Diary note: it may seem a while off, but the end of the world is still scheduled for 2030, exact date TBC. After he suggested it once nameless destruction may be upon us in 2012the evergreen eschatologist Graham Hancock subsequently updated his advice a comet, now six years off. Or thereabouts. MailOnlinewho unearthed an ancient Hancock text reminds readers of his “grave warning for our age“.
In any case, what is certain is that a great and terrible disaster will occur as soon as October 16th. This is the day Netflix will launch something astonishing, almost beyond belief, something skeptics said could never happen: series 2 of Hancock’s Ancient Apocalypse. And even stranger: this terrible event starred with Hancock, the Hollywood actor Keanu Reeves.
How? Why? What can explain this? Why didn’t any ancient warnings engraved on Göbekli Tepe foretell an event that, for many of his admirers, will overturn everything they once thought they knew about Keanu Reeves? Even if he is once saw a ghost. A show promo clip shows the star telling the older man: “I mean as a kid I always thought the timeline was [dramatic pause] off.”
Oh, Keanu. This is pure speculation, of course, but there’s no escaping the impression from this clip that he respects, may even believe in, Hancock’s signature theory: that after a comet (formerly “crustal displacement”) utterly destroys a great Ice Age civilization, his genius , somehow globetrotting survivors bequeathed many of enormous monuments, possibly containing comet warningsbefore disappearing, leaving locals – until Hancock intervened – to take all the credit.
Cut to Hancock posing on some high ledge rehearsing his theme: a lost civilization and the clues to its existence that he, alone, never stops finding all over the shop, specifically in this series, in the Netflix part of the world. Thunderous music underscores the solemnity of his final question: “Could the key to the discovery of an Ice Age civilization lie here…in the Americas?”
Again, we can only guess at this point what Hancock will soon deduce, key-wise, from his latest trot around sites others have been good enough to dig up, but it seems reasonable to expect some overlap with his 2019 book , America Before: The Key to Earth’s Lost Civilization. Will Hancock thrill Reeves with perhaps the most baffling part of America Before: his suggestion (also shared on the Joe Rogan show) that ancient monuments were sometimes built by paranormal means? “My speculation,” writes Hancock, “which I will not attempt to prove here or support with evidence, but simply offer for consideration, is that the advanced civilization I see developing in North America during the Ice Age transcends leverage and mechanical advantage have and have learned to manipulate matter and energy by deploying powers of consciousness that we have not yet begun to use.”
Viewers can expect, as Hancock’s ITN producers are faithful to his latest scholarship, to hear more about his lost civilization’s familiarity with powers like telepathy. This may not impress “materialistic thinkers”. “But if telepathy is real,” he writes, “and if its use and projection can be refined and made reliable, then who would need cell phones or Facebook or any of the other means of communication that are so ubiquitous today?” We can certainly take Hancock’s bold thought processes further. What if his entire Netflix series could just be telepathically beamed into your head, thanks to some undreamt-of new subscription fee collection system?
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Awaiting these wonders, it seems astonishing that Netflix and ITN should once again grant an influential platform to a writer who has long been categorized as a purveyor of pseudoarchaeology. Admittedly, the rise of anti-scientific discourse helped to normalize, if not his theories, Hancock’s bizarre claims to special – even suppressed? – insights. Contributing to this trend, the show’s creators show him as a quest-driven, misunderstood seer; the rejection of his speculation, once thought quite appropriate, is presented as an attraction.
No opportunity was lost in the first series of Ancient Apocalypse to dismiss dissenting archaeologists for disputing the existence of ancient Hancockia. “Perhaps,” he said in program one, “there was a forgotten episode in human history, but perhaps the extremely arrogant and condescending attitude of mainstream academia prevents us from considering that possibility.” In the same programme, Hancock interviewed an architect, Prof Danny Hillman Natawidjaja, who says the Gunung Padang site in Indonesia is an incredible 25,000 years old. Literally incredible. The professor’s research paper has been withdrawn this year.
Any complaints from experts about Hancock’s actions may inevitably serve as evidence of his heroism, as sinister confirmation of establishment conspiracies, just as medical correction only reassures anti-vaxxers that their suspicions are well founded. After the Society for American Archeology (SAA) a open letter to Netflixwho object to the belittling of archaeologists in Ancient Apocalypseafter classifying it as a “documentary” and the “injustice” to indigenous peoples (those whose monuments are claimed for Hancockians), the author, defending himself, duly quoted the Netflix letter as proof of his prosecution. “The SAA’s open letter is just one of the more recent examples of this ongoing highly personal vendetta.”
As for the SAA citing a lack of evidence: “That archaeologists have not found substantial evidence that would convince them of the existence of a lost Ice Age civilization is by no means compelling evidence that such a civilization did not exist could not have existed,” he wrote. And we can take it from the impending second series, that Netflix and ITN fully endorse Hancock’s reminder, one that supports his entire oeuvre, that “absence of evidence is not evidence of absence”.
Quite so. There may be no evidence to show that Reeves was forced, probably by occult means, to participate in a project which was as likely, as his predecessor, to be condemned by the Society for American. Archaeology.
That doesn’t prove he wasn’t.
