Megalithic Marvels - Lost Tech of Angkor Wat / Cassie Coppersmith

Episode Date: December 16, 2025

Precision spindles featuring machine-like lathe markings, 3D intricate carvings, depictions of ice age mammals, the largest cut barays on earth, inverted clamp crevices, giant precision lingas, and huge megalithic blocks featuring 90 degree angles, interlocking nubs and drill holes - why does mainstream archaeology ignore the evidence that lost ancient technology was used to engineer Angkor Wat and the many other incredible temples and structures in and around Cambodia's Siem Reap area? Back from our recent Cambodia expedition, I sit down with Cassie Coppersmith (explorer, researcher and host of the 'Secrets in Stone' podcast) to discuss the many mind-blowing anomalies that we witnessed. We provide the receipts in 4k videoFOLLOW CASSIE HERE JOIN ME ON A TOUR

Well, I am very excited to be joined again by my friend Cassie Coppersmith, Explorer, researcher, host of the Secrets in Stone podcast. She was also the co-host of our recent tour to Cambodia, and we're going to talk about some incredible stuff in this episode. We're going to talk about ancient technology, lost civilizations, in the forbidden history of Anchorwat, the Coquare Pyramid and the many ancient structures and temples in Cambodia. Seam Reef Area. Cassie, how are you? I'm great. Derek, how are you doing? I'm great. It feels like our trip was forever ago, even though it was just a month ago. You've survived since we got back, it looks like. Yeah, doing well. It took, you know, a couple days to get over my jet lag and the flu that I managed to catch while we were over there. But I'm fully recovered now. I've had a chance to reflect on the trip. It was such a phenomenal time and learned a lot of really interesting

things while we were there. It was an amazing trip. What an amazing group we had. It was my largest tour I've been a part of, so that was cool. Like I mentioned on the previous show, we had like 20 plus people that had joined me on two or three other tours. It was just such an amazing group. If you guys are listening, we love you. The people of Cambodia were amazing. amazing, so hospitable. And of course, the coffee was awesome, all those iced lattes. And then you got me on to the smoothies. What was that one green smoothie you got me on to? Yeah, with avocado and spinach. We had to have a couple of healthy moments, didn't we? Yeah, you know, that might not sound good to some people, but I've got to really watch my sugar.

And so like an avocado smoothie was like my only option. But it was a great trip. And you were crazy, like, after a week long, most of us were beat in that humidity, climbing all those temples. But here you are going off to Laos for another, what was it, four-day adventure? I was in Laos for three days, and then I came back to Cambodia for another three days. Actually, went back to Coquare for an entire day because that site is just so amazing. So Laos was really special. We can talk about that a little bit later if you want.

and then, yeah, got to see a couple of the sites we didn't get to hit on our tour right before I came back home about a week later. Shout out to you again. You brought just a wealth of information to our tour. People loved the just the feedback you were giving. They loved the anomalies you were pointing out. It was really cool to start off our tour on day one with the conference in the big room. with the PowerPoints, and it was just cool seeing you up there, living the dream, co-hosting this tour.

And I just loved how we started out getting everybody thinking about the anomalies beyond the mainstream narrative, right? And so by the time we stepped onto our first site, people were looking for the crazy statues. They were looking for the precision cuts and all that good stuff. So thanks again. But I want to ask you, out of the gate. Okay, this was your second time. now to Cambodia, two anchor watt, like hit us with one of your big takeaways.

So I did a whole lot of research between my first trip where I acknowledged pretty quickly on my first trip that the stories that I was hearing about the site weren't necessarily aligning with what I was seeing with my own eyes. Did a couple of episodes on different sites in Cambodia, a lot of deep research, especially around the excavations that happened in the 1930s. There's a lot of really interesting photos. Unfortunately, Cambodia was severely looted from the 30s all the way up through the Khmer Rouge time period. And so for the last 50 or so years, Cambodia is just being looted. So these images from the 1930s are really interesting because you get to see how the sites were run down.

before they were rebuilt, you get to see a lot of the artifacts that were uncovered there. And what I started noticing about those photos, and then again on the ground with you, is there's a lot of really unexplainable things in Cambodia that really nobody talks about, whether it's these spindles that are clearly being made with lathe technology. and the first trip I was in Cambodia, I only saw reasonably small spindles, but some of the sites you and I went to with this tour group, the spindles were a foot across.

And you could, just the sheer weight of one of these, you can imagine putting those on a machine, spinning it, getting them formed, and then putting them in these massive windows. So I'm always struck by, I guess, A, the technology you see when you go to these sites, and B, how old they really seem. You know, the storyline is that they were all built really between 800 and 1,300 AD. And when you walk around on these sites, they feel almost incalculably old.

And you can see the wear on them. You can see the weathering. And these are reasonably hard. you know, sandstone in Cambodia is harder. It's like a, you know, six, seven on the most scale. So it's not, it's not a soft sandstone like you would find in Utah or something like that. So that's what I was just continually struck with, struck by when we were on this trip. It's just how old and precise and unexplainable these sites are.

You mentioned spindles and spindle technology. Let's stop and talk about this a little bit. because for me this was one of the most incredible things to see on this tour at so many of these sites were the spindles. And you and I have covered this on some other episodes where you went in death, but let's do it again. Because at these sites, when we say spindles, we're talking about, like Cassie said, some of these are a foot wide in diameter like. Some of them are smaller, maybe even bigger, but you get up close to these and they are

precision as precision gets, mostly made of sandstone correct? And you get up real close and you see the micro, what looks like, machine lines. So talk to us about when you say spindle technology, kind of what do you visualize that might have looked like? Any thoughts on that? The technology itself, I don't know. I mean, you can see at the top of the spindle in the bottom, there are some that have been removed from windows and are just lying around the sites. And you can see that they had little kind of nub is the wrong word, but protrusions out of the end of them that have since been used to put them in place in the windows. But in my mind, if you think about how those could have been made, whether it's a stand-up or horizontal lathe, most likely it was that, you put this

piece of sandstone into it and then it starts spinning. in, you know, and then they formed, you know, they used a machine to cut these spindles as they moved on this lathe. What was interesting to me is I found in my time at CoCare spindles that looked to me to be almost identical to the one next to them, almost like there's a program being run. It's not random. I don't think it's a person sitting there pushing the machine. in and out at will making whatever design they want. It felt like one spindle looked almost exactly like the other. I saw this up in Laos as well. So what I believe are the oldest sites,

which are really the pyramids around Cambodia and some of the temple structures immediately surrounding these pyramids. They all have very, very large spindles that you can clearly see these lay blinds. in. Then as you move into these less precise, what I believe are some of the newer temples, you start to see these spindle shapes change and then ultimately, you know, for example, if you go to the top prom pyramid or temple where you see the famous dinosaur carving, those spindles are simply carved into the walls as a feature or a design. They're not

stand-alone spindles like you see at the other site. So spindles are actually a really interesting way to start to think about the relative age of these sites compared to each other. Yeah, Jason Kirk's and I were near the Coquare Pyramid Complex. And you said that's also pronounced. How do you say it? I believe Cochay is another way to pronounce it. There's mixed results online, but I think there's a multiple ways to pronounce the site. Yeah, because even when you reference the Khmer civilization. I've also heard it's also pronounced Kamai more properly. Right. But when we were at the Kokea pyramid, Jason found what looked like the broken off top of a spindle. And you might have seen the short I made of this on video. And we get up close. This thing was just incredible precision shape.

You know, it's this greenish red color. And then I said, flip it over on the bottom. Let's check it out. And I was just thinking it was just broken off, you know, from an entire spindle. But like you just said, there was a nub on the bottom. Yeah. And so it wasn't broken. It had just detached from, you know, I guess a larger piece possibly. And so that was that was a fun surprise. Yeah.

If you ask the official tour guides in Cambodia, what are these? They call them window dressings, which, you know, implies that they're purely decorative. One of the guides that I used up in Laos said that, you know, she said it was a way to cool the temples. It created movement in the wind as it came around the spindle into the temple space. So those were the two examples that I've heard from, you know, kind of the official storyline of what the purpose of these were. If you read your comment section and your videos and things like that, a lot of people believe, that they may have had some acoustic properties that they may have been used, I guess, for sounds or for even communicating different residences and things like that. So I don't know what these are.

I don't know what the purpose was, but they feel very deliberate. They're, again, at all of these oldest sites. So I have to believe they had a purpose other than pure decoration. The big takeaway about the spindles. You get up close to these, like as close as I am to my computer here, and you see machined lines on them. No chisel and hammer would make these lines, you know. So again, it just blows away the theory of the archaic tools making all this, right? And so I guess to set up the rest of our conversation, if you're new to the whole concept of these ancient structures and temples in Cambodia. The mainstream narrative basically says that most of what we see in the CM-Reap area were made by the Khmer or Khmer builders from circa about 800 to

1400 AD, correct? Correct. And they basically tell us that they use these huge slave armies, ropes, wooden rollers, elephants, boats to make all of this. But again, there's some There's a lot more going on when you get on the ground and you're looking at this with your own eyes. Because all over these sites, as we're going to get into, you see these metal clamp crevices, 3D ornate carvings, depictions of what looks like prehistoric ice age animals. These massive moats, which I definitely want you to talk more about the largest on earth, precision cut. These lingams, some of the precision cut lingams were blowing my mind. So I want you to tell us kind of what the lingam is. Again, we talked about the spindles, the lathe marks,

and then just what looks like huge megalithic blocks featuring perfect 90-degree angles, interlocking nubs, what looks like to me even drill holes in many places, right? And then we've got the LIDAR scans that you've talked in depth about before. There was so much going on here. And so let's talk about Anchor Wat specifically. I got a couple notes here, but what were your new takeaways about the anomalies of Anchor Wat? I've been to Anchor Wat twice, well, three times now. I went twice on my first trip and once last time.

We got to see the sunrise over Anchor Wat, which was really special. We had to wake up, I think, at 4.30 in the morning in order to see that. But that was a really beautiful thing to see, just a moment of peace before going into the temple with thousands of our best friends. I guess my two big takeaways from Angkor, or three, the first is it feels to me like the core of Angkor is older than the outer perimeters of Angkor, as if it was the original structure was built there and then it was built onto over time. I say that because some of the statues look a little bit less precise,

as you move out to the outer rims of the site. The stone doesn't seem nearly as weathered as it does in the core. So that was one of my first observations. Secondly, in the LIDAR scans, there's a whole lot of mounds that are all around this site. These mounds are big. They're 30 feet across, 10, 15, 20 feet high.

They're huge. Archaeologists have called them occupation mounds because they've done excavations on them, and they've seen that there was, you know, lithic scatters and pottery and things over the top of these. I don't doubt that people lived on them at some point, but I don't believe that the mounds were made for housing. I think that there's a different purpose to those. And we got to go out to the, I guess it was the southeast corner of the main part of Ancourt, inside the moat to the southeast corner and we actually got to walk these mounds which was a really cool experience to see just the size of them they're almost easy to miss because they're so big right

yeah that was one of the highlights of visiting anchor watt was this little side expedition you took us all on in this wet jungle uh that was so cool we were literally looking for the mounds that were in these LIDAR scans. And, I mean, there was like prehistoric snails this big in the jungle. I know there was giant bats because we'd seen those in other places. But that was like a real Indiana Jones experience. So thank you for taking us into the damp, wet, scary jungle. But I was proud of the group.

You know, a lot of them decided to go back there with us. And I personally came out of that little expedition with at least 30 mosquito bites. So people were brave to go back there. Yeah, I was. I was eaten alive. My first big takeaway from going through Anchor Wat, this thing is so colossal. I mean, you know it's big if you've seen photos or some videos on YouTube, but this thing is so massive in scale. And it was so amazing to see the sunrise.

And then how you point out during the spring equinox, the sun rises directly over the central tower if you're standing on that main causeway. So this thing was engineered almost perfectly. I think estimates say 50 million stones are in that anchor watt complex. So we're talking 400 plus acres, which is like 10 million square feet. The central towers, as people put, point out almost look like these drill bits going vertically straight up. The place is nuts. It's

213 feet high. There's five towers left, 12 staircases. And this thing, like you said, when you get up to that, what is there, is there three stories basically do it? Yes. When you get up to the third story and you look at the colossal biggest tower, it is so. massive and it does look like the older towers or the central towers predate a lot of these other structures that were added later. Yeah. And they look a little bit melted, do they not? Super weathered.

Like these could be way older than, what are they saying, 900 AD. Yeah, absolutely. I totally agree with you. So again, the mainstream, I think they say that if I'm pronouncing this right, King's Saravaraman the second built it early 12th century. And then after him, I think his son added on to it and made it in this Buddha style. However, as Praveen points out, the Buddha style stuff is clearly inferior to the Hindu stuff. and the son would have had access to the same ancient engineers as the supposed father.

So it looks like many centuries passed between these two civilizations, where you have the much older precision Hindu look, and then this inferior, newer Buddhist look. Tell us a little bit more about that. Yeah, you see that, interestingly, a lot in the statues. Now there are some statues left at Anchor. A lot of them, again, have been looted or looters came in and only took the head, for example. So there's a lot of headless statues still within Angkor.

But you do see that there are very, very precise, very well-made statues. And then right next to them, you'll see a Buddhist-style statue, you know, with the folded legs. And a lot of times there's a Naga behind them. and the quality of that statue, it's newer, remember, and it looks substantially less precise. It looks like a totally different quality of artisan made that statue versus the older ones that you can still see at Angkor if you look hard. And it's not just that, it's stonework, it's all of the additional details that they added when they converted this to a Buddhist temple. It's just, it looks, as Ben from Uncharted X says, it's the tail of two industries and you can see them side by side at Anchor. You know, again, when we're talking Anchor Wat, I know a lot of people have watched Praveen Mohan's channel in some of his videos.

And I wanted to get your take on what he shared regarding some stats at Anchor Wat. And if you agree with this, he says that, you know, if we calculate the weight of all the sandstone blocks in this comment, complex, it equals about 52 million tons of rock. And so, again, the mainstream tells us this thing was built in 1100 AD in 37 years. But according to his stats, if the people of that time in 1100 AD worked from sunup to sundown for 37 years with no breaks, this would equal 162,000 hours, which equals 60 tons of rock every hour, which means, One ton of rock every minute needs to be cut, carved, lifted, and aligned. So that's one ton every minute, clearly impossible. And he points out there's no quarry near the temple.

The main sandstone rock quarry is 50 miles away. So one ton every minute must include transporting over 50 miles away for the 37 years to work out. And this is what they tell us they did 900 years ago. Again, using slaves, elephants, wooden carts, chisels, and ham. cameras, any, do you agree with that and any thoughts? I think that that's really interesting math. And I love it when people do math like that, because it just shows how absurd the official story is. And it's not just at Anchor, it's sites all over the world.

But on top of what he points out, you have to remember, they dug a moat that's a mile long. They had, they built these mile long spiral embankments that were discovered on LIDAR, on the south side of the site. Just doing that is a massive undertaking all on its own. Then they built the mounds on the inside. They're moving and carving these stones, but then you see these beautiful reliefs all the way around, beautiful intricate carvings. Carvings that are so intricate, you can roll up a gum wrapper and you can stick it behind them. It's a fully sealed carving that has, you know, it's three, it's fully 3D, right? So it, and not to mention they're taking these stones all the way from the cooling mountains. So, um, I love stats like that. Those are my favorite.

And it just, it just shows that this is, I think, much more mysterious than the official storyline tells us. You mentioned the ornate carvings. That doesn't get enough attention. You know, again, because you have a temple that's so colossal, so massive, we just get so in awe of that. you get up close to these ornate carvings and like you say um again this isn't rose granite like in egypt but it is this much harder sandstone it's it's it's a lot harder apparently than the sandstone in egypt this was the best stone the hardest stone they had right right and you get up close to these ornate carvings and it looks like 3D printed i hate to use that term but that's what this looks like what Cassie is describing and what you're seeing on video here,

it's not just some, you know, one-dimensional, two-dimensional carving. It's 3D to where you can get up close to the fingers and you're seeing around the fingers and there's even, you know, a hole going in through the hand. There's space behind it. And you see this not just at Anchor Wat, but at so many of these smaller temples as well. And we've got to talk about your favorite site where I saw that the most.

So let's not forget that. Yeah. But Anchor Wat, an incredible place. So many anomalies. We've talked about the LIDAR scans. But something else I wanted to point out was I've heard, you know, unfortunately they don't let us get up to the top central tower anymore. I think back in the day you could.

Now you can only get to the base of it and look up. But apparently there's a hole in the top. of the central tower and a hole in the bottom of it. And the hole in the floor leads to a secret chamber some 100 feet deep, where apparently there was inside a stone box which has since vanished. Nearby at the Banti Sam Ray Temple, it still has this sacred box. So the one at Anchorwat might have looked like this one. And inside this box, according to mainstream, the box house house house.

the remains of this builder king. But people point out if that's true, why was there a hole in the top of the central tower? Because they have found stone boxes in the same area that had quartz crystals and apparently bronze wires in them. And I've seen photos of those, I believe. And so some wonder,

did the hole in the top of the main tower pass light into the floor and shine on the secret chamber box that held quartz crystals and wires. And again, does this somehow point to ancient powered solar energy? Any thoughts on that? I have a suspicion that Anchor Wat was not a temple, at least the way it was originally built. And the reason it was originally built,

I don't think it was built as a temple for worship. I think it was built for, some sort of specific purpose, whether it had to do with energy generation. I mean, just look at the spiral embankments to the south of it. Look at the alignments. Look at the way that the towers look melted. I think that there was a lot more going on here than it being the namesake temple for the builder that ultimately became his funerary temple.

I think it was at least originally. used for something much bigger than that. Okay, Cassie, let's talk about your favorite site. Tell us what that is and why it's your favorite site. Bantiase Re is my favorite site, although it was my favorite site before we went to Cocare. I think Cocare may now be my favorite site, but Ventees Re is this really, really special temple that was clearly made for worship. They call it the woman's temple. It's made of red sandstone, which is again a harder kind of sandstone than the regular sandstone you see more broadly around the anchor area. So you walk into this temple and it, first of all, it's bright red. It's very small. And you, you walk around and you

start to see the most beautiful ornate carvings you've ever seen. They look, they look like, like lace work. You walk up to them and it's millimeters of detail and the entire site is covered with this. They have the precision cut spindles. The site just blows me away every time I go there. Not just for what you see, but what you feel. The site's energy, granted, the day that we were there, it was maybe the hottest day that

we had experienced. But still, even though you're boiling a. under that sun, the energy at that site feels different. It's engineered to make you feel a certain way as you walk into it and walk around it. And again, if you go back to those 1930s photos, some of the most incredible and precise statuary that's been found anywhere in Cambodia was found at this site. This became a destination for looters because these statues commanded such a huge huge price on the international illicit art market that they were going in, they were digging them up, they were selling them. You know, you'll find them now in Paris. I think there used to be

some at the Met before they returned them. So this site is really, really special all the way through it. And that's why it's my favorite, for sure. It was an incredible site. Like you said, it was so blazing hot that day, I was dripping buckets of sweat, just walking. But I think this site had the most precision elements that I saw anywhere. When you get up to this ornate, intricate carvings, again, they're 3D, they're emerging out. You can stick your finger behind some of them, and they just seem so microscopic. It's like, what nanotechnology were they using to cut them? carve this? What kind of micro drill? You know what I'm saying? That's what it feels like.

And again, they tell us this was just chisels, baby, chisels. Yep. So it was an incredible site. And I love what you showed us in your presentation on day one. These statues found at this site, they look very similar to the megalithic statues of Egypt. One of my favorite things in Egypt are these megalithic statues. I'm not talking about the dynastic Egyptian statues, which are cool. I'm talking about the precision statues made from single pieces of granite that were literally machine made. What you showed us in those old photos looked so similar.

Tell us what kind of stone the statues were. From what I remember, there's really, you can't see them today like on public display, right? You can't see. They have only replicas at the site now. but there were these kneeling, they called them kneeling attendants. And they all were in the same position. They have one knee up. They're kneeling.

They have one hand on the other knee. And there are some that are lions, some that are birds, some that are people. And in up-close photos of these original statues, they have the same, I don't want to call them the same as Egypt, but they remind you of that. They have these raised brow ridges. They have this very peaceful smile. If you look at the back of them, you can see muscle tone in their backs the way it was carved. As I understand it, they're carved out of red sandstone, regular sandstone, and then this third kind of sandstone called greenish gray whack, which is an unfortunate name for maybe

the most beautiful sandstone in Cambodia. But it is incredibly hard. It's as hard as granite. And so it withstands weathering. So it looks just as perfect when it's pulled out of the ground in the 1930s as the day that it was carved. And the detail on them are extraordinary. They're made out of very, very difficult to carve sandstone. And then they were polished.

So you can see pictures of them in the museum in Panam Kulan or in Pan Pan Pan in places like this, where it's shining back at you, you can see people's reflections in them. So there's something special for sure. They feel to me to be very, very old, very, very precise. Before we move on, tell us a little bit about the energy you were feeling at this site. Did you feel it the same way this time as you did the first time? And what did it feel like? It feels like I didn't feel as much this time, I think, because of the heat.

but the first time I went there and this time, it feels like a very special energy. The only way I can describe it is it helps you to drop in. So it's almost, it's like that moment in meditation when everything starts to go quiet. It feels like that. You walk into the site, the sounds become muffled, you can feel the energy in sort of your heart space and it takes you from this frenetic tourist who's trying to get through a site to somebody who's there. I think, you know, it almost feels like you're there for the same reason that people have been there for thousands of years, you know, which is to connect with something

that is not you outside of yourself, something divine. And the site, it's surrounded by water. It has a moat. And so when you walk in, you've got water on all sides. of you, you have this red sandstone, it gets very quiet, and it just, the energy feels very special. And there aren't many places in Cambodia where you feel that. This is one of those sites. I think Bayon, the temple with the faces is another one of those. And, you know, these two examples specifically, you know that these sites were built as places of worship and temples, whereas the pyramids, for example, could have been built for something

completely different, like energy. These sites feel like they were made for worship. And it was interesting at this site. They wouldn't allow you today to get inside the temples, like at other sites. So kind of interesting, what you're describing as your most favorite temple that has some of the most amazing ornate carvings. We're not going to let you go inside these ones. But there were so many sites we could talk about, but we got to just stay focused for the sake of time. On my previous episode last week or the week before I talked about, I think it's pronounced to Bapuan.

That was one of my favorite sites. Go watch that episode. I'm convinced it had an older, superior, megalithic type base that far superior to most of what's built on top of it. But we've got to talk about the co-care or co-key pyramid. This was one of my favorite sites on the whole trip. It was a bit north from the rest of the area. Tell us why this place is special and why you feel it's far different than most of what we saw.

And I want to hear all your stuff first, and then I'll chime in with some thoughts. So Coquare is located, I believe, about 120 miles northeast of Cian Reap. So it's out on the next. northeast side of the country, sort of all by itself. And this site's huge. It has hundreds of temples and structures. Today, you can only go to maybe 20 of them. But, you know, the main, the main temple there is a seven-tier pyramid that is huge, first of all. You know, you walk up to the side of it. It's this, well, it's got, it's, first of all, it's the only pyramid in Cambodia.

that's made 100% of stone all the way through. The rest of the pyramids have an earthen center with laterite and sandstone outside of it. This one is solid all the way through. It's seven tiers. It has a central chamber that goes down from the top through all the way down to the bottom. When you walk around the side of it,

you can't walk up the front the way that the original builders would have intended. You have to walk around the side up a tourist staircase. But as you're walking up the side of it, you can see that these stones, there's no mortar, they're perfectly fit. They have odd shapes. You and I spent five minutes just staring at these precision lines on the side of the statue. Then you get up to the top, and the largest stones are at the top.

These stones help me with estimates on the side. here but they had to have been 20 feet wide maybe five five feet tall their massive megalithic blocks stacked perfectly on top of each other there are at least seven tons I believe so they brought those massive stones all the way to the top you know you get to the top you have a commanding view all the way around the entire valley there's a man-made hill to the west of this pyramid that you are no longer allowed to climb. Don't know the purpose of that. So the pyramid is, I think, first of all, what struck me.

And would love to get your thoughts on the pyramid before we move on to maybe my favorite part of the site, which were these giant lingums. I was running out of time actually going up the pyramid because I was so mind-blown by the colossal blocks, you know, that were surrounding it, the egg. leading up to the pyramid. Like Jason Kirkson and I got so distracted, just trying to film these multi-ton, again, I believe they're severely weathered, but these precision-cut, megalithic blocks that have drill holes, that have 90-degree angles.

I've been posting some of the video footage of this on my social media channels, if you want to check that out. But I was just taken back by the graveyard of stones, you know, approaching the pyramid. And then you start to see the artificial lakes there, right? And you just realize as you see the pyramid in the distance, man, you just feel like it's amplifying natural sources of energy, right? For sure. It's made of sandstone blocks.

And I also read that the volcanic blocks are made inside, which have more iron and is a source of electromagnetic energy. energy. And so you take that combined with the artificial lakes, and it's like this pyramid was, you know, some would say releasing negative ions as an energy source using kinetic energy from the water streams and the artificial lakes. And so like you said, the big thing to point out is most of the other temples are built over and around like an artificial mound. This thing, is solid all the way through. Again, at the top are seven tonne stones. You see the beast creature that is pictured and it's literally holding the sky and you're going to see that on video.

And so I was just blown away by the scale looking up at it and especially looking down from it. The thing looks like a giant energy amplifier. And again, it's seven layers and it's concentric, right? So it becomes smaller, obviously, at the top, which would be directing and focusing the energy. Apparently, seven is a sacred number in the Hindu religion. So that's interesting to point out. And so you just see all these elements which appear to be sacred geometry to amplify energy. I guess those are some of my initial thoughts. And then if you follow that pyramid directly east. So if you walk out, you know, down the main entrance of the pyramid, you go east past the, uh, the water. There are these five, they're called a linga temples.

And there's five of them. And they have the biggest linga I've ever seen in my life. You walk, you walk up to them and they're about seven feet tall. So they, they, they make you look very small when you walk next to them. They're all housed in these ceilingless structures. The linga is facing straight north. There's a doorway facing west directly to the pyramid. And there's five of them that were along this lake in front of the pyramid. As I understand it, these lingas are, they're very, very rare as far as how big they are. So there are found, there's five of them at Cocare. There's one on top of Panambach Mountain in Seam Reap.

It's on top of the seven foot high, 700 foot high hill. They schlepped this thing all the way up to the top. And then as I understand it, there's another one that size in Vietnam and maybe one in Java that I couldn't track down. So these feel, and I don't believe there's. any in India that are this size. So these are really, really unique. They're huge. And to me, that was what made this site my favorite because there's something here that's clearly technological. It's being used in conjunction with the seven tier pyramid. They're all facing north. They're all in perfect alignment. It feels to me like they were being used for some

purpose other than worship, whether it was energy. In some of the ancient Hindu myths, they talk about, you know, giant pillars of fire and light coming out of the top of lingams. You know, you have to wonder how much of those myths are true what was actually happening at these site with these huge lingams. I do have, when I went back to the site the following week, I actually found one that was no longer in the base, the Yoni. So it was sitting out on its own. This thing was at least seven or eight feet long. And I can show you a picture if you'd like.

It was sitting next to a picnic table with some hard hats on it. And it made this picnic table look tiny. It was an active excavation site, an active archeological site. And I was leaning over the top of the fence taking pictures of it. But these are extremely mysterious. I think that they were used for just my personal opinion. I could be completely wrong. Some sort of energy generation device in conjunction with the co-care pyramid.

Again, you see these artifacts. It seem like they predate so much of the rest of the sites, whether it's the lingams. And then we uncovered, I don't even remember what site, the most precision. It looked like it was at the base of a lingam. It was broken, but it had been buried, and it was almost in perfect shape

other than it was broken in half. And you look at the temples, and you look at this piece, and you're going, this is crazy. This is just like something you'd find in Peru. The definition of an out-of-place artifact. Out-of-place artifact. And then I think at Topprom, the Face Temple,

I saw something very similar there. You go into one of the temples is cool, but you look down and there was the base of a broken lingam. And this thing was so precision. You're going to see this on the screen now. I was mind-blown. It was a definition of a machine-made artifact. And I couldn't help myself.

I was standing next to another group that wasn't our group, and they had a tour guide. and I just asked the guy for fun, you know, like I didn't know anything. I said, how did they make this, this cool looking lingam? And he says, the chisel and the hammer. And I just had a good chuckle to myself. And I wish I would have recorded that because it was just so funny. So you see all these out-of-place artifacts, but I wanted to ask you,

one more thing about co-care. And I got to look into this more, but, you know, we heard about these, um, the story or this legend that back in the day, I don't know if it was the late 1800s, early 1900s, apparently two French archaeologists or explorers somehow are at this pyramid.

They go down that huge middle shaft and they get lost, disappear and are never found again. Was there anything else you've learned about that or heard about that? There's nothing else I've heard about that. I found that story. to be very, very interesting. And as I understood it, there were two different groups of explorers that one or two members of their teams ended up disappearing inside this pyramid.

What we haven't talked about is the LIDAR work that's been done at Co-Care. It exposed some really incredible things about this site, namely like a seven-kilometer long dam that was built just north of the pyramid that would have created the largest freshwater lake in all of Cambodia when it was full. So what I'll say about people disappearing in the pyramid is I think that there's a lot that can be figured out with LIDAR at this site that isn't really being talked about. If you look at the scans, the photos of the LIDAR scans, it's a lot. It's a It's really interesting because you'll see certain portions of the LIDAR scans are, they put like a white patch over the top of it.

So you can't see what the LIDAR scan was revealing. And in almost all of the LIDAR photos you see at the Kocare site, they kind of blot out the pyramid and the area around it. If they were to take away that censorship, what do you see around and under this pyramid, coming out from underneath it, you know, we know that they could walk up and there was an access point from the top, but were there other access points to this pyramid from maybe that manmade hill next to it or other areas where you could access it that you can't, you can no longer access it today and maybe that's being hidden from us with some of the LIDAR results.

All right, Cassie, we got a few minutes left. What do you want to talk about regarding all the amazing sites we saw. I know we can't cover them all, but was there anything else that you think we need to hit on? You know, on the last day of the tour, people were maybe a little templed out. It's easy to do in Cambodia. You just go from temple to temple in the extreme heat. You can get very tired. On the last day, everybody kind of went off and did their own thing. And you and I took a Tukuk and went to the Pannamba Kang pyramid, which is at the top of this hill across the road and a little bit north from anchor watt and i found that you know you and i were basically alone at this site you have to walk all the way up this hill and this hill is

it's oddly i'll just say it's oddly symmetrical it is in perfect alignment with uh other other sites in the Anchor Wat and Anchor Tom area. It has four colossal stairways that go up this hill that may or may not be manmade. And you can, when you walk up the front of it, you can still see the old stairwells, you know, with these massive lions at the bottom of them. You can imagine what this thing looked like in its prime. And once you get to the top of it, you're looking over the Western Barret, which is the largest man-made water feature from the ancient period. It was eight kilometers long and two kilometers wide. And you're looking over this massive water feature.

At the top, there's a pyramid with 108 towers. You and I got to go walk up to the top of that, which was, I thought, a really fun, kind of special experience to cap off the trip. Yeah, it was such an amazing experience to end like that. and that was where we saw the sunset the night couple nights before right yep i was so again distracted by what i was seeing at the base of this structure that i didn't even we missed going up there for the sunset with the rest of the group because it was again a graveyard of out-of-place artifacts some of the most precision that i saw on the whole trip um incredible i've been posting some photos

in videos of these, and I know you have too. And I love the one video I got of you explaining that last day we were there of how the mainstream says that this brick and mortar looking structure is the oldest. But you were saying, no, this is clearly a rebuild that was trying to look like the original, the older. Break that down real quick. Yeah, I mean, the general storyline from traditional archaeology is that as the civilization advanced over time, they went from building with purely brick to then becoming more advanced in building with sandstone and laterite. But if you, I covered this in several of my episodes of people are interested in this in depth,

but if you walk up to any of these brick structures, the first thing you'll notice about them is that they have a very old looking sandstone and laterite base. They have reused many of the doorways with the very finely carved lentils over the top of them. Oftentimes they'll even take statues and place them in the sides and then they build bricks around them and they build the bricks to look exactly like the statue or the temple that or the tower that would have been there previously. So in my opinion, the brick structures came later as repair work for these original megalithic structures. I think probably out of a form of respect to try to help rebuild these sites to their

former glory. But the bricks were all they really knew how to build with at that point. And it was easy and it was cheap. And so you see at the base of a lot of these pyramids and sometimes that even at the top, these brick reconstructions of the original structures. And once you have it in your mind that it's a recreation and a rebuild, it's so obvious that these civilizations that only knew how to build with brick would not have come up with a different kind of base and a different kind of doorway

and then reverted to the brick that they knew how to build with. It doesn't make any sense. And then at the top, once we finally got up there on that last day, Again, you see some of the lingams up there. You see even looking at the base floor up there, interlocking, just an incredible site. It was an amazing trip. And I just, again, Cassie loved the attention to detail you brought, the knowledge, the old photos of the statues, and some of the old excavations. again, it just seems to shed so much light when you can look at undactored photos before they were trying to put all this stuff back together.

It just seems like there's so much we can glean from that. But in closing, talk to us real quick. Give us a teaser about your adventure to Laos after that. I know you put out a video, so we'll point people to that in a second. But tell us about what you saw in Laos. Laos is a really, first of all, the country is beautiful and very, very, very. special. I stayed at a beautiful little hotel on an island in the middle of the Mekong River that's right across the river from this ancient side called Wapu. And Wapu's really special.

And it takes a minute to get there. You've got to fly to Laos, you've got to drive from the main city that you landed in down to this site. But once you get there, there's beautiful, very old, structures at the bottom with these precision spindles. You can tell it's old, you can tell it's precise, but then you walk up the side of this mountain. And as you get to the top, you start to notice these huge megalithic boulders that are carved in these really interesting shapes. There's a really famous crocodile that's carved up there. There's a serpent staircase. And it's all of the boulders are carved in almost Peru style carvings. You see, you know, staircases built directly out of the living rock. And what you're struck by is this entire megalithic boulder field has just been

cataclysmically destroyed. These boulders are tilted on their side and you can tell that some of them were thrown over the side of the mountain down the side of the hill. And so just like any of these sites, you get there and you start to walk around and you can, you know, that's why I called my channel secrets in stone because I really think that the stones tell the story more than any textbook ever will. The stones are what the stones told me at this site is that there was potentially an extremely ancient megalithic site here originally at the base of this mountain that has a natural lingam on top There's a huge spring at the fresh water spring at the top. I think this place has been worshipped for I don't know how many thousands of years

There was some sort of cataclysmic event that happened there. These boulders were thrown off the side of the mountain. And then a later, I still believe very old civilization came and built on top of these. So you'll see they built walls over the tops of these megalithic carved folders. And then as you go down the site, you start to see more of the traditional Khmer style statues and spindles and things like that at the bottom. So it was a really, really special site. As Derek said, I did an episode on it that I released. It's only 20 minutes.

It doesn't take long to watch. But it was a very worthwhile trip, even though I did it with the flu. It was worth it. I would highly recommend it to anybody who's interested in this kind of thing. It was a great trip. And we're actually going to try to go back there end of next year, 2006 or early 2027 so keep your eyes out for that and if we do it'll be bigger and better than this tour even was but cassie tell people where they can follow you how they can subscribe to your show your podcast your

youtube and um what your next uh adventure or expedition's going to be uh thanks for that derrick i have a youtube channel secrets and stone uh same same for instagram and facebook as Secrets in Stone or Cassie. Coppersmith. You can find me there. My next adventure, we're heading off to, I'm gonna be in Thailand in February, so I'm gonna go check out some of the temples in Thailand. And then I'm heading to Peru and Easter Island in March.

So doing a lot of travel this spring, and I'm really excited to see the Moai and everything on Easter Island. It's gonna be a great spring, but before I conclude, Derek, I wanna say thank you for inviting me on this trip. It was really, really special. And I know now why people have traveled with you multiple times.

You're just the best host. You put together wonderful tours. So I just wanted to put that plug in for anybody who's interested in an ancient history tour. Derek is the person to go with. He's fun. He's laid back. He watches out for you. He makes sure you get lunch when service is slow.

And so if you're looking to go to Israel or Egypt or Peru next year, jump on one of his tours, I couldn't recommend him more. That means a lot coming from a well-traveled expert like yourself. Thank you. It was a great tour. Thanks to everybody who came. And yeah, if you're looking for a future tour, we got Egypt coming up in December 1st of 2006.

It's going to be amazing. And then my Peru and Easter Island tours in May. And so you can go to megalithicmarvels.com slash tours to learn all about those and lock in some early bird. rates but everybody listening watching go follow cassie secrets and stone podcast on youtube especially follow their facebook twitter she's always putting out good stuff cassie thank you so much for your time and i can't wait for your next video thank you so much Derek it was awesome talking to you again see you