Graham Hancock | Magicians of the Gods, Atlantis, & The Ancient Impacts

00:05 Puppet masters almost surely have up this clearly maybe something ebby And until you've thoroughly tested every last close justin think you know the less you really do That's true, Dr. Seuss Without THC Cause we're their lion to us Just don't know without THC The higher side chat show Our one company

00:43 Holy hell, how's it going Hireside Chatters? You know the drill. Drinking a little drink, smoking a little smoke and just trying to keep my head above water in the great sea of madness from sunny San Diego I'm Greg Carlwood And folks we know the art of deception is in full swing these days as we work to navigate the landscape of lies and misconceptions that plague our troubled times as best we can And from the war on the chemical alteration of our consciousness to academia's aggressive promotion of their flawed historical narrative, few journalists have done more to erode the ironclad grasp over these ideas than todays guest Graham Hancock. He is a world-renowned journalist and author armed with such impactful pieces as Fingerprints Of The Gods, Underworld and Supernatural, and he has dropped into THC to talk about his latest addition to his arsenal Magicians Of The Gods, a continuation of his quest to explore evidence of lost civilization

01:31 And in a time when the conventional ideas of man's history are crumbling under the weight of new discoveries, it doesn't seem like the stars could have actually aligned much better. A modern mystical magician to the gods in his own right and powerful wordsmith to boot? You know him! You love him! Grandma Man how the hell are ya? You're too kind, man. And it is a serious pleasure to have you here! We're just a few short months from the two-week tour of Armenia that you hosted which I was lucky enough to partake in exploring paradigm changing ancient sites like the Stone Observatory of Karahunj that are just beginning to be looked at and then you have the numerous other sites we talk about and magicians...and it just seems like a great time to be alive for people who want evidence of an alternative to the historical narrative we've been given doesn't?

02:19 It really does i mean so much has changed. my first really big book on this subject 20 years ago, and that was Fingerprints of the Gods which was published in 1995. And it said the basic takeaway message is that there was a global cataclysm between 13000 to 12000 years ago and that a former high civilization had been wiped out in that cataclysm and is now remembered only in myths and traditions And at the time, the archaeological community and their buddies in the media poured scorn upon this book. Right. And attacked it from all directions many of the directions being ad hominem attacks on me as an individual rather than on the ideas

03:06 being presented seems like just anything possible was done to discredit the notion of a lost civilization. But in the 20 years that have passed, the evidence has moved very strongly in my direction We now have absolutely cut and dried scientific evidence and this is not you know woo-woo stuff This is from mainstream scientists publishing in major peer reviewed journals like The Proceedings of The National Academy Of Science this information has not much got out into the public domain yet it's in the rarefied atmosphere of scientific journals but it presents compelling evidence for a global cataclysm exactly in the window that I proposed in 1995 between 13,000 and 12,000 years ago. And this cataclysm resulted from the impact of several fragments

03:58 a giant comet which broke up into fragments as comets do. Several of those fragments hit the earth 12,800 years ago and caused that global cataclysm of flood and fire and rapidly rising sea levels and then again 1200 years later 11600 years ago there was a second series of impacts this time in an ocean we believe it was the Pacific Ocean uh... and this was accompanied by yet more traumatic events more global flooding and and more disasters than the one thousand two hundred years between them between the first defense twelve thousand eight hundred years ago in the second defense eleven thousand six hundred years ago those one thousand two hundred years ago what one thousand two hundred years of absolute

04:45 hell on earth with a huge plunge in temperatures and massive extinctions of animal species. And that's when I believe we lost the whole civilization from the record, and then in addition something else is that we now have archaeological sites that are popping up previously undiscovered which date back to that epoch and which contain extraordinarily advanced workmanship, which cannot be explained by the existing model of history. And if I may just run on a little bit the third and final thing is that the attitude of the public towards authority figures has also changed in the last 20 years. Twenty years ago if Professor X or Dr Y stood

05:28 up and said i have copies talking rubbish then the public listened but twenty years later now today we have been lied to so often by authority figures whether their academics weather that big corporations with a bad governments whether they're religious figures would be like two so often by them that's there is rightly and properly deep skepticism towards argument from authority of individual says i have the authority and i just know what the facts are people don't believe anymore about healthy Yeah, amen man. I mean the communication channels are open and to quote the book you say... Why is that? What's the danger in exploring these ideas?

06:15 Yes, it's very peculiar. I go into this in some depth in the book because I think NASA in particular which is charged with the responsibility and is the recipient of large amounts of public money is charged with the responsibility of understanding our cosmic environment. NASA is very misleading on the issue of the dangers that surround us in our cosmic environment It gives the impression that there is no real danger to the Earth from comets or asteroids and if there is a danger, it's millions or hundreds of millions years away. And this is completely incorrect! We actually live in a very hazardous cosmic environment

06:59 environment and a great many responsible astronomers are drawing attention to this and drawing attention in particular to what's called the torrid meteor stream which is this huge meteor stream 30 million kilometers wide that is the debris trail of the comet that hit us not once but twice 12,800 years ago 11600 years ago. And as a matter of fact a bit of that debris trail of that comet hit the Earth much more recently on the 30th June 1908, the so-called Tunguska event. It was a little bit of rock from that original giant comet still circling in the torrid meteor stream and that didn't even hit the Earth it was about 100 meters in diameter, it exploded about 5 kilometers above the earth's surface but it flattened 80 million trees

07:51 across an area of two thousand square kilometers which is about the size of the city of london uh... and if it's here i mean did that be a bad at happened for a major center of urban population rather than over fortunately an uninhabited area of Siberia in 1908. If that had happened over a major city we would have had hundreds of thousands of casualties and we would all be paying much more attention to the Taurid meteor stream now, and the astronomers who are alarmed by the Taurid meteor stream and alarmed by NASA's complacency have calculated that there is at least one object within the stream that is 30 kilometers wide and at least 100 objects in the stream more than 1 kilometer wide, and they are all on Earth-crossing orbits. It's like crossing a six lane highway twice a year with a blindfold on just hoping you don't meet any traffic or if you do it would be motorcycles rather than trucks

08:48 but said this is the this is the gamble we're taking and this is not a gloom and doom scenario maybe nasa are afraid of causing panic but this is not a gloom and doom scenario we have that technology now to sweep our immediate cosmic environment clean to be sure that we don't face any affect further impacts that might turn us into the next lost civilization but we're not making that choice that the money has been spent on other things on the big military budgets and on vanity projects for NASA, which really I feel it's much more urgent to make sure that we have a future on this planet. And the technology exists, we can do it! It is just a matter of choice." Yeah...it is a frustrating situation and I guess this idea of comet bombardment or meteor impact in the past has been speculated about but I guess critics would always say where are the craters? But now there's kind of answer for that right?!

09:40 Well, there's absolutely an answer for that. You see the impacts...the primary impacts were in areas that don't leave massive craters and I'll explain this however craters are now being found The primary impact 12800 years ago were on the North American ice cap And the north of the...this was the Ice Age 1,800 years ago. And the North American ice cap was still a couple of miles deep at that time. It had thinned out over the previous 20,000 years or so but it was still a couple of miles deep and you have at least four objects in the range of half a mile to a mile in diameter coming in at 60,000-70,000 miles an hour and impacting the ice cap. The craters are excavated in the deep ice they cause a massive melting of the ice cap

10:28 and the craters effectively vanished. They're transient, they're not...they are no longer in the ground but what you get is shock effects under the ice and those shock effects now that all of the ice has gone as it's the case today can be measured on the ground In areas just outside the ice cap in the northeast of North America, four distinct craters have now emerged that date back exactly to 12800 years ago. So so the question of of creators is in the process of being answered by the team of more than 30 scientists who are working on this problem, but their key evidence and that evidence alone is good enough is what I called impact proxies. These are the chemical products of a massive cosmic impact which cannot be caused by anything else and they include for example nanodiamonds these tiny microscopic diamonds which are created by the shock and heat of the impact they include carbon spherules

11:29 These are again a product of impacts. They include melt glass exactly like trinitite, the melt glass that was created in nuclear explosions during nuclear tests and they include evidence across actually 50 million square kilometers of the Earth's surface of temperatures in excess of the boiling point of quartz, temperatures in excess of 2200 degrees centigrade And finally, they include a distinct layer of ash in the soil which lies immediately over the remains of extinct species of animals. This layer of ash is the result of continent-wide wildfires burning. You see when these comet fragments come in so fast and hot

12:17 superheated ejecta is thrown up into the upper atmosphere and then can fall hundreds of miles away from the impact site on the primal forests about time. And so you're looking at control continents burning and the evidence for this is very distinct in a distinct stratum in the soil as a matter of fact, it was exactly the same evidence that led to the recognition that the dinosaurs were made extinct sixty five million years ago now NASA is and of course we know the dinosaurs were made extinct by a cosmic impact. Now NASA is, of course acknowledges that uh... a cosmic impact made the dinosaurs extinct and it acknowledges the evidence for that but up till now its ignoring the evidence for what happened twelve thousand eight hundred down

13:02 11,600 years ago and the other people who are ignoring that our historians and archaeologists because we had. Their story of civilization begins just after 11,600 years ago but they're not taking account of the extinction level event that immediately preceded that and we have to consider the possibility that those early signs of civilization are in fact a reinvention of civilization. A transfer of technology from the survivors of lost civilization to hunter-gatherer peoples Yeah, I think you make an excellent case for that and I'm curious with all this destruction in the heat coming in do you think this could explain the sheets of sand glass in the deserts to the world that some researchers use to justify the idea of like an ancient nuclear war?

13:46 Yeah, it could well be related. This event was astonishingly widespread as I said the main impacts were on the North American ice cap but the bits of the comet carried on across the Atlantic Ocean there were further impacts on the Northern European ice cap and indeed they would impact us far east as Syria now that may have been impacted even beyond that in the 12800 year ago event The research is still being done but its clear we're looking at a fingerprint about giant global cataclysms It's fascinating to see these types of discoveries that just give us another piece of history for our planet, but outside of the destruction to the environment and how it was radically affected. How does this affect the story we've been told about humanity?

14:29 Well, I think it affects it enormously. I just slightly touched on that you see historians and archaeologists over the last hundred years or so have pieced together what they regard as a timeline of history and that timeline shows us straight forward evolutionary progress of the story of civilization from primitive cavemen anatomically modern humans like ourselves by the way have been around for at least 200,000 years and right there. We should have a question Why did we wait? 195 thousand years to develop the first civilizations, right isn't it possible that people exactly like us made civilization much earlier But but that civilization

15:12 was in some way wiped from the record. At any rate, here's this nice timeline of archaeology which sees the cavemen who were entirely hunter-gatherers, Stone Age, it is called the Paleolithic they were entirely nomadic hunter gatherers this is the mainstream story And around 11,600 years ago weirdly they suddenly started to develop agriculture and then there was a slow build up from there. And about 6,000-5500 years we begin to see the first megalithic sites that are built with gigantic megaliths and then about the same period

15:52 cities are built and then we move on what's from there in a smooth progress right through to smart old ass sitting here in the twenty first century without technology and we are see ourselves as the apex of the pinnacle of all of the human story. The problem is that nice, comfortable reassuring model has been built without taking account of the extinction level event that we now know took place in the foundations of history. So I would say the House of History may be very well-built for the last 8 or 9 thousand years but it stands on foundations of sand

16:31 and we all know what happens to houses that are built on foundations of sand. Archaeology has to take account of this cataclysmic event between 12,800 years ago and 11,600 years ago and build it into its model of civilization or the origins of civilization or will never be getting the straight story Amen, man. I totally agree and i think this is just it's so great to just see all this stuff kind of coming to light and I guess one Of the biggest pieces of the puzzle is Gobekli Tepe why is this? So important to this new paradigm yes It's it's have absolutely crucial importance And this is go back to tepee a site in turkey in southeastern turkey in Anatolia which wasn't discovered until The second half of the 1990s

17:16 The reason it wasn't discovered by the way, Göbekli Tepe in the Turkish language means pot-bellied hill. And that pot-bellied hill, it looks a bit like a pot-bellied hill. It sits over the entire site is absolutely 100% artificial. It was all put there by human beings teams of people hundreds of them with buckets filled with earth and rubble they came and covered up the previously existing giant megalithic site that lies underneath that pot bellied Hill they deliberately systematically carefully buried it and it wasn't touched again for more than 10,000 years. The site flourished from 11,600 years ago we now know and that is the exact

18:02 date for the second cataclysmic event that was accompanied by enormous global flooding. 11,600 years ago is the beginning of Gobekli Tepe. The site was used for about a thousand years down to 10,600 or 10,400 years ago and then whoever made it whichever mysterious culture created this huge megalithic site which by the way it's 50 times bigger than Stonehenge and 7,000 years older than Stonehenge. Whichever culture created this huge megalithic site then deliberately buried it like a time capsule sealed it away It wasn't touched again for more than 10 000 years until archaeologists rediscovered it in the second half of the 1990's and began to excavate it And there awaiting for them under the ground was a colossal

18:51 inexplicable mystery. First of all, to understand a megalithic site – what megalith means big stones and what we're looking at is T-shaped limestone pillars that have been quarried out of the solid rock and they form roughly the shape that we would recognize as the letter T actually when you get closer to them you realize that they are anthropomorphic, that they represent human forms with the top of the T, the crossbar of the T representing the head of the individual and the upright pillar representing the body. And on many of these pillars are carved arms with hands, with long fingers meeting in front of the belly over a very distinct kind of belt. In fact many of the pillars at Gobekli Tepe are richly carved with amazing works of art. Now that the problem is that according to the mainstream model of history

19:43 You need a settled agricultural society which has produced surpluses for generations, which has allowed people to become specialists. They no longer have to go out and hunt and gather for their living they can become specialized in various skills including stone masonry but this typically been regarded as something that could only happen in societies that had already been practicing agriculture for a very long time. So when we see a site like Stonehenge in England, for example which dates back according to the orthodox story to about 4500 years ago, that's already

20:21 a fairly advanced neolithic society where they have agriculture, they have the specialists. They have the organizational skills to do something like this but the mystery of Gobekli Tepe is that it just comes out of nowhere. It comes out of the blue. There's no background whatsoever we see no evidence of evolution at these skills and then the society that archaeologists had been able to track in that region is entirely hunter-gatherer society prior to this And then suddenly we get this enormous megalithic site being created and it's very sophisticated. It contains, for example the world's first perfectly aligned north-south building and to align a structure perfectly to north and south

21:05 requires the use of accurate astronomy. We see many indications that astronomers were at work at Gobekli Tepe. So to cut a long story short, what archaeologists are scrambling to catch up with this right now but to cut a long story short the fairy tale that they are trying to spin is that a hunter-gatherer population which had no prior experience of architecture at all, no prior experience of moving megaliths that weigh more than 20 tons and in some cases up to 50 tons in weight. No prior experience of organizing a labor force or involving

21:41 specialists like astronomers in the work that this society suddenly wakes up one morning almost divinely equipped with all the knowledge and magically equipped with all the knowledge and all the skills. And, and all the necessary background to create the largest megalithic site that has ever been built on Earth. And at the same time just as a, as an aside They also decide to invent agriculture because it's exactly at that moment when Göbekli Tepe is created 11,600 years ago that we see agriculture suddenly spreading amongst the hunter-gatherers of this region of Turkey. To me the archaeological fairy tale is quite absurd. It's obvious what we're looking at is a transfer of technology from the survivors of a lost civilization who already knew

22:29 how to work megalithic architecture and who already knew all about agriculture, and who settled amongst the hunter-gatherers in Turkey and transferred their skills to them. They used Göbekli Tepe as a center of innovation. And what really drives this home is that this site pops up immediately after a global cataclysm on a scale that is absolutely capable of having wiped out almost all traces of a prior advanced civilization Right, yeah this new story is making a lot more sense. Now in Armenia we saw a couple of things like Karahunj and the supposed buried pyramid there which you know Armenia and Turkey are geographical neighbors You have any idea how these sites might fit into the story?

23:12 yes i think our media fits very much into the story in lots and lots of ways festival let's take caribbean uh... character changes is an intriguing a situation itself what we saw it together greg and as these these uh... amazing alignments of megaliths flowing in an almost serpentine like pattern across a plane surrounded by distant mountains. And these megaliths, many of them have holes drilled through them and those holes we now know were used for astronomical observations and the astronomical alignments that come out of them are very very old

23:53 going back into that 12,000 year ago period. And secondly recently just discovered by the way at the bottom of the Sicily Channel in the Mediterranean and not that far actually from Armenia out a depth more than 40 meters more 130 feet under the ocean marine archaeologists have come across something totally unexpected which is a huge submerged megalithic site and low and behold there's a megalith there which is 36 feet long And one of those, that 36-foot long megalith has holes drilled through it exactly like the holes that we saw in the Great Stone Circle at Karahunj. But in the case of the megalithic site at the bottom of a Sicily Channel, we can be sure that it's vastly ancient because studies of sea level rise are very well advanced and we know that area has been covered by the sea for at least 9 1⁄2 thousand years

24:48 which means that the site that's sitting there must be much older than that. We don't know how much longer it stood there before the sea levels rose and covered it, but certainly it may have been there for a very long time and that now makes sense in context of Gobekli Tepe where we know this site is 11600 years old I think what it's going to require us to do is reconsider the dating of other megalithic sites around the world, including Karahunj. Archaeologists really suggest that Karahunj might be some say 3,000 or 4,000 years old but nobody really knows. The astronomical alignments and nature of the site point to a much greater antiquity and it's important to make something clear here which is that the dating of megalithic sites is actually very difficult

25:33 There is no technique for directly dating when a stone monolith was cut and moved into position because carbon dating doesn't do that. Carbon dating only dates organic material so what archaeologists look for is a piece of bone, a piece of carbon, a piece of charcoal for example that is clearly and immediately associated with the stone they want to date that they can make the inference that the stone dates from the same period as the organic material in this very dangerous uh... really all or potentially very inaccurate because it's possible that later cultures wandering over a site if the site is exposed as many megalithic sites are, later cultures wondering over it introduce much younger organic material and that organic material is what is dated and gives falsely young date for the site. Now this couldn't happen with Gobekli Tepe because Gobekli Tepe was deliberately buried

26:30 more than 10,000 years ago and has been sealed since then so there's no possibility of later organic material being introduced to it. And it can't happen with the site at the bottom of the Sicily Channel because its 130 feet under the ocean now So where we have sites that are absolutely cut and dried where there is no question over the dating The Sicily Channel site and Gobekli Tepe low and behold turn out to be vastly ancient and much more ancient than other megalithic sites around the world. So I think we have to consider the possibility that many megalithic sites, whether it's Stonehenge, whether it's Meneider in Malta for example, whether it's Carnac in Brittany that many megalithic sites have actually been wrongly dated by archaeologists. I think these new discoveries are going to require a complete rethink of the age of megalithic sites all around

27:22 I agree. The Armenian sites, sorry Tai, I slightly went off your topic there but the Armenian sites are very much part of it. Karahunj is a fantastic site and I would urge anybody who has the possibility to do so to go there and take a look at it uh... and i'm not going to make that we saw near near divi is is dev absolutely definitely a pyramid and uh... really intriguing and and mysterious in its nature but so little luck uh... armenia isn't he's a very poor poor country they don't have enormous resources they've they'd be given the really bad deal by history over the years that things that happen to our media until our meetings of the last hundred years have been truthfully awful and and the country is

28:02 in a poor shape economically and they don't have the resources to do the archaeology. But I think if the archaeology were done, we would find that there is great antiquity within Armenia and let's not forget that the story of the flood – the worldwide story of the flood only one telling which is the story in the Bible, the story of Noah but this is a story told all over the world – the biblical story of the flood has the survivors of the flood turning up, settling coming to rest if you like on the mountains of Ararat. And Mount Ararat is the national symbol of Armenia because of the Turkish genocide at the beginning of the 20th century Armenia no longer has possession of Mount Ararat it's now in Turkey and only a few days walk from Gobekli Tepe but that notion that this was a place of refuge

28:52 for flood survivors that is carried by the noah story in the bible and that it is associated with a land that was historically armenia but that is today turkey uh... is a very intriguing one of one way following up are personally don't think that if physical park was actually washed out on the waters about our rat because they're good at flooding that took place would never in my view have reached sixteen thousand feet above sea level presently level uh... but i do think that that we're looking at a memory of the survivors of the global flood cataclysm who came to that area perhaps as a place of refuge and then began to pass on their skills to the local hunter-gatherers and we see the evidence for this in the archaeological record

29:37 I love that theory and there's a correlation, i suppose with the Atlantis idea. It kind of fits with this time frame of the Younger Dryas Cataclysm wouldn't you say? You're spot on Greg, you're absolutely right and thank you for using the right scientific name for this because this is what this cataclysm is now being referred to as in the scientific literature as The Younger Dryas Cataclysm And that's because this episode a worldwide catastrophe between 12,800 and 11,600 years ago. Has long been recognized as a very mysterious episode. There was a sudden deep freeze, the world had been coming out of the ice age and then temperatures suddenly plummeted to just appallingly freezingly cold and certain types of vegetation died out another type emerged and that's actually what the reference to younger dry ass is it's too assertive but dry ass is a certain kind of Arctic or Alpine

30:33 But geologists call it the younger dryers. It's a 1200 year period, it starts mysteriously 12800 years ago with a massive fall in global temperatures and it stops equally mysteriously 11,600 years ago with the massive rise in global temperatures and both events at both ends are accompanied by global flooding. Well the reason that the eleven thousand six hundred year-ago date is significant not only this is the date for the foundation of the deeply mysterious megalithic site of Gobekli Tepe but also it is the date that the Greek philosopher gives in his dialogues, the Timmius and Critias Dialogues for the destruction and submergence beneath the waves of the lost advanced civilization of Atlantis. Boom! Yeah, you know now archaeologists have been busy dismissing the Atlantis story and claiming that Plato made it up

31:28 uh... for a very long time i'll kill just don't like this story and they they use the word atlanta logist as an insult if anybody believes in the possibility that something like it let this might have existed archaeologists uh... treat them as though they're crazy but here's the thing play tell put an absolute date on the destruction of submergence and submergence of atlantis he said that it happens nine thousand years before the time of Solon and Solon was a famed Greek lawmaker. He was in fact the ancestor of Plato himself and Solon had lived in 600 BC so 9,000 years

32:09 time of Solon is 9600 BC which is 11,600 years ago which is exactly the date for that second spike of cataclysm for what geologists call meltwater pulse 1b a massive rise in sea levels eleven thousand six hundred years ago and it's also the date for the foundation of Gobekli Tepe so if Plato made it up he was astonishingly on the money with the latest science on what happened in that period. Global sea level rise, huge inundation of lands – that's exactly what he is describing and the interesting thing is that he tells us that Solon his ancestor got this story on a visit to Egypt.

32:52 He was told the story by the priests of the Temple of Neith at Sais in the Delta. That temple no longer exists today apart from a few stones, but as Solon reported the story and it was passed down to Plato it was those priests who informed him about the lost island continent of Atlantis, the last civilization of Atlantis and its destruction by flood and fire because it had become arrogant and proud and cruel. And it has ceased to wear its prosperity with moderation in Plato's account this was something that the universe took objection too. That is why Atlantis was if you like

33:34 put in its place. And we can listen to that and think about it, and perhaps wonder how many of the boxes of the next lost civilization we ourselves tick because Western technological society indeed does not bear its prosperity with moderation and has indeed become arrogant and cruel and unloving and unnurturing spirit. Right there's definitely some lessons there for sure talk just about Island of Ka, this is an interesting story that I learned about from your book and it kind of relates to the bigger picture And has a lot of parallels to kinda this-this picture you're painting right? Well yes it does. Uh...and this is uh.. This is a story that uh has survived in the ancient Egyptian annals You see when Egyptologists respond To Plato's Story Of Atlantis

34:19 They like to point out that there is no use of the word Atlantis in any ancient Egyptian text. And that is absolutely true You will not find the word Atlantis in any genuine ancient Egyptian texts, but what you do find Is a massive amount of references to an island homeland of an advanced civilization. It's called the Homeland Of The Primeval Ones, and it's made clear that they were navigators and sailors that they had advanced and sophisticated skills far ahead of those of the rest of people in the world at that time. And this story is told in what are called the Edfu building texts which are carved deeply into walls

35:04 of the temple of horrors at edfu uh... in upper egypt now the temple of course it had to be easy self not back told a temple that temple dates to about three hundred bc about two thousand three hundred years ago but it stands on the site of much earlier temples which received back one after another being rebuilt on the same site which received back into that the pre-dynastic era And what it turns out is that the priests of the then newly built Temple of Horus at Edfu, built on that same site 2300 years ago. They inherited the archives of the earlier temples and those archives included material

35:47 that was written, they say on animal skins and that was so fragile so much crumbling and falling apart some of it already lost but the priests at the temple of Horus in Edfu decided to preserve it permanently. And they took extract from those texts and thats what they copied onto the walls of the temple deeply inscribing them and these are the Edfu building text of the destruction by fire, by a cosmic event. By something that's described as a great serpent that leaps out of the sky and strikes the island and splits it and forces it to be submerged beneath the waves

36:26 They tell how there were survivors of this cataclysm because some of the quote-unquote gods were at sea, and they tell how those gods navigated their way back to the location of their former island and found it vanished entirely beneath the waves. The sea was completely filled with mud and this is a direct echo of Plato's story because he tells us exactly the same thing that when Atlantis went down and vanished forever, the sea where it had stood was filled with so much mud that navigation became difficult. So there is the story. The story of Atlantis is told in ancient Egypt. It's just not called Atlantis. And then we learn that those survivors of the primeval island of the gods, that those survivors

37:11 wonder the world. There's a very evocative phrase in the ancient Egyptian language about their wanderings and how they go to other lands, and their mission is to reconstitute or reincarnate – reinvent if you like – their former civilization. And Egypt is one of the places that they do that, and there they build what are referred to as primeval mounds And these primeval mounds are to serve as the sites for all future temples and pyramids in Egypt. They're a kind of blueprint that is laid out on the ground at that time, and I would suggest another place that they went was Turkey, Mount Ararat, the lands around Mount Ararat, uh...and we see their fingerprints in the mysterious site of Gobekli Tepe. Uh..and I think they also went to many other countries. I think-think we find their traces in Mexico

38:04 I think we find that traces in South America, in the Andes particularly and a place like Tiwanaku in Bolivia. We find their traces in all kinds of mysterious science that has survived the ages and that is vast antiquity indeed all around the world the evidence is staring mainstream archaeology by being so deeply wedded to the existing paradigm is finding it very difficult to see this evidence, very difficult to understand it. It's often the case with science that when new evidence comes in that completely contradicts the existing paradigms Rather than changing the paradigm, those who are attached to the paradigm hold on to it like grim death and it can often take a century or two for the old paradigm finally to be dismissed. And I think we're in that moment of paradigm shift in our understanding of the origins of civilization right now

38:57 Right, I agree with you and I love those stories of cedars of knowledge. They are just as widespread as the flood myths from Native American cultures to Samaria to the Vedic texts It's a major theme in the oral traditions around the globe And these are really the stories that the ancient aliens camp clings to Yes! Other camps like even more fringe things like the hollow earth they talk about beans coming from inside but all this new evidence, you know it really brings the story down to earth. You really don't need all that other stuff when you consider the idea of an advanced people. You could think about if today 99% of civilization was destroyed and a couple of New Yorkers made their way to a habitable remote area in Africa they might start trying to explain things like Wall Street McDonald's while trying to corral people into some kind of civilization. You can see how that could happen

39:45 Exactly. You can see exactly how that could happen and for me a lost human civilization is the simplest and most elegant explanation for all of the anomalies I have nothing against aliens by the way, I think that the universe we live in is deeply mysterious and I'm quite certain that it's full of intelligent life. The question is, do we see the fingerprints of intelligent aliens who have crossed into stellar space? Do we see those fingerprints in a and mysterious archaeological sites around the world. And I don't see them, it's been my privilege to spend 25 years exploring just about every intriguing and extraordinary ancient site in the world. And so far I haven't seen anything that could only have been made by an alien culture that had the technology to cross into stellar space. An example I often give is that you know The Great Pyramid

40:43 is an incredible monument and it's often attributed to aliens by the ancient astronaut lobby. But actually, the Great Pyramid is almost perfectly but not quite perfectly aligned to true north. It's 360th of a single degree off true north Besides of the great pyramid are almost exactly the same but there are variations about seven inches in the side links. In other words, there is error in the Great Pyramid and I think if you have a technology to cross into stellar space and navigate your way to this little blue dot planet Earth I do somehow want to build a pyramid or involve the local population and building a pyramid you would be sure that you would get your alignment true north right and you will be sure that you would get the side like your monument absolutely right so i think we're looking at.

41:33 absolute evidence of human error in the construction of the Great Pyramid. Nevertheless, it's an incredible piece of work. This is a monument with 13-acre footprint. It weighs 6 million tons. Its 481 feet high to align it just within 360th of single degree of true north is astonishing and uncanny precision. And I would say that it speaks of human abilities and the skills and knowledge of a lost civilization. Yeah, you very well may be right! Another thing I wanted to ask about was this handbag symbol... A related image that we see across way too many supposedly unrelated cultures when did you start to recognize this?

42:17 It goes back quite a while. I'm not the only person who's spotted this, quite a number of us have been intrigued by this mystery over the last few years it first really grabbed my attention when my wife Santa who you know is a photographer and Santa and i worked together we did many journeys in Mexico particularly back when I was researching fingerprints at the gods in the early 1990s And one of the sites we visited is a place called La Venta on the Gulf of Mexico, which is attributed to very interesting culture called the Olmecs. Actually, we don't know what they call themselves that's what archaeologists call them who were the predecessors of the Maya.

42:59 And actually everything the Maya knew and passed on had come down to them from the Olmecs, including the Mayan calendar which is itself an astonishing technological device. The Mayan calendar by the way inherited from the Olmecs gives us a more accurate length of the solar year than we using in our scientific society today and within the Mayan calendar there are devices that will enable you to accurately predict eclipses of the moon and when they will fall 200,000 years into the future or to accurately say when they happened 200,000 years in the past. So this line of transmission through the Olmecs to the Maya in the Mayan calendar has preserved a scientific artifact

43:43 But there at the site of La Venta, this so-called Olmec site on the Gulf of Mexico were dug up by archaeologists in the 1920s through the 1940s some astonishing physical remains. The so called Olmec heads which are these gigantic almost spherical megaliths that have been carved into human features. And these features are anomalous in themselves because they clearly do not look like the indigenous peoples of Mexico, they look like Africans as a matter of fact or perhaps Polynesians. The features are certainly not those of Native American Indians

44:20 but alongside them were also discovered images of individuals who look like Caucasians with very rich and prominent beards. Native American peoples don't normally grow, you know very large prominent beards like this they don't have the facial hair for that so this is buzzing but then amongst these artifacts is the earliest carved on a huge stone slab is the earliest surviving representation of the god Quetzalcoatl, which means the feathered serpent. Who was remembered as a great civilization bringer in a time of darkness he brings the gifts of civilization to the peoples of Mexico and lo and behold enshrined within the coils of the feathered serpents sits a man and his holding a very definite kind of bag in his hand

45:07 and he's holding it in a very distinct way with the fingers visible. Now I just filed that away, I didn't notice the bag symbolism when I first wrote about La Venta back in 1995 with Fingerprints of the Gods but then much later on as I'm researching Magicians of the Gods, this is the sequel to Fingerprints that have now published much later on I go to Gobekli Tepe I see in enclosure D, there are a number of distinct enclosures there. I see what is called pillar 43 by the German Archaeological Institute who have done the excavation and on pillar 43 on top as well an astonishing image that I argue in the new book

45:49 represents constellations and indeed shows us the sky in our time, on top of that pillar are three of these exact same bags. And then we find... there we know they're 11600 years old! We can be sure of that And then again, we find the exact same bags in ancient Sumer in Mesopotamia associated with another civilizer whose name was Uwan-Adapa or Oannes who came with seven sages. The seven Apkallu who are described as magicians indeed this is I call the book Magicians of the Gods and images of them, they're also holding the same what i call it jokingly a man bag. They are also holding the same man bag so in these three widely separated cultures supposedly have different epochs of history we find the same symbolism cropping up associated with the same story that this is about bringing

46:45 of civilization, of re-seeding civilization again after a great cataclysm. And I think that this is yet more evidence of the worldwide distribution of the survivors of the Younger Dryas Cataclysm. Hmm...I love it man! It's really intriguing and almost seems like the symbol of some ancient altruistic secret society It does that's what it seems like to me like you know if you were carrying one of those bags then other people would know who you are right as a secret like a secret handshake or something. What was in those bags we can't now we cannot we can only speculate but the symbol is enormously widespread and mysteriously interconnected all around the world that's a fact

47:25 Yeah, and you mentioned this pillar 43 in enclosure D at Gobekli Tepe. And it is a major part of this new book and a big part of that is decoding what might be a message there. This also relates to why its referred as the time capsule What do you think's behind that message? Okay. Well, first of all there's one other thing I need to say about Göbekli Tepe which is that the site as it has so far been excavated is only a tiny proportion of the whole site what we're seeing exposed by archaeologists since the mid-1990s is just a fraction of it they've been over the whole site with ground penetrating radar now and they know that more than 50 times as much still lies under the ground

48:07 That's why I say that this site, which is 7000 years older than Stonehenge is also 50 times larger than Stonehenge because the existing exposed area of the site Is already the size of Stonehenge and underground a way waiting to be excavated. It is so much more hundreds and hundreds and Hundreds and hundreds of gigantic megalithic pillars still lie buried So the full message of this time capsule may well remain to be revealed but we have the intriguing hint given to us on pillar 43 in enclosure D.

48:43 Now, listeners would really need to go to the book to see the full argument and to see the photographs and to see that case that I'm making here which by the way is based on – I want to pay tribute to Paul Burley, an engineer and architect who was the original proposer of this idea. And whose work I referenced in Magicians Of The Gods but there's a certain area of which is divided by the milky way now the milky way is our home galaxy and the center of the milky way incorporates what's called a dark rift it's caused by

49:23 Nebulae cloudy nebulae in the heart of the milky way and it looks like a dark gap in the middle of the Milky Way not got was a great importance to many ancient cultures particularly agent Maya who saw it as the womb. Creation is the cosmic womb with rebirth very symbolically important to them on either side of that dark rift at the heart of the Milky Way stand two constellations. One of those is the constellation that we call Sagittarius today and the other is the constellation that we call Scorpio and it is this area of the sky I'm convinced building on the work of Paul Burley, it is this area of the sky that is imaged on pillar 43. And what's really intriguing is that in that imagery the Sun is shown sitting directly over the dark rift and here I need to pay tribute to another researcher whose John Major Jenkins a great friend of mine one of the leading researchers on the ancient Mayan calendar

50:24 Major Jenkins has been showing us for years actually is that date of the 21st December 2012 that we all got so worked up about a few years ago which was wrongly suggested to be the date at the end of the world by many ill-informed commentators. It isn't a specific moment it's actually a window in time And that window is about 80 years wide and it extends from 1960 roughly to 2040. And it's when the sun sits astride the dark rift at the center of the galaxy as viewed from Earth between the constellations of Sagittarius and Scorpio on the winter solstice

51:04 the 21st of December and that only happens in our epoch. That's what happens today, that's what the Mayan calendar was really built on they were tracking the gradual motion of the Sun you see I have to explain the background for this The Earth is the viewing platform from which we observed the stars there is a wobble on the axis of the earth it's a slow cyclical 26 thousand year wobble called the precession of the axis of the earth and because Because the earth is our viewing platform, this change of orientation of the earth in space changes the rising times of particular stars and all celestial bodies and changes the appearance of the stars in the sky. In a very regular pattern at the rate of one degree every 72 years it's hard to observe but if you keep records long enough and your scientifically minded you can observe it

51:53 and this is the knowledge that is incorporated into the ancient Mayan calendar, and it was based on the processional changes in the position of the sun against the background of the stars on the winter solstice. And it's that exact moment that is depicted in great detail on Pillow 43 at Gobekli Tepe. This tells us, if I'm right and readers must make up their own mind from the evidence I present in the book this tells us that whoever created Gobekli Tepe had advanced scientific knowledge of the phenomenon of precession and were able to simulate future skies, the changes that would take place. And secondly it tells us that they wanted somebody to pay attention to the sky of our time indeed it is very much the same message as The Mayan Calendar its watch the sky during this window of 80 years between the decades we call the 1960s and 2040's in our epoch

52:49 Wow man, if you're somebody who puts any stock in synchronicity or some sort of poetic unfolding of events how coincidental is it that this very pillar would be unearthed and decoded in the very era its referencing rather than any other time before after? That's interesting. I agree with you It's a very odd thing that this should happen. And something odder about it, you know Gobekli Tepe was noticed by archaeologists in the very early 1950s which perhaps coincidentally is just before that window in time opens American archaeologist visited the site in like very early 1950's they were looking for Stone Age remnants and they found some plinths on the ground but then sticking up out of

53:38 They saw the tops of a couple of beautifully carved pillars and their immediate conclusion because of that prejudices, because of their preconceptions were that those pillars were recent. That they must be looking at the Byzantine cemetery And for that reason, they abandoned the site and never excavated it further. And it wasn't until the second half of the 1990s when Klaus Schmidt at the German Archaeological Institute took another look at the site that he realized actually they were vastly remotely ancient and coincidentally Klaus Schmidts discovery or rediscovery of the site in the second half of the 1990's is within the window

54:19 time that is indicated on Pillar 43. I don't do spooky often but this stuff does give me goose bumps every now and then, the reason why there's just so much more background that we don't have time to go into here but i do set out my stall very clearly in the book and every statement of fact is footnoted reference so people can follow it up and see where I get information from Yeah, it is a great case. A really lengthy detailed case in the book and I love it! I'm curious...I mean, I don't know how much it is in our nature to consider future generations in such a way but you know they might have had a way different mindset. They seemed way more concerned with the earth and people on it than we do today

55:00 well yes i think so and they had been let's not forget that's that they have passed through horrendous global cataclysm which had brought their civilization down they'd be taught a powerful lesson by the universe uh... lessening humility as a matter of fact and and i think it's that lesson but they thought at that they sought to transmit add to the future and that they did so with great care another slight a spooky point. And again, you know we cannot say that these are facts but every ancient civilization we know of worth its salt believed absolutely in reincarnation every ancient civilization amongst them the ancient Egyptians and they therefore believed that those who live on earth would come back at some time in the future so maybe maybe and I'm wildly speculating here maybe pillar 43 was

55:51 a message from the people of that time to their future selves today. Or maybe that's how they saw it at any rate, even if that was not actually the case. and uh... before we go to remind people where they can get the book and not your website things like that yet thank you take a break the place to go is my website which is www dot graham hancock dot com um... and and uh... there's a page dedicated to magicians of the gods there are very links to go purchase it if you want to do that and it was published in america on the tenth of november

56:36 It was published in the UK on the 10th of September. It's coming out in Canada very shortly and I hope that this is, this I know for sure, is the first major work that has considered the implications years ago and 11,600 years ago has considered the implications of that cataclysm for the stories we tell ourselves about our past. We should never forget that history is a narrative and I believe that this new evidence is not me! I'm simply the vehicle that brings... that puts this evidence before the public it's the evidence itself that matters and that evidence is a game changer. We are going to have to change everything we have thought about the origins of human civilization

57:20 And in so doing, vast new avenues of inquiry open up that can teach us so much about ourselves and what we're doing here on this planet. Well said man and that was great! We covered a whole lot of ground there thanks so much for being here man I had a blast hanging out in Armenia definitely a life-changing trip hopefully we can do this again sometime after the holidays and talk about more the interesting things you've gotten into psychedelics and all that Greg you have an absolute commitment from me I am looking forward to having much longer discussion with you hopefully in January of 2016 and we can go for a couple of hours and get into lots of other areas of my work. Because, you're right I mean psychedelics and consciousness and the adult sovereignty over consciousness are also crucial issues for me and i've talked a lot about this and I'll be very happy to engage in discussion with you about that. Amen man looking forward to it all until then take care yourself enjoy the holidays

58:13 Thank you Greg, thanks for having me on the show. You got it man! Thanks for being here Well whoop there it is people another episode of THC in the bag Of course this is just a one-hour show Graham's been super busy with the book tour and several different countries hot off The heels of that Armenia trip But I was happy to throw this together and get in rotation For spreading the good word about this new book so consider This a little Thanksgiving treat a bonus show But if you're new to THC, know that 99% of the shows I do are 2 hours with the second hour being for members of The Higher Side Chats Plus. It's $5 a month for 5 shows...for what you'd tip a pizza guy! With no ads either so although it is just a 1-hour show today, I am putting together some of the field footage I got of the sites we mentioned today and that trip

58:59 That footage will be available on the Plus site before the end of the year if you're interested in exploring some pretty under-the radar sites that are not far from Gobekli Tepe. It was because of the Plus members I was able to quit that shitty job and take two weeks on the other side of the world with Graham, and my special lady and pops as well But I've dragged my feet on getting that footage out and will put something together in the next 30 days. I've also been working on the Plus forums, and responded to over 150 posts and added profiles so of course you can't ignore the profiles but with the profiles comes private messages So if you have Plus and want to hit me up I can get back to you a lot easier than from my overfilled email And if you felt the forms were neglected well now that's where I'm going to be

59:47 Yeah, big thanks to Graham. It is a great theory I know he doesn't take it as far as a lot of my other guests might but for anyone who wants to push humanity back further than we're told you need to understand the Younger Dryas impact bombardment for over 1200 years it seems clear now that we lived through that And it was so destructive there just aren't ruins from before then. It pretty much wiped the slate clean and when shit calmed down some of the more enlightened survivors came out yearning for that civilized world once again, and they probably tried to help the hunter-gatherers to form one Of course they'd be seen as gods and maybe they did come up from the inner earth Maybe they came from Atlantis

1:00:25 But the idea that culture seeders of a higher intelligence wandered the earth dispensing knowledge from their ceremonial man bags... The case is strong and I'm into it. Thanks so much for listening, I'll be hitting you really shortly with a full THC episode in just a couple days about aliens. Until then thanks for listening please share the show and do what ya can to break free from the chains of that soulless 9-5. And if you already have? You got the golden ticket! Enjoy it That's it for me this week. Your move, Preservers of the Paradigm. Your fricken' move!

1:01:15 We thought this was low, it's bad Getting worse so Where'd all the good people go? They're on the higher side chats cause it's everybody's favorite show Where'd all the good people go? He got your Mars gold and white and then there's crow They talk this and that on the highest side Chat testing one, two Now what you gonna do? Bad news misuse Got too much to lose Give me some truth now Whose side we on Whatever you say Turn on the boob tube I'm in a mood to obey So lead me astray By the way now Where'd all the good people go? They locked them up it seems For protesting Monsanto

1:02:15 Where'd all the good people go? They're on the THC, my favorite show Sitting down New episode to hear Wanna light a bolt but I fear the police Can you hear me? Can't interrupt me from this friendly conversation Been waiting all week for THC With the car wood, there's no hesitation Exposing the truth getting to the elite Scams schemes conspiracies and treason It's an excellent show what I need to know Where'd all the good people go? Been only getting hate and fear from all the other hoes Where'd all the good people go

1:03:25 Guess that makes THC my favorite show They talk this and that on the highest side, chat testing one two now what you gonna do? Bad news misused. Give me some truth you got too much to lose. Whose side are we on today anyway? Okay whatever you say wrong and resolute but in the mood to obey. Station to station desensitizing the nation going gone