Diary be aware: it could appear some time off, however the finish of the world continues to be scheduled for 2030, exact date TBC. After as soon as suggesting that anonymous devastation might be upon us in 2012, the evergreen eschatologist Graham Hancock subsequently up to date his recommendation to a comet, now six years off. Or thereabouts. MailOnline, which has been exhuming an historical Hancock textual content, reminds readers of his “dire warning for our age”.
What is definite, anyway, is that an incredible and horrifying disaster will happen as quickly as 16 October. That is the day Netflix will launch one thing astounding, virtually past perception, one thing sceptics mentioned may by no means occur: collection 2 of Hancock’s Historical Apocalypse. And stranger nonetheless: this horrible occasion stars, together with Hancock, the Hollywood actor Keanu Reeves.
How? Why? What can clarify it? How come no historical warnings graven on Göbekli Tepe predicted an occasion that can overturn, for a lot of of his admirers, all they as soon as thought they knew about Keanu Reeves? Even when he as soon as noticed a ghost. A chilling promotional clip exhibits the star telling the older man: “I imply as a child I at all times thought the timeline was [dramatic pause] off.”
Oh, Keanu. It’s pure hypothesis, after all, however there isn’t any avoiding from this clip the impression that he respects, may even consider in, Hancock’s signature principle: that after a comet (beforehand “crustal displacement”) completely destroyed an incredible ice age civilisation, its genius, in some way globetrotting survivors bequeathed a great deal of monumental monuments, probably that includes comet warnings, earlier than disappearing and leaving locals – till Hancock intervened – to take all of the credit score.
Minimize to Hancock posing on some excessive outcrop and rehearsing his theme: a misplaced civilisation and the clues to its existence that he, alone, by no means stops discovering all around the store, particularly on this collection, within the Netflix a part of the world. Thunderous music underlines the solemnity of his last query: “Might the important thing to discovering a civilisation of the ice age lie right here… within the Americas?”
Once more, we are able to solely guess at this level what Hancock will shortly conclude, keywise, from his newest trot round websites others have been ok to excavate, but it surely appears affordable to anticipate some overlap together with his 2019 ebook, America Earlier than: The Key to Earth’s Misplaced Civilization. Will Hancock be thrilling Reeves with maybe essentially the most staggering a part of America Earlier than: his proposal (additionally shared on the Joe Rogan present) that historical monuments have been generally constructed by paranormal means? “My hypothesis,” Hancock writes, “which I can’t try and show right here or help with proof however merely current for consideration, is that the superior civilisation I see evolving in North America throughout the ice age had transcended leverage and mechanical benefit and discovered to govern matter and vitality by deploying powers of consciousness that now we have not but begun to faucet.”
Viewers can anticipate, if Hancock’s ITN producers are true to his newest scholarship, to listen to extra about his misplaced civilisation’s familiarity with powers like telepathy. It may not impress “materialist thinkers”. “But when telepathy is actual,” he writes, “and if its use and projection might be refined and made dependable, then who would want cell telephones or Fb or any of the opposite technique of communication which can be so ubiquitous right this moment?” We may certainly take Hancock’s audacious thought processes additional. What if his complete Netflix collection might be simply beamed telepathically into your head, due to some undreamt of recent system for gathering the subscription charges?
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Pending these marvels, it appears wonderful sufficient that Netflix and ITN ought to as soon as once more award an influential platform to an creator who has lengthy been categorised as a purveyor of pseudoarchaeology. Admittedly the rise of anti-science discourse has helped normalise, if not his theories, Hancock’s weird claims to particular – even suppressed? – insights. Contributing to this pattern, the programme makers present him as a quest-driven, misunderstood seer; the rejection of his hypothesis, as soon as thought pretty applicable, is introduced as an attraction.
No alternative was misplaced within the first collection of Historical Apocalypse to denigrate dissenting archaeologists for disputing the existence of historical Hancockia. “Maybe,” he mentioned in programme one, “there’s been a forgotten episode in human historical past, however maybe the extraordinarily conceited and patronising perspective of mainstream academia is stopping us from contemplating that chance.” In the identical programme, Hancock interviewed an architect, Prof Danny Hillman Natawidjaja, who says the Gunung Padang web site in Indonesia is an unbelievable 25,000 years previous. Actually unbelievable. The professor’s analysis paper was retracted this yr.
Inevitably, any professional complaints about Hancock’s performances danger serving as proofs of his heroism, as sinister affirmation of multinational plots, simply as medical correction solely reassures anti-vaxxers that their suspicions are effectively based. After the Society for American Archaeology (SAA) wrote an open letter to Netflix, objecting to the disparagement of archaeologists in Historical Apocalypse, to its classification as a “docuseries” and to its “injustice” to Indigenous peoples (these whose monuments are claimed for Hancockians), the creator, defending himself, duly cited the Netflix letter as proof of his persecution. “The SAA’s open letter is simply one of many more moderen examples of this ongoing extremely personalised vendetta.”
As for the SAA citing lack of proof: “That archaeologists haven’t discovered materials proof that will persuade them of the existence of a misplaced civilization of the ice age, shouldn’t be by any means compelling proof that no such civilization may have existed,” he wrote. And we are able to take it from the approaching second collection, that Netflix and ITN absolutely endorse Hancock’s reminder, one underpinning his complete oeuvre, that “absence of proof shouldn’t be proof of absence”.
Fairly so. There could also be no proof to indicate Reeves was coerced, most likely by occult means, into taking part in a challenge so seemingly, like its predecessor, to be condemned by the Society for American Archaeology.
That doesn’t show he wasn’t.
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