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Nov. 1, 2015 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
01:02:35
Edition 227 - Graham Hancock

This time world-renowned British author, journalist and historian Graham Hancock...

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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 Unexplained.
Thank you very much for keeping the faith with both me and the show, for your crop of emails, which has been quite remarkable.
So many emails recently and so good.
So many suggestions about things that I can do on the show.
So many comments about guests and basically you're my compass.
You helped to steer my direction of travel in this show.
You had a lot to say about the previous guest, James K. Lambert.
Some of you feeling that a man like that shouldn't have been on this show and had no idea about the conspiracy theories of which he spoke.
And others saying this man was a breath of fresh air.
When I do some shout-outs and talk about some of your emails in a future edition, we'll talk about some of the things you've said about James K. Lambert.
But I take every word that you say on board and I see every email that you send.
Thank you very much indeed.
If you want to send me an email, go to the website theunexplained.tv, the website designed, curated by Adam Cornwell at Creative Hotspot in Liverpool.
There, you can follow the link and send me an email.
And please, if you can, do send me a donation to this show to help it all to continue.
And if you have recently, many, many thanks for that.
The guest on this edition, this is why I'm speeding things up a little right now, is somebody very special.
I've been trying for four or five years to get him on this show.
And thanks to Roger Sanders in California at last, I've been able to make this happen, Graham Hancock.
If you're listening to this show, I think there's more than a 90% chance you will know who he is.
In fact, I put that probably in the high 90s.
His new book, Magicians of the Gods, is out in the UK at the moment, due to be launched on the 10th of November in the US.
He's doing a tour to accompany that book launch.
And you will know a great deal, I'm sure, about Graham Hancock if you're hearing this now and you want to hear the rest of this show.
A man who's spoken a lot about ancient civilizations and consciousness and a lot of other cool topics that we are very well and truly into on this show.
He is a Class A guest.
I'm delighted to have him on here.
And I thank him very much indeed for making time to speak with me.
So let's not mess about.
Let's get to Bath in the United Kingdom by digital connection and say, Graham Hancock, it is a pleasure to have you on The Unexplained.
Thank you.
And Graham, I'm particularly delighted, not only because I've had multiple myriad requests for you over a number of years.
And, you know, I've been trying to get you on the show for about four years now.
And thanks to my friend Roger Sanders, our mutual friend in California, you're here now.
We've finally connected.
And how has the I'm talking to you from London.
You're at the other end of the M4 corridor here.
How is the weather where you are?
Well, the weather where I am is sunny and bright with a very optimistic looking blue sky out there.
Well, this is good news.
This will be heard, our conversation, at the very beginning of November.
So I think, you know, we have to just hope here in the UK that the weather's kind.
You know, my listeners in other parts of the world don't really understand the British obsession with the weather, Graham.
I think we need to explain to them, don't we, at some point, but not now.
I think it's one of the great mysteries of science, actually.
Yes, I think so too.
Okay, now, I've watched and read various interviews with you in the run-up to doing this.
And one thing you do talk about, and I can completely understand why, is the amount of criticism, the number of brick bats that have been aimed in your direction over the years and the fact that you've had to fight to get your voice heard.
Now, you are becoming ever more popular and even more famous.
You've recently had a series of book signings in the UK, I know, because I narrowly missed one of them.
I was hoping to go to the one in Reading in Berkshire.
Sadly, couldn't.
Do you find that that increasing popularity immunizes you from the criticism?
No, and I would like to make clear right at the outset that I have no problem with criticism.
Criticism of ideas is a very important process in the improvement and development of those ideas.
So I welcome criticism.
What I don't welcome is misrepresentation of my work.
In other words, articles or reports that say Hancock says this and then attack me for saying it when in fact I never say it.
That's the kind of thing I don't like.
And that verges on, at times, it almost feels like a deliberate misinformation process, that there is a, in my own small way, there is a narrative about Graham Hancock that exists in the minds of journalists, particularly those associated with the mainstream media, and those journalists refer to that narrative rather than necessarily referring to me.
So I'll give you a very specific example.
Two or three weeks ago when the book was published in the UK on the 10th of September, there was a profile of me, almost a full-page profile of me, appeared in the London Sunday Times.
Okay, now the only problem with that profile is that the journalist never phoned me up.
The journalist never interviewed me.
See, when I was a journalist back in the 1970s, and I used to write for the Sunday Times, which was a classy newspaper then, when I was a journalist, if I had attempted to submit a profile of an author to that newspaper without even bothering to talk to the author, I would have been fired.
And they teach you, don't they?
When you train as a journalist, Graham, they teach you that primary sources are where it's at.
You have wherever possible to go to the first.
Primary sources are where it's at.
And that journalist should have phoned me up and checked his facts with me.
But that never happened.
And as a result, the article is full of errors, all of which appear to be deliberately designed to present me in a negative light.
The narrative wants to suggest that Graham Hancock is a quote-unquote pseudo-scientist or quote-unquote pseudo-archaeologist.
Well, it's interesting.
And I'm some sort of pretender.
Let me just finish.
I am not a pseudo-scientist or a pseudo-archaeologist because I've never claimed to be any of those things, to be an archaeologist or to be a scientist.
Therefore, I can't be a false archaeologist or a false scientist because I'm not passing myself off as an archaeologist or a scientist.
I'm a writer, plain and simple.
My work is the synthesizing of information from a broad range of fields.
I'm a journalist, I've always been a journalist, and I'm still a journalist today.
And that's why I'm dismayed and appalled by the low standard of research that goes into articles that are written about me.
And I can't help.
See, I know my own life.
So when I see an article riddled with mistakes that could easily have been corrected simply by calling me up, I have to wonder if the same sloppy, lazy standard of journalism is being applied to all the articles I read in the press, in which case everything in the media is just absolute unmitigated rubbish.
It's interesting because I have a foot in both camps.
As you know, I have, just to make money and pay my bills, I do shifts in mainstream media.
And mainstream media, let me tell you, is very big on training now.
So they tend to instill in us a great deal and indeed give us online training courses and other sessions.
You know, if we need refreshers, and they clearly think that we do, in two things these days, fairness, number one, and privacy or privacy, depending on which side of the Atlantic you're on.
They're very big about those things.
And in your life, I know that it has been an enormous irritant to you that sometimes you have considered what has been said to you to be grossly unfair.
And perhaps, and I'm very keen to get your view on this, maybe if you'd been in another field, you wouldn't have had to face this kind of roasting?
Well, I think the point is that I am proposing a radical revisioning of our history and prehistory as a species.
I'm saying that the account of the origins of civilization that has been fed to us through the education system and through the media for the best part of the last century is wrong, that we're missing a whole episode of human civilization.
And I've attempted to present the evidence and the arguments for that.
So it's inevitable if I choose to write in areas that go against a mainstream point of view, which I do, then I can expect to be attacked and criticized for so doing.
Of course, the mainstream are not simply going to roll over and surrender their model of history.
Of course, they're going to fight for it tooth and nail.
And that's good as long as it's a fair fight.
But if the criticisms of me are based on deliberate or idle misrepresentation of my work and a great myth about me and what I say is being spread by the media, which actually has nothing to do with what I really say, then this is a very disturbing situation.
And I certainly find it annoying, but most of all, I'm just disappointed that journalism has fallen to such shoddy lows.
I don't know about all this training to be fair and respect privacy, but I don't see much of it.
I think journalists are in the business of selling newspapers, and frankly, why let the facts get in the way of a good story?
Which is a motto that a couple of news editors in my very, very deep and distant past kind of tried to impress upon me.
And I tried to ignore as far as I possibly could.
But they were, you know, we both worked in older, harder days when sometimes you were forced to do things that you didn't want to do.
Anyway, that's a bit of a digression, but an important one.
Maybe this is just nostalgia, but I have to say the standards were higher.
When I look at the media coverage of my work in Britain during the month of September, it is just all rubbish and completely error-filled.
And a little bit of hard work on behalf of the journalists, I don't mean really hard work, I mean just a few phone calls.
They could have got things straight.
And always better, which I'm doing now, to speak with you.
Yes.
Now, I'm here.
I'm excited.
We're using the power of the podcast, and I'm delighted that we are, to reach people all over the world in a way that we couldn't do when I was training to do all of this.
Do you take heart in the midst of all of this, and this gets us into the meat of our discussion, from the fact that more and more people, and more and more people that I've interviewed on this show, take issue with the standard description of how we got to be who we are, where we are, and know what we know?
Other people have different takes on it.
They may think that we've been seeded by aliens or whatever.
But at least the general direction of travel is suggesting that what we've been told, which is what you've been saying for years, is wrong.
Yeah, that's absolutely right.
I think there is a new mood in the air.
And there is a profound questioning of previously unquestioned statements by authority figures.
And you know, this is much wider than just the investigation of ancient history.
This is right across the board in our society today.
If I were to put my finger on one of the key changes that has occurred in the past 20 years, as well as the radical decline in the standards of journalism, another key change that has occurred is that 20 years ago, the general public were by and large willing without question to accept an authoritative statement from a so-called expert.
That is not the case today.
Authoritative statements from so-called experts are a debased and devalued currency in the world of the 21st century because we have learned that these authority figures, whether they're big government figures or whether they're from the big corporations or even from the big religions, fundamentally they lie to us all the time.
And I think that this habit of political figures to lie and to spread, fill society with lies has led to, rightly, to a questioning of the statements of authority figures.
So when Professor X or Dr. Y stands up today and says, Hancock is wrong, we have got the whole story of civilization worked out, Professor X or Dr. Y is not likely to be believed by the majority of people today.
And that was different 20 years ago.
And just before we go off that point and we get into the meat of it, are you an angry man or a disappointed man, Moore?
I'm not angry, and I'm not disappointed.
I think it's unfortunate that journalistic standards are so shoddy, But we've already dealt with that.
That's not my problem.
The journalists themselves have to live with their poor work at the end of the day, not me.
It may be damaging to me, but I would say in the long run, it's much more damaging to the journalist who behaves like such a hack in what they're doing.
So I'm not actually angry, really, or disappointed in anything.
I'm excited, encouraged, and positive that I have had the opportunity in my life to explore the world, to study the most intriguing and magnificent and mysterious ancient sites, and to present possibilities about the past that do not appear to have been properly considered before.
We have a huge establishment that I would say effectively controls our past, and that is mainstream history and archaeology, the university departments associated with it, the entire teaching profession, which takes its ideas from the mainstream, and the media which pick up on the mainstream.
And I see myself as just one alternative voice.
My role is to provide an alternative take on what is known and what is not known about our past.
And you know, the intriguing thing is that the further back you go, the further back you go beyond 5,000 years ago, the less is known about our past and the more speculative become the attempts of archaeologists to explain it.
So I think an alternative point of view, well-reasoned, well-argued, coherent and positive, has a place.
And that's what I've sought to provide.
But I'm not disappointed and I'm not angry.
I expect to have to face the fire of criticism.
And I welcome that criticism as long as it's honest and comes from a good place.
Tell me if I'm being fair and accurate here when I say that the core premise then of this book and the one that preceded it some years ago is that we arose, what we are today, arose from what was almost pretty much so an extinction size and style event, but it wasn't quite that.
Am I correct there?
Well, you're broadly correct.
This is one of the new developments that has taken place in the last decade, which requires that we look again very carefully at everything we've been taught about the origins of civilization.
Since 2007, a group of extremely serious, highly credentialed scientists, mainly geologists, but actually they include some archaeologists, they include experts in impact dynamics,
they include oceanographers, a broad international team of scientists have been carefully and methodically piecing together the evidence which proves, and I put the emphasis on the word prove because I think this has gone beyond an argument now, which proves that the Earth was hit by several fragments of a comet 12,800 years ago.
This is not some wild theory from Graham Hancock.
This is material that has been published, for example, in the proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, in the Journal of Geology, in the monthly notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, and so on and so forth during the last decade, and which has built up a formidable and I would say irrefutable body of evidence for truly an extinction-level event.
Actually, there were two events.
As we reconstruct the data, it appears that the Earth, principally the North American ice cap, because 12,800 years ago we were still in the ice age, the North American ice cap was hit by at least four fragments of this comet.
And these fragments are not small.
They're in the range of a mile in diameter.
This happened 12,800 years ago.
That debris from the comet carried on across the Atlantic.
It came in from the northwest in a southeasterly direction, crossed what is now Canada and the northeastern part of the United States, crossed the Atlantic.
There were further impacts on the northern European ice cap, and the furthest fallout that's been detected was as far east as Syria.
It appears that there were a second series of impacts 11,600 years ago.
So we have a period of 1,200 years between 12,800 and 11,600 years ago, where the Earth is plunged into a nightmare of flooding and fire and earthquake and utter chaos and skies darkened and boiling and sea levels rising rapidly and just tremendous deluges tearing across the land as huge areas of the North American ice cap were liquidized.
And this was an extinction level event.
We know in that precise 1,200 year window between 12,800 and 11,600 years ago that there were enormous extinctions of animal species all around the world.
And what I bring to the party with intriguing evidence from archaeological sites all around the world is that we must consider the possibility that that extinction level event did not only affect hunter-gatherers who lived on the Earth at that time for sure, just as they do today, did not only affect the animal species that became extinct, but also wiped out an advanced civilization of prehistory that is now only remembered in myths and traditions all around the world.
So this is archaeological evidence in the main.
What about geological evidence?
Well, this is, first of all, the evidence for the comet impact is geological evidence, solid geological evidence.
Sometimes it's difficult for us to imagine the effect of an object, a solid object a mile wide, entering the Earth's atmosphere at 70,000 miles an hour.
But if you were to imagine the entire nuclear arsenal of the Earth going up at once, that would be roughly similar to the consequences of that impact.
It is truly cataclysmic.
You have tremendous heat and tremendous shock.
And byproducts of this heat and shock include a number of specific signatures in the strata of the Earth.
And these signatures include nanodiamonds.
The heat and the shock actually creates these tiny submicroscopic diamonds.
It includes carbon spherules.
It includes melt glass, which is indistinguishable from the melt glass produced in nuclear explosions.
It includes evidence of temperatures in excess of 2,200 degrees centigrade distributed across a large part of the Earth's surface.
2,200 degrees centigrade, by the way, is the boiling point of quartz.
These are the geological signatures of a massive cosmic impact, and those signatures occur in this period between 12,800 and 11,600 years ago.
Now, initially, the evidence for the comet impact was questioned because it was difficult to find a crater.
This was also the case with an earlier controversy, which concerned the extinction of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago.
We now accept that the extinction of the dinosaurs was caused by a cosmic impact, but for a long time that was disputed because Lewis and Walter Alvarez, the scientists behind the dinosaur extinction work, couldn't produce a crater.
Eventually, the crater was found in the Gulf of Mexico, deeply buried and partially under the waters of the Gulf of Mexico.
But initially, their case was based entirely on the same impact proxies that the team of scientists are now showing have been spread all around the world during these events between 12,800 and 11,600 years ago.
So we have two episodes of massive extinction, one 65 million years ago, which has been known about for a long time, and one 12,800 years ago, which is very recent science that has hardly even entered into the public domain.
And this is why I felt it was important to summarize and detail that science in several chapters of Magicians of the Gods, because this event is of fundamental importance, an extinction-level event right in the backyard of history.
And yet our notion of the origins of civilization so far has been formed without taking such an extinction-level event into account.
That requires us to think again about everything we know about the origins of civilization.
And it also gives us a clarity that perhaps we didn't have before in that everything has to have a starting point.
And there in that interregnum period, in that period between the first and second impact, you have effectively that starting point, that line in the sand.
We do.
We have that starting point because mysterious things start to happen.
And one of them is the incredible site, archaeological site of Gobekli Tepe in Turkey, which was not discovered until the second half of the 1990s and which has been excavated since then.
And we now know for sure that Gobekli Tepe dates back to precisely that cataclysmic period.
And it goes back 12,000 years.
And this is really fascinating because what we see at Gobekli Tepe is a gigantic series of megalithic circles.
Everybody has a picture in their mind of Stonehenge in the UK, okay?
So take Stonehenge and multiply it by 50, and that's roughly what you're looking at at Gobekli Tepe.
So far, only a tiny part of Gobekli Tepe has been excavated.
Most of it's still under the ground, but we know that there are hundreds of huge megaliths lying under the ground because of a survey with ground-penetrating radar.
Now, here's the problem.
Gobekli Tepe is 7,000 years older than Stonehenge, but it is far more advanced and far more sophisticated.
In the case of Stonehenge, we have a Neolithic culture from 5,000 years ago, which is already fully developed agriculturally, which is generating surpluses, which can support the specialists who are needed to create the stone circles.
In Gobekli Tepe, the context 12,000 years ago is entirely that of hunter-gatherers.
And hunter-gatherers have never before been considered capable of organization on a scale that is demonstrated at Gobekli Tepe, the site organization, the bringing of hundreds of workers to the site.
This is a site with no water.
They would have to be fed.
They would have to be watered.
The flow of pillars from the quarries to the sites would have to be organized.
The astronomical alignments of the pillars, which are extremely precise, would have to be organized.
And my point is, you don't just wake up one morning as a hunter-gatherer, suddenly and magically equipped with the skills to do this.
What Gobekli Tepe looked like to me is a transfer of technology.
There are people from a more advanced culture who already knew how to do megalithic architecture settled amongst a community of hunter-gatherers in what is now eastern Turkey and taught them the necessary skills.
That's what we see at Gobekli Tepe, and therefore it's not an accident that at exactly the same time that the mysterious Gobekli Tepe megaliths are raised up, we find a massive dissemination of agriculture taking place in exactly the same region of Turkey.
So another transfer of technology is suggested there, that incomers who already knew agriculture and who already knew how to make megalithic architecture brought the skills with them, established Gobekli Tepi as a center of innovation, and effectively attempted to restart their lost former world, but they did not succeed.
So you're talking about a kind of capsule civilization who realized that, of course, they'd been through a terrible thing and had to pass on what they knew and what they had learned to sustain themselves and to sustain the planet.
And they gifted what they knew to these people who had less ability.
Well, it may have been a survival issue.
You know, if the world were hit today by several fragments of a giant comet, as happened 12,800 years ago, I'm not at all sure that our highly complex technological civilization would survive.
Very few of us, we may have certain advanced skills and knowledge as individuals, but very few of us have the whole suite of skills that make it possible for us to survive in a post-apocalyptic world.
We don't know how to farm, most of us, some of us do.
We don't know how to build buildings.
We don't know how to make machines.
Each of us has a specialist Skill which locks into other specialist skills, break that apart, and suddenly you are looking at a very fragile kind of society, a high-tech society with very fragile bonds that could easily fall apart, with the majority of the population incompetent to survive.
That would not be true of hunter-gatherers.
If you went to the Amazon rainforest, you would find hunter-gatherers whose lives would be unaffected by the cataclysm, who would be able to carry on doing pretty much what they do.
They already know how to survive, as do the hunter-gatherers in the Kalahari Desert in southern Africa, also, for example, and a number of other hunter-gatherer people.
So that's my suggestion of what happened 12,800 years ago, that just as in the world today, we have an advanced civilization coexisting with hunter-gatherers, so also before 12,800 years ago, we had an advanced, lost, now lost civilization coexisting with the hunter-gatherers who also existed on the planet at that time.
And when that civilization was destroyed as a result of these comet impacts, there were survivors, and naturally they would go and settle amongst hunter-gatherers, transfer some of what they knew to the hunter-gatherers, but perhaps also depending on the hunter-gatherers for their own livelihood.
And what sorts of artifacts from those people, if we can call them people, have been or may be found?
There's just a vast range of material.
And this is why I say we need to look again at everything we've been taught about the origins of civilization.
It may be that we are missing clues because we're so convinced that there could have been no high civilization during the Ice Age.
We aren't looking for that.
And if you start a project firmly convinced that the thing you're looking for doesn't exist, then you're most unlikely to find it.
But if you start with the idea that this is a possibility, then various bits of evidence start to thrust themselves forward.
For example, ancient maps.
Ancient maps, by and large, these are maps that have come down to us because in the 15th and 16th centuries, they were copied from older source maps, which were then falling apart and which are now lost.
In the process of copying from the older source maps onto the maps that have survived today, certain information about the world was also copied.
And what we see are images of the world very much as it looked during the last ice age.
Not in the 15th or 16th century, but as it looked during the last ice age.
And I would suggest that that is a legacy of the source maps, that we are looking at source maps that go back to a lost civilization that was exploring the world, that was navigating, that had the technology to create good global maps during the Ice Age more than 13,000 years ago.
These maps include accurate latitudes and longitudes, and to find accurate longitudes on maps before the late 18th century is very puzzling because we did not have the technology to draw such maps until the late 18th century.
These maps frequently feature Antarctica, yet Antarctica was not discovered until the year 1818.
So these ancient maps are in themselves a huge body of evidence that there was a pre-existing civilization that had navigated, explored, and mapped the world, at least to the standards that we were capable of doing in the late 18th or early 19th century of our era.
In other words, a civilization that was vastly more advanced than is given credit for during the Ice Age when it has been thought that only hunter-gatherers existed on the planet.
And where does the notion of Atlantis and the reality of ancient Egypt tie into all of this?
Well, the notion of Atlantis comes to us from a very specific source, and that specific source is the Greek philosopher Plato.
In his Timaeus and Critias dialogues, Plato presented us with the single surviving account of Atlantis from which all subsequent accounts have been drawn.
And here's how Plato tells the story.
He says that his ancestor Solon, the famous Greek lawmaker, made his way to Egypt some century and a half before Plato's time, made his way to Egypt.
And there he went to a temple in the delta at a place called Sis, a temple dedicated to the goddess Nith.
And he was told the story of Atlantis by the priests of that temple who pointed to hieroglyphs written on the walls of the temple and said the story of Atlantis was there.
Now, archaeologists just dismiss the Plato-Atlantis story entirely.
In the archaeological lexicon, an Atlantologist comes even lower than a pyramidiot.
They totally ignore it.
They say Plato made the whole thing up.
Of course, there was no such civilization of Atlantis.
But here's the interesting thing.
When Plato talks about Atlantis, remember the tradition was passed down to him by his ancestor Solon, he tells us a key piece of information.
He says that the submergence of Atlantis in a single terrible day and night of earthquakes and humongous floods took place 9,000 years before the time of Solon.
That is 9,600 BC.
That is 11,600 years ago.
So that's pretty accurate on the timings then.
That is absolutely accurate on the timing.
In fact, it's precisely the date of the second series of impacts that we know were accompanied by massive global flooding.
So if Plato made that up, he was astonishingly accurate to the latest science in geology.
I think we have to take seriously the possibility that he was passing on to us a genuine tradition.
Egyptologists will complain that the word Atlantis does not appear in any ancient Egyptian text, and that's true.
But if you go to the Temple of Horus at Edfu in Upper Egypt, you will find the Edfu building texts.
And those texts, which were copied from earlier documents that had Fallen apart, those texts tell the story of a primeval island of the gods, where was present an advanced, sophisticated, highly spiritual civilization that was destroyed in a cosmic cataclysm, leaving only a few survivors who traveled around the world attempting to restart their former civilization.
And we're talking about a remarkable achievement here, and it's set into context by something that was in the news, I think, two or three days ago here in the UK.
A big debate about whether to, I think it was renew the contract or keep printing, keep preparing laws in the UK on vellum.
And the people who make vellum, the paper effectively that these things are written on, it's not really paper, are guaranteeing it for 500 years.
Now, you think about that in context of your 11 and 12,000 year cycle you're talking about here, and the people who make our laws are saying that our laws will survive, they can guarantee for 500 years.
That shows us a lot, doesn't it, Graeme, about the fragility of societies like that one, but particularly ours.
We have the problem here.
Absolutely.
This is the thing, you see.
If your project is to communicate to the future, to communicate information to the future, written information may not be the way to go.
Let's say that you would like a message to survive for 10,000 years, to pick a number, and to be intelligible after 10,000 years.
Writing it down in the English language on a piece of vellum probably wouldn't be the way to go.
As you've just informed us, vellum ceases to be useful after 500 years.
It can only be guaranteed for 500 years.
And who's to say in 500 or 5,000 or 10,000 years from now that anybody will be able to decipher the English language?
Right now, it can be deciphered, but we have ancient scripts, for example, the Indus Valley script in northern India, which to this day has never been deciphered.
So a script is not a great way to communicate a message.
What you want is a universal language which can be decoded by any moderately sophisticated culture at any time in the future.
And that's why I'm very interested in the use of extremely large monuments like the pyramids and the sphinx combined with astronomical alignments to draw our attention again and again precisely to this period between 12,800 and 11,600 years ago.
It happens at Giza in Egypt.
The pyramids and the Sphinx are a map of the sky at dawn on the spring equinox years ago, down roughly to 11,500 years ago.
We have a pillar at Gobekli Tepe, which actually contains a picture of the winter solstice sky.
But weirdly, in our epoch, with the sun sitting between the constellations of Sagittarius and Scorpio astride the dark rift in the Milky Way, it appears to me that a substantial effort has been made by these mysterious predecessors of ours to communicate with us.
I actually think Gobekli Tepe was deliberately buried as a time capsule.
I think the intention was that it was not to be found for a very long time.
And it's really spooky and strange that it has been found in precisely the epoch that is signaled by Pillar 43 and Enclosure D at Gobekli Tepe.
This tells us one very important thing, doesn't it?
That these people, this civilization, were more savvy and more intelligent than we are today.
Because they were able to work out that in order to continue themselves, in order to pass on the knowledge, the way that you had to do that was not the ways that we would do that.
And that is a problem for us, isn't it?
They understood they needed to find a universal language.
Actually, to give you a crass example of this, a crass modern example, the Hoover Dam in the United States incorporates an enormous star map into its architecture.
That star map freezes the skies over the Hoover Dam at the moment of the completion of the Hoover Dam.
And it was put there deliberately with the intention that in 10,000 years from now, people would be able to work out when the Hoover Dam was made.
And I'm suggesting that the same thing is happening at Giza.
It's not even an extraordinary idea.
It's something that our culture has done in the Hoover Dam and has been done at Giza.
And the message is pay attention to the period between 12,800 and 11,600 years ago in your epoch.
What about the notion that if we're talking about ancient Egypt here, which I've always found fascinating, and I've spoken to people like Robert Boval, who I know that you worked with extensively on Robertson.
Very good friend of mine.
We've worked together very closely.
We've been in the trenches together, doing battle with the archaeologists for more than 20 years.
Yes, and doing battle with the media, I think, together at one point, but that's a whole other story.
That's a whole other story, yeah.
The notion that, yes, we know a certain amount about the ancient Egyptians, but the idea now that is gaining some currency at the moment, that there was a civilization before them who came up from further south and basically inspired the people that we know as the ancient Egyptians and what they created.
What do you make to that?
Well, I think there's two issues here.
One is the peopling of Egypt.
Where did the peoples of Egypt, of ancient Egypt, originally come from?
Their language belongs to the Hamitic language family.
It's closely related to languages like Afar, Somali, Oromo in the Horn of Africa.
There undoubtedly are deep African origins to ancient Egyptian civilization.
But the notion enshrined in the ancient Egyptian texts of a period that they call Zeptepi, the first time, which can, using astronomy, can be very precisely dated back to the epoch just beyond 12,000 years ago.
In other words, exactly the epoch that we're focusing on here.
That contains so many references to arrivals by sea, to seagoing peoples, to navigation, that I think the story is more complicated.
There's a huge African element in the origins of Egyptian civilization, but I think that there's something else as well.
And again, if you go back to the Edfu building texts, it appears that Egypt was selected as the first place in which the attempt would be made to rebuild or reincarnate or restore the former world of the gods.
Another point worth bearing in mind, Howard, in the construction of these gigantic monuments that incorporate astronomical messages that draw our attention to an epoch in the past is that we are almost certainly dealing with people who believed in reincarnation.
And this may sound very mystical and woo-woo, but I make no comment on whether reincarnation happens or not, but let's say that for sure we're dealing with people who believed that it happened.
If you believe that reincarnation happens, then you believe that you drink the waters of forgetfulness before you're born into this life, into this physical incarnation.
The deal with reincarnation is that you don't remember your previous incarnations.
And I sometimes wonder if these monuments were created as a kind of mnemonic device to wake up reincarnated initiates at some later time in the future, to trigger a memory, to start a process of inquiry and of self-initiation.
The ancient world was deeply focused on spiritual matters.
I'm often asked, you know, what would be the difference between the lost civilization that I'm proposing and our civilization today.
And I would say the differences were huge.
Yes, this lost civilization did have technological abilities, the manipulation of gigantic blocks of stone, the creation of those maps, the careful and precise observations of the heavens, all of these are science.
But fundamentally, this was a civilization that focused on the spiritual essence of humanity and on creating conditions in which that can be developed and magnified.
And we see this again in the Atlantis story.
Plato tells us that Atlantis, for a very long time, was a great and good civilization, very generous, sharing, devoted to the spirit.
But then gradually the rot crept in, something changed.
The Atlanteans became cruel and harsh and callous.
They ceased to bear their prosperity with moderation.
And eventually the cataclysm was brought down upon them, the traditions suggest, in punishment for their lapse from their former high spiritual state.
Do you think we should read into this that all great civilizations, and we perhaps foolishly consider ourselves today to be a great civilization, ultimately become arrogant, which is what the Atlanteans seem to have become, and ultimately that will sow the seeds of their downfall.
And there's a lesson in that for us.
There's an absolute lesson in that for us.
And I think we can see it happening now.
And it's one of the reasons why I feel it's important to get this message out and to help people to understand that the story of the origins of human civilization is not settled and done for and fully established by archaeology at all.
There are huge question marks over it.
And those question marks actually touch on what it is to be human and where we're going next with our lives.
See, we've been taught to regard ourselves as the apex and the pinnacle of human achievement.
Thousands of years of physical and social evolution have led to us.
You know, we're sitting there at the top of the heap, and that is a very arrogant place to be psychologically, if we think of ourselves as such.
If we understand that a former high civilization, in many ways every bit as high and advanced as our own, existed on this planet and was wiped out in a global cataclysm, perhaps we might not be so sure and so confident and so arrogant about our own stability.
In many ways, we do look in mythological terms like the next lost civilization.
We tick all the boxes.
We have the arrogance.
We have the cruelty.
We have the severing of our connection with spirit.
Surely one of the most devastating aspects of the human experience during the last 200 years.
The severing of connection to spirit.
We live in a spiritually dry efforts are being made to make this world as spiritually dry as possible, to define all matter as dead, as lacking in any soul or meaning.
This is the situation that we confront today.
And the mainstream religions don't help.
The mainstream religions are not providing or reconnecting us to spirit.
They also are huge bureaucracies run mainly by men who impose themselves as intermediaries between ourselves and the divine.
I think that there's a whole range of habits of behavior that are locked into modern society, which no longer serve us and which we need to jettison if we are not to destroy ourselves in the coming century or so.
And that was the thing that I'm sorry to interrupt, Graham, but the thing that really excited me about the research that I was doing into your work prior to this conversation, the thing that I think excited me more than the discovery that there was a civilization much older than we thought could possibly have existed and our ideas of where we came from and all the rest of it completely wrong.
What excites me more than anything else is what flows from your work and what you are saying underneath all of this, and that is that we have a lot of learning to do and that we need to learn ways to predict things that may happen to us, that may destroy us, but we also need to find ways of, like the Hoover Dam you were talking about, of forwarding the knowledge that we have.
Because in this electronic digital society where everything is chuckaway and nobody cares about anything, any possibility of that seems to be going rapidly out of the window.
But more important than any of that, and it's a very simple thing, is love.
That's more important than any of that.
The great crisis of the modern world is the wide dissemination of fear and hatred and suspicion.
And that is being manipulated and exploited by big corporations and big governments and the big religions to divide us from one another.
What's needed is the realization, the recognition that we are truly all brothers and sisters with a common cause that we all share, which is the incredible gift of our humanity and the responsibility to use that gift well.
The modern world absolutely needs a wake-up call.
We need to understand that we live in a magical and enchanted universe, not a dead universe that is simply there for us to exploit.
We need to learn to bear our prosperity with moderation.
But above all else, our societies need to learn to act with love rather than to act out of fear and hatred and suspicion.
I totally agree.
One of the themes that arose from one of the conversations of yours that I listened to 24 hours ago, and I have heard hints of this before, was the tantalizing idea that you've referred to Egyptologists, so-called, that some of those people are actually doing explorations that we don't get to hear anything about and may have made discoveries that could be very material and may well tie into what you're saying.
Yeah, I'm afraid that's possible.
And in fact, it's part of the consistent track record of archaeology.
Secret excavations do go on to serve particular interests.
The public is not told everything about what is happening in the realm of archaeology.
And I think that's particularly evident on the Giza Plateau in Egypt, surely one of the greatest archaeological prizes in the world.
I have, in a series of books, for example, Keeper of Genesis that Robert Boval and I wrote together back in 1996, which is titled The Message of the Sphinx in the US, we looked at the background of people like Dr. Zahi Hawass, who for decades has had pretty much full control of the Giza Plateau, of archaeology on the Giza Plateau, and of his colleague, Mark Lehner, who formerly at the University of Chicago.
We go into all of this in detail, and I must say that some very interesting and intriguing and puzzling things happen at Giza.
Of course, part of the success of a great secret is that you don't know what the secret is.
But the feeling that something is going on behind the scenes at Giza and that we are not being told about it is solidly grounded in events.
You've talked and written about consciousness a great deal.
And apart from the research you've done about our antecedents and the research that you've done and the things that you've written about the importance of love and the importance of understanding who we are and what we are, you have talked about consciousness.
Let's be clear, first of all, about the different strands of my work.
We're primarily sitting down today to discuss a new book that I published, which is Magicians of the Gods, which is the sequel to my best-known book, which was Fingerprints of the Gods.
Fingerprints of the Gods was published in 1995, Magicians of the Gods in 2015.
And the reason I've published Magicians of the Gods is some of the information we've shared in this discussion, but so much more new evidence that strongly supports the case for a lost civilization more than 12,000 years ago.
Separately, I have a whole other area of interest, which is in the mystery of consciousness and in the role of altered states of consciousness in human societies and human civilization and in individual human lives.
Our society today is a society that demonizes psychedelics.
But ancient civilizations, pretty much all of them, made deliberate, careful, targeted use of psychedelics to contact the realm of spirit.
It was a science in those societies.
Psychedelics were not regarded as dreadful or dangerous things, but rather regarded as allies that help us to nurture and develop the spiritual side of ourselves.
And of course, this is the case with shamanism.
If you go off to the Amazon jungle, as I did when I was researching my book, Supernatural, which is the main book that I've written on this subject, you know, I find myself amidst shamanistic cultures that drink the powerful psychedelic brew, ayahuasca.
And naturally, as a good working journalist, I drink the ayahuasca as well, because I want to know what this experience is about.
And it's an experience, frankly, that changes my life.
I carry on, I write my book, but after having written the book and done perhaps 11 ayahuasca journeys as research for that book, I then carried on subsequently drinking ayahuasca every year because I find it such a valuable healing medicine.
And do you believe, because I have known people who have been to the places that you've been and done that, do you believe truthfully, truly, that it is something that opens up a portal or really, is there a gray area there?
Could it just be messing with your brain?
Oh, it could be, of course.
I just think that's most unlikely.
The probability at the moment is that we've misunderstood the brain, that the brain is more a receiver or a transceiver of consciousness than a generator of consciousness, and that what the powerful psychedelics, particularly dimethyltryptamine, which is part of the ayahuasca brew, what the powerful psychedelics do is they retune the receiver wavelength of the brain to allow us to gain access to other levels of reality that are normally closed off from our senses.
We don't have time to go into this now, but there's a vast amount of evidence for that proposition.
And therefore, I believe as part of the efforts to understand the nature of reality, which include the exploration of outer space, we should also be exploring inner space and the mysterious encounters that occur in visionary states.
Yes, they may just be our brain on drugs, but the evidence is compelling that they are far more than that and that these may be vehicles for making contact with intelligent entities, perhaps from other dimensions.
The research needs to be done.
The science needs to be done.
Rick Strassman at the University of New Mexico, professor of psychiatry at the University of New Mexico, did research with human volunteers in the 1990s and DMT.
And that research did strongly support the possibility that we are dealing with freestanding, completely real parallel universes inhabited by intelligent entities that can only communicate with us when we are in a deeply altered state of consciousness, not when we're in the alert problem-solving state of consciousness that we use for everyday matters.
The segment of the conversation we've just had about altering consciousness and using certain herbal substances so to do is, as you well know because you're in the UK, a conversation that's very, very difficult to have.
I mean, most broadcasting organizations that I've worked for and with don't really allow you to go very close to this at all for the reasons that we both understand that there are a lot of idiots out there and we don't want to be encouraging people who are rather stupid to misuse these things.
No, no, no, no, no.
This is so patronizing.
We have to give credit to other adults, you know.
We can't put ourselves in a position where we're making decisions for other adults about what they need to know.
That's the death of freedom of speech.
The moment that we start protecting our audiences from facts, that's the end of the freedom of speech.
That's the paternalistic model stepping back in.
It's really most unfortunate that these subjects cannot be discussed, particularly when there are dazzling research breakthroughs now taking place with psychedelics, which are being proven to be powerful agencies of healing, particularly for people with post-traumatic stress disorder or terminal cancer patients given psilocybin and losing their fear of death.
Incredible research is being done.
So, you know, if the broadcasting organizations are really seeking to impose a fatwa over these kind of discussions, they're making a huge mistake and they're out of step with history.
I think the concern is always, and I understand this because I've been schooled in this all of my life and career, that you don't want to be encouraging people to play with substances that may ultimately do them harm.
Well, we better tell people never to drive a car then.
I don't even have an answer or the beginnings of one for that.
But it does seem to me, and you tell me what you think, that this is very much one for academia before you start unleashing these things on people.
These things are already unleashed on people.
I mean, what are you talking about, Howard?
We live in a society where psychedelics are actually widely available.
They're illegal, which means they're surrounded with fear and paranoia, but they're available.
Anybody can get them.
You know, the present system of controlling these substances is utterly broken.
It doesn't work.
We need a new system.
And part of that new system involves open and free and honest conversation and respect for the intelligence of other adults.
And if a child of yours said, I want to go to South America and talk with the shaman and open up portals of consciousness by imbibing ayahuasca, you'd be completely cool with that?
I'd say wait till you're 21.
I've drunk ayahuasca with almost all of my six children, but in every case, we waited until they'd passed the age of 21.
I think that the psychedelics are extremely serious matter, and I think they are properly and rightly reserved for adults.
At the moment, with this absurd and evil thing called the war on drugs, we have psychedelics being delivered to children by criminal gangs.
I believe that if the psychedelics were made legal, we could control the access of children to them much more effectively than we do at present.
And there's a lot of hypocrisy, I think, also in this field.
You know, there are people running major organizations, I am sure, who say one thing and do another.
We've had some recent examples of that.
Indeed, we have.
Bringing you back rightly to the subject of the new book, what do you hope?
What's your best hope for what it will achieve and how it will be received?
In other words, what do you want it to do?
What I'd like the book to do is to reopen the debate over the origins of civilization, to have presented enough evidence, solidly enough, seriously supported, as I have attempted to do in this book, to make it impossible to ignore this, that there's something wrong with the story we're telling ourselves about the origins of civilization.
Something is missing.
We are a species with amnesia.
And I'm hoping that the book will help to waken people up and lead to more serious inquiry into this possibility.
Because as I've said, if you start out examining a possibility with the conviction that that possibility cannot exist, then you won't find anything.
You have to have some openness of spirit in order to make inquiries into these forbidden areas.
Do you feel a weight of responsibility on your shoulders?
You know, some people are saying these things, but they don't have the profile and the credibility that you have.
Yeah, I do feel a weight of responsibility on my shoulders.
It's a responsibility to my readers.
It's a responsibility to do the very best I can to get this information across and not to be discouraged and not to be beaten down, but to keep on going.
Because sooner or later, as the ancient Egyptians said, the truth is great and mighty, and the truth of our past will emerge.
Two listener questions that have come in, and I promised these people that I would try and put these to you.
Number one is from somebody called Stephen Ward.
Stephen, this is your question.
Listening to one of Graham's talks on YouTube, he mentions the pyramids and the Sphinx having an almost magnetic attraction for so many people.
I've felt this since I first became aware of them, and I'd like to know why Graham thinks that is.
Oh, well, I've been visiting Giza for a quarter of a century, and that has given me many opportunities to see the looks on the faces of those who stand in front of the Great Pyramid for the first time and to hear their conversations.
And my experience has been that these people have been drawn from all over the world by a kind of call that the Great Pyramid seems to send out.
It is a beacon.
And fundamentally, the Great Pyramid is about human consciousness.
And it's still working on human consciousness today, even though we lack the surrounding edifice of ancient Egyptian civilization.
You have a marvelous turn of phrase, and I know that you can probably answer this one succinctly.
And Joey asked this question.
Could you ask Graham the difference between science and a word that you used at the top of this conversation, pseudoscience, and not what the obvious answer would be?
What hard facts are there, says Joey, relating to his work, and can any of these be stood up to be real evidence and not just myths?
And where does he think his work will eventually lead him?
I've counted, I think, four questions within that.
Well, in answer to Joey's question, that's why I've written Magicians of the Gods.
You know, all the facts are in there.
There's hundreds of footnotes.
Every factual statement is referenced to the academic paper from which it is drawn.
So go read the book and all your questions will be answered.
One question.
The book launched in September, and I talked about that event in Berkshire that I was...
It was published on the 10th of September in the UK.
As we speak, we are still awaiting US publication, which happens on the 10th of November.
Which was published in the U.S. on the 10th of November.
And I'll be touring the U.S., giving talks all over the U.S. in November and early December.
I'm sure a lot of people, well, you know, a lot of people are going to want to see and hear you.
Why stagger the release in that way?
It's very good for me that the release is staggered because I can't be in two places at once, much as I would like to buy locate.
It's not one of my skills.
So it allows me to pay full attention to the UK release and then to pay full attention to the US release.
But it wasn't done for my convenience.
It's just that the US production schedule was a little bit slower than the UK one, that's all.
Understood.
When you talk to those people who queue up to get your autograph, your signature on their book, have you noticed a difference between people, say, 15 years ago when you were writing and now?
Are they more savvy than they were?
Yeah, the big difference I've noticed is that my readership has got younger.
And I'm very excited about that because that's where I see the hope of humanity, is in the youth of our society, young adults.
That's where I see the future.
And I noticed that distinctly in my events, that the presence of inquiring, open-minded young people is a very strong element of any audience that I now have.
If people want to know more about your work, which they will, where is the best place to get that information?
The go-to place is my website, which is www.grahamhancock.com.
And off that, there are links to Magicians of the Gods, the new book.
There are links to my author Facebook page, where I'm very active.
There are links to my Twitter account where I'm very active.
Basically, go to grahamhancock.com and have a look around.
And everything about my other output is linked off that website.
Graham, from my point of view, it was worth the four-year wait.
Thank you very much indeed.
Take care.
Great pleasure to talk to you, Howard.
The remarkable Graham Hancock, an amazing guest.
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