Graham Hancock challenges NASA’s rushed dismissal of Mars’ "face," demanding higher-resolution imaging and questioning cosmic threats like Clube’s 400-km comet fragments, which he warns could strike Earth before 2030. At Giza, carbon-dated mortar hints at pyramids predating 2500 BC by centuries, while Sphinx-era structures may stretch back 12,500 years—undermining Egyptology’s timelines. Aerial surveys like NASA’s Angkor scans could reveal Nile-era ruins, but secretive excavations and Hawass’s mixed approach stall progress. His June 15 Mars the Mars Mystery book promises deeper revelations, framing humanity’s future as dependent on uncovering lost truths before cosmic reckoning. [Automatically generated summary]
Once again, here I am in a moment, Graham Hancock.
You should know who Graham Hancock is.
Many, many books to his credit.
Fingerprints of the Gods, The Message of the Sphinx, The Sign and the Seal.
He's working on a new one, all about Mars.
So we'll be asking about that and a whole lot of other things.
Well, I'll tell you, the rumors are flying around about Egypt.
Our State Department, of course, has warned Americans away, saying they've got indications there's going to be more terrorism in Cairo.
And I imagine Egypt is about empty right now.
Well, all right.
Graham Hancock was formerly East Africa correspondent for The Economist and covered the war between Somalia and Ethiopia.
And I'll tell you, for those of you who don't know, The Economist is the publication that everybody in Europe reads.
You see it there as you would see the New York Times ads if you're in the middle of New York City.
I mean, it's everywhere.
He also, by the way, worked for the London Sunday Times.
His books include Africa Ark, Peoples of the Horn, the very widely acclaimed Lords of Poverty, which earned the 1990 H.L. Mencken Award for an outstanding book of journalism, The Sign and the Seal, the international bestseller that documented his real-life quest for the Ark of the Covenant, a quest that took him from Jerusalem to southern Egypt and the highlands of northern Ethiopia.
In a review, as a matter of fact, of The Sign and the Seal, Hancock was credited by The Guardian with having, quote, invented a new genre, an intellectual Whodone It by a do-it-yourself sleuth, end quote.
He is a very prolific writer indeed.
Message of the Sphinx by Graham Hancock, Robert Baval, and a new work underway now all about Mars, all the way across the continent and all the way across the Atlantic.
Graham, I'm going to start right off with the heavy stuff.
Here in America, we are having a real row right now about the new global surveyor photographs of the face on Mars.
The first photograph came out, and frankly, it looked like the leave-ins of a cat box, you know, a litter box or something.
Certainly not what we originally had seen and called the face.
Then there was, in the middle of the night, after all the newspapers had printed this first photograph, there was yet a second photograph, higher res, that looks a lot more like the face that we all know.
But nobody printed that.
So there's this giant argument going on now.
Most of the mainstream news people in America are saying it was nothing but a trick of light and shadows the whole time.
Well, certainly, and I've been logging on to the internet sites with images of the face, of course, and also looking at the British press, who have reacted in exactly the same way, which is to look at the medium resolution image that came out first and to say, well, this absolutely proves that there's nothing of interest in terms of artificial structures on Mars.
I mean, there seems to me, certainly in the press in Britain, I can't speak for the American press because I haven't seen it, to have been an incredibly hasty and almost relieved reaction along the lines of, oh yes, all those Mars people were just cranks after all, and now NASA has proved it, so we can all rest quietly and forget about it.
And I think this is a huge and extraordinary pity that the issue should be taken that way.
We're engaged in a seminal event here.
This is the first time that we have ever really explored a neighboring world, at least the first time in our memory as a species.
And to allow ourselves to be deflected from a very intriguing aspect of that exploration and to allow ourselves to feel that there's nothing there, nothing there further to look for in terms of signs of intelligence is, I think, extremely sad on the basis of this image.
Quite frankly, the image is ambiguous.
It's extremely ambiguous, and I always felt that it would be.
I think those who support the position of artificiality at Sidonia have definitely been dealt a grievous blow by this photograph.
I think it's up to them now to sustain their position.
And it has to be remembered, and it's a very important point, that the face structure, whatever it is, whether it's a hill or whether it's actually some kind of face, is set in a context.
And that context is very large, surrounded by a lot of other structures.
And I think that NASA must, and I believe they hope they will, photograph those other structures on the coming two passes that are going to be made over that area.
And I think that really what's needed to get to grips with this issue is to look in detail at photographs taken from a variety of different angles, not only of the face, but also of the dozens of other structures that are found all around it.
And I think it would be really premature and silly, and in fact I'd go further stupid of us, to write off this aspect of the Mars mystery simply on the basis of one photograph.
We aren't in a much better position now than we were in 1976.
And I think that more images are needed before anybody comes to a conclusion.
But you know what?
At the end of the day, this question of images of things is never going to settle the matter.
The only thing that's really going to settle the matter, and most people who've been researching in this field have said this from the beginning, the only thing that's really going to settle this matter is a manned landing on Mars.
I can give you an example of why I think that.
And that concerns another disputed structure, this time on Earth.
And that disputed structure is the so-called underwater monument at Yonaguni in Japan.
Now, I dive, I scuba dive, and I've dived to that monument more than a dozen times.
But the first thing that I want to tell you is that I've dived at that monument with two geologists on two separate occasions.
And subsequently, I've put those two geologists together to discuss the monument in a room.
Now, one of the geologists was Professor Robert Schock from Boston University, who, as you know, is a very open-minded man and is extremely open to the idea of an earlier Sphinx.
In fact, he's provided the basic geological work that has raised the whole issue over the age of the Sphinx at Giza.
And I thought it would be a very good idea for him to have a look at this underwater monument in Japan.
And quite frankly, after six dives to the monument, Shock's impression, although he feels that it definitely merits further research, a great deal of further research, his instinctual impression is that somehow this extraordinary thing is natural.
Now, I have also dived there with Professor Masaki Kimura from Okinawa University, who's made more than 100 dives to the monument.
Kimura is also a geologist, and he is convinced that it's artificial.
So we have here an enormous structure.
It's about 500 feet long and 60 feet high, which has been seen and physically touched by two highly qualified geologists, and they both reach different opinions about it.
Now, if that happens, you know, with ground truth, actually when you're face to face with the object itself, if we can get that level of disagreement over such an object that we can actually see and touch, you can imagine how difficult it is to reach a rational and informed judgment on the face on Mars simply from a photograph.
You realize, of course, Art, that this is a war for the human soul.
This is not a war for some petty scientific definition.
This is a war for the question of what we are and what our place is in the universe.
It's a war of paradigm between a view that sees us as the center of creation with nothing else outside us and a view that sees the universe as filled with life.
There's a fundamental issue in society here which is underlined by this debate.
And it's inevitable since the stakes are so high, since the stakes are our own understanding of what we are, it's inevitable that that war, unfortunately, should be fairly bloody with neither side taking any prisoners.
And as they say and have said for a long time, the first casualty of war is the truth.
I have high hopes for the ones they're going to yet take of the other artifacts there, but I'll bet when the day is ended, we still have a great big fight on our hands.
Do you think in our lifetimes, Graham, it'll ever be settled?
You know what I think may be being hidden is more profound than that.
I think that Mars has something to tell us about the cataclysmic history of the Earth.
I think that if one really gets to grips with Mars and looks at this extraordinary planet which has a thing called the line of dichotomy running along the middle of it, it's like an equator only it's tilted at about 35 degrees to the present equator of Mars and it divides the planet roughly into two hemispheres.
And north of the line of dichotomy the planet is three kilometers lower than it is south of the line of dichotomy.
So one can almost imagine a ragged line of cliffs running all the way around the planet dropping sheer down three kilometers to a lower area and that lower area is extremely smooth and uncratered.
Whereas the southern part of Mars is unbelievably devastated with thousands of massive 30 kilometer plus wide craters.
This planet has been hit by the most horrific devastation from space.
It's been hit by a bombardment of asteroids or I believe more likely fragments of a giant comet.
And the question that really arises is, is Earth subject to the same fate that Mars has been subject?
And this is why the monuments on Mars, in inverted commas of course, the supposed, the alleged monuments on Mars, are so interesting to me.
Because taken in context with the cataclysmic history of the planet, with again disputed evidence of primitive microbial life on the planet, which under any normal evolutionary laws one would expect eventually to have developed into higher life forms.
But to me this raises a whole other issue over the story of life on Mars and the story of what happened to Mars and the story of what happened to Earth.
And I've become very aware during the research for the book on Mars that I'm publishing in June of a huge body of scientific study into the issue of asteroid and comet impact.
A huge body of scientific study that has really not made its way out in any thorough manner to the general public.
And believe me, this is scary, scary, scary material.
And I can understand why certain people in government and in science would not want that material, the real story of what happened to Mars, to get too much out into the public domain.
There's no doubt that Mars once had a dense and possibly Earth-like atmosphere, that Mars had oceans, that Mars had rivers that ran for millions of years, etching deep channels in the surface of Mars.
And there's no doubt that all of this formerly attractive and undoubtedly potentially life-bearing atmosphere of Mars, there's no doubt that it was all stripped away as a result of a horrific cataclysm.
You have to envisage this planet, which is about half the size of the Earth, being hit by a massive, simultaneous bombardment of huge quantities of rock from outer space, very, very, very large.
We're looking at some massive object which fragments close to Mars and which peppers the entire southern hemisphere of the planet south of this line of dichotomy with an enormous explosion of objects.
There's a couple of problems with the exploded planet theory.
I'm familiar with Van Planden's work, and I think it's very interesting work.
But one problem with an exploded planet theory is to explain how you explode a planet in the first place, which is something that Van Planden has never successfully done, in my opinion.
And the other theory, which has been put forward by a number of people, of a planet-sized body coming close to the existing Mars and then exploding, also raises the question of how a planet-sized body does that, how it moves into an orbit that would bring it close to Mars.
But there are objects in our solar system which are capable of doing this damage and which we're all familiar with, and those objects are comets.
And what's, I think, not widely understood by the general public is that comets can vary enormously in size.
And a group of astronomers, including Victor Klube of Oxford University in Britain, Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramsingh and others, have developed a theory concerning giant comets, objects 300 or 400 kilometers wide, which drift in from the outer solar system and which fragment as they come close to planets, rather as Schumacher-Levy 9 fragmented in 1994.
Well, the thing about comets is that we really know almost nothing about them.
Our entire database on comets is really based on 300 years of observations from this tiny corner of the solar system, which itself is a tiny little pocket of the galaxy.
My guest live from Great Britain is Graham Hancock, and he'll be right back.
Now, let us operate with the scenario that we are sort of skirting around, or maybe we're not skirting around it, and that is that man has been around before, that our origins may not be what we think they are.
There has been a new discovery in southern Egypt that is confounding the Egyptians.
All over the world, we are making discoveries that suggest all the timelines we thought were right are wrong.
But, Graham, can the world accept, will the world accept that, or do you think that it ought to be kept secret?
I'll tell you, the bottom line for me, Art, is I believe that this wonderful planet that we live on is in enormous danger.
I'm convinced of this now, and I really can't quite understand why it is that the work of the scientists who have been embedded in this field for a long time, the field of giant comets and asteroid research, I really can't understand why their work hasn't got out to the public to the extent that it should have done,
because what that work shows is that we are in clear and present danger, and yet it is a danger which it is possible for mankind to avert.
But if we're going to avert this danger, we need a complete change of heart, a complete change of attitude.
Ours is a species that has become immersed to an appalling degree in materialism and in a kind of wicked violence during the course of this century.
And accompanying that wicked violence has been a closure of mind to all that cannot be immediately weighed and measured and empirically tested.
And it's the reverse side of the coin that leads to the blind, horrific violence of which our species is so careful.
And because it has led us to be closed-minded and blind, it causes us to ignore the danger that confronts us, and it causes us to ignore the advice and the warnings of the ancients on this matter.
It's as though we've deliberately cut off our entire heritage as a species beyond the last two or three thousand years when things have been written down.
Everything before that is just considered to be irrelevant to us.
And yet what we have there is the accumulated advice of our ancestors who undoubtedly experienced cataclysmic events before, particularly at the end of the last ice age.
And because of the state of mind that we're plunged in today, we're ignoring that.
And if we continue to ignore it, I'm convinced that we're going to pay a terrible price and that in the language of ancient mythology, that the gods will once again punish us for our arrogance and our cruelty.
Well, I suppose this is pure speculation, but if the Hall of Records is ever uncovered, would you expect it to contain, Graham, a sort of an instruction manual from those who were once here about the mistake they made that shouldn't be made again?
I'm convinced that such a message has been passed down to us, not just in a single hall of records, but in an entire network of monuments all around the world, which are linked to mythology and linked to astronomy.
And using the tools of astronomy and an open-minded consideration of mythology and of the nature of the monuments, there is an enormous amount of information that has been very carefully encoded and deliberately passed down to us by our ancestors.
But we have to take a step.
In order to benefit from that information, we have to be prepared to listen to what they have to say.
I have not heard anything of that, and I have no reason to assume that that's the case.
As you know, I'm participating in a conference on board a cruise ship, a floating conference, the first ever confrontation between myself and Zahi Hawass.
Yes, I should tell you, Graham, that I interviewed Zahi about the coming cruise, and he suggested that somebody might get tossed in the water, and I think that he might have had you or Robert in mind.
Well, I don't think so, actually, because there's been a series of developments over the course of the last year concerning ourselves and Zahi.
And I last met with Zahi in December in Egypt, at which time I spent six hours Around Thinks with him, and at which time he showed himself willing to answer any question that I had to ask and to show me anything that I wanted to see.
This meeting of mine with Zahi had been preceded by a meeting that Robert Boval had with Zahi in July of 1997 and had been preceded by a meeting in November of 1997 that John Anthony West had with Zahi.
And I feel that a number of painful issues that have arisen and been the subject of a great deal of controversy over the last two to three years are on the verge of resolution and that all parties to this debate are no longer anxious to engage in personal attacks and personal insults,
but rather want to get down and discuss the issues, the real issues, the issues of the true origins of mankind, the past of our species.
Well, then, discuss those issues in depth, and that's why we're doing this conference.
I, too, last year went to Giza and got a personal tour by Zahi.
And of course, he said, you can ask anything you want.
You can go anywhere you want.
And I did.
But I also realized, Graham, that if there was something going on there that Azahi did not want to tell me about and I did not know to ask, believe me, I would not know that it was there.
The situation which we often forget is that Egypt has a government and that Zahi Hawas is the senior official in that government.
And like any country with a government, it has a right to run its affairs in the way that it chooses.
And we will be told exactly what the Egyptian government wants to tell us and nothing else.
This is a certain fact and we should not expect any more.
I feel that the best way forward is definitely to engage in dialogue and through that dialogue, through a gradual opening to consideration of wider issues, that we may in the future get better information on Giza than we've had in the past.
And I'm at present cautiously optimistic that that better information will be available during the course of this year and will be shared with the general public.
Because one thing that the debates and the controversy over the last two years have done, without any doubt, is that they've made the Egyptian government aware of international public opinion.
They've made the Egyptian government aware that a very large number of people in countries all around the world are deeply concerned by what happens at Giza.
And I'm pleased to say that that awareness on the part of the Egyptian government does now seem to be translating itself into a new spirit of openness.
Look, this possibility of work, archaeology, investigation being done at Giza out of the public eye is one that will never go away.
This is a place where the stakes for investigators are very high.
They're high for two reasons.
Firstly, because a serious archaeologist who regards himself as a member of that profession and who values the opinions of his peers is placing himself in mortal danger every time he looks for anything at Giza beyond the normal routine run-of-the-mill theory of Egyptologists.
So one can see reasons why people who were investigating such issues at Giza would wish to keep it from the public purely because they don't want to be embarrassed if they turn out to be wrong.
And of course, one can envisage other, much more sinister reasons why secrecy might take place.
Personally, I think that this decision to close the Great Pyramid for eight months is going to lead to an enormous amount of speculation.
Yeah, Egypt has been devastated by this whole situation.
And it was very sad to note when I was there in December, and I traveled very widely around the country at that time, that there were almost no foreigners in Egypt at all, almost none.
And this has come about because of, very naturally, because people don't want to get shot and murdered while they're visiting a temple.
But the situation, like so many issues, has been really badly overplayed.
I found on my travels in Egypt in December that the country is safer than it's ever been.
I mean, at long last, the Egyptian government has taken a step it should have taken long ago, which is to put armed and highly visible units and clearly competent and professional men at all of these sites.
If those armed men had been present at the Temple of Hachep during last year's massacre, there would have been no massacre.
This is a Guardian spotlight interview of Dr. Hawass.
The Guardian asked him, Dr. Hawass, I'm sure you're aware that Robert Baval and Graham Hancock are publicly saying negative things about you and others who oversee the treasures of ancient Egypt.
Dr. Hawass, yes, it is unfortunate the things they are saying.
For example, Hancock and Baval are asking people to sign petitions to stop secretive work at Giza.
But he says there is no secret work going on at Giza.
Of course, for Hancock and Baval to suggest some kind of conspiracy at Giza helps them sell books.
They profit from the pyramids, while in Egypt we struggle to conserve these treasures.
It's interesting to hear that voice from the past, because it is voice from the past, and things have moved on a lot in the last year.
The first point that I'd like to make is that the issue of petitions and of the public campaign regarding excavations at Giza was 100% successful.
The project at Giza to which we objected, the project involving Florida State University looking for tunnels and chambers under the Sphinx in an extremely secretive manner and undoubtedly with certainly on the part of some individuals involved in that project, a background hidden agenda, that project was stopped.
And I don't believe it would have been stopped if there hadn't been this massive public reaction to it.
And we felt very strongly that whatever is to happen at Giza in the future, that project should not continue because the nature of the project was fundamentally flawed.
The other thing that has happened following the meeting that Zahi Hawass had with John West in November is that he has indicated a powerful willingness on the part of the Egyptian authorities to reconsider the Boston proposal which John West and Robert Schock have put in to conduct a thorough geological scientific investigation of the Sphinx.
This was the other problem that Robert Baval and I had with Zahi Hawass was the way that that earlier project had been arbitrarily stopped and then replaced with a much more suspect one pursuing rather similar objectives.
That situation has been redressed.
The objectives of our campaign have, as far as we're concerned, been achieved.
And we see no reason to engage in further personal animosity.
What we want to do is to get down and discuss the issues and keep a serious public debate and public awareness going on about Giza well into the future.
When I was at Giza, Dr. Hawass took me to the base of one of the pyramids where he had several workers and he said, Art, I am going to show you how the Egyptians built the pyramids.
Upon which he said, look at this one-ton or five-ton stone, limestone, I can't remember what it was.
And a worker got up on top of this rock, giant rock, and started pounding on it and pounding on it all the way around until incredibly it cracked right in half in front of my eyes.
I've got it on video, and he said, Art, that is how the pyramids were built.
Yes, the only problem is that there's two and a half million blocks like that, and they're raised to a height of 450 feet above the ground with absolute spot-on modern scientific precision to north, south, east, and west.
That would be a trick that nobody today could pull off.
But of course, we agree, when I say we, I mean myself, John West, Robert Baval, and others, we disagree fundamentally with Zahi Hawass and the Egyptologists over this issue.
We think the pyramids are an enormous mystery, and we think that any rational and reasonable human being should see that immediately.
But we're glad that the level of debate on this has now stopped being a series of vituperative personal attacks and has moved on to the level of serious discussion involving serious academics and ourselves in looking in depth at this issue and trying to present our case jointly in front of the public.
perhaps as old as 6,500 years, perhaps older because you can't date stone.
Again, what this shows is a heritage of astronomical and architectural knowledge in Egypt, which has previously been dismissed by Egyptologists as impossible.
I think that Egyptians and indeed the whole world have to wake up to the exciting possibility that Egyptian civilization may be much older than we have previously thought it to be.
There's been a kind of, again, it's been part of the hysterical media climate over this issue, has been in Egypt itself a tendency to say that whenever somebody like me or John West or Robert Vaval stands up and says that there's evidence of an older civilization in Egypt, that we're somehow trying to steal history from the Egyptians.
And our view really is this is a terrible misunderstanding of what we mean, because what we are actually trying to say is that Egyptian history is much older and much more noble than anybody could ever have imagined, that this country bears a legacy for the whole of mankind, and that that legacy goes deeply back into prehistory and that it's a legacy of knowledge and wisdom which we desperately need today.
Well, as you well know, Edgar Casey predicted the location of the Hall of Records beneath the Sphinx, and I interviewed Edgar Casey, Edgar E. Casey, Edgar Casey's son, and I believe that this is the year, is it not, that that discovery was to be made?
The Casey readings indicate an opening of the Hall of Records in 1998, and unfortunately indicates that opening being conducted in secretive conditions and not being shared with the general public.
That's why we felt that a project which was connected, albeit loosely, to the Edgar Casey organization, the Association for Research and Enlightenment, was perhaps not the best organization to be conducting an archaeological excavation at the Sphinx in 1997.
And I wouldn't be surprised if people are looking under the Sphinx and inside the pyramid, because, of course, we have the question of the doorway inside the southern shaft of the Queen's Chamber in the Great Pyramid as well, which Rahi did indicate to me would be opened publicly this year, and specifically in September or October this year.
It's, you know, we just have to be sensible about this and realize that this is a site on which anything can happen at any time without the public knowing about it, because it's on the sovereign territory of a nation called Egypt.
And that nation called Egypt, much though we may dislike it, has got the right to make up its mind what it does and is not obliged to inform anybody.
What Robert Baval and I and John Wetch have been trying to do is to widen this debate so that there is public awareness about it and so that the Egyptian government realizes that it really should, that it's in its interest.
Yeah, the book has been something of a phenomenon.
And this definitely annoys the entire historical establishment who basically are envious of the book's sales and of the response that it's had in the public.
But the book survived and continues to sell.
And I think that if it was fundamentally wrong in any area, that wouldn't have happened.
Fortunately, some fragments of the original facing stones of the Great Pyramid at the base have survived, and we have quite a lot of the original cladding of the second pyramid near the summit which has survived.
And from this information, it's been possible to do, I believe, highly accurate projections.
These have been done by completely Orthodox Egyptologists and scientists, which give us the precise dimensions, exterior dimensions of the Great Pyramid before the cladding fell off.
It's a relatively routine to do, I believe, highly accurate projections.
These have been done by completely orthodox Egyptologists and scientists, which give us the precise dimensions, exterior dimensions of the Great Pyramid before the cladding fell off.
It's a relatively routine mathematical problem, and it's been solved fully to my satisfaction.
So I think we can count on the dimensions that have been well worked out since the end of the 19th century.
My second question concerns the caption underneath a very interesting photograph of the object in the king's chamber, which is referred to as a sarcophagus.
In the information under the caption, you mentioned the speed with which a tubular drill apparently removed this material, very, very hard granite material.
One, Flindis Petrie, a great Egyptologist at the turn of the 19th, beginning of the 20th century.
And the other, Christopher Dunn, a machine toolmaker who lives just south of Chicago and who has been involved in the machine toolmaking and specifically drill making business for most of his life, and who, by the way, has a book on the engineering of the Great Pyramid coming out.
Now, Chris Dunn's work and Petrie's work both concur that this object, whatever it is, and we shouldn't jump to the conclusion that it's a sarcophagus, that this object was hollowed out using incredibly high-speed drills.
Not only this object, but other granite objects in Egypt as well have been found which were cut in this way.
And in some cases, the drill cores have survived.
You get a core with a tubular drill which cuts down into the stone and leaves the central core, which is then knocked out, and another drilling is done, and gradually they hollow the object out.
Now, what's interesting from the drill cores is that it's possible to calculate the speed at which the drill was turning.
And both Flinders Petrie at the turn of the 19th century and Chris Dunn in the last decade have demonstrated beyond any doubt, beyond any shadow of doubt in my view, that these drills were turning at an uncannily fast rate.
In fact, fast as fast or faster than modern power drills.
And this becomes just one more of the many enigmas of Giza, which has rather been brushed under the carpet by academics.
So that people understand what it is you're telling them right now, you're talking about a higher-speed drill than we have now in the modern day, and this would have been done how long ago?
Well, at least 4,500 years ago, if we accept the orthodox dating for the pyramid, and perhaps long before that.
It's a very disturbing and troubling finding.
And as I say, it's a finding which really can't be written off as a sort of lunatic fringe speculation because of the real solidity of the two people separated by almost 100 years who came up with this information.
Flindis Petrie in the early 1900s was completely baffled.
I mean, this was perhaps one of the most orthodox of all orthodox Egyptologists, and he really believed that he demolished most 19th century speculation about the pyramid, but he was baffled, baffled, baffled by this one issue of the speed of the drills, because the ancient Egyptians in that period, the period of the construction of the Great Pyramid, are really supposed to have only had copper tools.
And any fool knows that copper cannot cut into a stone as hard as granite.
No matter how much you temper the copper, you just can't drill granite with it.
And if you embed, for example, jewels into the tip of the tubular drill, you then have the question of the pressure that's applied to the drill, and that pressure would collapse any copper tube.
So we have a real problem here which has never been resolved and which hints very strongly at a lot of technology at Giza.
And of course, I'm convinced that the entire chamber and the so-called sarcophagus were designed to produce such effects.
I have been convinced for a long time that the notion that the Great Pyramid was simply the tomb of some megalomaniac pharaoh is a completely idiotic idea, which unfortunately has been foisted upon us with great success by Egyptologists during most of the last century.
I'm sure that the purpose and function of these monuments has been completely misunderstood by Egyptologists and that they're designed to have an effect on human consciousness and that they do have that effect and that they have it by many different means, one of which is sound.
I've always felt that in this respect and in other respects of his analysis of Giza, that James Hertak, by some means which I don't fully understand, managed to be very far ahead of the game back there in the early 70s when he wrote that book.
He also highlights the connection with Orion, which really didn't get properly into the public domain until Robert finally put the pieces together, and Robert Bavar and came up with the Orion correlation theory, which makes sense of all that.
Now, Hertak didn't speak of an Orion correlation, but he did speak of a connection between the pyramid and Orion, and he did so way back in 73.
So again, I don't know how he did it, but it's a great achievement.
unidentified
Right, right.
When did they first start to make extensive excavation or research the tunnels under the pyramid and the Sphinx?
Well, we don't really know how long this has been going on.
It's written that since the early 70s, there has been a series of projects which have addressed themselves to this mystery, the mystery of tunnels and chambers under the Sphinx and indeed inside the Great Pyramid.
And one of the odd things is the way that virtually every project which has ever got going on this has sooner or later been stopped by the Egyptian authorities.
But that may simply be because so many of these projects do actually turn out to have a hidden agenda.
It's difficult to say why, but the history of exploration and excavation at Giza over the last 20 plus years has been very peculiar, and it does seem that there has been an ongoing continuous concern regarding the possibility of tunnels and chambers.
And personally, I'm absolutely sure that the whole of the Giza Plateau, what we see above the ground, is matched by an enormous tunnel system under the ground.
It stands to reason that anybody who could build up as successfully as the pyramid builders did could also build down.
And indeed, they were masters of hewing out of solid rock.
Well, yeah, I find that difficult to see how that could be, I must say.
The issue of putting the cladding on is another matter.
I think there's no doubt that the pyramid was built from the base up, as far as the core structure of the pyramid goes, which is the structure that we see today, the two and a half million gigantic blocks that make up the body of the pyramid.
But the issue of the cladding, the covering of the pyramid, which fell off in antiquity, is another matter.
And much does suggest that that must have been laid in place from the top down.
Now, while I realize, Graham, that you have a sort of a new communication with Zahi Awas, I've got to ask about this.
When I was in Egypt, I asked Zahi about the allegation that he will invite various institutions and groups to Egypt to do ground-penetrating radar work and all other sorts of work.
And then just when they find something, that's the moment that somehow or another they manage to get kicked off the plateau.
And a lot of people feel the work then goes on in secret.
Now, of course, he said that's asinine and ridiculous.
Well, what I say is that if a research group gets a properly authorized excavation and investigation permit, a scientific permit, as opposed to a commercial license, which simply allows people to make films and so on, and if that group sticks honestly to the term of that permit, then there is no way that they're going to be thrown off the site.
But if, on the other hand, as has been the case in the past, a group does not stick to the terms of its permit, if for example it has a commercial license and it starts doing scientific work, or if it has a scientific license but is actually doing different scientific work from the work set out in the license, then that group can definitely expect to be stopped.
So it's incumbent upon anybody wanting to work at Giza.
First of all, again, you know, some of us in the West find this hard to deal with, but we have to accept the fact that Egypt is a sovereign government and has a right to run its affairs the way it wants.
We have to work within the ball game that they set.
What I detect is a new openness, a new willingness to consider proposals.
And as long as those proposals are stuck to by the group concerned, I believe that they will be allowed to do their work.
Yeah, that's why it's so important that everybody working in this field is completely honest and open.
If people really are looking for hidden chambers under the Sphinx, then they must tell the Egyptian authorities that that's what they're doing.
They mustn't try to pull a fast one on the Egyptian authorities.
They mustn't say, well, we're here to do some kind of survey or other, but not really specify hidden chambers when actually their whole objective is to search for hidden chambers.
Now, the problem in the past has been that the Egyptian government really wouldn't say yes to any team that was looking for hidden chambers.
And therefore, there was a natural tendency on the part of those teams to somewhat disguise their motive.
I was intrigued with the sign and the seal, and I was wondering, what, if anything, does Mr. Hancock know about the Israelis' plans for rebuilding of the Third Temple?
Well, the answer to your question is not very much.
I doubt, I've always doubted that the government of Israel would put itself directly behind any attempt to build the Third Temple because the issue is so explosive politically.
But there's no doubt that there are important groups in Israel which are absolutely determined to build the Third Temple and which indeed have fully developed architectural plans in place and are just waiting for their moment.
unidentified
Do you know, have any information or know anything about the so-called unblemished red heifer that has been born?
Yeah, then I take it you feel that it is so close, Graham, the danger so great and so close that we had better get to finding out what the message is while we have time.
A species like ours, human beings today, this problem, worldwide problem of paedophilia, people who murder children for pleasure, people who annihilate whole countries just because they feel like doing it, these are members of our species.
And while we allow this kind of grotesque outrage to continue, we will never, ever, ever come to grips with the real danger that faces us from the cosmos.
Graham Hancock, stand by, and now I am going to ask the audience to get a piece of paper and a pencil.
Because when we come back after this break, I will take a moment and tell you how you can still, if you wish, come along on this incredible cruise.
I mean, the cruise by itself is something that will remain with you for all your life.
I guarantee I've been there, I know.
But the debate on board, oh my, this is one you don't want to miss.
So get some paper and a pencil, and we'll be right back.
Good morning.
I'm Art Bell.
My guest is Graham Hancock, and he is one of the participants who will be along on this incredible cruise.
Trust me when I tell you, it's once in a lifetime when you've seen a gigantic glacier coming down to water that is as clear as any water you've ever seen in your entire life.
As a matter of fact, it's kind of like a mirror.
There is no way, I put some photographs on the website last time I went to Alaska.
There is no way to describe to you the majesty and the understanding that's imparted to you when you go on this cruise.
It's something important you can do with money.
You know, money really has limited use once you're comfortable, once you have enough to be comfortable.
One of the only good uses for it, in my opinion, is to travel and to see things that you would not otherwise ever see.
We'll be on a deluxe ship, the Stanton-Dam, Holland-America Lines, and believe me, it is luxurious, very luxurious.
It'll be May 10th through the 17th.
It'll be going through the Inside Passage in Alaska, two days cruising the Inside Passage.
It just, it'll be with you for the rest of your life.
But then as kind of a gigantic bonus to the whole thing, on the way back down from Alaska toward Vancouver, itself a great destination, there will be a great debate on board this ship.
And I mean a great debate with Dr. Zahia Wass, Danian Brinkley, Graham Hancock, Robert Luval, Dr. Ed Krupp.
I will moderate this whole thing.
If you would like to come along, there still is an opportunity for you to do so.
Here's how you do it.
Nationwide, you can call 1-800-888-5509.
Let me give that again.
1-800-888-5509.
In fact, it's what, about a month.
It's about a month now, and we'll be on our way.
1-800-888-5509 or in California.
If you're in California, you must call Area Code 310-568-0138.
That's Area Code 310-568-0138.
Love to have you come along.
You'll remember it all your life, I guarantee.
Live to Great Britain and Graham Hancock.
Graham, I've got a facts I want to read here.
It says, when I read the sign and the seal, I couldn't put it down.
Graham's investigation and storytelling are completely engrossing.
Whenever I meet someone from Ethiopia, I tell them I know they have the Ark of the Covenant, and they smile and seem very proud.
That's why I wrote a 580-page book Saying so, really.
The circumstantial evidence is compelling, that that's where this extraordinary lost object is.
And, you know, I think that a reasonable approach to the evidence will lead any sensible person to the conclusion that the Ethiopian claim has an enormous amount of merit to it.
First time caller line, you're on the air with Graham Hancock in Great Britain.
Where are you, please?
unidentified
I'm in Tinley Park, Illinois.
All right.
And I have a question.
It's concerning a paper you mentioned by François Chabas concerning a wand that was used by the ancient Hebrews and Egyptians from the Museum of Art and Archaeology in France.
And I was wondering what he thought that wand did.
Well, I wrote The Sign and the Seal eight years ago.
And since writing The Sign and the Seal, I've written several other enormous books.
And all of these books draw on a huge database.
And in fact, that's part of the service that I really try to provide to my readers, is to give them access to all the original sources I used, which in every case runs into well over 1,000.
And those are there in the footnotes and the references, and people can follow up those sources themselves.
My objective really isn't to provide final answers to people, but to provide intelligent and inquiring people with food for thought to follow their own quest.
I would really like to ask you a question, Graham.
As a talk show host, I have dealt in this kind of material now for years.
And I have made the assessment through thousands, if not tens of thousands, of letters that I receive commenting on my various programs that the kind of material we are now discussing inevitably makes about 20% of the people who write to me very, very angry.
And I'm sure that you must get a great deal of correspondence.
In fact, the percentage of hostile letters is so small, such a fraction of 1%, as to be almost negligible.
By and large, it's been very positive.
These letters don't tend to be just saying thank you for writing a nice book.
They tend to be raising queries and questions, which are exactly what I hoped these books would do.
But no, not hostility, not anger.
That's come exclusively from the academic establishment.
And the academic establishment have certainly reacted with hostility and anger to all my books and to the public support that these books get.
And that's why I feel this cruise that we're doing is so important because the first time ever, the first time ever, that there is going to be a serious debate between Orthodox academics, Ed Krupp is a major astronomer, Zahi Hawass, as we all know who he is, and people like myself and Robert Bavara.
It's the first time that we've actually had the opportunity in public to sit down and debate the big issues.
And I'd like to thank Abbas Nadeem, the gentleman who first thought of this conference and set it in motion.
Even with all said about Azahiwass, and I know that you seem to have a new relationship with him, I noticed when I was there, there are two Dr. Hawasses.
One is the Dr. Hawas who would like to greet you and shepherd you through seeing whatever it is you want to see while you're there.
And the other is another Dr. Hawass who has a very quick flash temper.
I have quite a temper myself, although I try to keep it under control.
But Zahi Hawas is a powerful personality and a charismatic man.
He's a great talker.
And I have found through my meetings with him in December, which included six hours at the Sphinx and then a very long private discussion afterwards, I found him to be much more open-minded than I imagined him to be when he was just a bogeyman who I hadn't met.
And I'd encountered his public statements, but I hadn't encountered him as an individual.
Encountering him as an individual was a very interesting experience for me.
First off, because I've said a lot of hard things about Zahi Hawas over the last couple of years, things which have certainly reached his ears in all manner of shape and form.
Although Robert Bavar and I stand side by side on all of these issues.
But yes, in the period of intense controversy and intense public speaking on these matters, there's no doubt that we said harsh things about Zahi and Zahi said harsh things about us.
And the conclusion we've come to is that this exchange of personal insults is absolutely useless to anybody.
Yeah, it's just not productive, and it was actually blocking any step forward in this area.
I do feel that the most important development of the last two years was the huge public interest in the matter and the thousands and thousands, and I can tell you it was many thousands of letters that were written to Egyptian embassies and to the Egyptian government.
And I think what these letters did was they made people in Egypt realize the depth of feeling on these matters.
And that's why I'm pretty confident that we'll find Egypt much more responsive to our concerns in the future.
And this conference is the first sign of that, that at least there's a willingness to sit down and really debate the issues and to do so in public, not in private.
Now, I realize that it's a horrible thing to contemplate.
However, I think the following is true.
Because of the State Department, U.S. State Department warnings to Americans not to go to Egypt because of terrorist forecasts, and because they're very hungry over there, and because there is nobody going to Egypt right now, is it not more likely that they would be open to any grand project, properly administered?
I think the most important issue in all of this is to be completely honest about human nature.
And there's no doubt that the Egyptians are desperate to see tourists return to Egypt and realize that this particular debate, this particular issue of the antiquity and meaning of the last surviving wonder of the ancient world, is an issue that really does have a huge resonance in the public all around the world.
But I see this as a natural development from what has happened, and it does create the opportunity for a new style of investigation to get underway in Egypt.
And certainly there is a new spirit afoot.
And I'd like to repeat, and I can only repeat my own impression, I have made more than 40 visits to Egypt, and I've traveled very extensively in that country.
And my honest opinion, following the terrible disaster that happened last year, is that the Egyptian authorities have finally woken up to the necessary security steps that must be taken to protect tourists.
If one is going to Egypt as a tourist, I would urge people as often as possible to travel independently to Egypt.
The large tour group is inevitably a target.
unidentified
But the individual traveling alone is not a target.
And I can't tell you how many Egyptians came up to me in the street.
They just came up to me in the street, not knowing me from anybody, and just said sorry.
They said, we're so, so sorry about what happened at the Temple of Hatshepsut last year.
The people of Egypt are devastated by this.
It's such a contravention of their traditions and of their genuine warmth and hospitality that were such a thing ever to start again, you can be sure that the people of Egypt themselves would do everything they could to prevent it.
I agree with what you say about the security of Egypt because the beggars in the street, and I used to live in Egypt for about a year, were always glad to see you, and they thanked you, and they were glad you were Americans, and they were glad you were there.
My two quick questions are, I had hired a professor from the university who taught Egyptian history for decades there, and I hired him on a daily basis during my year living there to guide me in giving education.
Two quick questions he couldn't answer exactly to my liking.
One was, do they have a date now that they settled on when the Great Pyramids were built?
Well, yes, Orthodox Egyptologists haven't changed their position on this throughout the 20th century, and they put the date at around 2,500 BC.
A little known study of the mortar that was used to join the blocks together, mortar that contains organic materials and therefore is susceptible to carbon dating, has indicated that this date is incorrect and that the pyramid may be up to 1,000 years older than Egyptologists believe it to be, but certainly not 12,500 years old.
That's not indicated by the carbon dating.
So what the carbon dating indicates, and I have to stress with carbon dating, you can only date organic materials, and there are organic materials in the mortar.
What it indicates is that the Egyptological scenario for the pyramid is completely wrong, but that the pyramid is not 12,500 years old.
And that fits with my own views.
I think the pyramid was probably built over a period of several hundred years, about in the fourth millennium BC rather than in the third millennium BC.
But I think that other aspects of the site, particularly the Great Sphinx, especially the Great Sphinx and the massive megalithic temples beside it, are vastly older and do date back 12,500 years.
I think this is a site that's been completely misunderstood by Orthodox academics and that it has a tremendous secret to reveal to us.
unidentified
I tend to agree with you from what I heard from him.
The second question is, the Nile has switched its route of flowing along Several places from Luxor to Abel Simbold up through Cairo.
Has anybody done any foundings and, God forbid, like core drillings, within about a mile and a half or so of where they were presently at and the river where it presently runs?
And or is there some phase now that HARP could give some location of any underground buildings or structures like old mine shafts that they can do, I understand?
Aerial surveys are revealing new evidence all the time.
I can give you an example of this, not at Giza, but at Angkor in Cambodia, where NASA aerial photographs have revealed an evidence, very convincing, definite evidence of a much earlier layer of construction at Angkor.
So Angkor as it looks today was built in 1150 AD.
But what this aerial photography has shown is that it stands on top of a much more ancient site.
And I think that the same techniques applied to Egypt, and they haven't been applied to Egypt extensively yet, could yield fascinating information.
And the old course of the Nile, which in the Giza area is not so different today from how it was many thousands of years ago, is a particularly promising area for excavation.
Well, in that case, obviously by then, we will all be back from the cruise and the great debate, and there would, I would hope, be another opportunity while you're here in the States to interview you again.
Before the year 2030, it's the fragments of a giant comet.
This is what the whole book that I've done on Mars is really focusing on.
It's the fragments of a giant comet.
astronomy behind this is absolutely 100% sound, the top academics, and what the
But what people don't understand is that when these comets fragment, and when you have a giant comet which is 400 kilometers across fragmenting, then these fragments spread out along the whole of the orbit of the original comet and they create a much bigger target for the Earth to collide with.
And the evidence is that we have a 30-kilometer fragment of comet on an Earth-crossing orbit, which will hit us before the year 2030, unless we do something about it.