The Joe Rogan Experience - Joe Rogan Experience #1124 - Robert Schoch

00:00:00.000 ready five four three two one mr. shock first of all thank you very very very much for being here i've been following your work for a long time now and uh i'm very appreciative of you and very appreciative of everything you've done and i've been fascinated by the subject of ancient egypt so i'm i really i'm really excited very psyched thank you it's a real pleasure to be here i've heard a lot about I've heard a lot about you.

00:00:30.000 My, of course, the late John Anthony West, I think, was on with you a couple of times, maybe?

00:00:35.000 Yeah.

00:00:35.000 He was very proud that, I guess, you did the only full Skype interview with him?

00:00:40.000 Yeah, that's the only one I've ever done is with him.

00:00:42.000 Yeah, he used to like to talk about that.

00:00:44.000 Well, I just had to talk to him, and, you know, he was in upstate New York at the time, and it was just...

00:00:49.000 He really didn't have any plans to come down here.

00:00:52.000 I was very fortunate to one day get him in studio, though.

00:00:56.000 It was really nice.

00:00:59.000 So, it's been wonderful.

00:01:00.000 Well, his work, that DVD series he did, Magical Egypt, was amazing.

00:01:05.000 And I had seen your work before that in that Mysteries of the Sphinx thing that was narrated by Charlton Heston.

00:01:12.000 Charlton Heston, NBC, 1993. I think, in many ways, it was the Mystery of the Sphinx that really broke everything open.

00:01:19.000 It brought everything to the public attention.

00:01:22.000 I've had many people tell me, I'm not trying to brag or anything, I'm just saying factually, that this really opened up a new field, if we could put it that way, a new way of looking at things among the popular groups.

00:01:38.000 Public, you know, press, the popular media, but people around the world versus the academic scholarly journals and the back and forth, that type of thing.

00:01:48.000 You have to remember I'm a faculty member.

00:01:50.000 I'm at Boston University.

00:01:51.000 I'm an academic.

00:01:53.000 And many of the academics have poo-pooed, should we say, over the years bringing things to the public, but I think it's been important to do.

00:02:01.000 Now what we're talking about for the people that are uninformed is the idea that some of the structures in ancient Egypt are far older than conventional wisdom or conventional modern-day archaeology, modern-day Egyptologists.

00:02:16.000 They would like us to believe that all of this spawned from a very specific time period.

00:02:21.000 And people like John Anthony West and yourself and some other folks like Graham Hancock are proposing that it's entirely possible that there were many different eras of construction in Egypt and that there are some structures that are far, far older than we think.

00:02:37.000 Yeah, exactly.

00:02:38.000 And what I was alluding to is this really opened up with our work on redating the Great Sphinx.

00:02:44.000 And I think you know the story, but maybe just to summarize in the smallest of nutshells, John Anthony West, before I met him, He became a follower, should we say?

00:02:56.000 I shouldn't say follower, because that sounds wrong.

00:02:58.000 That sounds like it's a religion dogma.

00:03:00.000 But he became interested in the work of the late Schwaller de Lubitsch, who died, passed away in 1961. But he had mentioned in one line that the Sphinx had been weathered by rain.

00:03:14.000 I would say precipitation as a geologist, not wind and sand.

00:03:17.000 So this, if it were true, and it is true, would put the Sphinx back to a much earlier period, which would tie in with Schwaller's work and John Anthony West's subsequent work that there were indications that dynastic Egypt as we know it,

00:03:33.000 going back to about 3000 BC, was really a legacy of what I call now an earlier cycle of civilization.

00:03:42.000 Something that goes back much, much earlier, which at this point I date back to the end of the last Ice Age.

00:03:48.000 Ice Age ended 9700 BC, just to put it in perspective for people.

00:03:52.000 So when did you first get on board with this?

00:03:56.000 Did John Anthony West come to you?

00:03:58.000 John Anthony West, okay, so the story goes this way.

00:04:01.000 John Anthony West published Serpent in the Sky, his probably most famous book, first edition, 1979. He was then looking for someone that could really validate, or at least...

00:04:15.000 Assess, from a scientific point of view, this theory about the Sphinx, which he had just barely sort of touched the surface based on Schwaller, that maybe it could be older, but this was really a geological question.

00:04:29.000 He mentions that in 1979 in Serpent in the Sky.

00:04:33.000 John Anthony West went on to become very involved with Egypt, and he started traveling to Egypt.

00:04:39.000 He led tours to Egypt.

00:04:41.000 He wrote The Traveler's Key to Ancient Egypt in 1985, also mentions in appendix, I think it was, just the, quote, older Sphinx theory, but really looking for someone to at least assess it scientifically.

00:04:54.000 He met a fellow at In Egypt, actually, at the time, Robert Eddy, who is Ph.D. English literature, I believe, something like that, but he was teaching in Cairo, American University in Cairo,

00:05:11.000 I believe.

00:05:11.000 Then he came to Boston University.

00:05:14.000 This is late 1980s.

00:05:16.000 I was and still do teach at Boston University full-time.

00:05:21.000 Robert Eddy and myself got to know each other.

00:05:24.000 Robert Eddy mentioned me as a geologist to John Anthony West and that maybe this was someone who seems fairly knowledgeable, fairly open-minded about things.

00:05:36.000 At the time, did you have any thoughts?

00:05:38.000 Not liberal.

00:05:40.000 Oh, my interest in Egypt goes way back.

00:05:44.000 I was reading about ancient Egypt when I was literally six, seven, eight years old.

00:05:49.000 I had a grandmother who had a wonderful library at the time, and I would go through her library.

00:05:55.000 She had books from the British Museum on ancient Egypt going back to the turn of the century.

00:06:00.000 So I was prepared in the sense I was open to such things.

00:06:05.000 I didn't imagine getting involved in Egypt in any way professionally.

00:06:09.000 Did you have any thoughts about the dating of the Sphinx or the pyramids or anything back then before you looked into it?

00:06:15.000 Yeah, there were two things.

00:06:16.000 So there were two things going on in my head back then which maybe prepped me for this.

00:06:22.000 Number one, I knew the conventional story.

00:06:25.000 I knew that the Sphinx goes back to 2500 BC according to the standard Egyptologists.

00:06:32.000 In 1989, which is when I first, I believe it was 1989, I first actually met West in person, I had in my mind that the Egyptologists must be correct because they've studied it, they must know what they're doing.

00:06:46.000 I was coming from an academic point of view.

00:06:50.000 I'm just giving, you know, saying where I'm coming from.

00:06:53.000 I had gone to Yale University to get my PhD in geology and geophysics.

00:06:57.000 I was very well grounded in, quote, the status quo academic point of view.

00:07:03.000 So I thought when I first went to Egypt, I would just prove West wrong.

00:07:07.000 I would just prove that the Egyptologists knew what they were talking about.

00:07:10.000 But, and this is an important but...

00:07:13.000 I was also trained in many ways, both as a graduate student and going back to my grandmother, who I had great respect for, and was also very, should we say, liberal and open-minded but critical.

00:07:25.000 You always have to follow the evidence wherever it goes, and that's always been my rule of thumb.

00:07:31.000 That not everything is always the way people say it is, even if they're, quote, authorities.

00:07:37.000 And something I already knew when I went to Egypt for the first time was that some of the very old Egyptologists in the late 19th, early 20th century had actually suggested that just the way it looks, the feel of the Sphinx, Not based on hard evidence,

00:07:54.000 really, that maybe it was older than the pyramids, that maybe it goes back earlier.

00:07:59.000 So I felt that it wasn't all said and done and, you know, pat and sound that the Egyptologists necessarily knew what they were talking about in modern times because some of the Earlier Egyptologists, who they held in very high respect, supposedly,

00:08:14.000 had said different things.

00:08:16.000 Secondly, and I hate to bring this up, but I will because it's part of the background.

00:08:20.000 My grandmother, who I mentioned a second ago, was a theosophist.

00:08:27.000 And if you know anything about theosophy, it also suggests that, you know, maybe there's things that go back earlier.

00:08:35.000 What is a theosophist?

00:08:37.000 A theosophist, it's, how do I explain it?

00:08:40.000 Have you heard of Blavatsky, Madame Blavatsky?

00:08:44.000 No.

00:08:44.000 No, okay.

00:08:45.000 I'm losing my headphones.

00:08:49.000 Theosophy was founded in the late 19th century.

00:08:53.000 It questioned a lot of the materialistic values, a lot of the dogma of science of the time, of religion of the time.

00:09:01.000 It looked to the East in particular, to other philosophies, other worldviews.

00:09:07.000 So basically it was a way—this is what it did for me at least—and I'm not a theosophist.

00:09:12.000 I don't want to say I'm a theosophist.

00:09:15.000 But reading theosophical works on top of everything else allowed me, I think, to expand my horizons and to see that maybe— The dogma of the day is just that, the dogma of the day, that there are other possibilities.

00:09:31.000 And not that we accept something just because someone said it or because it's old or because it's this religion or that religion or that's supposed to be an ancient culture, but no.

00:09:40.000 You keep everything open, you look at the evidence, and that's really where I was coming from.

00:09:46.000 But my point is that Even in the late 1980s, early 1990s, when I first got involved with this, if I looked at it critically, the evidence was not that definitive for the age of the Sphinx.

00:10:00.000 So, I was going in with open-minded possibilities, but honestly, when I first went to Egypt with John Anthony West in 1990, I thought, before I got off the plane, that this would be a simple open-and-shut case.

00:10:16.000 I would prove him Really?

00:10:38.000 Yeah, it really did.

00:10:39.000 What was your first impression?

00:10:40.000 Because my first impression of the Sphinx was now that I saw it on the ground in person, there was something wrong with the Egyptological dating.

00:10:49.000 Because when you look at the Sphinx, As a geologist with a geological eye, this was not weathered by wind and sand.

00:10:59.000 This was not desert erosion and weathering that I saw on the Sphinx, the body of the Sphinx, which is very difficult to tell because it's been heavily repaired and reworked, but particularly on the walls of what are known as the Sphinx enclosure.

00:11:13.000 The Sphinx enclosure is important because it preserves a lot of the details.

00:11:19.000 And if the audience has not been to Egypt, they should realize that when they carved the Sphinx, it's all solid bedrock, only the head initially was above the ground surface.

00:11:32.000 They carved down into the rock to free up the body, what I call the core body of the Sphinx.

00:11:40.000 And it's that core body and the walls of the enclosure, more or less the quarry around it, if you want to use that term, that show these ancient weathering, precipitation, erosional features that are incompatible with the last 5,000 years of climatic history.

00:11:59.000 On the eastern edge of the Sahara.

00:12:01.000 So immediately I knew there was something wrong geologically.

00:12:05.000 Had to figure that out.

00:12:07.000 Either this was a weird geological anomaly or something else was going on And the Sphinx might go back to earlier period.

00:12:17.000 Also, I want to point out that when you look at the Sphinx, and other geologists have looked at this as well, they did not just chip away at the rock to carve the body.

00:12:28.000 More or less, you could have chipped away at the rock with pickaxes and that type of thing, shoveled out chips of rock in baskets.

00:12:35.000 That would have been the easy way.

00:12:37.000 What they did is they carved out huge Huge blocks of stone.

00:12:41.000 And when I say huge, we're talking multi-ton, tens of tons, some of them maybe over 50 tons or more of limestone.

00:12:48.000 They moved those due east of the Sphinx and built what is now known as the Sphinx Temple, which is still there in Ruinas.

00:13:06.000 I think those constructions which are contemporary with the oldest portion of the Sphinx in some ways are more impressive if you think about the technology and what went into constructing them.

00:13:26.000 So Jamie pulled up two photos here.

00:13:29.000 The first one that he pulled up was a computer image that showed the Sphinx Okay, I'm looking at it now, yes.

00:13:36.000 And in this image, what you can see, that's a computer image that's actually from Mystery of the Sphinx, and then there's an inset that's an aerial photograph, the real thing, and that shows how when they were carving the body, they cut out huge blocks and then put them in position to make what's known as the Sphinx Temple due east of the Sphinx.

00:13:58.000 And the second image is the Sphinx Temple?

00:14:00.000 Okay, and you look at this, it says the Sphinx faces due east, the rising sun, and right in front of it is the Sphinx Temple.

00:14:07.000 So this is a humongous temple made out of these huge blocks of stone, which were carved out when they carved the body of the Sphinx.

00:14:17.000 And here you see in this image another picture of the Sphinx Temple.

00:14:22.000 And so these erosion features that you're looking at here...

00:14:25.000 And you can see how big they are.

00:14:26.000 You can see how big they are.

00:14:27.000 They're enormous.

00:14:28.000 Okay, these erosion features on the blocks, don't worry about them for the moment.

00:14:32.000 Okay.

00:14:33.000 Let's go back to the sphinx enclosure itself.

00:14:36.000 It's a sphinx enclosure where you see the rolling, undulating profile, the erosional features, Here you see it in that picture.

00:14:45.000 The vertical fissures, and I know you're familiar with this personally, because I've heard you talk about it with John Anthony West, that can only be caused by precipitation.

00:14:55.000 The rocks are like a layer cake, so it takes out the softer layers, it recedes the softer layers, some of the harder layers stick out further.

00:15:04.000 But the water also finds its way down crevices and cracks, natural features that are slightly softer, and it forms these vertical fissures.

00:15:15.000 I want to make the point because a lot of people get confused.

00:15:18.000 They say, couldn't it be rising Nile floods?

00:15:21.000 No.

00:15:22.000 Geologically, that would give a very different signature on the rock.

00:15:25.000 It's not floods coming up from the bottom.

00:15:28.000 It's actually precipitation and rainfall runoff coming from above.

00:15:33.000 Rainfall for thousands of years?

00:15:35.000 Well, there's two aspects here.

00:15:37.000 It could be thousands of years.

00:15:39.000 It could be much stronger rainfall, you know, huge flash floods, that type of thing.

00:15:46.000 And part of the story that I hope we'll get to is that...

00:15:50.000 Initially, I'm jumping around here a little bit, but initially I was thinking 5,000 to 7,000 BC. That was very conservative based on the geological data, based on the seismic, which we have to get to also.

00:16:05.000 But now I believe we're talking prior to 9,700 BC for the original construction of the Sphinx, and we can talk about why the dating.

00:16:15.000 And at 9700 BC, we have the end of the Younger Dryas, the end of the glacial epoch, the end of the last ice age.

00:16:25.000 I have now put together the story based on evidence.

00:16:30.000 And whenever I say, if I say I believe something or I think something, it's always based on evidence that I've been piecing together, that what we had ending the Younger Dryas, ending the last ice age, was a huge eruption from the sun, a huge solar outburst.

00:16:45.000 Huge climatic changes which put, among other things, a lot of precipitation, a lot of moisture into the air which came down as precipitation with huge floods, huge essentially thunderstorms, etc.

00:17:00.000 And I think a lot of the initial erosion that we still see on the walls of the Sphinx enclosure go back to that period.

00:17:07.000 So you had the situation where you would get this incredible Weathering and erosion.

00:17:15.000 And then it continued for thousands of years after that and was reinforced until you had the Sahara coming in in relatively recent times and geologically Holocene times.

00:17:25.000 The Sahara Desert.

00:17:27.000 The Sahara Desert, yes.

00:17:28.000 So before that, it was some sort of a rainforest.

00:17:31.000 It's savanna to rainforest.

00:17:33.000 It actually varied over time.

00:17:35.000 And before that, it was very fertile savanna, lots of plants there.

00:17:41.000 People have seen it even in popular movies and whatnot, how the Sahara at one point had water and all kinds of animals.

00:17:48.000 That's before the end of the last ice age, before these incredible changes that we have at 9700 B.C., So that's where the Sphinx, I think the original Sphinx goes back to that time period, and that's what the Egyptians called Zeb Tepe.

00:18:05.000 This was a first time for them, or what I call an earlier cycle of civilization.

00:18:11.000 The last cycle, the one that we're still part of, in my terminology, is the last 5,000 years.

00:18:17.000 So civilization arising, re-emerging, I should say, I think?

00:18:41.000 And just to map this out, a period from about 9700 BC, this is what I'm reconstructing now, to about 4000 to 3000 BC where we have civilization re-emerging between that period, so thousands of years,

00:18:58.000 9700 BC to say 3700 BC for round numbers, 6000 years.

00:19:03.000 We have essentially a dark period and what I've been now calling Siddha, solar-induced dark age.

00:19:10.000 Sort of ironic, the sun would induce a dark age because it brought civilization back to an earlier stage, if you would.

00:19:18.000 I'm not sure I follow that.

00:19:19.000 How did the Sun do this?

00:19:21.000 Solar outbursts.

00:19:22.000 Essentially, coronal mass ejection, huge eruption, bigger than anything we've ever seen on Earth.

00:19:29.000 And so that's what caused these massive thundershowers.

00:19:32.000 Exactly.

00:19:33.000 Nothing in modern history.

00:19:34.000 Nothing in modern history is even close to this, but we do have isotope data, etc.

00:19:40.000 That indicates this has happened in the past, at the end of the last ice age, and I'm sure it's happened many times over.

00:19:47.000 And you have a lot of markers that indicate this.

00:19:50.000 You have vitrification of rock.

00:19:52.000 In fact, a lot of the markers, and I don't want to be debating the issue necessarily, but a lot of the markers that people have used for a comet At the Younger Dryas or during the Younger Dryas.

00:20:06.000 Really, most of them are at the beginning of the Younger Dryas.

00:20:09.000 That's what they're claiming.

00:20:10.000 But a lot of the dating is very, very iffy.

00:20:14.000 I found it interesting, for instance, someone will use something as a marker for the Younger Dryas and it will give a date of 12,000 plus or minus 4,000 years.

00:20:24.000 So, you know, this is just the way geology is.

00:20:26.000 But I remember – I can't remember his name.

00:20:29.000 You had a guest on one of your shows.

00:20:31.000 He was when – Randall Carlson?

00:20:35.000 Not Randall Carlson.

00:20:36.000 I know Randall very well.

00:20:38.000 He was on with Carlson and Shermer and – but he came on by Skype.

00:20:45.000 Yes.

00:20:45.000 Malcolm?

00:20:46.000 I do not remember his name.

00:20:47.000 Okay.

00:20:47.000 But anyway, he was one of the people that was, quote, comet proponent.

00:20:52.000 And he started pointing out a lot of the evidence, microspurials, glassy spheres, nanodiamonds.

00:21:03.000 I don't think he mentioned, by all means, shocked quartz, etc.

00:21:07.000 And everyone has been assuming this has to be from a physical impact in the sense of something coming down, like a comet or asteroid, that type of thing.

00:21:17.000 But the problem is you don't necessarily find craters.

00:21:19.000 You don't necessarily find the pieces of the comet.

00:21:23.000 You should find some physical remains.

00:21:25.000 And he mentioned, and I found it very interesting, he mentioned In passing, what I've been working on now for a number of years that, no, and I was once on the comet bandwagon, I'll put it that way, and I'm not trying to knock.

00:21:38.000 Good research.

00:21:39.000 But when you look at the evidence, what is not being considered by a lot of people, and he mentioned this is, in passing, he said, well, you know, something else that could cause is lightning.

00:21:52.000 But you wouldn't have lightning.

00:21:54.000 You know, that's very localized.

00:21:55.000 We think of this as very localized.

00:21:58.000 But if you have a major solar outburst, major coronal mass ejections, and an astrophysicist who's now deceased, he was at Cornell, Thomas Gold, who did a lot of really good, in fact, prize-winning work in astrophysics, First pointed out in the 1960s that if you have a major solar outburst,

00:22:18.000 major coronal mass ejection, you would get essentially huge, what would be like huge lightning strikes over incredible areas of the Earth simultaneously.

00:22:29.000 This would cause vitrification, it would cause all these features and Just as within the last year, there's been more work done showing that fulgurites, where lightning strikes in modern times, even small lightning strikes like that can cause,

00:22:46.000 can create things like shocked quartz, other, quote, impact features that people have always said, well, it must be a comet or an asteroid.

00:22:55.000 But you're not finding the craters.

00:22:57.000 You're not finding other things.

00:22:59.000 So what I'm finding in my own research is I'm coming to conclude that it wasn't a physical object that hit us.

00:23:09.000 It was a solar outburst.

00:23:11.000 That's a general term I use.

00:23:13.000 Is it possible that it was both?

00:23:15.000 Actually, it's quite possible that it could have been both.

00:23:20.000 Yeah, there could have been fragments of both.

00:23:22.000 I can address that.

00:23:25.000 And there's a couple of aspects to both.

00:23:27.000 When you say both, there is indications that comets diving into the Sun actually cause coronal mass ejections.

00:23:35.000 They correlate it with disturbing the Sun.

00:23:37.000 So in some cases, you'll have the, I'll call it the comet group.

00:23:41.000 Talking about how we go through these comet streams periodically, I agree 100%.

00:23:46.000 In fact, I talk about this in some of my early books because I really was into comets at the time.

00:23:52.000 Voyages of the Pyramid Builders, for instance, I talk about how comets might have begun and ended the Younger Dryas.

00:23:58.000 But I wasn't thinking about solar activity at that time, seriously, as no one else was.

00:24:04.000 But we now find that comets diving into the Sun, when we go through comet streams, that can set off solar activity.

00:24:11.000 So in fact, I think it could be both, but it could be that the comets are affecting the Sun, which is then affecting the Earth, rather than directly, if that makes sense.

00:24:22.000 I think?

00:24:43.000 To modern, or even a little bit warmer initially, modern changes.

00:24:49.000 There we have some isotope data.

00:24:52.000 And what we have at 9700 BC, and this is based on sediment cores and ice cores, we also have lunar data that supports this.

00:25:01.000 At 9700 BC, we have incredible climatic change going from, you know, deep ice age To modern warming and this literally now based on what they call micro stratigraphy from Greenland ice cores can be dated within,

00:25:18.000 get this, weeks to days.

00:25:20.000 Wow.

00:25:20.000 So this happened literally, you know, we're talking virtually overnight.

00:25:24.000 When I was a graduate student we thought things happened suddenly.

00:25:27.000 We were talking thousands of years or decades.

00:25:31.000 Oh, God, you know, decades.

00:25:34.000 For something to happen geologically, that'd be crazy.

00:25:36.000 Right.

00:25:37.000 Now we're talking literally weeks to days.

00:25:39.000 That's incredible.

00:25:40.000 Yeah.

00:25:40.000 So I think this ties in our support that there was a massive solar event in 9700 B.C. What we had just on a slide a minute ago when I saw it out the side of my eye was a graph of, based on isotope data,

00:25:57.000 what they call proxies, of solar activity, again based on primarily ice cores, sediment cores, and the sun was incredibly active in 9700 BC and shortly after there, and it had huge, if you think of it anthropomorphically,

00:26:13.000 massive.

00:26:13.000 Mood swings would be very active, then it would go very still, then very active again, very still.

00:26:18.000 And this happened for some thousands of years, and then it evened out.

00:26:24.000 The sun sort of became quiescent.

00:26:27.000 It was during this quiescence period that...

00:26:30.000 Time back into human civilization.

00:26:33.000 Civilization was able to reemerge, redevelop again.

00:26:37.000 And we've had incredibly good conditions, should we say, for the last 5,000 years, quiet conditions, stable conditions on Earth for civilization to reemerge.

00:26:48.000 Time back into that theme.

00:26:51.000 But recently the sun has become very active again.

00:26:54.000 And we have to be very careful.

00:26:56.000 I'm not a doomsayer or a scaremonger.

00:27:00.000 I'm not trying to sell people on being preppers.

00:27:02.000 But the reality is the Sun has started to become active again, just as it was at the end of the last Ice Age.

00:27:08.000 And I think this makes perfect sense because the Sun is a star.

00:27:13.000 It goes through cycles like other stars do, and we're a little planet orbiting it.

00:27:19.000 And we're, like all the other planets, affected by this study.

00:27:23.000 It's fascinating, though, that we have this incredible need to keep things exactly the way they are to the point where we're in denial about any potential change.

00:27:30.000 Even if you're studying things, everybody's like, oh, it'll be fine.

00:27:34.000 We're so inclined to dismiss.

00:27:36.000 We're so inclined to do that.

00:27:37.000 It's very Aristotelian.

00:27:39.000 And in fact, I forget who it was.

00:27:42.000 One of the astrophysicists some decades ago said about the sun, it was sort of the last vestige of Aristotelianism in modern science.

00:27:50.000 Everyone assumed the sun is stable, essentially perfect.

00:27:53.000 Yes, it goes through little sun cycles of 11 and 22 years and maybe some bigger ones of a few years.

00:28:00.000 But no one wanted to think of it as what it is, just a plain old star that goes through periods of the equilibrium.

00:28:09.000 We've been in relative solar equilibrium for thousands of years now, but it goes through disequilibrium and has, we'll call it hiccups and spurts, and has to recalibrate itself, if you would.

00:28:22.000 And we feel the effects on Earth.

00:28:24.000 And so at the end of the last Ice Age, we had this massive solar event, solar outbursts, what they call solar proton events.

00:28:35.000 It would have messed up the ionosphere, caused all kinds of geomagnetic storms.

00:28:40.000 This ties in with earthquake activity that we see at the end of the last Ice Age because we now have lots of evidence That solar activity upsets the magnetosphere and the magnetic fields on the Earth.

00:28:53.000 The electrical currents in the Earth will trigger earthquakes that are about to happen anyway.

00:29:02.000 Not unlike...

00:29:03.000 I was talking to...

00:29:05.000 Katie, my wife, on the right here, and a good analogy is when you have an avalanche that's just about ready to go, you can clap your hands in some cases, and it sets off this huge avalanche.

00:29:16.000 Yeah.

00:29:17.000 So solar activity is tied in with Earth activity, earthquake activity, for instance, volcanic activity.

00:29:25.000 So we see...

00:29:27.000 Volcanic activity, increased volcanic activity, there was a major supervolcano that went off just at the end of the last ice age.

00:29:37.000 Well, why?

00:29:38.000 Probably, this is me speaking, because of the solar activity that set it off.

00:29:43.000 So when you start getting things like platinum In iridium and osmium spikes, that's not necessarily extraterrestrial.

00:29:52.000 That could be from terrestrial volcanic activity that was occurring at that period.

00:29:57.000 So yes, there's extraterrestrial causes, but I think that there's a very strong case to be made That this is solar, that this is the sun influencing us, which is really important too.

00:30:09.000 Fast forward to today.

00:30:11.000 Here we are.

00:30:12.000 We're on Skype.

00:30:13.000 We're using all these electronic media.

00:30:15.000 What could be more vulnerable to a solar outburst?

00:30:19.000 That kind of stuff, yeah.

00:30:20.000 Our power grid.

00:30:22.000 Power grids.

00:30:22.000 Power grids will be fried.

00:30:25.000 And I think we're seeing the beginning of this, or we saw the beginning of this, because again, I'm a geologist, so I think in broad terms, a few hundred years is nothing.

00:30:39.000 1859. Are you aware of the Carrington event?

00:30:42.000 No.

00:30:43.000 There was a major solar outburst.

00:30:45.000 From a human perspective, major solar outburst.

00:30:48.000 From an astrophysical perspective, it was nothing.

00:30:50.000 But it was coronal mass ejection, actually two in a row, that hit us in 1859. It's known as the Carrington Event after Richard Carrington, who first saw the solar flares, the really bright solar flares that were associated with it.

00:31:06.000 It was picked up on the primitive magnetometers of the time that they had, for instance, in London, etc., studied by the physicists of the time.

00:31:14.000 And 1859, there were electronics around.

00:31:18.000 It was called the telegraph system.

00:31:20.000 The telegraph system acted as huge antenna that picked up the changing magnetic fields, generated electricity along it, burnt out the telegraph lines, literally set telegraph...

00:31:38.000 You know, the places where the telegraph operators worked on fire, telegraph stations on fire, that type of thing.

00:31:46.000 If we had a Carrington-level event now, which is really quite minor from an astrophysical perspective, orders of magnitude less than what happened at the end of the last ice age, It would fry our grid lines.

00:32:01.000 It would knock out all the huge transformers. 0.98

00:32:05.000 It would, before it did that, as it's coming in, it would probably knock out all the satellites, the GPS systems, communications.

00:32:13.000 I mean, it would really bring us to our knees.

00:32:16.000 Is this an article, Jamie, from 1859?

00:32:19.000 Yeah, yeah.

00:32:20.000 The auroral display in Boston is another display of auroral.

00:32:23.000 Yeah, there you go.

00:32:25.000 So bright, brilliant, at one o'clock, ordinary print can be read by the light.

00:32:28.000 Exactly, because one thing you get is these bright auroras, these bright, what people think of as northern and southern lights, but in 1859, they saw them around the world.

00:32:41.000 Back at the end of the last ice age, because they were so powerful, when they become more intense, they take on Very discrete structures in the sky.

00:32:52.000 Here's some what are known as, again, northern lights, auroral displays.

00:32:59.000 But see how it starts to take on a discrete structure on the right there?

00:33:02.000 And to describe it to the audience, do you see how it sort of looks like a person with their hands up in the air?

00:33:07.000 They start to take on more and more discrete structures.

00:33:10.000 Some of them look like people with their hands up in the air and little legs.

00:33:14.000 And what exactly is this phenomenon?

00:33:17.000 This is basically the high-charge particles, electrons and protons and whatnot, interacting with the atmosphere.

00:33:25.000 And they form these figures.

00:33:28.000 It's an electrical phenomenon.

00:33:30.000 And it will ultimately come down, if you have a tense enough one, as you did at the end of the last ice age, it will look like if you were there living You know, 12,000 years ago, 10,000, 11,700 years ago, at the end of the last ice age,

00:33:45.000 and you saw this, you would see these things in the sky.

00:33:49.000 Oh, they look like gods.

00:33:50.000 They look like stick figure humans in the sky.

00:33:53.000 You would see huge lightning bolts hitting...

00:33:56.000 Oh, that image is fascinating, because that image that's in hieroglyphics...

00:34:02.000 Exactly!

00:34:03.000 You find us around the world, and Anthony Peratt, who's a lot...

00:34:08.000 Explain what we're looking at, because a lot of people are just listening.

00:34:10.000 Okay, what we're looking at...

00:34:11.000 Plasma discharge formation.

00:34:13.000 Yeah, this is plasma discharge formation.

00:34:16.000 Plasma is essentially, think of as electrically charged particles, electrons, protons, that type of thing.

00:34:23.000 As it comes off the sun, in this case, think of a coronal mass ejection, a huge ball of charged gas is one way to describe it.

00:34:32.000 Hitting the atmosphere, driving down into the atmosphere, causing these like northern lights on steroids, if you want to put it that way.

00:34:42.000 But it takes on very specific images that look like stick figures.

00:34:46.000 So these are things you would see in the sky, except in many cases they're spinning electrically.

00:34:53.000 You wouldn't notice that they were spinning necessarily.

00:34:55.000 And they look sort of like – because we tend to anthropomorphize.

00:34:59.000 We tend to look at like even clouds or rocks formations and we make them look like what we think they look like.

00:35:06.000 So they look sort of like stick figure men.

00:35:08.000 Is any of this an actual photograph or are these just graphic illustrations?

00:35:12.000 These are graphic illustrations but what we can show – No, because we haven't experienced this, fortunately, since photography.

00:35:19.000 But what we do have are petroglyphs dating back to the end of the last Ice Age, where people were seeing this in the sky, and they were drawing it on the walls of caves, on the walls of rocks.

00:35:32.000 Globally.

00:35:33.000 Globally.

00:35:34.000 Anthony Peratt, who's a Los Alamos plasma physicist, he is the world's expert on this type of high-energy plasma physics.

00:35:43.000 These are some of the illustrations.

00:35:44.000 Go back.

00:35:45.000 Go back, Jamie.

00:35:46.000 Oh, look at this from all over the world.

00:35:48.000 Look at this.

00:35:48.000 Exactly.

00:35:49.000 Amazing.

00:35:49.000 All over the world.

00:35:50.000 Arizona, Italy.

00:35:51.000 It's all the same thing.

00:35:53.000 It's all the same thing.

00:35:54.000 And notice, too, that...

00:35:56.000 Spain.

00:35:56.000 See how they look like stick figures?

00:35:58.000 Mm-hmm.

00:35:58.000 But they have little weird dots on their side, donuts.

00:36:01.000 Real humans don't have that.

00:36:02.000 But they're seeing this around the world in the sky and recording it.

00:36:07.000 Also, the motif of when these take on certain forms, they take on what look like bird's heads.

00:36:14.000 So the bird-headed man, a motif that you see around the world going back.

00:36:20.000 It all goes back to the end of the last Ice Age and what people were experiencing, what they were seeing, if you want to call it gods in the sky or whatever, but they were seeing this and it was having a real effect on their life.

00:36:33.000 What is causing that very specific pattern, that very specific shape that you're seeing with the two dots?

00:36:39.000 The best way to say it is you've got this, this is simplistic, but you've got these huge electrical charges coming down.

00:36:46.000 They sort of focus like a tornado focuses.

00:36:50.000 Or if you think of running water out of a spigot, if you play with it, you can sort of squeeze it and make it form different shapes.

00:36:58.000 That's sort of my analogy to it.

00:37:01.000 And it's the magnetic and electric fields interacting with each other.

00:37:05.000 Sometimes they sort of spin around each other like a rope.

00:37:09.000 And in that illustration here you see, how do you say his name, Peratt?

00:37:12.000 Peratt, yeah.

00:37:13.000 Dr. Peratt's experiments where he essentially reproduced that shape over and over and over again.

00:37:18.000 That's right, exactly.

00:37:19.000 Wow.

00:37:19.000 He reproduced that.

00:37:20.000 And then it gets even more fascinating, and this is something that ties in actually with Katie, my wife, Catherine Ulysses, And Perat's team has confirmed it.

00:37:30.000 On Easter Island, you have the Rongo Rongo script, which also duplicates this and seems to be a record.

00:37:39.000 You know, the modern Rongo Rongo are only a few hundred years old, but just like any manuscript or anything, it was copied over and over and seems to go back to it, too.

00:37:49.000 And if you look at some of the rongo-rongo, and I know a lot of your audience can't see this, but you look at some of them, they're even more definitive, showing what Peratt was able to reproduce experimentally, and there they have it,

00:38:06.000 recorded from ancient times.

00:38:09.000 So when you're talking about this event that happened at the end of the Younger Dryas, put it in perspective.

00:38:17.000 Are we talking about a hurricane times a thousand?

00:38:21.000 What would this be like with these thunderstorms?

00:38:22.000 Oh, probably a million.

00:38:23.000 A million.

00:38:23.000 Yeah, like huge thunderstorms.

00:38:26.000 I mean, literally.

00:38:27.000 Impossible to comprehend.

00:38:28.000 Impossible to comprehend from our point of view.

00:38:30.000 From our perspective.

00:38:31.000 Yeah, our perspective.

00:38:32.000 And there's more to it than that.

00:38:34.000 You would have incredible radiation levels at the surface of the Earth.

00:38:39.000 Paula Violetta, a physicist I know, and he's published on this, has talked about how during an event like this, you would have levels of radiation that were so high that large mammals, we are large mammals, large mammals, if they couldn't Protect themselves.

00:38:55.000 They could die within, you know, three to six, seven days, a week or so.

00:39:01.000 How do you protect yourself?

00:39:02.000 You go underground, you go into caves, you go into places, because rock will protect you from the surface radiation under these circumstances.

00:39:11.000 Now, you don't need to stay there forever.

00:39:13.000 You can, you know, because these solar events probably came Now, this is hypothetical because we've not experienced a huge one like this, but they probably came, and then it would back off a little bit, but then maybe another one would come.

00:39:28.000 Again, I'm a geologist, so think of a huge earthquake and then aftershocks.

00:39:33.000 Aftershocks that actually last centuries or millennia in some cases, you know, smaller ones.

00:39:38.000 So something that was happening, and you see this around the world too, is that where people survived, I believe in part because they had access to natural caves initially, then they built underground structures for when they came again, and it also encouraged our We developed this whole tradition,

00:39:59.000 should we say, of having a place to go, even if it's not occurring at the moment.

00:40:04.000 They knew that these things do occur, at least for some thousands of years, and we're aware of this, so we're being prepared.

00:40:12.000 An analogy I would use is during the Cold War here, what did a lot of people build in their backyards?

00:40:17.000 Bunkers. 1.00

00:40:18.000 Bunkers. 1.00

00:40:18.000 So they were doing this also. 1.00

00:40:20.000 So you get areas here.

00:40:22.000 I see there's a slide of India up at the moment.

00:40:26.000 Cappadocia region is very well known for this.

00:40:28.000 How do they know to get underground?

00:40:29.000 How do they know to get into caves?

00:40:30.000 Oh, I think initially, I think initially, I mean, you've got literally fire coming down from the sky.

00:40:36.000 Think of the lightning bolts, fire.

00:40:38.000 I mean, if you've got a cave there, you go into it.

00:40:41.000 It's the only thing that's going to protect you.

00:40:42.000 TPs and houses are useless.

00:40:44.000 Oh, yeah. 0.69

00:40:45.000 All that burns.

00:40:46.000 I mean, you've got literally fire coming down.

00:40:49.000 Think of this fire.

00:40:49.000 Lightning.

00:40:50.000 Yes.

00:40:50.000 That is going to set things on fire.

00:40:53.000 Literally incinerate.

00:40:55.000 Just lightning everywhere.

00:40:56.000 Yeah.

00:40:56.000 Almost like rainfall.

00:40:58.000 Yes, yes, yes.

00:40:59.000 Wow.

00:40:59.000 In certain areas.

00:41:00.000 And that's why you have huge sheets of glass in some cases.

00:41:04.000 Wow.

00:41:06.000 Yeah.

00:41:06.000 And so you're incinerating everything.

00:41:09.000 Where it hits ice, it's flash.

00:41:13.000 It's vaporizing it.

00:41:14.000 It's hitting water.

00:41:15.000 It's vaporizing it.

00:41:16.000 So this is causing massive flooding.

00:41:17.000 So it's causing massive flooding.

00:41:19.000 It's dumping all the ice ultimately into the oceans, which is causing rising sea levels.

00:41:23.000 But more importantly, it's causing massive precipitation, massive flash floods all over the place.

00:41:27.000 And what kind of population loss are we talking about in terms of human beings?

00:41:31.000 Oh, I think incredible.

00:41:31.000 I think incredible.

00:41:32.000 Because, for instance, we can document linguistically, and this is other people's work, but I think it ties right in.

00:41:39.000 They haven't been able to explain it cogently otherwise.

00:41:41.000 That there is, for instance, in Turkey, Middle East, there is a constriction of the population to the Anatolia region, Cappadocia, where you have these underground shelters.

00:41:55.000 You have a geology that was easy to go into and escape.

00:42:00.000 And linguistically, we can map back Indo-European languages to a small pocket that survived there at the end of the last ice age.

00:42:10.000 Wow.

00:42:10.000 So, you know, I think there was a massive—around the world, you would have had populations being constricted, and then they spread out again.

00:42:18.000 And when they were constricted, there's—I see the slide there for the linguistic data.

00:42:22.000 When you constrict down in one area, of course, you lose a lot of the technology.

00:42:28.000 You lose a lot of the high— Culture, if you would.

00:42:32.000 You know, you go back to a much more primitive stage and that's what we find.

00:42:36.000 So we find, for instance, in Anatolia, western Turkey, you know, near Asia as it was called.

00:42:44.000 In ancient times, you find not only, of course, you know, things like Quebec Le Tepe, which goes back before this huge catastrophe with the monumental stone megaliths, etc., but what you find there 2,000 years later in the same general area,

00:43:01.000 you find, for instance, Charalhuyuk, which is a bunch of mud brick houses all clustered together.

00:43:08.000 It's gone down.

00:43:09.000 It's gone into what I call, Katie and I call Siddha, this solar-induced dark age where they lost a lot of it.

00:43:17.000 Not unlike an analogy, I think it's easy for people to understand analogies, the end of the Roman Empire and everything that was lost there and then going into a much more primitive state.

00:43:30.000 With the Dark Ages, the European Dark Ages in this case, you look at the technology, it was much higher during the Roman Empire until maybe 1000 or 1200 AD again in many realms.

00:43:47.000 Same thing here, although this was such a mighty throwback, it took thousands of years for people to reemerge and at least start to get up to the status where they had been before.

00:44:00.000 Have you presented this in front of other scholars?

00:44:04.000 Yes, yes.

00:44:05.000 Well, there's a lot of resistance.

00:44:07.000 Look, I'm an academic.

00:44:10.000 I don't want to sound the wrong way.

00:44:12.000 I'm not looking for sympathy.

00:44:13.000 But going out on limbs like this, just beginning with the re-dating of the Sphinx, and we didn't even finish with that yet.

00:44:21.000 But that's okay.

00:44:22.000 We'll get back to that.

00:44:23.000 We've got plenty of time.

00:44:27.000 There's a lot of resistance to anything that's new.

00:44:30.000 Any concepts, new ideas.

00:44:32.000 Textbooks have already been written.

00:44:34.000 Textbooks have been written.

00:44:35.000 People have staked their reputation on it.

00:44:41.000 And I understand that.

00:44:43.000 And I try not to be that myself.

00:44:46.000 You know, oh, this is my pet theory.

00:44:47.000 But I do try to look at the evidence.

00:44:50.000 I think that slowly we're building up More and more interest, more and more at least people looking at it objectively.

00:44:59.000 And I do see changes occurring.

00:45:03.000 One thing I'll mention right now is as of relatively recently, now it's still very, very small, but at Boston University I've been allowed to found what is called the ISOC, the The Institute for the Study of the Origins of Civilization,

00:45:21.000 which is really just me at the moment.

00:45:23.000 But I want to build it up, and I'd like to get – I'm not trying to sound the wrong way, but I'd like to get people to donate to it, et cetera, et cetera.

00:45:31.000 Also, I've found it with some colleagues of mine, including some academic colleagues.

00:45:38.000 Oracle, which stands for the Organization for the Research of Ancient Cultures.

00:45:42.000 So we're bringing it into the mainstream both as a private – Not-for-profit foundation as an institute through Boston University to really be looking at these things in a, when I say professional way, what I mean by that is, you know,

00:45:58.000 evidence-based way, but also looking outside the standard dogmas, the standard boxes, standard paradigms, and the standard vested interest because So much science.

00:46:11.000 People say to me all the time, they think science is supposed to be objective.

00:46:14.000 Well, maybe it is supposed to be objective, but who are the scientists doing it?

00:46:18.000 They have all their subjective biases and notions and vested interests.

00:46:23.000 I'm not trying to knock anyone, but...

00:46:25.000 But it's a fact.

00:46:27.000 It's just a human fact.

00:46:28.000 Yeah, we're all humans.

00:46:30.000 And one of the things that happened in that documentary from 1993 that I was kind of stunned by was the reaction by the conventional Egyptologist when you brought up this evidence where he was very dismissive, almost mockingly, in this weird sort of a way where he was like,

00:46:45.000 What culture?

00:46:46.000 Where's the evidence of this culture?

00:46:48.000 Oh, absolutely.

00:46:49.000 Absolutely.

00:46:50.000 It's kind of gross.

00:46:51.000 It is.

00:46:52.000 Because that really should not have any place in science.

00:46:55.000 He was mocking.

00:46:55.000 Right.

00:46:55.000 He was mocking.

00:46:57.000 And being called...

00:46:58.000 I mean, I've been called a pseudoscientist.

00:47:01.000 Yes.

00:47:02.000 Look, I... Again, I don't want to sound the wrong way, but I think I'm as well credentialed as anyone.

00:47:09.000 Yes.

00:47:09.000 I mean, among my academic colleagues, you know...

00:47:13.000 Well, that's why I appreciate that you have stuck your neck out for so long doing this research.

00:47:18.000 But since that time...

00:47:20.000 Have I been punished?

00:47:21.000 Yes.

00:47:22.000 Yeah, I'm sure.

00:47:23.000 Yeah, I mean, you know, let's...

00:47:25.000 No, I'll be honest.

00:47:26.000 You know, I haven't gotten necessarily the...

00:47:28.000 I've had colleagues say to me in no uncertain terms, very well meaning, that I could have had a wonderful career and had all the promotions and advancements going up through the academic...

00:47:43.000 You know, ladder, if you would, with no problems if I just stuck to my, you know, some little specialty that no one really cared about.

00:47:52.000 You know, I'm...

00:47:53.000 But you've had an impact, a gigantic impact on people like me that are really fascinated by this stuff.

00:47:59.000 Oh, if I had continued to work on, for instance, one of my specialties as a graduate student was Paleocene Eocene Mammal Evolution.

00:48:06.000 Right.

00:48:15.000 Oh, absolutely.

00:48:28.000 Absolutely.

00:48:29.000 And that is the evidence.

00:48:30.000 Because that was an American Association for Advancement of Science debate on the Sphinx, which turned out I thought I was going in for a real debate.

00:48:41.000 I thought it was going to be a great debate.

00:48:43.000 We were really going to discuss the evidence back and forth.

00:48:46.000 I brought all my data, the seismic data, which is very, very important, which we haven't even touched on yet.

00:48:52.000 Other types of data we haven't touched on.

00:48:54.000 Because I want to make the point, it's much more than a little bit of weathering on the Sphinx.

00:48:59.000 And I've heard so many critics, even to my face, they say, well, you don't redate civilization based on a weathering profile.

00:49:06.000 No, I've got lots more than weathering profile.

00:49:09.000 The weathering profile and erosion is the easiest thing to explain.

00:49:13.000 And yes, it's what I saw initially in that first 30 to 120 seconds, because that's before I brought in equipment and worked with Tom DeBecky to do seismic work, to do other types of more detailed analysis.

00:49:26.000 I would not be talking to you today if it was just an erosional profile.

00:49:31.000 For my own self, I wouldn't put enough stock in that.

00:49:36.000 But when it ties in with everything else, we have a cogent picture.

00:49:41.000 But getting back to someone being dismissive like that, that was 1992. Gobekli Tepe had technically been discovered back in the 1960s, but they misdated it completely.

00:49:53.000 They thought it was maybe 1,000 or 2,000 years old, Byzantine or Roman, Greco-Roman period, not end of the last ice age, not You know, 12,000 years old.

00:50:05.000 And how did they make the distinction that it was 12,000 years old?

00:50:08.000 It was based on the soil samples?

00:50:10.000 That was Klaus Schmidt.

00:50:11.000 Klaus Schmidt went back to it in about 1994-95, so a couple of years after that dismissive comment from the Egyptologist Mark Lehner, who I think is the specific person you're referring to.

00:50:24.000 At the American Association for the Advancement of Science debate, which I just went to make the comment.

00:50:30.000 I went into that thinking that was going to be a debate.

00:50:33.000 I came out of it realizing that they were just trying to set me up to put me down and shut me up forever, which they were not successful in doing.

00:50:42.000 Why do you think that they're so reluctant to just listen to the evidence and look at the information and consider the possibility that maybe there had been an ancient civilization?

00:50:52.000 Because it upsets the standard timeline, the standard story, and it also upsets a lot of people's concept of progression.

00:51:00.000 And this is something John Anthony West liked to talk about.

00:51:04.000 He called it the church of progress, that we've gotten better and better and better.

00:51:08.000 And I talk to so many people that think that we are the end-all and be-all.

00:51:14.000 We're the best that there ever has been.

00:51:16.000 Well, maybe we are in terms of certain types of technology.

00:51:20.000 I'm not making any claim that people in the past could ever do what we're doing now, doing a podcast with all the electronics.

00:51:27.000 But as I pointed out, that also makes us really vulnerable to things.

00:51:31.000 But I would argue that there is a not so remote possibility that they knew things that we don't know, that they may have understood things that we don't understand.

00:51:43.000 They may have had a worldview that would benefit us to at least have a feel for it.

00:51:50.000 I mean, I don't want to go off on spiritual tangents.

00:51:52.000 I could if I wanted to, or philosophical tangents.

00:51:56.000 But I also have a training as an anthropologist.

00:52:00.000 I have an undergraduate degree in anthropology on top of everything else.

00:52:04.000 And I'm fascinated by human approaches to life and the environment and their situation.

00:52:11.000 And I'm convinced that we do have things to learn from the ancients, whether it's the really remote ancients or the more recent ancients from only 5,000 years ago, even dynastic Egypt,

00:52:27.000 and that it's not all simply a one-way progress, that there are fits and starts, that there have been high points and low points and high points again.

00:52:36.000 And I'm not frankly convinced that we're at the highest point when it comes to certain aspects.

00:52:41.000 We might be at a high point with certain types of technology, but I'm not convinced that we're at a high point when it comes to...

00:52:49.000 Stone construction.

00:52:52.000 Oh, certainly not with stone construction.

00:52:53.000 So there are types of technology we are not at a high point with, much less getting into this philosophical or spiritual or whatever you want to call it.

00:53:02.000 And we don't think of it as technology because we think of technology as being something that's electronic.

00:53:06.000 That's right.

00:53:07.000 And there are other technologies.

00:53:08.000 And if you ask me how did they build the pyramids, I will tell you I don't know.

00:53:13.000 If you ask me how they constructed the Sphinx Temple, they carved out those huge blocks of stone that can weigh 50 or more tons and move them in such tight spaces with such tight tolerances, I don't know.

00:53:27.000 I mean, I'm not going to— No one really knows.

00:53:29.000 No one really knows.

00:53:30.000 And sometimes people say, you know, you bring in thousands of slaves or whatnot.

00:53:34.000 Well, there's no evidence for that.

00:53:36.000 And where would you have them stand when you're building the Sphinx Temple?

00:53:39.000 You know, there's not enough room to get around.

00:53:42.000 And stones are so big, even thousands of slaves struggle to move them.

00:53:45.000 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:53:46.000 Just get a couple buddies, we're going to move this couch. 1.00

00:53:48.000 Yeah, yeah.

00:53:49.000 You know, we're not talking about that.

00:53:50.000 No, no, no.

00:53:51.000 And yeah, you can try to hypothesize levers and that type of thing.

00:53:55.000 But it's – this has been said before and I've seen – I wasn't there in person but I've seen off-the-record document – you know, footage of it when they've tried to just construct a little pyramid with very small blocks and then they end up using modern machines and they still aren't very successful.

00:54:15.000 I mean – So they knew a lot.

00:54:18.000 Yeah, they knew a lot.

00:54:19.000 So there's a real resistance, I find, among a lot of my academic colleagues to want to even suggest that people could have known things in the past that we don't know now.

00:54:29.000 Or if they knew something in the past that we don't know now, it was so trivial that it was worth forgetting, worth not worrying about.

00:54:37.000 So there's that concept.

00:54:39.000 I find it amazing.

00:54:41.000 And I hate to be stereotypic, I'm broad-brushing, but many Egyptologists, when I read their works or I listen to them at conferences, etc., I get the impression that they might love Egyptology and studying the ancient Egyptians,

00:54:59.000 but they also have this view that, oh, these guys made wonderful temples and had some fantastic art, but really, you know, they're sort of primitive and ha-ha-ha, isn't that silly?

00:55:11.000 You see what I mean?

00:55:12.000 It's like the very thing they study, they put down, in a sense to build themselves up.

00:55:19.000 And to build up this idea of ultimate progress that we keep going in a linear fashion.

00:55:24.000 Yeah, exactly, exactly.

00:55:25.000 Then you also have in Egyptology, and I want to give you another example of this, not just me bringing in scientific evidence and data and the Egyptologists rejecting it, But just recently, in the last couple of years, have you heard about the project on the Great Pyramid,

00:55:41.000 the Big Void?

00:55:42.000 They've been using muography, which is a highly sophisticated technique using muons that come from outer space or come from the atmosphere.

00:55:51.000 They go through the pyramid.

00:55:52.000 You can set up detectors long-term and pick these up.

00:55:57.000 They're sort of like, think of x-rays technology, but using muons, which are sort of exotic particles that most people are not aware of because they just pass right through us without interacting.

00:56:09.000 But when you've got massive stone, massive stone will block some of them so you can pick up essentially an image over a long period of time.

00:56:19.000 So this is really high-tech physics, very expensive.

00:56:23.000 A consortium of physicists did work on the Great Pyramid.

00:56:27.000 I think it's still ongoing.

00:56:29.000 But they put up, you know, tens of millions, if not more, worth of a high, you know, sophisticated physical physics equipment, gathered all this data.

00:56:40.000 I've seen the raw data.

00:56:41.000 I have a degree in geophysics, geology and geophysics.

00:56:45.000 I have some ability to evaluate this type of data, whereas I hate to say a lot of the Egyptologists don't.

00:56:51.000 And I found that with my own data.

00:56:53.000 When I shared my own data, that Right.

00:57:17.000 That has never been known before.

00:57:21.000 And yeah, there we have a picture of it.

00:57:23.000 The Egyptologists have been so resistant to this, saying this is nonsense.

00:57:29.000 There can't be anything new that we don't know about.

00:57:34.000 Or if it is, it's just trivial.

00:57:36.000 It's just some...

00:57:38.000 Space between the rocks is nothing important.

00:57:41.000 But what I wanted to say, which is really important, some Egyptologists actually called for the whole project to be closed down because they don't like the results.

00:57:51.000 And they called it, quote, propaganda.

00:57:55.000 Closed down, but you're dealing...

00:57:57.000 Closed down the whole scientific project.

00:58:00.000 Not only do they not want to look at the data, they don't want more data collected that might contradict their standard point of view.

00:58:07.000 That's fascinating that someone would actually call for that because this isn't even their field of study, right?

00:58:12.000 So you're dealing with physical evidence that they're saying is nonsense, but this is not something they studied in the first place.

00:58:18.000 So this void that we're looking at here in these images, can you explain to people that are just listening what we're seeing?

00:58:24.000 Oh, what you're seeing is, they call it a hidden chamber there, but you can see how it's parallel to the Grand Gallery.

00:58:30.000 The Grand Gallery is this huge gallery that goes up to the King's Chamber in the Great Pyramid.

00:58:36.000 And that's deep in the pyramid.

00:58:37.000 That's deep in the pyramid.

00:58:39.000 And this hidden chamber is above that.

00:58:40.000 It's above it, parallels it, is maybe close to the same size of it.

00:58:45.000 It's hard to tell until it gets probed.

00:58:47.000 You'd have to drill into it and maybe put a camera in.

00:58:51.000 But I've seen the raw data.

00:58:52.000 My point is I've seen the raw data.

00:58:54.000 I certainly think it's important.

00:58:57.000 They're interpreting it correctly.

00:58:59.000 Now the proof will be in the pudding, as they say, if they ever enter it or at least put a probe into it.

00:59:05.000 But my point right now is to just dismiss the data is nonsense.

00:59:10.000 To call for the whole project to be shut down is nonsense, in my opinion.

00:59:14.000 Who's calling for the project to be shut down?

00:59:16.000 Some of the Egyptian Egyptologists, close to the ministry.

00:59:21.000 And my point is they've done the same thing to me.

00:59:23.000 So, for instance, when we did seismic work and we found the chamber under the left paw of the Sphinx, that's never been explored since, at least not to my knowledge.

00:59:31.000 And they just dismiss it and say, we know there's nothing there.

00:59:36.000 And that was despite the fact that we also found a chamber at the rump of the Sphinx, which I didn't know about at the time, but they already knew about.

00:59:43.000 So it confirmed that our data was good because we were finding something they knew about.

00:59:47.000 But when we find something they don't know about and they don't want to be there, they dismiss it and don't want to pursue it further.

00:59:56.000 They have explored one of those chambers, correct?

00:59:58.000 Did they explore the one that's in the rump?

01:00:00.000 The one in the rump, yes.

01:00:01.000 The one in the rump, but it turns out they already knew about it.

01:00:04.000 It's probably not super significant.

01:00:06.000 It probably is just maybe a Greco-Roman or late period, you know, burial or some kind of excavation.

01:00:15.000 The one I believe is important is under the left paw of the Sphinx, which I believe is archive.

01:00:22.000 Actually may go back to this very early period because we now have hieroglyphic evidence indicating that.

01:00:28.000 What is the evidence that indicates it's an archive?

01:00:30.000 Okay, so recently, and this gets back to the Sphinx.

01:00:35.000 Yes.

01:00:36.000 Okay, so we started this portion of the discussion with the Sphinx and my initial observations of the Sphinx.

01:00:42.000 And one of my observations was that there's something going on with the weathering and erosion on the Sphinx.

01:00:50.000 The second observation, this is within the first two minutes at most, was that the head is too small for the body.

01:00:58.000 The head is not eroded the way the core body is.

01:01:01.000 It's not eroded the way the walls of the Sphinx enclosure are.

01:01:05.000 It's not the original head.

01:01:09.000 Hate to say it this way, but I knew immediately that was not the original head, you know, just from a geological point of view.

01:01:15.000 And I believe that's now since been fully confirmed that this is not the original head.

01:01:20.000 It was a re-carved head.

01:01:22.000 So for a long time, the question has been, in my mind, and we talk about this even on Mystery of the Sphinx, what was the original head of the Sphinx?

01:01:31.000 What was the Sphinx originally?

01:01:33.000 We've speculated and other people speculate it might have been a lion, for instance, Leo, because it faces on the equinox, the constellation Leo in the sky.

01:01:46.000 Not today, but 10,000 BC or so, more or less at the very end of the last ice age.

01:01:53.000 Now, I've had a lot of colleagues of mine, academic colleagues, say that's nonsense, you know, it doesn't mean anything because they weren't even recognizing the constellations back then.

01:02:04.000 We now have plenty of evidence that at least some of the constellations that we recognize today, Leo I would put in that category, Taurus is in that category, Orion is in that category.

01:02:18.000 Some of them we don't have evidence for, but the ones I just mentioned, the These are constellations that go back well into the end of the last ice age.

01:02:29.000 We have documents of that.

01:02:30.000 We have mammoth bones where you have Orion carved on it.

01:02:34.000 We have tourists shown in cave walls.

01:02:36.000 We have Leo shown.

01:02:37.000 So to me it's fascinating that some of these constellations that we recognize today were recognized tens of thousands of years ago.

01:02:46.000 So to me it's not nonsense that they carved a structure 10,000 BC approximately, that was facing its own image in the sky.

01:02:55.000 So one suggestion was that maybe it's Leo.

01:02:58.000 But recently, Dr. Manu Safsadeh, another colleague of mine, he recognized initially that there is a title, what's known as a dual title, In dynastic Egypt that goes back to the fourth dynasty and even back to the first dynasty with the earliest writings and it,

01:03:22.000 when properly translated, basically refers to the Sphinx as the guardian of an archive and not the Sphinx as we think of it as a lion with a human head, but as a lioness.

01:03:37.000 And there was a name for this lioness, Mehet.

01:03:40.000 She was the goddess Mehet, who guarded an archive.

01:03:45.000 And we wrote a paper on that.

01:03:47.000 When I say we, Manu Seifsadeh, myself, and Robert Buval, who you may know up from Orion Correlation and some of his work ties in with this, the archaeoastronomy.

01:03:58.000 But we've now We found that there is this sign, which we named the JAW sign in honor of John Anthony West.

01:04:08.000 There it is.

01:04:09.000 There's the JAW sign.

01:04:10.000 And what you see here is a lioness methit, which was the Sphinx originally based on our reconstruction and interpretation.

01:04:20.000 I can't go into all the details now.

01:04:22.000 Actually, people can read the paper.

01:04:24.000 If I could put a plug in, if people go to my website, www.robertschoch, and that's R-O-B-E-R-T-S-C-H-O-C-H. The main thing is my name's spelled S-C-H-O-C-H. So www.robertshock.com,

01:04:42.000 they can go, I did a popular summary of the paper, and they can also go and download the original paper in the peer-reviewed journal, Archaeological Discovery, where we argue that what we have here is the lioness methit.

01:04:58.000 She has what looks like a bent rod coming out of her back. 1.00

01:05:03.000 When people look at the actual image and then above it is axe.

01:05:09.000 That's an axe?

01:05:10.000 Yeah, it's a primitive axe.

01:05:13.000 When I say primitive, even for the ancient Egyptians in dynastic Egypt, it would have been sort of a symbolic axe, if you would, which was a sign of someone who was in charge of things, an overseer, that type of thing.

01:05:28.000 The bent rod, what is that?

01:05:30.000 That's a primitive key.

01:05:31.000 We would now call it a primitive key, but it represents a key.

01:05:35.000 And so it's basically saying that this is the guardian of the archives of Medhit, the locked chamber or vault.

01:05:44.000 And we also have images, I see it up on the board now, if you look at, you've got the lioness with the key, and you also have a lioness, not in that image, but a different image that we had before.

01:05:57.000 If you look at that, can you see how there's a lioness, sort of a diagrammatic Shape over what looks like a facade.

01:06:10.000 If you then go to the Stella that sits between the paws of the Sphinx.

01:06:19.000 You have the same image, much more artistically rendered, of the Sphinx sitting over a facade, over what looks like a building.

01:06:27.000 It's not really a building.

01:06:29.000 It's the archive underneath, I believe.

01:06:31.000 So you think there's something underneath there?

01:06:33.000 Oh, I know there's something underneath because long ago...

01:06:36.000 In the early 1990s, Thomas DeBecchi and I, when we did seismic work around the Sphinx, we found the chamber under the paws of the Sphinx.

01:06:46.000 And it's, I'm sure, an artificial chamber.

01:06:49.000 It's very regular.

01:06:51.000 And this, I believe, could well be, I'm hypothesizing, and in science we make hypotheses that are testable.

01:06:59.000 This is perfectly testable.

01:07:01.000 All we have to do is enter that chamber, even if it's just to put a fiber optic down, and we can see, is it a testable?

01:07:08.000 Artificial chamber that's an archive.

01:07:11.000 Hopefully there's still things there, or maybe it was gutted and cleaned out at some point.

01:07:15.000 But here we have the seismic work, one of the seismic maps, I'll call it, tomographic.

01:07:25.000 And what's labeled as anomaly A, under the left paw, that is the chamber we found under the left paw that the Egyptologists have wanted to deny ever since, and they don't want to explore it, and we haven't gotten permission to explore it yet.

01:07:39.000 Why don't they want to explore it?

01:07:39.000 That doesn't make any sense to me.

01:07:41.000 Well, I know, but this is— If there's physical evidence, right?

01:07:44.000 This is politics in Egypt.

01:07:45.000 God, it's so squirrely.

01:07:47.000 Yeah, yeah.

01:07:49.000 Now, okay, this is 1991 or so, early 1990s.

01:07:54.000 As of last year, 2017, we have textual evidence, ancient hieroglyphs talking about this chamber, talking about the Sphinx, talking about the Sphinx being a lioness guarding a chamber.

01:08:08.000 And I want to point out that the earliest hieroglyphs that we have that refer to this are about 33,3100 B.C., Which is hundreds of years before the Egyptologists claimed the Sphinx was even thought about being carved.

01:08:22.000 Which is somewhere around 2500 BC? 2500 BC. That coincides with the construction of the Great Pyramid of Giza?

01:08:29.000 Okay, well that's another question.

01:08:31.000 We'll come back to that.

01:08:32.000 Because I don't buy...

01:08:34.000 It's more...

01:08:35.000 Can we come back to that?

01:08:36.000 Yes, yes, please.

01:08:36.000 So the Egyptologists claim that the Sphinx was first carved 2500 BC. Right.

01:08:42.000 Yet there's no mention of the carving of the Sphinx then.

01:08:45.000 They cite the, not the inventory stella, that's another stella.

01:08:49.000 They cite the Thutmose IV Dream Stella, which is a thousand plus years later, which had at one point a partial cartouffe of kathra.

01:08:59.000 Partial cartouche of Khafra, which has since flaked away.

01:09:03.000 It was there reputedly in the 19th century.

01:09:06.000 There were drawings of it, which we, to put in our plug-in, just if people are interested in getting more information, Robert Bavall and I wrote a book last year, published last year, called Origins of the Sphinx, where we discuss a lot of this.

01:09:21.000 But Mehit is a more recent discovery. 0.99

01:09:25.000 So there's a partial cartouche of Khafre, which Egyptologists said, aha, this proves that Khafre carved the Sphinx, because the Sphinx sits due east of Khafre's pyramid.

01:09:36.000 Khafre was the pharaoh in 2500 BC, therefore the Sphinx must be 2500 BC. I contend, and Robert Buval and other people who are in our line of thinking contend, that this stella that's over a thousand years later does not say that he carved the Sphinx,

01:10:00.000 but that he restored the Sphinx.

01:10:03.000 Just like Thutmose IV, who was putting up the stela, was restoring the Sphinx.

01:10:09.000 And when you look at the Sphinx, it has been restored numerous times, including blocks of limestone that were put onto it to restore some of the very ancient weathering that when I asked Tsai Hawass, one of my biggest critics,

01:10:25.000 how old those blocks are, he said they were Fourth Dynasty.

01:10:30.000 Now, why would you restore it in the Fourth Dynasty when it had just been built, you know, literally a century or two ago?

01:10:36.000 You don't need to restore a meter worth of weathering.

01:10:40.000 His answer, and I'm not trying to make fun of him, is that it's rotten rock, that it wasn't very high-quality rock.

01:10:46.000 Somehow it just crumbled away, you know, a meter or so in a couple hundred years.

01:10:51.000 I saw his debate with Graham Hancock.

01:10:52.000 Yeah, but that's another issue.

01:10:53.000 I don't want to get into that.

01:10:57.000 Let me just say it this way.

01:10:59.000 There was not just science going on, there was politics going on.

01:11:05.000 There's a lot going on.

01:11:06.000 There's a lot going on, exactly, exactly.

01:11:08.000 I've seen it too, and I've known all these people for decades.

01:11:12.000 So I'm trying to keep just to the science right now.

01:11:16.000 So he himself admits that some of these repairs go back well over 4,000 years, which makes no sense.

01:11:27.000 It's only 4,500 years old.

01:11:30.000 Exactly, exactly.

01:11:31.000 And they've always contended there was no inscriptions or anything really referring to the Sphinx until New Kingdom times.

01:11:39.000 We point out in Origins of the Sphinx, Robert Buval and I, that you have to know what they were calling the Sphinx.

01:11:45.000 And now with Mehit, we have inscriptions. 0.95

01:11:48.000 How did they find that?

01:11:49.000 And when did they find this lioness?

01:11:51.000 And when did they...

01:11:52.000 You're saying this is very recent?

01:11:53.000 Yeah.

01:11:55.000 Manu Saifside, my co-author, just discovered that...

01:12:01.000 I don't know exactly when he found the inscription, but he first pointed out to Robert Bouval and myself about a year ago.

01:12:10.000 About a year ago and we all worked on it and confirmed it and put together the pieces.

01:12:16.000 I mean he really gets the most credit for it.

01:12:19.000 He knows his hieroglyphics really, really well.

01:12:21.000 Where did they find this hieroglyphic of this INS? It's shown in several different Ancient artifacts.

01:12:31.000 So, for instance, there's a statue of Vizier from the Fourth Dynasty who may have actually overseen the construction of the Great Pyramid or I would say the reconstruction of the Great Pyramid because I want to get back to that.

01:12:48.000 I think the Great Pyramid, just like the Sphinx, was being reconstructed, refurbished, if you would, during the Old Kingdom, not constructed de novo.

01:12:58.000 But he was overseeing that.

01:12:59.000 He must have had something to do with the Sphinx.

01:13:02.000 He was apparently given the title of being the overseer for the Sphinx, that type of thing.

01:13:16.000 Which is the pharaoh before supposedly when the Sphinx was built to begin with.

01:13:22.000 So that messes up the Egyptological thinking right there.

01:13:25.000 But this title was something that had been held by others before him back down to about 31 or so years.

01:13:34.000 100 BC, you know, 5,000 years ago.

01:13:36.000 Again, 500 or more years before the Sphinx was supposedly built.

01:13:42.000 So now we have this hieroglyphic text that goes back, refutes what the Egyptologists are saying.

01:13:49.000 And not only that, but when you look at the way they write it, this is the earliest writing, so it's not Surprising we don't have anything earlier.

01:13:59.000 Maybe eventually we'll find earlier, you know, the precursors.

01:14:03.000 But they are also in the context, it seems abundantly evident, they're referring to it as a very old structure itself.

01:14:12.000 Wow.

01:14:12.000 Now, how do Egyptologists receive this?

01:14:15.000 It's just making its way into the Egyptological community.

01:14:20.000 We will see how they receive it.

01:14:22.000 So, so far, there's been no reaction?

01:14:24.000 No.

01:14:25.000 I'll just put it that way.

01:14:26.000 No.

01:14:26.000 Well, you're skeptical.

01:14:27.000 Not that I know officially.

01:14:28.000 Well, you've seen it all before.

01:14:30.000 I've seen it all before.

01:14:31.000 And, you know, it's a classic thing, too, that in some cases – so I'll put it – Related to the Sphinx, and maybe hopefully somewhat analogous, I pointed out decades ago,

01:14:47.000 and John Anthony West and I working on this, that the Sphinx, the head is not the original head.

01:14:53.000 And I'm not sure if I'm the very first one to ever say that.

01:14:56.000 I'm not going to try to take cred, but it was quite obvious to me when I, as I mentioned, without anyone saying that to me.

01:15:03.000 I had not heard that someone else suggest that.

01:15:06.000 Since then...

01:15:08.000 Egyptologists, with of course out ever citing me or John Anthony West, have also been suggesting that in some cases.

01:15:16.000 And some have suggested that maybe it was Khufu's face on the Sphinx rather than Khafre's face after we brought in Frank Domingo who demonstrated that's not Khafre's face.

01:15:27.000 Frank Domingo, if you remember from Mystery of the Sphinx, was a New York City police officer, forensic expert, who literally would reconstruct faces, compare faces.

01:15:38.000 That was his business, and to present it in court.

01:15:41.000 He analyzed the face of the Sphinx in the face of Khafre, also known as Shefran. 0.99

01:15:47.000 The pharaoh, the Egyptologists before our time, before we got involved in this, always said these were the same faces.

01:15:55.000 The face of the Sphinx, the face of Kapra. 0.99

01:15:57.000 Frank Domingo came out very definitively that they're not the same face and they're both competent artists.

01:16:03.000 They're not, frankly, the same ethnicity of face. 0.97

01:16:08.000 And for Mark Lehner to publish in National Geographic, I'll paraphrase him, the Sphinx came alive when he reconstructed it with the face of Shefran, or face of Khafre. 0.84

01:16:19.000 It's just...

01:16:20.000 That's not science.

01:16:22.000 That's wish fulfillment or something.

01:16:27.000 He wanted it to be the face of a certain pharaoh.

01:16:30.000 He does a computer reconstruction with it having the face of the pharaoh he wants it to be and then passes that off as somehow...

01:16:42.000 I guess science.

01:16:44.000 But Egyptology is not necessarily science either.

01:16:46.000 And I'm not saying that in a nasty way, but it's an important point because Egyptology, a lot of Egyptologists classically come more from an art history background, that type of thing.

01:16:59.000 So tying in with the question you asked before, I literally, it's funny how things work, I literally, when I was in graduate school, took a seminar in sciences and other disciplines.

01:17:12.000 You know, this was because I was being trained as a scientist.

01:17:15.000 And one of the papers we had to read at the time, this was long before I ever thought about going to Egypt, was...

01:17:23.000 How Egyptologists are resistant to scientific information and scientific data.

01:17:30.000 And how to help, you know, try to overcome that if you're working with Egyptologists basically.

01:17:35.000 Which the answer was it's very difficult.

01:17:37.000 And it's not to put them down because I have lots of colleagues in other fields that are not sciences.

01:17:43.000 Right.

01:17:43.000 But classically, I would contend Egyptology is not a science.

01:17:48.000 It comes more from art history or from linguistic studies, you know, translating hieroglyphs, historical studies, and those are all very important academic studies.

01:17:58.000 But you do sometimes get people in a certain field and they're resistant to outsiders from another field, especially when they think it's a field that's so far apart and so diverse.

01:18:11.000 From what they understand, what they know, their own mindset.

01:18:15.000 Yeah, and their mindset is not geared towards scientific data.

01:18:18.000 Again, I'm not trying to be nasty.

01:18:21.000 You don't have to explain yourself.

01:18:23.000 You're not coming across nasty.

01:18:25.000 So when you initially saw these erosion features and the first 30 to 90 seconds or whatever you said it was, 120 seconds, when you first looked at it and knew Did you have any idea that your life would take the turn that it's taken?

01:18:44.000 I mean, did you have any indication you would be thrown into such a shitstorm all these years later?

01:18:51.000 Here we are in 2018. You're still fighting the good fight. 0.61

01:18:53.000 I know.

01:18:54.000 As John Anthony West once said, introducing me, he ruined my life.

01:18:59.000 25 years later, after that documentary, you're still swinging.

01:19:03.000 I know, I know.

01:19:04.000 And I'm still getting attacked and I'm still, you know.

01:19:08.000 The answer is no, I was naive.

01:19:10.000 I was incredibly naive at the time.

01:19:13.000 I still was not that far out of graduate school.

01:19:17.000 You thought you could just present?

01:19:18.000 Yeah, you just present the evidence.

01:19:19.000 It would stand on its own.

01:19:20.000 You just present the evidence.

01:19:22.000 Exactly.

01:19:22.000 This is incredible.

01:19:23.000 What a great new discovery.

01:19:25.000 Exactly.

01:19:25.000 That was it.

01:19:26.000 And I was so naive.

01:19:28.000 And so we first presented the evidence at the Geological Society of America annual meeting in 1991, I guess it was.

01:19:37.000 Yeah, 1991. And I want to say bluntly, I think?

01:19:59.000 They didn't think this was so great because they saw the implications for their Egyptological colleagues, and they started, you know, a little rumbling there.

01:20:07.000 Then the journalists come in back then, you know, no internet like we have it now, just phones, and the journalists start calling Egyptologists that were not there, had not seen the data, etc.

01:20:18.000 Immediately they were telling the journalists that this has to all be nonsense, that hundreds of Egyptologists have studied this for, you know, Two or three centuries, which is total nonsense.

01:20:29.000 It turns out I knew every Egyptologist, because there's so few, that have actually studied the Sphinx personally.

01:20:36.000 It's really just two.

01:20:38.000 So they were just trying to dismiss it.

01:20:42.000 And then the Egyptologists come back and say, we know this is nonsense, essentially.

01:20:46.000 I'm paraphrasing.

01:20:47.000 We know that the pyramids were not built by aliens, so they start bringing in aliens and UFOs.

01:20:53.000 It's essentially...

01:20:54.000 Just a dismissive.

01:20:55.000 Dismiss me.

01:20:56.000 And I wasn't talking about...

01:20:57.000 Total trauma.

01:20:58.000 Yeah, I wasn't talking about pyramids, number one.

01:21:01.000 We could talk about that if you want to.

01:21:02.000 And I wasn't talking about aliens.

01:21:04.000 They hadn't been there.

01:21:05.000 They hadn't seen the data.

01:21:07.000 It was so bizarre in hindsight.

01:21:10.000 And I was so frustrated with it at the time.

01:21:12.000 Trying to defend their positions.

01:21:14.000 Yeah, and they were really just attacking.

01:21:17.000 And then in Egypt at one point, they were putting things in the Arabic press.

01:21:23.000 Little did they know I have enough friends that would read it to me.

01:21:26.000 And they were saying that I wasn't even a faculty member at Boston University, which is an outright lie since I'd just been tenured.

01:21:33.000 So there was no doubt I was a faculty member there.

01:21:36.000 But this was other academics saying this, but they never thought it would get back to me.

01:21:41.000 I mean, really, really mean and nasty.

01:21:45.000 So, getting back to the evidence, so they set up, and this was, I think, unprecedented.

01:21:50.000 Within months, they'd set up this debate at the AAAS, American Association for the Advancement of Science.

01:21:57.000 And I thought, again, I was so naive, I thought, oh, this is wonderful.

01:22:02.000 Finally, we'll get rid of all this nonsense and this name-calling and, you know, the stuff in the popular press that You know, journalists, you can't blame them.

01:22:10.000 They don't know what's going on necessarily.

01:22:12.000 And we'll really get the evidence out and we'll be able to discuss it sanely and objectively.

01:22:19.000 Turns out that wasn't the case at all.

01:22:22.000 It was just from my perspective, they were just calling me more names and trying to set up straw men.

01:22:29.000 Is this Egyptologist who was in that documentary who dismissed everything?

01:22:31.000 Yeah, that was Mark Lehner.

01:22:32.000 Is he still around?

01:22:33.000 Oh, yeah.

01:22:34.000 And has he amended his position at all?

01:22:37.000 Not to my knowledge.

01:22:38.000 I haven't spoken with him for years and years and years.

01:22:42.000 Did you ever speak with him off the record, personally, alone?

01:22:45.000 Oh, yeah.

01:22:47.000 I'll tell you.

01:22:48.000 He didn't say it was off the record.

01:22:50.000 I guess it was off the record.

01:22:52.000 I don't think I would have said this years ago, but I'll say it now.

01:22:54.000 At that debate, at that debate, AAAS debate, I just suddenly found myself in a hall with him, and there was no one else around.

01:23:06.000 So he could totally deny this, but it's true, my perspective at least. 0.99

01:23:12.000 He said something to me like, You know, you don't really believe this.

01:23:16.000 I know you don't really believe this.

01:23:18.000 You just want to be on television and, you know, be famous or something like that.

01:23:24.000 He said, I said, no, I really do believe it.

01:23:28.000 Or, you know, I really go by the evidence.

01:23:30.000 And I do think the evidence says this.

01:23:32.000 And he sort of was telling me that, no, you don't.

01:23:35.000 You know, he was like, I don't know, analyzing me.

01:23:39.000 What?

01:23:40.000 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:23:41.000 And then what he does is he starts asking me a question, some detailed question about the geology and, well, if that's the case, how can such and such?

01:23:51.000 And I think it, in hindsight, might have been fed to him by some geoarchaeologist, as they call it, someone who does archaeology but knows a little geology.

01:24:02.000 And I realized in hindsight, it was meant to be one of those got you questions, I guess they say nowadays, where I wouldn't be able to answer it.

01:24:10.000 But no, of course I thought about it.

01:24:13.000 It was, to me as a geologist, very obvious.

01:24:15.000 So I start giving him this detailed explanation as to why that's not the case and why, you know, my evidence stands up, blah, blah, blah.

01:24:23.000 And we're standing there face to face.

01:24:26.000 I'm explaining this to him and I see his face sort of turn and it goes blank.

01:24:30.000 And I'm in mid-sentence.

01:24:32.000 He just turns around and walks away.

01:24:34.000 So he realized he couldn't refute what you were saying?

01:24:38.000 No, he couldn't refute what I was saying.

01:24:40.000 And he wasn't really...

01:24:41.000 My takeaway is that he wasn't interested in discussing it rationally or...

01:24:48.000 You know, he just wanted to win the debate or whatever.

01:24:53.000 And when he knew that he wasn't going to with you, he just got out of there?

01:24:57.000 Yeah, yeah.

01:24:58.000 Wow.

01:24:58.000 And again, you know, it was just a personal thing.

01:25:01.000 There was no other witnesses to my knowledge of this.

01:25:03.000 But if he had really wanted to discuss things, I was willing to discuss it with him.

01:25:10.000 It's so disturbing that someone would put their own ego so far above the information that needs to be distributed to scholars and people and students and all these folks out there that have questions about the history of the human race.

01:25:22.000 That someone would put their own reputation and ego above all of that and not have the The mindset to realize, well, we have new evidence and what we thought of before, we're going to have to apply to this new evidence and create a new timeline.

01:25:38.000 It doesn't dismiss all the things they learned in the past.

01:25:41.000 No, no, that's something.

01:25:42.000 In fact, I'm glad you brought that up because I've long contended that people talk about rewriting history, etc.

01:25:48.000 Well, yes, I understand that argument.

01:25:50.000 And I think we do need to rewrite good chunks of our very early history.

01:25:54.000 But I've never denied dynastic Egypt in the basic chronology for dynastic Egypt.

01:26:01.000 Now, what I say is that we've got a whole new chapter to add to it going back in time, plus—and I want to mention the Great Pyramid here—plus things like the Great Pyramid.

01:26:12.000 The standard dating for the Great Pyramid is, let's say, 2550 BC or so, the Pharaoh Khufu, also known as Cheops, just in case people hear those terms.

01:26:23.000 I don't deny that he had something to do with the Great Pyramid, but when I study it geologically, and I don't want to get into great detail here, when I study it geologically, I think there was an older structure there.

01:26:35.000 I think there was something else there.

01:26:37.000 For instance, the subterranean chamber, I suspect, goes back much earlier than the time of Fourth Dynasty Khufu.

01:26:45.000 So, for instance, to bring in Robert Buval, he has his Orion correlation of the three pyramids to the belt stars of Orion, which correlate very well at about 10,500 BC. So he'll talk, and we talk about this in our joint book, Origins of the Sphinx,

01:27:01.000 how there was a master plan going back to that period.

01:27:04.000 A lot of people have said, well, that's nonsense.

01:27:06.000 Why would they be following a master plan thousands of years later when they finally got around to building these structures?

01:27:12.000 I don't think that's the case at all.

01:27:14.000 I think there were earlier markers or structures at those spots.

01:27:19.000 The pyramids in this case, those three major pyramids, were built over or enhanced or restored older structures, if that makes sense.

01:27:29.000 So, for instance, under the Great Pyramid is what I call the Sacred Mound.

01:27:33.000 It's actually literally a stone outcropping mound, and Jean-Paul Buval...

01:27:41.000 Robert Buval's older brother is actually an architect.

01:27:45.000 Robert Buval himself was trained as an engineer.

01:27:47.000 They both make the point, among other things, that if you're building the Great Pyramid, I mean, this is a humongous structure with incredible weight.

01:27:55.000 It's much easier to Flatten the plateau at that point and get a nice level base rather than try to build over and around a mound that's to this day incorporated within the Great Pyramid.

01:28:09.000 This takes a lot more energy and work and is a much more difficult engineering feat, but it makes sense if you want to preserve that If it was sacred to them or whatever, that older structure.

01:28:22.000 Do we have images of this older structure?

01:28:24.000 You can't see it at this point because it's totally covered.

01:28:27.000 But we have something very analogous.

01:28:29.000 And I know you mentioned this when John Anthony West was on.

01:28:32.000 The Red Pyramid is also built over an older structure.

01:28:37.000 And you can see that to this day in one of the chambers where you have this much older structure.

01:28:43.000 I'm talking geologically now based on the evidence.

01:28:47.000 Then we have some images there.

01:28:49.000 Where you have this older weathered structure, which I believe goes back, I don't know how much older, but thousands of years older.

01:28:56.000 Let's just leave it at that.

01:28:58.000 And then they built the pyramid over it and around it, I think marking it.

01:29:04.000 You know, refurbishing a much older structure.

01:29:07.000 And you can tell by the weathering of the stones and the way they're constructed.

01:29:11.000 Exactly.

01:29:12.000 And you can see the sharp divide between the older structure and the newer structure, which is nice, finely cut stone.

01:29:20.000 And that newer structure goes back earlier than the Great Pyramid.

01:29:24.000 I mean, this is Sneferu.

01:29:26.000 This is even earlier by a generation.

01:29:29.000 So you have this where they're using, in dynastic Egypt, older structures.

01:29:34.000 They're reappropriating them.

01:29:36.000 You have a case here.

01:29:37.000 I believe you have that with the Great Pyramid.

01:29:39.000 I believe you have that with the second pyramid.

01:29:42.000 You have that with the Sphinx, most definitely, and the Valley Temple and the Sphinx Temple.

01:29:47.000 The first piece of evidence that really convinced me that something was going on with the Sphinx So, the first evidence that I saw that made me suspicious that the Egyptologists did not have it right was within that first 30 to 120 seconds that I described,

01:30:05.000 the weathering and the heads too small.

01:30:07.000 The first piece of really solid evidence was looking at the walls of the Sphinx and Valley Temple that were constructed from the stones that came out of the Sphinx enclosure.

01:30:19.000 We talked about that.

01:30:20.000 They are weathered, but then they were cut back a little bit.

01:30:24.000 That weathering was cut back, and they were resurfaced or refaced with granite in dynastic times.

01:30:30.000 It's believed.

01:30:32.000 So what you have is an older structure, and here's a diagram for anyone that's looking at it.

01:30:38.000 But what you have is older limestone temples, which are massive, which were then faced with granite.

01:30:45.000 But what they did, they did it the hard way.

01:30:47.000 They preserved as much of the older limestone temple as possible before refacing it with granite.

01:30:54.000 So they actually took the time in some cases to cut the backs of the granite blocks to fit the weathered surface of the limestone.

01:31:02.000 Wow.

01:31:03.000 It would have been much easier.

01:31:05.000 You have plenty of rock there.

01:31:06.000 Just skim down the limestone totally, make a nice flat surface, and then re-plaster, so to speak, re-granted it.

01:31:14.000 Wow.

01:31:15.000 So instead of chipping away the old rock, they chipped away the new rock and fit it into place.

01:31:21.000 It's like if we have a national monument now that goes back to Revolutionary War days.

01:31:26.000 You want to preserve as much of the original structure as possible, even if it makes it more difficult to do the restoration.

01:31:33.000 You put the effort into it.

01:31:35.000 Just to clarify, so you feel that this time period of the coronal mass ejections was somewhere around 10,000 Well, 9700 BC. And I say that very specifically because based on Greenland,

01:31:55.000 ice core data in particular, you can literally count back year by year.

01:32:02.000 And the best estimate is about 9700 BC, you know, take a decade or something.

01:32:08.000 So from that point to 2500 BC, which is where most conventional Egyptologists date the construction of the pyramid, you believe that the Great Pyramid was probably built on top of this great mound,

01:32:25.000 which represented an older structure, but Correct.

01:32:29.000 These are the people that their civilization was destroyed, and then thousands of years later were able to somehow or another rebuild these incredible structures.

01:32:40.000 Yeah, so thousands of years later—well, I don't know if they were rebuilding a pyramid as it was before, or they were building a new pyramid on top of it.

01:32:48.000 They obviously had retained some of the incredible wisdom and knowledge.

01:32:52.000 Yeah, exactly.

01:32:52.000 Well, think of it to this day.

01:32:55.000 I'll think of Judeo-Christianism. 0.99

01:32:59.000 I mean, we still have, like, the Temple Mound.

01:33:02.000 We have places where we know that there were older structures, Solomon's Temple, etc., and maybe only a fragment of it is left.

01:33:09.000 But it's still held in high esteem, veneration.

01:33:14.000 Modern structures are built around or over these relics.

01:33:18.000 I think that's somewhat of an analogy of what we're looking at.

01:33:22.000 The Acropolis and the Parthenon.

01:33:23.000 Yeah, yeah.

01:33:24.000 Yeah.

01:33:25.000 So you have veneration of older, if I could use that, and I'm not necessarily using it in religious terms.

01:33:32.000 I mean, it could just be respect.

01:33:33.000 Yes.

01:33:34.000 So I think that for all three of the major pyramids on the Giza Plateau, We have evidence that there was something there, whether they were pyramids as we see them now, which is quite a possibility, and they were just refurbished,

01:33:50.000 or something else.

01:33:52.000 We have evidence that goes back to that much earlier period, before the demise of high civilization, if I could put it that way, at the end of the last ice age, and then it was reappropriated, reused, rebuilt.

01:34:08.000 You've restored whatever term you want to use in dynastic Egyptian times.

01:34:16.000 I want to give you another example.

01:34:19.000 Have you been to Egypt?

01:34:20.000 No, I have not.

01:34:21.000 I didn't think you had.

01:34:22.000 You need to come.

01:34:23.000 I'm scared.

01:34:23.000 I need to show this to you in person.

01:34:26.000 I would love to go with you.

01:34:27.000 You're chicken?

01:34:28.000 I'm chicken.

01:34:28.000 I'm scared to go to Egypt.

01:34:29.000 I heard it's dangerous.

01:34:31.000 Not with me, not with me.

01:34:33.000 Oh, you're the boss?

01:34:34.000 Take care of everything?

01:34:34.000 No, no, I have enough contacts.

01:34:36.000 I have enough contacts.

01:34:36.000 Okay, I'll go with you.

01:34:38.000 Immediately.

01:34:39.000 We'll make something happen.

01:34:40.000 Yeah, definitely, definitely.

01:34:42.000 I wanted to point something out and just give people a perspective of time that 2,500 years ago, the conventional dating of the construction of the Great Pyramids, Cleopatra is closer to the construction of the iPhone Than she is to the construction of the Great Pyramids.

01:35:02.000 This is correct.

01:35:02.000 That's how long a history you're dealing with when it comes to ancient Egypt.

01:35:08.000 So we're talking about thousands and thousands of years for sure.

01:35:12.000 This is for sure thousands of years.

01:35:14.000 For sure.

01:35:16.000 Forget about all the speculation.

01:35:18.000 Just from Cleopatra to the 2500 BC, which is what almost all the Egyptologists accept, you're dealing with just a giant leap.

01:35:28.000 That's right.

01:35:29.000 We can see it here.

01:35:30.000 That's right.

01:35:31.000 And we are closer to the dynastic Egyptians, even the old kingdom dynastic Egyptians, we are closer to them in time than they were to the end of the last ice age and the demise of that earlier civilization. 0.57

01:35:46.000 Because the dynastic Egypt arose, rough terms, 5,000 years ago.

01:35:53.000 That was about 3,000 BC. That Was they arose over 6,000 years after, close to 7,000 years after the end of the last ice age.

01:36:07.000 That's crazy.

01:36:08.000 Yeah.

01:36:09.000 That's hard.

01:36:09.000 So we're talking real spans of time here.

01:36:12.000 And we're looking at a chart right here.

01:36:14.000 Is there a place where other people can go and see this?

01:36:18.000 Yes, they can go see a chart like this is on my website.

01:36:23.000 In the SIDA article, if you go to my website, Robert Schoch, www.robertschoch.com, and go to the website, you'll see charts like this.

01:36:35.000 But what you should do is go to the main page of the website, and then I believe it is Research Highlights.

01:36:43.000 Go to what's called Research Highlights.

01:36:46.000 Actually, I think for those on the podcast are seen here, and then go to what's called the SIDA article.

01:36:52.000 S-I-D-A. And this is what we're looking at.

01:36:54.000 We're looking at it on the website now.

01:36:55.000 Yeah, which stands for Solar Induced Dark Age, SIDA. And again, it's ironic, I think, that the sun, which of course is bright, could induce a dark age.

01:37:03.000 But when you have a major eruption like this, a major outburst from the sun hitting Earth...

01:37:09.000 And all the ramifications we were talking about, it's going to bring any civilization down.

01:37:15.000 To its knees.

01:37:16.000 So thousands and thousands of years of rebuilding civilization and rising back up to some still unbelievably incredible technological level.

01:37:26.000 So even if they did rebuild the pyramid at 2500 BC, it's still this incredible feat.

01:37:32.000 Oh, it's incredible.

01:37:34.000 Even for 2500 BC. Before...

01:37:36.000 If I could just finish a thought that I started to have, I was saying we have to go to Egypt together.

01:37:41.000 Okay.

01:37:41.000 And I could show you some of this.

01:37:42.000 We could do a podcast there, maybe.

01:37:44.000 Oh, snap. 0.99

01:37:45.000 I'd have to.

01:37:46.000 Yeah.

01:37:47.000 I would take you, among other things, around the second pyramid.

01:37:51.000 The second pyramid, you can see evidence, I would point out to you, that I interpret as going back to earlier structure.

01:37:59.000 Furthermore, the second pyramid, few people seem to pay attention to this, has a ring of...

01:38:05.000 A ring of granite around the base.

01:38:08.000 That's significant because they were using granite in many cases, and conventional Egyptologists have confirmed this verbally with me.

01:38:18.000 They would use granite when they were indicating they were restoring an older structure.

01:38:24.000 And there's no question that granite goes back to the Fourth Dynasty, just like there's no...

01:38:30.000 Question that the granite on the valley in Sphinx Temple goes back to at least the Fourth Dynasty, if not earlier, but they're using it to restore.

01:38:39.000 So we have all this indication that dynastic Egypt acknowledged that they were restoring older structures.

01:38:47.000 So getting back to where we were just on the Great Pyramid.

01:38:51.000 So no matter how you look at it, to try to build a Great Pyramid today, Whether you're talking 2500 BC or earlier, I mean, how were they doing it?

01:39:03.000 How were they doing it?

01:39:03.000 I don't know.

01:39:04.000 I told you, I'm not going to try to get into how they did.

01:39:09.000 They did it.

01:39:10.000 It's there.

01:39:12.000 Have I thought about it a lot?

01:39:15.000 Yes.

01:39:17.000 Whether I'm there in Egypt, on site, or elsewhere, I mean, it's incredible.

01:39:21.000 Is it possible?

01:39:22.000 I don't have any answer for you.

01:39:23.000 Is it possible that the people in that part of the world somehow or another survived the coronal mass ejection and they came out better than the people in other parts of the world that were really knocked into the Stone Age?

01:39:36.000 No, I don't think there's any evidence for that.

01:39:38.000 Because we seem to have a huge gap around the world.

01:39:42.000 Around the world.

01:39:43.000 The city gap.

01:39:44.000 But they still...

01:39:45.000 The historical gap.

01:39:46.000 Now, what they were doing in Egypt is incomparable, one could argue.

01:39:53.000 So it may well be that they found all the right materials, all the right environments.

01:40:00.000 The Nile Valley is, you know...

01:40:04.000 In its height, which is not in its height now, you know, at the end of Siddha, let's say, for re-emergence, may have just been, I hate to say the Goldilocks words, but just right for everything to come together for this to,

01:40:20.000 you know, come together.

01:40:21.000 It's a very fertile area.

01:40:23.000 It's very easily defended, that type of thing.

01:40:30.000 And also, I do want to tie in with what you were saying.

01:40:33.000 It is, and I've certainly thought about this, it is possible that we are electrical and the fluctuating electric fields and magnetic fields, did they have some influence sort of on brain development or, you know, that's real speculation, but I wouldn't say it's impossible either.

01:40:50.000 So these people, is it possible that they retain some of the knowledge from thousands and thousands of years now?

01:40:56.000 Oh, I think they definitely retain some of the knowledge, just like we have monasteries in Europe during the Dark Ages retaining knowledge.

01:41:02.000 And what's interesting is in some cases you retain chunks of knowledge that don't even make sense out of context, except that they know they're important.

01:41:12.000 They know they're valuable.

01:41:14.000 What kind of examples do you have?

01:41:15.000 Think in Europe, where you would have pieces of technology that would be retained, but you don't have the whole complex.

01:41:25.000 Or think in literary terms, that's probably the easiest, where you have parts of...

01:41:30.000 Like a history of Alexander, where the whole thing did not survive, but, you know, six out of nine chapters or whatever survived.

01:41:39.000 And even though they knew it was an incomplete manuscript, they would make numerous copies of that incomplete manuscript knowing that it was important to keep it.

01:41:47.000 Sort of like the Dead Sea Scrolls.

01:41:49.000 Oh yeah, there's another example.

01:41:51.000 Although the Dead Sea Scrolls potentially were absolutely complete, or at least most of them were complete when they were buried and, you know, put away for storage.

01:42:00.000 A lot of the incomplete list there may be because they degraded, because they were discovered by locals who then tore them apart and sold pieces here or there.

01:42:11.000 I'm referring more to a situation where you have ancient knowledge or ancient manuscripts, and even though, say, the monks in a monastery knew that this was not a complete list, They knew that even in its incompleteness, it was important to maintain as much of it as possible.

01:42:30.000 It's just stunning that a civilization that was knocked down like every other civilization, somehow or another 2500 BC, rose to this incredible level of construction that is just unparalleled anywhere else on the planet Earth.

01:42:44.000 Oh yeah, and it did it very, very quickly.

01:42:46.000 Very quickly, which I think is indicative potentially that they were reusing knowledge that had been passed down and somehow maybe things just clicked together.

01:43:00.000 Maybe it took one genius to start putting things together and that set off a renaissance, if you would.

01:43:06.000 I mean we've seen that historically in much more recent times.

01:43:10.000 And maybe perhaps the understanding of how it was built and designed is more prevalent amongst the civilization, amongst the community, than maybe it would be today.

01:43:20.000 Yeah.

01:43:20.000 So, I mean, there's still a lot of unanswered questions here, obviously.

01:43:25.000 Yeah, obviously.

01:43:26.000 It's incredible, incredible stuff.

01:43:28.000 But I think we're starting to get more toward an answer, or at least getting the broader outlines of what is going on.

01:43:39.000 Wow.

01:43:40.000 It's so fascinating to think that this could potentially happen to us.

01:43:44.000 Well, it's not only fascinating, I hate to use the term, it's scary and I think we're incredibly vulnerable and people are not addressing this.

01:43:53.000 It's not the type of thing to address for some reason because of major solar outbursts and coronal mass ejection and all the related phenomena.

01:44:03.000 We mentioned this earlier.

01:44:04.000 It would bring down modern technology as we know it.

01:44:07.000 It would fry the grid system.

01:44:09.000 You would have high radiation levels.

01:44:12.000 You'd probably have all the flooding.

01:44:14.000 I mean, look what happens now when you have little floods.

01:44:17.000 And I say that as a geologist, not to downplay the horrible disasters we've had.

01:44:23.000 But other factors, for instance, we have nuclear power plants.

01:44:27.000 All around the world.

01:44:29.000 We've seen that with a few isolated instances.

01:44:33.000 Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, Fukushima recently.

01:44:37.000 What happens when you have problems with those?

01:44:39.000 If you cut off power to a nuclear power plant, it's ironic.

01:44:43.000 A lot of people don't realize it.

01:44:45.000 Yes, they generate power, but they need a power supply going into them.

01:44:48.000 If you fry the grid system, you're essentially going to have meltdowns and radiation.

01:44:53.000 You're going to have problems.

01:44:55.000 And on top of everything else, we're going to bring on this artificial radiation around the world.

01:45:01.000 And again, I'm not saying this – I don't have anything to sell.

01:45:07.000 Sometimes I hear people talk about this because they want to sell their prepping kit, and now they're going to say, oh, for so much money, I'll sell you – Jim Baker style.

01:45:16.000 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:45:16.000 But no, and I hate to even talk about it, except I think it's important.

01:45:20.000 And I think that one of the things, this gets back to that it's not just sort of academic to study ancient civilization.

01:45:28.000 It's not just fun and interesting.

01:45:31.000 But I think there are things to learn from this.

01:45:34.000 And one of the things to learn is that they survived incredible...

01:45:39.000 Well, I don't know if they survived, but they were knocked to their knees.

01:45:42.000 But we...

01:45:43.000 They went through natural catastrophes, which are not unrealistic that we could go through them again and be potentially much more vulnerable than they were at that time.

01:45:57.000 Because we're so reliant on electronics?

01:46:00.000 Yeah.

01:46:01.000 Are there any hieroglyphs that are convincing or at least point to some of the construction methods of the pyramid or of any of the other giant structures?

01:46:13.000 Well, you said convincing.

01:46:13.000 I would say no.

01:46:15.000 No.

01:46:18.000 And this gets into the problem, too, that why would you expect that?

01:46:23.000 I'm serious.

01:46:24.000 Because what we have surviving are generally religious, somewhat literary things in tombs.

01:46:34.000 Now, I don't buy for a second that the Great Pyramid was a tomb or initially a tomb.

01:46:38.000 That's like saying a huge cathedral is just a tomb because you find a couple of bodies there.

01:46:43.000 And you've never actually found bodies in the Great Pyramid or any of the major pyramids.

01:46:48.000 And as you know, I know you know this, the pyramid construction goes downhill as you go into later dynastic Egypt.

01:46:55.000 So they seem to have either gotten sloppier or just lost some of the technological finesse they had.

01:47:02.000 So you find in some of the tombs These what almost seems silly pictures of them dragging huge statues on, you know, sledges where they're supposedly pouring oil or water in front of it to lubricate it.

01:47:18.000 And, you know, the Egyptologists say, aha, this is how they built it all.

01:47:24.000 Well, try doing that in real life.

01:47:26.000 It doesn't really work.

01:47:28.000 So I think some of that may just be sort of artistic license or metaphor, that type of thing.

01:47:34.000 Do you have any images of that?

01:47:36.000 Well, not that I brought with me.

01:47:39.000 But my point is that you wouldn't even expect them to be leaving detailed construction plans or that we wouldn't necessarily find them.

01:47:49.000 Maybe we'll get lucky finds someday.

01:47:51.000 But put it this way, if they find a bunch of iPhones 12,000 years from now or 5,000 years from now, whichever period we want to talk about, No.

01:48:13.000 So why would you expect it for the Great Pyramid?

01:48:16.000 You know, it'd be a lucky find if you did.

01:48:19.000 But the odds are against it.

01:48:22.000 And not to throw out too much academia type stuff, but one of the things I studied as a graduate school is I took a series of courses in taphonomy, which is basically how did things get preserved.

01:48:33.000 Focusing on fossils.

01:48:35.000 But the principles apply to other things as well.

01:48:38.000 And as you go back in time, what you expect to survive logarithmically drops off.

01:48:45.000 You know, so you go back to these earlier periods.

01:48:48.000 It's amazing we have much of anything.

01:48:51.000 And what's going to survive?

01:48:52.000 Big, massive stone structures.

01:48:55.000 Right.

01:48:56.000 The plans on papyrus or sheepskin or whatever, the details of how to build it.

01:49:04.000 That's what I found particularly offensive about that Egyptologist saying, where's the evidence of this culture from 10,500 years ago?

01:49:12.000 Like, what do you expect to find?

01:49:14.000 Yeah, exactly.

01:49:15.000 We're talking about...

01:49:16.000 What we find from that earlier period, if you think about it, are massive stone monumental structures.

01:49:24.000 Everything else would be grounded in dust.

01:49:25.000 It was incinerated.

01:49:27.000 It was grounded in dust.

01:49:29.000 Or it was reused in some cases.

01:49:31.000 Sometimes people say, well, how could they do that without metal tools?

01:49:35.000 Well, maybe metallurgy does go back further.

01:49:38.000 Maybe it was lost and then reinvented again.

01:49:41.000 So again, I don't deny the standard time frame, but there could be a lot of things going back further.

01:49:45.000 Before that, and if you have metal, and I'm not trying to focus on metal now, and I'm not making any big claims about metallurgy at an earlier time, but let's just say, for instance, as a thought experiment, if you had metallurgy much earlier than Right.

01:50:13.000 Right.

01:50:24.000 If you have a warehouse and you're not paying attention to it all the time, it's an old warehouse, there have been cases where people have found someone broke in not to steal the things in the warehouse, but to steal the copper piping.

01:50:36.000 Right.

01:50:37.000 Yeah, that's very common.

01:50:38.000 Now, there's some more interesting pieces of evidence that came out of the Great Pyramid And a lot of the other structures of Egypt have been the pottery that's incredibly difficult to reproduce, like those stone vases.

01:50:53.000 Yeah, yeah.

01:50:53.000 Well, you just made a mistake.

01:50:54.000 I'm not criticizing you.

01:50:56.000 Oh, I said pottery?

01:50:57.000 You said pottery because it's an important distinction.

01:50:59.000 Right.

01:50:59.000 It's not pottery.

01:51:00.000 It's not made out of clay and fired in a kiln.

01:51:02.000 It's carved out of stone.

01:51:04.000 It's literally carved out of really hard stone, which will crack easily if you don't do it just right.

01:51:11.000 So it looks like pottery.

01:51:13.000 You used the term colloquially to put it that way.

01:51:16.000 It looks like pottery because that's how people imagine.

01:51:19.000 It looks like a beautifully shaped pot.

01:51:23.000 And they go back to the earliest dynastic Egypt and probably much earlier.

01:51:28.000 They are carved out of really hard granites and schists and nice, you know, these really hard stones and to incredible tolerances and incredibly thin, incredibly beautifully carved.

01:51:43.000 And what's importantly, too, a very small opening.

01:51:45.000 Very small opening.

01:51:46.000 Into a bulbous bottom.

01:51:48.000 Exactly.

01:51:48.000 And how do you do this?

01:51:50.000 I mean, it's just incredible.

01:51:52.000 You have to come to Egypt with us. 0.93

01:51:54.000 Okay.

01:51:55.000 And when we do, we'll look at some of these on site.

01:51:59.000 There's a bunch in the Cairo Museum.

01:52:01.000 There's some at a museum at Saqqara.

01:52:04.000 Here we go.

01:52:05.000 That's not even a nice one.

01:52:07.000 Yeah, that looks like a mace header.

01:52:10.000 Or that's a jar, but that's not what we're talking about.

01:52:12.000 There's much, much nicer.

01:52:17.000 Nicer in the sense of the finesse of how they carved them.

01:52:20.000 What was the material that they were carved out of?

01:52:22.000 You say marble?

01:52:23.000 Oh, different.

01:52:24.000 Marble's the easier ones to do.

01:52:26.000 They would carve them out of diorite, granite, gneiss, which is a metamorphic stone, schist.

01:52:31.000 These are really hard stones.

01:52:33.000 How do you spell diorite?

01:52:35.000 Um...

01:52:36.000 D-I-O-R-I-T-E, I believe? 0.98

01:52:39.000 Try that because that's what I'm pretty sure I saw one of them that was carved out of that.

01:52:44.000 So what I was saying is that these are really hard to carve.

01:52:49.000 They use very narrow openings like you said.

01:52:51.000 Sometimes they put handles on them so they're not just spinning them on a lathe because how would you get the handles on it because that's not put on separately.

01:52:59.000 It's all carved from one.

01:53:00.000 Look at that.

01:53:01.000 Look at that.

01:53:01.000 There's a nice one.

01:53:03.000 That's why there's stone vessels.

01:53:05.000 And these, thousands of these have been found going back to the earliest dynastic times.

01:53:11.000 But what's suggested, yeah, there's how they were carved according to the standard Egyptologist.

01:53:17.000 Now try to do that without cracking it, without making a mistake, etc.

01:53:22.000 Well, we'll explain what we're looking at.

01:53:24.000 We're looking at some sort of, it looks like a mace.

01:53:28.000 Yeah, a mace that they would use to then scratch out the inside.

01:53:31.000 Yeah.

01:53:32.000 And maybe they did it and just took a long time.

01:53:35.000 Well, what's the speculation other than that?

01:53:37.000 Look at the one right above it, Jamie, that red one.

01:53:39.000 The red one right above your cursor.

01:53:41.000 Yeah, yeah.

01:53:41.000 That one's incredible.

01:53:42.000 Yeah, they're absolutely incredible and we can see these.

01:53:46.000 So what's the speculation?

01:53:51.000 The speculation is that they were doing it the same way they were doing it in New Kingdom times.

01:53:56.000 So when you look at them in New Kingdom times, as a general rule, you get things similar to this.

01:54:03.000 New Kingdoms, let's say 1500 BC, just for round numbers, you get similar types of vases and whatnot, but they're actually, to my eye, much cruder generally.

01:54:15.000 They're made out of softer stone, more your calcites and limestones and marbles, that type of thing.

01:54:21.000 They generally are just not, they don't have the same artistic finesse to them, the same perfection to them.

01:54:27.000 And the New Kingdom Egyptians did show diagrams, as we just saw, of how they did it, or supposedly did it.

01:54:33.000 And that may well be how they were doing it.

01:54:35.000 But I question as a geologist whether that would really work for these beautiful, harder stone, much more perfect in my experience.

01:54:46.000 Older ones that you find going back to the earliest dynasties, and you find in some cases thousands of them.

01:54:53.000 So at Saqqara, the steppe pyramid, generally considered the oldest pyramid, although I would question that.

01:54:59.000 But it's definitely an old pyramid, even by Egyptological standards.

01:55:04.000 You found thousands of these really well carved ones from the harder stone, the more artistic ones, if we could call it that.

01:55:13.000 Sort of a huge horde of them.

01:55:16.000 I don't even think they were necessarily carved at that time.

01:55:19.000 I think this may have been a hoard that they had preserved from thousands of years earlier.

01:55:24.000 Sort of a stockpile or museum, if you would.

01:55:27.000 In fact, what we're finding for many of these, quote, tombs and temples, not temples, tombs and pyramids, that type of thing, is that maybe essentially they were stockpiles.

01:55:36.000 They were the equivalent of fallout shelters, if you would, where you stock away supplies, that type of thing.

01:55:43.000 That may have been part of the original structure.

01:55:47.000 Some of these had very long necks too.

01:55:50.000 Very, very long necks.

01:55:50.000 Bulbous bottoms.

01:55:51.000 Exactly.

01:55:52.000 Insanely difficult.

01:55:53.000 The ones you pulled up were good, but there's ones that were much more complicated.

01:55:55.000 Yeah, some of them are insanely difficult and some of them have all kinds of curves to them.

01:55:59.000 And what you have to be careful, as I was saying, is that you have the really well finessed Very ancient ones.

01:56:05.000 And then you have ancient ones that are from the new kingdom, only 3,000, 3,500 years old.

01:56:11.000 And they're clunky.

01:56:12.000 Yeah, yeah.

01:56:14.000 And then what you have, and I could show you one if it's still on display in the Egyptian Museum.

01:56:18.000 I say still on display because they changed displays and they're building a new Grand Egyptian Museum, as they call it.

01:56:25.000 So it's hard to know.

01:56:25.000 And this is in Egypt?

01:56:26.000 Yeah, in Egypt.

01:56:27.000 When we go to Egypt, right?

01:56:28.000 Okay.

01:56:29.000 I can show you one where I'm convinced that it's a very old bowl that was then reused in later times.

01:56:39.000 So you see this cruder hieroglyphic inscription on it.

01:56:44.000 And you just look at it and you say, someone that could carve that incredible bowl would not have done such a crude inscription on it.

01:56:52.000 You see what I mean?

01:56:53.000 And then when we go through Egypt with the megalithic statues and whatnot, you can find over and over We're good to go.

01:57:20.000 The whole subject is so fascinating to me, but this bowl thing is very weird because it's almost like one of the crazier pieces of evidence, but it's dismissed.

01:57:29.000 It's like right under your nose.

01:57:31.000 Oh, it's absolutely dismissed, and it's not unlike, and I only think of this because I know you saw it.

01:57:36.000 If you remember, because I watched recently, to refresh my memory, the podcast where you interviewed John Anthony West, and he showed a picture, which happened to be my hand, But in my hand was a little bead that was found at Quebecle Tepe.

01:57:52.000 And the thing is, remember that little bead had this, it was a very hard, probably volcanic stone.

01:57:58.000 And a little teeny hole drilled all the way through it, the long way.

01:58:03.000 So you had a drilling that's, you know, a centimeter or more long going through.

01:58:08.000 It's not just a little hole punched through, but a little tunnel going through.

01:58:12.000 There it is.

01:58:14.000 And, you know, how do you do that with, quote, primitive technology?

01:58:19.000 That to me is as amazing as the direction of the pillars.

01:58:23.000 Wow.

01:58:24.000 So you have to look at both small-scale and large-scale.

01:58:27.000 And like you say, the bowls may be something you hold in your hand, but they're just as incredible technology.

01:58:32.000 Just like if people were to judge us today, 10,000 years from now, they'd say that iPhone is incredible technology.

01:58:41.000 Even the small-scale, just like I guess they would maybe say if anything survives of them, some high-rise was it?

01:58:49.000 Incredible.

01:58:50.000 And this is Gobekli Tepe.

01:58:52.000 Is that what you just pulled up, Jamie?

01:58:53.000 These images?

01:58:54.000 And what are these images of?

01:58:55.000 It looks like nail heads or something like that?

01:58:57.000 Yeah, they call them earplugs or plugs.

01:59:00.000 Earplugs?

01:59:01.000 Some people claim that no one really knows exactly what they are.

01:59:04.000 Earplugs?

01:59:05.000 Yeah.

01:59:06.000 Well, you know, not earplugs and plug your ears.

01:59:09.000 Oh, like posts.

01:59:11.000 Yeah, earrings.

01:59:12.000 Oh, I see.

01:59:13.000 Right, right, right.

01:59:14.000 I don't know exactly what those are supposed to be.

01:59:16.000 Could be anything.

01:59:16.000 Yeah, they call them buttons there sometimes.

01:59:18.000 What is the speculation on the construction methods of those complicated bowls?

01:59:21.000 What do people believe they did?

01:59:24.000 What, the bowls, the Egyptian ones we're talking about?

01:59:26.000 Is there any speculation?

01:59:29.000 Is there anything that's interesting to you?

01:59:31.000 Well, yeah, the speculation is that they may have been using some kind of lathe for it, at least in part.

01:59:36.000 But the problem is you can't turn it and still have the handle sticking out if you do standard work on a spinning lathe, that type of thing.

01:59:46.000 So there's something else that has to be going on there.

01:59:49.000 I was going to say, part of the problem with any of this knowledge being passed down, right up until at least the 1600s, early 1700s, you know, there were guild systems where you would retain knowledge of how you do certain technological things.

02:00:04.000 And I think that may go back to very, very ancient times, but you don't want to just give out.

02:00:10.000 Right.

02:00:11.000 You know, the knowledge to anyone.

02:00:14.000 But, you know, again, I've heard no good compelling, in my mind, explanations to how these things were made.

02:00:22.000 Now, one of the things that they found in the King's Chamber was what they referred to as, did they call it a sarcophagus?

02:00:28.000 Yeah, they called it a sarcophagus.

02:00:30.000 I prefer the term coffer.

02:00:32.000 And it's made out of granite, aswan granite. 0.96

02:00:34.000 Coffer meaning like almost like a treasure chest?

02:00:37.000 Yeah, a treasure chest or a big chest or box, that type of thing.

02:00:40.000 It's missing its lid.

02:00:41.000 And the sarcophagus represents something you put a body in.

02:00:44.000 Yeah.

02:00:44.000 You don't think that's correct?

02:00:45.000 No, correct.

02:00:46.000 That's why I don't like calling it a sarcophagus.

02:00:48.000 Coffer is more generic, should we say.

02:00:51.000 Right.

02:00:52.000 And doesn't...

02:00:53.000 The King's Chamber has some of the more complicated stones, right?

02:00:56.000 Larger...

02:00:56.000 Oh, it has.

02:00:57.000 It's lined with granite.

02:00:58.000 Yeah.

02:00:59.000 So the primary construction material of...

02:01:04.000 Did I lose it?

02:01:06.000 The primary construction material for the Great Pyramid is limestone.

02:01:12.000 Some of the limestone was quarried pretty much on site, and you can still see the quarries there.

02:01:18.000 Other high-quality limestone, known as Tura limestone, was brought from across the Nile, and you can still see the Tura limestone quarries.

02:01:28.000 And then granite was used for parts of the construction, particularly to line the king's chamber.

02:01:35.000 And this granite was brought from southern Egypt, brought down the Nile, I should say, from the south to the north.

02:01:43.000 The Nile flows from the south to the north.

02:01:45.000 And it's Aswan granite, and you're talking about huge blocks of stone, up to 90 tons or so have been the estimates for those particular stones in the King's Chamber.

02:01:55.000 So when you go into the King's Chamber, it's totally lined with this beautiful red Aswan granite.

02:02:01.000 You've got this big coffer there that, you know, if they give you permission, you can lie in, and it's a neat feeling to lie in, and a lot of people have, you know, All kinds of experiences, etc.

02:02:14.000 It's really incredible.

02:02:16.000 But this lining is so perfect and so well fit together.

02:02:23.000 And you have all the sides, the roof, the ceiling of it.

02:02:32.000 The walls of it, the floor of it, the coffer there.

02:02:36.000 And then you have what they call star shafts or air shafts that go out to the north and south.

02:02:42.000 That's what Robert Beauvoir has worked on in part.

02:02:44.000 And then above the King's Chamber, you have the so-called relief chambers or relieving chambers, which you can't get into normally.

02:02:52.000 I've been in there a few times.

02:02:54.000 But you have to get special permission.

02:02:56.000 They have to put a ladder up from the Grand Gallery and you go through this little snake hole, so to speak.

02:03:19.000 Why do they call it the king's chamber?

02:03:29.000 It's called the King's Chamber.

02:03:31.000 Basically, the Arabs called it that because their concept was, if I remember correctly, that men would have a chamber with a flat ceiling on it.

02:03:41.000 The Queen's Chamber, which is lower down in the pyramid, has an inverted V-shaped ceiling to it. 0.56

02:03:51.000 And they thought that was for the queen.

02:03:53.000 That would be female. 0.98

02:03:54.000 The king's chamber would be for the male. 1.00

02:03:56.000 It's also the more impressive chamber.

02:03:58.000 Right, but it's purely speculation.

02:04:00.000 Oh, it's purely speculation.

02:04:01.000 Yeah, it's purely speculation.

02:04:03.000 Now, the coffer, this giant stone box, one of the things that I read was that the way it was built, they believe that...

02:04:11.000 It was possible that cores were drilled out?

02:04:14.000 Yeah, yeah, probably.

02:04:16.000 And we have good evidence for that, going back to earliest dynastic times, if not earlier, that they, I forget what you call it in modern times, but you have a drill bit Mm-hmm.

02:04:57.000 And then go at it again?

02:04:59.000 You don't do that if you're, in my opinion, if you're doing it by hand, you know, back and forth with...

02:05:05.000 So you think there's some sort of machinery involved?

02:05:09.000 There's some kind of machining they were using in very ancient times.

02:05:13.000 There's...

02:05:14.000 Once you open your eyes to it, you see it.

02:05:17.000 Where you see, it seems to be high-speed machinery.

02:05:21.000 But there's no speculation as to how...

02:05:23.000 Oh, there's lots of speculation.

02:05:24.000 I mean, some people say they had electric motors and electricity and all that type of thing.

02:05:29.000 I like how you say some people, though.

02:05:31.000 Yeah, some people.

02:05:31.000 I don't go there because I want real evidence.

02:05:34.000 So I see real evidence that they were doing things that...

02:05:39.000 Seem really unbelievable from a standard status quo conventional point of view, say the standard Egyptological point of view of how, quote, how primitive they were.

02:05:51.000 But I'm not into speculating inordinately as to, well, what kind of technology they might have had.

02:05:58.000 I just don't know at this point.

02:06:00.000 Yeah, so are there images of the inside of the sarcophagus?

02:06:04.000 Like, we could get a look at what that looks like?

02:06:06.000 Oh, it's not very impressive.

02:06:07.000 I'm sure he could probably...

02:06:09.000 I don't know if you can see the drill marks easily.

02:06:14.000 But, you know, they're there.

02:06:15.000 You can see other places.

02:06:17.000 So, for instance, when we go into the Valley Temple next to it, there's one of the...

02:06:25.000 Doors that was on huge hinges.

02:06:27.000 And I don't think you're going to find pictures of this on the internet because it's very hard to photograph.

02:06:33.000 But when you look at that in person, you can see how they drilled out, you know, the hinge several inches in diameter and did a core drill because you can still see, if I remember there, you can still see the sort of the stub where it broke off.

02:06:48.000 Oh, wow.

02:06:49.000 Yeah, you can see how they were using sophisticated techniques to do this.

02:06:54.000 But no idea whatsoever about how they were doing that.

02:06:58.000 Well, put it this way.

02:07:01.000 I'm not speculating that they had such things, but you can tell in modern times that someone used a power saw or a power drill or this type of tool or that type of tool.

02:07:12.000 Thousands of years from now, you might be able to still see that.

02:07:16.000 Like this table.

02:07:17.000 Yeah, and like be able to interpret it, but you don't have a single example of the tool that was actually used for it.

02:07:22.000 Right, right, right.

02:07:23.000 You know, I mean, these guys, I sometimes almost find it silly when people say, well, you know, how could, oh yeah, there, that's a nice example of it.

02:07:33.000 Okay, there we go.

02:07:34.000 That's a good example.

02:07:35.000 Yeah, that's actually probably the one I was just talking about.

02:07:38.000 So this is a borehole.

02:07:40.000 Yeah, a borehole.

02:07:41.000 And you can see how it was spinning.

02:07:44.000 You can see how they were cutting down quite a bit in each turn.

02:07:48.000 Wow.

02:07:48.000 So I almost find it, I don't almost find it, I do find it silly sometimes when people say to me, the critics, the skeptics, oh, you know, if they were doing all this stuff, well, where's examples of their tools?

02:08:01.000 Well, I mean, how many guys just leave, you know, they walk away from a site and they leave their toolbox there?

02:08:08.000 You know, or forget, I mean, all the mechanics I've ever known and people like that, they're very careful to pick up every tool and put it back and make sure they've got all their equipment before they leave the site.

02:08:20.000 Well, go to the Empire State Building and try to find a hammer.

02:08:22.000 Yeah, yeah, exactly.

02:08:24.000 Yeah.

02:08:25.000 No, that completely makes sense, but, man...

02:08:29.000 I would just like to know, like, what were they doing?

02:08:31.000 Like, how did they make that whole?

02:08:33.000 That's a massive, massive mystery.

02:08:35.000 Right in front of everyone's face.

02:08:37.000 Yeah.

02:08:38.000 Yeah, exactly.

02:08:39.000 What's the standard Egyptologist... 0.93

02:08:43.000 Explanation.

02:08:45.000 They don't really have one.

02:08:47.000 They just shrug their shoulders.

02:08:49.000 Oh, we see that all the time.

02:08:50.000 Well, great.

02:08:51.000 You see it all the time.

02:08:52.000 But it reminds me of – this is maybe silly, but I'm going to say it anyway.

02:08:58.000 No, I don't know.

02:08:59.000 Well, I'll say it anyway.

02:09:01.000 Supposedly the analogy – If you're used to something, I'll put it this way, if you're used to seeing something on a regular basis, you stop questioning it.

02:09:14.000 It just becomes...

02:09:18.000 Common to you, but you don't really question it.

02:09:21.000 It's like technology today.

02:09:22.000 How many people could explain how, even in the most rudimentary sense, how some of the technology works that we have today?

02:09:30.000 The Egyptologists seem to, they just get immune to it.

02:09:33.000 They see all this fabulous stuff and they just forget that, well, this was made somehow.

02:09:38.000 We don't really know how it was made.

02:09:40.000 Then they again go back to...

02:09:43.000 The simplistic explanations of, oh, you know, in some new kingdom or late period, we have this illustration.

02:09:50.000 This must be how they did it.

02:09:52.000 And I'm not convinced that that's always how they did it.

02:09:55.000 What is the illustration?

02:09:56.000 It could be almost just like a little cartoon.

02:09:58.000 Right.

02:09:58.000 Do they have any illustrations?

02:09:59.000 Oh, yeah.

02:09:59.000 I remember where they would have a drill and some stones around it as it waits to keep it spinning.

02:10:07.000 No, I haven't seen that.

02:10:08.000 Maybe I have.

02:10:11.000 So you think that's just purely speculation?

02:10:14.000 Yeah, or it could be sort of The equivalent of modern cartoons of, you know, simple explanation of how something works.

02:10:24.000 And a lot of that is really more to say, okay, if you're a watchmaker, say 200 years ago, you're a watchmaker, you might have some sign that indicates you're a watchmaker, but don't try to take that sign as a blueprint of how you actually made watches.

02:10:39.000 Right, right.

02:10:40.000 If that makes sense.

02:10:41.000 No, it does.

02:10:42.000 It does.

02:10:46.000 When they constructed that coffer, they somehow or another bored...

02:10:51.000 Yeah, they probably bored down, maybe bored in the quarters, bored down, broke out pieces.

02:10:55.000 This is speculation now, and broke it out, and then once you've got it roughed out, then polished the surfaces, that type of thing.

02:11:05.000 So, you know...

02:11:07.000 If you leave any traces of how it was actually constructed, that's not as good as if there are no traces.

02:11:15.000 More or less, you know, it's not as good a job.

02:11:17.000 You look at something like the statue of Khafre, Shefron.

02:11:21.000 This is an incredible statue in the Egyptian Museum again.

02:11:26.000 It's the one that has the face of the Pharaoh that supposedly was the face of the Sphinx, which they don't match up at all.

02:11:33.000 He has the hawk on his shoulders.

02:11:36.000 That statue is absolutely incredible.

02:11:40.000 You know, it's so smoothly polished, etc.

02:11:43.000 You have to look very hard to find any tool marks or evidence of how it was carved because, you know, really good workmanship, you remove all that, ultimately.

02:11:56.000 So that's part of the problem with some of this really high-quality Egyptian work is that they would remove the traces.

02:12:05.000 Yeah, there it is.

02:12:07.000 They would remove the traces of how it was made.

02:12:12.000 And in that image, on the side of it, you see that sort of plasma formation.

02:12:17.000 Yes, absolutely, because this ties in.

02:12:20.000 This is why I brought an image of this, because it ties in with that whole...

02:12:27.000 And it has the circles as well.

02:12:29.000 It has the circles as well, exactly.

02:12:30.000 Very observant.

02:12:32.000 And think about the bird-headed man, the hawk.

02:12:35.000 You know?

02:12:36.000 Right.

02:12:36.000 And this incredible statue, if you view it face on, you don't see the bird from the side.

02:12:43.000 You see the bird.

02:12:45.000 God, it's incredible.

02:12:46.000 All this stuff is so fascinating.

02:12:48.000 Yeah, so I think it really all goes back to this very early formative period, if you would, this really important period for humanity and what was happening.

02:12:59.000 There's a head-on view.

02:13:01.000 And there you don't see the bird at all, of course.

02:13:04.000 Incredible.

02:13:05.000 And I mean, carve something like that today.

02:13:08.000 I don't know what it would cost, who you could pay.

02:13:12.000 I've heard, you know, this is anecdotal, but I've talked to stone cutters and that type of thing.

02:13:18.000 And, you know, to try to duplicate some of what they see in Egypt, I mean, it just would take them so long and so much work and it would be so expensive.

02:13:31.000 With modern power tools.

02:13:33.000 That they basically say, you know, who could do it?

02:13:36.000 Do you have any fear that this information is going to be lost?

02:13:40.000 I mean, you're so far down this track of sort of explaining these things and these revolutionary theories about what happened.

02:13:49.000 And I've been studying this for a long time, and this is the first time I'm hearing it.

02:13:56.000 Well, that's why I need to be on your show, right?

02:13:58.000 I'm so glad you're here.

02:13:59.000 To get the sound to the public, yeah.

02:14:01.000 You're so far down this road.

02:14:03.000 Is there anyone else that's doing the same kind of work?

02:14:06.000 Is there anybody else that's with you on this?

02:14:08.000 Well, I think I'm the one that's doing this right now, but I think there are a lot of other pieces that tie in.

02:14:14.000 So Peratt, Dr. Peratt's work, but he's sort of been, you know, he had some health issues and other things, and he's older.

02:14:22.000 The Electric Universe, there's what's known as the Electric Universe community, which ties in with this, that electrical phenomena and plasma discharges are more important.

02:14:33.000 There's a whole group now that I think are starting to think about what if we had another Carrington event in the near future?

02:14:42.000 How would that affect our grid systems?

02:14:45.000 So what I'm saying is I think there are a lot of little pieces that are starting to come together.

02:14:50.000 And, you know, starting to come together, weaving this together.

02:14:55.000 But what I'm trying to do right now is to paint the broad picture, the broad strokes, And I think it goes back to the end of the last ice age and what was happening then right up until now and what the implications are.

02:15:10.000 And how is this being received?

02:15:13.000 Are people picking up on this?

02:15:15.000 I think people are picking up on it and sometimes you know people are picking up on it when, how did they say it, the sincerest, what is it?

02:15:25.000 Copying someone?

02:15:27.000 It's a serious form of flattery?

02:15:29.000 Right.

02:15:30.000 Imitation.

02:15:31.000 Imitation.

02:15:31.000 That's it.

02:15:32.000 Imitation.

02:15:32.000 And I do find, and I can sometimes get a little annoyed.

02:15:37.000 Of course.

02:15:38.000 Yeah, people are starting to talk about a lot of these things, especially the plasma and the sun and solar events, and all of a sudden, by chance, they're talking about it.

02:15:47.000 Not necessarily mentioning me, but I think, you know, I know they attended a lecture or they maybe read my book, but Yeah, these things take time and I'm not asking for a lot of, you know, oh, everyone has to acknowledge me.

02:16:01.000 But I think it's important to get the information out and I think as we have things like your podcast and people read the books and I'm able to talk at conferences, we slowly get this out.

02:16:14.000 Well, you know, it takes time.

02:16:15.000 It all takes time.

02:16:16.000 I mean, put it this way, Copernicus, and I'm not comparing myself to Copernicus, but Copernicus and the heliocentric view, you know, he publishes that on his deathbed.

02:16:29.000 That was a view that actually went back to the rare predecessors in ancient times, of course.

02:16:35.000 But he publishes that on his deathbed, and, you know, a couple generations later, there's still...

02:16:43.000 Persecuting Galileo for supporting it.

02:16:46.000 Things go quicker now, but it still takes some time.

02:16:51.000 I see a big difference now than I do in the 1990s for even the redating of the Sphinx.

02:16:59.000 Do you think it's because of the internet?

02:17:02.000 I think it's not necessary.

02:17:05.000 Yes, the internet helps.

02:17:06.000 I have mixed feelings about the internet.

02:17:08.000 Because the problem with the internet is you can disseminate information.

02:17:12.000 You get information out, but it doesn't mean it's good information.

02:17:16.000 Right.

02:17:18.000 The naysayers, the critics, the skeptics, they have access to it too.

02:17:23.000 Fake news.

02:17:23.000 Fake news and genuine fake news versus real fake news.

02:17:27.000 And it seems that so many times they're flipped.

02:17:30.000 Yeah, it's very confusing.

02:17:32.000 So it's very confusing.

02:17:33.000 So one of the problems I see with all this information and misinformation and all these factoids out there is it's very confusing for many people if they're not I'm not trying to claim you have to go to experts and authorities because that's part of the problem too when you have the pseudo-authorities who just are pushing their own agendas and frankly don't know what they're talking about.

02:17:57.000 I see too many of that among, let's say, certain academics and skeptics, that type of thing.

02:18:04.000 But it's also confusing when you only take information and You don't know how to put it all together.

02:18:12.000 So I teach in a university.

02:18:14.000 I teach college at Boston University.

02:18:16.000 And what I find with students, and I'm not picky on them, I'm saying this with all due respect, they have so much access to facts and factoids, we'll use that term, but they have to understand the bigger picture.

02:18:30.000 They have to be able to understand critically and think critically about it to put things together.

02:18:36.000 And how does it all fit together?

02:18:39.000 And that's so important, and that's not something I think you get just from, you know, surfing the internet quickly.

02:18:49.000 Or watching a couple of YouTube videos by someone that's not necessarily reliable.

02:18:54.000 That's a problem, right?

02:18:55.000 How much misinformation has been spread through YouTube?

02:18:58.000 More than good information, probably.

02:19:01.000 Yeah, I mean, we could put on some fake lab coats right now and just make some nonsense video and get 100,000 views by the end of the year.

02:19:08.000 Exactly, exactly.

02:19:08.000 And see, I've had the problem, too, in my business.

02:19:12.000 You know, what I'm talking about?

02:19:14.000 Is that they say you can't please everyone all the time, but it seems like in some cases in my career in this field, I've been able to displease everyone because I'll come out with positions sometimes.

02:19:28.000 Sorry, I'm losing my headset.

02:19:29.000 I'll come out with positions sometimes where I'm not pleasing my academic colleagues, but I'm not extreme enough for the, should we say, other side?

02:19:38.000 Right.

02:19:38.000 You know, so I'm like caught in the middle because I'm going by the evidence I actually have.

02:19:43.000 Right.

02:19:44.000 And it's not jiving with, so to speak.

02:19:47.000 The tinfoil hat brigade.

02:19:48.000 Yeah.

02:19:49.000 So how is that received by the people that, I mean, there are those ancient aliens type folks that really want everything to be...

02:19:56.000 They want everything to be ancient aliens, and I've been accused of, how could I not accept this or that, you know?

02:20:01.000 Me too.

02:20:02.000 People get mad about those theories.

02:20:04.000 Yeah, they get really mad at me. 0.93

02:20:05.000 They're the nastiest. 0.98

02:20:06.000 Yeah, they're nasties, and they'll even tell me, well, this supports everything you've been saying. 0.99

02:20:10.000 I don't care if it supports everything I've been saying. 0.89

02:20:12.000 If it's not real, it's not real.

02:20:14.000 If the evidence isn't there, it's not, you know?

02:20:16.000 It is fascinating that they do dig up these ancient structures and Machu Picchu and all these different places where, like, wow, these construction methods are really pretty impressive.

02:20:25.000 Incredible.

02:20:26.000 What was going on back then, but they always want to tie it to aliens.

02:20:29.000 They always want to tie it to aliens, which I think is a, I hate to use this term, but sort of a cop-out.

02:20:34.000 Yeah.

02:20:35.000 Well, it's a business.

02:20:36.000 It's a business.

02:20:37.000 Well, that's what it gets down to.

02:20:38.000 A lot of this is business.

02:20:40.000 People want to sell their books.

02:20:42.000 They want to sell their conferences.

02:20:43.000 They want to sell their DVDs.

02:20:45.000 They want to sell their YouTube videos.

02:20:49.000 In some cases, they want to sell for money.

02:20:51.000 In some cases, they want to sell for promotion, self-promotion.

02:20:55.000 They want to be famous.

02:20:57.000 I told you, I was accused of that.

02:20:59.000 Back.

02:21:01.000 In the early 90s, oh, I'm just doing this so I want to be famous.

02:21:05.000 No, I'm not that type of person, actually.

02:21:08.000 People love those shows, those UFO and ancient alien type shows, and they love those conferences. 0.95

02:21:13.000 They go to those conferences, and they all just mentally masturbate together. 0.70

02:21:17.000 It's very bizarre. 0.98

02:21:19.000 But they're all like...

02:21:21.000 There's nothing to support what they're saying.

02:21:24.000 But I think it does fill a void for some people.

02:21:27.000 And one thing I'm trying to do is to fill that void with something real.

02:21:31.000 Something important, something that has evidence to back it up.

02:21:36.000 Because there are a lot of questions.

02:21:38.000 There are a lot of mysteries.

02:21:40.000 And I will admit, I've been on the Ancient Aliens show.

02:21:43.000 But I've never proposed ancient aliens.

02:21:46.000 I've never supported that.

02:21:47.000 I've always been clear if people actually listen to me.

02:21:50.000 But they ask me to be on it.

02:21:51.000 And a number of other academics have too.

02:21:53.000 Do they use you out of context?

02:21:55.000 A little bit?

02:21:56.000 Well, yeah.

02:21:57.000 The context is not necessarily...

02:21:59.000 Slippery.

02:21:59.000 Yeah, slippery.

02:22:00.000 But the point is that there are real mysteries to this problem.

02:22:04.000 Yes.

02:22:05.000 Things that we don't really understand that you and I have been discussing about and there's so many more we could discuss, but those are real.

02:22:13.000 And so many people that I know that watch shows like that, when I talk to them, and I'm talking academics who would never admit that they watch it.

02:22:21.000 We're good to go.

02:22:40.000 It's not the way to go, but they are real things that need to be looked into.

02:22:46.000 So even when I speak at a conference like that, there are so many very intelligent people that are there besides the other.

02:22:53.000 You know, there are different types of people.

02:22:55.000 But I know many people, they'll have PhDs and stuff, and they'll go to it for a sort of between entertainment, but also to get exposed to things they're not going to be exposed to by the standard academic Right.

02:23:11.000 You're not going to get exposed to a lot of these types of questions if you just go to the standard closed academic conferences.

02:23:20.000 It's interesting.

02:23:25.000 With Oracle, the Organization for the Research of Ancient Cultures, which is not just me.

02:23:30.000 I want to be clear on that.

02:23:31.000 In fact, our president is actually, I guess, a heavy metal guitar player.

02:23:38.000 He's Berkeley-trained.

02:23:40.000 He's excellent.

02:23:41.000 Yeah, no, I mean, seriously.

02:23:43.000 But he's a really bright guy, and he's fascinated by these things.

02:23:47.000 We have people like Jocelyn Godwin from Colgate University, who's a world-renowned scholar on the advisory board.

02:23:55.000 But what we're trying to do with things like Oracle, and I would encourage people to actually look at it because we've got a website up.

02:24:03.000 You can go through my website, www.robertshock.com to get there or go directly to www.oracle.

02:24:14.000 Oh, there it is.

02:24:15.000 There we go.

02:24:15.000 Oracle Online, O-R-A-C-U-L, online, you know, all one word,.org.

02:24:24.000 And what we're trying to do with this, and also through the Institute for the Study of the Origins of Civilization, ISOC, which I'm trying to do at Boston University, Is to have a forum where we can look at these topics seriously using evidence,

02:24:44.000 but also not be dismissive just because we have to uphold the standard dogma.

02:24:50.000 So I don't want to go with just a nonsense, you know, flippant or easy out to sell someone's book, you know, this crazy book, or...

02:25:00.000 Yeah, I'm not being nasty about anyone.

02:25:04.000 Or, you know, just stick to the standard paradigm, but thinking out of the box, as they say, but thinking out of the box using real evidence and using real logic and using real rationality.

02:25:18.000 to look at a number of these issues.

02:25:20.000 Is there more resistance towards redating Egypt and Egyptology, particularly ancient Egypt, versus other cultures like Gobekli Tepe and some other ancient structures that they're finding?

02:25:33.000 Well, I would say Gobekli Tepe, the beauty of Gobekli Tepe is that...

02:25:37.000 There's no civilization attached to it.

02:25:39.000 That's right.

02:25:39.000 The dating of Gobekli Tepe is the dating.

02:25:43.000 That is based on hard stratigraphy, Radiocarbon dates, German Archaeological Institute.

02:25:50.000 And correct me if I'm wrong, it's because it was purposely covered.

02:25:53.000 It was purposefully covered 10,000 plus years ago.

02:25:57.000 And in that case, this ties back to our bigger picture.

02:26:01.000 You have evidence.

02:26:02.000 We have evidence of catastrophe at Quebec-Litepe.

02:26:06.000 We have evidence that the pillars were knocked down and hastily re-erected.

02:26:12.000 And you can see that in the pillars.

02:26:16.000 There we have a picture up there.

02:26:18.000 If you can see the pillar on the right side, that is not an archaeological reconstruction.

02:26:24.000 That pillar was knocked down.

02:26:25.000 It was put back into position, but you can see how it was put back into position crudely using fragments of another pillar.

02:26:33.000 Then they built these crude walls to sort of hold the pillars up.

02:26:37.000 They abutted against it.

02:26:39.000 Well, to me, this is happening And the dating confirms it in the aftermath of the initial solar outburst at the end of last ice age when you had all this tumultuous, you know, things happening.

02:26:53.000 Earthquakes and the precipitation, the rain, the fire coming down, the thunder.

02:27:00.000 So you have this incredible situation where we have captured at Quebecle Tepe the catastrophe that was going on and how they were trying to reconstruct it.

02:27:10.000 And I think, I don't want to say they gave up, but for whatever reason, it was probably just so much, they ended up covering the whole thing artificially.

02:27:18.000 Maybe to preserve it, maybe they intended to go back to it, maybe for posterity.

02:27:23.000 I don't know what their thinking was we could, you know, I don't speculate about that.

02:27:28.000 But tying in with what you were just asking, Gebekli Tepe is not tied to some other later civilization as is dynastic Egypt.

02:27:39.000 So there's not a lot of dogma involved.

02:27:42.000 Correct.

02:27:42.000 The dogma there is involved how sophisticated it is.

02:27:46.000 Right.

02:27:46.000 Is Gobekli Tepe and, you know, those that want to uphold the standard story saying, well, yeah, it's pretty, but it's not that sophisticated.

02:27:54.000 Yeah, it's very dismissive data.

02:27:56.000 They're trying to say it's hunter-gatherers.

02:27:58.000 Yeah, they call it hunter-gatherers, and they say, oh, hunter-gatherers are thereby primitive, and therefore they, you know, they just try to wave their arms and say – it's sort of like saying it's an anomaly – But not much of an anomaly, so we don't need to really worry about it.

02:28:14.000 But they've only, correct me if I'm wrong, they've only uncovered a very small percentage of it.

02:28:18.000 Oh, a very small fragment of it.

02:28:19.000 Yeah, very, very small fragment of it.

02:28:21.000 So this is an enormous structure.

02:28:22.000 It's an enormous structure, and in that picture that's up, we'll describe it for those that don't see the picture.

02:28:29.000 But there's pictures like this in my book, Forgotten Civilization.

02:28:32.000 In fact, I think that's right out of my book, probably, or very similar to one.

02:28:36.000 You can see the pillar in the back on the left.

02:28:38.000 Do you see how that was knocked down and it's propped up and it has been put back into position and they built these crude walls against it before they buried the whole thing.

02:28:49.000 So this whole site underwent dramatic catastrophe, was being put together quickly again and then...

02:28:58.000 And those 3D animals as well.

02:29:00.000 Oh yeah, there's one right there.

02:29:02.000 Isn't that beautiful?

02:29:04.000 The sort of, I call it a feline, sort of feline going down.

02:29:08.000 That they had to carve the stone around that 3D structure instead of carve it into it.

02:29:12.000 It's so much more complicated.

02:29:13.000 Oh, much more complicated.

02:29:15.000 And when they were carving these originally, taking them out of the quarry to get, say, a 15-ton pillar, I think we're looking...

02:29:23.000 Oh, there we are.

02:29:24.000 Wow, that's so crazy.

02:29:25.000 Isn't that beautiful?

02:29:26.000 I love that.

02:29:27.000 Now, if you saw that in a museum of modern art, it could fit right in.

02:29:33.000 Two points I just wanted to make before I forget them.

02:29:36.000 One, when you're carving these pillars to get a 10 or 15 ton pillar like that, Finalized, you have to carve a much bigger chunk of rock initially because, of course, you have to leave the rock where you're going to have the animal.

02:29:51.000 You have to leave the rock because they're not incising these in. 1.00

02:29:55.000 They're carving them in relief, so that's a lot more complicated.

02:29:58.000 Cut away all the rock, etc.

02:30:00.000 So this is an incredible technological feat.

02:30:03.000 Also, off the record, and this one, if you look at that one, Do you see how it's got a wild pig?

02:30:09.000 Pigs and whatnot, but do you also see the weathered surface?

02:30:12.000 I'm going to teach you a little geology here.

02:30:15.000 That is an older pillar that was being reused at the end of the last ice age, I believe.

02:30:20.000 So some of these structures actually go back earlier.

02:30:23.000 And before Klaus Schmidt passed away unexpectedly, he was talking about this too, that even there they were maybe reusing some structures that were a little bit earlier or maybe several thousand years earlier.

02:30:36.000 So this goes back, the origins of Quebec Le Tepe may go back thousands of years earlier when all is said and done, once we get the evidence in, well into the end of the last ice age, stuffed out about 9700 BC. I was going to say,

02:30:54.000 before I forget it, A lot going on here.

02:30:58.000 Off the record, and of course they would never admit to this, but off the record, I've spoken to archaeologists when, you know, they're in a giddy mood and...

02:31:07.000 Getting drunk.

02:31:10.000 And ask them, well, if you just found, say, that...

02:31:15.000 Animal, on the Gebekli Tepe pillar in isolation, or you just found one of these pillars or part of one in isolation, you were just looking at, how old do you think it would be?

02:31:24.000 And I've heard the answer, 600 BC, 1000 BC, based on the technological finesse, the beauty of the carving?

02:31:35.000 Not.

02:31:36.000 8,000, 9,000 years earlier.

02:31:38.000 Right.

02:31:39.000 But they would never say that on the record.

02:31:42.000 Right, right, right.

02:31:43.000 Yeah, because it's so complicated.

02:31:45.000 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

02:31:47.000 But I've had them say that.

02:31:48.000 Well, if they just found, say, that little feline type thing on the side of the pillar just broken off in just an isolation, they'd probably say, one told me, yeah, oh, maybe it's 1000 BC at most.

02:31:59.000 Right, at most.

02:32:01.000 Not 9,700 BC or whatever.

02:32:05.000 That's crazy.

02:32:06.000 Now, have they identified the quarries where these stones were?

02:32:10.000 Yeah, some of them happen and they're not super far away, the kilometer or a bit more.

02:32:15.000 I mean, there's limestone around there.

02:32:17.000 So it's not a situation as you have in Peru, for instance, where they're dragging this stuff, you know, tens of kilometers away.

02:32:25.000 But I don't think that detracts from...

02:32:27.000 No, it's still crazy.

02:32:32.000 It's easy for me to say this, but once you've queried a block, if you're moving a kilometer, it's not that much harder to move it 10 kilometers.

02:32:42.000 It just takes more effort, but it's the same technology.

02:32:44.000 It's really querying it, be able to move it to begin with, and then be able to carve it into these beautiful structures.

02:32:52.000 And something I want to point out too is that a lot of times when I talk about Quebecle Tepe, I'll make the comment about Stonehenge because people are familiar with Stonehenge.

02:33:02.000 But Stonehenge, when you look at the blocks there, they're so much cruder than what we have at Quebecle Tepe.

02:33:10.000 And the Quebecle Tepe stone pillars, the central ones...

02:33:16.000 And particularly, they are so beautifully carved.

02:33:19.000 But if you look at them, they're also very, very thin in their smallest dimension.

02:33:24.000 There you can see it, how thin it is.

02:33:26.000 And that one's anthropomorphic with the belt and the hands.

02:33:31.000 And that sure looks like, some people would say, a metal buckle on it.

02:33:35.000 So that's very similar to like those Easter Island.

02:33:37.000 It's very similar to Easter Island.

02:33:39.000 I think there are definite connections there, but why shouldn't there be?

02:33:42.000 We were just talking about Rongo Rongo in a horse two ago.

02:33:46.000 Yeah.

02:33:47.000 And how they were seeing similar things in the sky.

02:33:50.000 But I wanted to point out that when you carve a pillar like that, that's so thin and narrow, that's much more difficult to keep it from snapping, to keep it from breaking.

02:34:01.000 Also, if you see in that pillar how it's set into the bedrock, it's set in just literally very, very shallowly set into the bedrock.

02:34:13.000 Klaus Schmidt commented to me that, and he published this too, that they seem to be using some kind of concrete or cement to help set them into the bedrock, which is untold of at such an early period.

02:34:28.000 When he first was excavating them before he got down to the bottom, I think he said this to me verbally, he estimated that about a third, at least a third of the pillars should be set into the bedrock just to hold it up, prop it up, not just on the order of centimeters,

02:34:45.000 as you find.

02:34:47.000 And is this a sturdy construction?

02:34:49.000 No, it's not.

02:34:51.000 Does it move?

02:34:51.000 No, no, you can't touch it now.

02:34:53.000 It would fall over.

02:34:54.000 Touch it and it probably would fall over.

02:34:55.000 They have to do all kinds of supports on it now.

02:34:58.000 My suspicion is that initially it was not roofed over, that they were freestanding pillars.

02:35:04.000 And they were very, very carefully set and balanced and everything was in perfect order.

02:35:12.000 This is total speculation, but like many of the obelisks and whatnot, they may have even had a vibration to them.

02:35:20.000 They may have purposefully vibrated or picked up some kind of frequency.

02:35:23.000 To see there how shallow it is.

02:35:25.000 Yeah, how shallow it is.

02:35:26.000 But they were finely tuned, whatever you want to call that.

02:35:29.000 And I'm not trying to claim it's some kind of weird machine, as some people have called it.

02:35:34.000 Speculated.

02:35:36.000 But I think there was something there.

02:35:37.000 And resonance and audio cues, audio frequencies are historically very important in both modern structures.

02:35:49.000 Usually you think of it as religious, but, you know...

02:35:53.000 It affects your mental thinking and abilities and that type of thing.

02:35:58.000 So something may have been going on there with that.

02:36:00.000 This may also be why they broke so easily during the catastrophe.

02:36:05.000 I shouldn't say easily.

02:36:06.000 It was a huge catastrophe.

02:36:08.000 But they were trying to re-erect them.

02:36:11.000 What is the timeline in terms of the total uncovering of that site?

02:36:16.000 Oh, in modern times?

02:36:17.000 I mean, what are they trying to do?

02:36:19.000 How much time do you think it's going to take for them to completely uncover?

02:36:23.000 Oh, if they do it carefully, centuries.

02:36:26.000 Oh, it could be.

02:36:26.000 It's a huge site.

02:36:28.000 And Klaus Schmidt, when Katie and I were there, I think he waved his arms and he talked about how there's all these other hills out there that probably have more under them.

02:36:38.000 I mean, you're talking a huge complex.

02:36:39.000 And we know that in some cases because you see little fragments sticking up and that type of thing.

02:36:44.000 And also, remember when you're doing archaeology, And I have training in archaeology, despite what some of my critics say.

02:36:54.000 When you're doing archaeology, it's inherently destructive because you can't put it back together.

02:37:01.000 So if you don't do it carefully, you don't do it right, you're destroying evidence.

02:37:05.000 You are inherently destroying evidence.

02:37:07.000 So a lot of people nowadays, professionals, they don't want to excavate an entire site at one time.

02:37:14.000 They want to leave parts unexcavated.

02:37:17.000 So that other people have a go at it as you develop new technology, you can apply that to a different part of the site.

02:37:27.000 Plus, practical things.

02:37:29.000 This is in Turkey.

02:37:30.000 It's close to the Syrian border.

02:37:35.000 And we know how the political situation there is with the Islamic State, etc.

02:37:40.000 They would love to destroy this site, I'm sure.

02:37:43.000 Really?

02:37:43.000 It's very close to Urfa, which is the city of Abraham.

02:37:47.000 It's a very sacred, holy site for Judaism, Christianity, but more than anything else, Islam. 0.90

02:37:56.000 Gebekli Tepe is just outside.

02:37:59.000 It's like a half-hour drive by taxi from Urfa.

02:38:03.000 In Urfa, you have the sacred cave of Abraham.

02:38:07.000 You have the pools of Abraham. 0.81

02:38:09.000 You have a big mosque there.

02:38:10.000 And I bring this all up because this is a very ancient city.

02:38:14.000 When they excavate In Urfa, not archaeological excavations, but say they build a new road or they build a new underground garage, they often hit 12,000-year-old or thereabouts remains.

02:38:31.000 So there's this beautiful statue called Urfa Man, which is now in the museum in Urfa, which also houses lots of artifacts from Gobekli Tepe.

02:38:40.000 And it was found right near the modern pools of Abraham when they were doing some construction project, but it represents an image of The people, supposedly,

02:38:56.000 or at least it's an image of a man, a person, that gets back to Quebecli Tepe times.

02:39:01.000 It's about full size.

02:39:02.000 It's about the same size as me, but lacking legs.

02:39:05.000 Very similar actually has a lot of comparisons to the Moai on Easter Island.

02:39:11.000 You got a picture of this?

02:39:12.000 I think we do.

02:39:13.000 I think we do.

02:39:14.000 Look, look, isn't that beautiful?

02:39:16.000 Wow.

02:39:16.000 Look, he's staring at you with obsidian eyes, and he is from Quebecle Tepe time, but he was found in Urfa.

02:39:24.000 And you're not going to do it.

02:39:26.000 We're not going to do it.

02:39:26.000 But if you could just wipe out the modern city and excavate there...

02:39:32.000 Who knows what you would find?

02:39:34.000 Potentially, Urfa, this is me speaking, is one of the oldest inhabited cities on Earth, going back to the late Ice Age.

02:39:45.000 Well, this is something that goes on in Mexico City as well, right?

02:39:47.000 Yeah, sure.

02:39:50.000 Oh, and you hit all kinds of things.

02:39:52.000 And you hit all kinds of things.

02:39:53.000 Find an Aztec temple.

02:39:54.000 Yeah.

02:39:55.000 And in Cairo and other parts of Egypt, there were families that lived for centuries because their little huts or their community was on the top of ancient ruins.

02:40:06.000 And they would dig in their basement and pull out a gold statuette or whatever, sell it, and, you know, eat for the next six months.

02:40:13.000 So is this IRFA place, is there any consideration to like picking isolated spots and starting to dig and...

02:40:21.000 Well, yeah, I think there's some consideration on the part of...

02:40:25.000 You know, archaeologists and Turkish government, that type of thing, but you've also got a very strong religious element.

02:40:31.000 See, religion plays into all of this, of course.

02:40:34.000 And also, you don't necessarily want to destroy ancient Islamic temples, say an Islamic mosque.

02:40:43.000 I should say a mosque that goes back to, I don't know, I'm just making this up, 800 AD or something, to excavate something that's...

02:40:52.000 A few thousand years older than that.

02:40:53.000 A few thousand years older or 10,000 years older or more.

02:40:56.000 I mean, again, On the one hand, which am I more interested?

02:41:00.000 It might be one versus the other, but other people are interested in the other.

02:41:03.000 See what I mean?

02:41:04.000 There's all these factors that play into it.

02:41:06.000 So it gets very complicated, very messy.

02:41:09.000 And then, of course, you have the situation, and this ties in, where, you know, I know Christians are more interested in the birth of Jesus and where the manger is.

02:41:21.000 And we can see in Egypt, if one's interested, the supposed place where the Holy Family stayed when Jesus went to Egypt, you know, whatever.

02:41:31.000 And you can see things like that in Urfa for Abraham and whatnot.

02:41:36.000 And how do you respect that?

02:41:39.000 But also excavate underneath.

02:41:42.000 And then some people would say excavating underneath is sacrilegious to, you know, what their main interest is.

02:41:49.000 You know, so it gets very, very complicated.

02:41:51.000 I've met PhDs in Egypt.

02:41:54.000 One in particular, just to tell you a quick anecdote.

02:41:58.000 I'm sitting there having breakfast.

02:41:59.000 This was in the 1990s, and it was in a hotel where it's overlooking the pyramid and Sphinx.

02:42:06.000 I'm looking out at them, having a nice breakfast.

02:42:09.000 A guy comes down and sits with me, joins with me, starts making conversation.

02:42:13.000 Turns out he's at Cairo University, you know, economics.

02:42:18.000 I think he was a professor of economics or whatnot.

02:42:21.000 And he starts telling me, because it's obvious I'm not Egyptian, I'm American, and why am I there?

02:42:27.000 I'm studying the pyramids and sphinx, and he starts telling me his opinion of all this.

02:42:31.000 You know what his opinion was?

02:42:33.000 That the pyramids should be dismantled, Get rid of the Sphinx.

02:42:40.000 Don't need any of that.

02:42:41.000 Use those raw materials on-site to build a covered-over, air-conditioned shopping mall bigger than the one in Dubai.

02:42:53.000 And that would really benefit Egypt, economically and otherwise.

02:42:59.000 Who sent this?

02:43:00.000 He was a professor at Carrer University.

02:43:04.000 I mean, I don't know his name, but I have no question he was genuine and real.

02:43:10.000 And I didn't laugh or anything because he was serious.

02:43:15.000 But where is he coming from in part?

02:43:17.000 Egypt didn't mean anything to him, dynastic Egyptians.

02:43:20.000 A lot of Egyptians do.

02:43:22.000 It means something to them.

02:43:24.000 But there's a lot of Egyptians in Egypt.

02:43:26.000 They're Muslim.

02:43:27.000 If it's pre-Muslim, it's not a big deal. 1.00

02:43:30.000 If it's pre-Arab, it's not a big deal because they're Arabs.

02:43:35.000 They might have been in Egypt for over a thousand years, but the native Egyptians is not their culture.

02:43:44.000 Well, but it's not—think about America.

02:43:48.000 How many Native American mounds and graves and whatnot get bulldozed over with that maybe the most preliminary archaeological salvage to build a shopping mall or a new development?

02:44:04.000 You know, it's the same thing.

02:44:05.000 It's the same thing.

02:44:06.000 We think it's really crazy when someone like that would say that about the pyramids and sphinx, you know, because everyone knows about them.

02:44:13.000 But from his perspective, if I quizzed him, he could have turned around and said, well, look what you do in your country.

02:44:19.000 Well, it's almost human nature across the planet when they're inconsiderate to do something along those lines.

02:44:25.000 Yeah.

02:44:25.000 So my point is not really to criticize him.

02:44:28.000 He had a very different perspective.

02:44:32.000 I don't agree with that perspective.

02:44:34.000 Right.

02:44:34.000 But I could understand where he was coming from.

02:44:37.000 He wasn't coming – he wasn't some – he didn't strike me as some crazy fundamentalist or anything like that.

02:44:44.000 He was just – Right.

02:45:06.000 Because it brings in tourism.

02:45:09.000 But then there's the counter-argument, which I've heard many times, that Egypt has to separate itself from tourism.

02:45:16.000 So you need to... 0.98

02:45:17.000 Cut off the nipple. 1.00

02:45:18.000 Yes. 0.97

02:45:19.000 Because I've had Egyptians say to me, in no uncertain terms, and...

02:45:26.000 I'm not joking or anything, but point out that depending on how you count it, you know, 25% to 60% or more of the Egyptian economy could be based on tourism, because it's not just the direct tourism, but it's those that supply the people who deal with the tourists, etc., etc.

02:45:42.000 And when you have a situation that you have something happen in the Middle East, it could be far from Egypt.

02:45:50.000 But people get excited.

02:45:51.000 You know, Americans all of a sudden tell me, oh, can't go to Egypt.

02:45:54.000 It's dangerous to go to Egypt because something happened in Syria.

02:45:57.000 That's what I heard.

02:45:58.000 And it has nothing to do.

02:46:00.000 No, but think if our country and our economy was dependent upon tourism solely, or, you know, not solely, but a major portion of it was tourism, and then something happens in Brazil, and all of a sudden, because something happened in Brazil,

02:46:16.000 no tourists are coming to America, and it cripples our economy.

02:46:19.000 I mean, I can understand that perspective.

02:46:22.000 No, I can completely understand the perspective.

02:46:23.000 What is the perspective in Turkey when they're dealing with Gobekli Tepe?

02:46:27.000 Well, I think it's a mix, too.

02:46:30.000 I mean, I think in Turkey, unfortunately, from my perspective, you've got more and more rise of, should we say, radical Islam and fundamentalism that doesn't really want to worry about such things.

02:46:42.000 But you also have people who see Gobekli Tepe as potentially someday Vying with the Sphinx and pyramids for tourist dollars and for a destination.

02:46:54.000 I mean, Turkey is wonderful, in my opinion.

02:46:56.000 I love both Turkey and Egypt, just to visit them, to travel through them, that type of thing.

02:47:02.000 With any country, you have to know what you're doing, but if people travel with me, I know what I'm doing.

02:47:07.000 I don't mean that in a nasty way.

02:47:08.000 And I will not take risks.

02:47:11.000 I'll take risks for myself.

02:47:13.000 And I've, as I say, been on the wrong end of a gun.

02:47:16.000 Have you?

02:47:17.000 Yeah.

02:47:18.000 What happened?

02:47:18.000 Well, the worst was Pakistan.

02:47:20.000 But that's another story.

02:47:21.000 What were you doing in Pakistan?

02:47:22.000 I was collecting fossils.

02:47:23.000 This is when I was a graduate student.

02:47:25.000 And at one point, I was accused of carrying plastic explosives.

02:47:31.000 And all of a sudden had four AK-47s.

02:47:37.000 Point at your side.

02:47:38.000 Well, not point.

02:47:39.000 I felt them.

02:47:39.000 Touching you.

02:47:40.000 Yeah, they were touching them.

02:47:41.000 And I know enough about small arms.

02:47:43.000 These were loaded and, you know, cocked.

02:47:47.000 I mean, their fingers were on the triggers, not on the trigger guards.

02:47:50.000 Oof.

02:47:50.000 Yeah, yeah.

02:47:51.000 It turns out I didn't have plastic explosives.

02:47:54.000 And, you know, I'm a mild-mannered guy, and I said, you know, whatever you want.

02:47:58.000 And I didn't do anything wrong, and I explained.

02:48:01.000 And I was carrying, back then, little bricks, little things of oil-based clay that I guess have the texture and feel of some of the explosives they would use.

02:48:16.000 We would use these when we collected fossils, and you find a bunch of fragments to prop it up and put it into position as you glue them together.

02:48:25.000 Hmm.

02:48:26.000 Tough explaining that.

02:48:27.000 Yeah, yeah.

02:48:28.000 I had to explain all that.

02:48:29.000 And someone came from the Pakistani Geological Survey and explained that, yeah, I really was who I was.

02:48:36.000 But, you know, it's a situation where people get excited.

02:48:39.000 And that was back in the bad old days of, you know, well, I don't know if it's any better in Pakistan now, but... 1.00

02:48:46.000 You know, they're tough situations, but if you know how to behave and you know how to deal with it and you know how to avoid it, you'll be okay.

02:48:56.000 And right now I would say Egypt is very, very safe.

02:49:01.000 It really is.

02:49:02.000 People have all kinds of misconceptions about Egypt.

02:49:05.000 Turkey, we were starting to talk about Turkey.

02:49:08.000 Turkey may be going the other route a little bit.

02:49:10.000 I'm being very honest.

02:49:12.000 But I have no problem going with Turkey.

02:49:14.000 I have no problem taking people to Turkey.

02:49:17.000 But at this point, there are certain areas I might avoid just to be on the safest of safest sides.

02:49:24.000 A little more slippery.

02:49:25.000 Yeah, but I would never endanger anyone else.

02:49:29.000 In fact, I always err on the side of safety when it comes to safety.

02:49:36.000 Not that I want to take great risks with myself either, but you know, sometimes as a geologist, I feel I have to do what I have to do.

02:49:43.000 Do you have any plans on releasing this theory of coronal mass ejections and all the things we've talked about today into something like a documentary?

02:49:52.000 Something that might be a little bit more...

02:49:54.000 I would love to do a documentary, something that John Anthony West and I, we're often talking about a documentary.

02:50:00.000 We also would like to do a film, a full-length feature film, if we could get backing and whatnot sort of...

02:50:09.000 How should I say it?

02:50:10.000 Semi-popularized, you know, semi-fictionalized, but always based on real science, real data, real evidence.

02:50:18.000 So, you know, I've seen so many films where they're about geological catastrophes, whether it's huge asteroids hitting or, you know, San Andreas Fault, and they're so faked.

02:50:29.000 Yeah.

02:50:29.000 Because it's not what would really happen.

02:50:32.000 It's not really what would happen.

02:50:33.000 And what I'm saying is what has happened in the past and what really will happen in the future if we get hit again, which I hate to say this, but from a geological perspective, there is no doubt these things are unavoidable.

02:50:49.000 It would be like saying we'll never have another volcanic eruption or earthquake again.

02:50:54.000 Of course we will.

02:50:55.000 Of course we will.

02:50:56.000 So it's better to be aware of it and prepare for it.

02:50:59.000 So yeah, I'd love to do a good film.

02:51:03.000 Yeah, I feel like a film would be something that would really catch on.

02:51:06.000 Well, if you could help us.

02:51:07.000 Well, I'll connect you to people maybe that can help.

02:51:09.000 That would be excellent.

02:51:10.000 I'm serious.

02:51:11.000 This is something that Katie and I, Katie, for those that just tuned in, Katie's my wife.

02:51:18.000 And I think you heard when we were talking before, she has some background in, you know, she was a dancer in entertainment and Broadway.

02:51:26.000 But film connections, we really need film connections.

02:51:29.000 So let's put it out there for contact information if someone is in that business and they wanted to get a hold of you.

02:51:35.000 Absolutely.

02:51:35.000 The best way to get a hold of me would be through my website, www.robertschock, S-C-H-O-C-H is how the last name is spelled,.com, or if they want to email me directly, and this is on the website.

02:51:49.000 Careful with this thing.

02:51:50.000 You're giving out the email.

02:51:51.000 I know.

02:51:51.000 Well, should I give out the email?

02:51:53.000 It's the contact page.

02:51:54.000 Go to the contact page.

02:51:55.000 There we go.

02:51:56.000 My wife is to my left there, and she said the contact page.

02:51:59.000 She nailed it.

02:52:00.000 Good move.

02:52:01.000 She said the contact page.

02:52:02.000 Did I say too much?

02:52:03.000 No, no, you're good.

02:52:04.000 Okay, so if people go to www.robertshock.com and then go to the contact page, they'll get my contact information there.

02:52:14.000 I think we have a fairly direct way to contact me.

02:52:18.000 I've also, I believe, got my business address there, Boston University address.

02:52:23.000 I'm in my office because I really am at Boston University, full-time tenured faculty member.

02:52:29.000 And I'm interested if people want to contact me about film, if they want to go to Egypt with me.

02:52:35.000 I do tours periodically.

02:52:37.000 I'll arrange something.

02:52:39.000 People have enough, you know, if they want a private, if they have enough people that would want to come to make it viable or, you know, these things cost money.

02:52:48.000 If I were independently wealthy, maybe I'd just take people for fun at my expense, but I just, I don't have that.

02:52:54.000 Well, I guarantee you, you have stimulated a lot of people's imagination.

02:52:58.000 Oh, can I mention one more thing?

02:53:00.000 That chamber, that chamber under the paw of the Sphinx for a Quarter century now.

02:53:08.000 I've wanted to continue the serious research on that.

02:53:11.000 I have contacts in Egypt.

02:53:13.000 I've talked to the Ministry of Antiquities, the actually director, I guess he is, of the Grand Egyptian Museum, the new museum.

02:53:22.000 I think we could make inroads there to actually explore that if someone has money or interest in that.

02:53:28.000 The problem is, and I want to say this bluntly, A lot of people say, oh, well, why don't you just raise money by crowdfunding?

02:53:35.000 Doesn't work for Egypt. 0.98

02:53:36.000 You have to have the money up front.

02:53:39.000 They don't want, you know, crowdfunding type money.

02:53:42.000 So that's another thing.

02:53:43.000 So my point is that there's film project love to pursue.

02:53:47.000 There's research love to pursue.

02:53:50.000 That's why we've set up the Oracle, the not-for-profit, to do this all right and legitimately.

02:53:55.000 That's why I'm setting up the Institute at BU, Institute for the Study of the Origins of Civilization.

02:54:01.000 So lots of possibilities, and I'm hoping we can make some of this happen.

02:54:05.000 I'm hoping we can, too.

02:54:06.000 I really appreciate you being here, man.

02:54:08.000 It was really awesome to talk to you, and you blew my mind, this whole theories.

02:54:12.000 It scares the shit out of me, but it also, it's very exciting.

02:54:16.000 Well, thank you.

02:54:16.000 Thank you.

02:54:17.000 And again, I'm not trying to scare anyone, but I think we have to be real and we have to be realistic and there's no point in hiding and closing your eyes to things.

02:54:26.000 And it's just an awesome theory.

02:54:27.000 I mean, it's very cool.

02:54:29.000 Thank you.

02:54:30.000 Thank you very much.

02:54:31.000 My pleasure.

The Joe Rogan Experience - May 31, 2018

Joe Rogan Experience #1124 - Robert Schoch

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Summary

Transcript