Graham Hancock joins Art Bell to explore the Lost Ark of the Covenant, possibly hidden in Ethiopia’s Jewish community, and its alleged radiation-based power tied to biblical and geological accounts. His research in Magicians of the Gods traces a 12,800-year-old comet impact during the Younger Dryas, reshaping Earth’s climate, and warns of a 20-mile undetected object in the Taurid Meteor Stream threatening humanity by 2040. Hancock argues ancient texts encode forgotten science, dismissing Zahi Hawass’s mainstream Egyptology while proposing Giza’s origins predate Egypt by millennia. He also links global temple complexes—like Gunung Padang (Indonesia) and Angkor (Cambodia)—to a shared Ice Age civilization nearly erased by cataclysm, urging humanity to transcend division and harness collective potential before disaster strikes. [Automatically generated summary]
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.
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.
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?
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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Another possibility that many people like is the ancient astronaut.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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I guess they always do to some degree, but well, I just think that we have to take a different perspective on this.
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.
In other words, we do not need to manifest these things by dwelling upon them in some sort of extraordinary, masochistic way.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
The new movie Selfless, released this month, is a provocative psychological science fiction thriller.
An extremely wealthy man dying from cancer undergoes a radical medical procedure that transfers his consciousness into the body of a healthy young man.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
And in the process, they reveal themselves as liars.
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.
You know, that criminal gangs are put out of business.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.