American Alchemy with Jesse Michels - Graham Hancock: Aliens, Atlantis & the Apocalypse

Episode Date: October 5, 2024

Graham Hancock is an unrelenting journalist uncovering the origins of humanity’s forgotten past. His new docuseries on Netflix is called Ancient Apocalypse and it documents the abundance of evidence that humanity is much older than the prevailing belief among mainstream archeologists. Most people believe civilization was started a mere 6,000 years ago in the Fertile Crescent. Graham explores various archeological sites across the globe that show in fact our civilization is much older than this. In this raw longform interview we discuss the secrets of Atlantis, the ark of the covenant, DMT as a window into the spirit world and of course, UFOs and aliens. Go watch ancient apocalypse on Netflix!! *** AMERICAN ALCHEMY is an original series hosted by Jesse Michels that explores the frontier of science and tech. Each week, we bring you exclusive interviews with some of the leading thinkers of our time. INSTAGRAM ➤ https://www.instagram.com/jessemichels TWITTER ➤ https://twitter.com/AlchemyAmerican EMAIL/BOOKINGS ➤ [e-mail] SUBSCRIBE TO OUR CHANNEL: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC7eOJzNRWY4l2UTDvIquxYg?app=desktop original music: https://open.spotify.com/artist/6LlLRudDi60Uy4jcmOSEs1 - Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

No one goes to Hank's for his spreadsheets. They go for a darn good pizza. Lately, though, the shop's been quiet. So Hank decides to bring back the $1 slice. He asks Copilot in Microsoft Excel to look at his sales and costs to help him see if he can afford it. Co-pilot shows Hank where the money's going and which little extras make the dollar slice work.

Now, Hank has a line out the door. Hank makes the pizza. Co-Pilot handles the spreadsheets. Learn more at M365Copilot.com slash work. Hello. Randall, how are you, my friend? I'm a seat. I'm good, man. Do you believe that there are survivors of ancient Atlantis that are among us,

perhaps with underwater bases or bases on the moon and advanced technology? I will just say very provisional, but it's never been completely lost. I know if it's been in everyday use, we just haven't understood or recognized. According to a professional midwit journalist at The Guardian, my next guest's highly acclaimed docu-series is the most dangerous show on Netflix. You've been described as a pseudo-archologist, someone who cherry-picks your data. And that makes him the perfect guest on our show, American Alchemy. If you're going to roll your eyes at the notion of mother ayahuasca, go drink some ayahuasca.

And then see if you're going to roll your eye. Right. The docu-series is called Ancient Apocalypse, and the journalist is internationally acclaimed best-selling author, Graham Hancock. Since his 90s cult classic, fingerprints of the gods, Hancock has been accumulating an abundance of evidence to show that our modern historical narrative that civilization was born a mere 6,000 years ago in Mesopotamia is wrong and incomplete.

It's going to absolutely demand a rewrite of history as we know it. Hancock thinks that the human species has been suffering from mass amnesia and that maybe hunter-gatherers were taught, basic agriculture and astronomy by remnant survivors of an ancient civilization that was wiped out in a mass extinction event. There's testimony from the ancients here. They're saying an enormous flood happened and that there was a time where there were only

a few survivors. This hypothesis known as the Younger Dryas impact theory sustains that an asteroid from the Torrid meteor stream hit the Earth causing a global cataclysm. To make things even trippier, this comet impact date almost perfectly coincides. with Plato's dates for the destruction of Atlantis. But let's rein in the speculation on which civilizations preceded ours. Inserting Atlantis as a placeholder for that civilization is admittedly a little more speculative,

as Graham Hancock would even admit. I'm not claiming or insisting that there was a civilization that was actually called Atlantis. By Plato's time, it was called Atlantis. But crazy speculations on Atlantis notwithstanding, I personally think it just takes some childlike instastings, and basic inference to believe Hancock's argument about the Younger Dryas impact theory. There's an overwhelming amount of evidence to show that a global cataclysm probably did occur.

Let's just take these high-level facts. The modern field of archaeology was born a mere 200 years ago. Let that sink in. The very idea that we take as complete dogma that civilization started in the fertile crescent 6,000 years ago. That concept was only established 200 years ago with the discovery of the great capital cities of Assyria and Babylonia. As we explore and discover more ancient archaeological sites, our dates for civilization get progressively older and older. Take Quebecli Tepe, an ancient burial site in modern Turkey dating as far back as 9,000

BC and involving the complex assembly of 50-ton blocks. It's not something that you're a hunter-gatherer and you wake up one morning and think, oh, I'm just going to build the largest megalithic site that will ever be seen anywhere in the world. Teppi was excavated in the 90s, so I think it would actually be the easy or safe bet to say that in the next 100 years, we'll find architecture that predates even this. It's like a sort of Moore's law for archaeology. The deeper we go, the older human history gets.

The lowest parts in any sediment layer are the hardest parts to explore. That's just geology 101. And our digging and underground mapping techniques are getting better and better. Not to mention you have entire swaths of the earth and deep ocean that may have been above sea level in times past. The Amazon forest, which is the size of the Indian subcontinent, and the four million square mile Sahara Desert, that have basically gone completely untouched and unnoticed by conventional archaeologists. To say that we know what exists in these massive black box territories is the epitome of human hubris. Finally, you have hundreds and hundreds of flood myths across cultures that had no contact with each other.

The amount of corroborating evidence for some flood having occurred is overwhelming. That story does not stand alone. That story is one of approximately 2,000 flood traditions. And for skeptics to unequivocally discount these texts, because many of them are religious in nature, is itself dogmatic and unscientific. These are the memory banks of our species. It's in these myths that the memories are passed down. I like to characterize Hancock's books as oscillating between trippy and speculative

and very hard-headed and scientific. It's almost as if he'll write one book for the esoteric psychonaut and then the next for the modern scientific skeptic. His archaeological accounts have been well covered on Netflix now and by other podcasts. So in this very raw long-form interview, I wanted to go to go off the deep end with him and get into the secrets of the Ark of the Covenant, DMT, and its history and its transcended qualities, and his fascinating beliefs on aliens, which he writes about in his 2005 hit book, Supernatural. So without further ado, sit back, relax, and hit subscribe while

I explore the mysteries of our forgotten past with this week's American alchemist, Graham Hancock. Different parts of the brain have different activities. But you know that, don't you? Maybe you should interview me. I've climbed the Great Pyramid five times. What? And two of those climbs were legal. Of course, there was a time when anybody could climb the Great Pyramid.

But here's my little anecdote. I found, Sampha and I together found at the top of the Great Pyramid on the south side overlooking what used to be the boat museum. On one step down from the top, we found the name P, initial P, Hancock. 5th of April 1916 Well my grandfather was Philip Hancock No

Yes and he was in Egypt He was in yeah He was in Egypt during the First World War Are you serious But I still couldn't be 100% sure it was him And at that time my dad was still alive And he had my grandfather's diaries Which were little things

Little diaries, dozens of them And I went through to the date given And I opened that page And I saw just one line And it said, Climed Great Pyramid today No way. Oh my god. That's crazy.

That was my granddad. Wow. Yeah, so I am kind of connected to that. Oh, you're completely connected. That's nothing. So why did archaeologists tell us for so long hunter-gatherers couldn't do it, and we needed agricultural populations that could generate surpluses that could pay for the specialists to... Yes, that was the theory. But that was...

So now with archaeologists are saying, I guess we were wrong about hunter-gatherers. So, yeah, the funny thing about Michael Shermer, there's a story about... about him and I think his wife Jennifer and they were I was like on their wedding night this mechanical clock starts playing in the other room that was an heirloom from her father and it hadn't played and it was like completely broken and it hadn't played in like 20 years or something and her father was supposed to walk her down the aisle but he had died prior to the wedding and it was this mystical moment for him it's this beautiful quote and I'm gonna botch it now that

If I were to paraphrase it, it's like we must throw away the dogmas of science sometimes and make room for these sort of anomalous mystical moments. He says this in the article. I'm very happy to hear that. And I would say I've only known Michael personally since 2017 when I had a debate with him on the Joe Rogan experience. Since then, I've had some correspondence with him. and I found him to be a much less dogmatic skeptic than I had taken him for. And just recently I had an email from him concerning my ancient apocalypse series on Netflix

where he kindly said that he felt I'd made a good case for my basic proposition, that we're missing an episode of the human story, that there may have been a forgotten, lost civilization of the Ice Age. And I think to me that speaks well of Michael's integrity, that he's willing to step out of an entrenched position when the evidence speaks to the need to step out of it, rather than just sticking in it all the time which so many of my critics do.

So much of our planet has not really been subjected to detailed intensive archaeological survey. I think it's extremely premature for archaeologists to be so confident in their model of the origins of civilization. They should have some humility and allow some leg room for alternative suggestions to come in, instead of just trying to smash down anybody who says something that doesn't agree with their model, perhaps be just a little more warm-hearted, a little more open,

allow that, and see what's good in the alternative evidence as being presented, rather than just trying to find bad things about it, and have a more constructive dialogue. Instead of this, you know, we know best, and we're going to smash you down, and we're going to insult you and humiliate you and call you any names we can. So childish, really. I don't even know what arguments. Like, if they see some, like, Gobeckley-Tepi has been,

that's been discovered since the night. Yeah. And so it's, I don't even know what arguments you have as to how the Fertile Crescent is sort of the cradle of civilization after that. And then in your amazing documentary docucuseries, rather, Netflix, Ancient Apocalypse, which features one of the episodes is focused on Quebec Leibretheir. Right, but you have seven or eight others that are pretty convincing as well. And so at that point it feels like kind of overwhelming that the consensus should actually shift

to much older. Yes. At the very least, there should be willingness to, there should be willingness to, you know, and so to consider the possibility that we have missed an important chapter of the human story. You want to know one reason, and I'm sure there are a whole host of other reasons, but why they reflexively might deny this as well, is because I think it interestingly dovetails with stories in the Bible and other religious texts around great floods. Well, the flood, of course, is a very important story in the Bible.

I think what a lot of people who are into the Bible don't realize that that story does not stand alone. That story is one of approximately 2,000 flood traditions that are found all around the world. Clearly documenting a global phenomenon. If we turn to the subject of paleohydrology, it totally confirms the reality of these inconceivably gigantic floods that occurred at the end of the last ice age. And if a comet from the Taurid meteor stream were to hit the earth, it could create a big flood. You bet. The Torrid meteor stream was formed

when a massive comet entered our inner solar system's orbit around 20,000 years ago. Over time, this comet has disintegrated into smaller space debris, like the very famous 1.5 mile wide comet, Anki. Anki and other comets in the southern torrents cross the Earth's orbit

yearly from September to November, while the northern torrid streams cross the Earth starting in mid to late October. Both of these streams cause beautiful light showers and give astronomers panic attacks. Why? Because they can cause massive damage on Earth in the form of impacts and air bursts. We're not dealing with just little dust-sized particles that burn up in the upper atmosphere. And that just as it was a danger to humanity 12,800 years ago, it hasn't gone away. And it still can be a danger to us today.

Just take Cometh Shoemaker-Levy-9, which collided with Jupiter in 1994. It was only a little over a half mile wide, but its impact on Jupiter was the equivalent to 6 million megatons of TNT, or 600 times the destructive force of the entire Earth's nuclear arsenal. And isn't there speculation that the 1908 TenguSka event was possibly? Correct, correct, because the Tunguska event took place on the 30th of June, 19008. It was an air burst. It exploded in the air, flattened 2,000 square miles of trees, didn't kill anybody because it was over an uninhabited area of Siberia,

but did enormous, enormous damage. And the fact that it occurred on the 30th of June suggests very strongly that it was part of the Torrid meteor stream because that is the peak of the torids in June. NASA's DART program aimed to prove that humans can deflect asteroids with satellites and prevent Earth impact. In fact, spacecrafts launched in November of 21 and September of 22, intentionally crashed into dimorphis, a minor planet moon of the asteroid didymus,

successfully altering its orbit. The problem is dimorphis has a diameter of 200 meters, not even close to the half-mile width of Shoemaker-Levy-9. It's interesting that NASA Dark Mission is taking place now, because we know that in the next 30 years or so, we are going to be crossing a much more lumpy and much more dangerous part of the Torre Beatty. That's interesting. I didn't know that. Yeah.

In fact, Dr. Alan West, one of the scientists from the comet research group, he points that out, that the next 30 years are a danger time. There are plenty of unknown comets in the annually passing toward meteor stream that have completely cataclysmic, destructive potential. So we need to invest in advancing our deflection capabilities here. Of course, it's not the only global threat.

There are many other global threats, all of which require an elevation of consciousness of the human race. We have to get out of this tribal mentality. where we're all hating and fighting each other. And get into a more loving and more positive mentality. Otherwise, it'll be like that movie, don't look up. We're trying to tell you that the entire planet is about to be destroyed. Yeah.

We're an excellent movie, by the way. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, and it sort of connects with all of this. Yeah. I think the part where I struggle most with, and what I'd love to talk to you about, because I feel like most interviews with you kind of focus on the abundance of evidence that human history is much older than we realize.

But I know you well enough to know that you've done speculating beyond that. And so let's demarcate this to the audience that this is speculation. And we don't know, but it's interesting. And because of the abundance of evidence, we should be speculating. That's it's almost like our duty. I think speculation is very healthy. And, you know, we need to step out of the mainstream point of view. That's where I think people like me can possibly play a,

useful role. So having said that, what's your number one candidate for an antecedent civilization? I mean, the classic one would be Atlantis. You wrote a book called America before, which connects with this story. Do you think it is Atlantis? Are there other pre-existing civilization? I think the name Atlantis needs to be taken a standing for something else. Need to be taken a standing for something larger. I'm not claiming or insisting that there was a civilization that was actually called Atlantis. By Plato's time, it was called Atlantis. Plato is the earliest surviving reference we have to this great lost civilization of prehistory that he referred to as Atlantis. His source was an ancestor of his. He didn't know him personally. They were separated by about

200 years, but the story had been passed down in the family line. And that ancestor was a very famous Greek lawmaker, Solon. And we know that Solon, that Solon, and we know that Solon, that Solon, made a documented visit to Egypt round about the year 600 BC in our calendar and Solon went to a temple dedicated to the goddess Neith at Sice in the Delta and there the priest showed him certain inscriptions on the walls and he asked them to interpret and they said that what these inscriptions recounted was a former civilization which had been highly advanced but which was destroyed that they said in a single dreadful day and night, was swallowed up by the sea and vanished.

And the other point, which I think is really important to make, and I do make this point in the series, is the date. The date that Plato gives us... Right around the younger drive. Well, the point is that when Solon was at that temple, the priests told him the Atlantis story and how Atlantis was swallowed up by the sea

in a single terrible day and night, He asked them, when did this happen? And they said 9,000 years ago. Now, immediately, that's a date we can convert into our calendar. 9,000 years ago in 600 BC is a date we call 9,600 BC, which, give or take 20 years, is 11,600 years ago. And just as the younger dryass began cataclysmically with a sea level rise 12,800 years ago, it also ended cataclysmically with an even more massive.

massive sea level rise 11,600 years ago. And that massive sea level rise has a name. You'll just call it meltwater pulse 1B. It's well documented. Nobody disputes that there was a meltwater pulse 1B, and it raised sea levels massively, literally overnight. So here we have Plato passing down a story with a date attached to it, which coincides exactly

with what modern science recognizes as a massive global flooding event. And when that's taking into account with the evidence from the from the Edful building text I think the Atlanta story becomes a whole lot more credible yeah you've often said that well put you've often said that the human race is suffering from amnesia mass amnesia and a mutual friend of ours Brian Murrah Rescu who you sort of presented to the world on Joe Rogan wrote a great book called the Immortality Key for which I wrote the forward for which you wrote the forward and he talks about not only the human race as

from amnesia. But this is kind of a platonic concept, the individual suffering from amnesia. It is the concept of an amnesis that the birthing process is kind of a traumatic forgetting process of your primordial soul. And that these Elucinian mystery rituals, Elusis being 13 miles northwest of Athens. I've been to Elusis. You've been to Elusis. Amazing. Is this place where the fathers of Western civilization, Plato, Socrates, if he existed, Aristotle.

All the great names. names. All the great names went and experienced some form of maybe noisis, like knowledge of their soul. Yeah. So do you think... Well, but it's important to add. Yeah. That's, um, and I first went into this in my 2005 book, Supernatural, which has been recently reissued under a new title of visionary. The point is, but there's no doubt in my mind that elyusus was a place. It was a perfect setting for deep psychedelic journeys. Every initiate in the Elysian Mysteries was given a drink called the Kikion and they were given this drink. Then they went down into this deep, dark hallway.

We don't know exactly what went on in there because the rituals were kept secret. But they then had extraordinary, life-changing experiences. And in many cases, many of those great philosophers said that what they lost was their fear of death. That they had had fear of death before. And after this experience, they no longer feared death. And, you know, Brian also presents excellent evidence that early Christians. that early Christianity was a psychedelic, a religion.

Yeah. Maybe the last supper was a... Maybe it was edible. When you need to build up your team to handle the growing chaos at work, use Indeed-sponsored jobs. It gives your job post the boost it needs to be seen and helps reach people with the right skills, certifications, and more.

Spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes. Listeners of this show will get a $75-sponsored, job credit at Indeed.com slash podcast. That's Indeed.com slash podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need a hiring hero? This is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs. The idea that Christ's Last Supper was actually a pagan mystery ritual is not new. In fact, Martin Luther King wrote a little-known essay called The Influence of Mystery Religions on Christianity, positing the pagan continuity hypothesis, that Christianity wasn't born in a vacuum, but

bears a striking resemblance to pagan polytheistic traditions and rituals that occurred across the ancient world. One of the leading scholars who compares the Last Supper with prior pagan rituals is Dennis MacDonald, a theology professor at Claremont. He writes, They, eating flesh and drinking blood, point to the Dionnesian cult imagery, specifically the eating of the flesh and the blood of the God and the immortality the initiates gain by such activity. He goes on to write that the cult of Dionysus famously involved two related rites, Sparagmos and Omaphagia. The first, dismembering, was the ripping apart of living beasts.

The second, eating raw flesh was the placing of the fresh and bleeding meat to the lips, which some ancient interpreters took to be a reenactment of the eating of the young Dionysus by the Titans. The participants celebrated Dionysus as the one who had survived death and death. Thus was granted immortality as the Lord of Souls. But even if you take the canonical description of the Last Supper at face value and say the book of John, things can get kind of trippy. Take John 653, truly, truly, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the son of man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. The one who choose my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life.

This sounds very similar to the El Eucinian mystery rituals Brian Murrurescu writes about in his book The Immortality Key. And this isn't even a Gnostic text like the Gospel of Thomas. This is canonical New Testament. In religions, let's take particularly the three big monotheistic religions, Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, which basically all worship the same deity and the same prophets are recognized. These religions are all very, very closely. to link. All of them have officials who priests, rabbis, mullahs, who interpose themselves between us and the divine experience. They tell us what the divine experience is, but we don't

have the opportunity to have that experience ourselves. And the thing about psychedelics is that they provide a direct experience, a direct experience, not mediated by some official, but an experience that you have yourself. And that seems to be what was going on in early Christianity. Yeah. The people were, where Christ was seen more as a teacher than as the son of God. What seems to have been going on is that early Christianity was very much a psychedelic religion. And it's really only when the Roman Catholic Church emerged and it started oppressing people. And the very first people it oppressed were those other Christian sects that had used psychedelics.

Any of the Council of Nicaea in 325, which sort of arbitrarily based on political reasons, kind of cuts down Christianity into an accepted canon, that in many ways it discounts some of the more interesting books like the Gospel of Thomas that have to do with a single individual's ability to ascend into a more divine state. That's right. You see, the problem is that the state of consciousness that we have today, that's dominant in our society today, is what I can. call the alert problem-solving state of consciousness. This is the state of consciousness that

our society values. So it's interesting when you look at the drugs that are legal in our society that everybody has access to and that are often glorified. Alcohol is one of the drugs that our society has embraced. Well, I can understand why, because alcohol does not lead people to ask profound questions. It's like a little holiday from the alert problem-solving state of consciousness, But that's all it is. But I just want to point out that what the psychedelics do is offer us much more than a break from that stage. They offer access to a completely different state of consciousness.

The other thing they do is they break very blocked and narrow ways of thinking. And that's what depression is. Depression is where you're locked into a state of mind that makes you extremely sad and unhappy and you can't escape from it. And the pharmacutical drugs like syroxat and Prozac and things like that absolutely fucking useless. in getting people out of depression. I speak from experience because I suffered from depression.

So eventually what I decided to do was just do a very gradual cut down of the dose and I used a razor blade to slice up the pills. I just cut it down day by day over six months until finally I was clear of that horrible medicine. At least I experienced it as a horrible medicine. Perhaps it helps some people. But honestly, the scientific studies that have been done

suggest that placebos are just as effective as the SSRI antidepressants. And it recently came out, there's no correlation between serotonin deficiency and depression. I know. And it's like, okay, you're saying this now after 50 years of mass? We've been sold a myth. We've been sold a lie. And if we look at the world through a very narrow, limited perspective, then all we're going

to see is narrow limited things. The role of psychedelics is providing another lens that allows us to see a wider reality. Can I offer you a crazy theory, and you can tell me if I'm nuts? Okay. So in 1973, Francis Crick, who discovered the... double helical structure of DNA, wrote a paper about directed pan-spermia. Won a Nobel Prize. Won a Nobel Prize, you know, renowned scientist.

He wrote a paper on directed pan-spermia. He did. He wrote a book actually called Life Itself. He wrote papers and a book. Interesting. I didn't even know that. The book is a tough read. It was published in 1981.

Okay. But it's fascinating. And if I can just jump the gun at it. Yeah, do it. You probably know what I'm going to ask. Yeah, yeah. that Crick, the world's leading expert on DNA, came to the conclusion that DNA could not have evolved on this planet

in the time available for it. You know, the classic model is that we have a sort of primeval soup. The early Earth, the Earth forms about 4.5 billion years ago, 4.5,000 million years ago. And for the first 600 million years, it's too hot to support any life. until about 3.9 billion years ago, it gets to the stage where it could support very basic life forms. And within 100 million years of that, which across a span of billions of years is a tiny amount of time, within 100 million years of that by 3.8 billion years ago, bacterial life was all over this planet.

And Cricksview was, as a leading scientist whose whole life was focused on the study of DNA, His life was that DNA could not have emerged accidentally from the primeval soup on this planet in just 100 million years. It needed much longer to it. He still bought into the primeval soup idea, but not on this planet. What he came down to was that there must have been some other planet somewhere else where a primeval soup had existed and there had been enough time for DNA to emerge from the accidental bumping together of molecules. That's, by the way, something I'm a bit skeptical of anyway. But nevertheless, that was Crick's point in life itself. And then he suggested that, you know, the universe is very old,

at least 13 and a half billion years old, there's time for life to have evolved elsewhere in the universe. And he suggested that what happened was that the first primitive bacteria continued to evolve on that distant planet, orbiting another sun on the other side of the universe, that life began to evolve. And eventually a highly developed civilization emerged, on that planet. I'm not saying they looked anything like us. And by the way, I need to

emphasize this is Crick. This is not me who's saying this. This is the Nobel Prize winner who's saying this. That life evolved on that planet, highly intelligent, sophisticated, advanced life form. And then they discovered that they faced certain doom, that there was going to be, he suggested, a supernova going off in their vicinity, which would strip their planet of all life. And to continue the Crick story, he then said, well, the first thing they would have done was to figure, could we get ourselves off the planet? Could we do? colonize another planet. But the distances in interstellar space were too great for that to be feasible. So they did the next best thing. They genetically engineered bacteria. They incorporated the DNA code

within those bacteria. And then they put the bacteria into cryogenic chambers in spaceships and fired them off in all directions. Put some algae in CO2 for food and then... Yeah, you know. And we know that bacteria, extremophiles, can survive in an extreme. dire circumstances and fired them off into the early universe. And the cut-along story short, 3.9 billion years ago, one of those spaceships collided with the early Earth, spilled out its contents of bacteria, and there you have it. Life begins to evolve on this planet, and it contains the DNA code that came from another planet.

And fungal DNA is more similar to human DNA than plant DNA, which is pretty amazing. Fungi are amazing things, which are kind of halfway between the animal and the plant world. They're most curious and incredible things. So that was Crick's suggestion, and I don't think it's a wild suggestion. Particularly bearing in mind who it comes from. God, he stuck his neck out in proposing something like that. Yeah, yeah. You know, because there's a huge lobby behind the natural selection and the Darwinian model.

He wasn't stepping away from the Darwinian model, but he was trying to solve an anomaly. He couldn't understand how DNA could have formed accidentally in just 100 million. Well, it almost feels like human evolution. There are gaps in human evolution, and evolutionary biologists like to say, they have these placeholder words like punctuated equilibrium. Yes, that's right. But if you really look at, you know, I think like the Stone Dap Theory, for example, the doubling in cranial size between two million years ago and 300,000 years ago, and then the

emergence of culture, which you and Brian Murar Rescue talk about, a possible explanation for the emergence of culture, which I want to get your take on, is... A lot of people say specialization and culture inevitably comes from having more time because you have agriculture. That's right. You have talked about sort of a transfer of technology, maybe from an antecedent civilization. What if you're planting wheat, barley, and rye, those were like the original sort of things in the agricultural revolution. Ergot grows on those things. It does, naturally, yeah.

And so what if there is, you know, this, it's almost like the ergot is like a zip-fi. Kind of ergotts, Cleviseps Paspali. Some ergotts are deadly toxic. But it happens that the one that grows on barley is not toxic, and it is soluble in water. So it can be turned into a brook. Interesting. So what if the consumption of that is what spurred all these ideas that have sort of created a lot of modern civilization? Well, that's exactly the case that I made in my 2005 book, Supernatural.

And it's exactly the case that Brian's taken much further in his, what, 2002 one book, The Immortality Key, that it was, and somebody else we have to recognize. Carl Rocker. No, it's the late, great Terrence McKenna. Oh, yeah, of course. Terence McKenna was a key thinker in this field. I would recommend to anybody who's listening,

his book, Food of the Gods, was one of the first books to suggest that this quantum leap forward in human behavior and in human consciousness was entirely the result of experimenting with psychedelics. Yeah, and McKenna thinks that he talks about a mushroom trip where the mushrooms say to him, within my memory, exist the blueprints for hyperlight drives. I believe that God left certain drugs growing naturally upon our planet

to help speed up and facilitate our evolution. If you think about it, if you have an alien civilization, would you present yourself as a hominid creature, like a foreign invader, a hominid creature, or where you subtly merge with the higher hominid creature, affect their thinking, and hitchhike your way to the next planet? I think you go for subtle merging. And this is where, again, shamanism has much to teach Western science, because shamans need to be taken seriously when they say that the plants and the fungi are teachers.

And that's a very mysterious thing. Anybody who's had deep psychedelic journey will know that they get teachings in that journey. And those teachings generally refer to their own lives and their own behavior and how they behave. It's very odd that a mushroom or a mixture of two plants from the Amazon should cause us to evaluate our behavior and should teach us that maybe we've been doing stuff wrong that we need to adjust and put right in the future. I myself have had a creative gift. from psychedelics. And that was back in 2006 drinking ayahuasca in Brazil

over a series of five sessions. I was given, literally given, the entire plot of a novel. I'd never written a novel before. That's crazy. But I was given the entire plot of a novel, which I eventually... And at the end of those sessions,

I got a very clear message from the entity that I call Mother Ayahuasca. And frankly, I don't care if scientists roll their eyes. if you're going to roll your eyes at the notion of mother ayahuasca, go drink some ayahuasca, and then see if you're going to roll your eyes. I was given the gift of a story, and I was given a very strong instruction, write it.

Did you? And I did, and I wrote it. It's called Entangled. And it features a young woman 24,000 years ago and a young woman today who are entangled across time in a battle of good against evil. There's a demonic force that is traveling through time,

and that is twisting humanity out of our true mission. And their job is to stop that force, both in the Stone Age and today. Do you consider yourself Gnostic? Or what would your, because you're not garden variety religious? I'm not, no. I don't. And in many ways, you're anti-. Yeah, I'm anti.

I'm anti. I'm not a Christian. I don't belong to any religion. If I were to put myself in a category, I would say Gnostic is the right category. I wrote a book with Robert Beval back in the 90s called Talisman. And of course, the Gnostics were amongst the first people to be burnt at the stake when the Roman Catholic Church, as I put it, pulled on the jackbook boot of the Roman state and began to persecute its competitors.

And you talk about almost in that book a through line of Gnosticism in the form of these sort of small, small, Kabbalistic units. I believe it's continued. I believe it's continued. The message has not just evaporated, but it's gone underground, and it's been transmitted through various lines. And in some cases, those lines may not even know what they're transmitting anymore. That's interesting.

Yeah. So it's like in the past you'd have the Templars, the Rosicrucians, or the Freemasons, and now there's like a hermetic transfer without a real exoteric organization even existing. Yeah, it can be passed down in that. way. I would say Freemasonry is an interesting example. I'm not a Freemason myself. I'm not, I don't join clubs and I'm not a member of that club and I never will be a member of that club. Our friend Randall Carlson. Randall is a Freemason. And I have spoken in Masonic Lodges. I've been asked to give lectures and I've happily done so. I'll give a lecture to anybody

who's interested in hearing what I've got to say. I've spoken several times in Masonic lodges. Through a mutual friend, I know an archaeologist who actually teaches at the University of Exeter in the UK, who's been involved in LIDAR work in Colombia. They have identified what they're certain is an enormous pyramid in the middle of the Amazon rainforests. And the next step is to put a team out there and actually see it on the ground. Well, that's cool. Are you going to go and check it out? You bet I'm going to go if I get a chance.

I would go with you. Yeah. Just let me know. Yeah, absolutely. And you wrote a book called The Sign and the Seal. I did. About the Ark of the Covenant. Indeed so.

And that was my first venture into, what shall we call, historical mystery. And in Ethiopia, I came across this really quite by chance. I found myself in the city of Axum in Tigray in northern Ethiopia. And there were some strange processions going on and wonderful music and dancing and rituals being performed. and I asked, what's this all about? And they said, well, we have the Ark of the Covenant here. And these ceremonials are in honor of the Ark of the Covenant. And you've got the Ark of the Covenant here?

I'd just seen Raiders of the Lost Ark. You've got the Ark of the Covenant here. Where? And they said, well, it's in that enclosure. And there's a huge religious enclosure in the heart of Axon, which contains a 16th century church, Church of St. Mary of Zion, and beside it a little chapel. And it's in that chapel that the Ethiopians claim the ark is kept.

And this is not a minor issue for Ethiopians. This is a very major issue for them. It's fundamental to Ethiopian culture. It's something that a lot of people don't understand. And it's kind of odd because the Ark of the Covenant is a pre-Christian relic. And Ethiopia is largely a Christian country. Why is Ethiopian Christianity, which is very Old Testament in its form, very unnew testament in its form?

New Testament in its form. Why is it, but still calling itself Christianity, why is it venerating a pre-Christian, non-Christian relic that belongs to Old Testament times? So I began to do my own investigation. And my own investigation included a lot of time spent with the indigenous Ethiopian Jews. This is something, again, that's not widely known. But there has been going back into remote prehistory, a Judaic community. in Ethiopia, and in Ethiopia, they're known as the Falashas. They refer to themselves as the Beta Israel, the House of Israel. And they say that their ancestors brought the Ark of the Covenant to Ethiopia,

and it happened in this way. But first of all, their ancestors lived on an island in the Nile, and they lived there for some hundreds of years. Well, that's the first thing I checked. Was there ever a Jewish community on an island in the Nile? Yes, there was on the island of Elephantine, opposite the modern city of Aswan in Upper Egypt, around 650 BC. The general story is that the Ark was stolen by the Babylonians about 60 years later in 587 BC. But the Babylonians have no records of the Ark of the Covenant.

They were ferocious bureaucrats, and they kept detailed records of everything they stole from the Temple of Jerusalem. It didn't include the Ark. The ark logically was gone before the Babylonians ever got there. And suddenly the Falashah story of their ancestors living on an island in the Nile starts to make sense. And then I go further into it and I discover that around 400 BC, there was conflict between that Jewish community and the Egyptians. The conflict was because the island of Elephantine was dedicated to the god Knoom.

And the Egyptian god Knoom is a ram-headed deity. And the Jewish community on that island were sacrificing rams. And again, this is historically established. They were thrown out. They were driven out. There's no evidence that they were massacred. They were just driven out of that island. And that's where it connects with the Fulasha stories,

that their ancestors were driven out of that island. And they then followed the Nile River system. They did not go north through a hostile Egypt. They went south. And the Nile, of course, divides into two branches. The Blue Nile and the White Nile. The White Nile rises in Uganda. The Blue Nile rises in Lake Tense.

Lake Tana in Ethiopia. And Lake Tana in Ethiopia is the center, the absolute center, of the area in which the Ethiopian Jews live. Wow. And suddenly it all began to make sense. Interesting. You know, and could be stood up as a reasonable... I never saw the object that is called the Ark itself,

and maybe that's just as well, because the Guardians of the Ark get sick and die very, very rapidly. Yeah, you said that. You said people come out with burns on their faces? They typically get cataract. They get blinded by cataracts, which is something that happens with radiation damage. But your narrative of the Ark of the Covenant would preclude the Templars guarding it, because they were later... Well, no.

It wouldn't actually. Okay. In this sense, that I came across a great Scottish traveler called James Bruce of Kinnaird. And James Bruce wrote a book in the 1780s or 90s called Travels to Discover the Source of the Nile. and in which he claimed to have discovered the source of the Blue Nile in or near Lake Tana. What's puzzling about that is he already knew of a Portuguese priest who'd put that together 60 years before. And James Bruce had a powerful interest in the Ark of the Covenant and was present in Axum during the ceremony of Timkut when replicas of the Ark of the Covenant are brought out.

And I began to get very interested in his story. And I became convinced, although I couldn't prove it, that he had been a Freemason and that it was his free Masonic interest that had taken him to Ethiopia. Let's not forget that James Bruce brought something back from Ethiopia. He brought back the Book of Enoch. Wow. We would not have the Book of Enoch. If it hadn't been for that Scottish traveller, getting a copy of it written in the Ethiopian sacred language of Gaines

and having it then translated into the language. That's an ancient alien abduction story, if I've ever heard. The Book of Enoch was a lost book. but it had been preserved in Ethiopia. And James Ruse found it and brought it back to Europe. But I thought what could have motivated him and could he have been a Freemason? And I began to look into this and I couldn't find evidence for it.

I went to his grave, which is in a little churchyard in Scotland near Forkode. And I found that the grave was in a state of disrepair. But the obelisk that had stood over the grave was lying on its side in the carport. and it was clear that something was going on. So I went to the keeper of the church and I asked him about this and he said, oh yes, we're restoring the grave of James Bruce right now

and the obelisk will be re-erected there. And I said, who's funding this? And he said, well, it's the Earl of Elgin. Oh, how interesting. Those were the days when you could pick up the phone and call an Earl. And I did that in probably 1990 when we're researching the sign and the seal.

I called the Broomhill estate where the Earl of Elgin lives, and he answered the phone. And I said, look, this may seem very odd to you, but I'm a journalist, and I'm investigating the story of James Bruce of Kinnaird, and I understand you have an interest in him. Can I come and talk to you about him? And he said, gruffly, I'll give you half an hour.

He gave me five hours, and my wife, Santa, and I went to his place, his estate, and we sat down and talked to him, and at the end of it, rather nervously, I said, look, I've been working on this theory that James Bruce was a Freemason, but I can't stand it up. I can't prove it. He said, my dear boy, of course he was a Freemason. And he gave me the lodge, the Kilwinning Lodge number two in Edinburgh that James Bruce was a member of.

And more than that, he was a speculative Freemason. He was interested in the esoteric side of Freemasonry. And so his journey to Ethiopia, I think, was very strongly connected to the Ark of the Covenant. Now we come to the Templars. Yeah. And the Templar connection with Freemasonry. And the fact that the speculation that I put in the sign and the seal that Templars had gone to Ethiopia in search of the Ark of the Covenant.

There was a time when an Ethiopian prince, whose name was Lalibela, was an exile in Jerusalem. And that was during the Crusades, when the Templars held the whole Temple Mount. The Alaksa Mosque was their palace. the temple mount was there at exactly the time that an Ethiopian prince exiled was present in Jerusalem. I speculated that he tipped the temples off that the Ark of the Covenant was in Ethiopia. And weirdly, Lalabella then went back to Ethiopia with a strange force of people who installed him on the throne of Ethiopia, who sound like foreigners, not Ethiopians. And then he created these incredible churches, which are the rock-hewn churches of Lalabella,

one of which has a Templar cross painted on its ceiling and an image of the Alaksa Mosque with a cross on top of it, which only happened when the Templars were using it as their palace. So I began to see a possible connection here. The Templars did have a long-term interest in this object, that they had learned some intelligence about it during their stay in Jerusalem,

and that they'd followed that intelligence to Ethiopia and put Lalabala back on the throne and been involved in the construction of his amazing churches. speculation, of course. That's fascinating. Speculation, but you've made a lot of pretty compelling connection. Ambition comes in all shapes and sizes. At First Citizens Bank, we roll with your goals because we're built for what you're building. Fit for your ambition for Citizens Bank.

There's so many examples of anomalous, megalithic architecture. It's almost so much that it's not even anomalous anymore that you show in your dokey series. And you've speculated that these things aren't built using kind of modern engineering techniques. They're built using kind of ancient engineering techniques. Yes, techniques and technologies that we don't know about, that we haven't used. Now, it's very important to emphasize that this is speculation. Absolutely. Not fact.

Yes. I think I suggest, I speculate that we have allowed some innate human abilities to fall into disuse, to lapse. And not only that, but we've actually come to despise those who think that such abilities exist. So it's almost the same as saying you're in the lunatic fringe if you say that you believe that telepathy and telekinesis. Telepathy.

Well, you're harder to control if you have those abilities as well. Well, yeah. And they ignore work. For example, somebody you should talk to, perhaps you have, is Dr. Rupert Sheldrake. Oh, yeah, a huge fan. He's incredibly important out-of-the-box thinker and mainstream scientist. He's a highly qualified scientist. And all of his protocols for the morphic field experiments are very rigorous.

They're very rigorous. He's done very detailed work on, for example, telephone telepathy. How is it that so many of us hear the phone ring and we know already, or we're really thinking on the individual who calls us, a universal human experience? Exactly. And that's every... People discount their own phenomenology for dog, Which is like if you were to pull nine people out of ten on the street and say, have you experienced it?

Everybody's like, yeah, I've had that experience. But that's not real. Exactly. Why? Because the high priests of science have told us that we mustn't believe that. Exactly. Whereas in fact, Rupert's work shows that these abilities do exist, that human beings do have the ability for telepathy. I don't know if he's done work on telekinesis, where objects are moved directly with the power of the mind, rather than using a machine or a lever to do.

to move them, but it's kind of telekinesis that I'm suggesting. To say that the ancient Egyptians move 200 ton blocks of stone on wet sand, okay, at ground level, that's fine. But to move 200 ton blocks of stone, 350 feet in the air, and to build them into a chamber in the heart of the Great Pyramid, that is another matter. So I think it's perfectly natural and reasonable speculate that they may have been using some ability or some technology that we have

not embraced and that we do not understand. And that if we had not become so dependent on mechanical advantage and leverage, we might have been doing things a very different way. There are a number of ancient Egyptian traditions that speak of the priests levitating these large blocks. And this is accompanied by sound chanting. music is played and it plays a part in the lifting up of the blocks. A number of traditions about this, which I think perhaps deserve to be taken more seriously

than they have been, not necessarily fantastical tales. Having climbed the Great Pyramid five times, having seen the majesty of its construction and the intricacy of its construction, I'm persuaded that we're dealing with something we don't fully understand. And we're better to admit that rather than come up with these pure speculations that are the work of Egyptologists, just as I'm speculating, that it was telepathy or telekinesis. But the frame should be speculation versus speculation, not... Yeah, it should be speculation versus speculation rather than saying this is established fact,

because it isn't established fact. And, you know, then we have to come to grips with other aspects of the Great Pyramid, which I often talk about, which are also neglected by Egyptology, which is its extremely precise alignment to true north. That on a 6 million-ton monument with a 13-acre footprint is no easy time. And it involves astronomy, it involves precise astronomy. The figure is... Isn't it mapped to Orion's belt in some way?

Well, that's another very important issue. And this is the work of my great friend and colleague Robert Boval who came up with the Orion correlation theory in 1994 in his book, The Orion Mystery. He was the first person to notice that the three great pyramids on the Giza Plateau have a stunningly similar pattern to the three stars of the belt of Orion. And Orion is not just any constellation,

in the ancient Egyptian system. Orion is the god Osiris in the sky. That's the celestial figure of Orion, of the constellation that we call Orion was the celestial figure of the god of Cyrus in the sky to the ancient Egyptian. So not only do they model the belt stars of that constellation, but that constellation is also an important one

to the ancient Egyptians. So there's been so many bogus attempts to discredit Robert's important work on the Orion congregation. And the soul, human soul, is supposed to come through Iran's, but I was reading Ptolemy. Absolutely, yes, yes. And that's a curious worldwide tradition, because you find that in America too. In the mound builder cultures in America, there was the belief that the soul enters the

afterlife journey through the constellation of Orion. The ancient Egyptians believed in a whole afterlife realm through which we travel, and the constellation of Orion plays a key role in that. They called this realm the Duat. And as we die in this world, we enter that world. and we make a journey and we will be, and it's a hazardous journey, and we need to be prepared for it in advance. That's one of the reasons I think psychedelics were used in ancient Egypt

as part of preparation for this after-death journey. Then you realize that it's not just the Giza pyramids, that the pyramids of Dachur, the red pyramid and the bent pyramid are also part of the diagram moving up into the constellation of Taurus. It looks like a whole stellar landscape was mapped on the ground, around at Giza. It's a much bigger picture and again it's unfortunate that Egyptology hasn't been willing to engage with this. He just wants to write it off. I think it has a lot to do with Egyptologists being entirely ignorant of

astronomy. Right. Yeah, it's crazy. Also analogous to all of the work that you do and you document a lot of this as well around human history being so much older is this precocious knowledge of the stars that these ancient civilization seems to have. Like, you look at Sumerian artifacts that show a heliocentric universe thousands of years before Galilee. They were incredible astronomers. The universe was, and then you have to ask yourself, that knowledge system that manifests in the Sumerians did not begin with the Sumerians. That's something that goes back much further. It's a, it's a universal, in my view, it's

a universal human legacy from a lost civilization of prehistoric antiquity passed around, past all around the world. And maybe they came from the stars or something, because why would we... I don't need to go there. And I've never found... That's like an Eric von Danica. Yeah, I don't need to go where Eric goes.

I think Eric... I know Eric. And I think he did a good job of alerting people to mystery in the past. But I personally think that the answer he came up with, that it was ancient aliens in high-tech spacecraft who came here, I think that's an unnecessary argument in order to explain the anomalies that we confront.

And I think a much more elegant and much simpler explanation is a lost human civilization of the Ice Age, which was destroyed in the global cataclysm of the Younger Dryas, which had survivors, and those survivors found ways to pass their knowledge down to the future. And that's the period that we call the Younger Dryas is the period that the ancient Egyptians call Zeptepe the first time. They call it the first time. And that's where they say all their knowledge came from. So I don't seek to divorce the ancient Egyptians from the Great Pyramid of Giza. The ancient Egyptians were definitely involved in the construction of the Great Pyramid of

Giza. But I think the Great Pyramid of Giza sits on top of something much older. And part of it is the subterranean chamber, 100 feet vertically beneath the base of the Great Pyramid. I think that's the original sacred site on the Giza Plateau. And the Sphinx, according to people like you and Robert Schock has water damage on the nose. The erosions of the lines.

The monuments of the Giza Plateau are multiple and very complex. And in the case of the pyramids, I do accept that the ancient Egyptians were directly involved in completing the monuments as we see them now, but they were building on the more ancient structures. But there are structures on the Giza Plateau, and the Great Sphinx is one of them, which are clearly much older. Robert Schock's work, let's put that in its proper context. I do want to pay tribute to Robert Schock because it's one of the few academics who's been willing to stick his neck out and suggest that the Great Sphinx,

that enigmatic monument from the ancient world, is more than 12,000 years old, not four and a half thousand years old, as Egyptologists tell us. The evidence for that was initially proposed by John Anthony West, who was the first to draw wide-scale public attention to the possibility that the Sphinx bore evidence of water weathering and Robert Schock then came

John West brought Robert Schock to the Giza Plateau as a geologist and Robert Schock took a very detailed and careful look at it and concluded that what we're looking at on the Sphinx and is particularly evidence on the trench surrounding the Sphinx is precipitation-induced weathering, weathering that was caused by heavy, heavy rainfall, not a flood that washed over the Giza Plateau,

but extremely heavy rainfall. And the world's climate has changed dramatically several times, and that dramatic climate change that was the younger dryas between 12,800 and 11,600 years ago, which brought freezing temperatures further north, resulted in heavy rainfall in the Sahara Desert and over Egypt. And that's the period when the geology says that the Great Sphinx was made. And like the pyramids,

the ancient Egyptians cannot be divorced from the great sphinx. The very fact that the sphinx has the head of a pharaoh tells us that the ancient Egyptians were involved in it. But what we think, and when I say we, the late great John Anthony West, Robert Schott, myself and a number of others, think, is that the great sphinx, Mano Sefzada, is another man who's doing really important work on this, and he's fluent in ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs as well.

The argument is that the great sphinx was originally a lion, Totally a lion, not just a lion body with a human head, but a lion body with a lion head. So the pharaoh aspect is modern? Yes. Originally it was, the prehistoric sphinx was a lion. And then the lion head became heavily eroded and damaged as thousands of years passed. And in the time of the pharaohs, it was transformed, it was cut down and remade into the human head that we see on it today, wearing the classic nemes headdress of an ancient Egyptian pharaoh.

But the fact that that nemes head dress and the head of some pharaoh, not necessarily kaffrey, is found on the Great Sphinx, speaks to later remodeling by the ancient Egyptians. It doesn't deal at all with the issue of the precipitation-induced weathering that says that the whole site is actually much older. So just as the ancient Egyptians were involved in completing the great pyramids, which I do not dispute, They were also involved in the Great Sphinx,

but they found it already present on the Giza Plateau. Do you believe not just in Atlantis, but in civilizational cycles? So in many esoteric traditions, you know, there would be different sort of root races or civilizational cycles, like the Hyperboreans, the Lemurians, the Atlanteans. I've not needed to go that far.

I think I've had enough of a challenge to deal with making the case for one lost civilization without seeking to make the case for multiple lost civilizations. But I'm not writing that off as a possibility. It might require you looking at the Ark of the Covenant to know. Maybe. I think that that's, to me, that's a bridge too far, which I've focused all my efforts on trying to make this case

and to make it in a way that makes sense to people and that is supported by evidence. It's clear that civilization is cyclical, that things come and go. Great civilizations rise and fall. It was only in the 1920s or the 1930s that we became aware of the existence of such a thing as the Indus Valley civilization, which is along the banks of the Indus River in Pakistan, Mojadero and Harappa, were unknown sites in the 1920s.

It was only an accidental discovery. Railway workers building a railway line that actually led to that. And then the dating of it, 5,000 plus years old, this extraordinarily sophisticated civilization that existed along the Induselago. River was totally unknown. It was a lost civilization. We still haven't learned to read its language, although they had a written language. So civilizations can get lost. Civilizations can rise and can fall. It happened again and again. And I'm really only saying that that maybe happened much earlier from a time that we've forgotten. And in Supernatural, you talk about shifting a little to aliens because we talk about that a lot on the show. Yeah. You talk about modern abductions and UFOs.

sightings, kind of pattern matching. Now we're getting onto a subject I'm happy to talk about. Let's do it. Because I think that the physical aliens coming here in spaceships or flying sources from other planets is fundamentally it's a materialist proposition. It's about tech and about material things. It's like the Elon Musk worldview. It's not the Yeah, it's a consciousness world view. It's not a consciousness worldview. What was striking to me was a conversation I had with the late Pablo Amaringo, an Amazonian shaman, who painted his visions after he'd been on the ayahuasca journey.

He would sit down and create thousands of beautiful, beautiful paintings. And in many of those paintings, there are flying saucers. So I said to Pablo, is this, I basically said, is this ancient aliens you're talking about? Are those spaceships that have come from other planets? And he said, no, those are vehicles for entering and leaving the spirit world. And when a shaman talks about the spirit world, that shaman is talking about what quantum physicists would call a parallel dimension or a parallel realm. And I'm not denying that there are.

physical elements to the UFO experience. There certainly are. They do show up in radar traces here and there. There are physical elements to it, but exactly what they are is not yet clear. Are they, as Pablo said, vehicles for entering and leaving, let's put it in modern language, a parallel realm, a parallel universe, rather than vehicles to take us across interstellar space in this universe, and then you come down to the consciousness issue. You come down to the fact, and I document this at length in supernatural, the inspiration for the idea came from Jacques Valet.

Yeah. I want to give him credit. You just did an interview with him. Did you? You know, there's something deeper that creates the illusion of space and time in humans. Yeah. I've never met Jack Valet. I have huge admiration for him.

Like him. Because his book, Passport to Magonia, was a breakthrough book. And anybody who's interested in the alienation. UFO mystery needs to go read passport to Magonia. And I quoted from it extensively in Supernatural, published in 2005. He was the first to recognize that there are incredible phenomenological parallels between the entities that were called fairies and elves in the Middle Ages and the entities that we call aliens today.

Astonishing parallels. Those fairies and elves would do so. surgery on people. They would abduct people. They would have sex with people. They would produce hybrid babies. And then go into spirits and the whole issue of shamans and what spirits are about and realize that this is going back now thousands of years and that these experiences are documented in cave art all around the world. And you'll find again that the phenomenology is the same. Shamanans are always having sex with spirits and often have babies in another realm. Might explain the immaculate conception.

Well, yeah. And, you know, this is, I often tell it as a joke, but it's true. I know of a shaman in the Amazon whose wife left him because of his wife in the spirit world. Wow. He had not only a wife over there, had kids over there too.

Oh, my God. We have the same phenomenology in encounters with spirits by shamans documented in cave art going back tens of thousands of years. We have that phenomenology in encounters with fairies and elves. in the Middle Ages and we have the identical phenomenology in encounters with aliens today. And I think it's obvious. We're looking at the same experience through time construed through different cultural lenses.

Do you think Gnostic or Kabbalistic traditions have attempted to make deliberate contact? I think any tradition that makes use of psychedelics, whether they want to or not, are going to make deliberate content. I mean, I had one of my early ayahuasca journeys in the Amazon, I had a typical alien encounter, and I was sitting on a bench outside the Shaman's hut, feeling pretty ill because that's what ayahuasca does with you. And I was having these wild visions. And then I saw, not one, but several flying saucers up above me,

and I saw this characteristic alien face, you know, this sort of heart-shaped, large, dark eyes, materialize up there. And I got the very strong message that they were going to take me away, we're going to take you. And that's where I was a coward. Because I was seeing these things with my eyes closed

and you can often stop visions by opening your eyes. And I opened my eyes and I shouted, no! I would think someone like you would, want to go. Well, I've regretted it ever since because what I should have done was keep my eyes shut and say, yes, take me. But I was scared shitless. I was literally scared stiff. And it shook me to my core, actually, this thing. I've mentioned this a number of times recently, but there's a really important project going on at Imperial College in London. And this is the first time that psychedelics have been trialed with human volunteers not to see what the therapeutic benefit is, but to understand

the phenomenology. And DMT is particularly effective in bringing about entity encounters, Terence McKenna's machine elves, for example. What's happening at Imperial College is that they found a way to keep people in the DMT state for an hour. Normally it's 10 to 15 minutes. Intravenous? Yes, an intravenous drip and they keep them in a steady DMT state for an hour and while doing that they put them in MRI scanners and they interview them, they talk to them to the extent that they're able to talk and quite often with a full-blown DMT journey you're not able to talk until afterwards. But because they're in the journey for an hour, they're able to process the experience much more effectively than if you're in the journey for 10 minutes. And this is really serious work that's being done

at Imperial College. It's being done with large numbers of volunteers. This is Christopher Timmerman. Chris Timmerman is the head of the project. Yeah. Yeah. He's the guy who runs that project and many other scientists working with him on that project. And they will sit with the volunteers through the whole hour and talk to them. And particularly what they want to know is about entities. What entities are you encountering? Now some might say what's the use of this, but I say it's incredibly useful because what they're doing is they're exploring the DMT realm. And these are like early explorers from our time, you know, who went out into the wilderness

and came back with stories about what they've seen. These volunteers are going out into the DMT wilderness and coming back with stories of what they've seen. And the stories are remarkably consistent that they're encountering the same entities in the same setting. And normally when large number of people agree on the same experience, we're inclined to define experience as real. It's only the prejudices of our civilization that lead us to dismiss it as unreal or as mere hallucinations. There's something about...

There's nothing mere about these experiences. There's something about DMT that's fundamental to the human story in a way that we don't understand. Like it's, you talk about it being the tree of life in Egypt or the acacia tree which is D.T rich being the tree of life in Egypt and then in Freemasonry the acacia leaf is a is a big, kind of plays prominently. It plays a role in Freemasonry. There's no doubt about it. The wood out of which the Ark of the Covenant was made was Acacia Wood.

Right. And then there's something, you know, I think both of our worldviews might be more akin to sort of pan-psychism or something than, you know, materialist reductionism, the separation of mind and matter. And DMT exists in all-organic material. So it's something... No matter how prejudice you may be against DMT, you cannot get rid of it. Yeah, it's everywhere. It's a natural brain hormone in us

a blade of grass. We make it. Yeah. Human body makes the empty. Yes. And it makes it at very interesting times as well. It makes it at around the time in the womb when your identity sort of forms and maybe anemnesis occurs and you forget your sort of past self. Yeah. It occurs during REM sleep and then when you die. It occurs at near death. Yeah. And normally it's in sub-psychedelic quantities, but maybe many of the natural visionaries that we've had who've not who've not taken a psychedelic, they just have visions. People like Joan of Arc, for example. Well, we now know the brain, we thought that the brain couldn't produce it. It was produced in the lungs. Now we know that the brain can endogenously secrete DMT and DMT receptors are all over

the brain. Jimo Borgagen at Michigan. Yeah. It's pretty amazing. It's pretty amazing. And, you know, the human body and the brain is, it doesn't waste resources. There's a reason that that is there. There's a reason that those receptors are there. Clearly, DMT is very important for us. And alongside other psychedelics. I mean, in many ways, psilocybin is rightly referred to as orally active DMT. Cylosybin molecule and the DMT molecule are very closely related.

It's more broadly the triptamine family that induce these extraordinary experiences in us, or allow us to have experiences that in an alert problem-solving state of consciousness, we will never, never, never, never have. I don't think consciousness requires physical bodies. I think consciousness is fundamental to the universe. I think it's a fundamental force in the universe like gravity. Consciousness is there.

But consciousness outside a physical body is obviously going to be limited in the range of things that it can experience. Once you immerse consciousness in a physical body, then that physical body and the person who's inside that physical body is going to face the challenges of physical life. We're going to have to make choices all the way through our life. Some of those choices may be very hurtful to others.

Some of them may be helpful, nurturing, positive choices. We are living in a theatre of experience. We have the chance to learn and to grow and to develop in physical bodies, but we cannot be reduced to our physical bodies. Consciousness cannot be reduced to the brain. Rather it manifests through the brain. in my view. Yeah, or the physical body is a filter or a reduction on a reducing bar. Exactly, on a default state of greater knowledge and understanding. And that's why mystery rituals,

you're temporarily killing that collapsing function. Yes. So that you kind of glitch into this greater knowledge. Into this wider reality, which we are all part of. But in order to survive in this physical realm, we tend to get very focused on this physical realm. And that's not a bad thing. I often say, and I'll say it again now, that if I get into an airplane, I would like the pilot to be in an alert problem-solving state of consciousness. I do not want my pilot visiting parallel realms while he's flying me from A to B. Once he gets off the plane, he can do all with DMT he wants. But while he's flying me, the alert problem-solving state of consciousness is very useful for certain functions. And we should not dismiss it.

It's part of us. but it's not all we are. Are you Darwinian or do you think that there's more to the story? I think there's much more to the story. I think so too. I think there's vastly more to the story. However, I would never be a person who denies that evolution takes place. There is such a thing as evolution.

It would be absurd to suggest that there is not. We live on a hazardous planet. There are all sorts of issues that can bring particular life forms to an end or nearly to an end. The clear point is the extent extinction of the dinosaurs 66 million years ago. Nobody disputes now that that was done by a comet or an asteroid. The Chicksgloob crater in the Yucatan, deep now beneath the Earth and the sea, is the evidence for that. And there's a line in the Earth, a rare of a line of Earth, which contains all the classic indicators of a cosmic impact, exactly the same as the Younger Dryas Band.

Yeah, why is one so controversial and the other so accepted convention? Well, initially the extinction of the dinosaurs was controversial. Lewis and Walter Arvarez were ridiculed by their peers, typical of science. Rather than saying, oh, here's an interesting idea, let's see what's good in it. They said, here's an idea which goes against everything we think, so let's destroy it. And they spent 10 years destroying the idea of Lewis and Walter Arvarez until they found the crater. The crater was the smoking gun. So I think that it would be observed to say that there's no such thing as evolution, because

we've got to be able, life, the whole thing of life, the whole project of life, has got to render itself very hard to wipe out. And evolution is one of the ways that it renders itself very hard to wipe out. But is evolution the whole story? No. Is survival of the fittest? The whole story? Definitely not. Evolution wants to see human consciousness as a byproduct of survival of the fittest, that we needed these big brains to thrive in the jungle of competition. And as an accidental byproduct of that, we got consciousness. I don't think it's an accidental byproduct of that. I think it's the focus of, I think it's what evolution is all about.

So while I don't wish to dismiss evolution, I do want to say that we're only getting a tiny fraction of the story. There may be as a teleology that's a little more preordained than we think, too, evolution. That's like a guy like Henry Bergson, you know, in creative evolution. would write that there's more of a clear end point than we realize. And I suspect that's true. I think so, yeah.

I think that under the layer that's been identified by science, the layer of Darwinian evolution, hidden beneath that is a whole other layer that's going on, which is directed. And we are seeing a project working out. And evolution is the way, is one of the means, one of the tools that is used by that project. And you brought up Rupert-Cheldrick, that's definitely a, gap in evolution where if a thousand people do a crossword puzzle and you do that tomorrow and then you do a control group crossword puzzle that no one's done you're more likely to

complete the one that a thousand people have done there's some sort of collective intelligence we're part of some sort of collective intelligence that that we are connected perhaps telepathically perhaps in some other way with all of the rest of the human race and it's why it's so absurd now that we live on this planet that we have this majestic planet at our disposal we have our consciousness We have these huge brains. And what are we doing? We're still spreading hatred and fear and suspicion, and we're still murdering each other on mass scale.

You know, dictators with nukes, threatening the world. Again, I mean, this is such a failure of the potential of the human race. We need to graduate beyond that simplistic tribal level. There was a role for tribal society once. But in a globally integrated world, it isn't helpful anymore to have these tribal mindsets where, you know, we're better than you. And because we're different from you, we're going to kill you. This is just nonsense.

Oh, we're going to take your stuff, by the way, as well? This is a sign of a species that has a lot of consciousness evolution still to go through. Yeah. Well, maybe you and Randall Carlson need to start a school or something. Yeah, Randall is a teacher. He does teach. My thing is books and making the occasional TV series. Well, it's reaching a lot of people, and it's amazing to see the docu-series.

It's always an honor to talk to you. I really admire you. And you have to promise to let me to tag along at one of your excursions. Absolutely. I'll do whatever you need. Absolutely. We'll make it happen, Jesse. We'll definitely make it happen.

Appreciate it, Grant. Good to talk to you. Likewise. Thank you. Pay off your home, travel for life. Drive a Ferrari. In celebration of the world premiere of the Monopoly Big Board Buckslot machine by Aristocrat Gaming, Yamava Resort and Casino at San Manuel is giving

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