Author and inspirational thinker Graham Hancock appeared on Lucid Planet Radio last week to chat with me about his new book uncovering humanity’s hidden past, Magicians of the Gods, which is currently sold out on Amazon due to unprecedented customer demand (don’t worry, it will be back next week)!
You probably recognize Graham Hancock as the author of world-wide bestselling books like Fingerprints of the Gods, or from his inspirational banned Ted Talk on the “War on Consciousness” – a must see if you haven’t already. In addition to his talks, presentations and books reaching an audience of tens of millions, in February 2015 Hancock was voted No 30 in the Watkins list of “The 100 Most Spiritually Influential Living People.”
Listen to this interview if you want to find out why. Hancock is eloquent, articulate, passionate and thoughtful. To his millions of fans and supporters, he is a modern day, real-life Indiana Jones, a hero who stands up to the insanity of a society that attempts to control our birthright to explore our consciousness and attempts to restrict us from asking tough questions about who we are and where we come from. Most importantly, he is incredibly humble and open to communicating with people. He goes out of his way to connect with his readers and fans, saying that without them, he would be “absolutely nothing“, calling them “the most important people in my world.”
And yet to others, particular those in the ‘establishment’ of academia and media, his work and research across architecture, astronomy, geology, physics, archaeoastronomy and more has been labeled as ‘pseudo-science.’ When asked about these allegations in our interview, he replied that:
“It is inevitable when we start exploring unconventional ideas which do not fit into the mainstream paradigm, which are not regarded as worthy by the mainstream, that those ideas will be attacked. What has surprised me over the years is the insidious nature and the dishonest nature of the attacks… I cannot possibly be a ‘pseudo- scientist,’ pseudo means false, and I cannot be a false scientist because I never claimed to be a scientist… I claim to be a journalist. My job is to synthesize information and to do so in a thorough detailed manner across a wide range of sciences. That doesn’t mean I am a scientist- That means I am someone who writes about science. I feel I am no more a pseudo- scientist than a dolphin is a pseudo- fish.”
So what make Hancock’s ideas so unconventional? He has come under attack because his ideas force us to examine everything we have accepted to be true about human history and the ancient origins of our civilization. Indeed, as he said in our interview: “Everything we’ve been taught about the origins of civilization could be wrong.”
In his outstanding new book, Magicians of the Gods, Graham Hancock hypothesizes that a highly advanced human civilization existed over 12,000 years ago, during a time when the traditional historical paradigm labels humans only as primitive hunter-gatherers. Moreover, he offers extensive supporting evidence that a cataclysmic event (namely a comet hitting the North American ice-caps) occurred 12,800 years ago (and again 11,600 years ago) that all but eradicated this advanced society- which is the same society that Plato referred to in his writings as ‘Atlantis,’ a lost advanced civilization destroyed by a global cataclysm. Graham reminds me that this is NOT pseudo-science and that a plethora of scientific, peer-reviewed evidence has been published on this cataclysm since 2007:
“To place all of this in context, it is important to understand we do have the firm and really absolutely irrefutable scientific evidence that a global cataclysm did unfold between 12,800 and 11,600 years ago. This cataclysm, which was also responsible for massive wide-scale animal extinctions… wiped almost completely from the face of the earth an advanced civilization that had existed before it.”
Although this advanced society may have been destroyed, Hancock proposes that there were survivors, and these survivors settled among the hunter-gatherer societies that also existed on the planet, transferring their knowledge and passing on their skills in an attempt to re-make the great civilization that was lost. He explains in our interview that it is entirely possible that an advanced civilization lived alongside hunter-gatherers 12,800 years ago, after all, this is still the case on the planet today: There are still highly technologically advanced cultures contrasted with hunter-gatherer tribes and nomadic peoples. The ancient knowledge from this lost civilization was passed down, integrated, and eventually woven into cultures like the Sumerians and later, the Egyptians.
Even though this advanced civilization was lost, ancient megalithic structures were left behind across the globe. The pyramid of Gunung Panang in Indonesia is once such as example, where drill core samples date back over 20,000 years. This sophisticated structure was not the work of primitive hunter gathers, but of a society with advanced engineering and astronomical skills. People often ask if these ancient megalithic structures were built by aliens, and while it is impossible to completely rule it out, Hancock believes it much more likely that these structures were built by advanced human civilizations who have been long forgotten by our history books.
Perhaps the most mysterious and profound site of all is is Gobekli Tepe in Turkey, which Hancock says was deliberately buried by humans and intentionally left as a “for sure time-capsule” that had been untouched and preserved for 10,000 years when it was discovered in the mid 1990s. It is the largest megalithic site on Earth, more than 50 times larger than Stonehenge and 7,000 years older than Stonehenge. According to Hancock, who has personally observed and photographed the site extensively with his partner Santha Faiia, on Pillar 43 in enclosure D, there is astrological diagram of the constellations that we call Sagittarius and Scorpio standing on either side of the dark rift of the Milk Way galaxy, with the sun sitting over this dark rift.
Amazingly, the only time that sun would sit in this position over the Milk Way in between these constellations is at the winter solstice in OUR TIME TODAY, not during the time that the temple was built. What does this mean? First, it means that the people who created Gobekli Tepe over 12,000 years ago had a sophisticated knowledge of the stars and were able to simulate the changes in the sky that would occur because of the procession of the equinoxes. Second, it means that they may have created this image of the sky during our time, deliberately, to send US a message. According to Graham Hancock, that message is:
“Pay attention to the sky.”
The fragments of the same comet that hit the Earth are still in our orbit today, known as the Taurid meteor stream. We pass through these fragments every year at the end of June and in November. Just to put this in perspective, astronomers believe that the comet was initially about 60 miles in diameter when it was captured by the sun and went into an orbit which crosses the orbit of the Earth. It broke apart into smaller fragments, probably a mile or two wide, before hitting the Earth 12,800 yeas ago, with primary impact hitting the North America ice-shelf around Minnesota (which looked very different than it does today and was under miles of ice at the time). The fingerprint of the comet’s impact reached an astonishing 50 million square miles, with evidence of its impact as far afield as Syria. This impact would have been thousands of times stronger than the impact of setting off the Earth’s entire nuclear arsenal at once! There have been other impacts too from the fragments in the Taurid meteor stream: The most recent impact happened in 1908 when a fragment about 100 meters long hit the Earth’s atmosphere and exploded in the sky above an uninhabited area of Siberia.
According to Hancock, it is “just blind luck” that we haven’t been hit again and suffered another extinction event.
“Crossing the Taurid meteor stream is like strapping on a blind fold and crossing a six lane interstate and hoping that we won’t get hit.”
Indeed, many prominent astronomers have voiced and published this concern, especially that an object up to 20 miles in diameter is sitting dark in the midst of the Taurid meteor stream. It is impossible to even comprehend the damage this could do to our planet and the majority of species living on it.
But let’s not become hopeless dooms-dayers just yet, warns Hancock.
“We don’t need to project doom and gloom. We what we need to project is positivity. We have the technology now to make our cosmic environment entirely safe. To make sure our children and our children’s children have a bright and beautiful future and we do not become that lost civilization.”
So how do we ensure the safety of our cosmic environment? For Hancock, the solution is obvious, although it requires people to wake up and demand change. “We have taken our eye off the ball of the dangers of our cosmic environment,” he says, “right now the cost of running a single McDonalds for a year is all we are spending on looking for harmful asteroids and comets in our environment.” And yet, he points out, we are spending trillions of dollars on military, on weaponry, and on ways to kill each other and wage wars.
Perhaps there is a choice, and we can demand to choose something different. “We can change our priorities. The technologies already exist. It is simply a matter of a choice. Now is the time for humanity to join together in a grand project. We are brothers are sisters, we are the same, the differences that divide us are totally artificial and have been manipulated by authority figures in our society. We need to change this… This is a message of unity and hope for our society.”
One of the biggest challenges to making these changes a reality is the lack of funding for research on the comet impact. A team of more than 30 major scientists from the around the world has been responsible for funding all of the research themselves, as they have found it impossible to obtain funding from the traditional outlets because these ideas are so new and still unconventional. Remember, as pointed out earlier, unconventional ideas (even with scientific backing and evidence!) are often attacked by the mainstream before they are accepted. Hancock suggests that this is the perfect research to be crowd-funded, and the most significant and important science there is for understanding the ancient past of humanity. Stay tuned for updates as this crowd funding initiative may become a reality soon.
Graham Hancock and I both believe that the world is changing, and that people are demanding positive changes and waking up from the amnesia over our forgotten past that has clouded us for so long. “What I see, particularly among young people, is a global awakening taking place…. There is a new spirit in the air, and I also feel very optimistic about the future. This is a time of great change, when paradigms shift… Where we suddenly see new possibilities opening up.”
Where will these new possibilities lead us? Will we listen to these ancient messages and look to the sky for answers? Only time will tell, but the change is up to each of us. To find out so much more, please check out Magicians of the Gods, and followGraham on Facebook and the web. You can also follow Dr. Kelly on Facebook and listen to all the radio show archives on The Lucid Planet.
Cover Image by Travis Simpkins
