concealed beneath the sphinx and inside the Great Pyramid, were meant to be found, so that every younger age of cosmic time might seek for them, as the ancient texts say.
They were meant to be found.
Right, let me rephrase the question.
Do you believe we're ready to find them?
I think if there were ever a time when mankind needed this wisdom that is hidden there, this legacy, that the ancient Egyptians themselves inherited, this
ancient legacy of wisdom and knowledge, that time is now, because we live in a time of darkness,
and really a power of evil is afoot in the world, which is trying to persuade all of us that
life has no meaning, and that's why there's so much viciousness and cruelty and hateful behavior in the
world today. We need this knowledge, we need this wisdom now, and it is there, and
people foresaw this long ago.
All right, Graham, hold on.
It sounds to me a lot like what I call the quickening, economically, politically, socially.
Every single avenue of human endeavor that you can measure these days is worsening, quickening, becoming harder to deal with, harder to understand.
Life these days means increasingly less, as events Events begin to move faster and faster and faster.
Graham Hancock back in a moment.
I'm Art Bell, and this is CBC.
Alright, back now to Graham Hancock.
Graham, are you there?
Yes, I'm still here.
Fading fast.
It's getting close to four in the morning here, and I've got to get up in about two hours, but I'm still here.
Oh, my.
All right, Graham.
So, all this incredible information may be below the Sphinx, may be contained yet in the pyramids.
I've got to ask you about the Ark of the Covenant.
Yeah.
You believe that it is real?
Locatable.
My first book in this series of books, and they are a series of books, during which I have personally developed as a researcher and during which I've undergone transformatory experiences that have changed my whole way of looking on life.
My first book that plunged me into this huge area of mystery was The Sign and the Seal.
Before that I was a correspondent for The Economist.
I was a hard-edged Journalist, I was interested in politics, wars, famine, economics, that kind of stuff.
And I was an investigative researcher, and just by the sheerest luck, by luck in my life, I came across the Ethiopian claim to possess the Ark of the Covenant.
And this claim led me into the realm of mystery that brought me to the pyramids, and finally to this story that we tell in the Message of the Sphinx, and that I proceeded with.
Fingerprints of the gods.
But the Ark of the Covenant was the beginning of it all for me.
Right.
In order to follow up the Ethiopian claim to possess the Ark of the Covenant, I had to try to understand what this mysterious object really is.
I had to go into all the ancient accounts that speak of it.
The accounts in the Bible and many, many accounts outside the Bible.
There are more than 200 references to the Ark of the Covenant in the Bible.
Before the time of Solomon, and after the time of Solomon, it is almost never spoken of again, and all the references to the Ark describe a most extraordinary and mysterious object.
Would you, if you could, open it?
No.
I would not.
I would not.
I have studied this matter very closely.
I began to wonder what the Ark is what it really is when when when I came at last at the end of my long journey which brought me through Egypt across the deserts of the Sudan during the Ethiopian Civil War in 1991 and finally up into the highlands of Ethiopia to the city of Axum and at last to the monastery at the heart of which stands the sanctuary chapel in which the Ethiopians claim that the Ark of the Covenant is kept I was determined to get inside that chapel and see the Ark
And then I encountered the guardian of the Ark, a single pure and holy monk whose responsibility it is to go before this object every day, to burn incense before it and to offer prayer before it.
And he spoke to me about the Ark, and the things that he told me made me quite certain that I didn't want to get inside.
And even if I had wanted to go inside, I would never have been allowed.
The city of Axum stands at the heart of the Tigrayan rebellion.
The biggest standing army in Africa, the tyrannical dictatorial army of the former dictator of Ethiopia, Mengistu Haile Miriam, was overthrown by the people of Tigray.
And at the heart of the province of Tigray is the sacred city of Axum, and it's a city which is guarded by fierce and independent people, and they would never allow anybody to get into that chapel, on pain of death.
I understand, but I want to know... But if I could get in there, would I open it?
No.
And why not?
I would not open the ark.
Why not?
For two reasons.
Firstly, because of the aura of sanctity and mystery that attaches to it, and in some matters I do not think we should dabble.
And secondly, because this object, in all the descriptions, it comes across as immensely deadly, physically dangerous.
I have now spoken, I've had the opportunity to speak with a series of guardians of the Ark in Axum.
They have a very short lifespan.
Once they are appointed to this position, they rapidly become sick.
They develop cataracts over their eyes.
One of them, Tesfamirion, the one I interviewed at the end of The Sign and the Seal, Gebremichael, who I spoke to in 1991, died a few months later.
His position was taken by another monk called Tesfamiriam, and I met Tesfamiriam on three occasions over a six-month period, and we visibly saw him shrink in size, and we saw the cataracts milk over his eyes and cover his eyes.
And we asked him why, what was doing this to him?
And he said, it's the Ark.
It's the Ark of the Covenant that is doing this to me.
We asked him how he felt when he'd first gone into its presence.
He said, I trembled with fear, and I trembled still, and I said, why?
Why do you tremble?
And he just looked at me, straight and level in the eyes, and he said to me, the Ark is a thing of fire.
And all the ancient traditions speak of it as precisely that, an instrument of enormous power and deadly danger.
I think it's another one of these legacies of a great lost civilization.
A legacy of a science and a knowledge that we do not understand today.
I found that there are descriptions of identical objects in ancient Egyptian tradition.
One, for example, is called the Box of Ra, and Ra was the ancient Egyptian sun god.
This was a golden box, just like the Ark, and it was said to contain a series of objects, including a rod or a staff, which is also said to be inside the Ark.
It was apparently hidden away in a fortress on the eastern frontier of Egypt
and thousands of years after the time of Ra an Egyptian pharaoh sought to open it and as they lifted
open the lid of this box a bolt of fiery energy shot forth from it and
everybody who stood around it was killed. Precisely the same thing happened again
and again with the Ark of the Covenant in the Bible.
How are you sure, Graham, that going through that metal door
at the Sphinx wouldn't leave one roughly the same way?
Thank you.
Because what is concealed there was meant to be found.
Because these were repositories of records and traditions, not instruments of war and death.
The Ark of the Covenant, in every description that has survived of it,
sounds like an instrument that was designed to kill people.
And that's what the Israelites used it for.
That's what Moses and the Israelites used it for when they travelled to the Promised Land,
when they knocked down the walls of Jericho with it.
That's what it did to the Philistines when they briefly captured it.
The Bible says, the hand of God lay heavy upon the Philistines.
This was an instrument designed to do damage and harm.
Indeed.
Well, yes, but... But the chambers under the Sphinx and the chamber inside the Great Pyramid were designed to contain records and tradition and information and secrets and wisdom.
And these were intended to be found.
You do not build a 200 foot long shaft, 8 inches wide and 8 inches high, rising at an angle of 39 degrees through a 6 million ton monument, leading to a door with two handles, Unless it is your intention that at some time, at the right time, when the time is right, that that door should be opened.
All right.
Quickly, the work of Mr. Hoagland regarding the monuments of Mars and how it relates to what we have here on Earth that we've been talking about tonight.
Well, the first point to make is that what we have here with the monuments of Mars is a testable hypothesis, and testable hypotheses are very desirable in science.
Science rests on the notion of ideas that can be tested out, and this is an idea par excellence that can be tested out.
We do not need to speculate any longer about what those curious forms and patterns on the surface of Mars are, which appear to be a group of pyramids and the face of an enormous sphinx about a mile long, gazing straight up at outer space.
We're shown in photographs taken in 1976 by the Voyager mission.
Yes.
And there is a possibility that the photographs are simply revealing tricks of light and accidents of erosion.
And this is the NASA story.
This is what NASA says.
It's possible.
Let's face it.
It's possible that that's what these things are.
But it's also possible that they're artificial.
And Richard Hoagland has put together an enormous amount of evidence which compellingly suggests that they are artificial.
Now, I don't want to speculate about it.
I want the work to be done.
I want the research to be done.
I want, and I think the American public would want, NASA to make sure that the two vehicles being launched and sent to Mars this year, one an orbiter and one a lander, take a close look at that area on the surface of Mars where these structures appear.
These spacecraft are being financed by American public money.
They belong To the American public.
They do not belong to a few bureaucrats with fixed and rigid ideas.
And I think the American public, in their masses, in their millions and tens of millions, would wholeheartedly endorse the use of these vehicles to closely re-photograph those structures on Mars.
And the use of the lander to land at that point, which is called Cydonia.
And to find out precisely what these things are.
If they turn out to be just tricks of light and erosion, Then the experiment will still have been worthwhile, and we can draw a line under the matter and forget about it.
But my goodness, if they turn out to be artificial structures, then everything changes.
Our whole view of life in the solar system changes.
Another great mystery opens up.
And that's what we're supposed to be doing.
That's what human curiosity and intelligence are for.
We're supposed to be finding out what we are, why we're here, our place in the universe, and we should be looking With urgency and intelligence and curiosity we should be looking with interest at these things and finding out what they are.
And it stuns me that the bureaucrats at NASA have never allowed this further work to be done.
I think it's extraordinary.
I think it's bizarre.
I'm not surprised that all manner of conspiracy theories have grown up around this.
It's an outrageous situation.
These monuments should definitely be studied, if they are monuments.
Let's find out what they are.
Richard has renamed his mission, the Enterprise mission, to boldly go where someone has gone before.
Yes.
And that would make sense.
Richard and I find common ground not just on the matter of suppression of knowledge at the Giza site and in the issue of the Monuments of Mars, but also in another intriguing possibility.
That we may not be looking at the work of extraterrestrials here.
We may be looking at a fingerprint of a distant, lost human civilization.
That an earlier human civilization may have made the climb To the level that we have now reached, where it was capable of exploring neighboring planets in the solar system, and that that earlier lost human civilization, spoken of in all the myths and legends of mankind, may have left those monuments on Mars, and that when we get there, what we'll find is ourselves.
This is the possibility that haunts me.
Again, I don't know if that's the case, but I think we should do the work.
I think we should find out.
If you were to have to hazard Well, I'm quite certain that the monument on the Giza Plateau are us.
sphinx and all the rest of it what is your
best guess in other words are the aliens are the aliens us i'm quite i'm quite certain that the monument on the giza
plateau are us this is the work of human beings
and this is the work designed to carry a great human knowledge and a great human
I do believe that these monuments are the legacy of a lost human civilization which knew things that we don't know and which understood the mystery of life far better than we do.
Designed by and built by humans?
Oh yes, designed by and built by humans.
I see no need to involve aliens in explaining these monuments on Giza.
I think it's a good principle in science.
That if a simple and elegant explanation exists for a mystery, it is preferable to a more complicated and clumsy explanation.
And yet, it doesn't really.
You articulated that in the beginning of the interview, that we really could not have built those things.
No, no, we could have built those things.
We just have to abandon our prejudices and assumptions about the path of mankind, that's all.
We just have to stop accepting the porridge that's handed out to us by our established academics who insist on believing that our civilization is the only civilization that has ever reached a high level of development.
We have to consider the possibility that we're a species with amnesia, that there is a forgotten civilization way back in our past that was every bit as advanced as we are, perhaps more so, that could do things That we can't do, and that left its fingerprints all around the world.
That's fingerprints of the gods.
That's the message of the Sphinx.
That's what my work is all about.
So we could have built those things, but only with the science that we do not today understand.
Yes.
We're looking at evidence of something we do not understand here, but that doesn't mean that it isn't human.
When do you suppose, Graham, we will know the truth about the Sphinx?
In other words, is it going to plow forth with this big commercial venture despite...
Uh, your protests?
I think that, uh, I see evidence all around me that public outrage about this matter is mounting.
And, uh, I think that the Egyptian authorities are going to have to stop these outrageous projects that are taking place at the Pyramids of Sphinx at the moment.
And I think they're going to have to consider the other applications for projects.
As I say, a joint one from Boston and Princeton has been put in, and that one would be conducted with full openness and public scrutiny.
What is it, what is the timeline if we don't get it stopped?
The timeline, if we don't get it stopped, the clock is ticking very fast right now.
These teams are working at those sites at the moment, and we don't know what they're doing.
We don't know what is happening there.
We don't know what may be being removed already from chambers under the Sphinx.
We don't know what may be being put back into those chambers.
All these are speculations, but anything is possible when research is being done under conditions of extreme secrecy.
That's why I think it's essential that these projects get stopped fast.
Before this mess gets any bigger and any deeper.
Well, who stops it?
The Egyptian government is the sovereign power in Egypt.
Yes.
They have the power to stop this if they want to do so, but they need to be persuaded.
They need to be persuaded to stop it.
Very powerful, wealthy individuals are behind these projects.
They seem to have connections to certain high officials in Egypt.
Particularly the official whose name I mentioned earlier, Zahi Hawass, who is responsible for the Pyramids and the Sphinx, and higher up figures in the Egyptian government have to take the necessary steps.
This will happen if a public inquiry is called for.
If the public of the world, if our mass media, All our television programs, so-called investigative TV, newspapers, endlessly regurgitate the standard Egyptological line.
Let them consider that they may be looking here at a vastly bigger story than even the opening of Tutankhamun's tomb in the 1920s.
That they should be, they have a responsibility to investigate this story.
If they investigate it, if they put the individuals under the spotlight, if they ask them harsh questions and demand answers, If they inquire into this, then the veil of secrecy will be lifted, and these projects will be stopped, and then we have a possibility for proper research to be done.
Alright, should this be a matter beyond Egyptian nationalism?
Yes, it should be a matter beyond Egyptian nationalism.
As many enlightened Egyptians have said, they are the stewards of these monuments.
But these monuments belong to the entire world.
They are a legacy of the whole of mankind.
They belong to all of us.
Egypt has the privilege and the honor To be the stewards of these monuments today.
And they should look after those monuments well.
And they should consider the meaning and the importance of those monuments.
And that's why they should stop these ghastly projects at that site at the moment.
All right, Graham.
I think we've done it.
And it's getting close to time for you to get a little bit of sleep before you do whatever you're going to do next.
Where are you going to be?
Where can people see you or hear you?
Well, I'm going to be in... I'm going to Dallas.
I'm going to St.
Louis.
St.
Louis, is that how I pronounce it?
That's close enough.
I'm going to St.
Louis first, and I'm going to be giving a talk tomorrow night, or rather this night, because we're now already in Wednesday, aren't we?
Yes.
Wednesday, the 19th of June, at a bookshop called the Library Limited in St.
Louis, between 7 o'clock and 8.30.
That's at 7700 Forsyth Street, St.
Louis.
Yes, okay.
That's on Wednesday, the 19th of June.
And then on Thursday the 20th of June, I'll be in Dallas, Texas, at Borders Bookshop, and I'll be giving a talk.
Again, these talks are given with slides, and I give a detailed exposition of the content of The Message of the Sphinx, and at all these talks, I make a detailed announcement More detailed than I can do here on the radio for legal reasons.
A detailed announcement concerning what is exactly happening at the Pyramids and the Sphinx today as we speak.
So the talk I'll be doing at Dallas will be between 7 o'clock and 9 o'clock at night on Thursday the 20th of June at Borders Bookshop and that's 10720 Preston Road, Dallas, Texas.
And so that's Thursday the 20th of June and then Wednesday the 19th. I'll be in St. Louis
At the library limited 7700 4th 5th Street, and then I'll also be doing a talk in Los Angeles
A few days later, and I'm just trying to To dig that one out
All right, well, we're almost out of time.
Yeah, I'll be doing a talk in Los Angeles as well, but my publishers would be able to give the details.
They're crowned books in New York.
All right, wonderful.
Graham, it has been a pleasure, an absolute pleasure to have you on.
I've been wanting to do it for a long time, and now it has been done.
Yeah, I'm really glad it happened, Art.
It's been an excellent evening's conversation.
I've very much enjoyed it.
Thank you so much for having me on the show.
Take care, my friend.
Get some sleep.
Thanks a lot.
Told you we'd do that.
Now we've done it.
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