Ep 10: A Rational Approach to Ancient Aliens [Pt. 3]: Non-Human Intervention & Cataclysms
Welcome back to The UFO Rabbit Hole Podcast. I’m your host, Kelly Chase.
Today we’re going to take on what will be the third and final installment in our series about the ancient astronaut theory. We’ve covered a lot of ground to get here, and we have a very full episode to get through, so I’m just going to jump right into it —
When we last left off, we’d established that sites like Gobekli Tepe and the Great Sphinx present major challenges to the current narrative of the emergence of human civilization, pushing back the advent of high civilization by thousands of years. And while mainstream academia has thus far been reluctant to embrace this reality, there is more than sufficient evidence to make the case that human high civilization has its origins sometimes before the Younger Dryas, more than 12,000 years ago.
This brings to light the astounding possibility that human civilization was in some way seeded, or at the very least guided, by a highly advanced non-human intelligence in our distant past.
But what other evidence is there to support this, admittedly, audacious claim?
The Evidence
Sunken City Of Cuba

In my mind, one of the most flabbergasting archeological discoveries of our times is one that has gotten very little attention, and has been almost entirely dismissed by mainstream academics.
In 2001, Pauline Zalitzki, a marine engineer, and her husband Paul Weinzweig, owners of a Canadian company called Advanced Digital Communications (or ADC), were working on a survey mission in partnership with the Cuban government off eastern the tip of Cuba. The area is known to have been the site of several treasure-laden shipwrecks, and ADC was one of a handful of agencies that was working with Fidel Castro’s government in an attempt to locate these riches.
The team was using advanced sonar equipment to scan a 2 square kilometer area of the sea floor when they noticed a series of symmetrical and geometric stone structures resembling an urban complex. There, lurking below the waters, were symmetrical pyramids, the foundations of vast structures, and wide, grid-like boulevards.
In my mind at least, the man made nature of these structures is undeniable and evocative of the complexes built by the Myans and the Aztecs, but as always, I don’t think you should take my word for it. Seriously. Go look at the pictures for yourself right now and decide for yourself. You can find them in the full episode brief that is linked in the description.
So unless you’re driving, go look at them right now. If you’re driving I’m going to need you to keep your eyes on the road and your hands at ten and two. You can see them later.

Once you’ve seen the pictures, I think you’ll see what I mean. It looks like the ruins of a city. And as far as I could tell in my research, no one has so much as ventured a guess as to how these structures could be the result of natural geological processes.
In July 2001, they returned to the site with geologist Manuel Iturralde, senior researcher of Cuba’s Natural History Museum, this time equipped with a Remotely Operated Vehicle to examine and film the structures. The cameras revealed even more astonishing evidence including large, perfectly cut stones of granite measuring 8 ft by 10 ft stacked on top of each other.
Despite these findings, Iturralde — who has studied countless underwater formations — was reluctant to draw any conclusions, saying only, “These are extremely peculiar structures, and they have captured our imagination. But if I had to explain this geologically, I would have a hard time.”
So why the reluctance to call this submerged city what it so clearly is?
The answer is that, according to the mainstream narrative of human history, it shouldn’t be there. Because the last time that particular area was above water was 50,000 years ago — approximately 40,000 years before the end of the last Ice Age and the building of Gobekli Tepe. Which, as you’ll recall, is itself a megalithic structure that has been definitively dated to 7000 years before humans were supposed to have been advanced enough to build something of that scale.

At this point, it’s glaringly obvious that we don’t just have the history of human civilization wrong, but we’ve undershot its true age by literally thousands, if not tens of thousands of years. And yet, mainstream academia simply refuses to engage with this reality, dismissing and discrediting any archeological find that contradicts their dogma.
In the case of the underwater city off the coast of Cuba, the response of mainstream academia has been to rewrite history. After initially refusing to acknowledge the site because it’s existence was impossible, it seems that some academics have found a workaround. It has now been accepted by some that the ruins are legitimate, but that they are 6,000 years old, not 50,000 years old.
And how did they come to this date?
On the coast near the site is another megalithic structure that was first excavated in 1966 which is believed to be 6000 years old, therefore, the underwater city must also be 6000 years old. However, thus far no explanation has been given as to how the city could have been built on a site that was underwater at the time it was alleged to have been built.
To be clear, I’m not saying that the city is definitely 50,000 years old. There is still a lot of work to do before anyone could say that conclusively. However, I don’t know how anyone could argue that general proximity is a better method of dating than, say, determining the last time that the site wasn’t underwater. Especially when your entire basis for choosing that younger date is to make it align to your preconceived notions of what must or must not be true.
At any rate, at least this commitment to cognitive dissonance has meant that the site has begun to be explored. And through these explorations they’ve found structures within the complex as long as 400 meters wide and as much as 40 meters tall. And an anthropologist affiliated with the Cuban Academy of Sciences has said that still photos taken from the videotape clearly show “symbols and inscriptions”, though the language has not yet been identified.
Puma Punku

Another archeological anomaly that contradicts the mainstream narrative of human history is Puma Punku in Bolivia.
High in the Andes Mountains, in the Altiplano Desert, just southeast of Lake Titicaca, in what is undoubtedly one of the most rugged and desolate places on Earth, lies the ruins of Tiwanaku. Discovered by westerners in 1549 by Pedro Sierra De Leone while looking for the capital of the Incan Empire, Tiwanaku is a massive ancient temple complex.

Within the complex is a large, walled courtyard with carved faces scattered intermittently between the other stones. Interestingly, many of these faces appear to look like humans from different cultures around the world, although supposedly such ancient peoples shouldn’t have had any way to be exposed to cultures on the other side of the ocean. And stranger still, some of the faces look humanoid, but still far from human, including one face that looks very much like a gray alien.


And listen, Tiwanaku is cool and all, but what we’re really here for is its mysterious neighbor lying just a half of a mile away — Puma Punku.
Puma Punku means “Gateway of the Puma”, a name given to it by the local Aymara people who found artifacts depicting warriors wearing masks made out of puma skulls at the site.
So let’s start with what’s strange about Puma Punka, because the answer is “basically everything.” (First of all…)
1. The site has been destroyed — we’re just not sure how.

Puma Punka looks like the ruins of what was once perhaps a large temple complex. What remains are scattered stone blocks and monoliths made from red sandstone and andesite. And these ruins truly are ruined. Despite the fact that the largest of these stones weigh up to nearly 150 tons, they are scattered about like a Lego city that just got Gozilla-ed by a toddler.
The site was further corrupted by a misguided and ultimately unsuccessful attempt in 2004 to reassemble the site, so some of the blocks have been haphazardly moved around, making it more difficult to piece together what used to go where.
And it’s hard to imagine what kind of force could have strewn these megaliths about like they were children’s toys. Due to evidence that some of the stones may have at one time been entirely covered in mud, it’s been speculated that perhaps a massive and catastrophic flood could have saturated the ground causing the stone foundations to become unstable before a deluge consumed it, scattering the blocks. But at 12,000 feet above sea level that scenario seems unlikely.
But that’s not all that’s strange about the ruins of Puma Punku. There’s also the fact that
2. We don’t know how the builders of Puma Punku got the stones to this site.
Based on detailed petrographic and chemical analyses of samples from individual stones and known quarry sites, archaeologists have determined that the red sandstone blocks at the site were transported up a steep incline from a quarry near Lake Titicaca roughly 10 km (5or 6.2 miles) away. And if that wasn’t daunting enough, the andesite blocks were determined to have come from quarries within the Copacabana Peninsula about 90 km (or 56 miles) away.
Archeologists still don’t have a definite answer on how this was done.
However, I will note that I’m always a little less swayed by the arguments that megalithic blocks were too big to be moved great distances. It’s interesting, for sure. And I would say that the size and the distance of the blocks being moved could speak to the advancement and wealth of that culture because the resources needed to undertake such a thing would be incredible.
However, there are two reasons that I hesitate to assume an advanced technological answer to explain megaliths being moved over large distances:
The first is that there have been various studies and experiments that have shown that there are some pretty ingenious ways of moving these megaliths, albeit very slowly, including using log rollers and other basic materials that would have been available — and we can’t rule out that ancient people were able to figure it out. And the second is that I think we tend to underestimate what can be accomplished by a civilization that is willing to throw endless amounts of human suffering at a problem.
So while it’s certainly an interesting data point, I’m not convinced that it can be used as decisive proof of the use of advanced technology or the possession of special knowledge.
However, that point may be irrelevant, because
3. The stonework at Puma Punka shows evidence of having been done by advanced tools.

The stonework at Puma Punku is bananas. It fucks me up. I seriously don’t even know how else to say it.
Red sandstone and andesite are both very hard kinds of rock. To put that into context, we use a scale called the mohs scale to measure the hardness of different minerals on a scale from 1-to-10, with 1 being the softest and 10 being the hardest. Diamonds are a 10 on the mohs scale. Granite is a 6. By comparison, red sandstone is a 6 or 7 and andesite is a 7.
Given the hardness of these stones, the stone work at Puma Punk defies any traditional explanation. The stones were cut in such a precise way that they fit perfectly together, locking into place without the use of mortar. Not even a razor blade can slide between the rocks. To accomplish this would not just require astounding technical precision and finesse, but an understanding of descriptive geometry.

The architectural historians Jean-Pierre and Stella Nair who conducted the first professional field study on the stones of Puma Punku concluded about these stones that:
[…] to obtain the smooth finishes, the perfectly planar faces and exact interior and exterior right angles on the finely dressed stones, they resorted to techniques unknown to the Incas and to us at this time. […] The sharp and precise 90° interior angles observed on various decorative motifs most likely were not made with hammerstones. No matter how fine the hammerstone’s point, it could never produce the crisp right interior angles seen on Tiahuanaco stonework. Comparable cuts in Inca masonry all have rounded interior angles typical of the pounding technique […]. The construction tools of the Tiahuanacans, with perhaps the possible exception of hammerstones, remain essentially unknown and have yet to be discovered.[12]
And those tools remain undiscovered until this day.
Even more astounding is the fact that many of these blocks are finished to ‘machine’ quality and with tiny holes drilled to perfection. And these holes don’t look like decoration, but like utilitarian means of construction and joining these pieces together. The machined appearance of these stones is all the more compelling because to create stonework with a similar level of precision out of the same materials today, we’d need to use advanced equipment like lasers and diamond-edged circular saws.

Further adding to the mystery is that many of these stones aren’t just precisely cut into complex, multi-faceted blocks, but they are done so precisely as to be completely identical, allowing one block to be perfectly interchanged with another, almost like the pre-fabricated building materials we use today.
And interchangeability of parts, as seen in the blocks of Puma Punku, is something that on its own is suggestive of a more advanced society. While there are a few isolated examples of interchangeable parts being used in the ancient past (almost always in weapons to make warring easier — go figure), for the most part, interchangeable parts weren’t something that was commonly used before the early 1800s.

Even stranger is that..
4. Many of the stones are magnetized.
Apparently if you hold a compass to the stones the needle will spin and spin. Why would this be? What would cause this? Could it have been some result of the construction process, or the result of a natural phenomenon? We simply don’t know.
And what’s extra frustrating is that we will likely never know how the builders of Puma Punku did it, because we don’t even know who they are for sure.
5. No one knows who built it.
While Puma Punku was an important site for the Incan people, they didn’t build it. Mainstream archeologists have offered several different potential dates for the creation of the site, with the most commonly accepted date being around 500 A.D., which predates the Incan empire by more than half a millenia. When the earlier Spanish conquistadors asked the Incan ruler who built Puma Punku they claimed that it had been built by the gods in only one night.
6. We don’t know how old it is — but there is evidence that its much older than believed.
And while mainstream archeologists insist that the site is no more than 1500 or so years old, there are many who question this date. Not the least of which is the local Aymara people, whose local elders and historians who claim that the site is 10 times older than that, having been built 15,000 years ago — or 3000 years before the end of the last ice age.
Austrian archaeologist Arthur Posnansky who was one of the first archeologists to study Puma Punku and who spent decades at the site also advocated for the date of 15,000 years ago citing various astrological alignments that would have tied it to that time.
And while I find the evidence that Puma Punku pre-dates the ice age to be compelling, it doesn’t need to be true for Puma Punku to be unexplainable within the current narrative. Whether it was 1500 years ago or 15,000 years ago, humans simply didn’t have the tools or the knowledge to create megaliths of such complexity and precision.
So who built it and how are the questions that really matter. The when is just an interesting detail.
Baalbek

On the other side of the world, in Baalbek, Lebanon lies another archeological site that defies explanation.
We don’t know for sure who ordered the construction of the Temple of Jupiter at Baalbek, nor do we know exactly when it was built. However, most archaeologists date it to either the first century B.C. or the first century A.D. The style of the temple with its towering columns and its dedication to the Roman god Jupiter, make it undoubtedly a Roman construction though, hazy though its origins may be.
However, what’s interesting about Baalbek isn’t so much the Temple of Jupiter, but the massive stone platform on which it sits. And although mainstream archeologists date this platform to first century B.C., more or less aligning with the building of the Temple of Jupiter, I’d argue that it’s pretty obvious that is not accurate.
First of all, the foundation of the temple itself appears to have been built on the foundation of an older temple. And both weathering and logic would suggest that the massive stone platform that it sits upon must be even older than that.
But once again, whether you date this structure to the 1st century B.C. or the 10th century B.C., it doesn’t matter — because at either time humans should not have had the ability to build it.



Now, I’ve already mentioned that I tend to not find the “rock too big, can’t lift” argument to be very compelling. But the megaliths at Baalbek are a clear exception. Integrated into the back wall of this massive platform are three of the biggest megaliths known to humankind. Each of these stones weighs at least 800 tons. To put that into perspective, that is the same weight as 5 average adult blue whales. It’s insane.
And not only were these monstrous megaliths quarried and moved to the site, but they were then somehow lifted 20 feet in the air to rest in their current positions. As with all the sites I’ll mention today, you can find pictures of these stones in the episode brief link in the episode description — and all you really need to do is look at them to understand that something we don’t understand happened at Baalbek.
But those megaliths aren’t even the largest found in the area. Three megaliths, conventionally known as the “Stone of the Pregnant Woman” , the “Stone of the South”, and the “Forgotten Stone”, lie nearby and are the largest stones ever to have been quarried. At a staggering 1000, 1200, and 1600 tons respectively, the size of these megaliths boggles the mind.
Now granted, the location of these three massive stones gives every indication that they were simply too big. All 3 of them still lie in the quarry where they were cut, and there they shall likely remain for millions of years. Even now our ability to move them would be extremely limited and would require an insane amount of time and resources.
The Most Impressive Parts Of Megalithic Structures Are Usually The Oldest Parts
And what we see at Baalbek is a perfect example of something very surprising that we see a lot with megalithic structures, which is that the oldest parts of the construction are by far the most advanced.
We see it at Gobekli Tepe where the oldest parts of the construction are the most sophisticated. We see it at Tiwanaku where Puma Punku, though agreed to be the oldest construction on the site, shows signs of advanced technology far beyond what would have been needed to build the more recent sites.
And there are particularly stunning examples of this in Peru.
The ruins of Coricancha — which means, The Golden Temple — can be found in Cusco, Peru. In many places, all that remains of this ancient Incan holy site is its massive megalithic foundation, upon which a Spanish church was built in the 16th century — because colonizers.


However, as beautiful as this 16th century church is, it looks somehow sad and small on top of the foundation of Coricancha. The precision with which the megaliths are cut and fitted together, including a perfectly curved retaining wall is enough to take your breath away. Once again, I’d recommend that you look at the pictures to get the full impact.
We can see something similar at the Peruvian site of Machu Picchu. The oldest and most foundational parts of the site, once again, show the most advanced knowledge and the largest megaliths, with subsequent rounds of building being done on top with much smaller stones and far less precision. This has caused some to suggest that Machu Picchu may not have been originally built by the Incan people, but rather repurposed and rebuilt by them on a far more ancient site.


And whether or not that is the case, it defies logic that the Incan people would start out with such a high-level ability to create megalithic structures of this scale and precision, only to be rebuilding the walls a few hundred years later with much smaller blocks of stone.
Much like Gobekli Tepe, we’re again and again confronted with an odd situation. An advanced civilization of megalithic builders pops out of obscurity with little to no evidence of ramp up time, does their most breathtaking and awe-inspiring work, before the civilization begins a long, slow decline, each new wave of building being only a shadow of what came before.
This doesn’t make sense. We know that it doesn’t make sense.
What Does It Mean?
So what does this all mean? What conclusions are we to draw from these anomalous archeological sites that can be found around the world?
The examples that we’ve explored are just a handful of examples, but they are representative of the four main problems that these sites present.
The first, is that many of them — like Gobekli Tepe in Turkey, the Sphinx in Egypt, and the sunken underwater city off the coast of Cuba — are simply way too old. They show a level of sophistication — not just in construction and engineering, but in art, geometry, and astronomy — that are thousands, if not tens of thousands, of years ahead of their time.
The second, is that some sites, like Puma Punku in Bolivia, show clear evidence of machining and perhaps even prefabrication. We simply have no way to explain how ancient peoples could have achieved with primitive tools what it would take advanced, laser guided and diamond tipped tools to accomplish now.

The third, is that some of these sites have megaliths that are far too big to have plausibly been moved without some form of advanced technology. As I’ve said, I generally don’t find arguments about megaliths being too large for ancient peoples to have quarried and moved to be particularly compelling. If you don’t care how long it takes and you don’t care how many people die, humans can do some pretty unbelievable things.
However, there are exceptions. The enormous megaliths of Baalbek are one example, but there are others of nearly equally gargantuan proportions in Egypt and Peru. There’s even a site in Southern Siberia called Gornaya Shoria that — if it can be proven that they are, in fact, man made and not a naturally occurring geological structure — has megaliths that outweigh even the monsters found at Baalbek. I’m less convinced on that one, but the photos are in the episode brief so you can check them out for yourself.
And finally, we have the mystery that we see all over the world — from Gobekli Tepe to Egypt and from Baalbek to Machu Picchu — where the earliest megalithic structures that a culture creates seems to be, by far, its most advanced and sophisticated with subsequent builds and restorations never coming close to rivaling that of the first builders. Again and again with megaliths we see advanced high culture seemingly appearing out of nowhere at the very height of its power and sophistication with little evidence of a ramp up period.
So who were they?
Two Other Complicating Factors
Answering that question only gets more complicated when we layer on two more puzzling observations:
The first is that, paradoxically…
These pockets of civilization were both relatively isolated and anomalous and spread all over the planet.
Regardless of what any of the archeological evidence surrounding these megalithic sites may suggest, there are still certain facts that we can’t deny. And the most glaring of these is that prior to 6000 years ago — and certainly prior to the last Ice Age over 12,000 years ago — most humans were still hunter gatherers. We have found their camps, their tools, their clothes, and their art everywhere on the planet where evidence of homo sapiens can be found.

And this only makes these megalithic sites that hint at advanced civilization in our distant past more mysterious. It raises the startling possibility that while most of humanity were still living a lifestyle that was akin to that of our early hominin ancestors, there existed pockets of civilization where humans had attained a dazzling level of understanding of engineering, geometry, astronomy, and more that rivaled — and in some cases may have exceeded — our modern understanding.
In some ways, this is almost the inverse of what we see on Earth today. Today most of the world is at least somewhat modernized. 86% of people worldwide can read and write, and an almost identical proportion have access to electricity. However, there are estimated to be between 100 – 200 uncontacted tribes on the planet who have had little to no interaction with the modern world and who are still essentially living the way that our ancestors did hundreds and even thousands of years ago.
And while it can initially be shocking to realize that there can be so much variability in how humans living at the same time might be living their lives, the situation in which we find ourselves in our modern world at least makes some level of intuitive sense. We understand how it could be that our modern lifestyle hasn’t reached people living in remote places. And when we look at the history of colonialism, it makes sense that there are tribes in places like the Amazon who may have gone far out of their way to avoid interacting with outsiders with strange new weapons and diseases.
But looking into our distant past, it’s frankly confounding that such a sophisticated level of high civilization could be achieved by a few while the vast majority of humans were still living as hunter-gatherers. What accounts for this difference? How did they get so far ahead? What happened to them that was so fundamentally different than what happened to everyone else to account for such a massive disparity?
And this mystery only deepens further when we recognize that this level of advanced civilization didn’t just appear in one corner or region of the world — but in pockets scattered across nearly every continent. And, for reasons that we still don’t understand, in each of these far flung cultures the attainment of this knowledge seems to coincide almost exactly with the building of megaliths.
And as if things weren’t confusing enough, we have one added layer of nuance and complication which is that
These civilizations show evidence of advanced technology that does not fit within our known paradigm.

As we discussed previously in part one of this series, if humans were to entirely disappear tomorrow there would be surprisingly little left to tell the tale of our modern lives. Our cities and skyscrapers, while they look impressive, are not built to last. In fact, it would take less than a thousand years after the disappearance of humans for all of New York City to become a pristine forest again.
And because we’ve only been at this relative level of advancement for around 100 years — barely a blip in terms of the dizzying scope of geological time — before long, it would be almost impossible to find anything of our way of life in the archeological record. It’s surprisingly easy for an entire civilization, even one as advanced and global as our own, to disappear without a trace.
But there is one form of evidence that we will leave behind that will leave an indelible mark on the planet for hundreds of millions of years, and that is our use of plastics.
Plastic never biodegrades, which means that every single piece of plastic that has ever been created — unless it got shot up into space at some point — is still here on the planet. And it will be. Forever. The Empire state building may vanish without a trace in a matter of centuries, but your tooth brush and the grocery bag you use when you clean out your cat’s litter box could be discovered virtually intact by someone millions of years in the future.
We use around 100 million tons of plastic every year, at least 10% of which ends up in the ocean. This means that our current time period will be marked forever in the geologic record with a layer that is basically speckled with plastic, even in the very deepest parts of our oceans.
It’s already happening. In Hawaii they recently identified a new kind of rock that has been washing up the shores called a plastiglomerate, which is essentially rock that has become fused with melted plastic.

So if these civilizations were in many ways as advanced as we are, and if they perhaps persisted for thousands of years at a time, why don’t we see something similar in the geologic record?
It’s certainly difficult to imagine our modern lives without plastics. Beyond just convenience products, plastics play a critical role in healthcare, safe food storage and packaging, complex scientific equipment, the space program, and more.
But what’s clear is that, whatever level of advancement may have been achieved by our ancestors in the distant past, it apparently lacked many of the trappings of our modern lives. And if their abilities and tools did truly reach the level of what we would call “technology”, as is suggested by megalithic sites like Puma Punku and others, it was likely of a fundamentally different kind than what we have today.
These civilizations didn’t use plastics, and they almost certainly didn’t use fossil fuels. This begs the question of how their technology differed from our own, and it offers us a tantalizing hint at a potential technological paradigm that may have once existed that was perhaps in better harmony with the environment than the one we currently occupy.
The Possibilities
So as we can see, each piece of this puzzle is baffling in its own right, and when we put it all together the path to the truth becomes even more labyrinthian. So what could explain all of this bizarre evidence of advanced civilization in our distant past?
If we’re willing to put aside the established narrative of human civilization as told by mainstream academia and consider the evidence with an open mind, a surprising narrative begins to emerge.
First of all, it seems clear that
Human Civilization is far more ancient than we thought.

At this point, I don’t think that’s even up for debate anymore, though mainstream academia may not yet be ready to accept it. As we discussed in Part 2, Gobekli Tepe alone presents enough evidence to prove that we’ve underestimated the dawn of human civilization by, at minimum, 7000 years. And the sunken city in Cuba hints that we may still be off by tens of thousands years more.
This revelation is astonishing on its own, but it unfortunately creates more questions than answers.
The reality is that the further we push back the start of human civilization, the more unlikely it becomes that any group of people could have risen to that level of sophistication on their own. It just doesn’t make sense.
After all, as we discussed in the last episode, the oldest sections of Gobekli Tepe were built approximately 12,000 years ago, near the end of the last Ice Age, also known as the Younger Dryas. And, as with many other megalithic structures, the oldest sections are the most sophisticated. Gobekli Tepe also clearly shows evidence that its builders had a complex understanding of engineering, mathematics, geometry, and astronomy. That kind of knowledge doesn’t just come out of nowhere and it should have taken thousands of years to achieve that level of mastery.
The Younger Dryas, which lasted around 1300 years, was a horribly tumultuous time for the planet with over 82% of mammals over 40 kg dying off in North America and suffering similarly massive losses elsewhere around the globe. It seems unlikely humans could have made those sorts of advancements during such a chaotic and dangerous time period, which strongly suggests that the origins of high civilization lie somewhere before the Younger Dryas.
But how could this possibly be?
This suggests that while the vast majority of our early human ancestors were still living in caves and hunting mammoths with spears, that someone, somewhere was inventing geometry and astronomy and written language. And honestly, I can understand why mainstream academia has been so resistant to embracing this reality, because it simply doesn’t make sense. It’s not possible.
Unless…
Unless we are willing to admit the possibility that we may have been gifted this knowledge and that early human civilization may have been intentionally seeded.
But by whom?
I’m not saying it was aliens, but…
It could have been aliens.

And, as I’m sure you’ve already guessed, when I say “aliens” I’m speaking broadly about a non-human or alien intelligence that could have a number of potential origins whether it be extraterrestrial, ultraterrestrial, interdimensional, or temporal. Where they came from and who they were is a matter of debate, but there seems to be no way around the fact that at some point in the distant past humans were helped by a very advanced and intelligent someone.
It would explain the sudden emergence of mathematics, science, and high civilization long before such things ought to have been possible.
It would explain how these advanced megalithic civilizations seem to continually spring out of nothingness and into the height of their power only to slowly degrade over time, each new iteration a copy of a copy of a copy until its original glory is lost.
It would explain the seemingly impossible megalithic sites like Puma Punku where the stones are cut too perfectly and Baalbek where the stones are far too big.
It could even explain an advanced technological paradigm that is fundamentally different than the one in which we currently live, and which seemed to exist without the vast networks of infrastructure and resources that are required to support technology in our modern world.
And, perhaps most tellingly, it would explain the eerily similar myths, legends, and religious texts from around the world — dating back to the oldest records that we have — that tell the tale of powerful beings who came down from the sky and gifted humans with wisdom and built mighty civilizations that they ruled over for thousands of years.
And might it also explain that startling claim made by Tom Delonge about the idea that he believed was responsible for not just gaining his advisors attention, but gaining entrance into their shadowy world? If you’ll recall, Delonge said multiple times in those early and unguarded 2016-2017 interviews that while it was his pitch that got him in the door with his advisors, it was something else that made them take him seriously — and that was the idea that the UFO phenomenon represents multiple “gods with a little g” who war with each other, and who have, for millennia, controlled and influenced humanity.
Could all of this be true? And if, as Tom Delonge has said, there are those within our government who know about this, take it very seriously, and who recognize that it is related to the UFO phenomenon, what does that mean about — you know…everything? Reality? Like seriously, what the fuck?
And, if I’m being honest, this is where I start to feel like I’m losing it. Because I keep retracing my steps, again and again, trying to figure out where I went wrong to end up with these same conclusions that seem to be somehow both entirely obvious and entirely impossible.
And I’m putting all of this out there knowing that I could be wrong. If you pull the wrong brick out of this game of Reality Jenga, it would all come crashing down. I accept that, and I’m genuinely at peace with it.
But I will say this —
In many ways the path we’re taking down the rabbit hole on this podcast mirrors the path that I took. And there’s a reason that we’ve ended up spending so much time on this topic, and why it’s taken me over two and a half hours into a series on ancient aliens to get to the point where I’m ready to say that there is significant evidence of intervention by an advanced non-human intelligence in humanity’s distant past.
Because this is where I started, and when I first pursued this line of questioning, I fully expected to debunk it — and easily.
If you go looking for literature and research on UFOs, you’ll immediately find that there isn’t much to find. And sorting through and weighing the ultimate credibility of what is there is daunting, if not downright impossible. This topic is shrouded in secrecy and insulated by stigma to the point that there is no bedrock of consensus truth, there is no clearly unimpeachable source material, there’s not so much as a sticker saying “this end up” slapped on the side of ufology.
But history — now that was something we had a handle on. And if there truly was a non-human intelligence of some kind that was interfering in human affairs, surely there would be evidence. And I’m not just talking about myths and legends. I’m not even talking about megalithic stones and whether or not they were too big to lift. All of that can be refuted and none of that gives enough of a foundation of certainty from which we can begin to build.
What I’m talking about is clear evidence that the path of human history has been in some way diverted or guided in ways we can’t explain by something bigger than ourselves.
And no one was more surprised than me when I found exactly that. And I’d argue that the evidence is overwhelming.
Who Is Inside The UFOs?

If we accept that human civilization emerged as the result of intervention by a non-human intelligence in the distant past, and that this event is related in some significant way to the UFO phenomenon, this creates an interesting question about the UFO phenomenon as we experience it today, which is — who is inside the UFOs?
Well the most obvious answer would be that it’s the Others — whoever they are. Perhaps they are some version of the gods of old: more-or-less immortal beings with technology so advanced that — even to our modern eyes — it looks more like magic than science.
And, in episodes 3, 4, 5, we talked through several different possibilities for who exactly they might be and where they might have come from.
But with the revelation that human civilization could be thousands, if not tens of thousands, years older than we previously thought, and with so much evidence pointing to the startling fact that some of our ancient ancestors may have at least been exposed to advanced technology which defies our current understanding, it suggests a profound new possibility:
What if some of the UFOs that are being reported in our skies and moving through our oceans belong to humans? Could what we’re seeing be explained by some isolated offshoot of humanity that somehow kept the flame of civilization alive across the millenia, and that in so doing, got a technological head start on us of ten thousand years or more?
It’s a fascinating possibility.
Why Did Ancient Humans Create Megaliths?

But there’s one mystery, more than any other, that has turned me inside out and kept me up, late into the night until dawn streaks the ceiling. In my mind, the question that matters isn’t who built the megaliths or even how they accomplished it. The only question that matters, is why?
Why would people who were only recently hunter-gathers, or who perhaps still were hunter-gatherers, do this?
The scale of these sites and the megaliths that our ancestors cut to raise them is enough to take our breath away — even now. Their symmetry and perfection make us feel small. In their presence we speak in hushed tones.
How did people who spent all of their lives in the natural world, a place — that while full of grandeur and unspeakable beauty — is utterly devoid of the right angles, the precision, and the elegant geometry made manifest in these megalithic temples.
And we assume them to be temples or sacred religious sites even when we have no other evidence for calling them such because in them we see what can only be called worship. Megaliths are worshipful. We know that in our bones.
What did our ancestors see? What did they believe to be true? What made them strive to defy the very limits of not just human ability, but of our capacity to recognize and create both divine order and transcendent beauty?
And where did that capacity come from? When did it arise and how? And what sparked that ember of knowledge? And what fanned that flame to cause the fever of megalithic building that seemed to consume our ancestors in every far-flung corner of the globe?
Did the stars call to them? Did gods walk among them?
Or perhaps they raised the megaliths because they knew something that those who build skyscrapers have forgotten — that everything is temporary, that the full sweep of human history is but a mote floating in the infinite cosmic wind, that mighty civilizations can rise and fall leaving little more than a whisper of their greatness — and that, in the end, only the mighty megaliths remain.
If They Existed, What Happened To Them?

Hidden at the center of this story about the dawn of human civilization is another near-forgotten chapter of our history — a devastating global cataclysm in our distant past that nearly extinguished the light of human civilization forever.
But what happened 12,000 years ago? And could it happen again?
There are a few different theories, none of which is perfect, but all of which are super interesting. So what are they?
The Younger Dryas And The Ice Ages
As we’ve discussed, the Younger Dryas refers to the last mini-ice age that occurred roughly between 12,900 and 11,600 years ago. There are lots of common misconceptions about ice ages, from what they are to how long they last, so it’s worth taking a minute to understand exactly what we mean when we say “ice age”.
We tend to think of an ice age as one event that lasts for a few thousand years and then ends, but an ice age is actually part of a much longer cycle.
An ice age is a long interval of time, usually spanning millions to tens of millions of years, when global temperatures are relatively cold and large areas of the Earth are covered by continental ice sheets and alpine glaciers. However, within an ice age are multiple shorter-term periods of warmer temperatures when glaciers retreat (called interglacial cycles) and periods of colder temperatures when glaciers advance (called glacial cycles).
At least five major ice ages have occurred throughout Earth’s history. The first was over 2 billion years ago. The most recent one began approximately 3 million years ago, and technically, it continues to this day. What we are experiencing now is one of the interglacial cycles within the larger cycle of the ice age.
This interglacial period began about 11,000 years ago with the end of the Younger Dryas. Before that, the last period of glaciation, which is often informally called the “Ice Age,” peaked about 20,000 years ago. As for when the next one will be — we’re not actually sure.

We know that ice ages are triggered by a variety of complex geologic and environmental factors including changes in oceanic and atmospheric circulation patterns, varying concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, and even volcanic eruptions. We suspect that the current ice age began when the land bridge between North and South America (AKA the Isthmus of Panama) formed, ending the exchange of tropical water between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, which significantly altered ocean currents.
But, with climate change escalating at an increasing and unprecedented rate, it’s hard to tell what impact this may have on the coming glacial cycles, making it difficult to impossible for scientists to determine when the next one might occur.
What Caused The Younger Dryas
However, none of this really helps us understand the Younger Dryas. Whatever caused the Younger Dryas, it wasn’t as simple as changing ocean currents, and the devastation that ensued is evidence of something far more profound.
As you’ll recall from the previous episode, at the onset of the Younger Dryas there was a massive, worldwide extinction of large mammals weighing over 40 kg (or 88 pounds). It is estimated that 82% of these animals disappeared in North America, 74% in South America, 71% in Australasia, 59% in Europe, 52% in Asia, and 16% in Sub-Saharan Africa. This mass extinction event marked the demise of the mammoths, as well as the disappearance of horses in North America, and other species, including bison, deer, and moose suffered massive population losses.
This kind of near-global extinction event is not consistent with the simple onset of an ice age, which tends to occur gradually — allowing animals to migrate and generally limiting population loss to species and areas within the glacial regions. And yet, this is the story that is still embraced by most mainstream academics — that the Younger Dryas was caused by changes in ocean currents.

So what happened?
One of the most popular and well-supported theories is that there was some sort of massive cataclysm, a black swan event of some kind that rapidly and drastically changed the conditions on the planet leading to a massive die-off of terrestrial mammals — but there is considerable disagreement about what this might have been.
So let’s talk about some of the most popular theories. The first is —
A Comet Impact
Many studies have shown significant evidence of a major biomass burning event that occurred right at the beginning of the Younger Dryas. So basically, something happened that caused so much of the planet to catch on fire that we can literally see it in the geologic record.
At sites around the world we’ve found a thick black layer, often called the Younger Dryas Boundary, that is consistent with biomass burning right at the depth that would align with the beginning of the Younger Dryas, emphasizing how wide-spread this disaster truly was.
In ice-cores from Greenland, Antarctica, and Russia we can see drastically increased dust concentrations, as well as chemical signatures consistent with massive biomass burning. Whatever happened, it left its mark across the globe.
For many, the best explanation for this would be a comet impact — whether it be one comet or many pieces of a comet that may have broken apart — that struck somewhere in the northern hemisphere, most likely in North America.
One study published in the Journal of Geology estimated that as much as 9% of the Earth’s terrestrial biomass burned in one devastating event. But after the fires died, things would have cooled down quickly. The amount of dust and ash in the atmosphere would have blocked out the sun causing temperatures to plummet, triggering a new ice age.
Another possibility, and one that is favored by Dr. Robert Shoch whose work on dating the Sphinx we talked about in the last episode, is…
A Solar Event

We tend to think of our sun as being constant and stable, but it’s actually anything but. It goes through periods of solar maximums, where it is very active and erratic, resulting in more activity like sunspots and solar flares, about every 11 years. We’re generally protected from this sort of activity by the electromagnetic field that surrounds the Earth, but like our sun, this field also goes through cycles where it is sometimes stronger and sometimes weaker.
Without getting too in the weeds, it could be that a particularly violent solar maximum could have coincided with a weakening of the electromagnetic field around the Earth which could have caused massive electrical storms and allowed deadly cosmic rays and radiation to reach the Earth. This could also account for much of the same evidence as a comet strike.
And to be honest, I don’t think that I have a firm enough grasp on the complex geo-climatological factors involved to give an opinion one way or another. Suffice it to say, the evidence that the Younger Dryas was initiated by a devastating burning event is overwhelming, but what caused it is still a matter of some debate to be settled by people much smarter than myself.
The Mystery Of The Poles
However, there is another set of much more bizarre theories about not just the cataclysm that occurred at the onset of the Younger Dryas, but a long cycle of cataclysms that have occurred on this planet — and bizarre though they may be, I promise if you hear me out I’ll make the case for why this is worth your consideration.
The Evidence
So let’s look at the evidence.
The Flood
When we look at the earliest stories and myths in cultures around the world, we find one story that appears again and again — which is that of a great flood. Much like Noah’s flood in the Bible, these stories tend to follow a common course. There is a great flood that is sent by one or more gods to destroy the Earth. Only a handful of people are saved, usually by some kind of warning or divine intervention, and after the flood the few survivors repopulate the Earth.

And because of the ubiquity of this story, there are many who argue that it must have been a flood that was to blame for the near erasure of whatever human civilization existed before the Younger Dryas.
And I will say that through this process one thing that I truly didn’t expect, but that has been impressed upon me by the evidence again and again is that I don’t think we give nearly enough attention to ancient myths and legends when it comes to understanding our distant past. I’m not suggesting that we should treat these as historical records, but we shouldn’t dismiss what they have to say out-of-hand either.
Stories that were important enough to pass down through the ages, to record in the pages of our religious texts, and to literally chisel into the stone walls of megalithic temples were important to people for a reason. They may or may not convey literal truth, but they do reveal something about the people telling the story. And at the very least, I don’t think it’s crazy to argue that the fact that this story of a massive flood that nearly wiped out humanity shows up in cultures around the world following a nearly identical narrative arc suggests some sort of shared experience or awareness on the part of our ancestors.
Let’s stop for a minute and just say for the sake of argument that a massive, global flood did happen in the distant past. Wouldn’t we expect to see exactly what we’re seeing? Wouldn’t we expect it to be recorded in myth and legend across cultures?
Now, of course, that doesn’t prove anything. And it doesn’t really help us to overcome the most obvious and logical refutation of the reality of the Great Flood — which is that, as far as we know, a global flood on a scale that could nearly wipe out humanity doesn’t seem like it should be possible.
In the myths, the flood was usually caused by one or more deities. But if we’re looking for an actual known, non-supernatural mechanism by which a flood of this scale could have happened, we come up short.

We’re familiar with how floods happen, but they tend to be regional, and wouldn’t explain the global impact that the stories point to.
We’re even familiar with rising sea levels and how entire cities in low-lying coastal areas can end up underwater due to climate change. But, looking at our modern day situation, even the most catastrophic estimates for sea level rise by the year 2100 are at around 8 feet. Which, don’t get me wrong, would be absolutely devastating — but it wouldn’t happen overnight. It wouldn’t be the great deluge described by our ancestors.
So if the Great Flood was real, is there anything that could possibly explain it?
There just might be.
Albert Einstein & Geological Cataclysms
And one theory describing this bizarre cataclysm found an unlikely proponent in one of the great minds his or any time — Albert Einstein.
Due to the scope and impact of his work in the world of physics, most people don’t realize that Albert Einstein also had a considerable interest in the earth sciences, and made important contributions in that field, as well. In particular, he did some important work in the area of fluvial geomorphology — which is the study of landforms and processes associated with rivers. Einstein was the first to articulate how helical flow helps determine meander length
and promote down-current migration of the meandering rivers. So basically, it was a model for how rivers form and cut their path across a landscape.
Einstein was also very interested in emerging theories of the time including Charles Hapgood’s ideas about crust displacement.
What Hapgood proposed was that the uneven distribution of weight caused by accumulation of ice around the Earth’s poles could, at times, cause the Earth’s crust to slip dramatically on its mantle by as much as 30 degrees. The impact of such an event would be absolutely catastrophic and would result in everything from volcanic eruptions to massive flash floods worldwide. It would also cause the poles to change positions as the land that used to be over the poles would be shifted thousands of miles away.
Hapgood presented extensive climatological research that he claimed, and which Einstein agreed, supported his hypothesis that global patterns of climate change over the past 100,000 years could be the result of displacements of the Earth’s crust and corresponding shifts of the geographic poles. In modeling the data he proposed that three geographic pole shifts had occurred over the past 100,000 years.
According to Hapgood, approximately 100,000 years ago, the north pole was in the Yukon. Then around 75,000 years ago, it shifted to a spot between Iceland and Norway. Around 50,000 years ago it shifted from there to the Hudson Bay. And then finally, sometime around 12,000 years ago, it shifted to its current location.
And there’s that 12,000 years ago date again.
Now, the mainstream scientific stance is that this is impossible, and the shifting of the poles does happen, but very slowly — approximately 30 degrees over the past 200 million years.
And I honestly hope that they’re right on this one, because I frankly find this idea to be terrifying. Einstein, however, was super into it.
Over the last couple of years of his life, Einstein maintained an ongoing correspondence with Hapgood about his ideas, and was very encouraging of his efforts. And while he did eventually convince Hapgood that the weight of polar ice wouldn’t be sufficient to shift the Earth’s crust, he was compelled by the evidence that the poles had — somehow — shifted dramatically.
Einstein was such a fan of Hapgood’s work that he actually wrote the forward to his book, Earth’s Shifting Crust, and when Einstein passed away it was that very same book that still sat open on his desk.
But it wasn’t just Hapgood whose work caught Einstein’s attention. An even more bombastic theory about cyclical global cataclysms was put forth by a man named Immanuel Velikovsky in 1940 in his book, Worlds In Collision.

Velikovsky compared numerous natural disasters in the Bible and other ancient texts and based on that he proposed the following truly wild scenario:
According to Velikovsky, at some point in the past Jupiter somehow burped out a comet that then fell toward the sun in a long elliptical orbit. As it went past Mars it pulled it out of its orbit and also yanked off its atmosphere. It then passed the Earth causing a series of catastrophes, which repeated approximately every 52 years as it made its long orbit around the sun before eventually settling into an orbit between Mercury and the Earth, becoming the planet we know today as Venus.
Now, I’m sure I don’t need to tell any of you that there is literally nothing in all of science that would support that. The entire thing is absurd and impossible for a multitude of reasons that a fifth grader could likely point out. So why was Albert Einstein wasting his time on these crazy ideas?
Well, from what we find in the record of correspondence between the two men, Einstein believed that there was at least part of his idea that had merit. He wrote the following in a letter to Velikovsky about his book:
I have read the whole book about the planet Venus. There is much of interest in the book which proves that in fact catastrophes have taken place which must be attributed to extraterrestrial causes. However it is evident to every sensible physicist that these catastrophes can have nothing to do with the planet Venus…Your arguments in this regard are so weak as opposed to the mechanical–astronomical ones, that no expert will be able to take them seriously. It were best in my opinion if you would in this way revise your books, which contain truly valuable material. If you cannot decide on this, then what is valuable in your deliberations will become ineffective, and it may be difficult finding a sensible publisher who would take the risk of such a heavy fiasco upon himself.
Or, as he said more succinctly in a later letter regarding Velikovsky’s work:
I can say in short: catastrophes yes, Venus no.
Einstein’s rather direct feedback didn’t seem to have a negative impact on his relationship with Velikovsky, and Einstein continued to encourage him in his work throughout their 9-year correspondence.
So what becomes clear is that, although Einstein wasn’t compelled by their explanations for the exact mechanics of how these cataclysms occurred, he was convinced by the work of both men surrounding the reality of cyclical global cataclysms in our distant past.
Now granted, just because he was one of the greatest thinkers in human history doesn’t mean that Einstein was infallible. And just because he took an interest in the topic doesn’t mean that it necessarily is true. But it is interesting.
And Einstein isn’t the only notable to have taken an interest in this idea — the CIA has actually shown an interest, as well.
The CIA and The Adam & Eve Story
In 2013, among a massive dump of newly declassified CIA files was something very strange — a “sanitized” version of a book called The Adam & Eve Story.
This book was written in 1966 by a former US Air Force employee named Chan Thomas. But before the book was released, it was seized, banned, and classified by the CIA. The original book was allegedly over 200 pages, but only 57 pages remain in the sanitized version that was released in 2013.
So what could this book possibly say that would make the CIA take such an interest — and go to such great lengths to keep the public from reading it?
I’ve read the declassified version, and I’ve gotta tell you — it’s more than a little perplexing.
The book describes a series of disasters that have occurred on the planet at intervals of approximately every 7000 years. These disasters are caused by the Earth’s crust becoming unbalanced and slipping along the mantle, much like in the crust displacement theory, but this is on another level. Instead of the crust slipping 30 degrees or so, The Story of Adam & Eve describes a scenario in which the poles would swing basically all the way down the equator in a matter of hours.

According to the book, when this happens, the oceans and atmosphere continue to spin in the direction they always have while the crust moves independently. This causes catastrophic 1000 mile per hour winds, and even more disturbingly, the oceans continue their journey west-to-east with the spinning of the Earth, while the crust is jerked north-to-south, which — according to the book — would cause a massive, 2-mile-high wave.
In the US, this wave would start on the West coast and move East across the entire continent, covering it all in over a mile of water in under 3 hours. This wave would circumnavigate the globe several times, and would take up to a week to settle back down into its original resting place, having completely decimated and resurfaced the globe in the process.
The book makes many other eyebrow-raising claims which run the gamut from an argument that the book of Genesis doesn’t describe the creation of the planet, but rather the 7 days that it took for the oceans to stop sloshing around and the skies to clear to the argument that Jesus spent the missing years of his early life in India.
I really don’t know what to make of any of this, but it does raise some interesting questions:
First of all, why did the CIA classify this book in the first place? It’s hard to know because they took out the parts that are still classified and what we are left with are the parts that we’re “allowed” to read. But the general thrust of the book seems to be focused on these recurring geological cataclysms and their historical and spiritual tie to the history and development of humanity — so the missing pages are almost certainly related to that idea in some way.
But the thing is — none of that is new. Even back when the book was originally supposed to be published in 1966 this idea wasn’t new. Hapgood’s book, Earth’s Shifting Crust, had already been out for almost a decade. And in the decades since countless books have been written putting forward similar hypotheses, and none of those have been banned. So what was different about this book?
Second of all, why was the CIA even paying attention to this? Chan Thomas was allegedly a former Air Force employee, but it’s unclear — at least from my research — what his job was, but he wasn’t in the service. He had a degree in electrical engineering from Dartmouth, but he spent most of his career positioning himself as “the world’s leading authority in the field of cataclysmic geology” and claimed to have accurately predicted a number of earthquakes. And most of his message seemed to be apocalyptic, focusing on the idea that the last time this cataclysm supposedly occurred was 6500 years ago and that we’re due for another one basically any minute.
But once again — none of this is new or different. Each new decade brings a new crop of New Age prophets who come bearing overly grandiose claims about their own abilities and dire apocalyptic predictions for the future of humanity. I mean, no shade intended, but that’s like half the shows on Gaia. So once again, why do they care about this book and this author? And why risk legitimizing something by classifying it when they could have just let it slowly drift into obscurity, collecting dust in basements and used book stores? Why was this on their radar? Why pay attention to it at all?
I don’t have those answers. And I in no way mean to suggest that this oddball little book that was declassified by the CIA proves anything about either the reality or the nature of cyclical, planet-wide cataclysms. After all, that seems to be the bulk of the parts that they left in the declassified version.
But it seems clear that the CIA, at least in the 1960s, saw this information as potentially being a threat to our national security — and that is interesting.
Alignment Of Megalithic Structures
But there’s one more piece of evidence that, to be honest, blew my mind completely.
So, we know that megalithic structures were almost always built in alignment with the cardinal directions or significant astronomical events like the solstice. And, in many places, these alignments are done with a level of precision that humanity wouldn’t be able to replicate for thousands of years.
But, strangely, this doesn’t apply to all megalithic structures. In certain places, particularly in South America, Mesoamerica, and Egypt, the alignments are slightly off at certain sites. Why would these alignments be so important in some cases, but not in others?
A study was done by author and scientist Mark J Carlotto that looked at 200 megalithic sites around the world and found that almost half of them couldn’t be explained in terms of traditional alignments.
But remember our old friend Charles Hapgood and his theory that the poles shifted dramatically three times over the past 100,000 years? Carlotto hypothesized that the alignments of these sites might correspond to Hapgood’s proposed pole locations.
Taking the group of unexplained sites, he developed an algorithm that would generate a best-fit model for the location of the poles they were aligned to, and the model is shockingly close to what Hapgood proposed.
Both Hapgood and Carlotto predict that the most recent pole before our current one was in Hudson Bay and are only 200 miles apart from each other. Carlotto predicted a pole in Greenland that was immediately preceded by a pole in the Norwegian Sea, and Hapgood’s Iceland/Norway Pole is 1250 miles away from the former and 300 miles away from the latter. And finally, Carlotto predicted a pole in the Bering Strait that is about 1500 miles from Hapgood’s pole in the Yukon. Not exact, but pretty close.
So, if we take for granted for a moment that Carlotto is correct and that the alignment of these megalithic structures confirms Hapgood’s poles and his general thesis then we are able to attach a general time period to the structures that are aligned to each of these poles.

And when we do this, what do we find?
Well, not surprisingly, we find that the majority of the megalithic sites align to our current pole, including the Pyramids of Giza and the Delphi Amphitheater in Greece.
However, certain sites, such as Puma Punku, Tiwanaku, Baalbek, the Western Wall in Jerusalem, and Tenochtitlan in Mexico are aligned to the Greenland pole, which according to Hapgood’s climate data would make them at least 50,000 years old — or around the same age as the sunken city in Cuba.
And shockingly, there are a number of sites that align to the Bering Sea pole, and interestingly, a disproportionate amount of those sites are in Peru. And among them are the sites whose foundations of massively cut and precisely placed megaliths we discussed earlier that were built upon again and again, without ever coming close to matching their former glory — including Coricancha and The Temple of the Three Windows at Machu Picchu.
And these sites, which feature some of the most precisely cut megaliths known to us, may also be the oldest. If Hapgood and Carlotto’s hypotheses are correct, these sites would be at least 100,000 years old.
Now listen, I find the fact that both Hapgood’s climate data and the alignment of anomalous megalithic sites both point to the same general locations for these alternate pole sites to be pretty damn compelling. However, I’m not sure that I’m 100% willing to accept them.
It’s clear that we’ve undershot the dawn of human civilization by a few thousand years. But 100,000 years? That presents a whole new set of problems and mysteries.

First of all, as far as we know, there shouldn’t even have been humans in the Americas 100,000 years ago. It was previously estimated that humans first arrived in North America around 15,000 to 20,000 years ago by crossing a land bridge in the spot where the Bering Strait is now between modern day Russia and Alaska. And although recent findings have pushed that date back to 30,000 years ago, there’s still a 70,000 year gap to account for.
And it’s not just the timeline that presents an issue. There’s also the location. There are few places in the Americas that you could go that would be farther than Peru is from the Bering Strait and still be in the Americas. So if — somehow — there was human civilization in Peru 100,000 years ago, it calls that entire migration story, where they started in the north and moved south, into question.
But if our human ancestors didn’t walk across the land bridge to the Americas how would they have gotten to South America in the first place? By boat seems like the obvious answer, until you consider just how vast the Pacific Ocean is. The distance from Peru to Australia is 15,000 miles — or more than half of the circumference of the Earth. To say that that would be surprising would be a massive understatement.
And it wouldn’t just throw the story of how humans came to the Americas into question, but also, everything we think we know about the migration of anatomically modern humans out of Africa and across the continents.
And even if we were somehow able to gather enough evidence to justify that dramatic rewrite of human history, we’re still left with the most glaring and inescapable problem:
How would a high civilization capable of the astounding megalithic stonework that we see at these sites in Peru possibly have arisen 40,000 years before the earliest cave paintings that we’ve found? It just doesn’t make sense. It’s simply not possible.
But what if…
What if it wasn’t a human civilization?
It’s a wild thought, but it isn’t a crazy one.
The admission by the Pentagon, the declassified videos, the rising bipartisan demand from Congress that they be given access to data surrounding what is clearly a credible national security threat, Tom Delonge’s high-level government advisors that were confirmed by the Wikileaks Podesta emails, and the growing number of highly credible people from our military and intelligence agencies, as well as private aerospace companies, who are coming forward to say that the UFO phenomenon is real and we need to take it seriously — all of these things point to one stunning conclusion — that there is a highly advanced, non-human presence on this planet right now.
And that profound and, at this point, entirely unavoidable fact means that it is entirely likely that it’s happened in the past, as well. And we should be willing to at least consider what that might mean for the story of humanity on this planet.
The Esoteric Tradition & UFOs
You know…or not. All of this is very fun and very interesting to talk about, and I haven’t made a secret of the fact that I find the evidence to be quite compelling. But if you still aren’t convinced, that’s totally fine. I respect that.
But the good news is that, even if these arguments for non-human intervention in humanity’s distant past have not swayed you, our time here was still not wasted. We’ll actually need all of this to help lay the foundation for what’s to come.
What these last three episodes have given you is the basic skeleton of the esoteric tradition. So what do I mean by that?

According to the Google, Ancient esoteric tradition is a modern scholarly term useful for designating currents in Hellenistic and Late Antique Mediterranean culture that are concerned with the mediation of some kind of absolute knowledge via a dialectic of secrecy, concealment, and revelation.
In more straightforward terms, there is a collection of beliefs that we tend to categorize as “occult” that are rooted in the belief in some special kind of ancient knowledge and ultimate truth that was entrusted to a select group of scholars and intellectuals. The ancient Egyptians — and then later the Greeks and the Romans — referred to these as the “mystery schools” and their initiates include some of the greatest thinkers of the ancient world like Aristotle, Socrates, and Plato. In our modern day world, we have the freemasons and other secretive societies that are the direct descendants of this tradition.
So you don’t need to believe any of this — the mysterious origins of human civilization, guidance and revelation from the gods or some other non-human intelligence, or the idea that our ancestors had exposure to highly advanced ideas and technologies in our distant past.
But you do need to understand that, throughout the last several thousands years there have been many people who do believe something along those lines. And the search for that ancient knowledge has been the driving force behind some of the most significant events in human history from the Crusades to our exploration of space.
So that’s where we’ll pick up next time — with the story of how a renewed interest in these ancient mysteries lead to a pagan spiritual awakening in Germany in the early 20th century, and subsequently, to two of the most important events not just of the last century, but in all of human history — the rise of Nazi Germany and the Moon landing.
And yes, UFOs and the mysterious intelligence behind them is at the center of everything that is to come.
I’ll see you then.
Sources
- Forgotten Civilization: New Discoveries On The Solar-Induced Ice Age [Revised & Expanded Edition] | Robert M Schoch, PhD w. Catherine Ulissey
- Disappearance of Ice Age Megafauna and the Younger Dryas Impact | Capeia
- What Happened to the Sunken City of Cuba? | Ancient Origins
- Puma Punku: A Mystery That May Be Greater Than the Pyramids | Gaia
- Baalbek Lebanon: Megaliths Of The Gods | Brien Foerster
- Earth’s Shifting Crust | Charles Hapgood
- Worlds In Collision | Immanuel Velikovsky
- Protzen, Jean-Pierre; Stella Nair, 1997, Who Taught the Inca Stonemasons Their Skills? A Comparison of Tiahuanaco and Inca Cut-Stone Masonry: The Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians. vol. 56, no. 2, pp. 146–167
- Uncontacted Tribes | Survival International
- Access To Energy | Our World In Data
- Literacy | Our World In Data
- Plastic Permanence: Our Litter Is Now Part Of The Geologic Record | Sierra Club
- Disappearance of Ice Age Megafauna and the Younger Dryas Impact | Capeia
- Extraordinary Biomass-Burning Episode and Impact Winter Triggered by the Younger Dryas Cosmic Impact ∼12,800 Years Ago. 1. Ice Cores and Glaciers | The Journal Of Geology
- Was There a Civilization on Earth Before Humans? | The Atlantic
- Combined Paleomagnetic, Isotopic, And Stratigraphic Evidence For True Polar Wander From The Neoproterozoic Akademikerbreen Group, Svalbard, Norway
- A New Model to Explain the Alignment of Certain Ancient Sites | Mark J Carlotto