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Sept. 28, 2007 - Art Bell

02:35:51

Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell - Lost Civilizations and Consciousness - Graham Hancock

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	From the high desert and the great American Southwest, I bid you all good evening, good morning, good afternoon, wherever you may be in the world's time zones, each and every one covered by this program, Coast to Coast AM.
	It is indeed my honor and privilege to be filling in for George Norrie this night.
	My name is Art Bell.
	It really is great to be here.
	In fact, really this will answer The first question that everybody has asked me since I've left?
	Yes, I... I miss radio.
	Of course I miss radio.
	How could I not miss radio?
	It's in my blood.
	And so, I've decided to take the show back five nights a week.
	I'm just kidding.
	Heart stop out there!
	It's just great to be here.
	George is doing a wonderful job, and so I'm glad to be here.
	Just filling in for the evening, as it were.
	We'll have Graham Hancock in the next hour.
	He's a brilliant guy.
	Absolutely brilliant.
	Now, also in answer to literally thousands of emails, please go to coasttocoastam.com, see the photographs posted of Myself, Aaron, Asia, all the ABs, the family photo, as it were, of the three of us, was taken on a recent cruise to Alaska.
	That's right, you see, I've not been completely idle.
	I decided to take my wife, who is from an area very close to the equator, where the sun rises and sets at the same time, virtually every day, with the same heat and humidity, and rarely would you see an iceberg.
	Actually, never.
	No ice, no snow.
	And so I made it to Alaska.
	We went to Glacier Bay, Juneau, Ketchikan, Sitka, you know, all of that.
	And it was a blast.
	And if you could have seen the expression on my wife's face when she saw ice that was, well, I guess millions of years old, actually.
	You know, that big, deep, blue ice.
	It was all worth it.
	And it was a lot of fun.
	Went on Holland America Lines, and it was a blast.
	Now, our daughter, Asia, is now, as you will see on the website, and you better take a look because I think, you know, those stay up for 24 hours, maybe.
	So, take a look.
	She is four months old on Sunday.
	Going to be four months old on Sunday.
	And, you know, like a proud daddy, I could sit here and, believe me, I could... She's an amazing child.
	Now, I don't know that all babies are like this, but I'm telling you folks, this baby, Asia is just the happiest child.
	I mean, it's like somebody gave her a happy pill.
	She smiles and she laughs, she's laughing now, all the time.
	So that photograph you see there is not unusual.
	She's doing it all the time.
	I don't care what it is, you look at her and she breaks out into a giant smile.
	She wakes up in her crib, and you go in there, and, you know, this big smile, just like the one you see in the photograph there.
	She doesn't even cry.
	She's beginning to, you know, exercise her throat.
	She has discovered her voice, but she doesn't cry.
	Rarely, rarely ever does she cry.
	Although she's on the verge of talking.
	So she's way ahead of herself.
	So I could sit here and I, you know, I could brag and brag and brag and brag, but she is an amazing child.
	I've never seen anything like it in my whole life, nor has my wife.
	Now, I want to give you my email addresses.
	I don't get a chance to do that very often, so if you want to reach me, you can reach me.
	I'm artbell, A-R-T-B-E-L-L at AOL.com or artbell at mindspring.com.
	And really, there's not a whole lot more news, frankly, from the desert.
	Well, except proving that age does not automatically inculcate wisdom in anybody, particularly myself.
	July 4th, Independence Day, I was sitting with Aaron on the front porch of the house.
	And in the distance, you could hear the fireworks going off.
	Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.
	You know, celebration.
	And I talked to Erin about why we celebrate Independence Day in the U.S.
	and who we're independent from and all the rest of it.
	And she said, OK, let's set off a firecracker.
	And immediately, flashing back to my youth, I said, why I have firecrackers?
	And I went inside and I fetched, well, what more or less amounted to a quarter stick of dynamite, actually.
	Starcrackers, sort of.
	Big one.
	And, um, like an idiot, went out there and said, okay, hon, watch this!
	Famous last words, right?
	Lit it up, threw it in the driveway.
	And, being forewarned, my young wife put her hands over her ears.
	The appropriate response.
	I didn't.
	BOOM!
	This was not just one of those bangs.
	This was BOOM!
	You know, the kind that rattles your gut Well, my hearing went away.
	And I mean, for the next 24 to 48 hours, I didn't hear much of anything.
	This weird little sound in my ears.
	It was bad, really bad.
	And then it settled down to sort of an annoying tinnitus, which I still have to this very day.
	So on the 4th of July, I did the umpteenth stupid thing in my life and more or less destroyed a portion of my own hearing.
	Some days it's okay, some days it's not.
	Anyway, there you have it.
	What a celebration, eh?
	Alright, let's look briefly at the world, never a pleasant duty, and then the rest of the news.
	Soldiers and police took control of the streets Friday.
	I don't know if you've seen what's been going on in Miramar, but my God.
	The gentle Buddhists against the guys with guns.
	So they fired warning shots this time, tear gas, scattered a few pro-democracy protesters, ventured out as a military hunter there, sealed off Buddhist monasteries, cut the public internet access, because a lot of pictures of the torture there that's been going on have been leaking out, so they cut the internet.
	It's the third day of harsh government crackdown.
	It just happens again and again there.
	The streets were empty of the mass gatherings that have peacefully challenged the regime daily for nearly two weeks, leaving only some small groups of activists to be chased about by thousands of security police.
	Big deal on CNN and elsewhere.
	A young girl who had been seen as being sexually assaulted in a homemade videotape is now safe, happy apparently, and alive, certainly, with relatives, according to sheriff's officials here in Nye County.
	Right here in Nye County, Nevada.
	A woman who spent eight days trapped in a wrecked vehicle.
	There's a terror for you.
	Can you imagine eight days and eight nights of terror Severe injuries, but brain functions normal.
	She can move her arms and legs.
	Tanya Ryder is her name.
	33 years of age.
	Found alive.
	Dehydrated, albeit, at the bottom of a steep ravine in suburban Maple Valley on Thursday.
	Up in the Seattle area.
	Helen Jensen can still picture the bottle of Tylenol.
	You know, that was 25 years ago.
	You remember the Tylenol mess?
	She can still remember the bottle perched in her medicine cabinet.
	She feels the receipt that she pulled from the wastebasket.
	She hears the pills that she poured onto the kitchen table and recalls the absolute certainty, even before she finished counting, that pills from the bottle in her hand had killed the 27-year-old man who lived there, as well as two of his relatives.
	So they never found anybody.
	Caught who did that.
	A student gunman held a high school drama class hostage Friday, firing shots, holding three of the students for more than an hour before police persuaded him to surrender according to authorities there.
	Nobody hurt.
	Police wouldn't say what the 17-year-old's motive might have been, but several students said he was distraught over the breakup that he apparently had with his girlfriend the night before.
	When I was a teen and you broke up with a girl, you went into your room, crashed on your bed, perhaps cried and listened to sad songs on the radio.
	You didn't pick up a gun and go shoot a bunch of people.
	In a moment, we'll be back with the rest of the news.
	Remember the bug that they were going to put in Spock's ear in Star Trek, one of the movies?
	You remember that?
	Here it is!
	Sounds like science fiction, I know, but unfortunately it's true.
	There is now a killer amoeba living in certain lakes which apparently enters the body through the nose and then attacks the brain where it actually feeds.
	That's right, feeds on your brain, eats your brain, until you die.
	Even though encounters with a microscopic bug are extraordinarily rare, thank God, it has killed six boys and young men this year.
	The spike in cases has health officials very concerned.
	They're predicting more cases in the future, saying, quote, this is definitely something we need to track.
	That's according to Michael Beach, a specialist in recreational waterborne illnesses for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
	Quoting, This is a heat-loving amoeba.
	As water temperatures go up, it does better, said Beach.
	In future decades, as temperatures rise, we'll expect to see more cases.
	According to the CDC, the amoeba killed 23 people in the U.S.
	from 1995 through 1994.
	This year, though, Health officials have noticed quite a spike with six cases, three in Florida, two in Texas, one in Arizona.
	CDC knows of only several hundred cases worldwide since its discovery in Australia in the 1960s.
	Today was certainly the first time I'd heard a word about it, but the amoeba will multiply with more heat, and more heat is what we're getting.
	The area covered by sea ice in the Arctic has now Shrunk to its lowest level since satellite measurements started about 30 years ago, opening up now, they knew it was going to happen, opening up the Northwest Passage, a long-sought shortcut between Europe and Asia that has been historically impassable, but thanks to the heat, it can now be navigated.
	Leif Todal Pedersen from the Danish National Space Center said, and I quote, We've seen the ice-covered area drop to around 3 million square kilometers, which is about a million square kilometers less than the previous minima of 2005 and 2006.
	There's been a reduction of the ice cover over the last 10 years.
	Now get this, listen carefully, over the last 10 years, of about 100,000 square meters per year on average.
	So, a drop of a million square kilometers in just one year is extreme And something to worry a great deal about.
	So it's getting warmer.
	And this, too, sounds like the plot for a scary B-movie.
	But I'm sorry to say, it's true.
	The Associated Press reporting, germs go into space on a rocket.
	And they come back stronger and deadlier than ever.
	I'm sorry to report this is real.
	The germ, Salmonella, best known as a culprit of food poisoning.
	The trip, Space Shuttle STS-115, September of 2006.
	The reason?
	Scientists wanted to see how much space travel affects germs.
	So, they took some along.
	Carefully wrapped up for the ride.
	The result?
	Mice fed with the space germs were three times more likely to get sick and died quicker than others fed identical germs that had remained behind on Earth.
	Wherever humans go, we all know, microbes go.
	You can't sterilize humans.
	Therefore, as we go, so go the microbes, right?
	And remember, the humans and the microbes are coming back to Earth.
	I wonder how carefully they've really considered this.
	Now, how much more deadly were the microbes that came back?
	Well, after 25 days, 40% of the mice given the Earth-bound salmonella were still alive and kicking.
	That's compared with only 10% of those dosed with the germs from space.
	And the researchers found it took about one-third as much of the space germs to kill half the mice Compared with the germs, it had been on Earth as a control.
	The researchers actually found 167 genes had changed in the salmonella that went into space.
	My God.
	Hope they're taking good showers when they come back.
	To the untrained eye, the tiny misshapen fatty blobs on Giovanni Murta's microscope slide wouldn't look very impressive.
	But when the Italian scientist saw their telltale green fluorescent glint, he quickly understood he had achieved something fairly remarkable and taken a vital step toward building a living organism from scratch.
	Getting close to God's work, huh?
	The green glow was proof that his fragile creations were capable of making their own proteins, a crucial ability of all living things, and vital for carrying out all other aspects of life.
	We're getting very close, folks, to being able to create life.
	I wonder if we really want that responsibility.
	It's only a first step, though.
	The discovery will hasten efforts by scientists to build the world's first synthetic organism.
	It could also prove a significant development in the multi-billion dollar battle to exploit the technology for manufacturing commercially valuable chemicals, you know, like drugs, biofuels, or cleaning up pollution.
	So it could be good, or...
	According to some scientists, it could be very bad.
	The application of nanotechnology, boy we get to read about all this new stuff, has allowed Russia to detonate the world's most powerful airborne bomb.
	The top military official in Russia announced that the artifact, thus far not named, is top secret.
	He revealed it contains a substance essentially more powerful than truffle, but gave no details about the explosive load.
	The test demonstrated that given its effectiveness and prospects, this new war item is, well, they think every bit as good as a nuclear bomb.
	The military official told local TV the new bomb does not contain contaminations, possible contaminants rather, for the environment from either a chemical or radiological point of view.
	With lesser mass than its U.S.
	atomic relative, this artifact is what they call it, is four times more potent.
	Its temperature in the epicenter, two times higher, and ground zero, twenty times larger.
	Now I'm not sure if I believe all of that.
	You can't believe all that comes from Russia.
	But if so, they've got something we don't want dropped anywhere near us.
	Speaking of Russia, their strategic bombers have resumed Cold War-style long-haul missions to areas patrolled by NATO and the U.S.
	In fact, a Russian bomber flew over the U.S.
	naval base on the island of Guam Wednesday and, in quotes, exchanged smiles with U.S.
	pilots who had scrambled to track it.
	It has always been the tradition of our long-range aviation, said a Russian general, to fly far into the ocean and meet U.S.
	aircraft carriers and greet U.S.
	pilots visually.
	Now I understand some of the greetings that they sent us while passing near our aircraft were not quite as friendly as perhaps they are today.
	A major cosmic pileup involving four large galaxies could give rise to one of the largest galaxies the universe has ever known.
	Each of the four galaxies is, get this, at least the size of our Milky Way.
	So each one of the four is gigantic, each home to billions of stars.
	The galaxies will eventually merge into a single colossal galaxy up to ten times as massive as our own Milky Way.
	Can you even imagine that?
	Go out on a clear night, we have them here in the desert, and look up at the Milky Way.
	Millions and billions of stars, and it's four times, actually when it gets together, ten times as massive as our own Milky Way.
	When the merger is complete, it will be one of the biggest galaxies in the universe.
	The finding, to be detailed in an upcoming issue of Astrophysical Journal Letters, gives scientists their first real glimpse into a galaxy merger involving multiple big galaxies.
	And by the way, NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope has, get this, detected enough water vapor to fill all of the oceans on Earth five times inside the collapsing nest of a forming star system.
	Astronomers say the water vapor is pouring down from the system's natal cloud, that's a baby cloud, and smacking into a dusky disk where planets are thought to form.
	So, in other words, what they're saying here, folks, is that this is the way water gets on forming planets.
	The observations provide the first direct look at how water, an essential ingredient for life as we certainly know it, begins to make its way onto planets, possibly even rocky ones like our own.
	London now has 10,000 cameras.
	CCTV cameras, which cost, in fact, 200 million pounds.
	That's a lot of money, right?
	So you would expect that crime in London would go down, but wrong.
	Hasn't budged, according to what I've got here.
	Crime, actually, in the areas where all the cameras are has gone up.
	That's it.
	We'll be right back.
	Indeed, here I am, filling in this night for George Norey, taking a well-deserved night off.
	Those are the numbers.
	What we're going to do when we get back in a moment is unscreened, open line talk radio, coming right up.
	Well alright, once again, just let me remind you, on the website www.coasttocoastam.com right now, there are photographs of the three of us together, and also a couple of photographs I've taken.
	By the way, the one of Asia is only about three or four days ago at the most.
	I think three days ago.
	And the one of Aaron was taken, I don't know, within the week.
	We took a trip into Las Vegas and there was this great big cactus.
	It was a beauty.
	And so I stopped the car, which I should not have done, got out, took a picture of her in front of that cactus.
	That's quite something for a gal from the part of the world she's from.
	All right, let's do as we said we would, unscreened, open lines, west of the Rockies.
	Good morning, you are upon the air.
	I'm going to have to begin this way.
	Turn your radio off, please.
	Okay, good morning, Art.
	How are you doing?
	I'm doing great, sir.
	Yeah, this is Danny, Sacramento, California.
	Yes, sir.
	Hey, I just wanted to tell you about something that happened to me when I was a little kid in East Texas.
	Okay.
	I guess I must have been about seven or eight years old.
	I guess it must have been about, oh, 53, 54, somewhere around there.
	And these little people, I don't know if they were aliens or whatever they were, but they came to our house.
	We lived out in the rural area on a ranch like in East Texas.
	And there were two of them.
	And I noticed the way that the people talk about them sometime on the On the air about how they move and everything?
	No, no, wait.
	Did they just wander on your property, knock on the door, or walk through the wall?
	No, no, no.
	They knocked on the door, and I was there with my grandfather and my grandmother.
	Okay.
	And, uh, my grandfather opened the door.
	They came in.
	These things just, they hovered.
	They didn't walk, you know.
	They hovered around like they were just off the floor a little bit.
	They moved by themselves like that.
	Eyes large like horse eyes.
	So they were hovering in the air?
	Yeah, yeah.
	Got it.
	They went over to my grandfather had a pipe and a tobacco can by his pipe stand and it was about probably like about four feet off.
	It was like a chest of drawer thing.
	About four feet off the ground.
	And this thing levitated up to where the pipes and everything were.
	He took the pipe out And hit the pipe onto the tobacco can.
	Made a sound, but they never said anything, but you could just about communicate with them by just looking at them.
	My grandmother told them that they couldn't have me and all that good stuff.
	They didn't try to bother me.
	This one that hit on the pipe on the tobacco can, he also saw my father's weapon, the shotgun, across the door.
	That's the way they hang them down in East Texas.
	He hovered all the way up there with my grandfather's pipe and he banged on the barrel of the gun and you could hear the sound of the metal and everything.
	And he just came back and he just looked at me and he looked around the house, both of them, and they just went back out the front door because my grandmother was telling them they couldn't take me.
	So you believe they were after you or they believed that?
	My grandmother did because when I was smaller I used to have nosebleeds and I think I had one of those transplants also.
	I had that, I removed that myself.
	Yourself?
	Yes.
	You performed surgery on yourself?
	Yeah.
	Where was the implant?
	It was like about six inches above my knee to the inside of my thigh like.
	And the little thing that I got out of there was about, it looked like a, I thought it was maybe a piece of a fish bone, but it looked like a piece of rice or something like that.
	It was, you know, like white-like, and it looked like a grain of rice to me whenever I took it out.
	Well, listen, sir, I appreciate the story.
	I don't know what to make of it, nor stories like it.
	On CoastToCoastAM.com right now, there is an X-ray.
	Of a small implanted something or another in somebody.
	I was looking at that a little bit earlier, so you can't rule all this out.
	It's certainly impossible.
	He actually removed it himself.
	Yikes.
	Wildcard Line, you're on the air.
	Good morning.
	Hello, Warren.
	Welcome back to the air.
	Well, thank you.
	It's great to be here.
	Hey, good to talk to you.
	I wanted to talk about the last show, well, the second to last show you did, which was spectacular, with the UFO affidavit.
	And it's just very interesting to me that when something like that comes out, the government
	has no comment on it at all.
	Because I followed it for a couple of days after, and I thought, an affidavit like this
	has to have some kind of reaction.
	Well, I would think the same thing.
	But the lack of reaction from the government is not a surprise.
	However, listen, I will agree with you, I guess, that a dying declaration carries a lot of weight.
	I mean, when somebody is, you know, their last few moments on earth, they're very unlikely to tell a lie, and the law recognizes that in terms of giving more weight to a dying declaration.
	Right, and the best part about it is I think that the lack of reaction Basically proved it to be true.
	Well, okay, I don't know that I would go that far.
	A lack of reaction is almost universally what the government does with respect to any sort of UFO information, no matter how solid it might be, even when it, you know, a craft lights up over Phoenix and thousands of people see it.
	They still managed to talk about flares and stuff like that.
	Wild Card Line, you're on the air.
	Good morning.
	At last I have finally gotten through to give you the love of the Lord.
	How dare you, sir, get on the radio again when I have explicitly told you and the Lord has warned you not to be on the radio.
	You disgust me, sir.
	The Lord has issued no such warning to me.
	Yes, she has.
	Who do you think he's talking through?
	Now, he?
	Is it a he or a she?
	It's a he?
	Excuse me?
	The Lord's a man!
	Everyone knows that the Lord's a man.
	You said she.
	You really slipped up, buddy.
	You said she.
	I said he!
	Second time you said he.
	I wouldn't ever say a she.
	We've got that, Chief.
	We all know that the Lord is a he.
	Yes, alright.
	He's a man.
	Now, listen.
	Speaking of, I was right.
	I fulfilled the prophecy that the Soviet Union is still there.
	They've never gone away.
	They're trying to attack us.
	They're disgustating us.
	Mr. Bell?
	Yes, last we spoke, it's been quite a while.
	Your wife, you said, would be back with you shortly.
	Now a great deal of time has passed.
	Has she run back?
	She is not my wife!
	You are confusing the issue.
	She is my servant.
	She is a disciple of mine.
	I can't get into it because it's complicated.
	But first, what I need to do is I need to call and I need... Is Edna back home or not?
	And they're still on the highways of this nation.
	We're close to getting her back.
	Born to be wild, J.C.
	Born to be wild.
	No, no!
	Listen, I also have to defend the honor of our Republican Senator Craig because he's been framed by the homosexual mafia to look like he's a homosexual.
	And we know he's not gay.
	We know that.
	We don't know much of anything except that he apparently signed a little piece of paper saying that he admitted... He looks for faith and values in America and loves America and the gay mafia framed him.
	That's what's happened.
	And now you see, I had no idea where you were actually from.
	So he is your senator, as it were.
	Yes!
	And he's a good, godly man who's been set up, set up by the gay mafia, by George Floyd, and all of your underworld friends who are trying to tear down faith and values Americans that love America.
	George is far too busy to do that sort of thing.
	I know he's busy being a criminal mastermind.
	Where is that no good tonight?
	Probably relaxing and saying, thank God I got the call and I didn't... Excuse me?
	It's unimportant.
	I know it's an honor for you to speak with me again because I am administering God's love and the new commandments.
	Now listen, you keep bringing up Edna and I want you to stop... Is that administering or ministering?
	Excuse me?
	You've got your radio on, don't you?
	You know that's a cardinal sin.
	Turn your radio off.
	Don't kill me with you, I'm going to turn my radio down so I can hear you better.
	Now, listen Mr. Bell, we know that America is being pornographized and destructized by the food pornographers.
	Have you seen this Rachel Ray on TV everywhere she goes?
	Food pornographer?
	Smile!
	What?
	What kind of food do you consider to be pornographic, JC?
	Well, definitely I consider Italian food to be pornographic, and Mexican food to be pornographic, because when people eat Mexican food, what happens is all those spices get your internals working and gets everything hot and bothered.
	That's why those... Do you really want to go after a food, J.C.?
	Why don't you go after lima beans?
	They're not God's work at all.
	Lima?
	No!
	Lima beans are just fine!
	Alright, well that's it for J.C.
	Anybody who says lima beans are just fine is out of here.
	Wildcard Line, you're on the air.
	Good morning.
	Ah, Art Bell, it's a pleasure to speak with you.
	And with you, sir.
	Definitely somewhere down south, I would guess.
	Excuse me?
	I said calling from somewhere in the south, I would guess.
	Oh, yes, sir.
	Knoxville.
	Knoxville, okay.
	The reason I'm calling is earlier in the week, George made a report that Virgil Goode has proposed a made a proposal to block the North American Union.
	Now that Virgil Goode, Delegate Virgil Goode, has proposed this, how can the rest of the politicians deny that it's going on?
	He wishes to block the North American Union?
	Yes.
	Earlier this week, George made a news report on the first of the hour.
	He does the news of the day.
	Well, what do you think about the idea of a North American Union?
	Oh, I think it should not happen.
	I think that the United States should get out of the UN and it should also get out of NAFTA.
	Well, how do you propose... I have a question for you.
	How do you propose that the United States, in fact North America, compete with our Asian partners and our European partners who are closing ranks and becoming one economic reality?
	Now that's an awful lot to try to compete with.
	Well, first of all, We need to impose sanctions upon China who's using slave labor.
	Just like all of these recalls of lead paint coming out of China.
	Right.
	I hate to say it, but it serves these companies right.
	Corporate America, it serves them right for taking our jobs overseas just to make an extra dollar.
	I understand the complaint.
	I understand how you feel.
	The reality is that the Europeans have their union.
	Asia certainly is a fertile ground for doing these sorts of things that require cheap labor.
	And I don't think we're going to cause them to stop.
	And so the reality of our world is we've got to find a way to compete with them.
	And eventually that's going to mean some sort of North American Union.
	I think I've said this on the program before, but We all began as various little towns and communities and villages and we traded then with other little villages and pretty soon we traded with other states, right?
	Then we were trading with other countries and now we've got these trading blocks and I don't see how the U.S.
	can kind of close its eyes and ears and ignore all of this that is going on and remain competitive.
	We've got to do something.
	Now, I don't know what that something is, but it probably involves making deals with others.
	West of the Rockies, you are on the air.
	Hello.
	Hi, this is Eric from Windsor.
	Hello, Eric.
	And I wanted to tell you guys about a time when I was 18 and I just graduated from high school in 1973.
	Me and some friends got in this camper truck and we went down to Arroyo Seco River.
	And we went up this fire road about 22 miles up.
	And we found this campground.
	There was nobody there.
	It was deserted.
	And we fished for a while in the river.
	And then it got dark and we started to eat our fish and make a fire.
	And then at about 8 or 9 o'clock we started hearing this howling noise.
	Just an unbelievable howling.
	It wasn't a cat.
	It wasn't a woman.
	It was none of those things.
	And it was coming from one direction.
	Then pretty soon it started coming from different directions.
	And it was after about 10 or 15 minutes it was coming from all different directions.
	In other words, you were totally surrounded.
	Yes. And we were like 22 miles out in the middle of nowhere and there was like four of us.
	And me and a friend, I had a machete and he had a bowie knife,
	so we went looking out with flashlights and we went to go see what the sound could be.
	And then we went walking.
	I would not have done that.
	Well, we did. We went walking and walking in the nearest direction.
	And we got about 50 yards away from the fire and it was pretty flat.
	There wasn't any trees around.
	All of a sudden, about 10 feet above us, there were these two bright red eyes about 10 inches apart,
	About as big as eggs.
	Each one was about as big as an egg.
	I've never liked red eyes.
	Just big, bright red eyes.
	And there was no sound.
	You raised your knife, no doubt.
	We tore back to the campfire.
	I told everybody to pack it up and let's get the hell out of there.
	Now you're talking.
	The next day we got out of that campground.
	We went down to the next campground and it was a much better feeling there.
	And in the morning we came back to the original campground to see if there was a tree up in
	a tree or what could be up that high.
	And the ground was flat and there was no trees.
	And the name of the campground was Escondido, which I think means unknown.
	Anyway, it really scared the hell out of us, you know.
	We were there for two months after that and we'd had no more sightings.
	It was just the most beautiful country you could imagine back there.
	Well, I think everybody is bothered by something and for me it has always been the concept
	of red eyes.
	I don't know if I associate it with the devil or something that you simply cannot combat.
	Something that you will not, some fight you will not end up winning.
	Red eyes.
	Very, very bad.
	I understand George is bothered by clowns.
	For me, it's red eyes.
	I always thought that I'd end up in the belly of anything with red eyes.
	East of the Rockies, your turn.
	You're on the air.
	Good morning.
	Hey, yeah.
	This is Ed from Johnston, Tennessee.
	Hello, Ed.
	Yes, about the North American Treaty.
	You know, we're having trouble having the 50 states try to get along, you know, and I could imagine having two other, you know, nations and especially a third world country to the south trying to, you know, get together with our type of government.
	Okay, but we need a place to have relatively cheap labor.
	In other words, we need a place to compete in a world where others are joining as blocks.
	So how do we compete if we don't do it?
	Oh, well, I'm not saying.
	I think we're very prestigious, and I don't really think we have to worry about that.
	I think if we bring somebody else in, I know we have cheap labor.
	How about our own people?
	Everybody says American people are extremely lazy.
	I don't think so.
	No, they're not.
	We have set this up.
	We have set it up.
	Wait, wait, wait, wait.
	The American people are not lazy.
	Actually, the American people are some of the hardest working people in the world.
	The Europeans take, like, five weeks vacation.
	The American people, if you look into it, sir, are very hard working.
	Oh, yes.
	Yes, I understand that.
	Well, I'm on guard duty right now.
	Well, anyway, no, I don't really think it's a good idea.
	I mean, it's sort of... I don't think there's so many people against it.
	I mean, they should ask, you know, kind of like a referendum, ask the people of the United States whether we need it.
	I don't... In the future, maybe we will.
	But I just don't think it's a really... Some of the European Union guys want them to break apart, you know?
	Well, I am very, very pleased that the Senate voted down this insane idea of having Mexican trucks running across all 50 states.
	I thought that was a very poor idea.
	Oh, yes.
	I mean, it's the... Well, besides taking jobs at a lower, you know, pay rate, I mean, they're dangerous.
	And, you know, it's just... Well, I don't know.
	I'm just sort of biased being an American, but... Oh, well, it's great talking to you, Art.
	And I'll hope to hear you on there again, okay?
	I'm sure that will occur.
	Thank you very much.
	I'll be here, of course.
	Well, I anticipate being here for Ghost to Ghost AM.
	And then toward the end of the year for the yearly prediction programs.
	And of course we will dig out from the bell vault those predictions made last year.
	And we'll compare them with reality.
	I hope we had a pretty good year of predictions.
	And you know I'll be here from time to time filling in.
	This is what's going on tonight.
	Spending one night filling in for George Norrie, who, and I can tell you from experience, working five and sometimes six nights a week, every now and then, you need a psychological day off.
	Otherwise, you'll go nuttier than a fruitcake.
	From the high desert, I'm Art Bell.
	Indeed, here I am.
	And by the way, some people thought I was back in the Philippines.
	I obviously am not.
	I'm here in the high desert.
	We no doubt will make a trip back to the Philippines sometime in the coming year and show off our little one.
	But until then, I'm right here.
	Graham Hancock, coming up!
	Graham Hancock has become recognized as an unconventional thinker who raises very legitimate
	questions about humanity's history and prehistory and offers an increasingly popular challenge
	to the entrenched views of orthodox scholars.
	Graduated from Durham University with first class honors in sociology, went on then to
	pursue a career in quality journalism, writing for many of Britain's leading newspapers.
	Graham Hancock is presently on a lecture tour here in the U.S.
	Yay!
	Promoting the paperback publication of his controversial new book, They All Are Controversial, Supernatural, Meetings with the Ancient Teachers of Mankind.
	He'll be speaking at the, I believe it's Bodhi Tree Bookshop in Los Angeles, is that correct?
	At about 3 p.m.
	on Saturday, 29 September, and at a number of other locations on the West and East Coast.
	Details of Hancock's lecture venues can be found on the Talks, Workshops and Events page of his website, which is www.gramhancock.com.
	Graham, welcome back to Coast.
	Thank you, Art.
	It's lovely to be with you again.
	Great to hear your voice.
	I'm really looking forward to our conversation tonight.
	Well, you began the whole thing.
	Actually, all your books have been controversial, but Fingerprints of the Gods, of course, right?
	Yes.
	Fingerprints of the Gods was the book that plunged me into years of controversy.
	In fact, it still hasn't ended.
	I had no idea.
	When I started researching and writing that book, what a storm I was going to bring down upon my own head.
	It talks about a lost civilization, Graham, the last ice age and more.
	Now, as you review fingerprints now, after all this time, do you stand with all of it or would you modify something today?
	Of course there are a few issues that I would modify, but the broad thesis of Fingerprints of the Gods, that there has been a lost civilization, that there's been a forgotten episode in human history, and that that episode is somehow connected with the end of the last Ice Age about twelve and a half thousand years ago, I absolutely stand by that.
	I'm certain that this is the case, that we have indeed Lost a whole civilization.
	I just think there's an enormous amount of evidence for this, and I think it takes almost a kind of willful blindness on the part of archaeologists to ignore it.
	It seems that our society has a vested interest in a particular view of history, and that view of history is that we ourselves are the apex and pinnacle of of the human story, and that we should therefore be proud and self-satisfied with ourselves.
	I don't know if we're doing that well.
	Well, exactly.
	I don't think we're doing that well at all, but this is the view underpinning ideas about history that are taught in mainstream archaeology.
	So, a central part of that view is the idea that all civilizations before ours must have been Less advanced, much less advanced than we were, than we are, that somehow we're the endpoint of the evolution.
	Even assuming that one was advanced in its own way and built a large civilization, what kind of cataclysmic event could occur that would virtually Not perhaps wipe out all traces, but nearly all traces.
	I mean, my God, look around us now.
	If we had a cataclysm in the world, one has to imagine that there would be artifacts that would be available for just millions and millions of years.
	Well, certainly, yes.
	Some of our non-biodegradable artifacts would definitely survive for a very long time, whether they would survive in recognizable form, whether they would survive in places that people would find them.
	Remains to be seen.
	We're certainly looking at the kind of cataclysm that, you know, wipes the Earth almost clean.
	And there is no doubt in my mind that such a cataclysm did occur around about twelve and a half thousand years ago.
	what's recognized by the scientists is the end of the last ice age that you had roughly
	a hundred thousand years when large parts of the Earth's surface were covered by enormous
	ice sheets. The whole of North America was covered with ice more than two miles thick.
	Similar ice sheet covered almost all of Northern Europe.
	And this ice melted down, most of it very, very rapidly. We don't really know why. And poured
	its contents into the oceans and raised the level of the sea by more than 400 feet all
	around the world and swallowed up 10 million square miles of land.
	Now, to put that into context, 10 million square miles of land is roughly the size of Europe and China added together.
	And my suggestion for why so few absolutely definitive and certain traces of the lost civilization have been found is that most of them are underwater in places where archaeologists are not looking.
	And secondly, that this civilization of deep antiquity, while advanced and technological in a number of ways,
	and there are just so many myths and traditions that have come down to us that speak of an episode
	of technological advancement in the past, nevertheless may have been very different from our own
	and may have created artifacts and objects that we might not even recognize
	as being technological in nature.
	Actually, there have been hints of it.
	I think off the island of Okinawa and elsewhere, they found hints of what they think could have been that, right?
	Yes, absolutely.
	And part of my work as follow-up to Fingerprints of the Gods involved a book called Underworld, for which I learned, I became an advanced scuba diver.
	I learned to dive and I put in close to 2,000 dives.
	All around the world over a period of about six years, following up myths and traditions about underwater cities, talking to local fishermen and divers, trying to see what they had to tell me, working with geologists who could pinpoint exactly the areas that were flooded at the end of the last ice age and seeing how these tied up.
	And one area that is particularly interesting is around the coast of Japan, off the main island of Okinawa.
	About 40 miles to the west, there's a group of smaller islands known as the Keramas.
	At the center of them is a little island called Akajima.
	And offshore of Akajima, at a depth of 120 feet below the sea, is a gigantic stone circle.
	A stone circle on the scale of Stonehenge.
	It's a really awe-inspiring object to see and to study.
	Is that part of the Ryukyu Island Chain?
	Yes, part of the Ryukyu Island Chain, and within 40 miles of Naha City in Okinawa.
	And I've done dozens of dives on this stone circle.
	No archaeologists have ever dived there, you see, because they're convinced that there's nothing to see, so they don't see the need to learn to dive and go and dive there.
	But when you do dive on it, you're left in no doubt that you're looking at a man-made artifact on a gigantic scale.
	And the geological evidence tells us that this artifact has been underwater for more than 12,000 years.
	Since no civilization capable of creating such a structure is recognized by historians 12,000 years ago.
	We are, by definition, dealing with the work of a lost civilization.
	And this is just one of a large number of enormous stone monuments that are found underwater off the coast of Japan.
	Another island is the island of Yonaguni, which is within 100 miles of Taiwan.
	And in fact, you can see Taiwan on a clear day from from Yonaguni.
	And offshore of Yonaguni, there's more than a dozen large stone monuments, again, submerged to depths of up to 100 feet, and again, have been underwater for more than 12,000 years.
	And all of this adds up in my mind to compelling evidence for a forgotten part of the human story, something that simply has not been recorded at all.
	In historical records, but something that is remembered in the myths and traditions that have come down to us from all around the world.
	There's virtually no part of the world today that doesn't preserve some kind of memory in its myths of a great civilization of antiquity that was capable of extraordinary feats.
	And you believe all this is a recurring cycle of destruction, yes?
	I think we have to be open to the possibility that it's a recurring cycle of destruction because that's precisely what the ancient myths say, that there is some dark danger that visits the Earth periodically over long periods of history.
	It may go away for thousands and thousands of years.
	It may be completely forgotten.
	It may be something that people never ever think about.
	Like a grim avenger, it comes back, it returns to strike us down again.
	And there seems to be some kind of cycle operating, which perhaps we don't fully understand.
	And I suppose the alarming prospect, and the one that should focus our minds and that we should consider seriously, is that this cyclical cataclysm spoken of in the ancient myths and in the traditions just might return in our own time.
	And indeed, there's much to suggest that it does.
	In the work that I did on ancient Egypt with my friend and co-author Robert Boval, looking at the mysteries of the pyramids, the Great Pyramid of Egypt and the Great Sphinx, one thing is very clear.
	Now, again, we have been attacked by the academics for putting this argument forward.
	But there's no doubt in my mind Robert Boval's Orion correlation theory is correct, that the great pyramids of Egypt are laid out on the ground in the pattern of the three stars of the belt of Orion.
	And because the positions of the stars in the sky change very, very slowly down the ages, And because these changes can be simulated on computers, it's possible for us now to say exactly what period is represented by the pattern of the pyramids on the ground.
	And that pyramid is roughly 12,500 to 13,000 years ago.
	And at the same time, there are indications in the pyramids that point forward to the future, again using the stars.
	At that time, the constellation 12,500 years ago, the constellation of Orion was at its lowest point above the horizon that it ever reaches in this great cycle of the heavens.
	And today, it's at its highest point that it ever reaches and is about to sink down again.
	And there's a clear link being drawn between that time, 12,500 years ago, and our own time today.
	And it seems to me to be talking to us, to be telling us something, to be saying that we should learn the lessons of history, that we should be aware that what struck our ancestors down may return to strike us again today.
	Okay, a couple of questions.
	One, you've probably had plenty of time to think about what could have triggered this cataclysm, and I'm sure you at least have guesses, right?
	Yes.
	Well, in fact, we can go We can go a little bit further than guesses.
	There's been some startling new information that has come out, and this information actually has come out from mainstream academics, not from the historical alternative history fringe, as they like to call it.
	And this information concerns the collision of a gigantic comet with the Earth.
	And that collision, according to the latest evidence and information, took place 12,900 years ago, which is exactly the time frame to which all the evidence points that we lost a great civilization.
	This comet, it may have had a diameter of as much as 10 kilometers, 6 miles in diameter.
	That would do it.
	I've seen some specials on the subject, and it would engulf the world in flames.
	Virtually the entire world would... Would burst into flames.
	The whole... gigantic firestorms would have swept the Earth.
	The entire climate of the Earth would have been Would have been changed overnight.
	We can understand why the ice sheets melted down so rapidly at that time and poured their contents into the sea.
	And really the evidence for this comet striking the Earth is absolutely compelling.
	The Carolina Bays in the United States are very likely to have been created by fragments of this comet impacting with the continental United States.
	Well, that absolutely makes sense.
	It's certainly possible.
	But it also goes on to beg the question, well, if it did happen, and that comet did hit us, why should we expect another one to hit us?
	Yeah, very good question, and a very good point.
	And this is where you need to look at what happens to comets when they hit planets.
	And we had an excellent example from the comet Shoemaker-Levy, which hit Jupiter back in 1995.
	It broke up.
	into 27 fragments. And those fragments hit Jupiter like gigantic machine gun bullets.
	And as it happened, Jupiter swept all of them up and none of them were left. In fact, by the way,
	Art, we should all be very thankful for the existence of Jupiter. Because orbiting out there
	in the distant reaches of the solar system, it catches most of the comets and incoming asteroids
	that might otherwise destroy the Earth.
	Thank God, because it's my understanding any one of them would have literally destroyed everything down to the bacteria on Earth.
	Absolutely.
	It would have sterilized the Earth.
	If we'd been hit by Shoemaker-Levy, it would have been the end.
	Absolute end of all life on this planet.
	We would have gone back to basic bacteria.
	And perhaps we would have had to have waited another four billion years before intelligent beings evolved again on this planet.
	Now, the issue I want to raise is that some of these gigantic objects do get through the guardianship of Jupiter and do come into the inner solar system and do strike planets in the inner solar system.
	And of course, this is pure speculation.
	But let's suppose that we are dealing with a comet that broke into multiple fragments And some of those fragments hit the Earth 12,900 years ago, but the rest of those fragments continued in their orbit.
	And we're talking about a long-period comet here, not a comet that comes around every 100 or 150 years, but perhaps a comet that comes back around every 12,500 years.
	If that were the case, then we could indeed be facing the return of the remaining fragments of that comet that hit the earth twelve and a half thousand years ago.
	Graham, if such remnants came back around, how much warning, knowing whatever we know right now about our ability to see these things coming our way, how much warning would Earth have?
	Possibly as little as three months.
	Possibly none at all, depending on the direction from which the comet approached.
	It's one of the One of the eerie and worrying facts of the study of near-Earth asteroids and comets is that we're constantly discovering new ones.
	Several of them have passed the Earth by extremely close and were not ever seen by our astronomers until after they had passed us by.
	That's when we first noticed them.
	That's true.
	You see an article in the newspaper saying, Earth had a close call last Thursday.
	Yes.
	That kind of thing.
	Yes.
	Exactly.
	That kind of thing.
	So it's very clear that this could happen again and we might not be so fortunate.
	It might not be a close call.
	These objects might hit our planet.
	And that's why I think, because with a long period comet which last passed this way twelve and a half thousand years ago, we don't have any modern observations that allow us to plot the trajectory of that object.
	All we have are the memories and the traditions and perhaps the warnings that have been passed down to us by ancient civilizations.
	And there's no doubt in my mind, very clearly ringing out like a bell is a warning coming down to us from the past.
	Do you think one of those warnings was issued by the Mayans?
	Yes, I do.
	I think the Mayan calendar is extremely interesting in this respect.
	And the Mayan calendar does, of course, contain a prophecy which could be interpreted as a prophecy, literally, of the end of the world in our time, certainly of the end of civilization as we know it, and very specific dates.
	And the date the Maya put on it, translated into our calendar, is the 21st of December, 2012, as of course is very widely known.
	I think many people in the world today are aware of this ancient warning and slightly spooked by it and
	rightly concerned by what it might mean. Now it's not as simple as that.
	The Mayan calendar and the ideas that lie behind it are extremely complicated.
	All right.
	Graham, hold it right there.
	We're at a break point.
	When we get back, I'm going to ask how the Mayans might have known to pick that specific date, 21 December 2012.
	How did they know?
	We'll be right back.
	21 is the day, December 21st, 2012.
	Can you imagine going out, perhaps early in the morning on that date, looking up and seeing a large, fiery, tumbling thing headed straight at Earth?
	Can you imagine that?
	We'll ask why the Mayans picked that particular date in a moment.
	I've always baited myself about the end of the Mayan calendar, figuring a couple of Mayans were sitting around.
	One said to the other, I've had it with this calendar crap.
	That's it.
	And that's when they stopped.
	They just got sick of making calendars.
	I don't know.
	But here we have a date, 21 December 2012, which could be the end of all, perhaps.
	Why that date?
	On what do you believe they might have based that, Graham?
	Well, I'd like to pay tribute here to the work of John Major Jenkins.
	I know that he's been a guest on Coast to Coast before, and indeed recently.
	And John's work on Mayan astronomy and the Mayan calendar tells us very exactly why that date, and also tells us that the Maya were extraordinarily accurate and precise observers of the heavens.
	And that they had a very clear knowledge and understanding of time and the way that the passage of time affects the positions of the stars in the heavens, and in particular the positions of those stars lying in the background against the rising point of the sun on the horizon on particular days of the year.
	And what happened on 21 December 2012, and in fact really As John Major Jenkins points out, we're looking more at a window here rather than a very specific and exact moment, a window of about 40 years.
	In the exact middle of which is 21 December 2012, like the crosshairs on a site.
	What happens is that if you stand on the morning of the winter solstice, which is the 21st of December, The sun reaches its southernmost point in its annual journey.
	And you look at the place in the sky where the sun is going to rise in an hour's time.
	It's an hour before dawn.
	And you're looking at the point in the sky where the sun will rise.
	You'll see that the Milky Way is lying on the horizon in that position.
	And in fact, the sun will rise against the background of the exact center, the heart of the Milky Way.
	And the sun has been tracking towards that position for thousands and thousands of years and reaches it.
	In our epoch.
	Now, I think what's going on here is that the Maya are not saying that that in itself causes the disaster.
	I think they're saying that that is the marker by which we can recognize the return of the disaster.
	It's like a clock in the heavens and their astronomy was so accurate that they were able to predict Well, given that date and a 40-year window, our butts are just about hanging out that window now.
	Our butts are right hanging out of that window now, and I do think that we need to take seriously what the Maya had to say, but that it also involves responsibly studying exactly what the Maya did have to say, and that is a very complicated message, not an extremely simple message that the world will just come to an end On that date, it's a bit more complicated than that.
	It certainly seems to be signaling the end of an age of the world, the end of an epoch, the closure on a long period of time.
	In fact, closure specifically on the whole of the last 5,000 years.
	But what exactly is to happen then still remains open to some question and to some doubt.
	But one thing I know for sure, is that we would be unwise to ignore this warning and this message from the ancient Maya, a civilization that observed the heavens so accurately and so closely, a civilization that had inherited thousands of years of knowledge from stargazing ancestors such as the Olmecs who preceded the Maya, is a civilization that we should take seriously.
	And when they tell us that something traumatic and tumultuous is going to happen, On the date in our calendar that we call 21 December 2012, I think at the very least we should listen to them.
	We shouldn't just dismiss it and ignore it.
	We should take it into account.
	And one possibility that occurs to me, we were talking before the break about the notion that the fragments of a comet that had struck the Earth before might be due to return in exactly this period.
	And perhaps the Maya used fortuitous events in the sky, which they were able to predict extremely accurately, to act as a marker or a signal for the return of this event, so that by looking at the sky we could know that this danger was returning to us.
	But there's something more in the Maya calendar than that, and indeed in all ancient traditions that speak of the destruction of a former civilization.
	And speak of the possibility that this destructive episode could return, and what all these traditions agree on is that humanity itself is in some way implicated in its own fate.
	If you look, for example, at the story of Atlantis, which was passed down to us by the Greek philosopher Plato, and which indeed sets the destruction of Atlantis very much in the same Same period, around 12,000 years ago.
	If you look at that story, you will find that the background to Atlantis was that it had once been a noble, good, nurturing, kind, and decent civilization.
	A civilization that was loved by the gods.
	But as time passed, it became arrogant, cruel, vicious, and mean-spirited.
	It became greedy It became arrogant, it became so confident and so sure of itself that it angered the gods.
	No, thank God we're not any of that today.
	Are you actually suggesting that if we stop being, I think it's, gross, repugnant, arrogant, cruel, wasteful, and excessive, then perhaps we avoid prophecy and we set aside this physical event somehow?
	Well, I'm suggesting that the nature of life on Earth may be more mysterious than we realize it is, and that the intentions and actions of human beings may resonate outwards from us into the cosmos, and may come back to us in ways that we might not like if our behavior is extremely negative.
	And I have to say, if there was ever a civilization That looks in mythological terms like a soon to be lost civilization, then that civilization is ours.
	Because just like Atlantis, we have, if you like, lost the mandate of heaven.
	We have become arrogant.
	We have become entirely and intensely materialistic.
	We have We have created a system of thought that denies the existence of any mystery in the universe.
	We say that we know everything.
	Our scientists claim to be in command of all physical laws.
	If you look around the world today, the terrible man-made disasters that are unfolding, the shocking and horrific cutting down of the Amazon rainforest, which is proceeding at an unbelievable rate, To me, this is not just an ecological or an economic disaster.
	This is, at heart, a spiritual disaster.
	And we know in our personal lives that if we think negative thoughts, if we allow ourselves to be overwhelmed with darkness and feel dark towards others around us, then that darkness will return to us.
	It will rebound on us without any doubt whatsoever.
	I believe that.
	Yeah, exactly.
	And if we, on the other hand, Think good of others, and try to act good towards others, then sooner or later that goodness will return to us, too.
	And I can't help feeling that on a cosmic level, this is also likely to be true, and that our civilization today is indeed bringing down disaster upon ourselves.
	And in a sense, we don't even need a long-period comet coming back after 12,500 years in order to do it.
	Because our civilization on its own is capable of destroying all life on this planet, and of wiping itself out in a frenzy of greed and stupidity and violence.
	So I must say, yes, I'm very worried when I look at this situation.
	Look at the story of Noah in the Bible.
	Again, it's the same thing, that God had become angry with mankind.
	If you go back to the Sumerian civilization, the epic of Gilgamesh, and the story of the flood that is told there, You read that the gods had become infuriated by the behavior and in fact by the noise that mankind was making and decided to shut us up and silence us and send a flood to wipe the earth clean and save only a few who survived in a great arc.
	So I actually do think that our behavior is a big part of the story.
	One need not feel helpless in the face of these events.
	It is possible for human beings to change their behavior, to stop behaving in a wrong way.
	And I think in our hearts, all of us know that our society has gone grievously and badly wrong.
	And, you know, it isn't too late to turn things around.
	And this is the other side of the Mayan prophecy.
	That inherent in the Mayan prophecy is a notion not only of the end of a world age, but also of the beginning of another one, of a kind of rebirth of consciousness.
	And in a way, that sun sitting in the heart, the womb of the Milky Way, can also be taken as a symbol of rebirth.
	That there may be hope in this prophecy, as well as fear.
	That there may be light in this prophecy, as well as darkness.
	That somehow, perhaps, if we can transform our own consciousness, then even if a disaster does afflict the earth, we will be better placed
	To deal with it in some way.
	Do you believe, Graham, do you believe it's possible, certainly at the fringes of science, there's beginning to be a recognition of the possible power of consciousness.
	Yes.
	So, do you believe that if it were, if we were in effect reborn and behaved entirely differently than we are now, that mass consciousness actually could avert the kind of catastrophic event, physical event that you've been talking about?
	Avert it, or at least make its consequences less damaging, and perhaps avert it entirely.
	Yes, I do believe that.
	So much wisdom has come down to us from antiquity that sees mankind not simply as a little local issue here on this planet, but really as the focus of a kind of cosmic struggle between the forces of light and the forces of darkness.
	And that the decisions and actions of mankind may rebound far beyond ourselves out into the cosmos, that we may in fact be the fulcrum on which the entire cosmos pivots.
	And while that may sound, you know, very self-aggrandizing, it is the message of the ancient text.
	It is, for example, the message of the Gnostic text, the Nag Hammadi library that comes down to us from Egypt, that was found in 1945, documents that were written more than 2,000 years ago.
	see us as the focus and fulcrum of a cosmic struggle.
	And I think again we need only look into our own lives in the small scale to see how this
	might work on a much larger scale.
	Do you suppose, Graham, that we might be alone in all that is out there and all we can see,
	all these stars and all these planets?
	So.
	After all, we haven't detected any signals, we've had no affirmed absolute visitations.
	Could we be actually alone?
	That's pretty egocentric.
	Well, yes, I mean, of course it's possible.
	I actually don't think we are alone.
	I think the universe is a gigantic cosmic and spiritual mystery.
	I think the universe has been created as a home for life.
	I think there is purpose and meaning in life and I believe the universe is likely to be full of life.
	Full of life.
	It's just that the distances are so great That these isolated pockets of life, separated by tens of millions of light years, may find it very difficult ever to come into contact with one another.
	And I think it's even more complicated than that.
	I think we live not in a one-dimensional universe, where everything is expressed and understood on the physical plane, but in a multi-dimensional universe.
	So actually, We may be dealing with intelligent beings, not only in other parts of this physical universe, but all around us, and interpenetrating us all the time, perhaps very close to us, perhaps right next to us, and yet inaccessible to our senses in some way.
	But I'm sure that the whole thing, across all the dimensions, including this dimension that we happen to inhabit and live in and know in, that it is a theatre for experience and a theatre for life and for spirit.
	to express itself in and this is why consciousness is so important and why I think
	the scientists The the scientists who believe that that matter that
	material things are all there is to reality May be making such a huge such a huge mistake
	It may be the case that that our consciousness is not is not in fact
	An accident of our brain chemistry just accidentally generated an epiphenomenon of the brain as some scientists
	like to say It may be that the brain and the body are vehicles for consciousness, that the true essence of consciousness is non-physical, non-material, but that, as all the wisdom of the past and the religions of the world have said, that consciousness seeks to incarnate temporarily in physical form.
	In order to learn certain lessons that can only be learned in that form.
	And this is why for the preservation, the long-term preservation of the experiment of life on this planet, and perhaps throughout the universe, it is necessary to contemplate, to undertake, to move ourselves towards a transformation of consciousness.
	Because we all do know, we all do know in our hearts, and in our guts, That things are going terribly wrong in the world today, and that the state of consciousness that our society particularly values, this alert problem-solving state of consciousness, or alternatively the other state of consciousness that it values, which is drunken oblivion, that this is not enough, that the human creature has much greater potential
	And our society seems almost to be locked in a conspiracy to shut down our minds, to send us all to sleep, to make sure that we never benefit from the incredible opportunity of being born in a human body.
	What else is 24-hour-a-day reality TV beaming at us from all directions but a mechanism for sending us to sleep and for stopping us from using our God-given minds?
	And the only way out of this is for us to take our destiny in our own hands and to seek a new direction.
	And I think it begins at the very small personal level by transforming our own lives and our own relationships with others.
	And if enough people do that, then I do believe that a transformation of consciousness for the good, for the better, is possible.
	And that we need not feel necessarily doomed.
	Our destiny Maybe much more in our own hands than we realize.
	I don't know.
	I watched Survivor China the other night.
	I have sinned.
	Your new book is called Supernatural, right?
	Yes, that's right.
	So obviously you've had a bit of change in your thinking.
	Yes, I would say more of an evolution in my thinking.
	There's been a bit of change in your thinking.
	Yes, I would say more of an evolution in my thinking.
	I think I've been very lucky, I've been very fortunate over the last two decades or so
	to have been able to spend a great deal of my life traveling in remote and exciting and
	intriguing parts of the world, exploring ancient monuments such as the great pyramids of Egypt,
	the temples of Angkor in Cambodia, putting together the evidence to argue the case for
	a lost civilization of deep antiquity.
	And really, I published a whole series of books on this.
	I think Fingerprints of the Gods is probably the best known, but there was The Message of the Sphinx, there was The Mars Mystery, there was Heaven's Mirror, and latterly there was Underworld, the book that looked at underwater ruins all around the world.
	And I really felt with Underworld that I had come to the end of that particular personal journey, that I had That I had assembled a body of data, that I had written a series of books, that I had put all the evidence that I could gather out there into the world before the public.
	I took a lot of flak, a lot of personal attacks from academics and their friends in the media.
	Some of it was very damaging, some of it was very painful.
	I took physical risks, risked my own life.
	My wife, Santa, and I both risked our lives with Underworld, diving in currents that flow like a river underwater.
	Having our diving gear ripped out of our mouths, surfacing and finding the boat not there.
	And finally, I got to the point where I felt I've done about as much of this as I can usefully do.
	And if I carry on, I'm either going to end up dead or I'm going to end up just boringly and endlessly repeating myself, which I don't want to do.
	All right, Graham, hold it right there.
	We're at a break point.
	His new book is in paperback, folks.
	It's called Supernatural.
	We'll be right back.
	If our fate is tied to our, I don't know, stopping from being gross, repugnant, arrogant, cruel, wasteful, and excessive, then I suggest to you that on December 21st, 2012, Or in that window, we're really going to rock on.
	Sorry for the poor analogy there, but that's kind of what I think.
	We're not exactly headed in the right direction.
	Science is only just now, as are many of you out there that listen to this program, beginning to toy around the edges of consciousness and what it means.
	We're going to have to get a lot further than that, or we rock on.
	We'll be right back.
	A little bit of a warning right now.
	We're about to enter an area that's going to be very controversial.
	It's going to make a lot of people angry and that's just the way it goes.
	That's what this program does.
	What's left of the rainforest has and is yielding some drugs.
	That modify one's thinking.
	They modify, perhaps might even be suggested, one's consciousness.
	It begins to change a person, the use of these drugs.
	Drugs like DMT, we've talked about them on this program before.
	I believe that mind-altering drugs are made Illegal, in this country and other Western countries, because they tend to change people's minds.
	They take people, it is suggested or believed, away from productivity.
	And in our economy, in our country, we want to be productive, don't we?
	And that's the basis, I believe, of these laws against these drugs.
	It may not be widely known, or perhaps it is, but Graham has experimented rather extensively with a number of these drugs.
	Tell us about it, Graham.
	Yes, well let me preface that remark by saying something, and you're right, I mean what we're going to talk about now will anger a lot of people because unfortunately in our society we have been conditioned by a kind of mind control A very sinister and a very dark mind control program, and part of this mind control program is the so-called war on drugs, so that most of us have grown up unable to think freely and independently about such issue.
	We hear the word drug and we automatically assume that it's a bad thing, and if we're to say anything good about drugs, Then immediately we arouse instinctive, instant anger from millions of our fellow citizens.
	Evil.
	Evil, yes.
	And what we have to understand is that this comes from an extremely clever and skillful program that has manipulated us into Ways of thinking that may be contrary to our own interests, but beneficial to the interests of the powers that be.
	Beneficial to the interests of those who control our lives, who tax us until we have hardly a penny left to spend, and who take our money and plow it into the creation of huge armed bureaucracies which exist to oppress us.
	I'd like to say at the outset I do have very strong views on this issue and I think it's outrageous in a supposedly free society after 2,000 years of progress towards so-called democracy that we live in a society today where we may not make the decision as adults privately in our own homes doing no harm to others.
	We are not allowed to make the decision to explore our own consciousness Through the use of ancient and sacred plants that have been used in shamanistic cultures for tens of thousands of years.
	If I am not sovereign over my own consciousness, then I am sovereign over nothing.
	And it's an absurd joke to talk about democracy and the wonders of democracy when I live in a society that will not allow me to explore my own mind, using tools and techniques that have been used by mankind
	for tens of thousands of years, but that is the society that we live in today. And rather than being outraged and
	angry about this, we've been lulled into a sense of false security. We've
	been told that our governments
	are acting in our interest to protect and preserve our health,
	when in fact what they're doing is infringing on the very essence of
	of ourselves upon our consciousness.
	I'm not here to advocate drugs.
	I know that many drugs are harmful and dangerous, but I am here to advocate adult personal responsibility.
	And unfortunately, we now live in a society where adults are not allowed to take responsibility for their own lives, where bureaucrats and social workers Interfere with our lives in every way and tell us what we may or may not do and even enter the inner sanctum of our own consciousness and tell us what we do there.
	And it's utterly disgusting to me that we live in a society that can throw, as I said earlier, 24 hours a day completely meaningless and mindless television at us, which of course is affecting our consciousness in all sorts of negative ways.
	And that is okay.
	But that we may not experiment with ancient and sacred plants such as peyote, such as the ayahuasca brew from South America, such as iboga from Central Africa, which have been used in shamanistic ceremonies to explore the supernatural realm for tens of thousands of years.
	Something terrible has gone wrong with the society we live in, and our own Money, our own tax dollars, are being turned against us, funding huge armed bureaucracies that may enter our homes, that may deprive us of our property, that may put us in jail, not because we did any harm to anybody else, but simply because we chose to explore our own consciousness.
	And I think any right-thinking citizen, any free-thinking individual, should be outraged and should shout with anger.
	at what is happening to us today and about how this is being allowed to continue.
	All right, then straight out, you have experimented with these drugs rather extensively.
	I have.
	I found that I needed to do so in order to research and write my book, Supernatural.
	And having done so?
	Well, having done so, I can honestly say that it has changed my life, that it has transformed The direction of my life.
	Now I'm not talking about heroin or cocaine.
	I've never taken cocaine in my life.
	I have no interest in doing so.
	I'm not going to put down anybody who does, but personally that's not for me.
	I'm not interested in something that doesn't expand my consciousness and I don't believe that cocaine does that.
	I'm not interested in addictive drugs.
	I don't want to become hooked and dependent on some substance.
	But what I'm interested in is certain plants that have been regarded as sacred.
	As teachers of mankind down the ages by shamans in tribal and hunter-gatherer societies, and amongst those plants I'm most particularly interested in a brew, a drink that is prepared in the Amazon.
	We have archaeological evidence of the use of this brew.
	It's called ayahuasca.
	It means the vine of souls.
	Archaeological evidence of its use going back more than 3,000 years in the Amazon.
	It's probably much older than that.
	It's a combination of two different plants.
	One of them is a vine, the Ayahuasca vine, and the other are the leaves of a bush, and the bush is called Chacruna in the Amazon, and its botanical name is Cicotria viridis.
	And these leaves contain large quantities of the potent and in this society illegal hallucinogen called DMT, dimethyltryptamine.
	Now the interesting thing about DMT and again I want to emphasize to your audience that none of these hallucinogenic substances are addictive in any way.
	It's impossible to become addicted to them.
	That DMT can be taken and effective in the human body by smoking it or in fact by injecting it and it produces a very short 12-minute journey into other realms but it cannot be normally absorbed orally.
	So that leaf that I told you about, the cicotria viridis bush from the Amazon, you could sit down and munch your way through a thousand leaves from that bush or you could brew them up into a tea and drink them and it wouldn't have any effect on you whatsoever and that's because there's an enzyme in our stomachs, monoamine oxidase Which actually destroys DMT.
	However, having done it properly, can you describe the experience?
	Yeah, I just wanted to add that the other ingredient, the vine, contains chemicals that switch off that enzyme in our stomach.
	And part of the mystery is how the shamans of the Amazon, out of 150,000 different species of plants and trees, ever managed to find these two plants that put together, will give us a four-hour journey into supernatural realms.
	And that is what the experience of Ayahuasca is.
	An extraordinary storm of visions.
	is unleashed behind your eyes.
	You find yourself leaving this world behind and moving on a journey into a seamlessly convincing parallel universe, a universe that is inhabited by intelligent beings.
	And indeed, one being in particular who almost everybody who drinks ayahuasca, it doesn't matter where they come from, they may come from a great city in the West, they might come from the Amazon jungle, they will meet this being.
	She is always recognized as a female spirit, and she is the spirit of Ayahuasca itself.
	Very frequently, most frequently of all, she takes the form of a gigantic snake, a serpent.
	Sometimes she takes the form of a human form, as a beautiful woman, sometimes of a mass
	of serpents.
	She conveys messages to you, messages of deep concern with the environment, messages of
	the fragility of the planet on which we live, of the fragility of the human adventure on
	this planet.
	Everybody who drinks Ayahuasca will meet this being and sense that we are dealing with a loving entity here which holds the planet in her coils and exists to protect and preserve this planet.
	But at the same time, has the time to pay attention to individual human lives, to enter into contact with individuals, to teach them.
	Professor Benny Shannon, he's the professor of psychology at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.
	Benny has drunk ayahuasca more than 300 times.
	That's a lot more than I've drunk it.
	I've drunk it 25 times.
	He's compiled the experiences of hundreds of people around the world who have drunk ayahuasca, and all of them speak of it as a teacher.
	It's like entering a school.
	Where you start to learn lessons that will transform your life.
	You examine your own behavior, the minutiae of your own behavior, how you act towards other people, how you may sometimes be cruel or unkind or thoughtless towards others.
	You're shown the truth about yourself in a very clear way, and you're given the opportunity to change yourself.
	And if you don't change yourself, the next time you drink ayahuasca, you will be shown those truths again, very clearly and very painfully.
	And this has happened to me Again and again in my ayahuasca experiences, and I like to think, although it's a difficult process to change a lifetime of bad habits, that ayahuasca has set me on a journey to improve myself, to make me a better person, to make me more loving and caring towards my fellow human beings, and which has greatly heightened my sense of the environment, of what is happening to the earth today, of the horror that is being unleashed in the Amazon.
	It made me care about these things in ways that I never did before, and most important of all, it's absolutely convinced me that our consciousness is not simply an artifact of our brains, generated accidentally by our brains as we go about our material business, that our consciousness is immortal, that we lived before we came into this life, that we will continue to live after we die in these physical bodies.
	That there are realms beyond our own, dimensions beyond our own, that they're all around us all the time, so close to us that they interpenetrate us, and yet normally we don't access them, we don't see them, and that's because of our state of consciousness.
	Graham, let me just stop you and say that the commonality of this experience that you've described truly is leaving me speechless.
	Yeah.
	That commonality is just, it's impossible Or is it real?
	Well, it's real.
	You see, this is the thing.
	Generally speaking, because we're wedded to the materialist paradigm in this society, we're convinced that there is only material reality and that there is nothing else beyond that.
	If large numbers of human beings all see the same things, then we tend to, in the material world, then we tend to agree that those things are real.
	But our society and our scientists tell us that so-called hallucinations, so-called visions, are not real, that these are just figments of our imagination, the result of brain chemistry, that we're sort of cooking up this imagery in our own mind.
	Now, if the conventional theories of hallucinations were correct, then everybody would see different things in states of consciousness.
	They would not see the same things, but astonishingly and stunningly, it doesn't matter where you come from, What your cultural background is, what your personal biography is, doesn't matter if you come from the jungle or from the city, you are going to see the same things in ayahuasca visions, and you are going to encounter the same intelligent beings with the same messages for mankind.
	And yet our scientists, of course themselves, they've never drunk ayahuasca, they've never had any experience of these kind of visions, and yet they are arrogant enough to say, That those of us who have these visions and those experiences are simply deluded fools who are experiencing illusions.
	What I would say is that when hundreds and thousands of people from all around the world see and encounter the same intelligent supernatural beings in altered states of consciousness, that should tell us that these experiences are real.
	Yes, but scientists claim that repeatability is truth.
	Repeatability is truth, and And this is what, you know, again, it's almost impossible to explore this idea in our society.
	We see the huge popularization of the supernatural on the media, on television.
	It's the subject of so many cheap and trashy TV shows.
	And, you know, people try to invent machines, you know, so-called ghost meters and such, in order to contact the supernatural realm.
	But I think that they will never succeed in doing so by those techniques.
	The contact with the supernatural is a matter of our state of consciousness.
	And when we are in the alert problem-solving mode of consciousness, which I think probably represents only about 1% of the potential of our consciousness, but that is the mode that our society wants us to focus our entire energies upon, we are never going to contact these other realms and beings.
	If we wish to do so, we must alter our state of consciousness.
	And this is why these ancient and sacred plants, the plant hallucinogens, may in fact turn out to be the single most effective method for repeatedly, and almost in a scientific manner, exploring that realm of experience that we call the paranormal and the supernatural.
	That you can, in a targeted way, enter And return from these other realms again and again and again and pursue your inquiries and contacts and discussions with the beings that live in them.
	Yes, but do you understand how our society, presently constructed, must regard such an experience and a resulting change in attitudes as its enemy?
	Well, the powers that be in our society must regard it as its enemy.
	Yes.
	And those powers that be include the organized religions, of course.
	They are part of the network of control that keeps us suppressed, that prevents us from realizing our true potential.
	We don't need organized religions if we, as individuals, can contact the supernatural realms directly.
	We do not need the rabbis and the priests and the mullahs to stand as intermediaries between us and the supernatural realm.
	We can reach those realms by ourselves, as shamans in tribal and hunter-gatherers still consistently do, To this day, in the Amazon, in the South Africa, for example, we also can do that.
	We all have this potential as human beings.
	It is our birthright, and certain plants have co-evolved with us over millions of years to allow us to exercise that birthright.
	And yet it is seen as a threat by the organized religions.
	It's seen as a threat by the politicians, who are supposed to be our servants, but who arrogantly presume to be our rulers and masters.
	They tell us, they wish to tell us what to think, what we are allowed to think, what we may and may not do with our consciousness.
	And naturally, they are very threatened and fearful at the prospect of individuals taking control of their own lives, taking control of their own destiny, taking control of their own consciousness, taking responsibility for themselves.
	The state does not wish us to take responsibility for ourselves.
	It wants to pretend that That bureaucratic officials are the only ones who may be responsible for us.
	That somehow, even though we are adults, we are children who cannot make decisions for ourselves about what we do or do not do with our own bodies and minds.
	And so it's very threatening for the controlling mentalities who naturally gravitate towards government and positions of power.
	It's very threatening to them.
	To see individuals taking control of their own consciousness and their own lives.
	And so a whole forest of laws and rules has been erected to prevent us from doing that.
	A whole fearful industry of indoctrination has been set into motion.
	Huge lies are told to us about this matter so that we become afraid and terrified and confused when it's always possible for us to think clearly and to act.
	Responsibly, as adults, without the state telling us what to do.
	Though mainstream science is not doing a lot in investigating this path, there is some science that's looking at it, and in a moment, we will.
	Good morning everybody.
	You're really on a ride this morning.
	Graham Hancock is my guest, I can assure you.
	If you live long enough, you'll begin to reflect on some of the things that Graham suggested that DMT or LSD or ayahuasca or whatever will cause you to reflect very hard on without perhaps the message from, I don't know, the female he spoke about or perhaps more ominously the snakes.
	At any rate, you'll begin to reflect on those things and your life if you live long enough.
	Such drugs give you insight into your own behavior to this point in your life and that which you will change if you live long enough or apparently use one of these.
	In a moment, the scientific point of view, limited though although it may be, Dr. Rick Straussman and others have done some research into these drugs and we'll get to it in a moment.
	Our brains are supposed to fry on drugs, right?
	Well, late Terrence McKenna was one of the most brilliant men I've ever had the honor to interview.
	Absolutely brilliant, and he sort of put it all in flames when he came on the air.
	Every time he came on the air, he talked of DMT.
	He exhibited brilliance above and beyond just about anything we've ever heard on the air.
	Graham, I wonder if you knew him?
	Sadly, for me, no.
	I never did know Terence, the late, great Terence McKenna.
	I never did know him personally.
	I realized that our work crossed each other at a number of points, intersected at a number of points.
	I'm a huge admirer of Terence's.
	I do talk about him in my book, Supernatural.
	I think he was an extraordinary human being, a real gift from the universe to this planet.
	A great teacher, a great communicator, a fearless free thinker, who truly set out to explore the limits and the potential and the possibility of this mysterious thing that we call our consciousness, which science does not understand.
	For the most part, Graham, what is Dr. Strassman doing?
	Well, Rick Strassman is a psychiatrist at the University of New Mexico.
	He's a personal friend of mine.
	And he was granted the first license by the federal government in the United States for more than 20 years to conduct research with human volunteers using a powerful hallucinogenic drug and the drug that Rick Strassman administered to his volunteers was dimethyltryptamine DMT which is, as I mentioned earlier, the active ingredient of ayahuasca.
	And Rick worked with his volunteers over a period of nearly a decade during the 1990s, giving them dimethyltryptamine by injection.
	And I've taken DMT in pure form, of course, as well as in the Ayahuasca Brew.
	And whereas in the case of Ayahuasca, you are dealing with a journey that can last up to four hours, in the case of pure DMT, as Rick administered to his volunteers, you're dealing with a journey that might last 20 minutes at the outset, at the most, and frequently even less than that, 12 or 15 minutes.
	And it's like mounting yourself on the nose cone of a space rocket and being fired off Into, not the universe, but into a parallel realm, into another world that is unique and extraordinary in its strangeness.
	You mentioned time.
	On the part of the experiencer, is there a sense of time?
	Does one know that he's been on a 12 to 20 minute trip versus four hours?
	The only sense of time is this, that when you go into the DMT experience, which sometimes can be extremely disorienting and terrifying, the one thing that certainly I find reassuring is the knowledge that I will be out of there again relatively soon.
	That it's not going to go on for hours and hours and hours, but actually when you're in the experience itself, you are removed from this time frame.
	Removed from it completely.
	Interestingly enough, the Mexican shaman Maria Sabina, back in the 50s, who used to work with psilocybin mushrooms, called these realms that you go into the world where everything is known.
	And in this world where everything is known, you're outside the frame of material time.
	It's technically possible for you to encounter people from the past or from the future.
	In this in this realm and certainly I've had the sense of that with ayahuasca and with and with DMT But it is it is in the back of your mind because you do never lose completely that still small voice of your own reason It is in the back of your mind Reassuring to know that you won't be there forever That you will come out of it and come back to this realm in which you were born and brought up and where you feel grounded and sure and secure.
	But the DMT world, and I think there's more than one of them, are astonishingly eerily strange.
	There's something oddly technological about them.
	When I took DMT, and this accords very much with the experiences reported by Rick Strassman's volunteers, and of course by Terence, I found myself in a strangely technological world, a room With no clear walls and yet a sense of glass or crystal planes surrounding the room.
	A room in which small, intelligent beings moved around at high speed.
	A sense that I was downloading a huge amount of information, a vast quantity of information just pouring into my mind.
	At an unbelievable speed, so much that it was overwhelming that I couldn't understand it, that I couldn't read it, the sense that it might take me a lifetime to process it, and the sense of contact with alien entities, with entities that are not of this world, not of this planet.
	I was just about to say that.
	It sounded an awful lot like that.
	Yeah, a real sense of of contact with beings that are not of this world.
	And the sense of an information transfer, an information flow.
	And this was one of the curious discoveries.
	I use the word alien quite deliberately.
	This was one of the curious discoveries that Rick Strassman made during his research, that very large numbers of his volunteers, although we know that they were not physically abducted, Because they were, in fact, lying in front of Dr. Strassman on a hospital bed in the University of New Mexico.
	Very large numbers of them reported experiences that were virtually identical with the alien abduction experience that has been reported so extensively over the last few decades.
	And to cut a long story short, Rick is suggesting that people who have the alien abduction experience And I just need to preface this by saying that, by the way, all of us have DMT in our own bodies.
	DMT is produced naturally in the human body.
	It's produced in the pineal gland, and Rick was suggesting that those who've had the alien abduction experience are people who spontaneously overproduce DMT and put themselves into an intensely altered state of consciousness, which then allows them access to these other realms and beings.
	Rick is very clear to stress that he is not saying that the experience is caused by or manufactured by or produced by the drug, but rather that the drug allows the experience into the mind, allows us access to the experience, makes the experience possible.
	And he's suggesting, he actually calls DMT the spirit molecule.
	That it gives us access to spirit realms.
	He believes that it plays a part not only in alien abduction experiences, but also in near-death experiences.
	That it gives us access to the world beyond.
	And I think Rick's work has given us a quantum leap forward in the understanding of this mysterious phenomenon that we call alien abductions today.
	Well, how in the world else do you explain the commonality of the experiences?
	That's where I'm stuck, I think.
	Yeah, it's the commonality that is utterly convincing, and what I've tried to show in my book, Supernatural, is that this commonality is not confined to our generation and to this time and place.
	It's not simply a commonality that people have never compared notes You know, from America or Britain or Australia or the Amazon share, but also a commonality that is shared across huge periods of history and that people have been having these experiences going back tens of thousands of years and that in fact they even documented these experiences on the walls of the Painted Caves in Upper Paleolithic Europe more than 30,000 years ago in the rock shelters of South Africa and of Australia.
	Exactly the same beings that Rick Strassman's volunteers reported encounters with, that people who have had the alien abduction experience report encounters with, these beings were also being painted more than 30,000 years ago in deep caves in Europe and Africa and Australia.
	Is all of this somehow encoded in our DNA?
	Well, this is an interesting mystery, and again, I explore this at length in Supernatural, much more at length than we can go into here.
	And can I just take the opportunity, since we're roughly midway through, just to say that I am, just to remind listeners, I am on a lecture tour.
	I will be talking tomorrow at the Bodhi Tree in Los Angeles.
	I'm traveling all over the United States.
	The details of the tour are on my website, which is www.grahamhancock.com.
	Go to the Talks, Workshops and Events page, and every event that I'm doing and the location is listed there.
	And, of course, there's much more details about my book, Supernatural, there as well.
	Well, we're glad to have you here in the country, and I imagine you're going to do very well on the tour.
	Well, I hope so.
	I find it very stimulating.
	I find it very stimulating to engage in questions and answers, and you know, we were talking earlier about the transformation of consciousness, and one thing that's clear to me, as I travel around the United States, is that there are huge numbers of incredibly good-willed, decent, and kind-hearted, open-minded, free-thinking people in this country.
	And this ultimately, I believe, will be the salvation of the United States and of the world.
	Well, I hope you're right.
	You know, they are not regularly reported by the media, so we don't hear a lot about it.
	We don't hear a lot about it, but good people are out there everywhere.
	And although the United States may be operating in a very harmful and negative way on the world stage at the moment, inside the United States There are people who are deeply troubled by this, and deeply troubled by the behavior of their own government.
	Of course, I'm speaking also of Britain, because Britain and the United States are in this together, and the same is true in Britain.
	More and more of us are deeply concerned by what our governments are doing with our money, and supposedly in our name, and deeply concerned by the tyranny and oppression of the individual that is the characteristic and hallmark of these governments, and what a tragedy it is.
	After a 2,000 year struggle towards democracy that we've given it all up for so little in the modern age.
	And you see, though, this attitude is exactly what makes these things the enemy of the powers that be.
	Yeah, that's right.
	That's right.
	There is a real struggle here, and it's time for individuals to take control of their own lives again, and to say that we as adults do not need to be told what to do by bureaucrats and officials We as adults must take responsibility ourselves for our own lives and for our own consciousness, and really the mystery of consciousness.
	Perhaps like the tea, we should be dumping DNA into the water.
	Well yes, you started with the question on DNA, and this is one This is one aspect of the problem that I do explore at some length in Supernatural.
	I actually meant DMT, but I do want to talk about DNA.
	Is it somehow encoded in our DNA?
	In other words, when DMT meets DNA, is that producing some commonality, or is it far?
	It's possible, and I think it's part of the mystery.
	You see, the mystery of the problem is, why is it that people from all over the world, all different cultures, different periods of history, separated from one another by huge geographical distances and by thousands of years in time, in undergoing experiences that our scientists today say are illusory and non-real, why is it that all these people actually have the same experiences and see the same things and are taught the same lessons by the beings that they encounter?
	And one explanation, and it's an explanation that I strongly favor, is that the spirit world that shamans talk about are real.
	They are not illusions.
	They are other dimensions.
	Quantum physics is really just beginning to get to grips with this.
	Shamans have been getting to grips with it for thousands of years.
	There are other dimensions that surround and interpenetrate our own.
	But another intriguing explanation that I also explore in Supernatural is that there may be information written on our DNA, a kind of teaching program, a huge message for us, for the human race, and that it is this message that we access in altered states of consciousness.
	And in fact, these two points of view may not be mutually contradictory.
	It may be that the physical and the material world is a creation of the spirit world.
	After all, that's what all religions essentially say.
	that may be that the physical world is created by the spirit world and that DNA,
	which is the essence of physical life, may in fact be a creation of spirit
	realms and spirit beings to allow non-physical consciousness to incarnate
	in physical form.
	Well, perhaps so.
	Graham, we have unraveled most of the mystery of our DNA, but there is this term... No, you have not.
	Well, there is this term scientists have called junk.
	Junk DNA.
	Junk DNA.
	Which happens to be 97%.
	Of DNA.
	And the DNA that we know about, everybody's heard of the Human Genome Project and we tend to feel reassured and think our scientists know everything about DNA.
	Actually, they know a lot about only 3% of DNA.
	And that's the DNA that is involved in our genes, that is gathered together in our genes and that codes for the assembly of amino acids into proteins that build cells that creates our bodies and the bodies of all living things, plants and animals.
	On this Earth, but the other 97% of DNA, scientists say, well, that's just junk DNA.
	It's completely unimportant.
	It's just random.
	It's meaningless.
	As though millions of billions of years of evolution would preserve 97% of something just because 3% of it is important.
	It's much more reasonable to conclude that the 97% of so-called junk DNA is extremely important as well.
	Professor Eugene Stanley at Boston University back in 1994 published a major article in Science Magazine, which he still stands by today, which absolutely proves that so-called junk DNA has the same hidden, deep mathematical structure as all human languages.
	And from this we may perhaps deduce that a message is indeed written on our DNA.
	And after all, if, for example, to take the example of an extraterrestrial civilization, we've all heard of the SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence.
	Why do we convince ourselves that extraterrestrial intelligences, whether from other dimensions or from this one, would wish to communicate with us by radio?
	There might be much more effective ways for them to communicate with us.
	After all, if an alien civilization had been broadcasting a radio message out into the universe for the last 100 million years, and had switched that message off in 1890 in our calendar, then none of us would ever have heard it.
	Because we didn't develop radio until after 1890.
	Much more intelligent would be to encode the message on the DNA of all living things.
	And to await the evolution of a being intelligent enough to read that message.
	And so one suggestion that I explore is perhaps it is that message that we are all accessing in altered states of consciousness.
	Perhaps we are accessing a teaching program that gets switched on at a certain stage in evolution, and perhaps that stage is now.
	So that commonality could be the contact we've been looking for externally.
	Exactly.
	It could be the contact we've been looking for externally, and it's been inside us all the time.
	And in order to access it, we must enter an altered state of consciousness.
	And that would then explain why everybody has these astonishingly universal experiences in altered states of consciousness.
	Are people changed in a very similar way after these experiences?
	Is it almost universal or what?
	That's what I found, that people are changed in very similar ways and that the bonds of love between them are enormously increased and the sense of barriers and boundaries between people that we erect fall down and fall away and we sense the oneness and the universality of life.
	I tell you, our economy just can't handle it, Graham.
	All right, Graham Hancock is my guest.
	I'm Art Bell.
	This is Coast to Coast AM.
	No point in fearing what we cannot control, right?
	Or can we?
	I guess that's what it's about tonight.
	Whether or not we can control, ultimately, the destiny of the human race.
	We'll find out.
	We'll also ask about the mystery of life and, of course, death.
	That's coming up.
	Well, the greatest mystery of all is what happens to us, I guess, after we physically pass away.
	And I wonder if these experiences, Graham, have told you anything about all of that, the great mystery of life and death.
	Oh yes, certainly.
	The work that I've done with Ayahuasca in the Amazon with Ibogaine from Africa has touched very often on that matter.
	I have encountered directly the spirit of my deceased father in my Ayahuasca journey.
	He has communicated with me.
	And not only with me, but with my wife, Santa, who's also undertaken many of these journeys with me, and communicated in such a way that I am left in no doubt whatsoever that his consciousness did survive death.
	If I go back in my own life story, I can say that I'm now 57 years old.
	Teens and my 20s, I regarded myself as an absolute atheist.
	I didn't believe that there was any meaning or transcendental purpose to life.
	If somebody said to me, do you think that life goes on after death, I would simply have laughed and regarded it as a complete joke.
	But experiences and lessons began to come to me during my 30s and 40s before I had ever experienced ayahuasca.
	Really, it was the first step that I started to make on this journey was the research and the work that I needed to do from my earlier books concerning ancient civilizations, and particularly concerning ancient Egypt.
	You know, the ancient Egyptians devoted their best minds for more than 3,000 years to the consideration of one mystery only, and that is the mystery of what happens to us When we die.
	That's right.
	It's precisely the issue that our society today ignores entirely and pretends does not exist.
	We are such amateurs in the exploration of these mysteries by comparison with the ancient Egyptians and by comparison with any practicing shaman in the Amazon today.
	Now if you go into the ancient Egyptian sacred texts, for example the famous Books of the Dead, Or the pyramid texts, or the so-called coffin texts, so-called because they were written inside coffins in which the dead were mummified.
	You will find a complete map of the afterlife realm.
	And actually, I have a chapter on ancient Egypt in my book, Supernatural, and on their ideas about the afterlife realm.
	And I'm certain that the ancient Egyptian priests used altered states of consciousness, deliberately induced them, in order to map out and in a thoroughly systematic manner, explore and explain what happens to us after we die.
	It's very interesting that they indicate that we make a journey after our death, that when the material body dies or the soul leaves the body, It then undertakes a journey through a strange parallel universe that the ancient Egyptians called the Duat might be roughly translated as the Underworld or the Netherworld or the Afterworld.
	And in this journey, we are confronted with the consequences of everything that we have done and failed to do in this material life.
	That's terrifying.
	Extremely terrifying.
	You see, those scientists who say that we have afterlife beliefs simply to comfort ourselves, and that of course it's all nonsense, really have no idea what they're talking about.
	If you go into cultures that really examine the mystery of the afterlife, you'll find that the beliefs are not comforting at all, and that we are tested and weighed up and measured on what we did or did not do.
	with our lives and every negative action, every cruel thought, every vicious word that we have spoken will come back to us during the afterlife journey in the form of monsters and demons to punish us, to terrify us, to confront us.
	We have to confront the consequences of our own actions.
	It was seen as a journey through Through a strange underworld of corridors and passageways, with a series of gates through which one must pass.
	And at each of those gates, one was tested, and eventually one comes into what was called the Hall of Mart.
	Now, Mart was the goddess of truth and justice.
	Her symbol was the feather.
	And there, symbolically, our heart is weighed in the scales.
	against the feather of Maat, the feather of truth, the feather of harmony, the feather of cosmic justice.
	And if our hearts are heavy with sin, and not only with sin, but with the failure to take advantage of the incredible gift that we have been given to be born in a human body, then our hearts will outweigh the feather.
	And then we must confront a being that the ancient Egyptians called Amit, the eater of the dead.
	And it becomes possible through Through the consequences of our own choices and actions, that we might face eternal annihilation, never to be reborn, never to come back.
	But if we've lived right, if we've used this gift of life properly, if we've lived it to the full, if we've experienced and given love, most importantly of all, if we have loved others, and that means giving.
	Love is not about taking, it's about giving.
	Then we pass the test in this Hall of Mart, which was also called the Judgment Hall of Osiris, and move on, perhaps into another incarnation in this world to learn more lessons, to grow, to develop further.
	to rectify past mistakes and ultimately the vision of the ancient Egyptians was that we would be reborn as a star in the sky.
	So there is a kind of a parallel to what we traditionally think of as heaven and hell.
	Yes, there's no doubt that these ideas of heaven and hell that are encountered in Christianity and Islam, for example, have their origins in the ancient Egyptian way of thinking.
	It's just that It's just that the ancient Egyptian approach to it was so much more sophisticated, and I would suggest based on direct experiences undergone by the priests of ancient Egypt in altered states of consciousness, rather than simply in a body of lore passed down without experience from generation to generation, which is what we have today.
	And reincarnation.
	And reincarnation.
	Reincarnation is a very strong A systematic part of the ancient Egyptian view, of course it's a systematic, very strong part of the ancient religions of India as well, that we come back into physical incarnation again and again and again.
	And why do we come back?
	We come back because life is a school, just as I said earlier that Ayahuasca in the Amazon is a school to teach us.
	And that if we don't learn the lessons it has to teach, the next time we drink ayahuasca it will confront us with those lessons again, so also with the broader picture of life.
	We come back into this life in order to learn those lessons, and only when we've learned them and mastered them and done right and thought right and lived our lives to the full, without harming others, without adding to the stock of misery in the world, only then do we move on to the next level.
	And the traditional concept of God?
	The traditional concept of God, I think, and again I'm drawing on my own experiences in altered states of consciousness here, rather than on the teachings of any church.
	I think that the traditional concept of God is largely a human invention.
	I think it's something that we created.
	We projected our own idea of how society should be ruled over by a single, all-powerful, omnipotent individual.
	And we projected that out into the supernatural realm, but I do not think that that's actually how it is.
	I think it's much more complicated than that.
	I think there are enormous numbers of beings and entities and intelligences out there, some deeply concerned with the human race, some loving and caring for and nurturing the human race, but some also that are antagonistic.
	All right.
	Listen, Graham, I've got to go to the phones.
	A million people want to talk to you, so let's keep it short, everybody, if we can.
	And here it comes, Graham.
	I think it's Bob in Washington, Pennsylvania.
	You're on the air with Graham Hancock.
	Thank you, Mr. Bell, for doing the show, Mr. Hancock.
	I just wanted to say that I've experienced with psilocybin Mushrooms.
	And the commonality, Mr. Bell, he is absolutely correct.
	I have met the Earth Goddess, is what I had called it, several times.
	And I just wanted to thank you very much for doing the show and keep up the good work.
	Thank you for that comment.
	It's much, much appreciated and helps to add to our knowledge and understanding of these mysteries.
	It does, and it seems to me that the commonality screams out for science, and science just walks away from this one, apparently.
	Walks away from it again and again and again, because it confronts and affronts the basic principles of science, which are that everything can be explained in simplistic, materialistic, and mechanical terms.
	That way, science can continue to control our lives if everything is material, but the moment that consciousness comes to the issue and that there is a supernatural realm surrounding us, then science must become more humble and must learn from the very people it despises, such as the shamans of tribal and hunter-gatherer societies.
	Okay.
	Kurt in Two Harbors, Minnesota.
	You're on with Graham Hancock.
	Hi.
	Hi, thanks for taking my call.
	I would like to ask Mr. Hancock why exactly is Absinthe criminalized in the United States, yet it's freely available for purchase over in other countries?
	Well, I mean, this is true not only of Absinthe, the drink, which does have undoubtedly mind-altering qualities, But it's true of many, many other substances as well.
	I've been talking about ayahuasca.
	Ayahuasca is totally legal and indeed its use is protected under laws of religious freedom throughout Peru and Brazil and Ecuador and other countries of South America surrounding the Amazon Basin, whereas in the United States and Britain it's completely illegal and DMT is completely illegal and one is not allowed to To to to consume these substances there's a lot of inconsistencies between the ways that different countries Come to conclusions about what is legal and what is not my own view controversial though it may be Is that governments have no right to rule and tell us what we may or may not put inside our own bodies as adults?
	We alone are responsible for that, as long as we do not get into other people's faces, as long as we do not do harm to others.
	The moment we start doing harm to others, then governments may have a role to prevent us from doing so.
	But if we do no harm to others, then I don't think the government has any business, whether it's absent or anything else, in ruling that we may or may not put it into our own bodies.
	We are adults.
	We have the rights.
	To make decisions about our own bodies.
	And it's an absurd transgression of human liberty that governments take it upon themselves to tell us what we may or may not put into our bodies.
	And in fact, by convincing us that they have a right to tell us to do that, they are opening the door to all kinds of other infringements of our liberties.
	And we are seeing those infringements of our liberties spreading out all around the world today.
	Far from becoming a free society, Our societies in the West are becoming increasingly unfree, and I think this campaign to control what we do or do not put into our bodies
	are at the heart of this transgression of liberty that is now underway.
	Well, surely you can understand, as I can, Graham, that there are certain substances that are addictive and damaging, and those you can understand perhaps being, you know, in the purity of the argument, I guess, I guess you could argue for cocaine or heroin or whatever you wish, but really you can come to an understanding of why they've been legislated The problem is that the legislation actually doesn't work.
	If we wish to prevent people from taking harmful substances, then making those substances criminal and illegal and ruining people's lives and putting them in prison for up to 30 years for taking them, that's not the way to go.
	Look, we have a very clear example of this, which is the issue of smoking tobacco.
	Smoking tobacco is not illegal in our societies, but there has been a very effective and efficient information campaign which has persuaded adults that it is not in their interest to smoke tobacco.
	And as a result, we can look at the statistics over the last 25 years, there's been a vast reduction in the smoking of tobacco.
	This has happened without any criminal sanctions whatsoever.
	On the other hand, if you take substances Like heroin and cocaine, against which there are massive, punitive criminal sanctions.
	Do we see a reduction in the use of those substances in our society?
	No, we don't.
	What about alcohol?
	Let me just finish on that.
	We don't see any reduction, and this suggests to me that our governments, as in so many other areas, are not being honest with us.
	They are lying to us about the reasons why all of these substances are illegal.
	It is really about control of the state over individuals that's going on here.
	A precedent is being set where the state, we ourselves, acquiesce and stand back and
	allow the state to intervene in this most intimate area of our lives, what we choose
	to do as adults.
	And once we allow that, then we're prepared to allow the state all other kinds of transgression
	of our liberties as well.
	Alcohol.
	Yes, well, there's another extremely damaging drug which is extremely dangerous to human
	health which is, of course, completely legal in our societies.
	Much more dangerous to human health than psilocybin mushrooms, for example.
	Oh, indeed.
	Indeed.
	What about the motor car?
	What about the tens of thousands of people who are killed every year on the roads?
	What about painkillers like paracetamol, which are entirely legal and yet are responsible for thousands of deaths every year?
	Take it further.
	What about, you know, what about knives?
	I mean, people get killed by knives.
	What about fires?
	Why aren't fires illegal?
	But if you just stay in the realm of drugs, Graham, alcohol is... Yeah, but what I'm saying is that the principle that something should be made illegal because it is harmful to our health, this is actually not the real reason why drugs are being made illegal.
	Because if it was, then other substances that are harmful to our health would be made illegal.
	We would not be allowed to drive in motor cars.
	Because those are harmful to our health.
	So the real reason is something else.
	It's about control.
	It's about certain individuals in our society who have controlling mentalities and who gravitate towards government.
	And they seek all kinds of excuses and reasons to control us.
	And that, I'm convinced, is what the war on drugs is really all about.
	It certainly failed in its own objectives.
	It has not cut down the consumption of heroin and cocaine.
	It has caused a great deal of misery.
	If we really want adults to stop taking heroin and cocaine, then we need to provide them with information that is honest, that they believe, that is not corrupted, and full of lies.
	That's a very good point.
	Lied to once, then a person feels they were lied to each time.
	It's Robert in Texarkana.
	You're on with Graham.
	Hey Art Bell.
	Hi.
	Alright, I got a question here.
	You guys are saying that in 2012 that We're going to be hit with a meteorite that might take us out, right?
	A comet.
	I'm saying it's possible.
	I'm saying this is one possible interpretation of the ancient myths and traditions of the Mayan calendar, that there was a horrendous planetary cataclysm 12,500 years ago, and that it may be about to come back, and that a comet may be the agency involved.
	Okay.
	Now, we do have telescopes that... Now, I'm not familiar with all the I don't even know what I'm talking about now.
	It's quite right, sir.
	We kind of covered that.
	We did cover that, that these objects approach the Earth very frequently without being seen by our leading astronomers, despite the investment of billions of dollars in astronomical technology.
	Actually, the people that find these likely-to-hit-Earth-type objects are the amateurs more frequently than the large telescopes.
	They're not looking for these things.
	They're not looking for these things, no.
	I mean, there is a study of near-Earth asteroids and of objects that might collide with the Earth, but it's woefully underfunded.
	It's one of the areas where our governments really do have their eye off the ball right now.
	And, you know, much more work should be done on making us alert to this danger.
	Instead of hating and fearing our fellow human beings, we should look at these massive objects, sometimes 10 or 20 miles wide, that are hurtling through space at tens of thousands of miles an hour, each one of which is capable of sterilizing this planet of all life in an instant.
	And capable of doing it with no warning to us whatsoever.
	Graham Hancock is my guest.
	His book is Supernatural.
	Good morning, everybody.
	This really has been quite the ride.
	My guest is Graham Hancock, and at this juncture, you definitely want to know his book, Supernatural, Meetings with the Ancient Teachers of Mankind.
	If you've been sort of lit up by what you've heard this morning, I would imagine you'd want to make the trip to Amazon and get that one on the way.
	Speaking of on the way, we'll be right back.
	So perhaps the real message has been there all the time, encoded within us and unlocked with something like the MT.
	Graham, welcome back.
	It's quite a journey you've made from the beginning of your career to what you're talking about tonight.
	Quite a journey, huh?
	Yeah, it has been a journey and I must say I do feel very lucky, I feel blessed, I feel privileged that I've had the opportunity to lead my life this way.
	I'm grateful to my readers for helping me to do it because if people didn't buy my books I wouldn't be able to fund my research and my journeys and my experiments and my adventures.
	I feel like a lucky man, a fortunate man and it has been A process of evolution, you know.
	I started out as a journalist.
	I was the East Africa correspondent of The Economist back in the 70s and early 80s.
	I was totally concerned with current affairs, with wars and politics and famine and economics.
	And really the journey began with coming across in Ethiopia, which was on my beat as a journalist A tradition that that country, that Ethiopia, possessed the Lost Ark of the Covenant.
	And finding myself in front of the gates of a mysterious chapel in the grounds of a great cathedral in the Ethiopian city of Axum, a very remote city, where I met a monk who claimed to be the guardian of the Ark.
	And this really was the beginning of the whole journey into ancient mysteries for me, and it turned my life away from this prior focus on current affairs and journalism And into an in-depth inquiry into the mysteries of the past.
	And I wrote a book called The Sign and the Seal, A Quest for the Lost Ark of the Covenant.
	And from there, I went on to explore the mysteries of lost civilizations to try to argue and present the evidence that there might have been a huge forgotten episode in human history.
	And finally, now in my mid to late 50s, I find myself exploring the mysteries of consciousness, and I find myself, because my ethic has always been that I must experience what I'm writing about, I find myself working with consciousness-altering plants, such as ayahuasca, such as DMT, to learn about the mysteries of consciousness, and I hope in some way that I've been of service, I've been useful, I've been helpful in helping other people in their own inquiries and adventures.
	Graham, having made the journey that you've made, you obviously, and with the understanding you now have, how much optimism do you have that the consciousness transition that's going to be needed can occur?
	I actually have great optimism.
	Really?
	My optimism has been increased by my travels in the United States on this lecture tour.
	Because I do keep on meeting people whose minds are full of questions, who are no longer willing to accept the lies and the deceitful disinformation campaigns that are foisted upon them by their governments, who want to reach out in love and care for fellow human beings rather than to beat those human beings down and force them into a particular narrow way of life.
	I think that America is full of good and decent people who care.
	Of course, this is a huge country.
	There are many, many millions of people who are with the forces of control and darkness, but there are equally many millions who are not and who are against it.
	So I think we're at a turning point.
	I think we're at a crossroads, but I do believe that a transformation of consciousness is possible and is on the way.
	These things begin in a small way.
	At first you don't see the signs of it.
	It seems hopeless for each of us as an individual.
	We feel hopeless.
	How can we change the world when so many huge dark forces are arranged against us?
	But if each and every one of us tries in a small way, in our own local community, in our own families, in our relationships with others, in the way that we approach the world to make changes, and I see evidence that huge numbers of people are trying to do that sincerely and decently and honestly, then it could have a cumulative effect that could be very dramatic and critical mass for this change could be reached much earlier than we think.
	So, you know, the ancient Maya may be right with the notion that it's not so much an end of the world But an end of a particular age of the world, and that a new age may indeed be just around the corner.
	Yes, I do remain optimistic.
	Excellent.
	Donovan, I think it is, in Beaumont, Texas.
	You're on with Graham.
	Yes, it is, and it's a pleasure to talk with both of y'all.
	I had recently read the book, Supernatural, and really liked it.
	It was great.
	But I was kind of curious about, I know I've listened to you quite often, Mr. Hancock, on Coast to Coast.
	You talk a lot about the ayahuasca, but I didn't really see a lot of that in your book, and I was wondering, are you going to have another book that will talk about your experiences more?
	Well, I have one major chapter on my ayahuasca experiences in the book.
	I didn't want to talk too much about my personal experiences.
	You know, sometimes if you go on endlessly about your own visions and experiences, it It's boring to others.
	What I wanted to do was to drop hints and provide the information that would show people that this is an interesting area for them to inquire into themselves.
	Since I finished writing the book, I have to add that I've continued drinking ayahuasca.
	I now travel down to Brazil every year to drink ayahuasca.
	I'm quite certain that I will go on drinking ayahuasca for the rest of my life on this planet at least five times a year.
	It's wrought such wonderful And positive changes in my life that I never wish to be without it again.
	And that's a choice that I'm making as a free adult in this world.
	How much flak have you taken?
	I've taken an awful lot of flak.
	I do find people get very upset.
	Some people get very upset and very angry and accuse me of advocating and promoting drugs.
	And I want to emphasize that's not what I'm doing.
	What I'm advocating and promoting is adult responsibility over our own lives and the choices that we make about our own bodies and consciousness.
	I've been attacked by academics with virtually every book I've written, and that is true of Supernatural as well.
	You know, there is among scientists the view that they own and possess all knowledge, and that their way of doing things is the only way of doing things.
	So how dare this That there might be another way, and I've got used to this over the years.
	It goes with the territory.
	If you write books that go against the prevailing order and the prevailing ideas of society, then you are going to be attacked.
	In former ages, people who questioned the status quo were actually killed.
	In our present age, more often they destroy your reputation.
	And they make it impossible for you to function.
	And I faced a lot of that over the years.
	Sometimes it's been very tough.
	Sometimes it's been very difficult.
	But I've never felt that I should stop doing what I'm doing.
	Good for you.
	Mike in Cleveland, Ohio.
	You're on with Graham Hancock.
	Hi.
	Good evening, Art and Graham.
	Hi.
	Art, someone needs to suggest to Major Ed Gaines that remote viewing the DMT molecule The pineal gland may allow a repeatable contact with that ET mind he's seeking.
	And Graham, a previous guest on Coast to Coast, Todd Murphy, has a product, Shakti Technologies, that has one putting eight magnets on one's head via a hat.
	The software program causes a rotating magnetic field effect that he says 80% of everyone who tries the device has an out-of-body, near-death experience, Yeah, I absolutely believe that.
	Magnetism is an extremely effective way to alter consciousness, and altered states of consciousness are the key to access to these supernatural realms.
	And in fact, Graham, I think some scientists have found a certain area of the brain when stimulated electrically does also produce these experiences.
	Well, yes.
	I mean, and the mistake that those scientists make is that they then suggest that the experience is somehow being manufactured in the brain.
	That's right.
	We would expect to see brain activity accompanying any experience.
	But that does not mean that the brain activity is causing the experience.
	It's just because our scientists have a prejudice against things that they cannot actually weigh, measure, and count.
	When such experiences that can't be weighed, measured, and counted in the conventional sense occur, scientists want to tell us that those experiences aren't real and are being made up or generated in the brain and they show us brain activity and they say, there, that's the proof that the brain is making this up.
	But no, it's not.
	All the brain is doing is what the brain always does.
	It's active when we have experiences.
	All right.
	Carl in West Allis, Wisconsin.
	Hi, gentlemen.
	I have a quick comment directed to both of you.
	Art, earlier you mentioned something about wondering if we're alone in the universe.
	Perhaps the aliens, when we try to contact them, have caller IDs and also I can see their concern about what we're doing to the planet.
	It just brings to mind a book by Isaac Asimov, the first book of the Foundation Trilogy, and the planet Tranter comes to mind.
	I don't know if you're familiar with it.
	But my question is, to Graham, is it possible that some of this damage done 12,500 years Yes, I dare say it is.
	In fact, that's what all the ancient myths suggest.
	They suggest that that former civilization incurred the wrath of the gods, incurred the wrath of the spirit world by its behavior.
	And, you know, I don't rule that out at all, and in fact that's, you know, that's my concern with our society today, that unless we take control of our own destinies and stop our governments leading us headlong over the abyss, that we will once again lose the mandate of heaven, once again incur the anger of the gods.
	Well, you can't rule that out.
	This would be a first-time caller.
	Ben in Tucson, Arizona.
	You're on with Graham Hancock.
	Good morning.
	Good morning, Art.
	Good morning, Graham.
	Hi.
	Hi.
	I'm an anthropologist at the University of Arizona, and I have to say, a huge fan of Heaven and Mirror.
	Thank you.
	My question, though, has to do with the Dropa stones.
	Are you familiar with these?
	No, I'm not familiar with the Dropa stones.
	Tell me about them.
	The Dropa stones were found in Asia in the 1930s, and they depicted a story of Beings coming from the sky that crash landed in Asia, and the story was written down by the people of the Hum, and these people weren't able to rebuild their aircraft, and so they couldn't return to their planet.
	My question is, do you think it's possible that we had paleocontact before the Ice Age ended?
	And is that a belief that you hold?
	Yeah, I do think we had paleocontact.
	I'm just not certain that that contact was with beings from other planets in this physical universe.
	When we have these contacts, we shouldn't necessarily jump to the conclusion that that's what involved.
	It could be much more interesting to speculate that the contact is rather with beings from other dimensions rather than from other locations in this dimension.
	We shouldn't prejudge the issue.
	Both are possible.
	Do you believe that these beings are spiritual beings who are trying to teach us something now?
	I think that the supernatural realm contains both good and evil.
	It contains wise and loving entities and teachers who have the health and welfare of the human race very much to heart, but there are also dark and evil forces out there which also contact humanity and operate in the human sphere, and ultimately the choice is up to us.
	I think that's what free will really means.
	That we beings, we human beings, must choose between the darkness and the light.
	Just as we must choose between the darkness and the light in this physical and material realm, so also we must choose between the darkness and the light in the supernatural realm.
	And those choices are the choices that we must make as free and independent adults.
	All right.
	Carol in Columbia, Mississippi.
	You're on with Graham.
	Hi, Art.
	It's so great.
	It's a great pleasure to have you back tonight.
	I really appreciate it.
	And I have a question for Graham.
	I am a... I lost everything I had in Hurricane Katrina.
	I'm an evacuee, and that's really the only good thing that came out of Katrina was because I started lifting the coast to coast, and it's been a great joy in my life.
	And my question is, I don't really know if you covered this.
	I didn't really understand, but did he feel that global warming And the dire predictions for coastal flooding is related to the 2012 return of the comet fragments, or is that something more man-made?
	Well, I think that the issue of global warming and of rising sea levels today is actually a very, very complicated issue indeed.
	And I've no doubt that human behavior is part of the story, but I don't think it's the whole story.
	There have been periods of radical warming of the planet before, when there were no human beings on the planet.
	And I think it's much too simplistic an argument that's being put to us at the moment about this.
	Surely there is no denying the change, no matter what... No denying the change.
	It's a huge change.
	I remember as a child in England, we used to see snow every winter.
	Deep snow, up to my knees in snow.
	And now, we never see snow in England at all.
	I mean, it just doesn't fall.
	So definitely, within the short span of a single human lifetime, the climate has changed enormously.
	Definitely, sea level is rising again.
	There's no doubt that people who live within two or three feet of the sea are going to be finding their feet underwater within a few years from now.
	Okay.
	Perhaps finally, from Sedona, Arizona, comes Tobias.
	Hi, Tobias.
	Hi.
	Hi.
	I wanted to just confirm the commonality you're talking about.
	I did some psychedelics 25 years ago in my life, but I really had no more interest in that until a year ago, and I ended up in the Amazon through strange circumstances or coincidences, as George calls them, and participated in five ceremonies.
	And in the first ceremony we did, ayahuasca did come as a green Goddess with copper-colored hair, and I had purposely not wanted to research or find out anything ahead of time.
	Right, good.
	Yeah, not reading anyone else's experiences, just to have a clean experience of the whole thing.
	And so that was, I just wanted to confirm that as well.
	And then I wanted to ask you about a life review.
	Daniel Brinkley talks about life reviews, and we have someone passing on in our family, and we've been Reading more of his stuff.
	But anyway, during the ceremonies as well, that seemed to come up.
	It came up for me personally, sort of a mini life review.
	Yes, absolutely.
	Yeah, and also about diet.
	I wanted, if you could speak towards how important the diet is, because we eat such polluted foods in the West.
	Yes, we do.
	And diet is an important part of the ayahuasca experience, and it is important to avoid certain foods prior to drinking ayahuasca.
	As to the issue of the life review, This again is one of those astonishing universalities about
	ayahuasca is that everyone who drinks ayahuasca, this has happened to me many times, at a certain
	point during the night after the intense visionary phase has passed usually, will
	undergo a life review, will see pictures and events and stories from their life going right back to
	their childhood and will get the opportunity to review their own behavior during those
	circumstances.
	And I believe that we're given this opportunity so that we have the chance, should we choose
	to do so, to change our behavior.
	And although it's extremely difficult to change our behavior, once we've seen how we behave
	with absolute clarity and truth, and that's what happens in a life review with no opportunity
	to hide behind illusions or pretenses, then we are strongly motivated to change ourselves
	for the better.
	Graham, that's it.
	My friend, it's been great to talk to you.
	It has been wonderful to speak with you.
	Graham, thank you so very much.
	What a wild ride.
	Have a great night.
	Have a great tour, my friend.
	Thank you.
	Lovely to talk to you again, Art.
	Hope to see you soon.
	Good night, Graham.
	Ladies and gentlemen, that's it for tonight.
	The voice you hear behind me is that of an angel indeed.
	From the high desert and the great American Southwest, I'm Art Bell.

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