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Aug. 9, 2012 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
01:00:21
Edition 88 - Ancient Egypt Special

This time, a must-hear show with Ancient Egypt expert and highly commended writer/researcherRobert Bauval direct from his home in Spain. We talk about the Pyramids, new revelations about theAncient Egyptians and the race that preceded them - and his excellent new book which explains why someof those revelations might not be getting out to us as fast as they should.

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Across the UK, across continental North America and around the world on the internet, by webcast and by podcast.
My name is Howard Hughes and this is The Return of the Unexplained.
Thank you for keeping faith with me and the show for the lovely emails that have come in lately from every corner of the world.
Lots coming in from North America too at the moment.
Please, wherever you are, keep your emails coming.
I'd love to hear from you.
I'd love to hear your thoughts about the show and the way that I'm doing it and ideas for developing it.
It means that you're involved and means that we're really interactive here.
You know, a lot of media outlets profess to be interactive.
They say, oh, yes, that's what we are.
We take listeners' views into account.
But I can tell you, having worked on the inside, some of them don't.
Yes, so that's one thing that we have over the mainstream media, I think, that when you suggest something, there's only one person to talk with, and that's me, and I can get right on it.
You've made a lot of good guest suggestions lately.
Some of your guest suggestions are very famous, internationally known people, some of them smaller individuals.
Whoever they are, I'll consider them all.
And one thing I'd like to suggest to you, so we can increase the momentum, especially on the big-name guests to come on this show, if you want to contact them as well and say, look, I've heard this show done by a guy in the UK, and I'd like to hear you on this show, then please go ahead, send them an email and suggest that they come on the unexplained.
And I'll contact them too.
And in the end, they will have to come on here.
So that's my latest thought about all of this, and I think it will work.
I don't know what you might call it.
Crowd bidding.
Maybe we'll call it crowd bidding for guests on the show, but it makes it more interactive, I guess.
So thank you for the emails.
Thank you to Adam Cornwell at Creative Hotspot in Liverpool for getting the show out to you and for designing and developing the website that you see before you at www.theonexplained.tv, where you can make a donation to the show.
Thank you very much if you have lately.
Gratefully received.
We need the money to keep going.
This time round, we have a very special guest in this second week of the Olympics as I record these words.
Robert Baval is his name, best-selling author of a book that was published, I think, in the mid-90s called The Orion Mystery, all to do with ancient Egypt.
That has been his life's work.
His latest book is out right now.
In fact, as I speak, it's coming out.
It's called Breaking the Mirror of Heaven, The Conspiracy to Suppress the Voice of Ancient Egypt.
This man is an expert on Egypt, its revelations and its mysteries, and why we may not always hear the truth about those things.
He was born in Egypt from Belgian parents and did a lot of his studying here in the UK.
You may well be aware of this man's name.
It's a great pleasure to get him on here at The Unexplained.
So let's not hesitate.
He's based in Spain at the moment.
Robert Boval, thank you very much for coming on The Unexplained.
Yeah, thanks for having me on your show.
It's a great delight.
And first time I've connected with Spain, where I understand you're based.
Whereabouts are you in Spain, Robert?
I am on the Costa del Sol.
Oh, Sol.
Lucky man.
Yeah, do you know the place?
Yes.
Only slightly.
I mean, everything I know about the Costa del Sol is referenced to its distance from Marbella.
Whereabouts are you relative to Marbella?
I am near the airport.
I'm just outside Torremolinos.
Oh, yes.
Which is about 40 kilometers from Marbella, further up the coast.
I'm actually looking outside the window.
We have an apartment on the 11th floor on a block which is right on the sea.
So it's like being on a ship.
Well, if you accept guests, I'll be there tomorrow.
But seriously, you know...
We're in the middle of the season, and I've got my daughter, my grandson, everybody, my grandchildren.
They're all here for the summer.
And you've got 38-degree temperatures from what I'm reading, but a lot of the time.
Yes, well, it's full summer here.
Yeah, I mean, I'm looking out of the window, and the beach is full of people.
Very seriously, Robert, I would say that where you're based, whenever I've been to that area, I can't understand why it is.
Well, I can in a way, of course, because of Spain's heritage, but you feel a great connection with North Africa, don't you?
Because it's just, even if you can't see it necessarily, which of course from Gibraltar you can, but even if you're in a place where you can't see it, you feel it.
Well, you can see it as you are a bit past Marbea.
You can actually see Africa.
Oh, you can stand.
I know you can stand, which I've done a couple of times.
You stand on the top of the rock of Gibraltar, which is a little piece of Britain out there, very weird little piece.
In Gibraltar, it's literally a stone throw, as they say.
And you stand there and you look, and on a clear day, and it's going to be a clear day, you can actually see trucks climbing mountain roads right across in Africa, can't you?
It's the most wonderful experience.
Well, from where I am, you cannot see it, but you could literally cross on a small craft.
I mean, it's really that close.
And, you know, seriously, a lot of people do that, don't they, these days?
Yeah, unfortunately, we're the coast of the illegal immigrants, but they patrol the coast quite a lot here.
But, you know, strange enough, I mean, having said this, it's a happy coast.
I mean, it had a bad reputation about 20 years ago because it was kind of the Bill Laut's kind of haunt.
But you're a bit too young to remember this, but in the 60s, it was the big gathering area for the hippie movement.
And it was made very popular by a book by James Michener called The Drifters.
It was actually based on a true story where all these young people gathered.
Now, of course, they go to Ibiza, but it was the place.
And I started coming here in the 60s.
The reason is that my brother has been living here for 45 years.
He's an architect.
And we moved in.
I moved in with my wife four years ago.
Previously, I was in Cairo, by the way.
Where you were born?
I was born in Alexandria.
Okay, let me fill you in, as they say, because my chronology is a bit confusing.
I was born in Alexandria in 1948, and I grew up there, and I left Egypt When I was 19, just before the Six-Day War in 1967, I don't know if you remember when Egypt attacked Israel.
So my family decided enough was enough.
And we left Egypt and I was sent to boarding school in England.
That's how I got to go to England.
And I completed my studies there.
We were talking earlier about the Polytechnic of the South Bank, where I finished my engineering course in 1973.
And then I went on this huge spree of working for British and French companies in the Middle East and Africa.
And it kind of lasted till 1984.
So now I had children and like Zorba the Greek said, the whole thing, including the dog.
All right, so your life was complete at that point.
And I guess, like a lot of people do at that stage, you start looking for something else.
Well, it looked for me in a funny way because I was actually living in Saudi Arabia.
And I'll cut a long story short, but this is where I made the connection between the stars and the pyramids of Egypt, the pyramids of Giza.
And from that point on, it became a kind of mission.
I wanted to publish it.
I wanted to get involved with this.
So I took the plunge.
I resigned from the company I was working with in Saudi Arabia.
I had sufficient funds to pay myself a couple of years sabbatical.
And against everybody's opinion, that's it.
I took the time off and I wrote my first book in Australia, of all places.
The reason I was there is that my sister had immigrated there.
And the next is history, really.
I got published in 93, sorry, in early 94.
The book was very successful.
My first book, The Orion Mystery, was extremely successful.
I'm reading your biogue, your biography, and it says that this one got into the Sunday Times bestseller list.
So this was a pretty big book.
And this was the book, as you said, that made the connection.
I have to correct you.
It was the number one bestseller.
You're very, very fussy-ass author.
No, I do remember the title, and I do remember the book.
Sadly, I didn't buy it.
I'm going to have to get a copy now, but I do remember the book.
The reason that it shot like a rocket in the charts is because I was extremely lucky.
The BBC decided to do a documentary based on the book.
And it was actually shown.
The documentary was shown on the day of the launch of the book.
So if you can, it's a very rare thing to be able to do this.
But I was very lucky.
And the book the next day was right into the charts and it moved up to the position number one.
And then I teamed up, by the way, with Graham Hancock.
You did.
And I wanted to talk in a little while about that because that's a significant part of your work.
But this work about Orion, I'm glad we started with that because that was the starting point for you.
But it's also the building block for everything you've done since.
Can you just explain simply if that's possible to remind people, I'm sure a lot of people have heard about this anyway, what that connection between the constellation of Orion and the pyramids was that you found?
Yes, in extremely brief and simple terms, it was known before I got involved with this that the pyramids were astronomically aligned to the cardinal direction.
So it was also known from the pyramid text that the destination of kings who built those pyramids was in the stars, in particular the stars of Orion.
And it was also known that there was a shaft within the great pyramid pointing at the time when the building was constructed to Orion's belt.
Amazingly, nobody noticed that Orion's belt, which are three stars in a row, two bright stars with a little one, the third one slightly offset to the left.
And that's exactly how the pyramids are on the ground.
You have two large pyramids in a line and a third one slightly offset.
So you have a correlation.
Did it ever strike you as odd?
It must have done, obviously, because you wrote the book, that in one of the most studied sets of buildings on the planet, nobody, none of the academics and scholars who'd looked at it before, had actually made that connection.
I don't remember hearing about it before you said it.
No, no.
In fact, I published before I wrote the book, I published it in an academic journal in Oxford.
And this was in 1987, 87, 88.
The book finally got published in 1994, so there was quite a gap between the two.
Yeah, I mean, it's one of those strange things, but I don't know if you know of John West.
I do.
I've seen the name.
Yes, John West coined the phrase.
He said, if you're looking for potatoes in a field, you won't see the diamonds.
Very true.
Yeah, and this is what happened.
They weren't really looking strange enough.
I mean, and you know, it's one of those things, because the minute I pointed towards that correlation, it became obvious to everybody who saw it.
It is the old theory, isn't it?
It's somebody that I've had on this program quite a few times once said to me, Howard, the hardest place to find a book is in a library.
And that's probably true.
If you're surrounded by wonders, then perhaps the biggest wonder of all could be the thing that eludes you.
Yeah, it's a strange phenomena that, first of all, there is a lot of bias in this kind of research.
There's a lot of preconceived ideas.
And there's a lot of politics from what we've read and heard.
Politics, yes.
But the funny thing is that sometimes something is so obvious that people don't see it.
And actually, there is a case in question before I wrote this book which exemplifies this kind of strange situation.
It happened in Saudi Arabia.
I'll be very brief, but this will drive the point.
It's a true story.
Apparently, the king of Saudi Arabia, King Khaled at the time, it was 1981 when I was living there.
I worked in Saudi Arabia, by the way.
And he was about to board the royal flight, and there was a commotion because his bodyguard or his priest, they said, it wasn't so clear, stopped him and said, you can't go on this plane because it has the Christian cross on it.
You know how touchy they are about those things.
Well, clearly more touchy than I thought.
Good Lord.
Oh, yeah, yeah, no, no.
In fact, to this day, they will not allow the display of Christian symbols, let alone Jewish symbols.
No, no, you can't even have a church there.
It's totally forbidden.
Yeah, people don't know this, but it's true.
So he was told that he couldn't fly because of the symbolism on this plane.
Yeah, but nobody said, where is it?
I mean, nobody could see it.
You know, I mean, they've been flying these planes with this.
It had the Saudi logo, the Saudi airline logo.
But in fact, what the priest had seen, because he couldn't read Roman letters, he had seen what is known as the image in ground phenomena.
He had seen the blank between the letter S and A. And they were written in such a way that it formed a cross, the blank between the letters.
And the minute he pointed it, everybody saw this cross.
I mean, it sort of loomed out of the...
The king ordered that it be removed from every sign, every aircraft, every napkin, every ticket.
And they did that.
I have the pictures of the old logo and the new one.
I often use it in conference.
So it's one of those things that nobody had noticed it.
But the minute somebody says, hey, look at this, everybody saw it.
Because when you see it and the documentary that you speak of, I'm sure it's been repeated here recently because I have a feeling that sometime very deep in the middle of the night, I've seen it recently on one of the channels here.
That connection, that correlation is absolutely as plain as a pike staff, as we say here.
You cannot miss it.
I guess the question from there, though, is, what does it mean?
Was it a navigation aid?
Was it a homage to something in the stars?
What was it for?
Well, my view is that you have to stick to the context of the people who build it.
And we're lucky to have, not in the pyramids of Giza.
One of the strange things about them is that they're totally devoid of inscriptions.
Hence the mystery, you know, because there is no writings in or outside.
However, there is pyramids that follow the Giza pyramids.
Giza are supposed to be of the fourth dynasty.
But the pyramids of the fifth dynasty, although much smaller, contain texts, they're known as the pyramid texts, which are in pyramids of the fifth dynasty, explain in, of course, in archaic language and metaphoric language, that the king, when he dies, is converted somehow into a star.
And the idea is to send him to heaven, to the starry world, through the, I call it the hardware, through the hardware of the pyramids.
The pyramids are like, to them, they were kind of machines, metaphysical machines, if you like.
One of the difficulties that most people have, particularly Egyptologists for some reason, is that you have to get into the frame and the mindsets of these people.
And it's not so easy.
You know, you really have to perceive the world as they perceived it.
And they truly believed that their kings were originally from the stars and would return to the stars.
It wasn't a belief.
It was more than a belief.
They were absolutely convinced of this possibility.
And that's why they were literally worshipped.
They worshipped the king, but this is why they went through this huge effort of building the pyramids.
Because in their minds, and this is one of the difficult things to understand, in their mind, it was necessary.
It was a necessary hardware.
It's a bit like us in modern terms.
Perhaps the metaphor that we can make is with computers.
The great difficulty is to, like I keep saying to, you know, after 30 years of being involved with this, I can get somehow into the mindset of the builders, of the ancient builders.
And the people who designed those monuments were the high priests of the cult.
And their job was to provide the Pharaoh with the means to be able to join the stellar gods in heaven.
So that was their job, if you like.
And they seemed to, in their mind, they needed to construct a metaphysical machine.
This is what the pyramids are.
And in fact, now the most recent appreciation of these monuments is that they weren't used literally for the king's body.
The king was probably buried physically elsewhere.
They were used for his soul.
Now, to us, it's a very strange thing to build such a big thing for somebody's soul.
You know, not to actually put the physical body inside.
But in their mind, this is what they were doing.
They were building an eternal home for the soul of the king.
And through that gate, if you like, through that stargate, there you are, the stargate, the king Was able to communicate with the heavens and return back to earth as he pleased.
But he needed that launching pad, if you like.
So, this is what they are.
And a lot of people miss the point, you know, and they put them totally out of the context.
You know, that they're landing strips or they're prophetic machines, they're prophetic monuments, they're built by UFOs.
You know, I have to be honest, I don't go for this at all.
What's more exciting to me is that we had a people who so deeply believed in their ideologies that they went through this huge, huge enterprise.
And we really have to not just admire them for it, but sometimes you wonder if perhaps they knew something we did not know about ourselves.
Well, when you look at the scale of it and the complexity of it and the knowledge that it must have taken to build it and the amount of muscle power that it must have taken to do this, the conclusion that a lot of people have quite, including myself, have quite logically drawn about this is that clearly, even if they felt they had a connection with the stars, perhaps they also had some help from something up there that we're not aware of.
Look, I'll go as far as saying that I am getting more and more convinced that they were able to access what we are able to access, but we don't do it, is internal knowledge.
You know, I happen to be a cosmologist as well.
I study astronomy and I've co-authored a book recently with an astrophysicist.
I talk with astrophysicists and cosmologists.
So your background is unique.
You have that building background that you trained for in London, but also you have a cosmic background too.
So you are the perfect man to do this, aren't you, really?
Well, you know, the person who designed those pyramids was a bit like me, or I'm a bit like them, if you like.
They were astronomers in the sense, but they had a sacred astronomy.
They saw astronomy in a different way that we see it, but they did study the sky and they observed the sky and they tried to make sense out of what they saw.
But they were also architects, they were also builders.
And you have this combination that is required to be able to understand them.
What we call the architect's brief.
You know, if you're going to design a cathedral or you want a cathedral built or a hospital, it's two very different things.
And you have to go to the architect who has the knowledge and the training of the monuments that you want to commission.
So there's no point going to an architect who designs hospitals and say, I want you to design a cathedral and vice versa.
So the architect's brief when it comes to the pyramid is, I want you to build me a monument that will help me get to the stars.
I mean, that's basically what his job was.
And he came up with these monuments.
And therefore, we have to look at these monuments and work backwards into what was in their minds.
What were they really trying to do?
And this is how I approached it.
And one of the keys, undoubtedly, is astronomy.
Because the monuments are intensely astronomical.
They are aligned to the stars.
They have symbolism related to the sky.
So you have to...
So you have to marry both.
You have to put both together.
And with the knowledge of astronomy, you extract the information that is in the architecture.
So that's the process.
And I'm one of the pioneers in this way.
But a lot of this stuff is science, if you can call it that, of a very high order.
And it is the kind of thing that we like to flatter ourselves with in the current era, that only us, with our technology that we've derived in the last three or four hundred years or so, that only we are capable of.
And the pyramids and the work that has been done in ancient Egypt shows us that, in fact, we are not as special as we think we are.
And in many ways, perhaps in this race of life, we're only just coming back up to the point that they got to.
Well, one of the things about ancient Egypt, and particularly the pyramid builders, is that they seem to have reached an extremely high level of technical and religious evolution.
When you look at the pyramids, it's hard to believe.
In fact, I'll let you on to a little thing in a minute because I'm writing a book at the moment with Thomas Brophy, the American astrophysicist, and I'll make the point about what I'm about to say now, is that it's very hard to believe when you actually are exposed to these monuments that they began, they sprang out of the beginning, not at the end of a civilization.
They seem to start the other way around, you know, as we were saying earlier.
So this has always been a mooted issue with Egyptologists and other researchers, is that you're looking at a situation where monuments are of that caliber, of that scale, of that precision at the beginning of a civilization rather than at its end.
So this doesn't work for me.
It doesn't work for a lot of people who have looked into this, especially if you are an architect or an engineer.
It's simply...
It's a bit like the Ferrari came before the Ford T. You know, it's simply not.
And how can you have learned all that stuff right at the start?
That doesn't make sense.
So there's two possible scenarios.
Either they got it from somewhere else that was a people or a civilization that had already developed this, or their civilization is much older.
And this is where the second solution is where I think is the answer.
I've just written a book, by the way, which was published last year called Black Genesis.
And now I'm working on a book with the same author, Thomas Prophy.
And it's probably going to be my opus because with all the experience we both have in this particular study, it's becoming more than evidence.
The evidence is overwhelming archaeologically, astronomically, anthropologically, that the Egyptian civilization is much, much older than we think.
And therefore, the process of evolution is much more slower and the way that we would expect it.
And that also would assume that we were just beginning to think, in our arrogance, perhaps, that we knew all there was to know about these people, or we certainly knew a great deal about them.
If there was something before them, and if their history goes back even further than we ever believed, then we've only scratched the surface.
Yes, there is, and this, by the way, is now widely accepted by many Egyptologists.
I mean, there is what we're beginning to call a proto-Pharaonic civilization.
There was a lost civilization, that's for sure, that existed in what today is the Sahara.
In a time where the climate was very, very different, and at a time where people flourished in a kind of lush, very, very habitable zone.
It's now, of course, just sand.
I've been exploring with my co-author.
We actually went to the remote parts of the Sahara, and the evidence is overwhelming that there existed people there who had developed the very thing that we find used by the pyramid builders.
Astronomy, for example.
There is a site that has made quite a sensation since the late 90s called Napta Playa.
It is in the very distant south of Egypt, about 100 kilometers from the Nile going into the western desert.
And it's baffled everybody because it's been now called a ceremonial astronomical site.
It's a kind of like a mini stone henge in the desert.
It's the oldest astronomical site known to the whole world.
It's dated to about 9 to 10,000 BC.
And it contains very sophisticated astronomy.
And precisely the astronomy that we see in the pyramids.
Alignments to Orion's belt, alignments to the star Sirius, calendars.
So it is very clear now that there was a people.
We don't know who they are, by the way.
I mean, all we know is that they were black.
They came from probably from South East Africa, Central East Africa, sorry, probably through the Chad and around 20,000 years ago.
They're the very people, by the way.
Do we have time?
I'm not quite sure how much time we have.
No, we have as much time as we need for this.
No, absolutely.
This is fascinating.
We can't truncate this.
Well, let me put this in a context because it's good for listeners to get a full picture of this.
We know now from genetic studies that model man began his adventure in Central East Africa.
Previous, and we can even date it, we know it happened some 200,000 years ago.
Previous to that, there were, of course, humans, but they weren't us.
They were a different form of humans.
Is this what they celebrate in South Africa?
There's a site there called Marapeng that claims to be the cradle of civilization, and they claim that civilization started there and moved north?
I don't want to go there at the moment.
Okay, all right.
Otherwise, we'll digress completely.
We know for sure that Homo erectus, the previous form of humans, there is something that happens to a female.
We now call her the African Eve.
That whatever it is, she gave birth to the first modern human, us, Homo sapien.
What caused this, what caused this mutation is the big, huge question that may or may not be answered.
But this is for sure what happened.
And from that very single woman, the whole six or a half billion people on this planet have emerged.
So from one mutation and how that occurred is the question that you're posing here.
That's how we're here.
Yes.
I mean, we know that this first modern human occurred around 200,000 BC.
They multiplied.
They stayed in that area till about 60,000 BC.
And then apparently, a rather small group, probably 150 or 200 people, started moving northwards.
Some of them, of course, stayed, and this is the African population we have in Africa at the moment.
But this small group moved northwards and eventually within the next 25,000 years populated the rest of the world with them.
With them.
Now, of course, there's been many mutations ever since.
And that's why we have the different groups of people.
We have the Caucasians, we have the Asians, and so forth.
But we all come from there.
Now, it seems that one small party From that source, did not move elsewhere, they stayed in Africa and they probably migrated to the Chad.
These are the people that we think are at the source of the Egyptian civilization.
We actually have seen them, if you like, because they left us rock art in the Sahara.
You can actually see them.
And they've left us all these wonderful prehistoric sites with astronomical alignments.
And we lose trace of them, literally, they seem to disappear at the very moment that we see Egyptian civilization sprouting.
So it's very clear that they moved eventually when the desert became too arid, too impossible to sustain life.
They moved from the desert into the Nile Valley.
And they took along with them all their knowledge of astronomy, of moving stone, of domesticating cattle and so forth.
And they injected this knowledge in the Nile Valley.
And within a thousand years, you had the pyramids.
So in many ways, in this era now, in 2012, the most fascinating study should be in that new area.
I say new, in that area that you were researching.
Absolutely.
Because the answers to a lot of questions could be there.
For example, what happened that made that change in the nature of human beings or whatever they were then?
Did that injection, if we can call it that, come perhaps from not on this planet?
Was it extraterrestrial?
There you can speculate.
I mean, and it is not an impossible proposal.
Because we appear from what we know now, and of course it's incomplete, it always will be, we appear to have made a giant leap very quickly, and from there everything else developed.
But how did we make that giant leap is the question, isn't it?
Absolutely.
And whoever is going to find the answer will solve the greatest mystery ever.
I mean, there is no question that a huge change, a huge mutation occurred from Homo erectus, who was fairly advanced compared to other creatures, but nonetheless, I mean, you've got to imagine, this is what we know about our human background.
About seven, eight million years, we can trace the human species all the way to about eight million years, perhaps slightly further, but around that time.
Whereas this planet, the planet we're on, has existed for four and a half billion years.
So human beings are relatively newcomers, if you like.
However, from seven million years ago to that moment where there has been that huge leap, the human species did not evolve that much.
I mean, one of the strange things is that when you study anthropology, you find that their tools are very basic.
They don't change for millions of years.
But then suddenly there is this enormous change.
And within literally a split second, if you like, in terms of cosmic time, we've got man on the moon.
In fact, we got a robot on Mars a few days ago.
As we speak, we went an awful long way very quickly, and that's very commendable, but there has to be an explanation for that.
Do you buy into the theories that there are still secrets hidden within, for example, the Great Pyramid?
There are still things that haven't been found yet, and they may include a blueprint that possibly explains all of this.
Well, to answer the first part of your question, there is no doubt in my mind that there are still chambers to be opened in the Great Pyramid.
I mean, we know of a very tantalizing possibility, because you may or may not have heard that in 93, the so-called shafts in the Great Pyramid, there are shafts that shoot out of the chambers into the core of the monument.
And the ones in the so-called Queen's Chamber were explored in 93 by a German engineer with a little machine, with a little robotic machine.
And he found a door, doors at the end of these two shafts.
They haven't been opened yet.
And the possibility of chambers behind them is extremely high, especially lately because they've been re-explored in 2010, sorry, 2011, just before the Egyptian Revolution.
And unfortunately, all the work has stopped now.
And they noticed that behind the door in the southern shaft were inscriptions, very, very mysterious inscriptions.
They now think, there's a whole controversy over this, but they now think that the inscriptions are actually numbers.
And they give a rather odd number.
They give the number 121.
Now, it may not mean much to your listeners, but the pyramid is designed on the number 11 as a master ratio.
In other words, there's a lot of dimensions, the pyramid, that employ the ratio of 11 something, like 11 to 14 or 11 against 7 and so forth.
11 seems to be the key.
And 121 is 11 times 11.
Really?
Oh, yes.
I've forgotten that.
11 times 11, yeah.
Okay.
My brother is very into that because he's an architect and he's also an expert on that.
That's fascinating.
So if you work that out, that could mean, I know we're leaping a long way here, but that could mean that that's the ultimate 11 times 11.
This could be the door to the ultimate secret.
Well, it seems to be a code.
It seems to be a code that needs to be understood.
Whatever that code leads to.
The pyramids has been designed.
Now, this is the...
Just think of the Great Pyramid as a monument.
And what we can say, without hand on heart, is that it is, apart from being huge and very large and all this, it is a monument that has been designed on the principles of astronomy and mathematics.
It's the very thing that we'd expect a scientific, not a religious, but a scientific society to do.
Why it was done is the big question.
Because the monument responds to mathematics and a rather high mathematics, mathematics of ratios.
It has the value pi, for example.
Some people have even argued that it has the so-called golden section and so forth.
It is really very odd.
And it responds to astronomy.
It has shafts pointing to stars.
It's aligned to perfection, to the cardinal direction.
So it's not surprising that a lot of people are mystified by this.
And some have gone too far, some jump to conclusions that we are not ready yet to consider.
But what we can consider is that there is some kind of code, there is some kind of message that is integrated in the design and astronomy of this monument.
And it's fascinating because, you know, it's one of those monuments.
Let me tell you, I was living in Cairo from 2005 to 2008, literally in front of the Great Pyramid.
I had an apartment that overlooked the Great Pyramid.
And I had a balcony where I would have my breakfast.
What a wonderful location to live.
Oh, yes.
I mean, I've had a, to coin the phrase, a belly full of the Great Pyramid.
It was there all the time.
And here is the weird thing, is that, I know it sounds strange, but you eventually are forced to, Every time you look at it, it raises so many questions that you spend the rest of the day pondering on these questions.
So you eventually stop looking at it because it's provocative.
It's not meant to be there.
It's as if it shouldn't be there.
You know what I mean?
And it's a bit like finding a, I don't know, finding a shoe on Mars.
It shouldn't be there.
And this is the Great Pyramid.
It is a, I usually describe it as a giant question mark for mankind.
I mean, it's there looming provocatively and tantalizingly.
Pointing a finger at us and daring us to work out what it's all about.
Well, that's what it does.
I mean, and hence why a lot of people are attracted to it, because it is a mystery.
It is a mystery, because here we are in the 21st century and you'd think, I know Egyptologists don't agree with this, but you'd think that we would have solved this monument, how it was built, why they used mathematics and so forth.
So although I have fitted it in a religious context of the time, we may not be dealing with a religion.
We may be dealing with what people really believed, and what they really believed is that they somehow understood that they had an origin in the stars.
And the real thing, you, is that we do have an origin in the stars.
I mean, there's no astrophysicist today will deny that.
We are star stuff, like Carl Sagan once said.
You and me and our computer and the chair you're sitting on and the people on the beach and the sea is made of star stuff.
There is a star somewhere in our galactic system that exploded and its stuff has been captured by another star, which is our own sun.
And we're it.
We're a star that has become conscious of itself.
We're star stuff that's become conscious.
This is the truth.
I mean, I'm not metaphysical here.
We are not happenstance.
We can't be.
We're not just random.
There is more to the equation, and the other part of the equation is probably not on this planet.
And that's where ancient Egypt and the pyramids come into it all.
Well, you may have watched or are aware that there is a rather popular program on History Channel called Ancient Aliens.
Yes.
Well, I've appealed quite a lot on this program, but I stay with my feet a bit on the ground, as they say.
But what was very refreshing, certainly with the earlier series, is that many scientists, many astrophysicists were quite ready to come and talk about the possibility of extraterrestrial intervention.
Now, it is a mooted subject, as you may well know, and it causes always controversy.
But, you know, an astrophysicist today, or a rather cosmologist today, will tell you that if we really were told what the universe is about, we probably wouldn't believe it, because it would be so amazingly strange.
Everything is possible.
I mean, we live in a universe that literally everything is possible.
But the only thing that can hinder discovery is mankind.
And I would imagine that takes us to the point of your book that's out right now, in fact, out in a few days from now, Breaking the Mirror of Heaven, The Conspiracy to Suppress the Voice of Ancient Egypt, in which, if the synopsis that I've read is correct, you are basically saying that roadblocks have been put in the way to this information getting out.
Well, this and other information.
I mean, yes, I mean, anybody who seriously investigates, and I emphasize the word seriously, because I have to say that there is a lot of funny stuff being written.
However, there are very serious non-Egyptologists, and I'm referring to people like John West and Robert Schock and Graham Hancock, Andy Collins, and a variety of others, who have discovered, unfortunately, that if you are going to publish new ideas,
especially that ideas that go against the established consensus from the academic lot, from the orthodoxy, as we call them, you're going to upset a lot of people.
And I'm the prime example of this because, boy, when I published the Orion correlation, I mean, I was rather innocent in those days.
I was what they call a virgin in academics.
You know, I was untouched.
But some people are not, whenever you go out there and you postulate a theory, there are going to be people inevitably who are not going to like what you say.
In Egyptology, it's particularly so.
I mean, let me tell you, I mean, when the program was shown in 94 on television, there was an almighty uproar from the Egyptologists and other academics, I mean, archaeologists, I mean, everybody who had an ist behind his name had their say, or rather had their go at me.
And at the end, what I said was that the pyramids look like on the ground, the same pattern as the stars.
I mean, I wasn't sort of suggesting much more at the time.
But it is a strange thing that you have that built-in bias in an academic establishment.
And we've known this throughout history.
And although I do not compare myself to Galileo or Copernicus, but there is this famous phrase from Galileo where, you know, he was absolutely sure that the planet rotates on its axis.
I mean, and it was round, you know.
But they actually made him recant.
I mean, they showed him the torture instrument and he said, you've got to say that it isn't.
And he coins the phrase in Italian, epurigira.
He recants, but then he murmurs to the bishop next to him, but I'm sorry, it does turn.
And this is the problem, is that there is an amazing resistance, especially in Egyptology, to new ideas.
Is this the conspiracy that you talk about in the title of your new book?
Is it a conspiracy?
Yeah, I mean, it's not that there is a bunch of old men smoking cigarettes and deciding to create a conspiracy.
But in practice, that's how it works.
There is a conspiracy of sorts in the sense that when there is a new idea of that kind, you'll find that Egyptologists behind the scenes rub shoulders, and you will find it difficult in publishing, in academic journals.
You'll find that if you...
And in my case, it got very nasty.
I mean, they...
They really cannot accept in their mind that outsiders make breakthrough.
And they want to admit it, but that's how they feel.
Now, you were telling me, Robert, there are parts of the Great Pyramid, and of course we know this because we've probably read this, that have yet to be explored.
Do you think that this in Inverted Commas conspiracy is connected with that?
Is the reticence and foot dragging about exploring those part of that conspiracy, or is it just connected with lethargy or the recent political problems in Egypt?
What do you think?
Well, it's a mixture of many things, probably all the things you've stated.
The main thing is that there are certain academics in high places that become very possessive and authoritative on the subject that they deal with.
One of them, as you may well know, was the famous ex-minister of antiquities in Egypt.
That's how he was, yeah?
Yes, we talk a lot about him and this problem in this book I've just published with Ahmed Osman, Breaking the Mirror of Heaven.
By the way, it was number one on the Amazon Charts Egypt section.
Really?
Is that Advanced Orders?
Or is that?
It hasn't yet been delivered.
That's fantastic.
Yes.
No, I'm sure it's going to be a popular book because, you know, not to blow my trumpet, but we did a very good job because we've lived throughout this problem over the last 30 years.
Ahmed, who is an Egyptian living in London, who's well known for his books on the comparison of the Bible with historical Egyptian characters like Ahenaten and so forth.
And we've been old friends and we've both suffered this kind of bias and prejudice coming from Zahi Hawaz.
I mean, it got to the point where, you know, we were obstructed from investigating.
Every time we published something, there was huge attacks against us.
But of course, I can't speak for him.
He's not here online to defend himself.
Presumably, he sees himself as a custodian.
That's his job.
Well, he's no more.
I mean, thank goodness.
I mean, he saw himself as the owner of the antiquities of Egypt for many, many years.
So Egypt is entering a new era.
Do you hope from your perspective that you're going to get the chance to put the keys in some of those locks and open some of those doors?
Well, I'm not going to be the one who physically will open those doors.
I mean, let me be clear.
Metaphorically speaking.
Yeah, well, here is what is going on.
I mean, they now have a new government.
It's been appointed.
The new government was appointed a few days ago.
It looks like a fairly good selection.
They have a very good new minister of antiquities, a fellow called Mohammed Ibrahim, who has worked in the antiquities for many, many years.
He is the opposite of Zahi Hawas in that he is focusing on what he's supposed to be focusing on rather than wanting to be a TV star.
He is a very quiet, sober man, and that's what they need.
They really need to have that kind of leader.
It got out of hand with Hawass.
I mean, he really was never there.
He was always hopping around from one show to the other.
So your hope is that there's going to be, once Egypt settles down, which it still fully hasn't, there's going to be a new focus, a new impetus to do all of this, and some of these mysteries may be solved?
Yes.
I mean, look, there is, of course, I mean, you know, Egypt is barely scratched the surface.
I mean, when you move around the western desert, let me tell you, there is a huge waste of territory there that has been still unexplored.
I went last year, you, I'm digressing here a bit, but I went, sorry, not last year, but in 2008, God, time passes, in the far western desert, all the way to the Libyan and Sudanese borders, in the most mysterious place you can imagine.
It's like going to planet Mars, totally uninhabited.
But this place was populated in prehistoric times, and it's totally unexplored.
I mean, there is a huge, huge work still to do in Egypt.
And what they need is to be much more open-minded to controversial research.
You know, new ideas, new breakthroughs come from controversial people.
I mean, you know, if everybody was sort of being quiet, nothing would happen.
We wouldn't get anywhere.
Do you think that the Arab Spring that we've been through and we're still seeing the backwash from, do you think that will help to open some doors and help us to make some progress?
I'm very optimistic.
There is, of course, an ongoing, but like all revolutions, especially of this magnitude, we need to give it time.
There are opportunities to try to grab the reins of the revolution and convert these countries into Islamic states and so forth.
But this is just a bad phase to pass through.
I think up here we don't understand the time scales that people work on down there.
We think that if you have a revolution, if you have political turmoil and upheaval and whatever, then the outcome of that will be immediate, which it might be in Europe.
But that's not how things work down there.
This is going to take years to shake out.
Oh, yes.
I mean, to be fair, I mean, I've written a book, by the way, with Hancock, which partly deals with the French Revolution.
I mean, if you look at the turmoil that happened in France after the 1789 revolution, it took them, my God, it took them half a century to get their act together.
We really have to appreciate that change of this kind does not happen overnight.
There is a process that has to take place and the people, well, for one, I mean, the majority of people in Egypt are poor.
Many of them are badly educated and there is a process to go through.
They need to be tutored, if you like, in the idea of the modern world and democracy.
And this doesn't happen just like that.
And whatever they come out with, we would be very arrogant and very wrong, and this is just a personal view, to expect them to come out with a system just like ours.
Why should they?
They've evolved from different roots.
They're not going to become good little Western replicas.
And anybody who expects that, if they're in Washington or London or wherever they are, I think, and that's only my view, is going to be really disappointed in the long term.
Well, and I'm glad.
I mean, we don't want that to happen.
What will happen eventually is that, you know, like Colonel Saunders said, you know, a chicken is a chicken.
I mean, he may be, you know, it doesn't matter where he gets born, you know.
That's the first reference on this show we've ever had to Colonel Saunders.
I'm glad.
You said this.
So listen, unfortunately, we're more or less out of time.
And I would love to have you, Robert, if you can make the time for me.
I want to have you on here again, if I may, at some point.
I would love to talk to you again.
Perhaps when you've made some more progress with the new book, made some more visits, I do want to get you back here.
But we seem to be leaving this conversation at a very optimistic point.
I was in Egypt several times after the revolution.
And one of the things that hits you, if you know the country like I do, is that there has been a radical change in perception with the people.
They are now proud to be Egyptians.
They felt ashamed before.
They felt wrong.
They felt that they were like servants in their own country.
And now they are proud.
They're proud.
And this is...
This is the beginning of the change.
It will take time, but with that seed being sown, I'm very, very optimistic.
Did you get this?
Yes, I absolutely got that loud and clear.
And that's a really good point to park this conversation until we talk again, Robert.
Thank you very, very much for making time for me.
It was a great pleasure.
I'm sorry about the connections.
No, it was perfect up until just that late point, and we just got a little bit of breakup.
But I would like to thank you very sincerely for that.
I've been riveted by our conversation.
If people want to know more about you and your work, presumably you have a website.
Yes, I have a website, www.boval.co.uk.
Please do not go to dot com.
It's been hijacked.
Oh, okay.
RobertBoval.co.uk.
One quick question.
You know and have worked with Graham Hancock quite closely.
I've been trying to get him on this program now for about 18 months or two years.
He's a very busy man.
Do you have any clue what he's working on now?
Yes, he's just completed a very, very large novel.
I can tell you it's to do with the Spanish conquest of South America.
I've been able to listen to a few parts of it.
It's a very exciting book, as you know.
He's a tremendous writer.
And I'm seeing, by the way, Graham, in a couple of weeks in Italy, we're meeting there for a conference.
Well, if this isn't too presumptuous of me, if you could mention me to him, and if you've enjoyed our conversation and think that it might be a good experience for him, I would love to talk to him.
I will, I will.
He has truly been very busy, and when he writes, even I cannot disturb him.
But he's now finished, so I'll pop the word for you.
Well, I've said a number of times that I would be only too happy to drive from London to Bath, where he lives most of the time, and see him.
I think you'll have to, yes.
Well, I'd love to do that.
And listen, a pleasure to talk to you, Robert.
Have a good day in southern Spain in the heat, and we will talk again.
Excellent.
The words and thoughts of author Robert Boval, fascinating stuff, a great pleasure to have him on.
And if you're looking for a link to his work and his books, go to my website, www.theunexplained.tv, www.theunexplained.tv, and you'll find it there.
If you want to send me thoughts and suggestions about the show, reflections on this show or any show that we've done, maybe some guest suggestions too, always grateful to hear from you.
Lovely to hear from you.
In fact, wherever you are in the world, thank you very much for your emails.
Keep them coming.
Thank you to Adam at Creative Hotspot for getting the show out to you.
Thank you to Martin for the theme tune.
And above all, thank you to you for keeping the faith with the unexplained.
We're hoping to get, by the way, Richard Hoagland on here, American space expert, to talk about the latest developments on the red planet Mars with Curiosity combing that place at the moment.
Fascinating images coming back.
So my fingers are crossed that we can have Richard Hoagland on here within days if all goes well.
Thank you very much for keeping the faith with the unexplained.
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