Graham Hancock

Guh, I dunno. He seems to fall into the usual traps of arguments from ignorance (particularly in this culture of the gaps he posits), the belief that correlation equals causation, general apophenia and attempting to shoehorn modern meaning into all things ancient. Also, someone should tell him to stop citing Indiana Jones... never mind, just found his official YouTube page, I'll tell him. On a side note, why is it that all these people seem to think ancient cultures needed supernatural or extraterrestrial help stacking big rocks?

[What juston said]^^^^^^^^ The core issue with all of these pseudoscientists is that they take correlation associated with mysteries and equate it to causation. It’s a very “Oh, there was an odd cold breeze through here just now and I feel scared, THEREFORE this place must be haunted.” approach to things. (Sorry, that's an oversimplification, but at it's core...) I agree with Hancock that (real) scientists are often unfairly dismissive of things that don't align with their theories and hypotheses, but that doesn't make what he does fully legitimate either. He finds interesting mysteries like the [i]Yonaguni[/i] “steps” and he WANTS them to be amazing beyond what they actually are. I'm sure there ARE human settlements under water off the coasts of our current inhabited shores, but that doesn't make them the cradles of [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Root_race]Madame Blavatsky’s root races[/url] by default. Two of the [i]facts[/i] that he and others like him constantly refer to in order to pique our imaginations are: 1) They knew a lot about the heavens and worshiped ‘entities’ from them. 2) They built pyramids. Well, there was no light pollution from electricity. So when it got dark, they could really SEE the stars in the sky clearly. Presumably they didn't sleep 12 hours a night, so they had many many 100s to 1000s of years to get familiar with the sky, and the literate cultures wrote about it and created calendars that we can still interpret today. The pyramid shape does metaphorically mimic the way human society self-organizes. That's very interesting to me. But, architecturally, it’s really the only way to build really tall, monumental structures with the technology available to them. Just look at [url=http://cahokiamounds.org/]Cahokia[/url]. Same basics. Less ‘mysterious’ to us (=captures our imagination less) because they were illiterate. I've climbed the Pyramid of the Sun at Teotihuacán. [img]http://www.differentworld.com/mexico/areas/mexico-city/mexico-teotihuacan1.jpg[/img] That site can [u]make[/u] almost anyone WANT to believe that something supra-terrestrial was involved in creating it. But, we tend to forget that in terms of intelligence, everyone in at the past 50k years has been, for all practical purposes, identical to us. They just didn't have post-Industrial Revolution technology. So, they did AMAZING (human) things with what they had to work with. That said, someone COULD totally convince me that a civilization like that of the Engineers has touched us. I’ve just not found truly scientific evidence of that. YET. And I’m not counting on Mr. Hancock for it. But, I am going to [url=http://seticon.com/][i]SETIcon[/i][/url] in June. ;•)

[What juston said]^^^^^^^^ The core issue with all of these pseudoscientists is that they take correlation associated with mysteries and equate it to causation. It’s a very “Oh, there was an odd cold breeze through here just now and I feel scared, THEREFORE this place must be haunted.” approach to things. (Sorry, that's an oversimplification, but at it's core...) I agree with Hancock that (real) scientists are often unfairly dismissive of things that don't align with their theories and hypotheses, but that doesn't make what he does fully legitimate either. He finds interesting mysteries like the [i]Yonaguni[/i] “steps” and he WANTS them to be amazing beyond what they actually are. I'm sure there ARE human settlements under water off the coasts of our current inhabited shores, but that doesn't make them the cradles of [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Root_race]Madame Blavatsky’s root races[/url] by default. Two of the [i]facts[/i] that he and others like him constantly refer to in order to pique our imaginations are: 1) They knew a lot about the heavens and worshiped ‘entities’ from them. 2) They built pyramids. Well, there was no light pollution from electricity. So when it got dark, they could really SEE the stars in the sky clearly. Presumably they didn't sleep 12 hours a night, so they had many many 100s to 1000s of years to get familiar with the sky, and the literate cultures wrote about it and created calendars that we can still interpret today. The pyramid shape does metaphorically mimic the way human society self-organizes. That's very interesting to me. But, architecturally, it’s really the only way to build really tall, monumental structures with the technology available to them. Just look at [url=http://cahokiamounds.org/]Cahokia[/url]. Same basics. Less ‘mysterious’ to us (=captures our imagination less) because they were illiterate. I've climbed the Pyramid of the Sun at Teotihuacán. [img]http://www.differentworld.com/mexico/areas/mexico-city/mexico-teotihuacan1.jpg[/img] That site can [u]make[/u] almost anyone WANT to believe that something supra-terrestrial was involved in creating it. But, we tend to forget that in terms of intelligence, everyone in at the past 50k years has been, for all practical purposes, identical to us. They just didn't have post-Industrial Revolution technology. So, they did AMAZING (human) things with what they had to work with. That said, someone COULD totally convince me that a civilization like that of the Engineers has touched us. I’ve just not found truly scientific evidence of that. YET. And I’m not counting on Mr. Hancock for it. But, I am going to [url=http://seticon.com/][i]SETIcon[/i][/url] in June. ;•)

Hancock is clever and tactical enough to NOT state anything concrete, because of strategic marketing reasons. As many other like Wilcock, Greer, Green etc etc he is in it for the money..Däniken still is the marking stone. He is talking for HOURS and HOURS. But in the end his theory is about a ´forgotten´, highly developed origin civilisation that he assumes located in Antarctica.. Atlantis, well..of course that was originally by Charles Hapgood.

@Kane77 You know your stuff, Sir. And you’re totally correct about Hancock [i]et al[/i] being in it for the M$N€¥.

Yeah, those darn mainstream scientists with their "evidence" and "peer review". What are they hiding?!?

I like graham hancock, if you had read anything he wrote, he doesn't really say anything at all about aliens, his early stuff was better, I'm quiet willing to believe there were pre ice age cultures. When it comes to these ancient culture, we truly know very little, consider this, in time we are closer to cleopatra, than cleopatra was to Khufu/Cheops builder of the great pyramid and she knew nothing of Khufu. There is nothing wrong with challenging the established view.