Graham Hancock's "Underworld" covers similar territory. I think there's some truth in it. You'll make up your own mind. The more time passes the more I find that the mainstream is mainly wrong about most things.
NIGHTMERRIES: THE LIGHTER SIDE OF DARKNESS This so-called "book" will chew you up, spit you out, and leave you twitching and frothing on the carpet. More than 60 dark and feculent fictions (read ‘em and weep) copiously illustrated by over 20 grotesque images you wouldn't want to meet in a dark alley.
AWAREWOLF & OTHER CRHYMES AGAINST HUMANITY (Vot could be Verse?) We all hate poetry, right? But we might make an exception for this sick and twisted stuff. This devil's banquet of adults-only offal features more than 50 satanic sonnets, vitriolic verses and odious odes.
MANIC MEMES & OTHER MINDSPACE INVADERS A disturbing repository of quotably quirky quotes, sayings, proverbs, maxims, ponderances, adages and aphorisms. This menagerie holds no fewer than 184 memes from eight meme-species perfectly adapted to their respective environments.
MASTRESS & OTHER TWISTED TAILS, ILLUSTRATED: an unholy corpus of oddities, strangelings, bizarritudes and peculiaritisms
FIENDS & FREAKS Adults-only Tales of Serpents, Dragons, Devils, Lobsters, Anguished Spirits, Gods, Anti-gods and Other Horse-thieves You Wouldn't Want to Meet in a Dark Kosmos: 4th Edition
HAGS TO HAGGIS Whiskey-soaked Tails of War-nags, Witches, Manticores and Escapegoats, Debottlenecking and Desilofication, Illustrated
Klaus Dona's monotone commentary is amusingly offsets the sheer enormity of the implications of these little known artifacts - first I'm hearing about many of them!
HI Antares, yes I got pretty engrossed in it myself.
There are many people out there making videos and writing articles about a particular category of "weird stuff". A lot of it, most of it, strikes me as nonsense.
But...
Without even getting into a debate about what is or could be true, what I find noteworthy is the extent to which certain themes are evident across many of these "reports"/"enquiries", eg:
> global mega-flooding
> sexual relations between humans and entities who resemble humans but on a gigantic scale (="giants")
> stars in the constellation of Orion
> stone artefacts/constructions that would be difficult if not impossible to reproduce with modern technology, or concerning which we have no idea how they could have been produced or put in place.
> beings who introduce humans to technologies seemingly well in advance of the level of technical knowledge in those human societies.
> wars/struggles between an older and a younger generation of what humans refer to as "gods"
Of course, the existence of "common themes" does not prove the themes are based in fact. But it certainly points to the fact that there are a set of ideas, beliefs, memes, that are widespread and amazingly resilient across human cultures: past, present and (speculatively) future.
Which at very least indicates that there are areas of study in which a lot of work remains to be done for anthropologists, psychologists and sociologists.
However, the attitude of mainstream researchers to the above tends to be coloured by concerns about career. It's daunting to face the prospect that most of the knowledge that one has spent a lifetime acquiring is based on fundamental error.
Re the video, I think there are some aspects that are questionable. But there are some aspects, which I've read about elsewhere, that I think warrant further investigation. If not for the simple reason that they do keep "popping up" in popular culture.
E.g. the stone structures tens of metres underwater in the coastal waters of Japan, India and elsewhere. Graham Hancock's "Underworld" has photos of such structures, as does the video. But of course, photos can be doctored. Images can be misinterpreted. People see what they want to see. And people interested in mythology may see ruined cities where other people see a jumble of stone blocks. But it's interesting also that some of the aspects "pop up" across a whole range of different mythologies, eg global mega-flooding, and cultural references, eg Plato's of Atlantis.
Re the flooding, there is some more "mainstream" evidence and acceptance of the possibility. eg the "Flandrian Transgression", as well as some more recent speculation about catastrophic glacial lake meltdown events roughly at the end of the last ice age over the period 15,000 BCE and 11,000 BCE, as a result of movement in continental ice sheets, possibly combined with major tectonic activity.
The overall hypothesis of a global civilisation I don't necessarily buy into -- I don't dismiss it either-- but some of the "artefacts" (or "items that appear in the photographs", if you prefer) I've read about elsewhere, and seen (different) photographs of, and which therefore to me constitute something I need an explanation for. And I'd be satisfied with: the photos are doctored (as long as that were satisfactorily demonstrated).
But just coming back to the artefacts. Take the Piris Reis and other maps, for example. To me a good case has been made by a number of people that the outlines of the continents on the map, especially Antarctica, 1) reflect a geographical knowledge not possessed at the earliest time that the mainstream says the maps could have been produced, and 2) the continental outlines in those maps reflect the sea levels shortly before and during the end of the last ice age, when sea levels were much lower. The implication being that human were sailing and mapping the oceans much earlier than conventional wisdom/knowledge.
So taken together -- myths about global superfloods in many cultures, the underwsater stone structures, the maps and other artefacts, and the mainstream and accepted "inundation mapping" of the continental outlines across the geological eras -- comprise enough to form a reasonably tight hypothesis for further investigation: That "human civilisation" at a basic level may have arisen, and been destroyed, much earlier than is currently thought to be the case.
Decades ago, a couple of writers called objects of this sort ooparts - out-of-place artifacts. As I recall, their claims included these:
(a) A sandal imprint over the footprint of a dinosaur, both fossilised.
(b) A machined, unrusted metal part of unknown use found snug inside a cracked piece of rock.
In this day, compared to the stupendous resources wasted on megalomania, it should be easy to robitically survey any stretch of continental shelf - or even wilderness with ground-penetrating radar - for artifical structures.
On cultural similarities across vast distances:
(a) Some natives of Sarawak, Borneo use feathers in their headresses, and loincloths, - and even dance - very much like the natives of the hotter parts of North America.
(b) The giant stone heads - that feature flat noses, thick lips and square jaws - found in Central America and in Cambodia are pracically interchangeable.
Are mainstream historians avoiding such topics? Like the correspondences between religions, and the inner workings and consequences of capitalism.
OTOH, since the champions of Hinduism - BJP and friends - lost power in India, the "stupendous" news of Dwarka off Gujerat has died down. There seems to be nothing new in Graham Hancocks's video on the subject - certainly no compelling visual evidence.
Hi mgeorge, I drafted a response to your comments, but the blogger application refused to publish as it was too long!
So I'll have to do this in bite size chunks: sorry.
Chunk #1
Graham Hancock's position is exactly as you say: That it would be relatively* easy to perform those surveys but that they haven't yet been done for a variety of reasons, including politics, and the reluctance of people to consider propositions that render their life's work meaningless.
What he says, for example, about the deliberate destruction of Maltese artefacts at the hands of the Maltese archaeological establishment --- because those artefacts threaten the mainstream view about the earliest human occupation of Malta --- has been commented upon by other researchers, including "mainstream" archaeologists.
Of course the existence of pyramidical structures on every continent doesn't prove the existence of an ancient global civilisation. There have been a lot of structures discovered based on the square, and the rectangle, all over the world! All it means is that for various logical and practical reasons, humans have been building rectangular and square rooms and buildings all over the place, for a long time!
Likewise with the other "cultural similarities" you mention. Yes, of course, they prove nothing.
But in my view there are a number of things posing much more specific and explicit issues in terms of how to explain them.
Hi mgeorge, I drafted a response to your comments, but the blogger application refused to publish as it was too long!
So I'll have to do this in bite size chunks: sorry.
Chunk #2
We each access different bodies of "lore", and so could argue the details back and forth for quite some time. Eg, in my understanding we haven't yet figured out ALL of the aspects of the construction of the Pyramids and/or other monumental structures eg the Osireon at Abydos, which is thought to date from pre-dynastic times, and which features the puzzle of how to maneouvre truly gigantic blocks of stone into positions requiring extremely fine tolerances, deep underground, with no space for cranes or similar.
Similarly, with the Piri Reis and other so-called "portolani" maps: I don't know much about cartography, but the maps are said to exhibit sophisticated projection/scaling techniques such as the "plate carrée" projection (whatever that is) and others. But the issue of scaling/projections aside, the question remains how a map / maps in use in 1513 could show Antarctica, when it supposedly hadn't been "discovered" by then.
And more peculiarly, that the outline of the continent is shown not exactly as it is now, but as it would have been towards the end of the last ice age.
And irrespective of the reality of many of the artefacts in the video, it is well-established that the maps exist: they are real, and the background to their discovery is real, and has been confirmed by many mainstream researchers. What people disagree about is the explanation. The debunkers have tried very hard to debunk, but have not put forward any alternate explanation, as far as I'm aware (AFAIA).
[please note there is an invisible AFAIA at the beginning of every sentence in this comment.]
Hi mgeorge, I drafted a response to your comments, but the blogger application refused to publish as it was too long!
So I'll have to do this in bite size chunks: sorry.
Chunk #3
But let's not get bogged down in the details.
The big picture is that there are two main propositions:
1) humans were sailing the oceans before many people think they did or were able to. Or more broadly, that human cultures at a relatively advanced technical and social level existed thousands of years before some people think they did.
2) Extra terrestrial beings exist and have been on the planet.
The two hypotheses are linked --- eg the idea that the aliens may have provided humans with some technological help --- but can stand independently: neither hypothesis requires the other to be true in order itself to be true.
Whether or not one thinks the hypotheses are true or false, the fact is that there is nothing in principle that would rule them out.
Virtually all astronomers today believe it is very likely, approaching certainty, that Life exists elsewhere in the Universe. Interplanetary travel is thought to be difficult and impractical, but not logically impossible or inconceivable.
My basic position is that I don't know for sure whether these things are true or not, but from what I do know, they are in principle possible. And that the jury is still out.
Thanks for your comments.
Cheers, MM.
I think this explains what happened 12,500 years ago and is destined to happen again soon...a global flood caused either by a meteorite impact or a pole shift. The race that lived back when these artefacts were made was evidently annihilated.
Hi Bruce, I haven't made up my mind but I think theories/hypotheses in the video and in Graham Hancock's work and the work of others have yet to be conclusively disproven, and in fact seem to beg for further investigation in the light of new evidence that keeps turning up.
Without question, beyond a shadow of a doubt, there are things that need explaining, foremost of which is: How did the continent of Antarctica come to appear on 15th century maps, when that continent had supposedly not been discovered by then.
I feel intuitively that something big, something global or bigger, is going to happen some time in the near future, between now and say, 5 years, to pluck a figure out of thin air.
As to the nature of the something big, I haven't formed a clear opinion. I think it could be a natural ("supernatural"?) catastrophe, but I think it could also be a worldwide social and/or political and/or psychological and/or spiritual and/or economic and/or technological upheaval that will change everything.
I feel strongly humankind is heading for some kind of almost unprecedented "disconnect"/"singularity" and it will be very interesting to see what comes out on the other side.
Thanks for your comment.
COMMENTS? Come on... gimme your best shot!