All Episodes
Previous Next
June 23, 2017 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
01:08:39
Edition 301 - Dr Robert M Schoch

Groundbreaking research on our ancient past from Dr Robert M Schoch...

| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
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.
Coming to you in the middle of a heat wave, where I'm recording this now, it's 33 degrees.
I've got the window open, so you might hear a little bit of extraneous noise, but boy, it's a hot one.
You know, I know there are parts of this world where they've got 40 degrees plus at the moment, but London right now is bacon.
But we're going to get it all done, hopefully, with the help of a lot of cold water and a certain amount of breeze coming in through the window.
We're going to do some shout-outs on this edition.
Then Robert Schock is the guest, who's got a great take on our ancient, ancient, distant past.
Now, I discovered this man by surprise.
He was one of the many speakers at Contact in the Desert, and the organizers of Contact in the Desert put me in touch with him.
And he was able to do about 15 minutes on my radio show about a month or so ago.
And I did say at the time that I wanted to get him on this show, and he very kindly agreed, so we agreed today, and we're going to be talking in just a little while about all of his cool research, Robert Schock, on this edition of The Unexplained.
Think you're going to like him.
Before all of that, got to say thanks to Adam from Creative Hotspot for seeing me through the last 300 shows and now into 301.
And we're aiming for 400 and then 500 after that.
So thanks, Adam, at Creative Hotspot.
If you want to get in touch with me, love to hear from you.
Just tell me who you are, where you are, and how you use the show.
And the way to get in touch is to go to the website theunexplained.tv and follow the contact link there.
Okay, which a whole number of people I'm about to mention did.
And I'm sorry if I can't get round to your email.
I'm just so far behind myself at the moment.
But anyway, let's start with John near Gloucester in the UK.
He says, I've been listening to your show for years and you're up there with the best.
Thank you for that.
John, cannot recall you having this guy on.
His name is Cliff High and he runs predictive linguistics via WebVots and has been producing monthly reports about current and future trends and events with amazing accuracy.
Well, I've got to find out a little bit more about him.
Sounds a little bit like the Merlin Project that we featured on this show.
But yes, John, thank you for that.
Antoni Cacciatori, thank you for your email.
Steve, thank you for the suggestions and the links you've been sending me from Peter.
Peter says, I felt I had to write to you after listening to your edition 185 with Dr. Judy Wood.
Dr. Judy Wood, of course, is the materials specialist who's essentially given up her career to campaign about 9-11 and her belief that we were not told the truth about how the towers came down.
Very controversial guest.
Peter says, I'm absolutely disgusted in your treatment of her during this show, which is 115 shows ago, but I remember it clearly.
I've had Dr. Judy Wood on twice here.
Peter says, I think you were misinterpreting on purpose most of what she was saying.
Peter, the reason I've included your email right now is that I would never, ever do something like that.
To misinterpret on purpose is just not in my DNA.
What I was doing is I was trying to get her to focus and spell out the nature of her arguments and see if she'd come any further from the first time that we talked.
And it's not for me to have a view about Dr. Judy Wood, but I believe she has a perfect right to publish her book and get it seen by as many people as possible and to say all the things she's been saying.
And I find, personally, her arguments very compelling.
I will tell you that.
But I have to do my job.
And that's what I was doing.
And I hope you understand, Peter.
Derek, flat earth suggestions.
Thank you for those.
Kevin, thank you for your email.
Andy Campbell, originally from Scotland, now in Texas, thank you for your great email about Gary Schwartz.
And synchronicity.
He was playing it back in the car and says the interview got to the point where you were discussing the synchronicity of you both having VW Beetle cars and that soft tops were rare.
At this point, my wife calls me on the cell phone and the podcast, Bluetooth, pauses while the car connects to my phone.
What should pass on the inside lane?
A cream VW Beetle with a soft top?
Synchronicity?
Coincidence or whatever?
I'm not sure.
But I do believe nothing really happens at random in this world.
That's just my five cents worth, really.
But thank you, Andy, for your email.
Denise in Reno, Nevada says, excellent show on Lord Lucan.
I believe he is alive and well, tending a bar in South America with Elvis as the lounge singer.
And Jimmy Hoffer on the door.
Thank you for that, Denise, and for cheering me up.
Austin in Park City, Utah says, I've been listening to your podcast for almost a year now and I love it.
The unknown's always fascinated me, but I have a strange obsession with the alien phenomena.
And I can't even begin to tell you how many books I've read on the subject.
Nice to hear from you.
Daniel, an American in Germany, nice to hear from you, Daniel.
Mary in Brisbane, Mandy, Mary, Mandy in Brisbane, that's my typing, says thoroughly I enjoyed the episode about Lord Lucan.
It was great to hear an unsolved mystery that was not well known in our part of the world.
Well, that's one of the reasons I did it, Mandy, and thank you.
Sir Ramsey says, found your podcast on an app called Podcast Addict.
I'm from the USA in the state of Virginia, and I listened to you while driving, Sir Ramsey.
Nice to hear from you.
Sophie says, I'm a psychology student at the University of Victoria on Vancouver Island, British Columbia.
Would love to go and see BC one of these days in my life.
Says I recently discovered the show, and I'm hooked.
Thank you, Sophie.
My name is Terry, and I live in Launceston, Australia.
Now, we had a great broadcaster in the UK called Alan Freeman, known by the nickname Fluff.
And everybody does an impression in my industry of him because even though he left us a few years ago, he was Australian and was the nicest man and a really great disc jockey.
He invented disc jockeying in Britain, really.
And his catchphrases were, all right, not off.
And I came to know him at Capitol Radio in London.
And we'd always have the same conversation in the corridor.
He'd say, are you Australian, right?
And I'd say, no, Alan, no.
Last time we had this conversation, no, I'm from Liverpool.
All right, I thought you were Australian, all right?
He'd say, do you know how old I am?
And I'd say, I'm not sure, 74.
He'd say, I'm 75, all right.
Lovely man, and he was from Launceston.
Anyway, Terry from Launceston, Australia says, when listening to the Lord Lucan episode, I mentioned the details to my wife, who's a big murder mystery buff and loves Agatha Christie, so you like this edition.
Martin Walsh says, my favorite guests are Courtney Brown, remote viewing, and David Paul Idis, both of them coming back on this show.
Stephanie in Columbus, Ohio says, I've been listening to your podcast since Art Bell's latest retirement.
I find your voice is the only other out there on radio worth listening to.
Stephanie, thank you for that.
And you didn't think a lot, though, about the Laura Thompson interview on Lord Lucan.
And I note your comments.
Heather Howie, great name.
Heather Howie in Benbecula.
Another place I'd love to go.
Thank you for the synchronicity story, Heather.
What a great place you live and work in.
And I did always have it on my list of places to go.
Vitali in Sydney, liked Gary Schwartz and Synchronicity, and many thanks for the guidance points you sent me.
Stephen Ohio says your interview with Dr. Schwartz was incredible.
Thank you.
Mary Joe in Columbus, you wanted some information from me.
I emailed you that, Mary Jo, hope you got it.
And if you make your trip to the UK, I hope it's a good one.
Sure it will be.
Martino, thank you for the suggestions on the Earth Lights Phenomenon, which was a new one on me.
Emily in Washington, D.C., thank you for your email.
Ryan in Minnesota, ditto.
Don on Vancouver Island, great points for my next link up with Gary Schwartz, thank you.
Jason in the amazingly named Trout Creek, Ontario.
Good thoughts about the interview with Gary Schwartz.
Thank you.
And Adam Colozza, or it could be Coloza in Missouri, USA.
Thank you, Adam, for your email.
Finally, from Chris Oldroyd in Wakefield in the north of England, quick message of thanks for the Channel Islands episode, one of the best yet in terms of credibility and evidence.
Alas, still no closer to cracking whatever these things in our skies are.
You say a lot of nice things.
Thank you very much, Chris.
You say I drive a lot in my job and the podcasts.
They're keeping me going on my long drives.
Keep up the splendid work, says Chris.
Thank you very much indeed.
Well, look, this is my labor of love that I continue to do even in 32.6 degrees centigrade of heat today.
And the guest, this time around, I think you're going to love.
If you want to get in touch with me for any reason, please do.
I read every single email, and if it requires a personal response, it gets one.
So go to the website, theunexplained.tv.
If you'd like to and you can make a donation, please do.
And if you have recently, thank you.
So theunexplained.tv, follow the links for either donations or messages there.
Let's get to the guest now, Robert Schock in the US, and we're going to talk about, well, our ancient, ancient past.
Robert, thank you very much for coming on.
Oh, it's a pleasure to be here.
And I'm delighted to speak with you, Robert.
You were a great surprise to me.
You were one of those nice little discoveries that you get along the way.
It's like finding, you know, a big coin on the road.
You know, it's a gift.
And it was the people at Contact in the Desert who suggested you.
And of course, Contact in the Desert was in the middle of the desert.
Now you're back in Boston, Massachusetts today, I know.
But it was a real pleasure to talk with you there.
I'm curious, though, why were you at Contact in the Desert?
What was there for you?
Well, that's a strange.
Well, it's hard to answer that.
Basically, Contact in the Desert, which I think you know is a big, primarily UFO type conference, which is not my thing at all.
I had been asked to attend it and speak about ancient civilizations in my research several times over the years.
And I don't know, I just, of curiosity more than anything else, agreed to do it this past conference.
When was that May?
Just last month.
And it was more really out of curiosity to see what it was all about, et cetera, et cetera, and experience a very different type of conference than I'm used to.
Very, very different, of course, from an academic conference.
Very different from most of the, we'll call it more popular conferences where I speak.
And you were rubbing shoulders with all the greats of ufology, Nick Pope, Stanton Friedman, Steve Bassett, all of those people were there.
Yeah, it was very, very interesting.
And, you know, I found that I've actually spoken at very small UFO conferences before.
So I had some experience with speaking to people like that or rubbing shoulders, as you say, with people like that.
But it is really outside of my main interest.
So it was an experience.
I'll put it that way.
Okay.
Well, we'll get into what you talked about there, but I want to know about you generally and your research.
So for people who didn't hear you on my radio show, and you did about 20, 25 minutes with me a few weeks back, just to introduce yourself from Contact in the Desert.
But tell me about yourself and the work that you do.
Well, I am a geologist and geophysicist.
That's what my PhD is in.
And I have a very classical training.
I went to George Washington University's undergraduate.
Interestingly, though, not only did I get a degree in geology at George Washington, I also have a degree in anthropology, which may be why I'm sort of curious about things like contact in the desert and rubbing shoulders with UFO aficionados, that type of thing.
Yeah, because the two areas, in fact, although they may not seem to be, they are tangential.
Oh, they're absolutely.
They're absolutely.
And I see, and this is actually part of my research as it has developed over the decades, is I see a lot of interaction, shall we say, or I see a lot of connections between the anthropological side and the geological side.
And something that I'm very interested in is how geology and nature, climate, etc., has shaped human societies, particularly not just ancient societies, but modern societies.
So I went on from undergraduate To really focus on the geology aspects, I received my PhD in geology and geophysics at Yale University back in 1983.
And I then got a job at Boston University the next year.
Was really for the first few years focusing on very strict geology and geophysics, you know, in a very classical way until I met a fellow named John Anthony West in the late 1980s, who has since become both a close colleague and a close friend.
He was and still is, unfortunately, his health is very, he's in very serious condition health-wise right now, but he's also in his 80s.
He is a self-styled rogue Egyptologist, and he had the concept, which he got from a fellow named Schwar de Lubich, just to give credit where credit is due, who's long deceased, that the great Sphinx of Egypt might not be 2500 BC, but in fact it may go back to a much more remote period.
And this is something that he thought should be looked at carefully.
And he had the concept, which was correct as it was, that this was really a matter for geological expertise.
So I met him through a colleague at Boston University who happened to know him.
We were introduced.
I was intrigued.
I said, oh, you know, this is sort of interesting.
I've always been interested in Egypt.
I've never been there.
And I thought that would basically be the end of it.
But lo and behold, he got me involved.
He got me to Egypt in 1990.
And it really set the course for the rest of my career since then, focusing on ancient civilizations and using geological expertise to analyze various aspects of ancient civilizations, which it turned out fit my interest from years back.
So this really is the Indiana Jones end of the profession, isn't it?
Well, yeah, you know, it's funny.
I don't like being called Indiana Jones, but it's interesting that, and I have to admit, I haven't watched all the Indiana Jones, but I really am an academic.
I really am PhD professional, as I guess Indiana Jones was in the fictional aspects.
And I really have gotten involved in, should we say, controversial topics, because my guiding principle is to look at evidence, follow the evidence wherever it may lead, whether my academic colleagues like my conclusions or not.
And I have to admit that I have had resistance to my conclusions from some of my academic colleagues, particularly Egyptologists early on, who resented a geologist coming in and telling them things that they, in a sense, didn't want to hear because it upset their paradigm.
Yeah, because it seems to me, and look, having gone to school in the UK in the 1970s, it kind of seemed to me, and we were all fascinated by ancient Egypt and Tutankhamun and all the rest of it.
It was all, to me, it was thrilling and fascinating stuff to be able to look back so far.
But I think geologists and archaeologists felt that they had it all nailed back in the 1930s and 40s.
Exactly.
Exactly.
And so things were very simple, very straightforward.
I learned that story.
You know, I'm a trained academic and everything was nailed.
And it was really just a matter as far as they were concerned at the time.
And some of them still feel this way, although I think now they're realizing we have to change our views.
But they felt it was just a matter of filling in little pieces, not changing the major story.
So when I came in and I was saying that the Sphinx was not 2500 BC, but in fact it was a much older structure that had been reused in 2500 BC, had been re-carved.
The head is a dynastic head.
The head was carved.
But what I came to conclude based on very solid geological evidence, both above ground and underground, is that the core body of the Sphinx, as I call it, is a much older structure.
And some of the basic evidence that I first proposed is, frankly, very, very simple, which I think made them even more upset.
Well, I can well imagine that.
But, you know, the idea that the Sphinx has a longer history and had actually been repurposed, I mean, that's pretty revolutionary, isn't it?
It is.
It's absolutely revolutionary.
And they were very upset about it.
For instance, I pointed out that the body of the Sphinx shows very distinctive and diagnostic features that indicate that it suffered erosion and weathering under a climatic regime that is much more moist, much rainier than the present Sahara conditions.
The problem for the Egyptologist is present Sahara conditions go back to all of the entire history of dynastic Egypt that goes back 3000 plus BC.
So if the Sphinx, quite logically, was eroded and weathered in pre-Saharan conditions, that means that this original statue has to be much older.
That did not make friends for me among Egyptologists.
So the idea that I was taught in school, and that was all the rage in the 1970s, was that the ancient Egyptians were a bunch of really clever people who knew stuff, some of which we can only guess at today, but which we are beginning to learn in these decades.
That's really, in your book, gone out of the window, because you're saying that, okay, they were definitely clever people, but there were other people potentially cleverer than them before them.
Well, actually, yeah.
Now, that's an interesting way to put it.
What I'm really saying is, yes, I have incredible respect for the dynastic Egyptians.
So let's just, when we say dynastic Egyptians, you know, for those That don't know Egyptian history, that's about the beginning of dynastic Egypt about 3000 BC, roughly, and runs right up to Greco-Roman times, Ptolemaic times, you know, say 300 BC.
So, this is a civilization that, of course, had changes, had influences, but it lasted for thousands of years.
So they had a massively, I mean, they make us look like rank amateurs.
They had a massively good run.
Absolutely.
I mean, they had a continuity, and just to have a continuity like that for all these thousands of years is amazing.
But what is very interesting and ties in with my work is that even the Egyptologists will admit that dynastic Egypt seems to spring up completely, you know, amazingly sophisticated close to 5,000 years ago.
There isn't a lot that seems to lead up to it, you know, gradually and slowly.
And this is interesting because the dynastic Egyptians 4,500 plus years ago, they talked about how they had predecessors at a time known as Zeptepi, the beginning of the age.
They basically were talking about a prior civilization that they had inherited things from.
This was always taken as pure mythology, pure imagination on the part of the dynastic Egyptians, sort of a myth of their origins, but not to be taken seriously.
And something that I've tried to, not try to demonstrate, something that I've found based on the evidence, and I think demonstrates now, is that the Egyptian, ancient Egyptians actually knew more about their early history than they're generally given credit for.
And what I'm finding with my work is that, yes, there was what I call earlier cycle of civilization that goes back to a much more remote period temporally.
And the Egyptians were right, that this was devastated by natural catastrophes.
And what we call dynastic Egypt was really a re-emergence.
So sort of like in Europe, we know about the fall of the Roman Empire, and you go into the Dark Ages and the Middle Ages before the Renaissance again.
Essentially, the same thing happened in Egypt, but on a much longer time frame.
Okay, so this is very much at variance with what we have been told and what we came to understand.
Exactly.
Because our view and the view that I was given at school is that the Egyptians were very clever people and here's what they did.
And then a little later came the idea, perhaps in the 1980s, certainly into the 90s, that they may have been influenced perhaps by something extraterrestrial.
But that was a fringe view.
What you're saying is something completely different.
I want to be very clear.
I am not talking about anything extraterrestrial whatsoever.
This comes back to contact in the desert where a lot of people wanted to try to put words in my mouth.
And it was a very interesting experience because they wanted to make, oh, you know, it was the ETs that came and seated civilization.
That is not what I'm talking about whatsoever.
And that's absolutely fringe as far as I'm concerned.
Not because, and I want to be clear, not because it's not conceivable that there are advanced civilizations out there in the stars.
In fact, given the number of stars and the number of Earth-like planets that have been discovered by modern astronomers, so I'm talking strict astronomy, and I don't think we want to go into it now, but there is some evidence from certain distant stars that there may be,
it's very controversial, but there are serious astrophysicists and astronomers that point out certain aspects of certain stars are very anomalous when it comes to trying to put them into a natural phenomenon setting.
So that may indicate advanced civilization.
But be that as it may, I see absolutely no evidence for extraterrestrial contact, definitive evidence in that somehow this seeded civilization.
What I'm talking about is an earlier cycle of civilization that arose before the end of the last ice age, arose before 9,700 BC, was devastated by the natural catastrophes that we can document geologically at the end of the last ice age.
And furthermore, I just want to say this quickly, my determination based on the evidence, and I'm not alone in this, is that what happened is that our star, our sun, underwent a major solar outburst as stars tend to do.
They go through cycles and this devastated the surface of the Earth.
It snapped us out of the last ice age.
And furthermore, when I first started talking about the Sphinx being much older, one of the questions that the Egyptologists kept asking me is, where is there other evidence of a sophistication at this level?
Where is there other evidence of civilization, if you would, before the end of the last ice age?
I didn't have the evidence at that time.
Since then, since the early 90s, we now have a site in southeastern Turkey called Gabekli Tepe, which is incredibly sophisticated also, has been excavated by the German Archaeological Institute and dates back 12,000 years, the same time period I've been talking about all these years.
Now, the idea that the sun can have done something which was a terminal, not a terminal, but a cataclysmic and seismic event, that's the wrong term, but you know what I'm saying, a full stop.
It was seismic in part because it set off earthquakes, among other things.
Right, so I was correct in that.
So the action of the sun is being researched heavily at the moment.
We are sending a probe to the sun because we think that the sun is going to give us some kind of shot of something, a major solar flare event or solar, you know, what do they call it, major solar ejections.
Solar ejections, solar flares, yeah, coronal mass ejection, CMEs might be what you're thinking of.
I use a general term Solar outburst because it incorporates of the AMP electromagnetic pulse, solar flares, coronal mass ejections, proton events, as they call it.
The sun is like any other star.
It does wild and crazy things from a human perspective.
Right.
So that is not beyond the bounds of possibility.
And that's why we, at this moment, are so interested in that.
And some fringe scientists and mainstream scientists are giving this a lot of their concern right now.
So it is possible that this happened in the past, and that was the event that drew a line under one civilization and moved us along to another one.
The other thing that's of interest, of course, is the whole subplot in your research, that there was an older and perhaps potentially bigger, but certainly as or more intelligent civilization before that one.
So we don't have an adequate understanding of who we are and where we came from.
That is correct.
That's absolutely correct.
And I think this is a very important subject that we really should know where we're coming from, what came before us.
And there are lessons to learn that they, I mean, they were decimated, as far as I can reconstruct, at the end of the last ice age.
And we are very vulnerable at the moment.
Talk to me about the signs and symbols of their presence then, the guidepost that you have found for them.
Well, it really started with my work on the Sphinx, which for better or worse, you know, was taken, you know, had a mixed reception.
We talked about that because the Egyptologists didn't want to have to deal with this.
They didn't want to have to rethink their paradigm.
In general, a lot of my academic colleagues were, well, they had the mindset that civilization arose about 3500 BC in Mesopotamia, initially in Egypt, maybe, you know, around the same time in the Far East, China, et cetera.
And if you go back before that, this was the mindset at the time, you're not going to have civilization.
You're not going to have sophistication.
You're only going to have hunter-gatherers.
That was a phrase that they liked to use.
So when I started talking about the Sphinx going back, it really caused a lot of consternation among my academic colleagues.
They attacked me, etc.
And I want to point out that with the Sphinx, I was using very solid geological evidence, both surface evidence.
I was looking at hard science.
I was looking at subsurface evidence that we collected geophysically.
I also pointed out, which only made matters worse, that when the Sphinx was carved, the core body of the Sphinx 12,000 years ago, and that's the date I'm putting on it now, before the end of the last ice age, they cut out huge multi-ton, weighing tens of tons, blocks and assembled them into what is now known as the Sphinx Temple and the Valley Temple.
So they were not just carving a hill into the shape of a lion, but they were also constructing huge edifices out of carved blocks.
And the Sphinx itself is emerging from the bedrock.
So as I mentioned before, this was very controversial.
They wanted other evidence from elsewhere.
And to continue the story, after I was talking about this, unfortunately, he's deceased now, but Professor Klaus Schmidt, Herr Professor Klaus Schmidt of the German Archaeological Institute in the mid-1990s began excavating very quietly a structure, a site known as Gabekli Tepe in southeastern Turkey.
It turns out that Gabekle Tepe is of the same level of sophistication as I was discussing for the Sphinx.
Many people have, and I don't like the term, but it's a colloquial term, many people have said, well, Gabekli Tepe is the smoking gun because it is an incredible site.
It's sort of Stonehenge-like.
You're in the UK, you're in England, so people know the concept of Stonehenge.
But the thing about Stonehenge is it's big, massive, rough-hewn blocks.
Kebekley Tepe consists of numerous stone circles, if you would, but they are beautifully carved.
There's reliefs on them.
There is even potentially symbolic notation on them.
They are erected pillars.
The pillars weigh 10 to 15 tons, the largest, beautifully constructed, and very accurately dated to the end of the last ice age.
So we're talking 12,000 years ago.
I have talked to archaeologists off the record, for instance, and they won't admit to this, but I have talked to them, and what I'm going to say is true.
And they've told me that, well, if they didn't have stratigraphic data, if they didn't have radiocarbon dating, and they just saw one or two of the Kobekli Tepe pillars and had to guess at its age, they would guess one told me 1000 BC, another one 600 BC, not 9,000 to 10,000 BC, as it turns out the site really is.
So this to me is another very strong piece of evidence for what I've been talking about, that we had a very advanced civilization or very advanced cultures before the end of the last ice age.
And at Gabekli Tepe, it literally spans the end of the last ice age.
And you can see broken pillars that were knocked over during the devastation at 9700 BC.
They tried to re-erect them very, very quickly, very hastily.
You can see how they were crudely putting them up again.
They built very crude stone walls between the pillars to hold them up.
It must have been a devastating time, and this is recorded at the site.
Ultimately, the Gabekli Tepe people decided to bury the site entirely.
They artificially buried the site.
And this is something Klaus Schmidt pointed out long before he passed away.
Unfortunately, he died prematurely.
I won't get into it, I don't know the circumstances, but he pointed out that they actually spent as much time covering the site, purposefully burying the site to probably try to protect it.
Maybe they intended to come back to it at some point.
So they knew they were facing a crisis and for some reason they wanted to preserve what they had.
Exactly.
And they spent as much time and energy covering it over to preserve it as, in his estimate, they had to erect it in the first place.
So it's all recorded at Gabekli Tepe that they were struggling.
So what we're being told about here then, you say, is that there was an international civilization.
You know, these days we think we're really smart because we've got the internet and everything else.
But these people were international way before we were.
Yeah, well, when they say international, I don't want to extrapolate too far.
Southeastern Turkey is not that far away.
It comes right down to it from the Cairo area where Giza is in the Sphinx.
We also have evidence.
I'll mention another site, Gunan Padang, in Java, Indonesia, modern Indonesia.
There's not so much evidence in the Americas that's more iffy.
Again, this is really opening up new territory.
But yes, there were definitely pockets of civilization, if we could put it that way, before the end of the last ice age, before the devastation.
I suspect, and I've talked about this for a very long time, I suspect that they were in communication with each other.
They were trading.
They were exchanging ideas.
So they were not isolated.
So they were international in that sense.
And when the devastation came at 9700 BC, pockets of people survived.
And we actually have, for instance, evidence in Turkey, in the Cappadocia region, and elsewhere into both Asia and Europe that they went underground.
That was how they had to survive, both into natural caves and apparently making quickly as they could because the devastation came and then the sun backed off, but then there were sort of more outbursts, sort of like a major earthquake and minor earthquakes after that.
So not only is this a fantastic historical story that helps us to pinpoint our own origins, but also if we read it smartly and cleverly, and if we take on board what it's telling us, then it could give us some clues as to how we might handle what's coming down the track for us.
This is absolutely, I think, one of the most important aspects of it whatsoever, because they were absolutely devastated.
Only pockets survived.
I was going to say, for instance, a pocket survived in the Cappadocia region in Turkey.
Interestingly, based on linguistic evidence, you can trace back a number of the Indo-European languages to that area at the end of the last ice age.
Well, that's because a pocket of people survived there.
And there would have been physicists who I've worked with have calculated there would have been incredible radiation levels on the surface of the Earth for short periods of time due to this, due to the destruction of the ozone layer, due to the destruction of the magnetosphere that helps protect us.
So it was a very devastating time.
And people did survive.
Not everyone survived.
But the primary way that they survived, either being just in the right place at the right time, but was to be able to go into escape areas, basically caves.
Interestingly, along the same lines, you have at the end of the last ice age, and this is very well documented geologically, a massive extinction of large mammals other than humans.
Humans are actually large mammals too.
Well, why the large mammals preferentially, they could not escape into areas.
You know, it's very hard for them to go into caves, that type of thing, and have a large enough breeding population.
Getting back to lessons for today, something that really scares me, and I hate to be speaking this way because then sometimes people accuse me of being a fear monger, that type of thing.
No, I'm not that way.
I'm not, as they call it in America, a prepper who thinks that you have to store up beans and rice and have your private.
A prepper.
Thank you for giving me that phrase.
I hear these commercials on American radio all the time for people selling a year's supply of storable food and your own generator and all of that stuff.
Exactly.
I'm not into that at all.
I have nothing to sell.
But it sounds, Robert, as if this ancient civilization that we're only learning about now was highly organized because it made a plan.
Some people survived.
This is something that I think we need to learn from then, that we do need to make plans, that we do need to have community.
And what I mean by community is that you can't survive this alone or you can't survive this just with your own immediate family, that you have to have plans, you have to have connections.
And there's a lot that I could bring up.
I'll mention, for instance, that archaeologists have found associated with many of these very early sites going back to the end of the last ice age, underground tunnels, underground passages.
And they've been perplexed by this.
Why would they need these underground tunnels that are very narrow and then they open up to little areas where a few people can gather?
Austrian archaeologists and Spielmunker, someone that's interested in caves, Heinrich, am I going to get this right?
I'm Kush, I think it was, has pointed this out.
Very perplexing, except when you put it into the context of what was happening at the end of the last ice age, end of the last Ice age.
They were planning.
They at least realized that they better do something.
Perhaps they were able to predict when this was going to occur, which would have been very good if they had tracked cycles of the sun.
Interestingly, ancient people at very remote time, and this has been acknowledged by academics for decades now, they had a fascination with large-scale cycles of the stars, of the sun, of the heavenly objects, the celestial objects.
And this may be in part why, because they realized that there were times of disaster that were brought on by heavenly objects, namely the sun in particular.
And the ancient Egyptians, they obviously felt that what these people had left as a legacy was very important, because rather than, for example, demolishing what we call the Sphinx now and starting again, they decided to repurpose, they refurbished, they gave it a new top and they kept it going.
So they clearly revered these people.
Oh, yeah, they absolutely, you're absolutely correct.
And I could give you more examples.
For instance, in the so-called Red Pyramid at Dashur, which is not very far from Giza, when you go into it, it's a very strange pyramid if you know what you're looking at.
Because the bottom line is that this pyramid was built around and over a much earlier structure.
And once you realize that, once you understand what you're looking at, and when I take people there sometimes on trips and tours or whatnot, and I pointed out there is this one, it looks like a strange chamber.
And interestingly, all the rocks inside there are heavily eroded and weathered.
You can't have that occur once you're inside a pyramid and the rest of it is in great shape.
This is a structure built over 4,500 years ago to encompass, to enclose, to hold, to protect a much more ancient structure.
Is the way to find out more about this ancient precursor civilization to dig down?
You know, I talked to one archaeologist a little while ago on this show who suggested that we need to go even further down underneath our feet to be able to find clues to what's really there.
Absolutely.
We need to go further down.
We also need to look off of coastlines because, of course, excuse me, I shouldn't say of course, because not everyone may realize this.
At the end of the last ice age, because of melting glaciers, because of warming oceans and warm water expands, etc., sea levels rose over 100 meters, in places 120, 130 meters.
People naturally gravitate toward coastlines, etc.
So off the coast we might find something.
We have an area in the east in the Indonesian area known as Sundaland, which is underwater now but was above water in the late ice age.
We need to go deeper.
When I was an undergraduate at George Washington University, we learned the standard paradigm for North American archaeology, which was that the Clovis people, the so-called Paleo Indians or Clovis people, who had a very distinctive culture, very distinctive stone artifacts, were the first people in the Americas, that they had crossed the Bering Strait and had come into the Americas.
And we learned that if you, once you hit the Clovis layer when you were doing excavations, you just stopped because there was no point in excavating down any deeper because everyone, quote, knew, unquote, that there were no humans in America before the Clovis people.
So literally, people just would stop excavating because you were a fool in wasting your time if you tried to excavate any deeper.
So in the great institutions of learning in England, in America, around the world, are archaeologists preparing to do this now?
I think they are.
One thing that's happening, I've been in this business, so to speak, for over a quarter century because I started in the late 80s, early 90s.
My first trip to Egypt was in 1990.
And I point this out because a quarter century is about a generation.
So now what I see is a new generation of archaeologists and people interested in this coming to the fore.
They're now graduating.
Some of the ones that are the early part of this generation getting their PhDs now.
And they are interested in doing this.
They're interested in pursuing this.
I see changes occurring.
For instance, people at Boston University, I'll be very blunt about this, 25 years ago were trying to have me fired.
Fortunately, I didn't get involved in.
I was not dumb, should we put it this way, from a practical manner?
I did not get involved in this controversy publicly until I was tenured.
So that did give me a certain ability.
So basically, until you had a contract that was fairly bulletproof, you didn't get as far into this as you wanted to.
They could go after me otherwise with raises and that, or lack of raises, that type of thing.
But at least I had some security.
But of course, funding for research is always the great problem, isn't it?
That's the bug base.
That's a huge problem, and we need funding now.
What I was going to say is, change of the times, I have just opened with the approval of the administration at Boston University something that is very small now.
We're looking for funding.
I'm looking for funding.
But I am now the director of what's known as the ISOC, and that stands for the Institute for the Study of the Origins of Civilization at Boston University.
This is literally just in the last couple of months.
I've been allowed to open this.
We have a web page up.
I want to build it up as a, you know, one vehicle, one way to really look at this in a serious manner, to be able to raise funds, to make connections.
There is so Much work to be done.
For instance, one project that I've been desirous of doing for a very long time is my early work, my early geophysical work with a fellow named Tom DeBecki, a PhD geophysicist, just to give credit where credit is due.
He and I found a chamber under the left paw of the Sphinx.
This has to this day, 20-some years later, not been excavated, not been probed, and there it is.
Well, is that because of the rather defensive, protective attitude of the Egyptian custodians of antiquities?
Yes, yes.
It's because of that.
There's a lot of politics in Egypt.
I don't think we want to go there now, but there's a lot of politics in Egypt and a lot of politics involved in the antiquities.
There's a lot of money and revenue involved in antiquities.
There's a lot of vested interest.
So in other words, if you're doing something that might overturn or change the story in some way, that's bad for business.
It can be bad for business.
I can argue that it could be very good for business.
Look at Howard Carter, and I'm not trying to compare myself per se to Howard Carter.
And he's the man who discovered the tomb of Tutankhamun.
That's right.
When he discovered that tomb, you know, look what that did for Egypt and all the attraction it, you know, all the attention it brought to Egypt.
It became an attraction spot, even more so than it was before.
So that means that you have tourism and money coming in.
But it takes a lot of money to pursue this.
It takes a lot of money to excavate, et cetera.
Of course, Howard Carter himself, just to divert you slightly, because it's always fascinated me, that tomb was said to be cursed, wasn't it?
Because didn't Howard Carter suffer and the people around him have a certain amount of misfortune after this discovery?
Exactly, exactly.
And there's all these stories about the curse and how so many people that were involved with it died prematurely.
And this actually gets into something else, which are the religious aspects, whether it's curses or the pitting different world religions against each other.
You know, so there's also, and I've, and I'm not saying anything, don't, I don't want to say anything bad about any religion or any particular individuals, but I've certainly encountered resistance when it comes to some of my work in Egypt from, we'll call fundamentalists, both Christians and Muslims, you know, people who do not want to hear about pushing civilization back to early.
It's a similar kind of resistance, though, to be fair.
It's a similar kind of resistance that you had from the scientific community.
It's because anything that challenges the established order can, for some people, be a bit of a problem.
But you're telling me there's a groundswell of research and opinion that is moving in this direction inexorably.
Yeah, I believe so.
I think it has to move that way.
I think the new generation, like I say, literally people coming into the field now, they want to move that way.
It also opens up opportunities to be very pragmatic.
If you're coming into a field, you're a new PhD, this opens up opportunities to really make important contributions.
And the growing feeling that so many people have had, you know, just ordinary people like me who read the newspapers on a Sunday, that the story that we've been told can't be all of it because it doesn't add up.
You know, these civilizations and these artifacts that they leave, they don't just appear.
Things don't just appear, they evolve.
Yeah, exactly.
Exactly.
And it's amazing.
For instance, you go into Saqqara, which is a steppe pyramid, which is even older than the standard attribution of the Great Pyramid.
I say standard attribution because I think when it comes right down to it, we're going to find that a lot of these structures have to be redated, or at least their origins have to be redated, because they're built on and around older structures.
But Saqqara, which again is not that far from Giza distance-wise, the Egyptologists have been amazed that they excavated, they found in underground chambers under it, literally thousands and thousands of stockpiled bowls and dishes, that type of thing, beautifully carved from solid rock, incredibly sophisticated.
And even the Egyptologists have admitted that these are older than the site itself, older.
They were basically stockpiling things.
I say some of this at least goes back.
They're basically relics that they were protecting, the dynastic Egyptians close to 5,000 years ago.
And parts, do you think, partly more evidence of this survivalist trend that they had as they were facing a crisis?
Exactly, exactly, exactly.
In fact, just because it makes it easier for people to understand these things, something that my wife, Katie, actually came up with it, and I like the acronym, we call it SIDA, Solar Induced Dark Age.
So just to give the brief version, as I was saying, there was this earlier cycle of civilization achieved incredible sophistication before the end of the last ice age, before 9700 BC, was devastated by the calamities, by the catastrophes, natural catastrophes in 9700 BC.
Essentially, humanity went into Siddha, went into a dark age, a solar-induced dark age for 6,000 plus years before there was this re-emergence.
And one aspect of that reemergence that we see very clearly is the rise of dynastic Egypt about 5,000 years ago.
How does your work tie in with the work of Graham Hancock?
Graham Hancock is, and I mean, I've known him for many years.
He's a journalist.
He's popularized this.
If you read his books, he's talked about my work for years.
I don't agree with him on a lot of aspects.
I mean, He, for instance, talks about, I guess, in his most recent book, A Comet, and somehow a comet.
I'm happy with comets, and there's evidence for comets and asteroids and that type of thing in the geological record.
For instance, I remember the days.
I'm old enough, I remember the days when the theory of the dinosaurs being the extinction of the dinosaurs, the Cretaceous extinction being caused by a major asteroid, first came out and all the controversy that surrounded that.
And it turns out the evidence indicates that was the case.
There's solid evidence for that.
Other people, and Hancock, you mentioned Hancock.
Hancock has popularized this, that there was a comet in the Younger Dryas, what's known as the beginning of the Younger Dryas.
It turns out when you look at the actual evidence, and I have spent a lot of time looking at the specific geological evidence, it doesn't hold up.
I don't see any evidence for a comet at the end of the Younger Dryas.
And furthermore, that's 10,900 BC.
The real event, which I'm referring to as 9,700 BC, that's where you see the extinctions.
That's where you see the decimation of this early cycle of civilization.
So there are many people doing research on civilizations before we thought there were civilizations, and you may be coming at it from different perspectives, all of you.
But isn't it heartening, don't you think, for the expansion of human knowledge to know that you're all moving in that direction.
At least you're all going in the same direction, and you're all not buying the traditional explanation and the things that we've been fed?
Yeah, yeah, I think that's heartening, and I think there's more and more work in that way.
See, I do come from an academic perspective, and what I see is more and more academics taking this seriously, looking at this, really the evidence coming together.
As far as the journalistic aspects, that is a sort of a two-way street.
You know, when you get someone that's very journalistic, but then they start making mistakes.
I live in an academic world where then somehow sometimes they will criticize me for mistakes that other people make.
I guess, you know, I have to say that my background is journalism, and I have a lot of sympathy for journalists.
You have to be able to tie facts together and come to conclusions, I guess.
But then we all do that.
Yeah, exactly.
Exactly.
Oh, I'm not knocking you or journalists in particular.
I'm just saying that I sort of straddle it because I both speak at popular conferences, but I'm also academic.
And I think there's incredible, let me be clear, I think there's an incredible need for good journalism.
But like anything, if it's sloppy, then that hurts.
But sloppy academics, it hurts too.
And what really hurts, I think, is when you have academics, so let me get back to academia, which I know best, when you have academics who won't change their opinion, have a mindset.
I have literally been told by Egyptologists, senior Egyptologists, I couldn't make this stuff up, that basically there are lots of rocks for me to look at around the world.
And it would probably behoove me to start looking at rocks in other places than Egypt, because they don't understand what I'm talking about.
They don't understand my geology.
All they know is basically that they must be right and I must be wrong.
And it's very upsetting for them to hear something other than what they believed with their leaders.
I mean, look, any researcher doing research may be wrong.
Any of us can be wrong.
Some of us are cleverer than others.
But everybody has a right to do their research.
And surely that's how we learn.
I agree.
I agree.
And so when I'm told by Egyptologists that it'd be better if I looked at rocks somewhere else other than Egypt, I mean, that's just, to me, that's just narrow-minded and horrible.
Just for a moment, talking about rocks somewhere else then.
I visited twice, in fact, in Africa.
It's about two hours out of Johannesburg, a place called Marupeng, which claims to be the cradle of civilization.
And there are more and more researchers coming to the view that that may not entirely be the case.
Does your work have any repercussions for places like that?
I have not, I've been to South Africa.
I've not visited that site, so I really don't want to speak about something I haven't visited.
What I suspect, though, and I don't know if this is answering the question or not, is that before the end of the last ice age, we had, as I was mentioning, pockets that were arising around the world.
Maybe they were interconnected.
Maybe they were, you know, I suspect there was, as I said before, that there was interconnections.
There was information being passed back and forth, communication.
But that side, I honestly don't know.
So I don't want to speak to it.
Okay.
What is your next task then?
You've got a body of research.
It seems to me that this is a journey that you're only just beginning, really.
It's such a huge journey that you're on.
Where are you going next with it?
Well, I want to continue following it where it leads.
I really would like to get back to Egypt to do serious research, which has been a bit hampered by the authorities for a couple of decades.
I'm hopeful, and this is hopefully not false hope, if I could put it that way.
I have met with Egyptian officials in the last year and a half.
They seem to be more open to continuing the serious research with, you know, there have been regime changes, we'll put it that way in Egypt over the last few years.
So the situation may be different now than it was 10 years ago.
So that's one aspect.
I went into the chamber that I mentioned under the paw of the sphinx, which could go back to that very remote time, since the sphinx itself, the body of the sphinx does.
And then there are other sites.
For instance, in Turkey, the Gobekli Tepe is not just a single little site, it is part of a much larger complex.
Before Klaus Schmidt passed away unexpectedly, he and his group had done geophysical research there.
They found that there were over 20 stone circles in the ground, that there are numerous sites in the Gabekli Tepe area that apparently were covered over and buried.
I've just established the ISOC, the Institute for the Study for the Origins of Civilization, as I mentioned, at Boston University.
So I really want to build that up.
I want to get more affiliations and connections with that.
I've also got, I'm part of an organization that's not for profit, organization for the research of ancient cultures as another vehicle to try to raise money to continue the research.
I've got books I want to continue to write.
I've got more books to write.
So I've got a lot to do.
I feel like I've got, I don't know.
Another lifetime's working.
Another lifetime.
Plenty to keep you busy because we're really opening up a whole new field.
And there are lots of implications here.
Can I give out a website?
You can.
Can we do that at the back end of this conversation?
Sure.
Which will be in just minutes from now.
But I want to ask you one thing before we do all of that.
And do remind me to mention your website and everything at the end of this.
Of course, I'll do that.
Your own continent.
What does your research, if anything, say to your own continent and how it developed, how civilization developed in North America?
Well, you know, that's an interesting question because my work has primarily been focused on the old world.
But what we seem to have is that civilization, at least we have the best evidence of civilization in the old world, some in South America, but that's an ongoing issue.
And there's been so much, like the Sphinx with in some of the Peruvian, Bolivian sites, which I've been studying, but I'm not ready to make any definitive statements about yet.
You have so much overlay where sites were used and reused and reused again, so it's hard to get to the bottom of it.
In North America, interestingly, we don't have so far much evidence of incredible sophistication before the end of the last ice age.
There's some glimmerings, but North America seems to have been, in my opinion, a bit of a backwater, if you would, when it comes to this earlier cycle, this earlier round of civilization.
But then on the other hand, there's probably a lot to...
We don't have anything real obvious when it comes right down to it.
Well, further south from you, how does all of this leave the Mayans then?
I'm sorry?
Further south from you, how does all of this leave, for example, the Mayans?
Well, the classical Maya are relatively late from my perspective.
I mean, only a few thousand years old.
But they do, they are an example where they talk about, again, earlier cycles going back to a much earlier period.
The Hopi, for instance, talk about that also.
A lot of the indigenous cultures.
I was just in Arizona speaking at a conference after the contact in the desert, which was in California.
I was speaking with some of the indigenous people and talking to them about their long-standing traditions, et cetera, which seem to go back to this earlier period.
But as far as good, solid physical evidence, that is, you know, we haven't really developed that yet.
Something that may be occurring also in North America is it may have been fairly strongly, if I could put that way, hit by what are known as plasma strikes at the end of the last ice age, which may have caused incredible devastation.
So wiping out some of the material remains from the American American.
So there's a possibility the equivalent of the hard drive for any civilization that might have been there has been wiped out by that.
Yes, exactly.
I mean, North America may have been fairly devastated to the point that we just don't have much in the way of remains.
Again, these are all sort of open questions, and we're really at just the beginning of this research.
And it's very exciting.
Have you any plans to go to Australia?
Because the, look, I met, was privileged to meet some Aboriginal people when I was in Australia, and their level of wisdom is tremendous.
Oh, Australia, believe me, is one of the places that's on the top of my list for that very reason.
And you're probably aware of this.
I'm sure you're aware of this, but maybe the audience isn't.
That even recently, in the last few years, it has been demonstrated geologically, for instance, that some of the traditions and stories and ancient wisdom of the Aboriginals can be demonstrated geologically.
For instance, when they talked about certain islands, which are now submerged and how their people had hunted certain animals, etc.
And this was just considered nonsense by a lot for a long time by my academic colleagues.
It's now been demonstrated.
Yes, there were islands exactly where they say the islands were at the end of the last ice age.
The animals they talked about hunting actually occurred there.
So some of these traditions seem to have been preserved for 12,000 years or more.
So the lesson as we conclude this conversation, Robert, and thank you very much for making time for me, is that we once again are being shown to be not nearly as smart today as we think we are.
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
I think we have to really give credit to our ancestors, to the people in the remote past before us, and we need to learn from them.
And we, I think, have incredible hubris in our modern Civilization.
We're also incredibly vulnerable to natural catastrophes, if I could use that term.
We are, and we didn't get into it in this conversation, but I just want to mention this: we are a society based on electronics and electricity and electrical grid systems.
If we have a solar outburst, as we did at the end of the last ice age, it's going to devastate our modern Western developed society.
We are incredibly vulnerable.
We are perhaps more vulnerable than those ancient people you've been looking at because of our dependence on our creations, which are based on electromagnetism.
I agree.
Absolutely.
And that's something that maybe politicians are doing this quietly, but I'm not sure they are, is not properly being prepared for on any level.
I think there are glimmerings.
There are people in government that are aware of this in some of the agencies like NASA in America and elsewhere, but it's not being taken seriously enough by enough people that are in positions to really do something about it.
So in many ways, it was heartening when we both read a couple of weeks ago that NASA is planning to send a robotic probe as close to the sun as you can possibly get to measure what's going on there.
That's very heartening, and I think it indicates that, you know, people in the know, I mean, certainly there are plenty of people in NASA and elsewhere that realize these things, but convincing politicians, convincing those with the purse strings that this is worth spending money on can be very difficult.
Robert, you're a fascinating man to talk with, and thank you again.
That website of yours.
Yes, my website, is that what you said?
My website is www.robertshock and it's spelled S-C-H-O-C-H.
So www.robertshockalloneword.com.
And that's my personal website.
And from there, people will find links to my books and to trips I do sometimes to Oracle, which I mentioned, and can get more information.
Thank you, Robin.
Give my regards to Boston and to the aquarium and to legal seafoods and all the places I love there.
Absolutely.
Great city.
I'll have to come back to very soon.
I'll tell you what, Boston is, for me, is always a winter place.
I think of Boston as a place that's great to go when it's snowing.
Yes, it is.
It's beautiful.
It's beautiful.
As long as we don't get too much snow.
Yeah, true enough.
No, too much for us.
Boy, oh, boy.
Robert, thank you very much indeed.
We'll talk again.
Thank you.
Okay, it was a pleasure.
Thank you.
Robert Schock, fascinating man.
I'll put a link to him and his work on my website, theunexplained.tv, the website designed and maintained by Adam at Creative Hotspot.
Apologies to those of you who don't like me doing shout-outs on the show and don't like me talking about the British weather.
I do realize I did a lot of both at the beginning of this show.
But for those people who like those things, thank you very much for supporting the show.
And I had to get through as many of your emails as possible on this edition because I'm so far behind with everything at the moment.
But I'm back up to speed right now.
More great guests in the pipeline.
Hopefully it's going to be a little cooler the next time I put together a show.
And I hope you're a little cooler where you are.
Unless, of course, you like heat like this.
There I am talking about the weather again.
So until next, we meet here on The Unexplained.
My name is Howard Hughes.
I am in London and please stay safe.
Please stay calm and please stay in touch.
Thanks very much.
Take care.
▲
Export Selection