Is a comet about to DESTROY Earth?
A cosmic explosion will soon strike Earth – triggering epic floods, argues best-selling author GRAHAM HANCOCK. Hokum? Read on and decide for yourself…
Temperatures plunged, starting a new Ice Age A giant comet is now careering towards us
the other side of the world, the ancient Quiche Maya people in Guatemala spoke of a flood with ‘much hail, black rain and mist, and indescribable cold’.
But the texts also tell of leaders who arrived in the wake of the disaster, armed with exceptional knowledge. These are the people I call the Magicians of the Gods.
They understood how to construct buildings on a grand scale, how to organise and govern and how to engineer tools of remarkable sophistication. Some of the technology they describe appears to rival modern electronic wizardry.
The Zoroastrian’s wise man, Yima, was said to possess a miraculous cup in which he could see anything that was happening anywhere in the world, and a jewelled glass chariot that could fly.
In carvings uncovered at ancient sites as far-flung as Turkey and Mexico, these wise men are depicted in strangely similar costumes: they are bearded men, holding a bag or bucket with a curved handle, with the heads of birds or fish.
The Babylonian priest Berossus, writing in the 3rd century BC, described a mythical figure who arrived in Mesopotamia. His name was Oannes and he had ‘the whole body of a fish, but underneath and attached to the head of the fish there was another head, human. Joined to the tail of the fish [were] feet like those of a man, and it had a human voice.’
It sounds very much as if Oannes was a human being, wearing an elaborate fish costume that might have been holy robes or merely a piece of showmanship. At the semi- subterranean t emple of Tiahuanaco in western Bolivia, South America, similar shamanic f i gures are depicted wearing garments from the waist down patterned in fish scales.
Experts disagree over the age of these carvings, but they do also show animals that appear to be toxodons — gigantic, rhino-like animals that became extinct around 12,000 years ago.
The Magicians of the Gods, it seems, roamed all over the world. In the Middle East, Oannes was accompanied by seven sages, who are repeatedly described as conjurors, sorcerers, warlocks and magicians, who were masters of chemistry and medicine and who understood carpentry, stone - cutting and metal-working.
Magicians such as these also turned up in Egypt at the same time. At the Temple of Horus in the Egyptian city of Edfu, inscriptions known as the Edfu Texts describe god-like beings who were refugees from a sacred i sland that was ravaged by flood and fire.
Their home, the ‘mansions of the gods’, was utterly destroyed and their civilisation wiped out, but a few survivors had, luckily, been at sea when the disaster struck.
They set sail in ships to wander the world, with one purpose: to reinvent their homeland. As the Edfu Texts recorded, their goal was ‘the resurrection of the former world of the gods’.
The seven sages who arrived in Egypt understood how to l ay foundations and plan the construction of buildings.
They were so steeped in knowledge that the primitive people who revered them believed they were wiser and more powerful than their own old gods. Arab tradition says that the secrets of this technology were buried in the pyramids at Giza millennia later. The 9th-century historian Ibn Abd El Hakem believed the pyramids were designed not as tombs, but as places of safekeeping for books of knowledge dating to before the Great Flood.
These books contained ‘profound sciences, and the names of drugs and their uses and hurts, and the science of astrology, and arithmetic and geometry and medicine . . . arms which did not rust and glass which might be bent but not broken’.
That evidence of a civilisation far older than the Babylonians and the Egyptians, a civilisation that was all but destroyed by a comet 12,800 years ago, has long been lost.
But there are other historic sites, just as breathtaking as the pyramids but much less known.
One i s Gobekli Tepe, which literally means Potbelly Hill, in Turkey. It is the oldest work of monumental architecture in the world and it is massive.
It is here, according to the late archaeologist Professor Klaus Schmidt, that neolithic man discovered farming. It is also the place where ancient humans first tackled megalithic stone carving, erecting pillars that weighed 20 tonnes. This is architecture on the scale of Stonehenge, but far more sophisti- cated — and, while Stonehenge is generally reckoned to be 4,600 years old, Gobekli Tepe is at least 12,000 years old.
Bizarrely, as far as archaeologists can tell, the astonishing strides in human development made at Gobekli Tepe came out of nowhere. It’s as if its people quite suddenly ‘invented’ both agriculture and monumental architecture at the same moment.
Now, it seems unthinkable that primitive hunter- gathers could suddenly dream up all the technology and know-how required, without any process of experimentation.
Surely Gobekli Tepe is powerful evidence of knowledge imparted by a prior civilisation. But the site is also significant for a far more ominous reason.
Complex zodiacal si gns are inscribed on one of its limestone pillars, incorporating astronomical data supposedly not discovered until thousands of years later.
Even more puzzling is the position of the stars — not quite where they would have been in the sky 12,000 years ago . . . but exactly where they are today. It is as if these mysterious, impossibly learned builders constructed their temple as if it existed in the present day. The Magicians of t he Gods had a message for our times, and it is not one we can afford to ignore.
The explosive power of the Younger Dryas comet was in the order of ten million megatons, two million times greater than the biggest nuclear bomb detonated and 1,000 times more powerful than all the atomic devices stockpiled on Earth.
But when the Earth emerged from the path of the comet’s debris stream 12,800 years ago, that was not the end of the story. My intuition is that the Gobekli Tepe pillar is a coded message to the future — our present — about a second impending comet strike.
As long ago as 1990, well before the discovery of physical evidence that proved the Younger Dryas Ice Age was caused by comet fragments colliding with the Earth, two far-sighted British scientists were sounding the alarm. Astrophysicist Victor Clube and astronomer Bill Napier believe that a giant unseen comet is now careering towards us through space. It is concealed within a cloud of cosmic debris, known to astronomers as the Taurid meteor stream.
This poses a double danger: we could be hit by any one of the millions of space rocks in the stream, or by much larger pieces of the unseen comet itself, if and when it explodes.
And it could explode at any moment. It is nothing less than an interplanetary hand grenade.
Sealed within its thick shell is a seething mass of pitch-like tar, which will gradually build up pressure until, like an overheated boiler with no release valve, the comet will detonate and shatter into fragments, a mile wide or more, tearing through the solar system at tens of thousands of miles an hour.
We cannot guess exactly when that explosion will occur. It could happen as we re-enter the meteor stream, or shortly before, strewing our planet’s path with hurtling boulders.
All we can know for certain is that, in around 15 years, the Earth will once again cross the Taurid meteor stream, that vast highway of cosmic debris, right at the place where the biggest and most numerous fragments that currently exist are collected. Some of them are three times the size of the asteroid that hit the planet 65 million years ago, setting off a global firestorm and bringing about the extinction of the dinosaurs. This is when the risk of a collision is most severe.
We can’t say that we weren’t warned. The Magicians of the Gods were trying to get a message to us, here in the 21st century. We need to listen.
MAGICIANS Of The Gods by Graham Hancock is published by Coronet for €16.99, easons.com