Graham Hancock and Randall Carlson present evidence of a 12,800–11,600-year-old comet cataclysm in the Channel Scablands, reshaping Earth with 50-foot ripples, 18,000-ton boulders, and megafauna extinctions. They challenge mainstream archaeology’s dismissal of Göbekli Tepe (buried 11,600+ years ago) and cosmic-driven myths, citing nuclear glass, microdiamonds, and ancient astronomical alignments like the Mayan temples. With 100,000 Earth-crossing asteroids lurking, they warn modern civilization’s fragility—digital hubris could mirror lost cultures’ fate—while proposing stone architecture and celestial knowledge as survival tools. [Automatically generated summary]
I have been looking forward to this podcast for a long time, gentlemen.
This is about as cool a podcast.
For me, as a fan, this is like one of my favorite ones because Randall Carlson and Graham Hancock together and your new book, Magicians of the Gods, is it out officially everywhere now?
All over the U.S. All over the U.S. And Randall, you guys together is so exciting to me because I know you guys spent a lot of time together and you were working together on just this current project.
What we did was we traveled from Portland to the Twin Cities.
And what we did was essentially followed the southern margin of the Great Ice Sheet.
For the most part.
And what we were looking at was this evidence that the whole ice sheet had undergone this massive catastrophic sudden meltdown.
And basically what we saw in the landscape was evidence that was oceanic level currents flowing off the ice sheets.
In fact, the geologists that have been looking at this use a term called Sverdrup, Which was originally contrived to, and it's a million cubic meters per second.
And they originally came up with it to talk about ocean currents, like the Gulf Stream and so on.
Not realizing that down the road it was actually going to be applied to currents that were flowing over the land.
But when you see it on the landscape, I mean, for example, there's a place called the Camas Prairie that Randall took me to, where you see these kind of ripples in the ground, and they look a little bit like current ripples on the beach, you know?
But actually, they are current ripples, but they're 50 feet high and hundreds and hundreds of feet long, and they're That receding flood left those ripples on that landscape.
Then, above the town of Wenatchee, there's a gigantic boulder which didn't come from Wenatchee.
It weighs 18,000 tons and it got there in an iceberg the size of an oil tanker which grounded against that side of the valley.
The flood waters receded, the iceberg melted away and it left this humongous boulder there.
And actually, there's thousands of them, thousands of these gigantic boulders just scattered across the landscape of the Pacific Northwest and it all speaks of this cataclysmic, horrendous, humongous flood that happened 12,800 years ago.
So when the ice caps suddenly melted down, and we know now that that happened because of the impact of several fragments of a giant comet back 12,800 years ago.
It released a huge flood of meltwater, and that meltwater carried, it was jostling with icebergs, huge icebergs.
And many of these icebergs had rocks enchained within them.
As glacial ice moves, it snatches up and enchains rock and keeps it inside.
There's a name for them.
They're called glacial erratics.
And so they're in these icebergs and the icebergs are jostling against each other and the flood is ripped up whole forests by its roots and there's mud and there's rubble and it's rumbling and it's...
But interestingly enough, this was a 100-year flood that happened in Georgia back in 2004. And what we had was a floodplain that got overtopped for the first time in decades, and it left these current ripples here.
And I use this slide to show what we're used to on the scale of phenomena that we would normally see, this kind of phenomena.
You get it in the small scale, in the first image Randall showed, the same phenomenon there with a flood just two feet deep, and then we come to this humongous testimony to what happened 12,800 years ago.
And it's easy to drive through it and not really figure what you're driving through, but once you look at it and realize what happened, it really dilates the imagination.
But certainly mammals were going nowhere before the dinosaurs were swept out of the way.
And the point I'm making is that these events, which are called extinction-level events, they reset the clock.
They make everything start again.
And this is why what happened in North America 12,800 years ago is so important, because that period, the whole period was 12,800 to 11,600 years ago.
That period stands right in the foundations of what we think of as the beginnings, the origins of civilization.
And yet mainstream archaeology and historians have not taken it into account.
And I don't blame them for that.
This is new information.
This is new science that's been mainly published in the professional journals since 2007.
It's very intriguing new information.
But we cannot any longer trust the established model of the origins of civilization since it does not take into account an extinction-level event right in the foundations.
And that's why I say the House of History appears to be built on foundations of sand.
I don't know whether it's psychological or something more sinister than that.
But whenever you propose that and present evidence for it, you can be sure that you will be descended upon by a furious crowd of critics.
And the group of scientists, more than 30 of them, very significant mainstream scientists who've been presenting the evidence for the comet impact, have had a fight on their hands.
Since 2007. But I can say with confidence, and I detail it at length in the book, that they have won that fight.
Every criticism that's been made of their work, they have refuted.
And they've come back with new evidence, sometimes three or four papers a year.
And it's a compelling case, and we can't ignore it, Tony.
Well, it seems to me as a casual observer, probably more into it than the average person, but not even close to you guys, that as this evidence piles up, like the nuclear glass that they keep finding, it's about 12,000.
See, what we've got to consider is that we are looking at objects which might be a mile wide that are coming into the atmosphere at 70,000 miles an hour, and they are hot.
Some people will remember Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 that hit Jupiter back in 1994. That was a small comet, just two kilometers wide, broke into about 20 fragments.
The explosive power of those impacts on Jupiter was 300 gigatons.
Now, let me put that into perspective.
The entire world's nuclear arsenal, were it to go off at once, would be 6.4 gigatons.
So you're looking at something beyond imagination.
The power of these impacts is absolutely colossal.
Numbers don't do it.
Just imagine a world on fire, a world that changed forever.
I'll just call it the Younger Dry Ass, and it's a 1,200-year period.
Temperatures plunge at the beginning, massive animal extinctions, and then 1,200 years later, equally suddenly, temperatures shoot up again, dramatically.
And there's another series of floods.
So the period is 12,800 to 11,600 years ago.
And I think, I don't know if Randall agrees, we're sure that the comet...
Was the cause of the first event, 12,800 years ago.
I think other bits of the comet were responsible for the second event as well.
I think there was an impact in ocean, which threw water vapor up into the upper atmosphere, caused a greenhouse effect, and created that sudden spike in warming and that huge flood.
Those two warming spikes show up very dramatically in the Greenland ice cores.
And I pulled these up, I think, in the last meeting, but it would be good to reference it again.
And basically what you see here is...
Warming spike number one is here and warming spike number two is here and these were extreme.
You know we're talking about 10 degrees centigrade roughly in perhaps a year or two and this translates into about 17 or 18 degrees Fahrenheit.
So we're talking many times greater than the the warming of the last century or two.
Instantly basically just like that and this this is this this what we see here brackets this this whole episode of this this period of transition from the glacial age to this nice warm Holocene interglacial age that we're in now and You know Graham brought up about how this sits right at the very foundation of our modern history and if you look at Whether it's the dispersion of languages,
the beginning of agriculture, the first cities, the domestication of animals, what you see over and over again is the same dates showing up, you know, eight, nine, ten thousand years ago.
And in this model that we're describing here, we're not really seeing the genesis of civilization, we're seeing the rebooting.
Fingerprints of the Gods, I started reading sometime in the late 90s and just became...
We're engrossed in it and fascinated by this concept that civilization, and as you put it, that we are a species that has amnesia, and that we just forgot what our past was.
But the two of you together is what's so fascinating, because it puts this puzzle together.
Your obsession with asteroidal impacts and these massive extinction events And your knowledge of this ancient architecture that doesn't make any sense, and these ancient construction methods that seem to differ, and the timelines, and for people who aren't aware of the whole story behind it, the erosion, the enclosure of the Sphinx, where they made the Sphinx, has thousands of years of rainfall erosion.
That doesn't make any sense, because the last time there was rain in the Nile Valley was like 9000 BC, which is Yes.
Really, the climate of Egypt has been as dry as it is today for about the last 5,000 years.
So you actually have to go back to this period, to this Younger Dryas period, to get those heavy rainfalls that could have eroded the Sphinx in the way it is.
And I want to pay tribute to the work of John Anthony West and Robert Shock from Boston University because they broke this story way back in 1992. And at the time, the Egyptological establishment, of course, were furious that anybody dared to suggest that the Sphinx might be 12,000 years old.
The Egyptologists said, we know the Sphinx dates from 2500 BC. Actually, one of the things I've done in this book is look at what the Egyptological case rests on.
And it's a fairy tale.
It rests on nothing.
It's kind of ideology.
It's their idea of how things should be, rather than any real factual evidence that puts the Sphinx at 2500 BC. And the geology puts the Sphinx much, much older.
Now, the argument of the archaeologists at the time was, and anyway, the Sphinx couldn't possibly be 12,000 years old, because if that was the work of some unknown culture 12,000 years ago, we're going to find lots of other monuments around the world that are 12,000 years old, and we don't find any.
Well, that was 1992. But now we're in 2015, and the site of Göbekli Tepe in Turkey has been discovered with its Gigantic megaliths, a deliberately buried time capsule, buried more than 10,000 years ago and created 11,500 years ago.
And if you can make Gobekli Tepe, you can make the Sphinx.
We are finding the fingerprints of this lost civilization popping up all around the world.
Indeed, on any archaeological site where you can be absolutely sure of the dating.
The dating proves to be much older than we have been taught by archaeologists.
They recently discovered a huge megalithic site 40 meters underwater in the Sicily Channel.
It's been underwater for the best part of 10,000 years, which means that megalithic site is at least that old and maybe much older.
And we can be sure about the dating because it's underwater.
Likewise, we can be sure of the dating of Gobekli Tepe because whoever made it, deliberately buried it, sealed it, and no later organic material...
Got in to contaminate the carbon dating record and give falsely young deaths.
Well, the dates that are coming out of it now, the earliest dates.
Now, it's important to be clear that there's much more of Gobekli Tepe under the ground.
There's actually about 50 times as much as has already been excavated.
Which is under the ground still and not been dug up yet.
They know it's there because they've been over the whole site with ground-penetrating radar.
And what they're seeing is hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of these huge 20 to 50-ton T-shaped megalithic pillars buried under the ground.
Just as somebody went to enormous lengths to create this site, they also, or somebody else, went to enormous lengths to bury it.
And actually, Gobekli Tepe means pot-bellied hill in the Turkish language.
And that whole pot-bellied hill that covers this site was artificially put there by human beings, teams of men and women with buckets filled with rubble and stones, filling it in and covering it up.
It's just a fact that it happened because archaeologists and geologists can tell from the nature of the material that covers these pillars that it isn't a natural sedimentation, that they were deliberately covered up.
You've got to be a bit obsessed to stick with something like this.
You know, I came in for an enormous amount of criticism and flack when I published I'm human.
It hurts when people say really bad things about me.
But what I've learned is you just have to persist.
You just have to keep going.
Even if your ideas are shouted down by the established holders of knowledge in our society, if you feel strongly enough about those ideas, you've got to hang with them.
And I've hung with these ideas for more than 20 years now.
What we're seeing is just a mass of new evidence that basically vindicates the notion of a lost civilization.
See, if I may say, Gobekli Tepe, the earliest dates they've pulled out of the ground now, which they think is the foundation of the site, is 11,600 years ago.
And that is really significant because 11,600 years ago was the second episode of cataclysm at the end of the Younger Dryas.
And we know it was accompanied by massive global flooding.
And archaeologists have a problem with this because the site is very sophisticated.
It contains the world's first perfectly north-south aligned structure.
And you can't do that without precise astronomy.
In fact, there are huge astronomical implications to the Gobekli Tepe site.
The architecture is Is massive.
And you see, the problem archaeology has is that up till now, they've been teaching us that megalithic sites like this, astronomically and megalithic sites like this, are a maximum of five to five and a half thousand years old.
And suddenly we're looking at a site which is far bigger than any other megalithic site known in the world, which is at least six thousand years older than any other known site.
So how do they explain this?
Our ancestors are supposed to have been just hunter-gatherers at that time, nomads, following the game.
Not with...
A sophisticated societal organization that would have specialists who had these knowledge, who had these skills, who could put this work together.
So the fairy tale archaeologists are now telling about Gobekli Tepe is that one morning a group of hunter-gatherers woke up somehow divinely inspired with the complete knowledge of megalithic architecture and how to organize a workforce and how to bring them to a site, which, by the way, there's no water on that site, and to put this whole proposition together.
And at the same time, Exactly at the same moment, 11,600 years ago, we suddenly get evidence of agriculture spreading all over Turkey.
It's like Göbekli Tepe is a center of innovation and associated with it is the birth of agriculture in Turkey.
And to me, this looks like a transfer of technology.
It does not look to me like a group of hunter-gatherers woke up one morning magically equipped with the ability to invent agriculture and create a megalithic site like this.
It looks to me like people who already had that knowledge came into that area, settled there, and tried to pass on their knowledge to the local people and maybe used Gobekli Tepe as a kind of university or initiation center to train and teach people in those skills.
That's what it feels like.
And another point is that that same date, 11,600 years ago, is the date that Plato gives us for the destruction and submergence by flood of the lost civilization of Atlantis.
And up till now, archaeologists have dismissed the whole Atlantis story and they regard it as kind of pseudoscience, although it comes from Plato.
But Plato said very clearly that this happened 9,000 years before the time of Solon.
And Solon lived in 600 BC.
So Plato is telling us Atlantis went down 9,600 BC.
11,600 years ago.
Exactly the date of the second spike of the Younger Dryas Cataclysm.
We can see here, these are studies of sea level rise at the end of the Ice Age.
And rather than it being a smooth curve, which was the old model, which you can see represented by the dashed line, It's two enormous spikes.
And that second spike, you see MWP-1B, that's Meltwater Pulse 1B. And you've got Meltwater Pulse 1A. Meltwater Pulse 1B is dated precisely to 11,600 years ago.
When we talk about these objects coming in at 70,000 miles an hour, they are packing an enormous amount of kinetic energy and heat, and when they hit the ground...
There are distinct products left in the soil and those include nanodiamonds.
They're created by the shock and the impact.
You can only see them under a microscope.
They're tiny, tiny, tiny things.
And carbon spherules and the melt glass, which is just basically identical to trinitite, which is the melt glass that you get from nuclear explosions.
They're called impact proxies and there's a distinct layer of the soil all around the world.
Dated to 12,800 years ago, which contains this stuff and also contains the evidence of continental wildfires burning.
And I think Randall might want to address that issue of continental wildfires and why they happened.
All these images are beautiful, but let's note that most people are just listening to this.
So if you're just listening to this, those images that Randall put up on the screen show these enormous straight up and down spikes of the water level rising, which...
Ocean level rising, which has to be caused by something extremely dramatic.
Just looking at that, like, wow, what happened there?
Well, it seems like to me, as a layperson, with all this evidence, and all this evidence that correlates, it's all corresponding, it all seems to fit together, it would seem that this would be something that a lot of mainstream scientists and archaeologists would be extremely interested in.
Like, why would they try to ignore something like this?
And it is sad because again and again what we see is the new facts Being dismissed because they don't fit the existing theory, where in fact what we should be doing is modifying the existing theory to explain the newly discovered facts.
And this is a problem in the whole history of science.
Well, I remember when I first became aware of that problem when I watched the documentary on the Mysteries of the Sphinx where Dr. Robert Schock met with some archaeologist in Egypt.
It wasn't Zawi Hawass, it was a Western guy.
And he met with this guy, and they were explaining their theory about the erosions of the Sphinx, and he was laughing at it, but openly mocking it.
Like, what evidence?
Where is this evidence?
But it was the way he did it was just so riddled with ego.
I was like, how could you?
First of all, the concept of 11,000 years ago, when you start thinking about 11,000, that's a long time.
I've come to view archaeology and history as a kind of more ideology, really, than science.
There's an ideological view about how civilization developed, that we have this long, slow, gradual, politically correct rise from the Upper Paleolithic, from the hunter-gatherers, through the Neolithic, into the first cities.
We go on and on, and then we develop technologies, and here we are, the apex and the pinnacle of this whole story.
And gosh, we're so proud of ourselves and our achievements, and we think we're wonderful, and we praise and value our technology.
I've got nothing against technology, but there's a hint of arrogance in this.
There's a hint of pride that it was all about us.
And I think that once you start introducing this new view of history, that there may have been an earlier civilization, A high civilization which was utterly wiped out by a global cataclysm.
Why, it contradicts that ideological position.
And you find yourself in ideological struggle with archaeologists.
And that's why, you know, so for example, if my book is handed over to any archaeologist to review, they're just going to piss all over it.
They're not even probably going to read it.
They're just going to say, Hancock, they say again and again, Hancock is a pseudoscientist.
Nobody should listen to him.
That's their system of attack, is to first of all devalue you.
So much that nobody will ever listen to you and that's why I appreciate the support of just real down-to-earth people out there who are looking at this information and finding that actually, yeah, the story of history we've been taught doesn't make sense and this new information does make sense of it.
It's so sad because you count on these people to distribute the information, but their egos get involved in things, and if you've been teaching something for a long time, then it turns out you gave out master's degrees on things that were completely incorrect.
But you mean if you have an absolutely established narrative that you're teaching and you're unwilling to look at any possible variations to that, you're saying, like, almost from an authority position, we know what happened and we know where we're going.
And we're kind of in this mode now where there's a very large, growing political agenda around the idea that humans are the sole cause of global change.
And that we're the dominant force within this whole process.
Now here we come along and we're saying, well, no, there's actually been forces unleashed on this planet that really utterly dwarf anything we've done yet.
What does that do to that paradigm?
You see, that's what I think we're coming down here to.
Part of the The scenario now is that humans are engaged in causing the sixth great mass extinction, as we talked about in one of the previous.
And now we're coming along and saying, well wait a second, here's something from outer space that has come in and caused the last great mass extinction on Earth.
And what's interesting, I found, is that quite a number of the The scientists that have been in the opposition to the Younger Dryas impact hypothesis have been in the forefront of pushing this scenario of human-caused mass extinction and blaming the extinction of the great megafauna that died out 12,000 years ago on human hunters.
Which again, we talked about that and I consider that ludicrous that paleo-Indian hunters using spears are going to It caused the extermination of 10 million woolly mammoths before they could even reproduce, along with 120 other species of megafauna.
The scientists who have been diligently working away in this field since they've published their first paper in 2007 have just brought out a new paper, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, July 2015, where they're doing a statistical analysis of all the sites where the evidence comes from.
And what that tells us is that this is what is referred to as an isochron, this event 12,800 years ago.
We're not looking at the effects of 100 or 200 years of events.
We're looking at something that happened effectively in a single afternoon across 50 million square kilometers of the Earth's surface.
And then I'd like, Randall, to address this issue of continent-wide wildfires, because we do see this in the stratum, that when you get this superheated ejector coming down on ancient primal forests, consider the effect.
The Clovis site was one of the first places in North America where human remains were found in association with extinct mega mammals, such as woolly mammoths.
And many of these Clovis sites, and there's been over 50 of them around now documented over North America, I think about two-thirds of them have this black matte layer which shows up very clearly in this image.
Now that black matte layer is black because of the considerable amount of carbon So in other words, right there, that's the evidence of your wildfires, is that this blanket of soot over the continent that left this black matte layer.
And below that black matte layer, you'll find extinct Mega mammals, like here, you see the yellow arrow there points to the black matte layer.
Now if you look up, you'll see how it's more buff colored.
That was the color of all of this, but the soot that was in that black matte layer has dispersed and colored the other adjacent layers.
But you'll notice the bones below are the bones of extinct mammals.
The bones found above it are extant, or still existing mammals.
And that layer separates These two domains of extinct mammals and extant mammals.
So you have the ice cap north of roughly Minnesota, and south of it you have a heavily vegetated area covered with primal forests, and that's what goes on fire.
And the reason it goes on fire is because when these impactors come in, they generate a huge amount of heat, and what is called ejector, superheated ejector, is thrown up into the upper atmosphere, and it falls down all over the continent, and it sets the world on fire.
This is why I've written this book, because it's mind-boggling.
It's mind-boggling material.
And up till now, most of the information has been confined to the really rarefied scientific journals.
Very little of it has got out into the public domain.
So one of the things I've tried to do is to put this together into a form that's very accessible to the general public, because we all need to know about this.
This is our yesterday.
This is our background.
This is where we come from.
The present order of the world Has descended from that moment.
Yeah, and when Ronald says Firestone and West and Kennedy, he's talking about some of the lead scientists who have presented the evidence for the Younger Dryas impact because they have triumphed.
Although they were attacked, and sometimes viciously, and frankly speaking, sometimes dishonestly, they were attacked.
But they defended themselves so well, and they kept on bringing in new data and new information that actually now we should be regarding their view as the mainstream.
There are a few critics still hanging in there who would like human beings to have been responsible for the extinction of all the mega mammals and who just are in denial about the climate change at that time.
Well, one of the problems with that theory is what you showed the last time you were here, the evidence of these woolly mammoths that died instantaneously, and the massive fields of them, that something had to happen, and ones with, like, their legs broken, just bent over from the impact...
Like, it's pretty clear something went down.
And all of these pieces point together, and including looking at this, which is just, this is blowing my mind, this idea of the world on fire.
And a lot of them, I think, probably dispersed from the area around the Great Rift Zone.
It seems like in a lot of the areas actually where we're finding early hominids is in that same area that seems like for whatever reason it was spared somewhat of the extreme severity that the rest of the planet suffered.
When we look at the arguments of history and archaeology, very little of the story is told in North America as it's taught in schools and universities today.
They look at places like Sumer in Mesopotamia and ancient Egypt.
Further down in South America, some of the great cultures of the Andes.
But it's like North America is missing from the map.
They talk about hunter-gatherers coming in here across the Bering Strait.
And there's still a dogged faction of archaeology that wants to maintain that that just happened about 13,000 years ago.
And that there was no human beings in the Americas before that, although the mass of contradictory evidence is overwhelming that dogma as well.
It's obvious that the Americas were populated long before that, and those populations did not only come in across the Bering Strait.
They came in other ways as well.
And then there just seems to be nothing for a very long time.
And North America is kind of left out of the story of civilization.
Well, now I think we know why.
Because North America was at the heart of this disaster.
It was at the absolute epicenter.
And the slate was completely wiped clean here.
And that's what archaeologists are looking at.
They're seeing a wiped clean slate and they think they're seeing the beginning of something.
Actually, they're not.
They're seeing the movement on of something after a horrendous disaster.
It's so hard to wrap my mind around this idea that for literally a thousand years, the Earth was just riddled with asteroid impacts and fire and nuclear winter because of the dust and mass extinction.
It's so hard.
The numbers that you're throwing around, the ideas behind it, it's very difficult.
There's a place that they call the Oort Cloud, which is just so far away that it's almost impossible to imagine it.
But it contains trillions of comets.
And often they're in stable orbits.
They're not coming into the inner solar system.
But as the solar system orbits around the center of the galaxy, our galaxy is the Milky Way, and we are in orbit around the center of the galaxy.
Our Sun, our solar system, everything is in orbit around the center of the galaxy.
And that orbit is not only in the plane of the galaxy.
Imagine a dolphin diving up and down, coming out of the surface of the sea, Descending below, rising up again.
That's what the solar system is doing, and those passages through the galactic plane disturb the Oort cloud, and they send comets winging in to the inner solar system.
Thank God for Jupiter.
Jupiter, with its huge gravity, is the great protector of the Earth.
We should all wake up every day and say, thank you, Jupiter.
This doesn't happen too often, but every now and then a comet gets past Jupiter's guard.
And comes in and enters the inner solar system and the calculations show this happened about 20,000 years ago and that comet went into an orbit that crosses the orbit of the Earth twice a year.
We are still crossing the orbit of that comet twice a year and there is still a very disturbing amount of debris.
Within it, it's called the Taurid Meteor Stream.
We've actually just finished our latest passage through the Taurid Meteor Stream.
The Earth passes through the Taurid Meteor Stream twice a year.
It takes 12 days to pass through it because the Taurid Meteor Stream, more numbers, is 30 million kilometers wide, and we orbit at the rate of 2.5 million kilometers a day.
So 12 days to pass through it.
And in the last 11,000 or so years, we've been lucky.
We've been passing through this 30 million mile wide stream.
We've been passing through bits where there are just filaments of small debris.
But the evidence is that it is actually full of large rocky debris, including one object that may be as much as 30 kilometers in diameter sitting in that torrid meteor stream.
So it's like I compare it to like strapping on a blindfold and crossing a six lane highway and just hoping that you don't get hit by a truck.
You know, that's what it comes down to.
And we've been lucky so far.
Actually, the most recent definite impact from the Taurid meteor stream was in 1908. And that was in Russia, in Siberia.
It's called the Tunguska event.
As I said, there's two passages through the stream, one in June, end of June, early July, and one in November.
And this was at the end of June, an object, not very big, about 100 meters in diameter, came out of the torrid meteor stream, entered the atmosphere of the Earth, and actually blew up in the sky.
It was an air burst about 5 kilometers above the ground.
It flattened 80 million trees across 2,000 square kilometers.
I actually want to say that there's something positive to say about this.
We are almost certainly the first civilization that's ever existed on this planet that has the capacity to intervene in our cosmic environment, should we choose to do so.
We can make sure that we are not the next lost civilization.
We can make sure that life and light continue on this planet and that our story continues.
But we need to pay attention to our cosmic environment.
And a number of scientists are now saying the same thing, that it's irresponsible of us To pretend that impacts like this may, they just happen every hundred million years, we don't need to worry about them.
We are intimately connected with a force that can change life on earth and we have the power to do something about it.
So I would suggest Instead of wasting, you know, trillions of dollars globally creating weapons of mass destruction to destroy one another and to manifest the hatred and fear and suspicion that are just whizzing around the world right now, we should be looking at a grand human project, a cooperative effort to make our cosmic environment safe.
And we have the technology now.
It's just a matter of choice.
It's just a matter of budget.
Trillions of dollars are spent on arms, and roughly $20 to $30 million is spent a year on so-called space watch.
It's a ridiculous chump change, given the nature of the threat and the implications.
My grandfather was born in 1895. The main mode of transportation, aside from railroads at that time, was horseback, right?
His grandfather, you know, would have been born pre-Civil War.
So in five generations we've gone from The very first railroads, the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, to where we are now, in five generations.
Now if you go back 200,000 years, say 196,000, and we divide that by 25. I love when Randall breaks out the couch later.
We're looking at almost 8,000 generations of humans.
Wow.
Now think about that.
Within five generations, we've gone from 90% dominant agriculturally-based subsistence farming, right, feudal system, to where we are now.
But now we've got 8,000 generations of humans on this planet.
Who knows what we may have accomplished in the past?
But once you put this perspective, and you've got to understand that the catastrophe we're talking about 12,000 years ago, while all the evidence suggests it was the most severe, probably at least within 5 million years, because the last time we can find a species loss equivalent to the terminal Pleistocene species loss was 5 million years ago, the Hempillion event, it's called.
Which then I would then consider that again as a measuring stick for habitat loss, which would in turn be a measure of the severity of whatever happened.
But the point is that in the time that we humans have been around, There have been multiple catastrophes of a global scale, not as severe as the one we're talking about here, but certainly the framework of this planet has been shaken numerous times.
And in 200,000 years, we've had probably four great glacial cycles that have come and gone.
Now just a glacial cycle alone, I mean think about that, what the ice will do to the landscape, and dropping sea levels 400 feet.
And now during an ice age, you've got to bear in mind that probably the most habitable place to be on the planet is going to be on coastlines, along the mouths of rivers and so forth.
What happens when all that ice melts and sea level comes up 300 or 400 feet?
And it's going to pretty much erase most of the evidence of human habitation.
Although, and I think I talked about this last time, and you would probably concur with this, the importance of marine archaeology.
But there is a prejudice in archaeology which says there could have been no interesting civilization before 12,000 years ago.
So since those lands that were submerged by rising sea levels have been underwater for 10,000 or 12,000 years, we're not really interested in human habitations there.
And this is the problem.
A very focused effort needs to be made to look at these lost lands.
I can put that in miles, 10 million square miles of the Earth's surface, roughly Europe and China added together.
Jesus Christ.
That's what's missing from the record, you know.
And again, we're talking about wiping the slate clean.
And Randall's right.
Those ice caps that sit on top of a continent, which are mountain high, they're going to just grind to powder anything that lies below them.
So was there a civilization there before where the ice cap formed?
Isostatic depression and we discussed how at this very moment your ass is demonstrating an important geological phenomena of isostatic depression sitting on that cushion that you're sitting on.
And if you were to stand up, what happens when you stand up?
The cushion comes back up, doesn't it?
It's exactly what happens and you can almost picture the planet breathing in effect.
The ice is released from the continental surface, the continental surface begins to rebound, the weight is transferred back into the ocean basins, and there has to be what's called rheology, which is the study of the distribution of the inner mass of the earth, requires That there be compensation.
So if in one area of the surface the land is rising, somewhere else it has to be subsiding.
And the obvious place would be that as you transfer the weight from the continent back into the ocean basins, that the ocean basins are going to subside.
And this brings us, you know, to the whole question of the scientific veracity of a sunken land mass.
Actually, it's happening in the UK, where I'm from, because the ice sheets in the UK were on the north of the UK over Scotland, and they were pressing Scotland down, and they caused the southern part of England to rise up.
Then when you take those ice sheets off, the southern part starts to go down.
So that's places like the Isle of Wight in the English Channel.
They're sinking beneath the sea because of this.
Still, the effect of that rebound is happening today.
When you bring forth a non-mainstream point of view or a controversial perspective, instead of considering the possibility, it almost immediately gets dismissed to see.
We talked about that considerably, and I noticed in a lot of the comments from our last discussion, most of the critical comments were people, you know, not liking the idea that I had questioned the dogma of global warming.
But there are some facts that you can't escape.
The global warming began 200 years ago, and we see that the glaciers from the Little Ice Age began to shrink back in the early 19th century.
Before there was, you know, a century before there was any significant human contribution of CO2 to the atmosphere.
So something was driving that warming that began.
And it's important to realize that the Little Ice Age was probably the coldest period since the end of the Great Ice Age.
In fact, the data overwhelmingly supports that and that the glaciers grew to their largest extent around the planet in 10,000 years.
So when we're talking about glacier recession, it's important to understand what the baseline is.
Our baseline in this case is the biggest the glaciers have been in 10,000 years.
And what's interesting, and this is going on right now, as the glaciers have been receding, Geologists and biologists and glaciologists and so forth have been studying the landscapes that are being revealed as the ice shrinks back.
And you know what they're finding is the remains of forests that had been overrun by the Little Ice Age glaciers and peat bogs and things that would suggest that prior to the onset of the Little Ice Age, those valleys that were filled with ice from roughly 1400 to 1800 We're actually forested because the ice came down and overran these forests and now it's receding back and revealing that there were forests there.
So that tells you that, you know, at some point, probably going back to the medieval warm period, those areas that were, that have been glaciated during the early part of the 20th century were actually free of ice.
And so, you know, the climate has been extremely dynamic.
That's the thing we have to emphasize, all by itself, without any help from humans.
And this is what I've been saying, is that we have to look at that and realize that, yeah, humans are a factor.
You know, somebody I did post and said all the other factors I had mentioned as, you know, ocean currents and wind currents and geomagnetic field and cosmic rays and volcanism and all that had all been investigated and dismissed and the only thing left was the human contribution.
But, you know, to me that's really, we're putting all our eggs in that basket and that could turn out to be very dangerous because we're so focused now on our own contribution that we might be overlooking the fact that there have been natural factors driving climate change over and over and over again.
I mean, because I still have not heard any consensus.
On what has caused the planet to first go into an ice age and come back out of an ice age.
And I think that what Graham and I are talking about actually presents a possible solution to what could have brought this planet out of the ice age, something on a grand cosmic scale.
And the other point I think I'd like to make is that we have to, really to understand our planet as a system, we have to realize that it's part of a cosmic ecosystem.
And the cosmos has been a much bigger player in what's been going on down here than has been previously understood or appreciated.
And I think our ancestors probably did understand that.
And it gives you a different sense of where you are in the universe because we're so...
And it's not necessarily our fault.
It's almost like we've put up a curtain over the heavens and we can't see through the curtain because we've decided that we like light and we like traffic lights and building lights and all this jazz.
And we don't realize until we're out in the woods or in the wild Until you're in the wilderness and there's no light pollution, you really don't realize what we're missing and what we're sacrificing in order to have these lights.
The view of the heavens, it's psychedelic in a way.
Because it makes you feel like, oh my god, we're really flying through space.
How could this be up there every day and we don't see it?
But...
What we've done is create all this incredible stuff, these streets and buildings and laptops and cell phones, and in doing so, we've robbed ourselves of a perspective.
Yeah, and it's weird, because we have this technology that enables us to go around the whole world and even go out into outer space, but actually, in a way, it's narrowed our focus.
We focus in on the technology and its products, and we forget about the majestic Cosmic and Earth environment in which we live, how sacred it is, how beautiful it is, how meaningful it is to all of us.
And the things that happened up there were evident to them.
I mean, because these days, how many people see meteors?
Living in an urban environment, you never see that hardly, unless it's really spectacular.
But you go out, like you said, in Montana, one of my favorite places to go out in the high desert country.
And there you really, with the stars, almost you can reach out and touch them, you know.
I think that one of the most important things that we could do for future generations as part of our educational curriculum for young people is get them out of the cities, into nature, into the Tremendous, you know, where they can actually see the sky.
Because, I mean, living in Atlanta, I'll talk to people, even grown-up people, that have no clue.
Have no clue.
You know, they couldn't find the North Star.
They couldn't find the plane of the ecliptic if their life depended on it.
You know, we've become cut off from that level.
And I think that that's...
It's important for us to keep that because our consciousness is linked to this greater domain and we have segregated ourselves from that.
And I think that there's something, you know, amazingly it's a grounding experience when you get out and you begin to see the sky and you can actually, you know, begin to figure out and identify the constellations.
You know, to know where the planets are, to look in the sky.
So, for example, if you talk about astrology to any, most any mainstream scientists, they're going to laugh in your face.
They're going to say pseudoscience because they're so locked into this earth-centered perspective, which It convinces them that the cosmos does have no effect on us.
So how can changing patterns of the stars, which zodiacal constellation is sitting behind the sun at a particular time, how can that affect us?
How can when we were born affect us?
I don't think we should throw that baby out with the bathwater too fast.
I think we're looking at an ancient science with astrology, and I think it's been heavily diluted and prostituted in the modern world.
You go back to the real origins of this and you start finding some very interesting information coming out.
There's a fantastic book by a guy called Rick Tarnas called Cosmos and Psyche.
And he's a real mainstream, a very major academic.
And he's got into this and he's shown that actually, yeah, astrology does have effects.
So we should not deny our cosmic environment.
That's the first thing we need to do to connect to it.
And we shouldn't close ourselves off to avenues of inquiry for ideological reasons.
It's noticeable in this field of ancient history how archaeologists throw around words like pseudo-archaeologist or pseudo-scientist.
That's meant to be an instant dismissal, just like climate denier.
You call somebody a climate denier today, that's like saying, don't listen to anything that guy has to say.
Never listen to it again.
These are ideological tools which are being used to straightjacket the human mind and to stop us thinking outside the box.
And if there's ever a time where we needed to think outside the box, I would say that time is right now.
Isn't it ironic that in this time, more information available to the average person than ever before, that this also has coincided with our lack of appreciation for what's above us?
You know, as we're talking about how dynamic the planet is and how it's changed and how dramatically different, which it is, I mean, if we go back to the end of the Ice Age, you know, you go east of here out of the Mojave Desert, that was lush grasslands and forests.
You go out here to the Santa Rosa Islands, you know, out here, they were all forested with oak trees and beech trees and Mammothus exilus, which was the pygmy mammoth, you know.
I mean, everything down here changes dramatically.
But when we go out and we look at the sky, we're basically seeing the same sky that our ancestors of 20,000 years ago were looking at.
And that's something to keep in mind, because there's something, there's a backdrop to all of this drama and change here below that's pretty much, for the most part, remained consistent.
But within that backdrop of consistency, every once in a while, something shifts.
And when it shifts out there, I think our ancestors knew that there was a direct consequence here below.
And that's one of the reasons they were so obsessed with being able to track motion.
You know, all of these ancient observatories from Stonehenge on down the line to, you know, the mound structures here in North America.
These were astronomical observatories using the horizon essentially as a telescope by which very intimate and intricate movements within that backdrop of fixed stars could actually be observed, possibly for predictive capabilities.
Well, first off, most archaeologists don't do that at all.
Because they just don't do astronomy.
They don't get it.
Their eyes are on the ground at their feet.
Right, two different disciplines.
Because astronomy is not relevant to them, they project that onto the past and imagine that it was not relevant to the past.
And that's one of the big mistakes, I think, that archaeology makes.
There are people called archaeoastronomers.
Who are looking at the astronomy of ancient cultures and some of them have done very good work.
But really there are certain key indicators.
The alignment of the site.
What's it pointing out?
And does that alignment change down the ages?
You can sometimes establish that a particular axis of a particular temple in Egypt, for example, was shifted.
Over a period of 2,000 or 3,000 years, several times.
And why?
Because they were tracking the changing rising point of the star Sirius, which they connected in their system of ideas to the goddess Isis.
They were tracking that...
Rising point, which changes because of changes in the sky.
I mean, long story short, the Earth wobbles on its axis.
And that, since the Earth is our viewing platform from which we observe the stars, changes of orientation of the Earth in space do change the rising times of particular stars at particular times of year.
And this was clearly tracked by the ancients.
So you can say that.
If you find anywhere a monument that is perfectly aligned to true north, south, east, and west, you can be absolutely sure that astronomers were involved.
If it's tracking the rising sun on the spring equinox or on the winter or summer solstice, astronomers were there.
They were right there when they made that monument.
Well, that's one of the scariest, or not the scariest, but most astounding things when you consider the ancients, that they had an understanding of the precession of the equinoxes.
Very long, very precise observations and the motive to make those observations.
That this was important to them and they sought to pass down that importance to us.
Very important work by two historians of science called Giorgio de Santillana and Hertha von Deschend.
Back in the 60s, they wrote a book called Hamlet's Mill, which tracks this ancient knowledge of procession.
And they trace it back, and this was very politically incorrect at that time, because Giorgio de Santillana was the professor of the history of science at MIT. They trace it back to what they call some almost unbelievable civilization of prehistoric antiquity.
That made this up.
They found the data encoded in myths and traditions all around the world.
And I do go into this in Magicians of the Gods.
They found it encoded as though the data were so important that it had to be passed down to the future.
So the numbers that relate to procession of the equinoxes, and they're all based on the number 72. And multiples of that number.
Why?
Because it takes 72 years for one degree of processional change to unfold.
And that's like holding your finger up to the horizon.
That one degree is just that one finger width of change on the horizon.
Very precise observations are needed to do it.
It's encoded in myths and traditions and it looks like somebody at some point decided this information is so important we must make sure that it stays permanently in human culture.
So what we're going to do is we're going to encode it in great stories and those stories can then be passed on by storytellers who will have an ethic that they must tell the story true.
It doesn't matter whether they understand the scientific information in the story or not.
All that matters is that they pass it on.
And so in the oldest myths and traditions of mankind, we have compelling evidence for scientific knowledge of the phenomenon that we call the procession of the equinoxes today.
Which is the full cycle, 25,920 years, a great circle in the heavens.
It's very evident, if you've got thousands of years to watch the sky, it's very evident at the pole.
Our pole star presently is Polaris, and that's just simply because the extended North Pole of the Earth points most directly at that particular star in the sky.
But it hasn't always pointed at Polaris because of the wobble on the axis of the Earth, and it won't always point at Polaris in the future.
The Polestar changes, but you need to observe the skies for very long periods of time, keep detailed records to get to grips with this phenomenon.
This therefore testifies to the fact That some ancient culture was doing this in a very systematic way.
It's like a ghostly fingerprint of an advanced scientific knowledge impressed upon the oldest myths and traditions of our planet.
It is accepted because we know that the Maya were an astronomical culture.
And it is accepted that they were building their They're temples in connection to the sky.
And the whole phenomenon of the Mayan calendar, which we all heard a lot about in 2012, is another factor to take into account.
The Mayan calendar, in my view, is another artifact of a lost civilization.
This was handed down from a former people, perhaps to the Olmecs and then to the Maya who succeeded them.
It's accepted, but the implications of it are not taken properly into account.
Remember 21st of December 2012, there was all that fuss and nonsense about the end of the world happening then, and it didn't.
But the Maya never said that.
They said that the end of a great cycle happened then, which would ultimately transform the world.
But what it was actually locked into, and I need to pay tribute to another researcher here, and his name is John Major Jenkins.
John Major Jenkins has done fantastic work on the Mayan calendar.
Decade before 2012, he was telling people, look, this is not talking about the end of the world on a specific day, on the 21st of December 2012. There's a calculation behind this, and what he showed in that calculation is that it is the position of the winter solstice sun against the background of the constellations.
And what has been happening for the last 5,000 years because of precession is that the winter solstice sun 21st of December, against the background of the constellations, has been gradually shifting towards alignment with the center of the galaxy.
And that alignment happened on the 21st of December 2012, but it's not an instant.
It's a window.
And that window is about 80 years wide, roughly from 1960 to 2040. That was what was focused on in the Mayan calendar, a calendar that can predict eclipses of the moon, 200,000 years into the future or 200,000 years into the past.
Incredible, stunning accuracy.
A better estimate of the length of the solar year than we use today in our modern calculations.
Now, what he said about the window is because, you know, you can't define the center of the galaxy with an exact precise point.
There's a diffuse area there.
And every 72 years, the spring point is moving one degree, which is twice the diameter of a full moon.
Full moon is a half a degree, right?
And I think that possibly one of the importances of monitoring, because you can't really, you know, you can't go out and look at the sun, you know, and say, okay, here's the sun relative to this backdrop of this constellation.
However, you can look at a full lunar eclipse, and then you will know that the sun is 180 degrees around.
So by monitoring lunar eclipses, you can actually Position the Sun quite precisely and know where it is in the sky because obviously you can't go out and look at the Sun and see what stars it's related to.
But during a lunar eclipse, it's 180 degrees almost precisely on the other side of the Earth.
I just want to make the point, and I go into this in this book, Magicians of the Gods, that that appears to be a diagram of the sky.
At the winter solstice in our epoch.
The round dot above the vulture's wing, the round circle, represents the sun.
And what we're looking at is an ancient constellation diagram.
The constellations that we call Sagittarius and Scorpio Stand on either side of the galactic center, of the dark rift at the heart of the Milky Way, which the Maya saw as the womb of cosmic rebirth.
And it's precisely that image that is depicted there.
I back it up chapter and verse in the book.
You'll just have to take my word for it at the moment.
We call those constellations today Ophiuchus, the serpent holder, which is represented by the bird there.
And we call the serpent constellation serpents.
Other constellations are also involved.
This is spooky and eerie because it appears there's overwhelming evidence that the people who made Gobekli Tepe had a profound knowledge of procession.
And it appears that they deliberately sent forward into time In this time capsule, a picture of the sky in our age.
And that is a staggering possibility that I investigate here.
Well, it's only at the winter solstice in our age that the Sun sits over the center of the galaxy.
The winter solstice in the area that the ancient Maya It's called the cosmic womb.
There's a dark rift in the Milky Way at that point.
And they saw that as the cosmic womb.
So it symbolizes a moment of rebirth.
And the evidence is that they've been tracking the movement of the sun on the winter solstice, which is also the end of the year and the rebirth of the new year.
They've been tracking it to the point where they could project forward and they could envisage the sky in our epoch today.
The Maya could do that.
And what I'm suggesting is that's done at Gobekli Tepe as well.
And I'm half serious because this is another issue that is ignored by the mainstream is the use of psychedelics in ancient civilizations was fundamental to the quality of those civilizations.
And this is another area we're in ideological denial about because the powers that be in our society don't like psychedelics.
They don't want ancient cultures to have liked them either.
I think it's one of the main points of view that when you don't consider them, it makes me really reluctant to listen to a lot of the other things you have to say because...
It's undeniable the impact those things have on human consciousness.
And it's also undeniable that many, many, many civilizations use them as a part of their spiritual rituals.
And the fact that this is not thought of as an important aspect of our history, all it means to me is the people that are talking about it haven't experienced them.
I think it's an important experience for archaeologists to have because it was a universal experience in the ancient world.
We demonize psychedelics today and we pretend that they are just totally negative things.
But in the ancient world they were revered and enshrined.
They were at the heart of the ancient mysteries.
The Eleusinian Mysteries in ancient Greece used a potion related to LSD, which brought about a revelation for the initiates, changed their lives just in the way that a powerful psychedelic trip can change our lives today.
So just like writing about history and the origins of civilization without taking account of, whoops, this gigantic cataclysm that happened 12,800 years ago, that's a mistake that archaeology is making.
The other mistake they're making is they're not considering the role of altered states of consciousness in ancient civilizations.
So, because of the fact that they've accepted that the Mayan temples are aligned with the constellations, have they decided to look at other archaeological discoveries in the same light, or is this something that's being resisted?
Except in subdivision, these are archaeologists who've been trained in astronomy, but they've also been trained in the fundamental dogmas of the discipline of archaeology, which is that there can be no lost civilization, that archaeology has already told pretty much the full story of humanity, and all that awaits is to fill in the details.
This is the dogma of archaeology that is taken in.
From the moment that somebody decides to become an archaeologist, part of the training.
And actually, if you try and go against that dogma as a mainstream archaeologist, you can kiss goodbye to your career.
Any archaeologist who entertains the possibility of an advanced lost civilization around the world more than 12,000 years ago will have no future as an archaeologist.
That right there will write him off for the rest of his career.
Yeah, it's a very foolish idea and it shuts us down to the possibilities.
I mean, the universe gifted us with these giant brains and this incredible imagination and intuitive faculties as well.
We're not only rational creatures, we're intuitive creatures.
And all of these faculties should be applied to understanding the mystery of who and what we are.
And I think that's one of the mistakes of modern science is this just chopped out one bit, the kind of alert problem-solving bit, the rational reason, the use of reason and logic, and it's chopped out all the rest.
The capacity of humanity to dream, to learn information in dream, to learn true knowledge in dream was revered in the ancient world and just ridiculed today.
Well, it seems like back then there was so much less information and now there's so much information.
To call someone a dreamer means that you're thinking of nonsense when you should be trying to acquire all the information that we've already discovered, that we've already accumulated.
But it's got to be satisfying to you going from that original book, which I became absolutely fascinated by, Fingerprints of the Gods, to slowly but surely, over time, more and more evidence being discovered in mainstream science and archaeology that affirms all these suspicions.
And then attached to what Randall has been studying his whole life, it really, the whole thing just sort of unfolds in front of your eyes.
There's a kind of perfect moment in human knowledge unfolding right now.
We now have the knowledge of this giant cataclysm that happened 12,800 years ago, which has just not been taken into account at all up to now.
And at the same time, and it's almost eerie, archaeological sites are popping up all around the world that cannot be explained by the previous model of history.
Now, with all this information that you've shown so far, the layer that shows the massive burning of the forest, the impact craters that we found, the nuclear glass, the micro diamonds, all this evidence that the immediate shift of the climate, the mass extinction of a huge percentage of the large mammals, is the impact Period.
Probably the first person to do it is to take that evidence and consider its implications for the stories we tell ourselves about the origins of civilization.
Very important story.
Where did civilization come from?
What is it?
And that information has not been taken into account at all by archaeologists yet.
I hope they will do so in the future.
They need to play a very fast game of catch-up to catch up with the science on this and take it into account.
But right now, it's not being taken into account at all.
You will not find a single Archaeological document which takes account of the cataclysm that happened between 12,800 and 11,600 years ago.
A big part of the problem is specialization in science, I think.
So you've got, you know, paleontologists looking at the extinction events.
You've got, you know, marine geologists looking at sea level rise.
You've got glaciologists looking at how the glaciers disappeared.
And we're in a position now where we need to begin synthesizing all of this.
You know, what's interesting to me, though, is that it really, it almost falls on the shoulders of the mavericks, you know, the synthesizers.
And that's kind of really, right now, there's so much specialization in science that the next phase of it, I think, is beginning to integrate it, to create a coherent model of our past.
Because a lot of, like Graham was saying, a lot of the mainstream scientists have this information, right?
If we look at this graph right here, and you see how this compares with the graphs we just saw of the climate changes and the ocean level rise, this is, as it says, a late place to see mortality graph.
And this is basically looking at radiocarbon dated Fossilized remains of the extinct mammals.
And if you look carefully, you'll see that within the range that we're talking about right in here, here's your 13,000-year spike right here.
Well, I certainly think there's some things that we don't know about the impact of nutrition and overall health and meditation and just the impact of stress and well-being and how it plays on health factors.
And I think we're going to learn all that.
I mean, I think there's probably more discussion and more focus on that than there is on stuff like this.
And one of Randall's colleagues, Brad, who was with us, shot video along the way.
And my wife, Santa, took photographs.
And, you know, we've documented all of this very, very, very thoroughly.
But it was an amazing road trip for me.
It was the first time, actually, I've driven a great distance across the continental United States.
I've always been in this city or that city and picking up an airplane and going here and there.
But I actually drive across this incredible, majestic area It was an enormous experience for me, and it filled me with a sense of just how huge America is.
I live in this tiny island, you know, Britain.
This giant, the open skies country that they call it in there.
It was a great initiation into a beautiful part of North America and a mysterious part of North America.
And it was great to do it with Randall because he's been walking the walk in this area for decades and he knows that landscape like the back of his hand.
Yeah, and for people that are listening to this podcast right now, and this is your first introduction to Randall and Graham, you gotta go pause right now and go back to the first one Graham was on, the first one Randall was on.
Yeah, and we know this had to have been transported aboard an iceberg for the simple reason that if it was carried within the glacier mass like a typical glacier erratic, you wouldn't have those sharp square corners like that.
A glacier radic gets ground off.
And oftentimes, this thing was transported almost 200 miles from, its likely origin was Mount Robeson.
And we didn't get to this one.
But this is evidence that the flooding was much more extensive than just the Missoula flooding.
Because this is, the Missoula flooding that we were looking at was on the west side of the I think I should just jump in there and say that it isn't any longer controversial that there was gigantic flooding in the Pacific Northwest and indeed across the whole range just south of the ice camp.
That is accepted now.
But the very idea that there was flooding at all was hotly opposed for decades.
There was a great American geologist called Jay Harlan Bretz who was the first to document the fact that there had been colossal flooding in that area.
And he lived in the 1900s, 1920s, and because he suggested that there had been a cataclysm, of course, he was exiled by his colleagues.
Eventually, his data prevailed, and he was awarded the Penrose Medal, the highest award of the geology in America, in 1976, when he was like 96 years old.
But what happened, you see, was Harlan Bretz was convinced from the beginning that he was dealing, and this is a very experienced field geologist, that he was dealing with a single humongous flood, which had risen and fallen within perhaps two weeks.
That was his evidence on the ground.
And he was attacked because people kept saying, well, where did the water come from?
You know, what's the source of this water?
And he said, that's not my problem.
I am showing you the clear, unmistakable evidence of flooding on the ground.
Flooding happened.
Somebody else go work out where the water came from.
And this stuck the whole argument for the best part of 40 years until a compromise was reached.
And that's the word that Randall used, Missoula.
They said that this flooding was caused by outburst floods from a glacial lake that's referred to as Glacial Lake Missoula.
And because the flooding is so extensive, it must have outburst 80 or 90 times to cause that flooding.
Which completely contradicts Haaland-Bretz's view that it was a two-week flood, one single event.
But the compromise was accepted that the cause of the flooding was Glacial Lake, Missoula.
That is now going to have to be reviewed because of the comet evidence.
If Haaland-Bretz, if J. Haaland-Bretz had had the information we have today, he would have known instantly what caused that single humongous flood.
And that was the liquidizing of a huge area of the North American ice cap.
Well, this is actually out of a 19th century text when catastrophism, before catastrophism, had been completely exorcised from mainstream geology.
And this was...
Louis Figuer, I think was his name, who speculated that the ice sheets over northwestern Europe had catastrophically melted down.
And he had an illustration in his geology text which perfectly captures how these large erratics are actually being transported aboard these icebergs.
And you can see the scale of the thing.
And this is the kind of, you see whole forests are about to be washed away here.
And this image, the first time I saw it, I thought, well, here it is.
This depicts the kind of field evidence that we've been looking at here.
So that's why I've included this here, because it helps to visualize what we're talking about.
This was a place that Graham and I visited here, which really spectacularly embodies this whole phenomenon.
This is known as Dry Falls Cataract.
And it's about five miles wide, and I'm going to show you ground photographs and a couple of aerial photographs of it, so you can kind of get the scale of the thing.
The discharge over of the Niagara River, over the falls, is a couple hundred thousand cubic feet per second, maximum.
The discharge over Grand Coulee was somewhere between 300 and 400 million cubic feet per second, or in other words, somewhere between 10 and 20 times the combined flow of every river on Earth flowing all at once.
And the height of this scarp face here, this cliff, is about 400 feet.
The water coming over was about 400 feet deep.
So if you were here witnessing this at the peak of the flood, you wouldn't in fact even see a waterfall.
What you would see is this massive 10 mile wide turgid river Choked with icebergs and debris and whole forests that had been ripped up.
What you would have seen here was just a bump in this flood.
And then only at the latter stages of it would it actually have been a waterfall.
As the water source was dissipating and as the water was declining, you would have the final stage of it being a waterfall, then eventually the waterfall stopped And what you have today is this fossilized feature of this massive—and this is only one of about a half a dozen comparable-sized cataracts.
We didn't get to see potholes or Frenchman Coulee next time, perhaps.
And what you see here is once you begin to understand cataract formation, and you understand the morphology of a cataract, you look at something like this, and what you're looking at is cataracts.
Extinct cataracts out in Canyonlands, Utah.
And they're massively scaled.
But no geologists...
See, here's the problem.
Geologists haven't been focused on catastrophism.
What they've been doing, they work for the government, they work for the oil companies.
There's another point I'd like to add to that, Randall, as to why geologists are not focused on catastrophes.
Geology is a science, and science in effect defined itself as being different from religious superstition.
So the notion of the great flood that we find in the Bible became a very discredited notion in science.
And by association with that, any suggestion of a great cataclysm in the past was seen as superstitious behavior to be shunned completely by the squeaky clean shiny new sciences who must never take that into account.
So any geologist Who dares to propose a cataclysmic episode is up against that right away.
That his colleagues don't want to go there because they're afraid that they're going to be accused of buying into Noah's flood or whatever.
And the prevailing dogma in geology is the uniformitarian dogma, which is basically to say the way we see things in the world today, that's how it's always been.
And I'm not necessarily saying that all of that was stripped in one event because the Pleistocene is basically two and a half million years.
I think 2.6 million is the latest dating of it.
And there's been probably a dozen or two dozen ice ages that have come and gone.
To me, the evidence I'm seeing suggests that the transition from glacial to interglacial and back again is not a smooth process.
In fact, it's probably highly catastrophic.
Not necessarily as catastrophic as the event we're talking about 12,800 years ago, but certainly catastrophic enough that were an event of equivalent magnitude to happen today, we could maybe not cause a mass extinction, but we could certainly pull the plug on modern civilization.
And so...
This picture is interesting because what it does is it shows that you travel over this landscape.
Okay, you know, now this is in western Montana, and this is a place called Dry Creek.
And what this is is just a gravel pit.
But what you see here is deposits caused by surging floodwaters moving up tributary valleys, loaded with sediment.
And one of the things that a stratigrapher or sedimentologist looks at is, you notice how they're tilted.
You see how the layers are tilted?
Okay, that's an indication of which direction the water is moving.
The tilting goes down in the direction that the water is flowing.
So what we see here is massive, turbulent, sediment-laden floodwaters back flooding up a valley, surging, leaving deposits, and then flowing back out, followed by another wave, followed by another wave, For now, for 13,000 years, 12,000 years, this material has been laying there, and you see that there's forests growing over it.
Okay, people traveling over this landscape don't see what's under their feet.
You see?
But once you get an outcrop like this, and you understand and you can read what you're seeing here, then suddenly it becomes apparent that the very hills and landscape that we live on, that we've built our cities on, and our highways, and that we're playing out all these dramas right under our feet.
Is the evidence of previous worlds.
You have to understand that what you're looking at there is the debris of a former world that was pulverized by these floods, carried in and deposited, and now a new world has emerged out of that and on top of this wreckage.
Existed, I believe, an advanced civilization that is memorized in myths and traditions all around the world, that has been ridiculed by archaeologists, but it is insistent and the evidence keeps on coming forward.
And I think it's something – it's part of the human heritage.
It's something that we all have to get to grips with.
Again, this is one of the things I find encouraging about – One of the developments in the world today is that more and more people do appear to be thinking for themselves.
There was a time when we took the word of specialists.
Dr. X or Professor Y said this.
It had to be true.
That was so actually when I wrote Fingerprints of the Gods in 1995. That was the first argument, was the argument from authority.
The authorities say this cannot be so, therefore it is not so, and a lot of people just bought that.
What's changed, I think, in the last 20 years is that that subservience to authority has gone away.
It hasn't gone away completely, but we don't trust authority anymore, rightly and properly, because we've been lied to by authority figures, and we know they lied to us, and we saw the evidence, whether it's politicians or Big corporations or the big religions.
There's an uprising against this and an assertion of individual will and of individual intellect to inquire into the past.
And I think that that's why this information now is coming at a time where it's falling on fertile ground.
There will still be a lot of resistance to it.
We can expect that resistance to be fierce and to go on.
But things are shifting in the world.
Just as our picture of the past is shifting, so our picture of who we are and what we're meant to be doing here is shifting as well.
What I'm asking to those who value and appreciate my work and feel that I'm doing something useful in the world, please support my work by getting this book because that is the best way to put one finger up to the mainstream.
Archaeology wants this book to go away.
They want it to be forgotten.
It will never be reviewed in any mainstream newspaper.
It will never be written about.
There will be no articles about it and probably no television coverage either.
The only thing that can make the difference is people voting with their feet, and I'm asking that now.
Yeah, go to my website and all the links and the whole background on the book is there.
I hugely appreciate, deeply appreciate the support that my readers have given me.
I would be Nothing without my readers.
That's why every time I do an event, I sit there for two to three hours afterwards talking to people and signing books because the readers are the most important people in my universe and they're who give me strength.
Without my readers, I'm literally nothing and I value and appreciate them.
And I'm on a journey across...
America now and I'm speaking in many many different cities and the whole program is up on my website on the talks and events page.
So I really think that you guys have to do one of these things together as a documentary.
I mean, I think it's just...
I think someone out there, someone's listening to this, probably some kooks that we don't want doing this documentary, but there's got to be somebody out there that's legit.
And I appreciate you guys and I appreciate this show because this whole thing came about without any planning.
This show just sort of became itself.
It's almost like I just happened to be there to germinate it or something.
Try to get out of my own way as much as possible and follow my curiosity.
And the beautiful thing about people like you guys is without you, take away you and fingerprints of the gods, take away you and what are we looking at?
I mean, it's very rare when you have two human beings that, without them, an entire field of study would be barren of a great deal of its information.
I mean, you have John Anthony West and Robert Schock, and you were obviously a part of all that, and John Anthony West, who's absolutely fascinating.
And while we're at it, Robert Schock really stuck his neck out from Boston University, really one of the first mainstream scholars that went out on a limb and said, we are absolutely looking at water erosion.
He's very courageous to be a mainstream academic, to be a professor of geology at Boston.
It was John West who introduced Robert Schock to the notion that the Sphinx might be much older, that the weathering on it...
didn't fit with the picture of history.
And John took Robert Shock to Egypt.
And Robert Shock went with the data, and he stuck his neck out, and he's taken a lot of criticisms and attacks for it, but he's a very, very important player in this field.
Well, all of you guys are just massively, massively important, and this is such a unique and satisfying object of curiosity.
For me, at least, when I start thinking about these things, it's almost like little things start firing off in my brain.
It's It's so it's so exciting I mean it's horrific to think about the poor people that lived back then that got hit by these massive impacts and the The aftermath of it all must have been insane but to think about now In 2015,
the slow unveiling of all this data and information, and as it all gets into focus and you try to get a clearer and clearer view of what could have possibly happened in the past, I find it so incredibly enriching and fascinating.
To me, one of the most exciting aspects of the potential of archaeology.
Just to be able to discover, like, oh, that's what happened.
And I think that, you know, how Graham wraps up the book really is about our future.
You know, and once now that we've integrated this information into our worldview, you know, what does it imply in terms of where we go from here?
Because one of the things that I track, and if you could throw this up on the screen for just a second, I'm going to speed through something really quick here so that you can kind of get the impression.
While Randall's fixing that, let's also remind that we had a relatively close pass with a half kilometer wide, actually bit of a comet, just over Halloween.
And the interesting thing is that NASA only found that object...
And when you look at the universe and just look at our galaxy, the size of our galaxy, look at our solar system, the size of our solar system, that is literally like getting grazed by a bullet.
When you think about it, you know, you say, well, a half a kilometer Compared to the Earth, that's not big.
But like when, you know, you think of a slug from a 32, right?
If I threw it at you and hit you with it, it wouldn't do much.
But if I accelerate it to a thousand feet per second, it's going to cause extreme trauma, right?
But now we're looking at these asteroids flying in comet debris, and they're 10 times, 20 times the speed of a rifle bullet when they hit our atmosphere.
Like, you know, 50, 60, 70,000 miles per hour.
And the kinetic punch of something like that is inconceivable.
It's like Graham said, I mean, to talk about it, you'd have to take our entire nuclear arsenal, Of the peak of the Cold War detonated all at once, and even that would only be a fraction of the forces unleashed.
Now watch this.
I'm going to go through this real quick here, and you'll get the idea, I think.
That where we're at, because astronomers are looking out into our cosmic environment, and this is what they're seeing.
This was October of 2000. Current predictions for the number of potentially dangerous asteroids have been underestimated by at least 20%, say, astronomers.
According to recent calculations, there are between 750 and 900 asteroids circling the Earth.
We're now looking at the estimates are now that it's 100,000 potentially Earth-destroying objects that are on Earth-crossing orbits.
This is an estimate.
The problem is NASA has only identified a tiny fraction of what's out there.
And again, I'm not saying this because I want to spread gloom and doom.
I'm saying this.
I'm saying this because we have the capacity to do something about it.
It takes goodwill on the part of the human race to stop wasting money on stupid, stupid pursuits, particularly warfare, and to apply that resource, those resources, to sweeping clean our cosmic environment.
Well, we don't take anything seriously unless it smacks us.
People don't quit cigarettes until they get cancer.
There's something about human beings that we don't consider the possible.
We have this idea in our head that we're eternal and we're going to live forever and everything's going to be fine.
I just need a new Lexus.
You know what I mean?
We have this wacky, I just need this watch that I have out of my eye on or this laptop that I want to buy.
If something happened, if a massive collision hit China and wiped out several million people and then caused the entire Earth to go into nuclear winter and crops died and we experienced global famine, then, something like that, then we would wake up and go, all right, Russia, let's talk.
Yeah, that was a fraction of the size of the Tunguska event.
But nobody was killed, you see.
If that object had been a little bigger, or a little denser, its angle of approach had been a little steeper, you might have been looking at 1,500 deaths rather than just 1,500 injuries.
I think that would have been a wake-up call, perhaps.
Maybe not enough to reorient civilization.
But I guarantee you, a Tunguska event over a major Inhabited area of the globe, wiping out a million people?
I can't imagine that that wouldn't have some kind of effect on our attitude towards our vulnerability in the cosmos and make people think maybe there's something bigger we need to be paying attention to here rather than, you know, Kardashian's butt.
At least that would be a useful project, is to actually do something that could benefit and serve the human race instead of multiplying fear and hatred.
These asteroids are actually extraordinary sources of resources, natural resources, platinum-group metals and hydrocarbons and water and precious metals.
All of these things that we're mining from the Earth now exist in those asteroids that are threatening the planet.
And we're not...
That far away from being able to develop the technologies and the industries to actually go and rendezvous with an asteroid.
Of course, it's a matter of, like Graham was saying, I mean, this last Halloween asteroid, they didn't find it but a couple of weeks before it passed by the Earth.
So we need a lot more capabilities of seeing what's out there.
Yeah.
And we're developing that, but at a very slow pace.
What you don't really want to do is to blow it up with a nuclear bomb.
Because then you get buckshot.
Instead of a single bullet.
And buckshot can do a lot of harm as well.
And it may even push it into a more catastrophic orbit.
So you don't want to do that.
But what you can do, for example, is to change the reflectivity of one side of the asteroid or comet fragment.
You can alter that, effectively paint it, and that affects the sun's radiation upon it, and that would be enough to shift it slightly out of its course.
There are a lot of techniques and suggestions, or nudges.
You put your finger on exactly the right word.
This is another of the technologies.
You just nudge these things.
You just don't need to do much, and you put them into a safe place instead of a dangerous place.
In fact, if you read the eyewitness accounts, they describe how it looks like it was being disgorged from the sun or being expelled from the sun or was like a second sun in the sky.
And that was because that summertime torrid stream is coming from behind the sun.
So, like, something could be coming from behind the Sun, and we literally would not even see it because of the mass and gravity of the Sun if it was in the right area.
It's interesting to speculate what would happen if we had impacts on the scale that happened 12,800 years ago.
And I'm pretty sure that it would mean, if it were allowed to happen, that it would mean the end of our civilization.
This civilization would go down.
This is a very intensely specialized civilization.
I think the just-in-time principle is that we have two-day or three-day food supply in our cities.
You interrupt that and you have a kind of walking dead scenario within a week, you know.
It's that bad.
This civilization appears to be very strong but in fact it's very fragile and it could easily fall apart.
And so many of us in the Western technological world actually have no survival skills whatsoever.
We don't know how to survive because we depend for our survival upon the complex network of society.
Who would survive a cataclysm like that would be the hunter-gatherers.
People like the hunter-gatherers of the Kalahari in southern Africa or the hunter-gatherers of the Amazon basin.
You know, the meek of the world, those who are not taken into account in the world at all today.
They're the ones equipped both with the knowledge and the psychological resources to deal with a situation like that and to carry the human story forward.
And I just want to make sure, if I can, if I can play some part in this, I just want to make sure that the descendants of those hunter-gatherers, 10,000 years in the future, are not remembering faintly and vaguely a great lost civilization.
a magical civilization which had the ability to...
Go to the moon, which had the ability to one person could speak to another person on the other side of the planet.
Magical, magical powers, which was destroyed because of its own arrogance and cruelty.
And that lost civilization, of course, would be us.
Megalithic stone architecture as being a textbook.
That's how you might preserve things.
And another way you might preserve things, if you developed a mythology around this whole scenario, and then you projected it onto the night sky, so that generations later they would tell these tales based upon the mythological figures juxtaposed on the night sky, and there would be the story.
Because it's there.
The whole mythos, western mythology, has been juxtaposed onto the fixed stars.
And so that's one way, perhaps, of preserving information.
And the other way, I think, is massive stone architecture.
Well that's the key thing and I'll come to that in a second if I may.
You take the height of the Great Pyramid, multiply that by 43,200 and you get the polar radius of the earth.
Actually Egyptologists know this but they say it's a complete coincidence because what's the significance of the number 43,200 but actually it's a highly significant number.
It's a number that is found embedded in mythology all around the world and it is a multiple of the number 72. It's actually 600 times 72 and 72 is the heartbeat of the processional cycle.
One degree of change every 72 years.
So what they've actually done is they've given us the dimensions of our planet On a scale defined by emotion of the planet itself.
And that in my view is incredibly clever way to pass information down to the future.
That way they could be sure that any astronomically literate society could work this out.
The information would be there.
So in all those dark ages when we had no knowledge that we even lived on a planet or what its dimensions were, those dimensions were encoded Into the enduring structure of the Great Pyramid, a monument, as the Arabs say, that time itself would fear.
The Great Pyramids themselves, the Great Pyramid of Giza in particular, is so spectacular that it almost makes you go, well, man, there had to be something going on.
We must be missing part of this picture, because you're talking about something that would be...
I've heard people say, we could reproduce it today.
Of course we could.
Of course we could.
Can you make a stone that's the size of one of the stones in the Great Pyramid?
It's such a special thing that we have, this area where you can see these ancient structures and causes your mind to wander and think about these things and these possibilities.
And when you add that to all the information that you guys have accumulated over the course of your study and your research, it's a Just an amazing, amazing thing to consider.
First of all, the ground penetrating radar, the picture of what is inside this, shows us that it is a man-made hill, not a natural hill.
Secondly, that it contains three large chambers within it.
One of them at least as large as the King's Chamber in the Great Pyramid.
Huge cavities regular in shape which have not yet been excavated.
And thirdly, that the date of this site...
It puts us back to 20,000 years, right to the last glacial maximum, when Indonesia didn't look at all the way it looks today.
Indonesia, 20,000 years ago, was part of a giant continent that geologists called Sunda, Sundaland, the Sunda Shelf.
It wasn't a peninsular, the Malaysian peninsula and the thousand islands of Indonesia.
It was a massive land mass.
And that landmass was submerged predominantly between 12,800 and 11,600 years ago.
This site sits in an area of high land which was never submerged.
And it looks to me...
Again, I'm speculating because the excavation has been stopped, but it looks to me, as does Gobekli Tepe, like a time capsule, something that takes us back to that earlier period.
And in fact, when we're looking for a lost civilisation...
I think we should be looking all over the world.
Plato made it clear that Atlantis wasn't just the island.
It had projected its power all around the world.
Indonesia is a very fruitful area for further investigation and I did a huge research trip in Indonesia and I saw megaliths that are just unaccounted for.
The archaeology has never been done.
There's a giant megalithic culture in that island.
Very cool.
Some cultures on Indonesia are still making megaliths today.
It can be broken up into blocks, and when you see them laid out horizontally like this, you know absolutely that human beings have been involved and that they have made this site.
But what's really interesting is what's underneath what we're seeing there, what's been revealed by the ground-penetrating radar and the drill cores.
That is really fascinating because that has not been taken into account by archaeology at all, and that's where we need to do this work.
If we're going to recover our lost past, Indonesia is one of the places we need to be doing it.
So this sort of parallels some of the ideas about the old kingdom in Egypt and the ancient structures where the new structures are built on top of them.
And as they dig deeper into the sand, they find different construction methods that represent an older time.
If this 20,000 years ago, if this actually existed, this gigantic megalithic structure that was created by human beings, advanced civilization beyond a shadow of a doubt 20,000 years ago, that's a deal breaker.
It spits up, belches, destroys the environment to the point where it creates nuclear winter, kills all the crops, most of the animals die, and 2,000 people scratch and claw their way of the existence.
Wow.
And only 70,000 years ago, so 50,000 years before this.
That's where the, you know, systems like Freemasonry come in.
Because here you have a body of symbolism that's been handed down at least since the Middle Ages and you have a lot of You know, currently active Masons who, in order to become Master Masons, have to memorize a tremendous amount of information.
Most of them don't have a clue as to what it means, though.
Even though they're told right into ritual, if you want to understand this, you have to understand astronomy, first of all.
You have to understand geometry and a number of other things.
But a tremendous amount of memory work is involved.
And this is the ancient system.
The oral traditions involved memory on a massive scale.
Being able to recite verbatim things that might take you hours to recite.
And like you guys have just discussed, we're losing that ability.
And this is, you know, to me it's regrettable that Freemasonry has gotten such a bad rep with all of these silly conspiratorial things in the age of the internet.
Well, it's one of the things that's so confusing about our money, right?
And so conspiratorially...
Constantly debated about the the origins of the symbolism on our money you know the pyramid with the eyeball on top of it and there's so many theories as to what this means and that means and oh look at the way they structured from Washington DC where the Pentagon is and where all these different buildings are all this is all Mason stuff and they want to take over the world and yeah I don't know, but it's fascinating.
But you'll notice what she holds in her right hand, the sprig of acacia.
And so in the Masonic symbolism, acacia represents resurrection, represents restoration.
In the Masonic allegory, you have the death of the master builder and the raising of the master builder.
And the symbolism for this, whether it ultimately, I think, goes back to the death and resurrection of Osiris and the death and resurrection of all of these God figures in history, which could be taken as a metaphor really for The god standing in for the human species, for human civilization.
And she's actually weeping.
She's holding in her left hand a cyborium, which was a symbol from alchemy.
And in the Masonic sense, it's in that container that she's holding that the alchemy takes place, which you might speculate is maybe the extraction of the DMT from the acacias.
They're even clearly depicted in the Hall of Bulls in Lascaux in France 17,000 years ago, a depiction of the constellation of Taurus with the Pleiades clearly marked on the shoulder of the bull.
So anybody who argues that there was no ancient knowledge of the zodiacal constellations, go to Lascaux, and you'll realize there was.
There's many depictions of the ancient Egyptian, an ancient Egyptian figure holding some kind of pipe.
And now that we know that Acacia nilotica is a DMT-rich tree, and that ancient Egyptians certainly had the chemical knowledge to extract the DMT from that bark, the very word chemistry actually comes from the name of ancient Egypt, which was Kemet.
The black land.
That's where we get the word chemistry from.
We can be pretty sure what they were smoking.
There is a particular scene, by the way, where we see another visionary agent, the Datura plant.
Rays in the form of Datura flowers are descending into the brow, into the third eye of the initiate in that image.
The imagery is all there.
You just have to dig it out and look for it.
In fact, look for it with eyes that are willing to see.
Does it, I mean, when you look at, it's one of the main concerns that we have today is that our cell phone signals and a lot of the pesticides that we're using are killing off bees.
The cell phone signals are apparently like really confusing bees and messing them up and the Wi-Fi and all the waves, radio waves and different things in the atmosphere interfere with their communication.
But then on top of that, the pesticides we're putting on crops and all these things.
And then there's diseases that bees are getting.
We have a serious problem with the honeybee population.
Yeah, I had three years of abstinence from marijuana, and that abstinence ended when we sat down for our last chats, September 2014. Well, you seem so healthy.
I think we can all relate to a certain amount of madness, and I know I certainly can, because I think we're all capable of going down spirals and paths, and then, you know, the concept of hitting rock bottom.
Like, sometimes you have to, like...
Hit something where you can't continue your momentum, and you must regroup.
And in that regrouping, you reassess or reevaluate.
And it's one of the reasons why I'm so addicted to sensory deprivation tanks, because that's my regrouping.
I am so grateful that there's people out there that have continued that tradition of building those things from the Samadhi tanks from the early 60s, from John Lilly to today, Crash and the Float Lab and the Zero Gravity in Austin.
I mean, they've done some amazing work in making sure these things are up-to-date and the most modern technology as far as filtration systems and insulation.
I'm really encouraged by what's happening in America, that we are seeing the legalization of cannabis, that the American people, state by state, are just putting their finger up to the federal authority and saying, we are adults.
We have a right to decide what we do with our own bodies and our own consciousness.
And there is that air of freedom now in Washington State, in Oregon, up there in Alaska, in Colorado.
And so this is part of my book tour that I'm really looking forward to when I go present an event in Seattle, which I'll do in early December, and in Portland, Oregon, and in Denver, and in Boulder.
Denver, they have exceeded what they had in terms of their expectations for how much money they were going to make out of this in terms of tax revenue.
This is the first time ever they make more money from taxes and marijuana than alcohol, which is fucking crazy.
If you look around Colorado, you see how many bars there are, how many liquor stores, how many restaurants are serving booze.
They make more money in taxes from marijuana than they do from all of that.
And what Colorado is proving to the world is that the emperor of the war on drugs wears no clothes.
The war on drugs is bullshit from beginning to end, and it's a grotesque abuse of the right of adults to make decisions about their own bodies and their own consciousness.
So right on with Colorado and the American people who are making this happen.
Only in America could this breakthrough take place.
It's true that America as a state entity has been a dark force behind the war on drugs, but the American people state by state are unraveling.
That horror and replacing it with something new.
This could never happen in Britain.
I mean, we have counties in Britain like Yorkshire or Northumberland.
I can't envision a situation ever where Yorkshire would make marijuana legal when London says no.
But in America, you can do it.
And this is going to change the world.
It's not because of marijuana itself.
That's not the point.
It's not about getting high.
It's about respecting the right of adults to make decisions about their own bodies, their own health, and their own consciousness.
That is a fundamental human right.
And we're beginning to realize that that's exactly what's been taken away from us by the war on drugs.
Well, I have to confess that all of this with me started back in the old days when I was camping in these canyon lands in the western states and altering my consciousness and looking at the landscape and going, something is going on here.
There's a story here that is...
Wanting to come out and, you know, I think that we have the potential literally to almost time travel with some of these substances and peer into the past and see it in ways that we would have never seen otherwise.
But yeah, spending a lot of time out hiking and camping from Minnesota to the Pacific Ocean and all those northwestern states, I spent months out there just Hanging in the landscape, you know, living in tents up on mountaintops and thinking about what was I seeing, you know.
And that's really where it started for me.
And I think that combining, combining, you know, this immersion into the landscape, you're talking about the sensory deprivation, which is...
A way to powerfully go in, at the same time you can have the counterpart of that which is powerfully going out and seeing the night sky in this altered state, seeing the landscapes around you and realizing that a hill isn't just a hill.
There's a story there.
There's some process that we have to come to reckon with in order to understand this planet we're living on.
there's an interesting point here, which is that part of the technological world is to regard nature as matter as dead, you know, that there's just this dead, we're the only consciousness on the planet in the universe.
And they refuse to consider the possibility that nature may be highly conscious and highly intelligent, that there may be intelligence in nature.
And it seems to me what the psychedelics are, are nature's way of speaking to us.
When we've closed our minds and shut ourselves down, when we've taken the soul out of the universe and just turned it into a huge machine, the psychedelics are coming back and saying, hang on, you monkeys don't know everything.