June 16, 1998 - Art Bell
43:25
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| 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 kudone by a do-it-yourself sleuth, end quote. | ||
| He is a very prolific writer indeed. | ||
| Message of the Sphinx by Graham Hancock, Robert Bilal, and a new work underway now all about Mars, all the way across the continent and all the way across the Atlantic. | ||
| If we have done it, here is Graham Hancock. | ||
| Graham, welcome to the program. | ||
| Hi, how are you? | ||
| Hi, I'm just fine. | ||
| Graham, very honored to have you back on again. | ||
| Thanks. | ||
|
unidentified
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It's a pleasure. | |
| It's a pleasure to be on. | ||
| And I suppose it's deep in the night where you are, and I'm looking at a misty morning in the southwest of England here. | ||
| then that is as usual anyway. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Boy, so much to talk to you about. | ||
| 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. | ||
| And so I'm sure you've heard about all this. | ||
| What do you think? | ||
| 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 that this is, 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. | ||
| Oh, I absolutely agree with you, Graham. | ||
| matter all experts here even agree on that but they nevertheless insist on claiming that this ends the controversy and there is no face 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 have 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 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. | ||
| Oh, I would really like your impressions of that. | ||
| This, folks, is off the Ryukian Islands near Okinawa. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| what have you found there? | ||
| 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. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Well, maybe this is where you can help me out a little bit, Graham. | ||
| You're absolutely right, of course. | ||
| And the two camps with regard to the artifacts on Mars are literally at war. | ||
| I mean, they are ripping each other's guts out. | ||
| The insults are flying. | ||
| I realize, of course, 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 paradigms 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. | ||
| Indeed. | ||
| So then you don't see any... | ||
| 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 lifetime, Graham, it'll ever be settled? | ||
| I think the only way that it can be settled is to land on Mars and look at these issues. | ||
| And that requires a scientific establishment which is prepared to recognize that as a priority. | ||
| The way that NASA has presented this whole recent adventure is as a kind of stop to public opinion. | ||
| Oh, well, the public got a bit excited about this, so we'll just show them how stupid they are. | ||
| And I just think that that's a very sad and dull attitude to this whole wonderful mystery. | ||
| Mars is the most intriguing planet in the solar system. | ||
| But then it's also one, Graham, that doesn't make any sense, because NASA, of course, would want to be funded to try a shot, a man shot to Mars, and that effort would certainly get a big boost if they found something that appeared to be artificial. | ||
| Now, the conspiratorialists, on the other hand, think that NASA is hiding all of this. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Well, what was Mars once? | ||
| Mars had an atmosphere, I believe, a rather thicker atmosphere than it does now. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Dr. Van Flanderen rather believes that it is an exploded planet that used to be, that in fact Mars was a moon of that planet. | ||
| Your theory is very much like that, but you think rather that it was a series or a very large, kind of like... | ||
| The problem... | ||
| I'm familiar with Van Flanden'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 Flanden 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 Wickram Singh and others, have developed a theory concerning giant comets, objects 3 or 400 kilometers wide, which drift in from the outer solar system and which fragment as they come close to planets, rather as Shoemaker-Levy 9 fragmented in 1994. | ||
| With what kind of return cycle? | ||
| 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. | ||
| Well, we watch Shoemaker-Levy 9 fragment and then plow into Jupiter. | ||
| If instead of Jupiter, those pieces had plowed into Earth, what would have been the result? | ||
| End of all life on Earth, without any doubt. | ||
| Without any doubt. | ||
| The planet would have been sterilized. | ||
| There would be no life left at all. | ||
| The planet would be a bit like Mars, actually. | ||
| So we have a rather recent example close by of this occurring. | ||
| Yes, we have. | ||
| It's as though the cosmos decided to give us a warning call, you know, a kind of wake-up call. | ||
| Hey, guys, look what comets can do to planets. | ||
| Here's Jupiter, a giant planet, made largely of gas. | ||
| You think it would shoulder aside or absorb an object like this. | ||
| Well, let's just show you what 21 fragments of a 40-kilometer-wide comet can do to a planet. | ||
| And we saw the gates of hell open on Jupiter when those fragments of a comet hit it. | ||
| Yes, we did. | ||
| All right, Graham, hold on. | ||
| We're at the bottom of the hour. | ||
| Rest. | ||
| We'll be right back to you. | ||
| My guest from Great Britain, live, is Graham Hancock, a very, very prolific author. | ||
| And also, one of those who will be along debating with Zahi Awass, Daniel Brinkley, Robert Faval, Dr. Trump. | ||
| Oh, that's going to be some cruise. | ||
| We'll tell you about it. | ||
| I'm Ardell. | ||
| This is Coast to Coast A.M. 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'd say 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 2,000 or 3,000 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? | ||
| Is that what they left for us? | ||
| 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. | ||
| And right now, we're not. | ||
| Let me quickly turn my attention, because we don't have a lot of time. | ||
| I want to talk about Dr. Zahiwas a little bit. | ||
| There is a persistent rumor that Dr. Zahiwass has been removed from office. | ||
| Now, this is a fairly recent rumor, and I wonder if you've heard anything. | ||
| 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 things 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. | ||
| Then let us, yes, of course. | ||
| Let us then discuss what really might be. | ||
| 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 Zahi did not want to tell me about and I did not know to ask, believe me, I would not know that it was there. | ||
| Would you agree with that? | ||
| Yes, I would agree with that. | ||
| The situation which we often forget is that Egypt has a government and that Zahi Hawas is a 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. | ||
| I hope I'm right. | ||
| I hope you are too. | ||
| When I last spoke with Zahi here on the air, he announced that he was going to close the Great Pyramid for a six or eight month period. | ||
| Are you aware of that? | ||
| Yeah, I am aware of that. | ||
| And I personally never feel happy when a monument like the Great Pyramid is closed down for eight months. | ||
| And I cannot understand the logic of closing the pyramid for the Great Pyramid for eight months. | ||
| It isn't necessary to close it for eight months in order to conduct renovations in it. | ||
| Oh, could it be he has other work to do? | ||
| Look, this possibility of work archaeology investigations 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. | ||
| Of course, at the moment, it may not matter. | ||
| There are so many warnings about travel to Egypt that almost nobody's going there anyway. | ||
| 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 Hatsheps during last year's massacre, there would have been no massacre. | ||
| You can get your reaction to it. | ||
| 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. | ||
| When was that done? | ||
| That was in March of 97. | ||
| Yeah, that was a year ago. | ||
| 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 had put in to conduct a thorough geological scientific investigation of the Sphinx. | ||
| This was the other problem that Robert Boval 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. | ||
| All right, Well, let's address one of those. | ||
| 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, it says 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. | ||
| Well, do you think if the age of these artifacts, and now new ones, I believe, discovered south to the south, 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. | ||
| But the age of these things would tamper with a lot of what Egyptians believe as their personal paradigms, would it not? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| 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 all know, Edgar Casey predicted the location of the Hall of Records beneath the Sphinx, and I interviewed 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? | ||
| What do you think? | ||
| Yes, it's very interesting. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Do you see that again now the Great Pyramid, as you know, is being closed, and there has been quite a bit of talk about a possible tunnel. | ||
| In fact, I believe there's some ground-penetrating radar indicating that indeed there is some sort of tunnel angling down toward beneath the Sphinx, and sure enough, there are chambers that they believe they've located beneath the Sphinx and so forth. | ||
| You don't suppose during this eight-month period that they'll be looking, do you? | ||
| Anything is possible. | ||
| 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. | ||
| 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 Wedge 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. | ||
| All right, Graham. | ||
| We are at the top of the hour, so hold tight, and I'd like to do one more hour if I could with you and let the audience ask you questions. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| All right. | ||
| When we come back, your opportunity with Graham Hancock. | ||
| I'm Art Bell from the high desert. | ||
| This is Close to Coast AM. | ||
|
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Close to Coast AM. | |
| We're winning all right. | ||
| It's coming home. | ||
| We gotta get it right back where we've started from. | ||
| Love is good, love is good. | ||
| We gotta get right back to where we started from We gotta get right back to where we started from Good morning, everybody. | ||
| My guest is Graham Hancock, and he's gonna be back in a moment. | ||
| His hour, I'm going to give you an opportunity to ask him any question you wish about his works, his investigations, his books. | ||
| Just a couple. | ||
| Fingerprints of the gods. | ||
| Many of you have read that. | ||
| The Message of the Sphinx, the Sign and the Seal, a new book coming on Mars shortly. | ||
| At any rate, it's going to be your opportunity with Graham Hancock. | ||
| Just one caution. | ||
| I'm going to ask you to be short and to the point because there is, of course, a transatlantic delay. | ||
| So it would be best if you ask your question and then pause and allow him to answer that question. | ||
| Otherwise, it gets kind of mixed up with the delay between here and Great Britain because he's with us live from Great Britain. | ||
| So coming up shortly, Graham Hancock. | ||
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To talk with Art Bell in the Kingdom of Nye. | |
| From east of the Rockies, dial 1-800-825-5033. | ||
| West of the Rockies, including Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, and New Mexico. | ||
| 1-800-618-8255. | ||
| First-time callers may reach art at area code 702-727-1222. | ||
| And you may call Art on the wildcard line at area code 702-727-1295. | ||
| To reach art from outside the U.S., first dial your access number to the USA, then 800-893-0903. | ||
| This is Coast to Coast A.M. from the Kingdom of Nye with Art Bell. | ||
| It is indeed. | ||
| And I'll tell you what, we are going on this incredible cruise next month, May 10th through the 17th. | ||
| There's going to be a great debate on board. | ||
| It will be Dr. Zahi Oass, Danion Brinkley, Graham Hemnock, Robert Baval, Dr. Ed Krupp. | ||
| And I will moderate all of this. | ||
| And it's really going to be something. | ||
| And of course, it's going to be a wonderful cruise. | ||
| Now, at the bottom of the hour, I'll tell you how. | ||
| I'll give you a number to call if you wish to come along because we can still fit you in, I think. | ||
| Come back. | ||
| Hi, Artist. | ||
| Hi there. | ||
| Good to hear you again. | ||
| I would very much now like to allow you to talk to some of the people out there that have a lot of questions. | ||
| We've got an awful lot. | ||
| How many books have you sold, Graham? | ||
| Well, Fingerprints of the Gods has actually sold four and a half million copies. | ||
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Wow. | |
| Wow. | ||
| That's absolutely astounding. | ||
| 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 survives and continues to sell. | ||
| And I think that if it was fundamentally wrong in any area, that wouldn't have happened. | ||
| I quite agree with you. | ||
| Let's go to the phones, as promised. | ||
| First time caller line, you're on the air with Graham Hancock. | ||
| Where are you calling from, please? | ||
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Good morning. | |
| This is Glenn calling from Denver, Colorado. | ||
| Denver. | ||
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Yes, I'm listening to you on 6.30 a.m. here. | |
| Yes, sir. | ||
| Cahal. | ||
| You have a question for Graham? | ||
| Go ahead. | ||
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Yes, I do, Graham. | |
| I have two quick questions for you regarding fingerprints of the gods. | ||
| The first question is the Great Pyramid is very interesting in terms of its geometry, which requires very accurate measurements of its dimensions. | ||
| And yet we know that the facing stones from the Great Pyramid have largely been removed. | ||
| So I'm curious about how that problem was dealt with by the scientists and others who examined it. | ||
| One at a time. | ||
| Go ahead, Graham. | ||
| Okay, yes, let me reply to that first. | ||
| Fortunately, some fragments of the original facing stones of the Great Pyramids 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. |
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