American Alchemy with Jesse Michels - Graham Hancock: UFOs, the Pyramids, and Ancient Cataclysms (Part 2)

Episode Date: October 26, 2024

Graham Hancock returns for his second appearance on American Alchemy. Enjoy! Graham's response to Flint Dibble: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PEe72Nj-AW0 Become a Member of American Alchemy: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCuG2KzrIMe3qoNcuDVpwnXw/join SPOTIFY ➤ https://tinyurl.com/jessemichelsspotify DISCORD ➤ https://discord.gg/jessemichels INSTAGRAM (Personal) ➤ https://www.instagram.com/jessemichels INSTAGRAM (Show) ➤ https://www.instagram.com/jessemichelsmedia 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 *** 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. #documentary #history #physics #oppenheimer 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. I will remember this phrase forever. He said, because it is a thing of fire. Oh. It's one of the very few traditions of a global flood that destroys a former civilization.

As I say, there's up to 200 of them. It's one of the only ones which actually gives a date. So are you getting to some sort of more true proto-architecture to religion that involves these sort of oral traditions passed down? that cuts across geography. Look, these were secret societies, which were entrusted with preserving information from what they call the first time

and passing it down to future generations. That represents such a precocious, advanced astronomical knowledge. That's macro, it's cosmic scale knowledge that we just don't have today. It's not just life after death. It's this leap to the Milky Way. It's this journey through what is called it. It's strange. It's called an underworld, but it's also in the scarf.

I'm here with the legendary Graham Hancock. I'm so honored to be with you. I'm always honored to be with you. Thank you. The feeling is mutual. Oh, well, thank you. And it's been two years since we last sat down. I feel like your career has hit a new apex over these last two years, despite the haters. You've become a staple on Joe Rogan. You did an amazing debate with Flint Dibble, which I feel like not only did you win kind of Socraticly, but you won because he wasn't even armed with the correct facts. Yeah, my objective was not to win, and I'm not sure I did win that debate. I think I was up against a very intelligent individual who was well prepared.

I'm more interested in the truth and getting the truth across rather than winning debating points. And I appeared with subsequent research to be up against an opponent who was primarily, interested in winning debating parties and whose argument is constantly praising himself for his for his win but I think I think that debate where I definitely wasn't at my best I think that debate has helped to show the general public how archaeology functions when it deals with people with alternative points of view yeah and that and that function seems to be to win at all That's right. Archaeology must win. Oh, that's the other thing that my debating partner in that debate says he constantly keeps repeating, he's destroyed, Graham. Actually, I don't feel destroyed.

And I think it was a good thing to do. Well, I think your truth-seeking has reached a new apex as far as its resonance just among the broader public. I mean, you have a new season of ancient apocalypse now out on Netflix. There's numerology, there's mathematics, there It's absolutely fantastic. You have cameos from people like Keanu Reeves. It's kind of getting bigger and bigger and growing into this groundswell that no kind of, you know, expert in some citadel sitting on a perch saying that they have the proper credentials can really stop at this point. So I hope you are aware of that. It's hopefully moved beyond the point where I can just be cancelled, which is what some of my opponents in archaeology definitely would like to say.

You're uncancelable. Well, I think. think, you know, it's like a mystery ritual. You have to die before you die to not die, and maybe you have to be many canceled to ultimately not get canceled or something. And so you've been, you've gotten, people have tried to get at you death by a thousand cuts, but now you're immortal. I wish. But it's fantastic to be with you. And as I always try to do it, per our, you know, to your tradition, I think you cover so much ground on some of the other podcasts when it comes to kind of just some of the basic claims. I want to get more into this kind of crazy speculative stuff if you're willing to go there. Let's go crazy. But first, I want to ask you,

what was Graham Hancock doing in his 20s and 30s? Because I sort of realized through ancient apocalypse, you're like, I've been doing this for 40 years. I know you're in your 70s now. Yeah. What were you doing before kind of discovering the ancient world? Yeah, well, if we go back to my school days, Well, let's go back even further. My childhood. I was born in Edinburgh, in Scotland. At the age of four, my mum and dad moved to South India, to the state of Tamil Nadu.

And my dad was a staunch Christian. I am not. I do not embrace any monotheistic faith, or any faith, actually. But he was working as a surgeon in a place called the Christian. I'm trying to remember the name of it now, the Christian Medical College in Belor in South India. So I had four years of my childhood in South India. And then came back, lived in the UK,

back to the UK, lived in Northern Ireland in the city of Belfast for four years, then moved to the north of England. From the moment we came back from India, that's when I started realizing that I was an outsider, that I wasn't, I wasn't, whatever the center of thing is, I wasn't in it. I was out on the edges looking in. And I did feel very alienated. I didn't feel that I belonged.

And that feeling of not being belonging to the mainstream was reinforced when I was sent to a boarding school in the north of England. And I just couldn't relate to their way of teaching. And I couldn't, I just didn't get it. this sort of forcing, forcing to learn a particular doctrine, a particular dogma, being forced to kneel down in chapel, which I refused to do. That was one of my first acts of rebellion. All of these things I just couldn't get. And the school couldn't get me. So although I struggled through, I was basically regarded by the teachers as quite stupid, actually.

They just couldn't see. They wrote reports saying that I had no future, that I was a dreamer. that I was going nowhere. It was very discouraging experience, actually. It was only when I went to just scraped into university that I suddenly found myself in an environment of free thinkers. And there I clicked, and there I ended up getting the best degree that it's possible to get

at a British university. But then I had a breakthrough when I met my first wife, who was from Somalia, but living in England at that time. She wanted to go back and live in Somalia again, And I thought that was a wonderful idea, but how do we fund this? And I managed to get a, because of my good degree, I managed to get a scholarship from a thing called the Levyhum Foundation, who funded me to spend a year in Somalia, very, very, very minimal funding, just the kind of amount that will just allow you to just get by. And when we came back from Somalia in 1970, yeah, it was 1975 to 1976, I was there.

When we came back in 1976, I had some expertise, at least in the Horn of Africa, in East Africa. And I was able to gradually build up freelance journalism assignments. And that was primarily what I did in the 1970s. I was desperate to get the opportunity to go back and live in Africa again. And I managed to get a deal with the economist to be there, East Africa correspondent based out of Nairobi, and traveling quite widely in East Africa, particularly in Ethiopia. You were just covering culture generally? I was covering current affairs. Okay.

It was current affairs journalism. It was not a big honorable position. I was there East Africa correspondent, but I was paid, you know, 50 UK pounds a month as a retainer. And then you get paid. Wow. Then you get paid for every word you write. Typically, an economist story is 300 words in length, so you don't get paid that much. But it opened doors for me, and it opened the door of Ethiopia to me.

And I got to know Ethiopia very, very well. And that, in turn, opened the door to the investigation of the possibility of a lost civilization. So it was a series of steps that led me down the path that I now still find myself on. Was the thing in Ethiopia that opened you up the possibility of them holding the Ark of the Yes, that's right. I think I've always had a nose for a good story, whether it's current affairs or ancient history. And while in Ethiopia on current affairs business, I kept coming across their tradition to that they were the true last resting place of the last Ark of the Covenant. You have to admit, though, that's a pretty trippy autobiographical three line, because the Ark of the Covenant is supposed to kind of carry. all knowledge, all, you know, timelines.

And your initial impetus for getting into all of this ancient civilizational stuff was looking into the Ark of the Covenant. I ate it, I slept it, I breathed it, I dreamed it all the time. It was with me. And look at how far you've come since then, as far as piecing together, all these similarities across, you know, disparate sites all over the world. Yes, yeah. It's very interesting.

Initially, it was just an intriguing story. And it wasn't my main focus in the 1980s, but it was something I gradually built up information on until I got to a point where I knew I had a book to write. What's the town that the Ark of the Covenant? It's Axiom. Axiom. A-X-U-M.

And it's in the province of Tigray in northern Ethiopia. And there's a, we need not go into it in detail, but there's a whole long tradition in Ethiopia. Actually, Ethiopia is the only country in the world that claims to have the Ark of the Covenant. There are lots of rumors, traditions, suggestions that it might be in Jordan, that it might be hidden beneath the Temple Mount,

in Jerusalem, in all kinds of places, but there's one country in the world where it's a living tradition and where it's central, oddly, to Christianity in Ethiopia, because it's a pre-Christian relic, but it's central to Ethiopian Christianity. And they have their own story about how the Ark of the Covenant got there.

But actually, it was, as I began to research this subject, and encountered the very interesting community of indigenous Ethiopian Jews who were known as the Falashas. They called themselves the Beta Israel, the House of Israel. They have a very ancient presence in Ethiopia.

And they have their own story about how the Ark of the Covenant got to Ethiopia. And it's quite different from the Ethiopian national epic, which is called the Kemberma Gass, the Glory of Kings. Their story is much, much more interesting and is clearly, factually based for all kinds of reasons, like how their ancestors had fled from Israel carrying the ark, like how they brought it to an island in the Nile River and kept it there for several

hundred years, like how they were forced out and fled south following the Blue Nile to its source in Lake Tana, which is where the Falasha communities still live today. Now, actually, when I say still live today. During the chaos of the overthrow of the Mangistu regime in Ethiopia in 1991, Israel flew in many, many large cargo planes and actually airlifted out of Ethiopia the majority of the Ethiopian Jews and put them, resettled them in Israel. Quite a number have returned, but there's still a large Ethiopian Jewish community in Israel itself now. And they just have fascinating stories about this. And stories that make sense. and stories that I was able to tie up with historical evidence.

So, you know, I gradually began to feel that this claim that Ethiopia makes may have a real basis to it. And obviously that involved me figuring out what this thing is. It's the first time that I began to get a sense of something missing in the human story. Because the Ark of the Covenant does sound, there's a very detailed description of it in the Bible in the book of Exodus in the Old Testament. And that description is like a blueprint for a device, which supposedly God gives to Moses on Mount Sinai. And it directs the Israelites where to go when they're in the desert?

Yes. As they carry it through the desert, it's carried in procession before them. It becomes central to the way. And of course, it contains the tablets of the Ten Commandments according to the Book of Exodus. But also it strikes people dead with bolts of fire that come out of it. It can cause whole populations to suffer from cancerous tumors, as it did when the Philistines, as they're called in the Bible, briefly captured it. They all died, so bad that they had to return it to the Israelites. Which is fascinating because you say that the guards that are guarding it in Axum currently seem to have radiation damage in certain cases. They have cataracts.

They all have cataracts over their eyes. And by and large, once they are appointed guardian of their ark, they have a lifespan of about three years. And they all say, because I've interviewed a number of them in succession, when the previous one has died, I've gone back, found a new guy there. And he said, yeah, my predecessor died, and the ark did it. And he shows me the cataracts over his eyes, and he says, the ark is doing this to me. And I said, why? And I will remember this phrase forever. He said, because it is a thing of fire.

Oh. And you said you almost went in there, but you were very afraid. Well, no, I was not allowed to go. You weren't allowed to go. I was allowed through the gates in front of the sanctuary chapel in which the Ethiopians claimants kept, but I wasn't allowed into the... I think I asked you, why didn't you sneak in, Graham? And you said, there was... You said something very interesting to me, though.

You said something inside of me said I wasn't ready and it would be dangerous. I felt it would be obnoxious to try and sneak in. It would be wrong. You know, I have to respect the sanctity of this place. And besides the people of Axum are well prepared to defend it, where anybody to try to break into that chapel, they would be shot. It's as simple as that. Did, you know, if it's just been an axiomol,

You had, you know, Heinrich Kimler under Hitler looking for these, you know, the Holy Grail, the Ark of the Covenant. Did he ever try to go to Axum and take it from that? During the Italian occupation of Ethiopia, which was roughly 1935 to 1941, the Ethiopians say that they took the Ark out of Axum. And they took it to another place of safekeeping. That's their story. They took it to an island on Lakes Y, which is south of Addis Ababa. I wouldn't be surprised if there were efforts to find it. But the Ethiopians have been very competent and frustrating those efforts for a very long time.

Anyway, it's a fascinating story, and it led me down a track that I hadn't expected to find myself going down. And it led me down that track of what else is missing in our past. And why are archaeologists so arrogant? Because they arrogantly and sneeringly dismissed the Ethiopian tradition. Whereas at a heart level, when I encountered Ethiopians who were connected to this story, I found people with a deep commitment and faith to it and solid reasoning why it should be there. So that probably was the first time I began to wonder whether archaeologists are entirely trustworthy. And certainly began to feel that if I'm researching any subject to do with the ancient past,

I will not rely only on what archaeologists have to say. That's beautiful. So you realized there was something more true about your firsthand experience. Definitely. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And that's my approach to researching any subject, is that I have to be there in person. I have to have boots on the ground. I have to have to have strong local investigation going on. I can't just rely on books and what so-called experts tell me. Shifting to the pyramids of Giza, you say they're not just a tomb.

Well, they're not only, they're not a tomb. They're not a tomb. Again, I'm in conflict with archaeology. but I'm certainly not the only one because the notion that the Great Pyramid is a tomb and only a tomb, which is what archaeology teaches, in my view, is absurd. It's well known that no burial of any Pharaoh was ever found in the Great Pyramid or, for that matter, in any of the Hundred Pyramids in Egypt. Some of that can be down to tomb robbery, but in the case of the Great Pyramid, it was completely closed and sealed until Arab Raiders. under Khalif Mahmoun broke in to the Great Pyramid and they found it empty.

They were expecting to find enormous treasures and wealth. Instead, they found it a completely empty building with nothing inside it at all. Of course, there are many other unexplored areas of the Great Pyramid. Remote scanning is now showing that there are huge, as yet, uninvestigated cavities within the Great Pyramid, huge chambers. The best known feature of the Great Pyramid inside is the Grand Gallery. And it looks like there's a second grand gallery above it within the pyramid. That shows up in scanning. Nobody's been able to get in there yet.

But it's not going to be an impossible technological feat to do so. I think rather than being at the end of the study of the Great Pyramid, I think we're just at the beginning of the study of the Great Pyrameter. And little by little, if we are worthy, it will reveal its secrets to us. I think that's what it's intended to do. But it's not a tomb. It makes no sense. It makes no say.

I have very simple reasons. When you know that monument, when you see it, when you confront it, when you confront it six million tons, when you confront its incredible precision, when you confront the already known corridors and passageways within it, the notion that this was built in 23 years is absurd. And yet, if the notion that it is the tomb of Kufu is correct, and if that's all it is, then it had to be built in 23 years because that was the length. of his reign. And I regard that as impossible. And anybody with structural engineering experience like my great friend Robert Povall also regard it as impossible. More likely it's a project

that took hundreds of years to complete. And maybe thousands. I think that there's no doubt that parts of the Great Pyramid were completed and finished by the ancient Egyptians. I don't seek to take it away from the ancient Egyptians. But I think they were inheriting a very ancient tradition and they were completing a monument that already stood in basic form on the Giza Plateau. I felt from the beginning that the three ground platforms on which the three great pyramids stand are far older than the pyramids themselves. And they represent an epoch that the ancient Egyptians called Zeptepi the first time. And they do so astronomically. They do so in terms of astronomical connection to Orion's belt, just as the Great Sphinx does so in terms of the

connection to the rising sun on the equinox, which at one time was housed by the constellation of Leo. And that moment when the three stars of Orion's belt are due south on the meridian at dawn on the spring equinox is also precisely the moment that the Great Sphinx is looking at the constellation of Leo, 12,500 years ago, not 4,500 years ago. 4,500 years ago, the stars of Orion's belt don't match up. And 4,500 years ago, the great sphinx was looking at the sun rising against the background of the constellation of Taurus. But we have a lion-bodied monument representing a celestial figure that we call the constellation of Leo and that many ancient cultures called the constellation of Leo. And of course, immediately, huge argument from Egyptologists, from archaeologists who say, no, no, the Greeks or the Babylonians, late Babylonians discovered the constellations of the zodiac.

Nobody had recognized them before that. Complete bullshit, complete rubbish. Ancient cultures exposed to the drama of the skies in a way that we are not, couldn't possibly have failed to observe the 12 zodiacal constellations, which happen to be the constellations that lie on the path of the sun. If you observe the annual course of the sun, you will see during the months of the year that it rises against the background of each one of those constellations.

But over a much longer period, When your marker is the spring equinox, you find that it's going backwards through the zodiac. And it gives us a very precise way of astronomically dating a time that was very important to the ancient Egyptians. Again, I think it's important for people to get this. That it is impossible to use megalithic architecture, which is going to endure forever. you know, there's that saying that time fears the pyramids, because they just last on forever. And to use astronomy to spell out a date very precisely, and that's what happens at Giza. We have many other monuments all over the world, which may have been built.

The example I usually give is one of the Gothic cathedrals in Europe, built in the 12 or 1300s, But much of the symbolism is devoted to the age of Abraham, which takes you back Ere of the Chaldez to about 2000 BC. So the notion that a monument might choose to memorialize a very ancient date doesn't have to mean that that monument was built at that ancient date. It can be referring to that ancient date and saying to us, the ancient Egyptians, that date was very important. And I'd be willing to stop there if it wasn't for the erosion patterns on the sphinx. Yeah, which... They have water damage on the last damage of the sphinx, the exposure of the sphinx to thousands of years of heavy rainfall. That was not, no such rains were on the Giza Plateau 4,500 years ago, but they certainly will when you go back to the end.

When you go back to the end of the last ice age. So it looks to me like the Sphinx and the megalithic temples beside it, the so-called Valley Temple, the mortuary temples on the Giza Plateau. There are elements on the Giza Plateau, in my view. It's much better to come to the conclusion that they were actually made 12,500 years ago. And there are other elements which are memorializing the date of 12,500 years ago. The implications of what you're saying are profound, because the procession is a 26,000-year process. And for a culture that we now consider primitive, I agree with you. I think it clearly was not at all primitive.

But to understand the vernal equinox. Let's be clear on that. No way on God's earth can we call the ancient Egyptians primitive. We can't build what they built. No. This was a highly sophisticated culture. And it was a culture as it emerges into historical recognition, as it becomes what they call archaeologically visible around 3,000 BC, 5,000 years ago.

It's already fully evolved. They're doing their best stuff right at the beginning. And they are from the beginning memorializing much more ancient times. Zep Tepe the first time, which I and my colleagues think correlates closely with the date that we call 12,500 years ago or 10,500 BC. But if what you're saying about the Sphinx and the pyramids are correct, and that the Sphinx was, for example, actually meant to depict Leo, which was the constellation, which represented the vernal equinox shift around that period, that represents such a precocious, advanced

astronomical knowledge. That's macro, it's cosmic scale knowledge that we just don't have today. It's knowledge that requires scientific observation over a long period of time, particularly when you're actually going to create a marker of that on the ground. And I think it's really important that I pay tribute to Robert Boval, because it's Robert Boval, close friend of mine, great, great colleague of mine, unfortunately, he's been very ill for the last several years. But Robert is the person who established and found the Orion correlation theory, for which he came into such vicious and vile attacks from Egyptologists, simply for noticing that the pattern of the three pyramids on the ground resembles the pattern of the three stars of Orion's belt, and then tracking back through procession to find the time when it actually absolutely matches. And that's about 12,500 years ago. And Robert and I worked together on the whole mystery of the Sphinx, but I would not be here.

in any way able to talk about the Orion correlation if it had not been for the absolutely fundamental foundational work of Robert Boval. And I finish this by saying I also want to pay tribute to Professor Robert Schock of Boston University, geologist, professor of geology, one of the few mainstream academics who's been willing to stick his neck out and say, as a geologist, when I look at the weathering patterns on this monument, it's not four and a half thousand years old. it's more like 12,500 years old. Again, Robert has come in for Robert Schock has come in for horrendous attacks

from the archaeological community. But he's had the guts to stick it out. And before him, John Anthony West, who's passed away in 2018. It was John who first brought Robert Schock to the Giza Plateau. So the ideas I'm expressing now have a lineage.

And I may be the person who's writing them down. They're not ideas that I've invented. And by the way, I think it's important to present to the audience that modern Egyptology is sort of a product and gated by modern Egyptian Ministry of Culture. And, you know, we're here actually. We have a yes theory present. They're amazing. They did a

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U.N. must be 21 to enter. And we also have your amazing wife, Santa. We have Kate and Laura as well. And Amar over here is Egyptian, and he actually, maybe his proto-yes theory experience that ended up kind of convening him with everybody else was he, wanted to be the first person to, one of the first people to climb the pyramid. Only to realize the grand... Only to realize that.

Grandin had already done it and seen that his grandfather had an insignia. He had done it too. My grandfather's graffiti at the top of the Great Pyramid. Yeah, I've been lucky to climb the Great Pyramid several times. 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...

Anybody could climb the Great Pyramid, but here's my little anecdote. I found, Santha 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 diary. 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, climbed Great Pyramid today. No way. That's crazy. That was my grandfather. You're absolutely right on the comment that there's like the current government, the current people, the governing body for antiquities and tourism in Egypt, they have been

Zet Hawassi's been this one guy that is like fully monopolizing what narrative comes out about Egypt and about how things worked back then and it's like it feels like he's just refusing to die he's like pretty old

I'd like to add a comment to that Zahi and I have had a long relationship from his signature fedora to his discoveries at the Giza Tumes and Valley of the Golden Mammies Egyptologist Dr. Zahi Hawas is clearly a passionate promoter of ancient Egypt. I've known Zahi since the mid-1990s.

And actually, for many years, that relationship was quite positive. It certainly wasn't negative. But we had a falling out in 2015. And I said some very harsh words to him at the time. And looking back on them in retrospect as the years passed by, I began to feel I'd been unfair to Zahi. not so much that Zahi'd been unfair to me, that I'd been unfair to him. And I've reached the point in life now where I would like to remove all bitterness and past conflicts from my life.

I don't want to be in conflict with other people, if at all possible. So I reached out to Zahi earlier this year and told him that I would like to meet up and have a conversation and see if we can make peace. Did you meet up? Yeah, absolutely. Was it good? It was great. Really? Santa and I had dinner with Zahi and with Zahi's son Kareem. Yeah. It was a very enjoyable dinner. Zahi is an entertaining and amusing speaker. Did you stay away from your semantic disagreements? Did you say... Well, no, I told him. I apologized. I made an apology to Zahy.

And by doing so, I lifted the burden off my back. And I tried to do this with people who I have been unfair to and been unkind to. I want to put that right as much as I can. Before I leave this physical body for whatever happens next, hopefully that's not for a long time. I don't want to carry a burden of too much bitterness and bad feeling and baggage. That's very noble of you, but did you say Zahi, I think that the Ferranic headdress put on the sphinx was after, you know, the original base. Zahi knows, I think, that.

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 a 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.

Zahi and I may have some interesting collaboration in the future. Interesting. Where it will be an agreement to disagree. Cool. Where he will have the opportunity to strongly put his point of view. And I will have the opportunity to strongly put mine. Amazing. But we won't do that by smearing and insulting each other.

Amazing. We won't do that by trying to cut each other down without hominem attacks on each other. We'll do that in a friendly way. Does he have any first principles argument? against the limestone damage, water erosion damage? Yes, Zahi and all Egyptologists don't accept that. Yeah, but what's the argument against it? Not accepting it seems problematic.

I've never understood what the argument is, clearly. It's never persuaded me. But perhaps if I can have more dialogue with Zahi, I'll understand it better, and maybe I'll be able to persuade him a little more to my point of view. Yeah. That there are issues around the Sphinx and around the pyramids which have not been properly investigated. Yeah.

You tribute to Zahi, he is undoubtedly spent his entire working life focused on the archaeology of the Giza Plateau and on the archaeology of Egypt in general. This is a man with an enormous amount of experience in this field. This is a man who has had access to every important structure and monument in ancient Egypt. In other words, he is a fountain of knowledge on the subject. And I don't want to dismiss fountains of knowledge. I want to see what I can learn from Zahi.

And I hope that he might learn something from me as well. And we might end up in a place where there is respectful disagreement, and we can openly discuss the mysteries of the past. That's what I would hope to get to. That sounds beautiful. Have you ever seen the movie Stargate? Long time ago. Kurt Russell movie.

Yeah. I have seen it. There's a portal. It's near the pyramids of Giza. But I look at a lot of your work. And when it comes to the pyramids themselves lining up with Orion's Belt, Ryan's belt has always, across many cultures, been the place of ascension of souls.

Absolutely. It is here in North America and in Central America and in South America, the path of souls. That idea that on death our soul makes a kind of leap up to the heavens and then makes a journey along the Milky Way. and that that journey is full of challenges and difficulties on which we will be assessed for the use we made of the incredible gift of life,

that idea is found all over the world. It's a universal idea, and it's one of the reasons why I propose that there's been a forgotten episode in human history, that we are looking at a legacy of an idea that was passed down to many later cultures from a remote common ancestor. going back to the end of the last. And even if you look at the king's shaft lines up with Orion

and the Queen's shaft lines up with Sirius, right? So it's this really interesting, precise alignment with constellations that... The shafts of the Kings chamber don't point it to Ryan, but one of the shafts of the Queen's chamber does. Okay, okay. And do, but... And let's be clear, no king was ever buried in that chamber. These are all modern names that have been given by Egyptologists to these churches. chambers to manifest their theory about why there's so many chambers inside the Great Pyramid. But we have no idea what the ancient Egyptians or anybody else ever called them in the past. Do you have a best guess as to what these were ritualistically used for, given their alignment?

Given the intense focus of the ancient Egyptians on the mystery of life after death, on the mystery of life and on the mystery of death, actually, what happens to us. Most modern scientists of a very so-called rational persuasion who believe that everything can be solved with weighing, measuring and counting will tell you almost as though it's an absolute fact that they've somehow established through experimentation that there is no such thing as the soul and that it does not survive death. Of course, this is not a fact. This is a statement of a religious belief on the part of those. scientists who view any such thing as mystical and nonsense. There is no experiment that could be done. Frankly, it's a mystery. None of us know.

None of us know. None of us have a clue what happens. Maybe the so-called rational scientists are right. Maybe we are just meat robots, meaninglessly living out our existence here on Earth, producing and consuming. Maybe that's all we are. It could be, but I don't think it is. And our society pays no attention to these mysteries.

The ancient Egyptians, that was their focus for 3,000 years. And they came to very, very, very definite conclusions about it. And those conclusions, I think, are very deep and very weighty and worth considering. And it's fascinating that the same idea is found all around the world. I get it why many different cultures might believe in life after death. The argument for that is people delude them rational scientists. argument for that is people delude themselves into believing there's life after death because they don't like the idea of coming to an end.

But it's much more specific than that. It's not just life after death. It's this leap to the Milky Way. It's this journey through what is called it. It's strangely, it's called it underworld, but it's also in the sky. It's this journey through it. It's the challenges and ordeals that the soul will face along the way, where he or she will be held to account for the life they have lived.

For that very specific set of notions to turn up all around the world, that's not an accident. That is a result, I believe, of a shared common influence. And this is something else that archaeologists, I think, don't really get. I think what's missing is an archaeology of ideas. And that ideas can live and can be passed on through stories, through traditions, for thousands and thousands and thousands of years, and they can re-manifest again and again. So you can get cultures that are separated by not just thousands of years,

but also thousands of miles who are still manifesting these ideas. For example, the ancient Maya in Central America, and we go into this in one of the episodes of Season 2 of Ancient Apocalypse, with a great archaeologist who doesn't hate me. And, you know, he agrees that this is a worldwide tradition. It's a very, very curious thing. And there's this common trope to you have King Judea of Sumeria saying that in a dream he was given this lapis lazuli, these tablets, saying that he has to build a temple with these specific astronomical alignments. You see the same thing with Pharaoh Tupmos in Egypt. You see the same thing with Aztec leaders, with Nebuchadnezzar.

Yeah. This sort of, you know, idea of you get this kind of download or you have this divine connection and then you must build this temple. with the specific astronomical alignment. So I think that does point towards something having to do with the afterlife or some sort of ascension portal. I was even reading Ptolemy. Pto-astronomy is sort of like the in-between of like the astronomy we have today and whatever we had in the past. And he's writing in 100 AD in Roman times. And he's saying that the soul's ascension path is through Orion's belt.

Yeah, that's right. The leap is always to Orion's belt. That's another of the common factors of this idea around the world tour. Because Orion stands by the Milky Way. And there you're on the Milky Way. Then you make your journey. So are you getting to some sort of more true proto-architecture to religion that involves these sort of oral traditions passed down that cuts across geography?

Look, I'll give you two examples. I've tried to explain it. It's best done graphically, really, for this to be able. understood, the phenomenon of precession is because the Earth is the viewing platform, I try to explain it in this way, from which we observe the stars, and because the Earth wobbles very slowly on its axis, and because that wobble unfolds a complete cycle in just under 26,000 years, the effect for us as observers is that the star's orientation in the skies gradually changes, and the rising time of those stars in relation to the sun gradually changes.

And the pole star gradually changes because the extended north pole of the earth is wobbling and will sometimes point at empty space and sometimes point at other stars. Ours is Polaris, but it's been other stars in the past. So this is a very complex, very sophisticated process, which requires detailed observation. Now, as I've said, using procession and monumental architecture, the ancient Egyptians have built an enormous statement on the ground that speaks to the date that we call 10,500 BC astronomically. It speaks to that date about 12,500,000 years ago. Then jump over to Quebec-Tepi in Turkey. Look at Pillar 43 in enclosure D.

Look at the very interesting symbolism on that pillar, which includes a scorpion, which includes a scorpion, which, includes a vulture with outstretched arms, which includes a circle, which we believe resembles the sun on the wing of that bulture. What we find is that that is very persuasively an astronomical diagram of the sky at the summer solstice 12,500 years ago. And the sun is on the arm of Sagittarius is the constellation that we think is represented by that vulture figure. The fact that we call it Sagittarius, other cultures can call it other things and symbolize it as other things. But the fact is that the shape of that constellation is what is reflected on that pillar. And using procession, it marks out, again, that same date that the ancient Egyptians called

the first time. And that's interesting, because Pillar 43 and Inclusion D, Inclosure D has been dated to 11,600 years ago, but it's marking a date more than 1,000 years before that, 12,500 to 12,800. years ago. So that tells us that whoever built Gobeckli-Tepi that that previous date was as important to them as it was to the ancient Egyptians. That's so fascinating. I think so, yeah. You write about this a little in your book, Talisman with Robert Beval, of this sort of quote-unquote organization. Yes. That sort of hermetically transfers wisdom. Yes. The passing down of knowledge over thousands of years does definitely involve some kind of organization.

It's not going to happen randomly. It can happen in certain ways with stories. This is something that I came to understand way back in the late 1980s. And again, pay tribute to the work of others, probably mentioned it to you before, Hamlet's Mill, Georgia de Santilliana. MIT. Not to be confused with the guy who presents ancient aliens. George E. Santilliano was a professor of history of science at MIT back in the 1960s. Hitha von Dessian, professor of the history of science at Frankfurt University.

And, you know, they have identified very ancient, very early knowledge of procession. I've been talking so much. I've forgotten how we got on that point. I brought up the organization. Yes, the organization. So one way that ideas can be maintained is to embed those ideas. is in wonderful stories, call the myths, if you like, which the story itself is so compelling that people will keep on repeating it down the ages. The storyteller no longer has to have knowledge that there is secret information embedded in that story. As long as the storyteller

keeps on repeating the story through, the secret information will continue to be passed down. And later cultures, if they're open-minded and have their eyes and ears open, may be able to decipher that information. That's one way that. that information can be preserved across thousands of years. It's one of the reasons why myths is so important to me, without any organization involved. But I think very clear in the case of ancient Egypt, whether you call them the followers of Horus, whether you call them the souls of pey and nekhine, that these were secret societies, which were entrusted with preserving information from what they call the first time and passing

it down to future generations. And although it may seem like a bit of a stretch, I suggest that that information was preserved for thousands and thousands of years and constantly passed down. And when the time was felt to be right, ancient Egypt was switched on. And of course, it was switched on entirely by ancient Egyptians. This was thousands of years after the information had reached them and then was passed down through the generations and preserved. And it's hard to say why exactly the period of roughly 3,000 BC, 5,000 years ago to 2,000. 500 BC, 4,500 years ago, was chosen as the time to switch on the engine of ancient Egypt. But interestingly enough, that's exactly the same period that the engine of the Indus Valley

civilization was switched on in what is now Pakistan and northern India. It's exactly the same time that the Yellow River civilization was switched on. This is found, this date, this sudden emergence of civilization, as it's called, coordinates with that date all around the world. It's not just ancient Egypt. So again, that makes me feel that there's something behind it and that we're probably missing a very important part of the human story that's behind it. And that part of the human story goes back to the last Ice Age, in my view. That's linking all of these civilizational cycles. And we think of the birthplace of kind of Western civilization as the Hellenic period in the Greeks. But in fact, you point out

that there's a really clear through line from Plato to the, ancient Egyptians, you have Solon and the myth, you know, and... Well, again, the Atlantis story is, I've had so much scorn poured on me by archaeologists for taking the Atlantis story seriously. Because they're convinced that it's just a sort of political fable that Plato made up in order to establish certain philosophical points about how governments should work. And this was for the audience because it was told that this festival that was, you know, mythos or whatever, it was involved in sort of storytelling, I think mythology played a very, there was more reality to a lot of what was transpired in

these festivals. That's right. I mean, you'll find the Atlantis story in the dialogues of Timius and Critias of Plato. And what the archaeologists say is that this is all just a fable. But in order to say that, they have to say that. They have to say, separate the Atlantis tradition from the global tradition of a great flood. That tradition is worldwide. There are roughly 200 flood myths from all around the world. There are very few parts of the world that don't have it. And there are many striking common features about those flood and cataclysm myths.

It's one of the reasons we call our series ancient apocalypse, actually. And I regard the Atlantis tradition passed down to us by Plato as part of that. Well, because it dates to 9,600 BC. It's one of the very few traditions of a global flood that destroys a former civilization. As I say, there's up to 200 of them. It's one of the only ones which actually gives a date. And it gives that date because the Egyptian priests who read the hieroglyphs on the wall of

the temple at Sice in the Delta to Solon and translated it for him, when he asked them, when did this happen? When did this place get destroyed? When was it submerged beneath the sea? They kind of matter of fact, they said, oh, well, 9,000 years ago. There's the date, because that was 600 BC. That's 9,000 years before 600 BC. That's 9,600 BC.

That's 11,600 years ago, give it take 24 years before our time. And that is meltwater pulse 1B. That is one of the big sea level rise incidents that took place at the end of the ice age. So for Plato to have stumbled upon that, just randomly picked that date as some sort of grand. and fiction seems to me observed. Well, I think once mythology starts to comport with actual events, we have to stop calling it mythology. I believe so.

I believe so. And I think what Plato did was I think he took elements of a very ancient tradition, which had been passed down to him by the ancient Egyptians, as he states in the Timias and Critias dialogues. He took elements of that that were useful to him, and he left out other elements that weren't. but it's the connection to the worldwide tradition of a global flood that archaeologists completely ignore when they seek to dismiss the Atlantis tradition. And I think they need to take it on board.

And rather than, excuse the language, rather than pissing on Plato, you know, they should say, well, actually, what can we find from this? This is very interesting. Let's see if there's more to it than we imagine. Let's see if that date is significant in some way. And it is. Well, I think a great other example would be the Peloponnesian War, where we said it was all mythology. You know, it was all, you know, the city of Troy did not exist.

And then late 19th century, we figure out, oh, there actually was a city. There actually was a Troy. Yeah, that's, that's one of the great examples. And I think, I think mythology needs to be used as a guide. You said this place was steps from the water. We just haven't found the steps yet. How much did we save? Enough. Enough to get lost.

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At only $12, it's great for affordable touch-ups on the go. Get this new must-have concealer at Sephora or at Sephora.com today. Absolutely. Rather than kind of sneered at as fantasies made up by our primitive ancestors. And the 19th century case with Troy, it was found by... Schleeman. Schleeman, who what Heinrich Lerner, who... Heinrich Monchleiman, who was kind of this, he was a businessman, he was an outsider.

Nobody in archaeology at the time respected him. I know, yeah. And they thought he was a fraud or whatever. Something's never changed. Yeah, right. No, that's what I'm saying. Archaeologists don't like outsiders. Well, in the 19th century, you had all these guys.

You had G. G. Frasier, wrote the Golden Bow. You had all these anthropologists and guys who were contributing to the bedrock of what we now do who kind of are more cut from your cloth than like this myopic paper-chasing academia cloth. There were these, you know, gentlemen journeyers who were very polymathic and they had this wide view of, you know, what was going on historically. And they would come to these amazing conclusions. And now we just, I don't know, we have these kind of nitpicker, you know, people who. As I've often said, I've learned a great deal from archaeology. Yeah.

And there are many great archaeologists still today who are doing good work. And often they are the archaeologists who are attacked by their colleagues. But when it comes to criticism of archaeology, I find that archaeologists tend to circle the wagons around each other rather than deal with those criticisms face-face on. And so speaking of archaeology as an institution rather than individual archaeologists, I would say that it appears to me that the mission of archaeology as an institution is the kind of mission of a vampire. They want to suck all the blood out of the ancient past. They want to drain the past of its blood, of its vitality, of its mystery, of everything that makes it worthwhile looking into. And leave this stuff that can just be counted and weighed and measured. They're so desperate to be seen as scientists that they've, in order to be regarded as scientists,

they've literally thrown the baby out with the bathwater. And we end up with this dry discipline, which is, which is, is extremely unattractive in many ways and fails to do justice to the romance and the beauty and the mystery of the past. And that is why people are interested in the past. They don't want the weighing and measuring and counting to dominate the debate. There's a great place for weighing and measuring and counting. But for that to have a monopoly on our understanding of the past, that's a mistake. The past is too big a subject for one small discipline of scholars who include a very vocal subgroup who wish to destroy any alternative ideas. It's wrong for such a small group to have

this death grip on the past and to claim that they're the only ones who have a right to speak of the past. I couldn't agree more. And I think the same thing happens to Plato, the people who claim that Plato has no say on what actually, he's not a historian, you know, he was just some philosopher or whatever. I think philosophers actually do the same thing, modern philosophers, do the same thing to Plato, where they say things like the myth of air holds no metaphysical bearing on what he actually believed. Or they call it the cave allegory because it's just an allegory, right? Well, what if Plato actually believed we live in a cave?

And there's some light we can glimpse outside of the cave and that the myth of air is sort of... Anybody who's had prolonged and deep experience of altered states of consciousness will know that we do live in a cave. Our perceptions are so channeled in to the physical world. which they need to be. We do need to know the laws of physics, but we're so focused into the physical realm that we tend to shut our eyes to be closed off to a much wider reality that surrounds all of that. And so what do you think, you know, you wrote a great book called Supernatural, and we've talked about Jacques Valet before and how you believe, you know, a lot of what people

experience through psychedelic experiences, I know you've done ayahuasca many times and other things as well. You've experienced some of these entities and those journeys. Do you believe that is, that encapsulates the modern alien conversation? Because there's also this sort of government disclosure thing around nuts and bolts and UFO crash recoveries. Well, I always go, I always go back to, I was fortunate to know the Peruvian shaman, Pablo Amaringo. I didn't know you knew him. I did. And had his permission to, to, to, reproduce a number of his images in my book, Supernatural, which has recently been retitled visionary in the United States with a new forward and afterward, but the main text remains

the same. I did ask Pablo specifically why he is painting UFOs in his flying saucers, literally, that's what they look like. And I said, are you telling us that we're being visited by beings from other planets, what are these flying sources that you're depicting? And again, very matter of fact, he said, oh, well, those are vehicles for entering and leaving the spirit world. That's what he said they were. So maybe there is some physical tech that can gain access to other realms of reality. But we do know that there is a neurological tech that gives access to that. And that is the powerful psychedelics like dimethyltryptamine, which is the active ingredient of ayahuasca. which do completely change our setting and our state of consciousness

and allow in all kinds of material that we normally keep out and give us access to that material. So I think that whatever the UFO mystery is, it is going to be solved by more than one approach. And perhaps the most fruitful approach is through the mystery of consciousness and what happens in deeply altered state. of consciousness. So we now know that all around the world, fortunately science is progressing, and we do in some ways. And we know that at a number of centers now, Imperial College in London,

University of California at San Diego, that work is being done with volunteers. They are being, they are being given dimethyltidemine by intravenous drip. Now that's interesting because some of our audience will have experienced DMT. And normally when we experience DMT, we're going to smoke it or vape it. And when you smoke or vape DMT, you're into a 10-minute, just utterly overwhelming journey to the other side of reality. And it's so overwhelming that it's often quite difficult to remember exactly. You know something happened to you.

You know you did have encounters. there were sentient others out there who you communicated with, but it's hard to remember it. So what they're doing at these two universities, one in Britain, one in the US, what they're doing is they found a new technology, and I'll mention my colleague Andrew Gallimore,

who is one of the, and Rick Strassman, Rick Strassman as well, very important in the invention of this technology, whereby it's possible to keep volunteers in the peak DMT state for actually as long as you want. Typically, they keep. them under for an hour, but they could stay under for days.

Because unlike, as far as I know, any other psychedelic, you never build up tolerance to DMT. If you take LSD, three, four, five days in a row, by the fifth day, you're not going to have a trip at all. Your body's become so tolerant of it. You have to take a break before you'll have any more experiences. But with DMT, you can just keep taking it every day, and you will not build up tolerance to it.

So they're using that particular, special, unique characteristics. of DMT to see what happens when people are plunged into this experience for much longer than 10 minutes. And those volunteers are all coming back with reports of encounters with sentient others. And there is an interesting group now who are called sentient others made up by these volunteers who are now exchanging notes. They didn't exchange notes when they were volunteers because that was part of the protocol. But now that they're that they've stopped being volunteers, they're exchanging notes and astonishing similarities are being found. And these similarities are of encounters with sentient beings who communicate with us and seem to have an

urgent message to impart to us. They want to know us and they want us to know them. And it seems that there is something of great value in this connection between the two. And a lot of people come out of these experiences saying they are more real. than real. More real than real. More real than our sort of waking life. Yeah, definitely. There is another way that you can have a prolonged exposure to DMT, and that is the ayahuasca brew, because the active ingredient of ayahuasca is DMT. The other ingredient is from the vine. It's particularly the harming in the vine, which acts as a monoamine oxidase inhibitor that allows the DMT to be absorbed orally. And an ayahuasca experience can last four or five hours, maybe more. But there's the

distraction of the vomiting and the diarrhea, which makes it kind of difficult at times to focus on your journey. It's a really good idea to fast for a day before an ayahuasca. Do you know how they ended up getting the vine and the boot? Because out of hundreds of thousands of thousands of who inspired the first people to put ayahuasca. I think it's a tribute to the scientific nature of shamanism. The more time I've spent with shaman's particularly in the Amazon, the more aware I become of how they are constantly experimenting with plants. But this is an almost supernatural achievement since there are two kinds of ayahuasca really. One is called yahi and the other is called ayahuasca. What they both have in common is the ayahuasca vine. They both have the ayahuasca vine in

common, which contains this monoamine oxidase inhibitor that allows DMT to be absorbed orally. But the source of DMT is different from, for, from, from, in yaha'e, than it is in ayahuasca. In the case of ayahuasca, it's the leaves of a bush called cicotria viridus. It's known as chakruna in the Amazon. In the case of yahae, it's the leaves of another vine. And that vine is called diploptera, diplopteris cabriana. And that, those leaves contain DMT. And they contain not only NN DMT, which is the more known one, but also five MEODMT. And I can say because my most recent experience was with Yahweh.

That must be overwhelming. It was incredibly powerful experience. Very, very powerful and compelling in every way. And again, this sense of a presence and of communication. And I realize, as I'm saying this to you, Jesse, that I am handing yet another stick to my critics to beat me with. No. Because that's one of the things that they do is that they drug-shamed me. They say that because Hancock has taken the ayahuasca,

this is why he comes up with all these crazy ideas about the past. Well, the truth that... You know, anything that works to shut somebody down, they will use. It goes to like this epistemological argument of, you know, you somehow can't learn anything through intuition in the modern day for it to be valid. You have to like piece it together through pure inductive rational logic. Yeah. Which is not how anybody operates.

It's not even how rationalists operate if they audit themselves. It's not. There's a real place for intuition and imagination. Absolutely. And that place, that's what archaeology in particular has tried to drive out. And most sciences have tried to drive out. You look at the epiphenomena of science itself. The most productive science comes through dreams and revelations and downloads.

There's actually a great book by Professor Jimena Canales called Bedevled about the history of demons and science. How interesting. Maxwell had a demon. Descartes had a demon. Laplace had a demon. All these guys who are literally building the science and tech that push humanity forward that all these kind of nitpicky, you know, current physicists or whatever, you know, are building off of now.

Had these sort of revelatory downloads. Stuff that came out of altered states of consciousness. Absolutely. Yeah, I know you brought up Francis Crick in the double helical structure of DNA. That's right. And Kerry Mullis, you know. Kerry Mullis, you know. Mollis, yeah.

Carrie Mollis saw an alien, too. You know, so it's time actually that, and I'm glad to say that that's what's happening at Imperial and at UCSD, is that science is beginning to take these experiences seriously, rather than just dismiss them of our brain on drugs. And it's so beautiful to see science merge with, honestly, ancient traditions. Because if you look at St. Thomas of Aquinas, he had an angel hierarchy. Yeah. You've got the Syrian neoplatonist Eambulchus.

He had an angel hierarchy. and you see these people mapping the spirit world via DMT, and you have these various beings. And I think a really interesting project, maybe in a year or two, once we get some more data, is how do those line up to some of these ancient Kabbalistic traditions? Definitely, yeah. That's what needs to be done.

And again, science just has to get over its hang up, actually about intuition and about older states of consciousness. And unfortunately, it's beginning to do so. And we're seeing some real solid scientific work being done. I mean, I personally would not like to be in an MRI scanner while on a DMT drip, but that's one of the things that they're doing. Do you think, you know, the curse of King Tut's tomb? Yeah. This idea that, like, anybody that, you know, you had a couple people try to x-ray it and then they sort of die mysteriously.

Do you have any sort of take on that? Because I was looking it up today. I was like, I'm going to ask Graham about this. And, you know, originally it was like this, like, mysterious metaphysical thing. And now the answer that, like, you read online is, like, oh, it's like uranium, like, coming from, like, the local geology, like, the rocks or something. And I'm like, that's not a satisfactory answer. Like, that's very interesting in and of itself. And actually, in a lot of sites where people claim to interact with the spirit world or aliens, even in a modern context a la Skinwalker Ranch, they say that there's, like, a lot of uranium around.

And there's radioactive substances around. You can think of the Ark of the Covenant is maybe a product of the same thing. Yeah, I specifically looked into that in my book about the art. So is there some connection via, and then you have this connection via, you know, there's actually a great book written by a guy named Robert Hastings about, and this is like the modern UFO kind of craze or whatever, but it's about how UFOs consistently show up around nuclear bases all over the U.S. There's something about nuclear that also represents a portal.

Yeah. the consciousness protocols, and then there's like something around nuclear. Well, again, let's go back to what Pablo said, you know, vehicles for entering and leaving the spirit world. When a shaman speaks of the spirit world, he's just that close to a quantum physicist speaking of parallel dimensions. You know, the spirit world is just another word for a parallel dimension, which is an idea that, again, is gaining currency in the world today. So I'm very, I'm very interested in the ongoing UFO revelations that are taking place. It's not been central to my work over the years. I've never felt that I've never felt particularly attracted to the ancient alien

hypothesis in its nuts and bolts form, where aliens are supposed to have crossed interstellar space and built the pyramids. I do believe that a lost human civilization is the best answer to that problem. But the question is, what inspired that? And I think it was experiences in altered states of consciousness and definite encounters. There's no doubt now. Nobody, no matter how rational they think they are, can dispute that large numbers of people under the influence of ayahuasca and straightforward DMT are having encounters with sentient beings or what they interpret as sentient beings. The only question is, what are those things? What are those, what are those beings? And I think that There are two parallel tracks of research here.

One is the nuts and bolts parallel, and the one is the consciousness parallel. And it is only when both are embraced that we're going to get to a solution to this. Do you think that the... I think the nuts and bolts idea that physical aliens are here, and they've got here in kit that's just a bit more sophisticated than our space rockets. That doesn't work for me. But a much more deeply mysterious idea, which may have inspired many ancient civil civilizations. I'm open to that. Yeah, I agree with that. I think it's not quite just this

you know next step in space travel. It's clearly something more. And you know the the showing up around nuclear bases. That's that's interesting. I mean if you have if if if you have a culture like ours global technological civilization, we've been given by the universe an amazing gift, planet Earth, we've been allowed the opportunity to live out our lives through multiple generations on this planet. What a gift to give us. Are we repaying that gift properly when we indulge in mutual destruction? When we even have a word for it called mutually assured destruction, where, you know, if you nuke me, even though I'm dead, my submarines are going to nuke you and wipe you out. This is childish behavior.

This is the behavior of unhinged teenagers who have at their disposal the power of gods, which is what nuclear weapons are. That's right. And if there is any oversight in this vast, mysterious universe that we're only just beginning, just beginning to understand, if there is any oversight, that oversight might well take an interest in the possession of the power of gods by crazed teenagers. which is what all the leaders of the world today are. I have no respect for any single leader in the world today.

I don't care what party they're from. I don't care what country they're the leader of. I don't have respect for any of them. They're not leaders. They're misleaders. They're pursuing their own agendas and deceiving the public in order to get support behind those agendas. We need a whole new way to function in the world

if humanity is going to continue as a species. If anybody cares about that, and I certainly do, I have nine grandchildren. I don't want them to grow up in a world that's suddenly devastated by a nuclear holocaust because of the stupidity, the idiocy, the irresponsibility, and the macho attitudes of these teenagers in old bodies who are running the world. Amen. Well, yeah, that was beautiful. That was amazing.

Robert J. Oppenheimer, who's the father of Fission Bombs, and sort of arguably created this. calamitous world that we're in, but it was a very complex character and regretted it immediately afterwards. There was a rumor that, and we'd have to, you know, collect the exact provenance on this. I'll disclaim to the audience. I don't know for sure if this happened, but a student of his was rumored to come up to him and said, you know, you've created the first atom bomb, you know, how do you feel? And he said, I've created the first atom bomb in modern history. Yeah. And if you look back at the Bhagavad Gita and you look back at like the Vedas, and a lot of, you know, Hindu traditions,

it's descriptions of these sort of crazy death weapons that seem to, you know, tap. I may not quote the line correctly, but it roughly, I am become death, the destroyer of worlds. Yes. You know, I still get a tingle when I repeat that. There's wisdom passed down to us from the past. As far as I know, we're the first human civilization

that had the power of nukes. But what do we really know? about the deep and ancient past. There's so much that may be missing. It's not clear. But what I do know is within the civilizations and even the notion of a lost civilization that I've been pursuing,

I think we're the first to have embraced these horrific weapons whereby a planetary apocalypse can be brought upon us by our own behavior, where we can actually do it to ourselves, where we don't need that gigantic solar outburst, or we don't need to be hit by multiple pieces of a disintegrating comet. We're so stupid and so irresponsible that we'll just do it to ourselves.

We're so tribal that we regard our particular tribe as having a right to wipe out other tribes. This has to change if there's to be any future for humanity. Do you think that the veil is thinning and simultaneous to multipolar nuclear world that's on the brink? We're also sort of commensurately waking up. Yeah, I do. I do. I think the only hope is an elevation of consciousness. And that has to be across a wide range of the population.

No dictator comes to power without a substantial mass of the population supporting that dictator. They don't just seize power. They're manifesting a particular impulse within society. And that impulse comes from low consciousness, a very low state of consciousness. And I would say that my comment on leaders a moment ago, I would say those who are leading the world or misleading the world today are at the lowest possible state of consciousness that a human being can have and how tragic it is that they're, that they're running the world. Consciousness change will be what saves us. If it, if it can

happen fast enough, if more and more people wake up and realize the predicament we've put ourselves in and realize that we're all fellow human beings sharing this journey on this amazing garden of a planet, voyaging through the universe. And we need to look after each other and look after ourselves. Great power brings great responsibility. We should not use that power for destruction. We should use it for building and for construction. If people are in a more difficult condition than we are, we should help them get out of that condition. We shouldn't kill them off. That's beautiful. Do you remember when we talked about the Teos Cave? Are you familiar with that? I am, yeah. I've never really followed.

of that up much, except it's becoming more and more obvious. And again, I tried to look into this in season two of ancient apocalypse, that the Amazon is a place of secrets, a great unknown. And the moment we start scratching the edges of that unknown, we find things that are stunning and awe-inspiring and just, we never conceived of them before. So the notion of, what is it, these gold tablets in the in the Taos caves. It's Ecuador, if I recall correctly. Exactly, at the edge of Ecuador, these cave that they came to have ancient, what feels like an alien metallic artifacts. It's like a library actually of these books.

And the interesting thing is, you know, I've always found this to be the most interesting thing about the Teos cave is that, because who knows whether it exists, but Neil Armstrong went to the moon, he comes back, he acts kind of weird to be honest, by just objective accounts and, you know, says some interesting things. And then the next expedition he goes on has nothing. to do with space. It's to this cage at the edge of the Amazon, which is rumored to have these sort of alien artifacts, and he brings this BBC film crew in with him in 1975. I want to watch that documentary. Yeah, right? Well, it's online. I'll send it to you.

Please, please, please. Yeah. And what happened? He didn't find it. But I'm in touch with this guy who claims that his father led Neil Armstrong down the wrong path. Yeah. So, and then we had a call with him, and you were like, I don't think that's going to happen. Like, you were like, I don't think you guys have the answer to this. But who knows? Who knows? Is there a place where, like, if you had just infinite money, is there a place you would look now that you think is the most productive?

Do you think it is the Amazon? Do you think it's lightering the Amazon for it? No, it's more than one place. Okay. And I've tried to draw attention to this through my work. The reason that I'm interested in the idea of a lost civilization at all is because, because of these astonishing shared symbols and ideas

that are found all around the world, the shared knowledge, the same idea of what happens after death and so on. That's where my curiosity has driven me to inquire into this possibility at all. And I have very definite reasons for inquiring into this possibility.

But I'm often accused of presenting what they call a God of the Gaps argument. When I say that there are certain very important parts of the world that archaeologists have never really looked in properly at all. That's not a god of the gaps argument. I'm arguing the case for a lost civilization because of a massive evidence that has led me to the conclusion that there is a forgotten episode in the human story and that it manifests through very many shared ideas and influences all around the world.

But the gaps are not just any old gaps. The gaps are the Sahara Desert. The Sahara Desert, But yeah, there's been some archaeology, but it's pretty minimal. I think if we want to get into the origins of ancient Egyptian civilization, we're going to have to start looking at what the Sahara was doing during the Ice Age. Indeed, we're going to have to start looking at what a lot of places we're doing in the Ice Age. The Sahara, about 9 million square kilometers, hardly touched by archaeology. I'm not saying there's no archaeology, but it's minimal.

I would like to see a much more expanded investigation of the entire Sahara Desert, which we know was green and fertile and a great place for people to evolve a civilization. Do you know Jimmy Corsetti? I know Jimmy. So what's your, so it's like you have. I'm not into the eye of the Sahara. The rich shot circuit. The rich.

I'm not into it. I'm not going to write it off completely. Yeah. I get that the ring structure resembles how Plato described Atlantis. But it's premature for me to pronounce on that because I've never been there. Well, you think Atlantis was. possibly in North America. Randall Carlson thinks maybe it was in the Azores, in Portugal,

and then Jimmy thinks. I think the Azores is a very interesting, very interesting potential, but I think it was more than one place. Okay. I think it was a global. It was a civilization that precisely occupied the places that were very hospitable during the Ice Age,

which are not accessible or not hospitable now. And the Sahara Desert is one of those. The Amazon rainforest is another. The submerged continental, shelves that were above water during the ice age and are now underwater. Again, the Amazon, the Sahara Desert, the submerged continental shelves, none of them have had enough research done to say, oh, there was definitely no lost civilization. We have to do more research. Those gaps on their own wouldn't be enough, but it's the curiosity, it's the clues, it's the mysteries,

it's the enigmas from the past, the archaeology does not explain that motivate the quest for a lost civilization of the past. And, Then when we ask ourselves, when I ask myself, what are the most likely places that we're going to find the hard evidence for that, those are the places precisely where archaeology hasn't looked enough. And where they are looking, like in the Amazon, as I show in season two of age of apocalypse, where they are looking, they're finding extraordinary mysteries. They're finding that the Amazon was once populated by tens of millions of people, that they were able to feed themselves, that there were huge cities in the Amazon with permanent populations, that there are enormous geometrical earth. earthworks precisely, very precise on an enormous scale, which actually can only be seen in full form from an aerial view. And yet there they are. And that's an example of stories that you've heard 16th, 15th century explorers. Yeah. Seeing these things, driving your research. Yes. And then

you corroborating those stories. And if you were to a priori discount those stories, you wouldn't be able to figure this stuff out. And you're doing real scientific work. That's right. And that's one of the differences between me and me and archaeologists is that they do a priori discount those stories. And yet when those stories are groundtruthed, as has been the case in the Amazon, with the introduction of LIDAR technology, those stories turn out to be true. Absolutely. Well, I would bet on everything you're saying because, you know, archaeology is 200 years old. and the history of archaeology is the history of human civilization getting older. So I think it's actually an easy base case bet

to just say, you're probably right. Well, I wouldn't go so far, but what I would say, what I would say I'm probably right on is that it's worth approaching the past with a much more open mind. Absolutely. Whether I'm right in everything that I say,

that's another matter. Of course. It's one of the areas where my archaeologists enemies or friends constantly misrepresent me because they misrepresent me as somebody who's saying, I've proved the existence of a lost civilization. I have never made such a claim. I have never made such a claim. I am following my curiosity. And I hope that readers and viewers will take that journey with me and will see the inspiration of the past and will do their own work on it. This is a work in progress. I am nowhere near proving the existence of a lost.

civilization, just like they are nowhere near proving the non-existence of such a thing. But you're breaking, look, everybody who watches ancient apocalypse grew up reading in a textbook that people crossed the Bering Strait in a specific time period in the Ice Age. There were no people in North America before that. And you're showing footprints. From 23,000 years. Right. So, like, that's important, you know.

Whereas the old model says. that the Americas weren't inhabited by humans until just 13.5,000 years ago or less. Fortunately, that old model is out of the window now. But what is still facing severe opposition from archaeology, you really have to nail everything down to such a point that they actually can't dismiss it before they begin to accept it. And those footprints in New Mexico, 23,000-year-old human footprints in New Mexico, which are interspersed with footprints of mammoth, and mastodons and giant sloths and all the extinct megafauna of the Ice Age,

they actually have been dated. You can't date the footprint, but you can date seeds that are embedded within them. And those seeds that have been done multiple times now, even the most hostile archaeologists can't reject it any longer. Those footprints are 23,000 or maybe a bit older. But what is still not accepted by the majority of archaeologists is even much older evidence for humans in the Americas,

going back as much as 130,000 years into the past, 10 times older than the supposed first inhabitation of the Americas as it was held by our kills until just a few years ago. Another great example, I think, is 65, 70 million years ago, the asteroid impact theory wiping out dinosaurs. That was presented by Luis Walter Alvarez. He was a character in Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer movie because he was instrumental in creating nuclear fission and the atomic bomb.

And he came up with this theory. He was totally castigated by the archaeology community, and now it's played out. It was Lewis and his son Walter. They were both subjected to humiliating attacks by many other scientists. And interestingly, they were relying initially on the same data that I've been criticized for saying data. Apparently in America, you say data. Yeah, but that's okay.

I think anybody watching would get, you know, make the adjustment live in their heads. Yeah. They were initially relying on what I called impact proxies. They didn't have a crater. This was one of the reasons why their critics found it so easy to dismiss them. They said, where's the crater? You know, if you're talking about wiping out an entire clade of creatures, all the dinosaurs go overnight, there must be a crater. And there isn't one. But they said, no, we don't need a creature because we've got the proxies, which proved that there was a huge impact. We've got the melt glass. We've got the carbon microsferules. We've got the, we've got the carbon microsferules. We've got. We've got. We've got. We've got. We've got. We've got. We've, we've got. We've got the Trinotype, we've got the shocked quarts. You know, we've got evidence all over the world of a boundary layer that testifies to this. But it still wasn't accepted until they found the crater. These are, which is the Chicksculube crater, deeply buried in the Gulf of Mexico. It's the same argument that's being used to reject the notion that there was impacts with an airbursts from a series of objects of a disintegrating comet. the debris trail of a disintegrating comet roughly 12,800 years ago.

That's the Younger Dryass Impact Hypothesis. At the moment, the prime evidence for that is exactly the same impact proxies that Lewis and Walter Arvarez were offering for their theory, which eventually proved to be completely correct. And I think it will be the same with the Comet Research Group and their work on the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis. Well, I pray all the amazing work you're doing, all the amazing consciousness work you're involved in as well,

that moves faster than whatever Tored Meteor stream shower we might be hitting as an earth. And it's been an absolute honor to sit down with you, Graham. Thank you. It's always a blast. And we really appreciate everything you've done. Total pleasure. I always enjoy talking to you as well, Jesse. I remember our last conversation very well, and it was a great pleasure.

So thank you for having me on the show again. Always. Do you guys have anything? Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. on the macro level of what the world is going through right now,

I think we're on the precipice of a really unfathomal paradigm shift and our all understanding of the place in the universe, our human history. So I think your work is almost like it's time as we can really feel people starting to be more familiar with it. But I actually think like this decade that we're in, it's only going to be year by year more people being open to this because everything is going to be in question. Yeah. And it's not just going to be like, wait, well, you know, like we've heard astronomers for

the past 20 years tell us that the universe is 13.8 billion years old and now it's like 27. Yeah, exactly. That's one of my motto. Stuff just keeps on getting older. Yeah. And the UFO thing is actually really cool too because you have all these executives at Lockheed Martin and stuff saying like, basically expressing extremely trippy out there world. You have this guy, this guy Jim Ryder, this VP of space systems there saying that the v. The veil is thinning and that that is literally the magnetosphere of the earth, which is weakening right now.

And so we're seeing more and more of this stuff as a result of that. It's interesting with perception that the more and more people who start to perceive something that previously has not been looked at, the more visible that thing becomes. It's like the energy, it's like the energy of an open mind. spreads out. And it's interesting that this is mobilized to a certain extent around ancient history because the so-called leaders in the study of the past are archaeologists. And I think this is one of the reasons why my work has been found so threatening by archaeologists, because I'm questioning their leadership. But interestingly, on a broader scale, people all over the world are questioning all kinds of leadership.

Yes. Particularly political leadership, but also medical leadership and other leadership. We are seeking to have sovereignty. Well, do you believe in the Age of Aquarius? You know, like, that... Yeah, we live in the dawning of the Age of Aquarius, which of course is another processional motif. That's right.

That's about the procession out of the Age of Pisces, when Pisces houses the Sun on the Spring Equinox, and into the Age of Aquarius, when Aquarius houses the Sun on the Spring Equino. But it's also... We are at that liminal point right now. But it also surrounds a collapse in global leadership. Hierarchical structures are probably going to collapse.

And it feels like they're in the death throws and that sort of happening. It does. It's a very challenging time. It's also a time filled with potential for hope for the future. I can agree. Ultimately, the choice is up to us. And emerging of the science and the spirit, kind of what you're doing, where your work is the interplay between your own into.

consciousness, and then evidential artifacts. Yeah. And it's this oscillation back and forth, and they're kind of meeting at some omega point. Yeah. And I see that happening everywhere, and it's beautiful. Yeah, it is. It is. 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.

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