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Jan. 14, 2016 - Project Camelot
01:42:50
KERRY CASSIDY INTERVIEWS MICHAEL CREMO RE FORBIDDEN ARCHEOLOGY
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Thank you.
Thank you.
And we're going to get his explanation of what forbidden archaeology really means to him once we get going here.
And I'm going to just read a very brief bio.
So it says Michael Cremo is on the cutting edge of science and culture issues.
In the course of a few months' time, he might be found on a pilgrimage to sacred sites in India, appearing on a national television show.
Lecturing at a mainstream science conference or speaking at an alternative science gathering.
As he crosses disciplinary and cultural boundaries, he presents to his various audiences a compelling case for negotiating a new consensus on the nature of reality.
And that's a great summation.
It's quite a long view of what it is you are involved in, Michael.
So I'm going to I'll bring you on the screen here and ask you to elaborate on who you really are and what you consider to be your mission because I think it's a really fascinating mission that you've kind of chosen for yourself and quite unusual in your approach.
So please feel free to introduce yourself.
Well, I'm Michael Cremo.
I'm the author of books like Forbidden Archaeology and Human Devolution, a Vedic Alternative to Darwin's Theory.
And I'm concerned with the questions, who are we and where did we come from?
And these are very important questions because we tend to set our values and goals and ambitions based on the answers that we get to these questions.
Who am I and where did I come from?
For example, if I think I'm an American man and that's the limit of my identity, then I behave like that.
So, for the past several centuries, past couple of centuries, the supporters of the dominant theories of human origins in science Have had the power to dictate the answers to these questions through their monopoly in the education system.
And basically, they're giving what I regard as incorrect answers to these questions.
Who are we and where did we come from?
The most common answers that they give are, well, we're Another type of hominin, a kind of ape-like creature that evolved on this planet over the past couple hundred thousand years.
They would say before 200,000 years ago, there were no humans like us on Earth.
There were only more primitive ape-like creatures.
But If the great wisdom traditions of the world give a different answer to this question about who we are as the human species, they would say, well, we're not just an accident, a recent accidental byproduct of some blind evolutionary process.
Rather, we've been on this planet since the very beginning, and there's a purpose for our existence here.
In my book, Forbidden Archaeology, what I've tried to do is show that there is some archaeological evidence that supports what various ancient wisdom traditions say about our origins.
For example, I've been a practitioner of a system of yoga called bhakti yoga, the yoga of devotion for over 40 years now.
And part of my practice of that system of bhakti yoga is studying the ancient Sanskrit writings of India.
And among those writings is a group called the Puranas.
The Puranas are the historical writings, and they contain accounts of human civilizations, human populations, existing on this planet many millions of years ago, going right back to the very beginnings of the history of life on Earth.
So, when I first encountered Those teachings, I began to wonder about them because they were completely different from anything I had learned from my teachers in high school or university.
And I began to wonder is, are they just mythological tales that were invented by the authors of these writings?
Or is there perhaps some factual basis for this idea of extreme human antiquity?
This idea that our human species has been around for a lot longer than mainstream science is prepared to accept.
So that's what got me looking into the history of archaeology.
Of course, the first place I looked was in the current textbooks of archaeology.
But in there, you don't find any evidence for extreme human antiquity.
You only see the discoveries that support the dominant evolutionary paradigm, namely that humans like us first appeared less than 200,000 years ago on this planet.
So I decided, well, let me look beyond the textbooks.
Let me look into the original scientific reports.
Now because of the way I was educated and grew up, I have a reading knowledge of many of the European languages like German, French, Italian, Spanish, and so on.
So I began investigating Not just reports in the English language, but archaeological reports in all the different languages that I knew.
And when I started looking into these original scientific reports, I discovered something that really fascinated me.
I discovered there were many archaeologists and geologists and other scientists Who were reporting finding human bones, human artifacts, and human footprints in layers of rock that go much further back in time than 200,000 years.
In many cases, millions of years.
So, that It surprised me.
I wasn't really expecting to find these reports.
I thought maybe there'll be one or two interesting anomalies.
When I started doing this research, I thought maybe I'll do eight weeks of research.
I'll write some short little article about it and move on to something else.
But as I got into the research, the eight weeks turned into eight months and the eight months turned into eight years because one report led to another.
It was like unraveling a detective story.
So I collected all those reports.
And put them in a book which I chose to call Forbidden Archaeology.
And why forbidden?
Well, because these reports, although they're there in what I call the primary scientific literature, the original reports by archaeologists, geologists, and other earth scientists, Published in their professional, peer-reviewed, scientific publications, they are missing from the textbooks today.
So I could see there was a process that I call knowledge filtration going on.
So that's why I call the topic Forbidden Archaeology.
Okay, well, thank you for that.
So at this moment, what I wanted to do was also talk to you about the person that you considered a guru.
And I'm sorry, I can't pronounce his name.
Perhaps you can for me.
But I was wondering whether he had any influence over your sort of path of research.
Yes, as I mentioned, I've been a practitioner of bhakti yoga for a number of years.
I grew up in a military family.
My father was an intelligence officer in the United States Air Force.
So that meant some things for me as I was growing up as a young person.
One thing it meant I was moving to a lot of different places in the United States and around the world.
So I got exposed to a lot of different cultures and worldviews.
And among the different worldviews that I got exposed to, the spiritual worldview of ancient India with its systems of yoga and meditation attracted me.
And I eventually became a disciple of a guru from India.
Actually, what really set me off on my path is once I was at a Grateful Dead concert and I received a copy of Bhagavad Gita, translated by this guru, Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada.
And I read that book and I became interested in those teachings.
So eventually, after a few years, I became his initiated disciple.
That was in 1976.
Now, part of my studies led me to These accounts of extreme human antiquity that are found in some of the ancient Sanskrit literatures that he translated, like the Bhagavat Purana, one of the histories.
And there was another of his disciples, Richard Thompson, who was a PhD mathematician who got his PhD from Cornell University.
We were Discussing these matters.
And he told me that Bhaktivedanta Swami was very interested in trying to develop a Vedic scientific approach to these questions.
Not just this question of human antiquity, but cosmology and physics and biology and a whole range of topics but the one we decided to work on first was this question of human origins so yes my guru,
my spiritual teacher did have some influence on my choice of topic So, the person that you, I think, co-wrote Forbidden Archaeology with, his first name is Richard, is that correct?
Yeah, Thompson.
Okay, and he was also apparently a disciple of this guru?
Yes.
And so was he, in other words, it would seem you became friendly, I assume, with him, and The two of you had both a passion going in the same direction?
Yes.
And actually, I would say when our relation first started, he was more or less my mentor.
He was a scientist himself, and he had thought deeply about these questions.
Myself, I don't have a PhD in any of the sciences, and my ambition when I was younger was simply to be a writer and to be involved in something universal,
something that goes beyond the narrow boundaries of nationality The constructs that define human existence for so many people.
So, by the way, just so you know where I'm coming from, I've actually studied the Bhagavad Gita when I was younger and have also studied Eastern philosophy and been to India and Nepal.
And so I do find it fascinating how that has influenced your path.
And sent you in a direction that perhaps other people would be more hesitant to pursue.
And I also wonder, is Richard still alive?
Thompson, does he speak out on these subjects at this time, or what is his status?
He left this world a few years ago, so now he's no longer with us.
The work that I did with him in writing and researching Forbidden Archaeology was done in the 1980s.
So, no, he's no longer here, but he has several works of his own in addition to the book that we co-authored, Forbidden Archaeology, and they're available for people.
One thing I would like to say, however, is that I don't claim to have a monopoly on truth.
I don't think that the Bhagavad Gita, for example, or Indian spirituality in general has a monopoly on truth.
I think truth can be found in a lot of different places and a lot of different wisdom traditions.
I think one of the big problems we see in the world today is exclusive claims to truth.
That are sometimes enforced violently upon other people.
So, although my own personal path has led me in a certain direction, I would just like to make it very clear that I don't think I have a monopoly on truth or my way is the only way.
Okay, well that's very good to hear.
I'm very happy to hear you say that.
In terms of where you started and with your investigations and where you've come to at this time, do you feel that you have...
brought forward to the world some very specific examples, for example, you know, in other words, that you are a person who has gone to the sites, you've, you know, I guess, sort of uncovered various skeletons and so on, and relics that have proven, in a sense, a lot of what you posited early on based on other people's work,
but it seems that you also have substantiated over the years yourself and brought these cases forward. but it seems that you also have substantiated over the So do you feel that you have substantiated this notion that humanity has been here since, well, for millions of years and so I wonder how you feel about that, how you feel about your overall work?
Well, Forbidden Archaeology was...
A first step in my work.
That book documents archaeological evidence for extreme human antiquity.
And I would like to make it clear I'm not primarily a field archaeologist going out and digging.
Most of my digging has been archival, digging into reports that aren't very well known.
This means digging into very I've got rare kinds of documents and books and publications that may be decades or even a century or more old in different languages.
So that's part of my work.
I do visit archaeological sites.
I visit museum collections to verify that artifacts mentioned in these different publications are there.
And I go to mainstream archaeological conferences and I present my findings and ideas.
So that's the kind of work that I do.
After people read my book, Forbidden Archaeology, they would ask me questions.
And one of the questions they asked was, what has been the reaction of scientists to your work?
So to answer that question, I put together a book called Forbidden Archaeology's Impact.
When Forbidden Archaeology came out, it attracted quite a bit of attention from the scientific community.
The book was reviewed in most of the professional scientific journals that deal with human origins.
So, as you might imagine, the book was very controversial, so some of the reviews were quite negative, harshly so.
And other reviews Even though the authors may not have agreed with me completely, they saw some value to what I was doing.
For example, one archaeologist, Tim Murray, wrote a review of forbidden archaeology in British Journal for History of Science.
And he said, this book provides a useful compendium of case studies and the history and philosophy of science.
Which is one of the things that I really wanted to do with the book, provide case studies that show how evidence is treated in science, how it's sometimes subjected to being filtered out if it doesn't go along with a dominant paradigm.
So in this book, Forbidden Archaeology's Impact, I included all of The scientific reviews of the work.
I included my correspondence with scientists on the internet and by snail mail.
And then people would ask me, okay, you know, you've written this book, Forbidden Archaeology, and you've presented a lot of evidence that contradicts the current Theories of human origins, but what theory are you going to provide in its place?
So to answer that question, I wrote a book called Human Devolution, A Vedic Alternative to Darwin's Theory.
And the basic message of that book was, before we even asked the question, Where did human beings come from?
We should first of all ask the question, what is a human being?
We should know what it is we're trying to explain.
Otherwise, how can we tell if we've explained it or not if we don't even know what it is we're talking about?
Now most scientists today would say that a human being or any other living thing is just a machine made of molecules or just a machine made of matter in competition with other such machines for survival.
It's a very materialistic conception of what we really are.
But I don't agree with that.
I think there's something associated with the human organism that goes beyond molecules, matter.
There is a conscious self that is completely non-material and has an existence that is completely separate from that of matter.
Matter doesn't produce consciousness, but Somehow or other, consciousness can become associated with matter.
So, in that sense, what we really are is not the machine made of molecules.
We are the conscious self that is using that vehicle.
And that conscious self isn't produced by brain chemistry.
It has its own independent existence.
So, in that sense, as conscious beings, we don't evolve up from matter, rather we devolve or come down from what I call a level of pure consciousness.
In that book, Human Devolution, I document various categories of scientific evidence that support that idea.
You know, medical studies of out-of-body experiences, psychiatric studies of past life memories, things of that sort, various areas of research into what some people call the paranormal.
I would call it the really normal, but Some people call it the paranormal.
It also takes us into questions about the ubiquity of life in the cosmos, which brings up the question of conscious, intelligent life elsewhere in the universe and beyond.
So, along those lines, and I appreciate that explanation of your book because that's a fascinating premise and obviously one that most of my audience, I believe, if you're at all familiar with Project Camelot, would support.
Can you tell me, in your own life, did you have any past life memories of Because you obviously studied with this guru, and I assume you learned meditation, and usually in sort of the process, one comes across past life memories.
Were you at all influenced by those past life memories if you had them?
Well, one way that this comes up...
is in terms of abilities or talents that a person might have that are difficult to explain in terms of just one lifetime.
I mean sometimes it would happen that a child, for example, displays at a very young age highly developed musical abilities or mathematical abilities or artistic abilities.
Ever since I can remember, I've had a fascination with words and a desire to arrange words into text.
In other words, be a writer.
And my mother once, my late mother once, told me that when I was an infant, you know, two years old, She gave me a bowl of alphabet soup and instead of eating it, I just began spelling out words in the bowl.
So I just take that as just a sign that I had some previous connection with writing in a developed way.
Of course, everybody writes to some extent, but My whole adult life has been based on my position as an author.
So I think that is something that I began in a previous life and that I'm continuing in this life.
And I've also had strong feelings of deja vu, a sense of having been in a place before.
Like India or Russia.
Sometimes these things may come out in dreams because According to the understanding that's there in the Vedic text, we have, in addition to our gross physical body, a subtle body made of mental and intellectual energies.
And when a gross physical body disintegrates, dies, in other words, the subtle body continues and it contains memories that it takes to the next existence.
So, sometimes these memories come out in dreams and I've had very vivid dreams that place me in countries.
Two of them that I've had dreams about are India and Russia for some reason.
You know, when I was in university, I studied the Russian language.
So there are things like that.
And also regression, also.
Well, can you say what parts of India or any particular setting in Russia or India that you seem to resonate with you?
Can you be a bit more specific in terms of your own, you know...
Memories.
I don't want to claim to have very specific memories like that.
Some people do.
And there are scientists who studied this.
Dr.
Ian Stevenson, for example, would extract very detailed memories from children and verify them.
I don't think that my memories are on that level, at least not the way they've Come to me.
So I'm going to be honest about that.
You know, that although I have a strong feeling about these things and I've had some dreams and deja vu experiences and feel that my talents have been with me for a while,
I don't want to claim, just being honest and truthful, that I've had Detailed recollections of the type that could be used as scientific proof of a past life memory.
Some people do have that type.
Definitely.
Have you ever been regressed?
Once.
I was at a conference on Atlantis and there was a researcher there.
I don't remember her name right off hand.
It was several years ago.
But she did a regression on me, and in the regression...
And sometimes you don't know if you're being regressed, whether you're being influenced in some way by the therapist to come up with a certain experience.
But I had a detailed...
A vision, you could say, of having been present on some island at the time of some great natural disaster.
And I was, at that time, according to the vision or regression memory that I had, or regression vision, whatever we want to call it, I I pictured myself or envisioned myself as young,
maybe 14 or 15 years old, in a male body, but being put with persons of similar age on a boat to be taken away from that place.
Fascinating.
That is some imagery that came to me during a regression.
And have you ever been drawn to Egypt?
As you may know, it is said that a lot of the people who were abandoning Atlantis went to Egypt.
You know, I'm interested in Egypt, and I've traveled to many places all over the world, but I've never been to Egypt.
Oh, no.
You know, it seems...
There's some kind of barrier there or something.
I think otherwise I would have been there by now because I'm just fascinated by the researchers who've gone there, John Anthony West, Robert Graval, Robert Schock and others who've gone there and done and others who've investigated those.
That part of the world, and I'm fascinated by it, but I've never been led there or allowed to go there.
I've just been led to other places.
Have you spent any time in the Middle East at all, other countries nearby, even?
Yes, I have.
In 1969, I was young at that time, and I was traveling in Europe, and it was in the autumn.
And many young people were also traveling in Europe, and they were going south gradually, from Denmark to Germany to Austria to Yugoslavia to Greece.
to Turkey and some of them went to Israel and I went with them.
Although my background is Roman Catholic, I thought it would be good, interesting to go there and visit Jerusalem and Bethlehem and places like that.
But I've been to other places.
I've been to Jordan, I've been to Turkey, I've been to Iran, I've been to Afghanistan, I've been To many of the countries in the Mideast, but not to Egypt.
Would you still consider going there in your life?
I consider it.
It's a dangerous part of the world at this moment.
Perhaps.
I'd consider it.
Okay.
I was listening to some of your other interviews and I saw that you described, for example, finding skeleton remains embedded in rock in a number of places and that you actually would sort of go and investigate.
You say you're not a field researcher, but I understand that you actually did go To some of these scenes and actually verify that these skeletons were indeed embedded in the rock and hadn't been disturbed.
And can you talk a little bit about that?
Because that seems very substantial evidence of millions of years where a skeleton has actually become embedded in the rock and not been disturbed.
Well, what I'm Speaking about or what I think you heard me speaking about was there are reports, say, of human skeletons being found in very ancient layers of rock.
You know, for example, In the 19th century, gold was discovered in California, and miners were going there to get it to places like Table Mountain in the Sierra Nevada Mountains near Sonora.
So when the miners were digging tunnels into the solid rock to get the gold out, They were finding human skeletons and human artifacts, obsidian spear points, stone mortars and cuspils and things like that.
So the first thing I did was investigate the old scientific literature on this.
These discoveries were reported to the scientific world in 1880.
by Dr.
J.D. Whitney, who was the chief government geologist of California.
So he published a report.
It was published by Harvard University.
It's called The Oriferous Gravels of California.
And in that report, he documents these discoveries of human bones and human artifacts and very ancient layers of rock.
Modern geologists consider the Layers of rock in which these things were found to be millions of years old, actually at Table Mountain in the Sierra Nevada mountains, where many of these discoveries were made.
They consider the rocks to date back to the Eocene period, which is a geological period that goes from about 30 million to 55 million years ago.
So these particular discoveries were made in early Eocene formations, which means about 50 million years old.
So what I first did was dig up these old reports that aren't very well known.
Then I went to see if I could find if any of the artifacts were still existing in museum collections today.
And I found they were still existing at the Phoebe Hearst Museum of Anthropology at the University of California at Berkeley.
That's where some of these things wound up.
And they're not displayed to the public.
They're kept in a storage building several miles from the museum.
Now, to get to see them, it's not so easy.
You have to make an appointment with the museum officials.
I didn't live in Berkeley.
I lived in LA, so I had to go up there.
And you have to tell them exactly what specimens you want to see.
They'll let you look at their catalog.
But in their catalogs, you just have specimen number, this, that, or the other.
You know, so I had to go through their catalogs, identify the numbers and the specimens I wanted to see, make a research proposal that was evaluated by some academic committee that they have there, and then finally they approved it,
and then they gave me an appointment a day to come to the museum, and then they have a museum official going with you, taking you through all the security and this But I did verify that the artifacts were still there.
Now, the human bones that were found in these California gold mines at Table Mountain weren't there.
According to Whitney's report, some of them wound up at the Museum of Natural History and the Natural History Society in Boston.
And some of them wound up in the Museum of Natural History in Philadelphia, which is now, I think, at one of the universities there.
So sometimes it just takes years to track these things down.
Now, recently I was through some assistants who were helping me In touch with the Philadelphia Museum and they said they had no record of these things ever having been in their collection, even though Dr.
Whitney published in a scientific journal saying that he had seen them, you know, at this museum.
So sometimes things mysteriously disappear from museum collections.
So that's another thing that I did.
First thing I did was check out the documentation.
Second, check in the museums to relocate the actual specimens and see if they're still there.
And then I did go out to Table Mountain in the Sierra Nevada Mountains with a couple of assistants.
And, of course, that wasn't very easy either.
You had to go to the county Land records office and check out the location of old mines and then go out and try to relocate where those mines were if they still exist.
And we found some of them did still exist.
We were able to relocate some of the old 19th century gold mining tunnels where these things were originally discovered.
So that's the sort of thing I do.
In connection with my research, archival research, research into museum collections, and then visiting the actual sites where the discoveries were made to see if the places could be relocated.
And with that information, then other people might be able to go out and conduct new excavations to see if any More of these things could be found.
Have you gone to Australia at all?
I've been to Australia a couple of times to give lectures.
One of them was organized by Nexus Magazine in Australia and Sydney.
I haven't done a whole lot of Research there in Australia, although I think there's some fascinating things there, and it's like another planet.
One of the things that I had been investigating in connection with Australia is some rock art near a place called Lake Eyre in South Central Australia.
This is a dry lake now.
Like in the western United States, we have dry lakes that millions or hundreds of thousands of years ago were full of water.
And, you know, there were plants and animals and fish and things like that.
Now it's all just desert.
So this place, Lake Eyre, in E-Y-R-E, is one of these dry lakes And on the shores of this dry lake, there are rock that have aboriginal artwork on them.
Rock art, it's called.
One of the items of rock art that was discovered early in the 20th century was a depiction of a platypus, a very large platypus, larger than the Currently existing species.
In other words, an extinct kind of platypus.
So I thought that was really fascinating.
You know, you've got this rock art showing this platypus.
So I got in touch with the National Museum of Australia and I asked them, when was the last time that the platypus was living at Lake Eyre?
In Australia.
So they got in touch with, you know, on their staff, they have some of the world's leading experts on the platypus, you know, paleontologists who study these things.
And they said, well, the platypus was living there during the Miocene period, 15 to 20 million years ago.
And then around 15 million years ago, the lake started getting salty.
In other words, when water starts evaporating from a lake, it gets salty, like you have the Salton Sea or the Great Salt Lake, Utah.
And when the water gets salty, they said, the platypus can no longer be living there.
So again, I asked them, When was the last time platypus would have been living in that area?
They said about 15 million years ago.
So, to me, that there's rock art there showing a platypus suggests to me that whoever made that rock art was aware of this kind of platypus, which is not like the current living species.
But of an extinct kind.
They must have seen this at least 15 million years ago.
And there's another interesting phenomenon in Australia.
It's cosmic impact craters.
You know, there are various places on Earth where Comets and asteroids, meteors have smashed down.
You can see their craters in some places on all the different continents.
Well, Australia also has these things.
But what I found really interesting was that In some of the locations where you have these cosmic impact craters in Australia, there are Aboriginal people who have legends of seeing something come from the sky and smash down and make the crater.
Now the really interesting thing for me is that these craters Are hundreds of thousands of years old and in some cases millions of years old.
Now the standard view among anthropologists and historians and archaeologists is there were no people in Australia any earlier than about 70,000 years ago.
So if you have now these Aboriginal tribes that live in Australia they don't think they've only been there For 70,000.
They think they've been there since the dream time, since the very beginning.
And they don't think that they came from anywhere else, like across the ocean or anything like that.
And they have recorded in their legends these accounts of these celestial objects coming down from the sky and making these craters, which are Hundreds of thousands or even millions of years old.
So I think that's really fascinating.
Absolutely.
Now, have you been to South Africa?
Have you met Michael Tellinger?
And have you been to, for example, Adam's Calendar?
I have met Michael Tellinger, but not in South Africa.
Occasionally we speak at the same conferences.
And I have been to South Africa.
A couple of times.
I went there once around the year 2000.
I spoke at a meeting of the World Archaeological Congress that was held in Cape Town, South Africa.
I presented a paper about my work at this conference.
It's one thing I do.
I mean, sometimes I'm speaking at events, UFO conferences or alternative science conferences, but I also speak at the mainstream scientific conferences because I think we're negotiating a new consensus on the nature of reality and I think there are a lot of parties to that negotiation with people who are on You could say the
more alternative side.
There's even people within the mainstream that are, in their way, approaching some of these questions.
So I try to stay in touch with all the different groups that I think are a party to this, what I call, renegotiation.
And then I've spoken at universities all over South Africa, In Johannesburg and Cape Town.
But I take it you've never been to Adam's calendar then?
I've seen his videos about the stone circles in Australia.
At the time, I went to South Africa.
Like I said, it was about 15 years ago.
I didn't know Michael Tellinger at that time.
He was trying to arrange A conference in South Africa where he was going to invite me to speak, but it never happened.
And he said if he had been able to do that, he would have liked to have taken me personally to see what he's looked into.
Well, right, because of course in the gold mines, I don't know if you've looked into that, but they discover things in these very ancient mines.
And I don't know if you ever got into Sitchin's work and looked into the Anunnaki and what might have been a settlement in parts of Africa.
South Africa is one of the areas.
Zimbabwe is another.
So I wondered if you'd ever gone down that road.
Well, I... I know a little bit about Sitchin's work and those of his followers, just having been around them at various conferences and things like that.
Sometimes we've had discussions, not him and me personally, although I think I did meet him once, but from I mean, we have some similarities and differences, I think, in our approach to things.
And I think some of the differences and similarities may relate to our different cultural inspirations.
He was working mainly from Sumerian texts, and I've been mostly influenced by the Indian texts.
It seems that Researchers in the alternative history field, some of them tend to be more influenced by Egyptian things, and some more by Sumerian things, and some, like myself, more by Indian things, and others more by Biblical types of work or Sure.
So I think maybe because of those different inspirations there are some similarities and differences.
I think what I would have in common with Sitchin is the idea that there are extraterrestrials and that they have something to do with our human presence on Earth.
I think the differences might be involved in In his particular tape on it, namely that, as far as I can understand, maybe I don't have it completely right,
but as far as I understand, his idea was that the process of evolution went on pretty much as modern scientists accept up to about 400,000 years ago.
Up to the point where the eight-man Homo erectus was existing on Earth.
At that time, some extraterrestrials came and modified that creature to be more like Homo sapiens.
Well, I think it's a bit more complex than that because apparently there was more than one race on Earth at that time of humanoids.
What I would wonder, in terms of your understanding based on the Indian texts and what you research, where did you think, were you familiar or do you kind of go along with the idea that there were many Different seedings of humanity to Earth, and that humanity actually came from the stars.
Do you go along with that notion?
Somewhat, but in this sense for me, the critical thing that is foundational for me is the understanding that The human body or any other kind of body is a vehicle for a soul, a conscious self, that is non-material, that has its origin on some completely different level of reality.
So I would say, as conscious beings, we're all extraterrestrials.
In other words, as conscious selves, none of us are from here.
We're all from somewhere else, ultimately.
And will ultimately wind up somewhere else.
Now when conscious selves, but I'll address your point more directly, when conscious selves enter this universe, this level of reality, they don't exist just on this planet.
They exist all over the cosmos.
And according to the ancient Indian text, there are 400,000 human-like kinds of bodies, species, scattered throughout the entire cosmos.
And they interact with humans on this planet.
There are, you could say, terrestrial-celestial hybrids.
There are Devastations that periodically occur on this planet, after which it has to be receded with life forms, and that's done not just once, but many times.
Right.
So the basic answer to your question would be yes, but I have my particular take on it.
Alright, well, what about the, you know, many of the art in India depicts a blue-skinned race, and some may say that that blue-skinned race comes from the Sirius area of the galaxy.
Do you agree with that?
Have you looked into that at all?
Yes, I'd say where that Blue color comes from is from what in Sanskrit we call Vaikuntha.
It means the spiritual or pure consciousness level that's completely beyond the material universes.
So ultimately it has a very high origin.
Like Vishnu is depicted with a blue color.
The inhabitants of Vicunta, according to the text, have blue-colored skins.
Of course, not just kind of like the blue-colored paint you would buy at a paint store here or something, but a more radiant kind of bluish color, like the blue color on a beautiful Summer day in the sky where you have a more radiant kind of color rather than just blue paint.
Sure.
Okay.
And have you, you know, in your travels, have you been approached by anybody that you feel was a member of that race here on Earth?
Do you feel that you've been visited by Beings of various races, some of whom might actually be extraterrestrial in the sense of currently residing on other planets but visiting this one.
I don't have any accounts like that to share.
As I said, in one sense, I think we're all extraterrestrials.
And I think a key part of Indian cosmology is the idea of avatars.
Avatars mean those who come from the higher level and descend to the lower level for the purpose of teaching.
But I can't claim myself that In my conscious waking state, I've interacted with a three-dimensional extraterrestrial being.
Not that I know of.
Perhaps I have, I just haven't recognized it.
Okay, and what about in your dream reality?
Well, that's another whole thing.
Is it?
I don't recall a lot of my dreams, but...
I just have the sensation that in dreams one can travel astrally in one's subtle body.
But I haven't let my consciousness just kind of focus on my dream reality.
You know, somehow or other I sense that I'm meant to kind of focus on what I'm Meant to do in my gross physical body on this plane of reality.
Okay.
I mean, I could say...
I mean, there are all kinds of spiritual entities that are mentioned in the ancient Sanskrit writings and the Bhakti Yoga texts that I would hope to contact and in some sense I'm trying to prepare myself to contact but I
can't claim at this moment that I've actually had those contacts.
Okay.
In the sense that I think you're Talking about.
Right.
What about giants?
I recently interviewed, for example, Hugh Newman and Jim Vieira, who had written a book called Giants in America, as a matter of fact, and have done a lot of investigation and traced documented evidence of giants actually worldwide and put them on a map of all the different places on Earth where giants Skeletons have been found or evidence of giants in one way or the other,
I assume.
So, have you seen or come across, you know, very tall skeletons, whether they be, you know, I don't know, seven feet tall or much taller, you know, going up to 18 foot and even taller than that.
Some have been said to be as large as 24 or 25 feet.
Have you ever come across that?
I wish I could say yes, because I'm convinced that large-sized humans did exist in the past.
In the ancient Sanskrit writings, it stated that in previous ages, previous yugas, living things, including humans, were larger than they are today.
And I am aware of Jim Vieira's work.
I think he's done an excellent job in Documenting some of the reports of such things, but I think he would agree it's difficult to track down those large-sized human skeletal remains today.
Of course, if we're talking about seven feet tall, there are many people living today who are seven feet, between seven and eight feet tall, but we don't see anybody ten feet tall.
Now, you do see, in addition to the kinds of well-documented reports that Vieira would be dealing with, you know, a lot of photographs on the web and things like that, which really can't be verified.
There was a case from the early...
20th century or late 19th century from France.
I'm trying to remember the name of the place Castelnau, C-A-S-T-E-L-N-A-U, Castelnau in France, where an anthropologist, a French anthropologist, had been conducting an excavation of And he encountered some large-sized human bones.
And the photographs of the bones were published in a scientific journal in France and in a scientific journal in the United States.
So the photographs of the bones are there, but it's not a complete skeleton.
It's like he found thigh bones and upper arm bones.
The upper arm is the humerus, thigh is the femur.
And if you have, say, a femur, a thigh bone, and you can measure how big it is, anthropologists could tell you how tall the person with a thigh bone that size would have been.
And he reported, you know, this French anthropologist who reported on these Castle Now discoveries said that the person with the thigh bone of the size of the one he found would have been over 11 feet tall.
So it's stated that these bones were placed in a museum in France.
So it's one of the better documented cases that I've come across, and if those could be tracked down, maybe Jim could do it, you know?
It's his specialty.
Giants.
Sure.
Well, okay.
I think that would be a really fascinating case.
Now, another thing that happened to me once several years ago is there was a man in New Zealand who took an interest in my work and he invited me to come to New Zealand.
He said he would arrange some lectures for me.
So I went and he met me at the airport in Auckland in New Zealand and he told me Tomorrow morning, we're going to see something very interesting.
He said, a friend of mine since childhood has been working at the Museum of Natural History in Auckland, and he's going to show us a skeleton of a human being over 10 feet tall that came from some Pacific island.
We went to the museum the next day, and this man met us, and he showed us around.
Here are the dinosaurs.
Here's this, here's that.
And then we asked, well, what about the large-sized human skeleton?
We said, I'm sorry, I can't show it to you.
It was very mysterious that he had told his friends since childhood He was going to show this to us, and then when we got there the next morning, he said he couldn't do it.
Very strange.
Once I was in Russia, and some people told me that in a mosque in Samarkand, there's a tomb with a human skeleton 24 feet tall in it.
So, you hear about these things, It's not my main field of research, but I think it's fascinating.
I think the difficulty is, although these many accounts are there, actually coming up with some actual examples that can be verified is a little bit difficult.
Okay, now I'm wondering, I don't know if you can see this or not.
I think you might be able to, but I'm going to put on the screen a photograph I took at the Royal College in London.
It's the College of Surgeons.
Well, actually, it's a museum.
Royal College of Surgeons.
Yes, and they have two skeletons.
They have a very large skeleton standing next to a human skeleton.
Actually, in plain view, in that museum...
I believe it's a real skeleton.
They claim it's giantism, as they call it.
But I believe that this is just a normal, very tall skeleton.
Really?
Yeah, and it's there.
You can go visit the place if you're interested.
But I just took it, it wasn't that long ago, maybe a couple months ago.
Now, are you able to see that?
I don't see anything.
Are you sharing the screen?
Okay, yeah, I'm sharing it with, you know, the people that are watching this can see this.
Let me see if there's a way, if I share, I think there is a way to share my screen here.
Hold on one second.
I hope this doesn't interfere with our broadcast at all, but I'd like you to see this picture if you can possibly.
Now, do you see it?
Okay, it looks like I'm covering it.
Oh, alright, so hold on.
Okay, I see it.
So it's in a glass case in the museum.
It's in plain sight and you can go photograph it yourself.
And how tall is it?
I, you know, well, this is a normal, I believe, a normal height of a person, you know, whatever, that is 5'7", 5'9", or whatever.
So, figure whatever this would be, maybe even double that size.
So, I don't know.
Nine, ten feet tall?
I don't know.
I'm not sure.
I didn't...
I don't think there was...
I don't remember there being an inscription as to exactly how tall he is.
Yeah.
I think there's even cases, one or two people in the world today who are nine feet.
Yes, I believe there are.
Now, are you familiar with Brian Forrester?
Yes, we've met.
He works in Peru.
Yes.
I think one of the things that he's focused on Is the skulls with the cone shapes?
That's correct.
So I wondered if you'd come across those skulls, had you been possibly to his museum at all, or...
I had an interesting experience.
I don't know if you've ever been to Malta, but we were supposed to be shown what is in this basis, they call them a longhead, Skulls that have been found in Malta and reported in the newspapers as such.
However, they were supposed to be kept in a museum there, and we had a special invitation to go into a back room, similar to your story, where we were, you know, shown, supposed to be shown some skulls.
And we were shown some skulls, but basically the longheads were not there.
We don't know what happened to them or whether we weren't being able to see them or what happened.
But it has been reported in the news.
There's an Italian researcher.
I think his name is Adriano Forgione.
I don't know if you've ever heard of him, who also investigates the long skulls.
Yeah, Adriano Forgione.
He publishes a magazine in Italy.
And I've had some articles published in this magazine.
I think he's interested in a whole lot of things.
Sometimes he arranges conferences and things like that.
Yeah, so have you ever looked into that, the Longheads, at all?
Well, my main topic is extreme human antiquity.
That's what I'm focused on.
That's what I consider myself expert on.
But wouldn't you consider, certainly if the longheads are extremely old, possibly?
Well, if they are, that would bring it into my ballpark.
I'm interested in all these topics, but what I can really say that I know very well and can speak with some authority about is...
Archaeological evidence showing that humans, like us, have been present for more than 200,000 years.
And most of these other things, the cone-headed skulls, crystal skulls, things like that, that I also find fascinating, or giants, or whatever, I I don't know any more about them than the average person who'd be, you know, reading magazines and looking at videos about them.
Or maybe I've heard lectures at conferences by other researchers.
But I haven't dug into it myself.
And I guess that's sort of natural.
Alternative history is a big field.
Sure.
What would you say, then, is the oldest evidence that you've come across of the oldest human habitation on Earth to date?
Well, the oldest discoveries that I've encountered depends, let's look, say, at human skeletal remains.
The oldest report that I found It was a report that was published in a scientific journal called The Geologist in 1862, I think it was.
It was about an anatomically modern human skeleton that was found 90 feet below the surface of the ground in McCoopin County in the state of Illinois, which is near St.
Louis.
According to the report, the skeleton was completely human.
Above it was a thick layer of slate rock, which was unbroken.
That's kind of an important detail, because one of the kinds of counter-explanations that you hear For discoveries like this is that, well, there was some crack or some fissure and a skeleton from some higher recent level slipped down that crack or fissure into some ancient layer of rock.
So the fact that the skeleton was sealed by a thick layer of slate rock that was unbroken kind of rules out that Kind of explanation.
So when we were doing the research for forbidden archaeology, we got in touch with geologists from the State Geological Survey of Illinois, and we asked them, how old is the Four Nation at that location?
And they said that's about 300 million years old.
So those are That's the oldest report of skeletal evidence that I've come across in my research.
If we're talking about footprints, then we've got the case of a shoe print that was discovered by a man named William Meister at a place called Antelope Springs in Utah.
He was a rock hound, a fossil hunter, and he was out with his little geologist hammer breaking open pieces of rock, and a piece of rock fell apart, and on one of the surfaces he saw what looked like a shoe print, and crushed in the shoe print was a shell, shellfish, and it was a special kind of shellfish called a trilobite.
Which is characteristic of what's called the Cambrian period, which means it's about 550 million years old.
So that was the oldest case of footprint or shoe print that I encountered in my research.
Now did you actually see that?
Were you able to see that in person?
My co-author Richard Thompson went to Utah and he visited Mr.
Meister and he saw and he photographed the specimen.
So the photograph of that shoe print that's in Forbidden Archaeology was taken by Richard Thompson who personally saw and studied the object in Utah.
And then there are artifacts.
In 1852, Scientific American published a report about a beautiful metallic vase that was found 15 feet deep in Solid Rock in Dorchester, which is in the Boston area.
And according to modern geologists, the age of that formation, it's called the Roxbury Conglomerate, is about 600 million years old.
So the oldest discoveries go back hundreds of millions of years.
Wonderful.
We do have some people that have written some questions here in the chat, so I wanted to see if I could ask those questions.
I've tried to cover them a bit.
It looks like someone wants to know...
I guess they're asking Richard Thompson of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Is that the same Richard Thompson?
That you're speaking about?
I don't think so.
This would be Richard Leslie Thompson.
Richard L. Thompson.
Okay.
A mathematician, Cornell University.
Okay.
And then, I guess, I think we've kind of covered this, but someone wants to know about the genetic manipulation of humans, and I don't know if this would be evident in any of the kind of Investigations you do, but have you come across anything of that nature?
Not in my work.
Now, there was a researcher, Lloyd Pye, who had a specimen he called the Star Child, and he was doing genetic research.
He thought it was an extraterrestrial-terrestrial hybrid.
And he was doing genetic studies.
Now, he didn't think it was particularly old.
I mean, genetic material normally doesn't last very long.
You know, scientists have been able to recover some DNA from Neanderthals going back 30 or 40,000 years or so.
But I don't think the star child was that old, but it was...
I think it was good research.
I don't know if he ever really completed it.
Well, they were doing...
I knew Lloyd Prye, and he passed on, I think, last year.
But he was doing...
I think they were doing, if I understood it correctly, some kind of DNA sequencing of the skull...
And they hadn't completed the work when he died.
I think they ran out of money and are still trying to complete that.
But basically, the evidence was coming up that it was not human.
So, yeah, that's a very interesting case.
But obviously, maybe not along the lines of where you go with your research.
In terms of Where you might be headed next?
Do you know where you're going next?
What area that you might be interested in or be finding clues with regard to finding, you know, specifically on your mission, which is to find the remains of the oldest human habitation on Earth?
Yes, I have...
A little road map that I'm following.
What I'm working on immediately is a follow-up book to Forbidden Archaeology.
That book was first published in 1993 and since then other cases have come to my attention and some new details about some of the original cases.
I've also come to my attention, so I'm putting those together in a book that I'm calling More Forbidden Archaeology.
And then, after that, I mean, people, like I said, I'm kind of in a constant dialogue with my readers, and, you know, they've told me, and have been telling me,
that, okay, You're giving us all this archaeological evidence that you say is consistent with what the ancient Sanskrit writings say about human origins, but you've just mentioned in a general way what they say, you know, that humans have been around for millions of years, and so on and so forth.
But now we would like to know More specifically, what the ancient Sanskrit writings themselves say about this without you giving us modern scientific archaeological evidence in support of it.
Now we just want to hear what those ancient Sanskrit writings have to say about Human origins and the human presence of this universe, its history, and so on.
And I think that's really fascinating because that's what I was hoping would happen.
So when I finish this next book, More Forbidden Archaeology, which is really tedious work, it really takes It takes a lot of time to go through all the scientific reports and verify them and recheck and check them.
But when I get that done, I want to turn my attention to giving the Vedic source material.
And then, when I get through with that, then there'll be something else.
I haven't decided exactly what.
Okay, now isn't it true you also dealt or looked into the Vimanas, the information about the Vimanas at one time?
Yes.
Vimanas are spacecraft.
They're mentioned in the ancient Sanskrit writings.
I talk about them a little bit in my book, Human Devolution, A Vedic Alternative to Darwin's Theory.
You know, I have some chapters in there about extraterrestrial human life.
But I sometimes speak about this topic at UFO conferences.
I appeared on some of the episodes of the Ancient Aliens series to talk about them.
And for me it's just a really fascinating topic.
Because there are different kinds of Vimanas.
To understand that, we have to take into account that the Vedic cosmology involves a multi-level cosmos, with some levels of the cosmos dominated by very dense, heavy Matter.
Some of the levels of the cosmos dominated by more subtle degrees of matter.
And then there's a completely non-material level.
And there are vimanas that function at each of these different levels.
So, some of the vimanas are made of gross material elements, metals, and they're described in the ancient Sanskrit writings.
Some of them are made of more subtle elements.
You could call them mind-ships.
And they're also described in the ancient Sanskrit writings.
And then there's completely spiritual vamanas, completely non-material vamanas, made of pure conscious elements.
So there are elaborate descriptions of all the different kinds.
Do you read Sanskrit?
Are you able to read Sanskrit?
Yes, I can.
I can read...
I'm not the best Sanskrit scholar in the world to do that.
You have to study it for years and years and years and years.
But I can read Bhagavad Gita in Sanskrit.
I can get into more...
Bhagavad Gita...
is relatively simple Sanskrit.
The verses are short, you know, a short number of syllables.
Some of the other texts are more complicated, and I can figure them out a bit with the help of the Sanskrit dictionary.
But I'm not a very advanced Sanskrit scholar, but I can go through certain texts Okay, so that's really wonderful.
There's a person asking about an ancient war that affected humanity.
I have to say there had to be many ancient wars, but I think perhaps they're referring to one that was...
I guess they're referring to one that was mentioned in the Bhagavad Gita.
So do you, I don't know, have you found evidence of this war in your investigations?
They may be referring to the Mahabharata War, which was described as a war involving people from a whole different from all different parts of the world although the center of the conflict was in northwestern India at a place called Kurukshetra and that Kurukshetra
place is still there you can visit it and as far as any detectable remains of the conflict other than the reports that are in the ancient Sanskrit writings.
I haven't encountered them.
Sometimes you hear that at some archaeological sites of what's now Pakistan at Mohenjo-Daro, for example, some people have claimed that there were vitrified Buildings or walls.
And vitrification takes place when you've got a huge amount of heat that melts stone or rock or sand.
So there are claims that there's evidence like that in Pakistan.
Again, these places are very difficult to visit at the present.
Time for various reasons.
But there are some reports like that.
I haven't verified them myself.
Well, actually, in the Middle East, of course, I don't know whether you've been to any of those sites where there's evidence there had been nuclear war in the far distant past in various places.
Even the Dead Sea is said to possibly have evidence of that, as well as Megiddo, I believe, and there are some other places.
Amarna, for example, in Egypt, but if you haven't been there, you wouldn't have seen it.
I have been to the valley of where Amarna was said to be, and it has been completely decimated as if a nuclear bomb Basically turn the place to dust.
So, have you been to any places such as that?
I have not.
I'm familiar with accounts of weapons resembling modern nuclear weapons in the ancient Sanskrit writings of India.
They were called Brahmastras.
And it's described that when they went off, it would be like you had Millions of suns all together in one place.
Actually, Robert Oppenheimer, who was head of the American program to develop the atomic bomb during World War II, in addition to being a great physicist, he was also a student of the ancient Sanskrit writings of India.
He was aware of some of these accounts.
So when the first atomic bomb that the Americans made was being tested at Alamogordo in New Mexico in 1945, he was in the bunker looking out, and when the flash went off, he started reciting some of these ancient Sanskrit texts from the Bhagavad Gita and elsewhere.
And he was once asked, okay, what was it like, you know, a couple years later he was asked, well, what was it like to be present when the first atomic bomb was set off?
And he said the first in modern times.
So...
I think these Brahmastra weapons, although they were very powerful, they may have been different in some ways from the modern nuclear weapons because they were controlled by mantras or sound vibration.
So that's maybe a technology we haven't really quite developed, although there have been attempts to use sound as a weapon.
And actually you can use ultrasound to weld metals together.
And you can do tremendous things with sound.
It can be used to sterilize medical instruments.
So I think the ancients may have been even more aware of all the various powers of sound vibration and could use it.
As an effective weapon, so destructive it could be compared to modern nuclear weapons, but without maybe a lot of the dangers associated with it, like the radiation.
Well, actually, one of the people that's listening to this and writing questions in the chat is, his name is Keith Hunter.
He's done a lot of investigation around The sort of nuclear sites and the intersection of ley lines creating a kind of a vortex that the nukes would be set off in very particular places on Earth to take advantage of that energy.
Those energies, and I don't know whether...
Are you aware of...
Certainly you're aware of ley lines and vortexes, and has that worked into any of your investigations?
Not directly.
It's like a different field.
Like I said, I'm like so many people.
I hear about these things.
I read about them.
But just as a...
you could say a fan not a dedicated researcher special areas of research ley lines well if you are looking for the oldest signs of humanity on earth although you seem to have found evidence of this in the United States strangely enough you know the seed of civilization
as we call it, at least this time around, is certainly said to be the intersection of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in Iraq.
I can't remember whether you said you went to Iraq at all.
Possibly that's been very difficult for anyone to go there, but did you...
Not go specifically to these places, like if I had an objective and I wanted to find the oldest evidence of habitation by humans, I think it seems logical that you would have been drawn to at least to go to Iraq.
Were you drawn to go there?
And if not there, then Australia does seem like a likely place, as well as certainly Africa and maybe even China.
What were your thoughts on that?
Well, I think the evidence for extreme human antiquity is found in all parts of the world.
I've mentioned some cases from the United States, but I think it's everywhere.
And, you know, I have been to the Middle East.
I may have been briefly through part of Iraq in 1969 because I went over land from Turkey, But I think instead of Iraq, I went to Iran.
I was following a more northern route, although I did hear some interesting things about that.
So these places are now quite difficult to visit.
Well, what about Iran?
Did you find specific cases there?
When I went there, it was before I started this kind of research.
I started this kind of research around 1984.
When I went through Iran, it was 1969 or somewhere around there.
I just wanted to go to India.
So I was, like many people were at that time, you know, traveling overland from Turkey to Iran to Afghanistan through Pakistan to India.
But not such an easy thing to do these days.
No, not so much.
Okay, well, we've kept you for quite a while, and I want to thank you very much for coming on the show.
I wonder if there's anything else you'd like to add to any final statements about your overall work, what you hope to discover at this time, any great clues that you're investigating?
Well, I don't see myself as alone in all this.
I think there's a whole community of researchers that are pushing on their investigations in different fields of alternative science, whether it's the historical or the archaeological or things related to the paranormal or to extraterrestrials or UFOs.
I think they all fit together and Some way.
So I would just say that I'm happy to be part of this development doing whatever I can to push it along and there are people like yourselves who in addition to your own research are creating forums for exchange of ideas and communication.
I think it's just A real positive development, one of the few positive things that's going on today.
Okay, well, I'm glad to hear it.
All right, well, thank you so much, Michael.
You know, I'd love to investigate more about your work and hear more from you in the future.
And, you know, please do stay in touch with us.
I have organized trips to Egypt.
In the past, and if I do again, I'm certainly going to invite you.
Thank you.
So that you can actually get there.
It's a remarkable place, and I think for someone like you, it would be absolutely a fascinating thing to experience, and everyone would love to hear your reactions.
And with your turn of mind, no telling what you might stumble on.
Yeah.
Well, thank you.
Okay.
All right.
Thanks, everyone, for listening, and have a great night, and we'll revisit Michael Cremo in the future.
Yeah.
Meanwhile, if people want to learn more about my work, they can look at my website, mcremo.com, M-C-R-E-M-O.com.
Yes, and we have your website linked on our page with this interview as well, so...
Again, thank you so much for being on the show.
Thank you.
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