The following article about Supernatural, and interview with Graham
Hancock, first appeared in the Daily Grail’s online magazine Sub
Rosa in October 2005. Sub Rosa:
subrosa.dailygrail.com. Daily Grail:
www.dailygrail.com

Article:

After the intelligent work of Jacques Vallee and John Keel in the 1960s, and
some subsequent gems such as John Mack’s research in the 1990s, the idea that we
may be in contact with beings from the ‘subtle realms’ had fallen out of the
public gaze. So much so – despite a mass of fascinating evidence worthy of
enquiry – that we now live in a world where alien abductions are simply a
tabloid headline, emerging from the padded-wall world of the obviously
delusional. However, that could well change with the release of
Supernatural, from best-selling British author Graham Hancock
(Fingerprints of the Gods). That’s not to say that this book is simply
about the alien abduction phenomenon and the ‘third-realm’ hypothesis – there’s
far more on offer, which we’ll work through here. Better strap yourself in
Dorothy, ‘cause Kansas is going bye-bye.

The subject of ‘contact’ is originally breached through some early chapters
in which Hancock discusses entheogenic plant hallucinogens such as ibogaine and
ayahuasca (and his personal experiences with them). Suddenly though, these
chapters are followed by the seemingly unrelated topic of cave art. Hancock
introduces readers to the ‘neuropsychological model’ of South African rock art
expert David Lewis-Williams, which is currently gaining wide acceptance. The
link to the earlier material becomes more obvious when Hancock outlines what
this is all about – that the beginnings of human behaviour, in art and religion
(as evidenced by cave paintings from the Upper Paleolithic era), may be tied to
altered states of consciousness. Not just through the use of hallucinogens such
as ‘magic mushrooms’ and the South American brew ayahuasca, but also
through other methods such as the ritual dance of the San bushmen in Africa.

The evidence Hancock points to in favour of the neuropsychological model is
fascinating – phosphene-like geometric forms, therianthropic figures, and most
especially the ‘wounded man’ image found across time and cultures. Also the
parallels in cave art with the ‘bleeding noses’ of the San bushmen is especially
convincing, with 19th century ethnographic records providing the key
(it’s ironic that despite the book’s emphasis on hallucinogens, the San didn’t
use them). By the end, Hancock will have won over most readers with his argument
that David Lewis-Williams’ theory is correct.

However, readers shouldn’t think that Hancock is going soft on academic
archaeology. After aligning himself with David Lewis-Williams and his
neuropsychological model, he then morphs into an agent provocateur and
rips into the shabby history of cave art research over the past century.
Hancock’s exposition of the shocking case of Altamira – where an ‘amateur
archaeologist’ was virtually sent to his grave early because of unwarranted
attacks from the establishment – does appear to come from a position of personal
empathy with the man’s plight. He also takes issue with the cave art experts
currently debating the neuropsychological model, for not being interested in
taking hallucinogens themselves (something which surely would be an aid in
‘getting inside the mind’ of the Paleolithic artists?). Always ready with an
eloquent (and in this case also humorous) turn of phrase, Hancock describes the
situation as “two celibates arguing about the ten best positions for sex.”

The following sections are to the cave art material what spicy Cajun chicken
is to rye bread – far more exotic and mouth-watering, but incomplete without the
right foundations. Beginning with the appropriately titled chapter “Voyage into
the Supernatural”, the rest of the book moves away from cave art into a
completely different frame of investigation, one which is best compared to the
ground-breaking books of Jacques Vallee during the 1960s and 70s (a point
Hancock acknowledges later on). While the first part of Supernatural
investigates a minor paradigm change, these chapters aim to reassess our entire
vision of reality. Hancock prefaces this change of tack with this:

“Because I had been shaken to the core by my experiences with
ayahuasca and ibogaine, I decided to take my investigation further and to
explore the extraordinary possibility…that the spirit world and its
inhabitants are real, that supernatural powers and non-physical beings do
exist.”

In this chapter Hancock provides a marvelous illustration of the
correspondences between shamanic experiences and the ‘alien abduction’
phenomenon (surrounded by quotes because Hancock is certainly not arguing for
‘nuts and bolts’ UFOs and aliens). It’s a good, solid introduction to what is a
quite bizarre topic, and hopefully it provides enough evidence to draw the more
‘straight-thinking’ readers into the following chapters. It also shows (sadly)
how little we really understand about ‘alien abductions’, while at the same time
presenting ways forward for research, with the many parallels to psychic
experiences.

Subsequent chapters add in Vallee’s link between fairy folklore and UFO
experiences. In fact, Supernatural becomes virtually a comparative
mythology investigation, with the subjects being shamanic voyages, fairy
folklore and alien abduction reports. Time after time, Hancock presents stunning
evidence to show that these are all part of a single phenomenon. Furthermore, in
part four of the book he ties in DMT, the DNA element of shamanic visions (as
explored by Narby, Harner and others), and the idea that information encoded
within our ‘Junk DNA’ may be facilitating our ‘education’, by either advanced
alien civilisations or entities from parallel/spiritual dimensions. Lastly, like
a prodigal son returning to his roots, he discusses how this may relate to art
and religion in ancient civilisations, specifically the Egyptians and Mayans. I
told you to strap yourself in!

It may be high strangeness, but it is also terrific reading. Unlike Bryan
Appleyard’s recent Aliens: Why They Are Here, Hancock avoids being
overly-holistic and attempts to lay out the individual parts of his hypothesis
backed by appropriate evidence, followed by the threads which join them together
(the idea that Hancock is being reductionist may be pushing the truth though,
considering the very nature of the subject matter). To my mind the section on
cave art could have been a little shorter, with the repetitive presentation of
evidence becoming tedious towards the end (probably a holdover from the
Underworld era when Hancock felt he need to present his popular works
with a sturdy scientific backbone to counter his critics). On the other hand,
one could argue that it’s just good value for money - with over 600 pages of
text on a variety of fascinating topics, you are surely getting that.

There is an appendix contributed by a British mycological expert regarding
the origins of certain psilocybin mushrooms in Europe, which functionally
destroys specific arguments made by cave art researchers opposed to the
neuropsychological model – in fact, he makes them look rather amateurish and
sloppy. Also in the appendices is an interview with Rick Strassman about his DMT
research at the University of New Mexico, which is a worthy addition.

Supernatural could well be a breakthrough book on a number of
subjects. Hancock has stepped forward with his high-profile and admitted to
taking illicit substances, issuing a challenge regarding the human right to
explore our own consciousness. He will also be bringing the strange ‘third
realm’ out of the shadows, so to speak, and presenting it to a wide range of new
readers. There’s something for everyone interested in the ‘alternative’ genres –
archaeology and anthropology, religion and mythology, shamanism and altered
states, ufology and alien abduction. One might even be tempted to throw in
cryptozoology as well, with the emphasis Hancock puts on the therianthropic
beings seen in altered states.

Hancock retains his familiar techniques. He always immerses himself in his
books, traveling the globe and attempting to ‘walk in the same shoes’ as
necessary. This method of narrating his investigation works simply because he is
a great writer: he takes the reader with him by employing florid descriptions
which somehow never seem to push into excessiveness and hyperbole. Once again
Hancock focuses on the work of a number of cutting edge researchers with ‘new
paradigm’ ideas – in Fingerprints of the Gods it was Bauval, West and
Hapgood, while here it is Lewis-Williams, Vallee, John Mack and Benny Shanon –
and links the disparate topics together to provide an over-arching theme to the
book. In the case of Supernatural, that theme is altered states of
consciousness, and whether humanity has grown (perhaps even been ‘taught’)
through our capacity to enter into them via hallucinogens and other shamanic
techniques. Graham Hancock is to be commended for picking up the torch which
Jacques Vallee and John Keel originally lit, and taking it even further in
Supernatural, in order to illuminate the margins of reality.

Interview:

Sub Rosa: Supernatural has a very wide and eclectic scope -
from cave art and shamanism, to the alien abduction phenomenon, fairy folklore
and even the origins of DNA. I'm interested in how you came to research all
these subjects within one book - was there a concept right from the start, or
was it a slow unveiling of these various correspondences between the topics?

Graham Hancock: There was a concept from the start. I'd had in mind,
for some time, to write a book about human origins. I always felt there was a
mystery in there somewhere, but when I started to look at human origins, I found
a very large part of the story to be frankly very boring, which was really the
period from the last common ancestor with the chimpanzee (which could be as much
as 7 million years ago), down to about 40,000 years ago - it seemed to be a
rather dull tale, with very slow gradual anatomical changes taking place, and
glacially slow behavioural changes taking place. Full anatomical modernity was
reached at least 200,000 years ago – still with no sign of the behaviour that we
today would regard as quintessentially human. And then long after that – really
just 40,000 years ago – the archaeological record suddenly starts to attest to a
dramatic change. In my opinion, that dramatic change in behaviour 40,000 years
ago is the really big issue in the human career, even bigger in terms of its
impact than our much-vaunted evolutionary adaptation of standing upright on two
legs.

It's just amazing the way the archaeological record 'lights up' after 40,000
years ago with incredible symbolism, the appearance of the first art, evidence
across a whole spectrum of activities of exactly what we would recognise as
completely modern human behaviour, and it seems to switch on very suddenly. I
realised that this is where the mystery lies, this is the mystery that I want to
explore. Whatever it was, this process that made us human, right there at the
very beginning was art, and incredible symbolism...the art of the painted caves
of Europe for example, going back 35,000 years.

When I started to look around in this field, I found that cave art
specialists had been squabbling for the best part of a century, but since the
1980s one very powerful and increasingly well accepted theory has been put
forward, which suggests that this amazing adventure of art and religion at the
beginning of modern behaviour was inspired by taking plant hallucinogens, by
inducing altered states of consciousness, and painting the visions that our
ancestors saw in those states. Once I realised that was a real possibility, then
it opened the door to all the other areas of inquiry in Supernatural.

SR: You're talking there about David Lewis-Williams'
neuropsychological model...

GH: Yes, David Lewis-Williams' remarkable work. David
Lewis-Williams is an archaeology Professor who founded the Rock Art Institute at
the University of Witwatersrand in South Africa. He’s recognised as one of the
world's leading researchers of rock and cave art. After years of field-work,
David came out with a theory which explains all the extraordinary common
features that we find in the cave art of upper Paleolithic Europe, and the rock
art of South Africa. These cultures were separated by vast geographical
distance, and in fact separated chronologically as well. The explanation is that
they were all depicting the same extraordinary mental events, experienced
in altered states of consciousness.

Thanks to modern scientific work with volunteers who are given hallucinogens
and whose experiences are studied, we know the typical visionary sequence begins
with patterns and geometrical forms - dots, dashes, zig-zag lines - and
gradually begins to turn into a fuller sense of altered reality in which the
individual may very often see human beings partially transformed into animals.
And this is exactly what we see in the cave art in Europe and in the rock art of
the Bushmen in South Africa, this mixture of geometric and strange visionary
forms showing transformed beings. We don’t have the space to go into it here but
I set out the evidence at length in Supernatural. The bottom line is there’s
very little doubt that the explanation that David Lewis-Williams has come to,
that this is the art of altered states of consciousness, is the correct one.

SR: Going on with that idea of people seeing archetypal
elements like snakes and jaguars under ayahuasca: with this being a high-profile
book, do you think there is a risk that you could ‘pollute the integrity’, so to
speak, all of subsequent reports? For example, a lot of people say we see ‘DMT
elves’ now only because of Terence McKenna's description.

GH: Yes, or do people see elves because under the influence
of the same chemicals, they go to the same places that Terence McKenna went to?
This is the question, and it's a little bit difficult to answer, but I think I'm
fairly clear on it. I think the source of these experiences is in the visionary
world - they get into the culture, but they start in the visionary world. And
so, in a way, it's a pointless argument to say "ah but you're influenced by what
you've picked up from the culture", because the culture itself is influenced by
what people have injected into it from their visionary experiences.

A very good example of this is the so-called alien abduction experience,
which can be reliably reproduced in the lab by giving subjects injections of
dimethyltryptamine, DMT - they see small beings with large dark eyes who cluster
around them and perform painful and unpleasant experiments upon them. I’m
referring here to the ground-breaking work done with DMT and human volunteers in
the 1990’s by Dr Rick Strassman at the University of New Mexico. Now, we might
say that those lab subjects were simply spitting out from their own minds what
they'd already picked up about so-called alien abductions from the tabloid
press, and from the culture surrounding them. Well one might say that,
except that experiments with exactly the same drug were done in the 1950s -
before any publicity surrounding alien abductions had ever got out into the
media - and in those experiments too the subjects reported these encounters with
small beings, who abducted them and did nasty things to them. So, you know, of
course human beings talk to one another, and share their experiences, and the
experiences we share with one another do affect the future experiences we will
have, I'm not denying that. We impose interpretation on every act of perception
– and at the end of the day hallucinations are perceptions too. But I'm saying
that experiences of this peculiar kind are too widespread and too universal, and
too long distributed in time, to be explained that way.

SR: And this is another big mystery that you explore in
Supernatural – the mystery of certain very surprising and complex ingredients in
supposedly non-real experiences that appear to be shared universally by all
humans?

GH: Yes, that’s right. The first mystery to grab me, which
we’ve already touched on, was that sudden extraordinary appearance of modern
human behaviour less than 40,000 years ago, which was completely tied up with
the emergence of art and religious ideas and the first-ever representations,
painted on the walls of caves and rock shelters all around the world, of beings
who we can instantly recognize as “supernatural” – for example hybrid beings
mixing both animal and human characteristics. In other words these are the
oldest representations to have survived in human culture of “spirit worlds” and
their inhabitants. Once I had established that this imagery is best explained by
David Lewis-Williams neuropsychological model - that is, that it is imagery
which attempts to depict what shamans saw in visionary, hallucinatory states -
then I was ready for the next mystery. Which is, why do people from all over the
world, and at entirely different periods of history, keep on reporting more or
less identical “hallucinations”? How are we to account for these astonishing
similarities in what are supposed to be “non-real” experiences?”

If we look at the mainstream model of what hallucinations are, we find
scientists explaining them as merely the brain in a disturbed state releasing
items from memory, and from culture, reconstructing them in novel ways to create
the bizarre non-real imagery that we call hallucinations. But this
individualistic approach can't possibly be the explanation, because it doesn't
account for the incredible universality of these images, reported by people from
completely different cultures with no shared memories at all. So we have a huge
mystery here, in my view. Why is it that 'non-real' experiences from all parts
of the globe and all periods of history, have so many clearly-identifiable
common features?

SR: And what conclusions do you come to?

GH: I conclude that “coincidence” – that much over-used
longstop of materialist arguments – cannot explain the massive universality of
many supposedly “non-real” human experiences. To cut a long story very short, I
think there are two possibilities – both extraordinary – which could provide us
with fruitful answers to this mystery.

One is that the brain is fundamentally a receiver of consciousness, not
simply a generator of consciousness. To function in the everyday world, our
brains have to be set at a certain wavelength, and have to stay pretty much
tuned in to that wavelength, like a TV set tuned into a channel. But a variety
of means exist (most of them long ago harnessed and exploited by shamans) by
which we can change the receiver wavelength of our brains and pick up other
realities which are not normally present in our daily perceptions, but are in
fact there. So we can reach other dimensions that way, not through some sort of
mechanistic fantasy of 21st century technology, but simply through retuning our
consciousness - and perhaps that's what these shamanic hallucinogens do.

The second extraordinary possibility, which I also look into in some depth,
goes back to the thinking of Francis Crick. It's not a widely known fact that
Crick was under the influence of LSD when he discovered the double-helix
structure of DNA and that this supreme achievement of scientific rationalism,
for which he won the Nobel Prize, came to him in an altered, even mystical state
of consciousness.

Until his death in 2004 Crick remained an atheist, deeply committed to the
materialist (i.e. non-spiritual) view of reality. Nevertheless he was unable to
accept that the DNA molecule could have assembled itself by accident. So he came
to the idea that perhaps life originated on Earth this way: perhaps billions of
years ago on the other side of the galaxy, doomed by a supernova, some ancient
alien civilization sought to preserve its DNA, and he suggests that bacteria -
perhaps with genetically engineered DNA inside them - were sent out into the
Universe in spaceships. Eventually one of those ships crashed into the early
Earth, and the bacteria containing that DNA began to reproduce, and the whole
story of evolution as our scientists tell it started there. Once we have the
DNA, evolution becomes plausible. Until we have the DNA, it's difficult to
explain.

But if his explanation has anything to it, then it may be the case that DNA
carries more than just genetic instructions. 97% of DNA we don't know what it
does - scientists call it 'junk DNA'. It may be that there's some kind of
message, or even a vast archive of messages, inscribed on these supposedly
redundant stretches of DNA. I present strong evidence for this in the book –
solid scientific evidence that reveals an intriguing linguistic structure in
junk DNA. It may also be that we can only access these messages in altered
states of consciousness. So these are the elements of the second possibility
I pursue: that we may see these universal images because they are stored in the
stretches of DNA that all humans share, and that they are in a sense messages to
us from our creator - whoever our creator was. Once again, common sense and
logic suggests the very least we can do is enquire further into this and see. We
have the means, the hallucinogens - this technology to enquire into these secret
chambers inside our own minds...Or parallel universes, if that's what they
are.

SR: The fascinating thing I find with Crick's idea of
Panspermia, is that it is basically the definition of Intelligent Design, and
yet we have scientists today really rubbishing the idea of Intelligent Design,
because they see it as the 'new Creationism'.

GH: Exactly, there's a huge propaganda war that has been
unleashed on Intelligent Design. First of all, I think it's important to put on
record that arch-evolutionists such as Richard Dawkins of Oxford University are
themselves men and women who are practicing a religion. The belief that life
assembled itself accidentally out of the collision of molecules in the primeval
soup is just that: a belief. There's no evidence for it whatsoever. It’s a
metaphysical position...

SR: The 'Hurricane in the Junkyard' belief...

GH: Yes. The scenario favoured by materialists that the DNA
molecule could have assembled itself by accident out of any imaginable “primeval
soup” has been rightly described as about as likely as a Boeing 767 being
assembled in perfect working order by a hurricane in a junkyard. And this is
what bothered Crick – this amazing statistical improbability - not because he
came to it from a religious point of view, but because he came to it from a
scientific point of view. He simply could not see how the DNA molecule
could have self-assembled just by chance, and if he couldn't see it, then it's
difficult to understand why anybody else should see it.

I don't think Crick would have been pleased to have be associated with the
Intelligent Design movement, but the fact is, that the process of “guided
panspermia” that he proposed to explain the origins of DNA was, by definition,
Intelligent Design.

SR: Crick’s use of LSD as a ‘thinking tool’ didn't really
come out until after his death - however, in your case, you've come forward in
this book saying you have taken these substances. Do you think more public
figures should be more outspoken on behalf of their positive aspects?

GH: Yes I do. I think it's time there was a real debate in
our society about the plant hallucinogens, used by shamanic cultures for
thousands of years. At the moment our society just lumps everything together
under the category of 'drugs', and says 'these are drugs'. And 'drugs' has
become such a loaded word - the word ‘drug’ and the word ‘abuse’ are constantly
linked together in the propaganda war that goes on. In a way it's rather
Orwellian, the language itself has been subverted and corrupted...people speak
constantly of “drug abuse”, as if there is no other way to relate to
consciousness-altering substances except by abusing them. When we use such
language long enough it becomes impossible to think of these substances in
anything other than a negative light.

Yet, the fact is that people all over the world have an innate, deeply rooted
drive to alter their consciousness, and we do this in all kinds of ways. Some of
those ways, like alcohol, are socially-sanctioned and some of those ways are
not. But whether or not they're socially sanctioned, all the statistics show
that the consumption of mind-altering drugs is increasing, not decreasing,
despite the cruelties and vast expense of the official “war on drugs”.

SR: I think if people were more aware of the history of how
these substances became banned in the first place, it would be quite eye-opening
to them.

GH: I think it would be eye-opening indeed - the absolutely
flimsy evidence, and the poor reasoning, on the basis of which they were banned.
Recently for example, fresh psilocybin mushrooms were made illegal in Britain.
If you look at the justification for this extra layer of bureaucracy, this extra
crime which has been introduced to our statute books, of eating fresh mushrooms
that grow wild and free in the fields - why should it be a crime? The government
officials who speak out on these matters say it's because it might make some
people crazy. This is a completely illogical position on which to make these
substances illegal. Firstly, making them illegal does not make them unavailable.
Secondly, the evidence that they make anybody crazy is extremely slim and
flimsy, and absolutely unpersuasive to the millions of people around the world
who have eaten psychedelic mushrooms, often repeating the experience many times,
and kept their sanity perfectly intact.

It’s true that some individuals - for example if they are already
schizophrenic or if they are borderline schizophrenics – may by precipitated
into psychotic episodes by these substances. But that is an argument for more
careful controls and excellent advice, not an argument for criminalizing the use
of hallucinogens by responsible, mentally-balanced adults. There are many
substances and objects in our society that are much more dangerous in the hands
of schizophrenics than they are in the hands of people in good mental health –
for example alcohol, paracetamol, fires and cars – but the fact that
mentally-unstable people may misuse them is never wheeled out as a pathetic
excuse to criminalize the general use of alcohol, paracetamol, fires and
cars.

We're talking about our own individual consciousness - the root, the very
heart of what each of us is. And these ancient hallucinogenic plants allow a
method for the targeted exploration of our consciousness. It's absurd and crazy,
in countries which call themselves advanced and democratic, that there should
exist medieval laws that will send people to prison for years, simply for
exploring their own consciousness through the “gratuituous graces” that nature
has provided. If we are not sovereign over our own consciousness, then what are
we sovereign over? What kind of game is our society playing when it stuffs its
bureaucracies full of public money to spend on tracking down and punishing us
for “consciousness crimes”?

SR: These negative connotations of 'drugs' extend into the
field of cave art as well. In Supernatural you point out that the cave
art experts debating David Lewis-Williams' neuropsychological model are
unwilling to take the substances themselves to ‘get inside the heads of the
artists’, so to speak.

GH: Well yes, there's two aspects to this. Firstly, there's
a huge debate, because a group of cave art academics very much object to the
idea that our ancestors discovered art and religion through hallucinogens. It's
clear that a number of archaeologists object to this on principle, and really
tremendously unpleasant and underhanded attacks have been made on the
neuropsychological model, precisely because it does affront the basic
sensibilities of archaeologists reared in the Western logical positivist
tradition. The very idea that hallucinations could be the source of art and
religion is an extremely threatening one to them.

But then beyond that, yes you're right: most of the people studying this
subject do not want to take hallucinogens themselves. Approaching it from the
point of view of reason, they can work out how visionary experiences could have
underlain the art that we see on the cave walls, and they have the benefit of
the huge number of reports done by scientists in labs with volunteers. But to
take the substances themselves is still a no-no.

I think it's perfectly legitimate to theorise on these things, but one should
not then make authoritative statements about the reality-status of
hallucinations if one has never taken hallucinogens oneself. One can certainly
enquire into this area, but to even begin to be qualified to talk about the
reality-status of these mysterious visions, one has to have had the visions
oneself.

SR: You begin the book with the personal story of your
father's death and how it affected you, and how you then took ibogaine at your
home and had an experience parallel to the common ibogaine experience of talking
to the dead. Ayahuasca is said to have a similar 'ability'. Do you think
hallucinogens may offer a means of research into the possibility of an
afterlife?

GH: Yes. I think every experience that we describe as the
'supernatural' - encounters with non-physical beings, whether they're the
spirits of the dead, or whether we call them fairies or elves or angels or
aliens - I think that enquiry into all of those areas will be, and can be, aided
by the use of hallucinogens. Right now nobody has exploring the paranormal with
hallucinogens at the top of their research priorities. But I would say that
could be one of the most fruitful areas of research to be able to take on.

SR: Well, Terence McKenna pointed out a few times that he
felt he had a telepathic connection when he was on mushrooms.

GH: Yes, there are extraordinary accounts of this sort, and
also of remote viewing – accurately reporting on things happening in distant
places. We have a great deal of anecdotal information about this, and then also
very specific information of people getting practical knowledge from their
hallucinations - whether it's Francis Crick seeing the structure of DNA under
the influence of LSD, or whether it's a shaman in the Amazon learning which
plants to mix together to produce a certain medicine. This information appears
to be available to us in the hallucinatory state, and I think this is something
that needs to be taken very seriously – because it seems to have been connected
with the mysterious, radical process that made us human in the first place, the
biggest evolutionary event in the story of our species. It might even be that we
are missing out on our next important evolutionary leap forward because certain
factions within our society have succeeded in demonizing, stigmatizing and
suppressing visionary states of consciousness.

SR: One of the great parts of the book - and maybe this is
just my personal interest – is that it really felt like a continuation of
Jacques Vallee's Passport to Magonia, where he equated the UFO experience
with all fairy folklore. Do you think Vallee was on to something here?

GH: Yes, very much so. This aspect of the inquiry, for me,
spanned three different issues. The beings that are called spirits in shamanic
societies, the beings that were called fairies and elves in medieval Europe, and
the beings that are called aliens today. I was inevitably drawn to this
because in taking ayahuasca I had something like an alien abduction experience
myself. It led me to look at comparisons between the spirits that shamans have
spoken of down the ages, and aliens that modern so-called UFO abductees speak of
today. I realised there were astonishingly close, really eerie spine-tingling
comparisons, between these two supposedly very different categories of
beings.

When I learnt of Vallee's work, which was conducted in the 1960s, and
compared fairies with aliens, I realised that the similarities spread even
further, and I decided to update and extend Vallee's investigation, looking at
the huge body of evidence that's become available on alien abductions since the
end of the 1960s, and comparing that with folklore about fairies and elves. I
think the comparison is absolutely watertight - what we are dealing with here is
one phenomenon, which has been with the human race since we first became human,
and which we have interpreted in slightly different ways at different periods of
history. We see this phenomenon through our cultural spectacles, but when you
allow for that you realise that it's the same phenomenon all the time - whether
we call them spirits, whether we call them fairies, or whether we call them
aliens.

I’m quite confident now that the key to all such experiences is to be found
in altered states of consciousness. But I also want to re-emphasise that when I
speak of experiences stemming from altered states of consciousness, I absolutely
do NOT mean to imply that those experiences are necessarily “unreal”. On the
contrary, I think there's a very good chance that many so-called supernatural
encounters, including those we call "alien abductions" today, are 100 per cent
real but are difficult to demonstrate scientifically precisely because they are
only accessible to us in altered states of consciousness. I also accept that
there are paradoxical physical elements often associated with visionary
experiences, from the implants that shamans and alien-abductees find in their
bodies, to mysterious healings, to objects and other traces, even books
sometimes, left behind by “spirits”, “fairies” and “aliens”. It’s a huge mystery
and it has haunted our ancestors for at least 35,000 years.

SR: You talked to John Mack before his death?

GH: I’d been acquainted with John Mack for many years and
met him twice. He and I had an email exchange in 2004, planning to meet up again
and conduct an extensive interview. I wanted to compare his work with the work
of Dr Rick Strassman at the University of New Mexico, the DMT studies – I
mentioned earlier – but unfortunately John Mack was killed in a car crash in
London before we could meet. John was a great man in my view, a good,
warm-hearted human-being, a top-notch scientist, and a fearless investigator of
the unorthodox conclusions his science led him to.

I did talk to Rick Strassman and my interview with him appears in an appendix
of the book. He confirmed that John saw many similarities between abductee
reports and the reports of DMT volunteers.

SR: Many proponents of materialist philosophy quote Dr
Michael Persinger's research on the 'sensed presence' as the way of explaining a
lot of these apparitions. Do you agree with Persinger's approach?

GH: What’s interesting here is that it depends on our
understanding of the brain. Persinger is also talking about altered states of
consciousness - it’s just that his particular approach is to induce them through
the use of electromagnetic fields, instead of inducing them through the use of
chemical hallucinogens. But the end effect is the same. Now, Persinger might be
a reductionist, and he might say “the brain changes I observe when I fire this
electromagnetic field at my subject’s head have caused his experiences of small
beings standing beside him.” But that causal connection is not at all clear – it
may be that the electromagnetic fields simply retuned the receiver wavelength of
the brain, and allowed it to pick up another “reality”, that is only accessible
in altered states.

For me, Persinger just provides us with another way by which human beings can
enter altered states of consciousness, but he doesn’t prove that what we see can
be reduced to the brain activity associated with it. We would naturally expect
there to be brain activity mediating any human experience, but the fact that
there is activity alone, does not reduce the experience to that activity.

SR: It’s whether it’s causative or not…

GH: Yes, or is it – again we come back to this receiver
model of the brain, which I think is enormously useful – that we would see
activity if the brain is a receiver, as it retunes itself, just as we would see
a telescope changing its focal length. That would be activity, but it wouldn’t
be causing the experience. The telescope would be seeing a further off star, or
our brain would be seeing another level of reality.

I think where Persinger is interesting, is that he provides this notion of a
connection to earth energies – that earth energies generate electromagnetic
fields – which could explain why crowds of tens of thousands of people standing
in one place all suddenly start to see visions at once: because they’re all
subjected to the same altered state of consciousness.

SR: You’re talking about events such as the Fatima and
Lourdes apparitions?

GH: Like Fatima for example. There’s no doubt that what they
were seeing was absolutely typical of altered states of consciousness. Now how
do we explain that a crowd of 70,000 people all go into an altered state at
once? I think Persinger may have provided us with the answer.

One point I make in the book is about the cave of Lourdes, where we have
modern miracles, and healing and pilgrimage. Nearby was a Stone Age cave
containing huge numbers of pieces of portable Upper Palaeolithic art. Maybe
certain places have been sacred for tens of thousands of years, because they
have an effect on our consciousness, and that effect on our consciousness in
turn allows some healing process to occur.

SR: To finish: Supernatural covers a number of
fascinating subjects, and you argue the case very intelligently, with mounds of
evidence. Having said that, there’s a lot of very strange material –
hallucinogens, sex with aliens, fairies and elves. Do you worry about the
reception the book is going to get, critics saying “Graham’s gone and fried his
brain on drugs and now look what he’s writing about”?

GH: Yes, I’m sure that cheap tactic will be used to attack
me and to try and ridicule me. It’s such an obvious one for my critics to go for
- I’m sure they won’t be able to resist it. However, I have expressed considered
views that are the result of a great deal of work. I don’t think any critic is
qualified to express any view whatsoever on the reality-status of
hallucinations, unless they themselves have had those experiences, unless
they’ve been prepared to take the shamanic plant hallucinogens, and face up to
the experiences that they unleash.

If they’ve been done that, then they’re at least qualified to talk about
this, but if they haven’t done that then it’s just empty air really. So I shall
try to ignore it.

Audio excerpts (from passages edited out of interview text) also available on
Sub Rosa:

Graham Hancock speaks:

* On the shocking case of the Altamira cave, where an amateur researcher was
pilloried by academia because of his discovery (which was eventually proven as
genuine):

GH: Yes, this was Sautuola. He was a Spanish nobleman - a
small-time nobleman - who owned land in northern Spain. One of his employees on
his land discovered the cave of Altamira, and Sautuola made several visits
there. It wasn't until his third visit, I believe, with his daughter, that he
recognised that painted on the ceiling was this extraordinary bestiary of
animals, featuring a number of large bison painted over knobs in the
ceiling...really the most beautiful and extraordinary thing. And because he
already had considerable experience of what was known of the art of the cave
period - up till then, this was all portable art, nobody had ever discovered any
art painted on the walls of caves before - the portable art showed exactly the
same Ice Age animals that were painted on the ceiling at Altamira. Sautuola very
quickly put two and two together and said "Gosh, this must be the work of Stone
Age artists."

But because the work was so good, all of the academics of the time refused to
accept that it could be the work of Stone Age artists. So this huge, horrible
campaign was mounted against Sautuola, to say he had hired an artist to fake all
of these paintings. He was accused of fraud, of deception, or of being a fool.
That they were some kind of graffiti left by Roman soldiers...anything other
than accept that these amazing works of art could have been actually produced by
our ancestors 14 or 15 thousand years ago.

Sautuola, eventually gave way - his personality collapsed under this
onslaught of this bitter, ascerbic, really violent attack on his integrity, and
he died before his time, a disillusioned and a broken man, and the tragedy is he
was absolutely, one hundred percent right. And those academics who had destroyed
his life, within ten years of his death, were going into Altamira and declaring
it to be a wonderful work of prehistoric art.

SR: Do you feel a certain sympathy?

GH: I do, I do feel a certain sympathy simply because - I've
never felt it as badly as he did, I've not been punished in the way he was
punished - but I've also been subject to this bitter, ongoing, unrelenting
attack of academics upon ideas they don't like. So yes, I do feel some
identification and sympathy with Sautuola.

* On whether his witnessing of a man’s death during a shamanic initiation
made him question whether he should be researching this topic:

GH: No, it didn't, but it did make me realise how there can
be real crossovers between the so-called non-physical or spirit world, and this
world. That these are not necessarily isolated domains. That there is a
to-and-fro between them, and in a sense that just made it seem all the more
important to me, to investigate this and to learn more about it. But with
caution and with care - I do think it's good advice not to be too eager with the
use of hallucinogens, but to explore it with reason and with care. But
nevertheless, with that proviso, this is something that's very important for us
to know about. For shamans, it's been clear all along - our world is in a
relationship, whether it likes it or not, with other non-physical realms. And
those other realms affect what happens in our world, and therefore we need to
know about them. But this is so alien to the contemporary western mindset that
very few people are thinking about it at the moment. Everything I've learned
while researching this book has made me feel this is what we need to be
doing.

* On ‘Shamanic Tourism’, and whether it is becoming too accessible to the
general public:

GH: No, I think it's good that it should be accessible to
the general public, under the guidance of experienced shamans. An experienced
shaman doesn't have to be somebody who grew up within a particular culture.
Shamanism is less about cultural transmission, and more about the direct
experience of altered states of consciousness that particular individuals have,
and what they learn in those altered states of consciousness - particularly what
they learn about how to manage those altered states of consciousness. So what's
useful about having an experienced shaman present when taking these substances
is that he, or she, will help you to manage what can otherwise be a very
alarming experience...until you get to the point where you can manage it
yourself.

So, that's the first point, is that this may be the only way that Westerners
may safely gain access to these experiences, and reliably gain access to these
experiences. And it's far preferable that they should do that than that they
should buy the ingredients on the internet and try to mix up ayahuasca in their
living rooms. So no, I don't think that it's a bad thing.

Another aspect of this, which all shamans in the Amazon will tell you, and
which experienced Western users of ayahuasca like Benny Shannon - who's the
professor of psychology at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem - will also say,
is that ayahuasca is itself the teacher. The teacher is not the shaman, the
shaman is there to help guide your journey. But the teacher is the plant. And
the plant itself has lessons to unfold to you, and it will unfold those lessons
according to its own timetable.

So it's getting into direct communication with this mysterious plant that is
the important thing, and secondly to do so in the best possible setting. I have
no objection to so-called ayahuasca tourism. I think it's a way that these
ancient shamanic plants are finding to spread their influence into the wider
world, and I think that's a good thing.

SR: And when you look at it, it's not exactly a 'fun trip'
the ayahuasca, so I think it's something that people really need to want to
undergo, before they commit to it.

GH: People very much have to want to explore their own
consciousness, and they will know before they begin to do so that they're going
to be in for an extremely uncomfortable, and physically and even psychically,
unpleasant time. Ayahuasca is not easy...it is physically very demanding, it
causes severe diaorrhea, severe vomiting. So it's not something that anybody
would even begin to dream of doing for fun. But it's a profoundly moving
experience, which changes the way you think about reality. It certainly changed
the way I think about reality.

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