Forbidden History: Prehistoric Technologies, Extraterrestrial Intervention, and the Suppressed Origins of Civilization

by J. Douglas Kenyon

  Stone-building technology—beyond our present capacity to duplicate—in Central and South America, as well as Egypt.

  Sophisticated archaeoastronomical alignments at ancient sites all over the world.

  Evidence of comprehensive ancient knowledge of the 25,776-year precession of the equinoxes (unmistakably encoded into ancient mythology and building sites, even though the phenomenon would have taken, at a minimum, many generations of systematic observation to detect, and which conventional scholarship tells us was not discovered until the Greek philosopher Hipparchus in about 150 B.C.E.).

  Water erosion of the Great Sphinx dating it to before the coming of desert conditions to the Giza plateau (as researched by the American scholar John Anthony West and the geologist Robert M. Schoch, Ph.D.).

  Evidence that the monuments of the Giza plateau were built in alignment with the belt of Orion at circa 10,500 B.C.E. (as demonstrated by the Belgian engineer Robert Bauval).

  Unfettered as he is by the constraints under which many so-called specialists operate, Hancock sees himself uniquely qualified to undertake such a far-reaching study. “One of the problems with academics, and particularly academic historians,” he says, “is they have a very narrow focus. And as a result, they are very myopic.”

  Hancock is downright contemptuous of organized Egyptology, which he places in the particularly short-sighted category. “There’s a rigid paradigm of Egyptian history,” he complains, “that seems to function as a kind of filter on knowledge and which stops Egyptologists, as a profession, from being even the remotest bit open to any other possibilities at all.” In Hancock’s view, Egyptologists tend to behave like priests in a very narrow religion, dogmatically and irrationally, if not superstitiously. “A few hundred years ago they would have burned people like me and John West at the stake,” he says, laughing.

  Such illogical zealotry, Hancock fears, stands in the way of the public’s right to know about what could be one of the most significant discoveries ever made in the Great Pyramid. In 1993, the German inventor Rudolph Gantenbrink sent a robot with a television camera up a narrow shaft from the Queen’s Chamber and discovered what appeared to be a door with iron handles. That door, Hancock suspects, might lead to the legendary Hall of Records of the ancient Egyptians. But whatever is behind it, he feels it must be properly investigated.

  So far, though, there has been no official action, at least not a public one. Citing episodes personally witnessed, he protests, “You have Egyptologists saying ‘There is no point in looking to see if there’s anything behind that slab’—they call it a slab, they won’t call it a door—‘because we know there’s not another chamber inside the Great Pyramid.’” The attitude infuriates Hancock: “I wonder how they know that about this six-million-ton monument that has room for three thousand chambers the same size as the King’s Chamber. How do they have the temerity and the nerve to suggest that there’s no point in looking?”

  The tantalizing promise of that door has led Hancock to speculate that the builders may have purposely arranged things to require technology of ultimate explorers. “Nobody could get in there unless he had a certain level of technology,” he says. And he points out that even one hundred years ago, we didn’t have the means to do it. In the last twenty years the technology has been developed and now the shaft has been explored, “and lo and behold, at the end is a door with handles. It’s like an invitation—an invitation to come on in and look inside when you’re ready.”

  Hancock is far from sanguine about official intentions: “If that door ever does get open, probably there will be no public access at all to what happens.” He would like to see an international team present, but suspects that instead “what we’re going to get is a narrow, elite group of Egyptologists who will strictly control information about what happens.” In fact, he thinks it’s possible that they’ve even been in there already. The Queen’s Chamber was suspiciously closed for more than nine months after Gantenbrink made his discovery.

  “The story was given out that they were cleaning the graffiti off the walls, but the graffiti were never cleaned off. I wonder what they were doing in there for those nine months. There’s what really makes me angry, that this narrow group of scholars control knowledge of what is, at the end of the day, the legacy of the whole of mankind.”

  Gantenbrink’s door is not the only beckoning portal on the Giza plateau. Hancock is equally interested in the chamber that John Anthony West and Robert M. Schoch, Ph.D., in the course of investigating the weathering of the Sphinx, detected by seismic methods, beneath the Sphinx’s paws. Either location might prove to be the site of the “Hall of Records.” In both cases, the authorities have resisted all efforts at further investigation.

  Hancock believes the entire Giza site was constructed after the crust of the earth had stabilized following a 30-degree crustal displacement that destroyed most of the high civilization then standing. According to Rand and Rose Flem-Ath’s When the Sky Fell: In Search of Atlantis, upon which Hancock relies, that displacement had moved an entire continent from temperate zones to the South Pole, where it was soon buried under mountains of ice. This, he believes, is the real story of the end of Plato’s Atlantis, but the “A” word is not mentioned until very late in his book. “I see no point in giving a hostile establishment a stick to beat me with,” he says. “It’s purely a matter of tactics.”

  The Giza complex was built, Hancock speculates, as part of an effort to remap and reorient civilization. For that reason he believes the 10,500 B.C.E. date (demonstrated by Bauval) to be especially important. “The pyramids are a part of saying this is where it stopped. That’s why the perfectment, for example, to due north, of the Great Pyramid is extremely interesting, because they obviously would have had a new north at that time.”

  Despite a determination to stick with the hard evidence, Hancock is not uncomfortable with the knowledge that his work is serving to corroborate the claims of many intuitives and mystics. On the contrary, he believes that “the [clairvoyant ability] of human beings is another one of those latent faculties that modern rational science simply refuses to recognize. I think we’re a much more mysterious species than we give ourselves credit for. Our whole cultural conditioning is to deny those elements of intuition and mystery in ourselves. But all the indications are that these are, in fact, vital faculties in human beings, and I suspect that the civilization that was destroyed, although technologically advanced, was much more spiritually advanced than we are today.”

  Such knowledge, he believes, is part of the legacy of the ancients that we must strive to recover. “What comes across again and again,”he says, “particularly from documents like the ancient Egyptian pyramid texts, which I see as containing the legacy of knowledge and ideas from this lost civilization, is a kind of science of immortality—a quest for the immortality of the soul, a feeling that immortality may not be guaranteed to all and everybody simply by being born. It may be something that has to be worked for, something that results from the focused power of the mind.” The real purpose of the pyramids, he suggests, may be to teach us how to achieve immortality. But before we can understand, we must recover from the ancient amnesia.

  Hancock believes we are a species with amnesia. “I think we show all the signs that there’s a traumatic episode in our past that is so horrible that we cannot somehow bring ourselves to recognize it. Just as the victim suffering from amnesia as a result of some terrible episode fears awakening memory of that trauma and tries to avoid it, so we have done collectively.” The amnesia victim is, of course, forced to return to the source of his pain and “if you wish to move forward and continue to develop as an individual, you have to overcome it. You have to confront it, deal with it, see it face-to-face, realize what it means, get over it, and get on with your life,” he says. “That is what society needs to be doing.”

  In the institutional resistance to considering ancient achievement, Hancock sees a subconscious pattern based on fear: “There’s a
huge impulse to deny all of this, because suddenly all the foundations get knocked out from under you and you find yourself swimming loosely in space without any points of reference anymore.” The process needn’t be so threatening, though. “If we can go through that difficult experience and come out on the other side,” he says. “I think we’ll all emerge better from it. I’m more and more convinced that the reason we are so messed up and confused and totally disturbed as a species at the end of the twentieth century is because of this—because we’ve forgotten our past.”

  If it is true that those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it, then there are lessons in our past that can be ignored only at our peril. Clearly written into the mythology of many societies are stories of cataclysmic destruction. Hancock cites the work of Giorgio de Santillana, of M.I.T., an authority on the history of science who is the coauthor, along with Hertha von Dechend, of the book Hamlet’s Mill: An Essay Investigating the Origins of Human Knowledge and Its Transmission through Myth, in which the authors hypothesize that an advanced scientific knowledge was encoded into ancient myth.

  Hancock points out, “Once you accept that mythology may have originated with highly advanced people, then you have to start listening to what the myths are saying.” What the myths are saying, he believes, is that a great cataclysm struck the world and destroyed an advanced civilization and a golden age of mankind. And cataclysm is a recurrent feature in the life of the earth and will return.

  The messages from many ancient sources, including the Bible, point to a recurrence of such a cataclysm in our lifetime. Notwithstanding such views, Hancock insists he is not a prophet of doom. His point is, he says, “We’ve received a legacy of extraordinary knowledge from the past, and the time has come for us to stop dismissing it. Rather, we must recapture that heritage and learn what we can from it, because there is vitally important information in it.”

  The stakes couldn’t be higher. “I’m convinced that we’re locked today in a battle of ideas,” he says. “I think it’s desperately important that the ideas that will lead to a recovery of our memory as a species triumph. And therefore we have to be strong, we have to be eloquent and argue clearly and coherently. We have to see what our opponents are going to do, how they are going to try to get at us, and the dirty tricks that they are going to try and play. We have to fight them on their own ground.”

  15 The Central American Mystery

  What Could Explain the Failure of Mainstream Science to Unravel the Origins of Mesoamerica’s Advanced Ancient Cultures?

  Will Hart

  It has been twenty-three years, yet I remember the morning like it was yesterday. A mist shrouded the jungle above the Temple of the Inscriptions. A series of roaring sounds suddenly split the silence as a band of howler monkeys made their way through the trees. It startled me. I thought the sounds might be those of a jaguar, but the cacophony added to the sense of mystery.

  My head was exploding. By the time I had reached Palenque, we had already visited dozens of archeological sites, from the northernmost part of Mexico down to the Yucatán Peninsula and Quintana Roo. I was steeped in questions and mysteries. Several things had become clear to me: The cultures that built the pyramids and other buildings had been advanced in the arts and sciences. I had seen many beautiful things, as well as mind-tugging enigmas.

  The Olmec civilization surprised me the most. I had read about the Maya and knew of the Aztecs, but I was unprepared for what I found in Villahermosa: large stone heads with Negroid features and stone stelae carved with depictions of curious ambassadors. The figures clearly were not from any Mexican culture.

  These artifacts were more than just a fascinating puzzle; they represented a headache for science. They were an anomaly. Who had carved the heads? Who had created the stelae? Where did they get the models for these heads and figures? These were questions that arose because of the way scientists have reconstructed the human history of Mesoamerica. Africans don’t fit, nor do the cloaked Caucasian figures carved on the stelae. They shouldn’t be there; however, they are surely there.

  Scientists do not claim to have solved this enigma. Anthropologists and archeologists admit they do not know much of anything about Olmec culture. Thus, we don’t know the ethnic group or the language and we know nothing of the Olmecs’ social organization, beliefs, or traditions. No one has any idea why they carved the helmeted heads and then buried them. It doesn’t make a lot of sense. We don’t usually bury monuments (if that is what they are).

  The only records we have are the monuments they left behind, which are impressive. But how do we understand them? Where do they fit into the mosaic of human history? There are no direct clues in Mexico. The Olmecs didn’t leave us any written records. However, we do have a clue.

  The Bible is an extremely important document. It doesn’t matter whether or not you are a believer. It contains a very ancient accounting of human history compiled from a variety of early sources. At least, this is true of the Book of Genesis. But it is not always easy to decode. Do we find any reference in the Bible that might help us solve the Olmec enigma?

  Turning to Genesis, chapter 11, we read: “Now the whole Earth used the same language and the same words.” This indicates that there was a period in man’s history when a global human civilization existed. We learn that during that epoch, men wanted to build a tower: “Come, let us build for ourselves a city, and a tower whose top will reach into heaven; and let us make for ourselves a name; lest we be scattered abroad over the face of the whole Earth.”

  The fact that the Olmec civilization presents science with an anomaly indicates something quite profound: The data does not fit the current model. Scientists can’t change the observable data; it is as hard as data can get. But they could change the model to conform to the data. There is the rub. Anthropologists and archeologists have a huge investment in that model, an intellectual edifice that has been built up over generations.

  Scientists would rather ignore the tough questions and leave the Olmecs alone in the dim mists of forgotten antiquity. That is not a very scientific approach. Where is the pursuit of truth? What happened to the scientific method? It is just not acceptable. Why?

  Some ancient society built the huge mound, dragged the basalt heads about sixty miles from the quarry to the burial site (those heads weighed from five to twenty-five tons), and carved the figures into the stelae. They wouldn’t have gone to all that trouble unless the people the monuments represented were important to them. This is a logical assumption to make and we can only hope that scientists in the distant future will reach the same conclusion when they study Mount Rushmore.

  Since we have the artifacts, we know that there has to be an explanation for who the builders were. As with any other mystery, you search for clues. You begin in the most likely places and work your way down the list: Mexico. The problem is that the Olmecs disappeared from the scene long before Cortez arrived. None of the cultures contemporary with the Aztecs made any references to the Olmecs; they seemed to know nothing about them. And no other Negroid heads have been found in Mesoamerica. Another curious fact is that the developmental period that must have preceded the mound building and head carving is nowhere in evidence.

  The Olmecs just suddenly appeared, then disappeared!

  It took me years of investigation to finally realize that the most probable answer was in the Bible, and ironically, the Bible was just about the last place I had thought to look. Did the Olmecs come from outer space, as some researchers have proposed? Not necessarily. For one thing, there is no evidence to support this theory. Second, the Negroid heads and the people depicted on the stelae are obviously human.

  The idea that there was a global civilization in ancient times does not conform to the current model of science. However, it is corroborated by the reference in the Bible. The problem with the scientific model is that it can’t explain the available data, and that is a serious issue that has many consequences. If the problem was limited to t
he Olmec civilization, we might just let it go. But there are artifacts in Egypt, South America, and other parts of Mexico that also don’t fit the orthodox scheme.

  Scientists have often shown a willful blindness regarding artifacts and developments that they can’t explain using their belief system. Worse, they have either ignored key questions or discredited the facts. Many other hard facts, the remains of lost civilizations, and the cultural records of numerous peoples corroborate the Olmec enigma and the Bible.

  References to a cataclysmic flood occur in 230 different cultures. Mayan history includes the story of how the Maya came from a land to the east that had been destroyed. Herodotus’s History recounted of the tale of lost Atlantis. Accounts such as these may sound like romantic myths spun out of early imaginations; however, when you stand at an ancient site surrounded by strange ruins . . . you begin to wonder if they just might contain more than a grain of truth.

  I climbed the steps of the Temple of Inscriptions and visited the tomb of Pacal. Then I decided to take a long trip down to the Rio Usamacinta, to Bonampak and Yaxchilan. It was one hundred miles of bad dirt road, heavily rutted in places. It finally became so muddy that we mired the van up to the axles. We had nearly reached the destination; Bonampak was a short walk. I visited Bonampak.