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Dec. 23, 2024 - Uncensored - Piers Morgan
38:18
20241223_graham-hancock-on-pyramids-atlantis-god
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Time Text
Disproving Ancient Encounters 00:03:22
Could you just be the world's ultimate wind-up merchant?
The granite blocks used to build the pyramids were somehow levitated into place by acoustics.
You've been listening to my critics too much.
What do you really want to achieve?
Most of all is for archaeologists to engage with my work without smearing me, without calling me a racist and a white supremacist and a misogynist.
I feel that life does have purpose, that it does have meaning.
I don't think we're here by accident.
I don't believe that death is the end.
Do you believe in dragons?
Joe Rogan recently said he's a dragon believer.
How do we know?
I mean, we know dinosaurs flew around.
How do we know none of them breathe fire?
These entities have much in common with spirits.
They have much in common with fairies and elves.
I had an experience of an encounter with an intelligent entity.
Just to be clear, you're not on ayahuasca now, right?
Ayahuasca is a powerful purgative.
Yeah, and nobody drinks ayahuasca for fun.
Graham Hancock is a scientific heretic, and for that he's garnered both sneering condemnation and a legion of fans, not to mention a shelf full of best-selling books and a smash hit show now on Netflix.
The new series of ancient apocalypse is out right now.
For those who don't know me, I'm Graham Hancock.
I've been exploring the possibility of a lost civilization in prehistory for more than 30 years.
Archaeology claims that if there were such a thing as a lost civilization, they would have found it already.
Well, I profoundly disagree with that.
Well, Hancock's theory is that a highly advanced Ice Age civilization pioneered everything from mathematics to architecture before being wiped out by comet strikes and a giant flood.
Notable supporters include Keanu Reeves and Joe Rogan.
He was on that show recently and 27 million people watched it.
Now, admittedly, I've always been a bit sceptical about this, but then I discovered that the Guardian newspaper had lamented Hancock, calling his series the most dangerous show on Netflix.
And suddenly, I began to warm to him.
And it's surely worth hearing him out at the very least.
So Graham Hancock joins me now.
Well, any man condemned by the Guardian is good for me, Graham.
Not just once, by the way, but five times.
Five times.
Well, there you go.
Five different articles across the Guardian and Observer stable.
Yeah, and they've done that to me repeatedly as well.
So that's why I'd like you to come in.
The only objection I have is that for none of those articles did they reach out to me.
Really?
And when I was a journalist, we used to do that with contrary opinions.
We would ask the subject of the article to at least speak.
So here's what's really interesting about what you do with this stuff, which is, I guess at the moment, nobody can really disprove you, right?
Because they say there's no proof.
That doesn't necessarily mean it didn't happen.
But could you just be the world's ultimate wind-up merchant where you don't actually think it happened, but you know they can't disprove you and you can build a fantastically successful business off the back of just winding them all up?
Yes, a lot of people could suggest that and a lot of people do, but the fact of the matter is this has been my passion for more than 30 years.
Pyramids and Plato's Numbers 00:14:50
I've devoted a huge chunk of my now 74-year-old life to following this mystery.
And it's mystery that draws me into it.
It's the feeling that there's a black hole in our past, which is not fully explained.
It's the fact that we have a worldwide tradition of a global cataclysm, which archaeologists tend to explain as massively exaggerated memories of local cataclysms.
A worldwide tradition of a global flood.
in that worldwide tradition, whether it's India, whether it's Mesopotamia, whether it's Easter Island, whether it's Cuzco in Peru, you're going to find that there were seven sages who survived the flood and who brought wisdom and knowledge to other survivors of the floods.
It's this universal testament.
When did you first get this notion into your head?
When did it start?
It started for me.
It started for me in the late 1980s when I was working on a book about Ethiopia and about Ethiopia's claim to possess the Lost Ark of the Covenant.
That was the first book I wrote in this genre.
And that book was called The Sign of the Seal.
And while investigating that, I had to go to Egypt as part of the investigation because the Ark of the Covenant is a story that involves Moses.
Moses was brought up in the household of the Pharaoh.
And it was standing in front of the Great Pyramid in Egypt.
Not for that project, but just being there and looking at this thing.
Six million tons, 481 feet high at its original height, 13 acre footprint, almost perfectly aligned to true north, south, east, and west.
And we're told that it was a tomb for a pharaoh called Khufu, and it had to be built in 23 years because that was his lifetime.
It couldn't therefore have been longer.
And my common sense and my gut feeling as I looked at this was this doesn't make sense.
Whatever this is, I don't think it's a tomb.
Why?
Because, well, apart from the fact that no body of any pharaoh has ever been found in any pyramid in Egypt at all, could be tomb robbers.
But the accounts of the earliest tomb robbery, which was in the 9th century when Caliph Mahmoud and his gang actually smashed their way into the Great Pyramid with sledgehammers, they found nothing inside it, nothing at all.
It was completely empty and devoid of any inscriptions on the main body of the pyramid.
So it's a genuine mystery.
For this thing to have been built in 23 years seems to me pretty long time.
Well, it's not a long time when you have a six million ton monument with two and a half million blocks of stone in it.
But scientific experts have said, yeah, it could be done.
Why are you disputing that?
Well, I'm disputing it entirely on the basis of my personal evaluation of the Great Pyramid.
Your theory.
Which include five climbs of the Great Pyramid and detailed investigation of all its internal chambers.
I don't think, I don't think it was a tomb.
And I've said that, but I might be wrong.
I just don't think it was.
And I think it's worth pushing back against that narrative and considering...
But it could have been a monument.
I mean, just playing devil's advocate.
It could have been a monument to these great pharaohs where they thought there was a risk of being grave-robbed, so they didn't ever put the bodies in them.
And they told the people they did.
Yes, it could have been that.
But then you have to ask yourself why when you take the height of the Great Pyramid and multiply by a particular number, which is not an insignificant number, it's a number that has geological significance.
You take the height and multiply by 43,200, you get the polar radius of the Earth.
You take the base perimeter, multiply it by the same number, you get the equatorial circumference of the Earth.
And even my staunchest critics accept that the math on that is right when you go back to the original true height of the Great Pyramid at 481 feet.
Now the question is, is it encoding the dimensions of the Earth by accident, or is it a deliberate and intentional thing to do?
This monument speaks to the Earth.
It is oriented within 3 60ths of a single degree of true north.
It's an incredible precision for a monument on that scale.
It's clearly connected to the Earth, oriented to true north, and at the same time, encoding the dimensions of the Earth on a scale of 1 to 43,200.
Why is that important?
It's important because there is an obscure astronomical phenomenon called precession.
It's a wobble on the axis of the Earth.
The Earth is our viewing platform from which we observe the stars.
And because of this wobble, the stars change their positions very, very slowly at the rate of one degree every 72 years.
These are called precessional numbers.
There was an enormous study.
How do you remember all this stuff, by the way?
I live it.
I live it.
You really are like a...
What would you call yourself?
I would call myself a writer.
That's what I am.
I try to do.
I try to do it.
Are you fictional or non-fiction?
I've done both.
So how do I know what I'm listening to?
Am I getting the fictional version or the non-fiction?
The non-fiction books have footnotes.
They typically run to 2,000 footnotes to a book.
They're all thoroughly documented.
My critics and my supporters can find exactly.
So finish the point you were making.
I'm sorry.
My point was that this process of precession changes the star field at the rate of one degree every 72 years.
There are a series of numbers built into ancient mythology.
There were 72 conspirators in the murder of the god Osiris, for example.
And what we're looking at is a multiple of the number 72.
72 times 600 is 43,200.
And the significance of that is what?
The significance of that is that we have a monument that speaks to the Earth, 6 million tons, locked in precisely to the true North Pole, not magnetic north, the true North Pole of the Earth.
And then it encodes the dimensions of the Earth on a scale provided by the Earth itself.
So it's a work of genius.
I believe it's a work of genius.
Right.
So why couldn't it have been the geniuses who did it at the time?
Well, I wonder, it could.
And I'm not saying they didn't.
I think the ancient Egyptians were massive.
Do you have a weird theory, and it is a weird theory, that the granite blocks used to build the pyramids were somehow levitated into place by acoustics.
You've been listening to my critics too much.
Is this not true?
It is true.
I've said I've seen chanting could have led to levitation of bricks.
Yeah, that's not my theory.
That's not a theory.
What is that?
That's an off-the-cuff remark.
And I'll stand by it.
If you look at my work, you'll find that that kind of thing I've also talked a little bit about.
Tell me about acoustic levitation.
What you would find is that it occupies perhaps 20 pages across 8,000 pages of my books.
It's there.
It's there.
That's a theory.
Are you a stat?
No, it's an interest of mine.
When I read ancient texts...
What's the difference between a theory and an interest?
Hang on.
Oh, go on.
When I talk about that, I'm reading ancient texts that talk about priests chanting and raising a huge block into the air.
And when I look, and by the way, the Great Pyramids are not all of granite.
The granite blocks I'm talking about.
How have these chanting priests levitated massive stones?
I don't have a theory about that.
You can't put these in your books.
Yes, I can.
And they say I have no idea how they did it.
It's there in the mythology, Pierce.
So it could just be a myth.
It could just be a myth.
And I'm not saying it happened that way.
I'm saying that so far, in 100 plus years of study of the Great Pyramid, nobody has yet come up with a convincing explanation how it was.
And particularly, sorry, let me continue.
And particularly how those 70-ton granite blocks, most of the Great Pyramid is made of limestone, not granite, but those 70-ton granite blocks that roof the so-called King's Chamber, plus another series of 70-ton blocks above that, plus another above that, plus another of that.
That's a brilliant feat of engineering.
It's an incredible feat of engineering.
When I look at that, and I've been above those blocks and looked at them from the top, the so-called relieving chambers, when I look at that, I am mystified as to how it was done.
The thought of people pouring water on wet sand and towing these weights along, that's okay on level ground.
But to get it up to 300 feet above the base of the Great Pyramid, that's a wholly different story.
You would need a ramp.
So here's my response to that, which is, look, I think you're fascinating, right?
And I did.
Everything you say is fascinating.
Your attention to detail is spectacular.
You're honest enough to admit you don't know the answers to these things.
You're raising a lot of suggestions, theories, whatever you want to call it.
But it's when you say, well, that is completely implausible, right?
The way that we all believe the pyramids is plausible.
But you just float in there that it could have been levitation, acoustic power from chanting priests.
I would dare to say to you, Graham, with all due respect, that is surely more ludicrous as a potential theory than if I were saying this is absolutely how it were built, it would be.
You're dying tantalizing us with the idea of chanting priests.
Then the Efius raising stones are tantalizing us with the idea of a ramp.
Do you think their theories are as ludicrous as yours?
Completely ludicrous.
A ramp would, first of all, have had to have been built of material as solid as the pyramid itself.
Secondly, because we can't, human labor cannot tow heavy weights up a slope of more than 10 degrees, that ramp would have had to extend it for more than a mile into the desert.
There's no sign of it.
Your grandfather's name is inscribed on the Great Pyramid.
Why?
He was a world traveller.
Was he like you?
I guess he was in some ways.
Is that where you get it from?
In some ways not.
Maybe.
It was a pleasant surprise to find his name there and see it confirmed in his biography, which was never published and still sits in a drawer in my office.
But he was with British forces in Cairo in the First World War.
And he was a minister of the church.
He was a chaplain there.
Wow.
Now you believe that tens of thousands of years before the ancient Mesopotamia, Babylonia, Egypt, there was an even more glorious civilization.
Plato called it Atlantis.
You think that existed?
Well, the story of Plato's Atlantis should not be taken out of context.
Plato's Atlantis is a flood story, and therefore it should be taken into account with the roughly 200 other flood stories that are found from all around the world.
To separate the Atlantis story from that, as my critics tend to do, is a mistake.
We have another flood tradition here.
Furthermore, there is a solid basis for that flood tradition in ancient Egypt.
Plato said he got the story through Solon, who had visited Egypt in 600 BC and had been told the story of Atlantis by a priest in a particular temple, the Temple of Nath at Sis in the Delta.
And interestingly enough, there's a temple of Horus at Edfu in Upper Egypt, which contains in full detail a description of a homeland of the primeval ones, an island, which was destroyed in a gigantic flood, of which there were survivors, including, once again, seven sages.
Some of them came to Egypt, settled in Egypt, and created what are called primeval mounds that were built up and down the whole length of Upper and Lower Egypt, which were to be the sites of all future temples and pyramids.
Now, that particular temple is Ptolemaic.
In other words, it's younger than Plato.
So one could say maybe they got the story from Plato rather than the other way around, except that that temple encodes the archives of the previous temple that stood on that site, which in turn encode the archives of the previous temple, going back to pre-dynastic times.
The language in that temple is Middle Egyptian.
It's not Ptolemaic.
That temple is yet another manifestation of a global tradition in ancient Egypt, much of which has been lost.
But here's what your critics say.
They say, all right, okay, interesting theory, very well researched, as always.
Can I just say one other thing?
It's really important, the critics on this.
Read the new complete translation of the Edfu building texts by the German Edfu project, because they've been translated completely into German.
How long are they?
How long are they?
You're looking at four or five volumes.
Have you read them?
Massive.
Yes, I have.
The whole room?
No, I haven't because I don't read German.
But I've had help of a German-speaking colleague to look at key aspects of the text.
Because when I first worked on the Edfu texts, I used a partial translation that was done back in the 1960s.
When was that text written?
Which text?
The one you're talking about.
Sorry, do you mean the Edfu building texts or do you mean the...
Well, the German version that you're talking about.
The Edfu building texts were partially translated by Eve Elizabeth Raymond back in the 1960s in a book called The Mythical Origins of the Egyptian Temple.
I used that as the basis for my inquiry into the meaning of the Edfu building texts.
Then I discovered, and it only happened in the last three years, that a complete translation was underway and was finally finished.
The question to me was, did that translation contradict the earlier translation or did it support it?
And I'm completely satisfied that it supports the earlier translation.
Which means what?
Which means that at least Plato wasn't lying when he said there was an Egyptian origin to this story.
And then when we set the Atlantis tradition in context of global flood myths, all of which seem to carry very much the same notion of a golden age that's ended, incurs the anger of the gods, is ended in the world.
Right, so here's my point I'm going to make to you, which is what the critics say, which is that archaeologists are not the only people who examine the past.
We agree on that.
Geologists, obviously, this is their speciality.
And their argument against you is that if there had been an ancient super civilization that we have no knowledge of.
I deny super civilization.
I've never said a super civilization.
What would you call it?
Atlantis is a super civilization.
I'm talking about a civilization like every other during the Ice Age that emerged out of shamanism, but that went further in some directions than some.
I'm not saying they built huge temples and columns and pillars and that they had steam engines or that they had spaceships.
I think that they had a very simple basic technology, but they had an incredibly advanced knowledge of astronomy and they had an incredibly advanced knowledge of the world.
They could encode accurate relative longitudes on maps.
So here's the key question.
Why, in that case, have geologists been unable to find any evidence of heavy metals, of manufacturing byproducts from the manufacturing of that time?
Why have astrophysicists not been able to pick up echoes of their radio chatter?
Why have geneticists not found widespread anomalies in the human genome?
Why has none of that happened, if your theory's right?
I don't think small groups of seven or so people settling in a particular neighborhood would leave a powerful genetic trace, actually.
They would leave a trace in Iceland.
Do you think that all around the world are especially...
Well, I know that Easter Island has seven sages.
I know that Mesopotamia has seven sages.
I know that Egypt has seven.
But they could all just be totally fantastical mythical people.
They could be.
Evolution Applied to Cranks 00:02:44
That's precisely what my critics say, but that's what I'm here for.
Yes.
I'm here to...
By the way, I kind of admire that.
I do.
My initial thing was to kind of laugh at it.
And then I thought, well, actually, the whole point of science and history and all these things is to challenge perceived wisdom.
Otherwise, how do we evolve and learn more?
And hopefully to do so in an intelligent and thoroughly worked out way, which is...
But yours is a logical mind, but it's applied to a lack of facts.
Would that be fair?
Yes, just as archaeologists are logical people and their work is applied to lack of facts as well.
I mean, they've only excavated, what, 5% or less of the world's surface.
There's huge areas that are completely unknown.
The Sahara Desert is almost completely unexcavated.
The Amazon rainforest, where in our show, we've been finding evidence of highly advanced cultures which were previously completely unsuspected in the Amazon rainforest.
Indeed, populations of millions, cities in the Amazon rainforest.
My feeling is that the further we go into this, we are likely to find more and more evidence which disturbs the existing picture.
And I've been trying for the last 30 years to put forward pieces of the puzzle that I do not feel are explained by mainstream archaeology and that are worthy of consideration.
Archaeologists, by the way.
Right, so when people call you a crank, what do you say to them?
They're welcome to call me whatever they want.
What do you feel about that?
Of course it's not nice to be called a crank.
Why would one welcome that?
Especially when I take my work seriously, when it's my passion, when it's everything that I do.
What do you really want to achieve?
What is the goal?
First of all, what I would like to achieve is for archaeologists to engage with my work without smearing me, without calling me a racist and a white supremacist and a misogynist and an anti-Semite.
All of these words were applied to me in the Society for American Archaeology open letter to Netflix trying to persuade Netflix to reclassify my work as science fiction.
They used all of these words.
Why have they called you these things?
There's no basis in the series for that at all.
And the only basis there is is that I reported indigenous myths from the Americas, which talked about bearded, white-skinned people coming to America.
Quetzalcoatl, the feathered serpent of Mexico, is a classic example, which talked about people with white skin coming to the Americas in the distant past and bringing knowledge and civilization with them.
Those are indigenous myths.
Woke archaeologists have tried to reinterpret them recently and say, oh, they were all made up by the Spanish.
To me, that is a racist assertion, that the people of the country were themselves so stupid that ideas introduced by the Spanish would be fully accepted by them as fact within 30 or 40 years.
Francis Crick and Supernatural Claims 00:10:19
How do you think we all got here?
We all got on planet Earth?
Yeah.
How do you think it all started?
I think it all started with very small bacteria and the laws of evolution applied.
And what was there before the bacteria?
Well, a primeval soup, according to science.
Well, who knows?
But here's the, if you want to go up, if you want to go that route, the Earth supposedly was formed about four and a half billion years ago, 4,500 million years ago.
It supposedly was not cool enough to support life until about four billion years ago.
But then by 3.9 billion years ago, the planet is seething with bacterial life.
And the mainstream argument is that that bacterial life just evolved by accidental bumping together of molecules.
Do you believe that?
I don't.
I go with Francis Crick on that, because surprisingly, as you know, Francis Crick won the Nobel Prize for the double helix structure.
I'm very aware of his work.
And he did not, in a less known book by Francis Crick called Life Itself that was published in 1981, he looked into the plausibility of what he called directed panspermia.
He felt that it was impossible for life to have evolved accidentally on Earth, for the DNA RNA system to have just appeared by accident.
He thinks it was sent to planet Earth.
There was a may have been, he speculated.
This is not me, this is Francis Crick.
He speculated that there must have been some gigantic civilization in some far-off part of the universe.
And a bit of it came to what...
No, they discovered that they were going...
This is Crick.
They discovered that they were going to be wiped out in a supernova explosion.
That's the suggestion.
They looked for ways to get themselves off the planet.
Distances are too great.
They settled on cryogenic freezing of bacteria.
They encoded DNA into those bacteria and they fired them off into the universe in all directions.
And one of those spaceships landed on the early Earth 3.9 billion years ago.
And I must repeat, this is not Graham Hancock.
This is Francis Crick, won the Nobel Prize.
Yes.
And this is his book, Life Itself, published in 1981.
Directed panspermia.
I mean, look, I used to love Star Trek when I was a kid.
He made the point that the universe is more than 13 billion years old.
There's time for life to have evolved once.
My question for all people like Richard Dawkins, I've interviewed everyone on this subject, you can imagine, is, well, what was there before nothing?
And because the human brain can't comprehend that and can't answer that question, I've always, I'm a religious person, I believe in God, I was raised a Catholic, and the reason that I have stayed that way is because to me it makes perfect sense.
It's logical that there must be a supernatural entity out there which is more sophisticated than the human brain because we cannot answer that simple question.
What was there before nothing?
We certainly can't.
What was there before the Big Bang?
No, no.
Nobody can't.
This is a strong argument for a creator of some sort.
Whether that entity is supernatural or whether supernatural is simply natural that we haven't yet understood is another question.
I was brought up as a Christian.
I abandoned Christianity in my early 20s.
I have been through a series of changes.
I feel that life does have purpose, that it does have meaning.
I don't think we're here by accident.
I don't believe that death is the end.
I think we are incarnated in physical bodies, but I think consciousness and the body are separate issues.
I think life goes on.
So in that sense, I am a spiritual person rather than necessarily a religious person.
I don't follow a particular religious doctrine.
You do think there's something else.
I do, particularly the notion that death is not the end, that it's perhaps the beginning of the next great adventure.
Right.
Do you believe in dragons?
You were on with Joe Rogan.
27 million people watching.
But Joe Rogan recently said he's a dragon believer.
He's probably a bit tongue-in-cheek.
I kind of thought dragons.
How do we know, right?
We know dinosaurs flew around.
How do we know none of them breathe fire?
Actually, we don't.
Right, we don't.
We don't.
I'm using the old Graham Hancock.
It would be interesting here if I don't think.
It would be interesting, though, to find out how that idea passed down to anatomically modern humans and got encoded in language since the dinosaurs were more than 66 million million years ago.
But is it more likely or not that dragons existed, do you think?
I would say it's less likely that they existed, but creatures like dragons certainly did exist.
Look at the parasaurs.
Why has no one from Hollywood just come and thought, you know what, Graham?
Whether you're telling them, whether what you're saying is right or not, your mind is so fantastical.
Your attention to detail is so amazing.
Why have they not come to you and said, here's a sever movie deal?
Go and do just something completely nuts based on all your theories, thoughts, findings, whatever.
I don't know.
Ask them.
Are you available?
I would welcome it.
I am being talked to by Hollywood about a couple of different things at the moment.
Yeah.
But talking with Hollywood about things and actually done are very different.
Well, Kieno Reeves is a friend of yours, right?
Yes, I like.
And he believes completely in what you're doing.
I can't speak for Keanu.
I know that he's deeply curious about the past.
He and I...
In a way, you've made me more curious about this kind of stuff.
Because I like the honesty of saying, I don't actually know.
If you were saying this with complete self-righteous certainty, that's one thing.
If all you're doing is digging, my journalist hat says to me, you know what?
Yes.
Isn't that the point of journalism?
Isn't it the point of people to actually just challenge every preconceived notion and keep chipping away and make the experts think about these things?
I've never fully understood why this particular 30-year project of mine has attracted so much intense hostility from certain sectors of archaeology.
Because I'm not saying I've proved anything.
I don't claim to have proved anything.
I'm saying there are huge numbers of unanswered questions.
You're suggesting things that we ought to find answers to.
For me, it's a black hole in the past and it's during the ice age and it comes, it's an episode that comes to an end around 12,500 years ago.
You talk about having had an encounter with an alien in the Amazon.
You had a typical alien encounter.
I'm not quite sure what that would be.
Tell me about your...
Well, then we have to get into this issue of my spirituality, such as it is.
In 2005, I published a book called Supernatural, Meetings with the Ancient Teachers of Mankind.
It's recently been republished in America as Visionary, the definitive edition of Supernatural.
In that book, I was intrigued by the astonishing similarities between art that's being painted in the Amazon rainforest by shamans today and art that's being painted in what was painted, for example, in Chauvet Cave or in Lasco Cave in France.
And the best explanation from this comes from a professor of anthropology at the University of Woodwatersrand in South Africa, David Lewis Williams.
He suggested that all of this art is shamanistic art.
And the essence of shamanism is an altered state of consciousness, not everyday problem-solving state, but a deeply altered state of consciousness.
And he managed to demonstrate, and further research has borne this out thoroughly, that the visionary experiences in a deeply altered state of consciousness, whether it's brought on by magic mushrooms or LSD, or most particularly dimethyltryptamine, DMT, which is an ingredient of ayahuasca.
The imagery that results, whether the person is in America or Britain or the Amazon, the imagery is very, very, very similar.
It starts off with geometric patterns, then you start seeing entities.
So do you think you actually had an alien encounter?
No, let me finish this.
Right now, at Imperial College, a major study is going on with human volunteers and extended administration of dimethyltritamine, the most powerful psychedelic knowledge map.
And these volunteers are all recording astonishingly similar experiences of encounters with entities.
They don't know what those entities are.
But here's the interesting thing.
These entities have much in common with spirits, as described by shamans.
They have much in common with fairies and elves, as described in the Middle Ages.
And today they're construed as aliens.
I think that what we're doing is a single phenomenon is being construed through different cultural lenses according to the interest of the culture.
But what was your alien encounter?
So I'm sitting on a bench in the middle of the Amazon jungle outside a shaman's hut, and I've just drunk a really hefty dose of ayahuasca about two hours before.
I've had more than 70 sessions with what is ayahuasca.
Ayahuasca is a brew of the Amazon.
It consists of two different plants.
One of them is the ayahuasca vine, and the other is a bush that they call chakruna.
Cycotria viridis is the name of the Amazon.
The leaves of the bush contain DMT.
The vine contains a substance called harmine and harmaline.
DMT is not orally active.
In order to experience DMT, people in the West vape it or smoke it.
But if you eat it, it is destroyed by an enzyme in the gut called monoaminoxidase.
Astonishingly, in the Amazon, they figured out a plant that includes a monoamine oxidase inhibitor.
So when you mix the leaves with the DMT with the bark of the vine of the ayahuasca vine, you have orally accessible DMT.
And that puts people into a roughly four-hour journey.
I was having a hence four-hour journey in which I encountered, as many of the volunteers at Imperial College do, quite a number of entities.
And amongst those entities...
Amongst those entities was more than one, two or three, which had what we would regard as the classic ET face.
ETs are not my thing.
An ET came to you.
But I had an experience of an encounter with an intelligent entity.
And that entity is looking down at me, and I'm suddenly terrified.
I'm suddenly terrified.
And I do what I shouldn't have done.
Instead of embracing that experience, I said, no, I thought I was going to be taken.
I said, no.
And I opened my eyes wide and I stopped that experience.
And that particular encounter, that experience has never come back.
But entities looking exactly...
You were terrified of being snatched by an ET.
Yes, that's what I felt at the time.
Just to be clear, you're not on ayahuasca now, right?
Well, if I was, I'd be vomiting.
You know, ayahuasca is a powerful purgative.
And nobody drinks ayahuasca for fun.
Climate Catastrophe and the Sphinx 00:07:01
It's going to exactly.
How many times have you drunk it?
About 70.
Since 2003.
Why?
Why?
Because for me, it's a very important therapy.
It's helped me to realize things about myself that I was shutting off from myself.
It's all like anger, like the tendency to get furiously angry very rapidly and to say things that I subsequently am hugely going to regret.
Ayahuasca has shown me that and has given me the opportunity to fix that problem.
You can't fix a lifetime of bad habits in a single night.
But I've kept on working on this and I think I think...
What do your family make of you and your family in my family join me in my obsession?
Most of the members of my family, including my adult children, have drunk ayahuasca.
Really?
Sounds like you have a lot of fun in your family.
I feel very blessed to have the family that I have, and I feel very blessed to have lived the life that I've lived.
What is, I mean, we've got to wrap it up, unfortunately.
I'd love to do a longer one with you on the time, but what is the one question you would most like to have answered?
What exactly happened between 12,800 and 11,600 years ago?
The world went through a horrific climate catastrophe.
12,800 years ago, for the thousand plus years before that, the world had been warming up, getting out of the ice age.
It was becoming a very friendly place.
And then suddenly, bang, it changed completely.
Global temperatures plunged to the peak of temperatures at the last ice age.
All the great megafauna of the ice age were wiped out in that 1,200-year period.
There may have been a few minor survivals, but basically this is the period of the extinction of the megafauna.
It's the period where at Gobekli Tepe in Turkey, 11,600 years ago, exactly the end of that climate episode, we have this extraordinary megalithic site built at Gobekli Tepe, consisting of 20-ton megalithic pillars arranged in a series of circles.
The pillars are T-shaped, the top of the T seems to form the head, and they have arms and fingers carved into their side.
Several of them have very precise astronomical alignments.
It's a very, very sophisticated site.
And it's roughly 7,000 years older than Stonehenge, but it dwarfs Stonehenge in its scale.
This raises huge questions.
What is the background to all that?
Where does it come from?
It's mysteries like that that intrigue me.
And I'd like to know what happened in that 1,200 years.
When I think, I do not claim to prove, I think that a civilization that had gone a bit further than other cultures at that time was largely wiped out during that cataclysm.
And they did have survivors, and those survivors attempted to replant the seeds of civilization.
And we see that happening at Gobekli Tepe in Turkey, and we see it happening at quite a number of other sites around the world.
Geologists, I'm sorry, the Great Sphinx.
This is the other thing which I have a big dispute with archaeologists on.
As far as I'm concerned, the Great Sphinx is a monument that was rehabilitated, renovated, and restored by the ancient Egyptians.
But I think the Great Sphinx dates back to that period around 12,000 years ago when there was a green Sahara and enough rain to have caused the erosion that we see on the Sphinx.
And that's not my work, that's the work of Professor Robert Schock, who's a geologist at Boston University.
I was with Elon Musk in the summer, fascinating conversation with him, but he said that one of the burning reasons, literally, that he wants to colonize Mars is because he said it's inevitable that Earth will be incinerated by the sun at some stage.
It won't happen in the short term, but it will inevitably happen.
Do you agree with him?
I think if I would look at scalar priorities, I would say let's sort out our problems on planet Earth first before we plan to colonize.
How worried are you about climate change?
Climate change is one of those issues, isn't it?
If you look at Donald Trump.
Both.
If we look at the period I'm talking about, the younger Dryas, between 12,800 and 11,600 years ago, there were climate flips on a scale that dwarfed anything that's happening today.
And so far as we know, there was no big industrial culture.
And I've never claimed my lost civilization was an industrial civilization.
So it's clear that natural cycles in the Earth and its relationship to the orbit around the sun do affect the climate quite radically.
However, the issue of human behavior to me, I connect it less to the issue of climate change and more to doing the right thing.
We have been gifted by the universe, this gorgeous, beautiful garden of a planet, and our intelligence and our consciousness, we should look after it.
We should care for it in every way possible.
It's our future.
It's our children's future.
We should love it and care for it.
And if that involves doing a little less excess than we do now, that would be a good thing.
But I would not rush to make the argument that humans are causing climate change.
Climate change has been a story of life on this Earth since the year Dot.
And you know what, when it comes to sort of what are perceived to be wild, crazy theories, everyone used to mock the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Louis Walter Alvarez, who in 1980 published a theory that an asteroid collided with Earth and wiped out the dinosaurs.
And now everyone says, yeah, that's probably what happened.
Absolutely right.
And he initially presented that information entirely on the basis of what are called impact proxies, carbon microspherials, meltdowns.
Are you carrying the torch for water?
Yes, because the evidence you talked earlier about comet impacts causing this.
In fact, it was one comet that broke up into multiple parts, if I'm right.
And again, that's based on the work of other scientists, for example, Chandra Wickram Singh at the University of Cardiff, has worked on this closely, and Bill Napier as well.
They suggest that a very large comet was drawn into the inner solar system about 20,000 years ago.
It went into an orbit around the sun that crossed the orbit of the Earth.
Then, because it's a comet, it started to break up into multiple fragments, rock bound together by ice.
The ice melts, it breaks up.
Suddenly, you've not got one object that might be 100 kilometers wide, you've got thousands of objects.
Suddenly, you're not dealing with a 100-kilometer impact target, but a 30 million kilometer-wide debris stream, which we still pass through twice a year.
That is the essence of the cataclysm that is proposed that brought on the Younger Dryas.
Not one single massive crater, but a series of airbursts all around the world of objects that might have been 50, 100, 200 meters in diameter, like the Tunguska event, which weren't quite big enough to reach the surface of the Earth, but blew up in the sky.
Tunguska happened on the 30th of June, 1908.
That's when the Earth passes through the Beta Taurids.
The same torrid meteor stream that is implicated at the beginning of the Younger Dryas.
We're still passing through it twice a year.
Okay, I have one question at the end, which is this.
Will Arsenal win the Premier League before or after the world ends?
Before.
Thank you.
Great to see you.
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