TRANSCRIPT

The Lost
World

Tokyo
Classified's interview with Graham Hancock at the opening of his
exhibition at the Umeda Sky Building in Osaka on July 1 1999.

How did you find out about the mysterious
underwater structures in Japan?
I'd been to a talk in
Okinawa when I was travelling in Japan in 1996 and I was shown some
photographs of the underwater monuments at Yonakuni and it
immediately intrigued me. The whole focus of my work has been on the
possibility of a civilization that was destroyed during a flood at
the end of the last ice age, and the geology of the area around the
vast monument was above water somewhat more than 10,000 years ago.
Now it's an extraordinary work of art and architecture covered by
about 30 meters of water, which wasn't good for me, but I had to get
to know it, I had to get more into it, I had to find out more about
it. So, I learned to scuba dive at that time, and we've now done
something like 60 or 70,000 meters into the underwater monument, and
after further inquiry we learned that there are many other
structures. Within at least one kilometer of that monument there are
four others that we know of. And further north, off the island onto
Okinawa, there are four other structures. I think it is really
impossible to overstate the importance of these underwater
monuments.

Why do you think that it wasn't
publicized more?
It's a mystery to me, the underwater
monuments and the other relics have received very little attention
in the West. It's received quite a lot of attention here in Japan,
but outside of Japan very little. I'm trying to do something about
that. I think that scholars find it very difficult to come to grips
with what it actually is. It's such a contradiction of the orthodox
picture of history, and I think historians prefer to ignore it. But
I'm quite certain that it'll be getting a lot more attention in the
future.

Do you believe that this could somehow be
connected to the lost continent of Mu?
I think it's
certainly the lost continent of Mu, although I prefer not to use
that name, or the other name Atlantis, which is the other name that
they give to the lost continent in another part of the world. The
basic fact of the matter is if you look at the geology of the land
30 or 40,000 years ago you will find that enormous areas of the
earth which are now under water were above water [up to] 12,000
years ago, and some of those areas were highly attractive, habitable
areas which could have been home to another civilization.

Very little archaeology has been done underwater, almost
none. There is a science of marine archeology, but it concentrates
mainly on shipwrecks. More work needs to be done into the mystery of
underwater ruins. I just think that we are very lucky that such a
marvelous monument has been preserved in Japan, the best in the
world as far as I'm concerned, and worthy of detailed research by
scholars all over the world. It really deserves close attention.

Are you actually excavating the Okinawan site, and
are the Japanese authorities or anyone helping you in any
way?
[We have] generous and helpful support from an
organization in Yonakuni called the Seamans Club. They're a group of
divers. The diving in Yonakuni is incredibly difficult and
dangerous, and the only way that we've been able to do this work is
the that we have a huge amount of technical support from the Seamans
club. Both Santha and I have come close to losing our lives and both
have been saved by divers there. I'm really pleased that there is an
organization in Japan who are interested in pursuing this, that
we've been able to do our work, and that we've been able to continue
going back there to dive in the gulf of Okinawa. But as for
excavation, that's not our business. That has to be done by
archaeologists; we're here for observation, exploration and
discovery, but definitely not removal of materials from the site,
that would be absolutely against everything I believe in.

I
think that my job as a writer is not the job of the photographer,
which is to draw attention to things that people may not have
realized are there, and to show them details and aspects of those
things that they may have missed. We hope that our work will draw in
scientists and academics to override their own prejudices and
explore these sites further.

And I have to say also, I pay
tribute to the work of Professor Kimura from the University of
Ryukyu at Okinawa. He and his team of research students have been
consistently investigating the underwater monument at Yonakuni for
several years now, and they've done very important work which has
been published in journals here in Japan, and I hope that that work
will become more widely known in the future. They're the only
academics really who are seriously studying this monument at the
moment.

What do you know about what's happening in
Giza at the end of this year, and are you participating in
that?
Like many countries, Egypt is planning its own
millenium celebrations. The first celebrations focus around the
Pyramids and the Sphinx. The Egyptian Millenium Project is to place
a capstone on top of the great pyramid. It's a sign of how modern
technology can't do things the way that the ancients did it, in that
that capstone can't be physically brought up the side of the
pyramid, but it's being lowered by helicopter onto the top, but,
yes, I'm going to be there and Santha's going to be there and all
our children will be there. As far as I'm concerned it's the only
the place to be for the millenium, and it should be wonderful.

Will you be involved in the official activities or
festivities?
Yes, in a small way, I will be. And other
things are happening too. The Egyptian government is hoping to open
a small, sealed doorway inside the Great Pyramid. It's a narrow
shaft going down the center from the Queen's Chamber. So far it's
been filmed by a robot camera, but it hasn't been opened. They're
hoping very much that they will be able to open it that night, put a
fiber optic camera through the hole in the door and see what's on
the other side of it. So, that could be very interesting.

With all the interesting things happening now in
your research on Earth, why did you choose to dedicate one of your
books to Mars?
Mars was an excursion for me, it's not
the main stem of my work, but I think it's a very interesting
scientific, and to a certain extent philosophical, mystery, and what
we do about this neighboring planet and what we can learn from it.
And I felt that the subject of Mars, the mysteries of Mars, were not
being properly addressed. There were enough unanswered questions to
justify quite a detailed examination, so that's why Mars received
attention. But it's not my mainstream. Definitely not.

Do you believe there might be a connection between
Egypt and Mars?
Look, there's a number of questions that
need to be dealt with first. One of them is that since 1976, NASA
photography of Mars has showed things that look like artificial
structures on the surface of Mars. They might not be artificial.
Take the case of Yonakuni in Japan. I can give you two geologists.
Both have seen it and they both have different opinions. One of them
thinks it's natural, the other one thinks it's artificial. They've
actually been there, they've touched it, and they can't agree. With
structures on Mars that have been photographed hundreds of miles
above the planet, how could we possibly arrive at a final conclusion
as to what they are? There are scientists who think they're natural,
there are scientists who think they're artificial. Much more
photography needs to be done, much more high resolution photography,
and even then it might not answer the question. I think we should be
landing in that place before we can be certain. I think it's a very
interesting issue. If those things are pyramids on Mars, you have to
ask yourself how likely it is to be a coincidence that there's also
pyramids on Earth. But we have to cross the first bridge first. Are
they pyramids, or are they mountains? I don't know. What I tried to
do in the book is to send out the information to allow people to
make up their own minds as far as possible. There are certain
mathematical regularities about that site, certain angles which
repeat that you would not expect to happen in nature, so it can be
that they are artificial.

Do you know of any
developments on this topic?
No, I don't. NASA is very
anxious not to talk about the subject.They do everything possible to
crush it; they do everything possible to close off inquiry into it.
They have a consistent, solid propaganda campaign against those
being artificial structures. I don't know why. What's wrong with a
free spirit of inquiry? What could be more interesting in our
exploration of a neighboring planet than trying to explore some
structures that might be artificial? There can't be any higher
priority. Certainly what NASA is doing, which is totally focused on
the geology of Mars, is much less interesting to me. I don't
understand NASA's position on this, I think it's a very strange,
very unscientific, slightly sinister position that NASA takes. But
when they say they are natural structures, they could be right. They
could be right. But they also could be wrong. And I think the issue
needed airing. I think it needed to be debated. And that's why I
felt the book had to be written.

This brings us back
to the lost Ark of the Covenant. In 1983, you became interested in
the lost Ark.
I did, yes.

And that
basically took you to Mars.
By a long way around, and
to a lot of other places as well, because prior to that I didn't
have any interest in historical mysteries or in the past, anything
really. I was a current affairs journalist for The
Economist. That was my last journalistic position. After that,
I stopped doing journalism. I stopped in 1983. I've done art
articles, in fact, but not much. I've been much more into books,
really.

How do you explain your journey to the
Ark?
What happened was that the extraordinary
possibility that Ethiopia actually might have the lost the Ark of
the Covenant appealed to my imagination, and I wanted to know more.
It also appealed to my curiosity, and made me wonder. And I started
to realize that there were a lot of unanswered questions in
Ethiopia. That there's an existence of a population of Ethiopian
Jews who practice Old Testament Judaism, the fact that it's a
Christian country and yet venerates this pre-Christian relic, the
fact that no other country has a living tradition of claiming they
possessed the Ark of the Covenant, the fact that the Ark of the
Covenant got lost in the first place without a proper account. All
of these things are very mysterious and strange. I suppose, in a
way, it was the background in journalism, that here were a series of
questions without answers, and I wanted to find the answers. In
order to find those answers, I had to learn a lot of stuff that I
didn't know previously. I needed an exhaustive history; I had to
learn about the past.

It involved Egypt because Moses was in
Egypt [and] that's where the story of the Ark of the Covenant
begins. I've always believed as a writer I've got to go to the
places that I'm writing about, so I spent a lot of time in Egypt as
well as in Ethiopia and Israel. In Egypt I confronted the pyramids -
more questions which were not answered. It was a doorway, I went
through a door that led me into a path of inquiry and as I started
on that path, I found I couldn't stop. There were more and more
questions up and down. And I often think, particularly with
monuments like the pyramids, that in a way that's what they're
designed to do. They're a huge statement. They sit there in the
desert, and they say, "Figure me out. Go on, figure me out." And
that's what they did to me. They made me want to know more. And in
order to figure out the pyramids, I had to learn [about] a lot of
other things - astronomy, a bit about architecture and engineering,
a bit about the difficulties of creating a structure that weighs,
you know, 6 billion tons, with 2 billion blocks of stone. For that I
had to talk to engineers, architects, builders, hear what they have
to say about it. And this is a process of self initiation, really.

What do you think of the Giza Pyramid power plant
theory?
I know Chris Dunn, and I know his work
reasonably well. Chris Dunn is a very interesting man. He's a
machine toolmaker by profession. He and I got to know each other
because of evidence that some kind of power tool had been used in
the drilling of granite at Giza. I have not read the Giza Power
Plant in its latest form - I read earlier versions of the manuscript
- and therefore I'm not really in a position to comment too much on
it. I think that the more theories and arguments there are about
Giza the better it is for all of us.

My own view is that
those monuments were not designed to serve any mechanistic or
mechanical function. I don't like that personally. I feel that the
Giza monuments concern the human spirit, the human soul. They are
monuments designed to awaken something in our consciousness, and
therefore any theory that sees them as purely mechanistic and in
technical terms is a theory that I'm very uncomfortable with. That's
all I can say, really. To me these are not machines. They look like
machines, there are things about them that feel machine-like, but I
don't think they are.

I think though... the key to me, the
key to the monuments is to understand the religious discipline that
surrounds it. And this is a religious discipline that asks
fundamental questions. Why are we alive? What is the purpose of my
life? What happens to me when I die? These are questions that modern
science is incapable of answering. Go to any scientist and he'll
tell you when you die, you're dead. And your body rots. And that's
it. And that scientist may be right. But he's not telling you a
fact, he's telling you his opinion. There's no empirical evidence
whether there is anything else or not - it's a mystery. And that
mystery is what the ancient Egyptians were interested in and their
predecessors were interested in.

When I talk about a lost
civilization, I am more and more convinced that I'm not talking
about a technical or technological civilization. They could do
technical things - if they wanted to manipulate the physical world
they could - but their path was not material and technical, their
path was spiritual, to puzzle out the riddle of existence, to find
out why we're alive, because surely it has to be more than just a
chemical accident? Just look at the intricacies of the human body,
never mind anything else. And you cannot satisfactorily explain this
in the theory of evolution. Look at the question of right and wrong,
none of these things could be answered with simple mechanistic
explanation.

The ancient Egyptians seem to see the world as
a theatre of experience. People tend to say, "Do I have a soul?"
With the ancient Egyptians there was no doubt that they had a soul -
more that a soul had a body than that a body had a soul. The body is
a particular vehicle for experience, and that vehicle requires a
theatre in which to operate, and that's the physical world. And then
the questions come: What do you do with your life? Do you learn? Do
you grow? Do you develop? How do you respond to the moral charges?
Do you use the mind that you have or do you waste it? All of these
are questions that concerned the ancient Egyptians very much. I
can't help feeling that the pyramids were involved in that. They
were involved in responding to the charge of physical existence,
they were trying to go beyond that into spiritual life. That's what
they're about.

What do you think they'll find behind
the door in the Great Pyramid?
I'm not sure. Again, when
I look at the way that whole thing is constructed - a huge monument
with a series of passageways and corridors, and you come into a
chamber, into a tiny shaft which... a person can't get into, it's
too small - it invites the curious. They want to know what's up
there.

So, actually, Rudolf Gatenbrig, the man who invented
the robots, said that his ultimate nightmare is that they would get
through the door, and they would find six more shafts going
vertically upwards, which is a further invitation to inquiry. I
don't know what they're going to find, I honestly don't know. There
are traditions in Egypt which suggest some kind of written archives
might be there, something written down to do with the god of wisdom.
There's a document called the West Carp Papyrus which talks about
the hidden chambers, the secret numbers of thought which are
contained within the pyramids. So there is an ancient background to
this, which suggests that there might be talks with the god of
wisdom and the god of writing, which suggests something written.
That might be my best guess. Chambers, chambers. I have no doubt
that there are chambers under the Sphinx. I have no doubt that there
are corridors under the Sphinx, I think the whole Giza plateau is
riddled with corridors and chambers.

Any luck trying
to get into those chambers recently?
Not really. More
work has been done. More survey work has been done. We do know that
that survey work has shown evidence of nine chambers under the
Sphinx. But it's a touchy issue, politically. It's a difficult
issue, a genuinely difficult issue for the Egyptian government. The
Sphinx is a national treasure. It's fragile. Very fragile. Bits of
it have fallen off before, and any kind of invasive drilling or
excavation around the Sphinx could have disastrous consequences, and
nobody's very keen to get into that right now.

Do
you think we should?
I think that the techniques exist
to do non-invasive work around the Sphinx. Tiny holes. Fiber optic
cameras, that kind of thing. And I think that it will happen. What's
happened in the last two to three years is that the Egyptian
government has become much more sensitive to international public
opinion on this issue. They don't want to be accused of being part
of a conspiracy to cover things up and I don't think that they are.
They really do realize that people are interested and fascinated.
The wheels move slowly but I think that the political climate has
changed, and I think that we will see some work done on the Sphinx.
[I'm] quite certain. The first step... [is] this doorway which can't
be accessed, and they'll drill a hole through it, put in a fiber
optic camera, and I think it's 99% [certain] that that will happen
on New Years'. And it will happen live. I'm pleased that it will
happen live, because that again cuts off any suggestion of skull
duggery, at least I see it that way.

Are there any
major developments in Okinawa?
Well, there's lots of
huge developments as far as I'm concerned. Because of the series of
dives we've been making there, we've found more and more monuments.
We rely a lot on lots of local divers there who've been diving
regularly, and we've been taken to many new sites around the
Yonaguni sites. I myself was involved in the discovery of the sites.
I think that it's becoming clear to me that what we're looking at is
an enormous sacred area, which is very large in extent. Kilometer by
kilometer by kilometer there is a lot to be discovered there and
that's why I'm going back to do some more exploration.

Do you know how many of your books were sold in
Japan
Yes, two million in hardback in Japan and about
four million around the world, so Japan has a very reliant share of
the sales..

Why do you think that
is?
For a book to take off in any particular country at
any particular time involves a lot of factors that are out of
anyone's control. It depends on the general mood that is prevailing
in that society. In 1996, for some reason, there was a mood of
inquiry and a desire to learn about the mysteries of the past, [a]
feeling that there is a mystery in the past, and I think it was just
was there, at that time, and it worked. I don't think that it's
anything special that I did. I think we just caught a nerve at the
right time, that's all.

There is a Japanese comic
version of "The Fingerprints of the Gods." How do you feel about
this?
I can't read Japanese, so I don't know, but as far
as I can tell they've done a reasonable job.

How do
you feel about being a comic book hero?
I'm flattered
and charmed. I think it's great. I love it. I just love it.

What do you think of the exhibition now you've
finally seen it completed?
It's a real pleasure for me
to see this exhibition finally brought to life after more than two
years of work and preparation. What I always try to do with my work
as a writer is to synthesize information from many different fields
of study in order to throw light on the history of the human past.
And what I really like about this exhibition is its zen approach. It
allows people to see with their own eyes some of the mysteries that
have intrigued me for so long. The early exhibition, of course, is
based on my work and my studies and my inquiries. It's really
important to stress that it's the result of a team in which the
skills and insurgence and creativity of many different people have
been involved.

Graham Hancock was interveiwd by Mary
Devlin and Maki Nibayashi.

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