Graham Hancock and Randall Carlson revisit comet impacts, citing 2014 Journal of Geology findings linking nanodiamonds across three continents to cosmic events. They challenge mainstream gradualism with evidence like Clovis site soot layers, 1,000-foot-deep inland tsunamis, and Lake Missoula’s thousand-fold flood surge—features dismissed as implausible yet tied to global myths. Carlson’s research suggests Earth may face heightened asteroid risks soon, while Hancock argues academia’s resistance stems from ideological paradigms. Their work implies humanity’s vulnerability to cataclysmic forces, past and future, demands urgent reevaluation of Earth’s dynamic history and preparedness. [Automatically generated summary]
This is one of my favorite podcasts that we ever do.
And this is very timely.
Because, first of all, the big New York Times article about the possibility of a comet hitting Los Angeles, the preparations for what they would do if a comet hit Los Angeles, and the comet known as Donald Trump that's hit the United States.
Got floated in the discussion the idea that this really important comet research that's going on, which is just changing our whole view of history and prehistory and of the future of humanity.
That it would be good to make a film about this and crowdfund it.
I actually mentioned that to the scientists, and they said what we really need is more funding for our research.
And so they've, inspired basically by your show, they have put out a crowdfunding campaign, which is linked on my website.
It's the Comet Research Group, and it's a big story right now.
You see, the thing is, these guys have actually not had any official funding.
This is a group of major, highly credentialed scientists who for the last decade have been investigating the extraordinary story of a massive series of comet impacts on the North American ice cap 12,800 years ago.
That is the global cataclysm that wipes out a whole civilization from prehistory.
So that's why it's of interest to me.
They're not coming at it from that point of view.
They're coming at it from rediscovering something that we've lost about ourselves.
Something that's really important to understand the role of cataclysms in the story of the Earth.
And they need to do much more research.
They need to go back to Greenland and look for the nanodiamonds in the Greenland ice cores.
There's an ancient city.
Which they're not revealing the name of, which they're pretty certain was wiped out by a comet impact about 4,500 years ago.
They want to go there and investigate that.
So there's a lot of fieldwork they need to do to drive home this hypothesis and to, frankly, put down the opposition because there's been so much opposition to this idea from people with vested interest in other theories.
And that's why these guys have not got funding.
So the only place they're going to get funding to do this further research is from members of the general public.
And that's what we're hoping that will happen.
It's called the Comet Research Group.
There's a banner on my site and all the links are there to their crowdfunding, to their website, which is full of masses of scientific information, and to their Facebook page as well.
Both Randall and I have really given a great deal of thought to this, and I think, Randall, Point is that catastrophes are the untold story of our past.
So it came in, I think it exploded 12 miles, about 20 kilometers up in the atmosphere.
But it was still enough to damage thousands of buildings.
And injure 1,500 people.
Now the thing about that one is if it had been slightly larger, if it had come in at a slightly steeper angle, a little bit higher velocity, you could have had thousands of fatalities rather than just injuries.
And that would have been major headline news at that point.
Which puts it on the record, whereas otherwise it would not be.
I think people don't...
They don't like to talk about cataclysms and catastrophes, and actually, nor do I.
Nobody wants a horrible cataclysm to occur.
But this is the point, which is that the prospect of a comet or asteroid cataclysm on the Earth is actually much higher than has been told to us up till now.
And something can be done about it.
It doesn't have to be the end of the world.
We don't have to say, OK, it's all over.
Forget about it.
Quite the contrary.
This is just something that would be prudent and rational for the human species to do.
And amongst many other imprudent and irrational things that we focus on instead, we should be focusing on a bit on this.
And when new evidence comes in, which can't be explained by the existing model, they just try to explain away the new evidence and not think, maybe it's time to change our theory.
This is the unfortunate thing.
But cataclysms, a global cataclysm, the massive event that happened 12,800 years ago, the Younger Dryas impacts, which were a series of comet impacts on the North American ice cap.
This accounts for why we don't have a lot of evidence, hard evidence, of a 12,000-plus-year-old civilization, because it went down in that catastrophe.
I've been trying to amass the evidence, actually, that complements what Graham is doing, and it really answers that question that Shermer brought up.
And it's a legitimate question.
Where's the evidence?
But I'm quite sure that Shermer is not really educated in the extreme events that have really taken place on this planet in the last 10,000 to 20,000 years, and what that would do to any kind of evidence.
And maybe while we have some time here today, I've brought a few things to try to convey some sense of how extreme some of these changes have been, and how one would actually be quite shocked to find anything Well, Michael Shermer's a brilliant guy.
But what is disturbing to me is that his knee-jerk reaction to this, without having any research at all in the subject, not knowing at all about Gobekli Tepe, which was discovered in, what, the 90s?
96. So this is, to me, this is something that I've looked at because of you guys in great depth.
When I read your book, I was just completely enthralled with this idea of history having some sort of rise and fall and civilization having these resets.
So I've been absorbed in it for a long time.
But what's fascinating to me is people that consider themselves to be skeptical or, you know, or, I mean, he's a skeptic professionally.
But many people who question anything that's outside of what they've been told, as soon as they hear any sort of a theory outside of what they've been told, they immediately call quackery.
Absolutely.
But it's a weird knee-jerk reaction to something, especially when you talk about asteroids, that is a very real part of our past.
We have a ton of evidence.
I mean, there's actual craters that you can look at on Earth.
The Moon, which has no atmosphere, is littered with them.
And if we look at the Moon as a model for what could possibly have happened to Earth, or at least, you know, some of them, obviously, with the Moon having no atmosphere, it's going to get hit a lot more than we are.
On the one hand, you have Earth scientists looking at the Earth.
And what they're realizing is that the Earth is pockmarked with scars.
And each of these scars represents a tremendously powerful catastrophe that's happened in the history of the Earth.
Now, that's accepted by mainstream science.
Major catastrophes have happened in the history of the Earth.
But where this thing now is about to come full circle is the recognition that these kinds of catastrophes have also influenced the rise and fall of civilization, and a lot more extremely than has been recognized up to this point.
And while geologists and Earth scientists are looking at the surface of the Earth and realizing that etched into the surface of the Earth or imprinted into the surface of the Earth are hundreds of scars, of which undoubtedly are only a small percentage of the total that exists.
At the same time, astronomers are looking out into near-Earth space and discovering that We cohabit space with a lot of stuff.
It's not as empty as we thought.
Just within the last six or seven weeks, we've had two close flybys.
This is the point, because NASA keeps saying, well, we've counted 1,650 asteroids, and none of them are going to hit the Earth in the next hundred years.
Well, yeah, that's true.
But what about all the ones they haven't counted, which are estimated to run into hundreds of thousands and which haven't been seen yet?
And what happens is we see them roughly 10 days before they pass the Earth.
That is not enough time to do anything about them.
But we have time if we're prepared to be rational and reasonable as a civilization to take care of this issue.
Now, when you're dealing with hundreds of thousands of near-Earth objects that are flying around, what are the things that could be done to protect Earth?
And ironically, the most dangerous asteroids are going to be the ones that are the closest to the Earth, which are the most accessible.
And the asteroids pretty much have...
Unbelievable amounts of resources on them.
I mean, pretty much everything that is being mined on the Earth can be found in asteroids, from the hydrocarbons to precious metals to all of these things.
And we're not that far away from technologically being able to actually, you know, mount expeditions to asteroids and mine them.
And that's the solution I kind of prefer because, again, these things are tremendous sources of Of all kinds of things that would be usable to an expanding civilization, and we could feasibly, within a decade or two, be mining asteroids.
And again, the ones that are the easiest to access are also going to be the ones that are more dangerous, because they're the ones that are coming closest to the Earth.
So, another point here is that there is one specific danger.
There's one specific, if you like, region of the sky that really needs to be looked at.
And this is the region of the sky.
This is why I wrote Magicians of the Gods, because of this discovery, that there's a thing called the Taurid Meteor Stream, Which is 30 million kilometers wide and which envelops the solar system and the Earth on its orbit around the Sun passes through the torrid meteor stream twice a year.
Turns out the torrid meteor stream is the debris of a giant comet that came in to the inner solar system about 20,000 years ago.
That thing was at least 100 kilometers in diameter, according to their calculations.
It may have been more so.
And then, like other comets like Shoemaker-Levy 9, which spectacularly hit Jupiter in 1994, it began to break up into multiple fragments.
And those carry on orbiting on the original path.
And as they break up more and more, they degrade, and small bits and large bits break off, and it gradually fills up a kind of huge hoop of debris.
That the Earth is passing through twice a year.
It takes us 12 days to pass through it.
We do two and a half million kilometers a day on our orbital path, 12 days to get through the torrid meteor stream.
And the scientists of the Comet Research Group have made the point that a big object out of the torrid meteor stream, multiple objects as a matter of fact, was what hit the North American ice cap 12,800 years ago.
It looks like there was a second series of impacts 11,600 years ago from the same source.
It looks like there were other impacts in the Bronze Age.
The most recent, almost definite impact out of the Taurid meteor stream was Tunguska in Siberia back in 1908. That hit on the 30th of June 1908 and that's at the peak of the Taurid June shower when we passed through the Taurids in June and in November.
And what they're saying is we really need to focus on this torrid meteor stream.
Their calculations are that there are hundreds and hundreds of massive objects in that torrid meteor stream.
And, you know, as a comet breaks up into bits, those bits become asteroids, and those asteroids are circling in the torrid meteor stream.
And I've likened it to strapping on a...
A blindfold and crossing an eight-lane interstate twice a year and just hoping that we don't hit any heavy traffic, you know, that we meet bicycles or motorcycles rather than trucks.
But the trucks are out there and what the Comet Research Group scientists are saying is we need now to be in-depth investigating the Taurid meteor stream because it appears to be the hidden hand in human civilization.
It has wiped out episodes of our history in the past and there's no reason to expect that it won't do so again unless we do something about it because the remnants of that original giant comet are still circling in the Taurid meteor stream and they are fucking dangerous.
By scientists who have a vested interest in other ideas.
First of all, there's a vested interest in not admitting that cataclysms are important at all.
This goes right back To really to the 19th century when science began to take shape in the form that we know it now and they wanted to separate themselves off, understandably, from superstition.
So they didn't want anything to do with something that sounds like the biblical flood, for example.
They felt they would be contaminated by that and they preferred to explain any cataclysmic evidence as a result of gradual processes.
I'm reading a book right now by Dan Flores, a really interesting book called Coyote America.
He's a wildlife historian and he is really an expert on all the different forms of wildlife in North America, where they originated, where they migrated to.
And one of the more fascinating things about it is he's talking about all these animals that went extinct, you know, 10,000 plus years ago, this mass extinction event, and never once does he bring up cataclysms and there's all these different There's different ideas, and one of the big ones being that human beings with atlatls, which is like really a very weird sort of a spear-throwing device, wiped out the woolly mammoths and all these other animals, and it seems so preposterous.
Well, the evidence that you brought up when you were here the first time, when you showed the images of all those mammoths that had been literally knocked over with broken legs from the impact of something, mass burial grounds, like these mass, you know, not burial grounds, obviously, but mass casualties.
Yeah, in fact, Graham, I visited one up in South Dakota called Hot Springs, where there's just several dozen.
Nobody knows how many are actually there, but there's at least several dozen, two species, woolly mammoths and Columbian mammoths, that have been entombed.
And while we were there, interestingly, you know, the guide, the woman giving us the tour there was kind of giving a gradualist explanation that, well, over long periods of time, these mammoths wandered into a sinkhole and were too dumb to get out, and so they became entombed.
And I asked the question, well, what studies have been done on the sedimentary matrix in which their remains are being found Because as I'm looking at this sedimentary matrix, I'm seeing a massive deposit.
That was actually written by one of the original scientists that worked on the site, and his description was, well, it could have been that, but also as an alternative, and he used the term bloat and float, that what you had was woolly mammoths that had been caught in a flood, drowned, and their bloated carcasses floated into a depression in the landscape, and that's where they were entombed.
And that makes a whole lot more sense to me than the fact that You know, individually, over several thousand years, these mammoths wandered into this sinkhole and then couldn't get out.
But you've got to bear in mind, we're talking about, you know, at the end of the last ice age, 120 roughly species of megafauna that disappeared, which is about equivalent to the same number of megafaunal species that inhabits the Earth today.
Yeah, but what we're actually seeing is that at the end of what's called the Balling Alorod, which was the...
Gradual warming at the end of the last ice age that preceded the sudden catastrophic change at 12,800 was the Clovis culture that existed for three to five hundred years, I think?
Yes.
But they suddenly were gone, right?
Exactly simultaneous with the mammoths.
And then there are interesting studies coming out now showing that, at least continental-wide, there was apparently a major human population crash, exactly coincident with the megafaunal extinctions.
Because you had quarries that had been mined for centuries that are suddenly abandoned.
You have campsites that had generations of debris and toolkits accumulating and so on, debris from the fluting of the spear points and so on, that are suddenly abandoned.
So the evidence actually suggests that the human population crashed, which would certainly imply that they would have been far less capable of wiping out all of these species of megafauna.
Also, the studies of their diet and their life ways suggest that they were quite diverse.
They were hunter-gatherers, and they focused mostly on small game.
They ate a lot of fish, a lot of shellfish.
They gathered food.
And why would they go after the biggest, most dangerous You know, in the whole array of animals.
Something else from that time, if I may say, Randall mentioned the Clovis culture.
This is, for a very long time, really until just a couple of years ago, All of the mainstream academics in the fields of archaeology and anthropology were saying there were no human beings in North America before, let's say, 13,000 years ago, give or take 500 years.
They came across the Bering Land Bridge.
The Bering Strait at that time was above water, sea level was lower.
They entered the Americas then.
They weren't hit there before.
Now, in the last two to three years, there's just been a whole raft of new scientific research and no Scientists today is prepared to defend the Clovis model anymore.
It's accepted, of course, that there have been human beings in America for 50,000, 60,000 years, and there's weird genetic links.
Like, for example, there's a trace that connects Aboriginal Australians with North Americans.
They had a common ancestor.
It's a very peculiar thing that's going on.
And so what happens is that actually these scientific models, which constrain and restrict research for so long, do get overthrown.
And that Clovis model is being overthrown, and what the missing piece of the puzzle, I think, for everybody working in this field is the cataclysm, the comet, what happened between 12,800 and 11,600 years ago, which changed everything.
I mean, I would say Magicians of the Gods, which I published in 2015, which deals with this whole comet issue, is actually the most thoroughly documented, the most thoroughly referenced book that I've ever written.
It's calm.
It's measured.
They actually don't read it.
They just say, oh, Hancock's brought out another book.
He's a pseudoscientist.
That's what they always call me, or a pseudo-archaeologist.
And it's obviously rubbish because it disagrees with everything that we know.
Well, that's the point of the heretic in society, is to offer an alternative view and well-documented evidence.
But it seems that we're dealing with such a deeply ingrained mindset, which is connected in curious ways to power structures in our society, that it's very difficult to change it.
And like Graham mentioned earlier, there's kind of a...
It went from a religious motive, I think, in the 19th century, and now it's more a political motive.
And again, the idea that...
Every day you'll find something, you know, coming from various factions that were destroying the Earth, and the Earth has never suffered this kind of, you know, assault on it before, and, you know, we're causing the sixth great mass extinction,
and we're going to cause catastrophic global warming if we pump another 50 or 100 parts per million of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, and so What that has done is like many, I won't say many, but several of the scientists now that have been in the forefront of criticizing the Younger Dryas impact hypothesis are also very much involved in the global warming movement and The idea that we are now precipitating the sixth great mass
extinction.
Having looked now at mass extinctions and been really an obsession of mine for about 30 years now, I've looked at everything from the Cretaceous Tertiary to the Permian Triassic, you know, right on down the line to the most recent one, which to me is really in some ways the most interesting because the most recent mass extinction that we're talking about is the one that took place while we humans We're part of the story.
Yes, the Younger Dryas, which is still an unexplained climate anomaly that happened.
And I mentioned this, I think, in previous broadcasts, that, you know, what you had was you had this spasm of extreme warming followed by rapid shifting into extreme cold, literally within a matter of a few years.
And we're talking about climate changes that are up to 15 degrees Fahrenheit within perhaps one to five years, which utterly dwarfs anything that we've experienced since the Industrial Revolution began.
And we still don't really understand.
And that's why this research is so important, because now we understand that there was something cosmic that happened.
It's left its imprint in the landscape over, what, four continents, five continents now?
Over 50 million square kilometers of the Earth's surface.
There's a giant debris field.
There's stuff that is only produced by massive impacts.
These things come in at 70,000 miles an hour.
And, you know, if they have any diameter at all, if they're 100...
Metres or more in diameter, they are going to hit the earth really hard.
They're not going to burn up in the atmosphere.
And when they do, they pack a huge amount of kinetic energy, a huge amount of heat and shock, and that creates very definite chemical products.
So nanodiamonds, so carbon spherules, so melt glass, that's like the trinitite that was produced in nuclear explosions.
All of these, when they're all found together in the same layer of soil, and when you can put a date on that layer of soil, and when it's all over the world, there's only one thing can explain them, a massive cosmic impact.
I mean, I do, I understand it, because I know that once people start teaching things, once people start doing lectures and giving speeches, They want to stick to their guns, and they want to somehow or another avoid anything that's going to contradict what they've been espousing for so long.
It changes the way we've looked at our past, it changes the whole story of archaeology, and it changes the way we're going to look at the future.
I think that...
People in academia are reluctant to embrace that change.
And they're afraid of being called pseudoscientists because there's a whole lobby of skeptics who use this word pseudoscientist or pseudo-archaeologist as an instant dismissal of other ideas.
And those who are in the profession, they don't want to get tarred with that brush.
You're talking about this nuclear glass, you're talking about nano-diamonds, you're talking about core samples that show this massive shift, when you do the ice core samples, massive shift in temperature, and you're talking about very clear evidence of impacts that we know exists.
It's not like a comet's a theory.
It's not like it's Bigfoot or something.
We're looking for the final piece of evidence that shows that a comet is a real thing.
Hundreds of billions of dollars on massive, sophisticated military equipment, which we can use to slaughter one another in ever more sophisticated ways.
But just $50 million a year on saving the Earth from a potential cataclysm that could put our civilization back into the Stone Age tomorrow.
And I don't mean to keep harping on Michael Shermer because I like Michael, but he highlights this sort of natural inclination to poke fun at something that he has done no research on whatsoever.
When I pointed out Gobekli Tepe and I sent him some articles from National Geographic, he went radio silent.
And to say that Gobekli Tepe was created by hunter-gatherers, well, I'm sorry, that's just a theory.
That's not a fact.
It doesn't seem very reasonable either.
You have a sophisticated site with astronomical alignments, with hundreds and hundreds of megalithic pillars weighing up to 20 tons each, the world's first perfectly aligned north-south building, which you can only do with astronomy.
This is – it's not enough to say, oh, they were just hunter-gatherers.
Well, the biggest one actually is still in the quarry.
They left it because it had a fault in it.
They clearly intended to move it.
50 tons.
You're looking at 20-foot-high objects.
And then it's the putting together of them.
See, here's the problem.
Hunter-gatherer societies are not the kinds of societies that produce large-scale fixed monuments.
Why?
Because they don't generate a surplus.
You can't pay for somebody to become an architect of those times, somebody to become an astronomer.
You're busy hunting and gathering and that's what you do.
Agriculture generates a surplus and that is the problem at Gobekli Tepe because there is no background.
This site just appears out of nowhere amidst what appears to be a hunter-gatherer community, but what they're not considering is the possibility we're looking at a technology transfer, that the survivors of a lost civilization, who already had all that knowledge, came to Gobekli Tepe and used that site as a center of initiation to teach the local hunter-gatherers how to do agriculture.
And that's now taken as the beginnings of civilization.
I would say it is the reinvention or the remaking of civilization.
So when we're looking back at Sumer and any artifacts we find in ancient Mesopotamia and that area, Iraq, those are the people that are sort of reinventing and relearning.
Well, actually, when we talk of Mesopotamia, which means between two rivers, the Tigris and the Euphrates, Gobekli Tepe is sitting right there in the headwaters between the Tigris and the Euphrates.
And we cannot separate that from the later cultures that enter history 5,000, 6,000 years ago.
They're part of the lineage that descended from Gobekli Tepe times.
And what's fascinating about Gobekli Tepe is the way it doesn't fit, the way there's no background to it, that you would expect to see them practicing.
Learning architectural skills.
The oldest stuff should be the worst.
And as they carry on it gets better.
That site ran for a thousand years.
The best stuff is the oldest.
A thousand years later what they were producing wasn't so good.
This is a real anomaly and it needs to be investigated, not mocked by skeptics, but actually explored to consider maybe this does rock the whole paradigm.
And it's kind of ironic that in their desire to get away from the ancient myths and tales in the Bible, they've ignored those ancient myths and tales which all talk about cataclysms.
Well, part of our modern psychology is to imagine that we are somehow so far advanced from our predecessors that we now represent the pinnacle of civilization, and anything that preceded us has to be looked upon almost as, you know, as if the workings of children.
It requires a major psychological shift to admit or accept that our ancestors may have been far, far more sophisticated than we had imagined in our 19th century models, which basically still dominate thinking today.
And, you know, in Graham's book he devotes several chapters to the story of one 19th or 20th century heretic, J. Harlan Bretz.
And his story, to me, kind of encapsulates the whole process of forcing this paradigm shift.
And for years, he was out there exploring this evidence that there had been this tremendous flooding in Washington State.
And all of his critics were dismissive without ever even going out and looking at the evidence firsthand in the field.
But what he did was he stuck to his guns for three decades and continued to amass evidence to the point where they just couldn't dismiss it anymore.
And finally, a group of them went out And begin to explore the landscapes for themselves.
And one of the leaders, I think you talked about it in your book, James Gallulli, who was sort of the leader of the skeptic faction that had set out, their sole purpose was to discredit and lay this whole flood heresy to rest once and for all.
But he went out in the field, and they spent about eight days in the field.
Where he's seeing this evidence for himself over and over again.
And when you look at just one piece of it, you might be able to say, okay, there's other explanations for that.
But what happens is when you get multiple lines of evidence all converging, and there's no way to individually explain away each one of those things other than just saying, oh, well, it's all coincidence.
James Galluli was honest enough so that after a week out there, they were at a place called Palouse Falls in southern Washington, which was one of these areas where these tremendous inland tsunamis swept across the land.
And I actually just visited there about eight weeks ago when I took a group of people out there and took them to Palouse Falls to show them right on the spot where James Galluli was standing when he finally had his epiphany.
Yeah, I've got some really interesting images to show you.
Which relates, because, see, this flooding stuff relates directly to the idea of the impact.
And we can get into a little bit of that, explaining how these parallel lines of evidence are now converging.
But the interesting thing about Galluli was that In the descriptions of the trip, he wandered off by himself for a long time, away from the group, and was standing there looking at this massive cataract with 400-foot cliffs and this little tiny ribbon of water flowing over it and this huge canyon below it and these big boulders.
For a whole week, he'd been seeing this stuff.
And it finally got to the point where It was undeniable.
And he walked back to the group, and the words out of his mouth, verbatim, were, how could I have been so wrong?
And he finally admitted.
And that was like a turning point.
And now, again, Graham describes this very effectively in the book, how, in a way, the flooding phenomena was hijacked and then placed within this more gradualistic context.
Really to avoid the fact that it was something so anomalous and such a departure from our modern experience that we had to look outside of our modern experience to find an explanation.
What they wanted to do was find something within our modern experience, and this is the cornerstone of the uniformitarian approach, is that we look for a modern example and then we extrapolate backwards from that.
So what they did was they saw, well, In the modern world, we have pro-glacial lakes, lakes that form in front of glaciers, and sometimes these pro-glacial lakes might be held in by an ice dam or another glacier.
These ice dams will give away and they will cause pretty catastrophic flooding.
They're very common up in Iceland because you've got several volcanoes under the Icelandic ice sheets, and up there they use the term Jokalaups to describe these outburst floods.
But here's the thing.
When you look at the modern versions of it, you basically are looking at floods that are less than 1,000th of one single flow from these floods we're talking about that happened 12,000 and 13,000 years ago.
See, Harlan Bretz, for 30 years, was walking the walk in the Channel Scablands, and what he saw was evidence for, as he called it, a humongous flood, which actually rose and fell within three weeks.
And he went through decades of being...
He was put aside by his colleagues, insulted, they mocked him, they laughed at him, just as the skeptics do today.
But gradually the evidence began to mount and they couldn't deny it anymore, that there had been flooding and actually eventually they gave Harlan Bretz, Jay Harlan Bretz, the Penrose Medal which is the ultimate, you know, The ultimate bestowal of geology in America.
He got the accolade.
He was more than 90 years old at that time.
He said at that time, he said, all my enemies are dead, so I have no one left to gloat over.
But the point is, in a way, there was nothing to gloat about because what they did was they separated him from his central idea.
Instead of accepting that there had been one huge flood, and that was always his view, They said, oh, there must have been 70 or 80 floods that caused all this damage.
And that's what we are seriously challenging right now.
As soon as you see something that might throw a monkey wrench into the gears of what you've been teaching and practicing your whole life, and I know that you've gone through this with Egypt, your whole issue with the Sphinx and with Dr. Shock and John Anthony West, who was on the podcast last month.
This is the thing, you see, that science today, yes, you're right, we have this thirst for knowledge and its human characteristic, but also we get invested in particular positions.
And when people criticize those positions, we take it as an existential threat and where we get all angry and hot and bothered about it.
If we allow that to happen too much, if we don't keep a place for heretics in our society, then we're never going to do anything novel.
We're gradually going to get locked down.
We need heretics.
John has been the leading heretic on ancient Egypt for decades, pointing out that we should listen to what the ancient Egyptians said, that their civilization was not a development.
It was a legacy.
It was a legacy from the time of the gods.
And that casts me back again to this whole issue of a lost civilization.
Now, when Gobekli Tepe was discovered, it vindicated you in so many ways, but what are the possibilities, if any, of more of these sites being explored and exposed?
Just a year ago, at the bottom of the Sicily Channel, at a depth of more than 120 feet, it's been underwater for at least 9,000 years, is a huge megalithic site.
Before the discovery of Gobekli Tepe, that site could never have been explained.
The dating is absolutely definite.
The seas rose and covered it at least 9,000 years ago.
We don't know how long it stood there before it was covered by the rising seas.
But there it sits underwater, and I think underwater discoveries, and I've had a part to play in this over the years, are one of the ways forward.
We need to look at those areas.
Because there was a 400-foot rise in sea level at the end of the Ice Age, You're looking at the amount of land that would be put together in, say, Europe and China added together.
That amount of land was swallowed by those rising seas.
And archaeology has largely proceeded without taking account of those lost lands.
I'm not saying they haven't looked at all, but they're primarily, in marine archaeology, interested in shipwrecks.
The scientists who worked on it, the fact that there are holes drilled through the stone, the fact that you can go to neighbouring areas like Armenia and find really very ancient megalithic sites where they have exactly the same kind of holes drilled through the stones, and the holes seem to have been used for astronomical sightings.
Now this site's a mess, it's been knocked over by the sea, it's fallen down, but we're seeing the same thing, big megaliths with holes drilled through them.
Well, it does make sense that if we do know for a fact, and we do, that the sea level rose dramatically at the end of the Ice Age, it makes sense that some things would be buried under the water.
Well, and during the Ice Age, whatever, you know, you don't have to talk about advanced civilizations or anything, but during the Ice Age, living on the coastlines and establishing your villages, communities and everything on the coastlines would have been probably one of the most benign places to get, you know, because for one thing, you're down near sea, the sea level, the presence of the seas is going to, you know, smooth out the climate and so forth.
You're going to have probably most cultural development during the Ice Age is going to be close to the sea.
So it's going to be underwater now, just like Graham was talking about.
And so this, to me, is probably the future of archaeology, is marine archaeology, where a lot of discoveries are going to be made.
And that particular thing, I mean, there's a lot of megalithic structures around the world that if you set that thing up like this and put those siding holes through it, would look precisely like.
Scrape the barnacles off of it, you know, and no one's saying, oh, it's proven.
But what it is, is we have to keep an open mind and say, well, there are some very strong similarities here, so let's investigate this thing further.
And that's the whole point of all this, is all of this stuff needs more research.
It doesn't need some cavalier dismissal by somebody who's, you know, protecting their own paradigm.
It needs more research on all fronts.
I mean, because I think that there's enough evidence that is now accumulated to suggest that there is a deep history to the human species on Earth.
And we're just beginning to really appreciate how much deeper it really is than the conventional models of history.
And rather than just waving an arm and dismissing this...
Each one of them would have wiped out all life on Earth if that object had hit the Earth.
Strange.
Another thing, we were talking about underwater structures, but let's also consider the possibility, and again John Anthony West's work is important here, let's also consider the possibility that we have misidentified a number of structures that are standing in plain view, like the Great Sphinx.
Egyptology, read any Egyptological text, any encyclopedia actually, they will tell you that thing was put there by a specific pharaoh, pharaoh Khafre of the fourth dynasty, around about 2500 BC. That is not a fact.
That is an opinion, but it's presented as a fact.
There is not a single inscription that relates the Sphinx to that pharaoh, not a contemporary inscription, not one dating from 2500 BC. In fact, there's nothing at all.
It's just the assumption, because it's close to a pyramid, which they assume the same pharaoh built, again on the absence of evidence, that the Sphinx must have been built by them, but John Anthony West was the first to see.
That actually when we look at the Sphinx, we're looking at a highly eroded stone object.
And that erosion is very odd.
And that's why he brought Professor Robert Schock, professor of geology from Boston University, to Giza in 1992 to look at the Sphinx and say, what actually caused this weathering on the Sphinx?
And Schock immediately saw it.
What caused it was exposure to a very long period of heavy weathering.
Heavy, heavy rainfall.
And no such rains have fallen in Egypt in the last 5,000 years, but they did fall during the Younger Dryas.
We had a prolonged rainout from this comet impact as that ice cap was pulverized and a massive amount of ice water was thrown up into the upper atmosphere.
A prolonged rainout, which could have been the cause of the erosion on the Sphinx.
It's the single largest block of stone ever cut and quarried in the ancient world.
And they found this just in 2014. They found it in 2014. Now, there's another big one right beside it, which has been in plain view for about the last hundred years.
And it's astonishing to me that this one, which is just below it, was covered by sediment.
So Baalbek was also the site of, I mean, there's many monoliths that have been discovered there, and it's a really fascinating site that many people have sort of overlooked when you talk about ancient structures from the past.
In terms of your question, what's happened within the last year or two, I would think that probably the most significant thing, or certainly right up there, would be the comet research and the discovery.
I mean, like this article I have right here, which came out in 2014, so it's not that old.
A nano-diamond-rich layer across three continents consistent with major cosmic impact at 12,800 years ago.
And it's something like 24, 25 highly pedigreed scientists.
But then there's the proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences host a lot of their work as well, and the proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences get into trouble for hosting their work, but they feel it's important, so they keep on hosting it.
They had brought out another paper in 2015. I won't go into the...
Some of the details are boring, but it's called a Basian chronological analysis.
And basically what they were looking at, they asked themselves, is it possible that this evidence, these nanodiamonds, these melt glass, the carbon spherules, could that have been laid down gradually?
And the chronological analysis that they've done absolutely answers that.
No, it was not laid down gradually.
This whole thing unfolded in a period of about 24 hours.
Yeah, and what had happened, Joe, was that for years, archaeologists had recognized this black mat layer at about two dozen or more of the Clovis sites around North America, which there had been over 50 of them that had been studied.
And it was C. Vance Haynes who wrote an interesting paper saying that He was the one who noted that below this black matte layer, which is only two to three inches thick in most sites, you found evidence of the Clovis culture.
You found their tool kits and their spear points and so on.
You found evidence of the extinct megafauna, but not above it.
You would find this evidence of this Cultural activity and the megafauna right up to the bottom of the black mat layer, but not above it.
So what finally happened was in 2007, Richard Firestone and Alan West and some of their colleagues, and it was just basically a small group at that point, took a look at this closer look, and that's when they began to discover these impact proxies, usually right at the base of the layer.
And the layer itself is carbonaceous, which suggests that there had been a lot of soot deposited, which would imply widespread wildfires.
In fact, there was a study right off the coast of California on the Santa Rosa Islands that pretty much concluded that there was just massive wildfires that pretty much just...
It annihilated everything.
And then this was preceded by the deposition of this black matte layer.
And right at the bottom of this black matte layer is where you find the nanodiamonds, the magnetic grains, the microspherals, the carbonaceous spherals, fullerenes.
You find these impact proxies, and they're not all the same at all the sites.
In fact, that's been one of the things that the critics have seized upon.
But what they're doing is, I think, taking an oversimplified model.
And when you look at a comet fragmentation event, you could be looking at the individual pieces, could have very different compositions.
And what we were talking about earlier, the torrid meteor stream, I'm not convinced at this point that it was necessarily just a single impact event.
It may have been a bombardment episode that may have lasted even several decades.
It may have then ceased for a while.
And we were talking about this last night over dinner that there seems to be a second spasm At 11,600 years ago.
It's also associated with a massive rise in sea level.
There's two meltwater spikes, meltwater spike 1A and meltwater spike 1B. I'm quite convinced that these meltwater spikes that have been documented by marine geologists and oceanographers are correlated with these melting events of the ice sheet that I've been looking at in terms of their geomorphic The only way I can describe some of these meltwater events is that the only modern analog to this would be a tsunami.
And we've seen some pretty devastating tsunamis within the last decade or two, both in Indonesia and in Japan.
And I don't know if you've ever seen any of the videos of these tsunamis.
Anybody listening, it is definitely worthwhile to go online and look at some of these videos where you can actually see the unbelievably powerful effects of a 30 or 40 or 50 foot tsunami, right?
Now, some of the landscapes, and I have some images we can pull up here shortly.
These are places in Montana, Idaho, Washington, where you literally had a tsunami sweeping over the land that was over a thousand feet deep.
It's meltwater coming off this catastrophic melting of the ice sheet.
And I've traced the sources of some of these meltwater.
I've made two trips now up into the plateau country of British Columbia looking for the source of this meltwater.
Because in the conventional models now of this flooding that goes back to Harlan-Bretz and basically what they've done is they said initially There could have been no flood because Harlan-Bretz didn't provide a source for the water.
The critics said, well, you're saying that all of this evidence in the landscape is evidence of the flood, but what was the source of the flood?
And he didn't have a source.
So the critics then said, well, you don't have a source for the flood water, therefore the flood didn't take place.
Then as the research evolved, you had independent evidence accumulating in western Montana by J.T. Pardee, who was with the U.S. Geological Survey.
And he was investigating evidence that the mountain valleys of western Montana had been filled up with an enormous volume of water.
And this volume of water seemed to be exactly the same time as Brett's floods.
He then assumed that this was a giant lake, and because you can see, and I think we have some images, I think Jamie has some images, so we'll pull them up shortly, where on the mountainside you see the shorelines etched, you know, a thousand feet above the valley floor.
And what he then decided was that, based upon an old 19th century interpretation by T.C. Chamberlain, that there had been an ice dam, he said, well, there must have been an ice dam west of here somewhere, in the Clark Fork Valley, A giant lake backed up, burst through the ice dam, and then this is what would have caused Harl and Bretz's floods.
So now the geological community is shifting because, number one, the evidence is overwhelming and they can't deny it anymore.
But what they're doing is looking for a gradualist or a more uniformitarian explanation.
So they immediately latched onto this.
Well, there was a giant pro-glacial or in front of a glacial lake.
Well, you're talking about somewhere between 520 and 550 cubic miles of water.
That's a lot of water, right?
And normally, when you have a large lake, you have a huge catchment basin that is feeding lots of streams and rivers that are feeding into that lake.
When you look at any of the big lakes around North America, You have the lake, and then you have this big old catchment basin, and all of that's feeding it.
In Lake Missoula, the whole lake fills almost the whole catchment basin.
It's like, to me, what they did was they said, okay, we're just going to push the source of the water from here over to here, but let's not go into the question of where did the water come from that's filling these mountain valleys of western Montana.
And this is what I did.
I spent a couple of weeks in September going up into some of these, following these valleys up into British Columbia.
And there's spectacular evidence.
And it's almost like The American geologists stop at the 49th parallel and they say, well, that's the Canadians preserve up there.
We'll let them, they've got their own theories, we've got ours.
Interestingly, the Canadians are saying that we think that the water for these floods came from up here.
But they don't like that because, you see, one of the leading geologists who's saying that these floods came from Canada is John Shaw, who basically came up with this idea that drumlins, which are these inverted boat hull-shaped landforms that are found by hundreds of thousands in the regions where glaciers were,
That they were formed not by the glaciers grinding over the landscape, but they were actually formed by massive subglacial flows of water.
And his critics have all been saying, well, here's the problem.
What's the source of your water?
Therefore, it wasn't water.
It wasn't subglacial floods.
It parallels Harlan Bretz's story very closely.
Well, here's the thing.
Shaw and his colleagues couldn't really come up with a plausible explanation for how you could form these massive subglacial reservoirs.
In fact, what they call the Livingstone Lake event required 84,000 cubic kilometers of water.
And 84,000 kilometers, I can do it really quickly here.
We divide that by 36. That's about 2,300 cubic miles of water.
That's more than all of the Great Lakes combined.
Vastly bigger than all of the Great Lakes combined.
It's probably every lake in North America combined.
And he said this one event required over 2,000 cubic miles of water.
Well, where did that water come from?
So he basically said, well, there must have been a reservoir somehow that formed.
His critics have said, that's impossible.
You couldn't form that much water under the ice sheet.
Well, what's happened now is the idea of a major cosmic impact into the ice sheet has completely obviated the need for a subglacial reservoir, because now we have a way of instantaneously melting enormous volumes of ice.
Well, it's baffling to me that this is a source of controversy because we know that the Great Lakes were created by melting glaciers.
We also know that there's vast areas of North America that are flattened by these glaciers.
You know, a buddy of mine, my friend Doug, lives in Cazenovia, Wisconsin, which is what's called the Driftless area, where the glaciers didn't go through.
We know that those glaciers melted, and they created the Great Lakes.
I mean, the Great Lakes were from glaciers.
We know that.
That's an established fact.
So why is all this confusing?
I just don't understand why they wouldn't just add that to it.
They're just going to accept the glaciers.
Somehow or another, in the last 10,000 years, the glaciers just decided to stop smashing North America flat and melt and create these great inland oceans of fresh water.
And then later on, when he finally agreed to come back into the room, because he was so angry with me, he walked out.
When he finally came back into the room, he was asked a question about Gobekli Tepe, and just like your skeptic, he didn't know anything about Gobekli Tepe.
Well, he claimed not to know about it.
I mean, this is supposed to be the world's most famous Egyptologist, and he knew nothing about this incredible site in a neighboring country.
Randall was talking about the second event 11,600 years ago.
With an episode of Cataclysm, which begins 12,800 years ago and ends 11,600 years ago.
Both episodes accompanied by massive floods.
And the 11,600 years ago date, I may have mentioned this last year, it's in Magicians of the Gods.
What's interesting about that is that is the exact date that Plato gives us for the destruction of the lost civilization of Atlantis.
Plato, that's the only source we have for Atlantis.
It comes to us, many people think it's all over the place, but it's not.
Atlantis comes to us from the Greek philosopher Plato, who lived around 340 BC. And he got the story through his family line from his ancestor Solon, who had visited Egypt in 600 BC. And there Solon was told of a great civilization that had existed on Earth that was the progenitor civilization of Egypt, but that was destroyed in a terrible cataclysm.
And he asked at a cataclysm involving a gigantic flood, and Atlantis was submerged beneath the waves and was never seen again.
And so Solon said to the priests, when did this happen?
And they said, 9,000 years ago.
That was in 600 BC. So that's 9,600 BC. That's 11,600 years ago.
In Timaeus, Plato discusses Atlantis in two dialogues.
And into Timaeus.
He prefaces the story of Atlantis by recounting the myth of Phaeton.
Now the myth of Phaeton is a very interesting story and Basically, what it is, is Phaeton was the offspring of Halios, the sun god, who was raised, didn't know who his father was.
His mother kept it a secret from him, and then one day he was being taunted at school because all of his schoolmates had, you know, recounting the great deeds of their fathers and everything.
So he went home distraught, and finally his mother said, well, actually, your father is the big granddaddy of them all, Halios, the sun god.
So Phaeton decides he's going to go and find his father.
And eventually does, and he goes to some celestial realm where his father is located, The way it is with the Greek gods, they have unlimited powers, except they also have certain restrictions.
For example, if a god makes a promise, he or she cannot go back on it, right?
So, when Helios sees Phaeton, his lost son, come, he's so overjoyed, he says, I'm so happy to see you, I will grant you any boon you want.
And Phaeton says, I want to drive the chariot of the sun.
I want to drive your chariot.
Helios says, well, I meant anything you wanted except that.
So it goes back and forth and back and forth.
Finally, Phaeton convinces his father, let me do it.
His father says, look, you've got to hang on to those reins tight because those steeds are going to pull away from you.
He gets in there, the gates of the sun open, it describes, in the myth, you can go, you know, you can read Edith Hamilton or Bullfinch or any of the great retellings of the Greek myths and they'll describe it in there.
It goes through the signs of the zodiac and then all of a sudden it careens off and heads down to earth.
And then it describes this whole litany of catastrophes setting the earth on fire.
And finally, Jupiter, at the beseeching of Poseidon, who's afraid that the oceans are going to boil away, gets Zeus to mount Olympus and hurl his thunderbolt, which knocks Phaeton from the sky, and he falls to Earth and falls into the river Eridanus, which is a metaphor for the Milky Way.
And his sisters, the Heliades, then Weep over the death of their brother and their tears fall to earth and cause the great flood.
Plato then, after referencing that myth, he then says, now this has the form of a myth, but what it really represents is a declination or a declining of the bodies in space orbiting around the earth and an eventual falling to earth of one of those bodies and a conflagration of all things triggered by the fall of that body.
Because the Taurid meteor stream is so cold, because it appears to come at us from the direction of the constellation of Taurus, a zodiacal constellation.
That's where those shooting stars, amongst which are some very large objects that have hit us in the past and can hit us again in the future, that's where they come from.
And so anybody in ancient times who was witnessing, and according to the Victor Klube and William Napier and those guys who are the British neocatastrophists that have been doing all of this work for decades on the torrid meteor shower have concluded that, you know, in times past, it was an extremely active shower and would have created some pretty darn impressive light shows, even if it wasn't causing catastrophes down here below.
But what they've conjectured is that there might be times of multiple Tunguska-like impact bombardment, Because there could be thousands of objects within the tarred meteor stream on the same scale as the Tunguska object.
And if you go and you read the accounts, the eyewitness accounts, over and over again, people are saying things like, well, it looked like it was being disgorged from the sun.
It looked like it was being born out of the Sun, right?
It looked like a second Sun in the sky.
Like, for a short period of time, the Sun had a twin, right?
Well, the summertime taurids are coming from their perihelion passage around the Sun.
So, like Graeme was saying, they make an elliptical orbit out to Jupiter and back around the Sun in this stream, right?
Earth crosses that stream twice each year.
One time, late June, early July, we cross, but at that point, they're coming from the direction of the Sun.
So their arrival to Earth is going to be very difficult to see because they're coming from the direction of the Sun, right?
But that's exactly where, on June 30th, a torrid meteor would be coming from.
And then also the fact that it's the perfect date for the peak of the shower and the The correct place in the sky, to me, is pretty convincing evidence that it was most likely a remnant of that torrid stream.
The other time that the Earth crosses is late October, early November.
In fact, we've just passed out of it within the last week, basically.
But it peaks, interestingly, coincidentally, between, like, October 30th and November 4th or 5th.
So it's peaking right around Halloween time.
In fact, they've been called the Halloween meteors, and there's some very interesting...
But there's some very interesting work done by a researcher back around the early 20th century named Grant Halliburton, who spent about 15 years researching the connections between ancient calendars.
And he concluded one thing very interesting was that a lot of these ancient calendars were being synchronized by people's observations of the rise and fall of the Pleiades, which is the shoulder of the bull.
The Pleiades comprises basically part of that constellation of the bull.
And what he came up with was that in his research, he discovered that many of these stories that were associated with the slaying of the celestial bull, you know, Gilgamesh and Enkidu in the earliest And so,
what he then found out, though, was that in many cases, our modern Halloween actually goes back thousands of years to an ancient Day of the Dead that was observed all over the Earth, At the same time, every year, even in the southern hemisphere, and it usually revolved around a commemoration of the culmination of the Pleiades, which is when the Pleiades crosses the local meridian.
In other words, it reaches the keystone of the royal arch, so to speak, up in the sky.
So if you go out on Halloween now and you face the south in the northern hemisphere, you will see the Pleiades right at midnight.
At midnight, they will be, if you think of the Arch of the Zodiac as being like a clock, it's right there at midnight, at midnight, right?
Well, here's the interesting link, is that in all of these myths, what Halliburton discovered over and over again was that the Day of the Dead ultimately went back to myths of the destruction of the world by a great flood and or fire.
It's fascinating that it's all coming out of the constellation Taurus, too, and it's the celestial bull that they're fighting in these ancient myths, and all these cultures around the world are celebrating the Day of the Dead at this exact same time.
And right now our science is closing its eyes to this.
I think it's fair to say, with the Taurid meteor stream, which is a very big issue in this whole discussion, That we are dealing with a hidden hand in human history.
It's something that is going to ultimately require us to re-explain almost everything.
The skeptics hate it.
They can't bear it.
Because, first of all, it involves cataclysms.
And secondly, it involves the possibility of losing a whole civilization from the record.
It's really...
It's really interesting when you look at the dates of this cluster, this episode of bombardment between 12,800 and 11,600 years ago, that's the period that just immediately precedes what mainstream academia think of as the very beginnings of civilization.
Maybe it's not even their fault.
This is so recent.
This science is so new that they've not had time to adapt to it.
But if they adapt to it and take this into account, then suddenly what was an extraordinary and absurd and impossible idea, that there was a lost civilization 12,000 years ago, becomes a very plausible and reasonable idea.
Once we take that on board, then we can start opening our eyes to archaeological anomalies like the Great Sphinx, like Baalbek, like submerged ruins, like Gobekli Tepe, and begin to consider what does all this mean?
Are we in fact a species with amnesia?
Are we here forgetful of the truth about ourselves?
Maybe that's why we're so fucked up, you know, because we just actually don't know.
We've made up a story about where we came from and what we are.
And that's interesting with comets, because this huge massive object circulating in the outer solar system Correctly if I'm wrong, but what is the source of all these near-earth objects?
Does it have anything to do with Earth 1 and Earth 2?
Does it have anything to do with the initial impact that created the Moon?
Because we were hit by another planet, right, during the formation of the Earth, and this is all scientifically established astro-scientists, or astrophysicists rather, and astronomers all agree on that, right?
There's a lot of debris that would go back to that time.
But comets are another story because they're coming in from the far reaches of outer space.
They're coming in from the Oort cloud and the Kuiper panel, just vast distances away.
They're voyagers.
They're kind of messengers from the distant reaches of the cosmos who come in in an unpredictable way because their orbits are destabilized by something like Planet Nine.
Isn't there something called Bode's Law where you can measure the mass and the orbit of a certain planet and you can accurately depict where the next planet is going to be?
And doesn't that fall apart somewhere between Mars and Jupiter?
And I have to say, there's a skeptic called Michael Heiser who has done really an excellent job of thoroughly debunking the bogus translations of Zachariah Sitchin.
Well, we were talking about all the difference between the fantastical and the practical, that there's this inclination to accept things that are fun.
You know, that's what I was going to say, is that when you start talking about the Anunnaki, those from heaven to earth came, these fantastic creatures from...
That is projected out onto his theory of the past.
Now, it seems to me very unlikely that the Nephilim or the Anunnaki would have had for 400,000 years, which is what he's saying, the same technology that NASA had in the 1970s.
It's much more likely that he's projecting that onto the data rather than that it's actually inherent in the data.
There was also some interesting ideas that he had that turned out to be ideas that scientists had also proposed about preserving our atmosphere by levitating or by suspending reflective particles in our atmosphere.
And that is something that the Anunnaki in his books were going to use gold for, because gold has such unique properties, which is why they use gold to plate things, because you could take a little tiny piece of gold, you could plate this entire table.
Gold is a really spectacular I mean, there's nothing like it, right?
No, there's a lot of really good material in Sitchin, but unfortunately, the translations of the texts, the translations of the texts are not translations of the texts.
They misrepresent the texts.
Often what he did was he took a 19th century translation and he massaged it.
So that it would, you know, fit his argument.
And that's a pity.
So we need sceptics and they help us to sift out the wheat from the chaff.
But occasionally what the sceptics do with this drive to criticise anything that's not mainstream, occasionally what they do is they let go a really good idea which deserves investigation and which the human species could benefit from.
And that's my feeling is we're this amazing species.
We've developed all this science.
Why are we so ready to let go Full of wonderful ideas.
Well, it's also fascinating to me that because of what Sitchin has been sort of criticized for, people now ignore the stuff that's absolutely undeniable, like the actual stone tablets themselves, the clay tablets, where you can see the depictions of the solar system.
Somehow or another, these people from 6,000 plus years ago had a detailed map of the solar system.
With the size in like a relatively correct order, and the planets in the right place, like they somehow or another knew that Jupiter was bigger than Mars.
They knew these things in some weird way, and we don't know why, and we don't know how.
Also, the caduceus representing the double helix of the DNA, that's a really fascinating concept too, that the caduceus is used for medicine, and it's used to...
I mean, he had some really interesting points, Zechariah did.
But the other issue of entities, the encounters with entities, anybody who's smoked DMT will know that As I have, as you have, that will know that you do encounter entities in the DMT state, and they do communicate with us.
And there's a lot of parallels with the ETs, or the aliens, as they're described in modern UFO abduction accounts.
And Rick Strassman, have you ever had him on your show?
Yeah, he's brilliant, and he's so important to me because I remember when I did it, I was so confused.
I mean, to me, it was like my first DMT experience changed everything I thought about the world, and I immediately didn't give a shit about aliens anymore.
It was almost instantaneous.
Before then, I was like, Roswell, they've got the ship, man.
It's in a hangar.
But what I encountered doing DMT was so spectacularly alien that the pedestrian concept of something that looks like a person but has a bigger head and large eyes.
That's the aliens, an utterly alien realm filled with alien intelligences.
And of course, again, the skeptics say, oh, it's all just made up in your brain, but we don't know that.
And Rick is open to the possibility that we are dealing with areas of reality that are not normally accessible to our senses and that become accessible to our senses by retuning the receiver wavelength of the brain, which is what...
He suggests DMT does.
And I think that's very plausible.
And at the very least, those who are interested in UFOs and aliens should be also investigating this line of inquiry.
Can we use changes in consciousness to understand the majestic complexity of the universe in which we live?
And I think the answer is definitely yes.
And many of Rick's volunteers, I paraphrase, but they came back with reports that the entities who'd encountered them said, we are so I'm glad you've discovered this technology.
Now we can communicate with you much more easily.
You know, it's fascinating.
So there's a technology for encountering other intelligences, and against that, this mechanistic, simplistic, alien meme that's going around now that they're a bit like us, but they came here in higher tech, it's dull by comparison with that.
He did, and because it was government approved, his remit was that he had to find some therapeutic benefit for DMT, and he couldn't, actually.
But that's not the point.
I'm sure, actually, there are therapeutic benefits, but that's not the point.
The point is, here is a tool for investigating the mystery of consciousness and the mysterious nature of reality.
And, I mean, fuck me, if we get five or six volunteers who haven't compared notes, all coming back who've met entities who've said, we're so happy you found this technology.
Because we're talking about the burning bush producing God, and it just so happens that this bush, the acacia tree is incredibly common and super rich in DMT, and it's all over the area.
I went to a wedding that my friend Duncan Trussell was performing at for these two Satanists in like 2003. And to this day, it was one of the LaVey's, Anton LaVey or Stanton LaVey, whatever it is, his son.
And his son got married.
Some young hedonist, you know, and they call themselves Satanists.
And so Duncan performed at this wedding, and I went there.
To this day, I get fucking tweets about being a Satanist.
Well, most Masons don't really understand the corpus of symbolism that they're sitting on top of.
I've got to say that.
Not to get off on the Freemasons, but simply, there's a mass of symbolism.
And that's the whole...
That's the thing that they're custodians of, and most of them don't have a clue what it means, but they're doing an important job by preserving this corpus of symbolism through the layout of the lodge, the meaning of every component in the lodge, because it's a purely astronomical allegory.
And then you have the Masonic carpets, and that's where you have the whole story of the comet, the flood.
But you can make special arrangements to bring women into a lodge.
For example, my wife, when I've given a talk in a lodge, I've given talks in two or three lodges, been asked to do so, then they make a special ceremony to allow my wife, Santa, to come in, because I won't go anywhere without Santa.
So women can go in, but then there are others within masonry who are pursuing deeply esoteric interests and exploring the mysteries, and you can have incredible conversations.
In fact, it's just another group of people who are doing their thing.
It's not for me.
I wouldn't join.
I think if I joined Freemasonry, it would weaken me as an author.
I think I'm better able to comment on these things by not being a member of any such group.
I mean, the thing, the initial thing where you were telling me about Ethiopia, that place where they believe that the Ark of the Covenant lays, which is one of the most bizarre ideas ever.
But I've always imagined you, as a young guy, forced to sort of reconcile with this bizarre piece of evidence.
You've got these old men that have cataracts in their eyes, like they're on radiation sites, and no one's allowed to go inside and see this thing, and they claim they have the Ark of the Covenant in there, and like, what the fuck is in there?
Fingerprints was published in 1995 and Magicians came out in 2015 and I would say in that time when I made the case for a lost civilization and a global cataclysm in Fingerprints of the Gods I can't Begin to account for the amount of hostility and anger and rage that I generated in the academic community.
And the idea was considered to be absolutely absurd.
Twenty years later, with magicians of the gods, it's not so absurd anymore.
The evidence is mounting.
We have incredible evidence now for a global cataclysm in exactly the period that counts, between 12,800 to 11,600 years ago.
And we have sites like Gobekli Tepe.
We have a redefinition of the Sphinx.
The whole area is just about to Explode in the future.
We're on the edge, I believe, of a paradigm shift, and this comet material is central to it.
Well, since I've had a web presence in the last...
I was a late comer, but maybe two to three years ago, I've been getting contacted by, I mean, professionals from around the world.
I've got probably a dozen major ones I've...
Geologists who want to know more about, and interestingly, you said earlier about debating, you know, I'm always looking for somebody to debate about this.
You know, because I have questions and I'm thinking maybe somebody, even somebody who would disagree with me on something could still help me answer some of those questions.
But I try to associate as much as possible and hang out with professionals in the field.
And of course what I discover is that A lot of them are working in these things part-time, almost clandestinely, without making it part of their...
If I go on a field trip of geologists into the floodlands, none of them are really working on it full-time.
It's all part-time.
They're working for the government, they're working for the oil companies, or exploration, mineral exploration, whatever.
They're doing this research into geological catastrophes.
On their own time.
But recently, just last summer, I got invited to actually present some of my research to the Atlanta Geological Society, which is the largest Society of Professional Geologists in the Southeast.
So I jumped at the chance, rather than, you know, and so I presented hoping that I would get challenged, that somebody would say, wait a second, there's a flaw in your thinking here.
Oh yeah, well, I mean, I've been known, I mean, I just took a trip in September, spent 10 days back out in the floodlands, and I had a geologist with me on that trip.
So yeah, I'm getting to know more and more people who are working as well.
You know, I majored in geology in college, so I still am in touch regularly with the head of the geology department.
I see her pretty much on a regular basis and have been keeping her apprised of some of my stuff.
And she has offered to sponsor me at whatever point I think that I can pull it together as a dissertation.
But we'll see how that goes.
I mean, my objective was to learn geology, not to become a professional geologist.
I wasn't interested in working for the government or working for, you know, the energy industry.
I had geological questions, and that's why I majored in geology.
You're always going to have the guys, like, I think Michael Shermer's very important, I'm not criticizing him, but that knee-jerk reaction to do something, to mock something or put down something that's not mainstream.
Like, one of his tweets, he said, you know what archaeology with evidence is?
And he wrote, archaeology.
Like, why would you even tweet that?
That doesn't even make any sense.
Like, that's someone who's not paying attention to your work.
Well, Robert Schock and guys like him are so important.
Guys who have the courage, who's a Boston University professor, who has the courage to look at the stones and say, this is the product of water erosion.
Kudos to Robert Schock as a geologist, as a career academic geologist who's taken that risk and put himself out there and followed the evidence where it leads.
Another one is Danny Hillman Natawajaja in Indonesia, who's been responsible for the investigation of this extraordinary site at Gunung Padang, where work has been stopped since 2014.
Again, he's a highly credentialed geologist.
He's Indonesia's leading expert in megathrust earthquakes.
But he's been looking at archaeology, bringing his geological expertise to that.
So things are changing.
We are finding academics who are willing to engage and willing to discuss.
I got into a very interesting email correspondence with a guy called Daniel Lohmann at Baalbeck, from the German Archaeological Institute, who's an architect and an archaeologist.
And he was very civil with me, and he answered my questions.
I must say, when I'm in his aura, I'm extremely convinced.
But when I look rationally at the so-called pyramids, I don't think they're pyramids.
I think they're hills.
I did spend, with Sam showing me around, I did spend three days in Bosnia looking at the so-called pyramid of the sun, the pyramid of the moon, the love pyramid and so on and so forth.
I do see that a tourist industry has built up around this, and it's a fabulously beautiful, intriguing site, massive, beautiful, mountainous place, but they are hills.
They are not pyramids.
Impression is given that there are tunnels, passageways inside the pyramids.
That's not true.
The passageways are about two, two and a half kilometers away.
They're very low tech.
I just don't see it.
And for that reason, I did not cover the Bosnian pyramids in Magicians of the Gods.
I'm not going to say they're not pyramids.
I'm not going to write a book saying that they're wrong.
But they didn't excite me enough to justify devoting a chapter to them.
There's much more exciting and important archaeological discoveries that are being made, like Gobekli Tepe, which need more space.
Yeah, to protect his soul into the afterlife seems to have been the idea.
And then there's a mythology that's come down, that within the pyramid is a lake of mercury, that there are mechanical devices in there which will fire arrows at you if you go in, that there's a whole story about how intensely protected it is, and up to this day it's not been excavated.
Yeah, and then we have to consider this with, you know, with archaeological sites all around the world, is that any site may actually not be the product of just one culture, but may have been reworked and worked over and used by many different cultures over many different periods.
Well, that is another thing about China that we just don't have a clue.
When we think about the age and scale of things, we're so silly.
We've only been around since, you know, 1776 is when the country was established.
It's not really that long ago.
You're dealing with China.
You're dealing with literally thousands of years of civilization all rising and falling and taking place and adapting and growing all in this one area.
But still, in our eyes, in a lot of ways, it's kind of behind, right?
I mean, they're behind environmentally, they're behind when it comes to human rights.
The Portuguese, in the late 1400s, have rounded the Cape of Good Hope, and they've entered the Indian Ocean in their little ships.
They've entered the Indian Ocean and they actually establish a huge empire.
They go to Malacca.
They go all over the place, okay?
The seas are open to them.
If they had come 40 years earlier, they would have encountered the Chinese treasure ships.
Ships that were 50 times larger than the little caravels that the Portuguese were sailing in.
You know what the Chinese did at that time?
They went through a period where they felt they just wanted to give gifts to people.
And they put together these huge fleets carrying incredibly precious gifts, silks and ceramics, and they took them all around the Indian Ocean and they just gave them to people.
So off the coast of East Africa and in East Africa you can find remains of this pottery from this episode.
And then a Chinese emperor came along and he closed the doors, burned all the boats, shut everything down, and didn't let anybody speak to China for 200 years.
Well, he felt that it was time for the Chinese culture to turn inward.
And they were afraid that their ancient culture...
On one hand, there might have been maybe a laudable motive in that they were concerned that the ancient culture was going to get contaminated by too much contact with degenerate cultures from other places, and that was a factor in it.
That's the thing, it's fractal, because this is the whole mystery of this, that this happens at a scale of inches on beaches and a scale of hundreds of feet here.
And I think you made the crucial point, Joe, which is that we can understand what this is because we can see it on any beach.
We can see how water flows receding across a sandy medium will produce ripples.
But here, they're on this unbelievable scale where they're hundreds of feet long and 50 feet high, where they dwarf houses, and they're lying all across.
And what that tells us is that a huge water flow went across this plain and did this.
But even there, you've got to picture the tsunamis that we've experienced in the last decade and a half in Indonesia and Japan.
When they made landfall, those tsunamis were roughly between 20 and 50 feet, depending on where you were Relative to the oncoming wave and how far distant you were from it.
Here what you have to visualize is a tsunami sweeping over the land that's over a thousand feet deep.
That's what happened here.
And we know that because we can trace the high water marks on the hillsides.
The high water marks are clearly etched into the hillsides.
So we now know, based upon the study of the ripples, and the water here was moving down.
It's filling this basin.
It's rushing in in a great tsunami from the north of fresh water, melt water, coming off the ice sheet.
And it's sweeping down over this land at probably two or three hundred million cubic feet per second, which is an inconceivable amount of water.
It's many times in excess of every river on Earth flowing today all at once.
One of the trippier things about water is that water in itself is kind of fractal in some sort of a weird way.
When you look at the actual molecules of water, it's almost like we don't distinguish it as being a fractal thing because we see it as like this moving flow.
But if you're looking at the actual molecules of water, A cup of water that you dip your fingers in, which is seemingly completely innocuous, becomes this massive element of change when the volume is a thousand feet high and just rolling over with massive amounts of weight behind it.
One of these flood flows here is three orders of magnitude greater than the largest measured modern flood.
In other words, over a thousand times greater.
In terms of peak discharge or volume, you would have to scale up at least a thousand times greater than any modern measured flood To get to the smallest, really, of these flows here.
Because this is just one place, one locale, on five states, where you can trace literally an ocean of fresh water sweeping across the entire Pacific Northwest.
Yeah, and here's the thing that the Michael Shermers don't get.
When you understand the extent of this, the scale of this phenomena, and the severity, the inconceivable severity of this, in the aftermath of an event like this, what would remain of a city, a village?
I mean, you find like an old refrigerator or a car up on blocks in someone's backyard in the south, and it's, you know, the 1970s, and the rot has gotten into the frame.
But again, I come down to this, which is that we are not dealing with gloom and doom and the end of the world.
We're dealing with a problem that humanity should be confronting.
We should not be sticking our heads in the sand.
We should be confronting humanity.
This problem.
And that's why I support the work of the Comet Research Group because they are the only people right now who are confronting this problem and really getting to grips with it.
I mean, we should absolutely all support them and confront it because if something like this can happen once, what really makes sense is how many stories of floods there are in ancient times and how many parallels there are.
Yeah, it was Caitlin, the Indian artist who spent 30 years or so pre-Civil War, I think maybe a decade after the Civil War, painting Indians of different tribes.
And he wrote a book called Last Rambles Among the North American Indians.
Very, very interesting book.
But what really is interesting to me when I read the book years and years ago was his final conclusion to the book.
He says, after all of these different customs and traditions that have been handed down amongst these tribes...
They all have one thing in common.
They all have a memory or a story of a gigantic world-destroying flood.
And this included tribes down into Central America that he visited.
The Native American peoples who have been subjected to so much destruction over the years, they...
In their mythology, their traditions, their memories, they keep more of this than almost anybody else.
It's really tragic what has happened in the Americas from the time of the Spanish conquest, the deliberate destruction of knowledge, the terrible, horrendous abuses that Native American people suffered.
Our wisdom keepers.
They are the people who passed down the oral tradition and remembered the past.
So not only do we have cataclysms wiping the human memory, but we ourselves actively get involved in the human memory and wipe it.
We rub it out.
The burning of the Maya codices by the Spanish friars.
Thousands and thousands.
God knows what was in those documents.
You know, we might have had a whole other story about ourselves if we could have had access to those, but instead we're this destructive, cannibalistic species that just goes and smashes everything to bits.
It's a weird impulse that human beings have is when they move into an area and they take over it, one of the things they like to do is destroy their icons.
That's exactly the thought I had, because I think that's the one way, one of those areas where Velikovsky finally really nailed it, was mankind in amnesia.
That somehow we carry the trauma.
Because once you begin to get a handle, and you get to get the picture of these events as they occurred, and did occur, and would have been experienced by our ancestors, You've got to understand, what would it be like to see your entire world completely obliterated, starting over again from basically a barren mudfield?
You know, that's essentially what these people were faced with.
The other thing to bear in mind is, in the world today, our world, we have an advanced civilization.
America, you know, Germany, the industrialized technological countries.
And we have coexisting with them in South America, in the Namibian desert, we have hunter-gatherers.
So the notion that hunter-gatherers and an advanced civilization might coexist in the same epoch of history should not be strange to us because we're doing that today.
And that's what I would suggest happened Before 12,800 years ago, before the cataclysm of 12,800 years ago, that there was a fairly advanced civilization that was capable of mapping and exploring the world, creating gigantic works of architecture, and it coexisted with hunter-gatherers.
And who were the ones who survived the cataclysm?
The answer is the ones who survived the cataclysm were the hunter-gatherers, not the sophisticated peoples.
A few of them survived and they then settled amongst the hunter-gatherers and tried to transfer some of their knowledge and skills to them.
And it's the same today.
If we were to have a repeat of the Younger Dryas cataclysm today, I don't think that people from Los Angeles or London would be amongst the leading survivors.
I think the survivors would be people like the hunter-gatherers of the Amazon rainforest, because they're in the business of surviving.
That's what they do.
It's not a mystery to them.
It's not even a problem.
They do it all the time.
They would carry the human story forward.
And 10,000 years from now, their descendants would be telling a myth about how there was once a great civilization on this planet, so advanced that they could even go to the moon.
They could fly around the planet.
They could speak to one another on other sides of the Earth.
But they did something wrong.
They fell out of harmony with the universe.
They ceased to wear their prosperity with moderation.
I would say that those who are more technologically advanced are less likely to survive because they depend on a complex interrelated network of skills.
And any individual on his or her own, most of them...
Well, you're different, Joe, because you do know how to survive, but a lot of people don't know how to survive.
So you have these massive, essentially, deserts where no wildlife exists other than predatory species like coyotes and ravens and things like that.
And then you go out from there, and then you have these vast farmlands.
The only benefit of the vast farmlands is the amount of deer that exist now is greatly more than when Columbus landed.
But it's because they've almost become an agricultural animal.
It's almost like they're almost a domesticated animal.
They're a free, wild, domesticated animal.
I have a friend who has a farm in Iowa, and when you go there, it's very strange because he's got these wild, giant, 300-pound forest horses running around his backyard.
I mean, they're fucking everywhere.
There's all these giant deer.
And when we were there, it's what's called the rut.
So they're very horny.
So the big bucks who usually hide, they show themselves.
I'm like, this is a crazy place.
There's all these wild animals that exist along with people.
And even in a game-rich place like that, it's incredibly difficult to get to one.
There's this incredible complacency and arrogance of modern civilization that we are the apex and pinnacle of the human story, that we're the best that's ever come.
And that's a danger.
Mythologically, that is a very dangerous place to be.
When you start imagining yourself as the Apex and the pinnacle of everything.
That's precisely when the universe reminds you that you are not that at all.
Yeah, it's a very weird Existence that we have where we just sort of look at how things are right now and we can't imagine things being any different No matter what whether it's people that have to come to The realization that they've been injured like someone breaks their leg and also it just doesn't compute like how come I can't walk anymore Well, your reality is now shifted And this reality that we have here with this fairly healthy Earth could shift at any moment.
The Yellowstone volcano is the one that's been freaking me out the most over the last few years.
An interesting parallel would be if we look at what happens in smaller catastrophes, like we've seen today.
When we look at the...
For example, when Katrina hit New Orleans, right?
It was almost as if the human species separated into two subspecies.
You had one group of people that rose to the occasion and did heroic things.
They organized and they saved people spontaneously, you know, because the government was conspicuously absent for five days, the first five days.
Of the Katrina disaster.
And here you had a major flooding of New Orleans, and you had people spontaneously organizing and performing these heroic actions of saving their fellow man and doing just stupendous things, superhero-type things.
But then you had another segment of the population that just went completely barbaric.
And you had mass rapes and smashing of businesses and looting and just people running wild, complete unrestrained gangs and just committing violent acts at random.
And, you know, if you go back, you know, I oftentimes, as a thought exercise, think, how would we respond if we knew that there was a high probability of a Younger Dryas type event or series of events impending in our future?
The real scary thing is, there's two scary things.
One, if you survived.
Because you're like, fuck.
You know, if you really did survive and everybody else was jacked and all of a sudden you're dealing with some Mad Max type reality where people are starving to death and they're very desperate and they become almost like animals.
Or the other terrifying possibility is that you leave the future of civilization up to those other people.
Is that they survive, and they have kids, and their kids survive, and somehow or another, somewhere along the line, we get better and better at understanding our place here, which is what I think has happened.
And all it would take is one...
I mean, this is...
As much as people are complaining right now, as much as there's riots in the streets because...
Or, excuse me, protests in the streets.
Some riots, apparently.
But over the president-elect, what this time is, it represents the greatest time in history when it comes to safety, when it comes to knowledge, access to information, the way we understand each other.
I don't think it's ever been better as far as as long as we know.
But the problem is that there's also very rigid mind control.
The way that our societies work is it's turning people into drones.
People brought up to believe that their only purpose in existence is production and consumption.
The people forced to fit into a sort of narrow place in the machine, mass media beaming, you know, messages at us all the time.
Even the concept of democracy is absurd.
When you don't have complete transparency, when there are secrets, when things are hidden, how can the people vote, you know, with a clear mind if a lot is being hidden from them?
That's not democracy.
Democracies, in fact, invest in mind control, most unfortunate development.
Well, I wonder how long it's going to take before the rigid mindsets that are in place right now and this idea of this resistance to change that we were talking about when it comes to science, when it comes to accepting this...
Asteroidal impact theory and I think that exists in politics.
I think it exists in religion.
I think it exists socially the way we approach relationships and friendships and Just all of it is evolving in front of our eyes.
I was watching a movie last night Not another teenage movie.
Is that what it is?
Is that what it's called and I was live tweeting it so smoking pot and writing and Sometimes I just like to have the TV on and not listen to it.
Just just sometimes I like to like See some things when I'm just writing things sometimes I don't that last night I chose to do it that way and I just got so enamored in this weird movie from 2001 This is a the movie felt like a time machine.
It's like I was Watching this culture that does not exist anymore.
It's one of those like Teenager movies were like in college and they're drinking there's a lot of naked women and really racist sexist humor and it's really crude and goofy and stupid and I'm like this is so bizarre because they this doesn't exist anymore this kind of film like this is like this is like Al Jolson with blackface on or something and in a way it's like a cultural time machine like you get to go and for a brief moment see like this comedy that somebody concocted
in 2001 which seems so recent But it's such a, in that film, you get evidence of this weird cultural change.
I shouldn't say weird.
Massive cultural change that's happened as far as the way we're allowed to joke around about things.
Like, there's some racist shit in that movie.
Like, racist and sexist shit.
And violence, like men punching women in the face and shit.
Like, that you just can't really do in a comedy today.
And that's only 15 years ago.
And what is it going to be like if we can avoid getting hit by a rock, blowing ourselves up, Yellowstone blowing up in our face?
If we can keep going, I think we're on a great path, regardless of what people think about the president-elect.
It's a path where the future is not at all certain.
But humanity is at one of those...
One of those crossroads where you kind of stand on the edge of an abyss and you don't quite know what lies ahead.
And we can take a really great path out of this or we can take a really horrible path out of this.
And I think the key issue is that we do actually have choice.
It doesn't have to be that way.
I see a lot that's positive out there in the world.
I do think people are waking up.
I think they are questioning old structures.
They're refusing to put up with the bullshit any longer.
More and more people are doing that.
It's happening in the realm of politics.
It's happening in the realm of dealing with the big corporations.
It's happening in the realm of investigating the past.
We're just not going to be told what to think anymore.
That's encouraging.
But then on the other side, there are huge efforts being put precisely into making people think in certain ways, whether it's the advertising industry, whether it's political messages.
And so we have to be aware of that.
And it could go down the drone path, I mean like the beehive path, which would be, why even bother to be human if your society is turning you into a worker drone and a beehive life existence?
Or it could go down an expansion of consciousness and a realization of the incredible, beautiful potential of the human race.
Well, that's beautiful to hear because this is a time.
I was watching the John Oliver show.
It's a great show on HBO. Very funny guy and he's very left-wing leaning as is his show.
But they had this fuck 2016 thing where they were just naming off all the horrible things that happened in 2016. And then just saying goodbye to this terrible year.
I'm like...
Yeah, but a lot of good shit happened this year, too.
There's a lot of fantastic discoveries, a lot of interesting observations, a lot of people learned a lot of things in 2016 as well.
In effect, what happened, you had a very closed conservative society and then you had an outside shock in the form of the psychedelic drugs that came in and completely stirred up everything in art and music and fashion and even into scientific concepts of our place in the universe and time and space and in so many ways That had just a major impact on the direction that our society went.
And what would be the equivalent today or in our near future in terms of an outside shock that would suddenly wake people up would be another event, another Tunguska event.
And based upon everything that I've seen, it would suggest that events like that are going to happen and probably within our lifetime.
And when it does happen, Especially if the message of the story has been out and enough people have heard it.
5% of the people or 10% of the people are aware that there is this major impending potential paradigm shift.
And then we have an event like that.
An event like Tunguska 1908. I think that's all it would take because the magnitude of that event would have been such that it occurred today And you had anywhere from a million to two million people instantly wiped out, or a whole city instantly annihilated from a shot from space.
What effect would that have on the planetary consciousness?
Right, and that's the thing, is because when the probability models for a Tunguska-type event were first laid out in the 50s and 60s and into the 70s, it was pretty much determined that it was like something that would happen once a millennium, once every couple of millenniums, then it sort of got contracted to once every few centuries.
You know, it may be that it's actually much more like one or two a century.
Or maybe even perhaps clustered events where you may have three or four or half a dozen of those type events occurring over a very short window of time.
But an event like that happening, not one that would cause the extinction of civilization by any means, but an event like that that could, you know, wipe out a thousand square miles of landscape completely in an instant would have a major effect, I think, on The people of this planet.
Well, I think it's like the massive impact versus the slow trickle effect.
I mean, is it going to happen eventually?
Or is it going to happen in one gigantic swoop because of an event like an asteroidal impact where it kills a bunch of people and we wake up to the fragility of our existence?
Look, as a Brit, observing what's been happening in America as an outsider, I'm enormously encouraged by the legalization of cannabis movement that is taking place here and what it all means.
Sure, I like to smoke a joint, but this is not about getting high.
It's not about recreation.
What this is about is recognizing the sovereignty of adults...
To make decisions over their own bodies, their own health, and their own consciousness while doing no harm to others.
That's what it's about, and that's a really fucking important issue.
For me, that is the most important issue, because if we live in a society that is not prepared to recognize Adult sovereignty over one's own body and one's own consciousness, then that cannot be a free society in any meaningful way.
And so I applaud the people of America in those states who have voted for full legalization.
That's a brilliant thing to do and that's going to have an impact around the world because the war on drugs, all the ideology and lies about cannabis are all going to be proved wrong.
We're going to know that the emperor wears no clothes, that you can legalize cannabis and civilization does not fall apart, as the war on drugs lobby have been telling us for ages.
It's going to change everything, and it's a beautiful thing because it's the American people, whereas the American state, America as a governmental state presence on the world stage, has been the dark force behind the war on drugs.
It's, for me, a beautiful thing that it's the American people state by state who are winding that back and saying, we will not put up with this shit anymore.
Well, even when there's no financial stake in it, there's just a social stake, like what you're seeing right now with the left versus the right.
There's some people, like my friend Wanda Sykes just got booed offstage at some thing last night, apparently, where she went on some anti-Trump rant, and people got super upset at her.
There's these systems that are in place, this almost like wanting to fight.
It's not...
It sets us up in this bizarre team mentality where this left protects its ideas of the future and the right protects its ideas.
And I'm watching these people go at it back and forth on social media and it's toxic.
And I don't like to use that term because it's so compromised by, you know, toxic sexuality or toxic masculinity.
And I think that we have to resist the urge to fight.
I think this is when people push too far on the left, that's when the alt-right emerges.
When people push too far on the right, that's when the left comes up, and that's when Kent State emerges.
You have all these weird factions duking it out that have so much in common.
And a lot of times, the things that they don't have in common, it's either because of an ignorance or it's because of an ideological dispute or a lack of communication.
And I think if those three things are in place, at least open lines of communication, which is also fostered by marijuana.
You get these people talking openly and vulnerably about these things, and you find out that a lot of our misgivings and our misunderstandings about each other are just misconceptions, miscommunications.
And even if we disagree on things, I have friends that I disagree on a lot of stuff with, but we're very close.
And in a flood this swiftly moving with this much turbulence, you literally have vorticular eddies, high intensity, high amplitude, high energy underwater tornadoes.
Literally underwater tornadoes.
Now these underwater tornadoes are typically, in this case, about a half a mile wide.
Giant 18,000-ton boulder brought there and chained in an iceberg, an iceberg floating on the flood, an iceberg the size of an oil tanker carrying an 18,000-ton boulder, carried on the flood, grounds 700 feet up a valley side, rests there as the floodwaters recede, the ice melts away, and the boulder is left sitting there.
Well, you know, they're only just catching on to what they're sitting on top of.
The first time I went out here in 98, there was the Ice Age Floods Institute, and I went to their only location, which was in the Better Business Bureau in Moses Lake, Washington.
And they had one room in the back of this Better Business Bureau, or no, Chamber of Commerce, Chamber of Commerce.
And there was two elderly ladies in there who were basically the overseers of the group.
Now there's about two dozen chapters.
And every year there's several guided field trips led by geologists who are studying this in their off time.
And I've been on a number of these just to participate and get the access to the geologists in order to pick their brains.
But this is very close to Wenatchee, Washington.
So if anybody's wanting to find this on Google Earth, this is a Google Earth image.
Now what we're going to do...
Oh, but before we leave the Google Earth image, I was going to explain that you've got those...
See those lakes, those meandering lakes up there?
What you've got to picture is you've got a sheet of water coming.
And as it's coming over this ridge, it's beginning to selectively erode into fault lines and cracks within the bedrock.
Can you picture that?
The water is going to naturally try to go into those low spots where there's cracks and fissures, and it'll start going from a sheet into channeling.
What goes from sheet to a channel, then that spills over the ridge.
And in the middle, you see this.
It's called a rock blade.
See that, the rock blade is that, yes, that's it right there, separating the two alcoves.
If the flood had continued for another few days, that rock blade would have been gone, and you would have had a single alcove up there.
Now, in the next, as this proceeds, what we're going to do is we're going to go down, and we're going to be right at the head of the rock blade.
Right there, yeah.
Right there.
We're standing right there.
So now you're going to get to see, as the drone is about to take off, you're seeing the landscape.
We're looking to the east in the direction of those Finger Lakes.
What's to me stunning, I mean, this is really beautiful and cool and everything like that, but what's really stunning is the initial picture, where it becomes so obvious, that above picture where you see the farmland and that just, it's so obviously cut.
When you're looking above it, like even here, I mean, you get a sense of it, but if you had just showed this to me, quite honestly, I probably wouldn't have pieced that together.
But when you look at it, the original image, it's so blatantly obvious.
Well, that's the thing now, is we are in this position where we can see it.
And when I take people out in the field, what I do is I prep them first by showing these images from NASA, the satellite photography, the Google Earth imagery, aerial photography.
Then ground photography, and then you go out in the landscape.
And at that point, you can start having this framework for understanding what you're seeing.
An adventure of exploration that we're just getting launched on.
This is recovering the lost past of humanity.
And if I may, I want to make a pitch again for the Comet Research Group.
I think it's really important.
It's not just a matter of funding their research.
It's also a matter of sending a message that we the people are prepared to take matters into our own hands and Support those scientists who are working with open minds, inquiring into the past.
And whether you give a dollar or a hundred dollars or whatever, any little counts.
It's the voice of the people as much as the money that really matters.
These guys, the Comet Research Group, they need their research funding.
They have an Indiegogo crowdfunding campaign.
You can go to my website.com.
Press the Comet Research Group banner.
It will take you to a page with all the relevant links.
Please consider supporting it.
It's valid, it's worthwhile, it's worthy work, and it has the potential to change the whole story of our past and our future.
And it's a story that would be incredibly exciting to be a part of.
And that's what I'm trying to get people to think.
Look, there's this thing happening, and it really, it is democratic in its own way.
And you don't have to be some specialist or a particular authority in some branch of academically approved science to begin to appreciate and understand this.
Getting out into the field and seeing this kind of stuff firsthand, getting it into the discussion and the debate, and spending more time on this, because it's such an interesting story.
And that's what the scientists at the Comet Research Group are offering, that the people who contribute will participate in certain ways in this research in the future.
Our time here on this planet has been confusing for so many reasons, and one of the big ones is not understanding how we got here, and that's one of the reasons why your book, I think, is so important to me, just give you this new perspective of how this sort of civilization emerged.
Another problem that I think we deal with all the time is light pollution.
Randall and I were having a discussion earlier about how ancient cultures related to the cosmos.
As above, so below.
They felt themselves connected with the cosmos.
They made their monuments in alignment with key celestial bodies.
They did it very carefully.
There was a sense of bringing down the enchantment of the heavens onto Earth.
In modern societies, we can't even see the stars.
You live in the middle of a big city, the stars are gone.
The light pollution just blots them out.
You never think they're there, and you forget, actually, that you're part of a majestic cosmos.
Everything about it is mystery.
We are immersed in mystery from the moment we're born to the moment we die, and yet our society is telling us, oh, it's all very prosaic and dull, and it's just about production and consumption.
I think everybody owes it to themselves to go out into the desert in the middle of...
When you know there's a stretch where the moon is not going to be out and there's going to be clear skies, especially if you live in Southern California, you can get out to the desert pretty easy.
Just get out away from all the cities and just look up and it'll freak you out.
It'll freak you out because it's one of those things that you kind of really take for granted because most of the time the sky is just a dark black...
Featureless thing with a couple little white dots that aren't really that compelling.
But when you get out there and you see the actual Milky Way itself, you go, oh, holy shit.
Well, see, now we could have, you know, every year there's probably a dozen high-altitude events that could have been witnessed by ancient peoples that we are completely oblivious to because of our urban existence, because of light pollution.
Because nobody is really looking at the sky.
But these high-altitude events would be essentially equivalent to, like, Hiroshima-sized bombs going off 20 miles up.
And we miss those?
Yeah.
Especially like if it's in the daytime, and you're not looking right up there, you're not going to see it.
And at night, if you're living in the city, if you're inside the light pollution, by the time it happens, it's over.
But if you're out in a completely wilderness area where you've got...
You know, visual access to the stars, and you're aware of that, and you're constantly aware of the presence of the sky, you're going to see much more of that kind of thing happening.
Then, if the cosmos decides to get a little bit more active, which it apparently does from time to time, suddenly the sky is now, becomes a major factor in your existence, your tribal existence, your cultural existence.
Especially if in those episodes you have multiple fireball-type events that could be on the scale of anywhere from Chelyabinsk up to Tunguska.
And that's what Klub and Napier, that's their scenario, is these clusters of...
And then we'll look at a couple of Google Earth things, and then we will look at a couple of U.S. Geological Survey things, and then we'll look at some photographs.
This is one of the early NASA photographs taken from 500 miles up back in the late 70s, actually.
And what we got here is the two big scabland tracks that show two of the big meltwater streams that have left their scars in the landscape.
So each one of those varies roughly between 10 and 20 miles wide, and the bigger one on the right is probably 50 to 60 miles long, or actually a little bit longer than that.
But you can actually see that when the water swept down from the north out of British Columbia, it washed away 200 feet, roughly, 1 to 200 feet of the existing topsoil that had covered the basalt bedrock.
Basalt bedrock, by the way, that was originally formed by eruptions of the Yellowstone caldera, interestingly.
So the water came down, swept away the topsoil, and left the bare, dark basalt exposed down below.
The feature that we just looked at is not even really in this NASA photograph.
Hey, Randall, I think we should keep in mind a lot of the audience aren't actually seeing the visuals on this.
They're not.
What I want to say is that all across the Pacific Northwest is a landscape that has been utterly scarred and devastated by gigantic flood that took place 12,000.
So as you see this, Joe, and you realize the scale of what we just looked at, and now you're seeing that within this whole landscape that was essentially inundated.
You'll start to get the scale of the thing, and that's what I'm trying to do here.
If you, Joe, can get the scale of this in your mind, I've accomplished something today.
This seems like something that would be really interesting to debate.
I mean, I would love to see someone who's a geologist that, you know, I'm sure there's someone out there that is listening to this that may have a dispute with it.
Well, in my mind, there's really no arguing with this evidence.
I mean, it's too overwhelming.
And the question really comes down to...
At this point, nobody disputes that there were catastrophic floods.
The question is, what was the mechanism?
How many were there?
How long did it take?
How long did it take?
Was it a bunch of catastrophic but smaller floods?
Or was it back to Bretz's original model of one giant flood?
And I think the truth actually lies somewhere between the two.
And again, the geology gets complicated, but I'm writing it up.
So I will explain in detail what my thoughts are, and after having crisscrossed thousands of miles of this landscape repeatedly, and basically absorbed every piece of scientific literature ever written on it, I've evolved some ideas about what could have happened here and how it happened.
Well, I was a grown adult, and I found out that North America, most of it was by What was it, 10, 12,000 years ago, was covered by a mile-high sheet of ice.
That's exactly, that's a great phrase, an eraser for the world.
And that is the thing that so many of the skeptics haven't factored into their thinking when they're going, well, where's the evidence?
The evidence, as you've got to understand, is that we have to rethink the possibility of evidence once we know that there has been these erasers of the world that have transpired.
And not just once, but I mean, what we're looking at here is probably the most severe events in the last five million years.
And I have a reason for using that number five million.
Not because I'm, you know, trying to pump the biblical flood model.
I'm far from it.
What I am trying to do is throw out pictures whenever I realize here's a great quote, and it doesn't matter where it's from because there's so many flood legends you can quote from.
Well, the biblical flood model is, it is one of those myths, it's one of those traditions that have come to, one of thousands of traditions that speak of this.
The whole ancestral memory of the human race is telling us that something terrible happened.
Also in that a lot of these stories you're talking about massive translations from ancient Hebrew to Latin to Greek and a lot is lost in the process and you're dealing with a lot of these stories were handed down from generation to generation for like what was it like a thousand years before the first version was ever written?
Now, if the water that was creating Grand Canyon, or the Niagara Falls, rather, right up there, if that all receded and we could see the bottom, wouldn't it look similar to what you're seeing here?
The interesting thing about water erosion and sedimentation is it's scale invariant.
So you can look at features, and coming up in the pictures here, I've got a beautiful example of scale invariance, where you see the small version and the large version, and it's exactly the same thing.
That's why if you go into any geology techs, they've always got something in the photographs, like a rock pic or a person standing there.
Otherwise, it's hard to get a sense of the scale of what you're looking at, right?
So my question, though, was that if that's the case, if you could drain Niagara Falls and it would have a similar feature set to what you're seeing on the ground there, well, we know that Niagara Falls has been doing that for a long, long time.
Well, for one thing, it's not basalt bedrock, so you're not going to see quite the same type of erosion, because really what you've got to consider is that all different rock types erode differently.
Also, you know, what happens is you have regimes of flow, so that what you have in Niagara today is a lower flow regime, which doesn't have anywhere near the type of turbulence or erosive potential is when you get water moving at 50 or 60 miles an hour.
One reason we definitely can know that this is the case is because we see the association with the giant current ripples, we see the boulders that have been Plucked and quarried, and some of them are 40 and 50 feet in diameter, you see?
And we'll look at some of those coming up in the next picture.
That was extruded basically with the eruption of the Yellowstone caldera 15 million years ago, basically, but then covered up by a couple of hundred feet of lost topsoil, and then that was exposed when the floods came through.
Go to the next 1018, and you'll see an example of some of the debris that was left behind by the floodwaters when they finally ceased.
There's the stuff that you're looking at.
Now, the bigger stuff there is 30 and 40 feet.
Those would be like four-story buildings down there.
Right, this massive, gigantic river moving 50, 60 miles an hour, sweeps through there, plucks and tears the bedrock, and then when the spigots finally get turned off, the water starts subsiding, and this stuff that's being carried in there just gets left in the wake, just like you're going to see any...
Modern, smaller flood is going to leave material in its wake.
The difference is this material is piles of boulders the size of houses, gravel bars two and three hundred feet thick and three miles long, and they're all in it.
So see, the answer to your question is, and this is how Bretz finally did it, was by showing that it was the full suite of evidence taken integrally that created a picture that was undeniable to the skeptics.
It was overwhelming, because every piece fit together too perfectly.
And there was no other explanation other than gigantic hydraulic events.
Well, you have to ask, what could be the change in the human orientation to life on this planet?
Like, for example, I remember the first Earth Day, 1970, right?
When this consciousness about, hey, you know what?
Our existence on this planet is having an effect on this planet, right?
And at that point you see this whole environmental consciousness emerge that didn't exist before that, right?
Well, I think maybe in the next decade or two we're going to see a new environmental consciousness that involves the recognition that this planet we live on is a very dynamic place, and has been so, and is the key to deciphering a lot of mysteries, geological, cultural, historical, and paleontological, biological, etc.
That this has been a dominant factor in the evolution of Basically everything that's been going on on this planet whether you're looking at millions of years or thousands of years It's just it's such a strange time to be alive where all this stuff is coming together all this information is being exposed As though a hidden archive has been has been broken open and the stuff is spilling out and you don't know Whether you've opened Pandora's box
Now this, we're going to travel about 500 miles south out onto the Utah...
That's beautiful.
And what you're seeing there is basically dry cataracts.
Now that you've seen these cataracts, you can begin to recognize them all over the place.
Now this has not been acknowledged as being a cataract, but what you actually see when you look at the modern erosion is that these features are being slowly eroded and eaten away by the modern erosion.
And it's a different erosional regime altogether that creates features like this.
And this is a vast scale of erosion here, and when you travel over the Southwest, that is the most striking thing that you're going to experience if you're empathic with the landscape, which is that there's been this enormous amount of erosion.
Now, I'm not saying that this enormous amount of erosion was all created by one flood, but I think what it is possibly saying is that when we go back over several million years, Gigantic floods on this scale aren't that exceptional.
That there's something that from time to time...
And see, here's the thing.
This is completely removed from the glaciers.
Any water that would have eroded this landscape was not coming from the glaciers.
So, at the same time, now get this, at the same window of time that these flood events are happening up in Washington and Idaho and Montana, this caldera suddenly fills up with water, and the water spills over the rim and cuts a canyon hundreds of feet deep.
Now, what could cause that to suddenly fill up with water?
And it's completely removed.
It's not receiving glacial meltwater.
There's only one thing by default, and that would be rainfall.
A lot of rainfall falling over days and days at a time.
So if you go to the next...
We'll see what sits down in the bottom of this valley is thousands of these gigantic rolled boulders.
And you know that they're water transported because they're round.
They're rolled.
That's what water does.
It rolls these things.
Now, this is in New Mexico, see?
So this is related to the spillway, the overflow of Wallace Caldera, which has been dated to that same interval.
When the floods were happening up north, the same interval that now the comet is dating to.
Is this coincidence, or are the two related?
I would say it would be very premature to dismiss it and say that they're not related.
Because, as Graham just said, one of the consequences of an impact, whether it's into the ocean or the ice sheet, is you're going to have extreme amounts of water vapor injected catastrophically into the atmosphere.
Which is then going to rain out in incredible torrential downpours that might last for days at a time.
And along with that water vapor is a tremendous amount of particulate mass.
And it's that rain out that I would say caused the erosion on the Sphinx and tells us that the Sphinx is 12,000 years old, not 2,500 B.C. You guys are freaking me out.
And so what I'm showing here is just a little bit selecting random almost dots to show you that no matter where you look, you're going to see evidence of these events imprinted into the landscape.
Yeah, go to the next slide, 1033. And if you go down and you stand on that floodplain down there, You'll see the kind of stuff that got left behind.
This is the sediment load being carried in the flood.
5,000 years ago, which creates tsunamis on both sides of the Indian Ocean, dated to about massive, massive tsunami deposits.
And again, this whole argument of the Younger Dryas cataclysm between 12,800 and 11,600 years ago, the strongest case is, the focus of the science has been on 12,800 years ago, but there's a lot of interest in the 11,600 years ago as well,
and the strongest The suggestion of what caused that, that sudden rise in temperatures accompanied by meltwater pulse 1b, was a second encounter with more fragments of the debris of the comet.
This time, the impacts not being on the North American ice camp, but in a major ocean, probably the Pacific.
And that then puts a huge plume of water vapor into the upper atmosphere and shrouds the Earth and creates the greenhouse effect that accounts for the radical rise in temperature that occurred 11,600 years ago.
More science needs to be done on that.
It's another reason why I want to see the Comet Research Group funded, because this is important work.
The only dates that we have that are hard dates are of volcanic ash, primarily, from Mount St. Helens, that date at 13,000 years.
But they use that as a baseline and then assume that there was multiple floods, and each flood was separated by 50 to 100 years.
And what they've done is they've gone from Bretz's original model of a single flood into a dozen floods, into 40 floods, and now up to 80 or 90 floods.
Which I disagree with.
See, I think you have to understand this in two phases.
Because the impact phase is going to melt a whole lot of ice all of a sudden, but it's not going to melt all of it.
It's going to leave a huge amount of residual ice in the aftermath.
Now what we see is that particularly after the 11,600 year-ago event, at that point the whole planet comes right out of the Ice Age inexplicably.
It's not like you could just go dig into the side of that hill at that same level and find something that's organic and absolutely dated to that, because that's all stone.
Go to 1041 and we'll see an interesting artist rendition by...
Edward Riau, who did all the illustrations for the original Jules Verne books, and he did a version for a geology text.
The guy's name is skipping me right now, but I thought it was an interesting image because it basically shows an event on the scale of what we're talking about.
And what's interesting here is you see that the torrents are carrying icebergs, and in this one iceberg in the foreground, I call it Graham's Rock from now on.
Okay, normal-sized people, and, you know, whatever, six feet tall, and bounce them on top of each other, 12, 18, you're looking at probably at least 35, 40 feet tall, right?
I mean, what we're doing here is we're looking where these flood events are preserved the most spectacularly.
And the reason is because you had a very steep gradient from the ice sheet elevation to the Pacific Ocean.
But Graham and I, when we traveled across, we traveled across the Continental Divide and traveled from the Rocky Mountains to the Twin Cities, which is on the Mississippi River.
And all the way across, we were crossing huge meltwater coolies.
We crossed the Missouri River Valley, which is an underfit stream, just very similar to the Snake, where the modern Missouri is just a little ribbon of river occupying this massive meltwater channel, of which there are hundreds across the plains.
And then when we got to Minneapolis, we went up and we visited some of the largest known potholes.
Probably, you know, I'm guessing, you know, these giant meltwater floods, this is right along the St. Croix River, which forms the border between Minnesota and Wisconsin.
It was probably of several weeks duration at its peak, at its peak.
And so the drilling of these bedrock probably was accomplished within that time span.
Listen, on top of these flood sediments from, I've documented it from Ohio to Washington State, there are thick layers of LUS. Now LUS is this strange topsoil that came down and it's, they've been arguing for generations, is it wind deposited or water deposited?
But the curious thing is it seems to be both wind and water deposited.
But I think the obvious explanation for it is that when you see the top layers of the flood sediments, particularly in the back flood regions where the water was calmer rather than so torrential, you see these layers.
They're called rhythmites.
They're very rhythmical.
On top of that is a layer of this lost topsoil with this vertical structure.
Well, to me, and again, without getting into the technical background, I think the logical explanation and most likely explanation is that at the tail end of the final flood flows, what you're seeing is a rainfall of mud.
When we think of the idea of these tsunamis, we think of water that you can see, but we're most likely dealing with the entire air around you filled with torrential downpour and solid matter and everything's flying through the air.