Art Bell retires from Coast to Coast AM on December 31st due to sciatic pain from a 15-year-old injury, handing the show to George Norrie while questioning Iraq’s WMD claims and the FBI’s investigation into "rods"—cylindrical, high-speed atmospheric entities documented by filmmaker Jose Escamilla. Graham Hancock reveals submerged structures like Cuba’s 2,200-foot-deep ruins (aligned with Plato’s Atlantis) and Japan’s Yonaguni megaliths, defying conventional explanations of erosion or natural formation. He ties their disappearance to Ice Age floods, suggesting lost civilizations erased by rising seas, and critiques science’s dismissal of evidence challenging mainstream history. Hancock’s research hints at advanced pre-historic cultures, possibly tied to global flood myths, while Bell abruptly ends the segment amid interference, leaving his final book Underworld as a provocative call for rethinking humanity’s ancient past. [Automatically generated summary]
But I've got considering it's such a heavy news, I had an announcement to make, and hopefully, with all the heavy news, it will fly under the radar.
There is nothing in the world that I love short of my wife, my beautiful wife, Ramona, more than doing this program.
But as you know, my work ethic in the past several months has been horrible.
Horrible.
And I've been gone as much as here or even more.
And that's not me.
I mean, that's just not me.
For 15 years doing this program, I did it six and sometimes seven days a week, five hours a day.
I mean, that's just not me.
However, interestingly, what brought me into radio or back into radio, more accurately, I've been in radio all my life, commercial broadcasting, ham radio.
Radio is my life.
And so what brought me back into radio about 15 years ago or so when I began what turned into Coast to Coast AM is probably going to be what takes me out of radio.
Now, here's the situation for those of you who don't know recent listeners, whatever.
I have a bad back.
And about, well, over 15 years ago now, I fell off a pole.
I burned a pole.
I went up a phone pole working on an amplifier and did what's called burned the pole, which more or less means fell off the pole.
Now, when you cut out and you're on a pole, as those who climb know, you have two choices.
One is to grab the pole and go all the way down real quick and hum all these little wood chips that are going to be pulled out of your body for years to come, or you can push off from the pole and you can fall.
I, for whatever reason, chose to push off and fall.
And I came down on my ass and my elbow, and when I did, I impacted L4 and L5 and did something really weird.
And the doctors then told me that it would come to haunt me later in life, and they were obviously very correct about that.
I've had MRIs.
I've been to the best doctors and so forth and so on.
And I may eventually face the inevitability of surgery on my back, but I'm not prepared to do that as of yet.
They're coming up with a lot of new things in this area.
And every week, every month, you read about some new procedure.
But contrary to what a lot of people believe, not all backs are the same, and not all back injuries are the same.
And mine doesn't quite lend itself so well to some of what's out there right now.
And I've had discs that are growing around my sciatic nerve.
And for those of you who have ever experienced sciatic nerve pain, you know what it is.
For others, you will never know and you don't want to find out, believe me.
But it seems to be coming to get me, as my doctors told me it would, more frequently now.
In fact, in the last few months, on and off every few days.
In fact, I had a couple of really good days earlier this week.
Tonight is not as good.
I am nevertheless here because I really do want to get this announcement made.
I think all of you deserve more than a very much part-time host for this program.
Therefore, lovingly, and it's very difficult for me, I will retire from this program December 31st, the very last day of this year, and the very first few hours of the next year.
I will be here for that, and then I will slip off into that good night.
Lots to do, and I have high hopes that with rest, you know, my back will get better enough that I can get out and enjoy life a little bit.
I'd really like that, because while time off is great, time off spent curled up like a pretzel is not so great, I can tell you for sure.
And so I will retire December 31st.
Now, taking the reins of this show, to be pretty obvious, is George Norrie.
And George, as I said one time on this program, I don't know, some months ago, George gets it.
And there aren't too many people who get this program.
They just don't get it.
And a lot of people will never get it.
But George gets it.
George was doing this kind of radio, you know, ventures into the paranormal before he ever came to Costa Coast.
AM.
He was doing that at KTRS, of course.
And so he's a perfect fit for the program.
Now, while I will retire and while I will leave, I will not ever leave entirely.
And so radio is in my blood and will always be in my blood.
And so I will fill in for George because George, despite what he no doubt thinks right now, Will occasionally need a break from what he's doing for whatever reason.
So you may hear me on from time to time, and I've got an agreement to do exactly that, come and fill in, or something's really hot and I've just got to get on.
There's an agreement to allow that, you know, and we'll fit it in from time to time, every now and then, perhaps.
But it's about time, folks.
You know, I don't like working one day and then not being able to work the next three and then working one day.
That's no way to do anything.
And I know that it's extremely frustrating for the listeners and extremely frustrating for those who are used to hearing my voice and whatever it is that we do here in the nighttime.
And it's as frustrating, if not more so for me.
It drives me crazy, and that's not the kind of work ethic that I'm used to.
I'm used to going all out 125%.
And I just, you know, while the brain is willing, the body is presently not.
so we'll see what develops and uh...
as they get better with back surgery no doubt eventually all uh...
And my own doctor told me that I was crazy if I went and had it.
In fact, his exact words were to me that he had seen many, many patients over the years who had then gone on with his referral to some sort of surgery.
And inevitably they come back, he said, a few weeks later and say, oh my God, I'm cured.
It's wonderful.
Then they're back a year later with more serious problems than they had in the first place.
And while science is making strides, I don't know that they have made enough strides for me to roll the dice on getting an operation for the sake of the radio program.
Because in my life, I'm not ready to do that yet.
I still have these high hopes that through exercise and diet and doing all the right things, I can correct my back sufficient to enjoy some sort of modicum of decent quality of life.
So that is the announcement.
From now until December 31st, I will hopefully work three days a week, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday.
But there is no guarantee of that because this is at a stage now where it's coming every few days.
It lets me alone for a few days and I have recovery and I think I'm better.
And then, boom, just like that.
It grabs me.
In a moment, news of the normal, again, in quotes, and the Abbey normal coming right up.
All right, now news of the, in quotes, normal.
Of course, all day breaking news on CNN.
Police hunting the serial sniper have issued an arrest warrant for a 42-year-old man they believe may have information about the string of terrifying shootings, the snipings that have left 10 people dead in the Washington suburbs.
The Montgomery County Police Chief, Charles Moose, said the man, John Alan Mohammed, should be considered, quote, armed and dangerous, end quote, and that he was being sought on federal weapons charges.
Now, he also was very, very careful to point out that this man should not be considered necessarily to be a suspect with regard to the sniper shootings themselves.
He is John Lee Malvo.
No, that's the stepson, the 17-year-old stepson.
He is John Allen Williams or John Allen Mohammed, about 42 years old.
John Lee Malvo, CNN said, was perhaps his stepson, about 17 years of age, might be traveling with John Allen Williams.
And apparently they're now looking for a 1990 Chevrolet Caprice, New Jersey license plate, NDA 21Z.
Nora David Adam 21Zebra, NDA 21Z, New Jersey.
Chief Moose, again, saying that the warrant is not related to the recent sniper shootings, but in the same news conference, he had some words to say about the sniper himself and the communications problems they've had and something about a request that the sniper had that the police say they had him like a noose around a duck or some such.
The whole thing was kind of strange.
This whole thing is kind of strange.
You know, I have a number of questions about the whole sniper business.
And the other day I was watching CNN, and they were showing right after the bus driver had been shot, they were showing a map of where the shootings have thus far taken place.
And they really are in a very small geographic area.
The great bulk of them, a few have strayed geographically from the center area, but this last one went right back to the center area.
And when you look at that area, it's a very, very small geographic area.
And it is to me amazing, startling that a man with a rifle, and a rifle is not a handgun.
It's not easily concealed.
A rifle is a big thing.
A man with a rifle that shoots, what, 223 rounds, whatever it turns out to be, can escape that many times.
Now, there are all kinds of details that the media is feeding everybody 24 hours a day, and I guess I don't need to go over them about the grammar used in the notes and about all the rest of it.
I simply am astounded, and I mean astounded, that that many shootings could take place in that small of an area without the man being caught.
That to me is absolutely astounding.
And it certainly is abnormal news.
A lot of abynormal news out there tonight.
We'll get to that in a moment.
In the meantime, at least 40 armed Chechen rebels stormed a crowded theater, took hundreds of people hostage in the middle of a musical threatening early Thursday to shoot their captives and blow up the building if Russian security forces attacked.
Several hours after the rebels rushed the theater, firing automatic weapons, they began communicating with Russian officials by cell phone.
The hostage-takers demanded that Russia end the war in Chechnya, southern region where the army is fighting Islamic separatists.
Now, you would think, wouldn't you, with all the trouble the Russians are having right now with, from their point of view, terrorists, that they would be more inclined to vote in favor of the United States resolution at the UN to go after Iraq.
But no.
Now, maybe after a few more incidents like this one, they'll be changing their mind on the issue.
A lot of things obscuring the fact that we are about to go to war.
Do you doubt that for a second?
There's delay at the UN, and there's, I think, the current administration really wants to get it on.
They really want to go ahead and have this war.
It is to me personally curious, and I certainly think that Saddam Hussein has these weapons of mass destruction.
How many of them I don't know.
No doubt some which came from us.
I'm sure we delivered some little things that he's able to grow into bigger things that could be turned against us, and that was done during the Iraq-Iran conflict.
I think the president has got to make a better case to the American people that we know what they have.
And so far, I don't think he's done that.
But with all the news of the sniper, it's awful, 13 people shot, 10 dead.
But, you know, we are facing war where a lot of people are going to get dead there and here.
And just the other day, we get news that Korea may have an atomic weapon.
Well, if the great rationale for going after somebody is that they are terrorists or people who would use a weapon of that sort against innocent civilians, as the North has certainly threatened to do against the South and against us and against everybody, then shouldn't we be going to war against Korea too?
Shouldn't we be declaring a joint war or something?
But we're not.
We expressed some surprise and we were upset that the Koreans did this, but you know damn well the CIA knew that they had it.
So it seems to me the president needs to make a better case to go to war against Iraq.
I'm not saying it's not there because it probably is.
It's just one that will embarrass us or one that we don't want to disclose for what reason I can't imagine other than embarrassment.
Now, another story running on CNN, turning for a moment to the Abbey Normal.
What an incredible story today.
I sat straight up when I saw this, straight up because I knew exactly what it was.
Some thought a terrorist missile.
Others thought an off-course alien spacecraft perhaps, or I don't know, some might say mosquito, but it's not that.
The image caught on a videotape by a Fox 23 cameraman shooting background for weather stories on Sunday resembles, when it slowed, enlarged, and then paused, a fine rod with a small set of wings near each end.
The cameraman didn't notice it at the time, said Fox assignment editor Jeb Rowledge, I believe it is, but the tiny dark spot streaking across the frame, apparently above the clouds, caught his eye while editing the video of a plane taking off at Albany International Airport.
The station showed the video to airport and Albany County Sheriff's officials on Sunday night, and on Monday, local authorities asked the FBI to please take a look as well.
There's something on that videotape that is interesting, to say the least, but we don't have any idea what it is, said airport spokesperson Doug Myers.
Well, I know what it is, and I would bet that a gazillion of you watching CNN today, because they ran the story just about every hour on CNN headline news, I bet you know what it is, too.
There was no question.
The second I saw it, I stopped the frame of video and looked and I said, oh my God, that's a rod.
Well, what's a rod?
Those of you who have been with the program for a while know what a rod is.
Jose Escamilius has been talking about them for a long time.
And he's brought us pictures of exactly what you see in this frame of video.
Jose maintains this is a living entity.
This is a living thing that shares the planet with us.
And that we generally cannot see these things, but Jose has caught them on tape.
He's taken photographs and video of rods.
Incredibly good video.
Video every bit as good as that which aired on CNN all day long today.
And we've done several shows on it in the past.
I'm going to tap the shoulder of Jose Escamilia because obviously the second I saw this, I called the network, said, get me Jose, called him and said, Jose, was that a rod or what?
So for those of you who are not familiar with rods, for those of you who would simply like to hear the reaction of Jose Escamilia to what was on CNN all day long today, we will, on the half hour here go to Jose and find out.
Find out what he thinks.
But I'm sure it was just like it was for me.
I'm telling you, when I saw this thing, it did not take one second for my brain to register rod.
With a visual image going across the screen, the very second I saw it, my brain said rod.
And I spoke to my wife, held the video, showed it to her, and she said, oh, it's a rod.
So for those of you who've been following this, this story, Jose Escamilia's incredible story, you'll sort of get his reaction for everybody else.
Prepare yourself.
It's going to be a very, very interesting night.
And regarding tomorrow's and what he'll sing about in a moment, I believe it, because they come real soon.
Take it from one who knows.
unidentified
It will soon be over tomorrow.
I don't ask for much, I only want to.
And you know it don't come easy.
That little ballpark keeps growing all the time.
And you know it just ain't easy.
Where are those happy days?
They seem so hard to find.
I tried to reach for you, but you have lost too much.
Whatever happened to our love, I wish I understood.
It used to be so nice, it used to be so good So when you hear me darling, can't you hear me?
S.O.S.
The love you gave me, nothing else can save me S.O.S.
When you're gone, how can I even try to go on?
S.O.S.
When you're gone, how can I carry on?
Call Art Bell in the Kingdom of Nye from west of the Rockies at 1-800-618-8255.
East of the Rockies, 1-800-825-5033.
First-time callers may rechart at 1-775-727-1222.
And the wildcard line is open at 1-775-727-1295.
To reach out on the toll-free international line, call your AT&T operator and have them dial 800-893-0903.
SOS Top of the evening or morning, whatever it is, everybody, I'm Art Bell.
Coming up in a moment, that video that ran on CNN all day long today with the UFO, which is really a rod.
Well, we'll ask Jose Escamilia about it in just a moment.
He's the man who knows all about frauds.
Soon you will, too.
On March 5th, 1994, Jose Escamilia, producer, director, and filmmaker, captured video footage of UFOs that appeared in broad daylight over Midway, New Mexico, small community nine miles southeast of Roswell.
These types of UFOs have since then been named Rods.
Jose's UFO experiences have put him on a variety of lectures, TV, and radio programs talking about this subject.
He appeared perhaps first on this program, or nearly first.
He's been on the Learning Channel, Rodo Rivera, hard copy sightings and counters, the other side, Inside Edition, major news networks, and of course here.
And again, I sat as straight as I can sit up earlier today, and so, oh, my God, look at CNN.
Jose, obviously, at some point today, either you happened to have the TV on and you were watching CNN headline news, or somebody called you on the phone, I wonder which, and you got to see the video they were running of the, in quotes, UFO.
Now, we've got, listen, everybody, we've got a video of this on my website, but it does not, it has not done as much justice in the video as, frankly, it was on CNN.
They did a very good job.
They slowed the video, then they stopped it, put a circle around it.
This, whatever in the hell, they called it a UFO with the airliner.
You broke the news on rods worldwide on the radio.
And at that time, I was discovering, I was, you know, saying that they are cylindrical-shaped objects anywhere from 50 to 100 feet long, and they're traveling at high velocities.
And basically, they're cylindrical-shaped objects that appear to be a living form of some kind, some kind of a life form.
And basically, it's a creature or a life form that can grow anywhere from four inches to a couple of feet long to hundreds of feet in length.
Well, you know, I think people have seen it every day.
They've seen this phenomenon every day.
They just passed it off as an instinct, like I did in the first place.
But cameras have a unique quality around them.
They have an infrared signal that allows it to look in a further dimension, basically, if you might want to look at, that allows it to capture things that are traveling at higher velocities.
When you slow the video down, you see what it is for what it is.
And the fact that Fox TV captured this on high-broadcast quality cameras, they have a real good definitive shape to this object.
I mean, when I was contacted by Fox TV, they told me, look, we've got what looks like a rod, but we think it's a UFO.
We think it's something else.
I said, no, it's a rod.
But they keep going for this UFO angle, which is fine.
It's an unidentified flying object because who am I to say?
Maybe it is something other than a life form.
But from all the research that we've done for the last eight years, it appears to be a living form of some kind.
And if they do, maybe they eat ether, which is an upper part of the atmospheric area.
When we find out about contrails, Jim Peters, who you know is my associate, he found that the Army disclosed facts that they're spraying aluminum oxide and other chemicals up there, trying to kill bacteria that is airborne in the thousands of feet above Earth.
So if there's bacteria up there, maybe that's what these things eat.
Well, they appear to be attracted to the ones that are flying or swimming close to the ground, they appear to be attracted to low-frequency sound and electromagnetic fields.
And we've got a lot of them flying over telephone poles, power lines of this nature.
And then we've got these high-altitude rods like the Albany one.
And then I've put one on your site up on the internet of a rod that goes right through the contrails of a jet.
And we know that jet's probably about 30,000 feet.
I mean, after all, in Albany, there was also a jet close by.
Could there be anything with regard to the passage of jet aircraft or maybe the contrails or chemtrails, whatever it is they leave these days, that attracts these things or the speed of the aircraft itself?
I've often thought, you know, these rods, they seem to operate at a much higher vibrational level than we do, as well as frequency, which means it's hard to see them.
And yet we capture them on film, so there's obviously something very real about them.
So could they be attracted to things that are moving much faster than the average talk show host?
Exactly, and the reason we get to see a jet, you know, traveling that fast is because it's way up there and it has a broader range than our perception.
I mean, we have footage of a tank that's firing off these rapid shells out of Sweden, and these rods are beating the shell casings before they hit the ground.
The rod's already gone through and chased the shell.
So maybe they are attracted to a high-velocity object of that nature, and we just, well, I know we don't see them, you know.
Well, we can't chase shells, so if they can chase a shell fired, then that would almost absolutely lend itself toward the concept that they are traveling at a much faster rate, much higher vibrational level, and they become moderately interested in fast-moving objects.
Yeah, I've got one going through a contrail or chemtrail on the internet as well.
And we have other shots of these things that go through the clouds.
I mean, these things are huge.
And we just don't know what they are.
We've got footage from NASA where these things are coming into Earth.
Or I'm not saying rods are coming to Earth, but rod objects that are traveling at high velocities in space, you know, just moving right in.
And we just don't know what we're dealing with until we investigate it further.
And I think this event that occurred in Albany, New York, now that the FBI is involved and some other scientific forensics experts, I think this will probably be the break that we've always looked for where they'll start taking it serious.
Jose, in order that the research on these, whatever they are, continue, in order that other people now jump in and we try and figure out what we're dealing with here, how do you think that we should proceed?
If there were money available, scientists, how do we proceed to investigate these?
Well, the first thing we do, of course, like you said, it needs money.
It takes funding, and that's what we have not had.
The next step that we must proceed, we need to get these scientists, these forensic experts, the authorities, to say, look, we have something here that is in our atmosphere, and they are in our homes, too, because, you know, we do have footage of things inside the cat's chase.
And, you know, it's something that's a living organism that needs to be checked.
We don't know if they're beneficial to us.
We don't know if they're harmful to us as far as viruses are concerned.
On the other side of the coin, if they are a living life form of some kind, they have a metabolism that is so far advanced than any living creature in the world.
There could be the cure to anything that ails us physically.
Well, shouldn't this, along with all the photographic evidence that you have and the presentations you've been made, be enough for somebody at a university level somewhere to say, all right, this bears really serious investigation.
We're dealing with something that we don't understand here, and we're scientists, and we would like to understand it, so let's look into it.
Well, I think now that the FBI saw one of these things fly over one of their airports, especially in Albany, New York, and now that we have a forensic expert that works for these people has come forth and they said, look, we don't know what it is, we're investigating it.
I think now we're going to finally get, you know, the scientific communities and the authorities.
I welcome everybody, man, to come in and let's find what it is.
And I think this is the break that we've always needed.
And I'm glad you're here with me, you know, after the six-year run that we've had with you on your shows.
I take it, Jose, that you're prepared to make all your video archives and all the information you've collected over the years available to legitimate investigators who want to take off with this now.
They swim through the air like the fish swims through the sea, and that's what the first thing that we noticed was these things just effortlessly swim in the air, you know, extremely high.
And now here from Chicago, he's actually in this country right now, I think, Chicago Here's Graham Hancock Graham, hi Hi Art How are you doing?
Nice to talk to you again Good, great to talk to you as well, Graham Graham, I've been following really closely a story down off the coast of Cuba Me too About this apparent...
They say...
They say it's like a city with structures, with buildings, with pyramids, with roads And half a mile under the ocean, 2,200 some odd feet below the surface of the ocean off the coast of Cuba People have said, "Well, gee, maybe it's Atlantis" and people are thinking all kinds of things Paulina
Zalitsky, the Cuban/Russian scientist who's found all this That's right Extraordinary...
It's an extraordinary story Yes And one of the most extraordinary things about it is that it's still not been possible to put the necessary funding in place to do the complete research there to satisfy us all on what it actually is And that, unfortunately, is because of the...
there's a mindset in science that says such things just cannot be and therefore it must be some kind of optical illusion on the on the sonar scans or some kind of some kind of illusion that we're seeing on the on the video images that have been brought back by the remotely operated vehicles.
I've seen some of the images and when I was researching Underworld, the new book, we talked to Pauline Zelitski and we talked to other people around her and I've included some material and discussion of this in the new book.
And what's amazing is that over the last few months it really hasn't moved forward much.
And this to me says where are our priorities in research and why do we get so focused on a particular idea of the past that when something new and intriguing comes like this, we don't have scientists rushing from all over the world to put in the necessary funding to provide the equipment to get down there and find out what's going on.
I mean at this stage you have to say maybe, maybe not.
I am more and more inclined to the view that we are looking at the remains of a great city underwater.
But it has to be settled with research in the field.
And the staggering thing is, although we've known about this for more than a year now, that it's not been possible to put in place the necessary equipment and personnel to do this research properly.
I hope that it will come.
The depths of the site is the most mysterious thing about it.
In other words, in order for something to have gone below the surface that far, how old would that, in conventional thinking, how old would that make whatever is down there?
Okay, well, here's the first issue is the issue of sea level rise at the end of the Ice Age.
That accounts for about 400 feet of submersion.
And that in itself was a dramatic series of events that raised sea level by 400 feet and swallowed up 10 million square miles of the best land on Earth.
So we've got 1,800 feet of submersion left to account for.
And this is a very serious problem.
One possibility, and scientists I've talked to say that it's a real possibility in that area, is that in addition to the sea level rise issue, we may be dealing with some kind of underwater landslide, which carried down a slope a whole mass of man-made construction and carried it down to a much greater depth than it would have otherwise gone.
The other possibility is massive tectonic activity, earthquakes.
But in both cases, you have to ask yourself how the material has managed to remain so intact through such a cataclysm that would carry it so deep.
If it had been submerged by sea level rise alone, the possibility of it remaining intact is there.
But if it's been submerged by massive earthquake or a massive underwater landslide, it's amazing that it's still intact.
Nevertheless, miracles do happen.
The other possibility, much more, much further out there, is that we're dealing with something from a different epoch of human civilization entirely.
As you know, I focus a lot on the last 12,000 years, the last 13,000, 14,000 years, the end of the Ice Age and the huge sea level rise that took place then.
It's in eerily the right place to fit in with Plato's description.
Plato is very clear on his dates, and he puts the submersion of Atlantis 9,000 years before the story reached the Greeks, which in our terms is 9,600 BC, which is 11,500 years ago.
And dramatic and extraordinary things were happening in the world at that time, and there was a huge sea level rise, and huge floods were pouring off the melting ice caps on land.
But still, if it's 11,500 years ago, we have to find some other factor that explains the depth of submergence beyond sea level rise, and at the same time explains the site staying as intact as it seems to have done.
So I think we have one of the great scientific mysteries of our time, and it's just very sad that science has responded to it with the usual cynicism and dismissal, which leads us to ignore so much that could enlighten us about ourselves.
Well, I know you're probably not going to have an answer for this, but one thing I thought about when I first heard about the story was that, you know, we've been at odds with Cuba for a long time.
And without any doubt, U.S. submarines, as well as those submarines of many other nations, have been all over that ocean bottom.
And so our U.S. naval forces would be well aware or should be well aware.
There's a very good chance that they are, and precisely because they are military, that that knowledge is military, there's also a very good chance that it would not be made public.
Because were it to be made public, then that would reveal how much is known about the whole security.
Yeah, there would be quite a few other reasons that I can think of.
I think that the prospect of lost civilizations, particularly one that may belong, as I said earlier on, to a totally other epoch of the human past.
I mean, as I said, I have focused on the last 12 to 15,000 years and what happened in that period.
And, you know, we're not considering the possibility that there may have been human cultures that are lost to our memory long, long before that.
And if we go far enough back in the time frame, we may find a way to account for the submersion of this site without a massive earthquake that should have destroyed all the structures, that would leave it looking the way that it does.
But at the end of the day, these ideas, and I've come to realize this more and more as I've dealt with this subject over the years, these ideas are quite subversive.
It rocks the boat, if you'll excuse the pun.
It shakes things up very badly to consider that our whole idea of how we evolved and developed as a species, as a culture, as a civilization, that this whole idea is wrong.
That's the bedrock on which we construct our reality today, is our sense of the past.
And if it's all wrong and we're missing enormous chapters in the human story, perhaps not just going back 12 or 15,000 years, although that's extraordinary enough, but going back 100 or 200,000 years or half a million years into the past, if evidence comes to light which shows that that is indeed so, then almost everything about modern reality suddenly gets shaky.
Its foundations are knocked out from under it, and we begin to question everything in the world.
We begin to question the whole judgment of science on what humans are about and what we're for.
In some ways, even more, because it strikes at the roots of what we think ourselves to be.
It causes us to question everything about our own past and therefore everything about our own present.
And the methods that we use to understand the human predicament, which these days are based on a very hard-headed scientific point of view, it's become the new religion.
We're persuaded that science has the answers for everything.
Well, suppose we suddenly find out that the answers that science gave us about the story of our past is just completely wrong, completely wrong, and we've just been looking at the tip of the iceberg and that there's a huge depth of history and prehistory behind us when things happen that we haven't reckoned with at all.
It's very disturbing.
I think it's very exciting, but it's also very disturbing.
And you can see why people might feel, were they privy to that knowledge?
What is suggested and what we see on the side scan radar and all the rest of it, what's suggested down there, does that jive with other stuff that we're finding in the world?
It was partly a reaction to my critics, and I have many of those, who said, listen, Hancock is talking about lost civilizations and he's comparing strange similarities all around the world and well and good, but he's not giving us any hard evidence.
So I looked long and hard at the mythology of the world, which is dominated by flood myths, and which speaks of a terrible series of cataclysms that destroyed a former civilization.
It's amazing how many myths and traditions there are around the world like this.
So what they all have in common is that that civilization was destroyed by water, was destroyed by being covered by the sea, by the ocean.
And I asked myself, could this ever have happened within the reasonable past of our culture as we know it?
And true enough, it did happen at the end of the Ice Age.
Between roughly 17,000 and 7,000 years ago, there was this 400-foot rise in sea level, and a staggering amount of land went underwater and disappeared from view.
And archaeologists will tell you, hey, we've got that tape too.
We have marine archaeologists and they've explored underwater.
Well, no, they haven't really explored underwater.
There is marine archaeology.
They do good work, but more than 90% of it is concerned with looking for shipwrecks.
And the place you look for shipwrecks is not necessarily the place you look for lost civilizations.
The marine archaeology that's been done specifically looking for sites on those areas of land that were flooded at the end of the ice age is an extremely tiny proportion of the whole.
And set against the more than 10 million square miles of good land that were washed away and covered at the end of the ice age, it's infinitesimally small.
They've hardly touched it.
Virtually the entire coast of India, vast coastline, has just never been inspected by archaeologists at all, for example.
Same with Africa.
Same with Southeast Asia.
And oddly enough, in India, in the two places that have been inspected, we found extremely unexpected underwater ruins, which don't make sense at all.
And I think gradually what's happening as more and more research is done in this field, and I've tried to open the door with this, with Underworld by going diving myself and seeing this stuff for myself, as more and more is done and people become aware of this possibility, and particularly as scuba divers all around the world become aware that there might be more down there than fish and pretty coral, that we are going to find even more.
I think we're at the beginning of a new epoch of exploration where all the dreams and mysteries and myths of the past turn out to be true, rooted and grounded in truth.
And we should be kicking ourselves for not having listened to them long ago.
Well, one would suppose that these myths would survive if even just a few humans somehow survive.
I mean, they would be carried forth, and that's exactly what's occurred.
now i i don't know i mean after all we know that if you put a long chain of people and they whisper something down the line you end up with a different story at the end so it may not be exactly as told but there's probably some nugget of It bears some relationship to the original thing.
And this was what haunted me, was this feeling that we had these stories from all around the world, all essentially speaking of the same thing.
So I felt in the quite correct demand of my critics to present more evidence for a lost civilization that the best place I could possibly look for that evidence was underwater.
And when I turned to science for further information, I worked with a top-class geologist who's one of the world's top three experts in sea level rise.
His information showed that in the places where the flood mists are thickest on the ground, where we hear most about a great flood, these are also the places that were most extensively flooded at the end of the Ice Age.
And at that point, I saw a strategy unfolding, which, of course, I cannot search the whole of the world's oceans on my own.
I don't have any institutional funding.
I must narrow down the search.
So I narrowed it down using science and using myths.
And that was one reason why I wrote Underworld.
But another reason was simple curiosity, which was sparked off in Japan when I was traveling there back in 1996.
We're here at the bottom of the hour, and so we'll take a break.
And the story about Japan is equally fascinating because it probably leads right into the story about Cuba.
My guest is Graham Hancock.
We're talking about what's beneath our ocean, something perhaps long forgotten, but not entirely forgotten, because the words are still told by those charged with remembering them.
I'm Mark Bell.
unidentified
What we do, you know, deep no one wear by your side.
You feel I love you.
You know it's just your foolish man.
Got me on my knees.
Call Art Bell in the Kingdom of Nye from west of the Rockies at 1-800-618-8255.
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This is Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell from the Kingdom of Nigh.
Since you mentioned that I am in the States, I am indeed.
I'm in Chicago at the moment.
I'm going back to New York tomorrow where I'm giving a lecture in a Barnes & Noble in Chelsea, New York at 7:00.
I'm giving lectures also in Boulder and in Denver and at three locations around San Francisco and also...
And obviously we don't want to go use up air time to give the details of all of these places, but on my website, on the underworld page of my website, is a complete tour schedule for me, the bookshops, the contacts at www.grahamhancock.com.
And if anybody in the wonderful Art Bell audience, which I know from past experience is a great audience of thinking people, would like to come along to those talks if they happen to be in those areas, they'll find that on the underworld page of GrahamHancock.com.
I mean, in terms of myths, or perhaps not, but things written in the Bible, for example, I mean, there's Noah and there was the very great flood, right?
I mean, this is the first contact that many of us have with the worldwide phenomenon of the so-called flood myth, which I think the word myth, unfortunately, it's there in our language and we don't have any other word to use for it.
But it's so often used to mean something that isn't true, something that's a fantasy, something that's an invention.
And what I'm learning is that it so often is true.
Well, our first contact with the worldwide flood story is indeed through the Bible and through the Old Testament and the story of Noah.
And that story does absolutely speak of a former civilization, the antediluvian civilization, which became wicked and which was punished with the great flood, that Noah survived and we're told that it was his line, his children, that passed down to future generations of mankind.
Well, of course, you know, a lot of people, scientists even, say that it's just plain impossible for there to be a lost civilization that predates a modern man.
Well, that's exactly why I set out to write Underworld, because I believe that that call for evidence is reasonable.
I think that if somebody is putting himself up as challenging the existing model, which I have been doing, then A, I should expect to be fiercely criticized and attacked, which I have been, and B, I should be required to produce the hard evidence that scientists can understand.
And so that's what I've tried to do.
And I've asked myself many times why there is this almost religious commitment to a particular model of history.
There's no doubt that science in many ways is the new religion which abolishes all things that cannot be weighed or measured or counted as simply not existing.
But I've asked myself, is it some kind of conspiracy to hide the truth?
I think often it's not.
I think the people that I've come up against, for the most part, the very large majority of them, are decent, honest people who truly, deeply and passionately believe in the model of the past that they work with.
And therefore they feel that anybody who is providing an alternative view, who's saying, no, that's possibly wrong, you have to consider other things, that that person is not only wrong, but in some way evil, and in some way out to mislead the public from the true past.
Anybody who's studied the story of the Inquisition in the Catholic Church from about the early 13th century onwards will find great similarities between what was done to heretics then and what is done now.
And I think in a world that has become largely unspiritual and dominated by material thinking and dominated by science, science is the new religion.
And the reaction that opponents get is the reaction that formerly was given to heretics.
Except now they can't actually burn us at mistake.
And the reason that I visited there was because my book, Fingerprints of the Gods, for some reason that I still don't understand to this day, took off like a rocket in Japan.
And it was enormously popular there.
And the publishers asked me to go there several times to further promote the book and to give public lectures.
And at several of these public lectures, I was approached by Japanese citizens, ordinary people, not scientists, many of them were divers, who showed me photographs of weird and mysterious structures looking almost like pyramids underwater.
And I said, my God, what is this?
And they said, well, we don't know, but it's been found.
And the one they were focusing on was off an island called Yonaguni, which is very near to Taiwan, the most southwestern of all the Japanese islands, in fact, Yonaguni is.
And the more I looked at these images and the more my Japanese contacts talked to me about them, the more I thought, I've got to go and see this stuff for myself.
I've got to find out what's going on here.
It's so weird.
And what's it doing underwater?
And that's when I really started to think about sea level rise as an issue.
Both my wife Santa, who takes the photographs, and I, at the end of 1996, we happened to be at a conference in the Los Angeles area, and we went out to Catalina Island in quite cold weather.
And we took the first PADI certification, which allows you to dive anywhere.
Of course, at that stage, you've only done four dives.
You're not a very experienced diver, and certainly we weren't.
And we really cut our teeth on diving in the most difficult and strenuous circumstances in Yonaguni, starting in March the following year, 1997.
And since then, we've put in about 200 dives On the five major structures that lie offshore of Yonaguni.
Yeah, we've become divers, and I feel good underwater.
I never underestimate the sea.
The sea is a god, and you don't mess with gods.
But if you go with the flow and listen to its anger when it's angry, and relax with it when it wants to take you in a certain direction, it's a good place to be.
And I've learnt a lot about diving.
I've learnt a lot about breath control, because that's a very important thing underwater.
New divers tend to over-breathe and limit their time very much underwater.
So what you learn after a while is a certain calmness and a certain relaxation, and this helps a great deal.
In fact, it's a great therapy for everyday life in every way.
Well, what I've finally come to realize is that although everybody focuses on the one terraced structure, which the Japanese call Iseki Point, literally Monument Point, which lies at depths of between 60 and about 100 feet underwater off the south coast of Yonaguni, that it is not alone.
In fact, it's one of a string of structures that run all the way along the south coast of Yonaguni, with a total covering a total distance of about seven miles.
And there are five distinct structures laid out along the coast.
Four of them are cut out of solid rock, and this is why we keep having the argument about is it man-made or not?
And so are many scientists that this is a man-made structure.
It's a series of structures.
These are megalithic structures.
They're very typical megalithic architecture.
And they're also rock-hewn structures.
We find rock-hewn ancient structures all around the world.
For example, on the island of Malta, there's a place called the Hypogeum, which is cut out of solid rock and goes down 30 feet below the ground.
So cutting structures out of rock is a well-known method of ancient construction.
And that's what we're looking at off the south coast of Yonaguni.
And, you know, if there was only one thing there, and it was just one weird thing, I think it would be irresponsible to insist that it's man-made.
But when you see that it's a complex of five different structures, all quite different in character, not the same as one another, but different in character, but all megalithic or monolithic, and when you look in close detail at the way that they're worked and at what has been done to make them look the way they look, you cannot reasonably come to any other conclusion that these are man-made.
And what I've tried to do also in the book is to show that there was an ancient culture in Japan which is known to archaeologists, which goes back 16,000 years, a culture called the Jomon.
And what I've tried to show is these were the people who were responsible for this fantastic work of architecture off the coast, not just of Yonaguni, but also of a whole series of islands.
Well, the Jomon are recognized by archaeologists as mysterious in one respect.
They're thought to have been rather simple hunter-gatherers.
But 16,000 years ago, they were the first people in the world to invent pottery.
And that has always been an oddity.
Why would hunter-gatherers, at a very, supposedly a very simple level of development, have come up with his invention, the very useful invention to mankind, at least 5,000 years before anybody else known to history did so?
And the fact is, nobody else figured it out, at least according to the historians, until many, many years later.
So there was always that mystery about the Jomon.
As I began to investigate them more and more, I found Japanese archaeologists were stumbling across all sorts of stuff that didn't make sense, including evidence that the Jomon were growing rice 12,000 years ago.
Now that is 8,000 or 9,000 years before anybody else in the world was growing rice.
And finally, when we take into account what is lying around the shores of Japan, now underwater, but above water 12,000 and more years ago, we're beginning to look, I think, at a forgotten episode in the history of a known culture, which at a very early stage in its development was capable of massive works of architecture.
I think that the function in all cases is fairly clear.
These are monumental works.
They strike the eye very forcefully.
They have their own aura and atmosphere.
And the creation of monumental structures connected to religious activity is a very old custom already in Japan.
Indeed, the creation of those structures out of rock, there's an ancient tradition in Japan, nobody knows where it comes from, of venerating mysterious-looking rocks and then actually working those rocks, maneuvering them, remanipulating them, positioning them in different places so that they create the right harmony and the right atmosphere.
And in Japanese tradition, there are two ancient texts, the Nihongi and the Kojiki, which were first written down about 14 or 1500 years ago, but which were based on much older oral traditions that were gathered together by the early emperors at that time.
And what these books speak of is a time that they call the Age of the Gods, which is specified to have been more than 10,000 years before these texts were written down.
And in this miraculous and marvelous Age of the Gods, this cult of worshipping and creating monumental rock structures is said to have begun.
And I think, again, that we're looking at a myth that is true and that's pointing us in the true direction.
And that if we open our eyes, instead of seeing a culture of simple hunter-gatherers who mysteriously invented pottery, who mysteriously grew rice 12,000 years ago, who mysteriously, despite being hunter-gatherers, had permanent large-scale town-like settlements 10,000 or 11,000 years ago, what we see when we look underwater is a culture that was also building monumental structures in stone, shifting and manipulating blocks weighing up to 100 tons each.
And that must force us to reconsider entirely our concept of these people.
What's marvelous about the Jomon is that they existed as a culture, and as I say, archaeologists know this, from 16,000 years ago down to 2,000 years ago.
They remained intact as a recognizable, definable culture through all that period.
They never fought wars.
There's no evidence of any conflict amongst the Jomon.
They always seem to have been prosperous.
They seem to have found, I don't know, the secret of living in the world.
And I think that taking the inquiry underwater is the next step to understanding the mystery of these people who were there, who witnessed the end of the Ice Age, and whose great structures, I believe, were destroyed by it.
This is, again, one of the reasons why I've written Underworld, and I've tried to take very much account of the critical point of view.
I took a German geologist, Wolf Wichman, who works with Der Spiegel magazine, very, very down-to-earth guy and absolutely does not believe in lost civilizations.
I took him to Japan with me because he has always been against the idea of the structures at Yonaguni being man-made.
But I also took him to another site off the island of Okinawa, off a group of islands called the Keramas.
And I took him underwater to a depth of 110 feet where a gigantic stone circle stands on the seabed.
Gigantic.
The stones the uprights are 12 feet high.
The thing has a vast scale.
It's one of the most striking things that ever can hit the eye.
And after a series of dives on the stone circles at Kerima, Wolf Wichman had to admit there's no way, no way that nature could have made this.
Graham Hancock, standby, we're at the top of the hour.
Under our oceans, all around us, evidence of those who came before.
I wonder if we'll leave evidence like that.
From the high desert, I'm Art Bell.
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Mama's dancing with baby on her shoulder Just trying to step in the big molasses in the sky I could sing, I had a moon Everything you always wanted more Anything you're longing for Black velvet and that little boy smile Black velvet and
that snow summons down A new religion that'll bring us to your knees Black velvet is a queen To recharge Bell in the Kingdom of Nye, from west of the Rockies, dial 1-800-618-8255.
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This is Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell on the Premier Radio Network.
I've got Graham Hancock here, who's authored many, many, many books about what once was.
His latest is Underworld.
Check it out on my website.
In the meantime, we'll be talking about it.
Well, all right, once again, here is Graham Hancock, a new religion that'll bring you to your knees.
You know, I think we've already got enough religions, and I think one of the things there might be worried about, Graham, is that we would get exactly that.
In other words, if we knew the whole truth, there'd be something new to, in essence, worship.
Well, for me, it's very clear in the ancient Egyptian religion and how this evolved into another religion around about the time of Christ that was generally known by the term Gnosticism.
And Gnosticism means knowledge.
It's not a religion of faith.
It's a religion of knowledge, of finding the key to life, and of finding it by personal experience and personal inquiry.
Again and again, if you study the ancient Egyptian religious texts, you see that there is this emphasis on knowledge, on understanding, and of living our life as though it were a work of art, that we're given 70 or whatever years, however many we get, to work on and to perfect.
And this is so far removed from the notion of blind faith that we find in more recent religions.
And it's always been interesting to me that Gnosticism and Hermeticism, which I do believe are the intellectual descendants of the ancient Egyptian faith, of the ancient Egyptian religion, how they were stamped out and punished by the Christian church, unfortunately, in the early days.
It is seeking the knowledge of the mystery of life, understanding, absolutely understanding why we're here, realizing there is much in common with Buddhism and Hinduism also, realizing that what we see as material life is not reality, or at any rate is not the only reality.
It's a place into which we're plunged.
It's a theater of experience.
We're dealt the cards almost according to a lottery.
Who knows what kind of life circumstances we're going to get.
But only we are in control of the choices we make confronted by those circumstances and what we do with them.
And the ancient Egyptian religion always dwelt on that, that our choices are our own, but we must live with the consequences of those choices.
specifically the God Thos, the God of wisdom, brings the world into existence with a word, with a word.
And you are reminded there of the New Testament notion of the word as something above and beyond just the plain simple meaning of a word.
So there is a notion of creation, as though this level of reality is created and is created for creatures in material form to face challenges, to confront themselves, to learn why they're there.
And when you learn, it seems that the first point of learning why we're here is to understand that it's an illusion, that it is not all there is, that it's only a tiny fragment of reality.
And once you understand that, then you understand many other things as well.
It's rather easy then, is it not, to believe that civilizations, perhaps not just 16,000 or more years ago, but even in cycles prior to that, have come and gone and come and gone, and man has come and gone.
Life as we know it has come, or maybe as we don't know it, has come and gone.
And then when you bring our best modern tools of science to bear on this, you do find that the Earth has been through cataclysmic processes many times in the last millions of years.
Many times the Earth has wiped itself clean.
The one I know best about is the end of the ice age.
And in many ways, that was like a huge eraser being rubbed across the surface of the Earth and just rubbing out the previous world.
I mean, just to give an example of that, the ice caps that sat on the northern hemisphere, and particularly over North America and over Chicago, where I'm sitting now, these ice caps were two miles thick, and they pressed down On the earth, creating huge basins underneath them up to 2,000 feet deep because of the weight of the ice caps.
And those ice caps were in motion.
They were grinding across the ground like enormous glaciers.
So anything that had been there before is thoroughly and completely rubbed away.
It is just absolutely inaccessible.
We will never know what was there before the ice caps were laid in place.
So dramatically and comprehensively erased that almost nothing is left.
And again, you come back to the flood.
It's not just an issue of rising sea levels.
The ice that melted on those ice caps didn't just drip away into the sea.
It accumulated in enormous lakes on the top of the ice caps.
And remember, those lakes are two miles above the land surface.
When the border of the lake broke, when the plug or the dam that held that water in place, and that might have accumulated 4,000 years of melting, when it broke, and mainstream science accepts this, we had the most awful and cataclysmic floods pouring down off the ice cap,
waves that were running at 1,000 miles an hour, 600 feet high, roaring down the ice caps at fantastic speed, tearing across the lands, creating the finger lakes of northern New York State, the scab lands of New Jersey in the process, and bursting into the sea and then raising the sea levels.
Anything that stood in the way of those catastrophic floods pouring off the land would just have been swept away forever.
And with what you're suggesting, and what they're suggesting, one of the reasons people might not want to buy into any of this is because they're scared.
And what this new science is showing us is that the kind of period we live in now, which is technically an interglacial, a period between ice ages, has, in the past, there have been a series of interglacials in the past.
And the last one was called the Aemian.
And these interglacials have been very turbulent times in terms of climate.
Very rapid climate flips, very strange weather conditions, wild and dangerous weather.
And really the last 10,000 years, we've had it good.
We've had it much better than it's been in previous interglacials.
And what seems to be happening now with the wildness in the weather, the unpredictability of the weather, indeed the flooding that's taking place all over the world, is a reversion to type, that we seem to be coming back into the rhythm of the Earth.
And that rhythm, unfortunately, promises troubled times ahead.
It focuses on a number of specific locations, which is the east coast of China, between Taiwan and China, around Japan, all around the islands of Japan, and the incredible mystery that I believe that Japan represents, which we've never understood in the West, and it's never really been written about in the West before.
It focuses also on the Mediterranean, with particular reference to the island of Malta.
A little known place lies about 90 miles south of Sicily.
Today it's just a group of three tiny islands.
But 12,000 years ago, those three tiny islands were joined together and connected by a land bridge 90 miles long to the southern tip of Sicily.
And all of that was flooded with the rising seas at the end of the Ice Age.
Now Malta contains very mysterious structures on land, supposedly the oldest freestanding temples in the world, gigantic megalithic constructions again.
And no evidence of any background for the construction of these things.
They just come out of the blue.
I've investigated the possibility and dived to investigate that possibility that the answers to this mystery may be underwater where the archaeologists haven't looked, where the evolution and the early stages of these bizarre and amazing temples are to be seen.
And then also of the Bahama Banks, particularly Bimini, where I think everyone's heard of the Bimini Road.
And most people believe that the Bimini Road was thoroughly debunked many years ago and written off as just a peculiar natural formation.
I've re-examined this mystery in Underworld and I've tried to show that it may have been written off much too quickly.
And it would seem that if there were some worldwide catastrophic event, that there would be land archaeological artifacts to support what you're finding under the oceans as well.
I mean, if we can find the bones of dinosaurs, we ought to be able to find what's left of the civilizations we're talking about occasionally on land as well.
So they would be in southern latitudes and they would be close to the ocean.
They would be close to the resources of the sea where the sea provides a kind of microclimate of its own and also allows people to travel because these ice caps are blocking the land masses.
To travel, the best way to travel is by sea.
So the higher cultures, the more advanced cultures of that period would naturally have gravitated and held the coast as their own.
And it's precisely those coastal areas that were swamped when the sea level rose, that disappeared from view at that time.
And that's why I use the title underworld, because I believe there is a whole underworld of unexplored territory where we just don't pay attention to it because it kind of doesn't strike us as important to do so.
But when we think about it, when we put ourselves back at the end of the ice age in the world as it was then, it's precisely those areas now underwater that people would have chosen to live in.
But another point is, and this touches on some of my previous work, is that I do believe that there are quite a number of large-scale structures scattered around the world on land, such as the Great Sphinx, which have been misdated, which actually do belong to an earlier epoch, but which we have found ways to fit into the established picture of the past.
I thought it was really awful the way that it was done.
It was one of the most exploitative pieces of television that I've ever seen.
And it's what we call a wind-up in England, where they just keep winding you up and winding you up and winding you up until you come to the last minute.
And they knew all along what they were going to show us, I believe.
I mean, I would have been more convinced if I'd seen them drill that hole, but the fact that it was pre-drilled, and I'm asked to believe that nobody looked through it beforehand, I don't think so.
And if they'd looked through it, they would have seen what we saw when the camera did go through it, which is very interesting.
A second door beyond it.
Very interesting indeed, but doesn't justify, what was it, two hours of exploitative TV beforehand that we all sit and watch?
If they'd told us the truth, none of us would have watched it.
So a terrible wind-up, and unfortunately, a wind-up driven by an agenda, which is the agenda of Orthodox archaeology, because old Zahi there, our mutual friend, and he is a good guy, I like Zahi, I love him dearly.
But he was taking every opportunity to bash the lost civilization idea, even though it wasn't necessary, even though it wasn't called for.
This, of course, is Coast to Coast AM on our bell.
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wonder if you think about me Once upon a time In your wildest dreams Call Art Bell International in the Kingdom of Nive from west of the Rockies at 1-800-6188255.
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It's posted those AM with Art Bell from the Kingdom of God.
Incidentally, those wishing to reach me may do so at my email address on Art Bell.
That's A-R-T-B-E-L-L at Minespring.com.
That's Art Bell at Minespring.com.
Bram is my guest.
His new book, Underworld, is what we're discussing.
Underworld.
That would indicate that under everything.
That is what's left.
Somehow, perhaps the water kept all of this in slightly better shape.
You know, whether it would be ancient civilizations or perhaps the rocks that built the pyramid that we surely don't understand, in some ways, these people understood either how to make of rock or to move rock in ways that we simply cannot fathom today.
That is, perhaps, except one minor or major modern example, and that would be the Coral Castle down in Florida.
I wonder if you ever got around to looking into that at all, Graham?
yes yes the word is right I think that what seems to me, and I suspect many people share this view, is that we are only realizing a tiny fraction of our potential today.
The human creature has much more potential within us than we are able to realize.
And the social context in which we live can either act as an accelerator for our potential, as I think it often did in the past, or it can act to inhibit our potential.
And unfortunately, that's what modern society is doing.
It's telling us we don't have the potential ourselves within us.
We must make machines in order to do those things that we dream of doing.
Maybe there's a whole other way of manipulating and moving in the physical world, which we have simply not explored, because we've been taught to use the powers of our mind to create machines, not to act on the physical world directly.
And I think that there was an ancient science, if you like, which has come down to us as memories of magic, which worked with the physical world directly through the power of the mind.
That may sound very far-fetched, and I freely admit that it's total speculation, although there is a basis for it in ancient traditions from all around the world.
But when I look at some of these structures and the way they've been put together and the way these vast stones have been manipulated, it's the only reasonable conclusion I can come from.
At least this, that they knew something we don't know.
And it would be very interesting for us to know it.
And again, ultimately, it brings us back to spiritual issues.
Is there a purpose and a meaning to human life, to the life of each individual, or what is it, six or eight billion of us on this planet?
Or is it simply an accident that evolved entirely by accident out of the chemical soup long, long ago?
Well, what all the ancient texts say is there is a purpose.
There is a meaning.
And the choices and the direction that we humans take rebounds on the universe that surrounds us, that it extends far beyond ourselves.
And I can't help feeling there's something to that.
And that's why I keep coming back to this issue of personal choice and what we do with our lives.
None of us can change the world, but all of us can change our immediate environment.
We can change the world around us.
We can behave in a different way to our own family.
We can behave in a different way to our own friends and enemies.
We can choose to do that if we want to, and if everybody were to make perhaps a more generous choice, a gentler choice than we tend to make in this crazy world that we live in.
The ancient Egyptian texts are very clear on this matter.
And when you follow them through into the Hermetic texts, it's stated quite explicitly.
In fact, the Hermetic texts from about 200 AD say, it's better to pay the price in this life than the next, but you will pay the price.
You will pay the price for what you do.
There is no escape from that.
It's part of the balance of the universe.
We don't get away with anything.
I'm convinced of that.
People may lead an evil and malicious life and benefit from it for 70 years, but at the end, they will pay, and they'll pay a terrible price in terms of their immortal destiny.
Would you believe it to be true that not only is there an individual price to be paid, but there is a larger societal price to be paid, that when you reach a certain level of debauchery and corruption and essential uselessness, that things are wiped clean?
In fact, some of the hard lessons of recent history show it to be so.
That, well, the Buddhists would call it karma, that there is such a thing as a national karma, as a societal karma.
And if a society goes down the road of destruction, of cruelty, of treating human beings as though they are consumable objects, of delighting in misery and pain, if a society goes down that road, sooner or later it will be destroyed itself.
It will either destroy itself or others will destroy it.
And again, if you study the myths, this is a universal theme, that the cataclysm comes not just because of blind natural forces, that the cataclysm is provoked by the actions of people.
But somehow what we do redounds on the world and the universe around us and leads to a reaction from that world and that universe.
And that we can go too far down a certain road and we will be stopped.
In effect, we will have stopped ourselves by the choices we made.
And we will get a chance to do it again, to go through it again.
And somehow, perhaps the myths are a guide.
Perhaps ancient songs and traditions that have come down to us from the past are a guide.
Perhaps our own intuition is a guide.
Everybody inside them, I believe, does know the difference between right and wrong.
I had a very moving experience in the Hopi Nation back in 1994 where I met with and talked at length with a Hopi elder.
He changed my perspective on the world forever.
There was such Paul Sifke, he was called, there was such gravity about him and such depth and such wisdom.
Very, very extraordinary man.
And speaking from his heart about the memories of his people and what these memories tell us for the future, which is that a terrible destruction is coming and it's in our hands.
There's this sense of powerlessness that we all have when confronted by the gross wrongs of the world that we live in.
We feel somehow it's not my responsibility.
It's somebody else's problem.
And in truth, there's very little that any individual can do to change things on a national scale unless he happens to be in a position of enormous power.
And even then, it would be very difficult to change the course of a nation.
Huge forces are at work, which it's very hard for any individual to deal with.
So what I come back to is, what is the sphere in which an individual can operate?
And that's in the immediate sphere that surrounds us.
And if we take the trouble to make that better, if everybody takes the trouble to make that better, and I know it sounds wishy-washy, but it's true, if everybody takes the trouble to make that better, then it is going to change the world.
It is going to change the world.
But if we give up and we don't hope and we don't believe that we can do something, if we just feel utterly powerless and don't bother, then of course the world will go along on its present direction.
This horrific sniper story in Washington at the moment.
I mean, there is a person Who lines up his gun on people he doesn't know and shoots them dead.
And that is a person who is far, far divorced from reality and from the suffering and the agony that he is causing in the lives of all the people around those people who've been killed and beyond them, in the lives of the nation as a whole and the world as a whole, that a human being can do this to a fellow human being.
And all of it comes from a disregard for the sacred value of human life.
I think if a person understood that life is sacred, above all, it is sacred.
It's a precious gift.
Each of us given those 70 or 80 years or 50 or 40, however many years we're given to live our life and learn, to take that away from a fellow human being, to steal it from a fellow human being, to deny them that potential is an act of unutterable wickedness and evil.
And if only that could be realized, then these kind of things would not happen, could not happen.
There is no good reason to steal the life of a fellow human being.
And somehow we've become so distanced from each other that seeing a death in a movie on TV becomes no different from seeing a real death in real life.
And it's this terrible distance that's grown between human beings, which is a cancer that's eating away at every one of us.
And you know it was a poet, John Don, many, many years ago, who said, each man's death diminishes me.
None of us are islands.
We're all connected to each other, and we're all part of the main.
Incredibly unreasonable, irrational violence, really tribal behavior maximized onto a global scale, behavior that was perhaps appropriate in a totally different set of circumstances and different environment, but not in the world that we live in today.
And somehow we haven't learnt to rein ourselves in and just behave decently and reasonably towards one another.
That's all that's needed, really, is just to put yourself in the other fellow's shoes and think, what was it like for him?
What is it like to have a member of your family killed in cold blood by an unknown stranger just for the hell of it?
What does it mean to that person's milieu, to his sister, to his mother, to his son?
What does it mean?
And think how awful it is and how terrible the agony is.
And that's why I think, I mean, I actually refuse to watch films that glory in horrific violence.
If it's kind of cartoon violence, you know, where you know that it's just nonsense, but where they actually dwell on the violence and the pain.
I will not watch it because I feel it makes me a smaller person.
I feel I am actually diminished by watching such a thing, and I just won't.
And I do think, you know, of course there's been arguments for years about whether television and the media, the movies have an effect or not.
I think they do have an effect.
I think they have a very insidious effect of distancing us from the reality of fellow human beings, of distancing us from their warmth and their lives and their network.
Somehow we just see them as a character in a story who can be rubbed out or not, as the case may be.
And I think that's the most insidious effect of some of the worst offerings of the film industry.
You have written so many books that have dealt with our past that you have been virtually for most of your adult life now dwelling on our past collectively, haven't you?
And in fact, I've also decided that Underworld is the last book that I will write on the theme of a lost civilization.
I will continue to write books, but I feel that I've taken with Underworld the investigation into the lost civilization possibility and presented the evidence in the best form that I can and tried to really open the door into a common sense practical inquiry into this mystery.
I feel that I don't want to take it further than that.
I hope other people will take it further than that.
I don't want to become repetitive.
I don't want to go around in a circle saying the same things again and again.
I want to move on and keep myself fresh and keep challenging myself.
And so after Underworld, which I feel has put the seal on what has been 10 years, actually rather more, 12 or 14 years of focused work on the lost civilization mystery, I want to move on from there.
And Arts, again, can I mention to your audience, I am giving a series of talks with slides across America.
And the details of those talks, which take place during the next 10 days, are all on my website, which is www.grahamhancock.com on the Underworld page at the top of the Underworld page.
And I hope to see some of your great listeners at those talks.
I am going to bail out a little bit early and take you on a sort of a time trip into the fairly distant past, I suppose, with a program that we did not too long ago.
And so if you're ready at that work, would you please roll that?