>>DAVID WILCOCK:
I'm David Wilcock,
and I welcome you
to "Disclosure."
This is our opportunity to
have a fireside chat about some
of the most fascinating
information ever put forward
by anyone who has been writing
books and doing research.
What we have here is a
14-episode miniseries
on ancient history.
If you think that
you know all there
is to know about
ancient history,
you may be very surprised.
Never before have we had such
an array of incredible talent
put together in a
synergistic sequence
where one concept
builds upon the next.
And we have all these
guys talking to you--
and talking to me because
I'm interviewing them--
about some of the most
fascinating mysteries
in Earth's primordial past.
Now, skeptics oftentimes
believe that we have nailed down
the truth, there's
nothing more that
really needs to be discovered,
and that Orthodox mainstream
thought is infallible.
This is much like a
religion-- the belief
that what we know now
is all we need to know.
Skeptics also can be
very aggressive and very
sarcastic and shaming
and demeaning in the way
that they try to
convey their opinions.
We are not looking
at anything here
that requires us to
suspend disbelief.
We're not looking at fantasy.
We're not looking at fiction.
And we're not
looking at something
that was channeled by angelic
beings from higher realms.
We're looking at straight
ahead, hardcore, empirical data
that can be researched--
anybody has the opportunity.
It's democratic.
You can go out there.
You can verify this
stuff for yourself.
The guy we're starting with
today is Graham Hancock,
and Hancock is specifically one
of the most brilliant pioneers
in the entire field of
ancient civilizations.
In 1995, he released
"Fingerprints of the Gods."
I had it as soon as it came out.
I'd already read 300 books
by that point on this topic.
I was blown away by what
Graham Hancock had to say.
In the traditional
view, civilization
begins with the so-called
Fertile Crescent and Sumeria,
and then it progresses
forward to Ancient Greece.
And this is the
first time that we
have any really
significant architecture
and roads and systems of law.
Some of that does
occur in Sumer,
but then it kind of grows into
its fruition in Ancient Greece.
The new knowledge is
the idea that there
was a highly advanced ancient
civilization before Sumer,
before all of this
stuff took place,
and that what we think
of as recorded history
is in fact not the only
history that's been recorded.
It's only the approved
version of history,
and the deeper truth
may involve the concept
that there was a
civilization that
had greater technology
than we have now
and that was wiped away in
a gigantic catastrophe that
started roughly 12,980 years
ago and then put the earth
into a profound period of cold
for 1,600 years, after which
time there was yet
another catastrophe.
And both of these catastrophes
involved massive flooding
and literally wiped the
surface clean of the earth,
taking away whatever remnant
of this foreign civilization
had once existed.
So we're going to
explore this as we
get into this first
episode of "Disclosure"
with Graham Hancock.
Check it out.
All right, Graham Hancock.
I am obviously a friend
of yours, a huge fan.
What you did with "Fingerprints
of the Gods" for me
was a phenomenal thing.
I had been reading 300 books
on ancient civilizations
up until I found
yours, and I started
to get really tired of
it because everybody's
trumpeting the same data.
Everybody's got the Rhodes
calculator, everybody talks
about Stonehenge, the
antediluvian flood maps.
And then along comes this book.
I think it was 1995, I had
just graduated from college.
And bam, this guy has
got all of the best stuff
that I had seen in all these
300 books I've been reading
and other stuff that
I'd never found before.
So a lot of people
know you for that.
>>GRAHAM HANCOCK: Definitely.
It's definitely my
best-known book.
No doubt about it.
>>DAVID: And that was
a major seller, right?
You sold a lot of copies.
>>HANCOCK: About 5 million
copies of that book.
>>DAVID: 5 million?
>>HANCOCK: Of which 2 and 1/2
million in hardback in Japan.
>>DAVID: Wow, really?
>>HANCOCK: And the other 2 and
1/2 million around the world.
It became a bit of a
sensation in Japan.
>>DAVID: That's incredible.
That's an incredible number.
You can't do that now.
>>HANCOCK: You
can't do that now.
It was a phenomenon.
It was one of those things.
It caught a wave.
There was a lot of
new stuff in the air.
There was a suggestion
that maybe we've
got the story of
civilization wrong,
and I think I was fortunate
to write "Fingerprints" when
I did.
I think it caught that moment.
If I had published it some years
earlier or some years later,
I don't think it would
have had that impact.
>>DAVID: And it is true that
actually the people that wrote
the movie "2012"
optioned the rights to--
>>HANCOCK: They did indeed.
They optioned the rights.
And if you can bear
to sit through the 20
minutes of credits at
the end of that movie,
you will see that it does
say at the very last line,
inspired in part by the book
"Fingerprints of the Gods"
by Graham Hancock.
>>DAVID: Well, and
"2012" is allegedly
a disaster movie
in modern times.
Why would they use
your book for that?
>>HANCOCK: Well, actually, I
would've liked to have-- were I
a producer, which
I'm not, I would
have liked to have seen that
movie delve a little more
into archaeology.
But what they took from
that book, I would say,
was just one thing, which
was as far as I know,
"Fingerprints" is the first book
that has connected the Mayan
calendar with Charles
Hapgood's notion of earth crust
displacement.
And those two
issues were actually
key to the scenario
in the movie "2012."
But they didn't take
anything else from the book.
>>DAVID: Let me
just briefly toss
in for people who don't know
that Hapgood's theory is
that the external crust
could slide over the mantle,
and therefore the whole Earth
has a shift in its crust,
even though the inner part
is still in the same place.
>>HANCOCK: Indeed,
rather like the skin
of an orange moving around
the fruit, to give an analogy.
And and this was the mechanism
envisaged in the movie "2012"
for the cataclysm that
they portrayed there,
because Roland Emmerich does
do big cataclysm movies.
And this was at the
heart of that idea.
I think that I
definitely would have
liked to have seen more
archaeology in the story,
but they focused
on the big effects.
>>DAVID: It seems
strange that they
would want to option
"Fingerprints of the Gods"
for a movie that only barely
touches on two little data
points from the book.
>>HANCOCK: Well, see, as
the project developed,
their ideas of what they were
going to do with the project
changed.
And they became more
focused on the cataclysm
and less perhaps on the
backstory to the cataclysm.
That's what they
became focused on.
>>DAVID: So there may have
been some Mayan calendar
stuff in the earlier
drafts of the script,
and that kind of thing?
>>HANCOCK: Yeah, indeed.
>>DAVID: Before we
go into your story--
because I want to do the
whole arc-- if you were going
to try to briefly summarize
what we learn from "Fingerprints
of the Gods," what
would you say is
the hypothesis or the goal of
"Fingerprints of the Gods"?
>>HANCOCK: At the
heart of it, that we
are a species with
amnesia, that there
has been a major forgotten
episode in human history.
And we are not taking
that forgotten episode
into account in our
understanding of who we are
and why we're here-- that
that has been buried,
partly as a result of
global cataclysmic events
12,980 years ago,
or thereabouts,
and partly because there are
forces at work in our society
that don't want that
information known,
that want the idea of a
simple linear development
from primitive, stone
age hunter-gatherers,
through settled
civilization, to us, the apex
and pinnacle of the human story.
And if you're committed
to that timeline,
then it's very
annoying to discover
that there was an earlier
episode of civilization when
humanity did achieve a very
high level, which was brought
cataclysmically to an end,
so massively and so severely,
as Plato put it, that
mankind had to begin again
like children, with no
memory of what went before.
I think there are people
who do have that memory,
but I don't think
they want it shared.
So that's the message at
the heart of "Fingerprints
of the Gods," I would say.
>>DAVID: The people
who don't want
this to be shared, it
appears that there has been
a narrative constructed in
the average person's mind
in which they might listen
to what you just said,
but then they'll say,
well, there's no evidence.
>>HANCOCK: Yeah, because
the whole institution
of archaeology and
mainstream history
has set before the
public, through the media,
through the education
system, a timeline
for the story of
human civilization.
And that timeline has
become embedded in the way
that we think about ourselves.
And that timeline
is this linear story
from primitive caveman to smart,
super-sophisticated, modern
human beings.
And we are supposed to have
gone through certain episodes
of development.
You know, we started
to make agriculture,
that agriculture provided the
possibility for a leisure class
who could become the priests
and kings in the cities that
were formed.
And we went on from there.
Yes, there were
some ups and downs,
but by and large, it's been
a straight, clean story.
And what disturbs that
is the possibility
that we've forgotten a
whole episode of earlier
civilization.
And new bits of archaeology
that are coming out--
like Gobekli Tepe in Turkey,
which cannot be denied
by the mainstream, because
mainstream archaeologists have
actually found
that archaeology--
themselves create ripples
in this timeline and make it
difficult to explain.
You see, if you're telling
people that hunter-gatherers
were this very simple kind
of society who were not
capable of large-scale feats of
engineering and construction,
and then suddenly in the
hunter-gatherer epoch,
before anything like a
city or a civilization
is supposed to have existed, you
have a very large-scale project
with enormous stone circles
and multi-ton megaliths
being put up and requiring
intense organizational skills,
management of a workforce,
a plan, all of that
in place, it doesn't fit
with the picture we've
been given of what our
ancestors are supposed
to have been like at that time.
And when I first went
to go Gobekli Tepe
and talked to Klaus Schmidt,
the excavator, who unfortunately
has recently passed away.
But I had an opportunity
to spend three days walking
around that side with
Klaus Schmidt in 2013.
And I said to him,
what does it feel
like to be the man who's
discovered the site that's
rewriting history?
And he was very careful.
He said, no, I prefer not to
say it's rewriting history.
I prefer to say it's adding
a new chapter to history.
That seems to be how mainstream
archaeology is trying
to finesse this--
that they still
don't want their basic
timeline, their basic story
of human progress to
be disturbed by this.
They just want to fit it
into the existing model.
I believe it won't fit
into the existing model.
It's going to
overthrow everything.
>>DAVID: The conventional
archaeologists
will attack guys like you.
I've seen this online
a bunch of times.
They say, if guys
like Graham Hancock
say that this civilization
was here on Earth
and it was very advanced,
show me the pottery shards.
Show me the linear curve of
how they built up to the point
to be able to manipulate
these large blocks of stone.
>>HANCOCK: That's what they say.
And that's why Gobekli Tepe
is becoming a serious problem
for them, because for example,
that particular point was made
in relation to the Great
Sphinx of Giza and the notion
that the Great Sphinx might
be vastly older than 2500 BC.
Well, the argument
of archaeology
was how could that be so?
There is no other large-scale
monument which is 12,000-plus
years old anywhere in the world.
If there was a culture that
could make the Sphinx 12,500
years ago, then surely it
must have made other monuments
as well.
Well, suddenly we have
that other monument.
We have Gobekli Tepe.
And it's not even very
far from the Sphinx.
>>DAVID: That's true.
>>HANCOCK: So you
know, it becomes--
the whole notion that the Sphinx
may be much older suddenly
becomes much more credible
than it was before.
I think the second point
which archaeologists are not
taking into account--
archaeologists
tend to be uniformitarians.
They don't really like
cataclysms very much.
And they don't, in my
view, take enough account
of the role of
cataclysmic events
in the story of
human civilization.
And again, there's new
information and new evidence
here.
We now know-- it's really
no longer in dispute--
that the Earth was hit by a
fragmenting comet round about
12,980 years ago, give
or take five years.
You can bring the
resolution down
that tight to a very exact date
from the Greenland Ice Cores,
because when comets
hit the earth,
they leave a signature in the
chemistry of the earth all
over the planet-- nanodiamonds
and iridium and platinum--
there are remnants.
And these have been preserved
in the Greenland Ice Cores.
And we can say for
sure, this event
happened 12,980 years ago,
give or take five years.
And it initiated an episode
that geologists have been aware
of for a very long time, which
they call the Younger Dryas.
See, 12,980 years ago, the Earth
was coming out of the Ice Age.
The Ice Age reached its maximum
extent 21,300 years ago,
approximately.
And there began a gradual
meltdown-- not always gradual.
There were some episodes
of rapid flooding
during that story.
But it was a process of warming.
And then suddenly,
12,980 years ago,
for reasons that
until recently it's
not been possible to explain,
the Earth was plunged back
into a dramatic
refreeze, went back
to colder than it had been at
the coldest point of the Ice
Age.
And that's the episode that
they call the Younger Dryas.
And it lasts from 12,980
years ago, give or take
five years, down to
11,600 years ago,
when suddenly the cold
lifts and the Earth
resumes its warming process.
You have roughly
1,600, 1,700 years
of radical, unexplained
deep freeze.
We now know why that happened.
It happened because of that
comet which fragmented.
Its fragments hit many
different parts of the Earth,
but the greatest impact of
all was in North America.
And it was on the
North American ice cap.
That's why there isn't a
crater, because the ice cap was
best part of a mile and
a half to two miles deep.
And that fragmenting comet
smacked into the ice cap.
The crater was made in ice,
not in the body of the Earth.
And that's why we don't
see the crater today.
But what we do see are
the chemical signatures
of that impact all
over the world.
So the comet hits.
The initial effect is
dramatic, large-scale flooding,
because the ice cap is
suddenly liquidized.
There's a huge
flooding event results
from that, which leaves scars
all over the North American
landscape.
And then, enormous
quantities of dust
are thrown up into
the upper atmosphere.
These enshroud the
Earth completely
in a mantle of dust, which
stops the sun's rays reaching
the Earth.
Then we go into the deep freeze
called the Younger Dryas,
because the sun's warming
effect on the Earth
is no longer happening.
And it takes 1,600 or so
years for that dust mantle
to disperse.
It's possible that the
Earth interacted again
with fragments of
that comet, and that
may be part of
why it ends rather
suddenly about 11,600 years ago.
>>DAVID: What's the
data on sea level?
What did it do to sea level?
>>HANCOCK: Well, then you have a
very rapid episode of sea level
rise, exactly following
11,600 year ago,
so you have instant flooding.
12,980, sea level goes up.
Then it goes down again,
because you go into a freeze.
Then 11,600 years ago, the
Earth is suddenly warming up
very rapidly, and sea
level rises very rapidly.
And it's not an accident that
11,600 years ago is exactly
the period that Plato pointed
to in the story of Atlantis,
because he said that Atlantis
was destroyed, submerged
by a giant flood
and earthquakes,
9,000 years before
the time of Solon.
And 9,000 years-- Solon is
600 BC, so that's 9,600 BC.
That is 11,600 years ago.
That is the end of
the Younger Dryas.
Now, how could Plato
have made that up?
It connects perfectly.
>>DAVID: To try to
say that that isn't
a link is a conspiracy theory.
>>HANCOCK: I believe
it's a conspiracy theory.
To dismiss that, as mainstream
academics have done,
they've tried every
way to make Plato not
say there was a cataclysm
11,600 years ago.
They even say that he's talking
about months instead of years.
I mean, this was Plato.
When he said years,
he meant years.
Solon was his own ancestor.
He received this
story through Solon.
He was reporting what for him
was a very strong and definite
fact, that there had been
an event that had destroyed
a great civilization 9,000
years before the time of Solon.
And in our time frame, that is
11,600 years before our time.
And it just all adds up.
So I think it's
going to become more
and more difficult for
mainstream archaeology
to dismiss this as we start
seeing new evidence emerging
all over the world.
First of all, we now
have a smoking gun.
We didn't have that before.
Yes, we all understood
that the end of the Ice Age
was cataclysmic, but we didn't
have an actual, very specific
smoking gun.
See, when I wrote
"Fingerprints of the Gods,"
I focused very
much on the window
between 12,000 and
13,000 years ago.
And the moment that the comet
hits the Earth, which we now
know but I did not know
when I wrote "Fingerprints
of the Gods," is
12,980 years ago.
That is exactly in that window.
I wasn't able to give my
readers a smoking gun when
I wrote "Fingerprints
of the Gods."
Rather just say that--
>>DAVID: Yeah, I didn't
remember reading that.
>>HANCOCK: Yeah,
it isn't in there
because the evidence
on the comet
had not been discovered in 1995.
This has all come
out since 2007.
And it's been a
debate in science,
but the evidence
keeps coming in.
And really, no serious
geologist is now
disputing that the Earth was
hit by a comet 12,980 years ago.
And then you have this
1,600 year deep freeze.
And 11,600 years ago,
we come out of it.
And the whole story
of human civilization
as we have it today all unfolds
in that last 11,600 years.
And what happens
before that is a blank.
And I would say the
reason that it's
a blank is because of this
horrendous cataclysm that
overtook the Earth.
We know that many of
the great megafauna,
the mammoths, the rhinos, died
out during the Younger Dryas.
And we now know what
caused the Younger Dryas.
So we're getting much closer
to understanding what happened
and why we are a
species with amnesia.
>>DAVID: Well, let me put
the tin foil hat on real snug
here for a moment.
Is it possible-- that's the
"Ancient Aliens" signature
line, right?
Is it possible.
Is it possible that
someone disliked
whoever was here on Earth--
maybe there was a war,
maybe they had gotten
themselves in a lot of trouble--
and that somebody had the
ability to take that comet
and deliberately
make sure that it
was going to hit the ice cap?
>>HANCOCK: Well, David, that's
a very interesting speculation,
I have to say.
Because there are
serious studies now
being done--
unfortunately by the war
mongers in our own civilization.
One of the weapons
they're looking at
is how do we use an
asteroid as a weapon?
How do we target an asteroid
at our, quote unquote, enemies?
What a shame, what a horror
that human beings could even
think that way, that
our imagination could
go in that direction.
But maybe that's in
our DNA in some way.
So it is not impossible.
I can't sit here and say, no,
that's absolutely impossible
that somebody could have
fired that comet at us
or deflected it from its
orbit to the point where
it interacted with the
Earth in cataclysmic ways.
>>DAVID: You and I spoke
in the car on the way
here about the Book of Enoch.
And the Book of Enoch describes
fallen angels, the watchers,
and that they inter-bred with
humanity, that they created
a race of giants, and that
in the aftermath of that,
Enoch was asked by the giants
to talk to the Elohim, or God,
and say, please don't wipe us
out, because God, Elohim, said,
you guys have become
wicked and you
need to be purged
from the Earth.
And that apparently was the
genesis of Noah's flood.
Do you believe
that we're talking
about the biblical flood here?
>>HANCOCK: Yes, I do,
as a matter of fact.
I think the biblical flood needs
not to be seen in isolation.
We need to understand
that that is
part of a global tradition
of a cataclysmic flood--
often, by the way, accompanied
by a radical deep freeze.
If you look at the
cataclysmic myths in Iran,
for example, they don't
speak so much of a flood.
They speak more of a terrible
freeze, a dragon that
caused the world to freeze.
And the Iranian Noah
figure, who is called Yima,
actually doesn't create an ark.
He creates an
underground sanctuary
into which human beings go,
where the seeds of all life
are preserved.
The same story is told
all around the world
and with interestingly
different angles on it.
In some cases, it's a flood.
In some cases, as in the
case of the Iranian myths,
it's a deep freeze.
And what we now know is
that both things happened--
that there was flooding and
there was a deep freeze.
And the biblical
story of the flood
is part of that
global tradition.
And it's well understood.
There's been very good
scholarship on this,
that the biblical flood
is genetically related
to the Gilgamesh
epic from Sumer.
And really, we're
looking at one story
told in a number
of different ways.
>>DAVID: Well, I'm
thinking of Rand and Rose
Flem-Ath and "When
the Sky Fell."
>>HANCOCK: Yes.
Brilliant, brilliant book.
They did really fantastic work.
And they were the ones
who raised the-- working
with the earth crust
displacement theory of Charles
Hapgood, they were the ones
who worked with and brought
before the public the notion
that Antarctica might have been
the home of the
lost civilization.
And there's another author whose
work is overlooked but deserves
to be paid attention to.
And that is Flavio Barbiero,
who's an Italian author, a very
scholarly man, who actually
published a book called
"Civilization Under the Ice."
I can't say it in Italian.
It was published in
the Italian language--
"Civilization Under the Ice."
Back in 1973 or '74, way before
the Flem-Aths or me or anybody
was working on this,
suggesting that Antarctica
might have been the
site of Atlantis.
And what's interesting
about Flavio Barbiero's work
is that he connects
this to a comet impact.
Flavio Barbiero is looking
at pole shift or earth crust
displacement, but he is
considering the process that
sets the earth crust
displacement in motion.
And what he suggests is that
the Earth is hit a glancing
blow by a huge astronomical
object, by a large comet,
and that that imparts
the momentum that
sets the crust in motion, or
that creates the pole shift.
So he was very, very far
ahead of his time in that.
There is a history
to these ideas,
and it's important to recognize
Flavio's part in them.
>>DAVID: Have you
looked into how long
most of the stuff
that we have now
would last if there
was a pole shift?
Because metal rusts away, right?
>>HANCOCK: Yeah, absolutely.
I don't think that our
civilization is very solidly
founded.
I think we could lose
it all very rapidly.
We are putting ourselves in
danger in a number of ways.
And one of those ways is
the intense specialization
of our civilization--
that everybody
is a specialist at
something, but nobody
knows how to do everything.
We're all very interdependent.
We take so much for granted.
There's food in the supermarket.
Well, what does that
all come down to?
There's the concept
called just-in-time
with the delivery of food.
We actually have
about three days
of food supplies in our cities.
And if the supply
line was cut, as it
would be by a major
cataclysm, you
would have people starving
in our cities within weeks,
probably within days.
It would be that bad.
And you would then have riots.
You would have massive
civil disorder taking place.
We've already seen it
with what in these terms
are very small-scale events,
like Hurricane Katrina--
the chaos that that caused.
Imagine that
multiplied 1,000 times.
Imagine a Katrina
but 1,000 times
larger affecting the advanced
technological societies
of our world.
Imagine an event that raises
sea level overnight 30 feet,
flooding every coastal
city in the world.
Would our civilization
survive that?
I don't think so.
I don't think we have
the psychic resources
to survive that.
I think we're
psychically very fragile.
We're all very
comfortable in our lives.
We are all
interdependent on others.
Very few of us actually
know how to survive.
There are people who
take survival seriously
and who would know
how to survive.
But it's very interesting.
If you look at
the NASA satellite
photos of the areas
of the earth that
are lit up by electricity
today-- it's very beautiful,
they call it the Black
Marble, I think--
you can see these wonderful,
brightly lit areas, the United
States, Europe, India also
increasingly brightly lit.
And then you can see
other areas that are dark,
like the Amazon rainforest
or like Central Africa--
completely dark and almost no
electricity showing at all.
And these images are taken by
us as a sign of the advancement
and achievement
of our technology,
that we can light up the world.
But what I would
say is that it's
the people who live
in the dark areas,
they're the ones who would
survive a coming cataclysm,
because they know how
to live off the land.
And we have forgotten
that skill by and large.
So we're fragile.
And secondly, we're impermanent
in the nature of the structures
that we make.
How many of our
skyscrapers would still
be there in 10,000 years' time?
I don't think many
of them would be.
And if this was accompanied
by gigantic earthquakes,
as it easily could be,
by large-scale flooding,
we could be wiped from
the face of the Earth
in the blink of an eye.
And we would become the
next lost civilization.
>>DAVID: Yeah, in
the blink of an eye,
we could all be wiped from
the face of the Earth.
That's not exactly the
most comforting thought.
But look, I don't
think that's what's
going to happen to
us this time around,
so please don't
think that I'm trying
to peddle fear porn here.
But it did happen before.
There is absolutely
conclusive evidence,
as you saw with
the nanodiamonds,
with the platinum, with the
iridium that's been found.
We know that there was
some sort of impact.
It could've been a comet, it
could have been asteroids.
John Anthony West,
as we'll see later,
says that it might
have been some kind
of coronal mass
ejection from the sun.
But the point is, there
was a great catastrophe,
a series of two.
And what this
means is that there
could have been a highly
advanced civilization that
got completely wiped clean.
And that means that all bets are
off as far as whether we would
ever be able to find really
tangible evidence of the type
that archaeologists
want to have.
There's some intrinsic
human blockage
that we have around the
idea of a mega-catastrophe
of this scope.
We don't want to think about it.
It's too horrifying.
Coming up in the
next episode, we're
going to be talking
to John Anthony West.
And specifically, I wanted
to engage him on something
that people don't
usually ask him about.
Everybody knows
John Anthony West
as the guy who essentially
back-dated the Sphinx
to make it much older, and we'll
talk about how he did that.
But I also wanted to talk
to him about, really,
the core of his work,
"The Serpent in the Sky,"
which is this notion of
this French researcher named
Schwaller de Lubicz.
I tried to get through
his book "Temple of Man."
And as I say in the interview,
I enjoyed the pictures.
That's about as
much as I could do.
So with West, we're going to
hear some very interesting
stuff about what did
de Lubicz contribute
to the field of
Egyptology in general.
And specifically, how
do we you use the Sphinx
and a new site in
Turkey to help date
ourselves much older than we
ever thought we were before?
That's coming up next
time here on "Disclosure,"
and I thank you for watching.
