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July 20, 2015 - Art Bell

02:37:40

Art Bell MITD - Graham Hancock

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37:07

graham hancock

01:14:23

leo ashcraft

11:14

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johnny cash

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Speaker	Time	Text
art bell ▲ ● ▼		From the high desert and the great American Southwest, I bid you good morning, good afternoon, good evening, wherever you are in the universe, the world.
		We're covering it all with a brand new program called Midnight in the Desert.
		I'm Mark Bell, and it is my pleasure to be here.
		It's going to be an interesting evening.
		The first thing we're going to do is cover the genesis of the name of the program.
		Now, let's think about it a little bit.
		Midnight in the Desert.
		Where have you heard that before?
		Midnight in the Desert.
		Midnight in the Desert.
		Let me think about that.
		Oh, yes.
		There's this lovely gal in Nashville.
		There's this lovely gal in Nashville who.
		I'm hearing music.
		I wonder where that's coming from.
		It's really strange.
		Now it's gone.
		All right.
		This lovely gal in Nashville who sang it for me.
		And her name is Crystal Gale.
		Crystal, welcome to the program.
unidentified		Well, thank you for having me on.
unidentified		I'm so excited.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I guess now I should reach back.
		I should tell everybody that one day you came to my house here in Nevada.
		You came all the way to Perrump, Nevada, and handed me a song on a CD.
		And it blew me away.
		And then, Crystal, as time went on, and you said, I sang this for you.
		Here you go.
		It's yours.
		And as time went on, I fell more and more and more in love with the song.
		It's the last song I play every single night.
		And so, first of all, I guess I would like to ask about the genesis of this song.
		Did you write it yourself?
unidentified		I wrote this with Mike Lautermilk and then my husband Bill.
		But Mike and I started out the song.
		We listened to your program all the time, as you know.
		And we just started thinking about it.
		We said, you know, we've got to come up with something.
		And it just came.
		And we wrote it and we decided we had to bring it to you.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Crystal, when you write a song, does it most times just come or are a lot of them struggles to write?
unidentified		Yeah, a lot of it can be struggle.
		But the ones that I like are the ones that just come easy.
		And this definitely did.
		But, you know, it just felt right, and we wanted to do this.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Boy, it does feel right.
		It feels right for.
		By the way, you'll be interested to know.
		We had a great vote on this website.
		And Midnight in the Desert won out, hands down.
		Everybody wanted the program to be called that.
		Everybody wanted the theme to be that.
		This is great.
unidentified		Well, we are very honored.
unidentified		Very, very honored.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I'm very honored.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		What are you doing these days?
unidentified		Well, we're still working out on the road doing different concerts and been in the studio working on a classic country album that's in the mixing process and will be out soon and just having fun.
		You know, in my career, I've been all over the world, made so many wonderful friends, and love it.
		And I'm still making more.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
		I want an honest response here.
		When you go out on the road, man, you're really on the road.
		I mean, you're from spot to spot to spot to spot all over the country.
		Does that wear one down after a while?
unidentified		Definitely, it can wear you down real fast.
		It just depends.
		You know, when I was younger, definitely we could go day after day after day, and then you get a little older, and it was like, okay, let's slow this down.
		But, you know, once it's in your blood, you love it.
		We enjoy being out there.
		And as you know, my sister Loretta Lynn, I mean, she loves it.
		She's still out there singing, and it's just incredible.
		And I've got to say, we're going to be at her ranch on September 5th with the Vandler girls.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Really?
unidentified		My sister Peggy and Loretta and I will be all together there.
unidentified		And we have so much fun.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		How come so much talent gathers in one family?
unidentified		You know, I don't know.
		I think my mother would sing.
		My father, I think he sang and played the guitar.
		But mom had a twin sister that they'd sing around at socials.
		And it was a part of our upbringing.
		In Kentucky, everybody gathered on the porch.
		And, you know, we didn't have the video machines and everything else.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Oh, I know about Kentucky.
		I do.
		It's really laid back.
		There's so much beautiful farm country there.
		Horses all over the place.
		It's gorgeous.
unidentified		It's a great place.
unidentified		A wonderful place.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You know where I am out here in the middle of cactus country.
unidentified		I love the desert.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		So you honestly really did.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You used to listen to the show, huh?
unidentified		Oh, yes.
unidentified		Yes.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		That's incredible.
		You know, I never know who's.
		Just like you never know who's in the audience.
		I never know who's out there.
unidentified		That's right.
		Well, we listen.
		Love it.
		And it inspired that song.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Somehow I can imagine you all listening as you're on a bus or on something going from one gig to another.
unidentified		Definitely that at home as well.
unidentified		You know, when you enjoy something and I enjoy what you talk about, so all the interesting things.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, when I played this, you know, I'm married again.
		I played it for my wife, and she just absolutely fell in love with it.
		And then I told her that I actually Met you and I showed her your picture and she about fell over.
		So I've got to ask you about your hair.
		You're world famous for your hair.
		There was some rumor or something.
unidentified		I don't know.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I heard from somebody that you were at one time thinking of cutting it.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		No.
unidentified		I have been cutting it back some.
		It's not quite as long.
		No.
		It's hard to get rid of something that's been with you as long as it has.
		So that's one thing.
		But I do dream about having short hair, you know, where I can just wash it and go.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		How hard is it?
		I mean, when I saw you, it was at your ankles now.
		I can't even imagine hair that long.
		But it's part of your trademark now.
		So I'm sure anybody connected with you is also saying, no, don't cut your hair, right?
unidentified		You know, some have said through the years, cut it, and some have said no.
		But I owe my long hair to my American Indian heritage.
		I'm Cherokee.
		It just grows so fast.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I had no idea you had Cherokee.
unidentified		It's 9 to 12 inches off a year.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Nine to 12?
unidentified		Yeah, you know, it just grows so fast.
unidentified		I don't know how long my hair would have been if I'd never trimmed it.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		In other words, you might be trailing it like a bridle thing.
unidentified		When I started stepping on it, I said, that's too long.
unidentified		So that's when I cut it back.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		So 9 to 12 is like how much it grows in a year?
unidentified		Yeah, you know, I think the normal is like, for most people, I think it's about 6 inches.
unidentified		But I started measuring my trimmings through the year, and it was from 9 to 12 inches.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, it's absolutely gorgeous.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		And I think that's why when you appear somewhere, they frequently get television shots or, you know, photo shots of you from the rear to show your hair.
unidentified		Yes, they have.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, again, it is my distinct honor and pleasure to have the show named Midnight in the Desert.
		I'm in love with that song.
		And, you know, if I weren't entangled, I'd be in love with you too.
		Oh, man.
		All right.
		So I had to do that.
		I had to do that at the beginning of the program.
		There was just no two ways about it.
		What a wonderful lady.
		And I'm not kidding you when I say she got on an airplane, came all the way out here, came to my house, had lunch, and handed that to me and said, here, this is for you.
		And I listened to it once and I said, oh, thank you so much.
		And, you know, it kind of ended there for a little while.
		And then I started listening more and more and more to the song.
		And the more I heard it, the more I began to fall in love with it, really in love with it.
		So that's how this show became what it is.
		And the good people at Belgab, that's a website that kind of follows the show, voted this as what should be the name of the program.
		And so that's how it happened.
		That beautiful, talented lady is the reason.
		All right, I'm going to go through, I think, a couple of rules for the show because, and that's all we've got is a couple.
		Actually, maybe only one.
		The rule we have here is no bad language.
		No bad language.
		Now, tonight, we're welcoming a whole bunch of affiliates to the show.
		So be aware that you're not only on the internet, but you're on broadcast radio as well.
		And I could go through a list, and I will at some point go through a list of all the affiliates.
		Those of you who have joined us, I say, welcome.
		And again, the only rule I have is really no bad language.
		There's no need for it.
		You can say what you have to say without saying a bad word.
		You can be dramatic and have emphasis without saying a bad word, right?
		So do that.
		And keep in mind that we've got children eight, people up to 80 listening.
		They both go through the roof if you've got a whole bunch of bad language.
		I think a lot of internet radio shows think, we're on the internet now.
		We can really swear up a storm, and they do.
		So what you're hearing now is a digital audio revolution, in my opinion.
		The world has changed beneath our feet.
		There is nobody, nobody who loves radio more than myself.
		But clearly, we are in the middle of a digital revolution.
		Everybody's carrying around these cell phones.
		I've got an iPhone sitting right here.
		Whether it's an Android or whatever you've got, it's pretty much plastered with you all the time, right?
		Half of you have most of your lives on the thing.
		I know I do.
		And when it's out of my reach, I get a little fidgety.
		Are any of the rest of you like that?
		Even when it's in the charger, it's like the charger has it.
		I don't.
		And I reach for it to look at a weather forecast or what have you, and it's not there.
		All right.
unidentified		So.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Oh, there is one other thing.
		There are many ways to call the show.
		We have a public number, which is area code 952-225-5278.
		That's 952-225-5278.
		You can use Skype in North America.
		That means U.S. and Canada.
		You simply kind of make like you want to make me your friend on Skype, and you enter M-I-T-D 51.
		That's M-I-T-D 51, as in midnight in the desert, right?
		If you're overseas anywhere outside North America, it's M-I-T-D 55.
		That's M-I-T-D-55.
		Now, when you call, we prefer you use a headphone mic.
		If you can find a headphone mic, that would be glorious because then you'd sound good.
		If you've got one of those little cameras on your computer, pick it up when you call and talk into it just like you're talking into a microphone.
		What you don't do is stand five feet back from the computer and yell at The computer when I come on.
		That never works.
		Always sounds bad.
		No exceptions.
		Just doesn't work.
		Now, on your iPhone, you can add me, and then you can call me.
		It's that simple from anywhere in the world.
		All right.
		All of that said, I think that I'll go into this break this way.
		This, of course, is the lady you just heard, Crystal Gale.
		I'm Art Bell, and this is Midnight in the Desert.
unidentified		Midnight in the desert, shooting stars across the sky.
		This magical journey will take us on a ride.
		Filled with the longing, searching for the truth.
		Will we make it to tomorrow?
		Will the sun shine on you?
		Good night in the desert.
		I'm my last night.
		Friday night and the lights are low.
		Looking out for a place to go.
		Where they play the white music.
		Getting in the swing.
		You'll come to know the first thing again.
		Take a ride from the high desert and the Great American Southwest.
		This is midnight in the desert, exclusively on the Dark Matter Digital Network.
		To call the show, dial 1-952.
		Call Art.
		That's 1-952-225-5278.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		That's the number, all right.
		Stumbled a little there at the end.
		5278 is what he meant to say at the end.
		And that's the way to call.
		Good evening, everybody.
		I am Art Bell, and I am back after a two-year hiatus.
		At the bottom of the hour, we're going to be joined by, or after the news at the bottom of the hour, Graham Hancock.
		And Graham is an amazing, amazing guy.
		I'll tell you all about him.
		If you've never heard Graham, well, you're in for quite a treat.
		I've got a few thank yous to do since this is an inaugural show.
		I'm going to repeat some of what I said last night.
		Now, I needed really, really good audio to do a show like this or to even contemplate doing a show like this.
		And so I called the Telos Company.
		They are the leaders in getting audio from point A to point B and getting phones working and all that kind of stuff.
		And the company Telos said, well, you know, our chief engineer lives right there in Prump, Nevada.
		I about dropped the phone.
unidentified		What?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		So I hooked up with Joe, who happens to be a ham operator like myself.
		Needless to say, he talked the company into providing us with the best gear that exists on planet Earth for getting sound from point A to point B or telephones or whatever.
		And so thank you, Telos, and thank you, Joe.
		Keith Rowland, my webmaster of...
		Probably bothers Keith, too.
		What is it, about 30 years, Keith?
		We've known each other, I think.
		Something like that.
		So he's doing it all down there.
		Well, I'm doing it all here, and he's doing it all there.
		Dr. J, my new producer, and by the way, Paul, my old producer.
		That sounds bad, right?
		The old guy.
		He's fine.
		Dr. J is my new producer and doing a great job.
		I want to thank the Belgab website.
		This is a website comprised of people that might chew your arm off or might give you a kiss on the cheek.
		It's really hard to say.
		They're sort of what I describe as vaguely lovable.
		It's a great site.
		You know, if you're not...
		Two sites.
		So here's the deal.
		Belgab is the wild, wild west.
		The other website listed, which claims the name of the show, is a little easier going.
		So if you don't feel like you would even put your head into the lion's den, you're going to want to go to that one.
		If you're unafraid, you know, I make these people sound bad.
		They're actually bright people.
		They're people who have really helped spread the word of the show.
		And, you know, it's a little acerbic at times.
		But Belgab is a place you might want to try.
		Belgab.com.
		Then there's Las VegasNet, LasVegas.net.
		We did a test show last night.
		And as I mentioned last night, Internet is crucial to virtually everything I do.
		Without Internet, there is no me.
		You know, the phones come in by Internet, Skype comes in by Internet, my program goes by the Internet.
		So I am Internet dependent.
		Last night, we did a little test show.
		And we had storms up on the mountain between here and Las Vegas.
		That's where the microwave sends the internet, right?
		And these storms caused a gigantic rain fade.
		I mean, it came, it's 9,000 feet up, folks, and it came down so hard that even the microwave signal simply didn't make it through.
		And when that happened, of course, an hour and a half or an hour and whatever it was, three quarters into the show, things began going bonkers.
		So that's why you do tests.
		We've ironed that out.
		We ironed out a whole lot of other things.
		And hopefully all will run smoothly tonight.
		That's not wood.
		That's sort of metallic, but it looks like wood.
		It's wood-like.
		Probably doesn't count at all.
		Let me find.
		There we go.
		That's real wood.
		All right.
		While we've got a moment, I'm going to pick up, I think, a call.
		And I'm going to go to, well, let's see.
		Let's go to Illinois.
		Hello, Illinois.
		Are you there?
		Yes.
		Extinguish your device, please.
unidentified		Done.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Done.
		Great.
		Okay.
		What is your first name?
unidentified		Rose.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Rose by any other, right?
unidentified		Yeah.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		What part of Illinois are you in, Rose?
unidentified		IUCA.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		IUCA?
unidentified		Population 600.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Really?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		That's a very small town.
unidentified		I'm out in farm country.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		So does everybody sort of know everybody in your town?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I imagine they do.
unidentified		Yeah, it's like everybody knows everybody.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay, well, listen, welcome to the program.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Do you have any thoughts, suggestions, ideas, criticisms, anything?
unidentified		No criticisms.
		I love him.
		I cried when they took his show off the air.
		My husband, I was screaming and yelling at him.
		He's not on.
		He's not on.
		That other radio show's on.
		And I've been listening to art for years.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, yeah, but you're talking about him like he's in the third person.
unidentified		Well, he was gone for a little while, and I missed him very much.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, he was, and he missed being here, too.
		But listen, just for the record, I'm art.
		This is art.
unidentified		Oh, my God.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		No, just art.
unidentified		Oh, my God.
		I got screwed in.
		Oh, my God.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Now, what have I always said, Rose?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I've always said I don't have a call screener.
unidentified		Call screeners, yeah, but usually they say that and somebody else picks up.
		Oh, my Lord.
		Oh, my God.
		I love you and your family.
		I swear, the day that you signed off the air, I go, no, no, he's going to be back on.
		That other radio show was on.
		I screamed at my husband.
		He's not on.
		I sat down and cried.
		It was like somebody stabbed me in the heart with a knife.
		I've been listening to you for years.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Rose, you know, you've really got to get a recording of this program.
		I hope you have joined as a time traveler and a copy of it.
		You know, if you're a time traveler, you can get a copy of the show.
unidentified		My husband paid for a subscription.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		There you go.
		There you go.
		Because you've got to hear your voice, Rose.
		You've got to hear your voice when you figured out it was me.
unidentified		I just can't believe it.
		Oh, my God.
		Oh, Art.
		I love you and your family and your daughters and your wife are just beautiful.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Thank you.
unidentified		So very much sorry about Mona.
unidentified		Oh, thank you.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right, so Rose, Rose, Royals, what would you like to hear on the show?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I mean, what is almost your favorite topic?
unidentified		Well, I have two of them.
		One is what's going on with the Earth and the planets, how they're changing, and the volcanoes and the earthquakes.
		And the other one is UFOs.
		And I've seen one.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Rose, let me first address the first thing you said.
		We now have, it'd be a great book title too, but I'm not going to write it.
		We have The Quickening on Steroids.
unidentified		The Quickening on Steroids.
		That's right.
		We do.
		All right.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Now, briefly, you said you've seen a UFO.
		Welcome to the club.
		Tell me about it real quickly.
unidentified		Okay, at the time, I was living in Kansas, and I went out to take my dog out, and I looked up at the sky, and the moon and the stars were gone.
		I ran back in the house, got my daughter, drug her out on the porch, and I hollered, look, look.
		And she looked up, and she goes, what?
		I says, where's the moon?
		Where's the stars?
		And then my neighbors across the way, they came out of their house and we were all pointing at the sky.
		And that thing was dead silent.
		Massive, so big, so huge.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		What about the shape?
unidentified		I'm going to stop with the blink of an eye.
unidentified		No noise.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		But what about the shape?
unidentified		It was...
		I...
		It was kind of like an arrowhead shape.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		An arrowhead.
unidentified		Yeah, you know how an arrowhead is kind of shaped?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Oh, sure.
unidentified		It was kind of something like that.
		And it was just pitch.
		The whole bottom of it was pitch black until it took off.
		And then multicolored lights all at the bottom.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Multicolored lights at the bottom.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		So it isn't like it was, not like it was on a rainbow, firing itself off on a rainbow or something.
unidentified		No, it was like when the thing powered up and took off, there were like these multicolored lights.
		And my daughter, speechless, I grabbed her and I was shaking her, trying to snap her out of it because she was terrified.
		All she was saying was pointing at it.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Really?
unidentified		Yeah.
unidentified		So me, some of my neighbors, and then shortly after that, we moved here.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Rose, is there anything that makes you think that it was, you know, from somewhere else?
unidentified		Well, I don't think we have anything.
		I mean, this is a huge trailer park that I was living in.
		We got nothing that big.
		Nothing.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Was it silent?
unidentified		Dead silent.
unidentified		Not a sound.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Dead silent.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You know, that's true.
unidentified		There's no noise of any kind.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right, Rose, I got to go.
		I got to go.
		I'm out of time.
		Bless your heart.
unidentified		Thank you.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Thank you.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Take care, Rose.
unidentified		Wow.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		That was a call to remember.
		You're listening to Midnight in the Desert.
		I'm Art Bell, and we're going to have fun.
unidentified		We'll be right back.
		Rising up, back on the street.
		Took my time, took my tenses.
		When I'm in the instance, now I'm back on my feet.
		Just the man in this will survive.
		So many times it happens too fast.
		You change your passion for glory.
		Don't lose your grip on the dreams of the past.
		You must lie just to keep them alive.
		Let's be out of the diamonds.
		The feel of a fight rising up to the terrain of our batteries.
leo ashcraft ▲ ● ▼		For Dark Matter News, I'm Leo Ashcraft.
		The Associated Press says scores of low-flying planes circling American cities are part of a civilian Air Force operated by the FBI and obscured behind fictitious companies.
		The AP said it traced at least 50 aircraft back to the FBI and identified more than 100 flights in 11 states over a 30-day period since late April.
		They were orbiting both major cities and rural areas.
		At least 115 planes, including 90 Cessna aircraft, were mentioned in a federal budget document from 2009.
		For decades, the planes have provided support to FBI surveillance operations on the ground, but now the aircraft are equipped with high-tech cameras and, in rare circumstances, technology capable of tracking thousands of cell phones, raising questions about how these surveillance flights affect Americans' privacy.
		The FBI says the planes are not equipped or used for bulk collection activities or mass surveillance.
		They say the surveillance equipment is used for ongoing investigations, but generally without a judge's approval.
		The Earth could be headed for a mini-ice age, according to researchers.
		A new study claims to have cracked predicting solar cycles and says that between 2020 and 2030, solar cycles will cancel each other out.
		This, they say, will lead to a phenomenon known as the Maunder Minimum, which has previously been known as a mini-ice age when it hit between 1646 and 1715, even causing London's River Thames to freeze over.
		The new model of the Sun's solar cycle is producing unprecedentedly accurate predictions of irregularities within the Sun's 11-year heartbeat.
		It draws on dynamo effects in two layers of the Sun, one close to the surface and one deep within its convection zone.
		Predictions from the model suggest that solar activity will fall by 60% during the 2030s, two conditions last seen during the mini-ice age that began in 1645.
		NASA has released an online tool known as MarsTrek, which aims to provide a Google-like experience so that users can explore the red planet's terrain.
		The zoomable map provides detailed views of landmarks such as Olympias Mons, the largest known volcano in the solar system, measuring more than 15 miles above its surrounding surface.
		Other notable features on the map include Vals Marineris, a canyon that runs across one-fourth of Mars' surface and measures about 90 miles wide.
		Across the map, gigantic rift valleys fracture the surface over vast distances.
		Huge outflow channels tell the stories of floods in Mars' distant past when water flowed across its surface.
		Studying these landforms reveals how Mars' environment has gone through tremendous changes over time and helps us understand how life might have possibly survived there to the present.
		The tool also provides users with the option of using a 3D view, which rotates the red planet to reveal its north and south poles.
		This is Dark Matter News.
		A University of Alaska spokesman has advised in an email that control of the High Frequency Active Oral Research Program, better known as HARP, would be transferred from direct federal control to their institution in August.
		Currently, the Air Force Research Lab has control of the HAARP facility until August 11th.
		After that, the university will have access to the site under the terms of an agreement between the University of Alaska Fairbanks and the Air Force.
		The officially reported purpose of the HARP installation was study of the ionosphere.
		The facility has a complex array of radio equipment meant to generate heat in the upper atmosphere from about 37 miles to 620 miles above the Earth's surface.
		But the mysterious nature of some of the experiments put the HAARP facility at the center of plenty of speculation.
		The troubling factor in this story is that although the Air Force is ostensibly transferring control to the civilian university, the bulk of the funding is still coming from the Pentagon.
		For Dark Matter News, I'm Leo Ashcraft.
unidentified		For Dark Matter News, I'm Leo Ashcraft.
		For Dark Matter News, I'm Leo Ashcraft.
		Don't leave me this away.
		I can't survive.
		Can't say alive without your love.
		Oh, baby, don't leave me this away.
		Midnight matters are best handled by those that understand how to move in the darkness like Art Bell.
		To call the show, please dial 1-952-Call Art.
		That's 1-952-225-5278.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Midnight in the Desert.
		It's a brand new program every.
		And I'm so very glad to be here.
		I can't even begin to tell you how glad I am to be here.
		It's been a long two-year wait, and it's been a long two-year wait for Graham Hancock, too.
		Graham Hancock is a British writer.
		He's a journalist.
		He specializes in very unconventional theories involving ancient civilizations.
		You don't think we were the first, do you?
		Stone monuments, megaliths, altered states of consciousness.
		That's a favorite of mine.
		More ways than one.
		Ancient myths and astronomical astrological data from the past.
		One of the main themes running through many of his books is a posited global connection with a mother culture from which he believes all ancient historical civilizations sprang.
		His work has been rejected by many scientists.
		They call it pseudo-archaeology.
		What a rotten word.
		Pseudo-archaeology.
		Graham, welcome to the program all the way from, I believe, London, right?
graham hancock ▲ ● ▼		Actually, the city of Bath in southwest England, about 100 miles west of London.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Both.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I hope Both was not a toll hall to our London line.
graham hancock ▲ ● ▼		Probably is, but it's okay.
graham hancock ▲ ● ▼		We'll live with that artist.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right, I'm glad to have a London line.
		I'm glad to have you on it.
		And listen, I am so sorry, Graham.
		Really, truly sorry about your being, you were going to be on the next night two years ago.
graham hancock ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, you stood me up audge.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I know.
		I felt so godfreaking guilty about that.
		Really did.
		So it's been so long.
		Here's where I want to start, if I can.
		This has been a lifelong, pretty much lifelong journey for you.
		And I guess I want to ask you how it began.
		In other words, what set you on this path?
graham hancock ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
		Really, I got onto this path by what certainly felt like and seemed to be a series of accidents.
		I really had no interest in ancient mysteries at all.
		If we go back to the 1970s and 1980s, I was very much into current affairs.
		I was based in East Africa.
		I was based in Nairobi in Kenya.
		I was the East Africa correspondent for the Economist in the early 1980s.
		And that was a responsibility that took me regularly to the war-torn, famine-hit country of Ethiopia, right to the north of Kenya.
		It was on my beat, and I used to go there regularly as a journalist.
		And in Ethiopia, I stumbled across a non-current affair story that Ethiopia claims to possess the lost Ark of the Covenant with all its powers, that it can still strike people dead, that it is still a thing of fire.
		And initially, this just seemed to me, at one level, like a fantastic claim being made by an obscure country in the Horn of Africa.
		And at the other level, there were intriguing elements about it that made me wonder what lay behind it and whether it uh-oh.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, that was awfully quick.
		We lost him awfully quickly.
		And he was just talking about the lost ark of the covenant.
		So I have no idea what just occurred.
		Nothing else is going askew here.
		So hopefully Graham will call back the lost ark of the covenant.
		Now, I've seen all the movies, and I'm sure you have.
		And I am intensely curious about the lost ark.
		I wonder, A, if it still exists.
		And I wonder, B, if we were to lay our hands on it, would we be pleased that we did that?
		Really, what happened?
		I wonder what happened to our line.
		That is our London line.
		It pretty much should have stayed together.
		And again, I'm looking at everything else that I can look at.
		The Skype calls coming in and other calls coming in, and everything looks all right.
		So I don't know.
		This is one of those things that you don't expect.
		You certainly don't hope that, I mean, you do hope ahead of time that nothing like this will occur.
		But it did.
		So he will realize, he's probably going on and on.
		He'll realize that he's been disconnected and will call back.
		But there's just no reason for this.
		You all have seen the movies about the Lost Ark, right?
		And I was just prepared to ask him about that.
		Let's see.
		What should we do?
		We could take an additional break here, and then I could call him.
		Or I could I suppose I could just call him.
		I'm not against doing that either.
unidentified		So let's see.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I wonder if it'll hold up.
		And I wonder how I dial from here.
		I wonder a lot of things.
		You should all know this is all new equipment.
		I repeat new equipment, so I hardly know what I'm doing.
		Though in that case, I'm not exactly sure what I would have to do to call London from here.
		So what we will do is we will take an additional break.
		That's what we will do.
		And that'll take care of one for later.
unidentified		So we'll pause for it.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		No, wait a minute.
		Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.
		I think this might be Graham back on the line again.
graham hancock ▲ ● ▼		It's me.
		That connection to London doesn't sound so good anymore.
		We just got cut off there.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		We sure did.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You sound fine right now.
johnny cash ▲ ● ▼		Good.
graham hancock ▲ ● ▼		Well, let's carry on.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay, we were with the Lost Ark of the Covenant.
graham hancock ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, and the bottom line was that it was that accidental encounter with the Ethiopian claim and my investigation of it over several years that led me to take an interest in ancient mysteries and to wonder whether the story we were being told about our past was actually true.
		I mean, previously I'd accepted that, you know, that what the historians and archaeologists said was based on science, it must be true, there was no reason to question it.
		And then I discovered in this specific case that there were lots and lots and lots of reasons to question it.
		And then I thought, well, if that's the case here in this subject, which I've now thoroughly investigated and found that archaeologists are missing a trick on, maybe it's true in other areas of the past as well.
		And that ultimately led me to my next book, and certainly my best-known book, which was Fingerprints of the Gods, published in 1995.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
		Let me back up just a little bit.
		I can't leave the Lost Ark just yet.
		Is it your view, Graham, that the Lost Ark still exists somewhere in the world?
graham hancock ▲ ● ▼		Yes, absolutely.
		And if Ethiopia doesn't have the whole thing, it's certainly got a large piece of it.
		There are some indications that it got broken or damaged during the last couple of thousand years.
		And according to my reconstruction, it's been in Ethiopia since about 400 years before Christ.
		Now, this is a controversial claim, but all the dots join up.
		And, you know, there's extraordinary backup to what the Ethiopians are saying.
		And the role that the Ark of the Covenant plays in their culture is really extremely puzzling.
		I mean, this is the only culture in the world which has a living tradition of actually worship of the Ark of the Covenant.
		Everywhere else, it's a forgotten relic.
		In Ethiopia, it's part of the beating cultural heart of that country, and every church has a replica of the Ark of the Covenant in its Holy of Holies.
		And it's really, the more you get into it, the more extraordinary it seems that this could just be based on nothing.
		There's something going on, and it's intimately connected to the story of the Ethiopian Jews.
		You know, this is a story that has been not well enough told in the world, the realization that there is an ancient Jewish community in Ethiopia which has roots that go back deep into Old Testament times.
		And these Ethiopian Jews who call themselves Beta Israel, which means house of Israel, they're often referred to by outsiders as the Falashas.
		The vast majority of them have now been moved to Israel during the crisis of the civil war in Ethiopia in 1991.
		The Israelis mounted a rescue mission and took most of the Ethiopian Jews out of the country.
		But I knew them before that exodus, and I traveled in their villages and I talked with their priests, because the Ethiopian Jews have priests.
		This itself should be an indication of how curious and strange their religion is.
		Modern Judaism does not have priests.
		It has rabbis.
		But these Ethiopian Jews were practicing a very ancient form of Judaism, even sacrificing rams, which is forbidden, again, in Talmudic Judaism.
		So intriguing story and one thoroughly worth investigating and one that woke me up to the mysteries of the past.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		If you had access to the Lost Ark of the Covenant, would you hesitate to open it given the opportunity?
graham hancock ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, I'd absolutely hesitate to open it.
graham hancock ▲ ● ▼		I think we're looking at a piece of lost technology, and there are some indications that it has gone rogue.
unidentified		Rogue?
graham hancock ▲ ● ▼		Rogue.
		That it kills its keepers.
		There is an old tradition in Ethiopia that a single monk is appointed as the guardian of the ark.
		Once he's appointed to that position, he can never leave the precincts of the chapel where the ark is kept.
		And I got to know a number of these guys over a period of several years, a number of them because once appointed as guardian of the ark, their lifespan tends to be very short, like two years, and they develop cataracts over their eyes, and they complain that the ark is doing this to them, but that it is their fate, their burden, their responsibility to be the keeper of the ark.
unidentified		That might imply some sort of radiation?
graham hancock ▲ ● ▼		I think it does.
		And I speculated on this as I was researching the subject.
		And it's one of the things that turned me on to the possibility that the story of our past may be badly flawed.
		Because the ark does sound like a piece of technology.
		I mean, here's an object that strikes, if you read the biblical accounts, and of course, I didn't confine myself to the biblical accounts.
		There's an incredible, incredibly rich heritage of the legends of the Jews and of other extra, what they call extra-biblical sources, sources outside the Bible, which are filled with references to the ark.
		And eerily, again and again and again and again, what you find these references are describing is some sort of awesome weapon that strikes people dead with bolts of fire.
		You need only reach out your hand to it, and a bolt of fire will leap out from it and break you down, that's capable of flight, that inflicts cancerous tumors upon the Philistines on the one occasion when the Philistines capture the Ark from the Israelite.
		There's really strange passages in the Bible that describe the way they opened it, which was a terrible mistake, the way they filed past it and looked into it, and how 50,000 of the citizens of a place called Ashdod were killed with cancerous tumors by exposure to the Ark of the Covenant.
		And of course, you know, the scholars just dismiss all of this as ancient fantasies, but there's a remarkable consistency in the stories.
		And I began to wonder whether we are looking at a legacy or a heritage of an earlier technology, which has somehow been preserved in Ethiopia and preserved elsewhere in other countries.
		We keep coming across these hints and myths of a lost technology.
		And if there's a lost technology way back in the past, then there's a problem with history, because history and archaeology see the evolution of human civilization as pretty much a kind of straight line.
		I mean, there might be a few...
		Exactly.
		There's a lost civilization behind it.
		Or there's, let's put it this way, there's an unexplained mystery behind it because the model that we are taught in schools and universities and that is largely favored by the mass media as well, the model of mainstream history, does not have any room for any lost civilizations.
		Historians and archaeologists, I find that on the one hand, they do some incredible work.
		On the other hand, they're very pompous about their findings and they're convinced that they've got the whole story when they should know that the next turn of the spade could change the story entirely.
		And I think that's what's happening around the issue of civilization.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		May I ask you a very controversial question?
		You're welcome to say no.
		The Bible, of course, is seen to be or thought to be a very historical and many would argue extremely accurate or totally accurate document.
		How much of the Bible do you think is the real McCoy?
graham hancock ▲ ● ▼		I think it should just be looked at as a repository of information from the remote past.
		And as such, there's no need for us to distinguish it from the incredible scriptures and religious ideas preserved in hieroglyphs by the ancient Egyptians, where those ideas often touch on the remote past of mankind, or the texts of the Sumerians in Mesopotamia.
		Or for that matter, the ongoing tradition of Hinduism in India.
		Hinduism is based upon the Vedas, and the Vedas are lost books going back into the remote.
		The origins of the Vedas are really a deep mystery.
		What we're looking at in the Vedas is the latest recension of a very ancient oral tradition that may have been passed down for more than 12,000 years.
		And I think that's the case with the biblical texts, with the ancient Egyptian texts, with the Sumerian texts as well.
		They're best looked upon as archives of knowledge.
		So I don't place the biblical texts any higher than the ancient Egyptian or the Sumerian or the Indian texts.
		I place them alongside those texts as a route into the past, that this is one of the ways, if you think of it as a wormhole in the fabric of space-time, that through these documents we can begin to enter and gaze upon and penetrate the mysteries of the past.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, I ask myself, Graham, all the time how much of it I believe.
		And I do this because even relatively recent history written supposedly perfectly as it occurred depends on who wrote it, whether they're the ones who won the war.
		And I mean, history is just, you know, even modern, relatively modern history comes out six ways from Sunday.
graham hancock ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, no, totally.
		I don't think we should automatically believe anything in any ancient text.
		We should just use it as an aid in order to inquire into the past.
		History is a story, first and foremost.
		It's a narrative.
		And the biblical texts are a narrative.
		And they are written to support a particular point of view.
		But that doesn't mean that there isn't good stuff in there.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Oh, no, there is.
		I mean, there's stuff that everybody knows is good.
		You know, that human beings, I think, just know as a natural matter of being a human being the right and wrong way to treat somebody else, for example.
		So a lot of it is that kind of common sense, and you can believe it.
graham hancock ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, well, the ethical stuff, you know, is an aspect of all ancient texts.
graham hancock ▲ ● ▼		No harm in listening to that.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		But, and Graham, I want to know, did the miracles really occur?
		Did the sea really part?
		All of that.
		I want to know, and we all do.
graham hancock ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, I think that what is being captured in some of these accounts, again, it comes back to this issue of a technology that we don't understand, the faint hints and traces of some system of manipulating physical matter, which is not the system that we use today and which appears to be miraculous, but is in fact an ancient science.
		I think that to me that's what it all comes down to in the end, that we're dealing with the fingerprints of an ancient science, and that this science goes back to a civilization before recorded history began.
		Now, I have to say that at the root of it all is mystery, not history.
		And when we seek to explain this, we should keep an open mind to all possibilities.
unidentified		Another possibility that many people like is the ancient astronaut.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right, hold it right there.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		We're at a breakpoint, and we'll be right back with Graham Hancock.
unidentified		I'm Art Bell.
		One of the four beasts sang, Come and see.
		And I saw, and behold, a white horse.
johnny cash ▲ ● ▼		The End There's a man going round taking names, and he decides who to free and who to blame.
		Everybody will be treated all the same.
		There will be a golden letter reaching down when the man comes around.
		The hairs on your arm will stand up as a terror in each step and in each cup.
		Will you partake of that last offer cup or disappear into the buttercrown?
unidentified		To reach midnight in the desert via Skype worldwide, if on a computer, please be sure to use a headphone mic and call MITD51.
unidentified		That's MITD51.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		This just seemed the exact right time for this song.
unidentified		I fell in love with this song.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I don't know, somehow discussions of the Bible dark of the covenant and all of it with Graham Hancock, and it seemed just the right time for that song.
		Graham, welcome back.
		Thank you.
		Your new book, by the way, is Magicians of the Gods, right?
graham hancock ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, Magicians of the Gods.
		It's not published yet.
		It'll be published in the fall.
		And it is the sequel to Fingerprints of the Gods.
		And when I say a sequel, I'm not referring to an update of Fingerprints of the Gods.
		This is a completely new book.
		20 years have passed since I published Fingerprints of the Gods, and there have been enormous developments in the world since then, both in the field of archaeology and in the field of understanding what happened to the Earth between 12,800 and 11,600 years ago, which is the period I've always focused on.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		In the book, I'm sorry to interrupt.
		In the book, you suggest that a giant comet may have hit the Earth about 12,800 years ago.
		Is that correct?
graham hancock ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, that's right.
		And that's not my suggestion.
		What I'm doing there is picking up on really extraordinary discoveries in science that have taken place really since 2007.
		This is all very new information.
		We have a group of around 30 scientists from all around the world, from major universities and research institutes, who've been looking at what they call impact proxies.
		Now, this information has got out in a small way to the public, but it's never been put together into a coherent case that has a bearing upon the origins of our history.
		And that's one of the things that I'm doing in Magicians of the Gods, is I'm putting all of that information together for the first time.
		See, it used to be held that the last time we had a major, what they call a cosmic cataclysm on this planet was 65 million years ago.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Dinosaurs.
graham hancock ▲ ● ▼		Dinosaurs, what they call the KT events, when what is calculated to be an asteroid about 10 kilometers in diameter smacked into the Earth in the Gulf of Mexico, created a global firestone,
		destabilized the crust of the Earth, sent huge plumes of volcanic smoke rising into the upper atmosphere, changed the climate completely, and in the process rendered extinct the dinosaurs that had been the masters of our planet for hundreds of millions of years before that.
		Now, the view of science was that impacts on this scale, what you call extinction-level events, are very rare.
		That they happen approximately once every hundred million years.
		Although how anybody could seriously expect the universe to be as predictable as that, I cannot imagine.
		Like every hundred million years, the alarm clock rings.
		But this was the view.
		And that while it is known that the Earth is in the path of small objects, meteorites, that they enter our skies all the time, little shooting stars, they light up, they're very pretty to look at.
		We don't feel endangered by these.
		They're the size of a speck of dust and they're not going to do any harm to the Earth.
		So historians looking at the story of human civilization, you know, anatomically modern humans like us, at least according to the mainstream view, are supposed to have existed for only the last 200,000 years.
		And civilization, according to the mainstream view, is only supposed to be about 5,000 years old.
		So if you're dealing with time spans of 200,000 years or 5,000 years, why need you concern yourself with time spans of hundreds of millions of years?
		This is the essential point of history.
		So history doesn't take account of cosmic cataclysms.
		And that's why, with this rigid view that the last one happened 65 million years ago, that we're not going to see another cataclysm for about another 35 million years, that's why history ignores cataclysms.
		But the group of scientists who I mentioned began to put together the information.
		They began to realize there were certain anomalies in the data.
		They began to realize that something horrendous had happened to the Earth much more recently than that, incredibly recently, actually just 12,800 years ago, at the beginning of an episode that geologists call the Younger Dryass.
		Now, geologists have been aware that the Earth plunged Into a very radical climate shift at that time, 12,800 years ago, and they'd been aware that there were extinctions which were associated with this time period, but they had never put it all together.
		They thought the extinctions might have been the result of human activity, hunters, for example, hunting down the great herds of mammoths in North America.
		And they didn't realize that there might have been another cause for this.
		And that's what the new science has gradually revealed.
		That the Earth was hit 12,800 years ago.
		And it was hit by at least eight large fragments of a giant comet.
		And those fragments included fragments that were a mile in diameter.
		In other words...
		Well, the point is that what all this comes back to is that the comet that was responsible for the cataclysm 12,800 years ago, the Earth has had several encounters with its debris stream.
		Those first impacts 12,800 years ago, and I'm summarizing, you know, eight or nine years of really intense science here, which is thoroughly documented in the new book, that the first impacts were largely on the North American ice cap.
		This was the ice age.
		North America was buried as far south as New York in ice that was, you know, two miles deep.
		This is why craters were not found, because those impacts on the North American ice cap were on the ice itself, and therefore the craters formed in the ice and the vast heat initiated by these gigantic impacts, these objects are coming in at close to 100,000 miles an hour, that the vast heat liquidized huge areas of the ice cap, causing enormous flooding.
		And part of my research with a fantastic catastrophe researcher called Randall Carlton, who traveled with me, we made a big journey across North America, across Oregon, across Washington State in particular, the channeled scablands of Washington State, unbelievable landscapes, the couleees, upper and lower Grand Coulee, just these huge gouges in the earth.
		We now know that these features were caused by cataclysmic flooding at the end of the ice age, and the old explanation for that flooding just won't fit anymore.
		The only thing that really makes sense is the impact of several fragments of a comet on the ice cap.
		So I'm going to summarize very quickly.
		We have impact 12,800 years ago.
		The science for it is impeccable, if not yet fully out into the public domain.
		Then there's another encounter.
		You see, what we're dealing with here is a comet that may originally have been 200 kilometers in diameter, a giant thing like the size of a small planet that is drawn in to the inner solar system.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		That's a really, really big guy.
		Just one quick question.
		I keep my ear to the ground on the internet, and these things come and go, I'm telling you.
		But there is this gigantic group of people right now that believe something like what you're talking about is probably pretty close to the horizon.
		They're talking even in September.
		I don't have a clue.
		I just know there's a gigantic buzz about it right now.
		If you want to comment on that, fine.
graham hancock ▲ ● ▼		Well, I can only tell you the science of it, which I've gone into in depth in Magicians of the Gods.
		I can only tell you the science of it.
		And what the science looks like is this.
		And let me just go back to this original scenario.
		That a huge comet enters the inner solar system about 30,000 years ago.
		It is captured by the sun, and it begins to go into an orbit that crosses the orbit of the Earth.
		It's subjected to all kinds of gravitational pulls.
		Comets are not as massively solid as asteroids.
		Comets are huge amounts of rock bound together with ice.
		And what happens with these gravitational pulls and the passage of time is that this giant comet begins to break up into fragments.
		Some of those fragments might be 20 miles across.
		Others might be the size of your fist.
		And it begins to form a debris stream.
		Imagine a huge doughnut spread around the solar system.
		That's the debris stream of this comet.
		And in it, there's lots of small stuff, which isn't dangerous, and there's a lot of large stuff, which is hideously dangerous.
		12,800 years ago, we are hit by about eight large fragments of this comet with the epicenter of the cataclysm on the North American ice cap and continent-wide wildfires across North America and the massive extinction of what are called the megafauna, the large animal species of that time.
		World climate changes.
		Huge amounts of ice water from the ice cap have been released into the ocean.
		This interrupts the Gulf Stream and it causes a radical fall of world climate and we go into a deep freeze that lasts 1,200 years.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Actually, I believe Britain would be some of the first to go, wouldn't it?
		One of the first to go.
		If those ocean currents change, you guys are going to freeze.
graham hancock ▲ ● ▼		Of course.
		Many people don't realize what a huge role the oceans play in maintaining the stability of climate.
		And if you interrupt these great conveyor belts that take warm water from the equator and bring it up into the cold northern latitudes, if you interrupt that, then you don't just affect the Atlantic, you affect the climate of the whole world.
		Now the mystery is that this episode, which began 12,800 years ago, ended equally suddenly 11,600 years ago.
		And the answer to this mystery appears to be that more fragments of that comet hit the Earth, that we crossed the debris stream again 11,600 years ago.
		This time the impacts were in oceans, most likely the Pacific Ocean, the biggest ocean on the planet.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Tsunamis?
graham hancock ▲ ● ▼		Tsunamis for sure, but also a greenhouse effect.
		Huge amounts of water vapor are thrown up into the upper atmosphere, and this creates the perfect greenhouse conditions, which then explain why the Earth, in a matter of a generation, undergoes a warming of more than 10 degrees centigrade.
		And all of what's left of the ice caps just melt, and you have huge flooding.
		This is 11,600 years ago.
		The point is, I'm not a big fan of doom and gloom and cataclysmic scenarios, but I think we need to be aware of our cosmic environment.
		And the point is that the astronomers and other scientists who've worked on this say that the debris stream of that giant comet is still in orbit.
		As a matter of fact, it's well known to all of us.
		The Earth passes through the debris stream of that giant comet twice a year.
		And that debris stream these days is known as the torrid meteor stream because it seems to come at us from the direction of the constellation of Taurus.
		That's an illusion, but that's why it's called the Torrid Meteor Stream.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, Graham, I know that.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I'm sorry.
graham hancock ▲ ● ▼		I'll just finish this thought, Art.
		The alarming thing is that calculations suggest that there are still many large objects in the Torrid meteor stream.
		Some of them are known, like Comet Enki, which is five kilometers in diameter.
		Others are theoretical, but when they backtrack the orbits of the meteor stream to the original giant comet, the inescapable conclusion is that there is at least one object with a diameter of 20 miles still out there and still crossing the orbit of the Earth every year.
		And it's really just a matter of luck.
		It's like crossing a six-lane highway blindfold.
		We've just been crossing that highway twice a year and missing the traffic.
		But sooner or later, we come into an area where the traffic bunches up, and then there is a danger of an impact.
		And some of the astronomers who worked on this think that that danger is a real and present danger, and that it could confront us anytime between now and about the year 2040.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I wonder if we'd see it coming out.
		You know, we look for these things, Graham.
		We really do.
		Amateurs particularly.
		But, but, but, we might not see one coming directly at us out of the sun.
graham hancock ▲ ● ▼		That's the problem.
		We're not looking for these things.
		The amount of money that NASA is spending on the research for Earth-crossing objects is absolutely minuscule.
		And as you, you know, to pick up on what you said, coming from the direction of the sun, we have no eyes on that at all.
		And we're looking at a situation here where actually we as a civilization could prevent this cataclysm.
		There is no reason for doom and gloom.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		If we saw it coming.
graham hancock ▲ ● ▼		Well, but we can see it coming.
		It's something that we should be taking an intense interest.
		Instead of the petty squabbles that divide us all at the moment, the ridiculous wars over ancient religious ideas which people have received as children and never questioned, the territorial conflicts, the greed, the stupidity, the hatred, the fear and suspicion being manipulated in society by the powers that be,
		if the civilizations on this planet were to put their heads together and say, all the evidence suggests that there is a real and present danger from the skies, what can we do about it?
		The answer is we could do plenty about it.
		There's no need for another extinction-level event.
unidentified		We have to grow up first.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Maybe we should be crowdfunding NASA, you know, and just say, use this money, please, to find what may cause an ELA.
johnny cash ▲ ● ▼		That's the general problem.
unidentified		We need to stop having wars and we need to start.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I know.
		The wars have got to stop.
		Hold it right there, Graham.
		We'll be right back.
		Graham Hancock is my guest, and this is Midnight in the Desert.
unidentified		And if it's bad, I don't want to get you down here.
		You can make it head.
		You can breathe.
		Hold your head up, hold your head up, hold your head up, hold your head up.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		That should jog a few memories on.
unidentified		What is that, folks?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Does that remind you of somebody?
unidentified		Michelle?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Oh, yeah, dreamland.
unidentified		While midnight sweeps across America, you've found an oasis for the mind.
		To call Midnight in the Desert, please dial 1-952-CAL ART.
		That's 1-952-225-5278.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Actually, no need to call right now.
		We've got Graham on, and as you can hear, he's got a very great deal to say.
		So hang in there and we'll get to your calls, but you might as well rest now.
		There's no point in everybody's dialing.
		I can see all the Skypes going, all the phone lines going.
		Just relax and listen.
		My guest is Graham Hancock, and here he is again.
		Graham, welcome back.
unidentified		Thank you a lot.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		So, you know, with all the internet rumor going on right now about something really gigantic coming, you know, usually I pass these things off, but this one seemed particularly, I don't know, constant, the drumbeat of something purest
unidentified		I guess they always do to some degree, but well, I just think that we have to take a different perspective on this.
graham hancock ▲ ● ▼		We live in a very dangerous cosmic environment, that's a fact, but we do not need to embrace gloom and doom, and we do not need to project a cataclysm upon ourselves.
graham hancock ▲ ● ▼		In other words, we do not need to manifest these things by dwelling upon them in some sort of extraordinary, masochistic way.
unidentified		That's true.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		But you mentioned wars, Graham.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You mentioned wars, right?
graham hancock ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, and we need to take a practical position to living in a dangerous cosmic environment, especially when the scientific evidence, never mind about the cultic evidence all over the internet, when the scientific evidence points to a possible encounter with more fragments of the same giant comet that devastated the Earth 12,800 years ago, we need to take a practical view of this.
		Can we do something about this?
		And the answer is yes, absolutely, we can do something about it if we'll focus attention on it.
		And that's where I come to this issue of human behavior right now, because the world is full of hatred and fear and suspicion.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		That's exactly where I was going, Graham.
		I was going to ask you, and this is a really, really critical, very important question.
		In your view, is mankind now any more or less warlike than we always have been?
graham hancock ▲ ● ▼		I actually think that we are much more warlike than we've always been.
		I think it's getting worse and worse because the same atavistic primitive urges that led to those bloody medieval wars with swords and spears are still at play.
		We still haven't grown up.
		We're still infantile.
		And we are now equipped with really dangerous toys which can cause absolute havoc and chaos in the world.
		Actually, never mind a comet, you know, we're perfectly capable of wiping ourselves out, of taking this beautiful garden that the universe has given us to play in and turning it into a hell world.
		And we're in the process of doing that.
		And I can't help feeling that there are powers at work which are manipulating us to think in this way, which are pressing those primitive buttons in our deep reptilian brain and not allowing us to begin to think clearly and openly.
		If we thought clearly and openly, we wouldn't have a single nuclear weapon on this planet.
		They're just such deadly, dreadful, dreadful things.
		But we do.
		If we thought clearly and openly, we wouldn't be allowing the destruction of the Amazon rainforest.
		Obviously, our society is just a little bit insane, absolutely crazy, and behaving in a psychotic manner.
		And then, looming on the horizon is the danger of cosmic cataclysm.
		And that's a danger if we were to pool our resources, if we were to work together, if we were to stop hating and fearing each other and actually realize that we are one human race, one family, all brothers and sisters, all with the same hopes, all with the same fears, that we don't need to fight each other.
		If we could take that line, then we could look at the challenges that face humanity, amongst which is the challenge of a dangerous cosmic environment, and we could do something about it.
		We could use our brilliant science for positive rather than negative ends.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Any idea, Graham, how we create that change in humanity?
graham hancock ▲ ● ▼		I think that there is a change of consciousness underway.
		I am very aware of this.
		The Internet is the key factor.
		The Internet is an instrument for liberation.
		Dark forces are seeking to control it and to limit its liberating powers.
		But what the Internet is doing is it's joining people all around the world into communities of ideas.
		Not communities based on skin color or the religious belief that we happen to have been born with or of our ethnic roots.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		That's the upside of the Internet.
graham hancock ▲ ● ▼		But to do with the communication of ideas.
		Now, I realize lots of negative things are happening on the Internet as well, but this ability for people all around the world to communicate with one another instantly, to share ideas, and to expand those ideas, is a great instrument for awakening.
		And I see that awakening taking place all around the world, and I see it particularly in the youth.
		It's small still.
		It's a small flickering flame, but it's growing.
		And, you know, we reach a point of critical mass, perhaps sooner than the big corporations any longer.
		We're going to take matters into our own hands and make a better world.
		And I think that's coming.
		I feel very optimistic for that.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, I'm not as much of an optimist as you are.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		And while what you point out about the internet is certainly true, it is also teaching teenagers or encouraging them to become radicalized, do something awful here, and or go to Syria and join up with the bad guys.
graham hancock ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, well, you know, we have some bad guys on our side, too, if we're going to think in those terms.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Oh, no, we do.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I agree.
graham hancock ▲ ● ▼		I really don't want to think of myself as a member of a particular nation, you know.
		I'm not, by the way, when I say that, I instantly realize there's a button that gets pressed.
		I am not in favor of one world government, okay?
		I am not in favor of any bloody government.
		I hate government.
		Government is an old phase of human activity.
		Our next phase is going to have a much smaller role for government.
		So when I say that I don't see the point of nationalism, I don't see why I should automatically owe allegiance to somebody else just because they happen to be born on the same piece of land as me, I'm not arguing for one world government.
		I'm arguing for an awakening of the human species where we realize for the first time our full potential instead of allowing it to be harnessed and channeled and narrowed down by sectarian interests, which include, of course, death cults like ISIS.
		Yes, I can't bear the fact that that hideous death cult has stolen the name of an ancient Egyptian goddess.
		It's appalling.
		But it is a death cult, and yes, it's using the internet, but many forces for love are also at work on the internet.
		So we have both sides.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Very quickly, you don't want a one-world government.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You don't want really any government at all.
graham hancock ▲ ● ▼		What would you have?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, we have such little time here.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		What would you have?
graham hancock ▲ ● ▼		I don't know.
		I just know that what we've got now is really bad, and it isn't serving the human race anymore.
		I don't think to recognize that that we have to create a roadmap for the future.
		I think it's enough to say what we've got now is a broken model.
		It doesn't work anymore.
		It's allowing millions of people around the world to starve, to go to bed hungry every night.
		It's allowing the proliferation of nuclear weapons into dangerously irresponsible hands.
		It's allowing pollution on a gigantic scale to eat away at the lifeblood of the planet.
		I don't think I need to recognize the need for change.
unidentified		Once we recognize that, the exact direction the change will go will be up to us.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
		Graham Hannock, hold tight.
		We'll be back to you.
		He is our guest.
unidentified		And, well, this man has a lot to say.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I'm Mark Bell, and this is Midnight in the Desert.
unidentified		Midnight in the Desert Riders of the storm.
johnny cash ▲ ● ▼		Riders of the storm.
unidentified		Into this house we're born.
johnny cash ▲ ● ▼		Into this world we go.
		Like a dog without a bone.
		And hacker out of road.
		Riders on the storm.
		There's a killer on the road.
leo ashcraft ▲ ● ▼		For Dark Matter News, I'm Leo Ashcraft.
		The owner of Jordan Lobster Farms said he can't bear to sell or cook a massive lobster that is nearly a century old.
		The crustacean is so big, employees are surprised by it and customers would rather take pictures with it than eat it.
unidentified		I've heard of these enormous lobsters, but I've never seen one, so it's a real treat.
		It's humongous.
		That one, you have to kind of use your whole body weight to just lift it up.
		So that was crazy.
leo ashcraft ▲ ● ▼		While it's difficult to tell a lobster's exact age, based on its weight and size, fishermen say this one is roughly 95 years old.
		Experts say lobsters at the deepest part of the ocean often live to be a century old.
		Owner Stephen Jordan is no stranger to large lobsters.
		Restaurant owners and diners routinely come to his wholesale and retail business for ones that weigh five to ten pounds.
		But this one officially weighs in at a whopping 23 pounds.
unidentified		I received it yesterday morning from one of our fishermen, John Price, who's in the Bay of Fundy.
unidentified		And he shipped it in.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		He even tell us, he told us to look in the crate.
unidentified		We opened it up.
unidentified		It was like, whoa.
leo ashcraft ▲ ● ▼		Jordan said it's been about a decade since he's seen a lobster this big.
leo ashcraft ▲ ● ▼		He plans to donate it to the Long Island Aquarium.
unidentified		It's almost like a dinosaur, you know, you don't want to, you like to see it continue on, and I think they would take good care of it.
		I think it's a nice thing for him to do, that the kids get to see it.
		It's more cool to watch it and look at it than eat it.
leo ashcraft ▲ ● ▼		The new movie Selfless, released this month, is a provocative psychological science fiction thriller.
leo ashcraft ▲ ● ▼		An extremely wealthy man dying from cancer undergoes a radical medical procedure that transfers his consciousness into the body of a healthy young man.
unidentified		It will take a few days, but it gets easier.
unidentified		I understand.
johnny cash ▲ ● ▼		New body smell.
unidentified		Death has some side effects.
leo ashcraft ▲ ● ▼		Consciousness has been defined as individual awareness of your unique thoughts, memories, feelings, sensations, and environment.
		Your own unique consciousness lives in a series of brain cells or neurons, which, when fired in certain patterns, cause you to recall memories and emotions, even smells and sounds.
		A study conducted at UCLA by lead researcher Martin Monty used MRI scans to study how the flow of information in the brains of 12 healthy volunteers changed as they lost consciousness under anesthesia with propofol.
		They concluded that consciousness does not live in a particular place in the brain, but rather arises from the mode in which billions of neurons communicate with one another.
		So will it ever be possible to accurately map an individual's intricate and totally unique consciousness and upload it into another mind?
		According to ASAP Science, the short answer is yes, it will become possible one day.
		Scientists continue to research this field and have begun to locate the true storage location of consciousness within our brains.
		This is Dark Matter News.
		Researchers have discovered the world's oldest fossilized sperm.
		According to the new study, the cells date back some 50 million years.
		The sperm fragments were found entrapped in the wall of a fossilized worm cocoon in Antarctica.
		Sperm cells are rarely found in fossil record as they tend to be short-lived and have delicate structures that don't fossilize well.
		The research team from Sweden, Italy, and Argentina used a scanning electron microscope to look at the specimen's surface, which revealed the presence of the sperm cell fragments from a 50 million-year-old gleitolata.
		Researchers suggest that the sperm fragments are similar to that of a group of leech-like worms found on the shells of modern crayfish in the northern hemisphere, where they feed on dead organic matter.
		Further studies on the cocoon could reveal a great deal of information, which has been overlooked by paleontologists who tend to focus on relatively hard structures, like bones and shells.
		For Dark Matter News, I'm Leo Ashcraft.
unidentified		Dark Matter News When
		the sun comes up on a sleepy little town Down around Santa Cruz And the folks are rising on all the day Round about their home Midnight in the desert, exclusively on the Dark Matter Digital Network with Art Development.
		Invite you to call now.
		1-952.
		Call Art.
		That's 1-952-225-5278.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay, that is the number, but actually, we don't invite you to call just yet.
		So relax.
		Sit down, relax, enjoy.
		Graham Hancock.
		We're actually clear sailing all the way to the top of the hour.
		Graham, we're back on.
unidentified		Welcome.
unidentified		Thank you, Art.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes, there's so much to talk about.
unidentified		There is, yeah.
graham hancock ▲ ● ▼		Well, I'm just brimming with this stuff at the moment, you know, because I spent the last three years working on this, working on this new book, gathering the evidence, putting it together.
		I try to make data, complex data, as accessible as possible, to open this up in a way that anybody can follow and understand.
		And in the process, I have to understand that data myself and really get on top of it.
		I think that's maybe the advantage of being a journalist rather than a scientist.
		I don't claim to be a scientist, and when the archaeologists call me a pseudo-archaeologist, I have to laugh because I don't claim to be an archaeologist, and I don't want to be an archaeologist.
		I want to be an independent mind who's looking at the past.
		So for three years, I've been working on Magicians of the Gods.
		The book is now finished.
		It's at press.
		It's going to be published in Britain on the 10th of September.
		It's going to be published in America on the 10th of November.
		And if I can just do a little commercial, if anybody is interested, just go to my website, grahamhancock.com, and it'll immediately take you to a page where you can learn more about Magicians of the Gods.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You can do as much commercial as you want, no problem.
		And so what are people going to say about this book?
		Are they going to say it's...
graham hancock ▲ ● ▼		I honestly have no idea.
		You know, when I published Fingerprints of the Gods in 1995, I had no idea then what sort of storm was about to break over my head.
		I was really quite innocent and naive in this field.
		I had no idea how many toes I would be treading on or how savage would be the reaction that followed.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, how savage for magicians?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You might as well make your prediction now.
graham hancock ▲ ● ▼		Well, I suspect it's going to be pretty tough, you know, and so I'm having to brace myself for that.
		You know, I'm like anybody else.
		I don't want to be hated.
		It's nice to be liked.
		And when people attack me personally, not just my work, not just what I say.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Oh, that's different.
graham hancock ▲ ● ▼		You know, the attacks on me, personal attacks on me, suggesting, you know, that I'm...
graham hancock ▲ ● ▼		Now, I don't and can't object to that.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, look, if they move from the scientific, if they move from that over to your personal life or you, then it just means they don't know how to attack you on what you've said.
graham hancock ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, well, it does.
		And that is a very common thing, unfortunately.
		And the argument is that those of us who are working in this field are simply exploiting a gullible public.
		And I reject that absolutely.
		I'm working in this field because I'm passionate about it.
		I feel that it's, and I know that that's true of many of my colleagues working in this field.
		We feel passionate about it.
		We feel that there's information that needs to be shared and exposed about the past.
		And that's primarily why we do what we do.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
		We've got to talk a little bit about the pyramids just because so much has happened.
		As you know, I had my tour of the pyramids, courtesy of your old buddy Zahi Awass.
graham hancock ▲ ● ▼		Yes, Zahi, good old Zahi.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Good old Zahi.
graham hancock ▲ ● ▼		He talks up a storm, though.
graham hancock ▲ ● ▼		He's a great talker and amusing to be shown the pyramids by him.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, you're a great talker, too, and I imagine if you two got together, it'd probably come to fist us.
graham hancock ▲ ● ▼		Well, we did get together in April, and it did kind of come to fist.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Really?
graham hancock ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, I've got the links to that on my website as well.
		We had a debate scheduled, but the debate, Zahi, at the last moment, refused to participate and got wildly angry, and it really behaved in a very strange manner.
		But fortunately, some of it was recorded on mobile phone, and it's out there on the internet now.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right, so Zahi got into some trouble.
		He got arrested.
		He was accused, I guess, of trying to get things out of the country.
		When I always thought Zahi had been trying to get them all back into the country, do you have any comments on that?
graham hancock ▲ ● ▼		No, I can't really comment on that.
		I haven't looked into depth in that.
		I'm more interested in Zahi's extremely negative impact on people's thinking as an archaeologist.
		That's really where I think he does the most damage is this championing of a redundant mainstream view, which he is now trumpeted as the world's most famous Egyptologist.
		He even has his own clothing line, you know.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Oh, now does he?
graham hancock ▲ ● ▼		Which he signs with the Zahi Hawai signature.
graham hancock ▲ ● ▼		He's got his own Indiana Jones hats.
unidentified		He's got his own safari suits.
graham hancock ▲ ● ▼		All of that kind of thing.
		He has become a very famous public figure, and he's an outspoken voice in favor of the mainstream view, in other words, that there is nothing mysterious in the past of ancient Egypt.
		And I think Zahi is doing all of us a disservice by spreading that view.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right, I'm going to tell you what he did when I was there.
		He took me, of course I got land sarcophagus and all that stuff.
		But then he took me to an area where he showed me graves, he showed me inscriptions, he told me these are the people, the workers who built the pyramids.
		And it was pretty extensive.
		What do you think I was looking at when he was describing all of that and we were standing there?
graham hancock ▲ ● ▼		Well, look, there's no doubt that there was a massive amount of construction work at Giza, quite apart from the pyramids.
		Giza is a gigantic construction site that's thousands of years old where huge projects have been initiated and put underway.
		So certainly there will be workers' villages there.
		Certainly there were workforces there.
		Certainly we can find traces of those workforces.
		But were those the very workforces that built the Great Pyramid?
		That's another question.
		By the way, I'm not one of those who seeks to divorce the Great Pyramids entirely from the ancient Egyptians.
		I think we're looking at a very nuanced site at Giza.
		And again, I go into this in Magicians of the Gods.
		We're looking at a site, it's not a simple site.
		You know, there are two simplistic views of Giza.
		One is that it's all thousands to 12,000, 15,000, 30,000, hundreds of thousands of years old, or that it was made by aliens or whatever.
		I think that's a very simplistic view.
		And the other is the mainstream Egyptological view that it was made entirely by the ancient Egyptians in the period from 3,000 BC onwards.
		I think both views are wrong.
		I think we're looking at a very complicated site.
		I think that elements of the site are remotely ancient, and other aspects of the site were the work of the ancient Egyptians.
		The ancient Egyptians saw themselves as the inheritors of and as the continuers of a very ancient tradition that had come down to them from the gods.
		Now we may argue about who or what those gods were, but we can't argue that that's what the ancient Egyptians said.
		And they said that their uncanny abilities to manipulate stone, and the ancient Egyptians were brilliant stone cutters and stone carvers, were a legacy of the knowledge of the gods.
		So we can see the ancient Egyptians as the continuers of a tradition.
		And I trace that tradition back 12,500 years in such monuments as the subterranean chamber beneath the Great Pyramid.
		Of course, the Great Sphinx is more than 12,000 years old.
		And Robert Schock's excellent geological work on the Sphinx going back to the 1990s has long ago made that case.
		The megalithic temples at Giza, the base courses of the Great Pyramids.
		But I think the pyramids themselves were completed by the ancient Egyptians, and I think they were using the same almost magical scientific techniques to do that job that had originally come down from a lost civilization.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Do you dismiss the ancient alien theory now?
graham hancock ▲ ● ▼		You know, it's a very interesting and also complex issue.
		And I don't dismiss it entirely.
		Let me, if I have a moment or two, tell you my views on this.
		Please.
		I think there's no doubt that the universe is filled with life.
		I don't think that human beings are just the only kind of life form in this vast and immeasurable universe.
		And I think there's compelling evidence for contact with other intelligences, if you like.
		And I think there's compelling evidence that that contact takes place now and that it has taken place throughout human history.
		But what those other intelligences are exactly, that's not been settled yet at all.
		At the moment, we happen to be a space-faring civilization, or we've begun to be.
		We've started sending spacecraft to the moon, even to Pluto.
		We're exploring our immediate cosmic environment.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, we've kind of started to back away a little bit, to be honest with you.
graham hancock ▲ ● ▼		Well, yes, we have.
		But the notion is not new to us any longer.
		Since the 1950s, 1960s, we have been...
		It's something that we've done ourselves.
		And therefore, when weird things happen and strange beings appear, and they may even appear to be in craft of some kind, we automatically jump to the conclusion that these must be visitors from other planets.
		Well, it could be more complicated than that.
		We shouldn't arrive at our conclusion before we've done the work.
		It could be that we're dealing, for example, that we're dealing with some kind of interdimensional connection.
		That this is much more mysterious and much more complicated than simply physical beings a bit like us crossing interstellar space in high-tech spaceships.
		Maybe what they're actually crossing is the veil between dimensions.
		Maybe that's why they're so elusive.
		Maybe that's how they can dip in and out of human culture.
		I have no doubt that something's going on.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, actually, modern physics backs you up on that.
graham hancock ▲ ● ▼		Sure, it does.
		And, you know, I think we're just beginning to realize how mysterious the nature of reality actually is.
		We're just beginning to get that.
		That this thing we call reality that we access through our five senses is very complicated and multi-layered and deep and perhaps endless.
		And that there are many different levels of vibration and many different levels of quote-unquote reality and that they all intersect and interact.
		So I think we should keep an open mind to what is behind The phenomenon that we are presently labeling as ET contacts.
		I wrote a whole book about this called Supernatural: Meetings with the Ancient Teachers of Mankind, where I set out my view: there's no doubt that something's going on, but let's keep an open mind as to what it is.
		Now, when it comes to the ancient astronaut question, I can only tell you this: that I have spent 25 years traveling around the world's most mysterious archaeological site.
		I've climbed sites, you know, I've climbed the Great Pyramid five times.
		I've dived to the bottom of the ocean looking at structures and ruins underwater.
		I've traveled the world for a quarter of a century.
		And nowhere, not in any single ancient archaeological site, have I seen something that could only be explained by high-tech aliens doing it.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		By the way, this is only slightly related, but anything new on Yanaguni in Japan?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay, so.
graham hancock ▲ ● ▼		I dived Yanaguni was 2002.
		I haven't been back since then.
		And, you know, in the way that the academic community does, they've just moved on and they ignore that, ignore the fact that there are gigantic man-made structures under the ocean off the southwest islands of Japan.
		You know, that's the case.
		My point is, all of these mysteries from the past, which I have really an intimate and detailed knowledge of, I don't need the kind of level of technology that you need to cross interstellar space in order to explain them.
		A much simpler, much more elegant explanation is that we are a species with amnesia, that there has been a forgotten episode of human history, that there was an advanced civilization in the past, and that that advanced civilization, human civilization, lies at the source of all the archaeological mysteries, which doesn't do away with aliens and other intelligences.
		I would believe that civilization was in contact with them, just as we are.
		But I don't think that those alien and other intelligences built the Great Pyramid.
		I think the Great Pyramid was the work of human beings.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		And what do you think the purpose of the Great Pyramids would be?
unidentified		Multi-dimensional purpose.
graham hancock ▲ ● ▼		Many, many things.
		But one thing, the Great Pyramid is for sure, is a gigantic instrument that works on human consciousness.
		You can see this effect at work in the faces of all of us who are drawn to the Great Pyramid.
		People come from all over the world.
		It's like a beacon, even in these troubled times in Egypt, and Egypt is going through very troubled times at the moment.
		That beacon reaches out and calls to us.
		And so many people feel that at some time in their lives they need to make contact with the Great Pyramid.
		And let's ask ourselves why that should be.
		And I think it's because it works on humans.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay, well, this is the absolute truth, my friend.
		I got to lay in that sarcophagus, and I felt something very powerful.
		I don't know if it was my own mind sort of telling me I should be feeling that because I'm in this exotic place, but I felt something very strong.
unidentified		Me too.
graham hancock ▲ ● ▼		I've also had the privilege to lie down in that sarcophagus.
		And if you tone in there, if you make a mute note, it's just incredible what happens with the vibration around you.
		You can almost feel the veil between worlds thinning and feel yourself encountering other levels of reality that you might never have imagined were there before.
		There are many ways to alter human consciousness, and I've explored quite a number of those myself.
		But the Great Pyramid is an astonishing instrument for developing, I would say, for enhancing the potential of human consciousness.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right, I want to very quickly, because time is so short, I want to ask you about this.
		The Arab so-called spring.
		Are you fearing the possibility of the destruction of so much that could be destroyed in Egypt?
		I mean, God knows, we have no idea what's going to happen.
		Even Italy is being threatened as this disaster spreads across Italy.
graham hancock ▲ ● ▼		Well, unfortunately, in fundamentalist Islam, we have within it, there are many great people in Islam, but within fundamentalist Islam, there is a kind of death cult operating at the moment which hates the past.
		It cannot bear the past.
		Perhaps because it realizes that the past holds the key to unwinding the whole edifice of control that the mainstream religions represent.
		I don't separate Islam from Christianity and Judaism in this sense.
		Christianity, of course, has had to give way to the Enlightenment, but there are still fundamentalist Christians who would impose their vision on others, just as there are fundamentalist Muslims and just as there are fundamentalist Jews.
		At the end of the day, all these three religions worship the same God, you know, Jehovah, Allah, Yahweh, whatever you want to call him.
		He's the God of Abraham.
		He's the same God in all cases.
		And unfortunately, I think the common point is fundamentalism.
		When people get so carried away with their beliefs that they're actually prepared to kill somebody else because of their beliefs, then you know you're dealing with a true psychotic.
		And unfortunately, these true psychotics are now in large numbers around the world, and they appear to be dedicated to the destruction of our past.
		So when I say we're a species with amnesia, it's not just because we've suffered cosmic cataclysms in the past.
		It's also because human beings again and again have deliberately rubbed out the past.
		Christian mobs used to do that in Egypt in the 4th and 5th centuries AD.
		You go around the Egyptian temples, you'll see many of the figures pecked out.
		Somebody's taken a hammer and a chisel and just pecked them out.
		Well, that was Christians who did that at a time when Christians were locked in the fundamentalist mindset.
		And this is what we need to free ourselves from if we're to move forward as a species.
		By all means, have spiritual values and spiritual beliefs.
		But never, ever, ever impose those values and beliefs on others.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
graham hancock ▲ ● ▼		The moment you do that, you're lost.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Right, hold it right there.
unidentified		Okay.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Graham Hancock is my guest.
		Can you imagine that?
		If those people ever got their hands on Egypt in totality, this is midnight.
unidentified		All right.
		It's not radio, but it is what's next.
		To cast your ray of light into the darkness, please call 1-952.
		Call Art.
		That's 1-952-225-5278.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I know everybody's doing it, but we've got so much ground we've got to cover.
		So much ground with Graham Hancock that I would ask that you hold your calls.
		And let's go back now to Graham Hancock.
		Graham, welcome back.
		You mentioned consciousness.
		And when you do that, it's like opening the world for me, buddy.
		In all the years that I've spent on the radio, consciousness was the most interesting subject that I became drawn to from nearly every corner of discussion that I was in.
		And you mentioned other dimensions.
		Consciousness may be the key to those other dimensions if we can figure it out.
graham hancock ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, I'm convinced of that.
		I mean, whenever you have an issue of exploring reality, you have to remember that what you're exploring reality with is your consciousness.
		That's right.
		Your consciousness is therefore part of the equation.
		And it's not good enough simply to mount physical investigations of reality.
		Yes, we should be doing that.
		But we also need to investigate the instrument with which we are exploring reality.
		And that instrument is our consciousness.
		And when we start to investigate this mysterious instrument called consciousness that science, by the way, cannot explain, mainstream science cannot explain consciousness.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Why not?
graham hancock ▲ ● ▼		It's still the greatest mystery of science.
		We don't know actually what it is.
		When you start to investigate this using the tools that are available to us, extraordinary information starts to come out.
		And I don't know about your audience, Art, but I need to say amongst those tools are those demonized substances, substances that our society hates and detests and actually sends us to prison for experimenting with, which are the psychedelics.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You're a great guy.
		You do your own segues.
		It's just where I was going to take you.
		Let me back up a little bit.
		I heard a rumor that I'd like to confirm or deny on.
		I heard that you went long ago to a show somewhere and said that you felt that you had had enough marijuana.
graham hancock ▲ ● ▼		Oh, yeah, I did.
		I did, actually.
		And that's absolutely true.
		I was, but let's not include marijuana amongst the psychedelic.
		No, although it is an intriguing, consciousness-altering agent.
		And I'm very excited by what's happening in America, that the American people state by state are asserting their independence and rolling back that absurd, monstrous enterprise.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Isn't it amazing?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		It's amazing.
graham hancock ▲ ● ▼		It's an incredible thing.
graham hancock ▲ ● ▼		I was in Colorado in May, and I just love the fact that there is a place where adults are actually treated like adults.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
graham hancock ▲ ● ▼		Because in the rest of the world, adults are treated like children when it comes to their own consciousness.
		If there's anything that we should be sovereign over, that we should be able to make absolutely sovereign decisions over, it's our own consciousness.
		And yet, in all of the Western societies, the keys to our consciousness are held by the state.
		And if we explore our consciousness in non-orthodox ways, using, for example, psychedelics, then the state will ruin our lives and break down our doors and send us to prison.
		There's a grotesque abuse of human rights that's taking place under the name of the so-called war on drugs.
		I'm not advocating drugs.
		I'm not telling people go out and take drugs.
		What I'm advocating is adult responsibility.
		As adults, we should be able to make decisions about our own bodies, our own health, our own minds, and our own consciousness.
		We don't need the state to tell us what to do.
		So I'm thrilled that places like Colorado have rolled back this invasion of adult sovereignty and have reimposed the right of adults to make decisions about their own consciousness regarding marijuana.
unidentified		Me too.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		20 years ago, I said it's got to be legal.
		And people went, ah!
		And then they talked about murders and, you know, the whole thing.
unidentified		Anyway.
graham hancock ▲ ● ▼		All the usual nonsense that's talked about to frighten us and terrify us.
graham hancock ▲ ● ▼		And that's what governments do.
unidentified		They seek to press our fear buttons.
graham hancock ▲ ● ▼		And in the process, they reveal themselves as liars.
graham hancock ▲ ● ▼		And that's what Colorado and the other states that have legalized marijuana are in the process of proving, that all of those horror stories and all those horror predictions that were supposed to come out when marijuana was legalized turn out to be myths.
unidentified		And that actually crime falls useful projects.
graham hancock ▲ ● ▼		You know, that criminal gangs are put out of business.
graham hancock ▲ ● ▼		And all of it comes from respecting the right of adults to make decisions about their own consciousness, a right that should never have been taken away from us in the first place.
unidentified		All right.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Now I wish to ask you about something about marijuana.
graham hancock ▲ ● ▼		Because this is, since you asked me it, I might as well answer it.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Oh, keep going, okay?
graham hancock ▲ ● ▼		Okay.
		And what happened was that I was a big user of marijuana for many, many, many, many, many years.
		I started late, actually.
		I started about the age of 37.
		But by the time I was in my 40s, I was smoking marijuana all day long, from morning to night.
		I was writing my books under the influence of marijuana.
		And it came to the point where I was smoking it 16 hours a day.
		Later on, I turned to vaporizers and started using vaporizers, much better for your lungs than combustion products from smoke.
		But I was abusing this herb.
		It's not the fault of the herb.
unidentified		It's me.
unidentified		It's my own personality, my own nature.
graham hancock ▲ ● ▼		I enjoyed it so much that I just wanted to do it all the time.
		And it began to have negative effects on my personality.
		And then I was in Brazil, in Brazil, for a series of sessions with ayahuasca, which is a powerful psychedelic that has been used in the Amazon for thousands and thousands of years.
		And during these sessions, I had a series of encounters with what I construed to be an intelligent entity.
		Many people refer to her as Mother Ayahuasca, the spirit behind the vine.
		And it was made clear to me that I had to change my relationship to cannabis radically.
		And otherwise, I was really on a slippery slope.
		It wasn't serving me anymore.
		I was serving it.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, was this for your new mistress, ayahuasca?
unidentified		Well, you wonder about the conflicts between the spirits behind the herbs.
graham hancock ▲ ● ▼		So here's what happened.
		I gave up cannabis for three years.
		And I feel I can now have a relationship with cannabis again, but never on that abusive level where I would do it 16 hours a day.
		I think, like any other powerful substance, it has to be treated with respect.
		And my problem was I wasn't treating it with respect.
		I've learned that lesson now, and it was a lesson that I needed to learn.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I think to some degree, I would make the statement that I believe that marijuana in milder amounts than you're talking about, contributes to creativity.
unidentified		Oh, definitely.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Definitely.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Really?
graham hancock ▲ ● ▼		Definitely.
		No doubt about it.
		Look, not for everyone.
		You know, we all have different body chemistry.
		Some people, marijuana doesn't serve at all, just as there are some people that other medicines don't serve.
		But others, definitely there is a breakthrough in creativity.
		I don't think I would have written any of my books of historical mystery if I had not started smoking marijuana at the age of 37 back in 1987, just a couple of years before I began to work seriously on the book that became the sign of the seal.
		I was already doing that research, but when I began to think of it as a book, I had to say marijuana played a part in that.
		Fingerprints of the gods, the book that I'm best known for, was written entirely under the influence of marijuana.
		I wrote from morning to night and I smoked from morning to night.
		And I have no doubt that it loosened up creative processes in my mind at any rate, but only if it's treated with respect.
		What I then went on to do was to make this the centerpiece of my life.
		And that was a mistake.
		And I was shown that mistake very clearly in a series of visions with ayahuasca.
		And the net effect was that I quit marijuana for three years.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right, now ayahuasca is something I have never done.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		So if you're able to do it, I would love you to describe your experiences with it.
graham hancock ▲ ● ▼		Okay.
		It's interesting.
		I mean, ayahuasca is now becoming quite a feature in pop culture.
		And you have various pop stars and artists who are taking ayahuasca.
		It's been around for thousands and thousands of years.
		The archaeological evidence traces the use of ayahuasca in the Amazon back more than 5,000 years.
		It probably goes back a whole lot further than that.
		It means the vine of souls in the Quechua language of the Andes.
		That's what ayahuasca actually means.
		The vine of souls or the vine of the dead.
		And its particular property is its ability to connect us with the realm of the dead and with the deceased.
		And very often it's the case when we lose someone close to us that we have unfinished business with them.
		And one of the things that ayahuasca can do is enable you to reconnect with that person in the realm of spirit.
		The other thing, it does many things.
		But first and foremost, let me describe the process.
		It's made of two jungle plants, the ayahuasca vine and a bush that is called chakruna in the Amazon.
		The botanical name is Cycotria viridis, and the leaves of that bush contain dimethyltryptamine, DMT, the most powerful hallucinogen known to man.
		Now, normally, DMT can't be absorbed orally.
		There's an enzyme in the gut called monoamine oxidase that neutralizes DMT.
		So if you try to drink DMT in any form, the monoamine oxidase in the gut will shut it off.
		And this is where, you know, we have to reckon with the very clever ethnopharmacology of the Amazonian peoples, because the other element of the brew, the ayahuasca vine itself, contains a monoamine oxidase inhibitor.
		It switches off that enzyme in the gut and allows the DMT in the leaves to be absorbed orally, producing a journey, an exploration of the far side of reality that can last up to four hours.
		Whereas DMT in its pure form, smoked, is a rocket ship to the other side of reality that will just take you there for like 12 minutes.
		And then you're back in this space.
		Ayahuasca allows a much longer, much deeper, much more reflective journey, a journey over which you have some control.
		If you don't like where you're being taken, you can object and stop the journey or at least pause it.
		Much more negotiation with ayahuasca.
		Tastes bad, horrible taste, one of the most ghastly tastes on the planet.
		Nobody need imagine that anybody is drinking ayahuasca for kicks.
		It makes you vomit.
		It gives you diarrhea.
		It also, so at a physical level, it's very tough, but it also plunges you into this seamlessly convincing parallel universe where you do encounter what appear to be other intelligences.
		Now, some scientists would say that they're just phantasms of our own minds.
		It's just our brain on drugs.
		And maybe they're right, but I don't agree with them.
		I think that what's happening is that the receiver wavelength of the brain is being retuned by DNT and we are gaining access to other levels of reality.
		And those other levels of reality appear to have an interest in the planet.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Other levels of reality, or do you think possibly other dimensions?
graham hancock ▲ ● ▼		Well, that's what I mean, really.
graham hancock ▲ ● ▼		By other levels of reality, I mean other dimensions.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I guess we could define reality perhaps as this dimension.
graham hancock ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, that's what we call reality, is this dimension that we can access with our five senses, that we can weigh, measure, and count, that we can investigate with science, and so on and so forth.
graham hancock ▲ ● ▼		But the revolutionary possibility that is being raised by quantum physics and that ayahuasca raises at the level of experience is that there are freestanding other dimensions that are aware of us, even though we may not usually be aware of them.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Did you, in your opinion, did you encounter another intelligence?
graham hancock ▲ ● ▼		Absolutely.
		Definitely so.
		This is what I feel I've encountered.
		It's a bit like an ancient Greek encountering the goddess Athena.
		You know, there's an intelligence that speaks to you and communicates with you.
		And I realize that, you know, anybody who's not had this experience may regard that as slightly lunatic.
		But I would say, you know, withhold your judgment.
		If you get the chance, have some sessions with ayahuasca.
		It's available in the United States now.
		A couple of ayahuasca churches from Brazil even function legally in the United States, the Unia de Vegetal and the Santo Deme.
		It's possible to have a legal experience with ayahuasca on the grounds of religious belief in the United States.
		It's a very interesting experience.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Now, I was not aware that you could do that legally.
graham hancock ▲ ● ▼		Well, you have to, at least in token, join one of these churches.
		When I say churches, they're the rather typical syncretic Brazilian spiritual traditions that mix together the aspects of many different religions.
		But both the Uniad de Vegetal, the UDV, and the Santo Deme have chapters in the United States.
		They have got Supreme Court exemption for their members to drink ayahuasca, because again, this is one of the great things about the United States, you know, is that there is this recognition that we do have certain rights, and those rights include the right to sacred space.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay, hold it right there.
		We're going to break.
		So in other words, praise the Lord past the ayahuasca.
		All right, hold it right there.
		Graham Angockey is my guest.
		Good morning, afternoon, evening.
		Whatever it is, wherever you are, this is Midnight in the Desert.
unidentified		Midnight in the Desert.
		To initiate a dialogue sequence with Art Bell, please coordinate your Valanges and call 1-952-225-5278.
		That's 1-952-Call Art Bell.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Again, hold your calls.
		We're so deeply into this conversation right now that it is going to be difficult to take questions.
		However, I will say this.
		I've got a message from a Canadian just came in.
		Somebody up in Canada calls himself the Canadian Walrus.
		And he says, you know, your guest, Graham, has just lost all his credibility and respect in my book.
		And this person read your books and loved them.
		But now that they've heard that you wrote them under the influence of marijuana, all respect is gone.
graham hancock ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, I'm quite used to that.
		You know, it's unfortunately the case that the very large majority of our populations have been brainwashed by 40 plus years of a mental conditioning Exercise called the war on drugs.
		And we now have, at a social level, deep-rooted knee-jerk reactions, which it's impossible for people to overcome.
		I mean, my view is: if my work was valuable before it was revealed that I used marijuana when I wrote it, then it should still be valuable afterwards.
		I mean, the work is the work, you know, and perhaps it can be separated from the person who produced it.
		The work stands.
		If the work was good before, it should still be good.
		And if it can be, you know, if somebody can change their view on the quality of a piece of work because of the mental state of the individual who produced that piece of work at that time, you know, that that person was exploring an altered state of consciousness, if that writes off the work, then nothing much I can do about it.
unidentified		No, I suppose not.
graham hancock ▲ ● ▼		I believe in being upfront with my readers about who I am and what I do, and I think altered states of consciousness are important.
		I wrote my book, Supernatural, to show that the embracing of altered states of consciousness by our ancestors 30,000 or 40,000 years ago was undoubtedly what switched on the modern human mind.
		And some of the greatest thinkers of our time, I mean, I wonder if the person who sent you that message has also written off all the work of Carl Sagan, because Carl Sagan was a great advocate of marijuana and a very big user of marijuana.
		I wonder if they're going to write off the work of Francis Crick, the discoverer of the double helix of DNA, because Francis Crick regularly used LSD in the early 1950s and late 1940s.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		We'll see if I get another message.
graham hancock ▲ ● ▼		Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak LSD played a huge role in the creation of the Apple computer.
		So we can either shut our eyes and our ears to all these facts and just bow down to the war on drugs and to the war on our minds that it has involved, or we can think for ourselves.
		That's a free choice for every individual.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay, so he now says he's turning off his computer permanently.
graham hancock ▲ ● ▼		That's okay.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Just kidding.
		I added that.
		All right.
		I want to know a little more about the communication you had under ayahuasca.
		It obviously stopped you from the marijuana use or taught you something about that.
graham hancock ▲ ● ▼		You interrupted my marijuana use and taught me that if I were to continue with it, it would need to be in a much more respectful manner or realize that I am using a sacred medicinal herb here, not a crutch to lean on 16 hours a day.
		And that was a very important realization for me.
		Marijuana, in my opinion, is very valuable in stimulating creative insight, but it's also very seductive and she can draw you down into this place where you really don't do all that much.
		I mean, these days I would not write a book under the influence of marijuana.
		I'd rather not spend the entire day puzzling over a single paragraph.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Did that really go on or were there?
graham hancock ▲ ● ▼		It went on.
		It went on.
		I write faster now, and I believe better.
		The inspiration is still there, but putting it down on words, I don't want to be smoking marijuana.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Were there any other valuable communications while using ayahuasca?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I'm very curious about that.
graham hancock ▲ ● ▼		Well, most important of all, it's well recognized amongst those who drunk ayahuasca that you go through a kind of life review.
		You get to look at episodes from your life and your interactions with other people, not from your own point of view, but from their point of view.
		And this can show you that you may not have been as kind and welcoming and nurturing and as positive an influence as you imagined you were.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I was going to say, it's a frightening thing to go through as a review of your book.
graham hancock ▲ ● ▼		And it's why people burst into tears in ayahuasca sessions, because you suddenly get it from the other person's point of view, that actually you hurt them really badly that time.
		Those words that you said, that you thought were perfectly justified, turned out to be a cruel attack on another person.
		And you see that from that other person's point of view.
		So what it's doing is it's not asking you to welter in self-pity about how negatively you behaved in the past.
		It's saying, listen, this is the truth about you.
		You want to do something about it?
		Well, now you know the truth.
		You can.
unidentified		Wow.
graham hancock ▲ ● ▼		You can do something about it.
graham hancock ▲ ● ▼		You get to see yourself as you've never seen yourself before, and that gives you the opportunity to change your behavior.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You know, what you're describing sounds an awful lot like an NDE.
graham hancock ▲ ● ▼		Yes, a near-death experience.
		It's very similar to a near-death experience.
		And again, let's remember this is the vine of souls or the vine of the dead.
		It is very similar to an induced near-death experience.
		And that sense of passing through a tunnel and of encountering spirits of the deceased is a very common part of the ayahuasca journey.
		And again, we're dealing with the mystery of consciousness here.
		And I happen to believe that we should use all of these ancient plant technologies, because that's what they are.
		They're ancient plant technologies that have been used in shamanistic culture for tens of thousands of years.
		We should deploy them to exploring the mystery of consciousness, which is truly the greatest mystery of all.
		Really, outer space can wait as far as I'm concerned.
		Let's get to grips with inner space first.
		Once we've settled all of that, then we might be more mature and in better shape to begin our exploration of the outside world.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I've really got to quickly ask you about this, and that is, clearly, no matter what you believe, global warming, man-caused, just changes going on that are somehow natural, it really is changing very quickly now.
graham hancock ▲ ● ▼		Well, look, the world's climate, geology bears witness to the fact that the world's climate can change radically overnight.
		This has happened many times in the past.
		Before the last ice age set in, go back 130,000, 140,000 years ago, and you find yourself in a time of massive climate instability with huge rises and falls in temperature.
		12,800 years ago, induced by comet impact, you have the extraordinary climate change of the younger dryass.
		Huge factors are at work in the climate of the Earth.
		It's a very complicated system.
		Undoubtedly, one of those factors is human beings, but we're not the only factor at all, and we'd be stupid to think we are.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Do you think we're beginning something that, at least as humans, we've got a pretty delicate balance, Graham?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		And so are we moving towards something that is not going to sustain us?
graham hancock ▲ ● ▼		Well, as long as we remain motivated by green interest, yes, that's the case.
		That's true of the general damage we're doing to the planet, irrespective of the argument about climate change.
		The general damage, you know, I think we need, I've said already, we need to recognize there are many factors at work that influence the climate of planet Earth.
		It's a delicately balanced system, and humanity is undoubtedly one of those factors.
		But what we need to do, I think what we need to do is focus less on climate and climate change as such, and more on our own behavior for the sake of looking at our own behavior.
		What is it we're doing in the world today that is really good and helpful for the future?
		And what is it that we're doing in the world today that's negative and destructive and dark?
		And the human project, regardless of issues like climate, the human project should be to fill ourselves with light and to eliminate the darkness as much as possible.
		So anything we do as nations that is damaging to this gorgeous garden of a planet that we live on is something we should stop doing because it's right to stop doing it regardless of what happens to climate.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
		All right.
		Listen, will you come back in this final segment and at least answer a question or two from the audience?
unidentified		Of course.
graham hancock ▲ ● ▼		I'd love to hear from the audience.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
graham hancock ▲ ● ▼		If any of them are still with us, I'll try it.
unidentified		Oh, they are.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		They are.
		Stay right there.
		This is Midnight in the Desert.
		I'm Art Bell.
leo ashcraft ▲ ● ▼		For Dark Matter News, I'm Leo Ashcraft.
		Given the fundamental importance of our DNA, it is logical to assume that damage to it is undesirable and spells bad news.
		After all, we know that cancer can be caused by mutations that arise from such injury.
		But a surprising new study is turning that idea on its head with the discovery that brain cells actually break their own DNA to enable us to learn and form memories.
		While that may sound counterintuitive, it turns out that the damage is necessary to allow the expression of a set of genes called early response genes, which regulate various processes that are critical in the creation of long-lasting memories.
		These lesions are rectified pronto by repair systems, but interestingly, it seems that this ability deteriorates during aging, leading to a buildup of damage that could ultimately result in the degeneration of our brain cells.
		These findings could have important implications because earlier work has demonstrated that aging is associated with a decline in the expression of genes involved in the processes of learning and memory formation.
		It therefore seems likely that the DNA repair system deteriorates with age, but at this stage it is unclear how these changes occur.
		So the researchers plan to design further studies to find out.
		Tales of black-eyed children began appearing on online forums in the late 1990s.
		Explanations as to what they are include alien human hybrids, demon-possessed children, and crypto-terrestrials.
		Regardless of their origin, one thing is certain, they're terrifying.
		Recently, reports of black-eyed kids' sightings have resurfaced.
		Black-eyed children have become a staple in conversations of the strange and unknown, and almost every reported encounter is eerily similar.
		Children as young as six years old to adult age approach people alone or with a partner and beg for help.
		Please let us in.
		Give us a ride.
		Follow us here.
		Permission to enter is always a legendary trait of a vampire.
		For some reason, these children frighten you, and as your hand reaches up to open the door, you see why.
		Their eyes are black.
		No iris, no whites, just an empty, soulless void.
		Many are convinced that these children and people like them are human.
		At least not anymore.
		It is unspecified what happens should you comply with their demands, as no reports of the black-eyed kids have included that happening, possibly indicating the death of those that comply.
		Whatever these entities are, the fact is people around the globe are encountering beings that look human, but are something else, something dark.
		Organizers of a Russian town's annual mosquito festival said this year's event will include a most delicious girl contest for women who don't mind bugbites.
		The festival features the contest with women in shorts and vests standing still for 20 minutes to allow the blood-sucking insects to feast.
		This is Dark Matter News.
		The world's first full head transplant could take place as soon as 2017 if the controversial plans by Italian neuroscientist Dr. Sergio Canavero come to pass.
		Wheelchairbound Valery Spirdinov, who has the muscle-wasting Weirdnig-Hoffmann disease, has volunteered to have his head transplanted onto a healthy body in a day-long operation.
		The proposed surgery is highly controversial, and its feasibility has been questioned by experts.
		But Dr. Cannavero's plans also raise complex philosophical and ethical issues.
		A natural question is whether a living person with Spiritinov's head and someone else's body would be the same person as Spiritinov.
		If what matters to Spirdinov is mental continuity as well as having a healthy body, then it will not be possible to determine whether the surgery is Successful in these terms until after the event.
		The impact of head transplants on our mental lives remains unknown.
		For Dark Matter News, I'm Leo Ashcraft.
unidentified		For Dark Matter News, I'm Leo Ashcraft.
		The clock strikes 12, and Midnight in the Desert is pounding Package Your Way on the Dark Matter Digital Network.
		To call the show, please direct your finger digits to dial 1-952-225-5278.
		That's 1-952-CallART.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		And on the one called Art.
		Hi, everybody.
		This is Midnight in the Desert.
		My guest is Graham Hancock, and this is good stuff.
		So let's go back to Graham.
		And Graham, I know it's going to be hard, but it's, you know, try to keep it short.
graham hancock ▲ ● ▼		Harry, like I say, I'm so brimming with new information.
graham hancock ▲ ● ▼		It's very difficult to keep it short, but I'll do my best.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I can clearly hear that.
		All right, let's give it a try.
		Somewhere in California, it's midnight and you're on the air.
unidentified		Yeah, hi, Art.
		This is Ward calling in Running Springs, California, and I'm listening on 10.50 a.m. in Loma Linda.
		Yes.
		And I just want to say, first of all, Uber Roswell to you, Art, for being back.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Thank you.
unidentified		Yeah, and hello, Bell Gabbers.
		But Graham, I had a question for you.
		I really respect how passionate you are.
		And, you know, you were looking for an explanation, maybe the anthropologist or whatever, but you seem to be an explorer of consciousness.
		And I think you really kind of define what that term is.
		And you think you're either scaring the people out there, but you're not.
		You're really putting us on fire.
		I myself had an experience, but I used to be really, you know, I used to look at this stuff as sort of all new agey and everything else.
		But the more I've gotten into biology, the more that I feel like we're missing a connection that we're having between us and plants.
		I mean, they really are the yang to our yang.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right, hold it right there.
graham hancock ▲ ● ▼		Absolutely.
		Plant intelligence.
		We have to realize we're not the only intelligent species on this planet.
		Plants may manifest their intelligence in a different way, but the way that plants can affect human consciousness is quite extraordinary and, I believe, deliberate.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		So there is a connection, or there can be a connection.
		Somebody else, let me see.
		I get these messages while I'm on the air, and they really want to know, again, if you received any other important messages while on ayahuasca.
graham hancock ▲ ● ▼		Well, yes, and it's the simplest message of all.
		You know, we need to set aside hate and fear and suspicion.
		We have to stop fearing one another, both at a personal, individual level, and at national levels as well.
		And we have to manifest love.
		For too much of my life, I did not manifest love.
		Ayahuasca, more than anything else, has taught me that that's our central mission here.
		That's what we're actually here to do.
		And while we cannot change our past, we can make sure that we act in a more loving and positive way in the future.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
		Off to Hilo, Hawaii we go.
		Hello.
		It's midnight.
		You're on.
unidentified		Yes, aloha, Art and Graham.
		My name is Pete.
		Hi, Pete.
		Okay, here on the Big Island, we have an actual church of the ayahuasca where they actually do ceremonies and stuff like that.
graham hancock ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, excellent.
graham hancock ▲ ● ▼		Which is, again, you know, the Supreme Court has granted legal exemption for members of the ayahuasca churches to work with this extraordinary blue.
unidentified		Yep, they sure have.
		Okay, so my question is, in the ancient cultures and stuff like that, they used mushrooms and psychedelics and stuff like that.
		The neurological diseases that we seem to have now in our society, like Parkinson's and stuff like that, did they have it back then?
		Because I haven't really been able to find anything that shows anything that's not.
graham hancock ▲ ● ▼		I think they had it much less.
		One thing that's come clear to me from my study of ancient civilizations is that the use of psychedelic plants was very extensive in the ancient world.
		And I think it led to healthy civilizations in the past and healthy individuals.
		I think that our society today is the opposite of that.
		You know, we think we've got all the truth, but actually our society is just a little pimple on the backside of history.
		You know, history is a gigantic, deep, and ancient.
		And, you know, modern technological society, which has been fighting the so-called war on drugs for, you know, 40 years, is a really recent comer.
		And actually, it's our civilization that is the aberration.
		We are out of step with the human story.
		We are medicating our populations massively, often against their will, with deeply dangerous pharmaceutical drugs.
		And at the same time, we are denying our population access to the healing powers of ancient visionary plants that have been trial-tested in human society for thousands and thousands of years.
		And obviously, this is a huge mistake, and it manifests in what I call the unconsciousness and the insanity of modern technological society.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right, let me try Skype.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		James, wherever you are, you're on midnight.
unidentified		G'day, this is James from Adelaide, Australia.
unidentified		Perhaps your first international caller from last night's test show.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You are.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		We had many last night, but yes, from Australia, you're on with Graham.
unidentified		G'day, Graham.
		I actually got to meet David Hatcher-Childress last week at my very first UFO conference in Melbourne, as well as Eric von Daniken.
		I had a question regarding the ancient destruction that you talk about.
		Have you at all looked into the information in the Billy Meyer case regarding the great catastrophe of over 11,000 years ago and the destruction of Atlantis?
graham hancock ▲ ● ▼		I haven't looked into the Billy Meyer case.
		I have looked into an enormous amount of information on the destruction of Atlantis and it plays an important role in my new book.
		But the Billy Meyer case has escaped me.
		Tell me more.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, I think you pretty much know what Billy Meyer is about, right?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		And the sightings he had, the pictures he posted, and all the rest of that, right?
graham hancock ▲ ● ▼		No, I really haven't followed it.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Oh, well, then that's a whole nother story.
		Let's go to Kaylen, is that right?
		Colleen, is that right?
unidentified		Keelan.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Keelan, I'm sorry.
		Welcome to the program.
		It's midnight, and you're on.
unidentified		Well, Art, it's wonderful to be on the air with you.
		I wish this name was not your first Australian call.
		I would have liked to be.
		I was wondering if Mr. Hitchcock, was it Hitchcock or something?
		By the way, Hancock.
		Hancock, I'm sorry.
		I was wondering if Mr. Hancock had any opinions on the Anunnbergs.
		I can't pronounce it, it's German, their work with psychedelics during World War II.
		The use of psychedelics by the Germans in World War II?
graham hancock ▲ ● ▼		What I can tell you is psychedelics are powerful agencies.
		They can be used for good or for ill.
		All is not sweetness and light in the psychedelic garden.
		The ancient Aztecs used psychedelics as part of their human sacrifice rituals.
		The fact that one uses a psychedelic does not automatically mean that one is a good person.
		It's the intention that is brought to the psychedelic experience that matters.
		And if very negative and dark intentions are brought to it, then the consequences can be extremely negative and dark.
		And it wouldn't surprise me if the death cult of the Nazis made use of these substances to enhance their occult powers.
		That is unfortunately the case with these psychedelic instruments.
		And they are used also in shamanistic cultures.
		There are healers, curanderos, and there are sorcerers, bruchos.
		What matters is the choices we make and the intention we bring to the experience.
		If that intention is positive, it is filled with love, it is filled with light, then so also will be the experience.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Johan?
unidentified		Thank you very much, Mr. Hancock.
		That was an interesting answer.
		Okay.
		I wish I knew more about your work so I could discuss it with you.
		Well, there are now, and you'll find out all about it.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Right.
graham hancock ▲ ● ▼		GrahamHancock.com.
unidentified		I'll have to have a look in.
unidentified		All right, Mr. Hancock.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Thank you very much.
		And take care.
		Let's go back to the phones.
		And you're on the air.
		Hi.
		It's midnight.
unidentified		You're on the air.
unidentified		Hi.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Hi.
unidentified		Hi, Art.
		Hello.
		Hi, Graham.
		Hi, there.
		Hi.
		Hi.
		I watched one of your interviews with Art probably a couple years ago, and I was just wondering if I can ask a question about something you said.
graham hancock ▲ ● ▼		You can ask a question about anything you like.
unidentified		Yes, go ahead.
		Okay, I remember you saying something about the Sphinx or a Sphinx in Egypt or something like that.
		And you said that there was like water marks on the side of it or something.
graham hancock ▲ ● ▼		Yes, I was talking about what is called the precipitation-induced weathering of the Sphinx.
		The fact that the Sphinx, at some point in its long history, the Great Sphinx of Giza, was subjected to thousands of years of heavy rainfall.
		You have not had that rainfall in Egypt in the historic period in the last 5,000 years.
		You have to go back to the end of the last ice age, to the cataclysm between 12,800 and 11,600 years ago.
		You have to go back all that way to find the kind of rain in Egypt that could have caused the weathering we see on the body of the Sphinx.
		Therefore, Professor Robert Schock at Boston University and John Anthony West have championed this case for many years now.
		Therefore, the Sphinx must be more than 12,000 years old.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay, going to the Skype line.
		Triana, I think it is.
		Hello.
		Hello.
unidentified		Trianna, are you there?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Going once.
		Going twice.
		And gone.
		So we'll go to the international Skype, and I think we've got somebody named...
unidentified		Hello, Pete.
unidentified		Yes.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Turn off your device, please.
unidentified		It's off.
unidentified		Okay.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Do you have a...
unidentified		I'm in the Philippines.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		In the Philippines?
unidentified		I'm in Makati's old, in Art's old hometown of Makati.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		My first Philippine call.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay, well, you're on with Graham Hancock.
unidentified		Art.
		Awesome.
		Great.
		Great to hear you.
		I have first a question about Makati.
		You used to live here.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
unidentified		Where did you live?
unidentified		What building?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, I'm not going to tell you what building.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Bonifacio Global City.
unidentified		Ah.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		That much awesome.
unidentified		You won't even recognize the fort now.
unidentified		The fort is booming with construction.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Sure, it's changed, yes.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		First Avenue, if that helps you.
unidentified		Okay, great, great.
		I'm sure I can figure out from there.
		And where's your wife from?
		Is she from the province or from the project?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		No, she's from there now.
		Now, anyway, we've got a guest.
		So do you have a question?
unidentified		Quick question for Graham.
		I love traveling and I love old temple complexes.
		I've been to the pyramids in Egypt.
		I've been to Chichenitsa, Tikal, Java, places like that.
		Thailand.
graham hancock ▲ ● ▼		I've been to Barabadur in Java.
unidentified		Java is amazing.
		Do you recommend any other places in Asia especially that are powerful?
		The energy, I really like the energy feel, that thing you feel in your chest like you're somewhere special.
graham hancock ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
graham hancock ▲ ● ▼		One word answer, Angkor in Cambodia.
unidentified		Oh, I've been there.
unidentified		Yeah, spent a week there and still didn't see everything.
graham hancock ▲ ● ▼		It's amazing and majestic.
		And be there on the spring equinox.
		Be there on the 21st of March at dawn and you'll see something amazing happen.
unidentified		Yeah, I was in Tikal on an equinox and the temple, they light fires on the peaks of the temples and they all line up in a row at night and it's amazing to see.
unidentified		And then it lines up with the moonrise.
graham hancock ▲ ● ▼		The ancients were masters of a loft science, of connection, of sky and ground, as above, so below.
unidentified		Okay.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, thank you very much from the Philippines.
		That was sort of home.
		Let's go back to the phone lines and say, Royal Oak, I think in Michigan, you're on midnight.
graham hancock ▲ ● ▼		Hello, hello.
unidentified		Hello, glad to be on.
		I'm listening to, I believe, 7490 on shortwave.
		It's coming in great here in Michigan.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, hey.
		Yes, that's true.
		We're on shortwave.
		We're all over the place.
unidentified		I think I'm trying to get the call sign.
unidentified		I believe WCBQ.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I'm so glad you found us.
unidentified		Yeah, so anyway, I'm glad to be on, enjoying the interview.
		In your introduction, you mentioned the mother culture, and this was before we had our Australian callers, but it made me think of something in Aborigine practices, the symbolic death, sacred rebirth.
		Basically, the initiation rites.
		They kidnap when a child comes of age as sort of a faux kidnapping into a cave.
		He re-emerges as sort of a symbolic rebirth, becoming an adult.
		And actually, such rituals are found all around the world.
		Oh, yes.
		I was just going to say.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		As in being reborn, for example.
unidentified		Sure.
		Yes, it even plays into the rites of Freemasonry, all kinds of things.
		So my question was, these commonalities we see across geographic borders, is there a connection here?
		Is it something to do with universal consciousness?
		Is there something in our DNA?
graham hancock ▲ ● ▼		But I trace it back to a universal culture, that there was a global advanced civilization during the Ice Age, that it was all but completely wiped out in cataclysms between 12,800 and 11,600 years ago.
		But that there were survivors and that they passed down a common legacy all around the world.
		And we see the manifestation, the reworking, the reincarnation, the resurrection of those ideas in many different ancient civilizations, which appear to be unconnected.
		But if you go back far enough to the very roots, you find that they are connected through the shared influence of a lost civilization.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay.
		Boy, we don't have a lot of time left, do we?
		Hello there.
		You're on the air.
		It's midnight and you're on the air.
unidentified		Good afternoon.
		Good morning, Ashley.
		Good morning from Scotland.
		Welcome, Art.
		How are you doing?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I'm doing very well.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Thank you.
unidentified		Wonderful to have you back on the air.
unidentified		Thank you.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		We don't have a lot of time, so hit us with a question.
unidentified		The question, all right, this is going to blow everybody.
		Would you comment on, Graham, thank you for coming on.
		Would you comment on the idea that there are two Sphinxes and that indeed the Sphinxes aren't lions, but dogs?
		Because they're Anubis, the guardians of the gate.
graham hancock ▲ ● ▼		I definitely don't think the Sphinx is a dog.
		I think that's a mistaken idea connecting the Sphinx to Anubis, the psychopomp or guide of souls.
		I think the Sphinx has always been a lion.
		I think it was at one point entirely a lion, and that its head was reworked into human form during the historical period by Egyptian pharaohs.
		But that the body is much.
		And the connections of the Sphinx to the constellation of Leo at the equinox takes us back to that epoch of 12,500 years ago when the world was going through a turbulent and traumatic change.
		So I have no doubt about the Leonine connection.
		Many ancient artworks show us two Sphinxes, and it wouldn't surprise me at all if under the sands of the desert a second Sphinx awaits discovery.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Really?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Do you really think there may be a second?
graham hancock ▲ ● ▼		Oh, yes, I think it's very likely that there's a second Sphinx.
		In fact, on the UK cover of my new book, I show two Sphinxes.
		The American cover is different, but the content of the book is the same in both cases.
		And let me ask, if the audience are interested in what I've said, and if you want to help my work, please pre-order Magicians of the Gods.
		Just go to grahamhancock.com, go to the Magicians of the Gods page, and you'll see the possibility of pre-ordering there.
		You'll strengthen me, you'll strengthen my book, you'll give me a chance in the argument if you do that.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Oh, I think there are many who will wish to do that.
		Very quickly, let me try Lewis on Skype.
		Lewis, hello there.
		You're on the air.
		It's midnight.
		Yes, go ahead.
unidentified		Hi.
		I'm sorry.
		I'll make you.
		Oh, quick.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay, you're going to have to get very close to your microphone.
		Listen to me.
		Listen to me.
		You're going to have to get very close to your microphone.
johnny cash ▲ ● ▼		Thank you.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Thank you for your patience.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Go ahead.
unidentified		I want to know about Ganung Padang in West Java, Indonesia.
unidentified		If you could give us a quick update.
graham hancock ▲ ● ▼		Thanks for asking that.
		Gunung Padang is a 25,000-year-old pyramid in Indonesia, which has been explored and investigated as the result of the work of an extraordinary Indonesian geologist called Danny Hillman.
		And I have made three visits to Gunung Padang, extensive research visits.
		This is the most extraordinary site in the world today, and I cover it in depth in my book, Magicians of the Gods.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, all right.
		It is perhaps a little early.
		It's such a pleasure having you on the program.
		Graham, you've got to come back.
		You've absolutely got to come back.
graham hancock ▲ ● ▼		I would love to come back, Art.
		It's a delight to talk to you.
		It's been many years.
		It's great to hear your voice.
		I'm so glad you're back on the air.
		I wanted to give you that solidarity.
		I regard you as an old friend, a great broadcaster, and I'm so glad that you're back on the airwaves sharing your wisdom.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Thanks, buddy.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		We'll do it again.
unidentified		Okay.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Good night.
graham hancock ▲ ● ▼		Good night.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		That's it.
unidentified		That's it.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Tonight, we're just simply out of time.
		Thank you all very much.
		Have a wonderful night, and we'll do it again tomorrow.
unidentified		This magical journey will take us on a ride.
		Filled with belonging, searching for the truth.
		Will we make it to tomorrow?
		Will the stars shine on you at night in the desert And we're listening.
		I'm less than you I'm less than
		you I'm less than
		you Midnight in the desert, and there's wisdom in the air.
		I've been looking for the answers.
		All my life I found you there as the world we live in quickens.
		Are we heating all the suns?
		Have we lost our intuition?
		Are we running out of time?
		Midnight in the desert.
		And we're listening.
		Ooh, I'll listen to me.

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