Graham Hancock details his new book, Magicians of the Gods, arguing an advanced prehistoric civilization was destroyed by comet fragments 12,800 years ago, evidenced by Göbekli Tepe's 11,600-year-old construction and Baalbek's 1,500-ton blocks. He links recurring myths like Oannes to survivors transferring technology to hunter-gatherers while warning that the Torrid meteor stream could trigger another cataclysm within decades. Hancock also reveals Zahi Hawass secretly surveyed the Sphinx for Edgar Cayce's Hall of Records and defends psychedelics as sacred tools against materialist censorship, suggesting humanity faces an imminent cosmic threat requiring immediate diversion efforts rather than nuclear focus. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, WAV2VEC2_ASR_BASE_960H, sat-12l-sm, script v26.04.01, and large-v3-turbo
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Fingerprints of the Gods00:03:59
Hi, this is Dark Journalist.
Today we have an epic show for you.
Best selling author and investigative reporter of our ancient past, Graham Hancock, is here with us.
Now, Graham has just released the heavily anticipated follow up to his worldwide bestseller, Fingerprints of the Gods, and he's called the sequel Magicians of the Gods.
We'll have a unique preview of the book, which is set to be released in the US in November, and is bound to shake up our views on ancient history even more.
Now, Graham is no stranger to controversy, and his establishment critics have tried to derail his deep research before.
But they couldn't.
Over and over again, his advanced findings have been borne out by new scientific and archaeological discoveries.
His latest conclusions about an advanced civilization in antiquity being destroyed by a giant comet are set to turn the view of our ancient past on its head.
Are we ready to change the accepted version of history?
Here we go.
Worldwide best selling author Graham Hancock Ancient Mysteries, Global Cataclysm, and Modern Awakenings.
I would suggest that the lost civilization was a more spiritual civilization.
The second cataclysm occurred 11,600 years ago.
That's when they went down.
And it was the survivors of that cataclysm who then were filled with the resolve to save something.
If Western technological civilization were to be affected by the same kind of cataclysm that occurred between 12,800 and 11,600 years ago, our civilization would definitely not survive.
The kinetic energy packed by an object like that, the one mile wide Comet fragment is just awesome.
It's massive and stunning.
It dwarfs the entire nuclear arsenal of the world going off at once.
Our civilization would fall apart at the seams.
You know, no one knows the pros and cons of being ahead of their time better than today's guest, Graham Hancock.
When his research unlocked the Giza Plateau as a series of astrological correlations on the ground, it opened up a whole new level of understanding that ancient structures like the Sphinx may, in fact, be much older.
This breakthrough brought to life a worldwide search to find a new understanding of the advanced civilizations behind these ancient marvels.
But Egyptology and the field of archaeology resisted it.
They viewed his work as a threat to their paradigm.
What were they afraid of?
Let's go find out.
Graham, welcome.
I've been following your work for many years and it's great to have you on the show.
Nice to be with you.
Now, the new book is out in the UK and it will be out here in the US in November.
It's called Magicians of the Gods.
Yeah, published in the UK on the 10th of September and in the US on the 10th of November.
So, as I speak to you now, we're barely a month away from the US publication.
Excellent.
Well, you can really feel the momentum building around this.
And I have to say, this must be the most anticipated book ever.
That I can think of when it comes to ancient mysteries, lost civilizations, history.
Now, your first breakthrough book, Fingerprints of the Gods, was a worldwide bestseller, of course, and really set the tone for so much of this deep research into our ancient past and opened up a new conversation about these ancient civilizations being far more advanced than the traditional model would have us believe.
It was really your work that brought that forward.
Thank you.
And here we are now, 20 years after the publication of Fingerprints of the Gods.
And far from doing a quick follow up to the book, you spent a lot of time developing this and going into other areas of research.
Now, what made you come back into this fascinating line of inquiry to do this important sequel, Magicians of the Gods?
Rewriting Ancient History00:15:36
Well, initially, I had no intention of doing any such thing.
Back in 2002, I felt I'd come to the end of my work on the issue of a lost civilization.
I had written Fingerprints of the Gods, thoroughly researched and written that book, then a book called The Message of the Sphinx with Robert Bauval.
Heaven's Mirror, and then Underworld, published in 2002, which reported the results of nearly seven years of underwater exploration that I did, of scuba diving all around the world, looking for sites covered by rising sea levels at the end of the Ice Age.
And for two reasons.
Firstly, I had been walking the walk of the lost civilization investigation for 15 years by then.
And secondly, I had had to deal with so much aggressive.
Hateful reaction from members of the academic community, particularly archaeologists and historians whose toes I had trodden upon, and their friends in the media, focused a lot of hatred and hateful energy in my direction.
And while one expects a certain amount of that when publishing on a controversial topic, after a while it becomes wearisome, especially when it involves dirty tricks, misrepresentation of what I've said.
Misrepresentation of who I am.
Basically, I became the focus of an ideological struggle to discredit the whole notion that the story of our past might be different than the mainstream wants us to believe it is.
And because I was the most prominent figure in the field of writing about a lost civilization, I came in for the most hard edged and deeply unpleasant attacks.
And obviously, I didn't enjoy that.
I felt that it came with the territory and I needed to engage with it and deal with it.
And I did for many, many, many years.
But after I'd published Underworld in 2002, I thought, okay, I am done with this story.
I have presented all the evidence there is to present, and I really have nothing else to say.
I hope some younger person will get into the field and pick up the baton and take the inquiry further, but I'm out of here.
And I went away and started writing books on different subjects.
I wrote a book called Supernatural, another nonfiction book, focusing on altered states of consciousness, visionary experiences, and their role in the evolution of modern human behavior.
A very different kind of book from the Lost Civilization books.
Then I wrote three novels.
The first novel of the Entangled series and the first two novels of the War God series about the Spanish conquest of Mexico.
While I was doing all this, and it was a delight for me not to have to get into these daily horrible arguments with academics whose territory they felt I had impinged upon, and just able to have actually some fun with my writing.
While all of this was happening, new evidence started to come out.
Yeah, and it's really been amazing how these new discoveries really match up well with what you were writing about starting, say, almost 20 years ago.
Now, can you name a couple of these new findings that really made an impression on you?
Fingerprints of the Gods proposed that there had been a global cataclysm between 13,000 years ago and 12,000 years ago.
And that that global cataclysm, as well as causing massive extinctions of animal species, had wiped out an advanced prehistoric civilization, a civilization the memory of which only now comes down to us in myths and traditions.
That we were effectively a species with amnesia, that a crucial aspect of our past.
Had been removed from the picture, and we weren't getting the whole story, and that a global cataclysm was at the heart of this.
In Fingerprints of the Gods, I wasn't able to really give a smoking gun.
I investigated a number of theoretical propositions as to what that cataclysm might have been, but I didn't have a massive mainstream science behind me which supported the notion of a global cataclysm between 13,000 and 12,000 years ago.
So the first thing that caught my eye were publications in.
The academic press in major scientific journals like the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences or the Journal of Geology, for example, where a group of scientists, an international group of highly credentialed mainstream scientists, mainly concentrating on geophysics, were beginning to present and make the case that the Earth had been hit by several fragments of a giant comet 12,800 years ago,
exactly in the window that I'd proposed in Fingerprints of the Gods.
And initially, There was a lot of argument around this new proposition in science, and a lot of scientists rejected it and said the evidence didn't stand up.
But as the years went by, the team of scientists working on this progressively hardened their case.
They were able to refute every attempt to refute their findings, and they were able to continuously add new evidence.
And the latest paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences just in July 2015, just two or three months ago, really absolutely settles the matter.
That not only do we have all these sites around the world that contain evidence of a cosmic impact with fragments of a giant comet, but we now can prove absolutely that this all happened in a single moment.
We're not looking at the consequences of an event spread out over hundreds of years.
This all happened like one afternoon across 50 million square miles of the Earth's surface.
It truly was an extinction level event.
It was accompanied by massive animal extinctions, it was accompanied by huge and unexplained sea level rises, and then a sudden.
Plunge of global temperatures.
And so I couldn't ignore that.
Here, in exactly the window that I'd proposed for a global cataclysm that cost us a whole civilization without hard science to back it up, I now find in the 2000s, and particularly from the year 2007 onwards, that the professional journals are carrying scientific data that documents a massive cataclysm 12,800 years ago.
So that's what sparked my interest again.
I felt I need to pay attention to this, but I was still reluctant.
To get drawn back into it.
Meanwhile, in parallel, I was aware of developments in a number of archaeological sites, most notably the archaeological site of Göbekli Tepe in Turkey, which is in itself rewriting history.
What we have here is a gigantic series of megalithic stone circles with pillars of solid stone weighing in excess of 20 tons, with precise astronomical alignments, with incredible Organization and management of the site.
And the dating is absolutely cut and dried and beyond dispute.
This site is at least 11,600 years old.
Amazing.
And it doesn't fit in to the existing picture of history.
It doesn't fit in at all.
Megalithic sites of that type, I mean, we're looking at something that's 50 times bigger than Stonehenge.
Megalithic sites of that type are not supposed to have begun to be developed until about 5,000 years ago.
So to find one that's definitively dated to 11,600 years ago is very troubling.
For the mainstream historical model.
And then something else.
I mentioned the comet impact 12,800 years ago.
The world plunged into a cataclysmic deep freeze.
But then, exactly at 11,600 years ago, which is the date that's given for Gobekli Tepe, another cataclysm occurs.
There's another episode of massive sea level rises.
And mysteriously, global temperature shoots up.
Just as it shot down 12,800 years ago, it shot up equally fast 11,600 years ago.
It turns out that this is more fragments of the same comet that hit the Earth 12,800 years ago.
The original object was a giant comet, more than 200 kilometers in diameter.
It began to break up into fragments which spread out along its orbital path.
That's an orbital path that the Earth still crosses twice a year.
12,800 years ago, some fragments of that giant comet hit the Earth, primarily hitting the North American ice cap, but having Global consequences.
And then 11,600 years ago, more fragments entered the Earth's atmosphere.
This time, the impact was in ocean.
And the result was to send up a huge plume of water vapor into the upper atmosphere, creating a greenhouse effect that explains the warming that occurred.
So we have actually a cataclysmic episode, a series of cataclysms.
One gigantic one, 12,800 years ago, and then another one, 11,600 years ago, that's almost on the same scale, but that Tips the balance back and puts the world back into a warming phase again.
And that's intriguing because 11,600 years ago, the date that we know Gobekli Tepe was established turns out to be the same date that Plato gives for the submergence, the cataclysmic submergence of the lost civilization of Atlantis.
Now, Atlantis has been a notion or an idea that has been ridiculed by mainstream science and archaeologists and historians.
They just dismiss it as something that Plato made up.
But he said he got the story through his family line.
From his ancestor Solon, who had visited Egypt and had been told the story of Atlantis in Egypt, and that this was passed down and eventually reached Plato.
And what the priests had told Solon, Plato's ancestor, was that the submergence of Atlantis in a single terrible day and night, after which mankind had to begin again like children with no memory of what went before, had happened 9,000 years before the time of Plato.
And that is 9,600 BC.
Which, in our terms, is 11,600 years ago, which is the date of the founding of Gobekli Tepe.
So, we have to consider the possibility that this mysterious series of megalithic structures that were deliberately buried by whoever made them represents a transfer of technology.
That what we have is a hunter gatherer population in southeastern Turkey, that the survivors of a lost civilization who already know everything that needs to be known about megalithic architecture settle amongst them and that they transfer that skill to them.
They transfer the technology of how to make these things.
And the crucial issue for me is that at exactly the same moment that Hunter gatherers supposedly woke up one morning and invented megalithic architecture with the largest and greatest megalithic site that's ever been built.
They also decided they'd invent agriculture that morning, too.
And that's when we see the widespread distribution and uptake of agriculture happening in precisely the same region.
And I think what that adds up to is not a group of hunter gatherers who woke up with a magical inspiration one morning, but a group of hunter gatherers amongst whom had settled people who already knew how to do megalithic architecture and already knew.
The principles of agriculture.
Fascinating.
So the new evidence was so profound that you were feeling, you know, this is what I was looking for.
I need to go back in here and really dive in deeply.
When I'm confronted by places like Gobekli Tepe, when I'm confronted by an extinction level event that is absolutely documented by mainstream science, and when I'm confronted by the fact that there are other sites all around the world like Gunung Padang in Indonesia, you know, which may be more than 20,000 years old, I got to the point where I felt.
I can't stay out of this anymore.
Yeah.
I know I'm going to get myself back into more unpleasant and personal insults from archaeologists and their friends in the media, but this has been, I've lived this story for so many years.
I can't ignore these new developments.
And so what I need to do is a new book that brings all the new developments together into one place and assesses their weight and to what they really amount to.
And that's why I've written Magicians of the Golds.
Yes.
And it's fascinating to note here that so many of the new archaeological discoveries now.
Are just starting to catch up with the work that you were putting out there in that period, some two decades before.
Yes, there is an element of that.
I don't want to be too hasty and to start crowing, I've been proved right, because we're not there yet.
But the trend, the tendency in discovery is to support the idea of a lost civilization rather than to reject it.
In other words, we have an existing model of history and, particularly, an existing theory about the origins of civilization.
And it's supposed to have been a slow, gradual process hunter gatherers gradually settling down, experimenting, learning a bit about agriculture, turning themselves into farmers over several hundred or a thousand years.
And then more complicated settlements, large villages become towns.
And then about 5,000 years ago, the first truly megalithic architecture and the really big city cultures, like in ancient Sumer and ancient Egypt.
That's the mainstream model of history.
So far, its explanatory power has been quite effective.
But when we have sites like Gobekli Tepe that just bust that model completely apart, then we find ourselves searching for a new model that can explain the new facts.
And that's what's happening.
That's the tendency, both in terms of the global cataclysm and in terms of the discovery of archaeological sites that do not fit the existing pattern.
The trend in discovery supports the notion of a lost civilization.
Just a month ago, less than a month ago, in September 2015, We're talking now at the beginning of October 2015.
Less than a month ago, a huge megalithic site was discovered 130 feet underwater off the coast of Sicily in the Mediterranean.
We know from sea level rise curves that that site has been underwater for at least 9,500 years.
Nobody could have worked on it at any time or touched it in the last 9,500 years.
How long it was standing there before the sea level rose and covered it, that at the moment we can only guess.
But it's another site that isn't explained by the old model of history.
But is explained by a new model that takes into consideration the possibility that we have lost a whole civilization from the human story and that we are gradually pulling the pieces back together again.
And the truth about our past is very slowly beginning to emerge in the teeth of opposition from those professionals who regard themselves as the sole arbiters and keepers of our past.
Yeah, absolutely.
And, you know, I remember when Fingerprints of the Gods first came out and there was all that controversy around the redating of the Sphinx.
To a much older period.
And the critical opposing line was well, if there was this advanced civilization in Egypt before, then show me a potsherd.
That was Mark Laner, then of the Chicago Oriental Institute, probably the leading American Egyptologist.
The Lost Civilization Model00:15:05
So that was his big argument.
See, my colleagues, John Anthony West and Professor Robert Schock from Boston University Robert Schock is a geologist.
Yes.
Took a new look at the Sphinx.
The original notion came from John Anthony West, and he brought Robert Schock over to Giza.
As a geologist, take a look at the geology of the Sphinx.
And looking at it purely as a geologist, the conclusion Robert Schock came to is that the Sphinx was exposed at some period in its lifetime.
It was exposed to a very long episode of extremely heavy rainfall.
I mean, like a thousand years of extremely heavy rainfall.
And the fact is that you have to go back to this cataclysmic episode between 12,000 and 13,000 years ago to get that kind of climate in the Sahara Desert in Egypt.
But Egyptologists at the time said Schock must be wrong.
Shock and West must be wrong.
There's no way that the Sphinx can be 12,000 years old.
What's not often realized is that Egyptologists have no evidence for when the Sphinx was made at all.
There's no textual evidence, no inscriptions, nothing that records its construction.
But they just sort of derive it from the context and conclude that it must date to, they think, 2,500 BC, 4,500 years ago.
So their argument was if there was a culture 12,000 years ago that was capable of creating something as massive as the Sphinx, And of creating the megalithic temples that stand in front of it.
Because when the core body of the Sphinx was created, it was created by cutting out a trench all around the rock that forms the core body.
And from that trench were taken the limestone blocks that are now seen in the so called Valley Temple and the Sphinx Temple in front of the Sphinx, some of them weighing more than 100 tons.
So the argument of Egyptologists was impossible.
This cannot be the work of a lost civilization.
If there was a civilization that could create the Sphinx and its megalithic temples 12,000 years ago, We would find lots of other 12,000 year old megalithic sites, and there are none.
See, Egyptologists could get away with saying that in 1992.
Right.
But this was before Gobekli Tepe was discovered.
And since Gobekli Tepe has been discovered, that whole argument just goes out of the window.
We can just forget about that argument because Gobekli Tepe is real, it's there, it's staring us in the face.
It's at least 11,600 years old.
And if you can make Gobekli Tepe, then you can make the Sphinx.
Wow.
Well, that really is fascinating.
You know, one of the things that caught my eye when I was reading the book were your conversations with Klaus Schmidt.
Who was the lead archaeologist who discovered Gobekli Tepe?
Yes.
And he just happened to be there when you were visiting the site and gave you a guided tour of the excavations.
Very nice encounter with Klaus Schmidt, much to my surprise, because normally when I turn up unannounced on archaeological sites, the reaction I get from archaeologists is one of extreme hostility.
A lot of them simply won't talk to me.
It's a matter of turning their backs and walking away as though, I don't know, a vampire has crossed the threshold.
Unbelievable.
Or something like that.
But Klaus Schmidt knew absolutely who I am and he had no hesitation whatsoever.
He Took it upon himself to thoroughly show me around the site and to really explain every aspect of it to me.
That's when I really got it that this site had been deliberately buried, because he showed me areas of new excavation where they're exposing more pillars that are still under the ground.
And he showed me the earth that surrounds those, which is a mixture of earth and stones, and demonstrated absolutely clearly this is not some natural buildup of sedimentation.
This is hundreds of human beings with buckets pouring earth and stones and deliberately covering all this.
So he helped me to really get that.
Right.
And he helped me to understand the whole layout of the site and how significant a site it is for archaeology, while at the same time still insisting that it wasn't actually rewriting history, because Klaus Schmidt, at the end of the day, is a mainstream archaeologist, and it's very difficult for them to say, oops, we got everything about the origins of civilization wrong.
Yeah.
He preferred to see it as adding a new chapter to the human story, like 5,000 years before the next chapter, you know.
Very curious argument, which I engage with in the book.
And I don't think that makes a lot of sense.
But I appreciated the time and the generosity that he gave me and his willingness to allow me and my partner Santa, who's a photographer, to really get down into those enclosures and study the pillars properly.
And this was an unusual experience for me with archaeologists.
It's interesting.
He was an unusual man, Klaus Schmidt.
That was in September 2013 that I spent three days going around the site with him.
But when I went back there in 2014, he wasn't there, and a week later in Germany he died.
Klaus Schmidt passed away the summer of 2014 while swimming of a heart attack, unfortunately.
And that's left Gobekli Tepe in a bit of a vacuum now.
It's not clear who's taking over the excavations or whether they will pursue it with the same energy that Klaus Schmidt did.
But it's interesting to know his story because how did he discover the site?
Yes.
Well, it turns out.
That the site had actually been surveyed decades before.
It had been surveyed in the 1950s by a team of American archaeologists who were looking for prehistoric stuff.
And then they saw sticking out of the ground of what looked like a sort of pot bellied hill.
That's actually what Göbekli Tepe means in Turkish.
It means a pot bellied hill.
They saw some edges of very finely cut and shaped pillars sticking out of the ground.
And they looked at them and they thought, that is really great workmanship.
This is not ancient.
This must be Byzantine.
It's probably a medieval cemetery.
Of some sort.
That's what they concluded.
And so they abandoned it and didn't look further.
And it was Klaus Schmidt who picked up their report, you know, 40 years later in the 90s and read it.
And he was just puzzled by it because there were all kinds of flints on the ground as well.
And then there were these beautifully cut stones.
And he thought, I think we need to have a proper look at that.
And when he went back in and had a proper look, he exposed the world's oldest monumental archaeological site.
Really amazing.
And what I find so intriguing about all that is he had this opportunity to show you and have you survey the whole site.
Just before he died.
You know, it's as if this window opened up just long enough where he could help you bring his discovery to this whole different and deeper level.
It's a curious thing.
It's a curious thing.
I'm very grateful to him for giving me that opportunity.
And I conducted a very lengthy and detailed series of recorded interviews with him, which I still refer back to.
They were very, very useful.
Now, one thing he discovered that really goes along with a lot of your research when looking at these ancient monuments, oddly enough, is that the older versions of the monuments are the more perfect.
Even at Gobekli Tepe.
That's right.
This is again, this was something that was perplexing and frustrating Klaus Schmidt at the time because he still was buying into the old model of a slow, gradual evolution.
And it puzzled him that Gobekli Tepe existed as a site for a little bit over a thousand years and then it was deliberately buried.
So you can see the whole thousand year story of Gobekli Tepe.
And the puzzling thing is that the oldest stuff is the best.
The oldest stuff is the most technical.
Technically accomplished.
The best reliefs are done then.
The most perfect cutting and polishing of the stone is done then.
And it just becomes a little cruder as the years go by and it begins to devolve, not evolve.
And by the time they bury the site, they're no longer capable of doing work on the scale that they did at the beginning.
So this seems to go against the deeply ingrained evolutionary model where things are supposed to start off simple and primitive and gradually work their way up to complex.
The opposite.
Seems to happen at Gobekli Tepe.
But of course, we can explain that easily if we regard what we see at Gobekli Tepe as a transfer of technology from settlers from a more advanced civilization who had survived the second cataclysm 11,600 years ago and had settled down, had chosen to take sanctuary amongst hunter gatherers in Turkey and then transferred some of their technology to them.
Well, of course, the first stuff would be the best then because it's the freshest, closest to the original technology.
And then, as those original survivors die, they've passed on some of their knowledge, but not enough, and it begins to devolve.
So that's why I say that we are coming to the point where we need a new model of the origins of civilization.
The old model that we've been taught in our schools and universities for 100 years is no longer fit for purpose.
Right.
And you do include in the book that really insightful quote from John Anthony West on the model for you, Ford.
Yes, exactly.
Exactly.
That you expect to see an evolutionary progress, and when you don't see it, You have to consider the possibility that you're dealing with, as John put it, a legacy, not a development.
And John, of course, was applying that to the mysterious emergence of ancient Egyptian civilization, but it applies equally well to what we're confronted by in Gobekli Tepe.
Now, when you were there at Gobekli Tepe, there were a number of things you noticed that seemed to you to be astronomical symbols.
Yes.
So, how did you feel when you were looking at these monuments?
You know, I've seen a series of photos in the book, and they are compelling, but how did they strike you when you're right there looking at them in person?
It struck me first and foremost as a place that speaks to us in symbolic language.
It's not dumb.
It's not just like stone.
There's an energy to it.
There's a power about it.
Something very, very strong comes through there.
I don't want to get all mystical here, but there's a sense that the stones have almost been impregnated with power and that that power is not over yet.
That it's still.
It's still projecting out.
Even though deliberately buried for 10,000 years, untouched by human beings for more than 10,000 years, when exposed, that power comes back on.
And just like the Great Pyramid, Gobekli Tepe is now a site that's drawing people towards it from all parts of the world.
I have to say, I've just said some very positive things about Klaus Schmidt and the German Archaeological Institute, but I have to also express something not positive that I feel, and that is that it is most unfortunate that the German Archaeological Institute.
Last year, they decided to cover Gobekli Tepe with an absolutely hideous wooden roof, which is in the worst taste possible to imagine, which cuts Gobekli Tepe off from the universe and from its immediate surroundings and turns it into some sort of hideous shed.
And the roof is very badly constructed.
They discovered that it would blow away in high winds, so they then built platforms that hang down from the roof, which are loaded up with tons and tons of stones.
It's like entering a rubbish tip and seeing the site now is extremely disappointing.
And in some moments, I wonder if this is a deliberate action to neutralize the power of Gobekli Tepe in some way.
I hope it's not that.
I hope it's just thick headed individuals who have no sensitivity for the beauty of a place.
There's plenty of those in the world, goodness knows.
But I really don't like what they've done to Gobekli Tepe.
I hope that roof's only temporary and that we're going to, if they are going to keep it covered, that we'll see a proper structure put over the top that doesn't interfere with the Profound experience of viewing this oldest architectural work of mankind.
Oldest surviving, I should add.
Yeah, well, more to discover.
Oldest yet discovered, because more turns of the spade are discovering us more.
This is happening all around the world.
That's true.
And it seems like with the new technology we have now, like sonar scanning and all of these advanced visual tools, that so many of the assumptions and conclusions that have come down to us as gospel from the 19th century in archaeology, in Egyptology, are eventually going to be blown away.
Yes.
But these people who control that whole apparatus of the institutions, they're not going to be very happy about that.
You know, it's almost as if they'll have to pass away before we get any real progress on these things.
Yeah, this is the case.
I mean, we are in the middle of what, in terms of the history of ideas, is called a paradigm shift.
We have been living with a particular paradigm or model of our past for 100 or 200 years, and that that model is effectively the property of a particular group of people.
Specialists who we call archaeologists and historians.
And the model has served them reasonably well up till now.
But we are now getting to the point where so much anomalous information is coming forward, which the model can't explain, that the model itself, for any reasonable person, is threatened.
And that we are beginning to realize that we need to find a new model that can accommodate all of this information.
Whenever you have a paradigm shift occurring, that's what happens.
It's not like the whole community of people who are vested in the Old model, just say, oh, yeah, great, we get it.
Welcome the new.
No, they fight it tooth and nail.
It has been true of almost all major scientific paradigm shifts that the ideas are fought tooth and nail, and it takes a kind of revolution in ideas before the new model can be accepted.
And what's key to that is new evidence.
Because scientists are not sinister or crazy people, they're rational people, just like you and I.
That they cannot explain with their existing model.
Sooner or later, they have to say, This model doesn't work anymore.
We need a new one.
We need to look again at the origins of civilization.
And what's driving that most strongly is the evidence for an extinction level event, indeed a series of extinction level events between 12,800 and 11,600 years ago.
That is the time when civilization, the long story of civilization, is supposed to have begun.
And to create a model of the past which says that, but has nothing to say about the extinction level global cataclysm that occurred immediately before that moment.
Is very bad science in my view.
Yeah, absolutely.
Well, it's so interesting because the idea that Gobekli Tepe and its creation was associated with this extinction level event lends credence to this idea of the entire site being a time capsule.
Yes.
And that's what it feels like.
Maps from the Ice Age00:13:14
It feels like a place that was deliberately buried.
We know it was deliberately buried.
The question is why.
I feel rather strongly that it was deliberately buried as a time capsule, it was something that was intended to be rediscovered.
In the future.
And whether by accident or design, it's been rediscovered in our time.
And we should be considering whatever it is, it's clearly a message from the remote past.
We are not often presented with that opportunity where we dig up a man made hill and discover underneath it a structure that our ancestors made almost 12,000 years ago.
I mean, this is very unusual.
And the structure itself may have a great deal to tell us.
So we should be looking at it as a window through which we may.
Look into the ancient world, into aspects of the ancient world that have previously been hidden from us.
It's a tremendous opportunity.
And it's not alone.
There's another site, Karahan Tepe, which is 50 miles away, which has got exactly the same profile of a potbelly hill, T shaped pillars sticking out of the ground.
The limited archaeology that's been done, and it confirms it's a Gobekli Tepe age site.
But so far, no full scale excavation has been undertaken, and it sits in a farmer's backyard.
And Gobekli Tepe itself.
The excavations may not continue.
Klaus Schmidt's discussion with me, he said, frankly, they only had money for another two years of excavation.
So, if they don't get more funding, they're going to have to close that site as well.
So, it's really crazy that we have the opportunity to really get to grips with aspects of our past that have never been seriously considered by science before, and we're just passing it by.
It's a most unfortunate thing.
But I think the drive is there in the public.
I think the public are not satisfied with that anymore.
And there's a demand for answers.
Well, let's go further with that.
How do you feel the climate of the global society is for these ideas now versus 1995 when Fingerprints of the Gods first came out?
What do you think has changed in terms of the recognition of our true history?
When I wrote Fingerprints of the Gods, when I published that in 1995, the way that information was spread around our society was very different from how it is today.
In 1995, there was still what I call the cult of the expert.
You only had to be Professor X or Dr. Y.
And make some grave pronouncement, and 99% of the population would believe you and not challenge you or question it any further.
That attitude to authority, that willing to abase ourselves before authority and say, Yes, you are the expert, you are right, tell me what to believe, that's gone in the last 20 years.
There's a whole new spirit in the world today, which is a spirit of inquiry, which is a distrust of experts, because we've had the experience again and again and again of being lied to.
By so called experts.
So called experts who serve the interests of big pharmaceutical companies, for example.
So called experts who serve the interests of the military industrial complex will tell us all kinds of so called facts as to why we should spend yet more money on weapons of mass destruction.
But when we really dig into it, we find that it's all lies and that we are being deliberately hoodwinked and deluded by experts.
So the status of the expert in our society has plunged in the last 20 years.
At the same time, the big media that used to Have a stranglehold on information and that could effectively block whole areas of information from reaching the public.
The big media have been completely undermined by the internet.
Now we can communicate with one another directly around areas that we are passionately interested in, and we don't need a newspaper mogul to give us permission to read that story.
So, you know, everything is changing, and so it's a very special time, I think, that we live in a time of flux where old ideas are coming up for questioning in ways that they never had before, when the technologies and the mechanisms are there that allow us to question those old ideas.
And when there's a new spirit and an awakening in the air.
Oh, it certainly is.
And I guess my question for you is how do you see that progress?
You know, when you're out there doing lectures now and you're looking out at the audience, do you think back to when Fingerprints of the Gods first came out?
And if you bring that forward to 2015, you know, putting out this new sequel, Magicians of the Gods, and this whole new wave of information that's been coming out, do you reflect over those 20 years and say, you know, this is great progress that we've made on the question of the lost chapter of humanity?
Or do you say we should be really so much further along?
Well, in terms of public reception of these ideas, there is no doubt that there's been a radical change in the last 20 years and that the general public is more receptive to ideas that question the established model of things than was the case 20 years ago.
And this is being particularly driven by young people.
People from their late teens through into their early 30s are who I see predominantly in my audiences when I give public lectures now.
Back in the mid 90s, I was seeing a much older profile, people in their 50s and 60s.
They're still there.
I'm still getting people in it.
But there's a really drive for change amongst the younger generation.
And because I have the opportunity to go out and speak publicly a lot, and because I'm in front of audiences all over the world often, I see this very, very clearly.
And I see how it's being driven by young people.
There's a new questioning spirit in the world, and it's questioning everything.
And this is a really good development for the human race.
Yeah, well, that's very interesting.
And I do really see that it's starting to happen.
I guess what I also see, though, is a kind of counterattack where certain forces are trying to dilute the impact of these breakthroughs by throwing all kinds of stories and disinformation out there.
So it becomes even more difficult to separate out fact from fiction.
Now, how do you see that?
There's definitely a counterattack afoot.
And again, I'm an old hand in this world because I've been.
Presenting this case for a lost civilization for a very long time, and I've seen just about every dirty trick that the establishment can throw at me and at my colleagues and friends in this field.
And some of those tricks are pretty dirty, and it's a kind of ideological warfare.
That ideological warfare was much more effective in the 90s than it is today.
These days, when those kind of tricks are pulled on you, the public is very skeptical about the trick, not about the individual it's being pulled on, but because we're you again, it comes down to this fact that we.
Don't trust the experts anymore and for good reason.
So, for a team of experts to stand up and say, This man is wrong, that's not enough.
That actually is more likely to inspire people to look into the work rather than drive them away from it because people are thinking for themselves these days.
And there was less of that in the 90s, less of it.
It's true.
There's certainly been this awakening taking place.
And I think you've really faced down so much of that criticism coming at you from the system.
And that your ideas have really penetrated through somehow.
And so let's go deeper into your work here on this lost culture that you've been looking for them.
You even put together this documentary called Quest for a Lost Civilization.
And that's an excellent documentary where you travel the world, you know, what an adventure.
And I really recommend that to anyone who's interested in this research.
It was a great adventure to tell that story.
Oh, yeah, I can imagine.
So this lost civilization, Can you give us an idea here of what you think they were about?
Now, if they were placing this Gobekli Tepe site as a kind of time capsule, who were they?
And you know, you've written about them being depicted as these seven sages in ancient stories.
Who were these wisdom teachers of mankind from this lost civilization that you investigate in Magicians of the Gods?
Sure.
I think we're dealing with a civilization that's very different from our own.
But nevertheless, it had.
Certain advanced technological accomplishments that can be identified quite clearly.
Our civilization is one that has gone very far down the road of mechanical advantage.
That's what we do well.
We make amazing machines and they get more amazing every year.
The level of technology in the 21st century is almost magical in some ways.
But I would suggest that in pursuing that route and leaning very heavily on the machines we make, we've allowed.
Faculties within the human mind to go fallow and to lapse.
And I would suggest, and this is based on mythological material and traditional material as much as anything else, I would suggest that the lost civilization was one in which what we would call psychic powers were much more highly developed than they are in our society.
We dismiss and ridicule such powers today and we put all our trust in machinery.
But it may be that huge areas of potential in our brains are simply not being tapped.
By our society, and they've gone to sleep.
I would suggest that the lost civilization was a more spiritual civilization and a civilization that harnessed the faculties of the power of the human mind.
So we get accounts of gigantic blocks of stone being levitated into the air or softened or melted.
Some kind of mysterious technology is involved that we don't fully understand, but there's much to suggest that the human mind is connected to that in a very In a very direct way.
So I think a different civilization, but nevertheless with technological accomplishments.
That's so interesting.
Well, it sounds like a kind of spiritual technology is what they possessed.
And you did mention their incredible ability to move these massive megalithic stones.
What other evidence do you think we have that is a remnant of these mysterious ancestors?
What I've gone into more in earlier books than in the present one is the fascinating issue of ancient maps, which show the world.
As it looked during the last ice age, we have a very good idea what the world looked like during the last ice age when sea level was 400 feet lower.
Right.
There are modern reconstructions of what the world looked like during the last ice age, so it's eerie to find those precise landforms appearing on very ancient maps.
Now, when I say a very ancient map, let me be clear.
These are often maps that are drawn in the 15th or 16th centuries of our era, but they are drawn based on older source maps.
For example, the Piri Reis map, which the creator of that map, a Turkish admiral in 1513, actually tells us in his own handwriting on the map.
That it was based on 100 source maps, which were all falling apart.
And he compiled the information in them and put them into this map.
And that turns out to be the case in all of these anomalous maps, that they're based on lost older source maps.
And we may then wonder how many times were they copied and recopied down the ages?
And how far back does this go?
When we look at the maps, they show us accurately the world as it looked during the last ice age.
More to the point, they show us the world, a sphere, a globe.
They show us it.
Accurately.
They incorporate accurate longitudes.
Latitude on a map is difficult, but not that difficult.
It's possible to work out your latitude from the height of the pole star above the horizon.
Right.
But longitude is a really difficult problem to solve.
And our civilization solved it using chronometers that could keep accurate time at sea so that you would always know when it was noon in Greenwich.
And you could then tell how far east or west of Greenwich you were.
Depending on the local noon.
So, to find accurate longitudes in ancient maps based on even more ancient source maps is really puzzling because our civilization didn't crack the longitude problem until the late 18th century.
So, this looks like evidence for a former civilization during the Ice Age that had the capacity to explore and map the world and to do so with levels of accuracy that are at least comparable with those of our own civilization in the late 18th and early 19th century.
More than 12,000 years ago.
And there's so much of this.
One of the places I visit in Magicians of the Gods is the incredible site of Baalbek in Lebanon, where we have three blocks of stone, the so called trilithon, built into a very anomalous, freestanding megalithic wall.
Secrets of Baalbek Stones00:03:33
And each of these blocks weighs more than 900 tons.
Amazing.
They're raised up 30 feet above the ground.
And then find other blocks still in the quarry, which I believe were covered by sediment throughout almost all of history.
The mainstream Archaeologists attribute the whole of the project at Baalbek to the Romans.
I don't think the Romans even knew these gigantic blocks were in the quarry.
Some of them weigh almost 1,500 tons.
We're dealing with a culture and a civilization that just did things differently from we do.
That for them, moving these huge blocks of stone was a relatively easy thing to do.
Otherwise, why do it?
It doesn't make sense.
They did it as though it was an easy thing for them.
And for us, even today, even at the peak of our technology, with the best machines.
And the best mechanical advantage.
Shifting 1,500 ton blocks is a really difficult thing to do.
Yeah, it's perplexing and a real mystery.
How did they do the things that even now pose these huge logistical problems for us?
It's a major puzzle.
And when we come back, we're going to explore how they decided to preserve this ancient knowledge and if we've even begun to rediscover its significance.
Stay with us.
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And we are back.
This is Dark Journalist, and I'm here with bestselling author Graham Hancock.
Graham is now releasing his long awaited sequel to the worldwide bestseller Fingerprints of the Gods, and it's called Magicians of the Gods.
You know, I've been spending a lot of time with it since my copy arrived here last week, and it's a remarkable tone of research of our true ancient past.
Very, very different from what we've been taught our ancestors were all about.
Now, Graham, we're confronted with this puzzle of an advanced ancient civilization back there, at least 12,000 years ago, that could perform amazing feats of architecture, had a genius grasp of mathematics and geometry, and could even map the world.
And they also possessed a wisdom and spirituality that seemed to inspire everything that they did.
Sumerian Legends and Cataclysms00:12:40
So, in your work, it seems you're proposing that at a certain point, they decided.
We're going to have to preserve all this.
What was it that was happening to them that they realized the need to do this?
I think that the, again, I have to speculate, but when I look at the whole field of evidence on this, I would say that that decision to try to preserve all of this was taken after the first massive cataclysm, the cataclysm of 12,800 years ago.
And I think that that cataclysm radically degraded.
But did not completely destroy the lost civilization.
When the second cataclysm occurred 11,600 years ago, that's when they went down.
And it was the survivors of that cataclysm who then were filled with the resolve to save something, to preserve something.
And where could they go?
They settled amongst hunter gatherers.
That's what would happen to us in the world today.
If Western technological civilization were to be affected by the same kind of cataclysm that occurred between 12,800 and 11,600 years ago, our civilization would definitely not survive.
Humanity would survive, but our complicated, sophisticated, deeply interconnected technological civilization would not survive.
Very few people in the modern world know how to survive, actually.
Some do, but most people don't know how to hunt, they don't know how to gather, they don't know how to plant crops.
We all depend on other people who know that.
There's a network of specialisms, and that's a very fragile state of affairs.
So if we were hit by five or six fragments of a comet, as happened.
Back 12,800 years ago.
It's important that people be clear what's involved with a comet impact.
You're having objects that can be a mile in diameter, okay, a mile wide, which are coming into the Earth's atmosphere at about 70,000 to 100,000 miles per hour.
The kinetic energy packed by an object like that is just awesome.
It's massive and stunning.
It dwarfs the entire nuclear arsenal of the world going off at once.
Just one single impact with a one mile wide comet fragment accounts for more explosive energy than the entire nuclear arsenal of the Earth.
Huge tsunamis, gigantic, gigantic flooding, skies filled with ash and darkness, a nuclear winter sets in.
It's important to be clear that this is an absolutely devastating and utterly shattering disaster.
Our civilization would fall apart at the seams.
Within three days, there would be no food.
Food in the cities because all the cities are supplied on a just in time basis.
Those supply lines would break down.
Feral gangs would start roaming the streets, robbing and looting.
The moral structure of our society is very flimsy and would rapidly fall apart.
In short, all our much vaunted achievements would be over and done with very, very rapidly.
Where would those of us who survived go?
Who could look after us?
Who could help us to survive?
And who might we be able to transfer some of what we know to?
The answer is hunter gatherers.
There are still hunter gatherers in the world.
In the Amazon jungle, in the Kalahari desert, in southern Africa, and they do know how to survive.
Yeah.
I mean, these guys know how to survive in the most extreme and difficult circumstances.
A global cataclysm of that nature, while it would affect an urban civilization radically, would leave hunter gatherer civilizations relatively untouched.
And that's what I think happened with the cataclysm of 12,800 to 11,600 years ago that it wiped out an advanced civilization.
There were survivors, and those survivors might have been quite random.
You know, some of them might have had technical skills.
Others might not have.
They might have been, I don't know, writers or hairdressers.
Right.
And, you know, what we get is the fragments that those who knew stuff, who survived, were able to pass on to the hunter gatherers they settled amongst.
Right.
And it's fascinating because we have so many recurring stories in these different cultures that you've studied, where there's a flood myth, a destructive cataclysm myth all around the world.
Yeah.
Now, one of these I found intriguing in the book was the Sumerian legend of Oannis.
Whose story fits again that pattern of seven sages of wisdom who help humanity in these stories.
Oh, Anis, yes, you mentioned the seven sages, and I didn't pick you up on that.
It's an important point.
All around the world, there are traditions of a group of seven sages, seven wise individuals, who come in a time of darkness after a cataclysm, who teach the benefits and the gifts of civilization.
To guess who?
Hunter gatherers.
Right.
And that is the case in Sumer in Mesopotamia, where the civilizing hero is called Oanis, which is a short form of the Sumerian name Uanadapa, who was the leader of the seven sages.
In India, in the Vedic texts, we have again a reference to seven sages who survived the cataclysm at the end of the last age of the earth and re promulgate the knowledge from that time into the new age of the earth.
We have seven sages.
Are considered to be the founders of Easter Island.
The seven sages are spoken of extensively in the Edfu building texts in ancient Egypt.
So it's weird that all around the world this particular idea of sages bearing the wisdom that is necessary to create civilization appears and provide that wisdom.
And again and again, this is associated with post-cataclysmic events.
So it's a very intriguing situation.
And I go into it in some length.
In Magicians of the Gods, because I think it's fascinating.
Whenever we find these cross cultural comparisons that can't be explained by a model of history that doesn't allow for a lost civilization and that doesn't even allow for any diffusion of ideas.
I mean, for God's sake, according to the mainstream model, nobody's supposed to have crossed the Atlantic until 1492.
And that is just absolute rubbish.
It's just absolute unmitigated nonsense.
Of course, people were crossing.
It's not even that difficult to cross the Atlantic.
That's true.
Of course, people were doing that long before.
Definitely.
You only have to look at the voyages of Tor Heyerdahl.
Tor Heyerdahl proved it.
He proved that this can be done.
I was privileged to know Tor Heyerdahl.
And he was a remarkable and amazing man.
And he had very strong views on the possibility of a lost civilization.
He regarded it as highly likely.
He believed in the Atlantis myth.
And very interestingly, I think if Tor were still alive, he would be all over Gobekli Tepe.
The similarities between Gobekli Tepe and the Easter Island figures are actually really quite stunning.
And I go into that again quite a bit in the book.
Yeah, and you cover so much interesting ground in the book.
Now, one thing I was really curious about was this symbol that you saw at Gobekli Tepe, which you realized was a pattern that you've seen in other ancient sites that you visited over the years.
And it's this unusual handbag motif related to a sacred image.
Now, can you go into that here?
I can, because again, what is intriguing is we call this iconography.
It's the imagery that is used by particular cultures.
And in Mesopotamia, associated with the seven sages, there is the imagery of a certain bag that all of them are shown holding.
And they're all shown holding it in a very specific way so that the fingers are visible and the handle of the bag comes through.
The fingers, they're all shown in exactly the same way.
So it's really puzzling to cross the Atlantic Ocean to go to Mexico and to find the oldest representation of the figure called the feathered serpent, Quetzalcoatl, in Mexico, holding exactly the same bag in exactly the same way.
And then lo and behold, the same bag, three of them in fact, turn up on the top of pillar 43 in enclosure D in Gobekli Tepe, where we know that it's 12,000 years old.
So, you know, how do we explain this?
Is this some extraordinary, amazing coincidence?
Or are we looking at a Something like the badge of office of an insider group of people whose project is to pass on the knowledge of civilization.
Yeah.
I think the latter, obviously.
I think this is like that mysterious man bag, as I call it, filled the function of a sort of Masonic handshake.
If you had one of those, you were a member of the team.
Something like that.
Absolutely.
That's powerful symbolism.
And when you pointed it out, in fact, in the book, I realized I've seen it many times before.
It's very common and it's all around the world.
Something else I found fascinating was how you track the biblical story of the flood to the Sumerian tale of the flood.
And we can see it's the original source text.
But beyond that, you examine the writings of this ancient Babylonian historian, Berossus, and there are some remarkable things in there.
Yeah, Berossus was a Babylonian priest in the late phase of Mesopotamian culture.
And he took it upon himself to set down in writing many of the very ancient traditions that go back to the origins of civilization in Mesopotamia.
And it's from him that we owe most of what we know about the seven sages and Oannis to, although by no means only him, because it's there in the cuneiform texts from much earlier time, which he himself was simply drawing on.
Fascinating to read the works of Berossos and to see the role that cataclysm plays within them and to see the role of the bringer of civilization within them.
And he actually describes meeting Oannis.
When he does, Oannis seems to be inside a kind of fish costume.
And that's how he's shown in all of the three dimensional relief carvings.
Archaeologists refer to them as fish garbed figures.
So they all wear a fish on their heads.
It's like a fish headdress, and the tail of the fish hangs down, but then their human legs are there.
And that's how Berosus describes them as a strange hybrid creature, which is part fish and part human, but that has the voice of a man, has the tail of a fish, but underneath that, the legs of a man were visible.
What it sounds like to me is people wearing some kind of costume, some kind of badge of office or mark of their brotherhood, if you like.
That this was how they dressed.
And what it symbolizes is their ability to survive the waters of ocean, that ocean which would drown and submerge and destroy others, that they survive it and they emerge from the ocean bringing the knowledge of civilization with them.
And so their reference to fishes, their association with fishes, is quite symbolic in that sense.
And the other thing to remember is that they are associated with the Sumerian wisdom god Enki.
And Enki.
Is the god of the Apsu, of the freshwater abyss, and therefore fishes are also appropriate symbolic creatures there.
And it's interesting that he is the god of wisdom and of magic.
The reason I call the book Magicians of the Gods is because again and again, that's how these kind of figures are referred to.
They are the Magicians of the Gods.
Well, that's really intriguing.
Now, when you've looked at these various ancient sites, so many trips, so many excavations, and of course, all of your journeys into consciousness around this sacred architecture.
You talk about the Great Return and that maybe these structures are, in a sense, a warning to humanity that says at a certain point in the future, when you're able to decipher these messages, you'll be facing the same type of disaster again.
Yeah, I go into that possibility.
It's been picked up and taken out of context by the British press, who claim that the book is all about predicting the return of this comet that hit the Earth 12,800 years ago.
Actually, it's a very small part of the book.
I don't want to entertain or project or manifest ideas of gloom and doom and disaster.
I think what we need to project out into the universe is love and warmth and strength.
The Taurid Meteor Stream00:05:53
However, it's important that we act responsibly towards this beautiful planet that the universe has given us and the incredible opportunity to be born in a human body and live a human life.
We have a responsibility to preserve and protect this amazing home of life that we call the Earth.
We now know for sure that.
Our planet has been radically affected by cosmic impacts, by asteroids or comets coming in from outer space many times.
We know that it happened 65 million years ago when the dinosaurs were made extinct.
You and I would not be here having this conversation if a 10 kilometer wide cosmic object had not hit the Gulf of Mexico 65 million years ago, because the dinosaurs ruled the world and mammals would never have got their place in the sun.
By making the dinosaurs extinct, the room was made for mammals to evolve and become what we are today.
And we now know that between 12,800 and 11,600 years ago, there was a second series of massive cosmic impacts, which again had a radical effect on the story of the world.
You know, a very massive and radical effect.
Now, the science that I report in Magicians of the Gods concerning the comet impact is very much drawn from the work of geophysicists, from scientists who study the Earth.
But there's a whole other group of scientists who've been studying the sky.
Their astronomers, and they can include figures like Victor Kloob and Bill Napier and the late Sir Fred Hoyle, Chandra Wickram Singh, quite a number of astronomers are very interested in a particular bit of the heavens, and that's called the torrid meteor stream.
It's called the torrid meteor stream because it appears to radiate out of the constellation of Taurus, the bull.
That is an optical illusion.
Of course, it's not coming from the constellation of Taurus, but it's coming from the bit of the sky where we see the constellation of Taurus.
And therefore, it's called the torrid meteor stream.
The Earth passes through it twice a year.
Each passage takes 12 days because the torrid meteor stream is 30 million miles wide and we travel 2.5 million miles every day on our orbit around the sun.
It takes 12 days to pass through the meteor stream.
We pass through it in June, end of June, beginning of July, and we pass through it again at the end of October and the beginning of November.
In June and July, we don't see meteors, we don't see shooting stars as we pass.
The stream is full of dust and debris, but we don't see the shooting stars because they're coming in from the sunlit side of the earth.
But in October, November, we do see them.
And many people refer to them as the Halloween fireworks.
There's a massive meteor shower that happens every year at the end of October and the beginning of November.
And that is our second passage in the year through the torrid meteor stream.
The astronomers who've been studying the torrid meteor stream are convinced that it is the remnant, the debris stream of a fragmented giant comet.
Lo and behold, the same fragmented giant comet that bits of hit the Earth.
12,800 years ago and then 11,600 years ago.
Their point is that large fragments of the original comet are still in orbit in the torrid meteor stream.
They have not fallen to Earth.
We've brushed through the edges of the stream, but in that stream is at least one object they calculate with a diameter of more than 30 kilometers, 20 miles wide.
And many other large objects are already fully known, like Comet Olgiato, Comet Rudniki, and Comet Enki.
These are all fragments of that original giant comet.
The point of the astronomers is that there is danger in the Taurid meteor stream.
It has impacted life on Earth very dramatically within the very recent past, within the last 12,800 years.
In fact, the most recent Taurid object to cause a near cataclysmic event on Earth was in the 20th century.
It was in 1908 in Tunguska, in Siberia.
That was a bit from the Taurid meteor stream.
It came down on the 30th of June at the peak of the Beta Taurids.
And it devastated an area of 200,000 square miles and flattened 80 million trees.
Thank goodness it came down in an uninhabited area of Siberia, because if it had come down on a major city, then the loss of life would have been in the millions.
And that is the most recent bit of the torrid meteor stream to hit the Earth.
The point of the astronomers is there's a real danger, and they calculate within the next 20 or 30 years that we cross that section of the torrid meteor stream.
That contains these large, lumpy, heavy objects, which are really dangerous.
And they believe we should be doing something about it.
So, fundamentally, when I report this information, first of all, I'm reporting the work of astronomers.
This is not some prophecy by Graham Hancock, as it's portrayed to be.
I'm not in the prophecy business.
And secondly, I'm not saying the end of the world is nigh.
I'm saying we have the time, we have the opportunity, and crucially, we have the technology to divert dangerous objects.
They don't have to hit the Earth.
As a matter of fact, we should be paying much more attention to the cosmic environment.
In which this majestic and magical planet circulates, because it contains objects that are very dangerous to life on Earth.
And rather than spending trillions of dollars every year on building up our armies and our weapons of mass destruction and creating a climate of hatred and fear and suspicion, we should be uniting as a human race to clear our cosmic environment of objects that can end human civilization in a single terrible day and night.
Wow.
Well, it's so important to be aware of something like that.
And the idea of a disaster occurring in a day and night has echoes of Plato's Atlantis story in it.
Hall of Records Mysteries00:14:44
So I'm glad you included that in the book, actually.
And it's interesting to me that the British press wanted to have a field day portraying you as a sensationalist predicting a disaster.
You know, it occurs to me it's probably because they were annoyed that Magicians of the Gods is already a bestseller in England.
Yeah.
They're very annoyed because they are really sort of stuck like glue to the mainstream archaeologists and to the established model of history.
So anybody who challenges the establishment in any way in Britain can expect a rough ride.
Fortunately, Americans are a bit more independent spirited than that.
And what we have in America and increasingly in Britain is a very active podcast community who are not, you know, under the control of the big powers, who are thinking freely and putting information out freely.
So the times they are indeed changing.
That's very true.
And I think in the surge of new independent media, there's a real opportunity for the expansion of ideas to happen.
And certainly that's what we're about here.
Now, Graham, I wanted to take you back to an unusual set of information and predictions by the American psychic Edgar Cayce.
In one of his trance readings on Atlantis, he foresaw the opening of the Hall of Records in Egypt that would contain the history of Atlantis.
Now, I know the Hall of Records was something of an interest for you, and what I'd like to know is how do you see Cayce's vision now?
Edgar Cayce was best known for his healing abilities.
He would put himself into a trance state.
And he diagnosed the ailments of his patients and offered remedies which were very effective.
He was fundamentally renowned as a healer.
We're looking at the 1920s to the 1940s here.
But in his trances, he would frequently speak of past lives, both of the past lives of his patients and his own past life.
And these took him back to Atlantis, and he talked about the destruction of Atlantis and how there had been survivors and how they went around the world creating not actually one but three halls of recognition.
Another one of them is supposed to be close to Mexico, somewhere in the Bahamas area.
Not one, but three halls of records, one in Egypt.
And that these were buried away and that they contained all the knowledge of the high civilization of Atlantis at its peak before it was brought down by the global cataclysm.
So, right there, because the notion appears to emanate from a psychic, mainstream science just writes it off completely and doesn't want to hear about it.
Actually, I think psychic powers are yet another area we should be exploring.
I don't think we should just dismiss it all as woo woo and mumbo jumbo.
There's a lot to indicate that there's something real here.
But because it came from a psychic, it's been dismissed by the mainstream.
What the mainstream ignore are the powerful ancient Egyptian traditions that speak effectively of a hall of records, of an archive of knowledge from the past, which is associated with the ancient Egyptian wisdom god Thoth.
So the number of the secret chambers of the sanctuary of Thoth is sought for by the pharaohs, you know, looking to create their.
Monuments.
They want to refer to an ancient archive.
There's a stela called the Inventory Stella at Giza, which is ignored by mainstream Egyptologists because it contradicts their view that the Sphinx was made in 2500 BC by a pharaoh called Khafre.
Why does the Inventory Stella contradict that view?
Because it says the Sphinx was already there and remotely ancient in the time of Khafre's father, Khufu, and that it was damaged, and that Khufu referred to very, very ancient records.
In order to restore the Sphinx as it had originally been made.
Fascinating.
So, this notion of an archive of evidence, information, knowledge from the past is very strongly ingrained in the ancient Egyptian traditions.
And it gives credence to the notion that there is buried at Giza an archive.
Of course, one of the interesting things that Casey said about the Hall of Records was that the entrance to it was under the Sphinx's right paw.
Now, you've been there at Giza.
Do you think there's any chance of that?
Certainly, we know from seismic work that there is a large, regular, rectangular chamber.
About 45 feet beneath the left forepaw of the Sphinx.
And that, if it hasn't already been secretly investigated by Egyptologists, which is quite possible because a lot goes on at the Giza Plateau that we are never told about, if it hasn't already been investigated, it urgently requires investigation and it's a relatively easy thing to do.
Well, interestingly enough, the former Egyptian Minister of Antiquities, Zahi Hawass, who you know all too well, has some very strange connections on this.
And actually, I should mention first that Zahi recently walked out of a Debate with you before it even started.
He walked out of a debate.
He promised to do it for a year, but when it came down to it, he stormed out and wouldn't do it.
Unbelievable.
Unfortunately, at the moment of his storming out, there was one member of the audience who'd arrived early who filmed the temper tantrum.
Yes.
Yes.
On record.
Otherwise, nobody would have believed me.
Absolutely.
Well, you handled it very well, and that's what counts.
The unusual thing about Zahi, of course, is that very often in his own investigations, he's been sponsored by the ARE, which is the Edgar Cayce Foundation.
Which shows that he's intimately aware of the Casey material.
He's fully aware of that material and he's had a connection with the Egger Casey organization that goes right back to the late 1960s and early 1970s.
I mean, it's very, very deep.
It's not something that he talks about a lot, but he still gives lectures at the Egger Casey Foundation.
So it's an odd combination of somebody who presents himself as an absolutely mainstream archaeologist who would never buy into any mysterious view of the past, and yet there is this deep connection with the Egger Casey Foundation.
I just find that very curious somehow, and it does open up this question of some of these official archaeological institutions doing their own investigation of a hall of records while doing this dance in public, as you said, of sneering at anyone who mentions it.
Interesting.
We know that of a number of projects.
When I say we, I'm speaking to myself, John Anthony West, Robert Ball, Robert Schock, other colleagues who work closely in this field and are regularly at Giza.
We know for sure that a seismic project was conducted at Giza, which was funded by a number of millionaires associated with the Edgar Cayce Foundation.
And supervised and authorized by Zahi Hawass.
You can't do anything at Giza back in the 90s without the permission of Zahi Hawass.
And that's when this happened.
So they were surveying the whole plateau with seismic instruments to detect hidden cavities under the ground.
And the results of that survey have never been fully shared with the public.
That is just so unusual.
And of course, in his readings, Casey does say that this is the time frame for when the Hall of Records will be uncovered.
Yes, absolutely.
And round about now, that's the suggestion in our time.
You know, one can't help wondering, pure speculation, if there's a bit of a fulfillment of prophecy according to a pre established schedule being underway at Giza.
It does feel right.
And when the first major news came out about Gobekli Tepe, I'll tell you, my mind flashed immediately to the Hall of Records.
And I thought, you know, maybe that's next.
Yeah.
Graham, when we come back, I'm going to ask you about some personal consciousness experiences you've had and the attempt by the TED organization to ban your lecture called.
The War on Consciousness.
Final round coming up here with the always insightful Graham Hancock.
Stay with us.
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Dark Journalist, the truth is never easy.
And we are back.
This is Dark Journalist.
With the great Graham Hancock, the best selling author of Fingerprints of the Gods, who's just released his new book, Magicians of the Gods, which you could say is the sequel to that original bestseller.
And I can tell you it's a very powerful piece of work.
Now, Graham, I'd like to flash back here to your recent book, Supernatural, where you do some powerful studies on consciousness and psychedelic plants in relation to ancient cultures.
And at the end of the book, You go out to some ancient standing stones and take a mushroom trip, basically, and the book ends.
So, I wanted to ask you here what happened?
You know, I've never had a really massive breakthrough to a parallel dimension with psilocybin.
I have with dimethyltryptamine, DMT, smoked.
I have with ayahuasca.
But psilocybin, I've never quite got there yet.
Okay.
The psychedelics that I most like working with are ayahuasca, where the active ingredient is DMT, or DMT in.
In pure form.
But I'm going to do more work with psilocybin in the future, and I'm just going to keep on upping the dose until I get to the same place.
Because molecularly, psilocybin and DMT are very closely related, very closely related substances.
You could almost regard psilocybin as an orally active form of DMT.
So it was a good place to end my story.
Yeah, I went to Avery, an ancient stone circle in the vicinity of where I live, and I ate a whole bunch of psilocybin then, psilocybin semilanciata, the mushrooms that we call.
Liberty camps.
And I had a great time, but I didn't find myself in a seamlessly convincing parallel world, which I often do with ayahuasca and DMT.
Well, it is intriguing.
Your investigations around these altered states of consciousness seem to bring you closer to the state of mind of the ancient shamans of wisdom whose work you've studied so closely for so many years.
Would you say that's correct?
I would say that's fairly correct.
And especially when we take into account That we cannot understand any ancient civilization without considering the ways in which they embraced altered states of consciousness.
This is another thing, just as the possibility of a lost civilization is not being factored in by historians and archaeologists, the other thing they're not factoring in at the moment is the role of visionary plants in the evolution and development of human society.
And that role, I believe, has been absolutely massive.
And we are cutting ourselves off from that tradition at our peril in the modern world.
It's a very important connection for humanity.
It's a connection that needs to be handled with respect.
These are sacred plants.
These are not, you know, for recreation, in my view.
I mean, everybody's free to make their own decision, but I think it's a mistake to use psychedelics for recreational purposes.
So, our society, by demonizing these substances, is making, I believe, a huge error and is an aberration when set against the whole story of human experience during which visionary.
Experiences have been embraced and deliberately cultivated.
Now, Graham, you did a now famous talk on this subject for TEDx.
The talk was yanked as too controversial by the TED organization, and it became quite the poster child for censorship.
You know, there was a huge outcry when this happened.
So, TED took it off the TEDx YouTube channel after it had been up there for a couple of weeks and got, I don't know, 32 or 33,000 views.
They suddenly took it down, and they took down the talk of another presenter at the same conference, Rupert Sheldrake.
He and I had both presented talks, very different talks, but they had something in common, which was a particular attitude to the mystery of consciousness.
Both of us regard consciousness as likely a non local phenomenon, not confined to the human brain, but that the brain should be regarded more as a transceiver of consciousness than as a generator of consciousness.
And this seemed to fly in the face of a scientific dogma that turned out to be at the heart of TED.
A lot of people thought that TED was all about promoting free and radical ideas, but actually it's not, because it's thoroughly founded in a particular branch.
Of science, a particular faction within science, which is called materialist reductionism, where everything must be reduced to a material substrate, where consciousness is understood to be simply an accidental byproduct of brain activity with no significance whatsoever.
We were challenging that in our talks, and that's why our talks were taken down by TED.
It resulted in a massive public relations disaster for TED.
It was a huge mistake because the internet community rallied around.
I got about three hours warning that the talk was going to be my talk was going to be taken down and Rupert's talk was going to be taken down, and I put out an appeal on my author Facebook page at that time.
Could anybody who knows how to do this download the talk now while it's still, because I didn't know how to download it?
Yeah, but it's out there on YouTube.
Download it and re upload it, and you have my absolute agreement to do that.
I'll be very happy for anybody to upload it, and lots of people did.
That video became one of the most viral videos on YouTube usually viral and then there came this whole then debate with Ted, really.
The whole argument, I ended up in long conversations with Chris Anderson, who runs TED, on the phone, and it was clear they'd got themselves into a horrible corner.
First of all, they had made all these claims as to why they'd taken our talks down.
And when we examined the claims and asked them to substantiate the points they'd made, they were unable to substantiate any of them.
Not a single claim, not a single justification for removing our talks could be substantiated by TED.
So we settled on the following compromise that they would keep permanently on their website.
A record of their objections to our talks, which would then be crossed out, and underneath would be published our rebuttals.
And the original talks would be there on the website in what Rupert Sheldrake calls the naughty corner of the TED website.
TED Talks and Freedom00:03:37
Right, that's a great way to put it.
And there they are to this day.
And it's a shameful episode for TED.
They publicly had to back down, admit that all of their objections to the talks were utterly baseless, that whoever had raised those objections hadn't actually even watched the talks.
And to publish in full our refutations.
And then the net result, they had hoped by suppressing the video that very few people would see it.
In fact, by suppressing it, millions of people have seen it, not have seen it before.
So, you know, I'm grateful to Ted for their repressive and dominating behavior.
Well, they gave you your biggest video.
They did.
Right.
It's amazing, though, because it shows that these organizations are not ready for true freedom of consciousness, regardless of what they say.
So, you talk about that and forget it.
You're guilty of thought crime.
That's right.
They're not ready to discuss that.
And this is a very simple point which I've made again and again, which concerns the basic notion of freedom in our society.
We in the West regard ourselves as the champions of individual freedom.
And yet we live in societies that will send an adult to prison for taking the decision to use ancient visionary plants to explore his or her own consciousness.
And as I've said many times, if I am not sovereign over my own consciousness, Then I'm not sovereign in any way.
There's just no way that freedom has any meaning if I live in a society that won't allow me to take decisions about my own body and my own consciousness.
The most intimate, the most personal, the most sapient, the most sacred part of myself, the state has the keys and can actually send me to prison for exploring that area of my consciousness.
And I've again and again made the point that if under the influence of psychedelics we cause harm or get in the faces of others, we already have many laws that govern disruptive behavior.
We don't need new laws that patrol our consciousness.
It's a fundamental human right.
And psychedelics are not for children.
Let me make that absolutely clear.
Psychedelics are a very serious matter.
But right now, the distribution of psychedelics in our society has been handed over to the worst human beings on the planet, to criminal gangs who are distributing all manner of illegal drugs and making huge fortunes out of it.
The answer, of course, is to make all drugs legal.
To put the criminal gangs out of business and to put out of business the huge armed bureaucracies that the state has created to enforce the war on drugs, who have a right to break into our homes and ruin our lives.
We need to end that negative period of human experience that is called the war on drugs.
And then we will be much better able to protect our children from the very real dangers that some of these drugs contain.
We'll be much better able to protect them if the drugs are legal than if they remain illegal.
It's a profoundly irrational solution that we have at the moment.
It's driven by ideology, not by facts.
Well, Graham, you've been able to articulate the whole point of freedom of consciousness from a variety of angles, and I think your work really shows that.
Now, my final question for you today is you know, it's been quite a journey since you were a political journalist to getting involved in a search for the Ark of the Covenant and then creating this whole genre of ancient mysteries with a worldwide bestseller, TV appearances, lectures, documentaries.
Magicians of the Gods00:02:24
How do you feel now about that leap into the unknown you took over two decades ago?
It's been a long journey, but it's a fascinating journey.
And I regard myself as very lucky to have had the opportunity to live that journey.
And yes, it's been painful and difficult at times, but there have also been so many joys and so much awe and wonder that I wouldn't want it to be any other way.
Well, we're all grateful that you took the plunge and brought the world so much hidden information.
About our ancient past.
The new book is Magicians of the Gods, and this is an amazing book.
I'd say what we're seeing is that the science and the archaeology and the discoveries that are happening are finally catching up with your work.
I think so.
I think that's what's happening.
So, what you're holding there is the British edition?
Yes, the British one.
Published on the 10th of September 2015.
The US edition has a different cover, but the content is identical.
The US edition actually features Gobekli Tepe on the cover.
Right.
But the content of the book is identical, and it's published on the 10th of November 2015.
In hardback across the United States.
Now, if anyone wants more information on your work, where should they go?
If anybody wants more information on me, it's grahamhancock.com, www.grahamhancock.com, and the link to my author Facebook page is there, and the link to my Twitter page is there, and I'm very active across the social networks.
Oh, yeah, there's always great stuff there.
And if someone wants to buy the book, you just recommend Amazon.
That's the easiest thing to do.
It can be pre ordered now.
Again, if you go to the Magicians of the Gods page on my website, there's a lot of links there that lead you to Amazon or to Barnes Noble or to wherever you want to pick it up.
Graham, thank you so much for being on the show.
What a pleasure.
And for all of your work, it's a great inspiration.
And I wish you well on Magicians of the Gods.
I have a feeling it's going to be your most successful one yet.
All right, terrific to talk to you.
And we will be in touch.
Have a great night over there.
Yeah, you too.
Keep well.
Okay, bye bye.
Bye.
Thank you for joining me for this powerful episode with bestselling author Graham Hancock on ancient mysteries, global cataclysm, and shifting paradigms.
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