Megalithic Marvels - Strange Artifacts, Giant Lords & Ancient Mounds of North America / Dr Gregory Little

Episode Date: May 6, 2024

In this exclusive interview I am joined by explorer, researcher and author Dr Gregory Little who has written many books which include "The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Native American Indian Mounds & Earthworks." Dr Gregory is the foremost expert regarding the ancient mound builders who thrived from coast to coast across North America in ages past. Did you know there were once millions of ancient mounds dated as old as 11,000 years old scattered across North America? Why do many of the strange artifacts that were unearthed inside these mounds appear to look as if they were Mayan artifacts? Why have many skeletons measuring between 7-8 feet long been found inside these mounds? Why are our history books and history classes nearly silent regarding this ancient mound building culture? Dr Gregory and I dive into all of these topics and more in this exciting new episode. Follow Dr Gregory on X here Get Dr Greg's book here JOIN US FOR ONE OF OUR 2024 ADVENTURE TOURS HERE Fair Use Notice: This video may contain some copyrighted material whose use has not been authorized by the copyright owners. We believe that this not-for-profit, educational, and/or or commentary use on the Web constitutes a fair use of the copyrighted material (as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. If you wish to use this copyrighted material for purposes that go beyond fair use, you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.

Stargate Voyager Well, it is great to have Dr. Gregory little back on the show with me. Greg is, I would say, the foremost expert on the ancient mound builders of North America. He's the author of many books, including this book I got right here, the illustrated encyclopedia of North American Indian Mounds and Earthworks. A Must Have. I'll have the link to this book in the show notes. So just click the link below if you want to get this book.

But Greg, thank you so much for joining me again. Hey, thank you for having me. You kind of surprised me with that book. That is a, I will say this, it is a wonderful exercise book. You can take that book and, you know, do all sorts of exercises with it. And actually, I'll tell a very quick story, if I may, an archaeologist who's a skeptic, who is very friendly with me. We interact a lot.

And his name's Andy White. He's now with Illinois. I can't remember which university he's with. but he posted a video just a couple weeks ago. And while he was talking about, he's very skeptical, so he was talking about alternative historians. And in the background on a desk, he had a copy of my book there. And I sent him a little note, and I said, man, you need to move that book.

You know, it's going to ruin your reputation. And then in the next video, he replied to that. And he said, well, I want to reply to Greg Little. He said, I use that book as a paperweight. He said, I do a lot of artwork and I have to flatten it out. So it's so big and so heavy, I use it as a paperweight. So it's an excellent gift for a paperweight for people or a doorstop. I'll add that.

But thank you for showing that. It is a heavy book. I'll give you that. But that's because of the vast research you've put into this subject. And in that book, what I love about it is you cover each state. And we're going to talk about a lot of these states. but every mound that's been discovered as far as we know in America in this book with all these pictures. So it's a must have. So Greg, you know what? We're living in exciting times in regards

to what feels like the mass awakening taking place regarding our ancient history. And I'm meeting more and more friends that never were interested in history at all. And now it's like, man, they're excited about what seems like the cover up of history and that there's so much more than we've been led to believe. And so being that there might be many watching this interview who do not know yet about this subject we're going to dive into or they're just kind of learning about it, I thought maybe you could just start out by giving us just kind of a basic overview of what's going on with this ancient mound building culture of America.

And then we'll take it from there. Okay. Great question. Great lead up. to it. Well, first of all, all the mounds that exist are not in the book. I don't think it'd be possible to do one. There's probably a million mounds that still exist. So what I've focused on are the ones that are obvious to see, that are sites where you can go, plus a lot of important ones. I think there's 8,000 mounds listed in that book somewhere, and a lot of them just are, you know,

it says that it's near another site or whatever. But here's the thing. Okay, when I went to school, when I went to elementary school and went to college, I took some history courses in college. I also took two anthropology courses and mounds were never mentioned. And as I started publicizing mounds on Twitter and Facebook, I mean, people were just coming out of the woodwork that said, I've never heard any of this.

I don't, you know, I always thought that there were a few, mounds around that were burial mounds, you know, the little conical mounds, but they simply had no idea. So to answer your question, here is the story of this mound building culture. When it began, I'll get to later. But in 1492, when Christopher Columbus reached the Bahamas, 1492, and Columbus never got to North America, never reached North America. He was basically in Cuba and in the area of the Bahamas. Hamas and in the in the Caribbean but in 1492 the population of the Americas was probably as it as it's believed now around 150 million people maybe more but probably 150 million back just let's see 2009 or so it was believed around 57 or 58 million was the population

but that has been greatly revised. So when Columbus got here, it was probably 150 million maybe more, much greater than the entire population of Europe at the time. So when he got to the Bahamas and throughout the Caribbean, they found mounds. And almost nobody knows this. People just don't know. There were mound cultures there when Columbus arrived. And then when the very first Spanish started making incursions,

into what they called La Florida, which would be basically where Florida is plus everything else. And that was around, we're not really sure when the first ones got here, but roughly 1513, 1514 is when Ponce de Leon first landed. There were some other incursions like in 1520 and then Hernando de Soto in 1539. So when these first Spanish came in to what we today call the Enduharto, United States, they encountered these mound complexes everywhere. And they were so numerous that DeSoto's chroniclers said that when they went from one town, village, or city to the next, they would go through agricultural fields and then hit another town or city centered around

Indian mounds. And when I say mounds, some of these were like huge platform mounds that look like pyramids. In fact, we know a lot more about those. Since the last time I was on your show, certain things have been uncovered about a lot of these pyramid mounds in North America being covered with stone casings, and a lot of them were. So these mound complexes were large. Some of these sites had up to 120. That was an anomaly. That was Cahokia, Illinois. But a lot of others had 60 or 70 mounds, 60 to 70. Around those mounds, which were kind of the center point or focal point of a city or a town, there were villages. And around this whole area, they built massive fortified walls, palisade walls. If you've ever watched the old cowboy and Indian movies from the 1950s and 60s, where you see the cavalry would build a fort, you know, and they had the wooden posts and the ground and points at the top. Well, that's what the Native Americans built. And they had them all over the place.

So everywhere, there were these mound structures. Some of these cities were large. Cahokia, Illinois, for example, had a population of 50,000 people, which was larger than London, England at the time in the year 1,200. But DeSoto and his men and Coronado out west, a lot of the other people that made incursions into America in the 1500s. They encountered giant populations, huge fields of agriculture, and these cities. So this mound culture goes way back in time, and it extends not only way back in time in

North America, but the same thing was prevalent in South America. And of course, most people think of South America and like Mexico and the Yucatan having these giant stone pyramids and so on, but they also had loads and loads of mounds and geometric formations. For just two years ago, National Geographic says that in the Amazon basin alone, there were thousands and thousands of these mound complexes, which were usually circular or square. In them, they had, again, platform mounds and burial mounds that were the center point of the city. And they believe there were at least 10 million people in the Amazon.

And since they've found this, they've started researching in the Amazon, and they found that the Amazon is not natural. The Amazon initially was a bamboo forest. And if you know anything about bamboo, if you've ever been in a place where there's a lot of bamboo, it's almost impenetrable. But at some point in the remote past, people came into the Amazon, burned the bamboo to the ground, and brought in all sorts of plants, fruit trees, nut trees, and they created a gigantic garden. And these mound complexes were the center points, and they spread throughout the whole Amazon. Shortly after the Spanish made their incursions, the populations declined dramatically. 80, it's not 80%, it's 90 to 95% is the mainstream belief of how much the populations declined within two generations, say roughly 100 years.

So by the time settlers came in, by the time they came into North America and started moving inland, all of the mound sites were abandoned because everybody died. And the few people that were left had been young, the ones that survived. it were fairly young, and they kept moving west because the settlers and the army and so on were pushing them further and further west. And that began a great myth. But anyway, to get to where it began. So mound building, we know that it began in earnest in mainly the area of Louisiana and Mississippi around 4,700 BC or 6,700 years ago. We know it took place in the Amazon as early as 8,400 BC or 10,400 years ago.

And just two years ago in 2022, a group of geologists with some archaeologists redated one of the mounds in Louisiana. And it now dates to 9,000 BC. So what they speculated is that mound building began around 9,000 BC. And for some reason, they simply stopped a few thousand years. And then it picked up again. Hard to say what took place then. And that's an area, if you've ever been in Louisiana or southern Mississippi, bones don't do well in the ground.

Artifacts don't do well. things, artifacts like wooden statues, which the De Sotos chroniclers wrote, they found life-size wooden statues everywhere in the temples on the mounds, which they entered and described. It was a very sophisticated culture. They made statues which the Spanish chronicler said they were just as profound as anything that they had seen in Rome and Greece. A few of those statues survived to this day. When I say a few, maybe a hundred, altogether. Some of them used to be on display, but they aren't anymore. But that's the mound culture. It was everywhere. Now, when you get way to the west, particularly the southwest,

they started building more with stone. So you have the mounds that were built, and then on top of those, they built what are called Pueblos or stone buildings, basically, on top of the mounds there. But it was just a different variation of the mound culture. But there are states that people think don't have any mounds, probably since the last time I've talked to you, I found 60 some more in California. I found an area of Oregon that has several hundred mounds still in existence. And I got access to the Minnesota, some of the Minnesota archaeological information, which normally is not readily available to the public. But in Minnesota alone, right now they are the state archaeologist is aware of approximately 12,500.

I don't remember the exact number, but it's like 12,560 some mounds that still exist in the state of Minnesota alone. And Ohio, of course, has 10,000 mounds. There are some counties in Missouri that have 2,000 mounds just in one county. And this past week, when I was in Missouri at the, doing some research on the eclipse, I talked to a few farmers that told me about how they destroyed burial mounds and other mounds in farmers' fields. One did some of this in a 50,000-acre farm, which he was contracted to grade, bring to grade,

which means flatten it so it's easier. And I know the same farmer years ago had told me that he had seen a lot of them being destroyed, They said they're still being destroyed today. So it started a long time ago, became very, very extensive, an amazing culture. They made incredible artifacts. I try to post a lot of those on Twitter and on Facebook. At first, I thought people would be most interested in seeing the mounds themselves. But most of the mounds that you go to today, except in parks and so on, they're totally overgrown.

And what people don't know is they didn't look like that when they were used. There were no trees in the area. In these areas where they had like the center point of a city where there was maybe a complex of six, seven, eight mounds made around in an oval or a square formation with a central plaza, a flat plaza. They literally had no vegetation at all in that area, none. They used a lot of controlled burning. And one more thing, most of the flat top mounds at the major sites were painted red. When you see depictions of these mounds, you'll see depictions of them with grass on them. That's not the case.

They either had stone casings or they had, in most cases, it was a type of hardened clay that was either red clay or it was painted red. And in some places, the U.S. Park Service, for example, has found that they had bands, horizontal bands of different colors. So there'd be red and yellow and gray and red. I mean, they were stunning looking. And, of course, that's very similar to what went on in the Maya lands. I'm not saying that they were Mayan. In fact, the mounds in North America predate the Maya. And I'll take it a step further.

The mounds in the Americas, the so-called New World. predate anything in Egypt. There are no mounds. Egypt has a mound dated the 7,000 BC. Mounds came before the pyramids. And a lot of the pyramids literally had a lot of dirt inside, and they started out as mounds, and then later they put stone on them. What a great summary.

There's so much you said there that we could regurgitate here. I'm looking at your book here, and on page 214, you were talking about these massive complexes. And this says this is somewhere in Mississippi, Jaketown. That's what I love about this book is all the illustrated illustrations of what these sites might look like based on kind of the early accounts. But sprawling sites, massive sites with these pyramids, and you're saying in some places they were lined with stone, which blows my mind, you're saying when Columbus

was coming to the Bahamas, did you say 150 million was the estimated population in North America? That's probably the population in all the Americas, North, South, and Central America, and add in the Caribbean. And a little known fact is that the Tijuana population and the Caribs, Carib, C-A-R-I-B, those populations were literally exterminated. Cuba, for example, I got very interested in Cuba years ago when we became friends with Andrew Collins. He had a book called Gateway to Atlantis, and in it he speculated that Cuba may have been the main island of Atlantis described by Plato. So I started trying to pull information, and Cuba's kind of a forgotten archaeological site. Cuba had a lot of mounds and a lot of mound sites, and Cuba has a lot of ancient canals, and it has a lot of submerged areas around it where it's pretty clear there was something there.

when I did work for the Puerto Rican government in the 1980s, which is something that I've been very fortunate to be able to do. I've done work for various governments, and because they were very glad I was assisting them in their efforts, and it had to do with crime and criminal justice. But the government's actually, in Puerto Rico, they got a limousine every day, and they took me out to Native American sites throughout Puerto Rico. And I was astonished at the time that there were mounds there. And I didn't know anything about that culture. Although I was really into mounds at the time, I was absolutely clueless about it. But they were all over those islands. But the populations there were decimated first. And in fact, they were exterminated on purpose. And that was the early Spanish

did that. A long story. It's a sad story. But yeah. And so those, all of those illustrations, most of those, well, all of them in that book were done by archaeological illustrators that are trained. They're trained archaeologists that specialize in illustrations. And the one you held up there from Jake Town was made by an archaeological illustrator who used to work in Belize most of the time and in Central America. And those are based on the early descriptions and surveys plus all of the archaeological work that was done. So the structures that you see on top of some of those mounds are based upon the post holes and the size of the post holes and other artifacts that were found on top of and inside these mounds,

as well as the houses that you'll see surrounding those mound sites. Those are places where there actually were houses. And in some cases, you'll see like the palisade walls around them with bastions and so on. And all of those are based on archaeological findings. So while there's a bit of artistic license in it, there's not much. So those are about as good as it gets. On the third edition, I'm adding another 40 or 50 illustrations that I've had made of other sites, including a couple of the sites that had stone mounds, which I was not aware of when I completed that book.

I just didn't know that there were that many. I thought there was one. You'll see one in that book, but I talk about having a stone casing, and that was the Miami-Esburg mound in Ohio. So, yeah, I want to ask you about several specific mounds in your book. I want to ask you about some crazy artifacts unearthed. I want to ask you about so much stuff. and I know we don't have much time. I guess we'll take this next.

And it's just mind-blowing to me that you're saying minimum, okay, we had a sprawling culture up to the day of Columbus of 150 million plus in North America's, that these mounds go back to at least 6,700 years old. There was over a million in North America. I mean, I bet this is blowing the minds of people that had no idea about this, this mound building culture.

Something I wanted to ask you out of the gate before I forget, because I know we're going to get into specific mounds and artifacts. But in some of your books, you write and hint about the elite rulers of the mound builders and how newspaper articles from the 1800s, early 1900s reported skeletons that were like, you know, seven feet, maybe eight feet, found in some large stone tombs buried deep inside some of these mounds. And you asked the question in one of your books, who were these tall elite leaders? So just hit on that real quick of, it sounds like you're saying some of this might predate the Native Americans and that there might have been this elite ruling class that actually ruled the

masses that weren't all in the mounds. Tell us a little bit about that and some of these skeletons that were larger than we would say are normal. Sure. Okay. So in the, In the Missouri part of that book, there's some photographs taken by the Smithsonian of some of the stone chambers and tombs that were under the mounds. So a lot of times when they excavated mounds, they would find at the bottom or at the base or sometimes in the sub-base, they'll call it. And that means that they would dig a tomb deep into the ground, line it with stone slabs, and then put a water. a ceiling over it or a roof. The roof was sometimes giant stone slabs, other times, probably most of the time, it was logs that they would put there, and then they would cover it with dirt and create a mound on top of the tomb. So yes, during the Smithsonian's Mound Survey project, which

took place for over seven years in the late 1800s, they dug into roughly 3,000 mounds. And their initial idea was that they wanted to find out who it was that built the mounds because at the time there was a belief by some that there was a lost race of mound builders because by the time the settlers came in and started finding these mounds and then the towns would be built and local historians would ask the few Native Americans around who built these mounds, Native Americans would say, we don't know. So this lost race of mound builders idea emerged basically in the early and late 1800s. And part of this mythology began because all of the 90% of the population died and they left the areas that were diseased.

They literally abandoned them. and there was a lot of movement of the Native Americans that were still alive at the time. So they and their descendants would move from one area to another. They were pushed out as settlers came in. And so nobody really knew at the time exactly who built them. So the Smithsonian was ordered by U.S. Congress. They were given $5,000 a year to do this. They were ordered by the Congress to go and do a survey of the mounds, dig into them, and find out who built the mounds.

final answer they gave was obviously it was the ancestors of the Native Americans that built the mounds. And that's what I'll stick with. The ancestors of the Native Americans built the mounds. However, when they dug into these 3,000 mounds, they found a number of large skeletal remains. And the number that is in their two annual reports that cited most of this, it was 17. and most of these large skeletons measured from 6 feet 10 or so 6-7 to 7 feet 8 inches in height and these 17 large skeletons, most of which were 7 feet and beyond up to 7-8, were found in very elaborate chambers, either stone or log-lined chambers in the base of the mounds. And it led to a number of newspaper articles. And there were actually some hoaxes.

One very famous hoax was in Florida on Whedon Island by a land, by a real estate, a real estate guy who bought the land from the Weeden family. That's why I got the name Weeden Island. And he actually perpetrated some hoaxes and said that there were 10-foot skeletons there. It made the newspaper. He actually paid the newspaper. He bought full-page ads if they would run these stories, and those newspaper articles went out all over the place. I'm not saying all of these larger skeletons in the newspaper were hoaxes because there's over a thousand newspaper reports that are in existence from the 1800s up to roughly 1930 that talk about these giant skeletons. So the idea that I followed up with along with, a colleague Andrew Collins in England, Andrew and I went through those reports in the Smithsonian of the giant skeletons, and we ran down a number of the newspaper articles. We actually went to a number of the sites. And when I say we ran down these newspaper articles, we went all the way to the

source. If it was a newspaper article, we found where did they get the information, who were the people, and so on. So bottom line is this since that time, since the since the Smithsonian did them, there were a number, probably another 20 or so, six feet, seven to seven foot plus skeletons found by mainstream archaeologists. All of which are found in the, again, elaborate tombs. Most of them are in Adina-era mounds, which Adina goes back to about 1,000 BC. So Andrew and I looked at some of the genetic research, and we actually published a book, well, Intertraditions published it. We co-authored this book called Denisiven Origins in 2019.

We followed it up with one in 2020 called Origins of the Gods. And in it we talk about what is now called the Adina Hypothesis, Adina Elite Hypothesis, which is the rulers of the Adina were, were a hereditary group that were exceptionally tall and robust people. And what we found through genetic research and so on is these people may well have been ancestors of an extinct version of humanity called Denisovans. And the Denisovans are Asian in origin. They probably went from Asia to parts of Europe, like Spain and the Pyreneesians. mountains in France and became what is called the um jeez um boy i can see the name but i can't say it

they they eventually came over here and became the clovis culture some of them uh and we believe that they came in around 10 11 12000 bc there were already people here and they slowly became the leaders of the people here because they had a different kind of of technology plus they were very large and robust people and a lot of ancient Native American legends and mythology specifically talks about these people and it says that they interbred with them and eventually the people rose up against them and killed them off but Native American populations that are alive today three percent of their DNA is Denisovan and

in origin. So the Denisovan trace remains among the Native American population. So that's the belief that Andrew and I have. And right now, I think the strongest evidence supports that. But it's pretty clear that the ancient Americas had several incursions of some of them were very large groups of people. Some came from the Pacific, the South Pacific, the area of New Zealand, Australia. Most of them went to South America, wound up in the Amazon area. Others came, definitely some came across what is called Beringia, around 10,000 BC, probably as early as 17 to 20,000 BC. But the other piece of this, the Americas were definitely inhabited probably at least 50,000 years ago.

And evidence is very clear, although it's not accepted by mainstream archaeology, that there were people here 130,000 years ago. And there's actually evidence in Mexico that there were people here 400,000 years ago, which would have been Neanderthals or some other extinct branch of humanity. So things are changing very rapidly, and a lot of that's relatively new. That area of Mexico is absolutely fascinating. and the U.S. Geological Survey actually did the dating of this site called Haua Talaco, which now dates to 400,000 years ago. And there's been others that have dated it, including the Max Planck Institute and the Sorbonne in France.

So things are getting weird. But yeah, we believe that it's the Denise events that were the ruling class. I want to ask you about several specific mounds that are featured in your encyclopedia. Let's start out talking about the Great Serpent Mound real quick, which might be one of the most fantastical mounds to see, especially from the sky or from a drone view. I mean, this thing is just huge. I believe it's like 1,300 feet long. About a quarter mile long, yeah. Yeah, this thing, and there's so much about it. it. Tell us a little bit about serpent mound. And I've even read somewhere that one of these

seven foot plus tall skeletons was even discovered near that mound. So tell us about serpent mound. Okay. Well, Serpent Mound is exceedingly controversial right now. Graham Hancock was banned from doing any filming there. The Ohio Historical, used to be Ohio Historical Society. Now it's Ohio historical connection, took control of Serpent Mound and the other sites in the state. And Hancock actually wanted to get into the dating controversy there, which initially serpent mound was dated to, I'll say approximately 500 BC or so. And it looks like a snake. It's not uncoiling.

but it's an undulating snake. It's got, I believe, three undulations. The head of the snake, the mouth is open, and it looks like it's swallowing an egg. It is aligned astronomically to the solstices and the equinox and probably the North Pole Star. And like I say, initially it was dated to around 500, 300 BC or so. Then Bradley Leper, who was the head of Ohio Archaeologists,

and another group decided to cut back into it and get some more material out and redated it. And they dated it to much more recent, like 1,300, the year 1,300. That's a big difference. And then another archaeologist came in and redated it and found that, yeah, it went back to 300 BC or so or 200 BC. Bradley Leppert said that, well, we're not really sure exactly what we dated. out of it, we may have cut into where a much earlier incursion was made in the 1800s. So nobody really knows, although the official line is it was made around the year 1,300 or so. What is it? Well, it is an astronomical effigy mound. It points to something,

definitely highly spiritual and symbolic. The area around serpentry mound is an upheaval caused by a meteorite strike that happened there long, long ago. Our mounds in the surrounding area, there are two burial mounds right on the grounds. When you pull in and you park there, there are burial mounds that you can see there. Those have been excavated, but those did not have the seven-foot skeleton that you're referring to. Down the hill from where a serpent mound is, because it's right on the top of the promontory or a hill. Down the hill, there are a couple farms, and there are burial mounds on those farms,

and one of those farms is where a seven to seven and a half foot tall skeleton was found. And mainstream archaeologists hate the term giants. There were no giants, you know, and they're talking about 20, 30, 40, 50 foot tall people. And there's actually newspaper reports that say that 20 foot tall skeletons were found. We've never been able to verify anything over seven to eight feet in height. And when I say we, I'm talking about Andrew Collins and I. It may exist. We just can't verify it.

But they don't like calling seven footers giants. But actually, we pulled archaeological reports, modern ones, where they're talking about seven foot, they're talking about six foot four inch tall skeletons giants. because when you have a population that averages, when the females average 4 foot 7 inches, and the males average 5, 2, somebody that's 6, 5, 6, 6, 6, 6, 7 looks like a giant. I'm 5 foot 9 inches tall, 9 and a half. Yeah, I've got to get the half inch yet.

But I've stood next to Wilk Chamberlain when he was playing basketball for the Philadelphia 76ers, and it was my junior year in high school when I stood next to him. and wilt seven feet one inch tall that's what he is and i was overwhelmed i could not believe how massive that guy was uh and if i had encountered him anywhere out in the real world i would have felt my god that man's a giant i knew he was big but standing next to them you just you don't have an idea other people that i've archaeologists i've talked to they go oh there's lots of seven footers no there's not uh today

day one out of roughly every 147,000 people is seven feet. That's it. And that's not many. I know many, many archaeologists even that when I've said, well, when you stood next to someone who was seven feet tall, how did you feel? And I said, well, I've never stood next to one. I've never seen one except on TV. And of course, on TV, you can't really tell. They look pretty normal on television when everybody out there six, six, six, seven to seven feet. It doesn't look, they all look normal. But it's overwhelming. So it's unusual to have so many seven footers pulled from mounds. There are several that did come out of Ohio mounds. But the actual preponderance of them came out of West Virginia from Adina era mounds, which West Virginia in Ohio was kind of the focal point of the

adina, although you'll find adena mounds in Tennessee, Arkansas, Mississippi, Indiana, Illinois, all these areas, you'll find them. But most of them are found in West Virginia and in Ohio. But in your book, it was fascinating to see great bear mound, I think, in Iowa, and then what they call man mound in Wisconsin, but that actually looks like some kind of humanoid with almost horns. And these are ancient mounds. You know, again, a mound in itself is incredible to see from a drone's eye view. But when you see these mounds that are in the shape of animals and humanoids, tell us a little bit real quick about these two mounds.

Yeah, okay. So the great bear mound is in effigy mounds National Park in Iowa. It's a fantastic place. Absolutely fantastic. there were 10,000 effigy mounds along the Mississippi in Iowa and say Wisconsin on both sides of the river. It might be Minnesota, I can't recall. But it's astonishing. From the ground, you can't tell it's a bear.

It's shaped like a bear. And there are several. There's actually marching bears in on. Iowa, where it's on the top of this mountain, it's at the peak of the mountain. It's about, probably about a half mile long. There's a series of these bears. They look just like bears, all in the same direction, and they look like they're walking in the same direction. So they're three or four feet high, shaped just like a bear on the ground. But when you stand there, you have no idea what this thing looks like. The only way you can tell is by getting above it. The same thing with man, man.

Now, well, let me give you the day. These were made in 500 BC, 2,500 years ago, which is why? You know, it's like, why? Why would you build something that you cannot tell what it is from the ground? And even if you could climb in the trees around it, which, of course, they've removed the trees so you can, so you can, so you can walk around and see these, you really can't tell either at the bare mounds. You can't tell. Why? I don't have an answer for that except it was something very spiritual. They were engaged in rituals and so on there. Of course, that's one of my big interest. What in the world were they doing? And what were these rituals about? Man mound is, it is the formation of a man. A road was built over his legs, which is, so it cuts off about a third of it. I've put some photos of it that were taken in

the 1800s from a, they actually put a ladder up in the air, but today there is a viewing station. But if you go up there, if you go up the viewing station, which has steps to the top, you stand there and you look down on it, that is an intaglio mound. And an entaglio is the opposite of an elevated mound. It is a depression. So it's called an entaglio mound. And it is formed like a man. Except, yeah, he has two giant extensions coming off the top of his head,

believed to be a shaman. That is the interpretation, that this is the portrayal of an important shaman and the shaman would wear a headdress that had these two extensions coming out. It's quite long. I don't remember the exact length of it. I think it's like 104 feet, but I'm probably wrong. But it's rather large. But you cannot really tell what it is by even climbing up to the top of the steps and looking down.

You've got to get way over it and look down and go, oh my God, then you can tell. It's a lot of these are astonishing. Now there's thousands of these effigy mounds around the United States. There are also other serpent mounds. And some of these are only recently being discovered. There's one that was discovered in 2006 in Alabama, and it's made out of stone. And it was a mainstream archaeologist who was the chairman of the Jacksonville State University Archaeology Department. And he actually took us to a lot of the stone mounds.

in this area, which there are now hundreds and hundreds of additional features and mounds in Alabama that were not known until roughly 2004 to 2006. So these are still being discovered. And a lot of people say, well, they were made recently. No, they weren't. These mountains in this area of Alabama, they were never inhabited. Nobody went up and cut all the trees down. They're not clear cut. They've never been farmed. You couldn't farm them anyway because there's too much rock there. There's no soil in these. And I'll tell you this too, you can't really get on those in the summer. It's so overgrown, you can't even get in. And there's rattlesnakes everywhere.

And they believe that's why a lot of these mounds, they are shaped like rattlesnakes. It's just, there's so many of them, it's unreal. You can only go in the winter. So, yeah, the effigy mounds are incredible. There are a lot of them. There are a lot of them in California also. a lot of them look like some of the Nazca figures. But in California, they're made very similarly,

but there are also a lot more of those being discovered now through drones because we just didn't know. So we're still finding out things now. And of course, in South America, like in the Amazon, they're finding these odd-shaped mounds as we speak. too. I don't think they've found, they've looked at 10% of the Amazon yet. And LIDAR, of course, is what's revealing a lot of this along with the burning of the Amazon. I got off track there, but go ahead. Let's keep moving. Sorry. No, this is great. You like your books called you, you are an encyclopedia, Dr. Craig. So this is awesome. Well, I can't remember all the numbers. There's too many mounds. I will look a lot of things up, and I'm actually remembering things better than I did,

there's, you know, with 8,000 entries in that book, it's hard to remember the dimensions of everything. Well, you mention your deep interest in the spiritual side of things with this mound building culture and why they were doing things. You talk about in some of your books how you guys, you and Andrew Collins explored, you know, how these, these ancient mound builders basically use shamanic rituals at these sites to create portals for communication with non-human intelligence. Talk about that a little bit when it comes to the ancient mound builders,

and I think you call it the ogie, the eye and the hand symbol that's everywhere. Tell us a little bit about the weird spiritual side of this, and anytime someone says portal or Stargate, I get excited, so just break that down. Okay, well, I'll describe the path of souls and then get into the ritual stuff. The path of souls is their belief about where we came from and where we go after death. So the path of souls is the Milky Way, but it is a journey that the soul takes to get here and to go back. Souls are spiritual in nature. Everything in the Native American belief is spiritual in nature.

they have a very deep belief expressed many, many decades ago about how the universe began with a singularity. That is not my term. That is the term that was used. It was a Cheyenne Edward Red Hat was his name, a Cheyenne shaman, who was the last great Massimony shaman of the Cheyenne. But it began with the singularity of spiritual energy. It blew out when it thought outward or expanded. It created what we would call the universe, but they called it a three-part world. There was an upper world, a lower world, and the middle world.

We live in the middle world, which is the physical universe. And the middle world in their belief system is a double-sided mirror. And like a double-sided mirror is reflecting two sides. It's reflecting the forces of the upper world, and it's reflecting the forces of the lower world. So the physical world is the interaction sphere of two spiritual forces that are interacting, almost like the Yin Yang does. And so harmony has to do, maintaining harmony has to do with the ritual. but let's explain the ogie part of it and the path of souls so when you die your physical body being spiritual in nature returns to its essence that is the earth they actually cremated most human remains

the vast majority of the populace was cremated to send what they called the life soul back to the soil back to mother earth but there's also a spiritual soul that is energy And that spiritual soul, they called the free soul. And that free soul through a ritual was propelled into the sky world a specific time of the year at mound sites and earthwork sites specially arranged to allow the soul to propel itself along a given path, to follow straight lines of earth to go to the sky. And there was a constellation in the sky. they called the hand the constellation and it was a severed hand i can't do that on that it's hard for me

to turn my hand but it was a hand severed at the wrist in the palm of the hand they showed an eye the the wrist had three stars that held it up and then in the palm this eye was a fuzzy kind of red-blue area. The three stars were the belt stars of what we call Orion. The eye in the hand, which they called an Ogie, spelled O'G-E-E. The Ogi was Orion's Nebula, which the Maya called Shil-Baba. The Maya had the exact same belief, and their name for it was Shil-Baba. There's actually a number of movies that show this and show Shil-Baba, and they actually talk about Shil-Baba. That That's where the soul had to go to begin the journey on the path of souls. So the soul would tuck itself in to the hand when it's set in the western horizon.

Because Orion in the winter sets into the west. Then the sun comes up. Throughout the night or throughout that daytime, the soul would make a journey through the underworld or the lower worlds, the three-part world that I talked about. The soul would make that journey and it would come up and be seen in the eastern sky. And the hand would then be pointed up in the air. The soul would hop out at night and get on the Milky Way and begin a path to the north. And along this path, the path, it took three to seven days, depending on which Native American legend that you subscribe to. The soul took this journey along the path and it had all kinds of trials and tribulations.

along the way and it would meet certain figures but eventually it reached the fork and the milky way the fork of the milky way is where the constellation of signus or the northern cross resides signus has always been seen as a bird and they saw it as a giant raptor bird it was a judge and so the soul was judged at this point if the soul was not worthy it could be banished to the underworld, or it could be sent back to the earth to be reincarnated. They have a big belief in reincarnation. If it was a member of the elite and they happened to bury the elites remains in one of these elaborate stone chambers, it was because they were hoping the soul would return to that body and resurrect. So they had a belief in resurrection about bringing back an important leader.

So, but if the soul passed the test, if the soul was judged to be worthy, it was allowed to go through another ogie in the sky and go to what they referred to as the other world or what they often told the early ethnographers to hide what their belief was. They say, oh, happy hunting ground. You'll hear that term used a lot. Oh, it's the happy hunting ground because they would say, we really don't have much of a description of it, but they say, they simply concealed what their belief was by using that term. So that that portal or ogi is is probably the star Deneb, which is the brightest star of Cygnus and was also the northern pole star instead of Polaris. It was the northern pole star around 18,000 years ago and also like 40,000 years. ago and so on because it all changes every 26,000 years. So that's the path of soul's idea. The rituals, the rituals that they performed were done largely at night for this. That is when they sent the soul to the sky world.

I've written about the night effect and the eclipse effect in 1990 book called People of the Web in a 1994 book called um um um written too many books yeah i've written in grand illusions uh the 1994 book was grand illusions

and actually told a joke in there started that the night effect with a joke why does weird stuff happen at night uh and well a lot of people would say well because it's dark and you get spooked and all that uh but i don't really think that's the reason I think it has to do with electromagnetic energy

uh and I've longed speculated that the way that a lot of these earthworks were made, we really haven't talked about geometric earthworks, but what some of these cultures did, mound cultures did, was they created pathways of elevated lines of earth. And when I say lines of earth, I mean, if, I took some people up to the eclipse in Missouri, and we drove by a number of levees along the Mississippi River. And what I did was explain the earthworks to them by saying there's a levy. It's an elevated line of earth. It's a huge mound of earth that runs for miles.

Well, the Native Americans built these, the same things in geometric shapes and geometric forms. And some of those were parallel lines of earth that ran for long distances. In one case, it's 56 miles. but in other cases where I know they performed these rituals, they would run for a couple thousand feet. And as they'd get toward the end, the lines would get closer and closer and closer. And they would get so close at the end

that only one person could walk between these two elongated lines of earth. Only one person at a time would go through. My wife actually called it an eye dropper. So it is kind of like an eyedropper, but it's a funnel. It's a funneling technique. So they would move people through these lines of earth. And there's geometric earthworks and squares and circles and really odd and unusual shapes. The biggest octagon that's made is 50 acres.

That's enormous. And the eight points are all open. But on the inside of the eight points, there are platform bounds so that when you stand in the exact middle of the octagon, you can't see out. no matter which way you look, there's no way out. And that has to do with a belief system that a soul that has been released from the body can only move in straight lines. And when it hits a wall of earth, it stops. It can't go beyond that. So a lot of these earthworks were places where there were rituals done to literally bring into physicality spiritual forces and to enclose them.

and confined them so they could not be released outside these earthworks. So there are some earthworks that are literally solid circles where the only way to get in it is to walk over maybe the 20-foot wall of earth around it or 16-foot wall of earth and then go down. And the inside is perfectly flat. Usually the interior and the surface was colored. colors of sand in it. Sometimes it was red, sometimes it was yellow, depending upon the purpose. But when it was solid walls around it, that was deliberately done to keep the spiritual entities that they were evoking inside to not release it. Other times where they had an opening, a very clear opening aimed at a star, it was designed to propel a spiritual entity out. So one of

of the things that I believe is that the ways that some of these were made and the places that they were made. I started speculating this in 19, well, actually the 80s, but 1990s when the first book came out on it. And that's people of the web. I speculated that there were very small electromagnetic differences that as you moved through these spaces, that there would be subtle changes in electromagnetic energy. And at that time, it was just the beginning of subtle energy research in neuropsychology. What are the effects of subtle electromagnetic fields on different neuroreceptors in the brain and really the chemical electrical impulses from different areas of the brain to other areas.

What are the effects of that? That was only being started in the late 80s and 90s, and I really thought that there was something to it. So I have continued down that line of thought, and of course John Keel and a fellow by the name of Terrance Mead, where Keel got his ideas from, from a guy by the name of Mead in the 1960s, that there are electromagnetic forces

that literally appear from time to time through plasma formations, through geotectonic forces, which are geotectonic mean tectonic is the strain that's caused by rocks, literally pressing on other rocks or grinding, and those create geomagnetic forces, and basically they produce electricity, which is released into the atmosphere and plasmus form. So that is what I've been trying to research.

That's why I got in, did this little study with eclipses this past week, doing my little magnetic research at Mount Sites during the eclipse. That's fascinating how basically you're describing that these ancients, we're using these mounds, these sacred sites. through these shamanic rituals to basically create portals, like you said, where they were bringing literal entities in and trying to trap them inside these mounds. I mean, that is just crazy to consider. It is.

They were trying to manifest them. And I've always thought, it's just psychological. I have a slightly different belief now. But I talked to a Edward Red Hat's grandson, who was a. an arrow priest the Cheyenne. I tell the story in people of the web actually began it with him. His name was Lou White Eagle.

He died just a few years ago. Lou stayed with my wife and I for exactly 30 days in Memphis during a protest. He carried the seven sacred arrows with him. I got to hold them. And we had a lot of discussions, some of which I put in that book,

People of the Web. He talked about how they manifested the spiritual energies and what they did. And basically his description of it is a lot like a Tibetan tulpa. And a tulpa is an energy manifestation that occurs through the mind and heart and by focusing and performing specific rituals. But I read everything I could in all the old literature and in talking to him and then others and participating in some

rituals. I concluded that in fact, they do from time to time actually manifest something you can definitely see something that is temporarily quasi-physical, which is what a plasma is. A plasma is quasi-physical. It is using physical matter. A plasma is physical matter. It's called a you know, a superheated ball of gas, but it is a, it has an electromagnetic field around it, very powerful field, and it pulls in dust and anything else it can, and it forms into physical matter. Plasmas are generally temporary, some physicists, not some, a lot of physicists now believe that it's the basis of life and that if plasmas are sustained for any length, of time. They have all the qualities of life as we know it today. They reproduce. They have something

that looks like DNA that forms in them. They die off to and only they have evolution and that only the strong survive. And they need energy to be sustained just like we do. And the word plasma actually was applied to plasmas and plasma physics because plasma resembles blood. It resembles blood plasma. That's where the term comes from. But it is very weird to think that, yes, they really are manifesting something. I have not seen it myself. I have not participated to any extent in rituals that are meant to manifest it. I know now

that some of these rituals were done in conjunction with basically the Native American mound builder's version of ayahuasca, which is the

DMT substance made so famous in South America by Graham Hancock. Ayahuasca which P.D. Newman, who's really the expert in this, he calls Missowah, he's calling it Missowaska because it was used by the

Mississippian culture, mound building culture. And DMT, which is the active substance in it, is actually in numerous substances throughout North America, found at mound sites all over North America. There are several substances of it. I don't talk about it much because I don't really want people going out doing this. It's quite dangerous because you have to mix it with a monoamine oxidase inhibitor and you don't have any idea how much to mix. And theoretically, it could kill you if you mix it wrong. But we know they were using hallucinogenic substances during this.

But nevertheless, it requires to manifest certain types of spirits. entities it requires certain shapes of these geometric earthworks and there are magnetic electromagnetic forces involved in it and that's really what I've been trying to work out I've worked out some of it can I get into the UFO abduction aspect that led to the the aspect of why we did this eclipse experiment or survey. All right. So in the 1980s, in a, there was a researcher by the name of Nicholas Ryder,

R-I-T-E-I-R, is how you spell his last name. Nick published articles in a scientific journal, and then he published a series of articles of his results in AP Magazine, which I was co-editor with, along with Brent Raines. That's how I became aware of him. And what Nicholas Reiter did was that he was studying UFO abductees. And a lot of UFO abductees, as it turns out, are electromagnetic sensitive. And I've written a lot about electromagnetic sensitivity. There are people out there who can sense electromagnetic fields, and it's a very discomforting to them.

There are people that can sense magnets when they're put close to their heads. So they are magnetically sensitive. And for some reason, a large proportion of people who report UFO abductions are electromagneticly sensitive. And of course, my first book called The Archetype Experience, which came out in 1984, it was about UFO abductions. And that is the time when I don't believe that they are alien in nature. I don't believe that ETs are flying all around, and I am a skeptic about all of the so-called flying, you know, the flying saucers are everywhere.

I'm not saying that we don't have some alien stuff here. I'm just saying that the vast majority of it is not. So I've been interested in the abductees, and I have done research with quite a few of them, which I stopped around 1993 or so. Anyway, Writers got these people, and he found 15 of them, 15 UFO abductees who were electromagneticly sensitive, who agreed for him to conduct a study with him. He built a device called a MEM, MEM, which stands for magnetic event monitor.

And what he did was these were devices, small electronic devices that would monitor the magnetic field in the bedrooms of. the abductees which were placed under their beds and then every day he would collect the information from these mems from the 15 and at the same time collect information from them did they experience anything weird that night did they have abductions or whatever and he did this study over a long period of time with the 15 abductees and what he found was that in general a high a high correlation between magnetic events that occurred and reported abductions or reported visitations. And a lot of these people would be in their bed, they'd be, you know, they'd be awakened that they'd be visited by alien beings, what they saw as alien beings.

So he took the two and he correlated them and there was a highly significant, highly significant correlation between magnetic events that occurred and the nights that they had these visitations, which is something that I believed in to begin with. So I really liked his research, something I'd like to duplicate someday, and that may be the next step. But anyway, he found that it occurred at regular times. It's that what he found is there's like a blip or a click that occurs.

And it's pretty routine. There's like a quick magnetic click. So it's real stable through the night. the electromagnetic field and the magnetic field on the side of the earth that does not face the sun that's in that's at nighttime it gets exceedingly stable at night because it's not being blasted by the sun's solar winds because on the side of the earth where the solar winds are there's all kinds of fluctuations going on which can be picked up by highly sophisticated electronic equipment but on the other side of the earth where it's dark it isn't there so the what he found was that roughly and it depends on the time he never stipulated this this daylight saving time or standard time because i've asked the question myself but basically they they tended to peak roughly at 3 15 a.m. at 315 a.m. is when most of the blips occurred so it was between 2.30.

a.m. and 3.15 or so when most occurred, and that is the most stable time of electromagnetic fields. This actually concurs with the UFO research done

in southeastern Missouri as well as in Yakima, Washington, by physicists that were looking at all the UFO reports in those states during the 1970s in the 80s that interestingly ended when there was an earthquake it's not the earthquake that

causes all of this it's the huge build-up in energy and the stability that occurs it's the energy builds up during stable times and then there's the sudden release but anyway that led me to look at rituals that took place during eclipses. I know that some of the geometric earthworks, ancient geometric earthworks in America, as well as Stonehenge in England, one of their functions was to chart the moon over its movements in its 18.61 year cycle. I don't have time to explain what the earthworks were. They're gigantic. It's the circle in octagon in Newark. There's a circle in octagon in Chilicothe, Ohio. are connected by a 56 long road that has parallel walls of Earth along it. There are other places

that do the same thing. But through that 18.6 one year lunar cycle, you can calculate when eclipses will occur, both solar eclipses and lunar eclipses. And I know from mythology and legends that rituals were performed during the eclipse. And they built up to it as the sun slowly moved as the moon moved across the sun's face and started blocking it, they would begin these rituals. They'd make a lot of noise. They would dance, probably take hallucinogenic drugs or hallucinogenic drink. It is what it is. And build up to a frenzy, but at the time when the sun was totally closed and it was dark, they got very silent for those few minutes, very, very silent. And that is when the rituals would supposedly manifest the entities.

So my idea or hope was that I could set up an experiment. It's not really an experiment. It's more of a survey. And I'll call it a haphazard survey because I did it through Twitter and through Facebook. I ask people, I said, hey, if you're going to mound sites to observe the eclipse, take along a simple magnetic compass, the kind that you would use for hiking, which most people don't even know what it is anymore. They say, well, can I take a phone and use that? No, you can. It needs to be a free-floating magnetic compass. So I had thousands of people say that's really interesting. I may want to do that.

And what I told him is to really do this right. You either need to watch this thing the whole time or you need to film it the whole time. Close up to watch it. And you take along a light so you can see the fate because it's going to get dark. It gets dark at the height of the eclipse. It really gets dark. It's like nighttime for those few minutes. So take along a light and film it.

So as it got closer and closer, I had a lot of people say, well, I can't do it. Others say I will do it. And I did it myself. I went to a site in Missouri with my wife and two other people. We went to Tawasaki Mounds in Missouri, in southeastern Missouri, which is a very remote site. The state's park department was actually there because it is a state. It's a state park. There were about 20 other people there, but we managed to be pretty much alone during it.

I'll show this. I made, or I didn't, I bought these. Somebody made them. There you go. I'm very nice. Solar eclipse. Yeah. I've already mailed them out to people that participated in the survey.

I even saw, I autographed them, which I've never done before on clock. That's kind of difficult, but I've already mailed them out. it wound up that I had basically nine really good usable responses. I had another 10 or 20 people that say, yeah, I went and I tried to do it, but I wound up watching the eclipse the whole time. And others said, yeah, it was really, I couldn't, I couldn't see the compass because it was too far away. Several people said, you know, I forgot to take a light and I couldn't see it. So I just watched the eclipse.

I'm looking at them now, nine really usable responses. Four of them, they didn't film it. They simply watched, and they said, I looked away some. I had people on serpent mound. I had people in several other mounds in Ohio, a couple of obscure places. several in Indiana, a couple of others in Missouri and in Arkansas. Some people didn't do it at mounds because some said, I'm in the eclipse, I'm in the area where there'll be a full eclipse.

Can I measure it anyway? I said, yeah, absolutely. So out of the nine that were usable, five of the nine, five of the nine, and out of those four filmed it, one did not film it, but said he, watched it pretty much the entire time. He said there was one time when it got full, he glanced up really quick just to see it. But five of the nine all have the exact same finding, which I didn't really expect. I didn't expect anything because I had interacted with an archaeologist who said that, man,

I don't know if the magnetic effects on the surface are enough to move a needle on a compass but what they found and i saw the same thing i filmed the whole thing myself i used a really good camera looking right at the thing uh the whole time and it's it's so stable it was so stable it was unreal uh during it except at the exact moment of the full eclipse the compass needle for the five and mine moved from one half of a degree to one degree, just almost imperceptible, because a half a degree is one seven hundred and twentyth of a circle. And you either got to watch it close up or you've got to film it close up to see it, but five of us,

and one of the people was a real scientist, and I'll tell you, he is, he actually gave the directions and so on. but there was this half a degree shift that occurred at the exact moment that there was the full eclipse. And then for four, no, I'm wrong there, for two of the five, they saw the exact same thing occur at the moment that a bit of the light of the sun came out the other side. And the moment the light of the sun comes out the other side, darkness is gone. I mean, that's why a 99% eclipse is nothing like 100. It's just nothing like 100. And I didn't realize that. I've seen several eclipses of like 95, 95, 98, 99%, but 100 is totally different.

So I didn't expect that. One person who was a scientist filmed it very close up, had a very good magnetic compass. And he found an exact one-half degree at the beginning. and one half degree at the end. At the beginning, he said it shifted a half agree to the west just for a moment. And at the end, it shifted one half degree to the east and came back just for a moment, which he wasn't expecting either. He didn't expect to see anything.

And the others that didn't see anything, again, those were people, the five who didn't say I didn't see anything. those were people who did not film it and said that I tried I tried to watch it at the same time I was watching the eclipse one person who pretty much watched it the whole time that was in the five that saw the blip in the beginning that person said there was some sort of a wobble that occurred at the height of the eclipse like the three-minute window that he had there was a tiny little wobble but nobody else saw that and I certainly didn't see that on my film either. So those are the results.

What does it mean? Well, there are scientific studies that have been done that say that the Earth's, that the magnetic field on the surface of the Earth changes during the height of an eclipse, and it gets stable. And that blip, I believe that the rituals that were performed then, that whatever they were doing and whatever substances they may have been using to create their ritualistic effects were heightened by that slight electromagnetic shift. I'm calling it electromagnetic because basically it's a magnetic field, but there is an electromagnetic field around us too. So that's kind of a summary. This is the first place I've said it.

but of course this this i'll have it released by the time anybody else sees this so there you go you're the first person that knows any of this if we just have a few quick minutes i want to just ask you about a couple artifacts because so many amazing artifacts have been pulled out of these ancient mounds i mean you're saying that these mounds are at least 6,700 years old they predate the maya yet so many of these artifacts look Mayan. Like if you just, if you just showed somebody off the street, hey, look at this artifact and said,

where is this from? They'd probably say, that's from Mexico. That's from a Mayan pyramid. These things are incredible. I mean, there's the eight-inch stone pipe of a humanoid-looking Mayan, what looks like a Mayan from the Adina, Ohio Mounds.

I think that's one of my favorite figurines that you featured on your Twitter account. There's recently on your Twitter, you showed a photo of a Mayan-looking figurine that was found in an Arkansas cave in the 70s next to another amount. So tell us real quick about just these

Mayan-looking artifacts, but these, again, likely predate the Mayans, correct? Well, yeah, the mounds predate, the mounds predate the Mayans, that's for certain, and predate the Olmex. That's for certain, too. There is a site in a large mound site in Florida where the museum at the site will tell you that there was a,

obviously some sort of influence, which direction it went, hard to say, whether it went from north, south, or they just interacted. And that site is Crystal River, Florida. The artifact in Arkansas, yeah, that artifact, that artifact, it's a, it's a, it's a, a little figurine. It's about eight inches tall. It's a piece of potter, and it looks like a little fellow sitting down, and it was originally affixed to a bowl. So it's an effigy of what looks like a Mayan guy with a really cool headdress sitting on a bowl. Very clearly, Mayan. A lot of people would say it's fake, but it was discovered in a cave in Arkansas around 1970. And when it was discovered, It was sent to University of California at Los Angeles Archaeology Department.

They did testing on it and said, yeah, this is a genuine Mayan artifact. The substance it was made from, the pottery itself was clearly from Mexico. It was genuine. Of course, you can't date it per se by, you know, carbon dating or anything. But they said it's definitely Mayan. there's no doubt about it. So on the information form, it's right, when you go to the historical museum in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, it's right by the door, and it's in this big glass case, it's right at the door.

And it has an information sheet there. And what archaeologists say is, well, it must have been carried here by Hernando de Soto's men. and they had obviously gotten it when they were in, they didn't come from Mexico. They actually came from Cuba is where DeSoto's men came from. But one of them must have been over in Yucatan, went back to Cuba, then came up with DeSoto and he carried all his spoils with him. And when he got to Arkansas, which was after three years trouncing, trampsing through the southeast, when he got to Arkansas, he decided it was too much to carry.

come back. So he placed it there to hide it and he'd pick it up when he came back, but he never made it back. That is what basically archaeologists have written about it, that it was left there by one of DeSoto's men. That's a stretch. To me, it's, that's bizarre. That's as good of an explanation as claiming that the 20-foot skeletons actually do exist and are walking all over. the same thing to me as that. So there are a lot of other artifacts that definitely look mine. There are a lot of artifacts that look South American too. Yeah.

There was interaction. There had to have been some interaction between the cultures. The cultures were not completely separate. We know that anyway, from a lot of the trails that have been found and a lot of the artifacts that have been found all over. For example, Spiro, Oklahoma, a lot of copper from the Great Lakes area, particularly the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. Loads of copper from there is found in the mounds at Spiro, Oklahoma, plus obsidian from the west, plus shells from a very specific area in Florida. They're not conch shells. They're welk shells, giant, wild shells, giant welk shells from Florida.

we know that a lot of artifacts from the Yucatan made it to Spiro, Oklahoma. And again, all these trade routes are laid out. It's just you don't hear much about it. Most archaeologists will now tell you that, yeah, there was some trade that went on, but they don't like to think about it or talk about it because textbooks up until recent years say, no, there was no. Nobody came into the Americas after, from roughly 9,000 BC till the time of Columbus, nobody except the small Norse incursion specifically in one area in Newfoundland were here.

And they just stayed there for a while and left and they didn't go anywhere else. That was the mainstream view until fairly recent years. That was what was in textbooks. And it's very difficult for any academics in any field to admit everything we've been saying is wrong. That's really hard to admit. I mean, psychology and psychiatry are kind of in that position now, like with SSRIs, that what we've said about serotonin is wrong. I was raised in the 1950s. I was born in 1949.

And I remember TV commercials that said smoking was good for you. And four out of five doctors say to smoke this version or that version because it's good for you. Lots of other things they used to tell us. They used to tell us that stress causes ulcers. I don't know if you remember that, but stress doesn't cause ulcers. It's bacteria. Stress can worsen ulcers, but it's not the cause. It worsens them.

So it's hard for, I never heard medicine say, hey, we're sorry that we told you that. I've never heard medicine stand up and say, we're sorry we told you that smoking was good for you. We're really sorry about that. I've never heard that. And I haven't heard archaeologists stand up and say, we're sorry we destroyed lots of careers of other people who said that the Americas were only populated. starting in 9,700 BC by a single incursion of people from Asia who crossed through the Beringian landmass, and that was it. And they all were the same. I've never heard them say they were sorry.

But that is what was in their textbooks for 70 years, 70 to 80 years. And they're still changing textbooks today because a lot of it's wrong. If you go to this, the site that I mentioned in at Crystal River, Florida, and you go into the museum, you will actually see maps showing people from the Yucatan going to Crystal River. They have a map on the wall showing that we know there was trade from the Yucatan to this site. Now, they show a little coastal route that they went all the way around the Gulf of Mexico, that they had to go all the way around, all of Mexico, of Mexico, and then go around Texas and Louisiana and Mississippi and Alabama

and then hit Florida and come down across the river. But what they'll tell you in the museum, now they use these giant canoe, some of which have been found, that Columbus saw, Columbus actually saw giant canoes that had a hundred paddlers in them. And these canoes probably, they went faster than any of the sailing ships could, They were probably paddling 20, 30 miles an hour or more. And they would cross the Gulf of Mexico.

And that's how trading routes occurred. And we know that happened. So things are changing pretty rapidly. And what people learned when they were in school, if you're my age, if you're your age, it was wrong. And a lot of times, they didn't tell us anything about mounds. There was probably nothing about mounds in your history in high school and nothing about mounds when you went to college. Probably never mentioned. Exactly.

Yeah, I never heard a peep about mounds, ancient mound building culture and high school or college. And again, that's why I love bringing you on, Dr. Greg, is just giving us an awakening to just right here in North America, how amazing the history is, is how much older it is and we've been led to believe. And again, when you look at these mounds and you look at the art. artifacts found in the mounds. There's so much more than we've been told. But like you're hinting at, you know, there's so much pride involved in the mainstream community, you know, because to admit that they were wrong would mean, well, that book is wrong.

And a lot of people would probably lose money and all that stuff. So I'm glad hopefully we're awakening minds together. And yeah, I mean, just the artifacts alone. in these mounds. And if you're watching on Spotify or YouTube, you're going to see all these images. And I'll refer you to Dr. Greg's book again in a second here. But let me just list these artifacts. There's the strange cube that you mentioned last time in one of the Ohio mounds. There's these Mayan-looking effigy pipes. You mentioned the spiral mound in Oklahoma, where there's what's known as the Lucifer pipe. I think that one is the

craziest looking. There's this hunchback hybrid chimeric looking figurine you recently posted on your Twitter. It was broken up into like 200 pieces and they put it together and it's this fascinating looking figure. And then you've got these copper plates and sheets that are embossed found all over Florida and in different mounds. Arkansas and Mississippi, too, and Ohio. They've been found all over.

Yeah, these elaborate tablets like in the Wilmington mound and Catskill Mound. And then you've got even these monolithic stone axes you feature pictures of. So you've got all these relics, all these artifacts. And I would say everybody go to Amazon like I did and get Dr. Greg's book, the illustrated encyclopedia of Native American Indian Mounds and Earthworks. And he's got a ton more books and then follow him on Twitter at, I got it right here, Dr. Greg Little 2. Nobody better to follow on Twitter regarding ancient history and mounds. He's always pumping out endless pictures of everything we're talking about.

Dr. Greg, is there any other way you want people to follow you or keep up to date with your research? Just get me on Twitter. I will give a final message and it's this. We never learned this in school, but there was a very sophisticated and vast culture here before our ancestors, my ancestors came into this country. It was everywhere and it was an amazing culture and it was erased from history. That's what the mound builders were. And I'm hoping they're not erased from history because it's an incredible culture needs to be respected. And that's what I'm trying to do. That's it. I appreciate very much the invitation. Derek, you're always a pleasure.

And I know I talk too much, but you let me do it. So there we go. Thanks again for coming on. This was amazing. And I believe it's going to really just so many people are going to enjoy this and have their minds blown by this. So Dr. Greg, thanks again. appreciate you. Keep up the great research and hopefully we'll do this again next year.

Thank you. And take care.