Graham Hancock: Aliens, Atlantis & An Ancient Apocalypse?? SPECIAL PRESENTATION

0:00 Speaker 1: Hello, Randall. How are you, my friend?

0:02 Speaker 2: I'm doing very well. Thank you.

0:04 Speaker 1: Are you doing, Jesse? I'm good man. Do you believe that there are survivors of ancient Atlantis that are among us, perhaps with underwater bases or bases on the moon and advanced technology.

0:18 Speaker 2: A question, Jesse, I will just say very provisional. Yes.

0:28 Speaker 2: Twenty twenty three is going to be a your disclosure. Things come around in your time, and there's been lost knowledge, but it's never been completely lost. Its fat incident everywhere around us, and some of it's been in every days.

0:43 Speaker 3: I just haven't understood to recognize what it is.

0:48 Speaker 1: According to a professional midway journalist at The Guardian, my next guest's highly acclaimed docu series is the most dangerous show on Netflix.

0:57 Speaker 4: You'd be described as a pseudo cherry picts your data.

1:02 Speaker 1: And that makes him the perfect guest on our show, American Alchemy.

1:06 Speaker 4: If you've got to roll your eyes at the notion of mother Ayahuasca, go drink some ayahuasca and then see if you're going to roll your right.

1:12 Speaker 1: The docu series is called Ancient Apocalypse, and the journalist is internationally acclaimed best selling author Graham Hancock Since his nineties cult class Fingerprints of the Gods, Hancock has been accumulating an abundance of evidence to show that our modern historical narrative that civilization was born a mere six thousand years ago in Mesopotamia is wrong and incomplete.

1:36 Speaker 2: It's going to absolutely to fan a rewrite of history as.

1:40 Speaker 4: We know it.

1:42 Speaker 1: Hancock thinks that the human species has been suffering from mass amnesia, and that maybe hunter gatherers were taught basic agriculture and astronomy by remnant survivors of an ancient civilization that was wiped out in a mass extinction event.

1:58 Speaker 4: There is testimony from the anciency yes saying an enormous flood happened and that there was a time where there were only a few survivors.

2:04 Speaker 1: On This hypothesis, known as the Younger Driest impact theory, sustains that an asteroid from the torred meteor stream hit the Earth, causing a global cataclysm to make things even trippier. This comet impact date almost perfectly coincides with Plato's dates for the destruction of Atlantis. But let's reign in the speculation on which civilizations preceded ours, inserting Atlantis as a placeholder for that civilization is admittedly a little more speculative, as Graham Hancock would.

2:34 Speaker 4: Even admit, I'm not claiming or insisting that there was a civilization that was actually cold at Lantis. By Plato's time, it was cold Atlantis.

2:43 Speaker 1: But crazy speculations on Atlantis notwithstanding, I personally think it just takes some childlike instincts and basic inference to believe Hancock's argument about the younger Dry's impact theory. There's an overwhelming amount of evidence to show that a global cataclysm.

2:59 Speaker 3: Probably did occur.

3:02 Speaker 1: Let's just take these high level facts. The modern field of archaeology was born a mere two hundred years ago. Let that sink in the very idea that we take is complete dogma that civilization started in the Fertile Crescent six thousand years ago. That concept was only established two hundred years ago with the discovery of the great capital cities of Assyria and Babylonia. As we explore and discover more ancient archaeological sites, our dates for civilization get progressively older and older. Take to Beckley Tepe, an ancient burial site in modern Turkey dating as far back as nine thousand BC.

3:42 Speaker 1: And involving the complex assembly of fifty ton blocks.

3:46 Speaker 4: It's not something that you're a hunter gatherer and you wake up one morning and think, oh, I'm just going to build the largest megalithic site that will ever be seen anywhere in the world.

3:55 Speaker 1: Tepi was excavated in the nineties, so I think it would actually be the easy or safe bet to say that in the next hundred years we'll find architecture that predates even this. It's like a sort of Moor's law for archaeology. The deeper we go, the older human history gets. The lowest parts in any sediment layer are the hardest parts to explore. That's just geology one oh one, and our digging and underground mapping techniques are getting better and better. Not to mention, you have entire swass of the earth and deep ocean that may have been above sea level in times past, the Amazon Forest, which is the size of the Indian subcontinent, and the four million square mile Sahara Desert that have basically gone completely untouched and unnoticed by conventional archaeologists.

4:42 Speaker 1: To say that we know what exists in these massive black box territories is the epitome of human hubris. Finally, you have hundreds and hundreds of flood myths across cultures that had no contact with each other. The amount of corroborating evidence for some flood having occurred is overwhelming.

5:02 Speaker 4: That story does not stand alone. That story is one of approximately two thousand flood traditions.

5:08 Speaker 1: Right, And for skeptics to unequivocally discount these texts because many of them are religious in nature, is itself dogmatic and unscientific.

5:17 Speaker 4: These are the memory banks of our species. It's in these myths that the memories are passed down.

5:22 Speaker 1: I like to characterize Hancock's books as oscillating between trippy and speculative and very hardheaded and scientific. It's almost as if he'll write one book for the esoteric psychonaut and then the next for the modern scientific skeptic. His archaeological accounts have been well covered on Netflix Now and by other podcasts, So in this very raw, long form interview, I wanted to go off the deep end with him and get into the secrets of the Arc of the Covenant DMT and its history and its transcendent qualities, and his fascinating beliefs on aliens, which he writes about in his two thousand and five hit book Supernatural.

5:58 Speaker 1: So without further sit back, relax and hit subscribe. Well, I explore the mysteries of our forgotten past with this week's American alchemist, Graham Hancock.

6:21 Speaker 3: Maybe you should interview me because I've climbed the Great Pyramid five times and two of those clients were legal.

6:35 Speaker 4: Of course, there was a time when anybody could anybody could climb the Great Pyramid.

6:39 Speaker 3: But here's my little anecdote.

6:40 Speaker 4: I found something I together found at the top of the Great Pyramid on the south side, overlooking what used to be the Boat Museum.

6:48 Speaker 3: On one step.

6:49 Speaker 4: Down from the top, we found the name P Initial P. Hancock, fifth of April nineteen sixteen. Well, my father was Philip Hancock. Now, yes, and he was in Egypt. He was in Yeah, he was in Egypt during the First World War. I still couldn't be one hundred percent sure it was him. And at that time my dad was still alive, and he had my grandfather's diaries, which were little things, little diaries, dozens of them. And I went through to the date given and I opened that page and I saw just one line and it said climbed Great pyramid today.

7:28 Speaker 1: That's crazy.

7:29 Speaker 3: It was my granddad. Yeah, so I am kind of connected to that.

7:33 Speaker 1: Oh, you're completely connected.

7:35 Speaker 5: That's so why did archaeologists tell us for so long hunter gatherers couldn't do it and we needed agricultural populations that could generate surpluses that could pay for the specialists super theory. But that was so Now with archaeolog just saying it was, I guess we were wrong about hunter gathers.

7:52 Speaker 3: So yeah.

7:52 Speaker 1: The funny thing about Michael Schrmer, there's a story about him and I think his wife Jennifer, and they were I was like, on their wedding, this mechanical clock starts playing in the other room that was an heirloom from her father, and it hadn't played and it was completely broken and it hadn't played in like twenty years or something. And her father was supposed to walk her down the aisle, but he had died prior to the wedding, and it was this mystical moment for him. It's this beautiful quote and I'm going to batch it now if I were to paraphrase it.

8:27 Speaker 1: It's like, we must throw away the dogmas of science sometimes and make room for these sort of anomalous mystical Michael said the moments he says this in the article.

8:39 Speaker 4: I'm very happy to hear that, And I would say I've only known Michael personally since twenty seventeen, when I had a debate with him on the Joe Rogan experience. Since then, I've had some correspondence with him, and I've found him to be a much less dogmatic skeptic than I had taken him for. And just recently I had had an email from him concerning my Ancient Apocalypse series on Netflix, where he kindly said that he felt I've made I'd made a good case for my basic proposition that we're missing an episode of the human story that there may have been a forgotten, lost civilization of the Ice Age.

9:18 Speaker 4: And I think to me that speaks well of Michael's integrity, that he that he's willing to step out of an entrenched position when the evidence speaks to the need to step out of it, rather than just sticking in it all the time, or so many of my critics do. So much of our planet has not really been subjected to detailed, intensive archaeological survey. I think it's extremely premature for our chaeologists to be so confident in their model of the origins of civilization, they should have some humility and allow some leg room for alternative suggestions to come in.

9:49 Speaker 4: Instead of just trying to smash down anybody who says something that doesn't agree with their model, Perhaps be just a little more warm hearted, a little more open, and see what's good in the alternative va that this is being presented, rather than just trying to find bad things about it, and have a more constructive dialogue instead of this you know, we know best, and we're going to smash you down, and we're going to insult you and humiliate you and call you any names we can.

10:11 Speaker 3: So childish.

10:12 Speaker 1: Really, I don't even know what arguments they like if they see some like go Beckley Teppe has been that's been discovered since the nineties. Yeah, and so it's I don't even know what arguments you have as to how the fertile Crescent is sort of the cradle of civilization. After that, and then in your amazing documentary docuseries rather Netflix Ancient Apocalypse.

10:32 Speaker 3: Which feeds, one of the episodes is focused on go Beckley Tepper.

10:35 Speaker 1: Right, and but you have seven or eight others that are pretty convincing as well, and so at that point it feels like kind of overwhelming that the consensus should actually shift.

10:44 Speaker 4: Yes, at at the very least, there should be there should be willingness to consider the possibility that we have missed an important chapter of the human story.

10:54 Speaker 1: You are to know one reason, and I'm sure there are a whole host of other reasons. But why they reflexively might deny this as well is because I think it interestingly dovetails with stories in the Bible and other religious texts around great floods.

11:08 Speaker 4: Well, the flood, of course, you know, is a very important story in the Bible. I think a lot of what a lot of people who are into the Bible don't realize that that story does not stand alone. That story is one of approximately two thousand flood traditions right that have found all around the world exactly the clearly documenting a global phenomenon.

11:26 Speaker 2: If we turn to the subject of paleo hydrology, it totally confirms the reality of these inconceivably gigantic floods the occurred at the end of the Last Icing.

11:40 Speaker 1: And if a comment from the tord meteor stream were to hit the Earth, it could create a big flood.

11:48 Speaker 3: You better.

11:52 Speaker 1: The tourd meteor stream was formed when a massive comment entered our Inner Solar System's orbit around twenty thousand years ago. Over time, this comet has disintegrated into smaller space debris like the very famous one point five mile wide comet anky Ankie and other comets in the southern Torrets crossed the Earth's orbit yearly from September to November, while the Northern Torret streams crossed the Earth starting in mid to late October. Both of these streams cause beautiful light showers and give astronomers panic attacks.

12:23 Speaker 1: Why because they can cause massive damage on Earth in the form of impacts and airbursts.

12:29 Speaker 4: We're not dealing with just little dust sized particles that burn up in the upper atmosphere. And that just as it was a danger to humanity twelve thousand, eight hundred years ago, it hasn't gone away and it still can be a danger to us today.

12:42 Speaker 1: Just take comet Shoemaker Levy nine, which collided with Jupiter in nineteen ninety four. It was only a little over a half mile wide, but its impact on Jupiter was the equivalent to six million megatons of TNT, more six hundred times the destructive force of the entire Earth's new clear arsenal. And isn't there speculation that the nineteen oh eight Tenguska correct event was possible.

13:06 Speaker 4: Correct correct because the Tumulski event took place on the thirtieth of June nineteen hundred and eighty. It was an air burst. It exploded in the air, flattened two thousand square miles of trees, didn't kill anybody because it was over an uninhabited area of Siberia, but did enormous, enormous damage, And the fact that it occurred on the thirtieth of June suggests very strongly that it was part of the tory Metia.

13:28 Speaker 3: Stream because that is the peak of the torreds.

13:31 Speaker 1: In June, NASA's Dart program eemed to prove that humans can deflect asteroids with satellites and prevent Earth impact. In fact, spacecrafts launched in November of twenty one in September of twenty two intentionally crashed into Dimorphous, a minor planet moon of the asteroid Diddimus, successfully altering its orbit. The problem is Dimorphous has a diameter of two hundred meters, not even close to the half mile width of Shoemaker Levy.

13:59 Speaker 4: No, it's interesting that mass adart mission is taking place now because we know that in the next thirty years or so we are going to be crossing a much more lumpy and much more dangerous part of the Tory beatings.

14:11 Speaker 1: That's interesting. I didn't know that.

14:12 Speaker 2: Yeah.

14:12 Speaker 4: In fact, doctor Allan West, one of the scientists from the Comic Research Group, he points that out that the next thirty years are a danger time.

14:22 Speaker 1: There are plenty of unknown comments in the annually passing toward meteor stream that have completely cataclysmic destructive potential, so we need to invest in advancing our deflection capabilities here.

14:34 Speaker 4: Of course, it's not the only global threat. There are any other global threats, all of which require an elevation of consciousness of the human race. We have to be get out of this tribal mentality where we're all hating and fighting each other, right, and get into a more loving and more positive mentality.

14:50 Speaker 1: Otherwise it'll be like that movie don't look up. We're trying to tell you that the dire planet is about to be destroyed.

14:57 Speaker 3: Yeah, it's an excellent movie. The way.

15:00 Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, yeah, and it sort of connects with all of this. Yeah, I think the part where I struggle most with and what I'd love to talk to you about, because I feel like most interviews with you kind of focus on the abundance of evidence that human history is much older than we realize. But I know you well enough to know that you've done speculating beyond that. And so let's demarcate this to the audience that this is speculation and we don't know, but it's interesting and because of the abundance of evidence, it's we should be speculating.

15:31 Speaker 1: That is that's it's almost like our duty.

15:33 Speaker 4: I think speculation is very healthy, and you know, we need to we need to step out of the mainstream point of view. That's that's where I think people like me can possibly pay play a useful role.

15:45 Speaker 1: So, having said that, what's your number one candidate for an antecedent civilization? I mean that the classic one would be Atlantis, who wrote a book called America Before, which connects with this story. Do you think it is Atlanta? Are there other.

16:02 Speaker 4: I think the name, the name Atlantis needs to be taken as standing for something else need to be taken as standing for something larger. I'm not I'm not claiming or insisting that there was a civilization that was actually called Atlantis. By Plato's time, it was called Atlantis. Plato is the Plato is the earliest surviving reference we have to this great lost civilization of prehistory that he referred to as Atlantis. His source was an ancestor of his. He didn't know him personally there separated by about two hundred years, but the story had been passed down in the family line, and that ancestor was a very famous Greek lawmaker, Solon.

16:40 Speaker 4: And we know that Solon made a documented visit to Egypt round about the year six hundred BC in our calendar. And Solon went to a temple dedicated to the goddess Neith at Seiss in the Delta, and there the priests showed showed him certain inscriptions on walls, and he asked them to interpret, and they said that what these inscriptions recounted was a former civilization which had been highly advanced, but which was destroyed. That they said, in a single dreadful day and night, was swallowed up by the sea and vanished.

17:17 Speaker 3: And the other point, which.

17:18 Speaker 4: I think is really really important to make, and I do make this point in the series is the date.

17:27 Speaker 3: The date that Plato gives.

17:28 Speaker 1: Us is right around the Younger drive Well date.

17:32 Speaker 4: The point is that when Solon was at that temple, the priests told him the Atlantis story and how Atlantis was swallowed up by the sea in a single terrible day and night. He asked them when did this happen? And they said nine thousand years ago. Now, immediately, that's a date we can convert into our calendar. Nine thousand years ago in six hundred BC is a date we call nine thousand, six hundred BC, which give or take to years, is eleven thousand, six hundred years ago. And just as the Younger Dryass began cataclysmically with a sea level rise twelve eight hundred years ago, it also ended cataclysmically with an even more massive sea level rise eleven thousand, six hundred years ago.

18:16 Speaker 4: And that massive sea level rise has a name. You'll just call it melt water Pulse one B. It's well documented. Nobody disputes that there was a melt water pulse one B and it raised sea levels massively, literally overnight. So here we have Plato passing down a story with a date attached to it, which coincides exactly with what modern science recognizes as a massive global flooding event. And when that's taken into account with the evidence from the edge for building texts, I think the Atlantis story becomes a whole lot more credible.

18:50 Speaker 1: You've often said that we'll put You've often said that the human race is suffering from amnesia mass amnesia, and a mutual friend of ours, Brian Murescu, wholl you sort of presented to the world on Joe Rogan wrote a great book called The Immortality Key, for which I wrote the forward for which he wrote the forward, and he talks about not only the human race as suffering from amnesia, but this is kind of a platonic concept. The individual suffering from amnesia is concept of anemnesis that the birthing process is kind of a traumatic forgetting process of your primordial soul, and that these Elusinian mystery rituals.

19:28 Speaker 1: Eleusis being thirteen miles northwest of Athens. You've been to Elesis. Amazing is this place where the fathers of Western civilization, Plato, Socrates, if he existed, Aristotle, all the great names went and experienced some form of maybe noesis like knowledge of their soul. So do you think, well, but.

19:51 Speaker 3: It's important to add yes.

19:53 Speaker 4: That's I first went into this in my two thousand and five book Supernatural Yes, which has been recent reissued under a new title of Visionary. The point is, there's no doubt in my mind that Elusis was a place. It was a perfect setting for deep psychedelic journeys. Every initiate in the Ellucinian industries was given a drink called the k and they were given this drink, then they went down into this deep, dark hallway. We don't know exactly what went on in there because the rituals were were kept secrets, but they then had extraordinary life changing experiences.

20:27 Speaker 3: And in many cases many of those great.

20:30 Speaker 4: Philosophers said that what they lost was their fear of death. That they had had fear of death before and after this experience they no longer feared feared death. And you know, Brian also presents excellent evidence that early Christianity was a psychedelic religion.

20:46 Speaker 1: And maybe the Last Supper was it was maybe it was edible to the idea that Christ's Last Supper was actually a pagan mystery ritual is not ni. In fact, Martin Luther King wrote a little known essey called The Influence of Mystery Religions on Christianity, positing the pagan continuity hypothesis that Christianity wasn't born in a vacuum, but bears a striking resemblance to pagan polytheistic traditions and rituals that occurred across the ancient world. One of the leading scholars who compares the Last Supper with prior pagan rituals is Dennis MacDonald, a theology professor at Claremont.

21:27 Speaker 1: He writes they eating flesh and drinking blood point to the Dionesian cult imagery, specifically the eating of the flesh and the blood of the God, and the immortality the initiates gain by such activity. He goes on to write that the cult of Dionysus famously involved two related rites, spiagmos and omophagia. The first, dismemberan was the ripping a part of living beasts. The second, eating raw flesh, was the placing of the fresh and bleeding meat to the lips, which some some ancient interpreters took to be a reenactment of the eating of the young Dionysus by the Titans.

22:05 Speaker 1: The participants celebrated Dionysus as the one who had survived death and thus was granted immortality as the Lord of souls. But even if you take the canonical description of the Last Supper at face value and say the Book of John, things can get kind of trippy. Take John six ' five three. Truly, truly, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. The one who choose my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life. This sounds very similar to the Eleusinian mystery rituals Brian Murray Rescue writes about in his book The Immortality Key.

22:46 Speaker 1: And this isn't even a gnostic text like the Gospel of Thomas. This is canonical New Testament.

22:54 Speaker 4: In religions, as let's take, particularly the three big monotheistic religions Christiana to Judaism and Islam, which basically all worshiped the same deity and the same prophets are recognized. These religions are all very very closely interlinked. All of them have officials who priests, Rabbis Muller's who interposed themselves between us and the divine experience. They tell us what the divine experience is, but we don't have the opportunity to have that experience ourselves. And the thing about psychedelics is that they provide a direct experience, a direct experience, not mediated by some official but an experience that you have yourself.

23:36 Speaker 4: And that seems to be what was going on in early Christianity, that people where Christ was seen more as a teacher than as the son of God. And what seems to have been going on is that early Christianity was very much a psychedelic religion. And it's really only when the Roman Catholic Church emerged and it starts oppressing people. And the very first people that oppressed were those other Christian sects that had used psychedelics.

24:07 Speaker 1: Any of the Council of Nicea in three twenty five, which sort of arbitrarily based on political reasons, kind of cuts down Christianity into an accepted canon that in many ways it discounts some of the more interesting books, like the Gospel of Thomas, that have to do with a single individual's ability to ascend into a more divine, divine state.

24:30 Speaker 4: That's right, you see The problem is that the state of consciousness that we have today that's dominant in our society today is what I call the alert, problem solving state of consciousness. This is the state of consciousness that our society values. So it's interesting when you look at the drugs that are legal in our society, that everybody has access to and that are often glorified.

24:51 Speaker 3: Alcohol is one of the drugs that our society has embraced. Well.

24:57 Speaker 4: I can understand why, because alcohol does not lead people to ask profound questions. It's like a little holiday from the problem solving state of consciousness.

25:07 Speaker 3: But that's all it is.

25:08 Speaker 4: But I just want to point out that what the psychedelics do is offer us much more than a break from that stuff. They offer access to a completely different state of consciousness. The other thing they do is they break very blocked and narrow ways of thinking. And that's what depression is. Depression is where you're locked into a state of mind that makes you extremely sad and unhappy and you can't escape from it, you know, And the pharmaceutical drugs like syroxat and prozac and things like that absolutely fucking useless in getting people out of depression.

25:38 Speaker 4: I speak from experience because I suffered from depression. So eventually, what I decided to do was just do a very gradual cutdown of the dose, and I used a razor blade to slice up the pills. I just cut it down, day by day over six months, until finally I was clear of that horrible medicine. At least I experienced it as a horrible medicine. Perhaps it helps some people, but honestly, the scientific studies that have been done suggest that placebos are just as effective as the SSRI antidepress and.

26:06 Speaker 1: It recently came out there's no correlation between serotonin deficiency and depression.

26:10 Speaker 3: I know.

26:10 Speaker 1: And it's like, Okay, you're saying this now after fifty years exactly, we've.

26:14 Speaker 3: Been sold a myth, We've been sold a lie.

26:17 Speaker 4: And if we look at the world through a very narrow limited perspective, and all we're going to see is narrow limited things. The role of psychedelics is providing another lens that allows us to see a wider reality.

26:29 Speaker 1: Can I offer you a crazy theory and you can tell me if I'm not?

26:33 Speaker 3: Okay?

26:33 Speaker 1: So in nineteen seventy three, Francis Kirk, who discovered the double heelical structure of DNA. Wrote a paper about.

26:39 Speaker 3: Directed Want a Nobel prize?

26:41 Speaker 1: Want a Nobel prize? You know, renowned scientist, he wrote a paper on directed pan spermy.

26:48 Speaker 3: If he did.

26:48 Speaker 4: He wrote a book that actually called life Itself. He wrote papers and.

26:52 Speaker 1: The book interesting. I didn't even know that.

26:54 Speaker 3: The book is a tough read. It was published in nineteen eighty one.

26:56 Speaker 4: Okay, but it's it's it's it's it's fascinating.

27:00 Speaker 3: And if I can just jump the gun.

27:02 Speaker 1: A yeeling, you probably know what I'm going to ask.

27:04 Speaker 4: Yeah, that Crick, the world's leading expert on DNA, came to the conclusion that DNA could not have evolved on this planet in the time available for it.

27:17 Speaker 2: You know.

27:18 Speaker 4: The classic model is that we have a sort of primeval soup the early Earth.

27:22 Speaker 3: The Earth forms about four.

27:24 Speaker 4: Point five billion years ago, four and a half thousand million years ago, and for the first six hundred million years it's too hot to support any life. Until about three point nine billion years ago it gets to the stage where it could support very basic life forms, and within one hundred million years of that, which across the span of millions of years, is a tiny amount of time. Within one hundred million years of that, by three point eight billion years ago, bacterial life was all over this planet.

27:56 Speaker 4: And Crick's view was as a leading scientist whose whole life was focused on the study of DNA, his life was that DNA could not have emerged accidentally from the primeval soup on this planet in just one hundred million years. It needed much longer. He still brought into the primeval soup idea, but not on this planet. Yes. What he came down to was that there must have been some other planet, somewhere else where a primeval soup had existed, and there had been enough time for DNA to emerge from the accidental bumping together of molecules.

28:30 Speaker 4: That's, by the way, something I'm a bit skeptical of anywhere. But nevertheless, that was Krick's point in life itself. And then he suggested that, you know, the universe is very old, at least thirteen and a half billion years old. There's time for life to have evolved elsewhere in the universe, and he suggested that what happened was that the first primitive bacteria continued to evolve on that distant planet orbiting another Sun on the other side of the universe, that life began to evolve, and eventually a highly developed civilization emerged on that planet.

29:03 Speaker 4: I'm not saying they looked anything like us. And by the way, I need to emphasize this is Qrick.

29:07 Speaker 3: This is not me.

29:09 Speaker 4: This is the Nobel Prize winning who's saying this. That life evolved on that planet, highly intelligent, sophisticated, advanced life form, and then they discovered that they faced certain doom that there was going to be He suggested a super and nova going off in their vicinity, which would strip.

29:24 Speaker 3: Their planet of all life.

29:26 Speaker 4: And to continue the quick story, he then said, well, the first thing they would have done was to figure could we get ourselves off the planet? Could we go colonize another planet? But the distances in interstellar space were too great for that to be feasible. So they did the next best thing. They genetically engineered bacteria. They incorporated the DNA code within those bacteria, and then they put the bacteria into cryogenic chambers in spaceships and fired them off in all directions.

29:55 Speaker 1: So it's an algae and CO two for food.

29:57 Speaker 4: And then yeah, you know, and we know that bacteria extremophiles can survive in extremely dire circumstances and fired them off into the early universe and cut a long story short, three point nine billion years ago, one of those spaceships collided with the early Earth, spilled out its contents of bacteria, and there you have it. Life begins to evolve on this planet, and it contains the DNA code that came from another planet.

30:22 Speaker 1: And fungal DNA is more similar to human DNA than plant is fascinating, which is pretty.

30:27 Speaker 4: Fungi are amazing things which are which which are kind of halfway between the animal and the plant world. They're most most most curious and incredible things. So so that was Krick's suggestion, and I don't think it's a wild suggestion, particularly bearing in mind who it comes from.

30:43 Speaker 3: God.

30:43 Speaker 4: He stuck his neck out in proposing something like that, you know, because there's a huge lobby behind behind the natural selection, the and the Darwinian model. He wasn't stepping away from the Darwinian but he was trying to solve an anomaly. He couldn't understand how DNA could have formed accidentally in just one hundred million years.

31:02 Speaker 1: Well, it almost feels like human evolution. Their gaps in human evolution and evolutionary biologists like to say they have these placeholder words like punctuated equilibria, but if you really look at you know, I think like the stoned ape theory, for example, the doubling and cranial size between two million years ago and three hundred thousand years ago. And then the emergence of culture, which you and Brian are rescue talk about. A possible explanation for the emergence of culture, which I want to get your take on is a lot of people say specialization and culture inevitably comes from having more time.

31:38 Speaker 1: Because you have agriculture. You have talked about sort of a transfer of technology maybe from an antecedent civilization. What if you're planting wheat, barley and rye. Those were like the original sort of things in the agricultural revolution. Ergot grows on those things, and so what if there is you know this, it's almost like the ergod is like a particular.

32:02 Speaker 4: Kind of gods cleviceps, paspali somewhergots are deadly toxic, but it happens that the one that grows on marley is not toxic, and it is soluble in water, so it can be turned into a book.

32:16 Speaker 1: Interesting, So what if the consumption of that is what spurred all these ideas that have sort of created a lot of modern civilism.

32:24 Speaker 4: Well, that's exactly the case that I made in my two thousand and five book Supernatural. It's exactly the case that Brian's taken much further in his What twenty and twenty one book The Immortology. Key that it was and somebody else we have to recognize. No, it's the late great Terrence McKenna. Oh, yeah, of course, Terrence McKenna was a key thinker in this field. But I would recommend to anybody who's listening his book Food of the Gods was one of the first books to suggest that this quantum leap forward in human behavior and in human consciousness was entirely the result of experimenting with psychedelics.

33:03 Speaker 1: Yeah, and he and mckenneth thinks that he talks about a mushroom trip where the mushrooms say to him, within my memory exist the blueprints for hyper light drives.

33:16 Speaker 3: I believe that.

33:17 Speaker 4: God left certain drugs growing naturally upon our.

33:20 Speaker 1: Planet to help speed up and facilitate our evolution. If you think about it, if you have an alien civilization. Would you present yourself as a hominid cre like a foreign invader, dominid creature, or where you subtly merge with the higher hominid creature, affect their thinking and hitchhike your way.

33:41 Speaker 3: I think you go for subtle, subtle merging.

33:43 Speaker 4: Yeah, And this is where again shamanism has much to teach Western Western science, because shamans need to be taken seriously when they say that the plants and the fung guy are teachers.

33:55 Speaker 3: And that's a very mysterious thing.

33:57 Speaker 4: Anybody who's had deep psychedelic journey will know that they get teachings in that journey, and those teachings generally refer to their own lives and their own behavior and how they behaved. It's very odd that a mushroom or a mixture of two plants from the Amazon should cause us to evaluate our behavior and should teach us that maybe we've been doing stuff wrong that we need to adjust and put right in the future. I myself have had a creative gift from psychedelics, and that was back in two thousand and six, drinking ayahuasca in Brazil over a series of five sessions, I was given literally given the entire plot of a novel.

34:41 Speaker 3: I'd never written a novel before.

34:43 Speaker 4: That's crazy, But I was given the entire plot of a novel, which I eventually and at the end of those sessions, I got a very clear message from the entity that I call Mother Ayahuasca. And factly, I don't care if scientists roll their eyes.

34:56 Speaker 3: If you're going to roll your.

34:57 Speaker 4: Eyes at the notion of Mother Ayahuasca, go drink some my Aahuaska and then see.

35:01 Speaker 3: If you're going to roll your eye. I was.

35:03 Speaker 4: I was given the gift of a story, and I was given a very strong instruction write it, did you?

35:08 Speaker 3: And I did? And I wrote it.

35:09 Speaker 4: It's called Entangled It and it features a young woman twenty four thousand years ago and a young woman today who are entangled across time in a battle of good against evil. And there's a demonic force that is that is traveling through time and that is twisting humanity out of our true mission. And their job is to stop that force, both in the Stone Age and today.

35:34 Speaker 1: Do you consider yourself gnostic or what? What would you? Because if I would religious, I'm not. I don't and in many ways you're anti.

35:44 Speaker 3: I'm not a Christian. I don't.

35:46 Speaker 4: I don't belong to any religion. If I were to put myself in a category, I would say Gnostic is the right category. I wrote a book with Robert Baval back in the nineties, Talisman, and of course the Gnostics were amongst the first people to be burnt at the stake when the Roman Catholic Church, as I put it, pulled on the jackbooked boot of the Roman state and began to persecute its competitors.

36:15 Speaker 1: And you talk about almost in that book a through line of Gnosticism in the form of these sort of small cobbalistic I.

36:24 Speaker 3: Believe it's continued. I believe it's continued.

36:26 Speaker 4: The message has not just evaporated, but it's gone underground, and it's been and it's been transmitted through various lines, and in some cases those lines may not even know what they're transmitting anymore.

36:36 Speaker 1: That's interesting. Yeah, So it's like in the past you'd have the templars of the Rescrutions or the Freemasons, and now there's like a hermetic transfer without a real exoteric organization even exists.

36:50 Speaker 4: Yes, it can, it can be passed down that in that way, I would say Freemasonry is an interesting example. Not a Freemason myself, I'm not. I don't join clubs, and I'm not a member of that club, and I never will be a member of that club.

37:06 Speaker 1: Our friend Randall Carlson rand is a Freemason.

37:10 Speaker 4: And I have I have spoken in Masonic lodges. I've been asked to give lectures and I've happily done. So I'll give a lecture to anybody who's interested in hearing what I've got to say. I've spoken several times in Masonic lodges. Through a mutual friend, I know an archaeologist who actually teaches at the University of Exeter in the UK who's been involved in led our work in Columbia. They have they have identified what they're certain is an enormous pyramid in the middle of the Amazon rainforest.

37:40 Speaker 2: Wow.

37:41 Speaker 4: And the next step is to put a team out there and actually see it on the ground.

37:44 Speaker 1: Well, that's cool. Are you going to go and check it out?

37:46 Speaker 3: You bet, I'm going to go if I get If I get the chance.

37:48 Speaker 1: I'd go with you. Yeah.

37:51 Speaker 3: Absolutely.

37:52 Speaker 1: And you wrote a book called The Sign and the Seal. I did about the Arc of the Covenant and so.

37:58 Speaker 4: And that was my first venture into what shall we call historical mystery. And in Ethiopia I came across this really quite by chance. I found myself in the city of Axum, in t gray and northern Ethiopian and there were some strange processions going on and wonderful music and dancing and rituals being performed. And I asked, what's this all about, and they said, well, we have the we have the Ark of the Covenant here, and these these ceremonials are in honor of the of the Ark of the Covenant. And you've got the Ark of the Covenant here.

38:34 Speaker 3: I've just seen Raiders of the Lost Arc. You've got the Ark of the Covenant here.

38:38 Speaker 4: Where they And they said, well, it's in that enclosure. And there's a huge religious enclosure in the heart of Aksum which contains a sixteenth century church church of Saint Mary of Zion, and beside it a little chapel, and it's in that chapel that the Ethiopians claim the Arc is kept. And this is not a minor issue for Ethiopians. This is a very major issue for them. It's fundamental to Ethiopian culture. There's something that a lot of people don't understand. And it's kind of odd because the arc of the Covenant is a pre Christian relic and Ethiopia is largely a Christian country.

39:13 Speaker 4: Why is Ethiopian Christianity, which is very Old Testament in its form, very a New Testament in its form, Why is it but still calling itself Christianity? Why is it venerating a pre Christian, non Christian relic that belongs to Old Testament times. So I began to do my own investigation, and my own investigation included a lot of time spent with the indigenous Ethiopian Jews. This is something, again that's not widely known, but there has been, going back into remote prehistory, a Judaic community in Ethiopia, and in Ethiopia they're known as the Plashes.

39:52 Speaker 4: They refer to themselves as the Beta Israel, the House of Israel, and they say that their ancestors brought the Ark of the Covenant to Ethiopia. And it happened in this way that first of all, their ancestors lived on an island in the Nile, and they lived there for some hundreds of years. Well that's the first thing I checked. Was there ever a Jewish community on an island in the Nile.

40:17 Speaker 3: Yes, there was on the island.

40:19 Speaker 4: Of Elephantine, opposite the modern city of Assouan in Upper Egypt, around six hundred and fifty BC.

40:26 Speaker 3: The general story is that.

40:28 Speaker 4: The ark was stolen by the Babylonians about sixty years later in five hundred and eighty seven BC. But the Babylonians have no records of the Ark of the Covenant. They were ferocious bureaucrats, and they kept detailed records of everything they stole from the Temple of Jerusalem, didn't include the ark. The ark logically was gone before the Babylonians ever got there. And suddenly the Falacias story of their ancestors living on an island in the Nile starts to make sense. And then I go in further into it, and I discovered that around four hundred BC, there was conflict between that Jewish community and the Egyptians.

41:01 Speaker 4: The conflict was because the island of Elephantine was dedicated to the god Khnum, and the Egyptian god Knum is a ram headed deity, and the Jewish community on that island were sacrificing rams and this and again this is historically established. They were thrown out. They were they were driven out. There's no evidence that they were massacred. They were just driven out of that island. And that's where it connects with the flash of stories that their ancestors were driven out of that island and they then followed the Nile river system.

41:31 Speaker 4: They did not go north through a hostile Egypt. They went south and they the Nile, of course, divides into two branches, the Blue Nile and the White Nile. The White Nile rises in Uganda, the Blue Nile rises in Lake Tana in Ethiopia. And Lake Tana in Ethiopia is the center, the absolute center of the area in which the Ethiopian Jews live.

41:51 Speaker 3: Wow, and and suddenly it.

41:53 Speaker 4: All began to make sense interesting, you know, and and and and and and could be stood up as a reasonable I never saw the object that is called the arc itself. And maybe that's just as well, because the guardians of the art and get sick and die very very rapidly.

42:09 Speaker 1: You said that he said that people come out with burns on their.

42:12 Speaker 3: They typically get cataracts.

42:14 Speaker 4: They get blinded by cataracts, which is something that happens with radiation damage.

42:18 Speaker 1: But your narrative of the Ark of the Covenant would preclude the templars guarding it because they were later.

42:23 Speaker 3: Well, well, no, it wouldn't.

42:25 Speaker 4: Actually in this sense that I came across a great Scottish traveler called James Bruce of Kinnaird, and James Bruce wrote a book in the seventeen eighties or nineties called Travels to Discover the Source of the Nile and in which he claimed to have discovered the source of the Blue Nile or near Lake Tana. What's puzzling about that is he already knew of a Portuguese priest who'd put that together sixty years before. And James Bruce had a powerful intro in the Ark of the Covenant and was present in Axam during the ceremony of Timcat when replicas of the Ark of the Covenant are brought out, And I began to get very interested in his story, and I became convinced, although I couldn't prove it, that he had been a Freemason, and that he was his free Masonic interest.

43:16 Speaker 3: That had taken him to Ethiopia. Let's not forget that James Bruce brought something back from Ethiopia. He brought back the Book of Enoch.

43:23 Speaker 4: Wow, we would not have the Book of Enoch, and it hadn't been for that Scottish traveler getting a copy of it written in the Ethiopian sacred language of gas and having it then translated.

43:33 Speaker 1: Ancient alien abduction story if I've ever heard.

43:36 Speaker 4: The Book of Enoch was a lost book until but it had been preserved in Ethiopia and James Bruce found.

43:42 Speaker 3: It and brought it brought.

43:44 Speaker 4: It back to Europe. But I thought, what could have motivated him? And could he have been a freemason? And I began to look into this and I couldn't find evidence for it. I went to his grave, which is in a little churchyard in Scotland near Foco. That the grave was in a state of disrepair, but that the obelisk that had stood over the grave was lying on its side in the car park, and it was clear that something was going on. So I went to the keeper of the church and I asked him about this and he said, oh, yes, we're restoring the grave of James Bruce right now and the obelisk will be re erected there.

44:20 Speaker 4: And I said who's funding this? And he said, well, it's the Earl of Elgin. Oh how interesting those were the days when you could pick up the phone and call an earl. And I did that in the probably nineteen ninety when we're searching the sign and the seal.

44:38 Speaker 3: I called the Broomhill estate where the Earl of Elgin lives, and.

44:41 Speaker 4: He answered the phone. And I said, look, this may seem very odd to you, but I'm a journalist and i'm investigating the story of James Bruce of Kinnair, and I understand you have an interest in him. Can I come and talk to you about him? And he said, gruffly, I'll give you half an hour. He gave me five and my wife Santha and I went to his place, his estate, and we sat down and talked to him, and at the end of it, rather nervously, I said, look, I've been working on this theory that James Bruce was a Freemason, but I can't stand it up.

45:13 Speaker 3: I can't prove it.

45:15 Speaker 4: He said, my dear boy, of course he was a freeman. And he gave me the lodge, the Kilwinning Lodge.

45:21 Speaker 3: Number two in Edinburgh, that James Bruce was a member of.

45:24 Speaker 4: And more than that, he was a speculative freemason. It was interested in the esoteric side of freemasonry, and so his journey to Ethiopia I think was very strongly connected to the Ark of the Covenant. Now we come to the Templars and the templar connection with freemasonry, and the fact that the speculation that I put in the Sign and the Seal that Templars had gone to Ethiopia in search of the Ark of the Covenant. There was a time when an Ethiopian prince whose name was Lali Bella, was an exile in Jerusalem, and that was during the Crusades, when the Templars held the whole Temple Mount.

46:04 Speaker 4: The Alaxa Mosque was their palace. The Temple Mount was there at exactly the time that an Ethiopian prince exiled was present in Jerusalem. I speculated that he tipped the Templars off that the Ark of the Covenant was in Ethiopia.

46:19 Speaker 3: And weirdly, Lalabella then.

46:21 Speaker 4: Went back to Ethiopia with a strange force of people who installed him on the throne of Ethiopia who sound like foreigners, not Ethiopians, and then he created these incredible churches which are the rock hewn churches of Lalibela, one of which has a Templar cross painted on its ceiling and an image of the Alaxa Mosque with a cross on top of it, which only happened when the Templars were using it as their palace. So I began to see a possible connection here that the Templars did have a long term interest in this object, that they had learnt some intelligence about it during their stay in Jerusalem, and that they'd followed that intelligence to Ethiopia, put Laalibala back on the throne, and been involved in the construction of his amazing churches.

47:04 Speaker 3: All speculations.

47:05 Speaker 1: Of course, that's fascina interesting speculation, but you've made a lot of pretty compelling connections. There's so many examples of anomalous megalithic architecture. It's almost so much that it's not even anomalousts anymore that you show in your docuseries. And you've speculated that these things aren't built using kind of modern engineering techniques they're used. They're built used using kind of ancient engineering.

47:35 Speaker 4: Techniques, techniques and technologies that we don't know about, we haven't we haven't used.

47:42 Speaker 3: Now it's very important to emphasize that this is speculation.

47:46 Speaker 1: Absolutely not fact.

47:47 Speaker 4: Yes, I think, I suggest I speculate that we have allowed innate, some innate human abilities to fall into disuse, to lapse. Not only that, but we've actually we've actually come to despise those who think that such abilities exist. So it's almost the same as saying you're in the lunatic fringe if you say that you believe that telepathy and telepathy.

48:14 Speaker 1: We're hard to control if you have those abilities, well.

48:17 Speaker 3: Yeah, and they ignore work.

48:19 Speaker 4: For example, somebody you should talk to is perhaps you have is Dr Rupert Sheldrake.

48:24 Speaker 1: Oh yeah, huge fan.

48:26 Speaker 4: He's incredibly important, out of the box thinker and mainstream scientists.

48:30 Speaker 3: He's a highly qualified scientist, and.

48:32 Speaker 1: All his protocols for the morphic field experiments are very rigorous.

48:36 Speaker 3: They're very rigorous.

48:37 Speaker 4: He's done very detailed work on, for example, telephone telepathy. How is it that so many of us hear the phone ring and we know already or we're already thinking about the individual cause it's a universal human experience exactly.

48:50 Speaker 1: And that's every people discount their own phenomenology for a dogma, which is like if you were to poll nine people out of ten on the street, and they have you experienced that? Everybody's yeah, I've found that, expert, but that's not real. It's exactly why.

49:05 Speaker 3: Because the high priests of science have told us that we mustn't believe.

49:07 Speaker 4: In exactly whereas in fact, Rupert's work shows that these abilities do exist, that human beings do have the ability for telepathy. I don't know if he's done work on telekinesis, where where objects are moved directly with the power of the mind, rather than using a machine.

49:23 Speaker 3: Or a late lever to move them.

49:26 Speaker 4: But that's kind of telekinesis that I'm suggesting to say that the ancient Egyptians moved two hundred ton blocks of stone on wet sand. Okay, at ground level, that's fine. But to move two hundred ton blocks of stone three hundred and fifty feet in the air, and to build them into a chamber in the heart of the Great Pyramid, that is another matter. So I think it's perfectly natural and reasonable to speculate them they may have been using some ability or some technolology that we have not embraced and that we do not understand, and that if we had not become so dependent on mechanical advantage and leverage, we might have been doing things a very different way.

50:13 Speaker 4: There are a number of ancient Egyptian traditions that speak of the priests levitating these large blocks, and this is accompanied by sound chanting music has played and it plays a part in the lifting up of the blocks. A number of traditions about this which I think perhaps deserve to be taken more seriously than they have been, not necessarily fantastical tales. Having climbed the Great Pyramid five times, having seen the majesty of its construction and the intricacy of its construction, I'm persuaded that we're dealing with something we don't fully understand, and better to admit that rather than come up with these pure speculations that are the work of Egyptologists, just as I'm speculating that it was telepathy or telechinosis.

50:58 Speaker 1: But the frame should be speculating versus speculation, not.

51:01 Speaker 4: Ye speculation versus speculation, rather than saying this is established fact, because it isn't. It isn't established fact, and you know, then we have to come to grips with other aspects of the Great Pyramid which I often talk about, which are also neglected by Egyptology, which is it's extremely precise alignment to true north. That on a six million ton monument with a thirty acre footprint is no easy task to It involves astronomy. It involves precise astronomy.

51:27 Speaker 1: The figure is, isn't it mapped to Orion's belt in some way?

51:30 Speaker 3: Well, that's another that's another very important issue.

51:33 Speaker 4: And this is the work of my great friend and colleague Robert Bavar, who came up with the Orion correlation theory in nineteen ninety four in his book The Orion Mystery. He was the first person to notice that the three Great Pyramids on the Giza Plateau a stunningly similar pattern to the three stars of the belt of Orion. And Orion is not just any constellation in the ancient Egyptian system.

51:55 Speaker 3: Orion is the god of Cyrus in the sky.

51:58 Speaker 4: That's that's the celestial figure of a riot of the constellation that we call Orion was the celestial figure of the god of Cyrus in the sky to the ancient Egyptians.

52:08 Speaker 3: So not only do they do.

52:09 Speaker 4: They model the belt stars of that constellation, but that constellation is also an important one to the ancient Egyptians, and there's been so many bogus attempts to discredit Robert's important work.

52:20 Speaker 1: On the human soult is supposed to come through rans.

52:25 Speaker 3: Absolutely, yes, yes, the right.

52:27 Speaker 4: And that's that's a curious worldwide tradition because you find that in America too, in the mand builder cultures in America, there was the belief that the soul enters the afterlife journey through the constellation of Orion.

52:37 Speaker 3: The ancient Egyptians believed in a in.

52:39 Speaker 4: A whole after life realm through which we through which we travel, and the constellation of Orian plays a plays a key role in that.

52:48 Speaker 3: They called this. They called this realm the Duat.

52:50 Speaker 4: And as we die in this world, we enter that world and we make a journey and we will be and it's a hazardous journey and we need to be prepared for it in advance. That's one of the reasons I think psychedelics were used in ancient Egypt as part of preparation for this after death journey. Then you realize that it's not just the Giza Pyramids, that the Pyramids of dash Sure, the Red Pyramid and the Bent Pyramid are also part of the diagram moving up into the constellation of Taurus. There's there's it looks like a whole stellar landscape was mapped on the ground at Giza.

53:25 Speaker 3: It's a it's a much bigger picture.

53:26 Speaker 4: And again it's unfortunate that Egyptology hasn't been willing to engage with this.

53:31 Speaker 3: He just wants to write it off.

53:33 Speaker 4: I think it has a lot to do with Egyptologists being entirely ignorant in astronomy, right.

53:37 Speaker 1: Yeah, it's crazy. Also analogous to all of the work that you do, and and you document a lot of this as well around human history being so much older. Is this precocious knowledge of the stars that these ancient civilizations seems to have, Like like you look at Sumerian artifacts that show a heliocentric universe thousands of.

53:58 Speaker 3: Years atronomers the the universe was.

54:02 Speaker 4: And then you have to ask yourself that knowledge system that manifests in the Sumerians did not begin with the Sumerians.

54:10 Speaker 3: That's something that goes back much further.

54:11 Speaker 4: It's a it's a it's a universal in my view, it's a universal human legacy from a lost civilization of prehistoric antiquity, passed around, passed all around the world.

54:22 Speaker 1: And maybe they came from the stars or something, because I.

54:26 Speaker 3: Don't need to go there, and and i've I've never found.

54:32 Speaker 1: That's like an Eric.

54:33 Speaker 3: Yeah, I don't, I didn't. I don't need to go where Eric goes. I think Eric. I know Eric, and I think he did.

54:39 Speaker 4: I think he did a good job of alerting people to mystery in the past.

54:43 Speaker 3: But I personally think that the answer.

54:45 Speaker 4: He came up with, and it was ancient aliens in high tech spacecraft who came here.

54:50 Speaker 3: I think that's an unnecessary argument.

54:52 Speaker 4: In order to explain the anomalies that we confront, and I think a much more elegant and much simpler explanation is a lost human civilization of the Ice Age, which was destroyed in the global cataclysm of the Younger Dryers, which had survivors, and those survivors.

55:08 Speaker 3: Found ways to pass their knowledge down to the future.

55:11 Speaker 4: And that's the period that the period that we call the Younger Dryers is the period that the ancient Egyptians called zep Tepi the first time.

55:18 Speaker 3: They call it the first time.

55:20 Speaker 4: And that's where they say all their knowledge came from. So I don't seek to divorce the ancient Egyptians from the Great Pyramid of Giza. The ancient Egyptians were definitely involved in the construction of the Great Pyramid of Giza. But I think the Great Pyramid of Giza sits on top of something much older, and part of it is the subterranean chamber one hundred feet vertically beneath the base of the Great Pyramid. I think that's the original sacred site on the Giza Plateau.

55:45 Speaker 1: And the Sphinx, according to people like you and Robert Shock, has water damage of the line.

55:55 Speaker 4: Monuments of the Giza Plateau are multiple and very complex, and in the case of the pyramids, I do accept that the ancient Egyptians were directly involved in completing the monuments as we see them now, but they were building on the more ancient structures.

56:10 Speaker 3: But there are.

56:11 Speaker 4: Structures on the Giza Plateau, and the Great Sphinx is one of them, which are clearly much older Robert Shock's work. Let's put that in its proper context. I do want to pay tribute to Robert Shock because it's one of the few academics who's been willing to stick his neck out and suggest that the Great Sphinx, that that enigmatic monument from the ancient world is more than twelve thousand years old, not four and a half thousand years old, as Egyptologists tell us. The evidence for that was initially proposed by John Anthony West, who was the first to draw wide scale public attention to the possibility that the Sphinx bore evidence of water weathering, and Robert Shock.

56:55 Speaker 3: John West brought Robert Shock.

56:56 Speaker 4: To the Giza Plateau as a geologist, and Robert Schock took a very detailed and careful look at it and concluded that what we're looking at on the Sphinx, and it is particularly evidence on the trench surrounding the Sphinx, is precipitation induced weathering, weathering that was caused by heavy, heavy rainfall, not a flood that washed over the Giza Plateau, but.

57:15 Speaker 3: Extremely heavy rainfall.

57:17 Speaker 4: And the world's climate has changed dramatically several times, and that dramatic climate change that was the Younger Dryass between twelve eight hundred and eleven six hundred years ago, which brought freezing temperatures further north, resulted in heavy rainfall in the Sahara Desert and over Egypt. And that's the period when the geology says that the Great Sphinx was made and like the Pyramids, the ancient Egyptians cannot be divorced from the Great Sphinx. The very fact that the Sphinx has the head of a pharaoh tells us that the ancient Egyptians were involved in it.

57:51 Speaker 4: But what we think, when I say we the late Great John Anthony West, Robert Sharp, myself and a number of others think is that the Great Sphinx, Mano Safe is another man who's doing really important work on this, and he's fluent in ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs as well. The argument is that the Great Sphinx was originally a lion, totally a lion, not just a lion body with a human head, but a lion body with a lion head.

58:18 Speaker 1: So the pharaoh aspect, well.

58:22 Speaker 4: Yes, originally it was a prehistoric sphinx was a lion, and then the lion head became heavily eroded and damaged as thousands of years passed, and in the time of the Pharaohs, it was transformed. It was cut down and remade into the human head that we see on it today, wearing the classic Nemes headdress of an ancient Egyptian pharaoh. But the fact that that Nemes headdress and the head of some pharaoh, not necessarily cufrey, is found on the Great Sphinx speaks to later remodeling by the ancient Egyptians.

58:56 Speaker 4: It doesn't deal at all with the issue of the precipitationduced weathering that says that the whole site is actually much older. So just as the ancient Egyptians were involved in completing the Great Pyramids, which I do not dispute, they were also involved in the Great Sphinx, but they found it already present on the Giza plateau.

59:14 Speaker 1: Do you believe not just in Atlantis, but in civilizational cycles? So in many esoteric traditions, you know there would be different sort of races or civilizational cycles, like the Hyperboreans, the Lamurians, the Atlanteans.

59:27 Speaker 3: Do I've not needed to go that far.

59:30 Speaker 4: I think I've had enough of a challenge to deal with making the case for one loss civilization without seeking that to make the case for multiple loss civilizations. But I'm not writing that off as.

59:42 Speaker 1: A possibility might require you looking at the arc of the Covenant.

59:48 Speaker 4: I think that that's to me, that's a bridge too far, which I've focused all my efforts on trying to make this case and to make it in a way that makes sense to people and that is supported by evidence. It's clear that civilization is cyclical, that things come and go, great civilizations rise and fall. It was only in the nineteen twenties or the nineteen thirties that we became aware of the existence of such a thing as the Indus Vali civilization, which is along the banks of the Indus River in Pakistan.

1:00:18 Speaker 4: Maijadero and Harappa were unknown sites in the nineteen twenties.

1:00:22 Speaker 3: It was only an accidental.

1:00:23 Speaker 4: Discovery railway workers building a railway line that actually led to that, and then the dating of it five thousand plus years old is extraordinarily sophisticated. Civilization that existed along the Indus River was totally unknown. It was a lost civilization. We still haven't learnt to read its.

1:00:40 Speaker 3: Language, although they had a written language.

1:00:43 Speaker 4: So civilizations can get lost, civilizations can rise and can fall. It happened again and again, and I'm really only saying that that maybe happened much earlier, from a time that we've forgotten.

1:00:56 Speaker 1: And in Supernatural you talk about shifting a little to aliens, because you talk about that a lot on the show. Yeah, you talk about modern abductions and UFO sightings.

1:01:07 Speaker 3: Now we're getting onto a subject I'm happy to talk about.

1:01:10 Speaker 4: Let's do it because because I I think that the physical aliens coming here in spaceships or flying saucers from from other planets is fundamentally it's it's a it's a materialist proposition. It's it's about tech and about material things.

1:01:33 Speaker 1: Like the Elon Musk worldview. It's not yeah, it's a consciousness world.

1:01:37 Speaker 4: It's not, it's not a consciousness worldview. What was what was striking to me was a conversation I had with the late Pablo ama Ringo, an Amazonian shaman who did who painted his visions after he'd been on the Ayahuasca journey. He would sit down and created thousands of beautiful, beautiful paintings, and in many of those paintings there are flying sorcers. So I said to Pablo, is this I basically said, is this ancient aliens you're talking about? Are those spaceships that have come from other planets?

1:02:14 Speaker 4: And he said, no, those are vehicles for entering and leaving the spirit world. And when a chaman talks about the spirit world, that shaman is talking about what quantum physicists would call a parallel, parallel dimension or a parallel realm. And I'm not denying that there are physical elements to the Upho experience. There certainly are. They do show up in radar traces here and there. There are physical elements to it, but exactly what they are is not yet clear. Are they, as Pablo said, vehicles for entering and leaving.

1:02:52 Speaker 3: Let's put it in modern language, a parallel realm, a parallel.

1:02:55 Speaker 4: Universe, rather than vehicles to take us across interstellar space in this universe. And then you come down to the consciousness issue, You come down to the fact. And I document this at length in Supernatural. The inspiration for the idea came from Jacques Valais.

1:03:11 Speaker 1: I want to give him credit, Ie digit you.

1:03:14 Speaker 4: Know, there's something deeper that creates the illusion of space and time in humans. I've never met Jack Lay, admiration for him because his book Passport to Magonia was a breakthrough book and anybody who's interested in the alien Upho mystery needs to go read Passport to Magonia. And I quoted from it extensively in Supernatural, published in two thousand and five. He was the first to recognize that there are incredible phenomenological parallels between the entities that were called fairies and elves in the Middle Ages and the entities that we call aliens todayish parallels.

1:04:02 Speaker 3: Those fairies and elves would.

1:04:03 Speaker 4: Do surgery on people, they would abduct people, they would have sex with people, they would produce hybrid babies, and then go into spirits and the whole issue of shamans and what spirits are about, and realize that this is going back now thousands of years, and that these and that these experiences are documented in cave art all around the world, and you'll find again that the phenomenology is the same. Shamans are always having sex with spirits and often have babies in another realm.

1:04:32 Speaker 1: I might explain the immaculate conception.

1:04:34 Speaker 4: Well, yeah, and you know this is I often tell it as a joke, but it's true. I know of a shaman in the Amazon whose wife left him because of his wife in the spirit world.

1:04:46 Speaker 3: Wow, he had not only a wife over there, had kids over there too.

1:04:49 Speaker 1: Oh my god.

1:04:50 Speaker 4: We have the same phenomenology in encounters with spirits.

1:04:54 Speaker 3: By shamans documented in cave art going back tens of thousands of years.

1:04:59 Speaker 4: We have phenomenology and encounters with fairies and elves in the Middle Ages, and we have the identical phenomenology in encounters with aliens today. And I think it's obvious we're looking at the same experience through time, construed through different cultural lenses.

1:05:16 Speaker 1: Do thing Gnostic or Kabbalistic traditions have attempted to make deliberate contacts, So.

1:05:21 Speaker 4: I think any tradition that makes use of psychedelics, whether they want to or not, are going to make deliberate contact. I mean, I had on one of my early ayahuasca journeys in the Amazon, I had an a typical alien encounter, and I was sitting on a bench outside the shaman's hut, feeling pretty ill because that's what ayahuasca does with you. And I was having these wild visions and then I saw not one, but several flying saucers up above me, and I saw this characteristic alien face, you know, this sort of.

1:05:59 Speaker 3: Heart shaped, large dark eyes.

1:06:03 Speaker 4: Materialize up there, and I got the very strong message that they.

1:06:08 Speaker 3: Were going to take me away. We're going to take you.

1:06:11 Speaker 4: And that's where I was a coward because I was seeing these things with my eyes closed, and you can often stop visions by opening your eyes.

1:06:19 Speaker 3: And I opened my eyes and I shouted no.

1:06:23 Speaker 1: I would think someone like you would want to go.

1:06:25 Speaker 3: Well.

1:06:26 Speaker 4: I've regretted it ever since, because what I should have done was keep my eyes shut and say yes, take me. But I was scared shitless. I was literally scared stiff, and it shook me to my core. Actually, this thing, I've mentioned this a number of times recently, but there's a really important project going on at Imperial College in London, and this is the first time that psychedelics have been trialed with human volunteers, not to see what the therapeutic benefit is, but to understand the phenomenology is particularly effective about in bringing about entity encounters Terence McKenna's machine LS, for example.

1:07:08 Speaker 4: What's happening at Imperial College is that they've found a way to keep people in the DMT state for an hour.

1:07:16 Speaker 1: Normally it's ten to fifteen minutes.

1:07:18 Speaker 4: Yes, an intravenous strip, and they keep them in a steady DMT state for an hour, And while doing that, they put them in MRI scanners and they interview them they talk to them to the extent that they're able to talk, and quite often with a full blown DMT journey, you're not able to talk until afterwards. But because they're in the journey for an hour, they're able to process the experience much more effectively than if you're in the journey for ten minutes. And this is really serious work that's being done at Imperial College.

1:07:49 Speaker 4: It's being done with large numbers of volunteers.

1:07:53 Speaker 1: This is Christopher Timmerman.

1:07:54 Speaker 3: Chris Timmerman is the head of the project. Yeah.

1:07:57 Speaker 4: Yeah, he's the guy who runs that project, and many other many other scientists working with him on that project. And they will sit with the volunteers through the whole hour and talk to them, and particularly what they want.

1:08:08 Speaker 3: To know is about entities. What entities are you encountering.

1:08:11 Speaker 4: Now some might say what's the use of this, but I say it's incredibly useful because what they're doing is they're exploring the DMT realm. And these are like early explorers from our time, you know, who went out into the wilderness and came back with stories about what they've seen. These volunteers are going out into the DMT wilderness and coming back with stories of what they've seen, and the stories are remarkably consistent that they're encountering the same entities in the same setting.

1:08:39 Speaker 3: And normally, when.

1:08:40 Speaker 4: Large number of people agree on the same experience, we are inclined to define that experience as real. And it's only the prejudices of our civilization that lead us to dismiss it as unreal or as mere hallucinations.

1:08:54 Speaker 1: There's something about nothing mere about these experiences. There's something about DMT that's fundamental to the human story in a way that we don't understand. Like it's you talk about it being the tree of life or the acacia tree rich being the tree of life in Egypt, and then in freemasonry the acacia leaf is a big is it kind of plays prominence.

1:09:16 Speaker 4: It plays a role in freemasonry, and there's there's there's no doubt about it.

1:09:20 Speaker 3: The wood out of which the Ark of the Covenant was made was a Kasha wood.

1:09:23 Speaker 1: Right and then and then there's something, you know, I think both of our world views might be more akin to sort of pan psychic panpsychism or something than you know, materialist reductionism, the separation of mind and matter and d MT exists in all organic material. So it's it's something no.

1:09:40 Speaker 4: Matter how prejudice you may be against the MT, you cannot get rid of it.

1:09:44 Speaker 1: Yes, everywhere.

1:09:48 Speaker 3: We make it. Human body makes the MT.

1:09:51 Speaker 1: Yes, and it makes it at very interesting times as well. It makes it uh at around the time in the womb when you're a identity sort of forms and maybe anemnesis occurs and you forget your sort of past self. It occurs during rem sleep and then and then when you die.

1:10:08 Speaker 3: And near death.

1:10:09 Speaker 4: Yeah, and normally it's in sub psychedelic quantities, but maybe maybe many of the natural visionaries that we've had have not who have not taken the psychedelic they just have visions, people like Joan of Arc for example.

1:10:22 Speaker 1: Well, we now know the brain. We thought that the brain couldn't produce it. It was produced in the lung. Now we know that the brain can indige, indigenously secrete the MT and d MT receptors are all over the brain. Amo borgage in at Michigan. Yeah, it's pretty amazing.

1:10:34 Speaker 3: It's pretty amazing.

1:10:35 Speaker 4: And you know, the the human body and the brain is it doesn't waste resources. There's a reason that that is there. There's a reason that those receptors are there. Clearly, DMT is very important for us, and alongside other psychedelics.

1:10:52 Speaker 3: I mean, in many ways.

1:10:54 Speaker 4: Psilocybin is rightly referred to as orally active DMT cilocybin molecule, the empty molecular very closely related these. It's more broadly the trip to mean family that induce these extraordinary experiences in us, or allow us to have experiences.

1:11:13 Speaker 3: That in an alert problem.

1:11:15 Speaker 4: Solving state of consciousness, we will never never, never, never have. I don't think consciousness requires physical bodies. I think consciousness is fundamental to the universe. I think it's a fundamental force in the universe.

1:11:27 Speaker 3: Like gravity. Consciousness is there.

1:11:29 Speaker 4: But consciousness outside a physical body is obviously going to be limited in the range of things that it can experience. Once you immerse consciousness in a physical body, then that physical body and the person who's inside that physical body is going to face the challenges of physical life. We're going to have to make choices all the way through our life. Some of those choices may be very hurtful to others. Some of them may be helpful, nurturing positive choices. We are living in a theater of experience.

1:11:57 Speaker 4: We have the chance to learn and to grow and to develop in physical bodies. But we cannot be reduced to our physical bodies. Consciousness cannot be reduced to the brain. Rather, it manifests through the brain.

1:12:10 Speaker 1: In my view, yeah, or the physical exactly, the physical body is a filter or a reduction on, a reducing on exactly on a default state of greater knowledge and understanding. And that's why mystery rituals, you're temporarily killing that collapsing function, yes, so that you kind of glitch into this greater knowledge, into.

1:12:28 Speaker 4: This wider this wider reality which we are all part of. But but in order to survive in this physical realm, we tend to get very focused on this physical realm.

1:12:38 Speaker 3: And that's not a bad thing.

1:12:40 Speaker 4: I often say, and I'll say it again now, that that if I get into an airplane, I would like the pilot to be in an alert problem solving state of consciousness.

1:12:52 Speaker 3: I do not want my pilot.

1:12:53 Speaker 4: Doing visiting parallel realms while he's flying me from A to B. Once he gets off the plane, he can do all the dm T he wants, But while he's flying me, the alert problem solving state of consciousness is very useful for certain functions, and we should not dismiss it.

1:13:07 Speaker 3: It's part of us, but it's not the only It's not all we are.

1:13:10 Speaker 1: Are you Darwinian or do you think that? Look, there's more to the story.

1:13:13 Speaker 3: I think there's much more to the story. I think there's vastly more to the story.

1:13:17 Speaker 4: However, I would not be I would never be a person who denies that evolution takes place. There is such a thing as evolution. It would be absurd to suggest that there is not. We live on a hazardous planet. There are all sorts of issues that can bring particular life.

1:13:34 Speaker 3: Forms to an end, or nearly to an end.

1:13:36 Speaker 4: The clear point is the extinction of the dinosaurs sixty six million years ago. Nobody disputes now that that was done by a comet or an asteroid. The chicks Glue Crater in the Yucatan Deep now beneath the earth and the sea, is the evidence for that. And there's a line in the earth rare of a line of Earth which contains all the classic indicators of a cosmic impact.

1:14:05 Speaker 3: Exactly the same as the younger driest bandy.

1:14:07 Speaker 1: Yeah, why is one so controversial? On the other wall?

1:14:10 Speaker 4: Initially, the extinction of the dinosaurs was controversial. Lewis and Walter Avarez were ridiculed by their peers, typical of science. Rather than saying, oh, here's an interesting idea, let's see what's good in it, they said, here's an idea which goes against everything we think, so let's destroy it. And they spent ten years destroying the idea of Lewis and Walter Avarez.

1:14:29 Speaker 3: Until they found the crater. The crater was the smoking gun.

1:14:32 Speaker 4: So I think that it would be observed to say that there's no such thing as evolution, because we've got to be able life, the whole thing of life, the whole project of life, has got to render itself very hard to wipe out, and evolution is one of the ways that it renders itself very hard to wipe out.

1:14:48 Speaker 3: But is evolution the whole story.

1:14:50 Speaker 4: No, is survival of the fittest, The whole story definitely not evolution. Wants to see human consciousness as a byproduct of survival of the fittest, that we needed these big brains to thrive in the jungle of competition, and as an accidental byproduct of that we got consciousness. I don't think it's an accidental byproduct that I think it's the I think it's the focus of I think it's what evolution is all about. So while I don't wish to dismiss evolution, I do want to say that we're only getting a tiny.

1:15:23 Speaker 1: Fraction story, but there may be is a teleology that's a little more preordained than we think too. Yes, evolution. That's like a guy like Henry Bergson, you know, in creative Evolution, would write that there's there's a there's more of a clear endpoint than we than we realized.

1:15:38 Speaker 3: And I suspect that's true.

1:15:39 Speaker 4: I think, I think, I think that under the layer that's been identified by science, the layer of Darwinian evolution, hidden beneath that is a whole other layer that's going on, which is directed and we are we are seeing a project working out and evolution is the way, is one of the means, one of the tools that is used by that project.

1:16:01 Speaker 1: And you brought up Rouper Childrick, that's definitely a gap in evolution where if you know a thousand people do a crossword puzzle, and you do that tomorrow, and then you do a control group crossword puzzle, no one it's done. You're more likely to complete the one that a thousand people have done. There's some sort of collective suggest.

1:16:18 Speaker 4: Where we're part of some sort of collective intelligence, that we are connected, perhaps telepathically, perhaps in some other way with all of the rest of the human race.

1:16:27 Speaker 3: And it's why it's so absurd now that we.

1:16:29 Speaker 4: Live on this planet, that we have this majestic planet at our disposal.

1:16:32 Speaker 3: We have our consciousness, we have these huge.

1:16:34 Speaker 4: Brains, and what are we doing. We're still spreading hatred and fear and suspicion, and we're still murdering each other on mass scale, you know, dictators with with nukes threatening threatening the world again. I mean, this is such a failure of the potential of the human race. We need to graduate beyond that simplistic tribal level. There was a role for tribal society once, but in a globally integrated world, it isn't helpful anymore to have these tribal mindsets where you know we're better than you, and because we are different from you, we're going to kill you.

1:17:09 Speaker 3: This is just nonsense. We're going to take your stuff.

1:17:11 Speaker 4: By the way, as well, this is a sign of a species that has a lot of consciousness evolution still to go through.

1:17:19 Speaker 1: Well, maybe you and Randall Carlson need to start a school or something.

1:17:24 Speaker 4: Randall is a is a teacher, he does teach.

1:17:27 Speaker 3: My thing is books and making the occasional TV series.

1:17:31 Speaker 1: But well it's reaching a lot of people and it's amazing to see the docu series. It's always an honor to talk to you. I really admire you, and you have to promise to let me to tag along at one of your excursions. I'll do whatever you need.

1:17:46 Speaker 3: We'll make it happen. Jesse will definitely make it happen.

1:17:48 Speaker 1: Appreciate it to talk to you. Likewise, thank you,