I find it very enjoyable that more people are discovering Graham Hancock now than they have at any period in the past because he and others have done some very excellent work in the field of history and its study of it. Graham Hancock has been around for a long-time writing books and has a unique gift to make the past come alive with vigor while going well beyond the accepted norms of science, which ultimately is what is needed in our present time for many reasons. Of course, people are gaining so much understanding of Graham Hancock’s work because of the new Netflix show, Ancient Apocalypse, which features Graham Hancock as the narrator, resulting in over thirty years of his work. What Graham does uniquely is taking many years of hard study by archaeologists, anthropologists, paleontologists, geologists, astronomers, and the like, telling a narrative of the human race that would never be captured if people were only paying attention to those specific fields by themselves. When we have an advanced society like the one we are living in today, somebody must do this so it all makes sense and comes to some point that concerns everyone. I greatly admire scientists’ work; it’s often slow and cumbersome. I would never have the patience to do it, but I admire people who are wired in such a way. But they need someone like a Graham Hancock to tell their story. Just publishing academic papers isn’t enough. Graham’s background is as a journalist, which is precisely what makes him so good at reporting these historical issues. Without Graham, there is a lot of great work that the rest of the world would never know about. But without the great science that has gone on, there would be nothing for Graham to write about. Yet for me, whenever there is a new book by Graham Hancock, I read it with interest, as I do a local personality of a similar type, Ross Hamilton, or the archaeoastronomer Robert Bauval, and publisher/editor Mark Booth. I’ve read many of their books, understand what they are doing, and think it’s infinitely imperative. Yet we are just scratching the surface with all this stuff, there is a lot that we don’t know, and it is with the effort that they approach their subject that is required to do the work we must all do to understand where we came from, and where it’s all going.

Graham Hancock is cautious not to be lumped in with the Ancient Aliens crowd even though I will say it, there was never a question for me after reading Robert Temple’s book on alien visitors from the Sirius star system over 5000 years ago that something to that effect occurred and is still likely happening today. Graham takes himself as an earnest journalist, so he presents the facts from the cutting edge boldly but specifically. He lets the evidence take things where they do. His quest is the search for an ancient civilization that was technically proficient in much the same way we are today and to understand it. Referring to Temple’s famous book The Sirius Mystery, written in 1977 and is a kind of prequel to the type of work Graham Hancock would dedicate himself to, I always wondered why Egyptians had all these strange gods in their pantheon of consideration. The mythologies of the world, which I have spent a great deal of time studying, never made sense until you start thinking in the way Temple proposed, not as some crackpot theory, but as a viable understanding of the facts that are presented. And if you read widely and over a significant number of subjects, then things start coming together to tell the real story of us all. And it is along those lines that the new Netflix show explores. But Graham’s work gives a lot of validity to the kind of thinking that a show like Ancient Aliens proposes, that alien life visited earth and helped seed many of the cultures we study today. Graham’s quest has been to prove or disprove that notion, and unlike Temple, who looked at the facts and took them where they went, Graham’s work is almost seeking a way to prove that not to be the case. But what he finds keeps taking advanced cultures in human civilization back much older than anybody previously considered. 

What’s important about all this is that it proves a fundamental flaw in human nature as to the conflict that has arisen between the expert community of academics and the reporting of Graham Hancock. Long before Covid came along, we caught the government in multiple conspiracies of controlling the media narrative to protect the way that science gets their funding by arriving at conclusions that governments want, not what the truth tells. The conflict over what the truth tells about human civilization is that we are much older than anybody previously thought and that there were global societies in the distant past, whether we call it Atlantis or something else. It’s not speculative musing anymore; it’s a scientific fact. And if the lies and manipulation by governments will make such a fuss over understanding our history, what would they be willing to do over much more serious issues? And that brings us to the present and how all this study is worth something useful.

But I’m not with these guys 100%, as much as I like them. I love them and their work and could talk to them for years without ever getting tired of it. But they likely wouldn’t like me. Like many people in science, publishing, and investigative sciences, they tend to lean more toward socialism than capitalism. I would argue, which they would dispute, that science was best when capital influences gave treasure hunters rewards for finding unique items. If a lot of discoveries that Graham Hancock writes about now were made today, we wouldn’t know much because of the way that science is funded by socialist governments under socialist economic policies for the benefit of institutionalism itself; we would never learn much because of the institutional controls, the same controls that told us we couldn’t take hydroxychloroquine or Ivermectin to fight Covid. Graham and his colleagues tend to see the Bible as an impediment to appreciating the technologies of the past and the worship of the sun and moon. Those religions I see are always trying to make a comeback and are presently in the climate change movement. And ultimately, that is the push behind how these great writers get published because they throw a bone to the religions of environmentalism that I would never do. I think of the Bible as a rebellion against those ancient stories and Canaan’s conquest as justified for human civilization’s progress. Instead of worshiping continued sacrifice to the forces of nature, mankind stepped boldly into self-assertiveness. When considered against the backdrop of what came before, many tens of thousands of years back, that was quite an achievement. But that doesn’t change the facts, only the perception of those facts. And because of the great work of Graham Hancock, we can have a more intelligent discussion about these matters than we ever have before. And I think that is fantastic!   

 

Rich Hoffman